CHAPTER 8
The Flow
That night, I had several dreams.
Or perhaps it was one dream that kept changing its spaces, people, and events.
It is difficult for me now to reconstruct their exact order. What I remember most is the feeling of constant movement – as if throughout the night I was being carried from one plane to another, from one story into the next.
At around one in the morning, I suddenly woke up after one of those dreams.
The feeling was so strong that I wanted to preserve what I had seen immediately. I knew that if I closed my eyes again, everything would begin to disappear.
That often happens with dreams.
So I took my phone and recorded everything I could still remember.
By morning, other images remained.
I no longer knew which of them had come first.
Perhaps it did not matter.
Because when I look back at them now, I do not see a sequence.
I see a flow.
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In one of those scenes, my husband, my dog, my grandmother, and I were walking up a mountain.
It was winter.
Cold.
But we kept moving forward together, along the same road.
On the way, we came across some people who had organized a race between two small dogs. At the sound of a whistle, the dogs were supposed to run against each other.
Our dog was running freely beside us.
But when the three dogs met, something completely different happened.
They stopped.
They began sniffing one another.
The race came to an end.
Instead of finding out which one was faster, they simply began getting to know each other.
We felt awkward. It seemed that because of us, everything had stopped. We tried to apologize.
But no one seemed upset.
Everything ended surprisingly peacefully.
Almost as if we had become friends.
Then we found ourselves inside a house.
My grandmother decided to prepare food for everyone. She wanted to do something kind for those people – as if returning the kindness they had shown us.
She was making cutlets and salad.
I stood beside her, washing the dishes.
After a while, a man approached me.
He thanked my grandmother and asked how he could repay her.
And then I said something strange:
“My grandmother does not yet fully know who she is. As many people as possible should hear about her. Because she deserves that.”
I began telling him about her.
About Belarus. About captivity. About the land mine in her childhood. About everything she had survived. And about the fact that she had survived at all.
Then I said:
“Sometimes I cannot visit her. I would be very happy if you came to visit my grandmother too.”
There were many people around us.
And for some reason, they were all grateful to her.
They decided to sew her a beautiful kitchen apron and hang it on the wall in her kitchen.
And then they began preparing food for her.
First, she had given something to them.
Then something came back to her.
And the scene disappeared.
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Now I was with a child in an apartment.
It was in Dubai.
I was trying to understand whether we could stay there and live.
Two women were nearby, both with children. I asked them whether my European documents would be accepted so that I could officially register our residence there.
I handed them the papers.
There were some codes on them.
They stated that I had two children.
Their details were there too.
I looked at those documents.
And then everything disappeared again.
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The next scene was completely different.
I found myself beside my former husband and his partner.
The three of us were sitting somewhere that looked like a club.
For some reason, my underwear was inside out.
From time to time, he looked at me.
But that was not what stayed with me.
What stayed with me was the feeling. The energy of those people was different. It was not mine.
I was sitting beside them, yet I felt that I did not belong in that space.
I wanted to leave.
And it was almost as if the dream heard me.
The scene changed.
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I met a woman I knew.
She told me that her daughter was having problems with some documents and needed a lawyer.
I replied:
“Perhaps my daughter can help. She is a very good lawyer. But you have to understand that she is a qualified professional, and her services cost money.”
Documents again.
I did not think about it then.
The dream simply continued.
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I came home.
My husband was standing outside with a shovel in his hands.
He was seeing off his two daughters and their husbands.
They were carrying gifts from us – several enormous heads of cabbage and lettuce.
One of my husband’s daughters was pregnant.
Her belly was already very large.
The baby would be born soon.
I waved to them.
“See you next time.”
After they left, my husband told me something unexpected.
Apparently, directly beneath the windows of our local town hall, there was a large piece of land.
And officially, that land belonged to us.
He wanted to make a vegetable garden there.
I asked:
“Are we allowed to do that officially?”
He replied:
“We’ll do it and find out.”
Land. A shovel. A harvest. A child who had not yet been born.
I remember all of it.
But at the time, I did not yet know why.
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There was another dream.
It was after this one that I woke up at around one in the morning and reached for my phone.
Before falling asleep, I had asked a question inwardly:
“Angels, Universe, my ancestors…show me my purpose here.”
I did not know whether an answer would come.
Or what form it might take if it did.
In the dream, I found myself in my grandmother’s old apartment.
In the building where she had lived for many years.
It was a corner apartment on the ground floor.
A place connected to my earliest childhood.
The same apartment where I once sat on my grandmother’s lap – the apartment I wrote about in the first chapter – Where Love Begins.
The building was shaped like the letter L.
In the entrance located where its two wings met, my father lived.
He never once came over to me, although I spent entire days playing in that courtyard with my mother, grandmother, and sister.
We were so close.
Only a few steps apart.
And yet there seemed to be a distance between us that could not be measured in metres.
But this story is not about him. At least not yet. Perhaps one day I will return to that door.
In the dream, my grandmother was moving.
But not far.
She was simply moving from the ground floor to the floor above. The apartment upstairs was larger. And warmer. Why upstairs? I did not ask.
In dreams, there are things you simply know and accept.
Then a company appeared.
A large enterprise of factory.
My husband unexpectedly began working there, even though in real life he had always worked for himself.
But that was not the strange part.
The company had a family name.
I saw it and recognized it immediately.
And almost immediately afterward, a book appeared.
Large. Old. Heavy. Filled with pages.
I knew it was not simply a book about the company. It was the book of my family line.
Everything was written there. Names. People. Events. What they had done. What they had owned. And what happened afterward.
In the dream, I understood that something significant had once belonged to my family – a company, an enterprise, or something similar.
And then it was gone. Something had happened. Something had been taken away.
After I woke up, the details disappeared. Only the feeling remained that whatever had happened had not been right.
Perhaps there had been a mistake.
A violation.
I do not know.
After some time, the company closed.
And my grandmother received the apartment upstairs.
But what stayed with me most strongly was the book.
And the place where it had appeared.
I had asked about my purpose.
And I found myself in the place where my earliest childhood had unfolded.
Not ahead. Behind me. In an old house. Beside a family name I choose not to reveal here. And in front of a book I had never seen in real life.
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My grandmother Maria has returned to my dreams more than once.
But sometimes I want to call her by the way her name sounds to me:
Maria, daughter of Adam.
And somehow, those words change something.
As if behind one person, along road suddenly opens into the past.
One generation. Then another. Then another.
And farther still.
To a place my own memory can no longer reach.
Perhaps that is why old houses appear in my dreams.
Documents. Photographs. Names. Family stories. And now, a book.
I do not know.
Perhaps all of this is simply the work of memory.
Why, when I asked about the future, was I shown the past?
