Trafika Europe 7 - Ukrainian Prayer

Yuri Vynnychuk

on a search. While this was fun for us, we really wanted to find some kind of treasure. As for me, nothing stood out with me, I was neither tall nor a shrimp, neither fat nor skinny, I inherited from my father a long face, decorated with a sharp eagle nose, and blue eyes in which girls would drowned. We liked to walk along different secluded nooks, narrow streets where houses were swaddled in drowsiness and wild grapes, and window sills bloomed in gillyflowers, Indian cress and lazy cats that basked in the sun. We liked to catch the smells that gushed from the kitchen windows, and to guess what will be for themid- day meal there today, but we didn’t love the circus and the zoo, even if it had come from Warsaw itself. Once we went and saw an eagle in a cage who was sitting squinting and frowning on a dry branch,

so we were not surprised when he boasted that he even had jumped the Poltva River, though we had not seen that miracle-wonder. So to be like Yas was everybody’s dream. When his mother locked him in the house from time to time, so he wouldn’t knock about and study his lessons, then he would crawl out through the window. Yasko and I were hooked on adventure books and at first wanted to be pirates, then cowboys and Indians, but in the end we would turn into a Kozak and a hussar and fought with swords like Bohun and Skshetusky. Our sabers were wooden, but sometimes all the same we’d end up with injuries. In addition we drew maps that indicated where buried treasure was and hid those maps in boxes and tossed them in someone’s cellar, and should anyone find it and realize it was a treasure map, they’ll set off

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