AT DAWN

Переклад англійською Андрій Євса
Translated by Andrey Yevsa

“Get up, son, it will be dawn soon.”
I raised my head from the pillow. There was the slightest glimmer of light in the hut. The windows were covered with black, smooth, woolen cloth, and it was impossible to guess, what part of the night had already passed and what part had not yet. Nothing resembles the world.
“Get up, son, we will go.”
I rubbed my sleepy eyes. “Where to, Ma?”
“Oh, have you forgotten? To see how the sun rises. You asked me to wake you up. Get up!” She started helping me.
Yes, I asked her to wake me up, it was my daydream, but now…
“I want to sleep, mom”, I whined and, as though I was guilty, I nestled my sleepy head against my mother’s breasts.
“Get up, get up, do not be lazy”, I heard her tender, but inexorable voice.
I hesitated, began to yawn, started to get dressed, sniffled. Mother helped me hastily and washed my face with cold water.
Some scraps of sleep still dangled in my eyes, and my feet stumbled as if through the pumpkin’s stems. We left the hut in a fresh darkness. 
Only the sky was visible in the darkness. It was distant and dark, with an enormous amount of gold bugs on it, laying upwards and sorted out with their golden legs, unable to leave their places.
A gentle spring breeze fanned me from head to toe like a cold shower. I shook my shoulders as though throwing off the remains of the  drowsiness.
I pitted my mother with questions like with peas, and my ringing voice voke the sleeping darkness.
Mother, thinking about something, answered gently, but shortly. Every now an then she was silent.
I had to be silent too. Looking around I wondered, why wasn’t it dawn yet, why was it still dark like in a cellar? It was even sad. And my mother was silent. It seemed as though there were indistinct, black, shaggy contours of scarecrows in the darkness. Some high, frightful, dreadful walls grew before our eyes as if they were just about to be indignant and crush us.
I became to feel sad. A child's lack of faith began to frighten me. Certainty of where we were and where we were going began to fade away. Maybe we would  never get out of here. Maybe we were already at a place  where there would never be sun, but always be night.
The unusually tall figure of my mother seemed strange and unfamiliar in the darkness.
"What, if it was not my mother?” a timorous thought came to my mind. I began to feel a coldness in my chest. ”Maybe a delusion was leading me through the night among these unknown mountains and steeps?"
“Mam!” I pulled my mother’s sleeve. “What mountains are those over there?
“Where, son?”
“Here, beside us!”
“Those are not mountains, those are gardens.”
A breeze blew, and dead, haircurling rocks breathed out of the darkness with a spring colour and with green cowslip.
There was a breath of a mighty, living, sweet-scented force.
"How timid I am", I shamed myself, smiling. Mother’s voice calmed me down at once.
Again I remembered and began to rave about how the dawn would be.
New ghosts were approaching out of the darkness, stretching out their hands, trying to catch me, pursuing me, and wanting to tear me from my mother as if to leave me lost in the wilderness.
I kept a tight hold on mother’s hand and looked at them bravely, threatened them with my hand and even teased...
“It is dawning, God be praised!” I heard my mother’s voice.
Really, it is. Why did I not notice! Because of the large shadows I failed to observe when the east was beginning to dawn. Some bright force got up there and pushed the darkness westward with all of its nightmares.
The stars became extinguished like icon lamps after an evening service, and the horizon was glowing like the face of a child that had just risen from a hot pillow. A pink darkness had fallen down on the field and on the rock-gardens, and on some village which little by little came up out of the pink darkness. The darkness was still on the cloud-gardens, as if it had covered them with ashes, but somebody was already blowing the dust above them and the dove-coloured spots of trees blossoms lined around it. The trunks of young birches became snow white on a pink background, as curly green clouds of young leaves darkle the branches above them.
Something strange was taking place, and a light agitation stirred in my chest.
As the boring, somewhat angry hubbub woke up in the village, cattle responded hoarsely, and short angry exclamations and the crackings of a whip were heard. The sleepy, unkempt, carelessly dressed people hung about between green gardens in the pink, darkened world, as though at the bottom of some pit. The sleep pushed them on all sides, over clots and logs. They stumbled, turned their faces away from the pink light, and in their sleepy eyes there was no flame of life yet. There was not even a hint of gladness or laughter.
The gardens, as so being alive, turned eastward and, without stirring, were gladly waiting for something from the visible edge. They were waiting inviolable, patiently, and only their brow became clear, glad and smiling.
We stopped.
Something strange, clear, and glad swam out of the pink haze.
There was palpitation of the heart.
"Coming! Coming! Coming!" a nightingale began to warble excitedly somewhere in the greenery and it was heard througout all the gardens and oakeries.
There was a joyous rustle.
Something went out indeed. Some joyful, golden procession, and a lot of golden needles had already sparkled on a pink background.
It seemed, some star bearers, having gone around the Earth, were climbing up a mountain toward us with gonfalons and cossack standards, gladly playing  the trumpets, raising the golden star high.
“Ah!” a glad scream broke the willy-nilly from my chest.
This was the first miracle that had been done before my eyes.
A bird in a white blossoming cherry tree, like a tired, feeble young lady in a green chaplet had already come out and was bowing to the pink dawn.
The young cherry orchard blazed up a pink smile.
And further away, a dead rock-oakery opened out its green chest like a vast sea, smiled with the quiet smile of a giant.
A lazy laugh has finally awoken and is gladly sounded somewhere in the village.
I gasped... And what would be next?
And now on the horizon, under that pink cloth, something black and shaggy, like that nightmare which frightened me in the darkness, began quickly to curve its back.
It curved its back, straightened its paws and appeared as black shaggy ghost  throwing around an enormous amount of hands and feet across the pink background. 
It seemed not to move. Only one of its paws began to grow longer and wider and began to open its shaggy palm.
It approached the golden ray and laid down on it like a black spot.
The pink world was going out. The gardens were becoming murky.
The laughter in the village ceased. A cloud was covering the sky. A nightingale calmed down. Tears smothered me: this would not be a clear day, this  would not be a joyful holiday…
“Why is it so, mam?”
My mother sighed and started to calm me down.
She said that the clouds would disperse and that the sun would shine again, that  drizzles would fall down from those clouds onto our gardens and fields, and they would become thicker, greener, and lusher.
But my heart was not calmed down by her words, and my eyes looked unfriendly at the clouds: they had darkened the expectations of my festival, my first golden morning, which had been created in my dreams.
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