“Well, now is clear,” drawled Andrew with a smile. “It means that Eugene exhausted his patience and he decided to help himself with the bucket?”
“Who exhausted the patience?!” Eugene rumbled in his bucket like a metal robot and taking it off from his head he added, “My patience is endless, it’s firm like steel! But extra vigilance has never been excessive.” And already addressing to Stas he uttered, “No, the bucket doesn’t help.”
“Why do you try then to isolate radio-waves with an iron?!” Kostya interfered inspired by the experiment of the senior guys. “As far as I know, only the lead can be used for it.”
Eugene immediately was jokingly indignant at that.
“You, dunderhead, want to say that my bright head needs to be put to the accumulator?”
“Why to the accumulator?!” Kostya laughed with all. “You may just wet the towel and wrap it around the head.”
“Right!” Andrew backed him. “Then your brain will feel better and the isolation will be good.”
Eugene looked with an unfavourable eye at these two advisors and then slightly grinning put the bucket on the sand and resolutely directed his steps towards Victor. The latter having finished his morning ablution dried himself with a towel and watched at Eugene’s clownery.
Eugene came close to Victor and began to take away the towel from him, “Stop rubbing! You shine like polished. Give me the towel, don’t be greedy.”
“Here you are, take it,” our seniour sempai smiled at that. “You may even take it for ever! I don’t grudge anything for my friend.”
“Of course, he doesn’t,” ironically uttered Stas, “especially when it’s my towel!”
Our group laughed again. Meanwhile Eugene took the terry-towel, wetted it in the water and without twisting it began to wrap it around his head like a turban. This made him look like an icicle melting down in the full blaze of the spring sun.
Right in that moment Sensei and Nikolai Andreevich came up to our group.
“Do you have a headache?” Nikolai Andreevich asked with care in his voice.
“No, he tries to screen himself against radio-waves this was,” explained Andrew while Eugene collected his thoughts to find a proper answer.
“How can you protect yourself with a wet towel from radio-waves?” the doctor said with a smile.
“Indeed!” interfered Victor combing back his resistant forelock. “I wanted to tell him this but he didn’t give me a chance to utter a word! The water is on the contrary a conductor. A dry matter can be a dielectric.”
With these words Eugene glanced at Kostya and Andrew in a severe way, took off the towel from his head and started to twist it in a demonstrative manner like a whip. Andrew and Kostya exchanged their cunning looks and disappeared in canes under the loud laugh of the other guys, so to say, to get out of harm’s way.
We stood in one circle together with Sensei. Stas used this opportunity and addressed to him, “But if to speak seriously, Sensei, please, forgive us! We were yesterday fools and losers. Word of honour, we feel so sorry and ashamed for that,” the guy put his hand to the heart and said it in a sincere way.
“Sensei, indeed,” Victor agreed to him, “Forgive us! Frankly speaking, I didn’t expect that I’m so full of arimanism, empty egocentrism. I was led like a stupid ass. Now I hate myself for it!”
“That’s true,” I thought listening to such revelations of the seniour guys. “And I was also so stupid! Sensei spent so much time for us, he wanted us not to believe blindly but to make a deliberate choice, pay high tribute to the spiritual things and understand what life is. And we behaved like pigs! Ariman needed less that half of the day to dip us into the mess of endless material wishes of our Animal nature! He smartly gained our confidence, made up a show giving us unobtrusive advices which attracted our Animal nature like dog hearing a whistle of his Master. He made such a subtle substitution of our strives to the spiritual life by the hell of the material world which we have to overcome, according to him, in order to realize our wishes.”
“We didn’t expect that the matter would catch us so yesterday,” Stas uttered sadly almost in unison with my thoughts. “It’s such a deceit! When I have realized all of it… My conscience tortured me the whole night! And this… ostrich beside me, too.”
The guy nodded towards Eugene. We also looked to that direction. Meanwhile Eugene kneeled, pulled his t-shirt on the head and quickly dug his head to the dry sand, obviously testing a new way of “waves screening” advised to him by Victor. Our company involuntarily grinned looking at Eugene. But then we glanced seriously back to Sensei.
“Well,” Victor sighed sadly, “we thought that nothing will lead us astray from the spiritual way. But this time we behaved like… Forgive us, please…”
“Alright, guys,” Sensei uttered in a friendly manner. “You are just people. If you understood all of that, that’s good. It means he didn’t visit in vain…” Sensei kept silence for a bit looking at us with some pensative kind-hearted gaze and then he said merrily, “Alright, drag this ostrich out, let’s go swimming!”
Our company felt relief. Faces of the guys brightened, a mark of fear and inner suffering disappeared. These simple human words meant for us really a lot. Once again I was amazed by Sensei’s Essence. He turned out to be even in such a situation a very humane Human. Since if to analyze it, it means that by our yesterday’s behaviour and stupid wishes we just betrayed Sensei, betrayed ourselves, our spiritual nature. But if the last one completely depended on reconciliation with our own conscience, in regard to Sensei, this unordinary Soul, we really felt awkward and even mental anguish for our “swinishness” and egocentrism. And it oppressed even more than internal anguish.
But Sensei simply forgave us. Or rather he didn’t show that something special happened, that he was hurt or dissatisfied. The other one would maybe in the best case moralizing for three hours, and in the worst one would turn out neck and crop with all our hesitations and stupidity. And he would be right! But it would be just an ordinary man, not Sensei! On the contrary he treated us with understanding like a careful parent treats naughty kids. He said just a few words, nice and kind-hearted, which not only let us realize the sense of our mistake, but warmed the soul of each of us. And this unspoken forgiveness revealed the essence of his Great Soul.
The seniour guys began to fulfil the request of Sensei to “drag out the ostrich” with such an inspiration that our company burst into laugh again from their endless humour. First Victor and Stas tried just to “tear” Eugene away from the sand. But the last on felt that he is separated from the sand elements and started to resist obviously for fun, that’s why all three of them fell down to the sand because of their too active actions accompanied by the loud laughter of our company.
Having stood up Eugene shook off the sand from himself and complained in jest, “Have you seen this! All in vain. Neither dry sand, nor empty bucket help to tackle this “conflagration” of thoughts!”
Nikolai Andreevich remarked at this smiling, “Right. As firemen used to say, what is a fire-bucket? It’s just an empty vessel having a shape of a bucket with an inscription “fire-bucket” and used to extinguish a fire.”
“And the main sense is that the fire is extinguished with water, not with an empty bucket,” Sensei specified with a smile.
“Exactly!” Stas backed the joke and turning to Eugene he said, “A bucket is an empty thing. And as it is known you can’t mill the wind!”
“You can’t mill the wind,” Eugene jokingly copied him when the guys laughed again. “Where have you thing the wind here?” He comically knocked at his head. “There boils so much in this pot from the very morning that I’m