Trafika Europe 7 - Ukrainian Prayer

Yuri Vynnychuk

couldn’t overcome that habit and didn’t want to, because her beloved was terribly fond of sweets, andmany times she nostalgically remembered feeding him with a teaspoon, and he would lick up everything clean, with drops of red or yellow jam glistening on his lips and tongue, and afterward she herself would relish those droplets; every time she set about puttering around the jam, these recollections would spring up in her memory and kept there until this process was complete, and then little by little diminished and dissipated until the next August. One such summer, when the heat was stifling and the air hovered over the trees, auntie Lucia, having exhausted herself by the stove, sat down in an armchair and dozed off, forgetting to turn off the gas under the basin with the hot

rarely ate them, and Yarosh did not have a sweet tooth, so the jars of jam increasingly took up all the shelves in the pantry, since there was no longer any space for them, but every August the very same procedure took place – boiling down the berries and mixing them with a wooden spatula in a large basin. At that time auntie resembled a sorceress who was preparing some kind of magic potion. She was focused and serious, and every fly that dared to fly at this sacred time into the kitchen, immediately fell into her field of vision and onto the rubber flap of her swatter. The scent of the softened loose berries intoxicated and infused the walls and furniture so powerfully that the house looked like candy and everything in it – as if it were made of marzipan. Any attempts to convince auntie not to putter around her preserves failed; she just

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