The Kindly Ones

by Jonathan Littell

He looked at me for an instant and struck up a Cossack song that I knew from having heard it often in the Ukraine, the one whose refrain goes so gaily Oy ty Galia, Galia molodaya… and which relates the atrocious story of a girl carried off by the Cossacks, tied by her long blond tresses to a pine tree, and burned alive. And it was magnificent. The man sang, his face raised up to me: his eyes, a faded blue, shone gently through the alcohol and the filth; his cheeks, beneath a scruffy reddish beard, quivered; and his bass voice, hoarse from coarse tobacco and drink, rose clear and pure and firm and he sang verse after verse, as if he would never stop. Beneath his fingers the keys of his accordion clicked. On the platform, the agitation had stopped, the people were watching and listening, a little surprised, even the ones who a few minutes before had treated him harshly, overcome by the simple and incongruous beauty of the song.