Trafika Europe 7 - Ukrainian Prayer

Tanya Maliarchuk

home from work. He dragged away her step-mother away from my grandmother, but my grandmother already couldn’t move or speak. She was covered in blood. Then her father started to beat the step-mother, but not with the birch switches, with his fist instead. The step-mother hated my grandmother. She used to feed her borsht with soap, and one time even with rat poison. This is all true. I’m not lying. It’s the pure truth. Though you might not believe something like this could actually happen. At six years of age grandmother ran away from home and ended up in a boarding school. At seven, she escaped from the boarding school because she was afraid of starving to death. In the boarding

school, grandmother learned a new recipe for soup: water with two string beans. At eight, grandmother lived at the Novohrad-Volynsk market and used to eat plum pits. Then she herded calves at the collective farm, then cows, then she tended some man’s farm, who promised her warm clothing for the winter for a year of work. Then with two years of additional service to him, grandmother earned a young calf. She took the calf by a tether, said farewell to the owners, and went to the city of Zhytomyr. The calf died in a week. Grandmother had to butcher it. She traded the calf meat for two tarpaulin cloth boots – both of them left footed. I’m telling you all this in brief, but it took grandmother ten years to tell it all tome. For ten

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