According to the order in which they appear in the novel:
The late brigadier general brought back a woman from Turkey, and a relative of this woman, the Serb, followed her here.
A few years later, the master and the Turkish woman died.
One morning, a big fire destroyed the prosperous landlord's mansion, and the rich man led his family to settle elsewhere.
The Serbs, who are old, were abandoned by their owners in the ruins of broken walls. He eats radishes and vegetables like a savage, picks up spoiled food discarded by people and cooks some black things in the pot.
He searched for leaves to eat in the garden, and was busy silently all day like an ant, looking for all the food that could be used to satisfy his hunger.
In winter, he lives in the dressing room of the bathhouse. When the weather is too cold, he spends the night in the haystack.
People turned a blind eye to him Sometimes he doesn't show up for days and nobody cares. Sometimes he kicks him at will, but no one cares about him. As for himself, it seems that he has never spoken in his life. He deliberately avoided those who wanted to bully him and tried to hide himself.
When Fogg was young, he worked as a domestic slave in a family called Count Peter ilych. Before the count died, he was liberated and became a free man.
Fog, who is in his 70s, is good-looking, well-informed, unique in his life, leisurely in his talk, making a living by fishing and staying in cheap hotels. He is friendly to poor Skopje.
He said that his old boss, the Earl, was a rich man before his death, and all the rich and powerful gentlemen nearby liked to visit him. The count often feasts his guests under the flattery of these people, and he also pays a lot of money to invite Germans to be the conductor of his own band.
The count also likes to raise women and buy them expensive jewelry, perfume and oil paintings in Paris. Year after year, his rich family property was squandered by him.
The count was poor in his later years and died in a hotel. No one cared about him. His fair-weather friends and beautiful young women have long since disappeared.
One hot midsummer afternoon, when I was hunting, because it was too hot, I rested in the Woods near strawberry spring, and the fog was fishing by the river, with his friend Stigio Serb by his side.
Vlasi, an old man trudging in the dust, also came to strawberry spring to drink water. Fogg talked to him. Vlasi said he had just returned from Moscow.
He went there because he asked his master to reduce his service rent because his son died of illness. Before that, his son worked as a groom for his master in Moscow and paid the service rent for him.
Now that he is old, he really can't afford the service rent of 95 rubles, and he has a dying wife at home.
The master of Moscow ignored him and told the housekeeper to kick him out, saying that his dead son Philip still owed himself a lot of debts.
Flass smiled and talked with us about these things, about his son's death, and about his own experiences, as if talking about irrelevant people, but his weather-beaten little eyes were full of tears, his lips trembled, and he tried to suppress sobs.
In fact, when I read this, I can't help but think of Fu Gui in Yu Hua's novel To Be Alive.
Life is too hard for them. Living, simply living, like ants on hot bricks struggling on the dying line, is a rare victory.