Simple Truths of Life - стр. 7

When I spent short school holidays in Moscow, I went to visit my grandmother and grandfather on the paternal side – my mother’s parents died before I was born. They lived on the outskirts of Moscow, near the MKAD. Their two-room apartment was on the top floor of a seventeen-story building. The windows overlooked a ravine and a stream below, and the forests beyond the ring road. As a child, I liked to look far ahead into the distance from their windows, as well as at what was happening right under the house.

My parents gave me the Dendy game console, and I constantly took it with me to my grandmother, so that I had something to do when I did not walk with my grandfather and grandmother outside – I usually sledded down the hills in front of the house.

Grandma was very pious. She had several icons hanging in the red corner of the room and in the bathroom. She often read various prayers.

At one time, my mother and I came to grandparents on March 8th. Then my grandfather wanted to teach me singing in order to try to help me this way with my speech stutters.

Alas, in the early morning when my mother and I returned home, and I was going to go to school, my grandmother called to report the death of my grandfather. I cried that morning very hard because of his death. I think this was the first time when I thought deeply about death. Does anything happen when we die?

In subsequent years I sometimes had this question again. For example, I remember thinking about life and death when I learned about the death of Steve Irwin.

At another time, on May holidays, my mother and I were going to go to Malye Gorki, but our alarm clock broke, and father could not take us in his car. Back then I really liked to spend time in the village. There had never been a single case that I did not spend the summer months there. That evening, before falling asleep, I wished to wake up at five o’clock in the morning – the time when we needed to get up to catch a train. What surprised me was that when I woke up and looked at the digital clock of the VCR, I saw “5:00” on it.

Thus, we were able to go to the village.

I talked about this interesting case with Lena, a village friend, when we burned a fire in the dugout in my backyard.

Then I became more confident in the environment of my old village friends, as a result of which I stopped being afraid to speak and spoke almost without hesitation in the summer in the village.

I think that it was that same day when I had the following dream: “Night. I walk through the grass to the backyards in the direction of the dugout, from the chimney of which smoke is coming out. I do not know why, but instead of going to the front door, I go to the dug hole of our fireplace’s chimney. I look down and see how a thin hand, completely covered with black short hair, moves around firewood with a stick in our fireplace. Then I had a clear thought in my mind that it was – a werewolf.”