A man tries to find his little nephew and bring him home. Healthy. The place is the east of Ukraine and the time is 2014 the first big Russian-Ukrainian crisiswhich was a prelude to what followed in February 2022. What seems so easy to find a child and bring him home “Orphanage”novel by Ukrainian Sergei Viktorovich Zhadan (born in 1974), the most difficult, most dangerous thing in the world.

Moving through a devastated and bloody area, the main character of the book, thirty-five-year-old teacher Pasha, struggles to get to the orphanage where his nephew Sasha lives. However, the shelter is now in enemy-occupied territory. But Pasha persists: he constantly changes borders in an almost dizzying way, finds himself in the epicenter of crossfires, even enters into an alliance with the Devil until he manages to get to the child.

Zadan, a poet, prose writer, translator, essayist and public figure (he accepts the characterization of a patriot, but not a nationalist), has written dozens of books of poetry and prose, many of which have won Ukrainian and international prizes, translated into multilingual. Today he is considered one of the most significant writers in Ukraine and Europe, and in 2022 at the Frankfurt Fair he was awarded the Peace Prize, awarded by the Association of Publishers and Booksellers of Germany.

Zadan did not leave Ukraine when the Russians invaded. He stayed in his special homeland, in Kharkov, so that he could help the Ukrainians in the struggle against the invaders.

“K” pre-publishes a characteristic excerpt from a book released on April 5 by Dioptra, translated by Dimitris Triantafillidis.

HM.

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Then a long, bandaged, old military ambulance, the color of soapy green, drove up to the school and began to take out the wounded. They were carried on their shoulders like sacks of groceries, apparently without a stretcher, so they trudged up the stairs and through the empty hallway. They turned right, their asses covered in plaster, and opened the door to the first room. That is the office of the Ukrainian language.

That is, the room where Pasha taught children. The wounded were left on the floor, between desks. Pasha ran after them, told the children to go home. They, frightened, trying not to step on fresh blood, gathered in the corridor.

Pasha also came out and shouted to the students of his class: Go home immediately. They stood motionless. He shouted in Russian, as always outside the classroom, in the corridor. Then he timidly opened the door. The classroom smelled of mud and blood, snow and mud. The soldiers brought blankets and some warm clothes to the classroom, pushed back the desks, and placed the wounded in the corners.

The classroom smelled of mud and blood, snow and mud. The soldiers brought blankets, the wounded lay down in the corners.

Another soldier came in with a machine gun on his shoulder, without throwing a cigarette out of his mouth. Black hair, black and therefore suspicious eyes, dust settled in the wrinkles of his face. Pasha saw such faces only among the miners rising from the adit. He looked coldly at the wounded man, saw Pasha, waved his hand to him, greeted him and spoke with some kind of Caucasian accent.

He was embarrassed by tongues, but he tried to speak cheerfully, as if it was very important to him that the pasha believed him. He translated some words immediately from Russian into Ukrainian, tried very hard, as if he were passing an exam. Okay, she says, do not be afraid, teacher, we will not give up your school, we will protect it, she tells him. You will continue to teach children.

“Who are they;” he asked, nodding at the portraits.

“Poets,” Pasha answered hesitantly.

“Good;” the gunner asked cautiously.

“He died,” Pasha answered just in case.

“True,” said the machine-gunner, laughing, “a good poet is a dead poet.

He cautiously aimed the machine gun at the window sill, as if airing it. Pasha collected notebooks from the seat, threw them into a backpack and, going out, fixed his eyes on the wounded man, who was lying on the floor next to the painted battery: two woolen blankets with gore, on top of which lay an old, worn-out sleeping bag, he turned to the wall, you could see only his long unwashed hair and unshaven neck, the cut off sleeve of a military jacket, dirty skin between gauze, covered in scratches, a bare left palm sticking out from under a sleeping bag. It was as if a passenger in a third-seat car had freed a haram hand from the blanket of the railway company, which hugged his sleepy, motionless body, outlining the angle of his legs and flat stomach, like a shroud outlines the body of Christ, while the nakedness of the beaten male body stood out sharply among the crumpled ones thrown onto the next shelf. warm things. So here, Pasha thinks, a thin, swarthy hand with a sparse hairline looks unnatural against the background of the summer-painted floor of the classroom, against the background of desks and boards, and this hand grabbed the sleeping bag, which he held tightly, afraid to let go, like a sleeping bag. the bag was the last thing that connected him with life. For a moment, Pasha could not take his eyes off the long black fingers, full of cuts and scratches, with that bluish tinge, but at that moment a draft of fresh air from outside hit him, and the machine gunner barely had time to close the window. . Pasha remembered where he was and quickly went out into the corridor, immediately falling into the arms of the headmistress.

“Pavel Ivanovich, Pavel Ivanovich,” she cried, taking his hand. “What are these things? Tell them to leave.”

She is crying so feignedly, she catches herself thinking Pasha. He doesn’t know how to cry, he thinks, he just doesn’t know what it’s like to cry. He can’t even laugh.

“Tell them,” he continues to say to Pasha, addressing him in the plural, like a tram assembler.

“Tell them to leave.”

“Yes, yes,” Pasha reassures her. “I’ll tell them, I’ll definitely tell them.”

He led the manager into her office, helped her into a seat, and closed the door behind him as he left. For several moments she stood in front of the door, she heard that the headmistress, instantly calmed down, was calling someone and talking noisily into the receiver.

I miss these, muttered Pasha in a whisper and went home.

“You better not go there. You will be left without legs.

The soldiers stood on the porch and smoked. Upon entering the school building, they thoroughly wiped their shoes with clean rags. It was hard to bleed. However, with great effort, they were able to erase it.

When the air is humid, you immediately smell different smells. Those who came from the south let out smoke, as if they had been sitting by the fire for a long time. The air was immediately filled with the heavy smell of wet clothes. There were more and more newcomers, some moved further towards the station, some got into jeeps, some helped others get into trucks. There are few places now, the soldier who passed ahead of Pasha was in a heavy bulletproof vest. Pasha tensed up, took a step back to the edge of the road, then another one, bogging down with his boot in the snow mixed with yellow mud, then another step and another.

When the air is humid, you immediately smell different smells. Those who came from the south were blowing smoke.

“It would be better for you not to go there,” Pasha heard.

He turned in the direction of the voice: he saw a standing man in a dark jacket, hiking boots, a backpack, with an untidy gray beard, looking at him haughtily, one might say condescendingly. He spoke, of course, measuredly, if you look closely, you could see that his chin was very weak, there were wrinkles around his mouth, which showed that he had grown a beard to appear wilder than he really was. He looked to be about fifty years old, and he looked at Pasha with the eyes of an elderly man ignoring the younger one. This is how passengers who have come from the point of departure look at those who get on from different stops: everyone has tickets, but the extra hours spent in the compartment gave them some kind of incomprehensible advantage.

His name was Pyotr, so he said: Pyotr, in tolerable Russian, not even trying to hide his accent.

“Better not go there,” he said, nodding toward the storm drain. “You will be left without legs. In general, come here, after a while they will start shooting at each other out of anger.