Читать книгу Fire Smoldering Under Water - Anastasia Kuznetsova - Страница 5

Jean Batist smiled with his cautious smile, poured himself some tea and began to listen to Anastasia carefully.

– What a great meaning has the ritual of sharing food and thirst quenching. As if we not only feed the stomach, but also add some special spice to the soul food. It seems that we not only quench thirst, but also slowly and with pleasure fill with a bracer the vessel of the mind. We can call this a repast, compiled from the temporal and the eternal. This kind of lunch is only possible when the interlocutors are free from the most widespread evil – stupidity. And stupidity is a human evil, eighth sin, I am deeply convinced of that, – Anastasia put her fingers around the porcelain cup and, responding to Jean Batist’s expectations, proceeded with her story.

Fateful nuances comprise our reality like the sand makes up the ocean coast. For example, today, when she decided to talk of a trauma in psychotherapy, an interesting awareness had occurred to her. Anastasia recalled the date, which she usually did not recollect. Almost 13 years ago, on November 20, 2003 she lay on a hospital bed, waiting.

She waited, unable to change anything.

She had waited for two days in a row.

Waited for her child to die.

Her little boy. Her Mishenka.

To die inside her.

To die in her.

And this had brought the understanding that she was dying together with him.

And probably no one would believe, but she had died.

This was an absolute, hundred percent death. Her physical body lay somewhere. Somebody took care of it. Her family. Her mother, husband, friends. Thus she was told afterwards. They told her the same way, as usually a person with amnesia is told. But she herself almost did not remember that time. Probably her Guardian Angel practiced in painting and at some point decided to master the technique of pencil drawing. And in graphic arts curved lines should be periodically erased.

Absurdity of the situation had brought such a compilation of emotions and feelings, that to Anastasia, who was a psychologist at the moment, not yet a surgeon, but already a great experimenter, all this seemed to be a bad dream. Viscous, stifling nightmare as it happens sometimes when you cannot wake up.

Because just yesterday she had been brought by the ambulance to the hospital and was told that her waters had started to break. But, despite such period of pregnancy – 6.5 months – nobody would try to change anything.

Thus she was told.

Nobody would.

Because, from their point of view, the term was too small. The chances that a child could be born alive, in their opinion, also were too small. And anyway, why did she bother them with some stupid junk and diverted the whole medical team from celebrating the anniversary of their best gynecologist. They had got a table set there. Vodka was getting warm. And you, girl, has to hang on, it happens like this. You already have a child.

So. It means that you are lucky.

Others have not got even this.

Everything was happening in such an unreal world, that she took a sharp pain when breathing in and lost her mind when breathing out. She kept breathing this way, filling every cell of her body, spirit and mind with a painful insanity.

It all happened too fast. Just last morning she woke up in an excellent mood. Her caring husband had got their daughter to stay for a while with his mother, who lived in the next building, and went to his work. Anastasia went to the kitchen and came close to the window. She always liked to look through the window.

Outside autumn was getting weird.

On the bank of the river, which flowed under the window, reeds competed with fallen poplar leaves. The reeds tried to show up against the background of already dimming water with a row of brown cobs. It provided a contrast to a slate-gray shade of the river water. The river, in gratitude, added some more profound shades of mercury in the slate-gray color. The leaves of the poplars, sparsely growing along the river bank, were carried away by the breath of the autumn wind and tried to get into water. Their pale yellow worthlessness enlivened the landscape in the most paradoxical way.

Looking into this autumn river-filled November, she wanted to wrap herself up in a plaid and to fall asleep. Till spring. To hibernate for the whole winter as a she-bear. To wake up in spring, give birth to her bear cub and begin living. It would be then, when her Mishenka was born, that the happiness would become absolute and obtain some universal scale.

How else could it be? As so much was already in place for that.

She had a beloved husband, the second one, which meant that with him they should definitely live long, happily and the covers of their coffins would be nailed with one and the same nail. Because with so much love people not only live happily ever after, but also die in one day. This was an obligatory condition.

Her beloved daughter, clever, beautiful, her small panther’s kitten with the name of a goddess, her Diana. Her first husband’s appearance, who looked very much like Steven Seagal, was reflected in Diana by its best features. She was tall, with long, coal-black hair; beautiful, dark hazel, almost black eyes, with ideal face features and a slender figure – Anastasia new that she was growing to be a beauty and a clever girl. With a very kind heart and a delicately organized soul. She was excellent in her studies, was a winner of academic competitions. Kind, sensitive, delicate in her attitude to and her perception of the world, like a crystal bell. What else could a mother dream of?

And her mother dreamed of a brother for her wonderful little daughter. The power of her each previous dreaming was so strong, that all the dreams came true. Every objective had usually been achieved. The desire reigned over the achievement of the goal. So this time also the understanding of her own forcefulness continued to cultivate a selective form of vanity and pride.

She got a great temptation – to feel herself as God…

But Life and Death – are God’s Providence. And this had become her first doze of pure medical alcohol, drunk to the bottom from the Holy Grail, at a long rest break on the scenic road of the psychotherapy skills…

…It was a night. The hospital walls had become saturated with sufferings and lost their distinctness. It had been 12 hours already, during which the smell of insanity accrued and became stronger. An animal fear was spreading in her chest and stomach, mixed with the pain of the increasing intensity of the labor. She was in pain.

It was so much pain that she wanted to scream.

The doctor on duty was sitting in the staff room, drinking vodka with other participants and colleagues of the hero of the anniversary. He had waved aside the request for alleviation of pain and with a poorly controlled tongue mumbled something about the damage caused by an anesthetization. And had not even bothered to give just a pill. Just any pill. Even a placebo.

Anastasia went out into the corridor, to the stairs, where it was allowed to smoke, taking out of the pocket of the hospital gown her cigarettes and a memo pad. They did not give painkillers here. But they did not prohibit smoking in a stairwell. Nobody cared about anything here.

Well, at least she got something.

She did not manage to light up a cigarette right away – her hands had already ceased to obey, and they quivered, reflecting the internal tremor of her consciousness. She wanted so much to write something. Her soul demanded a catharsis. Just a small but tangible proof that her mind was still fighting for the adequate perception of reality.

Outside the window the first snow fell. This was early for the end of November in a southern city. If snow ever fell here, it was likely to happen in the middle of winter, or even closer to its end. The snow was scanty, as were the colors of this last autumn month. But it was there.

Anastasia looked at it through her pain and through the dirty glass of the hospital window, thinking that it might be a sign. She tried to reason. This was a specific attempt to obtain hope for a further self-consciousness, which simply might never come. In case her psyche was not be able to go through the trauma.

She opened the memo pad, and holding a pencil in cold trembling fingers, she tried to catch some signs of destiny, poetry and drops of sense.

It was somehow disturbing outside. Using a pool stick, the wind pushed and knocked young snow, rolling it into billiard balls, which fell to pieces like shortbread biscuits. As if nature itself compassionately played up in unison to a strange and frightening tragedy, which was acted out on a green cloth of the billiard table of Her Majesty Destiny.

At some point her consciousness changed the form of perception; the level of control and criticism went down to the water line between the Ego body and the Id bottom. The ship became unstable despite the fact that the Alter-Ego sails had not been lowered yet. Suddenly her fingers became firm, the tremor stopped and the graphite turned into a scribbler. Anastasia new this state. While in this state, she used to write poems in her childhood and youth. And now this would happen again…

Anastasia lit up another cigarette, convulsively filling herself one last time with the memories of the bloodline force. And she remembered herself – as a memory of the past. As if she remembered herself is some parallel reality, as if she had already gone through all that, which she still had to go through.

Dissociation. The psyche’s attempt to keep her sanity.

And she turned to the bloodline force.

Elena, Anastasia’s mom, always told her:

– Whatever happens, remember that your great grandma Kady had given birth to 13 children, and your grandfather Aslanbek was her thirteenth child. You are a descendant of a great woman.

They lived high in the mountains, where there was nothing but mountains. Kady was a healer, curing diseases with herbs. Reminders of the war had come even to these palaces of ethnic paradise. Four of Kady’s children had died because of the severe conditions of the post-war life. Her older children aspired to be like their parents, helping with household and at the farm. And the younger one, Aslanbek, Anastasia’s grandfather, had a thirst for knowledge; like the great Lomonosov once had done, he went along his life’s road to the light of education. The only difference was that Lomonosov had come from Siberia, and Aslanbek descended from the mountains of the North Caucasus. And later he became a director of a school in Beslan, a suburb of Vladikavkaz.

At that time, when Anastasia’s grandfather was still alive, it was beyond belief to imagine that adults could commit a mass murder of children, to show other adults that they were not human beings. It happened during a lineup on September 1, 2004, when terrorists took as hostages the children at the first school in Beslan. 186 children had been killed there. More than 800 people had been wounded.

Afterwards they made the Cemetery of Angels in Beslan. Very beautiful.

Even when approaching it, people used to start feeling chill. Due to a combination of thoughts of inhuman atrocity, numbing human consciousness, near the children’s graves, and the perception of beauty of the Angels’ sculptures.

Anastasia thought about these killed children as well as about a tragedy which used to come unexpectedly. Terrorism – is an absolute evil. Unfortunately, people do not realize how serious this threat is. Otherwise, politicians would have stopped advocating their own interests and measuring their secondary sexual characters. With regards to this problem, not characters, but factors should be measured and compared. To unite all the countries against terrorism and to weed out this field. To deeply plow the land, root up old, rotten trees, clean soil from weeds and give this land a couple of years to rest. For another couple of years some sporadical weed seeds would come up, but this would be just residual traces. And after the land got some rest, it would be possible to sow wheat. Or to plant a garden. To revive life and cultivate the Joy of Life.

Her grandfather was just an ordinary person, a very kind one. His whole life was an example for his descendants. With his own hands he built a big house. He married a Ukrainian girl Kseniya from a refugee family, whom her father had brought as a little girl from Ukraine, where famine was rampant and cannibalism flourished, right after the Great Patriotic War. Her grandfather had lived with her in love and understanding for his whole life.

She was a Western Ukrainian, a bearer of blood and culture of the Antes, Orthodox, who had grown up in the tranquility of endless plains, where the Danube river was deep and wide, with its full-flowing breath.

He was a North Ossetian, a descendant of the Scythians, an Islamite, who had grown up in the infinity of the North Caucasian mountains, where the river Terek, in a torrent of a mountain river, carried its rapid waters.

They had met and fell in love with each other. They raised their children. And grew an amazing garden. Her grandfather was fond of botany, of plant breeding. Her grandmother worked as a pharmacist. Anastasia, their surviving descendant, always realized this genetically determined life energy, transferred to her by the bloodline force. Thus she was taught by her mother Elena, who buried two of Anastasia’s sisters. And Anastasia felt that she was the bearer of this specific Life Force.

She felt that she could survive in any situation. And there had been a lot of situations. And she never had doubts about this truth.

Never.

Even now, slowly sinking into the abyss of horror and autistic animal insanity…

…The morning came. Anastasia realized that she was still able to experience something, slightly resembling emotions. It was like a joy. Because this morning still came.

After the sleepless night, woven of the stuff of suffering labors, which continued beyond time.

But very soon the old cliché came to her mind. Morning could not be good. At that moment this phrase sounded very literal and straight, as a blade of a knife for steak. The steak was Anastasia.

Her labors had continued for almost 23 hours. She had strains. She was put in a regular ward of the hospital’s gynecological department. There she had been brought yesterday by an ambulance, first with a threat of a miscarriage, then with the verdict of the supreme penalty for her Mishenka.

The bed, where she had been left to give birth, had some metal rods over the bed-head. When her roommate in the ward, a girl of about 18 years old, who had been placed there for prevention of a miscarriage, saw how Anastasia moved apart the bed’s metal rods, she ran up to her and began to cry. Fearfully, bitterly, weeping, stroking with one hand Anastasia’s face, wet with sweat and tears, and with the other – her own huge belly.

Anastasia told her something, tried to ask her to go out, so that this little girl, who was going to give birth for the first time, would not have a premature delivery. But the girl would not go away. She continued stroking Anastasia’s hand, sometimes trying to loosen the tight grip of her fingers, tightly bent in this mortal combat; the fingers already could not be unclenched, but just continued to bend the metal rods.

Anastasia was so much devastated and exhausted overnight, that when a cry managed to burst out of her, it was like a low hissing whisper. Her throat was completely dry. And she did not know, what she would chose in this state: to get rid of this horrible pain or to get a sip or two of water.

After all, the great creator of a human motivation’s pyramid Maslow was absolutely right. Basic needs disable the personality. The only question is the level of expressiveness of a deficit and the duration of its effect.

But it appeared that to completely disable the Anastasia’s personality was not that easy. And in the rare moments of her consciousness’s clarification she thought about this poor girl, her roommate in the hospital’s ward. She realized that the girl would not go away by herself, and then she whispered to her a request to call the doctor once again. And again the doctor did not come. During the past evening and for the whole night they continued their quiet celebration in honor of the hero of the anniversary.