Trafika Europe 7 - Ukrainian Prayer

Tango of Death

week they used to deliver new books; only a limited circle of people received information about that, so for at least an hour before the bookstore would open up after the “delivery of goods,” he would occupy a place in line, and then dash into the place at the head of the crowd and be the first to grab a Kafka, Camus, Akutagava, Cortazar, Marquez, Borges, and their number was endless. For the sake of his sacred goal, Yarosh even started up a platonic love affair with one of the bookshop girls; he wasn’t able to do anything more because she was one of those spinsters, who, as a result of years spent in loneliness in their everyday life, they become intolerable, capricious, and boring. Inviting her out for coffee, Yarosh was forced to listen to her expound on her life motto, an entire heap of those cunning prescriptions,

to pass through life as a simple school teacher. This became a kind of obligatory ritual to tear him away from his work and to send him to the store for bread, carry out the trash, fill up the water in a portable cistern when the water pipes would be turned off, awaken him before dawn so he can occupy a place in line for milk, ringed sausage, cheese, sugar, and flour – it made no difference; it was just he who was made to run after everything when in the 1980s there was a shortage of nearly everything, and people turned into hunters for goods, scurrying through the city and saving his place in several different lines at the same time so that in each of them he would manage to buy a kilo of sugar or a packet of laundry powder, because they wouldn’t give each person more than one, and he also had to keep vigil over the bookstores, where once a

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