Бесплатный фрагмент - Предыстория и 1993—1997

Предыстория и 1993—1997

Никита Капернаумов

Я на 50% эту книжку (кроме английской предыстории) написал в течении конца 2020 и первой половины 2021, а в течении лета 2021 дописал оставшуюся половину, параллельно с другими парой книжек. И на перечитку-редактирование потратил 5 дней. В целом я дней за 20—30 её русскую частьнаписал. Всего тут 100тыс слов.

Я опять попробую выложить эту книгу на инет-магазинах. На инет магазинах нельзя редактировать, поэтому там будет версия то 26 07 21 (я только вчера её дописал и поэтому тут ещё наверняка буду мелкие корректировки делать если будет желание перечитывать). Наиболее свежие версии всегда где-то на моих страницах или в отложеных постах будут.

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Для каких-нибудь не в теме про меня вот прилагаю инфу (краткое состояние на данный момент 2021) и потом краткую биографию (она также есть в книжке про 2007)

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инфо со страницы вк

ебать желанную крутую девку ровесницу в молодости (18—25лет), пока у неё молодая пизда, рожа и ум (то есть также ненавидящая взрослость как и я и которую возбуждает быть молодой и иметь молодого самца) — это был мой смысл жизни. а я вообще не имел половой жизни никакой, кроме трёх проституток где я просто смотрел на сиськи-письки и третий раз мне в жопу тыкала, и кроме сталкинга дашки в интернете 10 лет, писания просьб ебли 100тысячам девок за 15 лет и обдрачивания в говне на лесби порнуху и рассматривания фоток как мои ровесники жили а я просидел в квартире ёбаной с 13ти лет всю жизнь, да и до этого я тоже сидел в квартире всегда. несмотря на кучу денег, творческие таланты, супер-порядочность, никаких препятствий и проблем и всё такое я оказался никому не нужен, мне ни одна крутая девка какую я просил в интернете не дала ебли, ни за деньги ни так. продукты моих любимых творческих занятий оказались никому не нужны и везде в интернете игнорятся, да и нужны они могли быть только дебилам и именно в интернете и никакой бы половой жизни мне они никогда не дали. увлечения, образ жизни мой получился таким что девке там неоткуда было появиться. неудовлетворение половой потребности за 28 лет превратило меня в дрочащего в дерьме урода и агрессивного шута. к 28ми годам я понял что занимаясь тем чем я занимался — любимыми делами и накоплением денег — я занимался ненужным мне вообще говном, а на самом деле мне нужно только то о чём было в первом предложении этого текста. и единственное что могло в моей ситуации заставить просимую (я просил в интернете) девку удовлетворить мою потребность это её знание что иначе она потеряет то чем дорожит больше всего.

щас описываю биографию и все обстоятельства произошедшего. когда допишу будет реакция на произошедшее.

но пока пишу меня всё ещё можно чучуть задобрить если найдется нормальная девка которая будет давать ебли, пока с некоторых ракурсов я всё ещё выгляжу более менее молодо. до 30ти это точно уйдёт ну и до туда я уже наверняка всё допишу (в мае 2021 я бросил всё и теперь пишу беспрерывно) и дальше мне будет нечего терять

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Поскольку я пишу исключительно автобиографические повествования, чтобы вкратце рассказать о чём и какие мои писанины, мне быстрей и проще рассказать о себе.

Я родился в Саратове в 1993 году у двух инфантилов (отец из-за гиперопеки, мама наоборот от тирано-матери), оба с высшими образованиями и невостребованными профессиями. С самого начала я был капризный, истеричный и плаксивый, что, короче говоря, очень быстро и рано выработало во мне озабоченность противоположным полом с 3ёх лет, сексуальные фантазии, себяжаление и нежелание делать то что не хочу (учёба, неинтересная мне работа в взрослости, армия, вплоть до что убьюсь или перестреляю там всех), осознание себя не таким как окружавшее меня быдло которых всё устраивало. За исключением ненавистных детсада и школы, и каникул у бабки где гулял на улице, я всё детство я провёл в квартире у телевизора, в мечтах и онанизме. Король лев, форрест гамп, титаник, амели и mtv с красивой жизнью в америке и мечты уехать в нормальную страну из этого постсоветского говна. Не свойственные моему возрасту увлечения — террариумистика, флористика, заработок денег, всё это до 9ти лет. Потом спортивная гимнастика, выкинул 2 года, понял что физически не подхожу, в 11 бросил, депрессия, хотел суицид. К концу гимнастики в школе уже отстал, не учил там ничего и ненавидел туда ходить, и вообще рано просыпаться и куда-то идти всю жизнь ненавидел и буду ненавидеть. Без конца везде надолго влюблялся и сталкерил каких-нибудь девочек. Джон фаулз, коллекционер, парфюмер и всё вот это. От неудовлетворённости — окр. Всё подряд мыл, руки трескались до крови, на родков орал и бунтовал, а в уединении развратно дрочил. Увлёкся агрессивной метал музыкой, но и одновременно запоминающейся мелодичной музыкой. От Slayer до Dire Straits и кельтского фолка и все те саундтреки из фильмов детства. Сразу понял что смогу делать такое же сам, решил посвятить себя созданию идеальной музыки. Вместо 9го класса, и ввиду что ещё обстоятельства поспособствовали, родки сдали в психушку. Дальше, уже с инвалидностью, мог спокойно сидеть в комнате и делать что хотел — занимался музыкой и дрочил всю юность до 18ти. Дальше, у мамы будучи свободные деньги, но у меня не будучи никаких возможностей уехать в европу, поехал купил квартиру хотя бы в курортной калининградской области. Меж тем, как и всю юность, я писал интимные просьбы девушкам в то время, и перед отъездом в калининград в начале 2012 я наткнулся вконтакте на роковую девушку ровесницу — дашу из саратова, которая к тому же не блокировала, в отличии от большинства других, а стала отвечать мне периодически. Дальше я жил в квартире без унитаза в калининграде, с музыкой не получалось потому что не знал о чём делать тексты песен и хотел на английском, а не мог его понять никак. Даша кстати лингвист. Квартиру продал, купил в питере в стройке, вернулся в саратов. Обсессия дашей набирала обороты, в 2012 ровно год сидел и обновлял её страницу, иногда писал и отвечала, и пытался понять английский. Дальше сподвиг маму всё продать и уехали в питер жить, ненавидел саратов, но и питер ненавидел, просто больше некуда, а латвию с внж за покупку жилья просрали т.к. стоило нам начать эту тему, так тут же валюта выросла в два раза. В питере она тут не прижилась, и я пошёл работать чтоб с ней депрессирующей и весь день плачущей не сидеть дома (поскольку она не хотела тут, ей не покупали отдельную квартиру, и деньги обесценивались в банках просто) и дрочить в автобусах и в сортирах торговых центров. Заработал полу-легальным курьерством за два года 2 миллиона, потом в 2017 потерял их все и 3 миллиона сверху в разорившемся тогда банке югра. Дальше 2018, начала подходить к концу молодость, даша уже годом раньше заблокировала навсегда. 2018 ездил искать и следить за ней в подзорную трубу на лето в саратов. Кое-как усваивал английский все эти годы, путём чтения книг и эротики на нём. С музыкой стало ясно что кроме как про недотрах петь не о чем и записал пару альбомов, но такую тему лирики в моём жанре музыки не понимают, плюс мой не отвечающий современным стандартам продакшн звукозаписи и вовсе всех оттолкнул, а что мелодизм и аранжировка уровня лучших исполнителей — это никому не важно, т.к. рок музыка это не академическая сфера деятельности, а развлекательная, и тут важно шоу и обёртка, а не содержание. В саратове уже нападал на девок от потребности секса, испугался что завалю кого-нибудь, пришлось сходить к проститутке, но это меня только разозлило что я до такого дошёл. В интернете развлекающиеся моей историей зрители увидели в моей активности угрозы убийств, стали писать заявы, ездил давал объяснения ментам. Все советовали ко врачу, ходил ко врачу, с 2007го у них ничего не изменилось — таким как я дают нейролептик и антидепрессант, первое это чтоб почти всегда спать, второе чтоб полового желания не было. Послал это в жопу. Дальше с 2020го ещё музыку записывал, полтора года работы нон-стоп, создавал именно что хотел и как хотел. Вот слушаю теперь, кроме меня это больше никому не надо (вряд ли вы даже найдёте в гугле по запросам Говнилиум или Nikita Kapernaumov где можно было бы скачать мои записи). Любимое занятие не приносит ни копейки, одни только насмешки, критику и непонимание от всякого слушающего тупое говно быдла, и главное ни к какому реальному неформальному контактированию с девшуками, кроме пары уродиц в юности это не привело. Всю молодость, кроме курьерства, просидел за компьютером в комнате. Пока даша там профессиональный английский, в европе, друзья у неё есть, всё у неё есть, парень у неё переводчик. У неё английский любимое занятие было. Ну и, главное, желание моё иметь половую активность в молодости достигло предела сейчас, именно вот иметь подругу, желательно дашу, ровесницу, в течении всей молодости, трахаться также как все эти молодые пары в этих бесконечных видео с домашней порнухой, а не то что у меня было все эти 15 лет молодости — бесконечное обдрачивание и попытки уговорить уже наверное более сотни тысяч девок на интим, никто ни за деньги не согласился, ни так, хотя я мог бы на несколько миллионов нормально молодость с кем-то провести. Все эти деньги, и талант, квартиры, всё это бестолку было когда нет возможности неформального контакта с девушками в котором возможно установить знакомство. Сейчас занимаюсь заканчиванием всей этой истории, музыку уже бросил, деньги тоже, пишу биографию пока есть силы, хочу описать побольше, детально вникая в психологию всех граней моей истории и прослеживая причинно-следственную связь обстоятельств в которые я попадал и вытекающих моих реакций и поведения, а также выложить те кучи музыкальных наработок которые мечтал реализовать но которые так поздно начал из-за всяких вот тех препятствий и, главное, половой неудовлетворенности, чтоб потом, если как-бы вдруг переродившись в другом человеке может все эти материалы найти и продолжить реализовывать, и, главное, желанную половую активность в той другой жизни вести.

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Я написал предысторию (биографию родков) в рамках тренировки письма когда учил инглиш и переводить на русский мне уже лень так что вот так. После английского текста там начнётся русский и ранняя биография. По началу там скучно и просто географические экскурсы и ранние впечатления от дерьмового этого мира. С 1996го там уже более рассказоподобный рассказ начнётся.

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I’ll begin with my mother’s line. First i’ll tell about her mother and her mother’s mother.

Now this my great-grandmother, born around 1910—1920 was a poor and not educated, silly woman, mum says. It was normal, i guess, for the quality of living in saratovskaya oblast which is a region 600km from moscow on the river volga was very low at the beginning of the 20th century. There was all village with wooden russia-style houses, which rot, stunk and bred grey people within. At any rate, in old photographs people are all grey and depressive. I detest old ussr photographs of my country. You look at them and there are always a bunch of aged people, or a soldier, and if there are some young girls they look abosulutely unsexual, and i can never guess their age, because they all look like 50-year-olds. No open legs, no jeans, nor shorts. Hair is either hidden under a russian kerchief or it is unsexually curly, which i don’t know if it is intentionally made so or natural. Everywhere sweat and rotten teeth, or no teeth at all, no sex, no joy. Soldiers on photographs i see as pieces of meat, not lives. I don’t know anything about any of them, i’m not interested, to me they are just meat in uniform which is going to die and rot. Why should i be interested in it? I hate people in boring old photographs, i hate the ussr, i hate asexuality, i hate muddy streets, i hate grey color, i hate, i hate.

There are photographs somewhere of my great-grandmother’s husband, but i’m not interested in seeing them. He lived in russia or the ussr (neither am i interested even in the correct names of my country) and he died. What’s interesting? The only interesting fact is that he was killed in finland which is europe. Only what i have to do with it anyway? I can benefit nothing from this fact. So he died, in the first fight as far as i know, somewhere near the town of vyborg, where he was buried. It was some war between the ussr and finland before the world war ii.

Great-grand-mother, her name was shura, was left with two children in the town of engels, it is right across the 3-km-wide volga from saratov, the central city of saratovskaya oblast.

Great-grand-mother comes, as I understand, from a large mordovian family, taking roots in the mordovia republic (another region of russia) or penzenskaya oblast, which is a neighbouring oblast to saratovskaya. The mordva are a people having, as i understand, some anthropological similarity to finland’s people, although living in central russia, even southern. The mordva are basically blond-haired blue-eyed people, not very tall, not very big, whose traditional occupation was to live and die in wooden houses which they built from timber of the thick mordovian forests, wherein they also were wont to go plucking berries and mushrooms. That’s what my father would tell me.

I give these anthropological details in order to give a picture of what my family is physiologically and inwardly, i mean occupation and traditional mental ways. And even more for the purpose of showing my national perception of myself. I just wrote the following paragraph, and i can understand that much of it is not the facts, i mean i even didn’t open wiki to check my knowledge, and my knowledge hasn’t changed from childhood and i have never been and am not interested in learning anything anymore, i’m 25 and at the end of my youth and no new knowledge gonna get me what i want anymore,,,, so my perception of myself is based on my probably wrong knowledge which i acquired by just observation of what is around me and from what (probably affected with misconceptions too) my father and sometimes mother (she would now and again use the term «mordvin» talking about some men) would tell me.

As it is in any multinational country, in russia there are various peoples. There are people that come from armenia (i can’t remember their characteristic features. Like arabs outwardly. I think they are muslims), kazakhs (from kazakhstan. Narrow eyed, like the people of china, and sun-tunned, almost brown in summers, live basically in oblasts adjoining to kazakhstan. I don’t know what’s their religion), ukrainian (look almost like mordovian, grey and blue eyed, they speak fluently, have some words in their dictionary funny to a russian, like «podsralnik», for «chair», which to a russian sounds «that which is below the place one shits from». They’re bold and rude, especially women come to work in russia. Not fastidious. Work various low jobs from floor-washers to porn actresses. Most of the prettiest porn actresses are ukrainian), jews, tatars (these are muslims, outwardly resemble russians only more hair. It’s what i see in google. But i always took for tatars those who were dark-haired, dark-eyed, and were muslims. Maybe google errs and these are what tatars really are). Traditional russians are blue eyed, blond haired, tall. Live basically in northern oblasts of the country, especially, i think, in the villages and in our two capitals. As far as i know, natural russians are descendants of vikings, all those erik reds and varjags. Outwardly resemble the mordvins and ukrainians, except that russian are tall and of old were counts and knyazes, while the mordvins were the mordvins at all times. Mere peasants. So compared to russians, the mordvins are a more humble folk. No ambitions. To have a tiny flat in an ugly ussr-style 5-storey house and a section in the common cellar in the common yard witch pickles and potatoes for the winter is enough to make them happy. That’s what my father would tell me and what picture of our own anthropological group i formed. This, as i’ll write a big way further in this story, affected me, especially in youth (but not too heavily, nothing like how nationality differences affect people in other countries where there is racism and all that. I, after all, am russian by documents and anybody asked would say that i am a classic russian. Nobody would even remember the term mordva. It’s just my own frustrating concept of me being no traditional russian, vikings or any of our counts’ descendant. I would add, it seems that in russia it is primarily personal dissatisfaction that brings up anthopological investigation of oneself and comparisons, and not vice versa. At least that’s how it is with me (in youth), with my father and other dissatisfied people I knew: first they got unhappy, then they made depressing anthropological discoveries.)

Also the facts (if wrong) in the paragraph above are already an example of what very far down the line will be the cause of many crucial tragedies in my (and everyone else’s) biography and thus the subject of study: based usually on stories and a couple of observations, complex systems of misconceptions and stereotypes, which it is prevented to get rid of or mend thanks to the lack of real experience, information on or dealings with the subject.

Great-grand-mother couldn’t write all her life. She died in around 1990. During the world war ii she lived in engles alone with two children who were my grandmother and her brother. Great-grandmother worked as a nurse in a neighbouring hospital 51.49372335764756, 46.14828973233675. She would take food thence, was very poor. They lived in a hut built of clay whose earthen floor was below the level of ground. There was a scratch of land by the hut where they grew vegetables.

My grandmother’s brother didn’t go to the war, because they both were a few years old then. My grandmother addressed her mother using a russian pronoun which is the equivalent of «you’ in comparison to «thou/ye’, if the latter is to be perceived as more intimate and more pertaining to the simple, friendly way of addressing. So their relationship was kind of formal. But perhaps it was still usual for those times. In earlier stages of russia it was definitely usual.

There was no bridge across the 3km-wide volga at the time. There were no institutions providing high education in engels. People used to commute across the river by steamships. I don’t know how many people lived at that time in engels and saratov, but in my time there were 200 thousand and 700 thousand respectively.

Must be noted the climate of this region — in summers sometimes +40C, in winters -30C. The air is very dry, kazachstan’s steppes being all over the engels’ side of volga and all behind saratov’s mounty shores which are mostly scorched with sun and frost. Very sunny most of the year. Much snow in winter.

Grandma klava, which is her name and how i will call her further, even maybe grandma1 if i get tired of writing in full, went to university, or rather the so called polytechnic institute, situated in saratov quite far from the shore. I don’t know the story of her going there. It would have been hell commuting to saratov every day (about 15km, and all this steamship and cold weather business), maybe she got a place in a dormitory. Nor do i know why she at all decided to get high education rather than continue being uneducated as her mother. I don’t know whence the inspiration came from. But half the population of engels had to do with saratov for one or other reason, so i think it was just a common tendency to go to saratov.

Also there must have probably been no good job unless you got a technical education, the country being industrialized at the time. As i said, it was not a university where she went, where one would read books and become philological, it was rather about engineering, technical professions. She studied to be an engineer related to building big houses. The houses she would be involved in the building of would be traditional 9-storey houses, grey, primitive, with small flats and with vertical pipes through all the storeys to throw stinking garbage in. Right next to the entrance to a section of such a house was the door behind which rot the garbage, which was taken sometimes by special people with shovels. Too much houses of the same type all over the country. The main russian movie for new year’s tv «ironia sudbi» begins with the hero being drunk and sent by mistake by his friends from moscow to saint-petersburg where everything was as in moscow, even to the key for his flat’s door.

Grandma klava finished the institute and, as it was practiced, was sent to a distant part of the huge country to work for some years, the city of krasnoyarsk. I don’t know anything about her staying there either, except that she there whittled away her front teeth eating cedar nuts.

After some years she returned to engels. She was about 27. By this time my grandfather moved to live in a neighbouring street with his relatives, from which family also my grandma klava’s brother grisha took a spouse, a little mordovian (these somehow were also all mordovian) woman called lusya.

My grandfather, vladimir, or just vova, was brought up along with his several brothers, as I know, by his mother in a distant little town on engels’ side of the volga. Somewhere in the steppes there are camels and the town of ershov, and somewhere in that direction there was their family house, a ramshackle hut, of course, mum says she went there once or twice, and the place was even poorer than my grandmothers’ place, no civilized town being close. Grandpa’s mother, my mum says, was a huge woman, maybe fat, and there they liked to eat scrambled eggs cooked on fat, which to my mother were nauseous. Near ershov there were lakes with fish abounding in them and grandpa grew used to fishing. His brothers, not speaking of his father, died of alcoholism. He alone somehow ended up in engels and in the pursuit of the not very pleasant profession of plumbing, which was not very pleasant because he would have to do much with toilets and shit-pipes.

Grandpa vova was always remarkably taciturn. The story, which he sometimes would confide to others when drunk, as mum says, goes that once in school he made a sentimental or bold remark on something during a class in school, but the children laughed at him, so he shut up. Also he was quite small, although very good-looking, dark-haired with blue eyes, his face always reminded me of that main male character in gone with the wind film, or, even more precise, Michael Madsen in Tarantino’s films. He served in the army all right with no accidents, as we know. Those relatives with whom he lived in engels, as well as the family and relatives of my great-grand-mother, were all very mordovian, in the sense that they didn’t approve of any sublimities, stuck as they were in domestic businesses like growing potatoes. The story goes that they all talked grandpa out of going to be an artist. Mum says he had already painted portraits. So he went to study plumbing in a college providing such lowest technical education.

Mum doesn’t know anything about her being born, her parents didn’t ever tell her about it. No question of course about her not being theirs, as she definitely has features of both of them.

Sometimes, though, her mother, grandma1, told her something like that she, grandma1, would hardly endure changing mum’s pampers (or rather what rags were at those times). Grandma was puritanic.

Here i again must note that my understanding of many words is wrong. For example i am not sure that «puritanic» means what i think it means. I think it means an adjective describing a person who was grown up by strict parents, who instilled in them hate to all physical things having to do with sex and genitals. But probably puritanic has more to do with something religious, or, rather, probably «puritanic» must describe a religious person. But not me, i don’t imply anything religious in the word. I don’t know whether my grandma was religious or not.

One, reading my story, must understand that many terms i understand and use wrong. And it would be not so important, but that all my life i acted in many situations guided by my wrong understandings of various things. I am almost absolutely uneducated. One must bear it always in mind and perceive all this story as a story of life related by a having lived all his life in his room and never interested in anything, apart from his very specific interests, man, as some 10year-old boy would. I’d say even 8-years old, but at that age many children don’t know about sex. I do. So i’m about 10-yo in my knowledge of the world. And i’m gonna deliberately avoid reading wiki on the things i describe, make all those mistakes as i always do, so as to relate my original perception of the world and things.

That bit of information about grandma1’s unableness to stand changing pampers was told by her when she saw my mum changing my pampers when i was a baby. To which my mum wouldn’t answer, as she says, as she didn’t understand how one can not stand anything pertaining to his child, even if it be shit.

The three — grandma1, grandpa, mum — lived together all mum’s childhood. I don’t quite know the sequence of the flats where they lived. There was that family spot, where great-grandma lived, where my mum would spend summers and holidays, and there also were flats which my grandma had begun to get from the state, one after another, the previous one being restored to the state of course. It was so practised in the ussr, one worked for some time somewhere, even getting a salary as usual, but at one point they would be given a flat from the state for the work. If one had a family then they got at least a two-bedroom flat.

I think it was when grandma1 bore my mum that she got her first flat. It should be the flat that was not very far from the family house, in a 5 storey house, in a place of the town called «the living and the dead’s» 51.487259407551825, 46.13789880735076 (because of the location of the houses — on the ground where there had been a cemetery before). All i know about mum’s living there is that when she would play in the yard with children they would find a bone in the ground. The place was neighbouring also to a landmark of my story — the town’s stadium, a quite big compex, with the stadium itself, and many sports grounds, various mini football fields and all, also groves of trees in which were tracks for various races.

The whole place, this «the living and the dead’s ” as well as that one-storeyed neighbourhood where the family spot was, and, in short, all the eastern part of engels, was very ussr-ish. Ussr cultivated a healthy lifestyle and sport, as it is known. There were, i imagine, various tournaments and games quite often, and all these people stinking of sweat, also there was that street «poligraphicheskaya», one of the main streets of the town, along which the buses drove downtown and to saratov to one direction and to the other — to dachas (russian summer gardens for people to grow vegetables on, usually with houses, also given for services or even free by the state during ussr), to the military airport, one of the main ones in the country, and to the town’s main cemetery.

Mum would describe what funerals looked like during her childhood. The corpse in a nasty red, even pink coffin was placed on a heap of flowers and wreaths, all of which was placed on an open ussr truck, a train of people went processing behind, heading along poligraphicheskaya to the cemetery, after a three day of the body rotting in the heat, due to some orthodoxical rule of funerals (which is strange as the country should have been atheistic). Maybe mum’s such an image of funerals was drawn by her from some particular burials, maybe some war heroes’, as it is hard to imagine everybody in the town being buried in such a pompous way, which would in this case obstruct the traffic on the streets. But nevertheless, such is the remembrance of the ussr funerals in my mum’s childhood. Nothing special. But it gets into the general association with ussr, and makes ussr loathsome to me. Sports, stadiums and sweaty stinking people commuting to dachas and work on special buses, stinking of gasoline and dusty and grey — this is hardly tolerable alone. But adding to that the cemetery, the military, the green russian trucks with pink coffins makes it unbearable. The reader will see further how and why this all formed my intolerance of everything connecting to the ussr, russia, the place where my childhood was spent.

So my mother was born in engels in june 1966, was named natalya, lived in that part of the town, and went to school there. The school was the school #10. Not many schools in the city, and this one was far from the best, as all around there were these half rotten one-storey houses with very poor, mostly uneducated families living in them, of which were the children going to that school.

Now at the family spot, where great-grandma lived in her half underground hut, they began to build a new house half of brick and half of wood. It would have been expensive to build a normal house from brick, and moreover it wasn’t practised. For some reason people built houses that way, and the houses soon began to stink, the wood began to rot, everything began to creak from fast ageing.

The whole family was involved in the building. Maybe the house was built even before mum was born. At least in her early childhood the house already existed. The wooden gates painted in green and a red one storeyed house. One stepped through the wicket into the yard, then was the porch, then the cold outer entrance hall where boots and galoshes lay scattered on the floor, also brooms, dishes. Then the main door, then at once the kitchen, to the left was a little living room, to the front was another hall and from it further ahead the door to another tiny, about 3m2 room, and to the left yet another living room, the main room of the house with two windows. The whole square of the house was about 50m2. No toilet in the house. One had to forefeel, then to snatch a gazette, to put on the quilted jacket and the cold galoshes, and if it wasn’t too late yet, to run and find the stinking cabin in the yard in the frozen darkness. It’s only close to my time that they remade that first little living room into an indoor toilet, although nobody except myself ever used it, as the owneresses of the whole place grudged wasting resources of the shit pit, which if overfilled with shit one day might require a special service of draining the shit out, which is expensive and, as i understand, would entail problems with law, as the whole construction was not and for some reasons could not, be registered officially.

At the school mum went to the children faced the same problems with the toilet. It was around 1975, and the school still didn’t have toilets within the building. The same problem of shitting in the frost outside in special toilets, with i can imagine what dirtiness inside. The school also had a natural bog, even a pond within its yard, with ducks, reeded shores, fishermen and all.

My mum tells how she wouldn’t stop laughing in school. It is her natural psychological feature, likewise mine. Like during a class she would laugh with her friends over something and she alone wouldn’t stop when everybody else stopped. And the teacher would put her out of the class-room, which was considered to be a punishment.

During childhood she was enrolled in female sport gymnastics. It was not however in the sporthalls at the town’s stadium (they weren’t yet built. There were only stadiums and open grounds i think), but in a special building downtown of the town, near the main square and the park. In gymnastics she did well on the first stages, her friend from school olya semyonova also went with her there. But at the point when these risky and painful, if one falls, stunts and jumpings over and on the balance beam began she gave up. She wasn’t the sort who could risk falling on that fucking beam and breaking a bone, or breaking in the skull or something like that. She cared for herself too much. Some might say it may have been more about her low confidence in herself, but i know that she was grown up by a hysterical neurotic mother, fearful of genitals and of pain and ever obsessed with physical condition of the body, and all this stemming from the fear of death, and i know that the hypochondria and this her pitying her own physical condition was the main reason she dropped gymnastics, or at any rate of her fear of doing those exercises. It is similar to my fear which i will tell about further in the story, that’s why i tell about mum’s attempts in gymnastics.

The family then consisted of these fellows: great-grandma, grandma klava, grandpa, mum, the son of great-grandma named grisha, his little red haired wife lusya, and the sons of the last two — valera and yura. All the eight were assembled in the family house at holidays and celebrations, and, except my mum and her parents, lived there.

Valera and yura, siblings, were of my mum’s age. They were both red haired (not really red haired like irish people, but not true blond), at least valera, and their mother was a pure mordovian little red-haired woman. Valera has a mustache and eyes somewhat close to each so together with redness he reminds of a cooked crayfish.

What’s remarkable, this lusya, whom i would call aunt lusya, came from the same family whence my grandpa had come when he lived in engels after moving from ershov. So my grandpa and lusya were relatives. (i forgot, I’ve already told)

As is expected from a red haired freckled boy, living with neurotic puritanic women although with a brother and a dad, the latter probably being psychologically subdued by the puritanic women’s company, so no real man in the family, yet nobody too depressed, just puritanic and poorly educated, valera grew into a prankish sex-obsessed youth. The linkage between growing in suhc circumstances and growing up into a sex-obsessed male is my own observation.

At about 19 i learned from mum about the following event from her childhood. Once the three — she and the siblings — played in the yard of the house and they somehow ended up in a barn where valera made some violent sexual attempts at my mum. Maybe yura was also present. This she held secret until i was 19 when she revealed it to my grandma during particular circumstances and to me.

Such «rapes» (no less, if only one knew how disturbing such events, even if just sexual accosts made by strange men in the street, were to my mum, a puritanic hypochondriac) however were not unusual with her. The stadium and its groves within along the gates were on the way from the family house to «the living and the dead’s». Once, mum tells, she went along the gates of the stadium and a man coming out of there accosted her, just verbally with a sexual hint. That’s all she tells. In both cases, whether he did do anything physical (but most probably he didn’t) or it was just verbal, the thing affected her. Otherwise the event wouldn’t have preserved in her memory so many years.

There were other «assaults», i’ll mention the other couple of instances i know of.

As a matter of fact, it seems during the ussr, although a puritanic and antisexual regime, the problem of sexual «harassers» was quite ubiquitous. My mum would tell me that the town’s main park (in my time innocent and full of children, at least in daytime) was quite a place to get raped. All that affected her.

So my mum lived with parents, an only child. What were her relationships with them and her psychological development?

Grandpa drank. He’d succeeded in becoming a plumber and worked in the town’s heating systems service, which was like they would climb down some technical well to fix all these pipes, with a miner’s flashlight on the forehead and all, but, as if that wasn’t bad enough, in the evening he would indulge his ancestral alcoholic predisposition. Grandma wouldn’t tolerate this and made scenes. Then some mental processes of his switched something inside his head and he would take up the knife.

No, i won’t write it like this. Written like this, to a reader it might sound ambiguous and hint to an idea that my grandpa had psychosis (as that sounds as if he were unpredictable), whereas in fact i know nothing of the sort. I will avoid such artistic ways of writing, i am no writer now, am a documentalist, i must be exact, even at the cost of this story’s captivation. My mum just says «he would run after grandma with a knife». What does this tell? Surely not that he took up the knife just for no reason, even if he did.

So i know only that he would run after grandma with a knife around a table now and again (i was about to write «every second evening», but i’m not sure how often it happened. It may even have happened just a few times, seeing how mum’s prone to exaggerate) and that mum cried seeing such scenes, always doubtful whether there would not be bloodshed. But there was never any bloodshed, the worse for mum, as it continued to develop her anxiety on and on, continued to raise doubts in her whether her parents thought about her, whether they needed her at all.

I used to read john bowlby and all these works on attachment theory. According to that my mum was developing as deeply insecure. I don’t know how much «preoccupied», or «avoidant», or «fearful» she was and is in general. In one situation she can be one, in another another. I see no use in labeling. To tell that she is insecure is enough, the rest needs not labeling but description of behaviour. If one wants to really understand a person’s behaviour he must observe their behaviour and see for themselves. That a person is, for instance, fearful-avoidant tells almost nothing. Or, rather, it tells, but doesnt show anything.

Mum says that in such moments grandpa would say «daughter,» with the russian diminutive suffix speaking of grandpa’s fond attitude, though drunk, to mum «go to the other room» and swear at grandma klava for enraging him. Grandma would attack him, beat him with her bony arm, which would only add to his rage and my mum’s dread of what will happen next. Then, grandpa having found no guts for using the knife, grandma would redirect her despair onto mum, and would apply the beating arm on her for any slight, while grandpa was left alone to his gloomy rest.

It may seem that grandma didn’t take grandpa seriously, as she would attack him armed with a knife, and perhaps she really didn’t, and yet to a 3-10-yo girl such scenes were nothing short of real serious mortal combats.

Mum said that once in early childhood all those anxieties had led her to such a state as to that she saw something like hallucinations, something like stars in the air in front of her, and she didn’ go to school the next day. But again, knowing her tendency to exaggerate, those sparkles or stars probably were mere insomnia issues.

So, if speaking of any violent acts against my mum, it’s only on her mother’s side that they occured. Mum says grandma beat her a lot. After i was 18—20 mum would get into such a rage remembering all her childhood and relationship with grandma, that she called her fucking bitch and would say she’d kill her as soon as she got home to engels (when we already lived in saint-petersburg), and that she should have complain to the millitia in her childhood for what grandma klava did to her.

Mum’s attitude toward grandma was always difficult and, after i grew up, hateful. I’ll probably tell a lot about it further on.

My mum says that basically she dreamed (wished) of her parent’s disappearance. Just disappearance. She didn’t want to be alone. There are stories and photographs of their going to the sea resorts together. On one trip, my mum says, on one day it was stormy and nobody went to the sea, but not so grandpa, he went out in rain to the seashore, half-humorously, «to face the elements’». It was not far, mum and grandma went after him to see what he was up to, and he stood on the top of a cliff as if defying the storm (for fun’s sake. probably drunk). That’s all.

He liked to go away from them, to stay alone, drink. His fishery was chiefly for this purpose, i think. He didn’t have any car then yet, but, as i understand, he always had what in russian is called motorroller, it’s not a scooter, it’s more of a big moto-something with a cabin attached at the side for the second passenger (or the second one could sit behind the driver’s back). I suppose he’d gone on this thing to fish a lot before i was born. Because when i was 5 and he bought a car and we all began to go fishing together he was already an expert in all these engels’ side’s labyrinthine rivers and islets.

They had not lived long among the living and the dead, a new flat was given to them, so they moved house. This new one was a bit farther from the family house, in the town’s location known as «school #1», which was being built then i think. From this flat nothing interesting can i remember, except that grandpa once nearly burned it with himself inside by forgetting to turn the gas off.

I think it was not long after that flat, before mum’s teen age, that my grandma, who all her life worked at the town’s plant making ferroconcrete, got the third, final, three-bedroom flat in a house in downtown engels.

The story, told by mum, goes that great-grandma made hysterical scenes anytime there was a prospect of my grandma moving permanently too far away from the family house. When my grandma had worked her due job at krasnoyarsk and they offered her a permanent job and stay there great-grandma flatly forbid it and grandma returned. The first and second flats were close all right, but when they offered grandma the third one there was also a choice: a two bedroom one in saratov or a three bedroom one in engles. At the thought of grandma living in saratov and the end of the habitual way of life with its meet-together’s almost every day, great-grandma threatened to hang herself. So the third flat in the downtown of engels was agreed upon. I’ll describe it in details later. Located it was in lev kassil’s street, some soviet juvenile literature writer. A not very long street, 500 metres long maybe. The house was three kilometres’ walk away from the family house. With it’s 500 metres longitude, kassil street had eight houses on our (i already call it our, as i lived there too) side in all, our house 150 metres long. The house was 9-storey, made of ferroconcrete. That was bad enough (houses of brick were always better. But grandma wouldn’t get in such as she worked at a ferroconcrete plant), but also the flat was in a corner of it, which was considered quite bad, as it was colder than others (perhaps in saratov option of another flat offered to grandma, the flat was not only in saratov, but also in the middle of the house, respectable and better. but it would have cost them shura hanging herself).

I also remember mum told that they also offered to grandma, instead of the three-bedroom one, two one-bedroom flats, or even one one-bedroom, and one two-bedroom. But this now was considered improper by my grandma, for she, as it seems to mum and me, wouldn’t stand the idea of mum’s getting, when she grew up, a whole one-bedroom flat for nothing. My grandma thought mum had to earn a flat herself, to shed sweat and blood working at some tedious job at a plant for years, like she herself did. When remembering her dialogues with grandma, mum would always recall grandma’s phrase «go earn yourself». With my grandma, and later with my mum in part, it was always about «who’s the worse off?». If in some situation one suffered while the other was the better off, the first one would try to make the balance level. He would detain something needed by the other so that the other had to earn it himself and suffer too, though he could easily give it and not lose much by doing so.

I can hardly imagine my grandparents living in flats (in my time they lived in the family house), much less, in that three-bedroom one, but they did, and i’m gonna list randomly eveything i remember from mum’s stories.

Not that anybody was a musician in the family, just as a part of the fashion current at the time, mum’s parents bought a full sized piano, worth a few monthly salaries and weighing a ton, to stand in the living room until its next and last move in 2006.

Once grandpa got home drunk and he lay at the entrance door among shoes asleep. The two women just stepped over him, and he lay and pissed his pants.

When grandma had had a bath she wouldn’t do anything with the soapy epithelium floating on the surface of the water and on the sides and the bottom of the bath, when the water was gone. For some reason mum had to deal with it. Nor did anybody else but mum have to wash grandpa’s hellish socks, and she says she almost vomited.

There were no physical gestures of affection among them, no hugging, except formal, maybe, on birthdays.

Ever since the photograph was made of grandma in her thirties where she looks more or less womanly and pretty with long hair, her haircut has been short. From what mum saw, there never was any sings of there ever had been romantic relationship between grandma and grandpa.

The three slept on separate beds. Grandma, slept lord-like on her back with her arms under her head. Grandpa blanketed with some rags would make noises in his sleep, as if signing.

Pigeons tried to add themselves and built nests on the balcony, but grandpa scared them away, and, though i may be mistaken, i even recall a story of grandpa shooting at them with something, although he never had any gun nor even a hunter knife, and, besides, mum told he was one of those who never harm as little as a fly, as they say.

Grandma and grandpa worked at plants at the outskirts of engels. I’ve been there a couple of times and they were the most industrial and boring places i’ve ever been to.

A bit more details on the town’s plan, although everything may be seen in google. As I said it is three kilometres between the family house and where grandma and mum and grandpa now lived. The family house i may eventually call just «frunze’ in my story, as it was in frunze street, after some soviet communist or whoever he was.

There were the following streets leading from frunze to downtown engels. Persidskogo, most famous in our life story and most used by us, as it was the nearest to the house path downtown. It led to a so-called children’s park with an orthodox church in it in my time. Through this park the main square could be reached, or, to the left in 300 metres, kassilya street, with their new home, or to the right there were, apart from the square, a bazar, called in russian yarmarka, the town’s main park and the ways out to the embankment and the volga. Everything small, the parks and all, it’s a small town.

From frunze also these streets led downtown parallel to persidskogo and they all crossed poligraphicheskya street (which is long and leads out of the town in the north, as i said): telegraphnaya (nearer to the volga), unpeopled, with one-storey houses along, reaching right the main square; nesterova, down which buses to saratov drove at those times as well as trucks and funeral buses.

There was also telmana street already, also parallel to telegraphaya, persidskogo and nesterova and reached by poligraphicheskaya in the above-mentioned place «school#1», but in mum’s time it was not as broad as now and only trolleys drove along it, carrying the unfortunate people living in new big grey houses in the most eastern and industrial part of the town, far away from everything except what many plants, including chemical-producing one, there were and the town’s old cemetery.

The stadium was near the poligraphicheskaya-nesterova crossroad. These two streets were also at all times the most abundant with synthetic wreaths hung on poles and trees along these streets as remembrances of people run over.

In the east nesterova ends in an unpleasant living district — lyotka, after «lyotchick’ which is «airplane pilot’. It has to do with the military airport which is nigh there. A very grey, military district, very downhearting.

What else mum told of her childhood? Seeing that the atmosphere at home with her two parents was always overtense, mum loved spending time at great-grandma’s.

Frunze, the family house stood on a hill. Not a hill really, it’s just an elevation of the ground about 10—15 metres high and it stretches south-north for a few blocks. Thousands or maybe millions of years ago, as i was told, it was the left bank of the river, that is, the whole lower part of the town was under water yet. During before-soviet times the city was constantly getting flooded, there are photographs in the museum of people in boats among the houses and all that. Then they built the embankment along the current shore. Not that it helped with getting rid of mud in the town, though. The town, which is all flat except that historical shore, the slope, is quite known for its abundance of mud on rainy days, as there is no draining system. Just a bit of geographical and historical details.

So the family house stood just on the edge of the eminent part of the town, facing the west: downtown engels, the ferris wheel and saratov, even, as far as i remember, its part where the bridge (built in 1965) came up to the city.

Accordingly, in winter there were snowy and icy hills for sledging. Mum would tell about this activity often, and always she would mention something disturbing connecting with it. The people that lived around, as i said, were poor, were uneducated and rude. Especially so male children, who all tended to be scamps. They would do any kind of pranks, trip each other, snatch one’s cap and throw it over some house’s fence, throw stones at each other, lift each other up by their ears, ask an ignorant one to lick a metal thing in winter (the tongue froze to the thing), spit at the spot of such icy hill where others were going to slide. There where children gathered, and the hills were the places where children came from all around, there always was much of that sort of things. Children were in grey coats and clothes, all muddy, faces freckled, treacherous eyes, ever hungry, savage, in these russian hats with ear-flaps, all just like in old photographs. So grandpa usually went with my mum and watched from the top of the hill.

In mum’s times the most popular slope for sledding was just three houses away from our house — down persidskogo street, they used to sledge a distance about 200 metres long, from the oncological hospital i mentioned (where great-grandma had worked), and down as far as to the district’s bathhouse. In my time along this persidskogo street automobiles already drove now and again, so it was not used for sledging anymore.

Around those times it was that the sequence of deaths began for my mum. The first was grisha, the brother of my grandma. Cancer or heart, i don’t remember. But i think it was his corpse that impressed my mum with the following thing. My mum used to (i even use «used to» — to indicate that she would recall this not once) tell that when one died in ussr he was to stay at home for a three days, as a part of some liturgical rite, as i said, and during these days the stiff’s mouth would open and somebody would have to go and shut it up. Those white bandages circling stiffs’ heads from the head’s top to under the chin are for the purpose of preventing that, I learned. This impressed mum at those times, i know, although she would recall this in humorous moments, as a matter for laugh. I know, back then, in childhood it developed anxiety and produced thoughts on death, a heavily disturbing subject. She would remember the stench, the moral atmosphere at home on such days.

That was the first death, there would be two more, all three in the house, and, surely, the neighbours, who consisted mostly of old people (as the younger members of families were more and more moving to new multi storey houses given by state) didn’t hesitate to add their funerals to the bargain. So, the family house mum assosiates with death. But she and her parents lived in the flats mostly.

I cannot remember exactly what this was about, but i remember mum told that there was a lot of night-going in her childhood. Like after a scene nobody would talk to nobody and then somebody would silently initiate a late walk to the family house to defuse the tension. As far as i remember, it was mostly mum, in her teen years, who, not willing to bear the atmosphere at home anymore, at the flat, where a row was ever about to burst out, would up and go to great-grandma in the late evening. But perhaps i’m wrong and the night-goings were initiated by the hysterical grandma. Like as mum herself did in my childhood — she would dress and go to drown herself in the river, and i would dress and go after her in tears. Something of the like happened to mum in her time. Maybe i’ll rewrite if i remember or get details.

Once in her childhood she climbed over some gates at frunze and her leg ran into a nail, and she literally hung on it upside down, until was taken off and to the hospital. Which, as well as the town’s morgue and an oncological hospital, was 100 metres away from the family house (the oncological one had been a war hospital during ww2, it’s there where great-grandma had worked as a nurse, as i’ve mentioned a couple of times already.).

So one can imagine the atmosphere of the neighbourhood around frunze. A bus station to a hateful work in one direction, to dachas (which is another labour. About this soon) and the cemetary in another, funeral throngs along the road now and then, a stadium with perverts, a school with no toilet, a house with no toilet, brother a pervert, a hysterical mother.

The family got a dacha, a spot of land. They built a house there out of some cement bricks grandma got from work somehow. The dacha was 10 kilometres away from frunze. I’ll describe what commuting to dacha looked like for, but now suffice it to say that it was hateful to everybody, except masochists, and my grandparents were masochists. But not they alone, many others too. All those women and old people with buckets of potatoes in each hand, with rakes and shovels commuting every day under the +40C sun, and seeming not to be suffering (except ever gloomy taciturn men like my grandpa whose attitude to the activity was hard to determine)? or even seeming happy. Yes I know those people had families to feed, so they had to go there. But in their place, where one’s allowed to buy a gun and shoot themselves and their family, die painlessly, and even maybe take some people who are responsible for their hardships, only masochists choose to live on their hateful life.

Some of course stayed overnight at dachas, some lived there through summer. But dacha, as i ve already hinted, by no means was a place for recreation, especially a dacha as ours. There were swampy ponds nearby to swim in, but these again, like snowy hills, as full of children as of frogs, no quietness, no recreation. Other people had dachas by the volga. That’s another story. There one swam, fished, there were shady trees, there one felt like sunbathing, there grew berries. There where our dacha was there was no getting away from the sun, everything dry, much growth to weed. Too far from the bus stop, always with buckets of vegetables. If it rains, muddy from foot to head and cold.

As her teen years were ending mum began to really hate going to the dacha.

There was nothing to do in saratovskaya oblast. Also lack of food. It was like this through all the soviet provinces, of course, but they say that as saratov was a strategic city, with its saratov aviation plant, the military airport, and other plants, it was particularly shut out. It was a problem here with meat, with sausages (proverbial phrase «to moscow for sausages’).

Through great-grandma, as i understand, mum had distant relatives in latvia (a part of the ussr then), whither she went maybe a couple of times, and she says there was a lot of meat food, everything in abundance, as in moscow, compared to home.

Nothing to do in engels, everything that was more or less advanced and intelligent was in saratov.

Two channels on tv. No jeans. All boring, all grey. Especially after visiting moscow or other more or less advanced cities of the shut out country.

I’ve never thought i was going someday to tell about the fucking ussr, like all these old people on tv in some as-it-was-in-the-ussr tv-series.

That was needed to describe mum’s childhood.

But now she finished school, and was the only one from her class to go to get higher education, she says. The female rest took up low-qualified jobs in engels, and the male rest, of these little is known. One, a weirdo and hooligan, who used to paint his hair green, for instance, eventually got killed somehow, mum says.

Almost forgot. Another one, he stalked her. I’ll tell about him.

She’d been attending for a year preparation courses and had tasted some of saratov’s life. The institution was the same one where grandma had gone.

Now about the geographical situation again.

Saratov is reached by the bridge. To get to that bridge from downtown engels one gets on a bus, usually the one going past the main square and the town’s main museum. The bus goes along a few little streets and places, each one named after this or that communist, or words having to do with industrialization and work, as «street of work», «street of labour» «timber factory street» and other dispiriting names. So the bus goes on, there is the beach on the right hand behind the tall embankment, then, stinking at kilometres around, a glue factory, then the bus turns right and soon it is the bridge. The bridge is 3km long, tall, allows three rows of cars, considered sightly and a local showplace, flies over a beach in the middle, and lands on saratov’s side at the place near the old 10 storey living complex called «pentagon’. Along the side of this pentagon the car goes either further along the hilly sokolovaya street, or, in case of public transport, turns left, to a tiny street, then maneuvers onto the bridge over the glebuchev ravine then again tiny streets on both sides and then the turn right onto moskovskaya which eventually ends in the main railway station and all public transport’s terminal station.

I’ll of course be describing the situation of the streets and places in downtown saratov many times, now i only need to describe mum’s route to the institute.

I’ve never been to or seen the polytechnical institute myself, only drove by in a car or a bus and my mum or dad would point to a direction and say «over there there is the polytechnical institute where your mum studied». I can of course clarify for myself on google earth where and what exactly the institute was, but i bet I never saw a wall or a fence of it. That’s very similar to the phenomenon of me never being able to see a morgue i wanted to see. Like i will know that there is a morgue somewhere around, but i look and look for it and it eludes me. And all this is similar to the issue of me never believing that people actually have sex, since i never once heard any moans, nor glimpsed anything in windows. But this is off-topic.

So the institute is almost at the foot of the mountains, on the other side of the railways. In short it is far from downtown saratov and there is nothing much more to go there for.

To go there required getting off the engels bus at astrahanskaya-moskovskaya, waiting for a tram, in frost, as behind your back those lucky bastards who’d chosen «humanitarian» education (in russia and in my story it stands for the education in such fields as literature, philosophy, etc. Not technical) are already getting into the warmth of their university here, and then about 20minutes’ drive on a cold tram to the institute.

I don’t really know what exactly she commuted on, if it was the popular trolley#9 that stopped going in 2004, then she would have had to get on it near the engels museum, where its terminal station was. This depends where she started. But, when we’d talk about engels’ mud she’d often remember how great-grandma used to see her off and take back the galoshes as she, in the shoes for saratov, got on a 247 or 249 bus. I mean that she either began her route from the lev kassilya flat, which is on an empty frosty trolley#9 from the museum, or an already packed 247, or she started from frunze and so got on a relatively empty bus at poligraphicheskaya, near frunze.

In any case she had, i think, to get to the crossroad of moskovskaya and astrahanskaya streets in saratov. On the central-west corner of it there is the saratov state university, which I mentioned, on whose territory I did never step, nor, i guess, my mum, for, by the family tradition she’d chosen a technical career.

She of course had girlish ambitions, she would have liked to become a ballerina, moreover she had the right figure for it, she’d also attended a musical school and various classes during school, as most of ordinary decent girls, but she hadn’t achieved any striking results in anything, and there was always that do-this-or-i-hang-myself problem with grandmas overhanging every decision, so, like so many young people, i guess, she’d chosen the most expected path. But even this was strange, it seems, as mum would often, in talks on independence, mention that nobody did as much as say a word about her future and profession, and it was she herself who up and went to the preparation courses, got all the needed documents and enrolled herself in the institute at her about 16 years of age, although heretofore a classic home-staying girl.

I think, mostly, it’s just that the situation at home stimulated her to do so. Mum herself said so, she wanted to get away from such a home.

What were mum’s relationships with boys?

Damn, everytime i hear a question like that I begin to feel like an extraterrestrial. Because that question sounds absolutely normal, it asks of something normal, natural. And here i am, having nothing to do with those things. People do have sexual life, and with them it’s only too normal.

In her school there was that guy from her class, who would appear once again in the story. He helped mum carry her school bag home, probably gave her flowers or something. He didn’t interest her, so i called him here earlier a stalker. I’ll describe him as i saw him, and try to conclude what was wrong with him.

Then there was someone with the surname kozlov. It is considered a funny word as «kozyol’ means ‘’he-goat’. Kozyol, in turn, is also a light insult for males. Some people change their surname to get rid of the stigma. There would be an acquaintance of mine from kindergarten with this surname.

I don’t know how much of a kozyol that kozlov was, but it’s clear mum didn’t like him. Nor do i know where she’d met him. The couple of things mum told were these.

Once she went to his home, which was in engels near the school#1, where his parents lived. Mum was a very pretty girl and his father also showed signs of liking her in various funny ways. Not that his father would become a competitor of his son, he just liked her in a parental way. Thus when she was getting ready to leave, dressing, she put her foot into her high boot and screamed as she felt there something bristle, a brush inside it, which she took for something living. All laughed. It’s the father who had placed the thing, although said that it was accidentally. He, in turn, definitely was more to her liking than the son, mum would always tell me so.

Then kozlov’s mother would call mum and ask questions of the when-are-you-going-to-get-marry sort, which i guess mum didn’t like. Also, kozlov was a fan of testing his parthner’s love of him, which of course mum didn’t like, so that when they once met at the beach as grown-ups, not long ago, he having ended up not too hapily in life, mum reminded him of those tests and their uselessness. That’s about all i know about kozlov.

Then there was a bicyclist. Again i do not know the story of his popping up, but he was definitely more to mum’s liking that the previous. It was evident that the ussr was on its last legs and soon the borders would open, and this cyclist, who was into long distance cycling, promised to take mum to europe, to france. Maybe he had the means to do it (it’s impossible to up and go cycling europe even now, not to mention the just opened ussr. I mean all these visa and money requirements), maybe relations there, although that’s unlikely, or he was just a romantic youth.

But yet a couple of details of her institute life.

When being a citizen of the ussr, one faced various obligations at every turn. The mentioned practise of that obligatory working after getting an education, army serving, various duties in school and strict schedules at summer camps, etc.

Before the institute they used to send just enrolled students to work some summer jobs having nothing to do with their future profession. Thus, mum with her would-be fellow students was sent to balakovo, a town 130km from saratov, in order to, as i remember, dig the state’s potato plantations as well as make chores on the territory of the nuclear power station being built at the time there.

Mum recalls living there in a dormitory, or even a new but unfinished living house with no facilities yet, a bucket to piss in in the night and local perverts flocking in the neighbourhood after young studentesses from saratov.

By the way, although i use «perverts» calling men who accost or even harass girls, i by no means express any negative attitude towards them by doing so, as do prudent puritanic people who will call every man who has as little as looked at a girl’s skirt «pervert» and «sex-harasser». I am a pervert myself, and I absolutely understand men trying to fulfill their sexual longings. True, i may call many men «perverts’ too rashly (like in the case of the balakovo ones), like puritans, but it has no negative connotation. It’s just that I can’t help being humorous sometimes.

So, she began studying architecture. Although dancing the white swan would have been better, she really liked to pencil and did it quite well, as she says.

She made friends in the institute. Mum being a beauty, her female friends had to be uglier. The first was shurygina (her surname). She was a jew, or a half-jew, or neither, but at any rate she had a big nose, no chin, and bat ears. The second was Rita black («black» being the surname). This rita was a little plump girl with not very long hair and a harsh voice from cigarettes, who could get into a car of accosting strange men driving by and go with them nobody knew where. That sort of behaviour was unacceptable with my mum, but they were friends anyway.

Mum says she was given a room in the dormitory, shurigina’s father helped with fixing light bulbs there, but mum had stayed overnight there only once, as it was infested with cockroaches, which, however, were abounding everywhere in those times.

Mum would tell how she and her fellow studentesses would work at their assignments and projects till late evening and how it was interesting and she wouldn’t want to go home and somebody would offer to stay overnight at theirs in saratov.

One day she was going home very late, probably in the night. There had been no opportunity to call grandma. Also no transport across the bridge at all. There was that traffic police station (i will basically write «police», although it’s only in 2008 that it began to be called so. it had been «militia» till 2008) on the saratov’s side, and there my mum went and the policemen offered to drive her across the bridge, she was pretty and everybody helped her all her life, and she agreed (or they helped her to get on a trolley which was returning empty to the engels trolley depot, or these, most probably, were two different nights and cases) and, in any case, in the middle of the bridge she saw grandma driving in a taxi from engels to look for mum. Thus they found each other, and that shows grandma’s hyper-protecting attitude towards mum, although, judging from mum’s stories, followed by beating when back at home.

Another time, at the moskovskaya-chernishevskogo crossroad, in late evening, she going to the bus-stop, a pervert glued to her on the side, as usual, and then a man from the second storey of a house they passed by poured out a bucket of water on him.

So, as it is seen, the commuting to the institution was a time when various things happened.

Grandma was in command of the family still, so in summers there still was the mandatory dacha.

A major instance of sex assaults on mum happened about then. There was no bus right to the dacha then, and it seems mum had to cover the not short road to the dachas from the highway by foot and alone (and against her will. grandma had forced to go to dacha), and there were wheat fields on both sides, and a pervert seized and pushed her to the side into the high growth, but someone moved by on a vehicle, as i remember her say, and rescued her, the perv fleeing, and conveyed her right to the dacha where he kind of told mum’s parents off for drawing mum in all that foolhardy commuting to the dacha. Grandma may of course have gotten the message, but it couldn’t have availed my mother much, for, even if grandma slackened her seizure on mum regarding the dacha, she would nevertheless have restored the balance by imposing other commitments as heavy, or just by corporal punishment.

The relationship with the bicyclist was broken by the beginning of another one — with the institute’s teacher or examiner sergey z.

Now about him. He’d come from Rostov-na-donu, the major city of rostovskaya oblast to the south of Saratovskaya after Volgogradskaya. He was an Armenian, or half-armenian by nationality, because he had almost grey eyes and wasn’t dark haired (he rather didn’t have it at all, at least in my time). As a child, his poor mum had sent him to an orphanage. It was practised so, mum says. And when the child grew up and could provide for himself he would return home. He’d served in the army all right. He’d studied architecture in Rostov and was considered to be successful (and all Rostov-na-donu’s architecture school was considered strong), and so he moved to Saratov with fellow students and now was some major in the institute with a promising future. He was almost twice older than my mum and he had a family — wife and a couple of daughters born already at the time, i think. So, mum having a relationship with a teacher in the ussr time was unacceptable enough, but also it enraged everyone around who was female that my mum was the prettiest girl and now lo she was the examiner’s fiancee. Mum’s beauty has always been the source of her benefits as well as quarrels with her fellows everywhere. She was about 19 then, as I understand.

In the institute years she once more traveled to the relatives to Latvia with Rita, and now she appreciated with an architect’s eye the local domes and churches and streets. During my life she would tell how they went to that Riga Cathedral to listen to the organ and there were tombs of kings, and gothic arches and those windows of glass differently painted, and it was cold inside as in a crypt, which it was, but overall it was exciting, she says. She brought back home packages of postcards which we used to look at in my childhood.

They made sketches of the local architecture, also they went to the local park which was more of a forest than a park compared to saratov’s, let alone engel’s, and to me she would often recall how she in the thick of that park saw and reached down to pluck up a real big amanita and then on standing up she saw right in front of her this real elk who seemed to have been up to get that mushroom for himself but was late.

They went on an electric train to the sea or what bay there is, to the town of Jurmala, which was both a famous soviet resort town and a place where soviet musical festivals used to be held, broadcasting nationwide. There was that unfamiliar whitish or greyish sand, and, although summer, it was cold and nobody went deeper in the water than up to the knee.

The relatives took mum all right, but not so they did Rita, who behaved too frivolously for that strict european region. The native locals’ despise in the general treatment of them two (here i mean that latvia-russia political issue) was perceptible, mum says, and this had made a longevous impression on her.

From Latvia mum brought home novelties such as short shorts and jeans, she says she was the first at Frunze to go about in such clothes.

When it was summer or holidays she, it seems, traveled a lot. At least she didn’t stay at home like some. For she would tell how it was ordinary to go to Moscow just for the two weekend days (whereas at my time, in my childhood, to go to Moscow was such a thing as done only by very business men), or how she for instance was once late for the train and it had already started off and she was running after it and her friends cried to her and even the conductor cried to get into a latter wagon, but still she had not been able, for a train is getting more and more speed, whereas the runner it losing it. She’s always wanted to live in riga or moscow because of the memories.

But the most of traveling, it seems, was done with this Sergey, her teacher from the institute and a lover. I’ll call him dyadya seryozha, as I did in my childhood.

He had a car, which was rare in those times and respectable. They didn’t travel around on trains, they traveled by car, and it’s of those times that she would remember what it’s like to go to Moscow on a car, and that it took as little as six hours sometimes or something, while the train took twelve. In Moscow I don’t know what they did, probably he was there on business and she just was with him. They also went to the south of the country, Rostov and the sea. She would say in my childhood «Oh, where haven’t I been?».

It’s hard to fathom why my mum liked him. Neither in my time, nor, as mum says, then did he have much of that typical charisma of a macho or much of sense of humour which was vital for mum (My dad won her by it) She would often, returning from hours spent with dyadya seryozha, say to me «Oh how boring it is with him». He had bulging eyes and a mustache, resembling a catfish, and in my time, between mum and myself, his face was a matter for a laugh.

It seems, as it is often with choosing partners in women, i suppose, to mum he resembled her own father, who was taciturn and absolutely humourless (much more than dyadya seryozha), to whom my mum probably always had internal sympathy, but could never express. Both the men were much older than she, henpecked in a way (grandpa of course much more than the other), and at the same time inaccessible: grandpa because of his habitude to be taciturn, short-spoken and unfathomable, dyadya seryozha because of him being already a family man and unable to promise my mum any prospect of a stable relationship. Also, dyadya seryozha was touchy, his pride was vulnerable, and he could be hysterical at times. He could make my mum get out of his car halfway and drive away, and they wouldn’t contact for some time, at least in my time it was so. But he didn’t physically harm her or anything, didn’t drink. He was an honorable architect in the city, had a car, was busy and well-connected.

Be that as it may, by him mum got pregnant. When she revealed it to grandma, this brought out a scandal and a hysterical scene, and grandma kicked her out of the house, not meaning that, just for the sake of drama. To hit back mum cried she would keep the child. That’s how it was, as I gathered.

However it was unreasonable and mum had an abortion.

Little note on the phrase «not meaning that’. It is one of the backbone psychological traits in our family (and on both — mum’s and dad’s — sides): nobody is ever serious when threatening. thus, when somebody threatens to hang themselves, they don’t really mean it, while the other side, though sure that it is the game again, yet prefers usually to act as if the threat was serious, thus, after yielding to the threater, to be able to blame future misfortunes on the fact that they were forced into these circumstances, so as not to let the threater fulfill the threat. This is all very subtle and may seem crooked, which it is, yet with experience i’ve come to see that really shitty things in our family happened when someone would actually quit the game and took threats seriously. I’ll show many examples of this theme down the line. Also, I know of the term «bluff’ in english, which might seem more idiomatic than «threat;, yet i deliberately didn’t use it, as all the contexts i found it in were such that the bluffer pursued some practical, specific goal by doing this. whereas in our typical situations, when we are threatening, we are not so, we rather thus test the quality of relationships between ourselves, and this works every way, for instance if we threat to do something to ourselves then we test if they care for ourselves, and if we threat to do something to them, they are thus tested if they believe that we are capable of hurting them,, if we threat to do something to the third party dear to the threatee then we again test the threatee’s faith in our not being capable of hurting them and so on.

Mum told me that at her final exams she was absolutely stupid and dyadya seryozha literally answered for her.

Himself, he’d been advanced and now took up the post of the Chief architect of Engels, which is the part of the state administration of the town. He helped mum to get a job there, where she worked among important persons at once after the institute, which provoked indignation in many and yet they held it back seeing who was her patron.

Around those years, two inhabitants of Frunze left the house feet first. Jura, the son of grandma’s already dead brother, died while serving in the army. Nobody ever got to know what happened. He served in some distant part of the country, and he’d been rebellious in his youth, my mum says, though it was, as they say here, «for the right cause», meaning he was against injustice and all that, perhaps it had to do with his end. His brother Valera even went to where he’d served to investigate but was daunted by all that backroom secrecies of the army. As I understand, officially he shot himself. Grandma would remember «How your mum cried when she came here and saw the wreathes and all, she ran out of the house and sobbed on the bench». Mum was evidently very sensitive to such things.

Then great-grandma Shura had had her fill.

I’ve seen neither of them, i mean even in photographs.

After great-grandma, a division of the family house had to be carried out, for, as it seems, Valera was out of age and he lived with his mum, Lusya, in a two bedroom flat in the neighbouring district, which i will describe later on, and he had nothing to do with Frunze except to claim his share, after his father. My grandma, as mum said, paid him off with money which she’d providently saved up. Soon there began all those crisises in the country which lost all the population’s money its value, including Valera’s share, as well as what was left in my grandparents’ purse for a car for grandpa. It seems it is this unluck of Valera’s put Lusya at odds with my grandma for ever, as well as still makes Valera, justly discontented, hover around fruze, popping up at days of remembrance, with his sons waiting for my grandma’s end which will allow of another division of the manor.

Now there was an acquaintance of my mum’s, whose name and where she’d come from i don’t remember, but i always remembered where she lived: not far from the entrance to Saratov’s City park, in Rahova street.

When told about by mum she always appeared to me as a woman of that kind (and probably a fictional one, for i never encountered such but in fairytales) whose main free-time specialization is matchmaking, management of others’ private lives. It was she who introduced mum to the then popular among young women, thanks to the fall of the Iron curtain, way of making it in life known as «inter-girl», which meant finding and getting married with a man from foreign countries. And it was at hers too, where my mum met my dad.

It was someone’s birthday party. I don’t know any details of this party and their getting acquainted there, but i know details of another birthday party had, as i understand, quite soon after the first one, at which I accidentally happened to start existence. But I, of course, will begin with dad’s background.

My father’s mother Valentina, whom i will call grandma2 or babavalya, was the twelfth, as far as i remember, and the youngest in a family not so wretched and poor, as i understand, as that of my matrilineal great-grandma (whose wasn’t even a family, as she’d lost her husband), but whose spawns, at any rate this twelfth, never showed any aspiration for academical education, and consequently ended up living a life of very low quality. Although living almost in downton Saratov with all its opportunities.

Grandma2 finished compulsory school only. Perhaps she was tied up in domestic chores, as being the youngest and the last to be educated, always serving those who were more busy, and this had formed all her futher calling. They lived in a detached house somewhere near Sennoy Market, which was a bazar, principal in the city, with a thousand booths of all sorts, it is 10 minutes’ walk from the university (further i may call it «SGU») along Astrahanskaya street, and also not far from Saratov’s main railway station. Although I’ve been at that house a couple of times, I cannot for sure remember where exactly it is.

Living in that part of the city, near markets and all, meant it was unlikely that they be very cultural people and their occupations be to do with intelligence. Although there was this SGU nearby, yet downtown saratov and the habitation of intellectual people was associated with the districts near the main square and further down to the Volga, especially around the park «Lipki». The people of grandma2’s class were more into trade, repairs, and car services. Thus, she even attended moto-driving school and got an official license, she told. She could never swim, which tells, I think, her family didn’t often go for weekends to the Volga, or to beaches.

She used to be very talkative and tell many stories of her life, but I remember almost nothing, for when i was a child they seem to have been to me not exciting enough to be remembered, and in my late youth years, when i used to live at hers, i didn’t listen to her at all, only nodded, as i was absolutely nonstop absorbed in my own problems and thoughts.

I know that almost all her siblings spread across the ussr, some of them to Latvia, another one settled near Saint-Petersburg, and grandma2 went to both the places. Once she told of some platonic affair with a youth when visiting Saint-Petersburg. I scarcely gave ear when she talked about this. But I gave both two ears when in my childhood, telling to beware of strangers, she told about her encounter with one once. She had stood in a bus and she started to feel something rubbing up her back or butt and she turned around and this something whitish? as she expressed, sprinkled on her clothes from the direction of the man standing next to her and she got off and it was really nasty.

She used to like to talk of men and of her amorous desire «to be with some old man» («old» because she herself was already old) with whom to talk, to live together and massage each other and even have baths together, but it was evident those assaults by perverts affected her, and the subject of sex was ambigious with her, she never found a balance between her phobias and desires.

There was this Saratov aviation plant, strategically important, around which a whole living district called Zavodskoy («Plants’») was formed of 5 and 10-storey houses. It was in the south of Saratov, which is elongated along the Volga. The district was reached only by two roads below and above the railways (farther above are the mountains), about 7 kilometres from the downtown. Here Grandma2 somehow got a job, had to commute here every day from home, as I understand, until she would get a flat when my father was about 20. Her job was at a hotel belonging to the plant, she did everything she could from cooking and cleaning the swimming pool to receiving various soviet bigwigs come here to inspect the work at the plant and cracking jokes for them.

«Tovarishes» from all over the Ussr were sent and assigned to work at the plant, one of whom, as I understand, was my grandfather2 from Ukraine, from some town near the city of Odessa. I write «as i understand» because i don’t really know who and what he was here for, but judging by that he lived, as grandma2 once told, in a big house near the plant means he worked here, as all the surrounding houses’s habitants consisted of the plant’s workers.

They didn’t get married. I guess they could have but the story, told by grandma2, goes that this grandfather of mine in one evening when heard his comrade was having a quarrel with somebody, took some metal thing in hand to go and stand up for his comrade, but on arriving was mistakenly arrested by the police and ended up doing a few years, after which he for some reason didn’t reunite with grandma2 and returned to Ukraine, from where he wrote grandma to visit him with the son, but they didn’t.

When my dad was a few years old, grandma had another affair and had her second and last child Larisa, but this second father is supposed to have been much less sinless, as grandma2 never told about him, and mum learned from somebody that he was a murderer and also ended up in prison.

About dad’s childhood i remember little, although he, like grandma2, would tell a lot and he is considered in our family to be an eloquent and interesting narrator. That’s true and i used to listen with interest to his stories, full of mockery and humorous details, but his past itself never interested me as much as mum’s. In his past appeared to have been no suffering at all. He is an optimist and carefree, and even when talking about grave subjects, such as prisons, or war or something like that, he would not show that it negatively affects his mood. While mum would have grown deeply disturbed, she’d say «horrible», or, more usually she would try to appear to have been unaffected and have taken the subject lightly and with laughs, but then, in fact, in her depressive silences and while nervously picking her fingers (since childhood, she says, she’s been picking her fingers, that is the skin — not nails — tips of which are always bloody, covered with abrasions and swollen, although naturally very slender and could have completed the ideal woman hands), or when she’s by herself, she would think on the disturbing subject a lot, and after some days she might come up with some afterthought.

So dad’s past was never interesting to me, there was nothing negative and no pessimism, and moreover he loves the ussr in general, the style of life, i’ll return to this many times, whereas i’ve always hated the ugly grey soviet past and had to endure the stories about it.

So, there was the three of them in their family, I remember dad told he drove his little sister Larisa to her school on his bicycle, grandma2 was indulging and never shouted at him, although their domestic tasks were distributed among them three, and all were laborious, there was a schedule telling who and do what and when. There was some adult relative, of whom i heard a lot, maybe one of grandma2’s brothers (to me all these questions never mattered), who lived near and was an automobile enthusiast, had a garage and repair gear. And for some time, as far as I can remember the story, he had a car which was made in the US, or something like that, or he had a friend who had such a car, or just once saw such a car in reality, which also could make him a local legend.

So he was an uncle of my father’s and was the only male person who appeared in dad’s stories about his childhood and who influenced him. What not much is in dad of a typical man, who loves cars and all, namely his adoration of men who have their own garages and deals with classic cars (i use «adoration» as dad himself has never had any of the mentioned stuff. he would just go on forever about how he wished to have a garage and deal with cars, how he would, how he should, how he could), was instilled in him by that uncle. Dad could and used to solder radio receivers in his youth, loved those numerous soviet magazines with designs of ships and war machinery, as most boys in his time, liked boyish films on Indians which in those times only those made in west-ussr countries were available. From his teen years, he says, he’s watched football and biathlon, although he never partook in such activities.

In other respects, he always lived and dealt with and was influenced by women. I’ll describe grandma2 many times yet, now suffice it to say she was over-indulging and answering, so although I don’t have a full image of his childhood, judging by what he has become I would say it wouldn’t be mistaking to call him a mama’s boy. The ussr, judging by what he loves it for, for him was like an overprotecting and observing mother itself.

He finished all his 11 grades, which is high school, but for some reason he didn’t go on to university and so he had to go to the army for the obligatory two years in those times (now 1 year). I asked him why he didn’t get out of it, as everybody tries in my time, he said men didn’t use to do so. There was still that heroism and nationwide military pride, after the war, men used to see serving in the army as a duty, although, as I understand, it was possible to avoid it, like now, by getting higher education.

He told how he was dispatched. It was a kind of lottery. The recruits stood in a disordered mob in front of military majors who would call the next recruits to come up and dispatched them in separate groups. Now a rumour spread through the recruits that the next called out would be dispatched to the Baltic, the collective name of the Western ussr countries (Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania), where everyone wanted to be dispatched to. My father was one of the fools, but he hadn’t known it until camels began to be seen in the steppes around across which he drove on a train on the third shelf (the shelf for luggage in russian trains) with others for a few days.

In Uzbekistan, after a shocking introduction period where he served at an ordinary male prison where one day they, young boys, were sent to a cell where one inmate had gotten rebellious and cut himself in front of them with a hidden razor from his mouth, thanks to which and maybe other events dad got a phobia of the police, prisons and criminals for the rest of his life, he for the rest of the two years served at a women’s prison. He told stories about his serving, which were interesting to me as long as the disturbing subject of one’s having to waste two years of his life concerned me.

He recalled no instances of «dedovshina» or «hazing», a US word for it, as i understand from wikidictionary.

Istead, he would tell how he would eat huge mulberry berries that grow there in abundance, or how he went to the local eastern bazaars, one story of how a fellow soldier went to the civilians’ town with his gun and overstayed there, which was forbidden and an emergency and caused an alarm and fuss at the military base. How some Asian who also served there and boasted there was a river, although narrow and knee-deep, in the town he’d come from, and then dad told them all about the volga which is kilometres wide and they were amazed. Spending two years in prison got dad, besides the dread of, interested in prisons, to a small extent, like when channel-surfing he would linger on films showing prisons.

So nothing special about his serving in the army, it seems, apart from that first shock.

Dad told how he returned home, and this was more or less of interest to me, as at the time he told about it, I was strongly connected with the locale, especially the street. Nobody was meeting him at the railroad station, and he got off the train and went home by himself proudly along Stepana Razina street, or near, as he told.

After the army he still didn’t know what to do with his life. He’d developed as a man without a particular aim or hobby, there had been no mentor for him except that uncle of his, nothing to influence him. And at the same time, with him there was no drama of being fatherless, nothing tragical in his childhood, so he was no mental sufferer, which if he had been, could have numbed him and make him be contented with the prospect of a boring life, working at some plant till death. So he was more of a romantic type, only a no-good type because of his having no training in anything where being romantic could be benefited from. He’d read books in childhood, but I think he didn’t like it as much as movies, for the university, where bookworms are supposed to swarm, was closer to his home, yet he wound up working at the local movie studio, farther to the volga down Moskovkaya street, in the crossroad of Oktyabrskaya street.

But before the movie studio he did go to university for a year, only not because he wanted to study any literature, but because he was seeking a prospect akin to that which the movie studio would offer, namely the opportunity to travel, go on expeditions, always to be involved in something interesting and new. He enrolled in the Faculty of Geography. He would have been working forever in some boring department in the city, dealing with tons of papers with figures and plans, or at best maybe sometimes have traveled to Syberia to inspect a spot out of where oligarchs would extract oil and enrich themselves. After half a year he’d understood that, switched to journalism, and when he discovered that there too were about the same frustrating prospects he quitted the university and got a job in the service staff in that local Saratov movie company, working where would be interesting and exciting at once, without any four years of studying.

It was, the service staff worked in various cities across the ussr, they made documentary films, and dad even boasts of having seen in person some ussr movie star.

He also worked some lowest job at the saratov theater college, where he shook hands with Yevgeny Mironov, who has become one of the most prominent Russian actors and also looks like dad.

I remember some stories he told me about those young years of his. Almost always they were about some bad luck of his, to the extent that listening to them in my childhood (and he also had a tendency to tell them all over now and again) i formed of him the picture of a looser.

Once when cable skiing behind a boat, he fell in the water and lost his pants.

Once, in winter, coming up some sloping street slippy with ice in downtown saratov, there were two children ahead of him and the girl fell and began sliding down and dad caught her and saw that it was a dwarf woman and the other it was her husband, and this husband was rude to dad for grabbing her.

Another time when he was a journalism student he got an errand to cover some little plant or farm’s activity in outskirt saratov. A day before somebody, probably that successful Zinaida Fyodorovna whom I’ll introduce in a moment, gave him some Czech (nowhere to be found in shithole provinces) shoes of natural leather as a gift. In these boots he went there and he went to some repair garage there and there was a pot with oil or something and he stood right in it.

Once he was at a party at someone’s flat, like in those post soviet 90» russian films, and there was a guy about thirty and he was impressing everyone with his encyclopedic knowledge of everything, he was giving out the facts just as they were stated in the encyclopedias, which, having an artisting mind, my dad didn’t like, and he observed to this guy that he didn’t have his own point of view and was just talking encyclopedias. Failing to summon to his memory a suitable article, the encyclopedist just punched dad in the face.

Another time there a party and someone wanted to take a shit and the toilet was closed and he couldn’t leave the flat and he found a dark empty room and he got onto the windowsill, stuck out his ass out the window and then the room was suddenly entered, the light switched on, and those entering saw two astounded lovers on the coach and the guy shitting out the window. This happened not to dad and i don’t remember if he actually was at the party, but let it be here for a change, besides shows that he went to parties or at least knew people whe did, wasn’t really a mama’s boy and shut-in.

On the whole, I know or remember little of those his years, and my mum too, she jokingly believes he was a drug addict during those dim years of his, so sometimes I would be jokingly, though degradingly, getting at him «you were a drug addict in those years, weren’t you?» to which he would joke «Well, what else could I be doing? Shot up by the flush toilet, of course».

As for his sexual life, he told me once when I was about 19, when he had come home after the army, he was 20, some mate invited him to a party at a dormitory where silly girls from villages lived, where he lost his virginity with somebody. Dad without consequence, but not so the mate, this got his girl pregnant and had to marry her and they still lived some ugly life together and were acquaintances of my father’s when he told me about that.

Mum says she heard it gossiped that before her he had an affair with another woman and she had to have an abortion for some reason.

I cannot imagine him being liked by any woman at all, to me he always seemed a classical case of friend-zone man, even though he looks quite self-confident and presentable in the photographs of himself of his youth which i saw. To me, as well as to my mum, i think, he has always seemed to have a low sexual drive. I’ll be explaining and describing this facet of his yet.

At the movie studio, as I understand, worked a woman, she was grandma2’s age and a friend of hers, called Zinaida Fyodorovna. She saw that dad was wasting time and had no prospect of promoting in jobs or life without high education. She persuaded him to go to university again, which he did. This time he chose the Philological Faculty, where he studied literature, specializing in Russian literature. I think he would have enrolled in some faculty closer to cinematography, but in Saratov there was none, and to leave his family, or, to grandma2, to let him be a grown-up, and go to Moscow or SPb was unthinkable.

So he was at his third out of the four years of his university and 24—25years of age, when he met mum, she a year older, and they went to this party where he didn’t withdraw and i had to exist.

This party, someone’s birthday, my father’s acquaintance’s, as i understand, was held not long after that one at which mum and dad first met and it was in some flat in a house on the western outskirt of Saratov. Beginning at Sennoy Market, there is a row of districts called «Dachnaya №..» with numbers up to 10 for the farthest, and that was 9th Dachnaya, as far as i can remember. The views of those districts and the quality of living (in all those microscopic flats) there, but for still working plants at that time, was on the verge of poorness and shit. So i was even begotten in the very shit of shit.

Mum says they got drunk there, which was highly out of character for her, and she vomited and it was awesome. She says she was saying to him to withdraw but he didn’t and she, perhaps, didn’t care much as she was drunk. So all happened absolutely stupidly, nor the both’s high education, nor her puritanical upbringing, nothing helped.

In the early morning they were already at Кryty (Covered) Market, by the Circus, which is in the city centre and one of the main interchange stations, waiting for a bus to Zavodskoy. Now dad felt so good that he lay right on the ground at the bus stop. It was one of his typical gamesome performances, mum says. It made her laugh then.

They headed to Zavodskoy to the two-bedroomed flat which grandma2 had just recently gotten for her work for the plant, and where after the devision of their family house, following, perhaps, that father’s uncle’s death and leaving the house to some relative of grandma2’s, grandma2, dad and Larisa who was just older than 20, lived threesome. Threesome, as I see on wiktionary, has that other sense, and I didn’t mean that, but, as my mum would mark, justly could. For it was highly abnormal for the three to live together at their age in a little flat, much more so as dad had to commute to the university (where, incidentally, he was nearly the only male in the group) downtown daily, and he always hated living in flats, especially in a proletarian district. Hated but didn’t deal with, as hasn’t to the present day.

But at the time mum didn’t take much note of all this, as she had grown sick of living at home with grandma1, who after the cessation of beating mum after mum had hit her back some years earlier still continued to oppress mum. (mum now lived with grandma1 and grandpa in the three-bedroom flat, in Kassilya st, while then vacant Frunze was rented out to female students). So mum was glad to find a way of getting away from her home and the oppressor.

Also, for some unfortunate (for there would have been no affair with dad) reason dyadya seryozha had been dispensed with, and mum and he were temporarily out of touch. Dyadya seryozha was prone to take offence at any excuse and perhaps she’d said something really insulting, like that some annex he’d designed or approved wasn’t to her liking, or herself had enough of his childish taking offence.

So for mum everything was in favor of the idea of messing with dad’s family. The atmosphere at home in Zavodskoy was just opposite to what mum was used to. Here everyone cracked jokes, no one had headaches, nobody would sit gloomily in a silent room with the TV turned off, holding some grudge and ever about to burst out flinging dishes and making scenes. I’m obliged to all this for my existence. Had mum lived with normal parents, she wouldn’t have messed with dad. She’d have dated dad for another couple of months, or even a month, seen all the abnormality of his and had an abortion and that would have been the end of the story. These are her own words.

Mum often remembered how she asked dad concerning the pregnancy whether she should terminate it to which he decidedly said «no, keep it» (when i imagine him saying that i always imagine him lying on the ground at that bus stop by the circus). And she thought that he, a man, would be responsible for what he said.

Actually I don’t really know whether mum moved to dad’s (or rather grandma’s, for dad never had any dwelling of his own) at once after the event of 9th Dachnaya or some time later, after the wedding. For there is a story, told by mum, that grandma1, who was present at the wedding, had carried from home bed sheets and all, right to the wedding, supposing that in the Zavodsky flat was none spare.

The wedding was celebrated a hundred metres from the flat, right in the recreational complex of the hotel, where grandma2 worked. Grandma2 managed the event. No bridal gown was bought, mum was in a plain blouse or a shirt (I still don’t know the correct names for dressing items in english). But this is not an indicator of dad’s inability to provide money for one (although he really had no money. I believe it’s mum’s parents who provided money for the celebration). I think it’s just that mum was never too girlish or womany, she never liked children, dolls and all, so she might have not wanted the gown herself.

There were guests all right, as at any regular wedding. Mum’s friend Shurigina was present, likewise Rita, and one of these was mum’s wedding witnesses. As I remember, Ivan, who would be the husband to dad’s sister Larisa, made his first appearance and acquaintance of Larisa there. Mum told me that she tried to get the scary Shurigina acquainted with somebody, probably that same Ivan, but it was useless, Shurygina had too much of ears. I would visit this hotel in early childhood, there was a dining hall like in restaurants and a couple of swimming pools, and rooms for guests with cozy beds, so i think the event looked decent. It was filmed, and the video-tape was in our flat in my childhood, but i was never interested to watch more than a couple of minutes of it. Video-tapes still were rare in those days, so it must have cost good money to order the recording, or it was some friend of somebody’s with a camera.

Now mum had her bed sheets and began to live permanently at grandma2’s.

Either in the summer of 1992 or 1993 mum and dad went with some acquaintances to a campsite. I will guess it was 1992, after the wedding. I don’t know any details. That’s just to give an idea of what their entertainment and tourism was like. No trips to Europe or Paris, no honeymoon on Skye (i’m obsessed with scotland at the time), or even at the Russian sea resorts. They never traveled outside Saratov oblast. Campsites are just small villages of summer houses with frogs under pillows instead of facilities, usually on islands of which there are thousands across the Volga. Said to be safe havens for bandits, especially in those after-soviet times.

Larisa began to date Ivan. This Ivan was from Ulyanovsk, Ulyanovskaya oblast, which is up the Volga, and he then lived in the downtown Saratov in Kiselyova street, near to Chapayeva str and the circus and the mentioned Kryty Market. All that is the very center of the city.

Mum remembers there was never any meat on the table at grandma2’s, but as soon as Ivan was about to visit meat immediately appeared, for Ivan was not used to poverty. Suffice it that there was never hot water in the flat in the bathroom, and grandma2 would run between the kitchen and bathroom with buckets of boiling water.

Money for living in considerable part was regularly supplied by grandma1 from Engels. Mum says, and it’s easily imagined so, all dad would do was lie on the sofa reading books, go to his university and entertain the three women through the evenings. Mum remembers that he would say «i’d like to work such a job where all that’s needed is to read books’.

When Ivan visited to fuck Larisa, dad and mum with me inside her would move with their bedding to the second, living room. Grandma2 slept in the kitchen.

Larisa was about 20, as I said, and she had no education at all except compulsory school, and she wasn’t going to get any more of it. I even can’t imagine what she used to do during days. She would go to parties, mum says, return drunk and vomit. If dad had had a mentor in the person of that uncle of his, Larisa hadn’t had any mentor except grandma2, who couldn’t develop anything decent and intelligent. Grandma2 always claimed herself to be very civilized and well-mannered, for she worked in a hotel and had to deal with important people, and she was always timid and all, yes, but she knew nothing except that. All this knowledge of which hand is for the knife and which for the fork and how to tie a tie doesn’t promote one in life. Dad was infected by this stupid belief too, he always would read lectures on manners and gentlemen’s etiquette, would tell how many writers would never sit to work if not dressed as gentlemen.

Mum says she lost all sexual interest in dad during the first months. There was this grandma2 everywhere and all the time. She is an example of a super annoying and intrusive woman. As if it doesn’t suffice that dad and mum were a separate family and should live at a separate place, she would burst into the bedroom in the morning with the pretext of there being a need to open the window, hastily run across the room, hastily lay on the bedroom table something she’d bought, some present or a small breakfast, or anything, just so as to do anything and not be forgotten. Dad reveled in such a life. Mum says she felt as if she’d married grandma2. I guess dad naturally had weak libido. He always to me seemed so.

Mum was beginning to hate it all, but now she concentrated chiefly on her physical issues and pregnancy and was due very soon.

In the Moskovskaya/Sobornaya crossroad there is a red bricked house, it was formerly a maternity hospital, and there i was born on March 3rd 1993. Caesarean section. Mum says when she came to they didn’t give her me for some time, as far as i remember, for a couple or even a few days. I don’t know the reason, but it was practised so. They didn’t give babies to their mothers at once as it is usually shown in movies.

Also, unlike movies, modern movies, no fathers were usually permitted to go inside the maternity hospitals.

When they did give her me, it was not I. It was some other woman’s baby. Perhaps if that baby hadn’t had dark eyes I wouldn’t be writing all this now. In short, eveything was kind of stupid, artificial, soviet-like ugly.

After a few days my mum went home to Zavodskoy with me, a fifth resident of the flat.

Mum’s first crap after two weeks of the incision’s healing was as thick as an arm, she says. In childhood, when she told me that I didn’t believe that a thing so thick can pass through.

I’ve begun to give minor (sometimes actually quite major) details of indecent nature from which there is no getting away in a psychological self-study and so which will be abundant in my autobiography, as I mean to give a full account of things I remember, especially such as affected or impressed me.

They named me Nikita, it is though derived from some Greek source, in fact a truly orthodox Russian name, that is, it has no analogs in other languages. It has nothing to do with Nicholas or Nick. There is the russian name Nikolai, and this is Nicholas and Nick in other languages, but Nikita is always fucking Nikita. No getting away from the associations with the tv series or, what is worse, with that soviet leader.

My surname, by the way, is Kapernaumov. Dad imposed it by marrying his mum, who previously was Bogomazova (translates as «one who paints icons in oil»). It descended to my dad from grandma2, who was never married and so didn’t have her surname changed. I’ll return to the meaning of my surname.

Once, going from a polyclinic (in russian in means just a state medical center, not a hospital) with me, mum and dad saw the one whose surname I should have born. Or rather he saw them and accosted them. Dad then hurriedly took mum by the elbow and led her away, despite this grandpa2 of mine crying in their wake something in a friendly manner, mum recalls.

Grandma2, dad, Larisa always held something secret from mum. They wouldn’t explain what was the matter with this man grandpa2, or, for instance they didn’t tell my mum that grandma2 had got a second flat, one-bedroom, in a house being then built nearby.

And not only from my mum were they secretive and mysterical. As it could be understood, dad’s family are silly superstitious people, and during the first weeks of my life mum says they wouldn’t let any stranger in the flat or see me, so as to guard me from evil. There was yet another Zinaida Fyodorovna (and it is a very strange coincidence of names, the first one being that woman who had put dad on the path of education and she is still a friend of grandma2), whom I never saw, and who I think won’t appear in this story anymore, but she was very close to grandma2 at the time, judging by the stories, and who was psychic and highly superstitious and it was she who instructed grandma2 in all such matters, and, i guess, is responsible for much of grandma2’s silliness.

It was all strange and weird to the sober-minded mum, but she still didn’t really care about it all yet.

Once she says she needed to get superfluous milk out of her and dad suck on the tit and afterwards he said he’d almost vomited. I am just recollecting all i can remember from mum’s account of those times.

There are stories about dad and Ivan making some business trips somewhere on a small airplane and how a gipsy swindled some precious ring out of dad. Also dad told that about those times another gipsy woman swindled a lot of money out of him in the park. Gypsies in Russia are specific gipsies, not like in Guy Ritchie’s «Snatch», who look like regular white western Europeans. Here they are all tanned-skinned, black haired, and women in their traditional gowns. They will appear now and again in my story during childhood.

Ivan was an aspiring businessman. He was short, rather little in size, and taciturn just like my grandpa1. Only while grandpa’s silence was rooted in some inward depression and submissiveness, Ivan’s was due to his natural attachment type. Dad tells he called Ivan a spy, but i think Ivan didn’t like it, Ivan was always easily offended, so it was said in my family, i even think dad didn’t really call him a spy. The usually annoying grandma2 in my time was always short-spoken with Ivan and trying to get out of his way.

Ivan was self-confident, calm. Although living in downtown Saratov, he didn’t go to any university. Perhaps he did go to some college and got some basic technical education, but dad told that as soon as Ivan turned 18, came out of age, he went to Poland and bought there some merchandise and returned to sell it. It was the time when everyone in the country who wanted money began to buy and sell various goods, as the ussr had been at last pronounced finished and under the new Russian flag all people were allowed to enrich themselves. This trip of Ivan’s to Poland clashes with the fact that he should have been called to the army at that age (and only studying at the university could save him, not any college. Or he just bribed.), but be it as it may, he was an aspiring businessmen, he didn’t drink or very rarely, knew nothing about being sentimental, was silent and very self-confident, as i said, had acquaintances (i don’t’ write friends, because mum says he could be treacherous sometimes to his friends if money was at stake, and she even went as far as to call him «heartless cunt» when she and I discussed Ivan once) and connections. Dad was his business partner for some time, and when i was once interested in that criminal epoch of our country dad would tell me various stories about their first steps, and that they sold cigarettes and furniture and everything. But, as it is seen from, for example, the fact that Ivan even sold cigarettes, which is very close to criminality and all, he wasn’t choosy, unlike my dad who was always choosy about what to have to do with and fearful of criminality and militia and law. So Ivan continued to make money and grow and live like a man, while dad eventually fell off and hid himself from adult life’s difficulties under grandma2’s skirt, as we say. Dad was finishing his university, his final thesis was on Scandinavian «The Edda», he says. Mum also recollects that he was slow at his studying, and she even helped him with his english. How she could help him with it I don’t know, for she herself only knew a few english words.

Some time passed after my birth, maybe a few months and mum began to come to her senses and get really sick of living in the crowded flat (Ivan too moved in. 45m2: one room, another room and the kitchen) with grandma2 for a husband. Grandma2 now constantly received guests at the flat in the tiny 8m2 kitchen, always new people who hadn’t had enough entertainment at the hotel where she worked (grandma2 always loved to please various important people to get into their favor and maybe have some profit), but mostly grandma2’s elderly friends, various half-witted women, as well as the more sour women like Zinaida Fyodorovna1 (from the movie studio) who would benefit from grandma2’s silliness and, say, sell grandma2 various Oriflame products and other such crap (I don’t think oriflame was already here at the time (but when it was this Zinaida got involved at once), i just gave an illustration what this friendship looked like).

There was no prospect of moving to a separate flat, as dad wouldn’t work (it was of course difficult to find a job in those times, but there were jobs anyway, only dad wouldn’t like the idea to work such jobs, as they were physical and stupid, too much «for men». ). Mum tells that grandma2 would say to her «No, Sasha [pet name for Alexandr, dad] will not work.». Once, mum says, mum retold those words, or just conveyed the idea of dad’s not wanting to work to her parents, when she was at Frunze and they all were in the kailyard, and on hearing that the shovel fell from grandpa’s hands.

And dad’s family didn’t tell mum anything about the second one-bedroom flat, which was already built and being secretly furnished. Mum says that grandma2, this incorrigible providing mother obsessed with well-being of her children, was always striving to snatch every opportunity of getting some more living space, mum says she worked for elderly rich Jewesses and washed them when they were dead, managed all these funeral rites and feasts, always hopeful that she would get something after them from their relatives. And mum’s parents owned the 3bedroom flat and the frunze house. So it seems dad’s family (and this makes it nastier to mum in retrospective: the fact that dad knew about the second one-bedroom flat but was silent together with grandma2 and larisa) decided not to hold the new flat in secret and wait maybe mum’s parents would participate in providing living space. But mum’s parents, as i already told, especially grandma1 who was the owner of everything, wouldn’t give out living space easily.

So, at the crowded grandma2’s flat there was no scene or scandal, mum just got tired of that all, packed her things and went with me to Engels, to the Kassilya flat, to her parents. Dad continued to live with grandma2 and eventually moved with her to the new flat in the neighbouring Entuziastov avenue, which was one-bedroom, as i said, that is a kitchen, where grandma2 would sleep for the rest of her life, and one more room. 39m2 in all. Also on the 9th floor. The two-bedroom flat was left to Larisa and Ivan.

Now mum with me couldn’t live with her parents in one flat any longer. Also, my moving from Saratov entailed the necessity to change the address in my residential documents so I would be able to use services at the children’s polyclinic in Engels. And to do that now there was a problem.

There had began this stir throughout all the country known as «privatization» which means that, apart from that which has to do with large organizations and oligarchy, all these flats which the state had given to citizens, likewise lands on which people had built their detached houses began to be able, upon application by its residents and lots of bureaucratic obstacles, to be converted into private property. This meant all the residents of the property got their share in it.

Also, from the ussr times, when the state tended to control people and their movements and restrict everything, such an idiocy as «propiska» had survived. It’s the address stated in the passport where a person is supposed to live and in whose locality they have their citizen rights. It’s the first place where all the letters, the police and everything like that comes to if the person is to be found. Having no propiska in the city, a person cannot be served in local polyclinics or hospitals, except in emergencies, in the two main cities one can even be fined if they’ve overstayed 3 months after their arrival, children cannot go to local kindergartens and schools, not to mention the impossibility to get a job in state institutions. Even if one’s address is just across the border of the city, no, they are to be served in his neighbourhood’s central town or village, even if it’s kilometres away. All these problems of not having the local propiska basically concern ordinary, middle-class people, who are poor and cannot afford to go to paid, non-state kindergartens, schools, clinics and who want to work in the state organizations. More advanced people sometimes do not even know the address they are attached to, as they work advanced jobs for non-state companies, where it doesn’t matter where one is residentially attached to. Having not found an equal word, I will further use «propiska» for the noun and the words ``residentially attached». Being residentially permanently attached to an address means that the person cannot be «detached» out from the address without his consent, which makes it impossible for the owner to sell the property, also the person can claim a share of it in certain situations, and all these sorts of things.

The necessity for me to get residentially attached to the Kassilya flat and other circumstances entailed the necessity for grandma1 to convert the flat into private property, this somehow entailed me getting a share in it, which entailed mum getting a share in it too. All this was demanded by the law, not by mum, but for grandma1 it was her nightmare come true, and she began to panic. How was that that mum should be getting the whole flat for herself and for nothing, and her ownership power at this flat be reduced almost to nothing. Grandma would go to various departments and call mum a fraud in her hysteria, but all had been lost, and in the end she gave up and with a curse, which mum would often remember, signed the whole flat over to mum.

So grandma1 and grandpa moved to their native seat at Frunze. But mum and grandma1 were far from losing contact with each other. All those hysterias of grandma’s were just dramas. She of course understood that mum didn’t have a choice and anywhere to live, and eventually would have surrendered the flat without curses. It’s just that, it seems, all happened very quickly, grandma1 wasn’t prepared for the merciless impetus of the law after signing a paper. Such an experience was new for a post-soviet person who was used to a society where nobody really owned anything. And for the easily-panicking grandma1 it was too fast and shocking. Now she’s the owner of the flat for which she worked all her life, and then she owns less than half of it and there is no unsigning of the fatal paper.

Mum had no money to live on, so a job had to be found. That is, dyadya seryozha, first of all. She phoned him and they revived their hole-and-corner relationship…

It’s October 11th now, i’ve had about a 10days’ pause in writing this, since the previous paragraph about dyadya seryozha, which I hadn’t written in full. I’ve decided to switch to a very plain English. Some readers will have noticed that so far i’ve been tending to describe things as a writer, finding more interesting expressions and all. During these days I’ve really estimated the amount of what i have to write, or rather i’ve estimated my ability to write as a writer fast and i’ve seen that if i go on like that i’m surely not going to ever finish even the first 10years of my life. I really wanted to write like a writer, but unfortunately i cannot allow it. Maybe there will be spells when i’m in the mood to write in a style offering some literary amusement. There are going to be many mistakes and misspellings i’m afraid, but i hope i’ll correct them when I reread the written text later. The following English i guess will often be quite ungrammatical and such as runs along the russian syntax too. I will also design terms which will help me to convey ideas faster. Probably i will use some english words in senses that may differ from the regular sense, but then i’ll caution of any of those instances. Also, my way of thoughts will be nearer to the stream of consciousness, so, especially, when i begin writing my own memories, which i am soon approaching, at last, I will divide the text in paragraphs more rarely.

So i was talking about dydya seryozha, yes, mum and he met again and he was helping her with finding a job, and i was about a year or a year and a half old. I guess dad might have visited us at ours, in Englels, but I guess at least half of the time i lived with mum alone.

I am gradually coming to describing myself.

The 0—2 years of age I believe is the most important and determinative period of the formation of one’s psyche (besides and after genetic factors), but naturally and unfortunately i seem not to remember anything from it. Mum says I cried a lot in infancy, it was very hard to soothe me. When she had lived with me in Zavodskoy at grandma2’s, there used to make visits some female relatives, as far as I remember that relative was a cousin of dad’s and who’d taken over grandma2’s house near Sennoy market. And when she visited us during my infancy in Zavodskoy, mum says I would begin to cry like hell and there was no soothing me, untill she went away. Whether i am right about the identity of that visitor or it was another woman, in both cases I remember mum said the visitor was kind-hearted, not old, and by nature like grandma2, that is, would bring presents and be playful and optimistic. So it was peculiarly strange that I should cry so with that woman around, mum says, apart from that i cried a lot in general.

Mum often recollects that I used to tear up my toys (but this is about age 2—4). I of course remember very well the instances of me tearing up toys and things in my childhood when i was 3—6 and older, and yet among my preys mum mentions, for example, some game’s playing board made of paper, which i do not remember at all. Nor did much of those instances of me tearing up things happen in mum’s presence. And those when she was present, she has no reason to remind me of them because she knows that I remember them well. She says that that paper board went to pieces when i was about 4, but i do not remember it, so it’s evident that she talks about occurrences that happened earlier, and i believe it was before my memories, i.e, before 2—3. The thing was mum’s, it was some board game from her own childhood, so here, being a very easily-to-get-offended person and prone to hold grudges forever, she is likely to make mistakes (saying that it was when i was 4 and not 2—3) as her memory may be affected by the offence. On the other hand, she should have remembered it, on the contrary, quite well and definitely and with no mistakes in dates, if it had offended her.

Those instances of me tearing up things after I was 4 I’ll of course touch in detail when their turn comes.

As for whether there had taken place any physical injury to me when i was being born, when mum would show me to doctors in my childhood i a few times heard her saying to the doctor «you know, i heard that in the maternal house when i was giving birth, the nurses griped him with forceps not correctly and probably they injured him», she even would pronounce some diagnosis, but there was no substantiantial description of it anywhere, and i have no scares, so i think mum just exaggerated rumours, as she always does when the matter concerns physical health.

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Как и во всех моих писанинах, всё что заключено в скобки с дефисами ( — пример — ) это «голос момента написания». То есть 2020—2021, в данном случае. Всё остальное голос в псевдо-настоящем времени. Все воспоминания которые описываю — только те, которые есть в памяти на момент описания. У меня поэтому нет диалогов и всяких там детальных описаний как в какой-то вечер где и что стояло на столе. У некоторых автобиографов просто есть такое, но это всё худлит сразу.

Циферки типа 51.53354862787988, 46.03750348798179 — это геолокации, можно в гугл скопировать и выдаст точку на карте.

________________

вот все основные персонажи до 1997го:

я

мама

отец

бабклава — мама мамы

дед — бабклавий муж, мамий отец

бабваля — мама отца

тётя лариса — сестра отца

иван — муж ларисий

дядя серёжа — мамий друг по делам

***************

основные места:

квартира лев касиль 51.497027868625004, 46.121676193925055

дом дедов фрунза

квартира бабвалина на 9ом этаже

квартира тёть ларисья тоже на 9ом

дача дедов

дача бабвали

_______________

По всем моим текстам я называю отца «отцом» так как я называю его и в взрослом возрасте сейчас когда рассказываю кому-то о нём. На самом деле всё детство я его называл «папа» вплоть до 11ти лет, когда «папа» сократилось до «па», а вскоре, в 14 лет, окончательно трансформировалось в «урод», которым я его с тех пор зову и в разговорах с мамой, и с некоторыми теми с кем у меня нет формальности, а также в половине случаев в моём взрослом дневнике. Бабвальку вместе отцом вместе взятых мы с мамой называем уродами.

Маму я ниже по тексту в биографии называю в основном мама. В реальности я её называл так же, только к 11ти годам оно так же сократилось до «ма», ну и только в её случае так и осталось. Но в дневниках и писанинах удобнее мама. А так, для неё конечно грубые варианты (и погрубее чем урод) тоже были, но до этого пока ещё далеко поэтому об этом позже.

Маминых родителей — бабклаву и деда я называю иногда «дедами».

Заводской — это район в саратове где живёт бабвалька и тётя лариса (сестра отца). Поэтому «поехать в заводской» в раннем детстве равняется «поехать к бабвале».

Фрунза — это от улицы Фрунзе в энгельсе, это где деды живут (когда они после переезда мамы со мной на льва касиля ушли из льва касиля), тот одноэтажный частный дом (про который много в предыстории на инглише) с огородом. Пойти на фрунзу = Пойти к дедам.

Лев кассиль — это от улицы Льва кассиля, энгельс, длинная девятиэтажка где я живу с мамой в трёхкомнатной квартире, ну и иногда отцом, мой основной дом. Лев касиль = дом. Само словосочетание «льва кассиля» я употребляю то в мужском, то женском роде.

Словарик моих слов, как и вкратце вся биография до 2021 есть в книжке 2007 апрель-июль

==================================================

1994

( — Это до моей памяти. Мама устала от инфантильного отца и бабвальки в качестве мужа и кучи народу в их двухкомнатном девятом этаже в заводском и уехала со мной в энгельс в трёхкомнатную на льва кассиля (описал в английской предыстории до моей жизни. А отец с бабвалькой перешли в однушку там недалеко, и в двухкомнатной теперь жила только лариса с иваном).

Переехала мама со мной примерно осенью 1994, то есть когда мне было полтора года. Примерно в ноябре 1994. На льве кассиле жили бабклава и дед и они первое время с нами жили.

Потом отец подтянулся, или наездами бывал. Сделал кровать двуспальную из каких-то досок. Денег ни у кого не было, отец ходил со мной куда-то в зданице рядом с энгельсской пристанью брал детский корм для меня 51.504431076285115, 46.11861465921515. Это всё не помню.

Дед купил игрушечный кран. Я его бросал из колыбельки и заставлял дать мне обратно и так по кругу. Не помню. Это мама рассказала осенью 19го.

Уже после переезда мы с мамой ездили ещё на 9тый этаж в двухкомнатную (откуда переехали) и я там ревел от ивановой мамы — Татьяны (Иван — муж ларисы, сестры отца которая там тоже жила. В двухкомнатной девятиэтажных уродов после моего рождения жили я, мама, отец, бабвалька, лариса, иван. И постоянно какие-нибудь люди бабвалькины приходили и родственники. Это для тех кто не читал английскую предысторию). Это всё не помню. Мама рассказывала неоднократно.

Я вообще постоянно ревел и капризничал, мама говорит, и ещё меня без конца рвало в общественном транспорте. А ещё писька постоянно стояла, ну это дальше я буду рассказывать.

Дальше на льве кассиля, как и описал в английской биографии, были жилищные истерики между невыносящих друг друга мамой и бабклавой (мамина мама, если что), и в итоге баба отдала маме эту льву касилю, а сама с дедом ушла в дом, а маму прокляла. Всё это описано в английском тексте, мне лень пояснять все эти психологии по второму кругу.

Дальше начнутся воспоминания которые уже помню.

Одни из нескольких первых воспоминаний — «мама голая», «блеванул манкой», «курочка» и особенно «потерял титю» возможно относятся к месяцам когда мне ещё не было 2ух лет (то есть конец 1994 или начало 1995). Это всё уже на льве касиле. Хотя курочка произошла в ситуации когда было очень много игрушек на полу, атмосфера после-праздника, то есть это или после нового года или возможно уже всё-таки после 3го марта 1995го.

Но первым делом опишу квартиру и как я всё видел в том возрасте. Это будет не воспоминание как таковое, а описание квартиры в момент переезда туда с мамой от девятиэтажных уродов, и во времена первых потом сознательных времён — )

*****

1994 Осень, квартира в энгельсе на льва кассиля, дом 16, кв 204, угловая трёхкомнатная, 6 этаж, 50 кв м

Как входишь в квартиру, то на полу тут старая плитка из синих и красных пластиковых пластин каких-то. Налево коридор пошёл. Направо ванная. А прямо кухня.

Направо в ванну значит. В ване нет места ни на что кроме стоять. Как в ванну вошёл тут справа куча белья для стирки. Впереди вана вдоль стены, а слева раковина. Дальше в сторону кухни мини комнатка это туалет. В нём кроме унитаза ничё нет. Места нет вообще. Между комнаткой унитаза и ванны зеркало высокое висит. Это в котором отражаешься. Я туда не достаю смотреть.

Дальше кухня, в неё есть дверь в ней вставлено стекло цветное, какой-то узор. Справа сразу там раковина, а под раковиной мусорное ведро за дверцей. Дальше идёт ряд таких столешниц по правой стене, они все из одного материала. На них мама готовит. Там дальше плита. Наверху на стене приделаны шкафчики из того же набора что и разделочные столешницы. Тут всё для готовки еды. На дальней стене в её центре окно на улицу во двор дома. Последний ящик перед окном по правой стене это в смысле такой небольшой шкафчик с выдвижными ящиками. В них там интересных вещей полно.

Да в принципе везде полно всего интересного. Тут неизведанно вообще всё, кроме каких-то элементарных вещей, типа ложки. Она понятно зачем — чтоб есть. И то, на ней узор какой-то непонятный.

В левом дальнем углу кухни там кресло. Оно козырное место в кухне типа самое удобное. Для почётных взрослых и именно таких которые более менее приближены к нашей семье. Ибо там сидишь как бы весь развалившись, а развалившись простые гости обычно не сидят, как я заметил. У меня вообще немного воспоминаний. Всё смутно помню. Ну я в том кресле не сижу, он для взрослых.

Дальше в центре кухни там стол кухонный главный. Высокий для меня. Табуретки вокруг него стоят. Всё кухонное такое, всё связано с едой. А у стола треугольные такие ноги. У него типа две ножки всего, но каждая из двух досок стыкующиеся одним концом и расположенные есле сверху или снизу посмотреть под углом 90 градусов. Такие вот у стола ножки. На столе телефон стоит. Телефон это куда мама звонит и говорит с людьми.

Поворачиваемся назад, выходим из кухни. Проходим сейчас у нас слева дверь в сортир, зеркало, дверь в ванну, впереди выходная дверь ну и поворот направо в коридор. По левую сторону коридора стоит большое строение, типа шкаф до потолка на всю оставшуюся длину коридора. В этом шкафу я даже не знаю. Что токо нету. Ну в главном отделении ближе к выходу из квартиры там висят разные пальто взрослые мамины. Оттуда ещё скучно пахнет деревяшками и шерстью.

По центру этой всей шкафины есть как бы ниша-углубление и там на дальней стене зеркало опять, а перед ним вот стоят разные пузырьки. Это типа мамино всё. Но я не замечаю что она особо этим пользуется. Не, ну в смысле пользуется, но просто значительная часть пузырьков насколько я заметил ей не используема. Там лак какой-то для ногтей есть. Пахнет который ещё.

После ниши с зеркалом там такой же отсек как и для пальто, но вот тут-то уже висит моя уличная одежда. Куртка. Я очень люблю куртку свою. Сразу что-то такое неизведанное, сразу улица, сразу новые неизведанные вещи. Обычно новое открытие связано с какой-то радостью или новым удовольствием. Поэтому мне всё новое интересно. А постоянно узнаю что-то новое. Я вот вроде живу в своей квартире, но мне тут только маленькая доля известна о ней. Да и о себе. Но я это так не оставлю, я тут всё изучу.

В отсеке где моя куртка там пылесос стоит. У этого шкафа коридорного есть нижние отсеки в которых башмаки. А вот наверху у потолка отсеки в которых я даже не знаю что. Я бы хотел туда залезть.

Вообще я бы хотел залезть например туда и наблюдать за ходоками коридора. Хотел бы чтоб пришли гости какие-нибудь, а я там сидел смотрел за всеми и был в курсе всего. Сижу там такой и у меня там уютно, тёпленько, а все низу и всем не ахти.

А напротив коридорного шкафа — комната. В неё дверь из части коридора который возле прихожей. Коридор кстати не широкий, взрослому полшага. В комнате там спальня короче. Вот туда входишь и там вот так: в центре дальней стены там окно во двор дома опять же (а под каждым окном в нашей квартире висит греющая батарея), потом там какая-то тумбочка перед кроватью и большая кровать, а слева как в комнату заходишь в углу, вдоль стены за которой зал — там стоит моя кроватка. У неё высокие перила. Я бы не смог из неё вылезти. Меня оттуда поднимают. Эта комната — средняя комната (из-за размера).

Выходим обратно в коридор и идём по нему дальше и входим в зал. По левую руку как и в коридоре идёт как бы такая стенка в которой книги. До потолка тоже. Внизу отсеки с посудой и очень интересными штуками. В смысле там даже кольца есть. Разные какие-то фотографии. Картонная коробка такая и в ней сложены фотографии.

Книг много, но книги не понимаю. Ну там текст и надо как бы читать его и там рассказ. Мне это неинтересно вообще. Вот кольца, посуда, или дальний нижний ящик это да. Дальний ящик уже у окна.

То есть вот если заходишь в квартиру поворачиваешь налево и видишь через коридор там вдалеке в зале окно ровно по курсу. То есть оно уже не во двор дома, а туда дальше, на торцевой стене дома. Есть второе окно в зале, вот оно — во двор. Зал — угловая комната дома. Ну и он же — большая комната. Но чаще он всё-таки зовётся зал.

Вот значит заходишь в зал и впереди это окно туда дальше, а направо — сам продолговатый зал, в конце которого там выход на балкон и тоже вот окно. То есть вот зашёл в зал и направо повернул и так по левой стене зала как бы если идти, мимо дивана стоящего вдоль этой стены, доходишь как бы до двери на балкон. А правее там балконная дверь продолжается в окно. Оно за занавесками. У другого окна в зале, то есть на торцевой стене дома, тоже есть занавески, они вообще везде есть кроме как на кухне. Вот у того дальнего рядом-с-балконного окна там перед ним стоит телевизор. По левую стену зала, напротив дивана то есть, тут короче по этой стене пианино стоит. Никто не умеет на нём толком играть, но оно есть. Ну или папа разве что. Я пока не понял. Мама на нём никогда не играет.

Дальше обратно к первому этому окну тут стоят два кресла. Они из того же набора что и диван. Зелёные поролоновые сидушки и спинки. Я с ними буду играться скоро. А в центре книжного шкафа вдруг раз и проход. В маленькую комнату.

В маленькой комнате, она квадратная, там сейчас непонятно что. Ну там есть шкаф и в нём опять же разные вещи висят. Этот шкаф кажется не очень интересным, но я уверен что и там можно что-то найти если захотеть. Ещё тут есть швейная машинка, это такой немаленький деревянный комод, который как-то раскладывается и там появляется какая-то опасная для пальцев штука, а в дверце во внутреннем кармане, как-бы, тут куча ниток и иголок.

В комнате этой тоже есть окно и тоже оно, соответственно, не во двор, а в торцевой стене дома. Меня иногда мама поднимала и я вот там видел слева улицу вдоль которой наш дом стоит и ещё прям под окнами у нас кирпичный красный дом одноэтажный внизу. А за ним дальше тоже большой дом как наш. 9 или 10 этажей.

Про балкон не могу ничего пока сказать, я туда даже не выхожу.

****

1994—1995 зима

Нас двое в квартире, я и мама. Это вот такой хмурый полдень, всё серо за окном. Я тут весь в слезах и реву, как всегда, но только ещё сильнее, не остановить вообще. Мама выкинула мою титю ( — ударение на последнюю ю — ). Я бегаю по квартире и вою «где моя титя». Она говорит она её выкинула и что пора взрослеть. Я ещё сильнее вою.

Я рыл сейчас в шкафу в маленькой комнате, я там ничего не нашёл только одежда и микрофон пластмассовый.

Прибежал вот сейчас в ванну, тут в белье ищу. Она говорит мол хватит, угомонись. Она даже весёлая. Я из-за этого ещё сильней вою. Она ходит хлопочет по дому со всякими тазами и стиркой. Я не знаю как теперь жить, титЯ была очень важной вещью для меня, а теперь её нет. Реву и реву.

Не ну понятно что она всё правильно наверное делает. Так видимо и положено. Я имею виду она очень спокойно реагирует на мой плач, даже выглядит весёлой, как я заметил. По такой её реакции я понимаю что я уж по любому переживу что у меня нет больше тити. Иначе бы она пыталась мне её найти. А это она сама её выкинула. Значит всё мне на благо.

Но всё-таки мне слишком хуёво ( — далее по тексту: мат я, естественно, года до 1998го не знал, но я использую его в тексте детской биографии для передачи ощущений в сильно жёстких моментах — ). Несмотря на какие-то благие мотивы.

Раньше я ревел истерил и мне её обязательно всегда давали. То есть я выучил это всё так, что теперь сейчас не мог подозревать что отсутствие тити будет мне на пользу. И резко мне заявляют что это на пользу. Это очень резко и без предупреждения и подготовки.

( — Ещё может возникнуть вопрос, как это мне почти 2 года и я реву из-за утраты соски, я значит её до сих пор сосал? Вот тут психологический нюанс в этой ситуации. Я её хэд не сосал уже долгое время. А вся эта ситуация и истерика возникла от просто какого-то напоминания мне о ней. Я помню что в момент той истерики я уже даже не помнил как она выглядит. Но что-то о ней мне напомнило и я начал её бегать искать — )

****

Прошло несколько дней после инцидента с пропажей тити. Я более менее спокоен сейчас. Мне она не нужна, у меня другие вещи на уме.

Засыпая вспоминаю вот чем занимался в последнее время, или даже о чём думал. В коридоре на стене которая напротив шкафа да и вообще в прихожей, стены отделаны пластиковыми пупырчатыми пластинами какими-то. Пупырчики тут такие большие квадраты выпирающие с немного заострённой ещё дальше выпирающей серединой. На них хочется надавать и вдавить их туда к стенке. Последствия разные. В основном когда их вдавишь, то они сами потом выпячиваются обратно. Иногда, если пластик совсем высохший и хрупкий, то они могут проломиться вообще вовнутрь. Мама не ругает.

Вся прихожая там то вот такие пластиковые пластины на стенах, то пластиковые пластины на полу. Всё пластиковое какое-то и не кажется чтобы мама это сильно ценила. Всё старое. Из какой-то старой жизни. Я этого всего не видел что тут было, какие события, какая жизнь.

Да я и не особо этим занимаюсь. Я про вдавливание опять. Мне просто сейчас не о чем думать вот я и думаю про это. Иногда они кстати вдавливаются и больше просто не выдавливаются обратно. Зачем вообще их вдавливать? Просто если это можно делать, то почему это не сделать? Да, это бессмысленно. Но так я проведу время. А чем ешё заниматься? Я не могу просто не делать ничего или не думать ни о чём. Я сразу чувствую что я теряю время. Завтра поищу какое-нибудь интересное занятие.

****

1995 вторая половина зимы

Сейчас вот такое чувство дискомфорта в теле сзади в попе. Значит надо идти какать. Я говорю маме хочу какать. Это целый процесс. Она мне открывает дверь, поднимает меня и я там залезаю на унитаз, она пока уходит делать дела на кухне недалеко. Дверь в туалет не закрывается. А мама когда ходит в туалет она закрывает на шпингалет изнутри.

В общем я залез на унитаз. Сначала писию. А дальше тут сейчас надо тужиться чтобы какашка вышла. Говорю «ка-ка». Так мама учила когда тужишься говорить так чтоб вышло. Вот она там сейчас выходит, какашка. Упала в унитаз. Остатки ещё вываливаются. Я всё. Кричу «я покакал».

Она сейчас приходит подтирать попу. Она умеет, а я пока не освоил. Да я может и смог бы уже, но я не хочу. Это удобно. Я люблю когда она подтирает мне жопу ( — далее в тексту: слово «жопа» я реально узнаю только в 1997ом, среди детей в детсаду. Так что это всё равно что «отец», которого в реале называл папа. Выбор написать «жопа», вместо «попа» обычно происходит в контекстах с каким-то унизительным элементом. Ну в этом случае это вонючесть и грязность какашек. — ).

Это, в принципе самые лучшие ощущения. Когда она заботится и хлопочет возле меня. Я любим, я нужен, я главный тут, всё вокруг меня, всё для меня. И не стану же я о маме заботиться. Я же ребёнок, а не она. Вот и подтирает попу мне, меняет моё бельё и всё прочее. Так и должно быть и меня это устраивает. Но вот писию я сам, тут мама не нужна.

Ну всё, мама смывает унитаз там поднимает эту штуку и вода подхватывает какашку и куда-то это всё уходит.

****

В льве кассиле.

Смотрю какие у меня игрушки. Была у меня игрушечная курица короткое время. Это очень грустная курица. У неё грустная судьба. Во первых она там какая-то механизированная была, она должна была стоять на подставке, но не было никакой подставки. Была просто курица с куском металла вместо ног, ею она видима крепилась какой-то подставке и типа клевала, двигалась. Но сейчас её нет вообще этой курицы. Её жалко. Она итак была сломанная, а теперь вообще вот так аж, аж нет её вообще.

А был с ней вот такой ещё случай. Я не знаю вечер это был или утро или вообще ночь. Я был очень слаб, очень сонный. Возможно я даже болел перед этим. Всё в тумане помню. И вот я с этой курицей побежал из зала в кухню по коридору. А потом мама за мной пришла, а я плакал. Не помню уже из-за чего плакал. Но курица была в руке, возможно что-то связано с ней. А в зале были разбросаны игрушки и уже темнело за окном или наоборот светало. И я в слезах как всегда. Такое вот воспоминание.

Поэтому грустно вспоминать о той курице.

Да я вообще часто плачу. Если нет причины, то могу её просто выдумать. Я мог плакать просто потому что мог бы себе надумать что курочка умела говорить и она жаловалась мне на то что она игрушечная и на то что у неё нет ног и на то что она вообще есть.

Вот сейчас например я прослезился от этой мысли. Цып цып цып где ты моя курочка. Я прям плачу уже. Но я вытру слёзы, не стану их показывать маме, я же не смогу объяснить ей причину. Я говорить-то толком не умею ещё. Да она вообще может не понять всей сложности всех этих воспоминаний и причин моего плача.

Да и вообще я не люблю когда меня видят плачущим. Я люблю плакать один на один с собой. Только в таком случае это приятно. А перед кем-то я не хочу. Потому что, если не считать плача по курочке, идущего от опекунских потребностей, зачем я плачу в большинстве случаев? Чтобы получить что-то. И дальше начинаем разбираться.

Я же вот хочу чтоб я сидел например на верху шкафа и за всеми следил. Чтобы я владел ситуацией. Чтоб вот кто-то идёт куда-то по коридору, а я уже сверху видел к чему он придёт. Чтоб я знал больше всех и оттого был в преимуществе. Ведь если в пункте назначения всё плохо, то лучше же знать заранее что там всё будет плохо. Чтоб не было сюрприза. Вот я буду знать. А человек который идёт туда не будет. Я буду в более выигрышном положении. Ведь если я, зная то, к чему он идёт, вдруг встал на его место, то у меня было бы куда большее преимущество нежели если бы я был им, неосведомлённым человеком. Таким образом желание сидеть на шкафу и всё знать это желание быть в более выигрышном положении прежде всего. В этом и есть интерес наблюдать за всем происходящим и быть в курсе всего. Какое мне дело до того что происходит? А вот до «быть не разочарованным и от того счастливым» мне дело есть и большое. Вот это я и преследую.