Some more things about my childhood and unusual visions

Shaman’s Stories. Part 3

I went to school when I was 8 years old. Granny was still psychically insane and concentrated only on me. We lived in a small house, too small for all of us. A new flat was promised to us we had been waiting for 15 years. The house was near “the Birch Wood” – the park situated on the place of a ruined cemetery. The church had been ruined by tanks in spite of the people’s indignation. My attitude to the Christian priests is negative, but the church was one of the oldest ones in the city, and during the Soviet power people had no other alternative except Christian orthodoxy. So to say, the place was not good. One wall of our house was burnt out as it had been the additional building to the main, very old one. Behind that wall there were only bulks of ash and a rusted chain with a hook. The chain was always squeaking, particularly at night, as if a little girl was crying.

The house was in a low place where the smog from the plants nearby was condensed. In the winter I fell ill badly: my lungs started to fail. Mom took me outside having wrapped me up in a blanket. Instead of a lullaby, he sang to me the song with the words about the storm and snow wind that ‘was howling like a beast or was crying like a baby’. I was frightened and whimpering. Mom was singing that song again and again; and in the twilight I saw a skinny girl on the chain like a hungry small monkey without the trainer. The girl was glad that I saw her and, like a deaf and numb person, began turning her eyes and mooing while calling me to play and rock. I couldn’t climb down from mom’ hands, and the girl couldn’t leave the burnt room. At night, I didn’t use the chamber pot but went outside to the toilet and ran to the chain. The girl wasn’t seen, only ash was tinkling my heels. I had a fever and perspiration. My palms froze to the chain links, and the chain stretched and didn’t let me come into the house. The frost outside was almost minus forty degrees, and everybody was sound sleeping. I couldn’t cry out as my throat swelled and was wheezing. Suddenly, a cat appeared; it started to purr and rub against my legs, then to bite and spit. I tried to kick her and stroke her nose with force. It hurt her so much that she stood up on her back legs, closed her eyes tight and swung, her blood flowing along her whiskers. As for me, I laughed as I recalled the circus performance I went with my mom to, where cats joyfully jumped through a ring and upon a funny man. I understood only later that the cat had been in great pain. The cat jumped upon me clutching at my shoulders. I wheezed and fell down; the skin on my palms was torn and stayed on the chain. I crawled away home and I told no one that I had gone to the toilet outside like an adult. By the morning my scratches had closed up a little; it was surprising that nobody (nor even Granny) paid any attention to the crust of dried sanies on my palms.

I didn’t feel worse. But the girl also started coming up to the window during daytime, opening her mouth – I didn’t like her teeth: they were yellow, like a dog’s fangs, and uneven, like the teeth of a serrated hacksaw after cutting iron instead of wood. What’s more, the girl tried to get liked. She was wearing a funny printed-cotton dress like in the children statues of the 1930s. Her voice became louder: “Let’s play and swing, I’m bored. My father doesn’t beat me any longer; bad men don’t let me go to my mom, they send me to dad, but I don’t want to, as he is evil. It’s bad there – let’s go to play.” She was saying something else very fluently. Then I was rubbed with vodka, and the girl disappeared. The cat was taken to the house. She was half-Siam; her tail was half-torn off, and the yellow cartilage, like a finger, unpleasantly protruded out of wool and was able to move. One night everybody was deadly sleeping again. The window frame cracked because of the wind, the ventlight opened widely. And the girl climbed into the room. Her small body was changing gradually: like a dead bird’s skeleton with bits of feathers, her dress turned into rags; no eyes – in their holes there were bits of frozen brain. The bones of her face cracked as if after the strike of a hammer. The cat hissed and suddenly began to sparkle with lightnings, then rushed to the ventlight and jumped. The girl turned into a ball of brown medical cotton, rolled-up, with the stuck bits of cartilage, turned needles and forceps like a beak. The cat was thrown to my aunt who was sleeping in a folding bed in the narrow pass between two other beds, she mumbled something in her sleep but didn’t wake up. The cat rushed to the window again and was again thrown away with greater force, being struck against the wardrobe. The glass of the window was crackling, the cat rushed again and jumped outside. Granny got up in her sleep, groped for the fastener of the ventlight and closed it. Through the old walls I saw the cat tearing the brown cotton ball near the toilet. The girl couldn’t withstand it and dived into the bucket inside the icy toilet digging in the papers with faeces. The cat jumped to the bucket, overturned it, scattered the papers, crawled to the abutment piece and died. The next morning Aunt Larisa found the cat, cried a little and dug it behind the house. Then she put the papers into the bucket and burnt them. I saw the girl begin laughing in the fire with a resounding bell-like laughter, then becoming a sun ray and disappearing in the blue air. At night some thieves tried to steal all our firewood from the woodshed, but were frightened by the loud sounds of the neighbours’ quarrel behind the fence; we found the firewood thrown around the yard. The chain disappeared from the burnt room – possibly it was taken by the thieves, I don’t know. But the cat stayed with me. I can’t see her, but in bad troubles she begins rubbing against my legs or biting me if I shouldn’t go anywhere. I saw her once in my dream when I started going to the Art school being a 5-year-pupil. Instead of her short tail she had a fiery seven-tail lash which was cheerfully clicking with sparkling small stars on their tips.

Then once in May, while studying at the university, I went with my friends to the countryside to drink some beer. All my friends were with their girlfriends, but I wasn’t – I had problems with girls. We got drunk badly; the friends went to the tents with their girls; and I went to urinate. During the process I was looking at the moon and reciting aloud Gumilyov’s poem: ‘Lucifer has given me five powerful horses and one gold ring with a ruby, so that I could climb down deeply into the caves and see a young face of the sky’. Suddenly, behind me I heard the voice of a stupid girl that was singing that line from my mom’s song about the storm and the snow wind. I twitched, slipped against the wet root of the pine and began falling while watching the moon, the urine streams and the last-year grass until there was a flash. I fainted having struck against an anthill. The ants were super-active at that time of late spring. My friends woke up at about 11 o’clock. By that time, the ants had partly solved my right eye and the face skin with their acid. I came to myself because of the torturing pain in the hospital being got on a drip. My face was wrapped with bandages, my consciousness was unclear: one moment I was here, the other one I was an ant crawling up the tree with ruby drops of my blood on the feelers and mandibles. I recovered, cured my eye with Yoga, but I still see badly with the right eye. Though I feel insects very well – this ability got five times as good. And I like to sleep upside down: I hung myself on the horizontal bar to sleep in such a way…

At the age of 15 I first got to know about Rudra. At the same time I discovered the Gift of Velund in myself (Scandinavian terminology, it is the creation of Power Things from everyday things, demonstration of the Things of Nature). I got mini-skis as a present: they were small red plastic with ropes. Their fastening looked like fastening of “laptis” (bast shoes), and the skis themselves looked like Indian snow shoes. I was eager to test them. I didn’t have many friends because of my oddity. They avoided me, picked on me but not much: they were concerned about something. It was not my rebuff, it gave them the creeps. The process of building is constant in our place. In front of me there was the bias of an open cast at the bottom of which there were some fixtures. They hadn’t been taken away from there. I gained speed before the ski jump, jumped and flew but realized that my direction was wrong and I was flying just to the fixtures. Luckily, I was wearing a quilted jacket which saved my life. I landed on a metallic fixture with my stomach – it as if was waiting for me. Then there was a red maze pulsing with ruby lights. I was holding thin titan ski-sticks in my hands and understood that the city was in the depth. A name – Manipura-padma, Precious City – came to my mind. Suddenly, there appeared a dog in front of me – a huge puppy that looked quite like my puppy presented to me in my childhood who died half a year later. I mourned over him greatly, but in vain – that was he! His name was ‘Scarlet’ like the character from my favourite film in my childhood. Now he was leading me to the city and I saw some illusions: a man was sitting on a stump of polished red wood and covering his stick with leather and decorating it with small bells. He nodded to me, smiled ironically and said in a bass voice…

I came to myself because a large mongrel – the crossbreed of a shepherd and Great Dane – was licking my face. I crawled away from the metallic fixture and trudged home at night. I had a huge bloody bruise above my navel; it didn’t hurt but ached just under the skin. I started clapping my hands and singing having locked the door in my room. A week later I walked along the Lake – we call so the area around the open cast with water, and saw a frozen dog’s head in the snow: the homeless catch dogs and cook them on a fire. I was angry and cried but got calm in the end. Later I saw it in my dream together with my Scarlet: they told me to be quiet: everything would be OK!