Fire Smoldering Under Water

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…

Through the darkness of hospital walls, in somebody’s clothes,I am slowly walking to light, to my hopes.Hope is splashing away in the waves of a sea breezeAs the magic gold fish of my destiny’s caprice.I want so much to make a wish: awaken from your dream!Just open eyes and, feeling free, get straighten like a beam,And make a coffee in the kitchen, with foam, in shaky style,And clamp blue smoke in the lips, and splash a happy smile.But in a dream the dream creates requirement for humility,To slow down horrors of decay, just only that ability.And step away from vanity at slow and steady paceAnd find myself against a wall with useless Hell in place.Devotedly realize that we are all just gnats,And start to slowly melt away like snowball does in hands.Offended snow sweeps the woes’ pages into dream,My soul makes me getaway, say farewell, meet the gleam…The smoke of a cigarette grew in the old blind wallsThe fear of loss burnt everything… Though voiceless to the calls,My genes cried suddenly… Snow melted… Smoke disappeared…The goldfish broth got cooked, get ready for the weird.There’s still one question, would you please explain:When with a bouquet of the autumn leaves and pain,Comes to the table my new friend, the name of which – Insanity.And we will both enjoy the viand, embracing with urbanity.Insanity will put my head against its shoulders in a tryTo make it easier for me to know, to wait, to die…

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.

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