Chapter 9

Never having burned her wings she did not feel the danger of the flame.

Sitting on the public bench I looked at the moon. It was not full, it was a small crescent.

She too was missing something.

When my sister was gone, I liked to look at her and think that no matter where she might be in the world, we were looking at the same moon, and somewhere the celestial star connected me to my big sister.

It might have been our mother's darling, but I never held it against her. After all, she was my sister, my blood.

But when she left I hated her. Not only did she leave me alone, she was my role model, but my mother's indifference towards me was also transformed into hatred.

Since she left, my mother was no longer transparent but black. Every day I was entitled to her criticisms, her remarks and her humiliations. At the beginning it had hurt me, very badly, I answered her by screaming or then I cried hot tears in front of her hoping to awaken her maternal side.

Poor child.

Some time later I had stopped in front of his lack of reaction and understood that we could not force people to like us.

Faced with this heavy fatality, I had made a big decision: never again would I be weak in front of someone.

And that was the case. Since then I had never cried in public again, I had built myself a shell and I fled into it as if it had been a fortified castle.

Dreaming of my past, I didn't see myself falling asleep on the cold metal bench.

It was only the next morning, when a policeman shook me, that I realized that I had fallen asleep in this public place like the homeless people to whom I threw coins out of pity when I was little.

He yelled something at me in Russian that I didn't understand. Seeing my head shaped with incomprehension he sighed.

- I don't speak Russian, I expressed myself.

- They were only missing that ! Where do you come from ?

- From California.

He looked at me and I saw from his expression that he was thinking. It took several long minutes before he opened his mouth again.

- Get in my car I'll take you to the station

I followed him to the small vehicle. Contrary to my bad habit, I fastened my seat belt. I was in the presence of the forces of order after all!

After he had started the engine, he dialed a number. When his correspondent answered, they chatted for a few short minutes and, once he had hung up, he set off.

For a short lapse of time, we drove on a lane at the limit of the highway and the country lane. Then he stopped in front of a car.

Innocently I tell myself that he must go and alarmed him that he was badly parked. Until I heard the locking of the door and that I saw out of the luxury car, Ivan dressed all in black.

I swallowed my saliva with difficulty.

Obviously not everyone had a good Samaritan soul like Donatello and his wife.