Trafika Europe 13 - Russian Ballet

Between We

The most memorable rain? Why compare them if they are indeed memorable? It is better to make a small collection of them that might on another occasion have been different. Lightning at night on a hillside. To lie in the hollow of a strawberry field, not under the trees, no tent either, only a tarp below and above you, and turn on your back to observe the bolts of lightning, listening how everything thunders so wonderfully and, waking up in the morning, to breakfast on the dewy strawberries. A sense of possibility. Rain inNewYork. Eightdegrees, Celsius, after theMoscow heat at the end of April, drops of rain fragmenting and swirling in the gusts of air between the building-cliffs, the watery dust of the Atlantic, against which one needs not an umbrella but a nor’wester hat. That is how there also, ruins enter – buildings that no one will ever again enter. Memory. Rain in Shejiang, south of Peking. A coalescing and gathering out of the fog, out of which the shan, the mountains that is, could be seen for a hundred meters or so, and finally falling – on the bright yellow-red forests, the lotus pond of Shuangqing, the Tingfa pines, the shaley cliffs of Yinlu, the temple of Tsonjin Dazhao, the tower of Chang’an. A book, taken away after three interesting pages. The return. A summer downpour on the warm lakes east of the Volga. To observe it from beneath a tree crashing into

95