In Berlin at the beginning of the 20th century, Wolf Messing discovered his telepathic gift. He became one of the most enigmatic figures of his century.
His inexplicable gift of foresight created a frightening mystical halo, provoking fierce attacks from official science. Messing was a nail in her boot for her - neither to pull out, nor to get used to it. It's easier to declare, if not a charlatan, then a hoaxer. And although even Einstein puzzled over his phenomenon, he was the biggest mystery to himself …
“A person should not know the future. Such knowledge can be fatal - Messing
In Berlin at the beginning of the 20th century, Messing discovered his telepathic gift. He became one of the most enigmatic figures of the 20th century. His inexplicable foresight has created a frightening mystical halo around him. He provoked violent attacks from official science. He was a nail in her boot for her - neither to pull out, nor to get used to. It's easier to declare, if not a charlatan, then a hoaxer. And although even Einstein puzzled over his phenomenon, he was the biggest mystery to himself …
Messire's visions
Today much is known about him (or seems to be known). Except, of course, my impression. And I could well have left it for "personal use" if not for the feeling of remorse. I remember how I smiled ironically when he named some of the events ahead of me. Neither a book published in Paris, nor a burnt house, nor a sudden contact with death and an Asiatic somehow involved in this - all this could have nothing to do with me! He must have confused my life with someone else's. What doesn't happen ?!
Now, years later, when everything has already happened (there was even an Asian who approached me on the street with an unkind warning …), I can appreciate the delicate caution with which Messing warned me. I didn't want to scare. Then I didn't believe him. My future felt like a win-win lottery to me. He knew it was not so …
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Here are excerpts from what was written. I supplemented them with some facts that have become known to me from publications about him only now. And much that I did not understand then was explained today. The time in our memory is always present. So he left him.
About Messing …
He does not like to go out, ride public transport, cross the street. He rarely answers the phone. Loneliness is assigned to him from above. This is the price of his gift. Hiding on the 14th floor in his two-room apartment on Herzen Street (now Bolshaya Nikitskaya), he can finally take off his frightening mask and relax.
He plunges into books and articles about animals. (I still have his book "The Zoo in My Luggage" by J. Darrell intact.) Especially - about dolphins with their mysterious intelligence, the ability to come to the aid of drowning people, as if having caught the impulses of their fear and despair. I am sure that they communicate telepathically, and he dreams of mentally "talking" with them. His other weakness is detectives. He swallows them with the gullibility of a child, although hardly the most exciting detective can match his own life …
What is he?
An impetuous, 75-year-old, with the appearance of a half-insane musician and the reaction of a swordsman, he swiftly enters the stage and sharply throws to anyone who volunteered from the audience: “Think! Think about what I have to do!"
Sometimes he touches the person who gave him the mental order, sometimes he doesn't. Often works blindfolded. Goes into the hall, guided by someone else's thought, like a radar beam. But how subtle is this thought! The only chorus of "voices" that sound in his brain that is needed by the whole. Lord, what a clamor!.. The hall's thoughts merge. Someone is trying to knock him down, mentally dictating stupidity, obscenity …
He rushes from row to row, whispers something abruptly, sometimes screams and suddenly freezes like a hound in a rack. Then he quickly approaches the required row and, having found the person conceived by the inductor, absolutely accurately performs the task. So, following his mental instructions, he found the chess hidden in the hall, arranged the pieces according to the study, which only the inductor-chess player (and the jury) knew, and put the given mate in two moves. And no one in the hall could even imagine that Messing was touching chess for the first time in his life.
To my question, does he happen to fail to complete the task, Messing replies:
- Rarely. And only partially. Difficulties arise with an illogical, absurd task. For example, once, following a mental order, I walked up to one of the spectators, took off the watch from his hand and, putting it on the floor, raised my leg over it. Then, turning to the jury, he apologized: “I cannot crush them, as the task requires. This is not my thing."
But something worse happened …
As then, on tour in Perm … The task was extremely simple: to find a certain woman in the hall, get a passport from her bag and tell her name from the stage. He did it easily. But then suddenly a photograph fell out of the passport. Messing raised her, smiled: “What a handsome officer. Still a boy!"
Suddenly a spasm contorted his face. He screamed. Clutched at the heart. Instantly gave a curtain …
He frowns painfully now, remembering this.
- What was it?
- At that moment, when I looked at the photo, I saw how the boy had just been killed.
Less than a month later, the woman received a funeral from the front. Both the day and the hour of her son's death exactly coincided with the moment of Messing's "vision" …
He discovered this gift of proscopy (foresight) in himself even earlier than the ability to hear other people's thoughts and the powerful power of suggestion.
How many times has he cursed his gift
How many times has he cursed his gift! An inevitability that I could not avoid, misfortunes that I could not prevent …
As then, with Aida …
This tragedy in November 2004 was retold by Alexey Filippov in the magazine "Caravan of stories":
“He had to carry her out of the car in his arms. The disease came ruthlessly, but she refused to go to the hospital, and doctors came to their home. On one of these visits, academician-oncologist Nikolai Blokhin began to assure him that there was no need to despair, that the disease could recede, even in this state, patients sometimes go into remission, and they live for a long time … He didn’t listen, his voice broke in falsetto:
Don't talk nonsense! I'm not a child, I'm Wolf Messing! She will not recover … She will die on the second of August 1960 at seven o'clock in the evening.
And so it happened. Minute per minute …
The first nine months of loneliness almost drove him crazy. He didn’t want to see anyone, rarely answered phone calls. Life has lost its meaning. The world narrowed down to the walls of a tiny apartment on Novopeschanaya, where his diplomas hung on the walls, souvenirs brought from all over the country stood on the shelves, a white Cuban coral donated by someone, the Santa Maria caravel …
And in the corner lived a wooden chest upholstered in leather and iron, locked with a key. He did not part with him during his travels. Nobody knew what was in it. His treasures? No one doubted that they existed: Messing's fees were very high, and the huge diamond sparkling on his finger spoke of the same thing …
She and Aida have lived in this apartment since 1954. After several years of wandering around disgusting hotels. She also knew how to fill this unsettled life with home warmth and comfort …
Wolf Messing's love
He recalled their first meeting in Novosibirsk in 1944. After the speech, a young woman approached him and said that his host did not have the necessary charm, and that she was not dressed strictly enough:
- I would not have led it that way.
-Well, go ahead, - said Messing …
Now all of his "Psychological Experiments" began with an introductory text, which mentioned the experiments of Pavlov and Sechenov. The text was specially written by Aida Rappoport.
Soon he declared his love to her … He was never an ascetic. Women have appeared in his life before. And they disappeared. Everyone was attracted by his fame and money. And he parted without regret. It was different with Aida. She became everything for Messing - a wife, a friend, a secretary, an assistant.
With her, he found his home, where he could finally throw off the mask and become himself. She enveloped him with such love and care, which he did not know before. And he, like a boy, willingly obeyed her in everything. Only sometimes, as if remembering something, he straightened up, getting into a pose, and in a sharp, raspy voice declared: "This is not Volfochka speaking to you, but Messing!"
His life became measured, normal, like everyone else. From the former, only the regime remained, which he did not change. In the morning - a cup of coffee, a soft-boiled egg with a piece of black bread. Walk with two dogs. During the day I read voraciously. Before the performance I slept for half an hour.
And he was still very afraid of thunderstorms …
Without Aida
Without Aida, everything collapsed into emptiness. Monotonous, maddening existence within four walls, where everything was filled with her presence, every thing kept her touch. Where he constantly heard her voice: "Wolf!"
And now it was time to move to an elite cooperative on Herzen, where he and Aida had to live together with the "folk" and "honored". (He himself became "honored" in the mid-60s and was very proud of this, although before, secretly wounded by long inattention, he liked to say that the very name "Messing" is already a title …)
The truck had been waiting at the bottom for a long time, but it kept wandering from corner to corner, not daring to go down. It was beyond his strength. Like a betrayal. Why would he want this new home without her ?! An ancient quiet area with elegant mansions of embassies … she so wanted to live here! Artistic shop "Mask" on the ground floor - as a reminder. In order not to forget now, when left alone, to constantly wear it …
Damn loneliness
Lord, why ?! But didn't he himself once said to his old acquaintance Chernov (there are memoirs by Vadim Chernov, a participant in the creation of Messing's book):
“To live means to lose all the time, to lose! Father, mother, brothers, wife, friends … And now I am completely alone! However, I've always been lonely and, you know, I don't really suffer from it. You look at the stars and everything falls into place. They don't become lonely. They are born lonely!"
Childhood…
Messing was born under the sign of the Virgin, September 10, 1899 in the Jewish town of Gura Kalwaria, on the outskirts of Warsaw. Ten years old, he struck his parents with a prediction that in two days their cow would die and a house in a neighboring village would burn down. His father punished him for his bad fantasies. And two days later the cow was killed by an enraged bull and the house really burned down … ("From that hour on, I was considered not quite normal. Maybe that's true. But what is normalcy? Do you know?")
The moon attracted him. At night he got up and went to her commanding call. His father fought his sleepwalking in a barbaric way - he put a trough of ice water near the bed. Wolf kicked him, shock! - and he woke up. But all is in vain. On moonlit nights the boy got up again to go … Where ?!
It was decided to send him to the cheder - to study as a rabbi. Wolf escaped from the header. Without money, without food, I got on the train to Berlin. It was here, in the carriage, that another extraordinary gift of young Messing unexpectedly manifested itself.
“Seeing that the inspector was walking,” he says, “I huddled under the bench with fear, hoping that he would not figure out to look there. But he looked. And lit me with a flashlight. His face became contented, because he caught a hare! Then, I don’t know why, I picked up a piece of paper from the floor and silently handed it to him, with all his might wishing that he took it for a ticket. The inspector obediently punched it with a puncher and said: “You are a strange boy. With a ticket and under the bench. There are places … “, - Messing recalled.
Thus, for the first time, the still unconscious power of suggestion appeared in him, which more than once would save his life. She amazed the most skeptical. As was the case, for example, in England, where he put to sleep all the professional hypnotists who had gathered to expose him.
In Berlin
Berlin became for Messing the city of discovery of many mysterious properties of his body. And the first telepathic surprises …
- Wolf Grigorievich, can you explain how this is happening with you? What does someone else's thought "look like"? Are thoughts in different languages different for you, and if so, how?
- The thoughts of other people for me are images. I don't hear so much as I see them. Some place, some human action. These images have both color and depth. As if you were remembering something, but … not from your life. Therefore, it doesn't matter to me what language a person thinks.
In my first time in Berlin, having discovered this ability in myself, I really fell in love with wandering around the market. Where else can you meet so many different people! Where else can you be so imperceptibly attentive than in a crowd? I remember one pair. They walked between the rows, and they looked very depressed. It was felt that their thoughts were far away. I watched them unnoticed. Suddenly, a vivid picture flashed in my brain: a sick girl in bed. I clearly saw her pale face …
As I passed this couple, I said out loud: “Don't be alarmed. Your child will recover. They stopped dead in their tracks. I don’t know which expressed their faces more strongly - fear, amazement, or hope. It was then that I suddenly realized that thanks to this ability to hear the thoughts of others, I could help people. Especially for those who are in dire need of support.
He did this all his life. Not expecting gratitude from anyone. I knew people too well, reading in their souls. Nobody likes those to whom they owe something. And often, help is rewarded with hatred.
Success is not forgiven …
The country applauded him, but the atmosphere of envy was dense - after all, success is not forgiven. The startling speeches were accompanied by accusations of hoax and fraud and, of course, violent exposures of "experts". They were even distributed from the pages of the relatively liberal Literaturka, where Messing was regularly and tirelessly brought to light by professor-physicist Alexander Kitaygorodsky.
Like everything inexplicable, Messing's eerie gift gave birth to a natural defensive reaction in many - skepticism. It always upset him. This is how he himself spoke about it:
I hate to be considered a charlatan and a deceiver. I have neither clever devices, like Kio and other illusionists, nor overdeveloped dexterity of fingers, like Ashot Hakobyan, I do not resort to coded signaling with secret assistants. I am not a magician, not an artist, although I perform on stage and in the circus. I myself do not understand many properties of my thinking. I would be glad if someone could help me figure it out.
Nobody helped. Even in the early 70s, already filled with such vivid images of "The Master and Margarita" that many did not doubt their reality (the sinister figure of a "foreign artist", "Messire" Woland was involuntarily associated with the name "Messing" - also a foreigner, an artist with a frightening appearance), when a craze for mysticism and parapsychology began in the country, the scientists who experimented on telepathy seemed not to notice its phenomenon …
Of course they did! But who wanted to risk their reputation by seriously investigating the strange entertainer?
- Often, to learn the task, you touch a person's hand. This gives rise to such fierce denunciators of telepathy, like Professor Kitaygorodsky, to assert that your gift is nothing more than the ability to catch imperceptible ideomotor contractions of the muscles of the hand or face and, from them, guess about a mental order. In a word - a kind of "sleight of hand and no fraud."
- If I touch a person, it is much easier for me to conduct a telepathic session, since I “separate” his thoughts from the background. And this is not just a background, but a whole orchestra in your head, where each instrument plays as it pleases. But in order to know what a person is thinking, contact is not at all necessary. And I certainly show this in my speeches. I leave the hall, where at this time the spectators themselves, under the control of the jury, determine the task for me. Then I go back and execute it.
- You usually ask to be blindfolded. For what? To not be reproached for guessing by ideomotor?
- No, no… It's just much easier for me to work when I don't see the hall. Visual interference only makes it difficult to receive someone else's thoughts …
- Men or women, blondes or brunettes, old or young … Is there a type of person with whom it is more difficult for you to make mental contact?
- There is no significant difference. It is more difficult, perhaps, with those who, willingly or unwillingly, are distracted from the main idea that must be conveyed to me. It's easy with the military, they are very collected people. Faster and easier I catch the thoughts of the deaf and dumb - they are perceived in brighter and clearer images. But I will probably never be able to explain in detail how telepathic contact occurs. There is as much uncertainty here for me as there is for you. Try asking a blind person to describe his world!