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…
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 breeze
As 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 pace
And 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 walls
The 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 try
To 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