Trafika Europe 7 - Ukrainian Prayer

Serhiy Zhadan

higher. The drive seemed to be going on forever. Maybe Mr. One Eye wanted to make sure our trail would be hard to follow, who knows. Soon the fields ended abruptly and we found ourselves in front of a wide gully stretching out to the east. The road dropped sharply, and about a dozen identical two-story structures, which looked like they’d been built back in the ’80s, stood at the bottom of the hill. At the edge of this settlement I saw rows of warehouses; gardens followed the warehouses, and then there were yellow meadows sprawling out to the horizon. Far to the east I could just about make out what might have been a dam or a huge earthen wall stretching out along the horizon. It had a well-defined shape, though I couldn’t quite decide what I was looking at. “What’s that?” I asked the

into a dry, rustling expanse of corn, shining in the afternoon sun and cutting off our view in every direction. It seemed there was a path hidden there, nearly invisible to the untrained eye, though obvious enough once we were on it; it ran through the heart of this corn jungle, protecting us from the evil eye. We drove slowly, pushing through the cornstalks and tuning in to the random sounds scattered out in the sun-drenched fields. It felt as though the Volga was barely moving—the thick dust on the dashboard jumped every time we hit a ditch. Eventually we emerged out into stubble fields. Then we crossed over a strip of fallow ground between two fields and rolled onto a brick-paved road. It was completely empty out there, just the dew sliding down blades of grass, and the sun rising higher and

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