The Rains

Translated by Leo Shtutin; Published in Luxury Literarure Magazine

Go ahead, try stepping outside. It’s not hard. Nothing’s going to jump out at you. Even your enemies take a break now and then. Well, yes, there is the question of the elements… But the wind hasn’t kicked up yet, the clouds haven’t quite smothered the sun, and the rain? Barely a drizzle, scarcely a mizzle, a casual, frivolous kind of rain. Pop your collar and you’ll be fine—those driblets won’t sneak down your neck. I mean, who’s afraid of a little sky-water! Let it do its thing. This is hardly Bad Weather, is it. This is hardly the time to seal your windows and batten down your hatches. Squint skyward, though, and unease is sure to creep in: the sun’s all but vanished, and the clouds are darkening and threatening to swallow the whole firmament. And what’s this? The celestial floodgates burst open, and the meek little drizzle morphs into a monstrous torrent. Quick—find a roof, seek shelter! They’re relentless, these rains. Relentless and life-changing. Does weather change lives? But of course it does. You forget the sun exists, you pull on your boots, you don your hooded mac; you drink grog of an evening, you stretch out before the fire, you watch with melancholic eye the dancing of the flames; most importantly of all, you feel every inch an Englishman, an old-timer whiling away the hours with a manservant you’ve inherited from your grandfather. Or perhaps, like a character from some Russian drama, you listen to the drum of the rain and lament the meaninglessness of your existence, an existence as interminable as the deluge outside your windows. But now you stop conjuring visions of melancholic Englishmen and anguished Russians; now you press your forehead to the window-glass and watch the rains descend in endless sheets, implacable and unforgiving, rains that herald the end of your patient little life, the vanishing of  all the living and the dead, the fall of the civilization we created. Rain floods land and sea. The oceans swell and burst their bounds, drowning the earth.  The planet, now a great sphere of unbroken water, drifts from its orbit, dissolves into the universe, vanishes into vast, cosmic indifference. Here we are, the last witnesses to the approaching horror; here we are, mute, transfixed, beating our foreheads against window-glass as if hellbent on tearing through the veil of our own existence, outrunning the catastrophe, and becoming the first to vanish into nothingness.