LITMIR.BIZ

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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 killer of her baby.

      For some reason she had no thoughts about herself. As if at that moment she was just a bearer of a new life. 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

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