Trafika Europe 7 - Ukrainian Prayer

Sofia Andrukhovych

further or demand their money back for the ticket. But suddenly all this agitated foam parts, as if absorbed by sand. “Aaah,” exhales the audience, for a moment turning into the lungs of a fairytale giant. Those who missed it ask agitatedly, “What? What is it? What happened?”— and then immediately fall silent, realizing what they had missed. They somehow figure out what exactly had happened on stage. There, in front of the blue- and-red Chinese pagoda, Chevalier Ernest Thorn in person just wove himself out of thin air. He did not come out from the wings, did not crawl out from inside the pagoda, did not slip out from the darkness on stage. No movement had happened; nothing stirred the

stuffy air. Everyone present in this hall can swear: Chevalier Thorn all this time was there, in the center of the stage, from the very moment when the curtains had opened, he stood there motionless and watched the audience. Then why didn’t we see him? Now he is frozen like a bug that pretends to be a little tree branch or a dry leaf. I can clearly see: he is not blinking, and his chest does not rise with breathing. The face is calm, focused, relaxed. He looks straight ahead in front of himself—but it creates an impression that he sees the entire hall simultaneously, the boxes, the back rows of the orchestra, the ushers hidden in corners. His left eye is squinting slightly and seems smaller than the right one, the left eyebrow lower than the right one.

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