Long ago, on a street corner in the city where I was born, there was a dump truck full of large green cabbages parked in the mud. The driver of the truck raised the bed, forming a mountain of cabbage on the ground. Suddenly, from nowhere, several dozen women appeared, as if they had been waiting beneath the pavement itself. In exchange for their tears and in some cases a few small coins, the truck driver, an unshaven man in his sixties, handed cabbages to the women. A short while later the cabbages, the women, and the truck driver were gone. But hunger remained. For a long time, hunger remained.