The Station
My small room.
A closet, a bookshelf, a piano, a desk in front of the window, a TV, a sofa bed, and a chair.
Every guest who visited us would stay here.
It was evening.
Lights began to shine in the buildings outside.
I opened the window, and soon the room filled with the fresh, breezy air of the evening.
I sat on the floor.
The first woman was sitting there with me. She was a friend of a friend, and she had brought several colorful books that they had asked me to read aloud.
Another woman was sitting on the chair.
We were sitting on a camel-colored rectangular rug with a dark square in the middle.
“Look. What do you see?” the woman sitting on the floor with me asked again.
“I don't see anything,” I said.
Again.
I really didn't see anything with my eyes closed.
The woman turned toward the other woman.
“She doesn't see anything.”
“Try again,” the woman on the chair said.
I tried again.
Nothing.
The woman on the floor opened the book.
She smiled in a funny way.
And we continued reading.
The book was about ancient Egypt, its history told through pictures.
I had been tracing pictures from this book and keeping them in my album.
After a while, the first woman asked me to try again.
I closed my eyes.
Soon, I began to see black and white colors changing into each other.
Then everything began to feel as if a spaceship were flying straight through space.
Lights on both sides stretched into long lines, left and right.
The lights mixed with something that looked like sunlight.
Then everything suddenly stopped.
All around me was a blue-white sky.
The invisible spaceship continued its journey.
The sky was blue, filled with foggy white clouds.
The clouds touched each other and slowly moved apart.
How long was this journey?
I wasn't sure.
Soon, a black square appeared inside the clouds.
Blue-white sky.
Black square.
The spaceship entered the black square.
Everything became dark inside.
But it wasn't ordinary darkness.
It looked like dark clouds moving around me.
Then, somewhere far away, a golden light began to shine.
It grew brighter.
It pushed forward.
As I moved closer, I saw a long, golden-yellow metal tower.
It looked like a modern electrical tower.
In front of it were metal poles with wires running between them.
The wires began to shine.
And something pulled me backward.
I opened my eyes.
The room was still there.
The women were still there.
And our evening of reading continued.
The Ten-Cent Coin
Yesterday, at work, I was writing a story about magic during the Second World War.
I had only a few minutes, so I wrote on a piece of paper and folded it before putting it into my pocket. Then I went back to work.
Later, I reached into my pocket to continue writing.
The paper was gone.
I checked my pockets again. I looked around me, under the things on my worktable, and everywhere I could think of. Nothing.
Then I noticed something else in my pocket.
A ten-cent coin.
I stared at it.
The coin was supposed to be in the little bin where we kept our work pens. I had no idea how it had gotten into my pocket.
For a moment, I just stood there holding it.
Then I looked into the box in front of me—the box I had been working with.
And there was my paper.
It was lying there as if it had never disappeared at all.
I picked it up and looked at the words I had written about magic.
I smiled.
Perhaps there was a simple explanation. Perhaps the paper had slipped from my pocket, and the coin had somehow followed the opposite path.
Or perhaps not.
I kept the ten-cent coin.
After all, when you are writing about magic, you learn not to ignore small things.
Sometimes magic does not arrive with thunder or a bright light.
Sometimes it is only a missing piece of paper...
and a ten-cent coin.
The Eyes
The Nazis drove into our small city.
They looked comfortable and happy. They looked around as if the city already belonged to them.
A translator announced that from now on, everyone had to register and receive a special identification paper.
I spoke German. It had been part of our school program.
Because of that, I was ordered to work as a maid in the house where one of the female secretaries lived.
She was a German woman in her thirties.
She had a lot of clothes, and my job was to organize them and keep everything clean.
She was calm and confident. She read books and studied our language.
Sometimes we talked.
One day she told me that our land was going to be redesigned for new German settlements.
That was the work of her company.
She asked me questions and promised that I would not be sent to Germany as a slave if I listened to her and behaved well.
I promised.
And then I began secretly watching her.
She was having a romance with one of the soldiers.
They met secretly.
And I secretly listened to them.
One evening, while I was listening, I realized something.
The German woman was afraid.
I could hear it in the tone of her voice.
“We are not going to stay here,” she said. “They are watching us like animals, ready to attack.”
The soldier tried to calm her.
He promised her that they would soon achieve victory over the Soviets.
He promised they would get married.
But the woman began to whisper.
She was talking about civilizations in the West, about different wars, and about the resistance here.
I stopped being afraid of her.
Something had changed in me.
Every look I gave them, every step I took, was the look and walk of an animal ready to attack.
Then the Germans began leaving.
They were running away.
The woman hurriedly pushed her clothes into her suitcases.
“Help me,” she said.
I didn't move.
I looked at her.
There was so much anger in my eyes that they no longer looked human.
They were the eyes of something wild.
Something ready to attack.
For the first time, she didn't say anything.
She quietly grabbed her suitcases and ran toward the truck.
Soon, our city was liberated by our army.
Chocolate People
The old women seemed deeply troubled. The older they were, the more grief was etched into their faces. The eldest bit her lips, frozen in place, one hand covering her mouth.
They stood together in a small circle around a rectangular stone monument. The inscription told everyone that a village had once stood there, until it was burned to the ground by the Nazis during the Second World War.
It was late autumn. Cold rain drifted through the wind, and the sky hung low and gray. The women, all in their sixties and seventies, wore similar coats and scarves. From a distance, they looked almost identical, as if they belonged to the same forgotten family.
"The house was here," one of them whispered.
The wind suddenly fell silent.
In that perfect stillness, a house appeared.
It was a wooden house with a terrace stretching across its front. A table and several chairs stood neatly arranged outside. Everything, the walls, the porch, the furniture, was the color of dark chocolate.
People moved across the terrace.
Women.
Children.
They, too, were made of chocolate. Thick chocolate dripped slowly from their bodies, as though they had just climbed from a pool of melted cocoa and had never bothered to dry themselves.
No one at the memorial spoke.
Then the women gasped together.
One of them whispered, her voice trembling,
"This is the least we can do."
Rivers of Honey
“Rivers of honey,” - a voice said dreamily.
“What?”- I asked, surprised that something was there, in this unknown portal where I was looking sometimes before playing the lottery at work.
“Rivers of honey,” - the voice repeated.
The voice felt happy.
Not just the sound. The feeling behind it. The spirit was happy, and that feeling reached me.
I wasn’t planning to talk.
Looking into portals was not new for me. I would look for a few minutes, just to see if something could be found, maybe numbers, something useful.
But this voice made me stop.
After a few minutes, I had to leave.
The next day, I came back.
Not for the lottery.
Only to see what the spirit wanted.
The happiness pulled me back.
The spirit didn’t ask again.
It showed me something small.
An oval shape, like a balloon, with a thin line coming from it.
Then I saw a woman.
She looked to be in her thirties. She was standing in a room with peeling walls. The wallpaper was falling off, showing smooth, light concrete.
Men in worn clothes were standing at the door, trying to close it.
In the middle of the room, there was a wooden table.
A child was sitting on it, a boy.
The woman was still smiling.
The room was broken, but it felt bright.
The child was smiling too.
Then I had to leave again.
The next day, I returned.
“I will help you,” - I said.
But I didn’t understand how.
And after that, I didn’t see the portal again.
Borte and Oelun
At first, Borte reminded me of a freshly made dumpling.
Soft.
Round.
Full of life.
Bright.
Or perhaps she reminded me of a young Asian child, with a round face, small eyes, and full cheeks.
She seemed to be dancing.
Or singing.
Her smile, her eyes, and her joyful expression matched the celebration around her.
Then everything became still.
I could no longer see very much.
Behind the cheerful impression was someone else.
She was not always smiling.
Joy was not her whole personality.
Beneath that gentle face lived the heart of a warrior.
Strong.
Disciplined.
Quiet.
Thoughtful.
At times, even cold.
───
Another woman was sitting on the floor with her head lowered.
Her coat was large.
Her fur hat was long, making it difficult to see her face.
The heavy coat spread around her in a wide circle, making her look like a bird resting in its nest.
She was older.
Her face was delicate.
Beautiful.
Thin, unlike the broad faces I had expected.
A different kind of beauty.
Quiet.
Reserved.
She was Oelun,
Temujin's mother.
LTemujin
"I see it!" someone exclaimed.
"See what?"
The young man sitting across from him laughed at first.
Then, suddenly, he became serious.
His expression changed so quickly—from an almost boyish face, with only the first signs of a beard, into that of a grown man. His features became hard as stone. His eyes turned cold as ice.
I tried to see him more clearly.
He was wearing a winter hat made of fox fur, orange with touches of white.
He sat on the floor in front of someone I could not fully see.
All I could make out were layers of dark gray clothing.
They were sitting in the middle of a small space whose walls rose upward and curved closer together near the top.
There was almost nothing around them.
Only the two of them.
A young woman entered.
She nodded several times before sitting down.
She wore a brown dress trimmed with yellow fur, and the collar was lined with dark brown fur.
She knelt beside the young man and gave him a quick, playful glance.
For a brief moment, something brushed against the edge of my shirt.
I caught a glimpse of a small, bright shape, almost like a thick ribbon of white air, drifting silently past me.
Then my attention returned to the man the young couple had been speaking to.
He wore a heavy gray coat.
Not large, but thick and bulky.
His fur hat blended into the grayness around him.
His skin was darkened by years beneath the sun.
Gray-brown.
Deeply lined.
Rough.
My eyes slowly lifted to his face.
Perhaps I was beginning to see what the young man saw.
The old man's eyes were blue.
One was slightly larger than the other.
At first, the color reminded me of creamy butter, rich and soft.
Then it became a pale blue sky.
White clouds drifted across it—two larger clouds to the right, two smaller ones to the left.
The sky began to move.
Its color deepened.
The blue grew darker.
Gradually, a round shape emerged.
Then I understood.
It was no longer a sky.
It was our planet.
Floating inside his eye.
The Souls
She was young and beautiful.
She had graduated from school and had all her plans ready for the new chapter of her life: mastering what people calledhealing with witchcraft.
She was the only woman in her family, and her “road” had been designed for her before she was even born.
“Go to university first,” her father said.
He was a warlock himself.
He was educated and believed education was one of the most important things a person could have. People without proper spiritual cleansing, without education, even those who were simply good talkers, meant nothing to him.
He was old-fashioned, proud of his position in the world of magic, and very sure of his opinions.
She was preparing to go to university when the Second World War started.
Instead of university, exams, studies, and books, she went to the military registration center.
“After a ten-month program, you can join the army,” a Soviet officer told her, looking at her with admiration.
What a brave young woman,she could almost hear him thinking.
She would hear something similar many times later:
“When people look at you, they want to live.”
The medical school was far away from the battlefield, in a small city where everyone and everything seemed to turn grey.
Many men had already joined the army. The ones who remained had worried, sad faces as they thought about the future.
During the day, the city was almost empty because people were at work.
At night, it was empty again because of the evacuated military factory. Only workers with special passes were allowed to go to work and return home at certain times.
She found a room in a small two-story house.
On the first floor, in a living room connected to an old-fashioned kitchen with a fireplace, lived a music teacher who had been evacuated from the war zone.
She had brought her large piano with her.
It took up a huge part of the room.
There was no school yet, and there was no music school either. So the woman spent her days at home reading cards.
She also knew how to make clothes, and that became her source of income.
She often talked about her hands, about her former students, about the important music prizes they had won.
Everyone felt sympathy for her.
On the second floor lived two young women who worked at the factory around the clock.
They would leave for work early in the morning and return almost at night, exhausted, sometimes carrying heavy bags filled with food.
Only on weekends did they sit together in the kitchen, drinking tea from small round cups.
The two young women were from a local village. They had just graduated from school.
On weekends, the piano teacher read cards for them.
She talked about long journeys, a charming dark-haired man, a gift, a letter.
There was a map on the wall.
Every movement of the Soviet Army was carefully marked and studied.
We all learned the names of cities and places.
We waited for victory.
The victory was not coming.
After about a year, the young woman found herself on the battlefield.
The earth was shaking from the bombing.
Day looked like night.
For the first time, she saw a German soldier.
He was injured and waiting to be sent to a prisoner-of-war camp.
One day, she was changing his bandage at their mobile medical station.
It was actually his last day there.
They were alone.
She took off his old bandage and healed him right in front of the German soldier.
He became frightened.
“I hated him so much,” she later said. “He was in front of me, injured and waiting to be sent to a prisoner-of-war camp. I touched his hand. It was burned.
“I was thinking,How can I harm him?
“But instead, I started to heal him.”
She looked at her hand.
“It changed. It became almost like a chicken's foot. Long nails. Thin and white.”
She had touched the burns and scratches beneath the bandages.
“Slowly, they started to disappear.”
A few days later, she met a young Soviet commander.
She was assigned to his division.
The commander told her that he could see things no one else could see.
He recognized the invisible signs.
The young nurse was ablack magician.
She was practicing black magic.
And the young commander was awhite magician.
They were opposites.
Or so it seemed.
During one battle, he saw her eyes watching him.
She was holding him with her powers.
That was how it felt.
Suddenly, he saw himself as an old man, completely dressed in white, with a long white beard.
And he saw her.
Young and beautiful.
Long black hair.
Dark, beautiful eyes.
She was reaching out her hand to him.
The old man in white touched her hand.
Lightning passed between them.
After the battle, he walked to the medical station where she was working and sat down.
She ran toward him, crying.
He closed his eyes.
He was exhausted from the battle and probably fell asleep.
And he began to dream.
He was a boy.
He was walking with his grandmother toward an underground river.
His grandmother was telling him the old folk stories she had told him when he was a child.
The river was hidden somewhere beneath the earth.
Only an almost invisible fountain of water reached the surface.
His grandmother touched the water.
Then she washed the boy's face and whispered words that only she knew.
The war ended.
He wanted to marry her.
Only her.
She was walking far away across the farmland.
He could see the long veil of her magic stretching farther and farther into the distance.
It was her gift.
Her magical gift.
She was giving everything to him.
Before that, there had been a long conversation between their relatives.
The war had united them.
Afterward came the spiritual cleansing.
And she became awhite magician.
They lived together happily ever after.
The Folk Forest
One time, a guest entered the yellow house.
He was an old man, probably my grandfather's age, wearing a suit decorated with medals. It wasn't a surprise to me. He belonged to my grandparents' generation.
All of my school friends' grandfathers had gone to the Second World War.
The man didn't say anything except:
“Okay. Look.”
He sat on the kitchen stool, put his head down, and closed his eyes.
“A round yellow circle. Like a sun disk without flames.”
He paused.
“A young woman in a green military uniform was dancing in front of it.”
“She was the most beautiful woman in our division.”
Then the woman spoke to me.
“Do you like plums?”
“Why plums?” I asked.
“We have a plum garden.”
“You are the most beautiful here.”
“Everyone tells me this.”
The dancing woman started to laugh.
The picture changed.
Now I could see farmland and a few houses at the edge of it.
Several women were sitting on a bench.
They were talking about the war.
The war had started only a few days earlier, and that day the grandson of one of the women had received a notice to join the army.
“He is going to fight,” she said in a heavy, old-fashioned accent.
That grandson was the man sitting in front of me in the yellow house.
The man continued in the same quiet tone.
“The German army attacked us very fast. We, the soldiers, had to leave the battlefield in small groups, hoping to meet our larger divisions somewhere up north.
“The Germans were everywhere.
“And we had nothing else to do but go through the forests.”
One of the soldiers managed to find civilian clothes and forced us to change.
We refused at first.
Then we changed and hid our uniforms.
“Who is going to fight for you?” he said.
He spoke with my grandmother's old accent, and that made me listen to him.
“We have to check the area,” he continued. “We cannot walk straight. The Germans are here. The only way is through the forest.”
He pointed at me.
“You go first. You look like you're from a village. Check around and come back.”
He gave me a long wooden stick.
And I went straight into the unknown forest.
After a while, I reached a darker part of the forest.
It's probably deeper here, with a swamp or a river,I thought.
The thought came and quickly disappeared because I wanted to turn back and find a different road.
Then someone moved in front of me.
There was a slightly open place in the forest, with a few small green hills.
At first, I was frightened. I thought I had walked into a German base.
For a second, I froze.
I couldn't move.
I could only stare at the place that had frightened me.
A dark figure was standing on one of the hills.
A tall, dark figure, with its back turned toward me.
I was scared first.
I felt as if my heart had dropped down somewhere inside me.
Maybe it's a strange hallucination,my mind answered, as if I had asked it a question.
Quietly, I started to move backward.
After one step, I had a vision.
Brown darkness, like dirt or mud.
Dark hallways with light bulbs somewhere high above us.
Metal grids over our heads.
I could see dirty men in the darkness.
And myself among them.
We were people.
Men.
Trying to lift those heavy grids.
The figure on the hill lifted one hand and pointed in the opposite direction from the one I wanted to take.
I started walking that way.
Soon, I found myself in a different forest.
My grandmother's stories came to my mind.
The forest was green.
The air was green.
Watery, light green.
The leaves of the trees were moving to the rhythm of music.
They were singing, but very, very softly.
Then hands appeared from nowhere, moving together with the music.
Women's hands.
Gentle hands.
I couldn't see much.
I could only hear the quiet music and see the leaves moving and the women's hands moving with them.
I walked toward a green mountain.
The mountain was darker green and smoother, almost watery.
I came closer.
Then I froze.
This time, by myself.
The mountain had one eye open.
And it was watching me.
I stepped backward automatically.
It wasn't a mountain.
It was a dragon.
A dragon waking up on the ground and watching me.
The dragon began to move.
It stood up on its feet and stretched its green wings slightly.
Then, in a second, it turned, almost touching me—
and disappeared into the green air.
I ran back.
I frightened the soldiers who were waiting for me.
They didn't expect to see me, and everyone jumped up from the grass where they had been sitting.
We started walking in the direction where I had met the dragon.
I believed the dragon had been walking straight, because that was how I had found my way back to the group.
And, of course, I didn't see any dragon.
Everyone was laughing at me and making jokes.
After a while, we joined another group.
Soon, partisans found us.
We joined them.
Later, I joined the army again.
