Tamara Alekseeva
Confession of a Russian Sinner
(How to make money in Russia)
I loved this woman… I still don’t understand where this kind of tenderness comes from.
She was badly ill. The doctors diagnosed a severe form of schizophrenia. For many years, I was her psychotherapist…
She used to tell me amazing things. She told me that she had mastered flying, overcame time, communicated with the elements of ancient water… I have no idea why she humiliated herself falling down to lies. In her lifetime, she managed to reach whatever a human being can dream about: love, richness, fame… And I know for sure that, somehow, this didn’t cost her, a small village girl, too much trouble. As if she possessed some secrets that ordinary mortals cannot comprehend. I have had to change her name as she is rather well-known…
She was doing her best to overcome her disease. She struggled with herself so fiercely that my heart used to sink out of fear for her. She had a special, unearthly power, but sometimes, life made her powerless…
It’s by mere chance that I managed to gather all her manuscripts and notebooks, which she protected anxiously from everyone while she was alive. I do believe that she would forgive me for taking secret notes of our conversations.
If not for these notes, I, a highly experienced psychiatrist, would have been deafened, long ago, by the surrounding emptiness free of that unique voice, that imperious magic of sound when ‘Valery Petrovich’ addressed to me filled my whole existence with meaning and unfathomable mystery…
Repenting, she would twist and squeeze a heavy pendant on her breast and start repenting again…
I never believed the charlatans who say that it is possible to revive those who are gone forever…
The first lines, your breath, have done something similar to shaking hard a wet lilac bush. My springtime tenderness… Where did you come from? From what stars did you descend upon me? Am I not just an ordinary person? Your voice and your scent have come to life. Why should I experience this suffering?
I can’t even guarantee that I am quite healthy after having read these notes, some of them quite delusional…
My windows face the shining stars. Sometimes, usually late at night, when everything is covered with the twinkling light, I look at the stars and think, my soul turning cold, ‘What if it is she who was an absolutely normal person? I mean maybe she always was, since her very birthday? And maybe, just as she used to say, she had descended to the unhallowed ground along the moon path together with one of the stars?’
I have dared to revive her image, her thoughts, her breath, despite death, despite the likelihood of damaging the Universe. For the sake of my faith that the story of this woman is the story of the whole Universe. I will always be by her side protecting the woman who came alive from eternity, my beloved sinful one…
V. P. Orlovtsev
The forest was full of beasts,
All of them three-eyed devils.
I also lived there,
A black-eyed witch I was.
Tamara Alexeeva,
1984
All that we know about the world is just human imagination.
Immanuel Kant,
1771
How do you know what really exists and what simply seems to us?
Henry Huggard,
1889
I was a thief…
I was a thief, an adventurist, a night restaurant dancer, and a men seducer.
I gave light weight on the scale and cheated, I went through the whole marketplace with all its inspectors, bandits, cops, and tax officers…
I was a murderer as I often killed myself in my thoughts for not being able to comprehend and accept the astounding, uncontrollable feminine power that was tearing out of me.
As any other woman, I dreamt of love. But I didn’t even imagine the trials and tribulations that would make the road to my dream so hard.
A self-affirmation demon disguised as thirst for knowledge blinded my soul. I fell into the darkness where not even a spark of light reached and from which no pleading was heard…
And the souls thrown down into that abyss, the people whose minds were darkened by worldly passions joined me in experiencing inexpressible longing for Love and for the lost Faith. That mortal anguish, that indescribable rejection of heaven-sent suffering didn’t scare me any longer… I lost my soul as well as the perception of disaster. I was choking in the alien air, I even watched my heart beating as it seemed to me that it would stop in that hell…
For many years I was looking for the force I could hang upon and the prayers that would resurrect me.
People of various nationalities, Georgians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, were doing their best to help me get out of the terrible whirly dance on the black ice. We prayed to different gods, but we asked them for the same thing, and each god’s mother was a woman. Life made us meet at the marketplace, a place I had never heard about before. It looked as if I had found myself in an unknown town where I would have lost my way wandering along the slippery streets, despite my frenzied courage.
I came to this beautiful, incomparable planet from a remote star, and I thank my gods for having let me understand this world in all its unprecedented diversity, for the inexhaustible abyss of forgiveness, for the fact that I could not have enough of this Divine air, for the fact that I loved and was loved, for the unique scent of newborn babies, for the sparks of the sun in the purple and blue sky…
Difference between temperatures…
The difference between the temperatures of the air and the water was amazing. The air smelled of hot dust and solar frogs. The green water of the pond in the bottom of the log was as cold as in winter. It was twinkling mysteriously with emerald and yellow sparks. When you dip your arms into the water up to your elbows, wavy circles radiate from them slowly, like in a dream… And crazy spiders jump happily in those circles as though trying to outrace each other and the silvery duckweed, pushing off the water with their broken-line legs.
When your hands ceased feeling the cold, the magic water began moving as if with a wave of an unknown force. The water agitated, bellied anxiously, huge transparent bubbles burst silently and spilled on the white foam. The dark-green hairy algae, previously calm, curved harder and harder, like waves, as if trying to shake something off their leaves.
I was always afraid of missing, and always missed, the moment when the heavy bubbly sides of the underground monsters would hit my hands bitingly, their scales shining like pearls…
It hurt. And my heart was beating awfully, and then it stopped beating when bug-eyed heads of ancient monsters would appear on the water surface… Those heads, glittering with cold blue and purple darkness, would toss their underwater nutty sensual eyes and slip back immediately with a squelch. I would pull my wet dark-green hands smelling of slime out of the water and grab my head so that emerald splashes would fly noisily in all directions.
And the water, exhausted as if after a childbirth, would come to a standstill, and the circles would melt… The frightened spiders, stretching the springs of their trembling legs, would take turns peeking out from under the shore stones densely covered with bluish ashen moss. Slowly flapping wings and losing yellow dust, flocks of transparent, godless butterflies flew away. The malachite-colored frogs started their evening prayers, and there was an old one with a hoarse trembling voice, in a faded pimply mantle, who was trying the best…
Solar sparks, with scarlet edges, flashed suddenly like fiery feathers, and their fluff floated on the water without touching it. When an invisible hand extinguished the red feathers gently, black stars lit in the sky like ripe cherry bunches… And I ran home…
Granny would listen to my story and scold me, ‘You are a little liar, that’s what I must tell you… That’s just a pool of water, there are no frogs there, they are all dead, to say nothing of big fish. Aren’t you 12 already, God bless you?.. How are you going to live in town, for goodness sake?’
Granny just had no time to walk down to the pond, she had to work round the clock. She would have seen that water and those monsters herself. Look at those pearl sparks, granny, flying off my hands; don’t they smell of the evening blue?..
It’s a pity that granny, instead of listening to me, is whispering carefully her long prayers, just like that frog in a bubbly mantle… She saves on electricity and doesn’t turn on the light. Village darkness is the most terrible darkness in the world, the blackest one…
It’s great I have a lot of friends and they are looking forward to seeing me…
My friends are huge. They are placed in the vegetable garden in such a way that granny’s kitchen garden would be separated from auntie Polina’s. The stones were brought from the quarry when grandpa and my father were alive. They brought those stones, which eventually went halfway into the ground. Those spongy blocks with wet grey cold and stone lace would never become my friends, until one day swinging the biggest one I accidentally knocked it on its side… God almighty underwater!
Whimsical herbs, devoid of sun, were still alive, though their life was strangely whitish. They were crisscrossed with ancient patterns and kept silent like a grave. Between those white roots, long narrow snakes with a lot of spider legs flowed. Their wet blue skins glittered. A huge beetle with solid pearl wings was sitting tranquilly among his possessions.
And there was such a scent coming from that underground kingdom… such a scent… When I would fall ill, I would always dream of digging ancient iron coins out of the wet ground. They were rusty, and I could hardly read the unknown letters… It was scary. And now, it smelled of the rust half mixed with the smell of dampness… That world also smelled of the past centuries and of death, too… And of blackberries washed by rainwater… And of an unsolved mystery…
Two worlds, the underwater and the underground ones, two mysteries were leaking in me… Or maybe I was leaking in those kingdoms without experiencing any counter resistance… Who created whom in their likeness: they created me or I created them?
The house smells of damp, too, and of dried meadow mint and an old spider that lives under the stove.
Granny is still whispering prayers monotonously, and, in the pitch dark of the hut, it seems to me that her huge hand with bumpy blue veins flies up. Like mountain streams running down. And her dry lips are moving…
My bed is behind the stove. It was made long ago, by my grandpa, he polished the boards smoothly. Granny was greedy for a long time and then, at last, gave me the feather quilt hidden in the attic till my future wedding. As to Pautinych, he remained a miser. Although his hands are studded with rings, all with different colored stones. He puts on airs and boasts, but as it comes to gifting, he frowns and says,
‘This stone, which you like, is called turquoise. See how bright blue it is? It’s because the stone is quite ripe. When you are big enough to look for a fiancé, I will give you this ring, it will meet the occasion. Now look at this turquoise. It is pale-green because it’s quite young, just like you. And this here is an emerald, a very expensive stone. Look at its shining thick sparks! This breed is not quite pure, purple trickles twinkle, while there should be transparent green ones. I have a genuine emerald, be sure, but I must have the ring mended first.
Pautinych is the brownie living on the wooden shelf nailed above my bed. Grandpa’s turban was blue like the color of the clearest sky towering on top of his head. His shirt is the same color, though the turban is made of silk, while the shirt is made of linen. Pautinych didn’t hide his hair under the turban, and the soft locks flowed behind his ears. They smelled of fragrant hay and were bright yellow like spring buttercups. And the vivid colors of the sky and the sun strengthened each other and seemed to be ringing due to the excess of joyful power.
Granny didn’t believe in the underground monsters and didn’t want to hear about Pautinych. Like now, as soon as I started talking quietly with grandpa, she hushed severely, ‘Who’s there?’ My heart began to pound like a bell and swayed under my shirt, so lest granny should hear it, I covered my chest with my arms and begged,
‘Granny, tell me about God today!’
My simple-hearted granny believed me as it was her favorite tale.
‘Once I was walking at dusk from a faraway village’, she began telling me the story slowly and with dignity, ‘and suddenly lost my way. I was scared and took the wrong path. It was awfully dark around. Owls were wooing, tree branches were crackling. Devilry was going on. I was walking through an apple garden, God’s pink flowers were seen in the darkness, the scent was making me dizzy like in spring. At that moment, God enlightened me and I started saying the Lord’s prayer. I only said a few words and, all of a sudden, thousands of tiny little candles got lit on the apple blossom. Around the snow-pure flowers, little angels were flying, their wings softer than swan’s fluff. Those little candles were lit at the command of Christ, the Great Martyr. I took the clear path and soon reached my house. So I looked at the bright moon and prayed to Lord thanking Him for help…’
‘Go on, granny, please go one’, I begged in my natural voice, feeling that granny’s voice was gradually fading like a candle. ’Don’t you remember about the late Anna?’
‘Once, when the late Anna was still a young girl’, granny came back to life and went on, ‘she swam in the pond and drowned accidentally. The reason was that she had washed her stuff on Whit Sunday, and it’s a big sin to do such things on a great holiday…
So, at the very bottom, Annie came to her senses and asked the Virgin for help. Virgin Mary is generous to all, so Annie woke in a chapel. She was scared and decided that she was dead lying quite wet on a large table, seaweed tangled in her hair. There were little candles around her lit by tiny little angels, their wings softer than swan fluff…’
I was already asleep dreaming of the tiny little angels. They had mischievous faces, and they looked like little snub-nosed boys. And like little boys they were fighting for the little lights, the flashlights. Especially pugnacious was one freckled angel. His hair had the color of wheat, and he was blinking to me in a strange way with one eye. ‘See you at the pond,’ he whispered in my ear and lit a candle in front of the mirror. I looked in the mirror and gasped. An unknown girl was looking at me, her beauty was kind of ominous. The girl’s eyes were sparkling like those of a witch, and her lips were filled with cherry juice that looked like blood. The girl seemed to possess magical power, and I struggled to understand its origin…
