Fire Smoldering Under Water

When his tears dried, Jean Batist who had already gone through a whole kaleidoscope of emotions, made up his mind. He would never forgive this person in a white coat.

Never.

For the pain.

For his rudeness.

For turning his back in response to the cry for help.

For the cruelty, which could not be natural for the one who knew the mystique of life and death.

For all the disappointment.

And he also made a decision that by all means he would become a doctor. In order to never cause pain to anybody. To become a real doctor and to help people with an open heart, looking into their eyes.

The time had passed. The results of Jean Batist’s education pleased his parents as well as his teachers. He drew the attention of his physics teacher – a monk from the congregation of catholic monks. They became friends. Monks with the mission of education or just with a kind human attitude had accompanied Jean Batist his entire life.

When the time came to go to university, the congregation of catholic monks helped Jean Batist, as one of the best students, to join the education program in Russia. Thus he got to Moscow, to the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia named after Patrice Lumumba. He came to Russia with a distinctive objective of getting a high quality medical education and to come back to his homeland, to Africa, to serve people. To become a monk and to dedicate his life to medicine.

But often love of God cannot withstand a competition from the love of a woman.

– Damn it! – it was long since this had become Jean Batist’s favorite expression in Russian. – I don’t know what to do. Deeply confused he was sitting in from of a monk, in front of his former physics teacher, in front of his friend.

– All these years I wanted to become a monk so much that I did not look at any woman at all. Until she appeared. I don’t know what I should do! And I ask you, my teacher, to help me. I will do as you say.

The monk kept silence for a long while. Then he slowly began to explain in detail the things that at first glance were very obvious truths. But, as it turned out, only at first glance. This was a very long conversation. But Jean Batist had remembered its main and fundamental essence for his whole life.

We are all people made of flesh and blood. And it does not matter if we are monks or ordinary people living worldly lives.

It does not matter what we believe in.

And if we believe at all.

We are animals. This is our biological nature. And as any living organism we do react. We have feelings and emotions. We experience them in a natural way and cannot have a full control over them. The strongest feelings are Faith and Hate. Having the absolute faith a person is capable of almost anything. Even of giving their own lives. Having the absolute hate a person can take lives of others.

And when a human being meets a person, to whom he or she develops biological attraction and emotional attachment, we call it love.

Love of a person – is the highest emotion which is called a feeling and is peculiar to human beings only. As all the other highest emotions, love is a specific psychological state, which shows itself in a long-term and stable worrying about the object of love.

The feeling of love can be different depending on the object of love. Love of parents, love of children, love of a man or a woman, of work or pets, of reading or traveling – all of these are different manifestations of this highest emotion. That is why feelings are often classified according to subject areas. The last being divided into moral and ethical as well as intellectual, practical. This is very simple, as simple as an alphabet.

Love of God is not an emotion. And even not a feeling. It is called a true love because it cannot be demonstrated in the morning or in the evening. It does not depend on a season or a life situation. This unconditional love is a part of activities of a human being.

Love of God is a state. As breathing, for example. Breathing may become uneven when we worry. Or quiet and deep when we sleep. It may be different. Furthermore. Particularly the sound of our breathing is the main sound indicating that we are alive. Love of God is like this.

And it does not matter if you are a monk or a worldly person. The main thing is that you breathe.

Jean Batist had cherished forever the memories of that sleepless night, which he spent thinking after his conversation with the monk. Soon he married the woman he loved, and he spent the rest of his life in a close cooperation with monks who revealed for him this amazing insight into life.

After graduation from the university Jean Batist came back to Rwanda with his Russian wife. They built a beautiful house. His wife was surprised by a mild sub-equatorial climate, without heat or cold. They reaped harvest in their garden several times a year. There were no mosquitoes on the shore of a boundless scenic lake Kivu, where they used to come for vacation. Sunsets and sunrises boggled the imagination with their unusual splendor peculiar only to the equator.

There is almost no twilight at the equator. An absolute day starts to be filled with red, lilac, pink colors, the solar disk dives beyond the skyline and an absolute night falls. All of a sudden. As if somebody turns off the day light and turns on a night light of an endless starry sky. This world resembled a piece of paradise created for a family’s well-being. Nature generously rewarded every day of the year with the wealth of all the benefits, which it was able to give.

Together with his wife, a nurse, Jean Batist served the patients in the clinic and worked on his thesis. The time when we are absolutely happy is like a wave of eyelashes. We do not notice it. Soon their life got filled with children’s voices, their family happiness obtained the perfection of great creation of a great artist, and a war came to Rwanda.

Genocide of 1994 claimed the lives of a million people. Jean Batist’s father and brothers were killed. Rivers of blood were running through the city and corpses of the people hacked to death with machete closed the exits from houses. Jean Batist was forced to flee the country to save his family.

Again he had got help from the congregation of monks. Jean’s wife and children were first taken to one of the West African countries, then to Belgium. In Belgium they had to start everything from scratch. In the literal sense of the word.

Russian degree in medicine was not valid in Belgium and he had to study again. To study again to be a doctor. But there was no money, so only one of them could study to be a doctor. His wife stayed at home with the children in a housing provided by social services.

Everything was unfamiliar. Unfamiliar country, unfamiliar language, unfamiliar people.

They just had to survive.

And they were surviving.

It took 4 years to validate his qualifications. The congregation of monks helped in this situation as well. They provided Jean Batist with an opportunity to work at their psychiatric hospital. Monks in many countries of the world opened medical institutions for working with psychiatric patients as well as with deaf and blind persons. This was their mission. And this allowed Jean Batist to find a work for that long period when he studied again. Even after he had obtained the official status of a doctor-psychiatrist in Belgium, he continued to work at the neuropsychiatric hospital of St. Martin on the outskirts of Brussels.

For a long time the horrors of war still echoed in the memories of all the members of Jean Batist’s family. But time moves space, and in a while the professional self-fulfillment of Jean Batist started to develop successfully as he used his life experience in working with PTSD – post-traumatic stress disorder – applying this experience to treating the people who had gone through a war.

Psychological traumas – is a special subject studied by psychotherapists. Jean Batist was not a supporter of a human body’s exposure to pharmaceuticals.

According to his long-term observations, it was quite obvious to him that a trans state in hypnotherapy was more qualitative by its nature than antidepressant drugs. Certainly not in every case, but in the cases related to mental health – for sure.

When mentally healthy people go through traumas, it is not necessary at all to introduce chemical elements into a body to exercise a forced control over people’s mental state.

Our unconsciousness – is that specific particle of God inside us. And this inner God is open to professional conversation. A psychotherapist always has a choice. To make a pharmaceutical company richer or to find the right words for a conversation.

Of course, it is easier to prescribe drugs. Substantially easier, as compared to that enormous work of the mind and soul, which is required to be done for the sake of a patient.

But Jean Batist liked what he was doing with all his heart and the more complicated the cases were, the more he committed himself to this amazing skill of curing human souls.

The children grew up, his son was going to apply to college and his daughter was graduating from a secondary school. Finally they got an opportunity to give up social housing, to take a loan and to build their own house.

Their own new house. Now each member of the family had their own room and in the evening they all could gather in the nice and comfortable living room with a beautiful fireplace made of red bricks. Only 3 years were left till the final payment to the bank. And the house would become theirs, at last.

And in this new country, in this new life, after all the ordeals of war, finally they would be able to obtain peace and to live happily ever after.

But one morning he realized that he was dying.

Jean Batist kept silence. Long ago they have agreed with Anastasia, that they would tell their own stories as well as the stories of their patients in third and first person.

This was fair.

– Jean Batist, do you mind if we get out into the garden and I have a smoke? – Anastasia realized that they needed a break. They were sitting near that particular fireplace of red bricks, where the fire was burning brightly.

– Damn it! Of course! I will breath your menthol, – exclaimed Jean Batist, smiling, as if this was exactly what he was waiting for. – You know, I will probably suggest the following. How about now you tell me how you lived. And then we will get back to my trauma. OK?

– No problem! – Anastasia took long menthol sticks out of a cigarette case, and they went out to the terrace, to the night garden filled with a citrus scent of lemon grass.

Black Caviar Sandwich

A pack of huge stray dogs surrounded her from all sides. She had to walk through the wasteland, which had a bad reputation.

For a 13 year old girl it was better to walk accompanied by somebody. And she was accompanied. As if unknown powers of her Guardian Angel took very unexpected shapes.

Until she reached the age of majority, if she walked through dark streets of the city or trough a wasteland between her home and her school, a large pack of stray dogs, led by a huge white dog, appeared out of nowhere. Wild dogs just ran alongside. And she felt that these free animals, that built up horror throughout the area, in some mysterious way protected her. The pack leader often looked into her eyes. And she looked back. Also with courage and confidence. But she never looked away first. By this age, seriously keen on studying animal psychology, she got to know the principle of a pack.

If you withstand a direct look – you earn respect.

The principle of a stronger one.

It is much simpler with animals.

They do not know how to lie.

Anastasia was born in Kazakhstan, on the shores of the Caspian Sea, where her parents had been assigned to work after their graduation from the university. Only in a month after her birth she was already flying in an airplane to her second homeland, to her grandparents, to the North Caucasus.

Thus she spent her childhood – between a desert with camels, at a seashore, from one side, and the authentic culture of the green mountains of Alanya, from the other. This paradoxical reality had influenced her perception of the world since her childhood.

Later, when her secondary school started, her parents moved to Volga. The southern city was alien to her in all its manifestations. All 20 years, which she spent in it, she wanted to move away. She still spent every summer in the North Caucasus and only there she felt at home. Summer storms with blasts of thunder and lightning, which hit the whole sky and made even stones in the mountains tremble, caused her to feel delight and admiration.

As well as all other natural elements, however.

She felt that some ancient, archaic energy of these powerful natural forces caused a response in her soul. In every cell of her blood, body, mind, soul. As if something inside her was like bottomless water well. And those ancient natural elements filled this deep water well with some specific life force. Unlike anything else. With the force of the Joy of Life.

It was like this when she, being a seven year old girl, came to the sea for the first time. It was that rare summer when she did not go to the Caucasus for all three months. And she went to the sea with her father. Severe storms happened at the Caspian Sea even in summer time. And now she just looked at huge waves that rose to the sky and soaked up the coastal sand in its total power. Her father took her hand and asked:

– Would you like to catch a wave, little sparrow?

– Yes, – she said, blinking with delight.

And they stepped into the sea. Her father firmly held her hand and led her toward the waves. The waves were high. The first big wave covered not only her but her father as well. When they came to the surface again she realized that she would never learn to swim. But she would always step into the stormy sea. Because from that moment the sea had become her friend. And for the first time she felt this sea waves’ energy, which was not like anything in the world.

Much later, when she became an adult, she had come to realize that there was no sense in learning to swim, as swimming in such a stormy sea was a complete folly. And to swim in a quite sea was not interesting, it was boring. Because sleeping natural elements were like a chrysalis of a butterfly – nothing remarkable, just an intermediate stage.

She preferred to look at an even sea from the shore.

As well as at a restless rain. Or at softly falling snowflakes. Or at a fire burning in a fireplace, limited by an air draft. To look before going to sleep, listening to a lullaby of nature.

Anastasia grew up in 1990s, which was a complicated period for Russia. It was the time, when the white house building was attacked in Moscow and a coup d'état took place. When the power in the country began to belong to organized gangs, and a person could be killed for no reason, just for the sake of practicing to fire a gun. Chaos reigned in the country and everyone was on their own. And it was a lot to go through and there were many roads to take.

Despite the fact that she had never loved this southern city, this was where Anastasia became a person and her profession was chosen.

Unlike most young people, she began to do what had been determined by her fate, after many twists and turns that had occurred in her life up to a certain moment. And only after breathing in this world for a quarter of a century, she had opened the door to her true destiny and had entered the space of professional self-fulfillment. Until that time she had just tried to survive as did many other people of the great country, which had got into the meat grinder of the 1990s.

When she was 18 she met her future husband. They got married and soon they found out that they would become happy parents. One day Anastasia left the apartment where the young family lived and went to visit her parents. Their houses stood next to each other, but it was dangerous to come back alone late at night. Her husband insisted that she should stay with her parents.

But unfortunately…

To the great regret of her whole life, the knowledge which lived inside her was stronger than reasonableness. And that night her intuition told her, that she should leave her parents and come back home.

Her belly was quite big, as it should be in the 8th month of pregnancy. Anastasia returned home but could not open the door as her husband had chained it from the inside.

Through a small slit provided by the strained chain she could see a girl. The girl was completely naked and she laughed drunkenly when passing the slightly opened door. In her hands the girl held an opened bottle of champagne from which she was drinking, listening to an anecdote that someone was telling somewhere in the bedroom.

This someone, judging by his voice, was Anastasia’s husband.

For a while Anastasia just stood there and looked into the emptiness of the apartment until she saw in the distance the edge of the baby cot, purchased recently for their future baby.

As in a slow motion, her emotions started to turn into a blasted bomb. Her breathing became frequent and intermittent.

At the moment when unnatural anger had almost raised from the depths of her inner world, the baby quickened in her belly.

The maternal instinct had instantly suppressed her emotions and Anastasia, her hands shaking, closed the door to the truth, the door which remained not fully opened.

Stepping out into the summer night, she walked slowly to her parents’ house. It was around midnight. The road went through a poorly lit poplar alley, with a chain link fence on the sides. When she had already got halfway, she heard some sound behind her.

She turned around and faced a young man with a roving glance. He grabbed her hair hard and threw her back on the fence while pressing himself against her belly. With one hand he grabbed her left wrist and raised it above her head, pressing her into the fence.

Anastasia got a chance to see how he brought his other hand, in which he gripped a knife, close to her belly. She knew the meaning of this glance and of this smell, which made her nauseous.

Marijuana.

In those days marijuana grew in the streets absolutely free, just as an ordinary grass. This man was intoxicated by drugs. He buried his face in Anastasia’s shoulder and was incoherently screaming out something about how nobody loved him, how he hated everybody and how he would pay all of them back.

Right now.

At that time Anastasia was not familiar with the psychology of a criminal, which she would start studying a few years later. She knew only one thing – her baby, her daughter, her little angel should be born in a month.

And a knife in the hands of a drug addict placed against her belly did not fit into the picture of the world at all. She had no time to recover from the shock of her husband’s betrayal, and now she stood in front of a potential killer of her baby.

For some reason she had no thoughts about herself. As if at that moment she was just a bearer of a new life. Of the life, which should have come into being by all means.

And suddenly she felt a strange calm. She felt what she had to do.

Bypassing the mind, her intuition turned to the old structures of the brain and obtained a true knowledge.

Her hands stopped shaking.

Her breathing became even and deep.

Anastasia slowly raised her free hand and put it on the short-cut hair of the drug addict’s head.

And she began to caress his head.

Cautiously.

Slowly.

Tenderly.

Sweetly.

Very sweetly.

Saying in a low, tender, calming voice:

– Oh, come on. It’s OK! Of course, they love you.

They need you very much. What would they do without you?

Everything will be fine.

You are so wonderful. You are just tired. It happens. Everyone gets tired. And when you are tired – it is necessary to have a rest. Now you have to rest too.

And everything will be fine. Everything will be fine for sure.

…Time stopped.

It seemed to her that she was showing the great power of love and tenderness to an absolute evil and it took forever.

And the scales swung towards life.

The drug addict’s body went limp, and Anastasia felt the weight of his head on her shoulder.

But he still kept his hand with the knife at her belly.

Through a thin fabric of her summer dress her skin felt the persistence of a metal tip.

Something had to be done. But she had already done all she could. And continued to do so, appealing to all supreme forces for help.

She did not know any prayers.

It was just like a radio transmitter started to operate inside her, sending an SOS signal.

And at that moment it was not important at all who would hear it.

A middle-aged married couple appeared at the other end of the alley. Strolling slowly before going to bed, a man and a woman walked arm in arm, unhurriedly talking about something.

Still caressing the drug addict’s head, Anastasia waited till the couple came closer. In a calm but loud enough voice she asked:

– Excuse me, could you tell me what time is it now?

She had to attract attention.

And she succeeded.

The passers-by looked at them trying to understand what was going on. It was very unnatural how the drug addict kept her hand raised and pressed against the metal fence. From the outside it might arouse suspicions. The couple walked closer.

Now in a lower but more anxious voice Anastasia asked:

– Could you tell me the exact time? She finally caught the eye of the approaching passer-by, nodded in the direction of the knife, and the man looked there and stopped.

He saw a pregnant girl with a knife placed against her belly. At first he got confused. But he composed himself quickly and asked in a stern voice:

– And what is going on with you here?

The drug addict did not react to Anastasia’s voice any more. Even when she addressed the passing couple, he was sort of daydreaming of something of his own. But when the man’s question broke into his dreams, he came out of it. He turned around frightened and started to run away, out of the ally.

Anastasia felt how her legs became weak, and the people who ran up to her barely had time to catch her. They walked her to her parents’ house, and her long-awaited baby was born prematurely, a month earlier than she expected.

Soon Anastasia left her husband. The newly born daughter was just 2 months old. Her parents, as many others, had not been paid their salaries for six months. In order to survive in that crazy mess of the 1990s, where an arbitrariness and criminal chaos reigned, she accepted her neighbor’s offer, who used to take to Moscow fish eggs priced as a gold bar.

– Fish eggs? – asked Jean Batist puzzled, – what is that?

– It is black caviar. The caviar of sturgeon fish such as sturgeon, sevruga and beluga. Your father was a poacher. He hunted for animals. But there are some poachers who hunt for fish.

I used to buy caviar from the fishermen, who were poachers, and then to take it to Moscow to sell it there. It was a very dangerous and punishable criminal business. All of those, whom I worked with at that time, have been jailed.

But they did not manage to catch me.

Because I have found a way out.

The thing was that during a fishing season, when sturgeons used to go to spawn, the trains coming to Moscow were met by police cordons with police dogs. Only dogs could detect a smell of caviar packed in plastic or metal cans in a flow of people with bags.

Of course, those who carried caviar, were warned, for a cash consideration, by conductors while boarding the train. That meant that you should not take this train and should go the next day.

But in that world everyone made a profit from information. And sometimes conductors had been provided with false information. In such case smugglers were caught. For possession of black caviar they were not just put in jail, they would also get criminal sentences with a confiscation of all their property. The Criminal Code article was very serious.

And I was raising a daughter. And my parents had not been paid their salaries for many months. People tried to survive in any way they could. And I had no right to allow myself to be caught.

When I was 4, my parents taught me to read books and to play chess. Music, pictorial art, analytical reading. My school was great and I was a diligent student. And my mind came up with a solution to this problem with caviar. Unlike all the others, I just did not go till the final railway station in Moscow.