Page 24 - Revelation

Svetlana de Rohan-Levashova. Revelation

— There, there. You’ll see, the time will pass and everything will be forgotten –
my grandmother assuaged my grief – the offense is not like smoke, it will not eat
away your eyes.

Well, yes it probably will not eat away my eyes, but it certainly ate my heart with
each new drop of injustice, to be sure! I was just a child, but I already knew much of
"it is better not to show" or "it is better not to talk about"… and I learned not to
show. After that little incident I really tried not to show that I knew more than others
and everything was all right. But was it really all right?

Cookies

The summer came quite unnoticed. And, as my mother promised, exactly this
summer I was going to see the sea for the first time. I had waited for this moment
since winter, because the sea was my long awaited "great" dream, but a quite foolish
event almost reduced my dream to ashes. Only a couple of weeks remained to the
journey and in my mind I already was on the shore, but, as it turned out, it was still a
long way off.
It was a pleasant warm summer day. Nothing unusual happened. I lay in the
garden under my favourite old apple-tree, read a book and dreamed about my
favourite cookies. Yes, yes, exactly about cookies from a little shop near by.
I don’t remember eating anything more delicious than those home-made cookies.
Even now, after so many years, I perfectly remember the marvelous taste and smell
of this dainty morsel melting in my mouth! They always were fresh and incredibly
soft with a dense sweet crust of icing which burst at the least touch, with a divine
scent of honey and cinnamon and something else which was almost impossible to
catch... These were the cookies which I was going to get without thinking twice. The

weather was warm and I had only my short shorts on. The shop was nearby, right in
a couple of houses and (there were three shops like this in our street!)
Then in Lithuania this kind of small shop in private homes were very popular
and usually occupied only one room. They grew like mushrooms after rain and usually
belonged to the citizens of Jewish origin, like the shop where I went which belonged
to our neighbour called Schreiber. He always was a very pleasant and polite person
and had very good food, especially sweets.
To my great surprise, when I came there, I could not enter inside – the shop was
crammed full of people. Obviously there was a new delivery and nobody wanted to
miss freshly brought products. So I stood in a very long line and was not going to
leave, patiently waiting for my favourite cookies. The line moved very slowly,

because the room of 5 x 5 metres was absolutely crammed with grown-ups and I could
not see anything because of them. Quite suddenly, on making the next step, I began
to fall head over heels down a wooden, crudely knocked up staircase and plopped
down on the wooden boxes which were made in the same rough fashion.
It turned out later that the owner left the door of his basement (seven metres
deep!) open, probably hurrying to sell new goods or simply forgetting to do that, and
I managed to fall into it. It is highly likely that the impact was very serious, because I
did not remember how and who dragged me out of there. I only remember many

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