SLA 468S 2002. Student translations.

Link to original.

Uliana Pasicznyk

Assignment 4, SLA 468: 11 February 2002

I walked out onto the street. Cars were streaming by, one after another, and trolleys packed with people swarming like bees in a beehive. One boy was peering through a splattered window, his nose pressed against the pane. It was raining, and there was no way I could pass through the interminable, blaring, surging throng. Above the street hung the bluish haze of gas fumes. The driver of a taxi spit a cigarette butt out his window. On the other side of the street stood an old man, waiting to cross, like me.

Above me a small window opened, scattering raindrops on my head. I looked up sideways [крайока].

"Hi!" said Maria. "Where are you off to?"

"Hi," I said. "Just over there!"

"Still cruising [дмешся], huh?"

I whistled lightly. Maria didn't like whistling, and I knew she'd probably take offense. And she did--the window above my head was already fastened, its drapes drawn shut.

I stepped up to the intersection to cross the street in earnest. The old fellow on the other side lost patience with the flow of cars: stepping off the curb, he bravely and briskly made his way through traffic.

As I entered the park, the wet pathways were glistening, and the autumn leaves lying on them gave off a dull sheen. A girl was coming toward me. She was really two girls, one walking on the asphalt and one in it. Shoes with too-thick soles treaded through the leaves, and these shoes were the only thing the two of them shared. I smiled at her. The girl looked past me, though, as if a light had just come on behind me and on the screen of gray sky a fascinating movie was about to begin.

The thought occurred to me that the girl's hair was cut like mine, and that our haircolor was the same. Then it struck me that we resembled each other somewhat. I looked down and saw some young fellow in my shoes walking in the asphalt, wearing pants that were too wide.

Two aging women were making their wavering way toward me, bobbing slowly down the sidewalk like two big balls.

"And Maya's married already," one of them said in a low voice.

"No--really?!"

"Her husband's got an apartment--he's an engineer..."

I again began to think about the girl who had just passed by me. Ravishing roses [розкішні підківки] had flamed on her cheeks--she was surely getting married soon too. Probably her future husband was an engineer, too, and had a luxurious apartment. For now, I was an electrician's apprentice, so maybe she had reason to look through me as if I were transparent.

I continued walking down the sidewalk and now even began to wish that a window would open above me and someone would call my name. But the windows I was passing by--store displays, shops, barbers, studios--simply stared at me blankly. I began thinking that I shouldn't have offended Maria. I should be walking down these streets together with her, her steady, guiding arm in mine.

Two people were coming toward me. A girl was walking arm in arm with an uncommonly ruddy-faced [red-haired: рудий] young fellow--her eyes showed that she had been crying. Suddenly I felt the urge to take her arm away from her young man's and to see a smile light up her sad face. Maybe that was the reason I smiled brightly at her. But the tearful girl just snuffled and deliberately thumbed her turned-up nose at me....

Crossing the street, I made my way down the boulevard. An old man sat on some spread newspaper on a bench. He held a second, totally rain-specked paper and wore a celluloid hood over his head--to me he looked like a being from another planet.

My stomach let out a grumble. My mother was working the first shift, so there'd been no dinner at home today. Going into the bakery, I bought five whole rolls [у пиріжковій аж п'ять пиріжків]. I ate them standing up, propped at the counter, and washed them down with water. Beside me was a drunk with a beet-red nose, drinking beer and making smacking sounds; he was probably sucking out meat that had been stuck between his teeth since the day before yesterday. A girl stood in front of me, but it wasn't the one that I kept thinking about--the one who had so miraculously become two on the asphalt. This girl was holding a roll in two fingers--on one of them the nail polish had half chipped off. She had very even teeth--eating her roll she didn't so much bite as slice into it.

"Do you know Halia Bondarchuk?" a voice asked behind me.

"Why sure," came the response.

"Vovko's going out with her now."

"You don't say!"

I knew a Halia Bondarchuk too, but not the one this Vovko was going out with. The one I knew lived at no. 4 and had two kids. When she went out, one kid pulled her one way and the other the other way, as if they wanted to tear this Halia apart, like the ancient Derevlianians had once ripped apart Prince Ihor.

"Gimme a cigarette," the drunk said to me, his red nose gleaming now that he'd finished his beer.

I gave the man a cigarette. He said nothing in return.

"Thank you," I prompted him.

"Wha'd you say?... [што говориш?]" he said.

I was walking out on the crowded sidewalk again--the rain had stopped but people had not closed their umbrellas, so they bloomed strangely alongside the walks and trees, and the blue smoke of gas fumes shimmered above the street.

I went into the post office to write a letter [at the counter there]. The letter was to a classmate whom fate had swept from our city. He had come to mind today--actually, a leaf with his whereabouts had fallen out of my address book. "It's letter-writing day," cried the placards, as an eager mass of people stamped their envelopes. I let out a laugh and began to write. I wrote that I was an electrician's apprentice and that I was the only one in our class who had chosen that profession. I wrote about the last soccer match and about a music record that another classmate, Borys, had given me. I wrote that I didn't have a girl, that the one I had been going out with was on hold at the moment.... I looked up and envisioned an empty pathway, totally strewn with leaves so that it glistened. A girl was walking through those leaves--she was two girls, one above the asphalt and the other in it. We looked at one another, and I was again struck by how much she resembled me.

"You're lying!" I caught myself, "She didn't even glance at you!"

Bending over the letter, I heavily crossed out what I'd written about not having a girl and wrote that I had a new girlfriend. I had met her in the park, my pen was scribbling, one evening when I was out walking aimlessly.... Suddenly I wanted to crumple up the letter and throw it in the wastebasket. But instead I sealed the envelope shut and went to have it stamped.

The streetlights were already on. It wasn't raining, but people were still carrying colorful umbrellas above their heads.

"How nicely the umbrellas bloom!" I remarked to myself and spat, aiming at my feet.

But it happened that the spit landed, instead, on a lacquered, wondrously polished and wet shoe. I looked up into such astonished eyes that I was obliged to bow.

"So sorry!" I said.

The coat that was sailing past seemed to be one I had seen before. Of course--the girl I was constantly thinking about had worn that kind of coat. I hurried after it, but the profile that turned to me had such a comical [чудернацький] nose that I halted in my tracks.

There was a movie theater in front of me.

"Good film?"

"Yeah--great!" said a fat, squarish man [чотирокутний пузань]. "A spy thrill-er!"

I bought a ticket, took a seat, and began to watch. To my left sat a longhaired youth whom at first I took to be a girl, and to my right sat an old maid with an upturned nose, who was crunching on an apple noisily.

On the screen people were running around, shouting incredibly. I sat looking somewhere past the screen, or maybe way beyond it. I smelled the fragrance of leaves and the aroma of wet wood benches, and asphalt glistened at me. "No," I told myself. "That's enough-enough about that girl!"

And I did forget about the girl. I watched as people tracked down the spy, and thought about Maria, sitting alone at home, knitting herself some wool gloves. Thrown over her shoulders was a wool shawl that she had made when we were still going together, and on her feet were hand-knit socks thrust into worn furry slippers. I recalled that my mother wore the same kind of slippers and that for a couple of months now my dad had been saying he'd buy her new ones.

The spy had been caught--there was nothing left to do but leave. Outside the theater I again spotted the girl who had made such an impact on me in the park. She was holding the arm of some polished, clever-looking dude [хлюстик] and gazing into his eyes lovingly.

The clock showed ten. I waited for a car to pass and crossed the street. The light in Maria's window was on, and now I knew for sure that she was sitting over her endless knitting. I stopped and tapped on her window, expecting it to open and Maria to respond. But around me there sounded only silence and emptiness--not even the passing of a car. Then, crooking my index finger, I tapped lightly on the pane three times, as I had a month and more before.

1. "Kil'ka khvylyn iz vechora," in Valerii Shevchuk, Dolyna dzherel (Kyiv, 1981), pp. 145-48.