CHINESE COOKING Poem by Serhiy Zhadan

This happened some fifteen years ago, if I'm not mistaken.
Right here, you know, on the next street, there's a tall building
where they rent out rooms,
well, several Chinese lived there then and, it turned out, they were
trafficking drugs in their own
stomachs,
like some unseen heavenly caviar, capable of finally destroying this rotten
civilization.

These rooms were mostly rented out by taxi drivers and charlatans,
as well as aeronauts, deprived of their heavenly apparatus, who always
made coffee in the kitchen
and listened to jazz radio stations,
till things would start to glow with a bright light, without casting shadows,
while former rugby players drank beer and smoked camels, as they played cards
and talked about
their damned rugby.

But something went wrong with the Chinese business, much was written
about this later,
you know how it is: one day the split wasn't right - and that was it,
so they had this terrible shoot-out right there in the back yard,
scaring rats into the basement and birds into the heavens.

I look in there, once in a while, I make a little detour on my way home,
I look up at the fire escapes and see the sky in which, if you think about it,
there's nothing but sky,
and you know, sometimes it seems to me that people really die,
because their hearts stop out of love for this
strange-strange fantastic world.