is much simpler with animals.
They do not know how to lie.
Anastasia was born in Kazakhstan, on the shores of the Caspian Sea, where her parents had been assigned to work after their graduation from the university. Only in a month after her birth she was already flying in an airplane to her second homeland, to her grandparents, to the North Caucasus.
Thus she spent her childhood – between a desert with camels, at a seashore, from one side, and the authentic culture of the green mountains of Alanya, from the other. This paradoxical reality had influenced her perception of the world since her childhood.
Later, when her secondary school started, her parents moved to Volga. The southern city was alien to her in all its manifestations. All 20 years, which she spent in it, she wanted to move away. She still spent every summer in the North Caucasus and only there she felt at home. Summer storms with blasts of thunder and lightning, which hit the whole sky and made even stones in the mountains tremble, caused her to feel delight and admiration.
As well as all other natural elements, however.
She felt that some ancient, archaic energy of these powerful natural forces caused a response in her soul. In every cell of her blood, body, mind, soul. As if something inside her was like bottomless water well. And those ancient natural elements filled this deep water well with some specific life force. Unlike anything else. With the force of the Joy of Life.
It was like this when she, being a seven year old girl, came to the sea for the first time. It was that rare summer when she did not go to the Caucasus for all three months. And she went to the sea with her father. Severe storms happened at the Caspian Sea even in summer time. And now she just looked at huge waves that rose to the sky and soaked up the coastal sand in its total power. Her father took her hand and asked:
– Would you like to catch a wave, little sparrow?
– Yes, – she said, blinking with delight.
And they stepped into the sea. Her father firmly held her hand and led her toward the waves. The waves were high. The first big wave covered not only her but her father as well. When they came to the surface again she realized that she would never learn to swim. But she would always step into the stormy sea. Because from that moment the sea had become her friend. And for the first time she felt this sea waves’ energy, which was not like anything in the world.
Much later, when she became an adult, she had come to realize that there was no sense in learning to swim, as swimming in such a stormy sea was a complete folly. And to swim in a quite sea was not interesting, it was boring. Because sleeping natural elements were like a chrysalis of a butterfly – nothing remarkable, just an intermediate stage.
She preferred to look at an even sea from the shore.
As well as at a restless rain. Or at softly falling snowflakes. Or at a fire burning in a fireplace, limited by an air draft. To look before going to sleep, listening to a lullaby of nature.
Anastasia grew up in 1990s, which was a complicated period for Russia. It was the time, when the white house building was attacked in Moscow and a coup d'état took place. When the power in the country began to belong to organized gangs, and a person could be killed for no reason, just for the sake of practicing to fire a gun. Chaos reigned in the country and everyone was on their own. And it was a lot to go through and there were many roads to take.
Despite the fact that she had never loved this southern city, this was where Anastasia became a person and her profession was chosen.
Unlike most young people, she began to do what had been determined by her fate, after many twists and turns that had occurred in her life up to a certain moment. And only after breathing in this world for a quarter of a century, she had opened the door to her true destiny and had entered the space of professional self-fulfillment. Until that time she had just tried to survive as did many other people of the great country, which had got into the meat grinder of the 1990s.
When she was 18 she met her future husband. They got married and soon they found out that they would become happy parents. One day Anastasia left the apartment where the young family lived and went to visit her parents. Their houses stood next to each other, but it was dangerous to come back alone late at night. Her husband insisted that she should stay with her parents.
But unfortunately…
To the great regret of her whole life, the knowledge which lived inside her was stronger than reasonableness. And that night her intuition told her, that she should leave her parents and come back home.
Her belly was quite big, as it should be in the 8th month of pregnancy. Anastasia returned home but could not open the door as her husband had chained it from the inside.
Through a small slit provided by the strained chain she could see a girl. The girl was completely naked and she laughed drunkenly when passing the slightly opened door. In her hands the girl held an opened bottle of champagne from which she was drinking, listening to an anecdote that someone was telling somewhere in the bedroom.
This someone, judging by his voice, was Anastasia’s husband.
For a while Anastasia just stood there and looked into the emptiness of the apartment until she saw in the distance the edge of the baby cot, purchased recently for their future baby.
As in a slow motion, her emotions started to turn into a blasted bomb. Her breathing became frequent and intermittent.
At the moment when unnatural anger had almost raised from the depths of her inner world, the baby quickened in her belly.
The maternal instinct had instantly suppressed her emotions and Anastasia, her hands shaking, closed the door to the truth, the door which remained not fully opened.
Stepping out into the summer night, she walked slowly to her parents’ house. It was around midnight. The road went through a poorly lit poplar alley, with a chain link fence on the sides. When she had already got halfway, she heard some sound behind her.
She turned around and faced a young man with a roving glance. He grabbed her hair hard and threw her back on the fence while pressing himself against her belly. With one hand he grabbed her left wrist and raised it above her head, pressing her into the fence.
Anastasia got a chance to see how he brought his other hand, in which he gripped a knife, close to her belly. She knew the meaning of this glance and of this smell, which made her nauseous.
Marijuana.
In those days marijuana grew in the streets absolutely free, just as an ordinary grass. This man was intoxicated by drugs. He buried his face in Anastasia’s shoulder and was incoherently screaming out something about how nobody loved him, how he hated everybody and how he would pay all of them back.
Right now.
At that time Anastasia was not familiar with the psychology of a criminal, which she would start studying a few years later. She knew only one thing – her baby, her daughter, her little angel should be born in a month.
And a knife in the hands of a drug addict placed against her belly did not fit into the picture of the world at all. She had no time to recover from the shock of her husband’s betrayal, and now she stood in front of a potential
