Description

Modern Belarusian literature in the Belarusian language.

MYSTERY | THRILLER | LOVE | DETECTIVE | FOLK

If you live near Prorva, it’s easier to believe in werewolves than in reliable mobile coverage.

But our main character is a city dweller. Antos, a university professor, loses his loyal friend, the beagle Argus. At the same time, his wife decides their marriage has run its course. Looking for a hobby to occupy his mind, Anton agrees to help an acquaintance decipher the text from mysterious notebooks found in an attic in one of the villages near Prorva—a swamp where the protagonist’s grandfather also lived. The notebooks are written in Sütterlin, a now-forgotten German script. Only individual words yield, but the more the hero understands, the more anxiously he looks in the mirror.

You can also buy the e-book version on Google Books and Kobo.com.

EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK:

The notebooks were different. Too different to be united by any common characteristic, word, or suitable description. Some were thin, just slightly thicker than a regular school notebook; others were thick, fleshy, like Piedmontese bulls. Paper covers, oilcloth covers, cardboard covers, notebooks with no covers at all… About twenty of them, no less. Stacked haphazardly—it was impossible to stack them neatly; they leaned sideways and threatened to collapse, to crash down from the table onto the poppy seeds and coffee mugs.

“May I?” I asked.

“Yes, of course,” Jaśsia nodded. “Take a look. This is only a part, to give you an idea.”

The manuscript on top was an ordinary general notebook. Pressing my thumb against the edge, I fanned through the pages. It smelled of dust and old paper. Then I opened it at random. Light pages with grid lines, no margins, not yet yellowed. They were filled with a clear, dense handwriting: lines ran in every row of the grid, letters sometimes leaned to the right, sometimes stood straight like toy soldiers on parade, and sometimes began to tilt left, as if a wind had blown over this formation, scattering the ranks of brave Prussian warriors.

“Reminds me of boustrophedon,” said Jaśsia.

“What?” I didn’t understand.

“A writing style. Even lines go left to right, odd lines go right to left.”

Just what I needed! If so, my bitter fate would be to track line numbers to avoid mixing up the direction.

“So, is this boustrophedon?”

“No.”

“Thank God,” I muttered.

“What do you think?”

I put the notebook aside, picked up another one, flipped through it. The same picture: dense text, variable slant. Not a single drawing, not one familiar word. The weave of symbols made my eyes swim.

“How can this be deciphered?”

“It’s a matter of habit,” Jaśsia shrugged. “Nothing complicated.”

The next volume was assembled from thin student notebooks, bound together, glued, and rebound—you couldn’t add or remove a thing: a real book. Unlike the previous one, this looked very old: it smelled of mold, and the yellowed pages were sprinkled with constellations of dark dots. Several headings caught my eye—short inscriptions of a few words between large sections of text.

“It seems they were stored in different places.”

“That’s right,” Jaśsia confirmed. “Some notebooks were hidden in a suitcase in the attic; we found a small number in the house among the books. The ones in the suitcase were better preserved.”

“Maybe they’re just newer? Is there any chronological sequence to them?”

Myatselskaya thought for a moment.

“Probably, but I don’t know about that. To tell them apart, I call the worse ones the Elder Edda, and the newer ones, the Younger.”

“Original,” I said.

“Pour me some coffee,” Jaśsia glanced at her husband.

He carefully filled the cup almost to the brim and handed it to her cautiously. Myatselskaya firmly brought the cup to her lips without spilling a drop and took a sip.

“Well, what do you think?” she repeated her question.

“I already told you—I agree.”

“Cold Lands”