to the touch. Father frowned and when Mother asked from the kitchen, "So, what's there?" He said I had to see a doctor… It was an awful night – the agony of panic and despair…
In the morning, walking with painfully shortened steps, I came with Mother to the Railway Polyclinic nearby the Station. In the reception, they gave me a slip of paper with my number in the queue to the doctor. We got seated on the chairs next to the specialist’s office in the hollow reverberating corridor. When it was my turn to enter the white door, I, averting my eyes, told Mother that if needed I agree to be operated on, let only everything be normal.
The doctor was a woman, but either her white robe gave her the status of man, or the fear to lose something beyond my current ken, erased my shyness. The doctor said it was a sprain and all I needed were spirits compresses. Two days later, the scrotum returned to its usual shape and I forgot my agonizing fears…
On the seventh of March, Vladya brought to school a miniature bottle of cognac. We shared the booze between 3 of us, sipping from the tiny bottle's neck. Some warm glowing filled my mouth, and we laughed louder and oftener than usual, but there was nothing like the bliss from the wine at Vladya's birthday.
We were dismissed early because it was the eve of Women Day, and when I got home the influence completely disappeared except for the heaviness in my head. I climbed onto the khutta's roof, because already for a week Father chewed my ear to dump the snow from up there.
The tips of four brick chimneys, barely protruding from the snowdrifts, helped to outline our part in the roof. It was rather steep, and in the final stretch my felt boots slipped and I fell into the narrow back garden. The landing was successful – on both legs and into a deep snow, however, when I saw the cusps of the low palisade between the back garden and the yard of the Turkovs, stuck up from the snow an inch off my thigh, my feet grew cold with horror.
(…in those irrevocably faraway times—past any reach, recall, redress—I hadn't realized yet that all my grieves and joys, my ups and downs sprang from that rascal in the unfathomably distant future who’s now composing this letter to you stretched on my back inside this here one-person tent surrounded by a dark forest in the middle of nowhere and the never subsiding whoosh of the river currently named Varanda…)
End March a team of doctors came to our class to have the physical examination of the dudes to register us as future conscripts.
While the girls were taken to another room for some special lecture, the physicians told us to undress and demonstrate them our backs and sit on a chair for them to knock a rubber hammer beneath our knees, besides the height-measuring and cock inspection.
In my draftee card, the line for "sexual development" was marked with ‘N’. When the commission left, Tolik Sudak explained that "N" stood for "normal" and all the dudes got that mark except for Sasha Shwedov, and the girls, who returned after we got dressed, somehow found it out and that's why now they were whispering to each other and exchanging informed giggles…
~ ~ ~
The summer started with the examination session for the ninth grade. Of all the exams, Chemistry was the most feared one – a normal guy from the Settlement could not really bottom all those benzyl rings and their atomicity.
Following the majority of my classmates, I memorized the answers to just one of the twenty-five question sets, aka "tickets", from the Tickets List. At the exam, hand-made cards with ticket numbers were strewn face down on the desk of examiners for us to choose. My chances were one to twenty-four and I lost. However, the teacher of Chemistry, Tatyana Fyodorovna, handled Hexabenzyl, began, for some unknown reason, pulling me out and, eventually, evaluated my ignorance by "four".
(…in those irrevocably faraway times—past any reach, recall, redress —I hadn't realized yet that all my, etc., etc…)
Physicist Binkin, who, strangely, had no handle among the students, at that examination was Assistant Examiner and used his position for demonstrating the cards to Vladya. Picking a slip from the exterminators’ desk, Binkin would keep it up, face to Vladya, and bob his head encouragingly before he put it back and get over to the next one. As fair a play as one could wish.
Unfortunately, Vladya was seated in the end of the classroom, loaded with handfuls of the cribs prepared by diligent girls, who had already passed the exam and dumped to him their cheat sheets. But who can get it seeing for the first time in your life all those formulas scribbled on an inch-wide accordion-folded paper-strip in a handwriting three times smaller than normal? Of course, Vladya would jump to the opportunity of swapping the ticket in hand for that one whose answers he had learned by rote.
For Binkin his fair play was an innocently sadistic fun because at such a distance Vladya couldn't make out the numbers, however hard he squinted. So, he had 2 more wild attempts by which dint he exhausted the ticket swap quota and, though raising his chances to 3 to 25, missed again. Still and all, he didn’t flunk and got his "three" as well as the comment from Binkin, "Your unalloyed proletarian origin secured this mark for you…"
I never quibbled about my clothes, put on and wore just what was given, and Mother made sure the things were neither torn nor dirty. So the new addition to my wardrobe—a jacket made of leatherette to the patterns from The Working Woman magazine—appeared on Mother's initiative and it was her to sew it.
The money to buy leatherette was found because Father moved to work at the RepBase as a locksmith again and his earnings grew by