Excerpt From The Orphanage

Literary Hub is amplifying its coverage of Ukrainian writers this month. The following is an excerpt from Serhiy Zhadan’s The Orphanage, a devastating story of the struggle of civilians caught up in the conflict in eastern Ukraine

A January morning, long and motionless, like a line at the hospital. Morning briskness in the kitchen, slate twilight outside. Pasha walks over to the stove, and his nose instantly catches the sweetish smell of gas. For Pasha that smell is always associated with vigorous mornings—getting up for work, tossing textbooks and graded assignments into his briefcase, ducking into the kitchen, breathing in sweet gas, drinking strong tea, following it with black bread, assuring himself he’s living the good life, and running off to work once he’s fully convinced. That smell has been with him his whole life; any time he wakes up somewhere outside his own home without the morning stove, its aged burners crusted with ash, he has no appetite. Pasha peers out the window, considers the black snow and black sky, sits down at the table, and shakes his head, trying to gather his wits. Six a.m., January, Monday, one more day with no job to go to.


He grabs some assignments off the windowsill, leafs through them, puts them back immediately, gets up, goes over to the main room, peeks in. The old-timer’s sleeping in his chair. A blooddrenched man is crying out to him from the screen, to no avail—the sound’s been off since last night. Now you can’t get to him, no matter how loud you yell. Pasha stops for a second, looks at the blood. The yelling man shifts his eyes toward Pasha and starts yelling at him—don’t turn it off, listen, this is important, it involves you, too. But Pasha quickly finds the remote, squeezes the large red button like he’s trying to get toothpaste out of the tube, tosses the remote on the table, slips outside, and shuts the door carefully, so as not to wake his dad. But the door still creaks menacingly in the morning twilight. The old-timer wakes up immediately, finds the remote, and turns the TV back on. It’s showing something horrible, something that involves everyone. Pasha’s already running up to the station.

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