Trafika Europe 7 - Ukrainian Prayer

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 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 and even

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