Unedited AI-Translation of the original russian book "Истоки моих поступков" by "Никита Капернаумов"
04 april 2026
For those interested in the author"s personality: a reconstruction of the first thirteen years of life up to 2007. One of the largest childhood autobiographies ever (over half a million words across four books). AI comparisons include Proust, Limonov, Knausgård. Here, however - complete anti-literature, no artistry at all, and consistently very deep psychology.
Nikita Kapernaumov, born 1993, from Saratov. Attended kindergarten and school, played sports, rode a bike, saved money. Unrequited crushes from ages 2-3. At 10-11 - broke down. At 13 - involuntary psychiatric hospitalisation, labelled "schizophrenic," and then 20 years in a room in front of a monitor, consumed by destructive envy of other people"s sexual relationships in youth.
_______________Book 4
___Part 54.
.::.
________________ Autumn 2004. I started seventh grade.
.:::.
Part 54, Text 1. Beginning of the school year and the renovation on Radishcheva - problems with the stove and a lock pick - companionship with Denis at gymnastics - the computer exhibition.
.::::.
I"m so fucking sick of writing this childish autobiography, where because of the yearly sameness I can"t guarantee the chronological accuracy of certain events. Take this school fair at the beginning of the year, for example. It could very well have been the year before. I"m placing it in this one only because in my memory those moments come with the feeling that I was already local.
On the very first school day, maybe instead of the first lessons, in the small back courtyard where once I had a couple of minutes of happiness in informal contact with my then beloved Masha Ermakova, a flea-market-type bustle was organised. Schoolkids and their parents laid out textbooks from previous years on the ground that younger pupils could buy. For some reason Katya Ilyina came up to my assortment with her parents, and they were for some reason considering the textbooks lying there. Maybe she had a younger brother or sister. By then we didn"t give a damn about each other anymore.
What changes there were in the subjects that year I barely remember at all. I think maths split into geometry and algebra. Maybe physics and chemistry appeared too. None of it interested me, and I didn"t study any of those new subjects, while my mother"s control over them was almost nonexistent. I remember some subject called OBZh appeared, and my parents warned that sooner or later we"d be sitting at our desks in gas masks. My father, on the theme of these semi-militarised things, kept telling stories from the army - how they were driven on forced marches and all that. The ultimate test of toughness, he said, was to lie down in a trench, not shit yourself when a tank drove over you, and then pull the pin from a grenade and throw it at that tank. He said he"d done it.
Trenches, and gas masks too, my father couldn"t help remembering at that time for another reason as well. He had taken it upon himself to sort out the utilities in our kennel on Radishcheva, where my mother and I went right after that first school day. Earlier, as I"d said, he hadn"t even wanted to think about fixing the rotten property my mother bought. But now it was as if he"d caught the same enthusiasm that I had in those days, the same feeling of a reboot. Or perhaps the point was that, unlike the previous options we had considered and which my father especially hated, this time we had bought an actual separate flat - and even one with its own entrance.
Water and gas were there, oddly enough, but there was a problem with the sewage. Because of that there was no question of living there yet.
If you ask my mother, she saw another reason why my father suddenly burned with the desire to help. The flat, though registered in my mother"s name and having nothing to do with him legally, was nevertheless a separate flat, and supposedly I could be registered there - otherwise why had my mother bought it, since the gymnasium administration needed registration rather than a deed and a story that we lived here - and that, in turn, could someday open the possibility of some rights to it for the second parent as well - meaning him. When this flat appeared, Grandma Valya was immediately there. So my mother would say that this surge of helpful energy was created not so much by my father, who by himself never really needed anything, but by Grandma Valya fussing on his behalf. In those same first days of September Grandma Valya even sprinkled the walls with water there - consecrating them.
In any case, my father began messing around in that flat in the evenings after work - I"ll return to that later.
On the second or third school day I came to the flat after lessons, ate the sandwiches my mother had brought, and we sat there: there was no point going back to Engels anyway, and soon I had to head to training. Meanwhile my mother was getting worked up about something she had always been a panic-merchant about for as long as I remembered: whether the flat was warm, whether the stove heated properly.
We sat in that tiny kitchen, and she kept pressing her palm to different places on the semicircular body of that monster. It wasn"t heating at all. The flame was burning and everything looked right, and it was completely unclear why the stove wouldn"t warm up.
Leaning her hand against it, my mother stood in silent despair. It was obvious: not even so much the money, but simply the collapse of the whole adventure and the point of this flat. If it turned out you couldn"t actually live here, then my twice-daily trips to Saratov from Engels were still impossible.
I understood the situation and the mood, but couldn"t do anything, so I passed the time sitting on the porch and in the yard in front of the flat.
At the beginning of the past summer I mentioned that I had had urges to steal something. Now, when I"d become disillusioned with bottle collecting and scavenging under kiosks while money was still needed, over the next months a theme of profit-seeking crime would start developing in me. Specifically in those days I became fascinated with lock picks. Sitting on the porch, I was turning a paper clip in my fingers. I straightened it out, bending only the very tip, and while my mother stood there by the stove I decided to stick that clip into the lock of the open door and somehow turn the cylinder.
It got stuck in the lock immediately.
My mother was already on edge, and then I called her and showed her that this shit had happened too. We started pulling at it. But we had to leave soon for our errands. My mother was in full panic. At once an atmosphere very close to the Lev-Kassil kind of domestic drama formed - and for the first time so far away from Lev Kassil Street itself, which felt strange.
My mother was waiting for Uncle Seryozha - they had business to attend to. When he arrived, he came into the yard and yanked the fucking paper clip. It sliced his finger open to blood, but it came out. So that"s how I briefly became a lock breaker.
At training something began happening: I started joining in the boys" conversations. I clicked especially when the topic was GTA or computer hardware, though the latter wasn"t discussed often - everyone else had had computers for ages. These conversations happened during the trampoline part at the beginning of training, when we sat on the bench waiting while someone else jumped.
Gradually that boy Denis began turning more and more in my direction. He was my age, a thick-boned dark-haired bull of a kid who had long been doing flic-flacs and standing backflips, little circles on the mushroom, and I think even swings on the bar in grips without the training loops, with the coach. Always in some basketball vest and shorts. He was extroverted, good-natured and jokey. Once the coach told us about the strictness of American law and that there they can forbid one person to approach another. Denis latched onto it and joked to the boys nearby: "I"ll sue you."
In manner he resembled that Sasha Yemelyanov with whom I had a companionship at the end of my kindergarten years. There was an episode similar to the one with Yemelyanov and the non-Russian kid in Anapa. Denis and I were hanging around the training rings near the exit from the hall, and Mephistopheles was working on those rings. By that time it had turned out that he was a heavy swearer and moderately vindictive. Denis started teasing him with some sort of joke or riddle: "A bird is flying and swearing..."
Mephistopheles got furious and kept jumping down from the rings to try to kick Denis, who was bigger than him.
On the high bar Denis spun swings on his own in the training loops - properly, backwards, with straight legs. I still couldn"t do anything by myself except useless forward swings with crooked legs, and my lower back was starting to ache more often - as if something shot through it. While Denis spun his swings I once stood chatting with a boy named Maxim who was about two years older than me - that happened only once. He did swings too, already in grips apparently. And of course he did flic-flacs and double backflips from the trampoline. He said he"d been training only two years and look what he had already achieved. For a moment that brought me down to earth out of my computer-themed oblivion.
Otherwise Denis and I constantly discussed GTA and other games too, and that became more important to me than the training itself. As always, my conversation partner was the guide.
The theme of computers seemed to be pressing in from everywhere. In the Sports Palace itself, in the big hall - the athletics hall - exhibitions were periodically held. Most often they seemed to be related to agricultural machinery: combine harvesters standing on the square in front of the Sports Palace were a regular sight, and inside the hall there would be stands and lots of men in suits with badges. But in those days in September, still summer-warm and dry, there was an exhibition on the computer theme.
At first I didn"t dare go in, but once Denis and I went down to the medical room to bandage blisters and we peeked in there together, and that morally cleared the path for me to go there alone later. I planned it deliberately and after training went into that hall.
There were computers with Nvidia GeForce cards that I was understanding better and better. A whole bunch of monitors with 3D graphics. Gaming computers with joysticks where you could try them, and boys like the one at the Shmyrkeviches" place were playing there. I grabbed some advertising leaflets and soon left.
Evening Saratov, bustle at the bus stops, kiosks with discs everywhere and computer shops every block. More and more people with mobile phones, the coolest of which could somehow be connected to a computer. Computers were, of course, not only about GTA, escapism and separating from society, but also the opposite - something through which to be part of society, a unifying theme with which people were moving into the future. And I too, for now, still wanted to move into the future.
.:::.
Part 54, Text 2. The beginning of Dire Straits - computer obsessions - parkour obsession - a flip from a ladder onto the ground - about shameful fuck-ups and the fading hope of physical mastery.
.::::.
One of those days another important event in my life happened at home. It was daytime, I was alone, and my mother came back with Uncle Seryozha. They had brought a DVD player.
By then I already understood the wires myself, so we didn"t have to wait a year and a half like with the camcorder and the VCR back in the day, and everything worked immediately. We didn"t have any DVDs, so along with the player they brought the first disc. It was something both my mother and Uncle Seryozha knew. A Dire Straits concert - On the Night. Uncle Seryozha had already watched it. Since it was music, we carried the Kenwood over to the TV as well, and I already knew how to connect it with the RCA cables.
They switched it on. There was that long intro before the first song. Judging by the look of the concert complex we concluded the concert was in the Colosseum. The band"s frontman - Mark Knopfler - looked a bit like Uncle Seryozha, and later, when my mother often put the concert on again, seemingly not only for the music but also to look at Mark Knopfler, I wondered how jealous Uncle Seryozha could have given her such a present.
When the band started playing, it was the first "real" music in our house. Something that, unlike even Aquarium"s Terrarium or the radio in my GTA, which were songs, was about music itself and musical mastery.
But at that moment it didn"t impress me much. As a guitarist - yes: with that fast solo in the first song I immediately considered Mark Knopfler an extremely high-level virtuoso. But the music itself... It was all perfect of course, and soon I picked up and started humming all the melodies. Yet it seemed to me that a band like that must be just one of many. Besides, they seemed kind of unknown. I had never seen them when I looked at the spines of music cassettes and discs. Everywhere there were things like Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, which I already suspected were some kind of rock, and I assumed they must be even better than some Dire Straits with that modest half-singing, half-speaking Mark Knopfler. I simply hadn"t yet listened to all those Led Zeppelins and Pink Floyds.
Uncle Seryozha left a couple of tapes and some DVD that didn"t interest me and went home. Dire Straits kept playing.
In the evening my father came home, and he was just as happy about the DVD player and Dire Straits as my mother was. It turned out one of their songs had played at their wedding. That made Dire Straits our main "family" band. We had dinner that evening at the coffee table like on New Year"s Eve, and the concert kept playing on the television. My father said, "Just look how many people came to their concert. And where they"re performing! In the Colosseum! Think about it." In fact the concert was at some other arena, just with a facade like the Colosseum.
With all those unifying elements - that disc, the repairs in the kennel on Radishcheva - those were again days of the "fourfold" (including Murka) Lev-Kassil-style idyll, a domestic family atmosphere like in the times of early childhood beach trips and Niva drives into the mushroom forest.
At the weekend, toward evening when in Engels almost nothing would be open anymore, we had a sudden hope of reviving the old system unit, and my father and I walked around the computer shops. Only the small computer department in the Melody shop on Lev Kassil and Gorky was open. We brought the system unit there for diagnostics. We had to leave it for a day.
I had already been dropping into that department quite often, taking price lists and looking at discs on the rotating rack. Among programs I was interested in 3D Max. Uncle Seryozha said it was a very serious program, for professionals. Cartoons like Finding Nemo were made in it, as I understood, and also all games.
Among the games one strange title attracted me - Far Cry. Every time I went there I stared at that disc and reread the description and system requirements. On the cover there was a brutal guy with a machine gun in a tropical sunny blue lagoon. It looked like the film of the same name, and also like the tropical islands printed on deodorant cans in Grandma Valya"s bathroom when I was little. Like the Bounty advertisement. And like The Last Hero. It was exactly my aesthetic: green, blue and sand colour. I hated darkness and dullness unless there were neon lights like in Vice City. But I still didn"t really know what Far Cry was, and the mention of monsters put me off.
We came back for the system unit the next day. The technician said it was a Pentium I - even worse than my father"s dying Pentium II - and there was no point repairing it.
Several times in early autumn I met either Artyom, or Kozlov, or both of them in turns, and we walked through the now quiet park. We went into the shooting gallery, picked up pellets and fired them. Right in front of the shooting gallery there were brick-and-concrete alcove benches that no one ever sat on because for some reason wooden seats had never been installed on them.
Still full of dopamine from the approaching teenage years in which I imagined myself a physically confident favourite of women, I became obsessed with parkour. I didn"t know that was what it was called. While my companions wandered nearby I couldn"t stop jumping along the backs of those brick benches. I jumped this way and that, but I wasn"t doing anything that any boy with a top grade in PE couldn"t do. Any actual parkour jump there - not even talking about a flip - on those surfaces threatened paralysis and shitting into a bedpan for life.
One day I went to Kozlov"s place and after playing his Mafia and another military shooter where you had to shoot fascists in some dark castle - which didn"t interest me at all - we went out into his yard and climbed around on the garages. Engels courtyards still had a nineties atmosphere.
Then another day Artyom and I wandered through town and reached School No. 33. I did some nonsense on the parallel bars again, but there was also that wave-shaped ladder there. Its lower part was about waist height, and I decided to do a front flip from it like I had done from a ladder at the beach that summer. Only here below was hard ground and grass.
Artyom wandered somewhere nearby while I stood there a long time unable to decide. If you didn"t complete the rotation you"d crash onto your back from a metre and a half and spend the remaining eighty-nine years lying there. If you over-rotated you"d land on your head and neck and then probably that would just be it.
But I was a fucking idiot and jumped.
I landed perfectly upright, as I remember. I climbed back up immediately and did it again, and then again. But on about the third attempt the thing I had feared happened: my soles slipped slightly at the moment of push-off, there was almost no rotation, and I landed straight on my arse from a metre and a half. To my surprise my legs didn"t go numb, but I understood I had simply been lucky that it wasn"t my tailbone or my back.
Another day, like the year before, my mother and I went there in the evening to Aunt Lena, who as usual was the night watchwoman. Not very late though, around seven. While my mother stayed with her, I went out into the yard again. The two of them walked down the corridor of the empty school to the window nearest that sports ground so that while they talked they could watch me jumping.
I did the flips again. There were no falls, but of course I still managed to disgrace myself another way. At one point when I had to crawl under the ladder to the other side, I tried to do it in a nimble Jackie-Chan way with a little jump - and in that jump I smashed my forehead pretty hard into the ladder. Somehow I pretended nothing had happened to avoid embarrassment in front of the mothers at the window. It was exactly the kind of stupid blow two-year-old children give themselves on objects right in front of them.
I was almost in tears with anger that I was trying so hard, had spent two years fucking around with gymnastics, yet these fucking humiliating screw-ups at the level of toddlers followed me everywhere. I had never seen the objects of my envy - those solid guys like the triangular Armenian and the rest - make such ridiculous mistakes. Fuck, how much I pissed myself off.
The mothers left later, but I kept fooling around on that ground. It was already getting dark and overcast, so there were almost no people on the school grounds. Still, the territory was open, and sometimes someone passed along the running track around the football field.
I kept doing flips, especially trying to do them when someone walked closest by. As if I wasn"t doing it deliberately - as if it just happened that way.
And there was one completely idiotic moment: a couple was walking from afar, and I was already tired of doing flips, but I had to do one for them too. While they walked - and they walked slowly - I stood for a minute and a half or two on the edge of the ladder with my arms raised in preparation for the jump. I even looked back at them several times, and they saw.
When they finally came close, I did the flip.
The guy probably understood I had waited for them to show off, and just to react somehow - as if he too were a sportsman and connoisseur of proper manners - he said: "Well, you landed - now hold the landing," and demonstrated a neat upright gymnast"s finishing stance.
It was already agony. None of those shameful achievements gave me any feeling of being a "master of myself," and there was no prize here at all. A prize through physical competence required a completely different level.
If I had been Kuzikyan-Jackie-Chan, I would have come here in summer when groups of teenagers hung around, and started training modestly without any flips. Some bastards would have come up to hassle me, and then I would have done every flip necessary and scattered them in front of their girlfriends. Tails between their legs, they would have fucked off, and the girls would have come up to me, we would have talked and got acquainted. As always I would instantly have fallen in love with one of them and started coming here every evening, and we would have kept meeting. Maybe she would have wanted to learn some tricks too, and I would have spotted her. First physical contact. And two months later she wouldn"t want to go home, and my mother would be staying overnight somewhere at a recreation base, and we would go to my place, and everything would be like in the second half of the music video "Vsyo, chto tebya kasaetsya" by the band Zveri.
That was how it was supposed to be, and it was clear that it wouldn"t be.
.:::.
Part 54 text 3. Outsiderhood in the gymnasium,,, agony with the flip and losing to Yerokin,,, into the woods with the class and Yudina"s strange attention,,, twitchy computer-guy Yevstifeev.
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I never say anything about school. There was nothing there anyway. I wasn"t hanging out with Guzhik anymore. I wasn"t hanging out with anyone anymore. Just petty little dialogues.
Everyone there had gone nuts over mobile phones - all they did was stare into those tiny screens. Probably there were games on them. I never even looked, so I don"t know for sure. Except in fantasies about some kind of business-image, I didn"t need a mobile phone for shit. None of the adults around me had one yet either - except Uncle Sergey. And neither Kozlov nor Artyom had one, obviously.
I endlessly drew the logo of the V-Rock radio station from Vice City. One lesson, which for some reason took place in the classroom of our original Svetlana Gennadyevna, the teacher wasn"t there yet and everyone was going wild, while I was drawing. Little Makarov turned toward me, saw the logo, and said, "What, played too much Vice or something?"
Yeah. Played too much.
Then one day in computer class we were all sitting there, and for the umpteenth year already we were mindlessly copying into our notebooks some idiotic incomprehensible bullshit, which made me hate the word programming more and more - no matter how obsessed with computers I was at the time - and hate what I imagined it to look like (and I imagined it correctly). I was sitting at a desk with a girl from my class whose name I had written in my student list as "Natasha something." She wasn"t attractive at all, a bit overgrown, a C-student, and in all those years I had maybe exchanged a few dialogues with her. She seemed to come from a not very wealthy family, but as we sat there she said something about a computer at her place and about the internet. I clarified - what, you even have internet?
She said, "Of course."
Holy shit. I was fiercely jealous. Even she had internet. And people like Yerokin and Korolyov obviously did too. I was jealous of everyone just for the fact that they had computers at all. And modern ones, not those first Pentiums where nothing ran. Once upon a time I was the guy who had a computer at home before anyone else. Now I was down there with the most backward ones.
The more I agonized through sports.
It was still warm, and we had a PE class in that small courtyard. I wasn"t doing anything anymore except climbing onto that iron beam - the one where, in that happy episode long ago, Ermakova and Dubinina had tried to slide down - and, gathering as much attention from people around as possible, I did my stupid flip there too.
Zemskov seemed impressed, because he was standing nearby and telling me that his father, or someone, had been a gymnast.
Another classmate didn"t leave my flip unnoticed either - Yerokin. This time (remembering his outrage back in second grade when I either beat him or at least finished neck-and-neck with him in a sprint) I clearly understood that all this pissed him off. Now he even started going up to the teacher shouting, "Look what he"s doing!" - like I should be stopped in case I got injured and the teacher would have to answer for it. The teacher had already begun addressing me, but other kids distracted him.
Seeing that it didn"t work, Yerokin ran to the concrete wall at the dead end of the yard. But no, not to kill himself. He started jumping at it with one foot, trying to get higher and higher, reaching with his hands toward the top. Decided to conquer it. But it was impossible - the wall was at least two and a half meters high - so I lost interest and kept doing flips.
Then Yerokin shouted to everyone.
He was standing on top of that wall.
Holy shit.
Then, as was traditional at the beginning of the year in that gymnasium, the class had to go somewhere, so we went to the woods. With parents. Above the Polytechnic and that big Soviet hospital where I had barely dodged surgery on my dick, higher up in the hills there"s a sanatorium area called October Gorge. That"s where we went.
We all met at the beginning of Shelkovichnaya Street and walked uphill. The atmosphere was friendly, as usual in our class, and I was always walking next to someone from the class, but still, as I said, I didn"t really have any deep connection with anyone anymore - nothing like before, when there were chasing games and endless playful nonsense with Guzhik over Katya - and I remember it actually felt more interesting to fall behind the kids and walk next to my mom.
Maybe I was stuck in childhood too much, and all those playful things I felt were missing were simply no longer for our age. But what was for our age then? Phones? Instead of even playful interest in the opposite sex?
And at the same time there was a strange moment with Anastasia Yudina.
She was a small dark-haired girl with brown eyes and an overall Latin kind of appearance. If you want a more precise visual reference, I"d open Camila Cabello"s "Don"t Go Yet" video. Even temperament-wise she was similar - a bit of a restless little spark.
We were all carrying bags with food for the little campfire hangout, and the road was uphill. For some reason at some point I ended up carrying Yudina"s bag. I was carrying mine and hers, like a mule loaded with packs, while my mom even chuckled at the sight. Anyway, I don"t remember the details anymore, but there was some kind of increased attention toward me from Yudina. To the point where I concluded to myself that she had fallen in love.
Of course that was probably not the case, because after the trip to the woods there wasn"t a trace of that attention. But being the way I was, my whole life - except maybe that one day when the sluggish Elena Zakharova asked me to catch her a lizard, which I didn"t rule out might have been just a pretext - I counted this episode with Yudina as the first time in my life that I had interested a girl.
She was only becoming a girl, of course: they were all about twelve then, and the awkward childlike proportions hadn"t quite left her yet. Considering how quickly everything happened, and with my mom right there watching, I didn"t manage to orient myself at all. If there had been more time and no mom around, maybe I would have tested the waters with Yudina somehow. She was pretty, actually, though I had never really considered brown-eyed girls before. And she had intelligent, sensible manners.
In any case, I was probably completely mistaken.
We sat for two or three hours in some completely unpicturesque clearing. Roasted sausages. Half the time I stayed near my mom. She talked with someone, but it seemed like things were fading out for her too. She had always hated Saratov anyway - she was only there for me.
But I did go up to Yevstifeev. He was the main computer guy in the class. He wasn"t a nerd or a straight-A student, and he didn"t wear glasses. But somehow everyone knew he understood computers best. At some point he had even brought a computer magazine to school.
And the next day at school I went up to him several times again. Now I was specifically asking him about 3D graphics and 3D Max. He answered in his nervous manner, twitchily glancing around like some paranoid lunatic.
It"s incredible that someone like that later grew into a person who, at twenty, tried to cheer me up on the internet while I sat there telling everyone how I was waiting for my mom to die faster so that I could finally kill myself, because I didn"t fucking want to live without sexual relationships. I had everything better than he did - no financial problems, no tyrant stepfathers. None of my parents had died, like Dasha"s, the girl I suffered over at twenty.
An ideal life compared to everyone else.
And that ideal life was completely ruined by a simple biological problem.
Hell inside paradise.
.:::.
Part 54 text 4. Father the ditch-digger on Radishchev,,, the beginning of my obsession with Thermaltake cases,,, pull-up-bar agony - the first and last "suns",,, shit on Radishchev,,, Slava Stallone"s back-handspring and almost the end of my gymnastics.
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The family atmosphere, meanwhile, was still in the mood of the first three songs of a Dire Straits concert. Music was playing at home, I was still tearing my back apart trying to do a press-to-handstand, and after training I would sometimes get off at Chernyshevskaya and Radishchev and walk up Radishchev to our little shack. There my father was digging a trench across the yard toward the nearest manhole for the sewer line and crawling around in the basement under our apartment, picking through rusted junk that looked a hundred years old already. Then we would walk to Moskovskaya and ride home.
Once I came there and had to help him, so I climbed into the basement with him. From a hole in the rusted water pipes a jet of water was shooting out. The situation was like this: fix one thing, and immediately two new problems appear. My father was losing his temper, swearing already, sometimes theatrically tearing or throwing something in his characteristic way - and that always made me laugh. Sometimes after the evening grind he would go to Baba Valya"s place, while I went back to Engels.
One time he came home with an amazing story: during his basement wanderings he had found some kind of fossilized shell down there. He took it to his museum, and they confirmed it was prehistoric. The shell stayed in the museum. It became a popular family story.
While he was dealing with dirt and shit there, my mom came there to deal with the stove. She had called some stove mason, and he took several thousand rubles - which was a lot - but, according to her, didn"t actually do anything. It turned out the inside of the stove was empty, and properly it should have been lined with special brickwork that would heat up and retain warmth. The prospects for that apartment were shitty.
One evening my parents were there while I was walking to them along Michurina from Moskovskaya, collecting price lists from computer stores on the way. In a fancy nine-story building at 150/154 Michurina, in the semi-basement, there was an Atto store - one of the main computer store chains in those years. In the price list I grabbed there, in the section of computer cases, I saw for the first time some extremely expensive case by Thermaltake.
I went back into the store and asked for a printout about that case. It even had a power supply rated at something significant for those times - four hundred and twenty watts or so. On the black-and-white picture they gave me, it was a model with a front panel shaped like a wave-door. A glass side panel so you could see the guts of the system. They explained that the company had other models with unusual, cool designs too - supposedly even cooler than this primitive wave. And the doors on those cases could even be locked with a key.
None of those cases existed in stores in real life - everything was special order.
I was still basically a kid, and in computers, where hardware constantly becomes obsolete while the case remains the one permanent element, the visual component of my future build suddenly became the most important thing to me, and I became obsessed with having a cool case. I imagined myself in a cozy room, sitting in front of a ЖК monitor with a joystick, the screen showing sunny Vice City where I was doing motorcycle stunts, and next to me stood a system unit in that stylish Thermaltake case.
And suddenly everything else didn"t matter...
Then warm days returned - Indian summer - and it pushed me again to go outside to fight my physical inadequacy.
I came in track pants and gloves to the playground where the children"s area was. There was a sturdy pull-up bar under tall trees by the football field. Nobody was there now, evening was falling, and I hung there alone doing the same primitive things as a year earlier. Then I went somewhere else.
I reached the yard of the building at 10 Volokha Street. That same building which, during my earliest childhood trips to the "pig market," had still been a construction pit. Now it had long been finished, and there were lots of kids there. Even kids from nearby Khrushchyovkas came there.
I started hanging on the bar there too. I swung so much that I tipped forward - meaning I did my forward rotation like in the gym. The bar was solid, so it worked. I was wearing a track jacket, and I even took it off like a badass, and of course everyone watched me. Even though I was doing those rotations with my usual stupid crooked legs.
Then I climbed down and the kids started chatting with me about something, and I dared - on the damp, hard sand between the swings, almost like dirt - to do a running front flip. Something I would never have done without daring and spectators, afraid of under-rotating, smashing my tailbone and never getting up again.
But I landed in a very deep squat.
That was lame. To look cool you had to land at least in a half-squat.
I went home and called my mom to come watch. We came back there together, and I did the rotations again, and later she confirmed that at the top of the movement I looked all hunched and awkward - clearly barely managing it.
Over the next days I did that "sun" on other pull-up bars a few more times, maybe. The athletic spark had returned, and I rode my bicycle through already deserted autumn courtyards searching for bars and spectators. In the final days of my last pull-up-bar push I even rode all the way to the beach - to the bars right by the road going into Saratov, near the building at 6 Trudovaya Street. In Yandex Maps from 2024 you can still see those same old bars there, and even the same autumn - everything covered with fallen leaves like the day I was there, toward evening.
But I didn"t do the "suns" on those bars - they were unreliable. And the lower-back problem I had already mentioned was noticeably interfering: in the most stretched moments or sudden jerks there would be a sharp stab there.
Then came the day when my father had to replace the last drainage pipe on Radishchev - the one running in the corner of the kitchen from the neighbors upstairs - and finish the sewer repairs. I wasn"t there at the moment and arrived later. My parents were wiping the floor with rags, half laughing, half furious. My father said that beforehand he had gone upstairs to the neighbors - lumpens - and asked them not to flush the toilet while he was replacing the pipe. They said they understood. But either they didn"t understand after all, or - more likely - they simply decided to screw over people who were resolving apartment issues, and they did it literally.
My father kept repeating the word "lumpens."
That was how I learned that word.
They fixed the pipe, but it didn"t inspire any enthusiasm.
And then, on the last warm day - probably around Teacher"s Day, October fifth - the gymnasium was preparing for an event on the main square in front of the building. They brought our class outside along with several others, including the parallel class where Slava Stallone was. In the center of the square they had laid down a smooth wooden platform - apparently for break-dancers from the older classes.
While they weren"t there yet, students from our classes could go onto the platform and do whatever they knew how to do.
Nobody knew any break-dance stuff, not even Slava.
But he waved everyone to step aside, ran up - and did a round-off into a back handspring.
With straight arms.
Fuck, I felt so awful that now I"d almost be ready to believe he didn"t just do the round-off back handspring but even added a flip at the end. But the break-dance platform was small, so most likely it was just the handspring and maybe a little jump at the end.
I had seen back handsprings in very early childhood - in some action movies - and there they did them on hard floors. The handspring was the trick most strongly associated with acrobatics, the symbol of real action-movie stunt work, even more than a flip. And in real life I had only seen them in gyms, on soft surfaces.
And now this Slava did it on a hard floor - like in the movies, like in my personal standard of coolness.
I had planned to become the first Jackie Chan in the yard - especially at that age.
But no.
Slava beat me to it. Took my dream.
Right after that outdoor thing we had a shop class. I understood nothing and was in such hell that I wanted to stab my eye socket on a pencil. I sat there jerking off by squeezing my legs. I probably did it several times in a row.
I realized: I would probably have to quit gymnastics.
.:::.
Part 54 text 5. To Baba Valya,,, the cat Dulya,,, the first issue of Igromania,,, depraved porn on Ren-TV,,, the end of Radishchev,,, idyll with Mom under a hidden depression and the beginning of the green armchair,,, hatred of books,,, MTV shows.
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The rains and greyness began.
In late September and October I stayed overnight at Baba Valya"s a few times. Around the days of the sewer repairs a mottled cat appeared at her place - orange, black and white. She seemed already grown, wasn"t playful, and somehow reminded me either of a cow or of Baba Valya herself. She was pregnant too. Baba Valya said she"d picked her up somewhere on the street in a miserable condition on her way to our little shack on Radishchev, where she"d been going to help.
She called her Dulya. Or Dusya. I didn"t ask again, and with time I became more and more unsure. Much later, even though Baba Valya was an extremely close person to me, I would still be afraid of sounding like an idiot and in twelve years of that cat"s life I would never ask again. But since my father, who liked to fuss over simple words, often called her Dulcinea, and in that form I clearly heard the letter L, it was probably Dulya.
And when I was there then, Baba Valya also told the story with the pipes. My father had bought pipes for that trench - iron ones, incredibly heavy. Plastic technologies probably hadn"t reached our region yet. Somewhere in Zavodskoy he bought them, left them for the moment on the ninth floor, planning to transport them later. But Baba Valya had always been inclined to heroic surprises - like when she used to bring enormous bags of food to my birthday parties when I was little. So she called that old lady friend of hers, Baba Lena, with whom I had once played cards, and the two of them dragged those pipes by trolleybus into the centre - about fifty kilos, she said. She had lived her whole life with that Christian belief that effort would be rewarded.
Most likely Baba Valya was also the one who bought me my first issue of Igromania. The October issue, with some monster-woman on the cover whose face looked like Katya Ilyina"s. Two discs came with it. It was the perfect magazine. For the first few days I ran around with it everywhere. It wasn"t even so much about games as about kindred spirits. I would read it for many months afterwards. Looking now at the articles in that issue, everywhere I recognise places where my vocabulary picked up words and phrases I"ve used ever since.
But the main episode from those nights at Baba Valya"s was this.
We were alone in her living room late in the evening. She was already dozing on the sofa behind me, while I sat in an armchair waiting for the porn on Ren-TV. It started. By the time the naked scenes came on, Baba Valya was already snoring, and I could safely watch without sound. The film was far more depraved than Kozlov"s cassette or anything I had glimpsed before. There was some kind of sex club, and the women - though at that point you wanted to call them girls because of their youth and smooth shaved skin - stood in a row, bent over with their skirts lifted and panties down, and the camera moved along their identical juicy arses with leather dumpling-folds. The sight made my head spin.
I couldn"t take it anymore and risked jerking off right there beside Baba Valya, who could wake up at any moment from another snort of snoring. There was more and more depravity in that film, including someone fucking a woman in the arse in a toilet. I was seeing that for the first time. Until then I had treated the whole phenomenon of anal sex as something half-mythical, thinking that in reality it probably existed only among the most deranged grown men in prison.
Those were the most depraved porn scenes I saw before the internet, and the memory of them is closely tied for me to the first torments of my anal-phobia, which would begin early the next year - so I"ll mention them again there. But for now, although I was already sliding into bodily fixations, those weeks were for me more a kind of broad existential gloom.
I was never again in the apartment on Radishchev. Everything there happened very quickly, and somewhere in early November Mom sold it. She added a bit to the price, though not as much as people who buy apartments for renovation and resale would.
My father, probably downcast like Baba Valya, was no longer living with us again.
With gymnastics I switched to the mode I had inherited from Mom: "it"ll sort itself out." I kept going, but without the third Saturday training, and judging by how few memories I have from the gym at that time, I was skipping some of the main ones too. The end would come in November, but even now in October I don"t remember the two-trips-a-day rides to Saratov anymore.
It seems this was already the time - which I had said would come - when Mom and I would often decide, especially if we overslept after somehow "forgetting" to set the alarm, that I simply wouldn"t go to school at all. I told her about my lower back, and about various other half-invented bullshit, as usual. I supposedly had a serious scoliosis, though of course I couldn"t see it myself, and only Mom kept asking me to stand straight with my back to her and lamenting. And I would keep joking, deliberately twisting crooked, and we"d laugh.
We kept doing homework in the kitchen in the evenings so I wouldn"t fall behind, bickering about little things, but mostly those days are remembered, on the contrary, as an idyll - with the Prichuda cake, jokes, and falling asleep in the same bed with Murka at our feet, talking and laughing for a long time.
And if I"ve got it right, these were the days of the nightly ritual of going out for a Nuts bar. At 20 Freedom Square, a hundred metres from the house, a second Pyatyorochka supermarket had already opened - a small one where you had to leave your bags in lockers and take baskets - and we"d go there to buy a Nuts, a chocolate bar with hazelnuts. That Nuts was running a lottery, and on the inside of the wrapper there were inscriptions you had to check. Every late evening, sometimes right before closing, we would get dressed and walk there специально for it.
And when I wasn"t in the kitchen with Mom, I increasingly settled again into the green armchair in the living room by the end window, with the Kenwood behind me - after the Dire Straits period we had returned it to its place in the wall unit. Dire Straits stayed the soundtrack of warm, almost summer days, but now, given everything, cold melancholy was required - and I switched my Evanescence back on.
Fuck how I hated all those books standing behind me. That fucking War and Peace: yellow pages, a mountain of text, and all - as I thought then - about the fucking Patriotic War, tanks. Parades, memorials, soldiers" cemeteries, old women and funerals. I"m inserting here a paragraph I wrote earlier for another year but didn"t include then. It fits here.
That fucking living room on Lev Kassil Street with its dim light, the TV showing badly, the lack of heating... Evening. While Mom reheats cabbage soup whose barely chewable meat will get stuck in your teeth and everything will hurt, you sit there in a sweater and wool socks in that green armchair and try to get interested in those fucking books which, Father says, you must read - "there"s strength in them." Fuck. And so you pick up that fucking Zoshchenko (that was in sixth grade) and try to get into it... Some play, some fucking character going "ahem-ahem-uhh," supposedly funny, and the scene is just the same kind of evening everyday bullshit the characters are living through... But you close the thing again because it"s simply fucking unnecessary. I don"t fucking need to know anything about the lives of Mitrofanovs and Panfilov Semyonoviches who lived a hundred years ago. Fuck it, I"d rather put on the Spider-Man cassette and watch it again at eleven.
Those bursts of hatred toward books - which haven"t disappeared even now that I"ve become a writer myself and have read War and Peace and other major classics - come from the fact that throughout my childhood I heard from my father, and later read on the internet, about all these people who in childhood devoured books endlessly and supposedly became successful, famous, satisfied in life because of that reading.
Since childhood I tormented myself with questions: why didn"t other people come to hate books the way I did? Compared to what many of them had in everyday life, I lived in paradise. How did it happen that they weren"t driven mad by all that yellow-paged crap and the aching behind your ears when you sit there trying to get interested in something you absolutely don"t need? My ears hurt, I was cold, and what I was reading was completely fucking unnecessary to me. Were all those people masochists or what?
And other questions like that. Why didn"t everyone go insane from their own Lev-Kassil-style life? Why do my classmates tolerate getting up early for school? Why don"t they look like they want to escape into escapism, drawing the V-Rock radio logo? They even joke about the hardships of student life, about the hardships of everyday life, the morning frost - all that. Bastards.
Fuck, I was enduring this life by the last of my strength.
And in the end it would turn out that I was the "defective" one.
I watched TV again. On MTV there was Pimp My Ride, where the rapper Xzibit took some loser"s wreck of a car, sent it to a garage for upgrades, and then returned it pimped out. And it was as if that car had been the only thing missing for the guy to become cool - at the end they"d show little scenes of how his life had transformed.
And in the evenings there was another show. Date My Mom. Or maybe Dismissed. They"d find an even bigger loser, a complete nerd, and, as I remember it, train him to be a macho. In the end they"d arrange a date with a girl, and when he walked her home, if she liked him she would ask: "Do you want to come in?"
There was one episode where the guy was an incredibly strong loser, almost a caricature. His ambitions were Napoleonic: he declared that he wanted to be such a womaniser he"d practically become a pimp. The host said that was nonsense from sperm-toxicosis and the guy simply needed a normal relationship.
Despite my depressive mental collapse and how well I understood that guy, at that time I would still have been horrified if someone had told me that this - and even worse - was my future. Intellectually I always understood my trajectory. But the hope instilled by my parents - especially my father - that nothing bad would happen, that I wasn"t some bastard but a good boy - never disappeared completely from the background.
.:::.
Part 54 text 6. Phone mania among classmates,,, masturbation and bodily fixation,,, the fateful biology lesson about worms,,, the penultimate training during the holidays,,, rented tapes,,, I almost strangled Murka.
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At the gymnasium, where I showed up only intermittently, I remember the dark corridors of the new wing during breaks and the mass psychosis around mobile phones. Even the last ones who had once been third-tier in the class - Arik, Guzhik - now had mobiles. As if that suddenly made them equal to the rest.
Those were the months of the hype around Night Watch - some strange Russian film with Konstantin Khabensky where there were both cops and vampires, and a song that now played from all the more advanced phones. "Advanced" meant ones with colour screens that could play the actual song. On the first-generation phones, which could only beep and which most people still had, you had to buy melodies - ringtones - by sending paid SMS messages.
Mobiles weren"t just about showing off or games, but about the beginning of that kind of wastefulness too - spending money on some bullshit I simply couldn"t relate to, which made me feel further and further away from my peers.
At home in the afternoons I was alone for long stretches and had already developed the stable habit of lying down and jerking off on the big bed in the small room. Still like a child, without any sophistication: lying on my back, holding my dick with my fingers like a pencil. I was trying hard to pull back the attached foreskin, and there had already been significant progress - the head came out halfway now. I even told Mom about it, bragging that I could now piss without spraying my trousers and the toilet, and she said, "Great!" (she had stopped those sittings beside me in the bathroom after bathing and the requests to "pull the little dick," leaving that topic to me a few years earlier).
But full exposure of the head was still a long way off.
When I jerked off it irritated me if Murka climbed onto the bed at that moment. It also irritated me to jerk off in socks, and in general I always wanted to undress completely, but that was too dangerous. The intercom had a safety feature (or what I thought was a malfunction): it beeped when someone opened the building door with our key. That would give me time to dress (in cold weather I was usually layered like an onion), but you never knew - what if Mom came in with someone else, not using the key?
Apart from those daytime hours alone, there were no other moments to masturbate. We slept together, and she still came into the bathroom when I was bathing.
These were times of frequent anatomical questions for me. I haven"t mentioned it, but since the last New Year, or even earlier, I had had a book on human anatomy packed with illustrations. I had pointed it out myself to Mom in the bookshop on Kirov, and she bought it later. It was from that book that I learned about aortas and all that pulsating vulnerability and fragility of the human body. I constantly opened the illustration of the penis in cross-section, where it was clear it was basically just a sponge, and tormented myself rereading the explanatory text about it filling under high blood pressure with blood.
I had already seen the word clitoris there too, though I didn"t understand what it was, and until almost fifteen I would think it was just another name for the vaginal opening. The word also unpleasantly reminded me of "collector." So whenever I heard clitoris, I remembered that drainage well between Petrovskaya and Telman where once I sank ankle-deep into warm sludge.
And then, in the days before the holidays, there was a biology lesson that became fateful for me. They told us about worms.
So that was what all that lifelong insistence on washing hands before eating had really been about - not etiquette. I sat there stunned, trying in vain to digest the information pouring over me. Beef tapeworm - ten metres! Fuck.
On the page of the textbook there was a diagram of the cycle of parasitic worms in nature. I remembered our fishing trips with my grandfathers in the past, how we approached little rivers near villages where the wet sucking ground was full of deep disgusting holes from cow hooves, and everywhere there was their shit, and how many times I had dropped something there and picked it up, and then taken sandwiches with those same hands for a snack.
That whole place must have been crawling with helminth larvae.
Then the teacher"s explanation reached the main point, and she used words familiar from the clinic posters - enterobiasis, pinworm eggs, faeces. She said: "You scratch yourselves there, then forget and put your fingers in your mouth - and that"s it, you"re infected."
Zhenya Zlotina, a dark-haired overgrown girl, a C-student - who later in life, judging by what I saw on VKontakte, grew into a rather brazen slutty type - didn"t understand either and asked: "Scratch what exactly?" To which Boldyrev, in his usual clever tone and manner, without lifting his head from the textbook, answered: "Your arse."
Fuck...
I went to one training session during the school holidays. It was only in the morning, and there were boys there from the first shift too. That bastard Sukachev-Korovin was there, the one I envied, and he was already doing everything.
In the changing room, while we were dressing, I glanced sideways at his bag with Korol i Shut on it, and Denis, whom I was talking to at that moment, suddenly said: "I"m going to switch to handball anyway." That nasty feeling shot through me - when others somehow progress or move on to something else, while you remain in place, ending up in a group with a new generation, the little kids. Might as well smash your head against the wall.
Outside it was eleven-o"clock sunshine and November chill. Denis lived in Zavodskoy, and I either arranged beforehand by phone or simply decided to drop in on Baba Valya unannounced - I still had my trolleybus pass, so riding around was free anyway - and we went there together. As always, we talked about something computer-related on the way.
Morning roads were fast - ten or fifteen minutes and we arrived. We got off one stop past Baba Valya"s, near Gymnasium No. 34, crossed the road, and I walked with him deeper into the courtyards to his building. I wasn"t in any hurry. I had been in those courtyards twice before - once in very early childhood when a Khrushchyovka collapsed there, and another time when I had walked with Baba Valya to the door of that tireless friend of hers, Baba Lena, who lived there with her alcoholic children and who would never appear in my story again.
There I said goodbye to Denis - and that too was forever.
When I got home, I fell ill for the rest of the holidays. Every evening I sat in the armchair by the window in the living room, with Evanescence playing behind me. Soon I was sitting there during the day too. MTV was on the TV, and in the evenings Mom and I would go out for a Nuts and sometimes rent films for me.
I, Robot.
Night Watch, which Mom and I watched with a Prichuda cake, expecting something special and exciting, but the film turned out to be some strange muddled nonsense.
Uncle Sergey had left that DVD of Asterix and Obelix vs Caesar, but I thought it was something for kids and didn"t watch it. But I did watch the cassette he had brought that same day - the day of Dire Straits - The Italian Job. Again that theme of camaraderie which year after year existed for me only in dreams.
I wasn"t going to gymnastics - supposedly because of illness, though by some point the illness had already passed.
I couldn"t establish even an approximate date when I strangled Murka. But in 2005 I probably wouldn"t have touched her because of my bacillophobia, and 2003 was too early. Somewhere during 2004, in some desperate period of course.
After lunch. Sunny outside. A very Lev-Kassil kind of moment.
Mom wasn"t home. Murka and I were alone. I sat there dissatisfied with everything. Not that I was in some negative affect - rather I was simply empty, unable to see any goal that would make life valuable, which for me has always been the main source of satisfaction. In such moments I always started picking on others and harming them. And besides, I probably hadn"t jerked off for a while. Well - a few days, say because of illness. The "sucking" potential in my loins had built up.
So I started pestering Murka as usual, chasing her all over the apartment.
I described it a couple of times in diaries, but I wasn"t aiming for strict accuracy, so somewhere I wrote that I came first and then went to strangle her. Naturally it was the other way round.
I drove her into the kitchen - under the table or the mustard-coloured armchair - grabbed her and dragged her out. If there had once been some logic to tormenting her, now everything had mixed into a single mess with all my despair of those months and turned simply into this sadistic excitement whose force now demanded more than just scaring and hitting.
Murka tore up my hands, but I sat down with her on the swivel chair and began strangling her on my knees. I was just as out of control and reckless as in those earlier moments when I jerked off by squeezing my legs while sitting at the table with Mom, or during school breaks when people were practically talking to me at the same time. And like when I destroyed the toys I loved most - not in monetary value but emotionally - or smashed things like those skis. I couldn"t be stopped.
That recklessness always seemed to come "from the dick." As always it felt like something was sucking there. But the sensation had nothing to do with sex. It was neurological. Just as productive dopamine and optimism seemed to connect in the back of the body with the rectal area, so destructive adrenaline born from serotonin-deficient despair seemed to connect along the front of the body with the dick.
It had been like that all my life - especially in moments of sadism.
For fifteen or twenty seconds I strangled her, and she stopped struggling. I opened my hands. She slid off my knees, fell onto the parquet under the table, and lay there motionless.
I thought that was the end.
If she hadn"t moved after another ten seconds or so, I probably would have done what I had once long ago planned to do with the heavy hammer we had lying there. But she moved. And I couldn"t bear it anymore - I ran into the small room, sat on the bed and came by squeezing in convulsions.
After that I burst into tears right there on the bed.
Then I went back to Murka. She was sitting already, constantly sticking out her tongue as if trying to lick herself - probably because I had squeezed her throat so hard.
I started hugging her through tears, saying "Sorry" and all the rest.
.:.
___Part 55.
.:::.
Part 55 text 1. The beginning of the November Balabanov-style gloom,,, the end of my gymnastics,,, anatomical depression in the green armchair,,, suicidal urges and childish ideas about the physiology of death.
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If the day with Murka happened around then, then that must have been the last sunny day of that year that stayed in my memory. After that came weeks of pure Balabanov-style gloom.
I went to the gymnasium for a few of the first days after the holidays. You could feel that the end was close.
On one of those weekdays came my last day of gymnastics. Afternoon shift. It was already dark outside the gym windows. Denis wasn"t at practice. After almost two weeks of illness I apparently didn"t have to do the routine, so I just wandered around the hall on my own, doing whatever I felt like on the free apparatuses. Torturing my wrists doing circles on the pommel mushroom, failing to hold handstands on the low floor parallel bars, uselessly pumping some random muscles. And at the end I practiced vaults with a running start over that signature horse shaped like a tongue. Fuck, every time I remember that horse I instantly get associations with oral sex. Here I am, completely nuts already, sitting here typing all this.
By that day not only the traction of the body in various hangs but even jumping onto the springboard sent sharp pain into my lower back. I did a few vaults, got bored - and left.
I couldn"t allow my mom to suspect that I had some kind of depression. It wasn"t even about shame, like when you cry and show weakness. Well, yes: quitting gymnastics is about weakness. Shame. Defeat. But this was too big a defeat. Not just losing some fight with another kid. For two years, day after day, gymnastics had been the only thing I was obsessed with. And now suddenly I"d just quit and sit in front of the TV? Obvious depression - and not a childish one. Why should my mom see that? She wouldn"t be able to help anyway, she"d only suffer for me. She might even guess about my suicidal moods - and that would be the worst. So it seemed best to smooth the transition somehow, find another interest and plausibly switch to it.
When I got home, I took a notebook, a pen, some kind of board, a book on anatomy - and by placing the board across the armrests I made myself a tabletop and sat down in the green armchair. I decided I would become an anatomy nerd. This was around November fifteenth, after which I"d again be on sick leave for ten days with some gastro nonsense - and not for the last time.
Behind me Evanescence was playing on repeat, the TV was quietly chattering in front of me, and in front of me I now spent long November evenings copying out the names of all those arteries and trying to memorize them. Mom would bring me something to snack on, and I would even eat my main meals right there, putting the plate on the board in front of me. I finally surrendered to that theme from early childhood - the cozy mouse-hole comfort from Tom and Jerry - this sitting in an armchair under a lamp with everything necessary for life within arm"s reach. Now I was drawn more to the minimalism of a hut and a sweater by the fireplace than to the mansions of Santa Barbara or lying on a poolside lounger in nothing but swimming trunks.
Most likely it was during those weeks - when at least every third day included a morning visit to the clinic - that Mom and I discovered the chocolate-covered cookies at the "Skazka" store and from then on, for the next two years of our Lev-Kassil-style life, kept buying them. We called them "binoculars," because they were packed as two stacks of dark brown cookies tightly wrapped in plastic. We would eat them already on the way home, because usually it was after some fasting medical tests. And in the evenings too - with cocoa and "Prichuda" cookies. Mostly they"re associated in my memory with my kingdom in the green armchair.
In the armchair, like in suspended animation, I sat every evening. But during the day... At some point powerful suicidal urges began. Something pushed me out into the street, and several times in a row, getting ready to go out, I was full of the thought: All right, that"s it, now I"m going to kill myself somewhere.
I imagined walking out under that heavy November sky, running up and jumping from the roof of Serebryakova"s building or some other house with a technical floor. I remembered scenes on a technical floor from the sitcom Ostorozhno, Modern-2 and thought that if they could get up there easily, maybe the roof exits were open too. But in the panel buildings - at Grandma Valya"s, Aunt Larisa"s, and in our own building, whenever I"d happened to be upstairs - I always remembered the metal gate locked with a padlock, and I assumed that in those buildings you simply couldn"t get onto the roof.
I had a whole bunch of strange, still childish ideas in general. For example, considering the option of hara-kiri: having seen murders only in movies where they often looked like a single stab in the stomach, I accordingly thought you died from one stab and in a few seconds. Despite my little sessions with the anatomy book, it would take me a long time to understand that the point is hemorrhage. That to be sure you"d basically have to riddle the torso with wounds to get anywhere near a guarantee of death. In that sense I was lucky I didn"t act on my impulse to kill the Kazakh kid back then (which I imagined doing with a single stab), and that I wouldn"t carry out a similar impulse the following year in another future episode. Still, I rejected hara-kiri because of the pain, even if only for a few seconds.
I also had an incorrect childish stereotype about jumping off roofs. I thought you would definitely die even from falling off a three-story building. I imagined you simply hit your head on the asphalt and by some mechanism automatically switched off forever.
Damn, unraveling those memories of my limited understanding of the world back then, I remember that I still believed eating wolfberries was one hundred percent fatal, and that any viper bite was too - despite everything I had read in books. Yes, exactly. I clearly remember how death seemed automatic, and dangers were understood in black-and-white terms. I also thought that if you ran under a car you would definitely die, by the same kind of magical switch-off principle from the impact. And with bullets, I thought one was enough - as long as it hit the head or the body.
I still had this idea that the body was like some electronic device, like a computer, where even a minor mechanical damage to one part causes the entire system to stop working due to a kind of electrical short circuit.
Exactly, exactly. Only the following year - when I would be playing GTA and there would be a Kalashnikov there, and I"d ask my father something about it, and he"d explain that rifles are called rifled because the barrel has grooves inside so the bullet spins and (as he somehow explained to me, or as I understood it) moves zigzagging inside the target"s body - only then would I realize what the real necessary point of cutting and piercing actions on a body in order to kill actually is.
My genuine interest in anatomy lasted only a few days, and after that it remained nothing more than a cover, and the same vacuum formed that I described in the episode about Murka. Mixed with the collapse of my struggle for physical competence, it turned into a level of fucked-upness I had never experienced before in my life.
I put on my gray down jacket, my ugly boots - no longer bothering about any visual image of myself or anything connected with me - and, telling my mom I was going to walk around the shops, went out. While waiting for the elevator I would look at the horizontal windows between the floors and try to figure out if I could climb out through them. No. They were too high.
.:::.
Part 55 text 2. Balabanov-style wandering through November Engels,,, a brief gambling impulse,,, a small bad-kid experience at the market fair,,, the end of the gymnasium and "blood" in my stool.
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Stepping out of the entrance onto the street, however, I immediately lost the suicidal urge: it was overridden by the usual stress of simply being outside. What mattered more was that there were passersby all around, windows from which someone might be looking at me - and other things in that same sociophobic spirit. In that state you couldn"t stay inside yourself. As a result I really did just begin my price-list raids on the computer stores in Engels. Besides "President-Agency" and that department in "Melodiya," there was one at 57 Petrovskaya - a simple local computer shop but with a nice thick price list - and another on Kommunisticheskaya, in an old almost private house at... actually that address doesn"t exist anymore. Opposite the Lazurny shopping center, where once our Niva used to be parked, and even earlier there had been a muddy market there, just like in the first Brother.
Occasionally near the museum I might run into my father, who came here to work every day from Zavodskoy District, and maybe I had already gone inside to see him there for the first time and had already met the women who would appear in the last half-year of my childhood story. That funny guy Sanya Krylov used to drop by the museum - mainly to see my father, though apparently not only him, since although he was the town"s local madman, he was also a valuable finder of historical artifacts. At that time my father was still living at Grandma Valya"s and wasn"t visiting us, though it was already easy to assume that for New Year he would most likely come to us again.
Other than heading toward the market fair, I didn"t know where else to go, so that"s where I wandered. Somewhere along Kommunisticheskaya, past the building where my mom once worked, past the barbershop from my very early childhood, past the passage behind the theaters, across Teatralnaya, stopping to look at phones in the first Euroset store in the city, in Yarik"s building. Then further on. On the left - the bread shop from early childhood that we hadn"t visited in ages, and the entrance to the architecture department where Uncle Sergey had long since stopped working. All of it under a heavy sky, through the slush of the first snow. A car from the road could splash you head to toe from a puddle.
And also there on Kommunisticheskaya, before the Zhiguli café and across from the building where Kozlov and I had once seen Serebryakova, there was something called a pawn shop. Through the windows it looked like an electronics store, and I went in there a couple of times and looked at cassette decks and music centers that were already on their way out. I just didn"t realize it yet and felt their era as if it were still at its peak. At home I therefore made more and more attempts to figure out our music center - recording onto cassettes and what other functions it had. I became obsessively interested in the back side of the music center: all those different connectors, the RCA jacks for the red-and-white plugs. I"ll return to that soon, but first I"ll finish the story about the fair.