Digital Wanderer

Lena Borovskaya told a lovely story—give it a read. In short, while working on a story once, she found herself in one of the capital’s ultra-fancy clinics. Not even a clinic, but a huge healthcare Pentagon, with everything in a single complex—a hospital, a general clinic, a children’s clinic; the only thing they didn’t have was the devil himself. Lena happened to be in the wing with the children’s clinic.

So she’s sitting there, waiting for the person she’s supposed to interview—a local medical luminary. She looks around. The lobby walls are covered with colorful pictures—you know, the way they decorate children’s clinics so that kids can relax. Usually they paint some primitive crap, but not here—the artist had put her heart into it. There were several pictures on the wall, united by a common plot—like a comic strip. The story went like this: a little girl is walking through a wintry city—she sees a kitten freezing on the sidewalk—the girl comes home, grieving—thinks about the kitten left out in the cold—feels sad—makes up her mind—goes to her mother—drags her mother outside—they find the kitten—take it home. The final picture: at home, in the warmth, a happy girl, a happy kitten, resigned parents. A happy ending.

A good, uplifting story: looking at these pictures, a child learns compassion, learns to strive to change the world for the better. Learns to act. This is important: the overwhelming majority of children are born with pure souls. They become stupid, cruel brutes later, by watching adults. And here in the clinic was this anti-brute propaganda, a manifesto of goodness and justice.

Lena was a little moved, waited for her interviewee, and asked him about the pictures—who had painted them, whose idea it was. The medical luminary nervously waved his hands: “Oh, some young artist was commissioned to decorate our premises, but it’s all bad, very bad, we don’t like it, everything has to be redone.”

And so, when Lena found herself at that clinic again a short while later, everything was different. The girl, the kitten, and all the other bright colors were gone. Instead, photographs hung on the wall.

One photograph showed the clinic staff with Vladimir Putin in a medical gown.

Another photograph showed a boy lying in the hospital there, his arms spread across snow-white sheets. And bending over him, holding a staff and practically a censer, was the patriarch.