2. The Book of Knowledge. 1. 2. Volodya

The BOOK of KNOWLEDGE,
a novel by Alexandra Kryuchkova
in the “PLAYING ANOTHER REALITY” series

PART 2. ANOTHER REALITY

Day No. 1

CHAPTER 1.2. VOLODYA

Dr. Ma arrived with Tamara, an interpreter, by 11:00. Dr. Ma was a doctor of alternative medicine, considered traditional in China. She made us a pulse diagnosis.

“You should have died as a child, right?” Dr. Ma said sadly, holding my hand. I nodded, Ma smiled and asked, “Do you remember why you came back?”

She prescribed us various procedures, which used to last until about lunchtime.

***

While we were lying in needles like porcupines, and needles were sticking out of our bodies from everywhere, even from our heads, awakening dormant meridians to put the energy in the chakras in order, my roommate and my good friend Svetlana sighed heavily.

“When we were about to fly here, you saw him at the airport. I wanted to show him to you. What do you see?” she asked me.

I really saw him. Just few minutes, but long enough to answer without hesitation, “He is not here, almost not…”

“How’s that? What does it mean?”

“He is trying to portray his presence in the Earthly Reality, but he is out There.”

“In Another Reality?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Nothing keeps him here. He understands that he should stay here, because of you and your children, but every time he steps over himself, pretending to do it,” I said calmly, realizing how familiar such state was to me.

“Is that why he drinks?”

“That’s the way for him to get There, where he feels better than here. Although it’s possible to get There in other ways, he doesn’t know how to do otherwise. He needs to be hooked with something here. But you cannot arrange that.”

“Why?”

“Only Love can. People destroy each other’s destinies because they are afraid of the opinions of other people and of their own sudden loneliness. They continue to live out of habit with a complete stranger, gradually moving away from him more and more. They can’t change him and start cheating on him. Sooner or later you will break up anyway. If you had done this earlier, perhaps now each of you would already be truly happy in the Earthly Reality, without leaving for Another one.”

***

The problem of the difference between close people, as a rule, manifests itself over the years. When people fall in love and start living together, they know each other for who they are at that moment. But life goes on, and over the years, someone continues to grow, and someone stops. Or one finds a sphere of hobbies completely uninteresting to the other. People stop stepping in step and looking in the same direction. One day you may find next to you a person with whom you have nothing in common now and in which there is absolutely nothing from the one you once loved. So then you have to answer the question: can you both accept each other as you are here and now, and continue to live on together? Most people try to remake others to fit for themselves, which spoils their life and the life of those around. People can no longer live as before, but they are afraid to step into a different Option of Space because of the fear of the unknown. The habitual cycle firmly binds them with chains that are difficult to break. But sooner or later, one way or another, they will break, and you will lose that changed person if you cannot accept and love a new version of him.

The lack of understanding and love forms the Void. But nothing in this world, as in any other, tolerates emptiness. Each of us knows this at the level of the Subconscious. We strive to fill it with something. The causes of various addictions and manias are emptiness, mental pain, overstrain of the psyche. Any addiction is primarily a mental addiction. A person tries to escape from what is pressing on him in the Earthly Reality, fleeing to Another. He receives there a temporary shelter, oblivion, those positive, at first glance, emotions he lacks here. The artificial defense against Reality is his outlet. For example, in the Reality of computer games or the Internet, the sense of Time and Space is lost, a person can become what he cannot be in real life, he realizes his Self, finds virtual friends, not having them here for one reason or another. At the moment of alcohol or drug intoxication, the astral body moves away from the physical one. Vibrational frequencies change. Consciousness is switched off. One can see Another Reality. However, this is an artificial tuning, as a rule, on the Lower Layers of the Astral World. What a person receives there for some time instead of his problems, activates a certain part of the brain at the physical level, “happiness hormones” are artificially produced. The more they are produced artificially, the less they are produced naturally, and the more and more often a person has to resort to surrogates. The will is paralyzed, falling into the capture loop, addiction is formed already at the physical level. Heredity, of course, plays its role, but it is secondary, initially everybody has freedom of choice and will.

You can put a person in a hospital to get him out of the binge. You can force one to be encoded. But if you don’t eliminate the initial psychological reason for escaping to Another Reality, sooner or later your friend will find another way to get away from Earth, and maybe forever.

***

There were many different people there – poets and spell-casters, musicians and magicians. During the break, I went to the table to make myself some coffee. Everyone was chatting. Suddenly, he loudly interrupted the speeches of those present, turning to me with an elementary, at first glance, question, “Alice, tell me, what if I fall in love with you?”

I raised my head, looked at him and… was horrified by what I saw! Instead of his face, I was shown the face of another man. It was a black and white portrait of a very famous and tragically deceased one. The portrait hovered in the air covering the face of the person who had asked me the question.

I answered something like a vulgar banality, it was useful for creative people to experience such emotions. But in my mind, I tried to make the connection between the man and the Other Face, while erasing the Portrait. In vain, the portrait reappeared. I shifted my gaze from the Face to the table – the portrait didn’t follow me – back, and again, I saw the portrait!

The break was over. He took the stage. I looked at him and still couldn’t see his face. My French grandmother affectionately had called that tragically deceased man Volodya. She knew his father and Volodya himself, still a baby, and treated him like her own son – my father. My dad was only five years younger. They both tragically died in the same year, less than a month apart. Grandma told me it was a double blow for her. I was still young then, so I didn’t ask her anything, besides, Volodya’s name, as well as his fate, didn’t interest me at all.

As I was leaving, he came up to me. Embarrassedly, he held out a crumpled ticket to his next concert and said that he really wanted me to come. We had often crossed paths in the so-called underground, but he was so cool and famous that there was usually a queue of people eager to give him their books, ask for a ticket or show personal interest. As a chance. What if he wrote a romantic song based on their poems, that would go down in world history? I had never approached him. I was the last thing he lacked, he had to read first everything gifted to him before.

“Alice, give me your books, please!” he asked suddenly. “Just sign first, I won’t take it without your autograph. And wish me Love there. I… I’m looking for love!”

“Everyone is looking for Love,” I thought and sighed.

He held out a pen. I suddenly realized that I knew his last name, but for some reason I didn’t know his first. I laughed and suddenly gave it out, “Listen, Volodya, what’s your name?”

“Would you write me a poem?”

In the evening, on the way home, I wrote the verse I had promised him, and sent him the link. He didn’t answer.

All night long I couldn’t fall asleep – my soul was twisting and turning in a hurricane whirlwind. I got into the Flow. I saw… his flat, and where it was situated, and all rooms, and their arrangement. I entered his room. It was on the right. Unfolded sofa. Bedside table. Shelves. The same ones I used to have. Computer on the desk. Equipment. Posters. Paintings. Balcony with never closing window. I closed my eyes, there, in his flat. I didn’t want to see. To see empty bottles scattered everywhere. Corks. Glasses. Cigarette butts and something else… Bathroom with a leaking water faucet. Kitchen with the always empty refrigerator. Old black smoky frying pan. Small table. Everything black.

It was a movie playing in front of me as an answer to his question, “What if I fall in love with you?” I would come and see what I saw that night. Each time it would get worse and worse.

Once I would open the door with the key. He wouldn’t be waiting for me. I would enter his room and see him drunk, there would be a naked girl. I would silently walk to the balcony. I would close my eyes not to see anything. He would say something about loving only me instead of the naked girl just passing by. And he would need inspiration. I should always be around somewhere to help him, to come when he was really bad, at his first call, to take him out and give him my strength, since he was left without his own.

I opened my eyes. It couldn’t be so, he was a person of Light. Everything I had seen wasn’t true. I was waiting for his call or message in the morning, but the phone was silent.

On the third day, I got a letter, “Thank you!!! Wow, you wished me Love!!! I really hope to find it!” I wrote to him more. He disappeared, then again answered something about hope. In each of his letters, the word “Hope” sounded desperately. I decided to know the truth in the Earthly Reality. I knew where and when I could see him, so I dropped my plans and went there.

They were celebrating the New Year. A farewell evening. Many people. I was sitting at the table downstairs. He was upstairs. Some columns made me invisible to him, and him to me. But I knew that he was there, behind those columns. He didn’t know that I was there. He knew I must be somewhere else. I wrote to him, “Hello!” He looked out for me, but couldn’t find, so he went downstairs, noticed and approached me, but I was not alone.

“Hello!” he said… drunk. “Too crowded here. I should sing now, and we’ll chat, okay?”

I nodded in agreement, being scared – I didn’t see his face again, since the same portrait of the tragically deceased man appeared immediately. Having sung a few songs, he descended into the hall.

“I sang for you…”

I went on stage. He enthusiastically looked at me from the crowd.

As I descended, he took my hand and led along out of there. We climbed the stairs. The hall was very noisy and one couldn’t hear anything. We went into the corridor, it was quieter, but there was someone third there. He didn’t want to talk in front of a stranger, so he opened the door into the blizzard and, abruptly taking my hand, led me outside.

I was in a thin dress. He was in a suit. We stood opposite each other under the snowfall in the light of the old lanterns. He gently and timidly took my hands and stroked my fingers. He looked affectionately into my eyes, caressing me with his eyes. I looked at his face and saw Volodya.

“Why?” I asked, already knowing the answer but refusing to believe it. “Why and where are you disappearing to?”

“Another Reality.”

“How often do you visit it?”

“I’m flying away for three days… Then I’m coming back… Then again… Forgive me… Well, I’m sorry… Forgive me…” It seems that at that moment he asked me to forgive him for everything that hadn’t happened yet. “You are very beautiful… Very beautiful!”

“You are in Another Reality now, right? So do I exist for you only there?”

“Yes,” he admitted. “Forgive me, I’m so in love with…”

He pulled me to him, hugged and kissed… in the snowfall… under the lanterns… Someone slammed the door behind us.

“Where do you live?” Volodya asked me.

“And you?”

“There, far up…”

“I’m far down…”

“What are you doing tomorrow?”

“Working…”

“I’m performing … But … if you come to me … No, you won’t like what you see there…”

We returned to the hall and danced on the stairs. I looked at him and refused to believe that everything shown to me was true.

***

I felt bad again at night. My soul was like a twisted rag. The astral body was pounding like a fever and I couldn’t sleep. I saw, I knew what was happening to him, and I held him on the Earth.

In the morning, I arrived at work squeezed like a lemon.

“What did you do last night, Alice?” my colleague asked me, “you don’t have a face.”

“I was dragging a hippopotamus out of the swamp.”

“Well, did you get it out?”

He laughed, and I fell asleep.

Volodya disappeared and, periodically appearing, wrote something, repeating the same word – Hope, but I didn’t answer anything.

I went abroad for two weeks. In Beirut, having switched on the phone, I saw his missing calls. I wrote that I didn’t want to communicate anymore in written form, but we could meet and talk when I got back only in the Earthly Reality. A week after my return, he wrote a long letter asking me to forget everything like a nightmare, and that in the new year, as he really hoped, everything would be fine with us. Once more “he hoped”. I didn’t reply. Closer to the midnight he called me.

“Do you want me to come to you right now?” he asked.

“No.”

“And when?”

“Where are you?”

“Somewhere far, far away. In the woods. Skiing. I am.”

“Have you looked at your watch?”

“Well… maybe I’ll be in time!”

“I returned on the 17th.”

“Isn’t today the 17th?”

“Add seven.”

“I want to see you. Let’s meet and talk.”

“What do you want from me?”

“Love … Don’t you want Love?”

“Of course, I want. Really want to. Love. But I want him here, not there.”

He sighed heavily. We said goodbye.

Two days later I woke up, switched on my mobile phone. I got a message that he had called me. Twice. The last time just a minute ago.

“Hi… What’s up?” I asked.

“Come.”

I was going I didn’t know where. Besides, I didn’t know to whom. I didn’t know anything about him except what everyone knew about him and what I had seen about him. But I wanted to see everything with my earthly eyes and put a dot.

I got to the metro station. He was not there. Fifteen minutes passed. “I’m on the street”. I went out outside scared. I didn’t know in what condition I should see him now. I didn’t see him. I dialed, “Where are you?” – “In the car!” Well, it meant sober… Ugh… He got out of the car and waved to me. I came up to him. He leaned over and kissed me. He was drunk. I got into the car. He was driving me somewhere, smiling like a child.

“I’m so happy you’ve come!”

We drove up to an old house. We got out of the car. He took my hand, stopped me and said, “I have to go to the store.”

“Why?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

“What do you mean why? You’ve arrived, it’s such a blessing! A holiday! We should buy a drink. What do you drink?”

“I drink cognac. But we won’t go to any store,” I said categorically. “Holidays can be without that. We won’t drink today. Let’s go.”

We entered the house and climbed the stairs to the top floor. I had already seen it all There, in Another Reality. We approached the door. He opened it.

I went inside.

Posters. Posters. Posters. I entered the bathroom to wash my hands. The bathroom with the leaking faucet. I entered his room, on the right. Unfolded sofa. Bedside table. Shelves. The same ones I used to have. Computer on the desk. Equipment. Paintings. Balcony with non-closing window.

I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to see empty bottles scattered everywhere. Corks, glasses, cigarette butts and something else there…

“I paint,” he said somehow embarrassed, taking out an easel covered with centuries of dust, somewhere in the corner on the balcony.

“Show me your paintings…”

So he did. There was a black city on all of them. Black houses. Small blind windows. Gray Mist. Everywhere. On every picture. A city painfully familiar to me. My favorite city. The City-on-the-Water.

“What is this city?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

“Venice.”

“Have you been there?”

“Never.”

“Why is it black?”

He shrugged his shoulders. I remembered and told him my dream about my funeral in Venice. Fog. Islands. The boat moving away from the shore. There had been a boatman and a Man in Black inside the boat. I didn’t know him…

“Would you like me to paint Venice for you? And forget the dream, it’s better to write a book about it! And call it ‘A Dream!’” He opened the curtains, and the sunlight poured into the black room. “Look! Look at it!!! What a miracle! You have arrived, and … the Sun!!! The Sun is shining! Isn’t that wonderful?!”

I smiled, frantically going through all the options in my head to help him, but … There was an almost empty huge bottle under the table. The glass was on the table. He showed me his treasures – a huge number of rare records with elite recordings.

“What do you want to listen to?”

I didn’t care. He turned on his latest disc. He had got a lot of them. He took my hand. We made a pitiful semblance of a dance. I sat down on the unfolded sofa. He sat down next to me, took a glass and poured the rest of the bottle. I took the glass, silently got up and put it on the computer desk. He silently got up, came up to the computer desk, took the glass and emptied it.

“What is wrong in your life?” I asked calmly.

“Let’s not talk about it now,” he replied calmly.

I suddenly looked at the place I had not looked before. Neither when I had been shown all that in Another Reality, nor when I entered his room. I had passed by that place, on the left at the entrance to the room, where there was some kind of bedside table under the shelves.

I walked to the bedside table and froze… Something inside me abruptly broke off. I thought I was about to lose consciousness. He came up and stood nearby. We looked at what was there, on the bedside table.

“What is it?” I squeezed myself out.

“A portrait. Of me and Him… And this is a book about Him.”

“What do you have in common?” I asked, still not recovered.

“Not long ago I… I began to understand Him. I have even learnt five of His songs. Recently I sang at His party. Do you want me to sing?”

“No,” I answered categorically, continuing to stare at their faces in one portrait.

“Well, I don’t know who my father is. But my mother… She died a year ago… She often told me about Him… How they were together… Do you know my father’s name?”

I slowly sank to the floor in silence.

I remembered my poem about Marina Vlady, I had written two days before. I came up to the computer, found my page on Internet, silently opened the verse and showed it to him. He read silently.

“Have you read me?” I asked, remembering the books.

“No… Sorry…”

“Funny! You are the first man in my life who doesn’t care what I write…”

“I do not care! Because they all see you as such a great writer! And I see you as a woman! For me, you are a wonderful, beautiful, amazing woman who is looking for her Love, do you understand?” He walked up to me and timidly ran his fingers over my face. “You are very beautiful. VERY!” he looked at me as if I had been a Goddess, and suddenly said hopefully, “You think it’s difficult for two creative people… to be together, right?”

I didn’t reply. I sat down on the sofa. He sat down next to me and talked about his grandiose plans. About those cool people he knew. About the queues lined up for him to record them down. I listened and nodded. I understood everything perfectly. Everything. Everything…

“How long have you been out of work?” I asked, but he was silent. “And what was your job?”

He answered and again took the glass.

“Do you eat anything?” I asked.

“No, I can eat nothing for a long time.”

“Let me cook something for you. Let’s go to the kitchen.”

Kitchen with the always empty refrigerator. Old smoked frying pan. Small table. Everything black… Everything was black. A small table. An old smoked frying pan. I opened the refrigerator, and found it empty.

“Ah, I remembered!” he exclaimed joyfully. “I have got some humanitarian aid for the homeless on my balcony!”

“What?!!”

We went to the balcony. With never closing window. With some cigarette butts and something else … He showed me a mountain of boxes piled on top of each other, opened the top, there were pancakes.

“With meat!” he said proudly.

“Where did you get that?”

“Once I sang in the municipality. They asked, if they could pay me with pancakes.”

I took the old smoky frying pan, poured the rest of the sunflower oil on it. We sat down at the table. He was eating, while I looked at him wondering, how old those pancakes were.

“Do you want to repeat His fate?” I asked.

He looked at his watch, “I have to go. Sorry…”

“To go on the stage?” I knew, that day he didn’t perform. In the announcements, he was only in two days and further – everywhere.

“To the public baths. With friends.”

We got up. He was looking for his wallet. I knew already that the next day, somewhere in the afternoon, he would call and say that he had run out of money and he didn’t know where to get it from, because the one supposed to come for a recording changed his mind, and the girl he taught to play the guitar, got sick… He would ask me to come, but I would be in office. And he would utter with a caustic reproach, “Well, yes! Of course, you work somewhere!” And I realized that I couldn’t help him, no matter how much I would like to do it.

He found the wallet, looked inside, sighed and said, “Not much… Okay, let’s go …”

We got dressed, left the flat and got into the car.

“Do you drive also being drunk?”

“Yes,” he waved his hand, started the car and took out a disc from the box. “We can’t help but listen to this of His songs today.”

He held the wheel with one hand and stroked my fingers with the other, singing along to Him, smiling like a child and looking at me as at a Goddess. I knew, that moment, there and then, he was happy…

I asked him my last (on that day or in my life?) question, “Why couldn’t we not listen to this His song now?”

“You are so wonderful! Don’t you really know? It’s His birthday today!”