ion>Prologue
There used to lay a boulder there. It was a boulder at the corner of Bazarna Street and Moskovska Street. A boulder you could sit on when your sweetheart was late (to say honestly, that scenario had already become habitual).Those two even invented a saying whose secret message was comprehensible only to them. She used to say: “You will have to sit on the boulder”. That is, to wait until she spruces up.
It’s boiling hot. Katrusya is walking next to me – she has been promised to be taken to the beach.
– Can I take a paper doll?
Why not? It’s not such heavy. At least the kid will be occupied when taken for a promenade…Anyway, the heat does not give you any choice.
Here we are at last. The heat is not so oppressive near the Dnipro. But the water does not refresh at all. Yet the river is magnificent! Compared to it, the notorious Seine is just a canal, a bit bigger than a brook, cemented all over as if fettered. But the Dnipro! – Wide, navigable, emerald-green! If only the weather were not so hot! What a day! There’s scarcely a trace of a cloud in the sky, the sun is a bit of a hell and the river lures you: dive in and stay forever.
The beach is overcrowded. Zn elderly lady, sunburnt as a grilled chicken, must be sunbathing here every day. Over there some kids and a puppy are being taken for a walk from the heat of a city apartment. The puppy is funny – it must be a terrier. Despite the heat it is running along the bank like crazy and fetches its masters all kinds of garbage. Look – this time it brought and put to their feet a wet half-rotten twig. You can’t manage without it, really! Then the dog proceeds further.
A young couple brought two little sons. Twins. The father looks as if he comes from Asia. Aha-a-a! That is the reason for so many sons at once. Who knows why, but easterners give birth to boys far more often than to girls.
The dog has fetched something again. What is it this time? A rotten fish. Good boy. That’s who wins bread in the family!
When observed from the ground, even a plane looks like a snail-sprinter. You will hardly be able to apprehend the slight movement of a cloud that just gives a hint of a battle between two giants: hot and cold air.
A huge mauve cloud floated reluctantly on the edge of the sun, hesitated and sailed off.
Meanwhile the unseen giants struggled for dominating over the patch of land. Nobody was going to give in.
The family with the dog went somewhere as it began scowling. Katrusya has already got that bluish – purple tint that only ardent bathers are able to acquire, and now she is sitting on a beach towel and dresses up her doll. In princess garments, presumably. Unfortunately, nowadays girls don’t play with princesses: they have a Belle, Jasmine or Ariel, all cloned from Disney’s cartoons.
The heat plays tricks on the eyes – it looks like a little dusty cloud has risen up.
The cloud was covering the disk of the Sun – the farther, the more resolutely. And the giants demonstrated their power pushing each other, catching everything with their fluffy jumbles: dust, litter, sand.
Some holiday-makers got round to collecting their things and set off. Maybe they felt the storm descending from faraway, or they just had made up their minds beforehand. But those were few. The majority remained on the beach – they still couldn’t believe that the relaxing heat was going to yield. It’s just a little cloud that will float away…
The giants stepped backwards, just to regain anger, and attacked each other violently, foreheads lowered, led by the only aim: to suppress, to annihilate, to win. The earth responded with a cloud of dust; the sand blinded people’s eyes, the trees’ branches interlaced and crashed, and in the sky, where the two ogres had encountered, there was a flash of lightning, followed by thunder.
Even the most careless understood: there would be a downpour in a minute. All things thrown into the bath-towel (we’ll fold them neatly a bit later), everyone grabbed their packages and ran to the nearest sun – shed. One of the bags let a ‘leak’ and it was immediately caught and twisted by the wind.
– Doll! My doll!
Down poured the rain.
Book one
Agatha
1
White, dazzling snow. Black, greasy soil.
Agatha is standing near the freshly-dug grave at the central municipal cemetery. Thoughts are jerking slower and weaker, similar to a bird caught in a net, and finally fade away. But this monotonous movement drives her crazy. It must be some kind of Chinese tortures: drop, another drop. Isn’t that a burden, heavy enough for a little tender woman? What an ordeal is to outlive her own daughter at the end of her own life, which was far from being cloudless. The war[2] had just finished, her daughter had two children and a husband. It seemed the real life was only beginning. Is forty-two the age to perish forever? What a torture it is to bury your own child, the first one, beloved, forlorn, the most beautiful. Wasn’t that the fate read from her hand by a gypsy fortune-teller long ago? The old woman wouldn’t say what she saw as she didn’t want to spoil Agatha’s years of happiness with an ominous prediction.
…It all began in Volyn[3]. Agatha was nearly flying home from a party. Her heart was beating sweetly and painfully: she was invited to a dance by such a beauty of a guy; he must be a prince, for sure. It’s a joke, really. The last Polish king must have been ruling this country a hundred years ago[4]! Really, what princes can survive in the hell of a tiny town like Ratne? It has always been on the outskirts of the Russian Empire then, while the Polish were ruled by the Polish King. But who could the young man be, otherwise? He was wearing French uniform with shining buttons, sewn with edgings all over. There was a coat of arms on his casquette. He was of enormous height: Agatha could hardly reach his breast with the highest point of her hair-do.
But when he knelt to ask her for a tour of mazurka, their eyes were nearly at the same level.
What eyes did he have! Greenish, dreamy in the frame of long golden lashes. His hair and moustache with turned-up corners were of the same golden color. He led her to the middle of the dance hall, where they were the only dancing pair. The whole world vanished, dissolved. The hall, the windows, the guests – all of them moved, whirled and finally melted into a bouncing rainbow. The only distinguishable thing there was him, him and the dance, that united them, brought them here and there, separated and united again, quicker, then slower until Agatha fell into her partner’s lap exhausted. And he caught the girl with one hand only and raised her in the air for a moment just before the magic ended. Agatha’s heart was violently beating, she was hot in the face, and her eyes sought to meet the green eyes of Stas.
Jesus Maria! How could she fall in love heels over ears in no time?
She tramped into a gypsy woman carrying a baby. Mum had warned her: never speak to gypsies. You will be enchanted, kidnapped and stolen of money. Moreover, they are spoken of as baby-kidnappers. Yet Agatha has no money. And she has no kids to kidnap. She is a child herself, she is only sixteen.
Maybe it’s worth asking the gypsy to tell the fortune about her Prince? Mum will never know. If the prediction pleases Agatha, she will present the fortune- teller with her ring.
– Let me tell you your fortune,
Katrusya is the form of name Kate, Katya. It indicates the speaker’s tenderness and affection to the girl.
Great Patriotic War – the Soviet name of World War II.
Volyn – a historic region in Central and Eastern Europe straddling Poland, Ukraine and Belarus.
The last king of Poland, Stanislaw August Poniatowski (1732–1798) was the last king of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania.
