Bessarabian Stamps by Oleg Woolf

Author:Oleg Woolf [Woolf, Oleg; Dralyuk, Boris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781939419354
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing

X.

Ileana and Sandu

ILEANA LIVED IN A VILLAGE WHOSE NAME SHE COULD barely remember. There’s no shortage of villages where young women scrub a long floor, tucking up their skirts on the threshold of a new day. The village was common, like recollections fit for any weather—where everything happens anew, if one thinks about it seriously. All Ileana had to do was delve into her thoughts, and they would take the shape of sunspots at the very bottom of the ephedra growing on the outskirts of the village. Then they would form into viscid, unfamiliar, meaningful words, or lengthen into resonant, thin-walled music, which sends the soul straight to heaven. And then tears would well up all by themselves. Such were Ileana’s thoughts. This is why she decided she couldn’t think properly at all.

There was a serious mystery in these thoughts, entrusted to Ileana so that she could divide it in two, when the desire to reveal it turned to love. In the meantime, Ileana kept the mystery in her chest, beneath her heart, occasionally taking it out just to admire it—and at that moment, she had enough for everyone. She even had enough for the carpenter Theophanes, who often walked past her yard drunk, and who once took the neighbor’s cat Manya by the head, struck the animal against the ground, and left it lying dead beside the gate. At that time, Ileana brought the mystery out to him in her sleep, carefully cradling it in her hands, in order to save him. At first he kept silent, shaking his curly head in shy wonderment and making eyes. Then he said: well, you think in the first place, and I in mine. After that, the neighbors got another cat, which went by another nickname, and Theophanes left the village and never came back. But Ileana still pitied both Manya and Theophanes, and once wept quietly in her sleep, seeing him dead in some unfamiliar town.

Once the village was flooded with such a light that only the blind can see it, having climbed to the very top on their smiles. The houses and trees no longer cast shadows, and the clouds lay so low that the pregnant dog Savka came out of her barn and commenced singing, while some passers-by crossed the street with their heads down, without even noticing.

This all happened so long ago that the road to Turkey went through Chernivtsi. Gazing out the window, the school physics teacher Ion Sandu saw an alley lined with linden trees, looking haggard in the light, like a railroad halt exhausted by passing trains. The instructor put on a pair of cream-colored boots, donned a green jacket, walked out of the house, slipped a piece of chocolate to a chubby tot counting pigeons by the fountain, and disappeared in a dubious-looking little clunker. So said an elderly passer-by, witnessing the incident. Well, yes, replied her friend. If you should meet a child, dig in your jacket pocket, see if you have a piece of candy or a ruble—and if you find something, give it.

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