Trafika Europe 13 - Russian Ballet

A Light in the Night

– Heeeey!.. – bellowed Ilya Ilych, forming a mouthpiece with his hands. – Anybody here? The sound drowned reliably in the surrounding immobility. – The key is not to panic! – spoke Ilya Ilych out loud. – I mean, what’s there to be afraid of? I am dead as it is, and things can’t really get any worse. It’s the living that might be afraid sometimes, but a dead man shouldn’t care. These logical words did nothing to calm him down. An unclothed man on a bare earth under a naked sky. And it isn’t even really earth, and is that really a sky up there above his head?.. He wanted to hide, to burrow into the ground… Ilya Ilych realized that pretty soon he shall start to yearn for Judgement Day and forthcoming suffering just to be rid of the uncertainty. Hopeless hysteria was rolling up his throat. How much time has he spent here? Likely no more than a half hour, it’s just that his sense of time was snuffed out, destroyed by the surrounding facelessness. Where nothing happens, there is no time. You can walk, you can sit, or lie down, but still you cannot move away, always remaining in the center of the pale plain. Like, how far has he stumbled, not very far, a dozen steps if that. And yet he has already lost all orientation. There are no landmarks here, and getting lost is easy as pie. He might have made three circles in those dozen steps. If there was only some point of reference… Better yet – two points, he could

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