Fire Smoldering Under Water. Anastasia Kuznetsova
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plantation worked the Rwandans from Tutsi and Hutu tribes, who needed money and who could dig the ground. Jean Batist’s father could not. He was a mine worker. And after work at the mine he hunted wild animals and buffaloes.
When Jean reached the age of 7, he was sent to school. The only one of all the families who lived in the area. It was 11 kilometers to his school. Every day little Jean Batist ran the distance of 22 kilometers.
He ran only because if he walked he would not make it to school on time in the morning, by the time the classes began. As well as he would not manage to be back in the evening before the sunset, before the moment when wild animals went out for hunting. By running he saved time to study and managed to survive. But he had one problem – not to miss a snake.
The parents told their children since childhood:
– If you see a snake – you should kill it. If you do not kill it – the snake will kill you. Or somebody else. A snake has to be killed.
That is why when he saw a snake he stopped. He knew that a deadly black mamba bite was too fast. And he had to react in time.
Black mamba, reaching a length of 4 meters, is notable for the speed of its movement. It can move with a speed of 15 kilometers per hour. Jean Batist was a child of an elementary school age, his speed could not exceed 10 kilometers per hour, and so he could just watch how a black snake dissolves and disappears in the jungle. I such a case he did not even slow down the speed of his running. As this made no sense.
He was strictly prohibited to go inside the jungle by his father, who used to say that the jungle fed the first and killed the second to feed the first. And children had nothing to do there.
And so Jean Batist kept on running. He was a skilful long-distance runner and preferred not to stop without an urgent need, but only to change the intensity of his run.
So he ran without stopping. Until he met a black ribbon on the road. Then he had to act to the most of his abilities as a child.
But Jean Batist was a son of a hunter, of a poacher. His ancestors’ blood was in his genes. The blood of those who had survived because they were faster than death. And he used to grab its tail with a proven movement, to lift it up with a sharp jerk and to hit its head on the ground at full force. Then he hit it again and again. Until the intense and solid flesh of a deadly reptile turned into just limp remains of a legless animal, with a thin, largely stretched body, without movable eyelids.
Many years later, when the tribes of Tutsi and Hutu started to fight for power and the war broke out with Tutsi genocide, in which about a million people were killed, Jean Batist would see how this method of killing poisonous reptiles worked for his own countrymen.
Warriors from the tribe of Hutu annihilated Tutsi with extreme cruelty, sparing nobody. Tutsi soldiers from the patriotic front, who attacked Rwanda, also annihilated every Hutu they met on their way.
They killed children like snakes.
They killed infants in an absolutely terrifying way. They took kids by a leg and hit hard against the ground or a solid object. They hit them until the brains started to flow from a small skull. After that they threw the babies together with their parents in the waters of the Nile to be eaten by huge – five meter long, with the weight of six or seven hundred kilograms – crocodiles-cannibals, which destroyed the bodies in a matter of minutes.
War is always devastatingly disgusting.
But one still had to survive until a war.
It was like that during all seven years of the elementary school. Until Jean Batist had advanced to a secondary school. The education was stationary and the parents had sent their son for another six years to live in a relative analogue of a college. It was when Jean Batist had already turned 13 years of age, that they have bought him the first pair of shoes in his life.
He tried to do his best. Realizing how many hopes his parents associated with his education, Jean Batist, having a natural curiosity and an inquiring mind, demonstrated remarkable achievements in his studies.
The experience gained from the men of his family – his grandfather-medium and his father-poacher – and piled in a neat sandwich with new sciences, had produced a striking contrast.
Jean Batist knew no fear.
To be more exact, he demonstrated some special state, which could be characterized as a rejection of fear. This helped in everyday life as well as in socialization with his peers. From his grandfather-medium he had got a developed intuition as well as an insight. He always felt what the other person had in mind. And as the years went by it became more and more interesting for him to learn the mechanism of functioning of this strange system called the brain. He kept remembering the incident, which occurred to him when he still was at the elementary school and which affected his whole life, becoming probably his determining factor in choosing a profession.
It was the second year of his running to school. Once, when he ran in being a little late after killing another snake, Jean Batist was surprised to find out that there were no classes. All the children had been gathered in a big classroom where there were unknown people in white coats. The children were vaccinated. Jean Batist had never been vaccinated before. But he already knew that a doctor was a being close to God. The most kind, the most compassionate being in the world. This was what his parents always said. This was what everybody around said. And he lived in an absolute awareness of this truth.
When a doctor in a white coat came to him, he started to watch happily and curiously how he would be vaccinated for the first time in his life. The doctor came closer and roughly grabbed Jean Batist’s forearm to turn his back. Before he could resent in surprise, Jean Batist felt the syringe needle entered his shoulder blade and the fire broke out in his body. It happened so quickly that the next moment he was screaming something through tears to the back of the retreating doctor in a white coat. Severe pain entered his shoulder blade as a burning flow, and the worst of all was that this pain started to increase. Lurching from a sudden coming fatigue, he felt the trembling in his weakened legs and wanted to lie down right on the classroom floor.
But the fire greedily devouring the little body was so unbearable that in his last effort, lurching, he got out and ran.
He wanted to cool his body and he ran faster and faster so that the wind blowing from the run could bring some relief.
Thus, not seeing anything around from the pain, he ran until he got home.
Catching the sight of his home he started to slow down and then, already losing his consciousness, slowly sat down in the shade of a tree behind the house. Leaning back against the familiar trunk of the oil palm tree he sat there till dark, wiping away bitter tears of resentment and broken illusions.
This old oil palm tree was his secret friend. He used to come to it sometimes just to worry about something, turning over in his hands the dry leaves, which covered the ground around. Or dreamed about something, slowly touching the amazing bark of this tree. The tree, which had so much changed the life of the whole mankind.
Many years later, already pursuing science, Jean Batist would find out what a catastrophe had struck the whole planet in connection with this ordinary tree, from which the palm oil was produced.
The thing was that for getting this highly profitable product large areas of tropical forest were cut down every day.
The areas of the size of 300 football fields.
Per day.
Every day.
Until no more forests were left in several countries as well as the animals that once inhabited them. And the zone with the “greenhouse effect” had appeared over the territories of Indonesia and Malaysia, killing our planet.
He would find out that probably this particular product had played its role in a very short life span of his countrymen. Men seldom survived the upper