The Messenger"

"

My mother told me the story, and her aunt told hers. Her name is Elena. She worked as a saleswoman in a department store during the Soviet era. She had a husband, a Candidate Master of Sports in skiing. He was initially a good athlete and a member of the regional national team, but by his forties he had become an alcoholic. They had four children, three of whom are still alive. The story concerns this skier husband, or rather, his death. He died of throat cancer, completely destroyed in a couple of years; they say he suffered greatly. After his death, Elena almost became an alcoholic herself, with four children to support, but her relatives helped her and kept her from spiraling into a downward spiral. Basically, the gist of it is this: Elena told her relatives that she had seen the same man twice before her husband's death: the first time a couple of years earlier, when her husband's illness hadn't even been diagnosed, and the second time a month before his death. But she doubted it was really him.

 The first time Elena saw him was in the courtyard. She was just going out to run some errands, and this man stood at the entrance and began to address her. He spoke very incomprehensibly, only distinguishing individual words. The woman later realized that it didn't sound like the incoherent babble of a drunk—the words she could hear were clearly distinguishable, while the rest seemed to be fading from her memory. She heard the man say her husband's name and became angry, thinking it was another drinking buddy who had come to drag her husband out for a night of drinking. She replied, rather rudely, that her husband wasn't home right now. He said something else, and the woman remembered two words—"completely home." She didn't understand what that meant and walked past the "drunkard." She took a couple of steps, stopped, and turned to him—but he was already gone, even though he couldn't have gone anywhere in that time, even if he had run at the speed of an Olympic champion. At this point, Elena's skin crawled. Interestingly, she couldn't later say anything definitive about the man's face or clothing—an older man in ordinary dark clothes—but the specific details had slipped her mind (though my mother told me that this could have been because my aunt's eyesight was already minus three degrees Celsius and she didn't wear glasses).

Soon after, it became clear that her husband was very ill, and eventually, he became completely ill. Elena saw the same man a second time near the school where she was picking up her youngest daughter, who was in elementary school at the time. He was standing near the gate. This time, she recognized him immediately. It was daytime, there were people, children, around, so running away would have seemed strange, so she approached the gate, looking at him. He began to speak again, and again, his words seemed to enter one ear and immediately exit the other. My aunt remembered that they were talking about his husband again, about his soon-to-die death. She vividly recalled fragments of phrases—"Don't be afraid" and "they sent it to her." My aunt was completely frightened, quickly passed the strange man, and headed toward the school building, without even looking back, so it remained unknown whether this interlocutor had vanished this time or not.

In fact, her husband did indeed die soon after, and the whole family later speculated about the meaning of the phrase "they sent it to her," but came to no conclusion. My mother's father, for example, generally believed that my mother either made it all up or mistook two different people for a single "messenger" due to her nearsightedness and suggestibility.