The Sky Unwashed

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When an author writes in one alphabet and her characters speak in another, the problem of transliteration arises. Because the characters in this book speak in Ukrainian and at times in Russian, I have used the English transliterations from both these languages (e.g., Kyiv and Kiev, Chornobyl and Chernobyl, etc.).

In the village of Starylis, during the less politically oppressive days of the Gorbachev era in the Soviet Union, the citizens working on the kolhosp, the collective farm, felt themselves to be more prosperous than their counter-parts in the cities of Ukraine. The cows’ milk was sweet and creamy because the animals were allowed to roam the fertile grasslands. From a distance, fleshy black cows dotted the crisp hay fields where they ate the tender and abundant lemongrass and clover. Near the fields, wild red-orange poppies grew defiantly between the giant stalks of sunflowers.

Old men chewed tobacco and sunflower seeds during harvest time so as not to set fire to the dry igloo-shaped bundles of hay with their homemade cigarettes, while the strong, overworked women tended the cows and ran the tractors alongside their men. When they weren’t too busy with the farmwork, the women still made traditional jam from Queen Anne’s lace, a golden paste they spread on generous slices of soft brown breads often baked in the huge outdoor clay ovens their ancestors had fired for over a hundred years.

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