The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - Сергей Николаевич Огольцов
Шрифт:
Интервал:
Закладка:
No, Twoic was not a homo. And I hadn't met a single one at the institute. What's the point? To matriculate and land among a group of girls? So the gay guys just flashed by like a funny episode. However, Dr. Grisha was useful indeed. Once he arranged a twelve-day sick leave for me, writing some bronchitis in the diagnosis. Such a cute little man; he had very beautiful hair, though the word "hair" wouldn't suit it, I'd rather say – a wavy chevelure. And he was handsome of face too, only that a little short. But his brown soft briefcase was large, as well as his hips which he rolled in his gait. I was on friendly terms with him, despite the difference in orientation; nothing like it was in the case with Tughrik. By the way, Dr. Grisha was also married and had two children, boys both of them…
But a three-day leave for acute respiratory disease, aka ARD, I could easily procure without Dr. Grisha’s help. Behind the Old Building, there stood the institute’s one-storied hut of the medical center. You come there in the morning before classes, and they give you a thermometer and, if there is the temperature, you receive a stamped slip of paper for ARD which meant 3 days of freedom. Only you needed to warn the headman-girl of your group not to smear the log with "absent" marks, in 3 days she'd have the reference.
Twoic, as a biology pundit, shared that the temperature significantly rises in the area of strained muscles, but the armpit is a bunch of muscles. Placing a thermometer in there, I started to intensely strain and relax that area muscles under the clothes, until the doctor, handled Pill, would say, "Enough!" And the result was never less than 37.3 degrees centigrade.
My falling ill so often perplexed Pill, where was my immune system, eh? Later on, her bewilderment transformed into angry suspicion, and she used to check me with two thermometers at once, one for each armpit. So the difference was only one-tenth: 37.3 and 37.2 – all the same ARD.
And then Pill went amok, "Enough! Here's a referral for you – go to the hospital!"
But I did not retreat, and went there, and lay in the hospital for a week and a half, for no reason, actually, just for the principle's sake…
With all that in mind, don't forget about my main occupation – studying. I was sitting thru the practical classes in my group, and at times attended lectures for the students of the whole course, I passed credits and examinations. Besides, I never dropped self-education.
In the second year, I was fortunate enough to meet The Cavalry Army and The Odessa Stories by Ivan Babel. He convinced me that even after the Great October Revolution there still remained writers in Russia and not just sholokhovs-proskurins-markovs. At the third course, in the institute reading hall, I discovered magazines with The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov. It was a thunderbolt… In my final year, the endless, like the flow of the Nile, Thomas Mann's Joseph and his Brothers were attending the institute to keep me company thru the long lecture hours.
I don't account for commonplace pulp fictions not related to my education, that was read for a pastime. Like, when there was a stir in the Hosty, "Ah, Efremov! Thais of Athens! The peak and limit of wildest dreams!" Ilya Lipes gave that hetaera to me for only 2 days. So after the midnight lights-out, I even had to go in the corridor and read it under the lamp above the doors to the washroom and the men's toilet.
I was sitting in a chair, dragged along, with my sheepskin coat thrown over the shoulders but not covering my bare legs because I was too lazy to dress after reading in bed before the curfew. So what? Let them imagine I'm on the beach…
But with all due respect to Lipes, that's not literature but just another illustration from the textbook The History of the Ancient World for the fifth grade of secondary school. When a schoolboy, I liked those gaudy pictures of the Egypt slaves dragging stone blocks to the pyramids, of the Roman legions on their march and other suchlike masterpieces. Some seductive means of education, no denying, yet comics strips and literature are not the same things… However, you cannot know beforehand where a find might be awaiting you, and where a loss.
Sitting out there, by the dark frozen window, with my eyes scuttling along the lines that described an ancient festival, where stark naked participants were having a ritual run thru the darkness of night, I had a vision again. Just for a fraction of a second I got into a dark Greek night and ran, stark naked, thru the black shadows of dark trees under the big moist stars in the sky… But then – flip! – and I am back again in the sheepskin coat, on a chair in the cold light from the lonely fluorescent lamp in the ceiling above the gray concrete floor getting lost in the pushed-off darkness of a corridor in the fast asleep hostel, and my body still tense from that pair of plunging step-jumps in my run thru that split-second, and my skin still feeling the chill of night from that distant past…
(…now, what to do about all that? Just do as everyone else – brush it aside with a dismissive shrug, forget, and get back to living on.
But the book itself was, nonetheless, lame garbage…)
No better garbage was all those theoretic Grammars, Theorophonics, Scientific Communism, Communist Aesthetics, and oodles of likewise farragoes devoid of any rhyme or reason obligatory taught at the institute… Although, I do understand, in part, the lecturers who poured them out; once upon a time
