Fanyasha: Why Do Angels Need People?

***

When the setting sun started glittering in the small round windows, Fanyasha all of a sudden felt a hitherto unfamiliar sense of peace and tranquility. She noticed that her teacher’s facial features seemed to become softer, and she even managed to see something good in her teacher’s big black eyes.

This, in fact, was the first lesson, and a very important one at that, for the girls at school. It just so happens that in order to teach a little girl the important feminine quality of humility, you need a lot of time. In the world of people, even a whole lifetime is not enough to learn humility for some.

Time is valued differently in the world of angels. It’s not possible to wait for the girl-angel to come to an understanding of all the various issues on her own. Therefore, the school system for training angels is designed in such a way so that little, inexperienced angels can acquire the necessary knowledge and turn into an adult angel who can be trusted with human lives as soon as possible. The school program provides all the necessary conditions for practicing a particular skill or knowledge.

Fanyasha came home in a quiet and peaceful mood.

Her mother, father, and grandmother weren’t home when she arrived. Bosya came out of his room to meet his sister and immediately noticed that she had changed.

“Fanya, hey, Fanya, you’re like, different, somehow,” he noted with interest. “How was school? Did you like it?”

“You know what, brother,” Fanyasha grinned. “You could have at least warned me! I didn’t know everything was like that there!”

“Like what?” asked Bosya.

“Like what, like what!?” laughed Fanyasha. “The way it was! So tough! So strict! And so dark and gloomy! And you can’t talk to anyone! All you can do is sit, be silent, learn the rules, do the exercises, and… well, it was totally different than I imagined it would be.”

“Silly goose!” said Bosya with a smile, and gently pulled his sister’s braid. “Sounds like the lesson you had today was the kind, I don’t know, where they teach girls first, maybe, patience or humility. Basically, don’t worry, tomorrow everything will be completely different, every day is different than the one before in school. Every day is a surprise! It’s like an amusement park! Incredibly cool! You’ll definitely love it!”

Bosya’s words inspired Fanyasha, and she looked at him gently and asked: “What did you, boys, do on the first day?”

“Let me think,” said Bosya, scratching his curly nape. “Oh ya, I remember! In our class on the first day the wind broke all the windows, smashed the walls down, and scattered the furniture, and we had to make repairs the whole day without complaining, and build everything back up, and patch it all. I was very upset, and it seemed terribly unfair that instead of learning and acquiring new knowledge, I had to do what seemed to me to be useless work. But then I realized that all that was very important for developing the necessary skills. And I became good friends with the other guys while we helped each other.”

“You see! So the boys are luckier than we were! At least you weren’t forbidden to talk to each other!” said Fanyasha sadly.

“Fanya, don’t worry, you’ll get to talk together soon too!” Bosya soother her. “Boys and girls are just different by nature, and they are educated to develop different qualities. You know, maybe for girls communication is harmful at first. Well, it’s true, judge for yourself, you won’t learn anything then, all you’ll know how to do is just chatter and giggle. You’ll understand later how everything at school is done at the right time, and is super well-thought out. So now let’s get some sleep, tomorrow is another day, and you’ll get new and important knowledge.”

“I’d love to,” answered Fanyasha with a yawn, “but we have to study all the rules, and there’s a whole thick notebook full of them.”

“Well, don’t even worry, here’s a secret: read the rules once, and then put the notebook under your pillow. In the morning you’ll know everything. I know because it worked for me,” shared Bosya, lovingly.

Fanyasha kissed her brother on the cheek, wished him good dreams, and flew to her own room.

Falling asleep, she thought about how lucky she was that she had an older brother who was so amazingly kind and nice, and always ready to help and support her.

Fanyasha felt very tired, as if she had to go through and learn more in a single day at school than she could have imagined in her wildest dreams. After all, there was nothing there that she was used to.

It must be said that in such beautiful, complete families, like Fanyasha’s, in which all members of the family give the child a lot of love, there is a high probability that the favorite child will grow up spoiled, petulant, selfish and stubborn. Therefore, it really was difficult for Fanyasha to accept and understand what humility was.

The first day at school got her acquainted with this quality. Surprisingly, just one day of humility gave her a new, previously unknown sensation of softness and femininity. This filled Fanyasha with pride. She knew that she had touched something secret and important. Not that she suddenly decided to become a prudent and silent type – no way! Fanyasha just felt that now there were new tools for communication in her arsenal.

Chapter 7:
Maximum Readiness for Action while Keeping Inner Calm

“Bosya, hey Bosya, tell me, what did you boys learn in school on the second day of class?” asked Fanyasha with a cunning smile, jumping into the cloud bus.

“Oh come on, Fanya, what do you care? No matter what, you girls will have something different!” muttered Bosya.

“But Bosechka, please, please just tell me. I’m interested! I really want to know,” said Fanyasha, still dying to hear her brother’s explanation.

“Well, as far as I remember, we were given all kinds of different tasks all day long the second day, and we were supposed to make a decision really fast and act on it. That’s really important for men! So it was really cool, although at that moment I still couldn’t understand when we would finally start our studies. That’s it.”

Fanyasha didn’t hear her brother’s last words, as the cloud bus had already taken off high into the sky and was racing to the school.

Fanyasha was thinking and imaging the whole way to school about what other skills could be important to girls, and about what she could expect to learn in school today.

At first, she was imagining how they would all be forced to wash and clean up, since girls should look after cleanliness and order. Then she guessed that everybody would be given the opportunity to demonstrate their talent at dancing or singing. That’s when she would surprise everybody! Her grandmother Nakomis had been working with her all throughout Fanyasha’s young life, teaching her to sing beautifully and to dance, so Fanyasha was absolutely sure that no one was better than her at singing and dancing.

She got so engrossed in her thoughts about her talents that she didn’t notice that she had wound up next to her school, and a strong gust of air once again threw all of the students into the right classrooms.

“This is amazing! It’s so beautiful! It’s just incredible beauty!” said a girl with a long red braid, and clapped her hands.

Fanyasha took a look at the girl, and together with the other students she started looking around their classroom with delight. The whole room was shining and transfused with light. There was not a bit of yesterday’s greyness and dampness left! In place of yesterday’s hard chairs, all of the schoolgirls got to sit on soft red armchairs. In front of them on the little cream-colored tables were white notebooks and colored pencils. It was hard to hold back one’s emotions, but Fanyasha had figured out yesterday that silence was like gold for a girl in school.

A raspberry-colored cloud appeared unexpectedly in the middle of the classroom, and in a flash turned into Horda Etyudizovna. However, today her dress had a deep raspberry hue, and her dark hair was wrapped into a tight bun, with a pearl hairpin shining in it. A playful twinkle was flashing in her large black eyes.

Despite that, her voice and facial expression were still serious and cold.

“Good morning, students. I want to start by recognizing one of you, and by giving away our first pink cloud. Krygoliya Zorge, I’m talking about you! You demonstrated your knowledge of rule number seventy-six with dignity! Congratulations!

With these words, the teacher pointed with her long index finger on her right hand at the girl with the red-haired braid, and in her other hand their immediately appeared a large scroll with the names of all the schoolgirls.

Horda Etyudizovna touched the scroll with her finger across from Krygoliya Zorge’s name, and a small pink cloud immediately appeared on the paper.

“Who can tell me why Krygoliya got a pink cloud?” the teacher slowly turned round and round, and looked fixedly into the girls’ faces.

“Efaniya Aros,” she suddenly snapped, “tell me, what is rule number seventy-six about?!”

Here Fanyasha shook out of fear, and she was extremely hurt that her brother’s advice didn’t work. After all, she had honestly read all four hundred rules for girls’ behavior in elementary school, and she honestly put her notebook under her pillow, but now she couldn’t remember a thing that she had read.

“Murisa Laucar, maybe you can answer me?”

The teacher shifted her glance to Fanyasha’s neighbor with the white bangs, and Murisa answered her quickly and precisely, “Rule number seventy-six says a girl should always speak out loud about her positive emotions!”

Within an instant, there were two new symbols on the scroll: a pink cloud next to Murisa’s name, and a black mark next to Efaniya’s name.

“I can’t believe it,” thought Fanyasha, offended. “This repugnant, uneducated neighbor even managed to learn the rules. I was wrong to listen to my over-confident brother! I got into this stupid situation because of him! I’ll give him what for tonight! He’ll get a beating from me!”

“I’m warning all of you,” sounded Horda Etyudizovna’s metallic voice, “the rules of behavior are the basis of the elementary school program. They have to be not only known, but also clearly executed. I’m going to mark every one of your achievements or successes in my gradebook with a pink cloud, and I’ll give a black mark for every failure.

“Fifty pink clouds will give you the chance to visit the school library and park. Fifty black marks will be a straight path to getting expelled from our school, and going right to a remedial school. And keep in mind, I’ll never let any angel graduate from elementary school if she doesn’t know the rules or hasn’t completely learned any one of the subjects we teach here! Believe me, it’s better to delay the birth of your person than to make this person suffer all throughout life with an angel who doesn’t understand the rules.

“That’s why I encourage all of you to know and execute the rules, and try your best in your studies!”

Fanyasha was interested by her teacher’s words.

“What could that mean,” she thought, “to delay a person’s birth. Hmm, if that’s possible, then, maybe, it’s possible to stop the child from being born altogether. In that case, I won’t even have to go to school! It would be good to know what goes with what. Ahh, I know! I’ve got it! I’ll make Bosya tell me everything he knows about that, since he let me down with learning the rules.”

Meanwhile, Horda Etyudizovna continued.

“Yesterday’s class, as you could probably guess, was dedicated to humility, one of a woman’s most important qualities. Thanks to the special conditions we created, you all learned the skill of humility one way or another. And we’ll see as time goes on how well you can use it in life.

“However, here’s my advice: always follow the sincerity of your feelings in your actions. Any fake behavior, or acting, can lead to irreparable consequences. The words “angel’ and “sincerity’ should become synonyms for you.

“You will learn to feel and to understand with sincerity during your time studying in the elementary school,” said Horda Etyudizovna, and with these words started swaying from side to side, and dancing, and she waved her long arms from side to side, and climbed higher and higher, right up to the ceiling. “You’ll learn to appreciate, to accept, to let go, to forgive, and finally, to love, all with sincerity.”

Here she pointed her finger at Murisa and asked her very strictly:

“Whom should an angel love most sincerely of all?”

“Rule number one: an angel should love her person more than anyone else,” the girl responded quickly.

“Well ya, ya, that’s all well and good,” Fanyasha thought, rolling her eyes. “That all sounds nice, but it’s hard to live like that. Really, how can you sincerely accept something that you don’t like at all, or sincerely love a person and dedicate your life to him or her, if that is completely not a part of your plan? If you have to love someone more than anyone else, it should be yourself.”

“Efaniya Aros!” the teacher barked, and flew down into the center of the classroom. “What are you mumbling down there? Are you really that desperate to fill your report card with black marks, and transfer to remedial school?”

Krygoliya exchanged looks with her neighbor and laughed. “Oh please, what a mean teacher, and my classmates are even worse,” thought Fanyasha with self-pity, and dropped her head guiltily, then started nervously writing the words “s-i-n-c-e-r-e-l-y l-o-v-e y-o-u-r p-e-r-s-o-n.”

“Well that’s better,” noted Horda Etyudizovna, then added a pink cloud to Murisa’s line, and continued talking.

“So, sincere love for a person is the meaning of life for an angel. And an angel’s main task in life is to accompany her person throughout life, from birth to death. A person is born, lives, and dies in a special place created for him or her, which is called planet Earth. This planet is situated in a different dimension of space. I’ll teach you in a few months how to get there.”

At this moment, the image of a bluish-green ball appeared in the center of the classroom. The ball was rotating on its axis.

“Earth is a place that serves as a kind of school for people. A person comes to earth in order to learn something. And the angel’s task is to help him or her with that learning.”

Fanyasha remembered her grandmother’s fairy tales about earth, and about how earth is full of various unusual beings, like animals, birds, and fish.

“So, it really does exist, this planet earth,” thought Fanyasha, taken by surprise. “But it turns out that unhappy people also inhabit this earth.”

“As a rule, a person has to go through six basic lessons, and a bunch more secondary lessons,” continued the teacher, flying from side to side between the desks. “The main lessons, unlike the secondary ones, must be followed in a strict sequence. The second lesson won’t begin until the first one is done, and so on.

“As sad as it is, sometimes there are cases when a person’s life ends faster than this person can go through all the lessons. And why is that? It’s because each time the situations in which the person goes through the lesson become more and more complicated, and in the end the poor person suffers throughout life with just one and the same lesson. And sometimes through more than one life! That’s terrible! Just unacceptably awful!” with these words Horda Etyudizovna sighed deeply, and grabbed her head, as if in desperation.

“However!” her voice sounded so loud and powerful that all of the schoolgirls lifted their eyes to her. “We have the power to change that! That’s why we’re learning! And the better you do in school, and the better you learn the school curriculum, the more chances your person will have of getting through all of their lessons, and living a full, happy life. And in that case you’ll have the chance to enter…” here Horda Etyudizovna coughed, brushed her long fingers on her lips, as if she had just given away a terrible secret, and quickly changed the topic of conversation.

“Alright, we’ll talk more about people later, but now let’s talk about cats.”

At this moment pictures of cats appeared all throughout the classroom, on the walls and on the ceiling. They were all really funny – all of varying colors and sizes, furry ones and bald ones. They were all running, and jumping, and stretching, and washing themselves, and yawning, and scratching themselves. Fanyasha smiled; she always liked the fairy tales her grandmother read her about cats.

Horda Etyudizovna continued: “Cats are wingless creatures that live on planet Earth. They walk on four paws, and live among people, and are one of the few creatures that are able to hear angels. A little bit later I’ll teach you how to get in contact with cats, but for today we’ll go over one of the most important cat skills.”

As soon as the teacher said that, all the schoolgirls’ armchairs quickly starting sloping downward, and began to sway from side to side. A few of the girls remained hanging, holding on to the legs of their chairs or tables, while many more, including Fanyasha, weren’t quick enough at grabbing on, and thus slipped from their chairs and fell downwards. Managing to break a little ways from the floor, all of the girls shot back up again, returning to their places. All of them except one. Murisa just stayed on the floor. She tried to energetically flap her wings, but they were too small and weak for her to be able to climb up in the sky.

Having seen what was happening, Fanyasha bolted down at top speed, grabbed Murisa by the arm, and helped her get to her spot.

Horda Etyudizovna pretended like she didn’t see anything, although Fanyasha could feel her steadfast gaze.

Waiting until all the schoolgirls were sitting in their seats once again, the teacher pointed to the wall, and a small scene was played out there: an outwardly relaxed kitten suddenly hears a rustling sound nearby, and instantly high-tails it out of there. Then a second scene: a fluffy, purring cat is lying on the back of a chair and is apparently quietly asleep; suddenly the chair falls over; at the exact same moment the cat jumps up, turns sharply, clings to the chair, and lands on the floor on all fours; it shakes it’s body and calmly walks away.

The picture went away and the teacher started talking.

“So, there you go, a woman’s nature is similar to that of a cat, and you need to learn to feel like a cat, and act like a cat. This means, first of all, that you have to be relaxed and calm in any situation. But if an unexpected danger or change in the situation arises, you should have an instant response. You must take the appropriate action, and show flexibility, tenacity, and a readiness to jump. This state is called the state of alertness, that is maximum readiness to act, while keeping your inner calm. I ask you to master this skill, and always be ready for any turn of events, while at the same time not having any worry and not making any judgements.

“Oh, and one more thing,” Horda Etyudizovna thoughtfully rolled her eyes and spoke quietly, as if to herself, “in my experience, I want to note that it’s just as useful for men to practice being in a state of alertness as it is for women. I’ve been proposing for a long time that we introduce the topic of state of alertness in the school curriculum for boys. I should write to the school committee chairman again.”

Fanyasha tried to listen carefully to the teacher, who was apparently asking for rule number 4, but her thoughts were constantly taken up by Murisa. Why wasn’t she able to fly yet?

Fanyasha suddenly noticed that her neighbor had the shortest wings of anyone in the class. If wings grow from being loved, then Murisa just wasn’t getting enough of it! And her wings haven’t grown out yet! Fanyasha, who had been covered in love and care and attention since she was born, was scared to think of how difficult life must be for her neighbor. She remembered that Murisa’s house had only two small rooms with round windows, and this could mean that Murisa lived only with her sister. Fanyasha could only guess what had happened to Murisa’s parents.

Fanyasha felt a strong desire to talk with Murisa, to become friends with her, to hug her, invite her for a visit, show Murisa her room, and introduce Murisa to her family, so that Murisa could feel warmth, care, and love, and so that her wings would grow more quickly.

Thinking about this, Fanyasha looked with tenderness at her neighbor, and suddenly noticed how Murisa’s wings had already gotten noticeably larger. What a miracle! Did it really happen? Did wings really grow even when you just thought about someone with warmth and love!? Fanyasha felt exultation inside! She felt like she could do magic! She felt good and beautiful!

“Efaniya Aros,” suddenly echoed the teacher’s voice over her head, “you are the only one in the classroom not taking notes. I understand that this subject is simple and clear to you. Well, in that case, I ask you to repeat, for the entire class, which quality of cats we’re working on today. And in which situations can this quality be particularly important?

Fanyasha shrank in her chair and squinted. It seemed the teacher had been hanging over her head and waiting for an answer for an eternity.

“You amaze me, Ms. Aros,” Horda Etyudizovna remarked with a grin. “I’ve never met an angel before who earned black marks so diligently and rapidly! You have a real talent for this! And since you are so persistent in your disobedience, I will give you the honor, from now on, of giving you not one, but two black marks for every mistake.”

All of Fanyasha’s classmates giggled. Everyone except Murisa.