‘This is why I love America,’ she says, impressively. ‘All your freedoms in writing. Why are you not there, anyway, drinking whiskey?’ The Ukrainian translator asks this of the American army instructor, as they sit one off-night getting lushed up in the small kitchen of a safe house in Mykolaiv.
‘First, we have to win the war,’ he intones with gravity.
‘We already won the war.’ She says this confidently, albeit softly, with the careful tread of the superstitious, as if to avoid some unintentional jinx.
‘I know we already won,’ taking a pull from his honey-laced Tennessee whiskey, ‘but it takes time.’ He smacks, licks a sticky tracing from his upper lip. ‘It takes time…’
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