Fanyasha: Why Do Angels Need People?

“What?” Fanyasha asked keenly while looking up, and calmed down immediately. She quickly wiped her tears with the hem of her purple dress, and sat across from her brother.

“Who are ‘people’”?

“Uh oh,” mumbled Bosya, and his eyes darted around the room as if he was trying to find something that could get him out of this awkward situation.

“Well, they’re… well, how do you say it… Well, I…I don’t even know what to tell you.”

How could he mess up so badly! From the first grade of elementary school he had had a whole class dedicated to correct information handling. And he remembered how important it was not to disturb the carefree, happy and peaceful ignorance of little angel-preschoolers! And most importantly not to talk about people! What a disaster! What should he do now?

“Bosya! Bosya! Answer! Why are you quiet?” Fanyasha insisted, pulling her brother’s shirt sleeve.

Her brother’s nervous silence ignited her interest more and more.

He knows something interesting! How she dreamed of discovering the answer to at least one of the secrets that surrounded her carefree childhood.

Her parents always flew away to work and were occupied with something very important; Bosya studied at school and learned about new things; she hadn’t seen her grandfather, he had been away on a super secret and super important assignment for a couple years; even her grandmother sometimes disappeared on some important matters. Everyone had their rooms and their secrets and nobody wanted to share!

Fanyasha realized that the world around her was enveloped in mystery. She noticed that her parents, when flying past her room, would often switch to whispering, and when her father helped Borisey with homework, the door to his room was closed shut so that she wouldn’t be able to hear anything.

And so it was finally here, and she wouldn’t miss it for the world! Bosya had said too much and – oh, how lucky she was to have a brother like that – was incapable of lying.

“Answer! Answer now!” she demanded in a whiny tone. “Tell me right now! Tell me everything!”

Bosya froze, shut his lips and just batted his long eyelashes. Then Fanyasha saw that she was not getting anywhere by yelling and decided to change her tactic.

She remembered how softly and lovingly her mother spoke with her father, and how willingly he answered any of her questions. She also remembered how her grandmother whispered to her mother when they were hanging new pearl curtains in Fanyasha’s room, “Men love to be praised, and if the woman does it genuinely and with love, the man will be ready to throw the whole world at her feet!”

“Let’s try!” Fanyasha figured. Especially since she did not need the whole world, she only wanted to find out one little secret.

“Bosechka, my precious brother! You are always so kind and brave! Also, you are such a handsome man! And smart! And curly! Please tell your dear sister, who are ‘people’? ” she twittered.

How fascinating are feminine essence and feminine wisdom. They are passed by word of mouth, by mothers and grandmothers, in a way much better than could be described in books, or explained at school. Interestingly, even a little baby like Fanyasha could remember and apply this experience.

Bosya relaxed a little, came to his senses, pensively scratched his head, then frowned and tried to invent a fairy tale where people were a special type of cloud, or another word for a ray of light, but quickly saw that he wasn’t capable of doing that.

Fanyasha sat closer to her brother and tried to give him an understanding and tender look just like her mother would do.

“Fanya, please understand. I…I shouldn’t tell you about people. You are still small and it’s too early for you to know such things.”

“Such things!” this got into her head and she pleaded, “I am begging you, my dear brother, please, tell me at least a little bit, a tiny bit!”

“So, essentially, people are sort of why we exist,” Bosya gave in.

Fanyasha’s eyes rounded and she was waiting for the continuation of this strange idea with interest.

“So, in other words, there are angels and there are people and we sort of help them. And so that’s how we, angels, live, and people are like us only very different. Do you understand?”

Bosya was pulling on his pants nervously.

“So, essentially, it’s difficult for you right now, but an angel is born, and in roughly ten years a person is born for him, and then the person must be helped. Always. There. That’s it! Don’t ask me anything else! I already spilled the beans! And promise not to say a word to anybody about what I told you. Got it? I need to get to school. Bye.”

With these words, Bosya rushed to leave his sister’s room in order not to say anything more.

“Oh, my,” whispered Fanyasha raising her eyebrows, “How about that!”

She understood that she didn’t understand anything, and that was awfully interesting!

“I definitely need to find out more about these ‘people’! Why do we need to help them?.. And most importantly, why do angels need people?..”

Chapter 4:

These Butterflies Won’t Fly Anymore

Little angels don’t have a concept of time. They do not care about counting minutes, hours, days, and years. They live by taking pleasure in every moment, and this gives them a feeling of being completely dissolved in time and complete happiness.

It is only natural that until you become aware that everything passes, it is hard to imagine counting time, and there is no sense in it. When you know only what you are meant to know, when you don’t need to rush anywhere, when it is not important what was yesterday and what will be tomorrow, and there is not a single doubt that everything will always be ok— that is true childhood!

However, Fanyasha’s sweet, carefree life came to an end the moment she found out about people. It is not that it bothered her. Quite the opposite; forbidden knowledge filled her being with a certain magical trepidation. She felt special, and waited for the opportunity to learn some more.

Now the time dragged unbearably slowly and days spent in her previously beloved room now felt like a long imprisonment.

Bosya hadn’t stopped by for a while – probably because he was scared of having said too much. Her parents, who always hurried away to work, visited briefly, praised their daughter’s new accomplishments, admired her new crafts, and were sure that Fanyasha wholeheartedly enjoyed her happy childhood. Yet, children always know and understand more than their parents think they do.

Fanyasha saw that everyone except her knew something important about people, and that a person must be born for her too. But when? And why? These thoughts haunted her. Having to live as a child for many years, having to wait for this childhood to be finally over and for the period of new discoveries to begin was weighing heavily on her.

Her room seemed smaller and more cramped every day, and her childish matters became duller.

Sometimes Fanyasha carefully asked about what was waiting for her in the future, what she would learn at school, and where her parents flew off to, but such questions always remained unanswered. Her father frowned sternly and asked grandmother to be more careful with her fairy tales.

But fairy tales were the only thing that distracted her from her sad thoughts.

What can you say, it is evident that a special talent is awakened in all grandmothers – they become such masters of voice and intonation when they tell their fairy tales that you forget about everything else, and fly off to a magical world.

So this is how nights were spent: grandmother’s velvet voice lulled Fanyasha, and in her sleep Fanyasha saw extraordinary stories, wondrous events and unusual objects. She learnt about natural phenomena, flying metal ships, various curious creatures, some of which were called “birds,” – they could fly but could not speak – while others, with the funny name “cats,” could neither speak nor fly but could run on their hands and feet, climb trees and, unlike most other ones, could communicate with angels.

When Fanyasha stayed alone in her room, she diligently trained, ran, jumped, pushed off the walls, and flew higher and higher. One time she could almost touch the door, but realized that she didn’t have enough strength to maintain that height. Then she grabbed the soft wall, drooped and jumped on the windowsill of the only tiny round window in her room.

“Wow! How pretty!” she whispered with delight pressing her face against the glass.

Outside the window, everything sparkled and radiated blue light, and semi-transparent and airy pink clouds rapidly flew by —grandmother weaved curtains and tablecloths out of them. In this azure light, here and there one could see thick accumulations of clouds. “These are probably the houses of other angels,” figured Fanyasha. She once heard that the parents flew to visit neighbors and friends.

The houses resembled huge snow-white magical tree trunks, which reached so high, that it was impossible to discern what was up there, and what kind of tops these trees have. Instead of branches, along the trunks hung rooms with windows like large droplets. On the right, the windows were square, on the left, round. In the lower part of the houses were large round or oval living rooms with large windows.

“Oooh! Oh, how interesting!” thought Fanyasha. “So this is how we all live here.” A little to the right she saw a large house with twelve rooms of different sizes, and below, a large living room sphere with panoramic windows.

“My goodness!” she said in awe. “How many people live there? They probably fly, play and have fun together. It’s not like what we have – mommy and daddy are always at work, Bosya is either at school or in his room studying something all the time, and it’s not even that fun with him, only grandmother knows how to live well.”

But then she noticed another house a little further to the left. Only two rooms hung on its thin trunk – one larger, and the other small, possibly a nursery with one round window at the top.