Postcard to a Ballerina

It is almost archetypical: the lone experienced traveller who in the midst of the monotony of a journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway invites you to hear the tale of one of the many incidents he experienced along the way. This is how Eva Koch’s “Postcard to a Ballerina” is built up.

The viewer meets Jørgen Hansen Koch, the artist’s cousin, who relates an anecdote, while the Russian landscape glides past the windows of the train: a series of small stopping places, where the locals peddle their wares to the passengers and huge flat expanses where sky and the earth seem to merge.

The ballerina of the title gives intimations of a fairy-tale. And the story has to do with a post card bearing a Russian stamp depicting a ballerina, a post card that nearly made the narrator miss his train when he tried to send it to a girlfriend one early morning on the border between Russia and Mongolia. What, one wonders, had he written on the post card to the ballerina, who we can already see pirouetting in our imagination? We are never told, but we sense that it was worth more than a story.

Postkort til en ballerina er et kærligt portræt af det rejsende menneske. Den rejsende er en ældre mand, Jørgen Hansen Koch, kunstnerens fætter, og turen går via den transsibiriske jernbanes klaprende sveller. Som en anden medrejsende foræres beskueren en anekdote, alt i mens det russiske landskab glider forbi togets rude. Skiftende små stationsbyer hvor folk faldbyder deres varer til togets passagerer, og store flade sletter hvor himlen synes at nærme sig jorden.

Titlens ballerina stemmer forventningerne til et eventyr. Og fortællingen handler da også om et postkort med et russisk frimærke med en danserinde på, som fortælleren en tidlig morgen mellem Rusland og Mongoliet, var lige ved at miste toget for at få afsendt til sin veninde. Hvad var det mon, der stod på postkortet til ballerinaen, der allerede piruetterer i baghovedet? Vi får det aldrig at vide, men vi fornemmer, at det var mere end en tilfældig historie.