A mosquito, out of its winter hibernation, woke me with its ultrasonic song.
“Get up,” it said. “You have big plans today.”
I brushed away its persistent many-voiced buzzing, not at once realizing that the neighbor upstairs was echoing it. You know those high female voices that drill straight into the brain?
The song ended suddenly: the mosquito fell under my applause, and the neighbor, apparently, went off to work.
I crawled back under the blanket and began thinking about the big plans. Though, to be honest, they are not so very big — just multi-step, and I have rather lost the habit of that.
For some reason I remembered an autumn evening from my institute years. There was a light rain, the kind typical of Lviv in those days, but the city was, for some reason, not gray; it was the color of ochre — golden ochre, not pale ochre, as you might have thought. I felt very, very sad: by nature I am more of a Pierrot, only an optimistic one. And so I walked sadly through a city made sad by rain, in an autumn month full of sadness. I did not know the streets I had wandered into at all; I simply walked, led by my girlish sorrows.
Lviv has a strange feature: you may go in any direction, but like a boomerang you return to the point where you began. I told my husband about this effect; he always agreed with indulgent politeness until he himself found himself in Lviv two winters ago. We would go out for a walk and wonder whether to turn left or right; after wondering, we would go one way and then the other, and in the end find ourselves in the same place. Something like “all roads lead to Rome.” We never reached Rome, though, but Lviv, I tell you honestly, is very fine too.
So, returning to that long-ago autumn with the sad girlish streets along which I wandered, rustling maple leaves and catching drops of rain that was warm, quite un-autumnlike. There were almost no passers-by, or perhaps I simply did not notice them, or perhaps there were some but I did not remember them; and suddenly I met a dry little elderly woman of short stature, who asked me something in a quiet voice. I no longer remember what she asked, but the image itself still stands before my eyes brightly and clearly. She asked, and I answered on autopilot, without leaving my girlish autumn spleen, and walked on. Only after I had gone quite a distance did I suddenly realize what had happened and freeze, looking back. I became frightened. The woman had addressed me in Polish, and I had answered her in Polish.
I did not know the language; I had never studied Polish. Only the radio in the dormitory had told its stories and sung its Polish songs while I did my assignments. So if one digs deeply enough into the depths of the subconscious, one can find, oh, a great many things there. And understand why you understand not only the question of an elderly pani, but also the song of an ultrasonic mosquito.
“Get up,” the mosquito sang. “You have big plans today.”
Though I have already told you that.
Having interrupted the mosquito’s song with an ovation and pretended that I do not understand mosquito language, I climbed under the blanket with a cup of hot tea to write to you, my dears, that it is time to get up, leave the blanket, the day is beginning, and spring, and plans, and good morning!
