Changelings
Our forefathers believed that the world was filled with changelings, some horrible and dangerous, others funny. You looked at one and saw a nice smiling face, then you blink and see an entirely different face, maybe not even a face. In some cases you had to blow in his face to see it for what it really was. Some were in a state of constant transmutation, assuming an ego depending on circumstances and keeping it until circumstances changed. Of course, such phenomena could not have totally disappeared in a matter of several thousand years, the period known from written historical sources. We could not but inherit some of them. Hence each of us has an experience of dealing with people capable of changing masks depending on certain factors, particularly depending on whomever they are talking to.
The sad fact remains that even some of the clergy cannot be trusted concerning what or whom they pretend to be. Interviewing, say, a hegumen or bishop, you hear a quiet cultured voice, you are treated with emphasized politeness and attentiveness, yet you are constantly aware of the man’s rank. Then a monk or a lower-ranking clergyman enters the room with some urgent business. Only a couple of words are exchanged but the tone and the very stature of your interlocutor undergo an instant and dramatic transformation. His voice, a moment ago quiet, becomes harsh. He may bark a command or even use an expletive. And you see the impact on the subordinate: fearful submission. In some cases you are aware that only your presence stops the superior from resorting to more than words. Then the door closes and once again you are faced with a kind- hearted shepherd and hear quiet and clever words, under the eyes of the Virgin Mary looking on from numerous icons.
George Bernard Shaw offers two eloquent examples of purely gentlemanly conduct. His Professor Higgins treats a duchess as if she were a flower girl, whereas Colonel Pickering is as courteous to a dishwasher as if she were a duchess. Here we have taste without a touch of hypocrisy.
The more publicity a person attracts, the more interesting his personal transformations become. Unexpected, it would seem, for one can always come up with very good reasons, most often big money or backstage politicking. Take that Moscow television idol host. We have been watching him for a number of years in Ukraine, too. With childish naХvetО he calls himself a TV star. Until quite recently we all regarded him as a knight of democracy, defender of justice, a fearless and selfless herald of truth. With time, however, the visor on what turned out an operetta helmet slid upward and instead of calls for peace and democracy we started hearing calls for victory in Chechnya. He once even said, “We’ll pay whatever it takes.” In one of his latest programs Mr. Dorenko described, with obvious relish, how Russian soldiers caught some Chechens and “cut them down then and there.” In other words, those captives were killed without trial on the battlefield despite it being the end of the twentieth century and despite all international POW conventions. Watching that changeling on television was disgusting, yet imagining what was really happening in Chechnya was even more horrifying — let alone what was happening to the human souls being influenced by such “knights without fear and reproach.”
Nikolai Gogol most eloquently illustrated Serhiy Dorenko in one of his tales: “He had already danced the famous Cossack dance brilliantly and already succeeded in amusing the crowd. But when the officer brought out the icons and raised them aloft, his whole face began to transform: his nose grew and bent to one side, his eyes turned from brown to green, his lips became blue, his chin quaked and sharpened like a spear, a fang ran out of his mouth, a hump appeared from behind his head, and the Cossack turned into an old man. ‘It’s him! It’s him. The warlock has reappeared!’ the mothers cried out and clutched their children close.”
And thus we live as if in a masquerade. Even when we meet a truly honest, open, and attractive person, we try to tear off the mask even when it is not there.
It is no secret that the Crimea is getting smaller.
First, the sea is licking away its coast by incessant daily and nightly storms and regular tides. Every year, the peninsula’s rivers carry hundreds of thousands tons of mud into the sea, and the waves take a mass of solid rock far from the shore. The old-timers living on the coast claim that formerly the distance from the structures, trees, and cliffs to the sea was much longer. The sea is gradually advancing, relentlessly destroying all it encounters on its way. In most cases this is a slow process visually observable only decades later, but there also are some strikingly disastrous instances.
It is only through documents and sometimes even by old geographic maps that one can find out where the early nineteenth century coastline existed. For example, some stones, which are known to have chipped off the coastal cliffs and fallen into the sea during the Crimean earthquake of 1927, are today well offshore. But recently processes in the superficial layer of the Crimean Peninsula’s body have been significantly put into action. While 56 substantial landslides were recorded in 1997, their number jumped to 82 in 1999. There are a total 2,000 landslide- prone areas on the peninsula, mostly on the littoral. The shore is receding before our eyes into the Azov and Black Seas in many areas of the Kerch peninsula, around Sevastopol, and in Tarkhankut. What saves the southern coast is the fact that the surf line is reinforced with gravel.
Eyewitnesses were recently struck with a grandiose spectacle on the Fiolent Peninsula: a huge chunk of rock, weighing an estimated several tens of thousands of tons, split off the shore into the sea. This pulled into the water a metal fence and an old World War II concrete fire emplacement. This seaside spot in Sevastopol’s recreation area is very popular among holiday-makers, but on that day there was nobody there by pure accident. As eyewitnesses reported, the cave-in was accompanied with deafening roar, shocking one and all. The cause of the collapse has not yet been completely studied, but scientists think the most probable cause was landslides on the peninsula due to heavy floods and earthquakes in Turkey and Greece, as well as the continuous erosion of the coastline.
One can also notice the gradual movement of ground waters
