Читать книгу A Flower Ungodly - Антон Прус - Страница 5

The cadet sleeps, but the thought – never! My little quivering soul engulfed in flames yearned for freedom. Yes, you can go on leave to visit your girl, hold her hand in yours for half an hour, and run back. You can even go fishing during the summer holidays and spend a couple of weeks in the forest, where it seems that there aren’t any barracks or moronic superiors because nothing has changed there: the train, the drunkards on the stations, the round leaves of water lilies, the small fish at the bottom and the big pikes caught on a zherlitsa – everything is the same as before. Almost the same. Only now you’re covered with dust, and you can’t wash it off, no matter how much time you spend in the shower. It’s dust from our boots when we march to the bathhouse along the Liteiny Bridge across the Neva, dust from the wind on a potato field, dust from scraping the barrack floor with a piece of glass. It’s dust from a soul that has dried up in two years – you walk, and it crumbles, leaving behind you a trail of gray ashes…

If this is considered normal, maybe it’s better to be abnormal? You instinctively turn to those who cannot be like everyone else – the loonies. They were distinctly visible against the perfectly symmetrical formation of indistinguishable cadets. In everyday life, where everyone is different and lives at home, dresses how they want, and goes to bed when they want, the loonies can conceal themselves. Or maybe it’s just that when no one yells at you, your soul also screams less, and your crazy can sleep inside you for a long time. It isn’t so in the barracks. Symmetric rows of identically dressed teenagers with identical haircuts – any difference is clearly visible. Madness, the things you cannot control, jump out immediately. Sergeant Guzimenko had a beautiful singing voice. He was from western Ukraine, and as we marched in formation, he sang in his high tenor.

Unharness your horses, my lads, and lay down your heads to rest,

And I will go to the garden, dig a well at your behest,

Marusya, one, two, three, my dark-haired maiden,

Picking berries in the garden.

So he sang, but one day he quarreled with the course foreman, who forbade Guzimenko to sing. Sergeant became the storekeeper in charge of the pantry, a utility room for storing mops, buckets, winter clothes, and other things. It’s hard to say what went on in his head. We never talk about our worst struggles and may even be unaware of what’s tossing and turning inside our chests. Sergeant often locked himself in the supply room alone and smoked in the bathroom at night. A few months later, someone noticed he had taken their nice writing pen. Thief! – the word softly traveled through the ranks of marching cadets. And then some idiot nailed sergeant’s boots to the floor at night. In the morning, before morning exercise, sergeant put his feet into his shoes but couldn’t walk. He fell on the floor, and everyone stood around him in their underwear, laughing… A month later, several hundred pens, pencils, dozens of slippers, hundreds of spoons, and forks were found in his supply room, along with a bunch of other useless stuff. Guzimenko disappeared. Some said that he was in a psychiatric clinic diagnosed with schizophrenia and that kleptomania was a manifestation of his illness. No one was ashamed of laughing at the sick sergeant. We were all healthy and good and not crazy.

Ukrainians had a whole bunch of loonies, and we, Leningraders, even gloated because they called our beloved city the city of barracks and garbage dumps. In any case, we did not feel any sympathy when the course foreman Shadrin, very provincial, with a huge head and face of a Yakut, even though he was a Jew from Odesa, ordered Podbelsky, a Kyivan, to step forward. Podbelsky was odd: very tall, with disproportionately short legs, a huge chin, hunched over, and very quiet.

«Cadets,» the foreman shouted, «our first-year cadet Podbelsky gave a general’s wife an enema. Got the wrong place. Cadet, why did you do it?»

«Well, sir foreman, she’s, I, she had, there was, I didn’t know, and then it went, and I – »

«Podbelsky, are you trying to amuse us here? The wife of a military general wrote a complaint against you, and you are playing the fool?!»

Podbelsky stood and moved his fingers as if he was searching where to put an enema. He was looking at us and smiling but, at the same time, crying. Then Pinochet came out and enunciated that for the behavior of Podbelsky, the entire fifth platoon would wash the department of that clinic. I didn’t see or hear Podbelsky for probably half a year. He continued to study, or rather, his shadow did. Then he also disappeared. This time we were all gathered in formation and told that Podbelsky had schizophrenia. We couldn’t help but look around as if trying to see who else was crazy – it was one too many schizophrenic people for a year. And to think that we all answered a psychologist’s questions for a whole day and passed the interviews. Where were they coming from?

No one else was schizophrenic, but there were quite a few boneheads. They could become military doctors – sergeants, warrant officers, and foremen. I doubt they could work as hairdressers, so how did some become surgeons? Sometimes I have nightmares that one of these bonehead officers is operating on me. But even among the ordinary cadets, there were surprisingly stupid people. The boneheads marched perfectly and loudly answered, «Sir, yes, sir!»

Administering an enema into the wrong place is a crime, but being a bonehead is okay. During the anatomy exam, one had to answer about the female uterus. He was given a section of the uterus glued between two large pieces of glass. The uterus is quite a small organ, even with tubes. They were generous with the glue when making the section, so it occupied a lot of space, while the uterus only accounted for ten percent in the middle. Our bonehead could not answer a single question. When the exasperated professor asked him to point out the uterus at least, our Vanya traced his little pencil around the edge of the glue, about 80 centimeters in total. The teacher was so stunned he could only say, «Cadet, we are studying human anatomy here, not that of an elephant! Get out of my sight!»

And so I continued my half-awake living, but something stirred in the corners of my soul – see how good it is to be a looney, you won’t be here. Madness is the ticket to freedom. Fishing, skiing, parents, house plants – they don’t care if you’re crazy. But it was not clear what happened there, inside a psychiatric clinic, what it was like to be schizophrenic… In the meantime, I could occasionally be a bonehead when life got unbearable. So I walked around, arranging my face into an idiotic expression, which made the superiors mad, especially coupled with the fact that the strap on my overcoat always – I swear, sir – had just been stolen, and my cap had no metal rim that gave a dashing appearance to a cadet of an elite military academy. Some sergeants ordered their caps with enlarged fields, almost sombrero-like, which seemed to them the height of coolness. The brims of my cap hung down dejectedly, reflecting my mood.