“Addressed to a friend, the little song goes round in circles, because...” sang the radio. I did not manage to hear the rest: someone knocked on the window.
I terribly did not want to wake up. It was a day off; the day before there had been so much to do that it seemed it could never all be redone. But no, I had done everything, managed everything. Just before midnight I collapsed onto the pillows, thinking I would fall asleep instantly, but sleep would not come. That happens after severe overwork. I managed to fall asleep toward morning, and then...
Why the radio had begun singing, I did not understand. Everything was switched off, that was certain. But the foolish song about a song from the days of my early childhood shattered my sleep to pieces, and I could not remember why that song was going round in circles. And how can it go at all? What nonsense.
The knock on the window, which had prevented me from understanding the plot and intrigue of the song, repeated itself. How I did not want to lift my head from the pillow, I thought, crawling out from under the blanket. With my eyes still closed — or perhaps not yet opened, like a newborn kitten’s — I put my feet into cold slippers and went to the window.
Our house stood beside a park. The park was old, well-kept and dense. “How can that be combined?” you ask. Perfectly! Mighty old trees, gathered in groups like aksakals at their aksakal meetings, looked indulgently at the young growth that self-confidently stretched upward: here we are! Look at us! What can one do — a new generation, accelerated. The aksakals chuckled into their branches, lazily shaking off the night’s stupor.
Between the plots where the heroic trees and teenage trees grew ran a narrow path laid with beautiful multicolored stones. The path hid behind trunks, then ran out again, encircling the relic part of the park with a colored sparkling ring. In the middle of the mass (I wanted to write “wooden mass,” but no, a mass of trees is probably called something else) shone a round lake. Looking at the park from the window was sheer pleasure in any season. Watching how oaks and plane trees converse sedately, how birches and aspens whisper, how poplars and elms rustle about something of their own. On benches around the lake, pensioners with books and grandchildren sit all year round; children on scooters and roller skates rush around the water.
Lovely...
And our park is especially beautiful from the height of the Ferris wheel. You rise upward in a festive little cabin and admire all this park magnificence.
Half asleep, I stood at the window, thoughtfully looking at the park and not understanding why I had got out of bed so early.
The knock sounded again...
No one was visible. Only the wind was whirling some leaves and something resembling a transparent candy wrapper. In childhood, I remember, mother would bring me from business trips extraordinarily tasty sweets in multicolored translucent wrappers. I then folded those wrappers into a tin box: I collected them.
Nothing else could be seen. But what was that knock? Surely the wind was not knocking at me? I opened the window slightly, and with a gust of wind a beautiful “wrapper” landed (or windowsilled itself?) on the windowsill. It was so intriguingly strange and unusual that I did not send it back outside, but closed the window.
“Phew,” said the “wrapper.” “At last one can sit down.”
From astonishment, turning into horror, I lost the power of speech.
Running to the table, I grabbed my glasses and returned to the window. Leaning against the window reveal sat a strange translucent creature, remotely resembling a tiny girl. There was something mysterious, attractive and astonishing about it (her?). Very light, like a May cloud, flowing like a moon path on the sea, exciting like the touch of a pink petal.
“Who are you?” I literally breathed, because my voice suddenly stopped obeying me.
The creature (or vision?) stretched itself into a line and gently rustled: “I am a song. Some, evidently great, poet wrote me, having looped the line of my fate, and sent me into life around a circle. At first it was easier: I lived in an old radio receiver, a plate loudspeaker the poet had inherited from his grandmother. Then I jumped from one gramophone record to another. With a ring of smoke from the pipe of the owner of one record I flew out the window, circled for a long time around a cloud that once spilled itself in tears over a stadium, where for many subsequent years I ran my endless marathon. Then, on a chance balloon torn from the hand of a child who had come to the stadium with his father, I flew into your park. And there are so many circles here! It was good that I managed to rest on the Ferris wheel, because for so many years I have been running and running in circles with my last strength... simply an enchanted circle! Thank you to the wind: it picked me up, spun me and brought me here. And here, with you, there is a pause — do you know why? Perhaps you wrote me and can break the closed circle you yourself created? I would even say, this vicious circle!”
I thought for a minute; the simple little song of my childhood again sounded in my head, returned today by the radio, and smiling, I answered:
“No, I am not a songwriter. I am, apparently, the friend to whom he addressed you. The circle has closed. Or everything has returned to its proper circle. Stay. Rest.”
“Addressed to a friend, the little song goes round in circles...” sang the radio.
At the edge of the windowsill a transparent shadow stirred. Or was it sunlight glinting?
