Trafika Europe 7 - Ukrainian Prayer

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

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