Letters from Moscow: A Soul's Journey of Love

By Elena Veronica Hall

Letters from Moscow: A Soul’s Journey of Love is a gripping, heartrending tale about the bounds of human love, empathy, and compassion.

A young woman loses her faith in God and humanity after suffering the tragic deaths of three close people in her life. Embittered by grief and the circumstances of her struggling lot as a server and caregiver for her ailing mother, she aims to change her future through a Faustian bargain with a much older man. Ignoring the moral implications of such a perilous path to success and comfort, she takes her studies abroad to St. Petersburg, Russia, where she attends a university to gain her PhD.

When almost in grasp of her goal, Exillien’s soul is tested as tragedy strikes her life again after witnessing the scene of a brutal murder involving her host family. Hoping to escape the trauma of that incident, and refusing to help, she flees to Moscow to resume her studies at another university. Upon landing in her new environment, she is suddenly plagued by a mysterious illness. Stopped in her tracks by fate, she begins to recount the story of her life through soul-baring letters to a man with whom she has fallen hopelessly in love. Through deep introspection, she reveals the tragic events that closed her heart against the Lord and her fellow man, along with her innermost secrets.

Grappling with vertigo and her newfound fragility by herself in the busy city of Moscow, she finds empathy in her encounters with the Russian people with whom she develops an enduring kinship. Her spiritual awakening and redemption come when she finds the courage to face her fears and transcends her impossible love. Cleansed by Christ’s compassion and a new vision, the beauty of her soul is revealed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9781638445272

Book preview

Part One

The Letters

March, early twenty-first century, Moscow

My dear beloved Makar Alekseevich Devushkin,

I hope you don’t mind my calling you that—it’s one of my favorite Dostoevskian characters, one long forgotten, or never even heard of, but one that you embody in many ways for me. Besides, I don’t dare write down your real name, or anyone else’s, in my private bible of secret thoughts, for that wouldn’t be beautiful and just. And things should be beautiful and just, don’t you think? I’ve been lying here pondering on the state of my world, wondering if there is any hope for it. But all I see now is a spinning ball of death and destruction. Oh, why can’t the warfare and the murders stop for a minute? Why can’t the cruelty, the deceit, and exploitation end for a while? Thieving and scheming should come to a halt for at least a few crucial seconds! Yet that rarely happens in this world. The flags of truth and beauty don’t ever seem to take hold in the slippery mire that is humanity, and we must march on with bloody boots through the foggy, boggy abyss that separates us from those two elusive words: truth and beauty. Why must we constantly swim through a polluted sea of ugliness and evil; a sea of greed, arrogance, and ignorance; of treachery and subterfuge; of theft and schadenfreude; of great riches for few and poverty for most? These seem to be the keys to survival on this warring, whoring planet called Earth.

Yet, for a short while, I saw a beacon of hope when I met you, my dear Makar Alekseevich. Suddenly, unexpectedly, a shining lighthouse beamed brightly through the Molotov cocktail-tainted mist of my life. All at once, the warm glow of a kind and wonderful person poured over me. You were looking at me with such bright and compassionate eyes! No one had ever looked at me so tenderly. No one had ever held such pure empathy in their eyes for me. Oh, dear Makar, my heavenly Prince Myshkin, my innocent one, my first fruit—the one I never plucked, you have such magnetic, emotive eyes! In an instant, they conveyed secret volumes to mine, downloading centuries of benevolence and light to my own two holes of darkness. Waves of some kind of ineffable cosmic power washed over my body and soul, and I became transfixed by the welcoming warmth in your beautiful smile, which kindly flashed my way once or twice. It was the smile of a father, a brother, a husband, a best friend—someone who knew all my secrets. Yes, it was as if you knew about each one of my deadly sins, my humiliations, my failures, and loved me just the same.

I am ashamed to admit it, but I played a little trick on you back then—to see if those magnificent eyes were actually looking at me, or in fact at someone else behind me. One day, I sat in a completely different place, way in the back of our classroom, out of view. As the clock on the wall struck past the start of our lesson, I noticed you surveying the classroom, and then landing upon the empty seat where I usually sit. You then waited a few minutes longer, shuffled through some papers in your briefcase, talked to some students in the front row, delaying the start of our lesson. At exactly seven minutes past, I slid off my grandmother’s noisy charm bracelet and placed it on my desk, as I always did for our class, for I never wanted to miss a word of your lectures. It was then I saw your eyes begin to dart around the room, carefully searching each row, one by one, and then the instant they fell upon mine, you began our lesson with a shy, embarrassed smile. That was the happiest moment of my life—the moment I fell completely, utterly, and fatally in love with you, Makar Alekseevich Devushkin! You see, no one like you had ever searched for me before, no one like you had sought me out before, or ever cared whether I was in any place or not. And no one like you, in my whole life, had ever looked at me so affectionately, so lovingly when they found me. Oh, what a joy that was for me, for I am someone accustomed to dirty looks or unfriendly gazes from people when this body meets the street, as if I were some kind of wild tigress on the loose for some prey. I usually get leers from men or sneers from women, never love and empathy.

But you, my temperate, gentle friend, do not look at me that way. You don’t see me as a seductress, because you are one who would never cross the ever-beckoning line of temptation. You could have. I made it easy for you. You were suffering. I was suffering. I felt a deep, unspoken pathos in your gaze, and in some unfathomable way, you answered the emptiness and loneliness lurking in mine. We traded the story of our lives and fates through magical invisible waves that passed silently to and from our eyes. And through our eyes, we had a deep connection to each other. Through our eyes, we wanted to run into each other’s arms for a few moments of comfort and love. Surely, that is not such an evil thing, loving someone silently and invisibly?

Yes, it’s true. I wanted you for myself at that very moment. I wanted to steal you from whoever had precious you in their life. Eventually, I tried to seduce you by every means a woman has, especially my female brain, that gift from Eve, a brain so different from Adam’s. And yes, you received me, in your own special way, but you never gave in to my seduction. You already knew my perfumed plan, my delicately woven web of feminine allure. You knew how to handle the voodoo of human oxytocin glue that holds it all together until the moment of coupling arrives.

Yet, no matter how the passion boiled up in our blood that day, no matter how much we both needed a long, soothing embrace, and a sweet enduring kiss, you resisted our union with all of your might. You held yourself back from the fateful snare of my womanly wiles, my ready breasts, my willing hips. And I would have even used my virginity—had I that to entice you with. Yes, imagine! I would have used even that. How I wanted to give that one unstained part of me to you, Makar Alekseevich, and only to you, but it was stolen from me. This world stole it from me. It soiled me. I wanted, more than anything, to have given you my innocence, the only true gift I had to give anyone, the only part of me that wasn’t tainted by this wicked thing called life. But you would never have taken that from me. You would never even touch me, except for a kindly handshake of friendship. You always remained on your sacred ground, a shining knight of virtue. You did not cross over the precarious bridge of forbidden love that stood between us. You never wavered for an instant.

Yes, you were steadfast and true to your beautiful heart, and especially to all those who love and depend upon you. And while you never left the fortress that guards your shining soul, its light shone on me through the iron gate that separates someone like you from someone like me. You gave me a graceful blessing, instead of a tawdry affair. You gave me pure love and understanding, instead of surreptitious sex. And you did it gently, and affectionately, sparing me the cold dagger of rejection with a warm and tender look into my eyes. You saved me, my gentle, humble, loving friend. You saved me from taking another soul down with me into the burning pit of hell, where I now know I am surely going one day.

Yes, my beloved Makar Alekseevich, we could have enjoyed our portion of the delicious bliss that forbidden love promises. We could have filled our bodies’ dream of uniting in the wild ecstasy of wanton lust, if only for a few stolen moments. Oh, how thrilling that would have been for us, how rapturous and fiery a communion would have ensued with someone like you and me. No one would have known. We could have nursed the pleasure of that secret rendezvous in our hearts forever. But, no, you had to be beautiful and just! You thwarted the tsunami of our love with a handshake of unfathomable strength and temperance. You breasted the rushing current of unbridled lust like a great ship through a turbulent tide. What kind of unearthly power do you possess that can resist unstoppable human passion? Yet, you did, my dear Makar Alekseevich, you resisted, you prevented our coupling with all of your might. You saved me that day. You saved both of us!

Oh, my elegant friend, if only Adam could have resisted Eve’s folly that fateful day—the day she doomed the human race! What if he had simply told her, No, my love, don’t eat the fruit of that forbidden tree! Yes, it’s bright and shining, but it’s rotten inside and filled with poison. It’s been tainted by the Serpent of Death. It’ll ruin our lives forever. What if they had simply thrown it down before Eve swallowed the worm that begat the rest of us, the worm of the perennial purveyor of death and destruction? What if they both had stayed away from that wretched tree as they were warned? How different would life on earth have been then? Where would the human race be today if our first mother had not succumbed to the virus of evil that lurks in our blood? Generation after generation we remain prisoners of the snake that lead us astray; the master of our fatal flaws has us forever in bondage. Yes, we have raised our heads above what we call wild animals, but we never seem to outgrow the monstrous beast that left its mark upon us. Wild animals kill on instinct for food, territory, and survival; we kill for pleasure, power, revenge, and gain. We grow larger and smarter brains, but we never seem to shake off our most primitive and uniquely human traits: self-gratification, greed, and bloodlust.

Oh, my dear and gentle friend, what wonderful things could we—the great Homo sapiens!—have done had we not fallen prey to the demons in our brains? What shining cities could we have built without bloodshed, strife, enslavement, and fear of one another? What further great heights could we have reached in science, physics, engineering, mathematics, medicine, literature, architecture, and the fine and gracious arts of music, poetry, and dance without killing each other? What wondrous achievements could we have attained with the gifts of our many cultures? How many billions of wonderfully talented human beings could we have filled our world with then? What far-flung places in the universe could we have flown to then? How many worlds could we have graced and enlightened with our vast benevolent knowledge, generosity, and love?

But no, we are not destined for true and lasting greatness. We are doomed to a self-created prison on this godforsaken planet. We have been cast out into the cold, black void of space, precariously spinning on a forgotten arm of a distant galaxy, far away from the more vibrant parts of the universe, whose glories we may never see—all because we are natural-born killers and destroyers, who will never move beyond what we inevitably do: wreak havoc, war, loot, rape, pillage, and kill. We remain stuck forever in the cobweb of Lenin’s wicked dream for us: One step forward, two steps backward. We remain Rosa’s little plants, the willing masses, yearning to be herded, classified, and molded for this evil purpose or that. We so easily fall into these terrible self-destructive traps. We are so swiftly seduced and enslaved, and then we seduce and enslave, and kill one another when we finally get the upper hand in revolutions. And yet, we never understand that the blood and flesh of the diverse peoples of our earth don’t mean anything to anyone except human beings, and Him, the mysterious master of the universe, who supposedly created us in His image. Oh, when will my fellow man stop killing my fellow man! When will we hold each other’s hands instead of chopping them off?

We create great civilizations and cultures, only to sink back into the barbarism and slavery that helped build them in the first place. We construct mathematically perfect pyramids with massive stone blocks, only to deface and strip them as material for lesser structures. We carve impossibly exquisite statuary and temples from the hardest, most enduring stone, only to hack them down to bits of rubble a few years down the road. And the destruction continues unabated in the twenty-first century! Where are the Twin Towers that shone brightly over New York City?—those modern Towers of Babel, a triumph of human endeavor and achievement, a mecca of international trade and commerce in one of the most industrious areas of the globe? Where are they now? There’s not even a trace of their former glory that buzzed the heavens with human energy. Reduced to ashes in minutes, they are but cinders on the wind, along with the souls that comprised them. Everything went flying in tiny pieces to the winds, including one of my few good friends. Where is she now? There is nothing left but a gaping hole of running tears.

And art, that gracious human craft—one of the few enduring human endeavors—what happens to our art? Eventually, it lies in pieces and tatters, half-burnt, smashed, disfigured, or hidden away for decades in someone’s private collection. Why is it when the benevolent efforts of man’s soul approach unforeseen pinnacles in beauty and excellence, it suddenly deflates, degrades, and becomes base and lurid? The great winged Nike of Samothrace, whose marble gown once fluttered gracefully in an invisible wind for millennia, now greets thousands of people every day at the Louvre without her head! Where are the Venus de Milo’s graceful arms? The calm and composed, enigmatic Mona Lisa must stare through the centuries behind bulletproof glass, lest someone shoot guns at her! What drives the destruction of brilliant human creation? Suddenly, out of the blue, someone gets it into his head to take a hammer to Michelangelo’s irreplaceable Pieta, and disfigure the Virgin Mary! Where is the noble nose of the great Sphinx of Egypt? Gone are the Buddhas of Bamiyan that silently watched over the cradle of civilization for more than a thousand years. Ancient Palmyra, a once flourishing city that could have taught us so much about humanity, lies in irreparable ruins. Suddenly deemed offensive, even the ruins have been blown to bits in the twenty-first century—the time of our highest technological achievements! What secrets of the universe could these treasures have told us before they were obliterated? And will we blow up the pyramids when they get in our way, or loot the Hermitage or the Louvre of their treasures too? What right do we have to deface or destroy such magnificent things?

And literature, what of our literature? We write scriptures and tomes and tomes of ingenious poetry, grand stories and deep, mind-bending philosophies, only to throw them on a heap and burn them to cinders when the current political or religious tide has turned. Treasures of past knowledge and wisdom are deemed heretical on a whim, then treated with disdain and subject to the pyres of revolution. The great library of Alexandria, a vast storehouse of ancient knowledge, which may have held the keys to our past and future development, was systematically purged of its entire contents. It took months and months to burn its vast stores and records of hard-won human endeavor. Yet no one stopped the destruction of such precious objects. Why did we do such terrible things? Why must we destroy the sacred secrets of our past?

We free, unchained peoples create fair and just laws—even perfect constitutions!—only to denigrate, subvert, manipulate, or simply cast them aside for the right price of power and circumstance. We amass millions of people under intricate organizational systems of government, only to repress, oppress, and murder them en masse when it suits us. Whole cultures, and all of their gifts and creations, have been diluted to obsolescence by someone’s new idea of going forward. Good ideas are deemed outdated before they can even spread and enlighten, while bad ideas are resurrected in haste with even more disastrous consequences than the first time around. We invent mind-boggling, expansive technologies and machines, but ultimately use them for evil and deadly purposes. We have ungodly weapons, missiles, and bombs all over the world that can obliterate millions of people in a split second.

We can cure diseases, repair sick hearts, and transplant organs, yet put a prohibitive price on human wellness, and then sell human body parts like commodities on a stock exchange. We declare human rights, and boast and reward ourselves handsomely for such lofty ideals, then look the other way while women and children are raped and murdered in a place that conflicts with our interests and agendas of the moment. We close our eyes and sit on our hands while arms and legs and heads are lopped off during raging battles, if there is a stake in a resource-rich land. We flagellate ourselves in the name of religions; we cut, maim, and disfigure ourselves and our children to please some unseen divinities. How many Abels have been stabbed in the back by their brothers? How many sons of Abraham have been sacrificed on stone altars? How many virgins have been thrown into volcanoes? How many innocents have been burned at the stake as witches or heretics, because they didn’t agree with the status quo? How many so-called infidels have been murdered or enslaved for the sake of a creed? We tortured and crucified a man who taught love and forgiveness, who warned us against our evil ways, yet we drove spikes in His hands and feet for that! What kind of rapacious creatures are we?

Look at the recorded history of the human race. It’s nothing but organized murder and mayhem from its very inception. We wreak more havoc on the planet than inclement weather, volcanoes, or earthquakes. In our hubris and blind ambition, we split the atom and unleashed its deadly power all over the world. We have polluted our lands and poisoned our seas, and never looked back at the wounds we inflicted and the damage we did.

We love money and things more than people. We kill more of our children than we bring into the world. We take pains to mourn and honor our dead, yet wage war and shed more blood on another killing field five minutes later. Century after century there is battle after battle somewhere on this planet. We love to kill each other. We are good at killing one another. We kill myriad creatures of the earth without ever a thought of their lives, and what they might bring to the world. We kill them for food and for sport, and wear their skins on our feet for shoes. We love the taste of blood. We are the cannibals of the universe, cursed, warped, and stunted from birth with a nefarious nature. We have been infected with faulty genes at the very origin of our creation by a faulty creator, who has no intention of seeing the human race at peace with itself and flourishing. We are but playthings, dolls, toy soldiers, perpetually directed toward self-destruction in the never-ending game that serves the pleasure of some mad immortal being.

We are all born to live in a state of constant self-created chaos, where your own mother could love you, abort you, or torture you for the rest of your life; where your father could rear you, abandon you, abuse you, or even throw you off a bridge when you got in the way of his pleasure. Even priests and rabbis, mullahs and pastors, those so-called messengers of God, can’t be trusted. And despite our great uniting institutions, we don’t truly want peace and prosperity among peoples and nations. We only want the free champagne and caviar that’s sure to be served at the endless but fruitless conferences. We make war with peoples and nations—we don’t unite them. We want what someone else has, and we want to take it from them in the easiest and most lethal way possible. Better yet, get someone else to do it for us so we don’t have to soil our hands with the blood. And even though great revolutions are sparked in the name of democracy and freedom, this never truly becomes the state of affairs. Social justice and equality for all is merely a catchy slogan for the signs and banners, along with the clubs and guns and knives that are sure to come with it.

The truth is that we don’t actually want others to be free to succeed and thrive on their own. We want to control them. We’ve got to control them! We’ve got to cut them down before they get too good at their trade so that the apprentice may never surpass the master-craftsman who taught him. They’ve got to be grouped into classes and types and colors and skills. We want to keep them squeezed into little boxes and then order them around like automatons. We want to enslave them! We don’t really want to share our good fortune and security with one another. We want it all for ourselves. We want to pile up our silver and gold, generate great wealth in banks, gain interest on it, then let it rust away in vaults, or gamble it all away, and then start anew with someone else’s money. It’s always a zero-sum game, always some type of Ponzi scheme to come out on top while someone else loses below us. Someone somewhere always has to lose so we can gain more and more.

We take every human virtue and twist it for profit. We place profit before protection. Everything’s an opportunity to gain more for less. Everything in this world is corrupt. And charity? What is charity exactly? A chance to throw a gala, wear fancy evening clothes, walk a red carpet, pose for pictures, eat more rich food, drink more champagne, collect a coveted award, and pay less taxes all in the name of the downtrodden, those poor unfortunates who can’t have those things, because we want them for ourselves. Is there anyone who truly gives away a great deal of his fortune without reward, recognition, or glory? Is there anyone who is actually willing to pay a greater share of taxes on their fortune for the sake of others less fortunate? The richer we get, the more we want—and the more we are afraid of losing it. It is not enough to be a billionaire! We must find ways to make sure no one else gets the chance to climb that high, to wield such godly power. All that money and the power it breeds are never enough. We must rule! We must become gods ourselves! We must now help the little people, those poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Only, they mustn’t truly be free, the so-called working class, that is, the blue-collars and the as yet unbuttoned white-collars, who still have to go out and make a living every day so that we can have it all. No, they need to stay in the rat race. After all, someone has to work while we are enjoying our riches, and they’ve got to work cheaply for us, because we wouldn’t want them to ever have what we now enjoy. Oh, no, that wouldn’t do, for then things would be equal, then they would be exactly like us.

And so, having reached the pinnacle of monetary success, we immediately set about clever ways to enslave and keep others impoverished, simply because we don’t want anyone else to succeed as we did. No one else can ever be as special as we are. How many millionaires and billionaires truly wish their fellow man the same good fortune? Who is truly willing to say, I have enough for ten lifetimes, let me help and teach others to achieve the same good fortune I enjoy. Everyone should live as good as I do. No, we can’t have that kind of equality. It’s better to keep them in the dark. After all, someone has to be poor enough to have to work in the bowels of our far-flung factories. Then we’ll find someone to let them know just how bad they have it, and how, for a percentage of their hard-earned salary, we can make it better for them—but they’ve got to pay their dues. And then, if they get too numerous, we’ll have to start thinning out the herds somehow. Yes, then we’ll have to start thinking about how to get rid of them and replace them with another group of poor unfortunates—not unlike those carved into the rocks of ancient Babylonia, lugging heavy sacks of someone else’s gold up a hill for them. This is the bitter truth of the human race, and we’ve got to face it.

Our unending infliction of pain and suffering; our cruelty to one another never stops for a second. The wheel of death never stops turning on human flesh. The charnel house of humanity goes on and on, century after century, millennium after millennium all over the planet. Our self-idolatry, self-loathing, and self-annihilation are inescapable and ineluctable. No matter how hard we try, we can never be free from those rotten seven deadly sins that haunt us at every turn. Yes, envy, wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, and gluttony seem to infect our bodies at birth; they lurk in our blood; they are stamped on our very DNA. What kind of beings are we anyway? We are a violent breed. Who made such abominable creatures? He should be damned! We should all be damned!

But no, not you, my dear Makar Alekseevich. You are not a killer or a destroyer of beautiful things. You are not selfish and cruel. You are generous and kind. You are firm, but measured. You are sensitive, but strong. You are brilliant and wise, and freely share your knowledge and wisdom. Yes, my love, I saw you in your glory that day. You stood tall in your armor of beauty and virtue. You shone like a star in your nobility and rectitude. You bade me goodbye and good luck in my travels, while your eyes welled up with an unspeakable pain. How hard that was for you, my darling Makar, to break the spell of our love that day; to stop the speeding comet of human desire is not an easy thing.

I’ve never known a man, before or since, who could be that strong. Yet you had the strength to stop our predestined communion dead in its tracks. You did it for me, for us, and for the world. You took the hardest step a man can take. You held fast against the burning flames of passion that were consuming our bodies and souls at the time. You loved me that much. You were true to your wife, your life, and your destiny. Oh, how lucky she is, the one that has you, and how lucky the world is for someone like you, my darling. No one had ever looked at me so tenderly, so sweetly, with such genuine love and affection. No one had ever said, But I know you worked hard. For that, you are the love of my life, my one true friend, my Lamb, my Lord, my only guide on this wicked world called earth. You saw my very soul, and all the dirty sins upon it, yet you never spurned me.

You, Makar Alekseevich, are the meekest and most humble person I know. Yes, you are meek and humble in the true sense of those words before they were disdained as undesirable human qualities. Yet you are not weak, nor a craven coward that runs away from the demands of love and honor. You are the brave and noble knight on the tall white horse that faces the enemies of the human heart with mercy and empathy. There is no arrogance, no conceit, nor any malice in you. You would never bring shame upon me, yourself, or anyone else. You can love deeply and truly in a pure and generous way. You are my heavenly paladin, my sweet and honorable Prince Myshkin. My Jesus.

You, my spotless champion, are, therefore, the only one in the world I could tell this story to, because I know, deep in my heart, that you would never judge me. You would look at me attentively and patiently, with your deep, soulful eyes, and your loving countenance, and I would tell you all the things I could never tell anyone else. So, in a sense, you will be my priest, my secret confessor, my own Father Zosima—the bearer of what’s on my wretched soul, the tainted soul of a Varvara Dobroselova, a Nastasya Filippovna, a veritable Grushenka. You may not even know who these characters are, but they perfectly define me, for I, like they, do not own my human soul anymore. I sold it to the devil. My serpent has destroyed it, and now I am doomed to walk my quadrillion kilometers in the dark, only I can’t even walk a straight line anymore…

Evening

Hello again, my darling Makar Alekseevich,

I grew weak and must have lost consciousness over my notebooks. I also must have breathed in a lot of cold air while I was out, as my throat is parched and my lungs are aching. I remember feeling very disoriented for a few minutes, as if I had left my room and were walking along a dark and lonely corridor that had no end. Then a sudden flash of bright light came over my eyes and woke me up. I’ve had some rest since then and feel a lot stronger now. I see that I’ve written quite a dramatic soliloquy on these pages, a tirade of the ills of this world. I’m sorry I went on like that, but lately I can’t seem to control my thoughts or emotions anymore—and that’s not like me at all, for I have always been in total control of myself. I never talk like that. I am actually a very private person. I never share my thoughts with anyone. No one knows how I honestly feel or what goes on in my head. I keep the fortress of my heart closed to the world, but suddenly the floodgates have flung open, and I am spilling out all over the place. Oh, what has happened to me, Makar Alekseevich? Look at what’s on these pages! It’s craziness! Why should I care about this world at all? No one else does.

I didn’t mean to wax so depressingly philosophical, but I am in dire straits, my dear friend, and I don’t know what to do. For the first time in my life, I feel utterly helpless, weak, and stupid. You see, I thought I could escape the fate of defeat—avoid that ignominious admission of being a complete failure—by coming to Russia a second time. I thought that by daring myself, with my iron will, I could push through the horrors of what happened last year in St. Petersburg, and get on with the business at hand: getting on top of the world instead of staying at the bottom of it. With a fresh new start in Moscow, I could block everything out and concentrate on my personal goals, as I always have. I would finish my studies with honors. I would go on to do what I have planned for so long. Nothing would stop me. Nothing would get in my way. I would get everything I ever wanted and more. But there’s no chance of that now. Now that life, and even life as I know it, is over. I don’t know what will become of me. And worst of all, those frightening dreams, those fiery visions I used to get when I was younger, are haunting me once again, and I can’t seem to escape them.

Once again, these visions have come flooding back to my brain at night, and I can’t block them out like before. Oh, how they frighten and unnerve me. They are fantastical, terrifying things. First come these fierce, penetrating shafts of pure white light. They are so bright that they almost burn your eyes with their intensity, yet you can’t turn away from them. It’s as if someone is forcibly holding your eyes open and the light keeps flooding into them, burning and painful. Then, suddenly, three very tall, flaming figures loom up before me accusingly. They are glowing and flowing around my bed, pointing and poking at me with long, fiery fingers. They dance around my room in a rainbow of bright, luminescent colors, prodding me here and there with those flaming fingers. Oh, it’s torture, these visions, these crazy dreams. What are they? I thought they were over with, that it was all in the past, but now they’ve come back and won’t let me sleep—and I’ve got to sleep. I’ve got to study for my classes. I’ve got to excel on my final exams, or I won’t be able to keep my scholarships or the job at the Capitol that Kuzma promised to arrange for me. I must get myself together at once, but something won’t let me, and now I am not only terribly ill, but actually I have been incapacitated somehow. I have been stopped dead in my tracks!

I’ve suddenly become very dizzy and nauseated all the time. I’ve never been sick like this before. I have always conquered every flu, every virus, every wound I’ve ever had. I don’t understand it. I’ve always had rock-steady nerves of steel no matter what the circumstance. I’ve lived through everything. No matter how perilous the pit was beneath me, I could walk a high wire over it with ease. I could take any kind of punishment, suffer any debasement, and never lose my balance or sight of my goals. But now, now I can’t even walk three steps without stumbling like a drunk or feeling faint and sick to my stomach. I have fainted dead away several times since I landed in Moscow, and now I have a constant fear of falling unconscious in the street. And the worst part is that these fainting attacks, or syncope episodes as the doctor calls them, can happen at any time. I have absolutely no control over them, but I can sense one coming on, and start to panic. All of a sudden, the very life force drains out of my body, and I feel like I’m going to die right there on the spot. And when I get up my nerve and venture forth into the world, I feel the ground slipping out from beneath me. Everything under my feet feels sort of spongy, slippery, and nebulous, as if I’m walking along the melting ice of a frozen river, and then when I am about to pass away, someone catches me, or comes along with a glass of juice or tea to revive me.

My strong sense of self that I have always been able to count on has completely vanished overnight. My great, faithful self-confidence, self-belief, self-reliance, and self-sufficiency have all been suddenly stripped away from me. Suddenly, I’m a piteous heap of frazzled nerves. I see a pale and frightened stranger in the mirror. I’m a ghoul-eyed, shattered wreck. I’ve become tentative and obsequious. And although I am only twenty-seven, I feel like I am one hundred years old. My face has a deathly pallor, and my hands are bluish, veiny, and thin. And I’m cold all the time. I’m a wretched mess of a person. I don’t know what’s happened to me, Makar Alekseevich. If only you were here to save me, to hold my hand and tell me it will all be okay. What’s more, now my memory has started failing me. I can’t remember the simplest thing someone tells me. I can’t seem to think clearly for long without becoming woozy and confused. The more I try to study my Russian lessons, the worse it gets. What is this? Is it some kind of punishment, the release of some unspent karma, some vengeful demon out to get me? I’m falling apart, Makar Alekseevich! I feel so incredibly foolish and stupid. I’ve got to get myself together somehow. I’ve got so much to do. I can’t stop now. I’m almost there. Everything was going so perfectly. Everything was falling into place. Oh, God, what’s happening to me, I’m unravelling! What has been done to me? What have I done to myself!

It’s my fault. Yes, perhaps it’s all my fault. There, I admit it. Perhaps that’s what this is—bad karma, because I didn’t want to help someone, didn’t have time to help someone, didn’t want to make time to help someone. But why should I want to help a murderer? I am so mixed-up. I am so confused. I keep going back and forth. I should have tried to help him. I should have made an effort. I could have at least testified on his behalf. I could have told them what was going on. Babushka begged and begged me to help: For little Dasha’s sake, she pleaded, don’t leave her without a father too, but I was angry and wouldn’t listen to her. I didn’t care. I should have told them everything I saw all those months. I should have stood up for Kostya, but I wouldn’t do it at the time. I’d had enough, and I was actually scared and totally thrown off-balance for the first time in my life.

You see, I was very angry at Kostya, angry at the bouts of drunkenness, at his slamming his big fist down on the table all the time. And when he yanked out a fistful of Nastya’s hair that fateful New Year’s night, when he threw the little kitten against the wall, that was the last straw for me. I couldn’t take it anymore: the arguments, the chaos, the unspent violence that hung in the air, like a bomb waiting to explode. And then all the blood I saw that terrible night. Oh, that blood was too much to bear! There was so much of it when I walked into that room. It was all over the floor and on the walls. And then I stepped in it and got it on my boots. Imagine, Makar Alekseevich. I got Russian blood on my boots! Jesus! How could that happen? I know that all of this sounds crazy, my dearest, like some wild nightmare, only it’s all true, so horribly true. How I wish this was all a dream, just a bad dream that I could wake up from, my darling. But it did happen, and now I can’t go back and fix it. I haven’t the strength or the will. I feel drained of my very life force. In fact, I don’t feel alive anymore. Truly, I feel like I might die at any moment. It’s as if I am hovering between life and death, and I keep swinging back and forth from darkness to light, like a pendulum.

Oh, God, but what if I was wrong? What if I was wrong about Kostya? Was he but a man driven to madness, a jealous husband driven to insanity because of someone he loved, someone who could never love him? Could he truly do such a monstrous thing to someone he cherished? I thought I knew him, knew all the sweet things he had done for his Nastya. Could he truly carry out such an abominable deed, commit such an unspeakable crime? I don’t know. I really don’t know. Now he is incarcerated for the rest of his life because of my selfishness. And I made it ten times worse by running away and not testifying on his behalf. All right, yes, I could have helped him, but I wouldn’t do it. I was so annoyed at all the turmoil so close to my final exams that I lost my head and became very angry. I don’t know what came over me. I began to hate Kostya, hate him viscerally, hate them all, hate all Russians! They were getting in my way, and I was angry at that. I hadn’t felt such wrath since I was a young girl, the wrath I felt at that bastard who had harmed my beautiful sister.

And now, now I’ve let myself become weak and obsequious. I have turned into a sniveling weakling for the first time in my wretched life. I ran away, a selfish, craven coward, becoming all the things I despise in others. I let it happen. I let it all happen the way it did because I simply didn’t care anymore. I didn’t want to care. I don’t want to care about these people, these pitiful Russians and their tragic history filled with violence, death, and woe. They are not my responsibility. I don’t want to waste my time on other people’s problems. It wasn’t my business. I was in Russia to finish my studies, master the language, get my PhD, and move on. I had my own golden aspirations. It was all about me.

Besides, I had only caught a glimpse of Kostya holding Nastya’s body, which is what I stated at the inquest before I left. All I saw was an ugly, raging monster, dripping in blood. I simply didn’t know anymore—did I? Babushka and I were only a quarter of the way into the tiny basement flat when we saw Maxim at the other end of the room. He was tied to a chair with a heavy electric cord. His face was swollen and bloodied. What were we to think when we saw Maxim in that condition? His eyes were wide open and bulging with madness. His mouth was agape, lips split and oozing blood. He had a weird expression on his face, a sort of wonderment, mingled with great fear. An eerie light flickered in his frozen stare. I’ll never forget it. It was as if he had passed through the gates of hell itself, and the image of its infernal flames was now permanently reflecting in his eyes. I could tell that he was already insane at that moment. What did he see to put him in that state? What is the truth of this whole debacle? I told the truth, didn’t I, the truth as I saw it… I told them exactly what I saw that night. That’s all I needed to say—what I saw that night. That’s what I needed to do—tell them what I saw that night in St. Petersburg, tell them and get out, get out of Russia. But I came back. I needed to finish my studies, nothing would deter me from that goal. So I came to Moscow to finish my cherished plan, my golden dream, the only one I knew.

Oh, my dear friend, these thoughts keep coming into my head, and I don’t want to face them anymore. I thought I had blocked them out, but they keep coming back into my mind like pieces of a scary puzzle I don’t ever want to finish. The terror of that night keeps haunting me now. I thought I had put it all behind me—I’d be in Moscow, far enough away, and pick up my studies in a new university. I’d be engrossed in my lessons and lectures, and could forget about what happened back then. But the gruesome images of that night keep coming before my eyes now, and I’ve got to confess this to someone, to you, my dear friend. I’ve got to confess this, and move on, or else I am doomed.

When we walked through the door, we saw Kostya sitting on the floor in front of Maxim, cradling and rocking Nastya’s limp body in his arms. Her long, shapely legs were lying on the floor in an unnatural pose. Her pink satin sewing box was next to him with all its contents spilled out across the blood-soaked floor. All the little spools of brightly colored thread, the fancy thimbles, the whimsical animal pincushions, bits of shiny cloth, strings of tiny pearls, gold and silver sequins, all sorts of ribbons, tiny bows, and lacy frills were all scattered about the room. Each one, half glittering in the faint light, half drenched in pools of dark-red blood. Then we noticed little piles of something that looked like offal near some of the sewing items. We screamed from sheer horror as soon as we saw it.

Kostya suddenly caught sight of us and roared in Russian, You! Devils! Monsters! He then instantly dropped Nastya and flew up at us like a great bear. He raged at us like Frankenstein, throwing his blood-covered hands high up in the air and clenching his fists in rage. Anger, madness, and grief interplayed on his tortured face, hideously dripping with drool and tears as he beat at his huge chest. He kept pointing and screaming at Nastya’s limp body: Why? Why? For what? For what? What good did he ever do for you! Then he began whirling madly around the room, wailing and growling like a rabid animal at the top of his lungs, shouting out something I could not understand. Babushka kept screaming his name, begging him to calm down, but he didn’t seem to recognize us and raged and twirled about the room