[excerpt from A NOVEL ABOUT A GOOD PERSON by Emma Andiievska - translation project in progress. The novel takes place in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany at the end of World War II. A few explanations: the word baba means grandmother or old woman. A plakhta is a skirt woven of two panels connected at the waist, and did means grandfather or old man.] "After all, all kinds of gossip was spread not only about baba Hrytsykha personally but about her plakhta, as well, which she had brought from Ukraine and with which she never parted. And as folks languished, bored, not knowing what to do with themselves as each only waited where in the world fate would now dump him (it took those higher-ups so long to come to a decision that folks lost all hope that things would finally be settled), it so happened that among the talkers there were those who'd been around and who following certain clues were able to establish that baba Hrytsykha's plakhta was not just your run-of-the-mill piece of clothing, but a divining plakhta, handed down from generation to generation, which was why baba never parted with it, and the fact that the plakhta never wore out and the colors never ran, even though baba frequently washed it, with that caustic camp soap, no less, that made the skin peel and after which all colored items needed retouching with dyes bought from bald-headed Ivan, revealed to an experienced eye that it was woven of magic thread. Bald-headed Ivan prepared the dyes himself of bricks, roots growing along the river Isar, and American powdered milk, burning the ingredients into dust in a special kettle - at least, that's what he himself said, pulling wool over our eyes, so as not to disclose the secrets of dye-making that did Okhrym had bestowed upon him. That same did Ohkrym, that camp eccentric, who was already much too old when he arrived at the camp heaven-knows-how (some claimed that kind folks had sheltered him, picking him up in Ukraine somewhere as he was on his way to who-knows-where after his village and all the people in it were burned to the ground while he, who wasn't born yesterday, had miraculously survived, having wandered into a dale while chasing after a lost calf - he eventually made it to camp with those folks), and who once said while tossing off a shot of whiskey that baba Hrytsykha's plakhta chronicled fates from around the world far more accurately and clearly than what has been deciphered from the pyramids or in Michel Nostradamus's prophecies."