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Tanya Maliarchuk
And there seemed to be an
endless number of jars of
string beans. In the attic
eaves. At various stages of
shelf life. Some of them were
older than me.
The fear of starvation
controlled
grandmother’s
life.Whensuddenlysomehow
the summer rain would fall
for a long time, grandmother
would sit in the garden and
announce what now would
happen to the potatoes, the
string beans, the beets, and
the corn, o, Lord, what will
happen now?! We’ll all die of
starvation!
One time, I remember it quite
well, grandmother’s demon
of hunger settled in me.
I have never particularly
been enthusiastic about
food. I always just ate what
was there, sometimes a
little, sometimes a lot, but
without any zeal. But then
something happened. One
day I had been asleep for a
really long time, till noon, I
had frightening, disturbing
dreams, from which it was
really difficult for me to break
out. And when I awoke, I
wasn’t able to get up frombed
and go over to the summer
kitchen where grandmother
was making borsht. It was
a really tasty borsht. Even
right this moment I can smell
the aroma of the hot borsht.
But I couldn’t move. I was
so incredibly hungry that I
couldn’t move. An immense
painful hole in my stomach
opened up, a precipice,
into which I was falling. My
stomach become me, that
is, I became my stomach. I
was so hungry that I would
have been able to eat the
tablecloth on the table next
to the bed or my shoelaces.
Never before and never after
has anything similar ever