When the impossible repeats itself

Left: Solomon Vides, 32 years hiding in the jungle, not knowing the end of the war. Center: Akulina and Karp, husbands, 42 years in Siberia, not knowing about World War II. Right: Agafia: Of four children of marriage, the last and only survivor, today, at 73 years old.

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In this crazy world it is not impossible that impossible things happen. Not even that impossible things happen twice.

The most recent was in Guatemala in the year 2001. There, in the jungle, a group of hunters shot at something that moved among the bushes. The result was a desperate cry: "Kill me I can not take it anymore ...!" He was a half-naked man, covered with leaves, who seemed to be the age of many old people together.

His name was Solomon Vides, 72, and the last 32 had been hidden to escape a war that had barely lasted a hundred hours. It was the famous "Soccer War" between Honduras and El Salvador in 1969, used as an element of distraction by two equally corrupt and incapable governments, which left more than 5,000 victims.

Solomon never knew about the ceasefire and thought that the wisest thing was to get away from the barbarism of war. He fled to the jungle, and lived like a wild animal, until they discovered him turned into a walking skeleton, wrapped in a tangle of hair and fear.

And on the other side of the world, not long before, Karp Livkov, a Russian peasant, decided to escape to the depths of Siberia. He wanted to avoid the Stalinist repression against his ultraconservative religious group, which had also been persecuted by the Tsarist governments since the 17th century.

But the Guatemalan jungle is a five-star resort compared to the Siberian taiga, where even the wolves howl with hunger. There, deep in the frozen solitude, Karp arrived with his wife and two children. In the first winter, they were hesitant to keep their shoes shabby so their feet would not freeze, or eat them to relieve hunger. They ate the shoes and made others with barks and then with animal skins that they managed to hunt.

And after the first harvest, after having cleared the land with their own hands, they hesitated between eating everything harvested, or saving some seeds for the following year. They preferred to continue enduring hunger and save seeds for the next season. Thus they survived, fighting for the impossible, for 42 years.

That family that saw two more children born in the solitude of Siberia, never knew of the Second World War, or of one Kennedy, shot dead, or of Russians and other humans on the moon and in space. "Maybe they were stars that moved faster than others," said Karp, when they told him the story.

In chess, unlike life, survives who gets fully into the battle.

This story was originally written by my friend Ramiro Díez in Diario EL TELÉGRAFO under the following address: https://www.eltelegrafo.com.ec/noticias/columnistas/1/cuando-lo-imposible-se-repite If you are going to use it, please quote our source and place a link to the original note. www.eltelegrafo.com.ec