CHAPTER 1
The Beginning
Life can be good, and life can be bad; life can be happy, and life can be sad, but the thing we all know for sure is that life will never stay the same.
Life was not easy for Anna living in an orphanage deep inside the borders of Russia. The food was bad, the sanitation was terrible, and the sleeping conditions with the bugs and the lumpy things they called a mattress were just about impossible to endure. As she lay in bed with just a thin cover for a blanket, the cool seemed both refreshing and lonely at the same time. She slept in her dress, of course, with her stockings pulled up as high as she could, but still the evening air was chilly. Living in an orphanage was about the worst thing her eight-year-old mind could comprehend.
The 6:00 a.m. alarm had gone off, and it was time to rise and shine, as the matron Polina would so gleefully put it each morning. It was time to put on her dingy things they called shoes and get ready for another day of fixing meals, washing dishes, scrubbing floors, and dumping out the toilet bucket. This was the job she hated the most. The bucket smelled really bad, and the handle was just a piece of thick wire that cut into her small hand. The place where she dumped the disgusting bucket smelled even worse. And there was no end in sight as far as she could see. Not only did the dark tunnel of life in which she lived not have a light at the end of it but it seemed only to get darker and darker.
She passed her fingers through her hair a few times. Combing it was almost impossible. She had not bathed for over a month, and her hair stuck together like it was glued. She had asked for a comb strong enough to pull through the snarls, but the answer was always the same. "Don't be silly, sweetie, we hardly have money enough for food."
Speaking of food, there was none; only a bowl of what the children called gruel was placed before them at 10:00 a.m. and at 2:00 p.m. What was in the gruel was, of course, a mystery, some kind of mush she expected, but who really knew; it could be cats' ears and ponies' tails for all she knew. Yuck, she hoped it didn't contain ponies' tails. There was, however, a slightly hairy taste to it now that she thought about it. How could she continue to exist in this world, and why had she been placed here? No loving God would place a child in such a disgusting place. Unless, of course, there was a reason for her being here or something she was to learn. But what could possibly be taught to a child in circumstances such as these? There was none that she could think of with her rather small but very intelligent brain.
Then one day, just two days after her eighth birthday, her life would change forever. It was her day to take out the toilet bucket. This bucket sat in a small closet underneath a big board that had a large hole in it. The children and the matrons used it when they needed to go to the bathroom.
She postponed taking out the bucket as long as she could, trying to look busy doing other chores, but Matron Violetta kept reminding her until it was past the afternoon meal, and the other children were starting to complain about the smell. Finally, with a heavy heart, a heavy bucket, and the handle of the bucket cutting into her fingers, she stumbled her way out of the shack, up the six steps one at a time, and then up the long, long hill to the dumping place. She could only carry the heavy bucket about two or three feet before she needed to put it down again and rest a few minutes. The path was not bad to walk on except in the winter or when it rained, which thankfully didn't happen very often. It was packed-down clay, and when it got wet, it became almost too slippery to walk on, but that didn't prevent the need for the bucket to be emptied, and the person carrying it would just struggle one step at a time till they reached the top.
About halfway up the hill, she had just set the bucket down for what seemed like about the fiftieth time when suddenly, she heard a voice. This voice was as clear as any she had ever heard during her short life, but when she looked around, there was no one there. Startled, she looked around to see if someone was hiding near the trail, but in fact, there was no place to hide. There were no bushes or trees or big rocks to hide behind. The voice had said, "LOOK FOR THE SPRINKLES." But what in the heck were sprinkles? She had no idea.
Ignoring the voice altogether, she continued up the long climb until at last she was at the edge of a large pit containing raw sewage. The slope going down into the pit was covered with ugly brown scum that made Anna feel like losing the contents of her stomach. It appeared to her eight-year-old eyes that the pit went on as far as she could see and then drained into a large river.
Using the bottom of her dress, Anna covered her nose and mouth and then tipped the bucket until the muck went splattering and splashing out. It seemed to take forever to get to the bottom, but the matrons insisted that the person dumping the gunk make sure it did not stop and cause a clog. This was the worst part. Standing there smelling the disgusting raw sewage and watching it as it slowly ran down the hill and eventually dropped into the pool below. This was not at all what Anna wanted to be doing. Luckily, this chore only came around about every eight or nine days.
Then starting back down the hill again as fast as she could, holding on to the heavy bucket as tight as her little fingers would allow, suddenly she tripped over a small rock on the path and went head over heels down the path, spilling the contents of what remained in the bucket all over the only dress she had ever owned. Quickly she jumped up and tried to scrape off the foul-smelling goo, but it was no use; the dress was ruined unless she could somehow wash it out. The superior matron Eva of the orphanage was going to be mad, mad, mad! There was even a possibility that she would be taken to the shed. She had never been there, but she had heard lots of tales from people who had. According to them, terrible things happened if you were taken to the shed.
Suddenly, she remembered the river, but it was far away. She guessed it would take her the rest of the day to go there and back, and that was on the condition that she could even find it. Sometimes at night when things were really quiet, she thought she could hear the river way far off in the distance.
A decision needed to be made: go and try to find the river and face the punishment of being found missing or go back to the orphanage and face the punishment and ridicule of wearing a stinky and foul-smelling dress. She had no idea which punishment would be worse, but the words "LOOK FOR THE SPRINKLES" kept coming into her head.
Finally, she decided that there certainly were not any sprinkles on the trail...
