THE SEVENTH CHAPTER

by Kostiantyn Moskalets

translated from Ukrainian by Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky

What shall we do in the heat of summer

But wait in barren orchards for another October?

Some malady is coming upon us. We wait, we wait,

And the saints and martyrs wait, for those

who shall be martyrs and saints.

T.S. Eliot, “Murder in the Cathedral”

I

“And suddenly it dawns on you that these strange experiences of remembering the future are states of direct awareness, in which time and space, future and past are made simultaneously present through a perspective that is uniquely your own. Nothing ever happens twice. On the horizontal axis of history each event appears only once. What gives rise to the illusion of recurrence are those states of awareness, refined to utmost purity. That focused perspective is your fate for eternity. All of your actions are inscribed in it, like in a book, and will be illuminated by that perspective through a single principle: having faith in yourself. Everything that you’ve ever known, you little seed that fell from heaven, everything that you’ve known forever is now happening to you, unfolding in historical time. Eternity unfolds in history. History passes into eternity. True fate is chosen as one’s unique perspective, one’s own take on things. Identity is based on this decision — to choose…”

Stakhorsky thought that it would be too hard for them, too obscure, and stopped writing. They need bread and spectacles, well, spectacular sex too, and there he is overwhelming them with the phenomenology of seeing and philosophy of time. Little seed, you say?  He came up to the mirror and looked into his eyes. The eyes looked back at him, sad and bloodshot. He caught a glimpse of the window in the mirror. It was raining. Stakhorsky decided it was time for a coffee break and started getting dressed to go out. 

His father came into the room. His long fingers were trembling, but he smiled as he handed Stakhorsky a magazine clipping. 

“Remember, we once talked about the execution of the imperial family. I found a picture and saved it for you. And then forgot all about it, for years! Can’t remember anything these days. Good thing I noticed it in my desk this morning.” 

Three girls in white dresses were sitting around a small table. The fourth one was standing with her head lowered. White flowers in a vase, an open book, a thick mirror frame on the wall. The caption read: “Daughters of Nicolas II Romanov, 1913. Photograph tentatively attributed to K. Bulla.” There was an interview with the director of the USSR Photography Association on the back of the clipping. An old magazine from a no-longer-existing country. An even older photograph from a non-existent empire. Some dead princesses. 

“Beautiful girls,” said Stakhorsky returning the clipping to his father. 

“No, you keep it… How did they dare raise their hands at such beauty?”

“Not just beauty, father. Have you taken your pills yet?”

Father shuffled to the kitchen for a glass of water. Stakhorsky slid the clipping into his desk and went outside. 

At dusk, the falling leaves smelled of vanilla and stop lights glimmered like moist crystals. He went to get the strongest coffee he could find in town. Every time someone came into the coffee shop, the sound of rain would burst into the room, making him think of a smuggled vinyl record on the verge of exploding with seventies rock music. Life was becoming bearable. The crowd was passing by the window, a self-sufficient mass in whose amorphous womb the reader of Merleau-Ponty and the practical man who thinks of such reading as a waste of time become equal, indistinguishable, rescued from their apparent differences by dissolving in the multi-headed waters of the alien Pontus. Stakhorsky pulled out a train ticket to Lviv and reviewed the information he knew by heart. He took this train regularly, often ending up in the same train car, sometimes even in the same sleeping compartment. What kept changing were the prices, the faces of the train conductors, and the felt length of the journey. There was still plenty of time left. Eight hours or so.

There are many things one could do in eight hours. One could read a book. Or keep writing the chapter. Even though the chapter started posing serious problems as of late. Stakhorsky was trying to work out the distinction between the internal time of experience and external time, the time of seasons and clocks: how the internal time condenses when one takes a trip, contemplates, or falls in love — and how it sags and lapses when one stands in a queue or awaits arrest. Stakhorsky was intimately familiar with queues and arrests. He tried to treat them dispassionately, as objects of his phenomenological study. What he was missing was not experience, but a broad enough concept to account for it in general terms. Husserl and Bergson with their cumbersome terminology and questionable methods of description became an obstacle. He came to this city where he was born and grew up just for a couple of days, to visit his frail father and to take a break, but now he found himself spending the nights in his father’s study, poring over notes and books, as old and feeble as their master. It was raining, and that was a perfect excuse to barricade himself inside the apartment and not call on any of his old high school friends.

So what if once upon a time this “Tidbit”, poorly furnished and meagerly decorated, was his gang’s favorite hangout spot, where they had their first drinks and smoked their first cigarettes? So what if here they had mind-blowing conversations about Latin American novels and T.S. Eliot’s poetry, read out loud their masterpieces written the night before, and made seditious prophesies about Ukraine’s liberation from the Russian imperial yoke? They thought their gang was so extraordinary, the only one of its kind; that people like them did not exist anywhere else, well, maybe in Wilno or in Krakow, — but certainly not here. Here it was only them and their enemies. They had to accomplish unheard-of feats, perform superhuman miracles of self-sacrifice, austerity, and naturally, asceticism, and write unsurpassable novels, getting sentenced to ten years of hard labor in the camps, and many decades later they’d each get a Nobel Prize… They were a brotherhood of spiritual practitioners and pilgrims to the East — but today he doesn’t want to call or visit any one of them. Over time, it turned out that his precious gang was one of many; that each had a favorite hangout spot; that from Lviv to Kharkiv all the heresies and the prophesies were nauseatingly similar; and that those who came to fulfill them were not heroes, but intrepid profiteers and daring raiders. None of them ended up writing anything great, all of that was just childish babbling for which nobody would give them any prizes nor honors, even though they could have certainly ended up in a labor camp for that silly scribbling back then, why not, there were numerous precedents.   

  Stakhorsky shrugged his shoulders — and immediately smirked at this convulsive gesture. It was already dark outside. He kept catching a glimpse of his own reflection in the window, as well as a reflection of the barista juggling brandy glasses and espresso cups, a lively brown-haired girl who looked nothing like the girl who’d worked here twenty years ago, what was her name again? Anastasia. His classmate Best was after her, even though she was older. But that’s precisely what turned him on. They went to the same school, and she hated Kundel as much as they did… Stakhorsky suddenly got an urge to go see his old school, that prison house of his youth, to take a look at its lit windows — straight off, as if it could run away and disappear forever. 

He stepped outside into the rain. Pedestrians were in a hurry to get home, change into a pair of dry slacks, and eat in front of their TV’s. A group of Russified teenagers were picking on each other at the internet club entrance.  Stakhorsky tuned in to their conversation and learned that football striker Andriy Shevchenko was a god and dead poet Taras Shevchenko was a snot. Two drunkards were helping the third one out of a puddle. They were laughing, he was crying. An ancient ambulance passed by, a new flasher fixed with duct tape on its roof. Stakhorsky took a drag of his Prima, now renamed Prima Suprema, the cheapest brand of cigarettes, the only one he could afford. These were the signs of the times: old, tattered things fixed up with flashy postmodern gadgets; cigarettes called “Supreme” that taste like shit; still Little Russia, but now — Ukraine as well. They pick her up, she falls down again and weeps, everyone else is laughing.

The school was not to be found anywhere. It used to be right there, on that spot, ever since the First World War. After the second one, the Nazis set up their headquarters there, and a little later Sydir Kovpak, a terrorist, made passionate speeches before the students, and later still Stakhorsky, a dissident, studied there, and not so long ago the dissident’s classmate Best taught English in one of the cavernous rooms. He was the guy who translated Eliot’s “Murder in the Cathedral” when he was fifteen and lost his manuscript in the river, or more precisely, the manuscript sunk into the river along with the rest of the contests of Best’s backpack, which was accidentally pushed off the boat by to a fateful move of Anastasia’s hip. And no matter how long they searched, diving all in, the school wasn’t there, just a paid parking lot remained. A double murder in the Cathedral and in the Water, said Brest then. Years of creative efforts hit bottom. That’s the storyline.

Best sported sideburns and smoked a pipe. He was an anglophile, like Nabokov and Kant. Why not call him and ask where that monstrosity of a school went, even though the answer to his problem is already clear: a conflagration of clairvoyance in the middle of the night, a chronotope of consciousness. The internal landscaping of time, the cursed theme of Stakhorsky’s book’s Seventh Chapter. Nah, I won’t call anywhere, I’ll just go home and spend some time with Father.

Father was asleep. Stakhorsky stood by his side for a while, anxiously listening to the whistling of a tiny bagpipe in his chest. He didn’t dare wake him up. Maybe he’ll last a while longer. Please let him last a while… How much time fits into “a while”?

The school that’s become the central element in the landscape of his nightmares was no more. He remembered the predatory smile of his homeroom teacher, Mr. Kundel. “Why aren’t you in the Komsomol yet?” Kundel asked him at the end of the senior year. “I think it’s too early for me. Komsomol is such a serious establishment, and I am still so naïve and immature, so easygoing, you know,” Stakhorsky said, looking his enemy straight in the eye. “Watch out, or it’ll be too late,” the teacher said in a threatening tone of voice. Is he dead yet? That would be too bad. If only he could see the national blue-and-yellow flag on top of the city administration! He would die of rabid fury after biting a couple of random passerby, foaming at his mouth. But the passerby would survive! Where will his homeless nightmares go now? They will probably move in with someone else, whose school remains intact. 

He dialed Best’s number. 

“Best. Did you sell our school to an oligarch, or what?”

“Hey old man, what’s going on? Where are you?” Best was audibly glad to hear his voice.

“I’m home. But I’m leaving tonight. So where’s the school?”

“Aha! So now you feel the sense of loss? Mourning, huh! You should have tended it like a young tender shoot! They took it apart and drove it off half a year ago, and now you wake up! That’s what the enemies of the people do! They set up a parking place there.”

“I saw that. Yet another cherished dream of two village idiots come true.”

“Two idiots? Man, that school was cursed by whole generations!”

“Well said, friend. Serves us right. Do you remember Anastasia? She was a bartender at “Tidbit.”

“Why wouldn’t I remember?”

“What’s going on with her?”

“She married a pilot who stopped over in our beautiful little nest of a city. And flew with him all the way to Sverdlovsk. That was a while ago, during Perestroika.”

“I just remembered today how she sank your translation of T.S. Eliot.” 

“That was an accident. She just had an epic ass, you know. Hey, what’s the Polish word for ‘ass’?”

“Dupa! As always, I appreciate talking to a philologist. And where do you teach now that the school is gone? In the city square, in the church, at a subway station?”

“Way down in the hole, man. Come over, I’ve missed you.”

“I can’t, Best. I am leaving in a couple of hours.”

“How’s Father?”

“Same old.”

“That figures. Hang in there, man.”

“Same to you.”

Stakhorsky went out to the balcony for a smoke. It wasn’t raining as hard. He went back into the room, turned on the lamp, sat at his father’s desk, sank into his comfortable old chair. Out of boredom, he took the yellowed clipping out of the drawer. 

…The dark-haired girl, propping her chin with her hand, seems to be smiling. Perhaps she knows the photographer and is smiling at him. Her hair is hanging down, flowing freely over her shoulders, touching the book on the table. What’s the book? Two of her younger sisters are huddled up together. They seem to be sharing a single chair. They are looking intently into the camera. The one standing in the middle pretends to look at the book. She certainly can’t read anything from that distance. No, she isn’t reading – she just doesn’t want to look at the photographer. That one doesn’t care about appearing handsome to some future viewers. She’s focused on expressing her hostility towards the present situation, here and now. What made her so mad? The vase with the flowers had been pushed all the way to the edge of the table, to make room for the book. Why did they need a book? The composition would certainly be complete with just the vase. And what’s with that bare wall in the background? Something isn’t quite right. It looks like the table had been pushed against the wall in a hurry, and so the edge of the mirror disrupts the compositional unity of the shot. The girl on the right looks a bit like Nicolas II. What if it’s not a mirror, but a painting? One can’t tell just by looking at the frame. The angry girl must be the eldest. Her hair is tied with a ribbon. That hairstyle must have been fashionable back then. Reminiscent of the portrait of the poetess from Pompeii, the one that people frequently refer to as “Sappho”. What in the world made her so mad?..

Stakhorsky felt blood rush to his face, a powerful shiver ran over his body. His hair stood on end. He shot up from the chair, his heart tearing through his ribcage. 

“Wait! That was me! She is mad at me! How could I forget?” 

II

First he stepped into a mirror and started down a long hallway, filled with empty boxes and various junk. This did not surprise him in the least. In fact, he now recalled having entered the mirror on many other occasions and now he distinctly remembered which way to go, where to make a turn, which obstacles he would come across and how to avoid them. The hallway also reminded him of walking behind the curtains at the National Theater, where at any moment you could be overtaken by some Dr. Krolick or a friendly Rabbit with a bottle of calvados, eager to discuss Oleh Lysheha’s eclectic poetry or some other critical matter. But as he dove in deeper and deeper, no Rabbit emerged out of the dark. Instead, he heard some squeaking and scurrying; helmets, spears, flags and other props were jutting out of shadowy boxes; he kept stepping over costumes with epaulettes and frills and scrolls of theatrical backdrops with painted Riviera landscapes and Russian onion domes. He stopped to pick up some of the junk and stuff it back into the boxes, so as not to stumble over it on his way back. Finally, he reached the end of the hallway and came out onto a cobblestone street. He walked through ornate gates into a garden. A dark-haired girl with long hair was waiting for him near the entrance. 

“At last!” she said. “Let’s get going.”

The girl led Stakhorsky to the palace. He didn’t know the girl, didn’t even know her name, but she acted like an old friend. Or has he seen her before? Was she the bartender from “Tidbit”? He looked over her neat little body and immediately felt ashamed of himself. She was so trusting. Like a little sister. Any vulgar thought seemed completely out of place. 

The palace was bustling like a beehive. Everyone was in a hurry. Servants were busy covering up the furniture and carrying boxes, couches, and chairs. Stakhorsky felt lost for a moment, and the girl took him by the hand and led him through the halls, decorated with exquisite richly framed paintings, elaborate grandfather clocks, carved tables, ancient-looking amphorae, and fine Chinese vases. Who was that girl? They stepped out of the mirror and into a long white ballroom, with a row of luminous chandeliers hanging from a vaulted ceiling. Street noise, the neighing of horses and the honking of automobiles seeped into the room. So much light. 

“Here we are. Let me call them.” 

But two girls in white dresses were already running toward them.

“You have to take a photograph,” his nameless friend said to him.

“Alright. Do you have a camera?”

The camera was standing by the wall, an ancient box on a tripod with castors peeking from under the raspberry-colored cover. Everything here looked old. Except for the girls, who were very young. 

“We have to stand you against the wall, to let the light from the window fall on your faces,” Stakhorsky explained to the girls as he was figuring out how to use the camera. 

The girls quickly pulled the table and stood it by the wall. Then they grabbed a chair and stood it by the table. Why were they in such a hurry? Had war been declared? Were they leaving for their summer house, or going on vacation? 

“When you see this photograph, you’ll remember us,” said the girl with the long dark hair. “And you’ll bring us over to safety. Just as we agreed.” 

“I’ll bring you over? From where? From here? But how?”  

“You’ll say a magic spell.”

“But I don’t know any.”

“That’s easy. You’ll take a book…”

“How about the Bible?” suggested her little sister.

“I don’t own a Bible,” Stakhorsky said.

“So what books do you own? Shakespeare, Dante, Homer…”

“I do have a copy of Homer. In Zhukovsky’s translation.”

“Excellent. The Odyssey. I’ll go fetch it.” 

She came back carrying a huge volume. 

“Let’s pick a passage. It will be our key. You’ll see this photograph and you’ll remember that you have to read the magic spell. It’ll open up the mirror for us. We’ll read the same passage here. Promise? We’ll be in grave danger,” her voice began to break.

“I promise,” Stakhorsky replied.

“Do we have your word?”

“I give you my word of honor! Let’s look for the key,” Stakhorsky said. The general sense of anxiety and urgency passed over to him, too. 

“What passages from the Odyssey do you remember?”

“Odysseus and the Cyclops. He ties himself to the underside of a sheep and escapes.”

“Excellent choice. Very appropriate. And there’s no way you can forget it. Look here, it’s at the end of the Ninth Song:

When young Dawn with her rose-red fingers shone once more

I roused the men straightaway, ordering all crews

to man the ships and cast off cables quickly.

They swung aboard at once, they sat to the oars in ranks

and in rhythm churned the water white with stroke on stroke.

And from there we sailed on, glad to escape our death

yet sick at heart for the comrades we had lost.”

“In this song, Odysseus calls himself Nobody,” Stakhorsky recalled.

“So you’ll be our Nobody,” said the dark haired girl, giggling.

“Or your sheep,” he said, smiling.

Against the background of the wall, white as a movie screen, they looked strikingly beautiful. White dresses, white flowers in a vase.

“I have to capture the edge of the mirror through which we entered. To make sure that I remember.”

Stakhorsky rolled the camera to the right. This disrupted the composition of the photograph, and he was struggling to find the right angle when one set of the doors opened and yet another girl in a white dress with a pseudo-Grecian hairstyle came into the room. She saw Stakhorsky and her face turned pale.

“So this is what you are up to! All alone in a room with a strange man? What a lovely way to pass the time! Straight away…”

“Calm down! Please!” the dark-haired girl shot up from her seat at the table. “I’ll explain everything later. Let it go for now, I beg you.”

“And I beg you to stop this outrage immediately! You’ve picked a fine moment for it, too!” 

The dark-haired girl grabbed her hand, raised the palm to her lips, and kissed it. Then she made the fuming Grecian stand at the table.

“A single moment for eternity. And you too are with us.”

“I can’t bear to look at this depravity…”

“Then look at the book!”

Somebody was walking down the hallway. Those were the measured steps of a confident man. Perhaps it was their father, because even the dark-haired girl turned pale. But she collected herself, sat at the table, lowered her chin onto her hand, and smiled. 

“Now take the picture. We are ready,” she ordered quietly.

Stakhorsky pulled the cord, the frame made a click. Like a breechblock of a pistol. 

“Now run! Back into the mirror!”

The steps stopped in front of the door. Stakhorsky dived into the cool darkness and hit something with his side. He looked back and saw that one of the little sisters snuck into the mirror after him. She caught up with him, kissed him on the cheek, and whispered: “Don’t you ever forget us! We’ll be waiting.”  Flushed and bewildered, she turned around and ran back out. 

A wave of tenderness washed over Stakhorsky. How much they wanted to live! Could he ever forget it? He walked through the garden, crossed the cobblestone street, and walked into an inconspicuous building. Behind the door, he found the familiar long hallway. Ecstatically, he flew through that hallway, humming to himself, suffocating with joy. His life has suddenly become worthwhile, meaningful. It was no longer a private isolated glimmer, but a continuous suprapersonal shining. He had the key to one of the world’s greatest mysteries. He himself was the key, a bridge between past and present. Time lost its false appearance of linearity and irrevocability. The gold of the One shone through. Its light dissolved all knots of dichotomies, all the distinction between the apparent and the reflected, life and death.

Bearing this good news, he woke up. Inna was still asleep. The Sun of Oneness shone through the window of the old Boyko hut, a walnut tree casting a tremulous shadow on the wall. In the golden heat of June, the Carpathians shimmered around them. Laying on his back, he watched this holiday of being, going through every detail of his dream with his eyes wide open, waiting for his wife to wake up — it was her birthday today! — so that he could tell her one of his most wonderful stories.

III

“So that’s what I get from you for my birthday!”  Inna said after hearing the story to the end. “While the birthday girl is sound asleep, her husband runs off through the looking glass and finds himself in the company of long-haired maidens, who shower him with kisses! You didn’t manage to meet me in your dream, did you?”

What a prosaic response to such an extraordinary vision. They packed some food to go, grabbed a bottle of wine, and went off to the mountains for the day. 

For a while after the incident, Stakhorsky felt as if he had been divinely inspired. The luminosity and tenderness he experienced in the dream seeped into his waking life. Lviv had opened up to him as never before. Everything was falling into place. For the first time in his life, Stakhorsky felt what it’s like to have a charisma. He wrote half of his book in a couple of weeks. The writing gave him a lot of pleasure. It was dense yet light, without any marks of effort, which he could tolerate neither in his own writing nor in the writing of others. 

But after a while, the experience of a miracle became more distant and the brilliant illumination it cast over his life grew dimmer. Trips, work, chores, the coming of winter — soon enough he forgot about his dream, his extraordinary mission, his promise. On the seventh chapter of his book, Stakhorsky started tripping up again and eventually got stuck; Inna fell ill; his father’s condition deteriorated dramatically; there was no money, and he felt trapped rushing from one gig to the next, translating tedious academic articles, writing reviews, making do with who knows what, who knows how. He typed and retyped, and borrowed money, and gave it back again… The circle was too tight for any princesses.

Stakhorsky took another look at the photograph. He felt uneasy. He’d experienced vivid dreams before, déjà vu, mystical visions… But this? What do I do with this? Where do I begin? He grabbed his phone and dialed up Lviv. 

“Inna? Good evening. This is me.” 

“Good evening. And this is me. What’s going on?”

“Not much. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

“How’s your father?”

“He’s better. He started going outside again. But it’s been raining a lot recently.”

“Same here.”

“Inna, listen, do you remember the dream I had on your birthday?”

He sheepishly hoped that his wife would say no, I don’t remember you telling me anything. And everything will go back to normal. He was exhausted, his mind was wondering, the auroras of time regained, this happens to everyone, doesn’t it? But Inna’s memory was impeccable.

“How could I forget! Three snow-white nymphs frolicking with Satyrus Stakhorsky, a photograph commemorating the moment, kisses exchanged through the looking glass… What about it?”

He couldn’t come up with an answer.

“What’s wrong? Did you have another dream about those girls?”

“If only!”

She figured it out herself.

“You found the photograph?”

“Father found it. In some magazine from the Perestroika era.”

“That’s so freaky… So who are those girls? Is there an inscription?”

“They’re the daughters of Nicolas II. Romanov. The last Russian tsar. They were executed by the Bolsheviks in 1918. The picture was taken in 1913. And you know what else is weird? It said that the photographer’s identity has not been confirmed.”

A silence. 

“So… what are you going to do about it?” Inna’s voice sounded reverent. People use that tone of voice around the insane and the dead.    

“How should I know?”

“Have you found the book? The Iliad, was it?”

“The Odyssey. Not yet. But Father owns a copy.”

“Listen, Stakhorsky. Don’t do anything, I beg you. Come back tomorrow. Bring that photograph with you. We’ll talk about it. I mean, this is mind-blowing! We should probably consult …”

“…a psychiatrist,” Stakhorsky completed her thought for her. 

“But in the dream, you didn’t know who they were, did you?”

“No. I’ve never seen their photographs before. All the images of the royal family were prohibited for the longest time, remember?”

“I thought they were just symbols. Muses. I won’t be able to fall asleep now.”

“Let’s not add to the phone bill.”

“So … goodnight?”

“Goodnight.”

He found the Odyssey in its usual place. As a young boy, Stakhorsky planned to learn it by heart. He read somewhere that the educated Greeks knew the Iliad and the Odyssey by heart, and he wanted to be like them. Father was very amused. His son set up a shrine with images of Hermes and Apollo and got straight A’s in ancient history. Soon enough they started studying the history of the Soviet Union, and he became a C student. 

Stakhorsky flipped to the Ninth Song and skimmed the overview. Yes, this is it. Even in its size the book resembled the one that the princesses had on their side table. This is what insanity must feel like. Should I cross myself?

Read. There are just six lines in the hexameter.

But it’s impossible.

Read. They are waiting.

Time is linear. History can’t be reversed. They’re long dead. Murdered. 

You will kill them the second time if you don’t read. Don’t try to wiggle out of this. You made a promise.

In a dream.

You gave your word of honor. What do you know about dreams, mirrors, and time anyway?

I can’t.

We are waiting! Read!

I’m afraid.

She caught up with you and kissed you. So that you won’t forget. You wept for joy. Read, you may still save them. It’s their only chance, whatever it is.

But it can’t be!

Here’s the photograph. Here’s the book. Inna confirmed that you told her about that dream. You are not insane. Read it out loud.

But I am terrified.

Stakhorsky moaned in pain. The fear was unbearable. Waves of hot ice rolled over his body. He was shaking.

All right, I’ll try. What if nothing happens? I gave my word of honor. This could be a test, right? I’ll just do it and get it over with.

He took a deep breath and plunged into the icy waters of the unimaginable:

When young Dawn with her rose-red fingers shone once more

I roused the men straightaway, ordering all crews

to man the ships and cast off cables…

Stakhorsky heard a hoarse voice at a great distance, and barely recognized it as his own. Where am I? A yellow butterfly that lay dead on a windowsill came back to life and started fluttering around the table lamp, shaking the pollen off its wings onto the open book. Behind his back, he heard a noise, resembling a creaking of snow under a boot. It came from the mirror frame. Stakhorsky sprang back, as if from a snake bite. 

They were already running down the long hallway! He heard the echo of their girlish voices, the clicking of heels, the rustling of dresses. Three more lines, three more moments packed into one — and they will be here, in a tiny room of an ugly Soviet-built apartment. Saved. Just one more moment, filled with three lines of hexameter… But what will Father say? They might wake him up! And he’s very ill, he shouldn’t get upset. How will he survive their arrival? He would recognize the girls right away! How would I explain to him what happened? And me, how will I survive?

Stakhorsky pushed the book away with all his might and it fell on the floor. The desk swam before him, ashes slowly fell from the ceiling, his heart was barely beating. The butterfly was gone. That monster Kundel would have a reason to be proud of me now.

Father walked into the room. 

“You’re still here? What time is it?”

“Time zero,” Stakhorsky’s cheap digital watch showed four empty loops.

“You’re white as a sheet! What’s wrong?”

“I just… saw something scurrying around. I hit it with a book.”

“Where could it come from? I’ll tell Sveta to bring over some poison. You know, I heard voices, laughter. I thought your friends came over.”

“No, Father. Nobody came over. I have to get ready for the train.”

“Right. Don’t be late. A mouse? Who would have thought! Soon enough there will be wolves running around here. Wolves and bears…” 

Stakhorsky put on his coat and hugged his old man.

“Be well, my dear.”

“Travel safely. Call me. Come visit. You’re taking the girls with you, aren’t you?”

Father handed him the clipping.

“You know they don’t like Russians in Lviv. Let them stay with you.”

“They’d take care of me,” his father looked Stakhorsky in the eye. “And this little one with the book, she’d read to me in the evenings. Wouldn’t that be the dream…”

Kostiantyn Moskalets is a Ukrainian poet, novelist, essayist, critic, translator, and musician. Born in 1963 in Matiyivka, Chernihiv region, he graduated from the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow and gained country-wide recognition in the 1980s through the Lviv theater-studio Ne zhurys! with his song “Vona.” His novels and collections of essays include Dumy, Myslyvtsi na snihu, Vechirniy med, and others. His works have been translated into English, German, Japanese, Polish, Serbian, and Russian. He is the recipient of Ukraine’s highest literary awards and honors, including the Vasyl Stus Prize, the Yurii Sheveliov Prize, and the Taras Shevchenko National Prize. He has lived and worked in his native village, within a hundred miles from the Russian border, since 1991. 

Oksana Maksymchuk is a bilingual Ukrainian-American poet, scholar, and literary translator. Her debut English-language poetry collection Still City was published by University of Pittsburgh Press (US) and Carcanet Press (UK) and has been long-listed for the 2025 Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2025 Pen/Voelcker Award for Poetry. Her poems appeared in The Guardian, The Paris Review, The Poetry Review and many other journals. She had also published two poetry collections, Xenia and Lovy, in the Ukrainian. Oksana holds a PhD in philosophy from Northwestern University.

Max Rosochinsky is a scholar and translator. With Oksana Maksymchuk, he co-edited an anthology Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine (Academic Studies Press/Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2017), and co-translated several poetry collections, including Lyuba Yakimchuk’s Apricots of Donbas (Lost Horse Press, 2021) and Marianna Kiyanovska’s The Voices of Babyn Yar (Harvard University Press, 2022). They are recipients of a National Endowments for the Arts Translation Fellowship, the Scaglione Prize for Literary Translation from the Modern Language Association, the American Association for Ukrainian Studies Translation Prize, and other honors. Their work has been supported by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Fulbright Scholar Program, National Endowment for the Humanities, and National Endowment for the Arts.