Oles Ulianenko — Stalinka

Excerpt:

Daily and gradually, his fatigue diminished and in its place a corrosive restlessness set in; a sense of horror hardened in his chest: outdoors old Nykodym, Halyna’s father, was cursing and thrashing a horse with the reins—all those years that had trickled by like sand between his fingers, the years saturated with a dismal madness and rampant, sickening ignorance; all those anguished, wrecked years had congealed inside; but the girl would come in to rub Jonah’s body with a foul-smelling lotion; he’d wait and wait for her, impulsively counting the hours; images of blistering-hot gravel appeared to Jonah at times, sometime around St. Elijah’s Day—green waves scattering sparkling droplets, the gromwell absorbing the sunlight, the hypericum growing firm, the birds piercing holes in the massive clouds pregnant with rain, the waves hurtling forward one on top of the other and then pausing; the gulls skirting the sun then imperceptibly dropping to the ground; inside, someone is lying between the pale blue walls, wrapped up in the folds of a bedsheet; outside, the chill of autumn was nibbling away at the shore—someone is leaning over him, but Jonah cannot remember—no matter how he tries; he just wanted to retrieve the memory of a woman: surrounded by the sea, with white flowers, and yellow flowers, standing tall, on a slope, a steep slope, from where the sand on the beach looked colorless, and birds were silently dropping down into the depths of the cliffs—and in the midst of the twisted brush, her overly elongated neck, entwined with snakes of yellow, slightly wilted lilies; Jonah searched his memory but the woman was lost—a cracked windowsill, a carafe on a table, the chatter of orange-gray birds beyond the window, the rain pelting the poplars at night; he almost remembers a hand but immediately catches himself, because the hand is all that crystalizes; darkness brims over like ink, it’s raining hailstones over the rooftops, the wind picks up, the sea roars, tossing waves that eat away layer after layer of cooled pebbles, dead seaweed, and dead fish; in the twilight, in the blue twilight, he hears a loud noise and, surprisingly, this he remembers vividly: gentle ripples flirting with reflected heaps of beet-colored clouds, a white hand, the taste of something sweet in his mouth, the juice of crushed grapes; the black sun has plunged downward, and the sparrows, too; shadow enfolds the hands; the sparrows plunge downward, plunging with the sun; a storm approaches: a wild whistling from the east, tearing the air to pieces, beating a rhythm of ta-ta-ta-bam-bam-bam-ta-tam-m, like the thumping of train wagons, gnawing the flesh with cold, sucking the body (that miserable, tired body), into some kind of quagmire. The sun going down. The black sun. Jonah was coming round—the ugly, murky day was drying out, lapsing into bands of black and white; “So that’s what it is,” Jonah said to himself, the melting snow on the other side of the window frame peeling off like old skin, like blisters. Jonah felt himself somewhere else...