My World by Viktor Grebennikov — Chapter 1 — Summer Night.

Sleep, why do you elude me?

City dwellers never have the chance to experience so many miracles around me: the starry sky, the darkness of slumbering trees, the unfathomable mystery of night sounds…

I had a vision of slowly flying high above an alfalfa field buzzing with multi-colored butterflies, bumblebees, and honeybees.

Now I can see something familiar. I see myself walk across an endless alfalfa field filled with many flowers. Its lush and cool green shroud is being slowly unveiled before a palette of colors: lilac, white, yellow, pink. Those delicate brushstrokes keep blurring into the canvas until each flower, each stem, and each luxuriant trefoil leaf is uncovered before my eyes in its minutest detail. Butterflies with bright wings are still hovering over the field. Big bumblebees and a number of different honeybees, their colors ranging from gold, grey, or pure dappled sunlight, keep spiralling around the buds while flying from flower to flower. I keep staring at both bees and flowers and I can’t help but either whisper or write down strange but very familiar words: Melitturga, Rophites, Megachile, Anthophora. I want more, I’m trying to hone in one specific type of bee I need amidst this swarm, but other insects assault my senses as blue-green trefoil leaves and flowers keep gliding past me. And then I am welcomed by another feast of color.

A distant memory comes to mind. Imagine a day spent berry picking. All one sees at the threshold of sleep is an endless vista of forest meadows filled with ripe raspberries. Oh, what a cornucopia!

Another thought pops up. Staring at anything under a bright sun all day long will result in the same vision.

And Seryozha has long been asleep and he must have had the very same flashback of numerous insects buzzing over an alfalfa field before sinking into oblivion.

Some see berries; some see honeybees and bumblebees.

We are sleeping now.

An opalescent summer night sky with an occasional star lighting up here and there is caged by the turrets of a dark forest. Every leaf is still and so is every tall tree. The birch trees are mercifully asleep only to brave yet another day of torrid winds in the afternoon.

A night jar bird, a long-winged mystery of the night, bursts through the darkness and quietly flies over dewy grass and people sleeping by the shrubbery. It suddenly dashes aside and disappears into the woods just as swiftly without making any noise.

A hedgehog appears to survey his dominion of forest meadows at night. The tip of his long wet nose sniffs at something. Barely visible in the shadows, the creature tumbles down the meadow before biting down on a fresh succulent bug hiding in the grass.

Something makes a faint sound in the rustling grass. A more distant sound comes from the cavernous depths of the dark woods.

A shimmering pale yellow star is fleeing the tops of the birch trees to return to its starry home.

Neither Seryozha nor I are awake to marvel at all this splendor. We spent a whole day counting honeybees and bumblebees and crisscrossing that alfalfa field while marking down every new insect in our note books under a blazing sun. It has been a very long day.

Now both of us are sound asleep.

…Something suddenly makes me open my eyes in the middle of the night. A fluttering large nocturnal butterfly is almost touching my face before flying to a tree branch. The butterfly laps up a few drops of cold dew, makes a purring sound with its wings and disappears into the night side of Eden again.

The cool pale sky is beginning to look rosy. What of our yellow star by the tall birch tree? It has either found a new abode behind another tree or has disappeared into the silvery mist of a short summer night altogether.

That one late mosquito is always singing somewhere in the vicinity of our house.

I’m shivering. I fix my blanket and move closer to my brother because I need to get more sleep.

I have another strange dream before the dawn. I see myself standing before a large canvas depicting the sheer panoramic vastness of the steppe. I’m holding a very long brush and a palette with oil paints. I mix a splash of dark azure with some white and I get a perfect blue. Yet my paints feel stuck and heavy and I have a hard time mixing them. I’ve been an entomologist for many years now. Why am I painting now? Why the heavy canvas? Is this all some kind of mistake? Finally I succeed in making that perfect shade of blue I want. I’m approaching the landscape in front of me and I’m painting a sky that is already perfectly blue…I feel that the sky is absolutely real despite still being a part of the canvas which is gradually fading into nothingness. Everything on that canvas is real: the grass, the steppe, the horizon. I’m tasked with perfecting this very landscape by re-painting and fixing it a bit with my oil paints. Both sky and steppe are parts of the world and they contain the entire world within. But I don’t have enough paints and what I have left is becoming dry and dim.

My dream is turning into something very surreal and unusual right before the dawn…

I suddenly realize the sheer weight of my responsibility. What might be the consequences of my mistakes? What if I ruin the work? And why don’t I know who gave me this work and why I chose to bear this burden?

…I wake up startled and open my eyes. What I see is a completely different world. The top branches of the trees are already being caressed by sunlight and the blue sky is hanging above them. This real sky looks different and more silvery than my dream sky and a dragonfly is rushing towards its first morning prey. Seryozha is sleeping beside me. A train is whistling somewhere far away and this sound finally returns me to my normal self. My strange dream ecstasy is fading away from my consciousness.

Within half an hour, we’re fully armed with pincers, a shovel, and a tablet with a map. Now we are trail blazers ready to discover miracles that will eclipse any fantastical dream. We’ll observe the lives of our meadow inhabitants. We’ll enter our sacred Kingdom of Insects. When it was still spring, we made dozens of very special wooden domiciles for our bumblebees close to the field. The bumblebees — we know it for certain — found many of them and moved in. Our map is filled with Bumble Bee Hills markings so we can find them underneath all the tangled grass. Why hills? I can’t even remember myself. It was just a very accidental and convenient code name. It served us well. Since nobody ever mowed the grass there, we managed to set up a very first insect reserve in the country. All this black earth naturally rose by 15 cm. During the spring and autumn period (when the ground is bare) one can see that the meadows become hollow but natural looking hills.

What will I see after I wake up?

Today we’re supposed to lift all wooden and turfy lids on our bumblebees’ little houses. What’s nesting inside a beehive? We need to furthermore check who has begun to inhabit our reed and paper pipes of different sizes. We neatly stacked them under a tiny awning. This is why we decided to spend the night in the field.

Half of the trees are already basking in sunlight. A bunch of grey and golden flies are sunning themselves on the bark of a birch tree. They lazily buzz around their little camping ground. All this commotion doesn’t escape the attention of the dragonfly. Accompanied by loud noise of the wings, it flew by my face and darted upwards like a lit candle to seize a careless fly mid-flight.

A gold-beetle is climbing up a blade of grass by our camp. After hanging on its top, it lifted its emerald green fore wings and plopped on dewy grass. Its transparent — as if made of cellophane — wings slowly came out and they looked a little ruffled after a night’s sleep. Off with the blanket. It’s time to wake Seryozha up.

The gold-beetle is ready to fly.