Читать книгу Fanyasha: Why Do Angels Need People? - Марианна Россет - Страница 12

“Bosya, hey Bosya, tell me, what did you boys learn in school on the second day of class?” asked Fanyasha with a cunning smile, jumping into the cloud bus.

“Oh come on, Fanya, what do you care? No matter what, you girls will have something different!” muttered Bosya.

“But Bosechka, please, please just tell me. I’m interested! I really want to know,” said Fanyasha, still dying to hear her brother’s explanation.

“Well, as far as I remember, we were given all kinds of different tasks all day long the second day, and we were supposed to make a decision really fast and act on it. That’s really important for men! So it was really cool, although at that moment I still couldn’t understand when we would finally start our studies. That’s it.”

Fanyasha didn’t hear her brother’s last words, as the cloud bus had already taken off high into the sky and was racing to the school.

Fanyasha was thinking and imaging the whole way to school about what other skills could be important to girls, and about what she could expect to learn in school today.

At first, she was imagining how they would all be forced to wash and clean up, since girls should look after cleanliness and order. Then she guessed that everybody would be given the opportunity to demonstrate their talent at dancing or singing. That’s when she would surprise everybody! Her grandmother Nakomis had been working with her all throughout Fanyasha’s young life, teaching her to sing beautifully and to dance, so Fanyasha was absolutely sure that no one was better than her at singing and dancing.

She got so engrossed in her thoughts about her talents that she didn’t notice that she had wound up next to her school, and a strong gust of air once again threw all of the students into the right classrooms.

“This is amazing! It’s so beautiful! It’s just incredible beauty!” said a girl with a long red braid, and clapped her hands.

Fanyasha took a look at the girl, and together with the other students she started looking around their classroom with delight. The whole room was shining and transfused with light. There was not a bit of yesterday’s greyness and dampness left! In place of yesterday’s hard chairs, all of the schoolgirls got to sit on soft red armchairs. In front of them on the little cream-colored tables were white notebooks and colored pencils. It was hard to hold back one’s emotions, but Fanyasha had figured out yesterday that silence was like gold for a girl in school.

A raspberry-colored cloud appeared unexpectedly in the middle of the classroom, and in a flash turned into Horda Etyudizovna. However, today her dress had a deep raspberry hue, and her dark hair was wrapped into a tight bun, with a pearl hairpin shining in it. A playful twinkle was flashing in her large black eyes.

Despite that, her voice and facial expression were still serious and cold.

“Good morning, students. I want to start by recognizing one of you, and by giving away our first pink cloud. Krygoliya Zorge, I’m talking about you! You demonstrated your knowledge of rule number seventy-six with dignity! Congratulations!

With these words, the teacher pointed with her long index finger on her right hand at the girl with the red-haired braid, and in her other hand their immediately appeared a large scroll with the names of all the schoolgirls.

Horda Etyudizovna touched the scroll with her finger across from Krygoliya Zorge’s name, and a small pink cloud immediately appeared on the paper.

“Who can tell me why Krygoliya got a pink cloud?” the teacher slowly turned round and round, and looked fixedly into the girls’ faces.

“Efaniya Aros,” she suddenly snapped, “tell me, what is rule number seventy-six about?!”

Here Fanyasha shook out of fear, and she was extremely hurt that her brother’s advice didn’t work. After all, she had honestly read all four hundred rules for girls’ behavior in elementary school, and she honestly put her notebook under her pillow, but now she couldn’t remember a thing that she had read.

“Murisa Laucar, maybe you can answer me?”

The teacher shifted her glance to Fanyasha’s neighbor with the white bangs, and Murisa answered her quickly and precisely, “Rule number seventy-six says a girl should always speak out loud about her positive emotions!”

Within an instant, there were two new symbols on the scroll: a pink cloud next to Murisa’s name, and a black mark next to Efaniya’s name.

“I can’t believe it,” thought Fanyasha, offended. “This repugnant, uneducated neighbor even managed to learn the rules. I was wrong to listen to my over-confident brother! I got into this stupid situation because of him! I’ll give him what for tonight! He’ll get a beating from me!”

“I’m warning all of you,” sounded Horda Etyudizovna’s metallic voice, “the rules of behavior are the basis of the elementary school program. They have to be not only known, but also clearly executed. I’m going to mark every one of your achievements or successes in my gradebook with a pink cloud, and I’ll give a black mark for every failure.

“Fifty pink clouds will give you the chance to visit the school library and park. Fifty black marks will be a straight path to getting expelled from our school, and going right to a remedial school. And keep in mind, I’ll never let any angel graduate from elementary school if she doesn’t know the rules or hasn’t completely learned any one of the subjects we teach here! Believe me, it’s better to delay the birth of your person than to make this person suffer all throughout life with an angel who doesn’t understand the rules.

“That’s why I encourage all of you to know and execute the rules, and try your best in your studies!”

Fanyasha was interested by her teacher’s words.

“What could that mean,” she thought, “to delay a person’s birth. Hmm, if that’s possible, then, maybe, it’s possible to stop the child from being born altogether. In that case, I won’t even have to go to school! It would be good to know what goes with what. Ahh, I know! I’ve got it! I’ll make Bosya tell me everything he knows about that, since he let me down with learning the rules.”

Meanwhile, Horda Etyudizovna continued.

“Yesterday’s class, as you could probably guess, was dedicated to humility, one of a woman’s most important qualities. Thanks to the special conditions we created, you all learned the skill of humility one way or another. And we’ll see as time goes on how well you can use it in life.

“However, here’s my advice: always follow the sincerity of your feelings in your actions. Any fake behavior, or acting, can lead to irreparable consequences. The words “angel’ and “sincerity’ should become synonyms for you.

“You will learn to feel and to understand with sincerity during your time studying in the elementary school,” said Horda Etyudizovna, and with these words started swaying from side to side, and dancing, and she waved her long arms from side to side, and climbed higher and higher, right up to the ceiling. “You’ll learn to appreciate, to accept, to let go, to forgive, and finally, to love, all with sincerity.”

Here she pointed her finger at Murisa and asked her very strictly:

“Whom should an angel love most sincerely of all?”

“Rule number one: an angel should love her person more than anyone else,” the girl responded quickly.

“Well ya, ya, that’s all well and good,” Fanyasha thought, rolling her eyes. “That all sounds nice, but it’s hard to live like that. Really, how can you sincerely accept something that you don’t like at all, or sincerely love a person and dedicate your life to him or her, if that is completely not a part of your plan? If you have to love someone more than anyone else, it should be yourself.”

“Efaniya Aros!” the teacher barked, and flew down into the center of the classroom. “What are you mumbling down there? Are you really that desperate to fill your report card with black marks, and transfer to remedial school?”

Krygoliya exchanged looks with her neighbor and laughed. “Oh please, what a mean teacher, and my classmates are even worse,” thought Fanyasha with self-pity, and dropped her head guiltily, then started nervously writing the words “s-i-n-c-e-r-e-l-y l-o-v-e y-o-u-r p-e-r-s-o-n.”

“Well that’s better,” noted Horda Etyudizovna, then added a pink cloud to Murisa’s line, and continued talking.

“So, sincere love for a person is the meaning of life for an angel. And an angel’s main task in life is to accompany her person throughout life, from birth to death. A person is born, lives, and dies in a special place created for him or her, which is called planet Earth. This planet is situated in a different dimension of space. I’ll teach you in a few months how to get there.”

At this moment, the image of a bluish-green ball appeared in the center of the classroom. The ball was rotating on its axis.

“Earth is a place that serves as a kind of school for people. A person comes to earth in order to learn something. And the angel’s task is to help him or her with that learning.”

Fanyasha remembered her grandmother’s fairy tales about earth, and about how earth is full of various unusual beings, like animals, birds, and fish.

“So, it really does exist, this planet earth,” thought Fanyasha, taken by surprise. “But it turns out that unhappy people also inhabit this earth.”

“As a rule, a person has to go through six basic lessons, and a bunch more secondary lessons,” continued the teacher, flying from side to side between the desks. “The main lessons, unlike the secondary ones, must be followed in a strict sequence. The second lesson won’t begin until the first one is done, and so on.

“As sad as it is, sometimes there are cases when a person’s life ends faster than this person can go through all the lessons. And why is that? It’s because each time the situations in which the person goes through the lesson become more and more complicated, and in the end the poor person suffers throughout life with just one and the same lesson. And sometimes through more than one life! That’s terrible! Just unacceptably awful!” with these words Horda Etyudizovna sighed deeply, and grabbed her head, as if in desperation.

“However!” her voice sounded so loud and powerful that all of the schoolgirls lifted their eyes to her. “We have the power to change that! That’s why we’re learning! And the better you do in school, and the better you learn the school curriculum, the more chances your person will have of getting through all of their lessons, and living a full, happy life. And in that case you’ll have the chance to enter…” here Horda Etyudizovna coughed, brushed her long fingers on her lips, as if she had just given away a terrible secret, and quickly changed the topic of conversation.

“Alright, we’ll talk more about people later, but now let’s talk about cats.”

At this moment pictures of cats appeared all throughout the classroom, on the walls and on the ceiling. They were all really funny – all of varying colors and sizes, furry ones and bald ones. They were all running, and jumping, and stretching, and washing themselves, and yawning, and scratching themselves. Fanyasha smiled; she always liked the fairy tales her grandmother read her about cats.

Horda Etyudizovna continued: “Cats are wingless creatures that live on planet Earth. They walk on four paws, and live among people, and are one of the few creatures that are able to hear angels. A little bit later I’ll teach you how to get in contact with cats, but for today we’ll go over one of the most important cat skills.”

As soon as the teacher said that, all the schoolgirls’ armchairs quickly starting sloping downward, and began to sway from side to side. A few of the girls remained hanging, holding on to the legs of their chairs or tables, while many more, including Fanyasha, weren’t quick enough at grabbing on, and thus slipped from their chairs and fell downwards. Managing to break a little ways from the floor, all of the girls shot back up again, returning to their places. All of them except one. Murisa just stayed on the floor. She tried to energetically flap her wings, but they were too small and weak for her to be able to climb up in the sky.