Trafika Europe 13 - Russian Ballet

Naum Vaiman

packed cheese sandwiches to take with us) from the mummies swaddled in gray shawls, and then walked for a while along the swampy road, plowed up by car tires, my new boots (“What are you doing, in boots?!”) crusting over with mud, without passing a single soul. Imitating the village women, she wrapped her face up in a silvery blue shawl that had been tied around her neck, like a pioneer’s handkerchief, and, modeling the new outfit for me, she smiled joyfully, and suddenly, her face seemed so lovely to me in its unanticipated simplicity, so dear and near, that I immediately, right there and then, in the middle of the road which was rounding the edge of a field and beyond which stood a forest, in the midst of the autumnal and unpeopled world – unexpectedly even to myself, embraced her. Perhaps because this had happened so suddenly (a suddenhappiness is the sweetest) and,most importantly, so naturally, in joyful surprise I, for the first and only time in my life, felt that I no longer feared anything and that life is not my enemy, who must be deceived, subjugated, conquered, I sensed some sort of – there is no other word for it – harmony with the world, some sort of a strange lightness. Before this, I hadn’t even known that it could be this way; even now, I can only believe it with difficulty. (The interesting thing is that this joy left no poems after itself; I was inspired then only by sadness.) Over the days that followed, I kept looking at myself in the mirror, trying to understand

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