Fire Smoldering Under Water. Anastasia Kuznetsova

      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.