Guardian Angel. 2. 6. Occasional poems

"A GUARDIAN ANGEL"
a mistical novel
by Alexandra Kryuchkova

PART II. A DREAMS TRAP

2.6. OCCASIONAL POEMS

December 1988, Moscow

In the evenings before going to bed, I went to my mother. She was out of the hospital again, but now she stayed in the living room, and I slept alone. Mom hardly got up from bed. Every day a doctor came to inject her with drug medicine, but she said they didn’t help, and she was tired of enduring endless infernal pain all over her body. It hurt me to look into her bottomless black eyes, which used to be brown. Everyone told me that mom would get better soon. I wanted to believe them at the level of Consciousness, but my Subconscious had long known the truth.

«Do you write anything?» Mom suddenly asked, and I silently nodded. I didn’t want to upset her, but I couldn’t lie either. «Recite what you wrote, the last one…»

I went to my room and returned with a paper, sat down on my mother’s bed and kept silent.

«Recite, I won’t scold you.»

«It’s about… dad’s funeral.»

«But you weren’t there,» Mom said, not surprised for some reason.

«I don’t write poetry myself. The words come to me.»

«Have you ever seen your dad in sleep?»

He died at the age of 36, when I was 4. I hardly remembered him at all. Just a couple of fragments from childhood, very vague. I remembered, we had been in the cottage, having lunch. Grandmother was pouring soup into our plates. Dad said that it would be nice to pick some greens from the garden. I ran to the garden, picked the greens and returned to the table, but dad had already eaten everything, and I had tried so much to please him. Then we went into the forest and played pinecone shooters. We returned in the cottage, and I jumped on his stomach. Mom said dad was in pain, but I was having fun. Before his death, I had stayed in the kindergarten for five days a week. Maybe that was why I didn’t remember anything else.

Dad had often been out on long business trips abroad as an intelligence officer and even met one-on-one with Andropov. I would learn about it after his death. We would watch «Seventeen Moments of Spring» with my mother, she would say, «Your farther was like the main character.» I kept his letters to me and my mother from his last business trip to America.

Once walking home with my mother, I had asked her, «Where is dad? Why doesn’t he come for so long?» And I got in response, «He died and won’t come again.» I started laughing. Mom was horrified, «Aren’t you ashamed?» And I told her, «People never die!»

Mom had told me that his last words were about me. He said that I would die soon, and how it would happen, and that my mother would save me. Mom thought it had been a figment of his delirious imagination. But when, seven years after his death, and almost on the day of his birth, I had really died, hadn’t she believed in the possibility to foresee the Future? And not just to foresee, but to change…

He died suddenly in 1980, shortly before another business trip, on which we were going all together, the three of us. Rather, he had been killed with a long-acting poison. And everyone who had worked with him in America died suddenly after returning home the same year, and their deaths were shrouded in legends.

I didn’t have many photos of my dad, but as a child I looked like him.

«I saw him last night in my dream,» Mom said in a calm voice, scrolling the dream through on her internal screen. «It was like we were getting married again.»

«You said dreams are deceptive, they can’t be trusted.»

«Okay, recite to me!»

So I recited to her one of the few poems that would later survive and resurrect from the darkness of black poems I wrote before 1993. Then, in 1993, re-reading that verse, I would suddenly pay attention to the last two prophetic lines about the approaching second funeral…

Mom listened to me silently looking far into the distance for a long time. Then she suddenly asked, «Bring me the scissors.»

I went for scissors and came back. I gave her the scissors. She cut off a lock of her very rare, after chemo therapy, hair and handed it to me.

«What for?» I wondered, at the level of Consciousness still refusing to believe that my horror dreams would come true.

«You’ll understand later. Do you look a bit like me?»

«Of course, I do! It’ll all be over soon. The leap year is coming to the end. You just have to be patient a little, mom.»


***
February — August 2011, Moscow — Greece


The Man in White didn’t call me again. A pity. But finally, I set myself to finish my «Book of Knowledge». I wrote it at night, because I worked during the day. Each chapter took me several nights. As soon as a new one appeared, I purposefully put it on the Internet. If someone read you waiting for the continuation, you had no right to quit work, stopping in the middle. If I didn’t finish the book that time, I wouldn’t do it ever, exploding from the inside. I disappeared from the world, plunging into the Flow, invisible to the human eye, to which I belonged entirely, it was guiding me. On April 24, 2011, I put the final dot and sighed with relief. It seemed that I had been writing that book all my life, but everything I could say to the world had been said. Almost immediately, I got an automatic message that the Man in White had reviewed my CV again. And once again: those waves, attracting and repelling at the same time, panic fear somewhere inside me. «Fear of what, Alice? Why are you so afraid of this man? What can he do to you?» My mother’s words resounded in me, «If you don’t defeat your fear, one day it will defeat you. You must step towards it.»

But I couldn’t call him, being too scared to hear his voice, sharp as a knife, mercilessly cutting me into pieces. He didn’t keep my phone number in his phone. I would call and hear thunderous, «Who are you?» What would I answer? Everything had been said for a long time: I wanted to be with him. I was drawn to him like a wave to the rocks in order to crash…

He looked at my CV many times and… disappeared.

The same summer, in parallel with the «Book of Knowledge», for which there had already been a queue of buyers, I published the book «Occasional Poems». The third part of it, titled «Woland», was dedicated to the Man in White.

I used to make covers of the books with my paintings, but that time I was looking for a photo, sorting through my foreign archive (it wasn’t for nothing that I had traveled to more than 50 countries), and I found my business trip to Venice. My heart began to beat faster. It was my photo on the pier of San Marco with a clear sky, a view of an unknown island, and a boat sailing away from the shore, with a boatman inside… I looked at the photo for a long time and remembered that the verse «Chimera», one of my «Occasional Poems», was exactly about my funeral in Venice dream. I asked the cover designer to add a flying butterfly to the photo as a symbol of the soul and infinity. At the same time, out of nowhere, television materialized in my life. They invited me to four programs on different TV channels, for free.

Just as unexpectedly, Natela called me, «It’s your time, TV star, to update your CV!»

I obediently went to the job website where my CV hadn’t been updated for a hundred years, but for some reason found the Man in White in the list of employers and saw the same vacancy, with a fresh publication date!

«You must defeat your fear, Alice, otherwise…» resounded in my mind. I clicked on the «Send CV to the employer» button, and… He called me back! With trembling fingers, I took the phone in my hand.

«Hello, Alice,» he said coldly and gloomily. «All the same… money, conditions… Yes, and one more thing, I forgot to warn you then, no medical assurance, I don’t pay for your illness days. Vacation time is in August only.»

«I get it,» I said in a steady voice, while my heart was about to exceed its maximum number of beats per minute.

«If you are interested, we can meet and discuss the details,» he threw it to me rudely and indifferently.

I was about to say «yes», when… My God! What a horror!

«I’m leaving tomorrow for Greece. I’ll be back in two weeks. Friday morning. Can I come to you on the same Friday evening?»

«Monday. See you,» he replied dryly.

I went to Greece absolutely happy. When was the last time I felt like a happy person? I couldn’t remember. The blackest streaks of life with tragic twists of fate turned me into a closed creature, covered with a multi-layered shell due to the periodic sudden stabs to my back. But it would be different that time! Yes! I had been waiting for it for so long! Perhaps we would just work together, but I would be able to see him. I was drawn to him, inexplicably, irrationally, like a wave to the rocks in order to… Stop! «Why crash, Alice? Your fear comes from your childhood. The premonition of separation from those you loved left an indelible mark in your memory of the Past. But it’ll be different now! You’ve already stepped forward to meet your fear, and you’ll safely meet the Man in White when you return!»

During my tour of the Greek monasteries, I stopped at the icon of St. George the Victorious, and an irresistible desire to buy that icon for the Man in White as a gift, came to my mind, as if one day St. George would help him. Already returning to Moscow, I remembered that he had called me in January, when I was crossing the border of Lebanon and Syria, and the guide was telling us about St. George. «What do they have in common? Why Saint George?» I pondered and found no answer. But one day the answer would surely come.

I returned home happy and full of energy to start the next stage of my path. On Monday, somewhere in the afternoon, I dialed the Man in White from work to clarify the time I would come to his office in the evening, and… He didn’t answer the phone!

I sat down on a bench outside, trying to breathe evenly, as Natela called me, «Tomorrow at 11:00 you have an interview with a German company.»

«Okay,» I exhaled doomed.

An hour later, the Man in White called me back. I almost jumped in my chair, but calmly said the usual, «Hello!»

«Who are you?» I heard a loud thunder in my ear.

I closed my eyes, but forced myself to answer, «We agreed that I would come to you today about your job offer.»

He kept silent, having long forgotten about me, and clearly didn’t understand whom he was talking with, but then he said, «I’m not in the office now.»

«Okay,» I answered calmly. «Let me know when you are there.»

The next day I signed a contract with the Germans. Maybe the Man in White had been just my dream, and he didn’t exist in the earthly reality. Who was he?

It’s too stuffy in hell,
city walls are grave stones.
Dust hand-made by the hooves
is a checkmate to souls.
Oh, my darling, you haven’t
drunk me up to the bottom,
but I feel like a vase,
broken to smithereens.

Years hasten like birds.
Dates are portraits of strangers.
Any traces are grains,
every day in a blitz
I’m howling with wolves,
I’m living by pages.
Let a Happiness Shadow
visit my sleep!

Wonder, creature of God,
to work miracles out,
is so deeply in love —
that’s the trouble, of course! —
with a mountain place,
with the blackberry Heaven,
where flickering stars
are still waiting for us.