Orchestra

1 The ways of chance amaze me. How can one comprehend its power, its vagaries, its greatness and caprice, its waywardness and willfulness, its sheer implausibility? Like a mischievous youngster, chance acknowledges no laws, cares little what people want, and only rarely bows before the inevitable course of events. Division X received a visit from one Captain Shilin, a military pilot and an undisputed and unrivaled ace, one capable – unlike most of the population – of flying a military aircraft at high speed at a significant altitude. It was early March, when winter was still in full swing and was not yet thinking of letting up, had not yet given a nod in the direction of spring. Someone who had completely lost track of time would have been quite unable to tell what month it was from the weather outside: frost, snowdrifts; proper winter. A keen eye would nevertheless be able to make out where the snow had settled and darkened, where moist depressions had formed in the snowdrifts around the trees. When a thaw was just starting, the cold air took on an elusive smell of watermelon and apples. Few city people know the airy smell of meltwater, renowned for its healing properties. Country people know how it boosts one’s health and brings relief to a weary body. It is no wonder that birds and other animals rush to drink from a fresh patch of melted snow, and if you water wilted indoor flowers with snowmelt, they will spring up and grow. This is not what Shilin was thinking about, however. If the smell of spring suddenly catches a man unawares in the wintertime, do his thoughts turn to the possible advantages and benefits of it? Does he find himself harassed by corrosive self-centeredness? The faint, barely perceptible smell unsettles the blood, weighing on the heart and mind. Hope awakens in the breast, growing stronger with each minute: we have survived the winter, and now we can live, and live well, until fall! The pilot stepped off the bus, and waited for the shaky old vehicle to rumble off, taking with it its smell of rusting iron and the acrid fumes of gasoline. The bus gave out a moaning, screeching sound, as if it suffered from chronic shortness of breath and was aching in its worn-out bolts. The fumes and soot hung over the road, but as the decrepit old bus slowly vanished, the air cleared, and a boundless stillness stretched off in all direction. Rare indeed was the silence that settled in. The highway curved through the fields and was lost among the snowy hills. The pilot stood, absent-mindedly looking out over the landscape, listening, and breathing in the clean, cold air. Tall trees grew along the bends of the river and on the slopes – black trunks amid the immaculate whiteness. The crest of the road revealed birch groves, and meadows beside the river. Further off, the river valley was walled by forest; the nearby hollows were lined with thick undergrowth, and one could readily see how nature would flourish here when the warm days came. Where the pilot had come from, the landscape was depressingly featureless: bare fells, stunted and windblown forests, gnarled trees, impassable swamps, lifeless rocks, and tundra, tundra, a mossy wasteland without end or edge. His garrison was located in the Arctic circle. The settlement there boasted few inhabitants or visitors: dull buildings perched on the slopes, featureless streets, pipes running from small boiler rooms, trash dumps, scrub land, and finally the airfield off in the distance, its runway blasted and hacked into the rocks. It was a stone’s throw from the sea, where no two years were the same: one year the bays would be frozen solid and passage could only be secured by an icebreaker; the next, the life-giving Gulf Stream would tame the bitter cold, warming the sea and cloaking both the dry land and the sea alike in an impenetrable fog.