Chapter 2 - The World at Suchumi

    

      I went from the Hirshhorn directly to our headquarters to see if I could get another mission in the East. I was hoping for another chance to get back to Leipzig to talk my problem over with Ushi and Steve. Well, I did get a mission in the East all right, but it wasn't to East Germany. I was sent to Russia, to a peace conference, held in a resort town on the Black Sea. The appointment officer told me that this was the first grassroots level meeting ever to be held in the Soviet Union that was neither organized nor sponsored by the Soviet government, but by the youth of the country. It would be held at a small place that he called, "Suchumi" at the Black Sea. My mission was to be an observer. Every country in the world had been invited to send an observer.



      I was rather pleased to have been chosen for the assignment, especially when I found out that my boss had already selected me before I had asked for it. Of course, I knew that this wasn't a real mission, even for a greenhorn like me. Still, I was excited about the assignment, mostly, because it promised to give me plenty of time to figure out my puzzle. I felt that two weeks at the Black Sea should be more than enough time for such a relatively simple task. Steve would likely have said that it shouldn't take any time at all for someone with 'my experience.' But Steve wasn't here and I had all the time in the world now, so it seemed. I felt so grateful for the mission that I went straight to the boss' office and thanked him personally for the appointment.



      As it turned out, I had no idea how wrong I had been when I thought that those two weeks in a resort city at the Black Sea would be a time for quiet contemplation. Life didn't stand still. It left no room for retrospection. It surged ahead. It was anything but quiet there.

      The moment that I arrived I felt an excitement in the air that I hadn't felt at a public gathering for a long time, especially at a peace conference. The conferences that I had attended had all been gloomy affairs. This one promised to be different since it wasn't designed to focus on merely political issues. The focus of the conference was on the liberation of mankind. A daring idea! I felt it was daring, because the organizers felt that this focus had to include also the liberation of men side by side with the liberation of women, something nobody had been prepared to talk about before. The liberation of women was one thing. The idea has long been accepted around the world, but the liberation of men? It was unheard of. It was something that Helen might have been prepared to deal with, but not the whole world.

      Maybe this was Helen's contribution, I thought. Maybe that's what she'd been invited to Moscow for. Maybe the whole conference was her idea in the first place. Maybe she was at the conference herself. What a thought!

      In this regard, I was soon disappointed. The official list of delegates and officers had not a single person listed with the first name of Helen. Of course, I could guess why. If Helen had been involved in creating the conference or its platform, she would have felt that the hard part was done by the time the conference started. If in this case she were ever asked why she wasn't at her own conference, she would likely answer: What has my personal presence got to do with anything? Is my idea not big enough? Is the principle involved not enough?

      "This conference belongs to the youth of the world," she might have said. "It is their task to build on it. I am not going to deny the universality of love by presuming that the young people of the world are not up to the task of loving one-another, and supporting one-another, which this conference was evidently designed to facilitate. I love them by respecting their integrity and their wisdom."

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Stories about  Healing from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche