The morning courtyard is strangely colored by patches of sunlight. How difficult it can be to invent such light, how difficult to reproduce it.
The trees — not all of them, only some, as if accidentally caught — are lit with a whitened orange and edged with the dark braid of shadow. This makes the courtyard almost a stage set: beautiful, but empty of people, like backstage.
A woman came out in an unbuttoned jacket. She left her burden by the bench and began rolling the stumps, scattered by someone — perhaps by yesterday’s promised wind, perhaps by the nasty voice of a uselessly wailing siren — into one common pile.
The mournful sound caused irritation, anxiety, and quotations from Quartet I:
— “He’s honking. Let him honk at his wife!”
— “And what if someone sees? — Well, you saw it, and so what?”
Memories of the siren carried me from the magic of the lighting to thoughts of factory whistles, which I knew only from grandmothers’ stories — and not even my own grandmother’s. The coloring of those whistles was different, however. I think there was something stable and unshakable in them.
The light plays with me, hiding now behind other trees and illuminating, as if by miracle, the surviving branches near the neighboring house. Above the roof the branches are completely dark in the halo of a flock of orange trembling butterfly wings pretending to be bursting buds.
It seems that the light, mysteriously flowing from behind the squat five-story building, comes from the little flower, “scarlet, fairer than which...” That is exactly how it was in the cartoon.
Spring nature is special. It tries very hard to correct the unsightliness piled up by thoughtlessness and neglect, flooding it with light, filling it with grass, decorating it with greenery and flowers. And you really believe that everything will turn green, shoot up, and bloom. And that these stumps, once tall shady trees and now adapted as a fence around a heap of sand, will put down roots, branches, buds, leaves...
But for now the woman in the unbuttoned jacket is rolling them into one common stump pile, a sad monument to fallen trees. And the siren, which merely assures citizens that it exists and works but does not explain at all what to do if anything happens, blends organically with the picture of those stumps.
Only the sunny spring light keeps playing with us, now coloring everything yellow and scattering silver glints across different windows.
And the gaze moves away from the cut-off trunks to the sunspots; the lips stretch into a smile; joy softly squeezes the heart:
Spring!
