Elegy in brown

The chestnut tree is a strange plant. Like humans, it has a contradictory nature and loves attention. For example, the sun is still shining, there are still no tickets to the Crimea, but the chestnuts are already fading and shedding their dry leaves, panic-stricken, as though they’re saying: Oh, my, fall is coming! Or, the opposite: Save me, it’s sizzling hot (even though fall is just around the corner)! Everything is still green, but the chestnuts are turning yellow.

But this just a prelude before the real circus begins. I am sure that many readers, walking along a quiet street, have gotten a good pop on the head. It’s not from a bunch of basketball-playing pranksters but a little chestnut that has dropped from a branch, as the season requires. It bounced off your head, opened up, cast off its thorns, and went bounding down the cobblestone road. This is a minor detail, but the guardian spirit who sits on the tree branch is elated.

That’s not all that happens: autumn is burgeoning, the trees are swiftly shedding their leaves, the Crimean suntan has faded, and the rain keeps falling drearily. But then there’s a warm, sunny spell, and the chestnuts immediately burst into blossom. Green catkins are falling off one branch, while another shows a white or pink candle-like flower: look at me, your November is of no consequence to me!

Springtime needs no explanation at all. The chestnut “candles” light up on the same day all over the city, and even a run-of-the-mill little street begins to look like a hall in a real palace. This is not simply beautiful, it is solemnly beautiful. This is a very human tree.

And how can one possibly eat chestnuts? This is cannibalism pure and simple. I still regret the day that I tasted some out of sheer curiosity. Some Arabs were frying them in large funnel-shaped pans and selling then on the Seine esplanade near the Quai d’Orsay Museum in Paris. You pay one euro, get them in a small newspaper cone, like they sell sunflower seeds in Ukraine, and nibble them as you walk along. The taste is nothing special, like a baked potato, even blander than that. OK, you’ve eaten it, and then start feeling pangs of conscience: isn’t this why chestnut trees begin to wither so early nowadays? Maybe they have some kind of inter-tree solidarity, transmitting signals to each other through their underground roots?

Here is the difference between us and Europe. They eat chestnuts, while we feast our eyes on them. As for Russia, there are no chestnuts there at all. To be more exact, there are some, but can you find at least one block in Moscow where they glow in spring like a thousand candelabra in a palace?

Why all these reflections? I’m in a lyrical mood. It’s been a warm September, the moon is full, I am dreaming my pipe dreams, but there’s lots of work to do, and I haven’t been in the lap of nature for a long time. I’m a faded urban orchid in an office filled with computers. All I can do is hope that I will get a good pop on my giddy head from a chestnut when I happen to pass under the crown of a tall Kyiv chestnut tree.