“I was flying along at Uncle Gleb’s side, holding his hand. He yanked me off the escalator—you can’t look back—and into the underground snow palace, a kingdom of marble and white stone, with pillars instead of columns, with a never-ending dome stretching to infinity instead of a ceiling. Never in my life, my life on the other side, on the surface, had I seen such beauty, such splendor.”
From The Underground by Hamid Ismailov, translated from the Russian by Carol Ermakova and just published by Restless Books. Ismailov is an Uzbek journalist who was forced to leave his native country in 1992 for the UK, where he now works for the BBC. His work is banned in Uzbekistan.
Read more Saturday European Fiction
Photo – Krasnogvardeiskaya metro station in Moscow by A.Savin
literalab 
Leave a Reply