Of the life, which should have come into being by all means.
And suddenly she felt a strange calm. She felt what she had to do.
Bypassing the mind, her intuition turned to the old structures of the brain and obtained a true knowledge.
Her hands stopped shaking.
Her breathing became even and deep.
Anastasia slowly raised her free hand and put it on the short-cut hair of the drug addict’s head.
And she began to caress his head.
Cautiously.
Slowly.
Tenderly.
Sweetly.
Very sweetly.
Saying in a low, tender, calming voice:
– Oh, come on. It’s OK! Of course, they love you.
They need you very much. What would they do without you?
Everything will be fine.
You are so wonderful. You are just tired. It happens. Everyone gets tired. And when you are tired – it is necessary to have a rest. Now you have to rest too.
And everything will be fine. Everything will be fine for sure.
…Time stopped.
It seemed to her that she was showing the great power of love and tenderness to an absolute evil and it took forever.
And the scales swung towards life.
The drug addict’s body went limp, and Anastasia felt the weight of his head on her shoulder.
But he still kept his hand with the knife at her belly.
Through a thin fabric of her summer dress her skin felt the persistence of a metal tip.
Something had to be done. But she had already done all she could. And continued to do so, appealing to all supreme forces for help.
She did not know any prayers.
It was just like a radio transmitter started to operate inside her, sending an SOS signal.
And at that moment it was not important at all who would hear it.
A middle-aged married couple appeared at the other end of the alley. Strolling slowly before going to bed, a man and a woman walked arm in arm, unhurriedly talking about something.
Still caressing the drug addict’s head, Anastasia waited till the couple came closer. In a calm but loud enough voice she asked:
– Excuse me, could you tell me what time is it now?
She had to attract attention.
And she succeeded.
The passers-by looked at them trying to understand what was going on. It was very unnatural how the drug addict kept her hand raised and pressed against the metal fence. From the outside it might arouse suspicions. The couple walked closer.
Now in a lower but more anxious voice Anastasia asked:
– Could you tell me the exact time? She finally caught the eye of the approaching passer-by, nodded in the direction of the knife, and the man looked there and stopped.
He saw a pregnant girl with a knife placed against her belly. At first he got confused. But he composed himself quickly and asked in a stern voice:
– And what is going on with you here?
The drug addict did not react to Anastasia’s voice any more. Even when she addressed the passing couple, he was sort of daydreaming of something of his own. But when the man’s question broke into his dreams, he came out of it. He turned around frightened and started to run away, out of the ally.
Anastasia felt how her legs became weak, and the people who ran up to her barely had time to catch her. They walked her to her parents’ house, and her long-awaited baby was born prematurely, a month earlier than she expected.
Soon Anastasia left her husband. The newly born daughter was just 2 months old. Her parents, as many others, had not been paid their salaries for six months. In order to survive in that crazy mess of the 1990s, where an arbitrariness and criminal chaos reigned, she accepted her neighbor’s offer, who used to take to Moscow fish eggs priced as a gold bar.
– Fish eggs? – asked Jean Batist puzzled, – what is that?
– It is black caviar. The caviar of sturgeon fish such as sturgeon, sevruga and beluga. Your father was a poacher. He hunted for animals. But there are some poachers who hunt for fish.
I used to buy caviar from the fishermen, who were poachers, and then to take it to Moscow to sell it there. It was a very dangerous and punishable criminal business. All of those, whom I worked with at that time, have been jailed.
But they did not manage to catch me.
Because I have found a way out.
The thing was that during a fishing season, when sturgeons used to go to spawn, the trains coming to Moscow were met by police cordons with police dogs. Only dogs could detect a smell of caviar packed in plastic or metal cans in a flow of people with bags.
Of course, those who carried caviar, were warned, for a cash consideration, by conductors while boarding the train. That meant that you should not take this train and should go the next day.
But in that world everyone made a profit from information. And sometimes conductors had been provided with false information. In such case smugglers were caught. For possession of black caviar they were not just put in jail, they would also get criminal sentences with a confiscation of all their property. The Criminal Code article was very serious.
And I was raising a daughter. And my parents had not been paid their salaries for many months. People tried to survive in any way they could. And I had no right to allow myself to be caught.
When I was 4, my parents taught me to read books and to play chess. Music, pictorial art, analytical reading. My school was great and I was a diligent student. And my mind came up with a solution to this problem with caviar. Unlike all the others, I just did not go till the final railway station in Moscow.
I used to make an agreement with the train driver and asked him to apply the so-called slow speed before the train reached the final station. And at a low speed of 20 kilometers per hour I just threw the bags with the cans of caviar on to the platform of the intermediate station that we were passing. And then I jumped myself.
– And the train kept moving? – Jean Batist was surprised.
– Of course, it kept moving! This was the whole point of the trick, – Anastasia laughed. – Yes, I used to jump from a moving train after throwing my bags. This was the only chance to avoid police cordons at the final railway station. After that I carried this caviar to several
