A good girl Sasha. Lexi. Alexandra. I’m braiding her soft golden hair and quoting Barto: “While a Moscow girl has two braids, Uzbek girl has twenty-five…” Most probably she doesn’t understand what I’m saying, but she clearly likes the sound of my voice. Sometimes I sing to her. And on one occasion or another I blurt lines “Alexandra, Alexandra! This is our home. We became its dome. Look it in the face…” instead of a lullaby. And she would look with those big greyish-blue eyes framed with a veil of pointed eyelashes at the space that is her ward: the ceiling… one wall… another one… The head of her iron bed is right next to a huge floor-to-ceiling window that overlooks the hospital yard. People occasionally walk past it or sit on a bench opposite the window.
I saw those windows from outside. If not for box numbers, it’d look like a solid ground glass wall with benches in equal distance from each other right opposite it.
I witnessed one scene yesterday: an elderly man was sitting sideways to the glass and talking on the phone to a woman visible in a little opening in the wall. The opening wasn’t designed that way by the engineers or construction workers, and it is not the only one there. In actuality, those are areas of the ground window with the coating carefully and diligently peeled off by family- and homesick patients. They tried their best at getting rid of this barrier thus creating a little transparent opening in a large ground glass wall. It looks somewhat like a frozen window in a trolleybus with a little penny-like gap – ice melted by a passenger’s breathing.
Sasha’s box has its own opening too. But no one is going to come up to it. Sasha lives in an orphanage. Actually, she mostly moves between hospitals because of her developmental issues that just don’t give her spare time to return back to the orphanage. She has no interest in looking outside, and she wouldn’t be able to see anything or anyone regardless. It’s simply a source of daylight in her case. Sasha enjoys looking at this simple light though.
As she wakes up in the morning, she stretches her neck with a too large for her body IVC filter in it in pursuit of that light behind her bed. The length of her neck and a tracheostoma won’t let her throw her head that far back, so the child instinctively opens her mouth trying to stretch her head as well.
It’s easier in the evening time when four square lights shine bright white light down from the ceiling. Then it’s easy and she doesn't have to move at all. She can simply stare at the ceiling lamps, moving from one to another as if in a hopscotch game. Sasha can play this game for hours before the lights dim. And then there’s only a steady stream of warm light that comes from an open door to the portal, and then to the hallway of a former infectious disease floor.
Oftentimes people pop in that doorframe: doctors, nurses, techs, canteen workers… No one knows for sure whether Sasha sees anything but light. Maybe she notices silhouettes when they stand between her and her main object of interest – light. It’s difficult to explain, but it seems like she sees me. Her playful pupils seem to stop for a fraction of a second, her inner scanner reads my vibe, and the girl dissolves into a radiant smile.
Her face is emotionless most of the time, and what you see is a certain type of tranquility, or rather detachment from the outside world. And then, suddenly, but oftentimes just as she wakes up, her face glows with unbound happiness. Her already large eyes get even larger and Sasha glances at the same walls, ceiling and opening in the wall with unabashed delight. This tiny human needs so little to be happy. Just self-awareness, warmth and light.
There are times when I’m extremely worried for her. Sometimes you forget that it’s a little child in front of you with how much cosmic anguish her face captures. The soft pink of her serenity would give place to the redness of pain and despair. And a howl! A howl from a nightmare in daylight, a soundless cry that would transform into the sound of screeching teeth. And then just one hot tear would get stuck in the tail of her eye. I would touch it with my fingers, wipe it off and whisper: “Sasha… Lexie… Sugar, it’s all right…” She would get still, tuned into the sound of my voice and the feeling of my touch at her temple. And then her face would morph back into detachment.
There’s no way to avoid thinking that she is the impersonation of Heaven and Hell in one person when you look at her. Her slender arms are bent in an unnatural angle with skin both blue and yellow after never-ending blood draws. Her beautiful tiny fingers flap fitfully sometimes and remind me of a birdling fallen down on the ground with its feathers stuck together. A youngling angel.
Birdlings that fall out of their nests don’t have a future, and so does she. Kids like her live as long as they are taken care of, as long as they are children. Like real life Tamagotchis – fully dependent on the will of those who take responsibility over their life. They never ponder on timeless questions of “What do I live for?” and “What is the meaning of life?” just because most of them won’t ever reach an age when people ask these questions of themselves.
But grown-ups do ask these questions, and also answer them in a sinister, brutal and cynical manner.
When I started my job as a schoolteacher, one of my veteran colleagues told me: “Don’t try to teach everything to everyone. It’s impossible! If you reach just one student and teach them something during your lesson – you had completed your mission.”
Something makes me think that the mission of these kids is to give adults a lesson. And if just one adult who had a life that devastated and bittered them becomes a little kinder, slightly more merciful, a touch humbler – then the life mission of such child is completed.
“Good girl” was the first thing I was told when they introduced Sasha to me. And I heard the same “good girl” from many different people over this time that I took care of Sasha – a youngling angel. Her mission has already been completed, but it doesn’t make me less sad.