Page 11 - Revelation

Svetlana de Rohan-Levashova. Revelation

On the left side: mom, dad, grandmother and me.
Right: Dad after pneumonia, Mom and I.

The first "swallows"

My second favourite passion was reading, which forever remained my greatest
love. I learned to read when I was three which, as it appeared later, was a very early
age for that. When I was four, I already could fluently and incessantly read my
favourite fairy-tales (for which I have now paid with my eyes).

I adored living with my heroes: I sympathized with them, cried when something
went wrong and was indignant and offended when the evil won. And when fairy-tales
had a happy ending, everything sparkled in pink and the festive mood accompanied
me throughout the whole day. It is funny and sad to remember these astonishingly
pure childhood days, when everything seemed possible and absolutely real. Well,
sometimes it was indeed so real that I could not even imagine how this was so. It
happened when I read one of my favourite fairy-tales, being in pure rapture. The
feeling was so bright that I remember everything as if it happened yesterday: the
ordinary world around me suddenly disappeared and I found myself in my favourite
fairy-tale. I mean I truly appeared there. Everything there was really alive – moving,
changing and absolutely astonishing. I did not know exactly how much time I spent
in that amazing world, but when it suddenly disappeared, I felt a painfully-deep
clanking emptiness inside me…
It seemed that our "normal" world had suddenly lost all its colours, so bright and
colourful was my strange vision. I did not want to part with it. I did not want it to end
and suddenly I felt so "deprived" that I started crying and rushed to complain to
anybody I could find at that moment about my "irreplaceable loss". Fortunately my
mother was at home and on patiently hearing out my confusing babble, made me
promise not to share this "extraordinary" news with my friends.
When, surprised, I asked: – Why?

My mother confusingly said that it would be our secret for a while. Of course I
agreed, but it seemed to me a little strange because I was used to sharing all my news
openly with my friends, and now it was suddenly forbidden for some reason. My
strange "adventure" was gradually forgotten, because every day of one’s childhood
usually brings something new and unusual. But one day it repeated again and then

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