- translated by Yana Kane, edited by Bruce Esrig
- russian text: https://kopilkapoetry.org/?p=779
“If I don’t have coffee brewing all day long,” says the Woman from the Café, “this corpse smell will drive me nuts.
“You know,” she says, dropping her voice a bit, “if a man gets killed, it’s as if he is not entirely dead. It’s like he’s asleep. And he keeps on growing in his sleep, he keeps growing.
“That one over there, lying in the park by the cinema. He’s gotten as big as a city square. Sometimes, they grow to fill an alley, or even a whole street.
“My husband works in the trolleybus depot. He says they have to keep changing the route because there’s one lying over by the subway station. My husband says: ‘We keep trying this and that to get around them! Just look at the mess you’re making—can’t you just let people go about their lives! But what do they care? They just lie around and keep growing.’
Mark my words,” says the Woman from the Café, as she raps a teaspoon on the tabletop, calling attention to her words, “soon things are going to get so bad that the city will run out of room for the living.”
“Well, my son-in-law—he’s a doctor in municipal number three,” says the Woman Who Wipes the Trays, “So, he told us that you can get used to not breathing at all. Then you can’t smell the death-stench.”
“That’s nothing new!” says the Woman from the Café, “My daughter’s a student at the teacher’s college. Over there, they stopped breathing two years ago.
“Do you want sugar in your coffee?”
Sveta Ben
Sveta Ben´ (a.k.a Ben´ka, b. 1975) is a Vitebsk-born Belarusian poet, singer, stage director and political activist. Since 2005, she has been performing as the frontwoman of the freak-cabaret band Serebryanaya Svad´ba. Sveta is an author of several volumes of poetry.
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