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RUSSIAN TUNISIA

They walk in the heat, overcoming the approaching hot faint, through the sirocco, along narrow whitewashed streets, sheltered from the scorching sun by striped blankets stretched from roof to roof, past blue doors with Fatima's hand knocker and blue closed inlaid shutters of other people's houses. On these streets, in these houses, they are looking for their new destinies, their new life circumstances - their old life is all in the past, now they are all wanderers, all strangers in a new land. And this city itself - Bizerte - becomes their new destiny.


The daily solemn drama of the incompatible unity: the major of the brightest sunlight, all-penetrating and warming everything and everyone, the all-covering blue-blue Sky, present in everything, and the constant aching pain of colossal loss, deprivation of everything that was dear, that made up the very flesh of life. And this pain, melted by the sun and the sky - with the joy that has lived in this land for centuries, gives birth to forgiveness. And everything that is flooded with light is as a guarantee of a meeting, as an image of a covenant with God, His mercy and presence nearby in this desert of wandering.

Blessedly banish the truth for the sake of it,
for of them is the Kingdom of Heaven (Matt. 5:10).

People, torn out of Russia, from home, by the cataclysm of the tragedy of the civil war, end up in Africa. Bizerte, Tunisia.

They walk in the heat, overcoming the approaching hot faint, through the sirocco, along narrow whitewashed streets, sheltered from the scorching sun by striped blankets stretched from roof to roof, past blue doors with Fatima's hand knocker and blue closed inlaid shutters of other...

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