Down Among the Fishes

A sack came rolling…

A SACK CAME ROLLING…In spite of everything that had happened here, I did actually come back. But not for long. I’m going to leave soon and never return.

It’s beautiful here. Really lovely. Misty steel-grey sheets of fine rain divide the air over my head and all around me into tiers — close up they’re greenish-grey, further away they look greyish green. The rain runs down my face and the oilskins I’m wearing. In a way they are just like each other. Oilskins lose their shine when they’re old, and an old face no longer lets the soul shine through. I’m standing right on the frontier. Or, to be exact, where the frontier used to be. On my right, on the other bank of the Buh*, I can hear people shouting in Polish — in spite of the rain someone is swimming in the river. To my left there are people speaking Russian; these are the townies who have dachas**, at least those whose crummy shacks haven’t yet been bought up by Tolik the alcoholic. They’re always on guard, keeping watch over their fruit and vegetable patches, even in a downpour.

So here I am, standing on a narrow strip of water meadow right by the old frontier in my oilskins and wellies, one scar on my stomach, another — just for the sake of variety — on my back; the bones in my fingers have healed but the calluses haven’t worn away yet. The rain is just teeming down, making the grass bend under the weight of water. A little lizard swims calmly past my foot in a stream the rain has made; it’s bright green with a yellow pattern on its back. This is a top-grade lizard. When I was a child, we got really excited whenever we caught one like this — much better than the common-or-garden plain grey ones. I’m amazed at just how much the feet of the lizard– when it spreads them out — are like the tiny hands of a young child. Meadow. Water. Ripples on the surface of the enormous puddles of rain water. Calm lizard with a child’s hands. Poland on one side, Russia on the other. And from this narrow strip of land between them I hear a whisper, although I have no idea where it’s coming from precisely:

A sack comes rolling down the hill,

In it is food, take what you will,

There’s rye and wheat,

And soft white rolls to eat…*

I get a sense of being rebuked by these words, or mocked, or even of being thanked in a patronizing kind of way… This is the earth talking to me, the thick black waterlogged mud of the river, in a voice you can’t hear, you can’t pinpoint where it comes from, it’s indistinct, but you feel its power. And the earth speaks Ukrainian.

A sack did come rolling down the hill, straight into my arms.

The price of the sack was a human life.

You hold out your arms to catch the sack, but what you catch is Death.

And then here you stand, under the pouring rain, and the water runs down your faded face, your khaki-coloured oilskins and your green wellies.

Right now I’m going to wipe the water off my face, take a last look at the tiers the rain has made in the air, and then go home, sit down in the one cosy corner that’s left where I can write, and put everything down on paper, just as it happened. And when that’s done, I’m going to leave this place and never come back.

And there’s something else: not everything in this story is fictitious, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, or real events is by no means always purely coincidental. If this means that so-called official personages will come and pay me a visit, then I’ll simply deny everything. For the benefit of these plainclothes art experts, I can add that the events of the story take place in 2012.