Chapter One

 

 

 

My eyelids are so thin that I wake as soon as the natural light reaches 0.005 lux in the room. After rising, I step onto the balcony and exercise while lively tits chirp, bounding from branch to branch like ping-pong balls.

This is how my typical day begins. It proceeds with a contrast shower, the ritual of shaving my beard, and cooking a straightforward bachelor's breakfast: fried eggs with ham and noodles. All the while, I repeat like a mantra, "People who eat bread with vermicelli are invincible!" This paradox energizes me for the rest of the day. And as a supervisor, I need that energy—desperately!

However, that morning, my daily routine was disrupted. I continued to lie in bed, not aware of myself and not feeling my own body. This condition resembled depersonalization-derealization syndrome. My essence, independent of me, was in a space-time continuum where there is no past, present, or future. For they are all united into one whole, without beginning or end.

The sad history of humanity floated before me like an endless holographic panorama. The grandeur of what I saw delighted, discouraged, and saddened me. It was impossible to remain indifferent, watching how Homo sapiens transformed our planet. The first to catch my eye was the most curious character of this tragicomedy, the ending of which is impossible to predict, much less change.

He was sitting at a table with an hourglass on the tabletop in front of him. Looking closely at him and the chronometer, I guessed what he was doing: he was watching the movement of sand from the upper flask of the clock to the lower one.

“Eureka! I command Time and Space!”

“That’s how it all started,” I heard.

“Since the invention of the hourglass,” I continued, deciding that I was talking to myself.

“No, out of pride!” Someone contradicted me.

And suddenly he screamed at the top of his lungs:

I looked around and saw a man with a lute in his right hand.

He seemed to be standing two steps away from me. In reality, we were separated by several generations. That is why his figure was blurry, as if woven from air and light.

Looking closely at the phantom, I recognized my father in it. What surprised me most was not that he was here, next to me. But how he looked. I had only seen him so young in photographs taken long before I was born. Looking again at his face, at the musical instrument in his right hand, I remembered my mother's story about how my future father courted her when she was a girl.

"Do you know what he won me over with? His lute playing and the timbre of his voice. He played and sang amazingly, your future father..." she recalled.

“Where is Mom? Is she here too?” I asked my father, worried.

“Yes, she’s there, in the garden,” he said, nodding his head towards the garden.

I looked where he pointed and saw my mother among the blossoming apple trees. She was wearing a light blue dress, her loose hair the color of ripe oats, fluttering in the wind that wasn’t there. She looked back, smiled, and waved at us a bouquet of wild flowers: white daisies, blue cornflowers, and red poppies.

"How young and beautiful she is!" I said enthusiastically. And I looked at my father.

"Your mother is twenty-five now, she is at the age when we met," he said. And after a moment's silence, he continued: "However, all of us here are at the age when we were happy."

“And everyone is twenty-five?” I asked.

“Well, why not?” he said. “People know happiness at sixteen, and at thirty, and at seventy, and even those who are older.”

“And there are many of them here?”

“Whom?”

“Those who are older?”

“I didn't count. But they are the happiest.”

“Do you still play the lute?” I asked, remembering my mother’s story.

“Playing the lute is the only thing I do with joy. Our neighbor Albert comes to visit us with a violin, and we play a duet. Mom really likes it.”

“Albert, is he a violinist?”

“No, he is a theoretical physicist, a mathematician, in a word, a scientist. He is already at a very respectable age, and he is the happiest of us.”

“Does the quality of happiness depend on age?

“Not always. But Albert is an extraordinary case. Like many others, he spent his entire life doing something he didn’t want to do, developing theories that could neither be refuted nor tested in practice. For this, his colleagues respected him and envied him. He wanted only one thing — to play the violin. And when he got here, he finally managed to free himself from any hierarchy and become happy, absolutely happy…”

“But I, father, do not feel happy at all!” I admitted, embarrassing him.

"Are you dating a girl or a woman?" he asked.

“You know, Dad, it's easy for us! If you have money, you find a dating site on the Internet, choose a girl to your taste from the photos posted on its pages, and order her. And they sent her to you,” said, deciding to play a joke on my father.

“Is it by mail?” He asked, confused.

“No, what are you saying! It's delivered like pizza, straight to your home.”

“And what is this money you are talking about?”

“The equivalent of love: more money, more loves and vice versa,” I boasted, unconsciously jealous of my father’s happiness.

“It’s interesting,” he said. “But don’t tell your mother about this, she’ll get upset and start crying, feeling sorry for you.”

“Why? It is a common service, a service that many people use, thus making their lives easier and saving time.”

"How old are you?" he asked, looking at me with the look of a man whose sense of humor is failing him.

“Thirty-six! Don't you remember, Dad?

“You are eleven years older than me, but you still have not known happiness. And do you know why? Because you are looking for happiness where it does not exist, on some internet. But it is close by, inside you. But you have to feel it and know it,” he said.

“I don’t think I have it there either.”

“Then why are you here?”

“It was an accident, but I won’t do it again,” I began to justify myself like a guilty teenager.

“Okay,” he said conciliatorily.

“Son, you have to go, you can’t stay here forever,” said my mother, who came up to us, hugging and kissing me.

“Where are the flowers?” I asked, remembering the bouquet she had just been holding in her hand.

“And we enjoy the beautiful without destroying it or appropriating it for ourselves,” said Mom.

“Okay,” I said, feeling hungry. “But before I leave you, let’s go home. And you, Mom, make some pancakes – they’re so delicious…”

Mom looked at Dad, and Dad looked at Mom. Then they both looked at me, confused. And Dad asked:

“What house are you talking about, son?

"And what are pancakes?" Mom asked in turn.

I was confused. But without saying anything, I took their hands, like in childhood, and asked: “Do you know where the exit is?”

"No, we don't know where the entrance is. But you still have to leave here," Mom said.

“If our son has found the entrance, he will certainly find the exit,” said the father, agreeing with the mother.

And, holding hands, we went. There was no familiar ground under our feet, but that didn’t scare me – after all, my mom and dad were nearby. Then we switched to jogging. Then, we sped up and, picking up speed, took off, fanned by the light like a gentle wind. I looked around, hoping to find a way out. However, there was no way out in sight.

"Look to the right!" said the father with boyish excitement.

I looked to the right and saw a picturesque mountain landscape. Under one of the steep cliffs, several men in loincloths, probably hunters, were cutting up the carcass of a large animal with flint knives. It is possible that this could be the carcass of the last mammoth on Earth.

"What a gluttonous boar!" said Mom, pointing to a bald young man who had separated from the general mass of hunters and was dragging a whole mammoth thigh behind him.

“This is an alpha male,” the father clarified. “He’s heading for his lair. And there, left alone, he’ll gnaw that thigh down to the bone. And if any strangers try to get near him, he’ll get a skull from them. From such males, greedy and gluttonous, come leaders, kings, presidents, and so on down the list…”

“Yes, so they ate all the dinosaurs, and then they came up with and justified the necessity of the hierarchy, Albert can’t stand it!” said Mom.

"Be careful on the turns! Space is warping, we could fly off the edge!" my father said, raising his voice as we entered a new orbit, and he squeezed my hand tighter. That was when I first felt the weightlessness of my own body.

On either side of us, events that had happened before and those that happened after us flashed by in a holographic leapfrog. Their sequence in this timeless "formlessness," as I defined the place where we found ourselves, had no meaning. Only the consequences they caused, and the consequences caused by these consequences, still had some veiled meaning.

Therefore, when, after another turn, Pope Urban II jumped out in front of us like a jack-in-the-box, I was not at all surprised.

The Pope, seeing the Pope, slowed down, and we hovered over the southern French city of Clermont. On this day, November 25, 1095, the city was hosting the famous Church Council, which gave rise to Christ's campaigns. We began to listen to what the Pope, this vicar of God on earth, was saying.

"The land you inhabit is squeezed in on all sides by the sea and the mountains, so it has become cramped with your multitude. It is not rich in wealth and barely feeds those who cultivate it. Hence, it comes about that you bite and reproach each other like dogs, wage wars, and inflict wounds. Let your hatred cease now, let your enmity be silent, let the wars subside, and let the civil strife slumber," said Urban II, convincing: "Go to the Holy Sepulcher. And the Holy Church will not abandon your loved ones with its care. Free the Holy Land from the hands of the pagans and subjugate it to yourself. That land flows with milk and honey. Jerusalem is the navel of the earth, the most fertile, and the second paradise. It asks, awaits liberation..."

The Pontiff, in an unctuous voice, seduced the doubters, calling on them to go and free the Holy Sepulcher from the infidels: “Whoever is destitute and poor here will be joyful and rich there!” he promised.

“I think I’ve heard or read something like this before,” Mom said and looked at Dad.

"Yes, my dear, you are not mistaken," said the father. "Eight hundred years later, with approximately the same words, Adolf Hitler justified the right of the Germans to expand their living space at the expense of the Slavic lands..."

The fiery speech of Urban II caused a stir among the knights and ordinary parishioners, thirsting for a miracle; their desire to receive the desired well-being and happiness on foreign soil, for free, was great. And thousands of them, destitute and hungry, without waiting for the official date of the beginning of the Crusade, rushed to Palestine, to "Jerusalem - the navel of the earth, the most fertile, the second paradise", as Urban II called it.

Wave after wave of crusaders and pilgrims came to the Middle East to impose Christian values ​​there with sword and cross, cultivating in their hearts hatred of the white man and arousing jihad in them. Collective madness spread throughout Europe and lasted for two hundred long years...

I looked back, and in the crooked-looking glass of history, through the curtain of verbal fog, I saw the flickering shadows of some of the heroes of the era of the Crusades: Godfrey of Bouillon, Frederick Barbarossa, Conrad III, Edward I the Long-legged, Louis IX the Saint, and Ida of Austria.

“Who is this Ida, do you know?” I asked my mother.

"Ida is an Austrian margravine, a legendary woman from the Middle Ages," Mom said. "She was the wife of Leopold II, the Fair, and had seven children with him. And then, when he died, Ida went with the knights of the Crusade to liberate the Holy Sepulcher."

"Yes, there were women in the times of knights, not that," said my father vaguely, and looked at my mother with apprehension. But she did not hear his remark; otherwise, she would have given him a dressing down. And I, intrigued by Ida's action, said:

“I wonder how this patriotic act of the Austrian Margravine ended.” She was a woman, after all, a weak creature.

“Yes, as the legend goes, Ida was captured, then taken into a harem, and there gave birth to another son, Imad ad-Din Zanga, the atabeg of Mosul. And he, in turn, became a hero of the East. And, imagine, he became famous for his devastating raids on the territories that were captured by the crusader knights…

With her womanly heart, Mama saw further and more than our eyes could see. And when we finally left the environs of Clermont and headed east, she suddenly asked:

“And who was that who came out to meet the crusaders?”

"Having traced where they came from, I can say with a high degree of probability that they are Sunni Muslims. They are fleeing war-torn Syria," the father replied.

“But if these two human streams - crusaders and Sirian refugees - meet, bloodshed cannot be avoided,” said Mom with alarm in her voice.

"Don't be afraid, dear," her father reassured her. "They will pass on opposite courses without touching each other."

“Why do you think so?” Mom asked.

“Because the crusader knights and the Muslim refugees began their mortal journey a thousand years apart, the former in 1096 and the latter in 2015,” he explained.

“Are you sure about this?”

“Yes! Mom, Dad is right. The whole point is than the war in the Middle East continues...”

“Since the  Crusades?” Mom asked in surprise.

“The war there has never ended and continues with short breaks to this day. Muslims fight among themselves and with Christians, and all together against each other. So the war in these parts is unlikely to end anytime soon.”

“These Syrian refugees reminded me of the Ukrainians who fled to the West to escape the Russian invasion,” my mother said.

“Yes, the only thing missing is planes with red stars on their wings, who bomb refugee columns,” said the father.

“The Russian pilots knew no mercy,” Mom clarified. “They bombed Ukrainian cities and villages with some kind of devilish pleasure, destroying all living things…”

With her womanly heart, Mama saw

"They were the ones who bombed the Mariupol Drama Theatre, where hundreds of peaceful citizens with children were hiding," said the father. "And then their propagandists accused aliens of this atrocity, who allegedly acted on the advice of the Americans, the British, and the Estonians."

“Oh God, will this ever happen?” I thought, and quietly cried…

"Dad, Mom! What are you talking about? The Russians could be bombing the Syrians, but they would dare kill Ukrainians!" I said indignantly.

Dad looked at me the way you'd look at a mentally disabled person and made a sharp turn on the spot. At the same time, I almost fell out on the roadside of the space-time continuum. But at the very last moment, he grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and said, barely containing his irritation: "Look! Look, this is what your Russian brothers will turn Ukraine into..."

Before me, like a holographic image,  of the near our future flashed: cities and villages, devastated by war, scorched agricultural lands, apple and cherry orchards that would never bloom again, and cemeteries, cemeteries with mounds of fresh graves...

I saw as Putin's oprichniks struck Odessa,  Cathedral Square, I saw as they hit the Holy Transfiguration Cathedral with a missile.

"Turning out the parallels are interesting," Mom said with a sad smile. "In 1936, this abode of God was blown up by the Russian Bolsheviks, and in 2023, the restored church will be hit with a ballistic missile by Russian National Socialists..."

“Yes, they have the same handwriting,” Dad agreed.

"No, no! This can't be," I said in despair.

"And I say: it can. We even know the day and hour when it will happen," Mom said.

“Yes, no matter what you think, no matter how mad you are, the Russians will start this war!" So my Brain commented to the events not far away of the future.

“Well, why do they need this?” I asked.

"Don't you know why? They want to do all again," Brain clarified his prophece. "again blow up the Holy Transfiguration Cathedral,band then rename Cathedral Square back to 'Soviet Army Square…"