Trafika Europe 6 - Arabesque

Sergei Lebedev

I froze; I thought that cutting their hair would be preparing them for death; they also asked for soap, and imagining its fragrance of ar t i f i c ial f reshness , chemical cleanliness—the last cleanliness for them—I felt fear; but then I washed each of them in the barrel with rain water, cut off their long matted hair, and the old men, changed into white cotton underwear, started touching one another, using one another as mirrors. I brought them driftwood, sawed and chopped it into logs; the old men sat, getting used to their new selves, and they couldn’t, the power of adjusting had waned in them, so they just listened to the whine of the saw, the ringing sound of the axe on the tarry wood, and those sounds— the sounds of beginnings, work, construction—seemed to reach them less and less.

I did not ask them about the island; the past seemed very fragile and unstable to me; touch something in the past and there would be a collapse of honed memory and the heart that had lived with pain would grieve again. The old men were silent, and I left; words of farewell would not have reached them. The dinghy picked up the bank current and sailed past quickly, the houses on the shore vanished in the twilight, the big apple moon cast shimmering light on the water, and I pointed the dinghy’s nose along the moonlight path. I sailed all night; the river carr ied the boat over shallows and whirlpools, over the backs of f ish; in the morning when a cold fog rose from the river bays, I saw the island.

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