An Embrace of the Eternity
Sund'ring, dark'ring, thund'ring
Rent away with a terrible crash...
No light from the fires,
All was darkness in the flames of
Eternal fury
Again she was awaken by the sigh of loneliness beside her head. Claire started and opened her eyes. Nothing could be seen around her. Every object seemed to fade in the arrogant beauty of the night. Quaint angular shadows of the objects added a bit more aggression and malice to the streamlined room into which Claire was included against her will.
Again she would sink in the oppressive darkness as if in her nightmares that left only by the morning. Claire was overfilled with a strange feeling of fear which gave her a sweet pleasure. She expected something to happen with the things around her. The moon painted her face with mysterious hieroglyphs. A myriad of Stars pushed their antennae through the open window and Claire could see their reflection on the floor. A little round table by her bed took a form of the moon and was glimmering in the darkness of the closed space. And suddenly Claire realized herself included into the world without a beginning or an end, so endless it became. "It has neither the top nor the bottom... Where am I now? Am I Alice who is falling down into another world or am I the
all-seeing eye of the Eternity with opening of which the world begins to exist and which dies every time it closes?" The fear Claire felt was the fear at the thought of facing the immortality of existence.
In her dreams she often came into contact with the Eternity but, still she had never touched it so definitely and felt it so clearly. Though Claire was known for her strong spiritual force she was really afraid of being lost in such a mess of the stars which she swallowed every time she took a new breath and which at that time were spinning inside her. They produced the music Claire had heard the night before and even the little changes in the melody made her get excited and pulled her back from the reality. "Everything has its soul,-she said to herself.- Look at this little table-moon. Do you hear its melody which is like the tinkling of a silver bell? And now...that cumbersome awkward dresser which has suddenly become so powerfully majestic, when sounding like an organ.
Even every little gets its importance when being included into the whole. The Absolute speaks through the infinity of its faces. How much shall I mean without my ambitions? Are they worth speaking of when I have recently stopped realizing myself as a whole? Now I'm just one of
the numbers standing before the equality which leads to the Immortality." The stream of her consciousness seized every part of her weakened body and Claire absolutely switched off the events that were going on around her. A thick fog covered the room as if with the white shawl she was to put on when she felt exhausted of the world outside. The pungent smell of little smouldering sticks in every corner of the cube space without the top and the bottom penetrated through the walls
making them unseen.
Yesterday Claire left Andrae...they had lived together for three years, however, it didn't seem to be a long period for Claire to change her mind. She hadn't ever fallen out with him. For so many times Claire vanished from men's lives leaving them only vague memories about her. Every time she left her own place of living she had a constant desire of coming back there. Fortunately, she had the place to return where she lived in estrangement from the others surrounded by her dreams and
stars. In the evening she would sit with a glass of wine in her hand and listen to her favourite gramophone record. Though it often happened so that she wouldn't.
Since some time Claire had constantly heard a charming melody which followed from outside the window; it began somewhere in the deep sky and ended in Claire's mind.
Slowly Claire left her bed and approached the widely open window. She watched the mute town down her that piled up into the sky clutching and tearing it with the invisible claws and throwing back millions of its faces in its attempt to look at the black eye-sockets of the sky.
Everything seemed to be asleep forever, so lifeless and dim it was in the street. The silence was disturbed by a cat's shadow that jumped down from a lantern pole and hastened in the direction of a dump.
"How lonely the cat must feel",- thought Claire when the night wind brought a piece of cold silence from the cat's shadow.
Something stirred behind Claire and she turned her head to look what it might be. With her eyes fixed on something in the middle of the room Claire flattened herself against the cold wall. The object that terrified her was a cauli-flower, all in moving human eyes that were staring at her as if at their victim. Millions of little eyelids were blinking making terrifying sounds of something adhesive and astringent. Horror distorted her features. Claire fell down on the floor and lay still for some time. The glossy linen of the floor was the only thing in the real world that could console her. It was the floor that would absorb the tears and the whisper of her lonely nights. The tears weakened her. She didn't know how long she had been lying fainted (could she really feel that?). When she felt somebody touch her gently with a finger.
"You shouldn't worry,- the Finger said to her.- Get rid of your tears and trust yourself in my hands. Now we're soaring over the borders of two worlds. You're free to choose which of the two worlds is preferable for you. But now, look at this," - and the Finger pointed at the cauli-flower.
Again Claire was struck when she saw it slowly spinning around its axis. With each new spin the cauli-flower was getting bigger and bigger, but it didn't become the size of the girl. On the contrary, both the object and the human being preserved the same difference in size. Claire didn't know how it could be that she was able to distinguish every detail in the cauli-flower though being much higher than the object.
The crystal flowers of the cauli-flower somehow looked like human eyes. But there was something strange about them. And suddenly Claire understood that there were no pupils in the eyes - just eyeballs. Nevertheless, the Finger told Claire to come up to the cauli-flower to see what was there in the biggest eye. The girl stepped forward and froze up. There was a small human figure, in the place of a real pupil. It was a girl's figure which reminded Claire's (in the appearance).
However it was rather a doll than a living being with no place in the place where it had to be and with hair much like the flowers of the cauli-flower.
"And now look at what I'm going to offer you instead of being like this at the very end of everything,"- and the Finger opened a door which had been unseen behind the darkness of the room. There was nothing but the melody that she always heard in her nightmares. Only this was much sweeter and consequently hurt even more than that one. Without a single sound of reply Claire stepped forward to look out of the door. Holding on the door-past which by that time had become overgrown with the same flowers of the cauli-flower. She bent over the timeless space. A strong
wind from the outside blew her off into the cold twinkling of the colour blue. It was the embrace of the eternity...
-Good morning, doctor.
-Good morning. What a nice morning we have today!
-Doctor!
-What's happened with you?
-We had an accident that night. Miss Claire from ward 6 jumped out from the window. But, indeed, I don't know how it could have happened as I always lock all the windows in every ward.
-Well, things happen. She had been running the worst stage of schizophrenia for the last three weeks. You shouldn't worry, - and doctor Andrae F. Harrison crossed out something in his note-book with a pen reminding a finger in its form. - By the way, what's for breakfast
today?
-Cauli-flower, as usually.
(c) Eugenia Masourova (1978-1998)
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