“This is so wild!” Mila yelled, greening from ear to ear as she glanced at Alexander briefly, unwilling to take her eyes off the fierce landscape below.
Alexander smiled, nodding in agreement, although they were connected via an intercom headset with each other and with the helicopter pilot, the majesty of such wild beauty below demanded a silent awe. After some swooping sensations and bumps in the air, the world’s longest perennial water curtain appeared before them.
The water rushed into the void, raising an enormous cloud of dew. The strength and magnificence of the Smoke that Thunders, or Mosi oa Tunya as the natives called it, caused Mila and Alexander to put a momentary halt to their also raw reality: one relearning who she was, emerging from the abysmal void in her memory, and the other on a personal quest for a just path, a journey to redemption.
Witnessing such a majestic display in juxtaposition to their fragile human lives, moved them closer to each other. They held hands overpowered by the greatness in view as the helicopter lingered over the waterfall. A bright rainbow appeared, crowning the torrent, and both held their breath. Each refracted droplet forming the arc was a message, a love promise of peace sent to both.
The chopper descended to the Victoria Falls bridge. The strong currents of the Zambezi River falling into the waterfall seemed even more terrifying from up close.
“Do you have a death wish or what?” shouted Mila, climbing off to the bridge, her voice muffled by the helicopter’s rotor and the loud thundering water of the mighty Zambezi beneath. “If jumping off this bridge is how you want to end your days… I won’t stop you!”
“Right, you won’t stop me because you are jumping with me.” Alexander squeezed her hand with a wide side grin. “Together we’ll plunge 111 meters into the river, what do you say about that?”
“You might need an adrenaline fix, but I don’t,” she chirped while showing her passport as Isabelle Fiori to the border agents standing on the bridge uniting Zimbabwe and Zambia.
“Enjoy the most spectacular backdrop,” one of the bungee assistants said, welcoming them while letting the crew rig them up with protective body harnesses and pulleys for the ropes. “You may jump as you wish, head down, make flips…” instructed the assistant, double-checking the gear.
Mila and Alexander inched their way to the edge of the platform. They looked at each other, eyes wide opened, frightened, but neither would back down. They held hands, trembling and sweating. They were two people pushed on a journey neither of them had wanted to follow, forced to meet under questionable and even dangerous circumstances. And yet, they were two individuals with a deep yearning for love. The feelings Alexander harbored for Mila were ever so present, attempting to surface at every touch of her hand.
“Who are you Alexander Lyashenko?” Mila whispered, searching the answer in his eyes as the jumpmaster began the countdown:
“Five, four, three, two, one, jump!”
Mila and Alexander leapt from the railing headfirst, straight bodies and arms stretched out like birds gliding downwards. In a fraction of a second, overpowering lights enveloped Mila in a rush of adrenaline as everything around her trembled. She recognized the lights and shaking as if moving at a great speed. What do I need to see? She didn’t resist the experience.
Unlike the event in Hong Kong, Mila now waited to see why she was left in a small garden. She walked through the neat hedges of what she could tell were raspberry and blackcurrant bushes, followed by patches of strawberries. The breeze was gentle and fragrant as some bushes were in bloom. She stood for a moment to take things in; there were legumes and vegetable patches. How neat! I’d like one of these someday, Mila thought, while surveying the rest of the rectangular property, a tiny orchard. It was wreathed by apple, pear, cherry, and plum trees. Yes, I definitely want to have a garden house like this. Birds chirped in trees, before taking fly above her. She lowered her guard. The place was too idyllic to be dangerous. She peered in the old shack behind the house. There were gardening tools and harvested fruits. Why am I here? Is it part of my past? Did I used to live here?
Mila walked to the entrance of the house, her steps blending with the neighbors’ steady snipping of her garden shrubs and the traffic on a nearby road. She opened the door slowly. The space inside was mostly pastoral. She made her way past the few pieces of carved furniture, which seemed to be hundreds of years old, every piece for practical use only. There were paintings of hunting scenes on the walls she didn’t have the time to appreciate. She drifted towards the sound of voices in a room and dried book pages being flipped in another.
She stopped in a very narrow dining room where she found a boy seated at an old table, his back to her. She tiptoed around to study the scene. He was making his pencil fly over the notebook paper, glancing furtively to the thick book in hand. Mатематика. Russian—Mila recognized the language although she didn’t know it well. The book seemed bigger than the boy’s age and too advanced for his normal developmental capacity to solve the problems within its pages. He might have been eight or nine, with big brown eyes and light chocolate hair contrasting with his creamy, rosy skin.
The boy didn’t seem aware of her presence. He wiped his runny snot with the sleeve of his sweater while writing furiously. He glanced from time to time to the hallway leading to the room next to him. Mila followed the boy’s gaze, she saw a corner of the room with a stove and carved wooden cupboard. It was the kitchen, where a harsh male voice overpowered a soft female one. Mila disregarded them and stayed by the child. He seemed to be thinking so fast, skillful at what he was doing although he was so young. A flow of numbers, letters, and signs filled pages like expert coding on a computer screen. If not for the furrows on his forehead and his swollen, red eyes, Mila would have thought he was enjoying the activity. He moved on to the next page as quickly as he wrote the answer for the last problem, glancing at the hall again.
Mila sensed the boy’s urgency; an imminent danger was approaching. She kept on guard wondering about Time’s concessions, if he was in danger could she do anything about it? She had only the experience in Hong Kong to compare.
The man yelled from the kitchen something Mila couldn’t understand as a glass shattered on the floor. Then heavy, unsteady steps echoed in the hallway. The tall man with square shoulders and heavy hands entered the room. The boy turned to him with dread-filled eyes and said something that Mila interpreted as I’m almost done, Father!
The man narrowed his unsympathetic eyes to the pages he had snatched from the wincing boy. Then he slapped and gripped the boy’s arm, pointing at the error he found. The woman ran to her son’s aid but the father pushed her against the wall. The boy stifled his cry and got to work, glancing at his mother. He was too young to help her and she too scared to do anything else.
Mila gasped in shock, anger rising in her chest. She jumped to action, but she couldn’t move, she couldn’t bruise the man’s face as he had done to the child. She stumbled, confused, stopped by some powerful force. She wasn’t there to change the past.
“These exercises were too easy, Alexander, and you failed! You weren’t using your gray matter, were you?” shouted the man in accented European English, pouncing on his son. “Look me in the eye when I talk to you!” he screamed in the boy’s face.
“Yes, Father, I’ll do better!” Alexander answered, peering at the equations.
“Geniuses aren’t born, Alexander, but made! I will make a genius out of you even if I have to break you in the process. We have zero margin for failure. Do you understand? Now, keep working!”
“Yes, Father!” The boy began working frantically through the exercises.
The woman stood; one shaky hand covered her cry as tears rolled down her face. “I know your intention is good, but this is not the way to…”
The husband waved a hand to silence her and moved to the child. “I expect you to improve your time! You have twenty minutes left to finish!” he said, setting an old timer on the table. “Remember, if you fail, you won’t leave this room until you have learned the lesson.”
Mila wondered why they were speaking in English. Could it be in preparation for moving abroad? Work? Scholarship? Espionage? She studied the boy’s face. Ripe, bluish marks on his cheeks. She opened and closed her fists, her heart pounding in her chest.
“A genius isn’t born, but made!” repeated Alexander as an automaton. Mila watched him refocused his mind in a contest versus himself. She understood in the depths of her soul that he was racing against blows, against misery, against hunger, and against weariness. How can he function under such panic? He must have an innate ability for numbers. Mila wanted to wrap him in her arms and comfort his mother, but she now knew they wouldn’t feel her warmth.
The earth trembled; the blinding light captured her and moved her forward. She appeared in another unfamiliar but modern room covered with wallpaper of climbing ivy plants instead of the wooden walls in the Russian dacha.
Mila didn’t move from the corner where she had appeared, and from that vantage point she studied the boy on his bed. It was Alexander, although, he now was perhaps twelve years old. Arm covering his eyes, he ignored the rain slashing the window by his bed.
A door in the flat opened and closed. Mila heard the jingling of keys and the squeaking of a raincoat being hung.
“Sasha, I’m home!” a woman called, walking towards the room.
Mila recognized the beautiful woman with pink cheeks and wavy brown hair she had seen in the previous time trip. Alexander’s mother entered the room and sat at his side, her hand running through his hair.
“Sasha,” said the mother with so much tenderness and sadness in her voice. The two shared the same sparkly brown eyes, soft cheeks and full lips, unlike the pale man who terrorized them in the dacha.
Alexander’s eyes were red and his face bruised with his lower lip split and bloody. The beating must have been brutal. A few held-back tears escaped Mila’s eyes. These Time visits were more than she could witness.
“We haven’t risked leaving Russia and Viktor to exchange one abuser for another. Do you understand?” The woman whispered in English, the language of the land. She caressed Alexander’s injured cheeks and cleared his hair from his forehead.
Alexander ran the tip of his tongue through his split lip.
“We survived Viktor’s violent ways, who despite his bad methods, wanted you to be better than him. Of course, nothing justifies his behavior. We fled that life, Sasha, to start over. But it’s up to us to make this second chance work. You have a brilliant mind, and let me tell you this, not as your mother, but as a scientist, not all minds are made the same. Viktor didn’t beat you up into genius, you were born one. Those students at school don’t know what to do with a kid like you, years younger than them and so ahead of them. They might be intimidated, jealous…”
“Or they are simply awful, Mother!” Alexander answered, grabbing a fistful of the white down comforter on which he lay.
“Oh, Sasha, I’m sorry.” She held his hand and studied his bloody knuckles. The peeled skin showed he had tried to defend himself. She kissed her boy’s forehead. “You did well standing up for yourself.” The mother stroked his face ever so gently with the palm of her hand as if trying to absorb the pain while sealing every crack on her son’s soul and leaving it whole again. “We must go forward as best as we can, but don’t let your soul fill up with hate, Sasha, it will only destroy you and those around you. I’ll be right back!” She rose and stepped out of the room as gently as a shadow.
Mila couldn’t move from her corner or stop staring at Alexander. But she had to, her heart was breaking and she couldn’t comfort him. She wandered carefully around the simple apartment room. Thick volumes of scientific and classic literature were scattered by his bed and on the nightstand. Lego constructions were displayed on a work table neatly left as battle scenes. She imagined him letting his mind escape in epic wars and smiled. She at marvelled the miniature robot prototypes made with bolts, wires, plastic caps, and other rescued-from-the trash-objects, possibly made as a little child.
The mother returned to the room with a wet cloth and medicine. She sat down again beside Alexander and cleaned his wounds gently. “We have this opportunity for a new beginning, Sasha, let’s make it a great one, my strong boy.” She smiled reassuringly.
Alexander nodded.
“Very well then, this was the last time those wild beasts will attack you.” She gathered her first-aid kit. “Tomorrow I will make the necessary arrangements to send you to a better school, and if we can, to the best school in London. I’ll ask Masae Norfolk, my boss, if she could help us with the necessary recommendations, and of course, with a financial stimulus for the research I’m working on…” She smiled at him, looking ever so tenderly into his eyes.
“But Mother—” Alexander sat up.
“But nothing! With your brain power, my research work in Pharma-NorTech, we’ll be able to afford it.” She cradled her son’s face in her delicate hands. “One wise step in the right direction after another… steady, steady and you’ll see. Now, come help me prepare supper.” She kissed her son’s battered face.
Mila was overwhelmed with longing and understanding. As she stretched her hand to Alexander, even though he wouldn’t feel her touch, Time’s engulfing lights brought her back to the moment of the jump… five, four, three, two, one, jump!
Mila didn’t have time to arrange the chaos in her mind, she was falling weightless, free. It was exhilarating. Her chest expanded and contracted as if it was about to burst. When suddenly the jump was over. She bounced into awareness: the raging Zambezi river and the luscious green forest came into focus while they both bounced like yo-yos for a couple of times, until the recovery team appeared and set them back on the bridge.
Alexander and Mila faced each other dumbfounded by the leap of faith they had made. They were soaking wet from the splashing river water, but this didn’t seem to matter to either of them. There was so much to say, like what was it like turning fear into courage in a split second. But simple words couldn’t describe the array of the intense emotions each felt.
Mila climbed on board the helicopter hovering over the bridge, followed by Alexander. He sat in front of her still smiling, unaware of her trip to his childhood. Mila resisted the urge to sit by him, to embrace him, to hold his hand the rest of the way. She hadn’t intended to invade his privacy, and she felt bad about it. She wondered if her desire to know him had triggered the trip or was it a random working of Time…or was it a Divine Power directing her moves, aiding her to gain insight.
As she returned Alexander’s gaze, her heart was overflowing with a strong yet tender emotion. It was love for the boy behind those intelligent eyes that were looking at her. Love for the man taking yet another risk, stretching his hand to hold hers.