Page 15 - The Mirror of My Soul. Vol. 1

Nicolai Levashov. The Mirror of My Soul. Vol. 1. Born in the USSR

almost feel my toes sinking into the warm, fluffy dust of dirt roads, where we rushed

about barefooted with the great delight that is possible only in childhood.
One more thing caused a similar delight and interest: the puddles left on those roads
by swift summer thunder-and-lightning showers, when the air was filled with ozone, and
freshness flowed into my lungs like honey; or when I felt something enigmatic and
incomprehensible in every thunderbolt; and my soul would give a start—filling me with
inexplicable wonder.

I had countless adventures without which it is impossible to imagine a boy’s life.
However, I’d rather not exhaust anyone with my childhood recollections, although they
recreate the atmosphere of my perception of life, without which it is quite difficult to
understand who I am. Therefore, I’ll pass on only to those events of my life which
directly touch the circumstances which made me think that whatever was happening to
me had never before happened to anyone else.

* * *
When I was five and a half, I had an accident that surprised everyone but me, since,
at that time, I saw nothing unusual about it. It happened at the farm in Salskie Steppes.
My grandmother worked at some neighboring apiaries, located about five to ten
kilometers from our farm. They were reached by cart in those days and sometimes my
grandmother took us with her.

I loved horses from early childhood on. To ride with them, even in a cart, was one
of my most burning desires—the direct opposite of what I could say about being at the
apiary. The problem is that I swelled up severely from bee stings, so had no special liking
for bees, to put it mildly, especially, when they began to spin around me. That is why, I
always returned home from there with great enthusiasm, whenever possible.

During one of those trips home, while passing a field of enormously-growing

sunflowers, the driver offered to cut one off for me. My penknife was made of wonderful
steel and very sharp. I reached out to a plant, grasped its stem with my left hand just
below its cap and, following the trajectory of the knife, cut away vigorously. Either due
to inertia or to excessive force for such a sharp knife, I cut my hand in the area of my
wrist where my thumb joins to my hand.

I pulled back my hand and saw a very deep cut. I watched with surprise as the blood
gushed from it almost instantaneously. The coachman gave me a newspaper and I
wrapped it around my wounded hand. I was never afraid of pain and never cried even as
a child. This cut was not the first one, so I waited quietly for the gushing blood to stop.

I didn’t want to get a good scolding from my mother for my carelessness and
thought the best way for me and the driver, who was more scared than I, would be to
hide “the traces of the crime”. We had different reasons, but one purpose. However, due
to reasons that I didn’t understand then, the blood quickly soaked several layers of the
newspaper that was wrapped around my hand. I didn’t like that at all—I had lost a lot of
blood, turned white and felt that I had no chance to avoid a scolding that I didn’t want
to get.

Therefore, to stop the bleeding I pressed the wound under the newspaper with my
right hand and began to think that the bleeding had finally stopped. At that time I already
knew that blood could drain out completely from the body with all the inevitably dire

Back to contents
15