Trafika Europe 7 - Ukrainian Prayer

Sofia Andrukhovych

hall, and how it had to stop every few minutes for people and their goats to clear the tracks. What wild and dark times those were! And now photographic cameras in minutes can preserve for all eternity your precise likeness, just like a reflection in the mirror, but even more perfect. A telephone allows you to hear instantaneously, though the noisy thickets of air, howling winds, tree trunks, and rolling hills, someone located so far that Margosches and his high-speed automobile would take a very long time to get there. Roentgen’s X-rays see through the human body with all its innards. And each smallest particle the next day is broken down into even smaller ones; they move about, circle around us, everywhere, inside everything. It turns out that

matted hair does not result from “cooking and eating fish in the Jewish manner,” that it cannot be described as a male or female creature, and cutting it off does not lead to immediate death. And bloodletting is not only of limited effectiveness for curing disease—it can even do significant harm. If it continues like this, physics will even explain God. Some couple of hundred years ago for words like these I’d be burnt alive next to city hall, and I’d become the second witch executed in our city. Ifyouaskme,asfarasbelieving in miracles is concerned, let them be miracles for entertainment purposes—for example the performances of world-famous Chevalier Ernest Thorn, owner of the Thorn Coliseum in Lviv, “the enterprise for representing

54