V–A–C Sreda online magazine continues its three-month programme dedicated to memory and its relationship to history, archives, and nostalgia.
In this issue, we publish a text by the poet, prose writer, and screenwriter Pavel Koshelev. In his work, he turns to childhood—a particularly fertile theme when it comes to memories. The essay is structured around the clubs and extracurricular activities it’s protagonist attended as a child. Gradually, this foundation grows into small stories, impressions, and associations: sometimes ironic or absurd, and at other times—sad.
For many years, I had avoided basketball, and then I agreed. In the courtyards of Kitai Gorod, three against three—if I’m honest, I don’t even remember who won and who lost. But I do remember all my childhood clubs and groups, sectors and circles.
“You’re on fire!,” “I’m open!,” “Get it out!,” “Keep it up!”—cried unfamiliar guys to one another, and I thought about the fact that there are certain things in a person the don’t ever change: I personally am still a little afraid of the ball, and, as soon as it comes into my hands, I try to get rid of it as fast as I can. I imitate more than I participate. I still keep to the back in defence and don’t want to win as much as to go home.
Actually, there is something to such a style of play.
Inevitably (and quite quickly) the moment comes when you plunge into a particular condition and perceive what is happening as slow-motion, interactive cinema, in which you are playing the role of a third-tier character and all that is required of you is to press a worn-out button once every few minutes for the absurd action to continue before your eyes. Shadows hum, trajectories intertwine, a message in an indecipherable language incomprehensible to the others is carefully conveyed to the observer.
Likely even then, in Severodvinsk, a child in the basketball club, I acquired something important on the level of feeling. For example, the fact that the centre of the world is not me.
The world in general has no centre, just like the centre has no world. Everywhere only the moderately beautiful convulsions of a coloured void.
Three times a week I ran for the bus to the youth centre through the vacant lots near the clothes market. From the outside, the building resembled the sarcophagus of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station, while inside everything was according to the classic: a sleepy lobby with plants in huge pots, a dark, stuffy changing room, a cold, echoing gym.
Everything began very banally: Sergei Viktorovich, the school sports teacher, noticed that I wasn’t a bad shot maker, that I could make a couple of “clean” shots from the foul line, and so on. He said I needed to develop my talent (he said many things) and I relayed this to my parents (though I relayed little). And so I ended up there.
I don’t remember the first class, just like I don’t remember a single one. All the trainings crumple into a homogenous silvery hallucination.
We were trained by the ice-lady Larisa, with a short, electric boy’s haircut. She often looked at me with her razor-blade grey eyes, as though she were trying to remember the formulation of a vague riddle, and then to solve it.
I wonder, what did she think of me?
A little boy, who, like everyone else, could become something, but who, for some reason, preferred not to stand in the light: as much on the first day as through the following year of regular lessons. For all this time, during our training games I scored maybe five random goals. I didn’t display the slightest initiative, just ran along with everyone from one end of the gym to another. I tried to remain unnoticed, fancied myself invisible, felt like a pug running awkwardly around the court alongside the big dogs.
I sat through games on the bench. If, closer to the end, the difference on the scoreboard was very big, and nothing was needed from anybody any longer, then I would be let out for a couple of minutes so I could run around, sort of so I wouldn’t feel too bad about having sat through the whole game on the bench. But I just as well wouldn’t have, I’d just as well have sat there on my own, sat calmly, watching and watching. I grew up an unusually patient child.
Denis pronounced “basketball” with a “ts” and had a vaguely cartoonish resemblance to a caterpillar. He became my only friend there. All the others were older and more experienced, with their established jokes and confident dribbling. I wasn’t included in their circle, but, to be fair, I also didn’t try to be included, I was immediately drawn to the outcast, and it couldn’t have been any other way.
We had known of one another before: we studied in parallel classes, but then Denis began to win all the city Olympiads, and his parents quickly caught on to the fact that it would be better for a child with such abilities to develop in a good mathematical gymnasium rather than to degrade in our mediocre suburb school, the number of which was an ironic figure for an educational institution, consistent with the mark for “unsatisfactory.” Denis was transferred, and I continued to study there. And then we met at basketball.
When two captains were choosing team members, the two of us, not wanted by anyone, remained until the very end, and, consequently, were always in different teams. They instructed us to intercept passes from each other, but no one ever passed to us, and so we ran around aimlessly together and talked about banal things: school subjects, seasons, computer games of the “arcade” genre (this word I remember from Denis’s lexicon, I myself, if I’m honest, still don’t understand it to this day) and probably about some other things.
Denis had started going to basketball (“batsketball”) half a year earlier than me, and gave up a few months after my appearance. Everything was like in the first class: I stayed, he left. Sometimes someone new would appear and become my partner, but no one would stay for long. Mainly, I was on my own. Of all the “invisibles,” I stayed longer than anyone. If only I knew why.
I remember, the three of us are walking—me, my classmate Sanya, and his mother (I think we were helping her carry in grocery bags)—through a sunny winter’s day, and it is literally pouring out of me: I am eagerly telling Sanya one funny story from basketball after another, with such confidence, with such genuine delight, as though the stories weren’t invented, as though I wasn’t composing them only the fly. And I was. I was inventing nicknames for characters, generously filling the scene with details so insignificant that this invented world, similar to the Jetix cartoon series, seemed even more real than reality, even to me.
Sanya also believed me—he wasn’t one to hold his tongue when they don’t believe you—I am one of of those. He believed, but he didn’t buy into the hype. I had begun to unfurl all this propaganda to try to lure him to basketball with me, to overcome his loneliness. But it didn’t work. Though it would have been odd if it had, and he had come there and understood that it had all just been a made up, childish fantasy, a three-storied lie in the middle of blinding winter’s day. How would I have explained all my old wive’s tales to him? For some reason, when I was composing them as I went, I didn’t think about this at all. Probably I was too happy, I lost myself, as it were flew through light.
And in spring—it’s best of all to leave anywhere in spring, it’s clear—everything ceased, came to an abrupt end. I had just had enough. That is I’d had enough from the beginning, from the first lesson, but after a year and a half, I understood that enough was enough. There was no reason for this, but my mother didn’t believe it. All evening she unsuccessfully interrogated me, thinking that they’d been bullying me. And fretted over the fact that my father had gone away on business and that she had no one to set against me.
She said on the phone to my grandmother:
—“It seemed like he liked everything so much, and now under no circumstances!”
She said on the phone to my father:
—“And now what, he abandons sport and takes to the streets, hangs about in building entrances instead?”
I’d already begun hanging around a little in building entrances. In order not to hear my mother’s lamentations on the phone, I put on my headphones and a disk of melancholy Petersburg rap—this was the way I preferred to live through my abrupt and ruthless, belated break up with the basketball club.
I never went there again. I didn’t even say goodbye. I think no one noticed my disappearance.
Probably, they only said once in the changing room:
—“And where’s that one? What’s his name?"
—“He’s been gone a long time.”
—“He quit I guess, about time.”
Or maybe they didn’t remember.
Maybe I was never there.
*
A couple of years later, our sports teacher Sergei Viktorovich enrolled our class in a city basketball competition. Our strongest players, for some reason, had all been born in 1996, but only those born in 1997 or later were allowed in the competition. The team that was gathered was openly awful. We shamefully lost every time.
Before the start of a match, I saw Larissa in the gym—the ice-trainer. She had accompanied her new wards—the team of an elite gymnasium, against whom we were to play. I went up to greet her. Larissa pretended not to know me, and soon after this the starting whistle sounded.
The centre kept sending three-pointers at us. The others also played like young gods. We couldn’t do anything against them. By the third time, the score was already more humorous than humiliating. They condescendingly winked at us, sending the ball through our hoop in more and more absurd ways. By the fourth time we were mournfully walking about the court, which sent Sergei Viktorovich into a rage—he leaped about and shouted that we had to fight until the end. Larissa chuckled spitefully, and my former acquaintance Denis watched from the reserve bench—it was against his gymnasium we were playing then.
And it would have been alright if this match had been the last—it isn’t shameful to lose to such a good team. But no.
After this there was one more match—necessary, although it already wouldn’t change anything, just a hacking to death of the worst by the worst, apparently just for fun. We played against a team of guys a couple years younger than us, and were able to lose even to them.
When I got home (in those days home was my grandmother’s house, because my parents had gone away somewhere for a couple weeks), I was met by a strange, bespectacled man. He had come to advertise a vacuum cleaner. People would invite them in for their free trial cleanings.
—“Well, how did you play?” asked my grandmother as she came into the hall, with sincere hope and optimism in her eyes.
—“We won,” I lied. I couldn’t answer her truthfully this time.
—“You won?!”—she was genuinely happy. “One time, at least! Thank God!”
And she kissed me on both cheeks.
—“I congratulate you! A sportsman!” the bespectacled old man congratulated me, like a very little boy, shook my hand and returned to the room to continue his magic with the carpet.
In the kitchen the radio was muttering. I approached the iced-over window. The radio said:
—“Remember this day in detail. In twenty years you’ll write about it, do you hear?
Well or something different. I wasn’t listening, if I’m honest.
Today, I think that all these clubs and groups of ours, if not without fault, all the same fulfilled their main mission: we really did find ourselves, at least for a couple hours, under some kind of supervision, instead of chaotically perverting one another.
A very representative instance comes to mind.
Before basketball, at a very young age, I went to the karate club organised in the small sports hall at school. Once, we arrived at the lesson and found it had been cancelled, our Sensai had not come.
It was sunny May evening, a slow, long sunset, the kind that occurs only in childhood, and only in the far north. We went out into the school courtyard and immediately found entertainment: to stand a few dozen meters apart and throw stones at one another. Roused by adrenaline, we flung these rough fragments of granite, one after another, again and again.
For a second, the orange rays were reflected by the school window and blinded me (it sounds overly cinematic, which means its possible my memory is misleading me and adding in beauty, but all the same, it seems that yes, I was blinded), and immediately afterwards a stone hit me under the eye.
I covered my face with my hands and bowed over. “I will have a black eye, I will have a black eye”—for some reason, this was what worried me, and the guys ran towards me from all sides. I couldn’t see it, but I can imagine well how the rusty stadium dust rose from their pale yellow trainers.
—“Take away your hands, take away your hands, show us!”—someone insistently demanded.
With an effort of will, I tore my hands from my face, but my eye wouldn’t open. The guys cursed from shock. And then I opened my eye after all.
In the light of the sunset, the thick, dark blood struck me as too voluminous and lustrous, similar somehow to the toy called “slime,” and a lot of it was flowing out, really a lot. Out of fright, I cried out and stamped my feet on the ground. Later, my classmate Sanya would more then once imitate this reaction of mine, but then he wasn’t ready to make fun of me, his face had become grey with horror. It had been him who had thrown the rock. I turned around and rushed home.
Home wasn’t far away, but I ran for what seemed a long time.
Past the football-hockey centre, past our first five-storied building, past my grandmother’s house, through my kindergarten, named “Seven-Flowered Blossom” where some alt-kids were drinking on the veranda, and for some reason I noticed and have remembered that at the sight of me—a child, running by with a bloodied face—they started joking and laughing loudly.
In the lift I began to sob, anticipating my mother’s reaction (this time too my father was on a business trip).
Mama truly was horrified.
There was no need, surprisingly, for stitches (and there wasn’t even much of a black eye). In the emergency room, they tended to my wound and put a bandage on it. They said that would be it—tear the bandage off in a few days, and forget about it. It must be said that I was less than ideally successful in following the second of these prescriptions.
In contrast to basketball, which was a full-fledged sports club, karate was precisely an amateur group—small-town and unserious: we didn’t participate in competitions, didn’t take exams—not even for the yellow belt—we just practiced throws and hits, and then, wearing enormous gloves, cudgelled one another with enthusiasm.
If anyone got hit on the liver, the trainer would say: “Everything’s fine, breathe, relax.” If someone had their nose broken, the trainer would press an enormous bunch of keys to their nose, which were so cold it was as though he had stored these keys especially for such situations, and would lament that someday, someone’s parents would inevitably complain to someone, and he would be sent to prison.
I hid the T-shirt covered in blood stains in an inconspicuous lower drawer of the cupboard, and when my mother found it during a spring cleaning, I lied, and said that the copper spots were chocolate. I didn’t want to end up in a vegetarian Aikido club instead of our genuine karate. I didn’t want the trainer to be locked up, and the karate club closed down with him.
The trainer’s face I remember badly. I remember only the feeling I got from him. And, if I go by this feeling, the trainer could absolutely have played secondary roles in cheap criminal television series. Names, of course, I also don’t remember. He himself didn’t call anyone by their real names, he preferred to give street names: Weakling, Square, Adam’s Apple, Tow-Haired…
No one ever understood the logic of the nicknames. The trainer would just suddenly say: “Now you will be Tow-Haired”—although the guy could well have had ordinary brown hair. I never got a nickname, he addressed me only as “Oi, you,” and had a somewhat distanced, detached attitude to me. He only honoured with nicknames those of which he was not overfond.
Most of all, the trainer was not overfond of Square—though the reason for this was absolutely unclear. Square liked to play on football simulators on the computer, and he also had a functioning toaster in the kitchen, just like in American films, which impressed his guests every time. What else is there to say about Square? Nothing else it would seem. He was just a guy.
Before the start of another lesson, our coach gathered us together and began to speak strictly to us:
—“The technician complained to me that during the previous lesson someone flooded the women’s toilet. That is someone went there, turned on all the taps, and the water poured down all night. One of you did it. No one else. Let the guilty one take a step forward.”
Of course, no step forward followed.
—“That’s what I thought. Square, come here.”
Square approached, and the trainer immediately grabbed him roughly, turned and twisted him in a particular way.
—“This is a secret move from the ninja and samurai arsenal. If I move my leg now, even a couple centimetres, discs in your cervical spine will immediately break.”
Square laughed nervously. It was as though a part of him even enjoyed what was taking place.
—“Was it you that did it? Did you flood the bathroom? Admit it!”
—“It wasn’t me.”
The trainer turned around and flung Square over his shoulder. And he landed on his back on the mat, with a powerful, muffled thud.
—“Listen”—the trainer was hanging over him—“if I find out that it was you after all, it will be worse.”
I observed this with unbelievable calm. I didn’t wince, and wasn’t ashamed. It was as though the flood had been started in a dream, though not in mine and not by me. Yet it I was precisely the one who had done this.
In general, I wasn’t wild, but I would do quite a few unexplainable things on the sly: I threw glass jars from my grandmother’s balcony onto cars, set fire to dry moss in the forest and almost setting fire to the entire village over the summer holidays. And here I had started a flood.
It would be simplest of all to say that I did this as part of so-called teenage rebellion. But no. Of course not.
First of all, I was nowhere near to being a teenager.
Second of all, teenage rebellion simply doesn’t exist. This is known to all teenagers, and they are driven absolutely made by adults who simplify everything so much and reduce it to hackneyed cliches, not having even the slightest understanding of the elementary order of things. And then teenagers, as it usually happens, themselves become these adults, and entirely seriously come out with the same nonsense they had once mocked: a litmus test, youthful maximalism.
Basically, I don’t have the faintest idea why I did it. But I did it all very well.
Close to the end of the lesson I asked to go out, slipped my bare feet into formless winter boots, and made my way through the dark, frightening corridors (any school turns into a fairytale underworld in a dark night) to the other wing. I went into the women’s toilet near our class. It was in no way different from the men’s, and no one was nearby, but all the same I felt myself on foreign territory. Why was it specifically the women’s I chose? I didn’t even chose. I just knew—thanks to the general cleaning that took place at the end of every term—that there there was a tap for gathering water in a bucket located directly above the floor. I found this tap, opened it, turned it on. A stream of hot water fell upon the worn, glazed tiles, steam rose up mockingly in the moonlit, street lantern light. I went back to the gym. The training soon ended.
That evening, Mama and Papa came to pick me up together. I remember they were sitting on a window sill in unfastened down coats, and that for some reason they were eating dried fish from a packet, tearing the salted skins from the spine, breaking the fragile bones. For some reason they—Mama and Papa—seemed to me remarkably young then. And they were: 30 and 32 years old (not much older than I, the writer, am now) but all the same there and then—framed by a school windowsill, with the yellow salted fish—I caught for a moment something strikingly youthful. I never saw them younger—not before and not since.
Did the skills I acquired in karate ever prove useful? Once, they certainly did.
In the village (the same one I nearly set fire to) I knocked a local ruffian to the ground multiple times, using the most elementary hip throw. The ruffian was surprised every time, and my grandfather, who was observing our confrontation, would go into raptures over the spectacle: he clapped his hands and laughed, as though I had displayed a mastery not inferior to Bruce Lee’s in Exit the Dragon—we had watched it together on television, and then, when my grandfather came into town for medical examinations, watched it again at home on a pirated DVD-disc.
My grandfather really wanted me to grow up active, daring, and insolent—he call this “energetic.” But I did not grow up energetic. I preferred attentive observation of ants and other simple occupations to any fight, was more akin to depressive men in deep mid-life crisis, than to students of the younger classes.
However, that time, I was able to make the old man happy. Though few months later, of course, he became very unhappy, when he found out I had stopped going to karate.
In the “Wanderer” hiking club, it smelled of old dusty rags: ropes salty from sweaty palms that had been wound a thousand times into various knots, yellowed posters, creaking carabiners, torn rucksacks, faded red pennants… What kind of pennants? As I said, red, with badges and yellow fringes along the edges.
The space was partitioned off by a burly kayak. Our amusing moustachioed leader would stand beside it and announce: “Tomorrow we are going on a hike to the railway bridge. Everyone, pour hot tea into thermoses and don’t forget them!”
A hike—this meant sitting by a fire and waiting while nothing was prepared in a pot.
A hike meant listening to the trainer tell us that we were in fact not really on a hike but in the middle of nowhere. He would draw a photo album from his backpack and show shots from previous—real—hikes. Real hikes took place in summer, over many days, with canoes and tents. This was an imitation, a short walk, an hour from the city on the sleeper train.
Smelling of rain and smoke, we return through the fog.
It gets dark. It gets dark early. At home, there are two sheets of equations, stewed vegetables, and a window with yellow lanterns, though I prefer white ones. The next hike will be on skis. And after that—a real hike. But that would be without me.
Between us, mispronouncing his surname, we called him Usanich, and his alpinism club—alpinidiotism. One after another, practically all the people I had once gone to karate with appeared there. The club became a sect. By that time, we were already in the fifth class.
Usanich took us climbing at the rock-climbing centre, taught us to tie the necessary ropes, to navigate terrain—in a word, to go on hikes.
He was upset that neither I nor my friends went to the additional canoe lessons at the swimming pool. We came up with awkward excuses, and every time Usanich would repeat: “He who wants finds the opportunity, he who doesn’t finds a reason” (during the pronouncement of this phrase, he would become even more similar than usual to Pechkin the postman), and also remind us that, without these aquatic lessons, he would not allow us on the full-fledged hike in the summer.
It sounded ominous, only we had absolutely no intention of going on these full-fledged hikes.
Essentially, the guys and I were unthinkingly spending our and others’ time on the acquisition of specific skills applicable nowhere besides hiking. I our case, this was absolutely nowhere.
It seems like the most pointless pastime imaginable, but in fact it was no more pointless than anything else. After all, time exists only to be filled with something, and why not on alpinidiotism? And, if you think about it, all of life is the acquisition of skills which will never and nowhere be of any use beyond it. Or, as our other trainer would put it, “Hard in training, easy in death.”Adding karate skills to our training, he cultivated a kind of Samurai spirit in us, Severodvinsk style.
Almost every day, I go for a walk to the Cherkizovsky Pond.
It’s autumn now, and in the sunny weather you can see children paddling their kayaks amid fallen leaves, laughing, pushing each other with their paddles as though they were trying to capsize and drown one another.
Observing this is amusing, but all the same, kayaking in a swimming pool is far more poetic as a pathetic and absurd image. Perhaps I was wrong to search for a reason rather than an opportunity? I could have at least gone once, just for fun.
When I think about the meanings of clubs and sections, most of all I remember one situation.
With a friend of mine nicknamed Bashka, we were robbed in the middle of a very very grey early-spring day, they stole my phone, and we, instead of going to the police, went back to my house, so that I could take my uniform for the training. And ran into my mother.
I had to lie to her that my phone had no network, that it had simply run out of charge and died. She believed me. We went to alpinism-idiotism. At alpinism-idiotism, Usanich had prepared an obstacle course from improvised objects: benches, wall bars, gym mats, ropes.
Bashka and I navigated these obstacles, and I smiled, laughed, was sincerely happy. Bashka could not understand: an hour ago they had stolen my phone, and there I was enjoying myself.
Later, of course, the horror began (I had to tell my parents everything, my father was close to killing me, they gave me a hard time at the police station, they tried to force me to withdraw my report, to lie about a lost phone) but at that moment, the red sunset filtered through the shockproof mesh-covered windows of the gym, and that was it.
The floor was lava, and the rest was unimportant.
Such moments are truly worth something, even if they only last a minute, and are then followed by a return to helplessness and nervousness, the endless burden of the childhood pull to darkness.
Usanich lived in the same building as my grandmother—she on the ninth floor, he on the eighth.
After I had stopped going to classes, I felt awkward every time I ran into him in the lift. All the more because every other time I smelt of smoke. My personal alpinidiotism had become less and less athletic. Usanich didn’t greet me, just like the Lady Larisa once hadn’t.
I don’t remember why I stopped going to his club. There was no specific reason. It stopped of itself, gradually. Sooner or later everything always did. I didn’t stay in a single club longer than a year and a half.
Sometimes one lesson was enough.
One time, Bashka and I went to chess for the first time and immediately began causing mayhem: we ran around the room in ecstasy, and, while a grandfather with the face of a beardless Santa Claus overly enthusiastically explained the solution to a complex problem, flicked figures from the chess boards.
This ended with him kicking us out onto the street, and our spending the rest of the day heartily enjoying the idiocy of our own pranks.
There were also short-lived (though I did manage to almost drown) swimming lessons in the first class, and awkward drawing in kindergarten.
But the most free-spirited club I can remember, without a doubt, was the ball-game called “Sniper”—essentially an broader version of dodgeball. This club could just as easily have been called a club for primitive anarchism, in the sense that anyone at all could come and do anything they wanted, which of course, was mainly causing mayhem.
The gym-teacher would leave us with a large gym for the whole evening, while he himself would go smoke out his already smoked-out office. And everyone benefited from this. Sergei Viktorovich probably received a decent addition to his salary for running additional lessons, and we received the opportunity to absolutely legally loaf and fool around behind a believable pseudo-athletic smokescreen.
After all, in many ways, all these groups and clubs were no more than means of demonstrating one’s own normalcy to relatives, of lulling them into a false sense of security. Early on, I understood that children and adults are not friends but embittered neighbours, forced to share a single territory. If you attend a particular club, they simply lose a few reasons to pick on you, that’s all.
And all the same, in these clubs, things that weren’t unimportant happened—things that were never forgotten: the deafening of din of balls during warm-up, the roar of the swimming pool mechanisms, the smell of dumbbells, the swirling dirty water in sippy-cups, the leisurely evening walks home from the gym.
***
In the end, I did once go on a real hike. It happened when I was already in Ryazan (or, more precisely, in the Ryazan region) where I had moved at random immediately after finishing school.
I was then in the middle of a highly hopeless period of my so-called biography—between my expulsion from the radio-technical institute and my enrolment at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography. This period lasted almost two years: I scraped by with odd jobs, desperately clung to any opportunity of acquiring any new experience, and mixed primarily with eccentric people far older than me.
And so in the middle of a cold April—the snow hadn’t even fully melted—I embraced the idea of going on a full-fledged hike with astonishing enthusiasm. Granted, there were no kayaks, but there were heavy rucksacks and tents.
Or rather one tent. A two-person tent. For five people.
What happened felt like an absolutely empty, exhausting experience. Dragging yourself somewhere all day, in order to once again drag yourself somewhere the following day, and in between to drink moonshine in the acrid smoke of a campfire, with classic shit-rock hits in the background, performed on a guitar with a missing fifth string. Close to midnight, inevitably, as if according to a schedule, a downpour would begin, and we would all head off to sleep together in our cramped tarpaulin space.
On one of those nights, after floundering for sometime in this torturous trap between wakefulness and sleep, I pulled myself to the surface, came to my senses, and, without thinking, declared out loud that I would go home immediately.
—“What home?” they asked. “Where will you go? It’s forest and darkness all around.”
—“Relax,” they said to me. “You’re already home.”
But in my head it sounded differently:
—“Forget it,” said my inner voice. “You no longer have any home at all. Nowhere.”
However strange it may seem, I fell asleep after this. I haven’t been on hikes since.
I’m essentially on an endless hike as it is.
It’s already nine years, not counting dreams, that I haven’t been to Severodvinsk.
One the one hand, I’m drawn to travel there, on the other, something strongly holds me back. This is something—that draws me there and holds me back—is of course memory. In Severodvinsk, everything for me is made of memory, and there’s something to this.
Sometimes I come upon something in my head and ask myself an idiotic question: why did I need all of this—this awkwardness, shame, inexplicability—at all? The answer is simple: in order to have something to remember. It sounds banal, but if you think about it properly, it’s so true, even as it were profound. To have something to remember. And again, why? I don’t know.
And yet I remember. At twenty-eight, like an old man.
Memories are circles. Of water or hell? Alright, this is nonsense.
Perhaps I’ll decide to visit my home town in the next year, to mark the tenth anniversary of my physical absence.
I will travel there, walk to my courtyard on 5 Stroiteley Boulevard, and there, necessarily, I will feel or understand something important, even sacred. Or feel nothing. Or feel something, but something absolutely unimportant—cold, sleepiness, boredom.
Or maybe I won’t go after all. Which means I won’t.
15 August—8 October 2025