Fiction

EnZi Part One Odesa Chapter 16 Surgery and Archaeology

by Stanislav Dema
01/26/26
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Mood:

Die Apocalyptischen Reiter - Terra Nola (acoustic)

Ester went to the windows and drew the light, translucent curtains—soft morning light, passing through the fabric, filled the living room with an even radiance. The air smelled of coffee and the sea. Somewhere in the distance, beyond the wall, seagulls called to each other.

Vasilis sat on the sofa, Ester settled next to him, turning slightly toward me. I took the armchair opposite. On the small table between us stood cups, a coffee pot, glasses, and a carafe of water. There was a sense of comfort, trust, as if within these walls one could talk about everything without fear of being misunderstood.

I leaned back in the armchair, sat silently for a while, gathering my thoughts—where to begin.

Vasilis and Ester waited calmly, without rushing. In their gaze was respect—that special attention with which people listen not out of politeness, but truly.

— I have been fascinated by history, by ancient mysteries—since childhood, — I began. — My father loved history very much, often told me about great discoveries, the development of our civilization, vanished peoples. But most importantly—he taught me to look at the past not as a chain of random events, but as a complex system where everything is interconnected: faith, culture, economy, climate, diseases, human weaknesses, and hopes.

I fell silent for a second, feeling echoes of the past rising from the depths of memory—the smell of ink, blueprints, and tobacco in my father's study.

— When I entered the university, — I continued, — I studied to be a doctor, studied surgery. But fate decreed that my best friends turned out to be not among medics, but among historians. It was they who invited me to their archaeology club. I went on expeditions with them: at first just helping, then I got seriously involved. And one day I realized that archaeology and surgery have much in common.

I raised my eyes to Vasilis. He nodded slightly, encouraging me to continue.

— A surgeon, — I said, — dissects the tissues of the body to get to the cause of the disease. A historian, an archaeologist—the fabric of time, to understand what corroded society from within. Both seek the source of suffering. Only one heals the body, and the other—the memory of humanity.

For a moment I fell silent. The breeze lifted the light curtain, and a ray of light glided along the wall, refracted in the carafe of water like a messenger of the sun.

— When we worked in the fields, — I continued, — we almost always found the same things: scorched stones, broken pottery shards, clay vessels warped by heat, charred bones. All these are traces of perished life. At first, we treated them as scientific objects, but then the realization came: every such find is a trace of someone's pain, someone's scream frozen in the earth.

I spoke slowly, as if listening to my own words.

— It was then that I first thought that society gets sick just like a person. A disease of the body is inflammation, infection, immune failure. A disease of civilization is war, violence, hatred. And if a surgeon is capable of healing a person, then perhaps a historian should help humanity heal. To understand where the infection began, and not let the wound open again.

I fell silent. Silence stood in the room, and only outside, beyond the window, the sea whispered softly. Ester tilted her head slightly, looking at me with quiet attention, and Vasilis nodded, his eyes gleaming in the twilight of the room.

— Well said, Monsieur Duroc, — he pronounced quietly. — Very well.

I paused briefly, looking into the cup with cooled coffee, and added quietly:

— At some point, I wondered: where does all this come from? All this malice, this hatred that seems to be transmitted like an infection from generation to generation. Why do people, possessing reason, continue to destroy each other? After all, this behavior is not at all obvious.

I raised my gaze to Vasilis and Ester.

— In the face of danger, society always has a choice, — I said. — One can unite to survive, to seek a way out, to help each other. Or one can start killing, taking away, raping, searching for enemies among "one's own." And every time history shows: people choose the second path. Although all that is needed for happiness is cooperation, trust, compassion.

I sighed.

— You know, sometimes it seems to me that history itself is not a sequence of events, but a long, agonizing disease. The disease of hatred. And perhaps our task is to at least try to understand its cause. Then, perhaps, we can cure what has made us enemies to ourselves for centuries.

— I understand, of course, — I said, looking somewhere past them, — that the history of humanity began with one brother killing another out of envy. In this, perhaps, lies the primordial crack in human relations. But that was a personal conflict, a family tragedy. But war... war is something else. It is mass madness, when thousands, millions of people suddenly begin to see enemies in each other, rush into battle like possessed, tear flesh like wild beasts.

I shook my head.

— Take even our Franco-Prussian War, — I continued. — After all, initially there was no hatred between our peoples. We traded, cooperated, participated together in scientific congresses. And then—as if something clicked. People who never knew each other, had no personal grievances, suddenly went to kill. Farmers, engineers, teachers, artists—those who yesterday could sit at the same table—suddenly became enemies.

I paused, feeling a chill run down my back.

— There is some riddle in this, — I said quietly. — As if someone pressed an invisible button in people's consciousness, and reason gave way to the instinct of destruction. I cannot get rid of the thought that war is not just a mistake or a coincidence. It is a phenomenon... almost mystical, devoid of rational reasons. And the more I thought about it, the more distinctly one word emerged in my head—the State.

I was silent for some time, then continued:

— It is the State that turns thinking people into "masses." It recruits soldiers, appoints enemies, says: "this nation insulted us" or "this land must be ours." And people—peaceful, hardworking, kind—believe. Yesterday you lived side by side with a neighbor, and today your son puts on a uniform and goes to kill his son. Not because he personally did something bad to him, but because he was told: now war is your duty, now this person is your enemy.

I shook my head.

— The State makes the human personality an instrument of someone else's will. It forces people to defend not home, not family, not justice—but someone's ambitions turned into slogans. That is why wars repeat. Because someone always knows how to convince people that the goals of those in power are their own destiny.

— And the more I reflected on this, — I continued, — the clearer I understood: someone once set the very matrix of these relations between man and power. From somewhere came this terrible principle—to look at a human not as a miracle of God's creation, but as a resource, a tool. Not as a personality, not as a bearer of reason and will, but as a unit of account, a line in a ledger, a digit in calculations.

All institutions of the state as we know it inherit the same idea: that a person is a cog, a consumable, a means to an end. And the more civilization develops, the more skillfully it learns to count these cogs, redistribute them, rationalize their life and death. When a soldier dies on the battlefield, a record is made somewhere. When a city is wiped off the face of the earth, it becomes a "tactical necessity." Yet behind every such record is someone's life, someone's love, a whole universe.

I ran my hand over my face.

— In this, — I said, — lies the real tragedy. Once, someone changed the very scale of values. Since then, power considers itself entitled to dispose of lives as easily as an accountant fills out pages of a report. And this perception is passed from century to century—from one era to another, like an ancient virus embedded in the very fabric of human civilization.

— Of course, I do not deny the necessity of management itself. A community of people inevitably needs order, rules, a structure of relationships, otherwise—chaos. The problem is that the structure itself is neutral—it can be a home and a support, or it can turn into a barn. Today's system is closer to the second: it is not a coherent organization for the common good, but an animal farm ruled by a farmer. Such a master knows how to give orders, he knows how to count and distribute resources, but sooner or later he will slaughter his sheep and bulls—because the life of animals means nothing to him. And it is from this logic—from the idea that the value of human life is measured by its utility to power—that all our troubles begin.

And here we come to the story retold in the Book of Genesis and the Book of Enoch. You surely know it.

Two hundred Messenger-Watchers were sent by God to help people—to teach them agriculture, crafts, explain the structure of the world so that it would be easier for them to build a normal society on the land where the Lord settled them. But then trouble happened. The celestial beings, having acquired physical flesh, acquired fleshly passions peculiar to humans. They coupled with women, and as a result of this union, the so-called Nephilim were born—hybrid beings, half-human, half-angel.

These Guardian Angels were punished and cast down, and their descendants declared themselves gods and began to rule over people with cruelty, not considering them their equals. It is precisely from here that this attitude toward man on the part of power originated—not as one who needs to be cared for, but as one who needs to be used.

Being not quite human, these creatures were devoid of conscience, empathy, and that divine spark that distinguishes a man created in the image of God. They began to fight each other, and turned people simply into tools for their games.

In the end, the Flood destroyed this society, but the cultural matrix itself—this system of relationships—was preserved in human consciousness. They no longer understood how it could be otherwise. And therefore, the post-diluvian civilizations, of which we are heirs, followed the same path: they created the same ruthless, inhumane society, only now without any gods. Chiefs, khans, emperors, kings—all of them proclaimed themselves "divine" or descendants of gods. Of course, this was a deception, but the thought was forever fixed in human consciousness: we must be ruled by higher beings,and for the sake of their interests, we are ready to kill each other.

Since then, the history of humanity has gone down this path—from war to war, from empire to empire, from one madness of power to another.

— But let us return to our En-zi, — I said, sipping the cooled coffee slightly. — After the so-called "Great Colonial Repartition," Egypt passed under French administration and remained its colony until the defeat in the Franco-Prussian War.

During this period, a huge number of artifacts, manuscripts, entire collections were taken out of Egypt—including the surviving part of the Library of Alexandria found in an underground vault. Based on these materials, a special fund of ancient documents was created in Paris. And I, as a member of the archaeology club, was lucky enough to get access there.

I spent whole days there, sitting in semi-dark halls. And then one day I came across a Greek treatise with a strange title:

«Ἐν-Ζι. Ὄργανον ἐξουσίας ἐπὶ ἔθνεσιν» — "En-zi as an Instrument of Rule over Nations."