Читать книгу A Flower Ungodly - Антон Прус - Страница 3

I still don’t get how after the mental hazard of high school, I immediately wound up in the barracks, virtually jailed, with rules harsher than in some countries’ prisons. At seventeen, how much conviction can a child have? Most have none, even in their 50s. Somehow I managed to escape my grandfather’s insistent desire to enroll me in the Suvorov Military School; I flat-out refused to as much as visit it. School, girls, books, fishing, skiing – take all this and swap for the black uniform of a Suvorov soldier?! Impossible. But with the academy… my will faltered. All my relatives pressured me: from my grandfather, the general, to my aunt and uncle, who were geneticists. Instigated by my grandfather, they deceived me into thinking I could study biology at the Military Medical Academy since it had better funding. To this day, I don’t know how exactly he bribed them, but their deception worked.

And yes, I began to study at the Department of Biology at once – specifically, researching the cavity fluid of swine roundworms. I even spoke at a student conference once, my hands blue from Coomassie paint – I stained the cavity fluid with it – and even my forehead smeared with blue: the pigment would not come off no matter how much I tried. At the conference, the head of the department acidly asked whether I had offered my scientific work to Soviet pig farms. Girls from medical school also came to that conference; they were smiling. That’s biology for you. Pig worms were as far from my favorite botany as the reality I faced during the novice fighter boot camp immediately after enrolling. Taking exams outside was even fun, especially when the applicants locked the old biology professor Mr. Tumko inside the summer veranda where we had our exams. He stood there for half the night, knocking softly on the door. Knock-knock – «I’m Professor Tumko. I’m here to conduct your biology exam.» – knock-knock – «I’m Professor Tumko. I’m here to conduct your biology exam.» He continued for several hours while we sat in the bushes cracking up until the patrol released him. It was cruel, but youth is always cruel and stupid.

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.

But my soul resisted, and I fell ill – I developed a terrible stitch in my right side. I was hospitalized and stayed in a ward with a sergeant from Angola. His service impressed me very much. At least they didn’t shoot at us during the NFB! But the joys of serving in the USSR army did not excite me, despite the persuasion of my curly-haired roommate. My biliary dyskinesia – apparently psychosomatic – was quickly cured, and I had to return to the vale of sorrow and marching in step. I was saying goodbye to my carefree life, walking along the rows of birches, stroking the rough surface of the trees with my palms, looking sadly at the rare bolete: what use are they to me now? I was far from suicidal, but my past – maybe less than cheerful – life disappeared behind the Military Medical Academy summer camp fence. New friends were getting used to each other, new superiors paralyzed the will, and the brain produced amnesia and anesthesia. And just like that, half-asleep, I spent more than two years.