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The Woman who could not die – Iulia de Beausobre

Now that I am not so unconquerably drowsy as I was at the beginning of my imprisonment, my awakening in the mornings is the most awful thing in my life. It is a reluctant dragging back into awareness of the swelling chime of large keys unlocking rows and rows of cell doors. Today this clamour is particularly distressing. I do not think I can bear it any longer.

I begin to wake when the cring-crang is quite distant.

Gradually it grows nearer, nearer, nearer, till I can stay asleep no more. I must wake up. Yet with all my will I shudder back, away from wakefulness, away from any life in the flesh. Oh, to sleep on and on and never to awaken! To be done for good with this horror of waking, this horror of life. To die. Why should I live? Why?

Nicolay's face emerges out of a pattern of revolving light and colour. It hovers over me with mute reproach, then floats away. On the brink of waking, from a great distance, I see myself being fashioned into a shining crystal canoe. The canoe is wrapped in the sea-green folds of a gigantic, rippling mantle and carried West-ward. The essence of me is stowed away within the luminous crystal and something else is put in beside me.

What? I do not know. Nicolay is nowhere near me.

Why?

Even this may become clear and simple one day.