A sparrow, pitiful tiny ball with non-winking, yellowish eyes, was piercingly cheeping beneath the canopy of our cottage. "It might have fallen out from its nest", I thought and climbed up the stepladder that led onto the roof. There were no nests visible on the roof. "It had apparently been blown away by the west wind from the garden yesterday", I decided. Anyway, as I could not tell what a tree the chick had fallen from I picked it up and brought home.
That summer holidays I was staying with my mother at my grandma's in the countryside of North Russia. I was about nine-years-old then. My mother let me have the sparrow until it learnt to fly. She even fetched an old rusty cage from the storeroom and put it onto the table in my bedroom. I remember vaguely the way I was feeding my chick. It seems to me that I was giving him breadcrumbs and water with a dropper for he was unable to eat or drink. Later on, when he got a little stronger, I was bringing him plenty of worms each day. That time my sparrow even learnt to fly short distances from place to place. Day by day, I took him out to the verandah for our flying lessons, and there, just as I opened my fist, he swiftly flew out of my palm onto the floorboard, his wings trembling.
It was on one of our training flights when an enemy, a tomcat Vaska, caught him. Vaska rose above his victim so suddenly and so suddenly fell upon him, snatching my sparrow almost out of my hands, - the robber with a cold-yellow gleam in his eyes - I didn't manage to do anything about it. Vaska, bastard, would be beaten more than once later on for I would hate him. He pinned my sparrow down to the floor by his clawing paw and snatched him with his teeth. Finally, I took away the sparrow from him; but while I was chasing after the tomcat round the verandah, trying to catch his tail, and then nearly sitting on him, hissing, scratching and snapping the beast, the events became non-reversible. The damned cat had squeezed the sparrow so tightly that his wings seemed damaged beyond repair; clots of sticky blood were visible in the fluff underneath the feathers. The sparrow looked barely alive. My mother didn't believe that he would survive, and she was right. We all felt sorry for the chick and were angry with Vaska. My mother always fed the tomcat but even she didn't restrain herself from whacking him as he got under her feet. Vaska was an urchin and thief, sturdy and enormous, his deep grey fur shining. All the people of the village used to feed him, besides he was rummaging for leftovers in the garbage. He apparently never starved. It was not his hanger that forced him to grab the sparrow, but his feline sense of hunting. Ironically, this swindler Vaska did not gain anything from his greediness.
A pity, it was in our power to help the poor thing to survive, but something inevitable had to interfere with our good intentions. It seems so, doesn't it? Sometimes, when we play God with nature, some uncertain strength may lead us to unforeseen results. I understand my mother now; she intended to give me a lesson of kindness and humanity. Why not, if we lived in a rural area close to nature and we were on holiday. How much time and how much food did the chick need to grow up a little and get stronger? There were no special skills necessary from my side too, such as ability to fly or peck worms, just patience. He was learning all his skills on his own, always prompting me, how to help him. I remember, I was rolling the whole incident back in my head, imagining again and again as I would rescue the poor chick from the tomcat. It was such an unbearable thought.
My sparrow died after a couple of days, and for the first time in my life, I had to observe the dying creature. The sparrow refused food and drink, and just sat on the twig in his cage, rolling his eyes and breathing visibly in and out. I was desperately regretting that I could not turn the time back. Exhausted from struggling for his short life the sparrow even didn't try to stay alive any more, refusing all my attempts to help him. He simply gave up.
There was a certain scent of death in the air; I physically felt his life leaving his tiny body as something weird and tiny went out along with his last breathing, something, like a soul, probably. Maybe, it was just my imagination, but sitting beside the poor thing, I had to be a witness of the dying...
So, why did my mother permit me to keep this sparrow? The result was unforeseen, yes: since then I knew that one day in the future I also would weaken and surrender. What that experience was for? Was it just to draw me into the first meeting with death? Was that the point, pestering my mother with questions she was afraid of, like: