Page 14 - The Mirror of My Soul. Vol. 1
P. 14
Nicolai Levashov. The Mirror of My Soul. Vol. 1. Born in the USSR
Also, when I was a baby, my health was seriously endangered by lobar pneumonia.
My mother, being a physician, did not wait for the district doctor but gave me an
injection of penicillin herself. The doctor, who came later, told my mother that if it had
not been for this injection, I would have needed nothing else, in other words I would
have died. However, the pneumonia was completely healed in a single day (most unusual
in itself), despite the fact that we were still occupying the same damp basement that was
our first family dwelling.
As I understand it now, I was not saved by the antibiotic injection, which often was
not effective in many such cases, but by a powerful curative impulse, an outburst of my
mother’s vital energy (force), triggered by her wish to save her child. In such a situation
every normal mother wants to rescue her child from death, but not every mother is a
sleeping vedunia (a woman magus), whose abilities can be triggered and manifested in
critical situations during powerful emotional eruptions.
Another unusual incident happened, when I was three years old. Every summer,
when my parents had their vacation, we stayed at the Kundruchenski Farmstead, in
Rostov, which was secluded in the Salskie Steppes. There my maternal grandmother had
a fairly roomy house with a large garden (by Soviet peoples’ standards), where the
families of her three daughters gathered every summer.
My great grandfather was an excellent gardener and grew an orchard that was
considered the best in the neighborhood. He planted acacias along the fence, which, by
the time of my childhood, had grown enormous. Their shade and the shade of mulberry
trees that grew around the house and buildings created a protective shade for all living
creatures, including us. My great grandfather built several stairs, which chickens used in
order to climb up to the acacia branches, where they often spent summer nights, opting
for the gentle freshness of a southern night instead of the hot, stuffy hen-house.
During our visit, my brother, who was almost two years older than I, offered to help
me reach the highest branches of the acacias by climbing up the “chicken” stairs. When
I was three I differed considerably from today's “me”, but, nevertheless, I wasn’t a hen.
During the heroic climb of my first “Everest,” one of the transverse slats of the staircase
broke off and I found myself in free-fall. Unfortunately, unlike those hens, I did not have
wings. So I had no choice but to personally check the law of gravity as a future
experimenter: I started hurtling down toward the palisade.
My first “scientific experiment” remained unfinished then. There was a wire for a
dog chain between two acacias that grew along the fence and I hung onto it without
touching either the ground or the sharp posts of the fence. I began to “reflect” about the
meaning of life between heaven and earth, both literally and figuratively.
My “philosophizing” continued until the “independent observer”, my older brother,
found my parents and explained the whereabouts of his younger brother “Tolka”. It was
quite a problem for my father to translate his words into Russian, as my older brother
could not, at that time, enunciate the sounds “K” and “R”. After my father managed to
decipher the message and get the exact site of the occurrence, the rescue expedition was
successfully completed—and I was removed from the wire. The moment was so joyful
that I was not even punished for my first scientific experiment.
The summer recollections of my childhood remain the brightest and the most
pleasant of my life. When I think about those times, the memories are so strong that I
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