The Bloom-Keeper
This story happened to me several years ago, and to this day I do not know if it all truly took place or if it was merely a dreamlike hallucination, a haunting delusion. I will tell you about how I met a real enchantress. My name is Marina, and these events unfolded after I moved into my godfather’s apartment.
Our home was destroyed in a terrible fire that claimed the lives of my mother and father. At night, I was afraid to fall asleep in the dark, so my parents would turn on an old Soviet nightlight with little fish. That night, it short-circuited, and the fire began. I woke up while already in the ambulance. My father had pulled me from the flames while I was unconscious. He did not manage to get my mother out or escape the burning house himself.
I often blame myself for what happened. For my foolish childhood fear of the dark and for that nightlight, because of which I lost the people dearest to me. Once, walking home from school, I saw a man driving by in a large black SUV, and for a second, it seemed to me that my father was at the wheel. It was hard for me to believe they were gone.
My grandmother loved me, but she was a very difficult person; she lacked the emotional stability to keep from lashing out at me sometimes, striking me in the heat of the moment. At school, it was always painful and a bit shameful that I had no parents, only a grandmother. I envied the girls and boys whose moms or dads came to pick them up. By the second grade, I started walking to school alone so I wouldn't feel awkward about my grandmother. After her death, it became shameful and sorrowful to remember all this. That I was ashamed of her ridiculous clothes.
As it turned out, I had no one left in my family, and they wanted to send me to an orphanage. But my godfather, Uncle Sasha, always showed me incredible care; he was the person in my life because of whom I probably truly began to believe that there is goodness in the world. There are people so radiant that you feel yourself too cruel or petty in their presence. They do not plunge you into shame or provoke guilt. Simply who they are and how they treat those around them sets the bar very high by the mere fact of their existence. What excuses could I have for not being like him? Such people teach kindness without ever uttering a single moralizing word. Uncle Sasha was like an angel. Unfortunately, he and his wife were infertile, and despite all attempts to solve this through medicine and science, it remained so. Uncle Sasha adopted me, and instead of the orphanage, I moved in with them.
It all began the moment I was returning from school. I was finishing my senior year then; it was a warm day in May. As I approached our entrance, I saw her in the front garden of our building. She was weeding the flowerbed. A slender, elderly woman, about seventy years old. She told me I had a very beautiful skirt and asked where she could buy one like it, saying she wanted to get one for her daughter. I felt incredibly pleased—not just because of the compliment itself, but because I had sewn the skirt myself. Uncle Sasha had given me a cool sewing machine for my last birthday, and I spent almost all my free time sewing unusual clothes for myself and my friends.
She said her name was Aunt Tonya, and then... then she penetrated my secret. I cannot reveal exactly what she told me about myself, as it is an intimate and personal thing, but I froze in that garden with her. For a long time, she told me some story about her daughter, but almost everything in that story coincided with what was literally happening in my life at that moment. Only later did I realize she did this constantly.
Now, I wish I could extract more of our dialogues from my memory, to recall everything she said. To find the lost value hidden there. Sometimes it makes me very sad that so little remains in my mind. The thing is, Aunt Tonya always spoke specifically about you. No matter what people or situations she described, she was actually addressing your memory, your inner world. It was like some strange puppet theater from within speech itself, a play whose only purpose was to give the spectator a chance to recognize themselves. Not in a general or universal sense, but specifically in your sense. To become a mirror of exactly you, not of people in general or someone similar to you.
Aunt Tonya didn’t want to tell me her secret right away. And later, I understood why. I thanked her and said I had sewn the skirt myself and could sew the same one for her daughter if she liked, but she said her daughter was away for now, and it would be better to deal with it when she returned. In general, Aunt Tonya always gave compliments about things that others usually either don't notice or don't value. Yet these were the very things and qualities that I myself considered important and significant. Somehow, she knew exactly what was dear to your heart.
“How about, child, I weave you a wreath out of all this? It will be very beautiful,” Aunt Tonya said, gesturing with her head toward a pile of pulled weeds.
“A wreath made of weeds?” I smiled from the awkwardness and that strange sense of numbness that had gripped me after her story, which had held my secret within it.
“Well, yes! Why are you laughing! I usually make a herbarium out of them, which I then use for my paintings, but the wreaths turn out very beautiful too. Come here tomorrow after school and you’ll see for yourself.”
That day, I had no idea how much my life would change because of that harmless meeting by the entrance; in essence, my entire future was defined by my acquaintance with Aunt Tonya. That night, I dreamed of the fire again. Since the death of my parents, this dream had become a recurring nightmare that unfailingly visited me several times a year. The burning house, their screams, and a small, frantic me, trying to find them and save them from the fire.
Approaching the house after school, I saw her. She was breaking up the dense crust of the earth with a shovel and a small pickaxe. Seeing me, she immediately began to smile. There was always so much warmth and a certain trembling tenderness in her smile. Sometimes it seemed to me that she saw me as her own daughter.
“Look at that, you came! You didn't forget!”
“Well, duh! I'm curious, after all, to see what kind of wreaths you get from weeds.”
She brushed off her hands, took off her gloves, and began rummaging in a large woven bag standing next to the flowerbed. The wreath really did turn out to be very beautiful and somehow surprisingly warm.
“And I thought there would only be weeds in there!”
Aunt Tonya burst out laughing when she heard that.
“Well, I’m not such a miser as to deprive such a beautiful girl of flowers. I just happened to have some picked chamomiles, dandelions, and everlastings for my herbarium, and I thought they certainly wouldn't be out of place in it!”
I thanked her and said the wreath was truly wonderful. I told her it felt unusually sunny somehow.
“I should say so! Chamomiles and dandelions have positive heliotropism, so if you wear it, mark my words—you’ll start stretching toward the sun yourself.”
“Helio... what?” That was the first time I heard a complex term from Aunt Tonya. Later, I would get to hear many more of them, along with strange and difficult concepts which, despite the general homeliness and simplicity of her speech, brought the realization that everything with Aunt Tonya was not as simple as it seemed at first glance.
“Heliotropism. It’s a mechanism where certain plants begin to reach for the sun themselves, stretching toward it and turning the flower head to follow the sun’s movement from east to west. Not all of them have it, but some of the little flowers in your wreath do.”
“You seem to know a lot about flowers! Did you study to be a botanist?”
“Goodness, no. I studied to be a cryptographer.”
Again, I caught myself not knowing the meaning of the word she used, and I was about to ask what kind of profession that was, but before I could open my mouth, Aunt Tonya began to answer.
“Oh, child, what’s there not to understand? It’s a code-breaker, in our tongue! Cryptography is a science. About how to tie knots on a language. You look at a canvas—seems like just threads and more threads, a total muddle. But I know how to catch a loop so that a pattern emerges. A cryptographer is like a lace-maker: they’ll weave such a thing that looks like abracadabra, but in truth, it’s an important dispatch. He who knows how to pull the string—he’s the one who reads it. And the rest just stand there, blinking their eyes, like you are now at my chamomiles.”
“Do you happen to be able to read minds, too?”
“Minds? My, dear, what a thing to say—'read'! Minds, they’re like pollen on the wind: they fly about, sticking to everything in sight, you just have to keep brushing them off. Why read them when they’re written all over your face. You think you’re a locked chest, but in truth, you’re a ripe dandelion. Give a little puff—and all your secrets scatter across the garden, taking root in the earth. I’m not crawling into your head; I’m looking at the roots. Just as you can tell by a plant’s leaf that it lacks magnesium or needs water, so it is with a person: if the soul is parched or a worm of doubt is gnawing, it sprouts right away in your gestures. Cryptography is only that complicated in books. But in life, it’s simpler: the world is all one plain embroidered pattern, child. People have just forgotten how to look with their eyes, they’re all poking at their screens, inventing passwords for each other... But you can’t encrypt yourself from the earth. It remembers everything, and I along with it. So don't be afraid. I don't read minds—I listen to the silence between your words. That’s usually where all the most interesting things are buried.”
My throat went dry. And the air around Aunt Tonya became thick and viscous. Shimmering, like in a sweltering desert.
“Would you like some compote, perhaps? It’s made from dried fruits, harvested last summer. This isn’t your Coca-Cola. It’s a pure concentrate of memory and sun.”
I silently took a sip from the bottle, looking at her with a frightened gaze, and after she finished loosening the soil, we went to the woods near our house. To burn rotten leaves and trash. She told me she had been watching me for a long time. Trying to understand if I was "one of them." Aunt Tonya told me that she was an enchantress and the flowerbeds she planted were not like everyone else’s. She wasn't engaged in decorating the neighborhood; she was performing a ritual every day. A ritual of hidden love. Every flower she planted, every seed, every flowerbed contained hidden messages about love. She had begun to apply her knowledge of cryptography to start enchanting the surrounding space.
“How, how... With the eyes, dear, it works with the eyes. How is a human built? He thinks he’s just walking down the street by himself, but in truth, he absorbs everything he sees like a sponge. Take a man, angry, resentful of life—his gaze involuntarily falls on my flowerbed. And there aren't just flowers there; there’s a special order. I place every seed with a charm. A blue flower is a pause, a red one is an inhale, a yellow one is tenderness. I don't plant them just any old way, but in a line, the way they wrote in old books, where one letter is gold and another is silver. The eye catches this pattern, and in the person's head, somewhere deep, deep down, it’s as if a bell goes ding. He won't even make out the words, but his soul has already read it: 'don't be afraid,' 'hold it to your heart,' 'forgive.' This is quiet magic. It’s not in thunder and lightning; it’s in how color lays upon color. I’m re-stitching the world around us, you see? On top, it’s old, gray, and mean, but the lining is already different—floral and kind. We create a place where love is easier to happen than hate. Like treading a path in the woods: isn't it easier to walk there than through the thicket? So we 'tread' a path for people toward their own hearts.”
“We? You have comrades in your floral ciphers?”
“Of course, child, I’m not the only such ‘seamstress.’ Maybe in the next town over, some old woman is hanging scarves on fences the same way, or a craftsman is laying tiles in a secret pattern. We are enchanting the world piece by piece, so that it turns from a prison back into a garden. And it must be done covertly, because if everyone finds out—the miracle will evaporate. Not to mention they’d kill us all,” she said with that same warm smile and laughed.
My heart began to beat faster.
At that moment, Aunt Tonya suddenly stopped laughing, but the warmth did not leave her eyes—it only became sharp, like the edge of a freshly cut stem. She stirred the bonfire with a poker, and a flurry of sparks soared upward, looking like a scattered constellation.
“And did you think we were just playing tiddlywinks here, that we never outgrew childhood games of spies?” she said quietly. “This world, child, has been under watch for a long time. There are these agencies... in suits the color of dust, with eyes like empty wells. They look after order. Only their order is a dead one. They need every person to be like a brick: gray, cold, and lying apart from the others. They are magicians too, only inside out. Their ritual is a crack in the asphalt, peeling paint on the walls, news on the television that makes you want to howl. They deliberately ‘plant’ grayness so that people won't see each other, so they’ll sit behind closed doors and cry into their pillows. Why do you think I chose flowers? Because you can lock yourself behind three doors and surround yourself with four walls, but you can’t escape a scent. Combinations of fragrances are also my way of making love penetrate those who run from it. A person can filter out almost anything and refuse to let it deep inside, but not what comes through the sense of smell.”
“But why would they do that? I mean, these agencies.” At that moment, I began to seriously wonder if Aunt Tonya was insane.
“I understand, sunshine. I sound like a mad old woman. Who cares about grandmothers working in their little front gardens, right?”
“Marinochka, to them, your joy is like a weed in a sterile garden bed.”
“Because it’s easier to sap the juices from an unhappy person. Suffering, fear, loneliness—to them, these are like fertilizer; they feed on it, drawing their strength. But love, your empathy, when you feel another’s pain as your own—to them, that is a system failure. An uncontrolled variable. If you love, you are free; you cannot be commanded through fear. To them, you are like a virus in a perfect program. If they let you have your way, you’d infect everything around you with that light of yours, and their factory of grayness, this whole enormous machine of despondency, would simply crumble into dust. And that cannot be allowed. Big business. So they strike down those who engage in such subversive activity.”
“Did you know someone they killed?”
“I don't want to scare you. All I want to tell you is that I’m opening up to you now because I see that you yourself are quite the little dandelion. I don’t have much time left here, but you have a whole life ahead. And if you want to become like me—you must be careful. That’s how they track us down. They look for ‘wrong’ patterns, for colors that are too bright, for smiles without a reason. And when they find them...” she fell silent, watching a dry leaf turn black in the fire.
“Death for us is just as quiet as our magic. You look—yesterday a person was singing songs, and today they’ve put their head in a noose or jumped off a bridge. And everyone says: ‘Depression, it happens.’ But it isn't depression, child. It’s them ‘switching him off,’ erasing him like a typo in a document. They masked their own fear as his weakness.”
She smiled again, and that smile sent a chill down my spine.
“So you and I—we are partisans in a floral paradise! Every one of my flowerbeds is a hack into their gray reality. And while they think the world is under control, what they cannot weed out is already sprouting beneath their feet. Everything around will be bleak, lifeless, and grim, but these little ones will bloom and disrupt that grayness. It will be their defiance through beauty. The main thing is not to poke your head out too soon. Drink your compote and remember: our main cipher is kindness. They have no protocol against it.”
Aunt Tonya adjusted her headscarf and looked at my nervous hands, which were still clutching the empty compote bottle. It was as if she saw in them not just fingers, but the trajectories of future movements.
“Don’t look at me so frightened,” she said softly, poking the embers. “I’m not forcing you to dig the earth. Magic doesn’t sit in the shovel; it sits in whatever your soul has grown fond of. You can stitch a cipher into anything, as long as your hand doesn't shake. You love to sew, don’t you? So sew. Stitch by stitch, thread by thread. Every seam on a dress is like a line in a spell. You can embroider a coat’s lining so that when a person puts it on, their heart grows warm and armor grows against all their grayness. You can sew on buttons in such an order that they become charms against their ‘dusty eyes.’ They—those hounds from the Special Service—they look at the facade, at the general canvas. It’s important to them that the gray mass is uniform. But you—you perform the ‘hack’ from the inside. Embroidery on a collar, a pattern on a cuff that no one will notice unless they look closely—that is your cryptography of care. You will release people into the world dressed in ‘bulletproof vests of love,’ and they won't even know why they’ve suddenly stopped being afraid in the subway or in a queue. The world is like an old patchwork quilt, dear. In some places it’s worn thin, in others the moths have eaten it—that very depression of theirs. And we—we are the menders. Someone closes the holes with flowers, someone lays tiles, but you—you work with the needle. The main thing is that in every stitch there is that hidden thought, that rhythm they cannot calculate. How do they think? That everything can be measured with the mathematics of despondency. But you—you add a drop of absurdity to the seam, an extra knot where it wasn't expected, a secret symbol on the reverse side. To them, that’s like sand in the gears. While they are trying to crack your ‘code,’ the person will already have time to get warm and remember that they are alive. That is how we’ll win—thread by thread, petal by petal, by a drop of compote, in the end!” Aunt Tonya said and smiled sweetly.
I don't know why, but I believed her. Mostly, of course, because she was reading my thoughts almost the whole time, but that wasn't the point. The goal of her activity seemed to me supremely worthy, however strange. A hidden ritual of love. An attempt to make the whole world filled with hidden rituals of love that would one day converge and shatter the old order. This was an elderly woman in a garden beneath my house. How was such a thing even possible? Aunt Tonya contradicted not so much common sense as everything I imagined about people in general. I have many strange classmates, but compared to Aunt Tonya, they aren't strange at all.
The next day I went to school full of excitement, wanting to tell this story to my boyfriend, but as soon as I approached him before classes began, he told me we were breaking up and that he was in love with another girl. The world around me didn't just collapse—it instantly lost its color, confirming every one of Aunt Tonya’s words from the day before. It seemed the “Agency of Grayness” had struck back at the exact moment the first sprout of hope had pecked through in my soul. Inside, it didn't just hurt—a vacuum cavern had formed. It was a physical sensation of “switched-off” space right in my chest, where a living heart had been beating a second ago, and now an icy draft, stinging with its cold, was blowing through. My throat went dry again, but Aunt Tonya wasn't there with her magic compote. There was only a sharp, burning feeling that your own “lining” had been ripped open with rusty scissors, and all those threads you were going to mend the world with were now hanging in meaningless scraps, unable to hold even yourself together.
I stood in the middle of the noisy corridor, and it felt as if I were the only living object in this forest of gray concrete, and that object was now slowly but surely being covered by the frost of infinite apathy. I bolted before he could finish speaking and see my tears. The school corridors turned into an endless tunnel filled with noise that no longer formed into voices—just a hum, a static crackle. Outside, the sky, which had seemed merely overcast in the morning, was now turning to lead. Clouds crawled low and heavy, as if someone above were painting over the world with a dirty roller. As I ran, the wind lashed my face with cold, stinging gusts, blowing out the last remnants of yesterday’s warmth. It felt as if the city sensed my vulnerability: traffic lights blinked with angry red eyes, and passersby seemed like identical gray shadows that intentionally blocked the path just to stare a little longer at a foolish girl falling apart in the middle of the street. A heavy downpour began, making me feel even more trampled and insignificant. It was as if I’d fallen into some dramatic scene from a movie about tragic love. In a way, it even became funny, how pathetic my situation was.
At home, I didn't even take off my shoes—I simply burst into my room and collapsed onto the bed, burying my face in the pillow as if it were a portal from which even the apocalypse could not reach me. After remaining in this state for an indefinite number of hours, I got up to wash my face and saw Aunt Tonya's wreath on the table. Without a second thought, I went over and put it on. In that very instant, the sun broke through the clouds outside, and the rain ceased. The entire room was flooded with warmth and a sense of some invisible care dissolving into the air. I realized then that Aunt Tonya truly was an enchantress.
An hour later, I went down to her flowerbeds. Aunt Tonya was kneeling in the wet grass, tenderly straightening the stems of asters beaten down by the recent downpour. She didn't turn around as I approached, but I saw her shoulders relax. I was wearing her wreath, and it seemed to bind us with an invisible thread through which warmth was transmitted. But inside, I was still stinging from my loss, and this contrast—between her eternal, invincible "sunny" optimism and my scorched emptiness—forced me to ask the question that was burning on my tongue.
“Aunt Tonya,” I called softly, “do you... do you have this love yourself? The ordinary kind. The kind you don't have to be silent about, or hide within petals? Are you married? Was there ever someone for you?”
The gardener’s movements froze. Slowly, as if overcoming the resistance of thick air, she rose from her knees. When she turned to me, I flinched. For the first time, her face did not glow with that familiar, slightly mad smile of a holy fool. Her eyes, which had always seemed like all-seeing lenses to me, suddenly grew wet. In them swirled a pain so thick and concentrated that my own school breakup seemed like a minor scratch compared to a deep, unhealing wound. She looked not like a powerful enchantress, but like a very old, infinitely tired woman.
“Forgive me, child,” her voice wavered, turning hoarse and real, stripped of metaphors. “Forgive me for drawing you into this without warning.”
She wiped her eyes with the back of a hand stained with black soil, leaving a dark streak on her cheek.
“This path... it is a lonely one. Almost always. We are like receivers tuned to a different frequency, you see. An ordinary person doesn't hear us, and if they do, they get scared. How can one live with a woman who has the noise of stars instead of thoughts, and the saving of a city from grayness instead of plans for the evening? To them, we are glitches in their understandable, cozy world.”
She sighed heavily, looking somewhere through me, into that reality where, perhaps, she had once been happy.
“I’ve heard legends... of those who managed to find 'their own.' They say if two such masters meet and fall in love, their magic becomes capable of moving mountains without a single incantation. But I myself have never met such people. There are too few of us, dear. We are scattered across the world like rare seeds in a concrete field. The chance that two sprouts will break through within a meter of each other and entwine their roots—it is vanishingly small. Almost zero in this coordinate system.”
Aunt Tonya stepped closer and touched my shoulder. Her hand was cold from the rain, but from it emanated a sympathy of such power that I wanted to cry again—but now from gratitude.
“We enchant the world for others to find love, but we ourselves often remain in the shadow of our own light. This is our cross to bear. We write letters that no one will ever send back to us. But precisely because we know the price of this loneliness, we have no right to abandon our work. If we stop mending this reality with love, then absolutely everyone here will become lonely and forsaken.”
Aunt Tonya sniffled, and it was so human that the shroud of high tragedy began to dissipate a little. She looked at her dirty hands, then at my tear-stained eyes, and suddenly gave a short, old-womanish grunt. In the corners of her eyes, those same mischievous wrinkles I was used to seeing began to gather again.
“There now, child,” she said, adjusting my wreath, which had slipped slightly to the side. “I’ve gone and let it get all damp in here; I nearly flooded myself. And yet, in our business, the main thing is balance. If you grieve all the time, nothing but thorns will grow instead of flowers, and we have enough of that sort of thing as it is.”
She scanned the garden, where heavy drops still trembled on the aster petals, sparkling under the timid sun like a scattering of small diamonds.
“Look at it from another side,” she winked at me, and her voice regained its old cunning. “In every trouble, even in a rotten downpour or in that sorry excuse for a suitor of yours, there is a use if you look closely.”
I realized she had read everything inside me again. I wasn't sure if it was magic; everything was plain to see on my face even without words.
“Take me, for instance—today I don't have to spend three hours lugging buckets around the plot. The sky did it all for us! Nature washed everything, gave it a drink, and even wiped the dust off the leaves. The higher powers organized the watering themselves.”
She gave my shoulder a gentle nudge.
“The world gave us a day off today. It saved our strength. Since there’s no need to water the beds, it means the time we’ve freed up should be spent on something else, something important for the heart. For example, on picking up that very needle and thread. When it’s wet in the soul—the hands must have a task; that’s how it dries out inside.”
Aunt Tonya’s smile broadened, and it was like the first ray of sun after a thunderstorm.
“Go on home now, put the kettle on. And as for that boy... well, just consider that you were more than he could handle. He didn't have the heart to see your depth; he got scared. It happens. We need those who aren't afraid of oddities, and you will surely meet such a person. Maybe he’s sitting somewhere right now, looking out the window at the rain, wondering why he feels like tracing special patterns in the dust of an old attic.”
All the following weeks I spent with the Bloom-Keeper. School lessons dragged on incredibly long and were of absolutely no interest to me anymore. I waited for our meetings. I waited for new secrets. She told me why she plants aconites in the shade rather than the sun, otherwise the cipher won't add up. That a message needs the right soil of attention, or else it will be eaten by the slimy slugs of indifference. She told me how bees and other insects help carry the pollen from her magic flowers. How the lilacs she planted change the feeling of the evening. How she fights aphids. How she covers the flowers for the night. How the fragrances of her flowers block the production of stress hormones in those passing by. How she leaves seeds in specific places, knowing that birds will carry them to the necessary coordinates. Every day was an endless transmission of art—the art of being an invisible force that changes the fabric of the world without touching it with coarse hands. Compared to what she taught, what they taught at school seemed like an endless lie. Every evening in the woods or in her garden became a lesson in "quiet presence."
“Do you think a weed is an enemy?” she would ask, carefully stepping around a bush of lamb's quarters. “No, dear. A weed is noise. Like interference in a radio receiver. If there's too much of it, a person won't hear the music my asters sing. I don't pull them out of malice; I’m just clearing the ‘airwaves’ so the melody of kindness comes through pure.”
She taught me the rhythm of the descending twilight. She told me that every hour has its own color and its own "lock." “Evening dew is glue for words,” she would whisper. “What you say in a whisper over an opening bud at six in the evening will freeze within it until dawn. And in the morning, when the flower opens under the first ray, that word will fly away with the scent, straight into the window of someone who has already forgotten how to hope.”
She showed me how to "charm" the paths. “Look,” Aunt Tonya would lay small stones along the edge of the path, alternating them with pine needles. “People are used to looking under their feet with heavy thoughts. If you lay out an ‘endless knot’ pattern here, a person will involuntarily slow their pace. Their heart will tune into this rhythm, and by the time they reach the end of the alley, the resentment in them will settle to the bottom, like silt in a glass of water.”
One of the strangest lessons was about the “shadow of sound.” Aunt Tonya explained that silence in a garden can be different. “There is a dead silence—that's when the Special Service has weeded everything out. And there is a full silence—when thousands of tiny lives breathe in unison. We don't plant bellflowers so they’ll ring in the wind, but so their shape will catch the bitter words people throw at each other. The flower absorbs the poison, processes it into sweet nectar, and suddenly the bee carries not anger back to the hive, but healing.”
She taught me to listen to the wind. “The wind is a postman who has no address,” she would say, tilting her face to the cool stream. “But if you plant a hedgerow at the right angle to the north, it will swirl into a funnel, gather all the city’s rage, and carry it high into the sky, where it breaks apart into harmless droplets. I knew many architects of the air.”
“I’ve always wanted to ask you—who was it that initiated you into all of this?”
“Eh, child... That was a long time ago, back when the world still seemed vast and the borders were made of iron. I went on an exchange to Czechoslovakia; I was young then, with curly hair, and I thought I was simply going for an internship at the KGB branch there. But Prague itself is less like a city and more like one continuous cipher. That’s where I met Tomáš. He was slender, like a stem of young flax, and his eyes glowed with a kind of feverish, dangerous knowledge. He used to walk the narrow streets pasting up flyers. You know, those ordinary scraps of paper with phone numbers at the bottom. I approached one, and there...” she gave a bitter smile. “There, a secret was written that I hadn't even dared to voice to my own reflection in the mirror. Just a couple of phrases, in a handwriting that sent shivers down my spine. I was so frightened then that I nearly collapsed, but he stood nearby, with paste on his fingers, watching me. He smiled and told me to fear nothing.
“He was the one who opened my eyes to the fact that the world is a battlefield. Tomáš told me about the Dark Sorcerers of the East—about those who serve the very bottom of human despair. They aren't just evil people, child; they are masters of distortion. Their order is the order of scorched earth. They know how to rewrite human memories and crawl into dreams like slugs into a bud, and they rig everything so that a person wakes up with the feeling—the memory—that they are worthless, abandoned by everyone, and hate the whole wide world. They need you to eat yourself from the inside, because it is easiest to grow their black seeds in a person who hates themselves.
“Tomáš used to say,” she continued, “that if you have the spark, if you feel more than others, then you have only two paths. There is no third. Either you take this gift and carry it like a healing tonic, saving the world through love and care, even though it is painful and lonely. Or you begin to use this gift to break others, to sap their juices, their energy, their resources. Those others live richly, but inside they have a void that nothing can fill. They exploit life itself, turning it into dry husks.”
She looked at me very seriously.
“Tomáš was my teacher. He taught me that love is the hard labor of mending broken space. He stayed there, in that Prague, to fight his shadows, and I came here. But every time I plant a flower, it’s as if I’m continuing that conversation of ours by the flyer on the wall.”
I froze, afraid to move. A heavy, thick silence hung in the air between us, one that even the wind did not dare to break. Her words about the secret services, about quiet deaths masked as accidents, flashed through my memory.
“Aunt Tonya...” I whispered, barely audible. “Are you and he... do you still communicate? You know, letters or maybe those same signs through the birds? Do you know where he is?”
Aunt Tonya slowly straightened up. She wasn't crying, but her face became like a frozen mask of gray stone. She wasn't looking at me, but somewhere beyond the horizon, where the sun was setting, staining the clouds the color of clotted blood.
“No, child,” she replied in a voice that held not a single living note. “We do not communicate. He was killed. More than thirty years ago.”
She reached toward the earth again, but this time she simply squeezed a handful of damp soil in her fist—so hard that her knuckles turned white.
“Those very ‘masters of grayness’ tracked him down. He was too brave, you see, too bright. He didn't just paste up patterns; he made entire neighborhoods wake up from their stupor. They couldn't ‘reconfigure’ him; he was like a bone in their throat. First, they tried to get into his dreams, to poison him from within, but Tomáš was strong. So they decided the matter simply, in an earthly way. They found him in a tiny room right under the roof... They said his heart gave out. Said he was young, but had overstrained himself.”
She opened her fist, and the earth crumbled back onto the garden bed in dark clumps.
“That was when I realized this war isn't in books. If you decide to light a lamp, be prepared for the darkness to come and blow it out. They took his body, but the cipher remained. Those words he passed to me then, that knowledge—it lives in my flowers now. He is gone, but his ‘virus of love’ continues to spread through me all across the world.”
Aunt Tonya finally looked at me, and in her eyes that piercing, almost unbearable fire flared once more.
“That is why I’m telling you: secrecy is our everything. Love must be a covert operation. While they are looking for an enemy with guns, we are tucking flowers under their feet. Tomáš cannot be brought back, but as long as I plant lilacs and you sew your patterns—he is still leading this fight. Along with us.”
A few more days passed, and I saw her as I had never seen her before. Aunt Tonya was standing at the garden gate, not in her eternal faded robe stained with earth, but in a fine green sundress of a deep, mossy color. On her head was an elegant hat with a narrow brim, and in her hands, she clutched a small linen pouch embroidered along the edges with a strange, looping pattern. She looked younger and at the same time somewhat transparent, as if the sunlight passed through her a bit more easily than usual.
“I’m leaving, child,” she said, her voice sounding solemn and quiet. “I need to go to the dacha; things have piled up in my garden beds that won't wait. And there’s someone I need to look in on.”
She handed me the pouch. It was surprisingly heavy for its size, and a faint warmth emanated from it, like from a stove that has only just begun to cool.
“Here, take this. These are special seeds. While I am away, you must plant them. But remember: do this only at night, when the moon is full and round as a saucer. They drink its light, soaking up the lunar power so the root will be strong and the color clear. Plant them in the very heart of the garden, where you and I last weeded.”
I took the pouch, and my fingers involuntarily trembled. A bad premonition, cold and sticky, stirred in my chest.
“And when will you return, Aunt Tonya?” I asked, trying to keep my voice from shaking.
She looked at me, and in her gaze was such infinite tenderness, the kind shown only to those who are being left forever. She adjusted her hat, touched my forehead with her fingers, and smiled that invincible smile of hers.
“Now, don't be sad, dear. I’ll be back in a couple of weeks! Sadness is like rust for our 'firm.' Remember everything I taught you. Every stitch, every petal—it’s your word in a great letter to the world.”
She turned and walked away down the path, light and straight, disappearing into the greenery of the alley. I never saw her again. Not in a week, not in a month. I realized that I had never been to her apartment and didn't even know which floor she lived on. I began to look for her. First cautiously, then almost in a panic, going around to the neighbors. Но as soon as I uttered the name "Aunt Tonya," people looked at me with polite bewilderment. "A gardener? Why, we’ve never had a gardener here; the Housing Office plants everything." The world began to blur with a gray haze again, until one day by the entrance I ran into Sofya Petrovna. We were all a bit afraid of this old woman in her eighties; she was always wandering in circles, wrapped in a moth-eaten shawl, angrily muttering something under her breath as if arguing with herself.
“Excuse me...” I blocked her path. “Do you happen to know Aunt Tonya? She used to look after the garden here...”
Sofya Petrovna froze. Her wandering gaze suddenly came into focus, becoming clear and joyful. She beamed as if I had gifted her an armful of her favorite flowers.
“Antonina? Ivanovna?” she asked back tenderly. “How could I not know her, child. Come, come quickly, I’ll show you the cards.”
She led me into her cramped apartment, which smelled of mothballs and dried herbs. With trembling hands, she took a heavy velvet-bound album from a shelf and sat me down at the table.
“Drink your tea, dear, I’ll find it now... Here she is!”
Two women stood in the yellowed photograph. One was Sofya Petrovna herself—young, laughing. And beside her... beside her stood she. She was no older than thirty. The same tilt of the head, the same unruly hair escaping from under her headscarf, and that very same smile that seemed to make the air smell of spring.
“That’s her!” I exclaimed, pointing a finger at the photo. My heart was beating in the very back of my throat. “That’s Aunt Tonya! Please, tell me, which apartment is she in now? She went to her dacha and left me some seeds, but I don't have the keys...”
Sofya Petrovna suddenly went quiet. She slowly stroked the photograph with her finger, and her joy was replaced by a quiet, resigned sadness.
“What apartment, child? Antonina... why, she died a long time ago.”
The air in the room suddenly vanished. The walls swayed, and the floor beneath my feet turned soft as cotton wool.
“Died?” My voice broke into a whisper. “How did she die? When?”
“Forty years have passed, dear,” the old woman sighed, not looking at me. “That year, the summer was heavy, full of storms. She was betrayed by the man she loved. That youth she dreamed of, the one from abroad... something happened there, and she couldn't bear the pain. She was proud, fragile. Her heart couldn't withstand the suffering, and she went to our lake. That’s where they found her... She drowned herself, poor thing, right in that green sundress she’d sewn for her own wedding.”
My head spun so violently that I gripped the edge of the table. A roar filled my ears, drowning out the ticking of the old clock. Forty years ago. The green sundress. The lake. But the pouch of seeds, heavy and warm, still lay in my pocket, searing my thigh with its undeniable, physical reality. I realized then that I could tell no one about my meeting with Aunt Tonya without being considered insane.
All the following months turned into a viscous, gray jelly. I lived as if in a fog, through which reality emerged in distorted, terrifying patches. My mind became my worst enemy, constructing endless logical traps.
Had I gone mad? If I had seen a ghost, why was she so warm and smelled of earth rather than the dampness of a grave? If I had a split personality, where did these complex insights into cryptography, chromatic codes, and the "shadow of sound" come from in my head? I was just an ordinary schoolgirl; I had never opened books on alchemy or protective rituals.
I would go out into the yard and look at the flowerbeds. They were there. Petunias, asters, aconites. But were they "the ones"? Maybe this was just the mundane labor of a tired Housing Office worker, and my fevered brain had simply overlaid a grid of ciphers onto them? But then how to explain the photograph at Sofya Petrovna’s? I had seen that same smile, those same eyes... If I had invented Aunt Tonya, I had invented her face before I ever saw the picture. It was impossible. It was a dead end, beyond which yawned the abyss of madness.
At night, my old nightmare began to haunt me again. That same house, engulfed in greedy, roaring flames, and the silhouettes of my parents vanishing into that fiery hell. I would wake up in a cold sweat, and the orange flame on my head seemed to burn brighter from my terror, as if feeding on my despair.
The morning came when I realized: I couldn't cope anymore. The grayness of the city had begun to seep inside me, filling my lungs with concrete dust. I decided it was time to give up. I packed a small backpack and headed toward the psychiatric hospital on the edge of the district. Fine, "the loony bin" was my middle name now. Thank you, Bloom-Keeper. I walked with my head down, trying not to look around, lest I see another "miracle" that my brain would turn into a hallucination. But right before the hospital gates, two construction workers blocked my path. To the sound of a raspy radio, they were lazily laying sidewalk tiles. I had already lifted my foot to step over the dug-up sand, but suddenly I froze. My heart skipped a beat. The workers weren't just laying stones. They were tracing a strange, winding pattern of different-shaded tiles in the shape of fish.
“Hey, kid, don’t step on it—it hasn’t set yet!” one of them grunted, wiping sweat from his forehead.
I stared at these completely ordinary, prosaic men in their dirty overalls, and suddenly Aunt Tonya’s voice rang in my ears, warm and a bit mischievous: “Maybe in the next town over, some old woman is hanging scarves on fences the same way, or a craftsman is laying tiles in a secret pattern. We are enchanting the world piece by piece...”
This couldn't be a coincidence. These fish on the asphalt could be another cipher. Another ritual. The world around me wasn't empty or sick—it was full of partisans, waging their secret war against the grayness right beneath my feet. I stood motionless, unable to tear my eyes away from the pink and blue fish tiles. For a moment, the world around me froze, leaving only their quiet, mundane conversation, which cut through the silence sharper than any scalpel.
“Rough morning, Pash,” sighed the older one, leveling a tile with a rubber mallet. “Wife came down with a fever, so I had to drag the little one to kindergarten myself. She clung to me, bawling, wouldn't let me go to work...”
“Just being fussy?” the second asked, without interrupting his work.
“If only. She had a nightmare. Like our house was burning down, and her mother and I were inside... right in the flames. She woke up in tears, shaking all over. Lena and I spent the whole morning hugging her, explaining that here we are, alive, right beside her, that we’re okay. But she looked at us with these eyes, like we were ghosts, and she just couldn't believe it. She held my hand all the way to the gate, checking to see if I’d vanish.”
Every word fell into my soul like molten lead. My nightmare. My parents burning in the fire. My fear, which I had considered my private, incurable madness. A thought flashed in my mind, so bright it was painful: what if, all this time, the Dark Sorcerers of the East had been lying to me? What if the house never burned down? What if it was their “order of despair,” their way of convincing me that I was an orphan in this cold world to sap the energy of my grief?
“They didn't die,” I whispered to myself, staring at the stone fish beneath my feet. “They simply went into a mode of invisible care.”
The builder struck the tile with his mallet—tap-tap—and the sound was like a heartbeat. He was laying a fish so that someone, walking over it, would remember home. And there I stood, at the gates of the madhouse, ready to surrender voluntarily to the Grayness because I had believed in their picture of the fire. I looked at the heavy gates of the clinic, and then at the pouch of seeds that had been in my pocket all this time. I realized: if I walk in there now, I betray more than just Aunt Tonya. I betray Tomáš, these builders, and the very possibility that love is not a disease, but the only cure. I came back to life and went home.
Many years have passed since then. I am no longer that frightened girl standing at the clinic gates. Today, I am the head of a fashion house, a designer whose collections are discussed in magazines, but whose true essence no one understands. I have dozens of seamstresses and hundreds of employees under me, and every day kilometers of fabric pass through their hands, turning into dresses, coats, and scarves. They think they are just creating clothing. They don’t know that under my direction, every stitch is placed in a strict, almost sacred rhythm. Into every collar, I sew a rhythm of tranquility; into every lining seam, a cryptogram of tenderness; and the order of buttons is a formula of consolation for those who have lost hope. I have filled my garments with a hidden symbolism of love, turning fashion into a partisan war for human souls.
The Agency of Grayness sees me only as part of the consumer system, failing to notice how my clothes—acting as viruses of tenderness—spread through cities and create an invisible network of resistance. So far, they haven't caught on. I know that the story of Aunt Tonya cannot be proven. Any psychiatrist would say she was merely a figment of a lonely child's imagination. But I don’t need to "believe"—I keep this knowledge in my fingertips. Reality can shove all the "facts" it wants at me, but I remember the warmth of that pouch of seeds and the taste of that compote.
I will not surrender. I continue this secret construction, this invisible assembly of another world. For I know: the day will come when critical mass is reached. All these hidden rituals, all the charmed patterns, all the flowers planted by the full moon and the tiles laid in the shape of fish—it will all one day "collapse" into a single point.
In that moment, the old order of grayness, that entire cumbersome machine of apathy and atomization, will simply crumble, unable to withstand the weight of accumulated love. And then, we will all suddenly find ourselves in Aunt Tonya’s boundless garden. This garden will smell the way her most secret aconites and bellflowers smell—fragrances so powerful and pure that in a single instant they will burn away every stress hormone accumulated in us over centuries. Fear, haste, and anger will simply evaporate like morning mist.
And even if they track me down tomorrow. Even if they mask my death as another "tragedy of loneliness," I am not afraid. My work is already woven into the fabric of being. My life will become the compost for this future tenderness, a nutrient medium for that day when the world finally wakes up alive.