"God Is a Rusyn": Anthology of Contemporary Carpatho-Rusyn Literature

Pavel Korobchak

Pavel Korobchak PAVEL KOROBCHAK / Paweł Korobczak was born in 1975 in Wrocław. He earned a Ph.D. in philosophy in 2004 at the University of Wrocław, where he now works at the Institute of Philosophy. His research concentrates on the crisis of metaphysics and such thinkers as Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger , and Jacques Derrida. Korobchak began writing in 1996 and has published prose sketches, meditations , and journalistic prose in the Lemko journals Zahoroda and Besida. The influence of Korobchak’s work in philosophy and cultural studies is clearly felt in his prose. 160 POLAND [From Tsy to lem tuha, tsy nadiia] The Dawning He raised his eyes from the book. Outside the window of a room illuminated by a glow lamp, the depth of darkness began to differentiate, broken in half by an undulated border—at first only slightly more black than the rest, later gray, and then more and more ablaze (as always, variation is the first to arise out of chaos). The brighter it shone, the deeper it became, overflowing from above the entire top layer of the window frame. At the bottom, the blackness had not yet retreated so that the horizon was carved out in the shape of the mountains. The heads of the mountains burned with a holy light … The curved ant-path of the railroad exposed the witch-like metamorphosis of the train, which with every passing meter changed from front to back, from an electric “yolk” to a steam-engine “retro-caterpillar.” From the fog that covered puddles along the railway emerged the station. The train screeched, whizzed, and breathed the fog, raising its cloud, which for a moment covered the world—and stopped … He closed the book, picked up his backpack, and jumped from the car into a moist, soft, billowy white feather quilt. He looked at it and then raised his head and noticed in the dark grayness (in which, meanwhile, the mountains had managed to dress themselves) a road disappearing in the forest. He set out … The forest still roared in a sleepy clamor, although under the heavy boot of the traveler silver drops of dew tinkled happily. Pines and spruces with torn, shaggy hair bent down, bowing in wonder to their visitor. He entered a clearing. A little wooden church, probably three hundred years old, grew in the middle. Heavy fir cones of crosses hung from juicy, full cupolas. Under it grew new little churches, some slightly bigger (perhaps five, ten years old), others still very small. One of them could barely be seen: the small cupolas were taller than the young spruces only by a teardrop—with crosses like little sticks, curiously pulling up their heads. In the next clearing sat a little old cottage, a little old woman on a stool of stone, along a babbling little stream. Its hunchbacked roof, its back hurting, almost entirely covered the thick, carved door and protected from rain a severe bench made from a halved tree trunk, which stood under the window by the wall. He sat on the bench and pulled little papers and a small bag of tobacco from his pocket. For just a moment he wanted to chew it, as, he remembered, his grandfather did. No. With concentration and as if anointing, he set about the ritual: he stuffed the little paper with tobacco, rolled it up carefully in his PAVEL KOROBCHAK 161 fingers, licked it on the edge of his tongue and put it in his mouth. He pulled out matches: sulfur hissed, a little flame burst … He inhaled the smoke, leaning on a steep Lemko wall, and slowly letting out the smoke, he looked at the mountain inclining over him. From its back thundered burning flames of light, and a rumble proclaimed the arrival of the whitened brass disc of sun, which in no time peeked from behind the border of the horizon. Dawn had arrived … ...