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Tango of Death
and happy, and whoever
doesn’t believe it can put his
ear to his stomach and listen
to them happily cackling, and
we pressed our ears and really
heard some kind of clucking,
similar to a chicken’s, and
Wolf laughed and his belly
twitched. Wolf was a master
of all trades and knew how
to make a sailboat and an
airplane with a motor, and
during the winter he made
tiny mangers, the kind with
three kings and a tiny baby
Jesus, as though they were all
alive, and a tiny donkey, a tiny
ox, and a tiny horse nodding
their heads, and when Wolf
pulled a string, the tiny baby
Jesus would wave his tiny
arms and legs and whimper
“Be-ee!” Mrs. Rita said that
it was a sin to mock the
baby Jesus, but we couldn’t
understand what she meant,
becausewhat kind of mocking
can be going on there.
Because it was an infant, it
can’t preach the Word of
God, so it says “Be-ee!” We
went caroling with that tiny
manger and to the Zamarstyn
and Lychakiv cemeteries
and had incredible success
everywhere. Even Yosko went
with us, and although he
didn’t sing carols, he played
along on his violin. We sang
carols in three languages and
even went to Vynnyky, which
was a German settlement,
and caroled for the Germans,
and they couldn’t have been
happier, because already
just mostly older people
were there, because their
young people had gone to
the Vaterland, and there was
no one to carol to them in
their native language until we
did. Oh-hhh, we stuffed our
bellies there! They even gave
us some for the road.
But Yas was a thin pole, he
had long legs, long arms, and
climbed trees like a monkey,
and there wasn’t any ditch
that he couldn’t jump across,