Photo credit: pulse19.ru
It has happened a really long time ago. Long before my husband was baptized and I became a church-going Christian.
Often, when I was sitting on the floor, I noticed that our kitty would gaze intently somewhere in the space above my head
I was working for the philharmonic orchestra hall and my husband also had a decent income, so even though it was the stormy 1990s, we were always happy to receive guests. People from our philharmonic orchestra, from the drama theater, the youth theater, and musical comedy theater would repeatedly show up in the evenings—drifting from the bar at the Actor’s House to my place and then back again the next day, if they had no rehearsals. There were days when I’d be greeted upon my return home from work by the same old faces already waiting for me there. This crowd was a motley crew of talented people, like the members of the now famous duet “Bely Ostrog,” some mediocre folks, and a few hapless fellows. At the same time, all of them were busy dancing, singing, and playing on stage. We’d also have journalists come by. Then, there were those who didn’t even try to conceal the fact that they worshipped evil spirits to get their talent, fame, admirers, and material prosperity.
And then, frightful things began to happen in my house…
Often when I was sitting on the floor, I’d see our cat staring intently somewhere in the space above my head. She would fix her gaze on something, and then she’d watch that something going out of the window. Then, she would casually resume licking herself clean. Like nothing had happened.
“There’s something out there”
Once, we tucked another group of guests into bed, but in the morning our philharmonic hall’s HR manager suddenly confessed to us:
“So, I woke up today only to see something sitting on top of the wardrobe near the window. Scary-looking and furry, it simply paralyzed me with its gaze, so I couldn’t move from fear. On top of that, my throat was dry with fear.”
“What if you imagined seeing something?”
“But what about the fear that paralyzed me—did I imagine it too?”
What could I say? She wasn’t the first to notice “odd” things at my place.
“Women’s fears”
At night, I often heard the sounds of someone walking around the apartment and I even complained about it to my husband, but he always disparaged me, like, “Who knows what she might see in a dream!”
One day, our cat, the family’s favorite, a silent and intelligent creature, always quick to understand us, went into heat. Typically, at times like that, we had to lock her in the bathroom. But, since she was able to easily open the door with her paw, we usually tightened the hold with the addition of a towel. The door would close so tightly that even we had difficulty opening it later.
All of a sudden, half asleep, I clearly heard someone’s footsteps, and then—the sound of a door opening and closing
That evening, my husband was already asleep, but I was still up watching my movie to the end. I turned off the television and soon began to fall asleep. Next, I suddenly heard someone’s footsteps and the sound of a door opening and closing. I didn’t want to wake up and check what was going on, so I slept until the next morning. In the morning, while my husband was still asleep, I went around our apartment. Every door we had shut closed the day before had been opened and our cat was roaming free. My husband reacted to my bewilderment with bafflement: “Oh those women’s fears, it’s all fairy tales!”
Sleeping blissfully
During those days, before I found the Church, I could get up to do some inappropriate things. For instance, at Christmastime, when all good people celebrated the wonderful feast of Nativity at church and at their homes, I might engage in fortune telling with my friends.
One day I turned up at my neighbor’s, and seeing how they were spinning a plate on the table to learn the future, I also decided to “spin” it for company’s sake. “Well, why not?! It surely won’t hurt to try it,” I reassured myself. The fun was over when my neighbor and I decided to go to my place and where we saw two light bulbs exploding one after the other before our very eyes. And then, when I fearfully leaned over to turn on the TV, a noticeable breeze blew across my cheeks. There was no chance of a drafty window, because in the severe Christmastime frost, with temperatures as low as minus forty Celsius, all vent panes in our apartment were tightly shut.
“Lena…, can you please beg your mother and spend the night with me, pleeeease?” I pleaded, my voice squeaking from horror.
Lena’s mother didn’t allow her to stay with me, but she invited me to come over to their place. I politely refused—given my aversion to cockroaches, which, as I found out, many people were breeding… to boost their income.
And so, I ended up at home alone. My son was at his grandmother’s, my husband was on a trip, and here I was, all alone with who knows what setting up all those “transcendental” shows for me, like fireworks streaming from exploding light bulbs and a fresh breezes sweeping through a tightly insulated space.
But I had to go to bed somehow. My gaze fell on the Gospel my husband had brought from Poland. I placed the Gospel published by the “Gideon Brotherhood” at the head of my bed, curled up and... and fell blissfully asleep.
My husband’s baptism
At that time, my husband sincerely believed that mankind descended from the apes. I somehow couldn’t accept that all great men were descended from apes, even if they went through evolutionary stages.
“But Darwin’s theory wasn’t created from thin air, was it?” my husband argued.
“But it was a man who developed this theory, and we know that people often make mistakes. That’s how we are made! Answer me this: Why over time did some descendants of primates became great leaders of the human race, while some others were left hanging by their tails on palm trees and such?”
“Well, I don’t know…”
Finding no decent answers to my tricky questions, he would grow silent but he still held his ground. Baptism was out of the question. So I’d have to back down for a while.
Not a churchgoer myself, I somehow knew from childhood that there is Someone high above, and all we need to do is to figure out Who? But the time was passing by, or rather, was zipping along. My son was getting older, but we still never made it to church…
One day I was waiting for my husband, so I prepared dinner, left everything on the stove, and sat down on the sofa to read a book. I lay down and covered myself with a throw blanket. Our favorite cat peacefully snuggled underneath it at my feet. Our kitty usually waited for us at the door about half an hour before we came, but today she didn’t even move to meet her beloved master.
Suddenly, the lids from the pots began to rattle and clatter like anything. We grew silent. My husband turned white
My husband came home. We got deep into conversation about something, taking a minute before walking towards the kitchen, when suddenly, the lids from the pots began to rattle and clatter like anything. We stopped talking. My husband turned white. I suddenly remembered Obraztsov’s famous “Extraordinary Concerto,” with its sarcastic music of “everyday life and all the things around us.”
“What’s that?”
“I’ve told you many times, there’s something abnormal in our house.”
“Oh, please... get serious after all!”
“You can’t hear anything at night because you sleep soundly. But now you get your fill of it in the daytime!”
“But it’s our cat!”
“Nope,” I replied and threw the blanket open showing him our beloved kitty sleeping peacefully under it.
We entered our kitchen. The lids rested quietly on top of the pots.
***
Soon, my husband was baptized, and as he himself declared, he felt as if he “had grown the wings”—so ethereal his body and, most importantly, his soul have become.
