Trafika Europe 6 - Arabesque

Sergei Lebedev

too heavy, too ripe, and the straw did not sof ten the blow completely; apples fell, during the day the sound was muf f led, but at night it seemed that a chronometer was beating in the garden, that a different time was beginning, the t ime of r ipeness . And when I later read about the Transfiguration of the Lord, this incident helped me to understand it as much as I could: that old image of the apple orchard in August on the threshold between summer and autumn; the Transf iguration occurred when His time had come. The apple is the fruit of time; and even though it is not said that Adam and Eve had eaten of the apple, what other fruit could have embodied the unknown fruit of the tree of knowledge in a painting? Human time began

with the apple—Seth begat Enos, Enos begat Cainan. So the old peasant ordered them to send the apple to the exile village in order that apples would grow there, he was trying to spark the time of the new village, the way you start a motor, the village that arose on carted-in soil, to put down roots in the place where it appeared by accident, by the will of those who sent the exiles; some settlements, even though a hundred years old, stand on bare earth, as if the huts had just been knocked together, while others accumulate time, grow into it. And now the three old men told me: we had a reason for sharpening the axe today. We’ve decided to chop down three old apple trees: they no longer give fruit, we have no firewood, and we

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