Trafika Europe 7 - Ukrainian Prayer

Quiet Flows the Una

nights, devoid of all magic because the minutes and hours are hammered into the heads of your dwellers like heavy-duty nails, puncturing their memory with its pining reminiscences of that other life – a former, old, better, more beautiful life where we were all young, strong and unburdened by others’ death, memories continued in peacetime even when the war had ceased. Death is the only continuity that hasn’t been disrupted. Such thoughts work their way along people’s mental pathways in the nights as boring and eternal as the panting of the undertaker’s assistant digging fresh new graves at the town cemetery. Once you were different. They usedtocall youLittleParis. You were full of greenery, shops,

hurries home, as if home was a sanatorium where they’d be safe from the hysterics of the climatic behemoth. Winter is even more disconsolate because othermonsters reign, formless and impalpable. There’s no sun then, and no rain or summer storms, only shadows gliding through the town, the souls of the dead and souls of the living mingled in disorder and driven by the same restlessness; that feign anxiety spread by subterranean waters. Winter is a stateof limbo,whoseevery cell is made of depression. Those endless twilights that begin as early as half past four in the afternoon and have a pale and weak sun, unable to warm the sullen face that watches the outside world through a window. Those

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