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Sweet Darusya
to come to rest, and then
suddenly disappeared in the
water. But Mykhailo found
not a trace of the livestock,
not a trace of a woman’s foot,
not even a tiny digit from her
bast shoe, although Yurko
Ohronnyk had given him
his old binoculars from the
Austrian war. And even when
there was some kind of track,
it stopped at the river....
*
In order to make it easier
for you to imagine such an –
almost improbable – picture
of a mysterious momentary
disappearance without a
trace of not a mute, not a deaf
woman, who additionally
had lived locally for a long
time, it would be good to in
detail describe this locality,
the landscapes, the location
of the river, the surrounding
villages
and
even
the
neighboring countries, in as
much as the described events
date back to June 1940 of the
past millennium.
It’s like this. On the two
sides of the Cheremosh
River, always murmuring
and rushing no matter what
season, shallow in spring and
overflowing with water in the
summer, between the hills
and bald top mountains as
though in the deep bosom of
a woman, were nestled two
mountain villages with the
same name – Cheremoshne.
If you looked at them from
a bird’s eye view or at least
from the middle of the river,
you could see that the villages
reflected each other equally
the same, the way a person’s
face is reflected in a mirror.
From
time
immemorial
the inhabitants of both
Cheremoshne villages spoke