"The private life is dead."
My pain is as blinding as the surrounding snow. I never thought such a horror possible. Never in a thousand years can I express this despair I feel. I am a statue of death.
The magic feeling was gone like a comet in the sky never to return in a lifetime. Strelnikov rigidly watched the black flaky ashes scattering on the blistering white snow of where his home once stood in the bone-chilling wind of the lonely expanse of Russian countryside. He had nowhere else to go. In the distance a farmhouse, where the best he can hope for was to receive polite silence to the inevitable hatred he received wherever he went. Powerless and on the run, a man without a planet.
It strikes me, this horror. Is this the horror I visited on others? Oh God, do not let it be! Then I am a monster. A monster without redemption. Even my death cannot atone for what I've done, the blood spilled on my angry orders. Why did anyone listen to me in the first place?
His personal life was dead - as he once so famously declared - a proud victim of the 1917 devolution called revolution. But the world never moves forward without sacrificing its love, he believed. Nothing so useless as a useful idiot! Strelnikov stood helplessly in the binding cold, the wind his only companion. It seemed to him it mattered not to his future if he wandered the entire globe or stayed exactly where he was. Had someone approached him it would only increase his isolation.
I'll die if I keep standing in this cold, immobilized by fear. I can show my face to no one now that I know what I've done. They will see I've recognized my sins and lose all fear of me. Then the family members will avenge their dead by delighting in my demise.
Three years of madness. His crusade for justice had made him unjust. He ruthlessly crushed the flower of life wherever he found it. Who can trust him now? His steel grey eyes were remorseless in their betrayal, to unhesitatingly prove the hero he was. As hero of the devolution he felt alive, injected with the energy of history. Time, he believed, was on his side. Now time had run out too soon.
My world is a lie. I gave my life to a false god. There was no revolution. Just small men killing for power's illusion, same as the entirety of history. The world is a lie.
And yet he still felt obliged to be the same man, as someone feels compelled forward walking down a hill even if it's the wrong path to follow. He looked down at the ground and wondered why his feet didn't move. Were they still his? Were he back in his train still ruling the province and being the spider controlling the web would he feel just as sad and empty? Strelnikov had gone against his true wishes, declaring them enemy of the state. What does it mean to go back to them now?
But I must ask myself: To whom is the truth denied? I shut my eyes and blamed the sky for being a lie. What kind of beast slanders the truth, shredding hope? I drank from a cup without love. How can I still have a future?
He could post a commanding proclamation in every village as before, only this time stating he regretted what he had done. But he'd be mercilessly mocked, asking who is he to strike such a statement. Strelnikov is not human, they would say. Strelnikov has no human feeling. And maybe they are right. His heart was still hard. Why proclaim otherwise even if it were the correct words to post. This confused him greatly on the right thing to do. Before, as arbiter of his own morality, he never need consider anything but himself. If only he had grasped what it would have meant to so many victims to see the great and feared Strelnikov admit his mistake even as an empty gesture.
I can't go on like this. I can't not go on like this. No way out.
Then the shot rang out.
This one I made. So much pain for all.
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