Page 12 - Revelation
P. 12
Svetlana de Rohan-Levashova. Revelation
happened almost every time when I began to read something.
I fully submerged in my amazing fairy-tale world, which seemed to me far more
real than all other usual "realities". And in no way could I understand, having the
mind of a child, why my mother became less and less delighted every time I told her
my inspired stories. My poor kind mother! Now, on living my life, I can only imagine
what she must have gone through then! I was her third and only child (my brother and
sister died at birth), which had suddenly submerged into who knows what and was
not going to come out of it!
I am very grateful to her for her boundless patience and her efforts to understand
everything which happened to me then and during all the following "crazy" years of
my life. I think that my grandpa greatly helped her to do that, the same way he helped
me. He was always with me and probably that was why his death became the most
bitter and irreparable loss of my childhood years.
The loss
A burning and unknown pain flung me into a strange and cold world of adults,
giving no possibility of ever coming back. My fragile, light and fairy-tale world of a
child was broken into thousands of tiny pieces which, somehow I knew, I could never
bring together. Certainly, I still was a little six-year-old child with my dreams and
fantasies, but at the same time I firmly knew that our amazing world could not be
always so fairyland beautiful and, so it appears, was not always safe to exist in.
I remember that just a few weeks before that frightful day, my grandpa and I sat
in our garden and "listened" to the sunset. Grandpa was quiet and sad for some reason,
but this sadness was very warm and light and even had a kind of deep kindness. Now
I understand that he knew then that he would leave very soon, but regrettably I did
not know that.
— Some day, in many, many years, when I am not with you, you will watch the
sunset and listen to the trees and maybe sometimes you will remember your old
grandpa, – his voice purled like a quiet brook. – Life is very precious and beautiful,
child, even if sometimes it will seem to you cruel and unfair. No matter what happen
to you, remember: you have the most important things in the world – your honour
and your human dignity – which nobody can discredit or take away from you,
only you can do that. Preserve them, little one, allow nobody to break you, and the
rest in life can be remedial.
He rocked me like a baby in his dry and always warm hands. I felt so incredibly
peaceful that I held my breath in order not to scare off this wonderful moment, when the
soul was warmed and rested, when the whole world seemed to be so enormous and
extraordinarily kind... suddenly the essence of his words reached my mind!!!
I jumped up like a disheveled chicken, gasping in indignation and, as ill luck
would have it, unable to find in my "rebelling" head the words so needed for this
moment. It was so vexing and absolutely unfair! Why must he speak about the sadly-
inevitable event which (I even understood it already) sooner or later must happen, on
such a wonderful evening?! My heart did not want to hear that and accept such a
"horror", which was quite natural: all of us, even children, refuse to acknowledge this
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