Analect 2.746x

8 July 2010. Again, gray, cool...

Listening to reading of Pan Apolek. Я помню: между прямых и светлых стен стояла паутинная тишина летнего утра... (I remember: between straight and glowing walls stood the cob-webbed quiet of a summer morning...) Babel describing Novgorod-Volynsk, 1922.

But here, Leningrad, twenty years later. A painting from a summer's exhibition in the Tretyakov. Neo-Impressionism (for lack of a better term) brought to bear on the siege of a city in winter. Sloping piles of snow adorn each cornice (Apollo in the Snow), and a single figure stands to confront the pinkish neo-classical facade of a building unknown... Pale gray barrage balloons hover in a darker gray sky, over silent roofs. A single band of whitish crimson juts across flash of horizon...

Amsterdam, half a century later still, summer again. The street just outside Avraham Unger's flat, near the Javaplein. A songbird in a cage, placed there each morning by its owner to spend the day in open air...

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