Page 188 - Revelation

Svetlana de Rohan-Levashova. Revelation

Therefore, in order to occupy myself with something and not think of gifts, I began
to make a "festive menu" which my grandmother let me choose at my discretion this
year. I have to confess that it wasn’t an easy task. She could do many culinary wonders
and one has to puff and blow to choose from such "plenty", and it was quite a hopeless
business to find something that she could not cook. I am absolutely sure that even the
choosiest gourmets would find something with which to regale themselves in her
kitchen! And I wanted very much that this time our home smelled of something
absolutely special, because it was my first "serious" birthday and I was allowed to
invite so many guests for the first time. My grandmother treated all this very much in
earnest and we sat for about an hour, discussing which of her special specialties she
could make for me.

Now I, certainly, understand that she simply wanted to make me feel good and to
show that the things which were important to me were just as important to her. It
was always very pleasant and helped me feel needed and partly even "important", as if
I was a grown up who meant a lot to her. I think that the feeling that someone truly
believes in us is very important for children, because we all need the support of our
self-reliance during this fragile and strongly unstable time of child's maturing which is
almost always a combination of a strong inferiority complex and extreme risk in
everything that we try to test in order to prove our human value. My grandmother
perfectly understood it, and her friendly attitude always helped me to continue my
"mad" search for myself in any circumstances without fear.
At last we finished making the list for my birthday table and I went to look for my
dad who had a day off and (I was almost sure) was somewhere in "his corner" enjoying
his favourite pastime.

Like I thought, he was comfortably settled down on the sofa and peacefully
reading a very old book – one of those which I was still prohibited from taking, for
which, as I understood, I was still too little. Grey cat Grishka curled up on dad’s knees
with contentedly narrowed eyes, inspiredly purring the whole "cat-like orchestra". I sat
down on the edge of the sofa, as I did very often, and quietly watched the expression
on his face... He was somewhere very far away, in the world of his thoughts and dreams,
following the thread which the author enthusiastically wove and at the same time
placed the information he got on the shelves of his "logical thinking" in order to skip it
through his understanding and perception and after that forward it to his huge "mental
archive".
– Well, what do we have here? – Dad asked tousling my hair.

– Our teacher said today that there was no soul and all talk about it was just priestly
invention to "undermine the soviet man’s happy psyche"... Why do they lie to us,
dad? – I fired in one gulp.
– Because the whole world in which we live now is built on a lie... – My father
answered very calmly. – Even the word SOUL is gradually falling out of use, or rather
it is intentionally ousted... Look, before we had plenty of words with the root "soul":
soulful, soul-searching, soulless etc. and now they are replaced by other words –
emotional, contemplation, cruel... Soon there will not be any soul in Russian. The
language became different – poor, faceless, dead... I know, you did not notice. – Dad

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