Lucky Breaks by Yevgenia Belorusets

Author:Yevgenia Belorusets [Belorusets, Yevgenia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780811229852
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2022-02-11T16:42:24+00:00

the stars

the days drag on with no meaning. It’s really quiet in A, where we live. Nobody shoots at anybody; nobody asks for explanations for no reason; roadblocks don’t work the way they do at B. Here, you can drive through a roadblock unmolested, especially if you are taking a jitney bus or taxi.

I don’t orient myself well in the city where I’ve spent my whole life.

I don’t understand who these people are: the ones I consider my friends, the ones I get together with every Thursday to play cards for small change while consuming a mountain of cookies and candy. What scares me most is stability. There’s a quiet, but an unsteady kind of quiet, giving way, like a bog or a swamp. That’s it, a swamp. Not a soul around. I am searching for my husband in the forest, in the middle of water, knee-deep. Did this happen to me? Or did none of it happen? You’re going to laugh. It happened not to me but to my neighbor. For some reason I always find myself in her place when I tell her story. Don’t chalk me up for crazy. I often have dreams that I’m by a line of trees, gallons of blood running everywhere, a cart completely covered with bodies, they’re shooting us down, a firing squad. It must have come from a history textbook. I have nothing left to do but to climb into the cart, hide under the bodies, and smear blood over my face so that they count me as one of the dead.

Whereas in real life, rather than in a dream, here’s what happened. Last year, my neighbor went searching for her husband––they had taken him prisoner, but then they said they had let him go. She searched for him day after day for many days, and in the end found him in the forest! It took a while. She started in the nearby villages, then she searched in town, and then at his relatives’ places. Finally, she took to wandering around the forest, calling him by name until he answered. The forest is a good place to shout out somebody’s name. You can even howl.

They held hands and walked through our vast forest. Whenever I remember my neighbor’s story the forest strikes me as impenetrable, gigantic. The trees of the forest rose high above them like ship masts. Sergey, her husband, walked beside her; they moved very lightly, with cushioned tread, as if they had feathers on their soles, or a layer of moss. She said that the moss in the forest began to understand them. The moss spread out before them and became their compliant ground, carpet, and pillow for their every step, each step so soft no one heard them. They found a path that, in three hours, brought them to a roadway, and from there the town was close at hand. Night had fallen but they nonetheless learned very quickly how to see really well in the dark.

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