When you’re in love with three girls at once, even the walls of a psychiatric clinic are no obstacle to happiness, and life in a Soviet military looney bin can enthrall more than an adventure movie. A lousy soldier, a bad poet, and an imperfect lover – yet it isn’t all bad if you feel good, and even the surrounding psychos become your friends, your doctor becomes your lover, and dreams become a reality. This is a story about freedom, for which you can risk everything, even freedom itself.
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Антон Прус. A Flower Ungodly
A flower ungodly. Love, roundworms and Soviet punitive psychiatry
Foreword
My friends, the roundworms
Late-night conversations in bed with the brains
Loonies from my course: kleptomaniac, schizophrenic, stupid
Love poetry and vexation of spirit. Girl number 1. Sveta
Love catatonia and an unsuccessful proposal
Booze night and talking to the general
Crazy poetry
Girl number 2. Anya. Vuoksa
Doctor visit. First night in the psych ward
Sulfozine cross
Tahir the Uzbek and schizophrenia
Animal tamer from motel Olgino
Occupational therapy. Roses and rods
Talented psychos, the Third Reich, military poetry
Yehuda Sukhanov’s revelations about insulin therapy and God
Ginger doctress or red-haired goddess
Dream number 1 about love and the runs
Comet Halley. My friend Horatius
Dream number 2 about losing virginity and depersonalization
Night witches and day angels
A kaleidoscope of visitors
Schizophrenia doesn’t smell. Medical panel
At the academy, but free
Conclusion: psychiatric center in a spring puddle
Отрывок из книги
Most poets aren’t talented. Most writers aren’t outstanding. Take me, for example, neither the former nor the latter, and generally neither here nor there. But one day, I read my grandfather’s diary – my father had it – and this diary shook me. My grandfather wrote it in a dugout during the Winter War of 1939—1940. Of course, he wasn’t a grandfather back then, but practically a boy, just twenty-three years of age. His writing was excellent for a kid with four years of education and an accounting class. He certainly wasn’t a writer, and he never thought about it like that; these were merely some notes a military supply manager kept for himself: nature, subordinates, news. Nothing exceptional. But for me, my grandfather’s life immediately became three-dimensional, and I gained a new perspective on him. An actual poet, like the ones in a school textbook, isn’t a living person. But your father, brother, great-grandfather – it’s personal. How did they overcome their fears? What poetry did they write? Bad, obviously, but what was it? About what? About whom?
Then I got accepted, even though the competition was 19 candidates for one student position. But not all 19 had a grandfather general. Many had. There were marshals, KGB officers, and ministers. But those who just wanted to become military doctors were out of luck. I don’t see how you could enter on your own. There were bright guys, much more intelligent than me, but they always had epaulets and cunning intrigues behind them. And then karma came for us in the form of the novice fighter boot camp, the NFB. In the first days, we understood exactly where we ended up: patrol duties, marching, lockdown, shouting sergeants. Some of the newly accepted students immediately packed their belongings and disappeared. I tried to escape, but 13 relatives came and stood with their chests in my way. Who am I to upset so many people who inexplicably dreamt that I would become a military doctor? Not an ordinary doctor, not a botanist, which was my dream, but specifically a military doctor, and they would grieve it for the rest of their lives if I was not to be an army doctor. Their life would become a nightmare. And I wasn’t that cruel, so I stayed.
.....
I left the building, the northern lights disappeared, and my soul hurt and howled, but then my consciousness forced out everything unpleasant. Only the northern lights, our walk, and the memory of spending New Year’s Eve together remained. And joy poured out in a rhyme.
