Page 21 - The Mirror of My Soul. Vol. 1

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

went to bed and fell asleep instantly. I woke up in two hours and felt a chill. The
thermometer confirmed I had a high temperature. But there was no reason for me to have

caught a serious cold—I had neither lain on wet ground, nor gotten chilled from the wind
after a sweat. Nevertheless, my temperature continued to rise and fever-lowering pills
had no effect on it. At about ten o’clock in the evening it reached 40.5°С. Generally
speaking I always tolerated high temperatures easily. A temperature of 40°С made me
feel a little sluggish, but nothing more. After swallowing another fever pill that my
mother gave me I fell asleep quite quickly.

I woke up in the night gasping for air. When I awoke fully, I noticed that my throat
was parched and my lips were cracked and extraordinarily dry. There was a “drought”
in my lungs and throat, and my pulse and breathing were greatly accelerated. Curiously,
I felt that my blood was like boiling hot water, being forced into my arteries with every
rapid contraction of my heart, and spreading throughout my body like a meltdown.

The feeling of boiling water coursing through my vessels was quite peculiar. Also,
it seemed to me that my bed began revolving. I do not know what temperature I had
then. The feeling of 40.5°С could not be commensurate to what I felt—the “magma”
that was racing through my vessels. I was absolutely calm and contemplating myself as
if I were a stranger. The thought entered my head that within another half degree my
blood would coagulate. I knew that at 42°С, the blood proteins coagulate and thought
about possible death, as though it were no concern of mine.

After that I felt as though I had fallen into “something” and didn’t awaken until the
morning feeling perfectly well. My temperature was 36.6°С. I got up and went outside,
where my friends were waiting for me. What had happened to me was something

unbelievable? I’ve never heard of anyone experiencing anything like it. Throughout my
life there have been a lot of life-threatening critical situations, but I have never dreaded
possible death. This was not because of a child's ignorance.

In the course of time my experience was filled with new oddities. Socializing with
other people I discovered that a great deal of what was happening to me, other people
did not experience. I understood that, of course, my friends and acquaintances did not
tell me every detail of their lives. Nevertheless, I began to suspect that what I had
experienced was, in many cases, at least, strange.

* * *
All this reached “critical mass”, when I was by then a university student. After
8
finishing my first year I worked in a student building group . I was the billeting officer
of our group and had to pass my exams before the scheduled time of our group’s next
assignment so that I could prepare a camp for their arrival.

I had never before been to the Trans-Arctic Circle in the city of Urengoy. The
summer tundra is something extraordinary. I could not even imagine such beauty in a
land of perpetual frost. In summer the tundra is a land of lakes and bogs, or, more
precisely, quagmires. Their beauty is majestic and mortally dangerous. However, the
plans of our group were changed and we ended up billeting in Nadym.

8 It was a general practice in Soviet times for those attending universities and other educational institutes to form student
groups, which were assigned either to building projects or to work on the collective farms.
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