“Just look at her. She is happy!” and, clasping my face in your hands, you forced me to look that way. “She’s already got nothing to worry about; she doesn’t suffer from cold anymore and doesn’t care where she can get a grub. Now she doesn’t give a damn about anything.”
“She is free,” I repeated to myself, staring at her stiffened face. Is a primitive escape from life the only way to gain our freedom? Isn’t there some other way?
“We’ll jump out of the window.” You said it so confidently as if you had reflected upon the thought hundreds of times before. “The house is high enough and we will definitely fall to our death. Just think about it, this time we will make the decision completely by ourselves. For the first time we will be personally responsible for our fate; it’s the only thing we have got left.”
Indeed, people are equal only in one thing. Every one of us is gifted a life; other differences are only notional. What to do with our lives is at our own discretion. The time had come to bestow upon us the most exalted gift of serenity and joy. We silently trudged back upstairs. I fancied that I heard steps creaking and groaning throughout the entire stairway as if hundreds of invisible feet were stepping on them along with us. We were still alive, but among the ghosts already.
It was snowing outside; the iron ledge boomingly tapped in the blasts of wind huffily breaking into the house that had sheltered us from death. At the window I hesitated for a moment, desperately vacillating between imminence and fear. In my mind, multiple questions were replaced by new ones. What is the point of living if we are going to die anyway? What difference does it make if it’s going to happen now or later? All we have to do is to take a step and jump off; that will resolve all problems, answer all questions once and forever. And what if we are already flying down? We have jumped off – perhaps, right after birth – not even knowing about it! The ground is already near; we just have this last moment to live and then we are finally released and we realize we are already dead, and had been from the moment of birth.
It is hard to take this last step, but the hardest thing is to face the choice between the unwillingness to live and the inability to die. With mixed feelings of horror and unshakeable determination, we stepped on the chest, and then got up on a window-sill. The wind was blowing mercilessly, trying to stop us, restrain us and push us back. I looked down, hoping for a quick death but not wishing to die. To jump off, stupid intention is not enough; one also needs to have courage. Who, then, is a suicidal person, a courageous guy or a fool? I might decide this for myself while flying down to earth, I reflected sourly.
I got dizzy. My hands were shivering frantically, my heart beat, my thoughts were confused and flashing; I was terrified by the thought that the end was near, so unexpectedly near. The wind picked me up and started shaking me aggressively. I realized all the futility of our existence, but down there, everything seemed much more senseless. I wonder what you were thinking at that same moment; you never told me. Not knowing what to do, I closed my eyes and imagined us lying on the ground, painting the snow with our blood, powerless in view of what we had done. Chilling frustration burdened me like a stone; my feet stiffened. In deepest confusion, I seized the window-frame with my hands and, yelling like I have never done before, pushed off the window-sill with my feet.
I remember that I fell on my back and screamed either with back pain or with relief. And at the same moment, I heard a groan of disappointment and rage: you were still alive, still here with me. Exhausted and satisfied – while standing on the window I held my breath with fear – I couldn’t recover it for a long time, convulsively gasping for chilling air. Fortunately, our falling downwards had failed. Yeah, humans behave so strangely and miraculously, preferring life full of anguish to a quick end, clinging like grim death to something that brings pain. Each imprisoned by her own thoughts, we lay on the floor without movement like turtles turned upside down. At last, weakened by our unexpected rescue, you started crying bitterly, while I senselessly looked around to observe our refuge anew. There were times when life and love reigned in this house, but now it was undoubtedly dead; my eyes slid over intensely chipped beige walls, a long spiral staircase with a wooden handrail, huge semicircular windows and a fireplace still intact by some miracle. Apparently, many years ago the house served as a happy safe haven for several families, careful and grateful. Now, dilapidated, cold, abandoned, it breathed life into us. Sometimes, in order to start all over again one needs to step back, not forward.
And then the very next moment I caught sight of a chest lying near our feet. The longer I looked at it, the more perplexed I became. How could it be that we hadn’t taken a look into it before? We didn’t know what was in there. I had to do something right away and put thousands of thoughts into one promise. Fighting the pain in my lower back, I stretched out for the chest, gently lifting the lid and nearly cried out. There were books inside, plenty of books. A feeling of incredible freedom overwhelmed me, and having opened the very first one in the middle, I pretended to be reading, sliding my glance along each line and making out my own story in the process:
“A very long time ago, when the earth was inhabited by centaurs and unicorns, there also lived beautiful, two-headed people. As the millennia passed by, they built houses and cities and lived happily ever after. But there came a time when the two most beautiful women who were joined together gave birth to an unusual girl. As soon as she came into the world, she had two mothers but they grew numb with disgust. Their daughter had only one head. “How ugly she is; the gods must have cursed us,” one of them uttered and burst into tears. All night long the women were inconsolable but at daybreak, after arguing for a very long time, they finally decided to take the terrible child into the woods and leave her there though they were well aware she wouldn’t be able to survive alone….”
I paused to take a deep breath and turned the page over listlessly. You had already stopped crying and looked at me in astonishment, believing each and every word; and I believed together with you. Of course I did, for all this wonderful story was about us and was meant to be universal!
“And what happened to her?” you whispered quietly, still sobbing.
“She managed to survive. Trees gave her shelter from heat and cold, wild animals brought her food, she satiated her thirst with water from a river. Some time passed; the girl grew up strong and healthy and gave life to a whole race of one-headed people who populated all the earth and still dwell here.”
“And where do you think the two-headed people have gone?”
“Gods really cursed them. They gifted two-headed people with a miracle, but none of them was able to appreciate it and got rid of it as if it was something useless and shameful. Eventually, the two-headed race completely disappeared. Yet gods, sometimes reminded of it, send another miracle to the earth.”
I slammed the book closed and before putting it back into the chest, glanced at its name, which read “The Gulag Archipelago”.
“We are a miracle, but miracles secretly inspire people with fear,” you whispered reverently and, keeping silent for a little, asked: “So were there times when all people looked like us?”
“Yes. Probably that’s why loneliness is so hard to bear.”
“And as for us, we don’t even happen to know what it is,” you smiled with significance.