A DREAM: Chernowcy, 1956 1. Hanna leads her six-year-old grandson down a deserted town street going who knows where. Early morning. Low clouds. Vacant windows--except for one, with a white curtain with two wide black parallel stripes along the bottom edge. The wind drags on the linen, unravelling it into a white streamer of improbable length that touches the face of the frightened child, who tries to burrow into the wall, looking down at grey square slabs, grass stabbing through the cracks, red rhombic "soldier" bugs with Aztec-painted shells that skitter to and fro. Grandmother and grandson go down a crooked sidestreet named after Klara Tsetkin; they turn left onto a square, where there is a theater built on bones-- standing over the bulldozed site of the old Jewish cemetery. The year before, its east wall shook and sank-- the dead, reminding us of them-- a last reminder, most likely. Restored expeditiously, the building stands foursquare. Grandmother and grandson go on and the white linen keeps unravelling, an imperceptible wind tossing it up and down, shaking the limbs of the trees. Here, something is not right; the limbs toss in sundry directions, as if there is a special wind for each, or each responds to the breath of wind in its own way. . . . all is vanity and a chasing after wind. The two cross the street; Grandmother Hanna stumbles, dislodging one of the cobbles, opening a square inspection port to the underground domain. The boy bends over the hole seeing something resembling a night sky, thick with stars, that he imagines are the opened eyes of millions of sleepers who see in their dreams something even stranger or more fearsome than what he sees himself. 2. Forty-one years later a grizzled, stooped man who once was a child read this fragment to a slender woman. She said, "Is it possible you can't be honest, even when you interpret dreams?" He shook his head, said, "Actually, it was just two lights in the square black hole, and the voice of Grandmother (or some other loud, clear voice) said, 'It's a corpse. Look-- see the burning eyes? He has seen the devil.'" * * * * * Later, he remembers another recent dream where he, together with a stranger, black as tar in a grey cloak, with a face slightly mishapen by a spiteful sneer, walks along a dusty Odessa street toward the nearby Peresypsky bridge, passing a house where at some time or other his parents lived, and where someone else must be living now. © 1996 Boris Khersonsky. All rights reserved. Translation by Ruth Kreuzer and Dale Hobson.