Relationships
2020
Amadoca
by Sofia Andrukhovych
Mutilated beyond recognition in the combat in Eastern Ukraine, the protagonist of Amadoca makes it out alive, if only just. It’s too early to celebrate though: his injuries have caused complete amnesia. The man remembers neither his name nor his home town; not a single relative; not a fragment of his old life. At this point a woman finds him. Her love and patience can work miracles, reaching the deepest levels of memory and forgetting, bringing together discrete snippets of the maimed consciousness and weaving them together into the shared history. Amadoca was the largest lake in Europe that lay on the territory that is now Ukraine. First mentioned by Herodotus and faithfully recreated by medieval cartographers down the centuries it suddenly disappeared from accounts. How can large lakes, whole worlds or entire cultures disappears without a trace? And what is left behind in their wake? Are there paralels between Holocaust of East Europe’s Jews and the distruction of Ukrainian artists in Stalin’s Great Terror? Can one person’s forgetting reach several generations below ground? Are the signs and scars of maimed memories what really keeps us together? Can love and patience help to touch the mind of another human being?
