Chapter 3. From Pacifier to Chess
My earliest memory — not some sketchy moments and freeze-frames popping up in my mind, but a coherent memory of a whole situation — dates back to the age of about two years. I was still sucking on a pacifier at times back then. I remember how my mother and I came to the polyclinic and sat waiting for an appointment. There were a few other people there besides us. Some man said to me, "You are already big, but with a pacifier. Ew, kaka! Drop it!" I took it out of my mouth, examined it carefully, and repeated "Kaka!" threw it behind the steam radiator. I was done with the pacifier from then on.
Further memories are again fragmentary. I know from my mother's story and partly vaguely remember how once a tractor roared sharply and very loudly near our house, starting up, and I was frightened. I was crying all the time, I couldn't sleep. They decided to resort to folk methods, and I found myself with an old lady-medicaster. She whispered something for a long time. It seems that the sleepy conspiracy worked on her, because she started yawning and could hardly open her closing eyes. After the session, I slept for more than a day, and when I woke up, I was completely fine.
According to eyewitnesses, I was already a big talker by the age of three, always talking and telling something. When adults gathered and talked, I was always there and listened attentively. And they sometimes told me political jokes, half-voiced, cautiously. All this I memorised, and then announced it to the whole world. When at a feast on a holiday — and there were always a lot of people there, because my relatives liked to celebrate everything at our place — I started to tell anecdotes about Brezhnev, everyone laughed. But then someone would say to the parents, "You should explain to your child that he can't do that. Or you might get in trouble."
One of those feasts is a case that was later remembered for a very long time. I was then at the edge of the table, near my grandmother, who, as a hostess, began to pour wine to the guests. She poured wine for herself not lastly, as one would expect, but firstly. Then, reaching out to the others, she leaned over the table. I found myself shielded from them for a few seconds by her massive body. Taking advantage of the moment, I grabbed her shot glass, drank it and put it down carefully. She sat down, took a shot glass and found it empty. Looking at it in bewilderment, my grandmother said, "How can that be..? I remember that I poured it for myself. Did I forget to pour..?" After sniffing and making sure the wine was there after all, and then looking at my satisfied face, she gasped, "So you drank it?!" There was laughter. I remember all this too, so I can vouch for the authenticity of the story.
Soon I lost my talkativeness for a while. When I fell ill and went to hospital, I found myself in a ward with several children about my age. Obviously, we were restless patients: someone whimpered, someone squeaked, someone fiddled. And the nurse assigned to us had her own way of calming her charges: while mopping the floor in our ward, she yelled at us and whipped a wet floor cloth on our faces. After that, I started stuttering. Overnight, and in such a way that my speech became completely unintelligible. When my parents came to visit me again, they found out that I couldn't say a word properly. With great difficulty, I managed to explain what had happened. They rushed to the head of the hospital. The nanny was fired, the scandal was hushed up.
After a few months, my speech was almost back to normal. I began to speak well again, although some stuttering remained for life. It wasn't severe, and over the years it became less and less noticeable. But even now it shows up when I'm anxious or chatty.
Since then, I've only ever been in hospital with my mum. And I was sick quite often, and hospital life became a kind of norm for me. Sometimes, finding myself at home after a month or even longer treatment, I could not get used to the "new" environment, refused home food and asked for hospital food. This is how a significant part of my childhood passed — polyclinics, wards, and again, and again... When I got older, their atmosphere and the smells that reigned there began to cause me a persistent feeling of disgust.
In addition to numerous colds, I was constantly treated for my diseases. No one understood what kind of disease it was, and they prescribed a wide variety of treatments — apparently, mostly at random and as an experiment. Massages, heating, electrical stimulation, various pills, mixtures like calcium chloride (it was terribly bitter, but I got so used to it that I almost stopped noticing it), courses of injections, of several dozens of injections each, from which the skin on my buttocks became hard and burst from the needle insertion, and the medicine was not absorbed and flowed back, and so on, — I can't even remember everything.
Not only that. I was also treated at home, in my own way. When someone recommended a remedy, it was immediately applied. It all started with harmless fish oil, which I drank more than one bottle. Someone said I needed more calcium. My mother and grandmother, wasting no time, started collecting eggshells, grinding them and feeding them to me. The powder was scooped out by the tablespoonful, and I had to swallow it at least once a day. The crunch of the eggshells on my teeth still makes me cringe. Then they decided that my body lacked copper. Somewhere they found a copper nickel, still pre-revolutionary coinage, and began to treat it daily with a file. The resulting powder was added to my food. The nickel eventually turned into a thin copper plaque, honed on both sides until it was smooth. The crown of these events was the advice of an acquaintance who remembered the case when a house caught fire somewhere, and a paralysed disabled person ran out of it on his own. This clever guy seriously suggested that parents and grandmother set fire to the house, go outside and wait for me to run out to them. He argued in the spirit of "What is more precious to you — the house or the health of the child?" Fortunately, they had enough common sense to reject such a radical idea.
There were also proposals of a different kind. So, when I was three years old, one of the doctors advised my family to send me to a boarding school for disabled children. Like, why should you suffer? As I was told later, my mother and grandmother were inclined to do it, but my father resisted.
Honestly, the story is murky. Yes, I remember being asked back then if I wanted to go to a big house with lots of other kids and toys. Of course I wanted to. What else could a small child say to such a tempting offer? I mean, it really happened. But then everything looks strange. It doesn't seem very believable. Because my father treated me, let's say, not too warmly. He avoided taking care of me, never played, never communicated with me, except for the most necessary phrases, and even refused to hold me in his arms if there was an opportunity to transfer me to my mum. Therefore, the ending of the story looks as if the roles are mixed up. However, everything can be... Let's put a question mark here.
There were other health problems. So, when I was four years old, I was on the verge of life and death because of food poisoning. I was poisoned by ordinary stewed potatoes. How and why remained a mystery. The whole family ate it and nothing happened. But I got sick. I started vomiting, which continued day after day. I could not eat, I was very weak, I felt dizzy. Doctors were called, they washed my stomach with water and manganese, shoved some medicines into me... All in vain. Finally I became so weak that I couldn't sit up or even speak. The last doctor reported that there was no chance of survival. As he left, he said, "If you want him to live a little longer, don't let him sleep. If he falls asleep, he will never wake up again." I vaguely remember how much I wanted to sleep, — but as soon as I closed my eyes, I was shaken by the shoulder, "Vitia, don't sleep!" Then I fell into a semi-conscious state, and I don't remember anything else.
The story goes that the same evening an unfamiliar elderly woman, who looked Jewish, knocked on our wicket and said, "I am a doctor, I live nearby. I heard a child is dying here. Let me see him." She looked at me and told me not to do anything, but only to drink mineral water "Borjomi". She promised that I would get better, and left. In those days, "Borjomi" was a big deficit, and it was not easy to find it. My father rushed to the station, where he bought two bottles in the dining car, with double or triple overpayment. I began to drink it, and I really got better. Then a few more bottles consolidated the success. All in all, I was fine.
And then they were looking for that woman all over the neighbourhood, asking the people, describing her appearance. No result. Everyone just shrugged, "We don't know her. There is no such person here." She disappeared, as if it had never happened.
About the same time, closer to four years, I was taken to Evpatoria for treatment. A year later, there was a second trip. To pay for the first, we sold my father's motorcycle. To pay for the second one, my parents sold their wedding rings. Well, actually... Parents borrowed money for the trip from relatives. They began to demand the debt ahead of schedule. We need it, we don't want to wait — take it out and put it in! That's when they sold the rings. After that they thought of buying new ones from time to time, but never did.
My grandmother accompanied me and my mother on the first trip, and my father accompanied us on the second. As I have already said, the purpose was treatment. Several types of massage and other procedures, but the main thing was the therapeutic mud. Lying in a bath with hot black mud was unpleasant.
Massages were more fun if the masseur was chatty. I remember one began to chat with me about sleepwalkers — creatures that come to Earth from the Moon. He claimed that they did not exist, I argued with him. In the end, I was completely agitated and burst into tears, shouting "They do exist! There are! But only on another Earth!" I wanted to say "on another planet", but I didn't know the word yet. But I knew for sure that there were intelligent beings on other planets, although I didn't understand how. If the case were happening now, we could say that the child had watched cartoons about aliens, etc. However, those were different times. We, Soviet kids, were not spoiled by cartoons, films, games and toys in the form of aliens. In my years, I had no place to learn about such things. Especially since no one in the family was interested in such things. But lo and behold... Now we can assume that this was subconscious knowledge — the figure of speech not so well, but still — brought from postmortem in the world of energy. That's a guess. So, I cried, and people pulled up to us from other massage tables and judgementally looked at my massage therapist, who embarrassedly and confusedly justified himself, explaining that he did not expect such a reaction to harmless chatter. At the next sessions, he tried to keep quiet.
The dirt didn't help. There was a feeling that after it I weakened even more. But all the treatments passed mostly by my attention. I was just waiting for the next one to end, because a real fairy tale was waiting for me outside the walls of medical institutions.
A southern city with unusual houses, trees, sounds and smells. The air itself was different. The sea, which I fell in love with immediately and forever, with the storm that we saw nearby, a ride on a white motor ship, jellyfish, shells and crabs. The beach where I was really hot and bored, but where I could dig in the sand and look at the sea. Shops and stalls with amazing souvenirs. A park with amusement rides, where you could ride on small cars, which you have never seen in Homieĺ. Open-air cafes where you could sit at tables in the shade of big umbrellas and, again, look at the sea. And many more marvellous things.
Even the little things we bought there were amazing. Shells and various crafts made from them — of course. But also, for example, a whistle in the form of a plastic nightingale. Water was poured inside, and when you blew into it, a real chirp sounded. Or a small container with a solution, in which you dipped a plastic ring, and swarms of brightly coloured bubbles blew out from there. Or a toy — a simple wind-up robot... It's hard to understand now what's the big deal. But then relatives and acquaintances came to us to look at these curiosities. On our second departure from Evpatoria, we decided to completely amaze their imagination and show the curiosity of curiosities: a living jellyfish. We caught one and placed it in a jar of sea water. But while a day passed before leaving, and while we were traveling by train, it died.
On the same departure, already at the railway station, I saw mini checkers and mini chess being sold — tiny, plastic, on tiny magnets, in pocket-sized board boxes. Absolutely wonderful things. I was captivated by them and asked parents to buy it. My mother said, "We have the last money, and there will only be enough for one thing. Take your pick." I already knew how to play checkers, but not chess. But they were so beautiful... I chose them. There was nothing to do: I had to learn to play. But since I played mainly with myself, and did not learn to think through the moves ahead, I play terribly. Even in school years, I tried to fight with cousin, who was several years younger than me, but who already had some decent chess qualifications. Of course, he did whatever he wanted to me on the chessboard, reveling in his superiority. After several dozen games, he relaxed so much that he suddenly lost. We were both terribly frightened — he of his defeat, I of my victory — and we never sat down at the chessboard again. After that, I sometimes played with someone, but I always seem to lose. I think chess is too difficult for me. I'm not smart enough to play it well.
Distracting from the topic, it should be noted that the purchase of those chess was an irregular event, since they were, by our standards, expensive. They might not have bought it. And I would have to put up with it. It was like this: if I asked to buy a toy or something else, and they told me that it could not be done, I immediately fell silent. They tried not to deny me anything — within the limits that were possible for a family living on two ordinary Soviet working salaries and sometimes forced to borrow up to three rubles, then five, then ten. But a simple principle was explained to me from early childhood: if we can buy what you want, then you will get it without any whims. But if we can't, then you won't get it, and whims won't help. I'm used to treating not only shopping but everything else this way, on the principle of "What you can have — you can, what you can't — you can't." I think it prevented a lot of problems.
I had a lot of toys, but they were not fancy. Modest cars, toy guns with pistols or arrows with suction cups, a pipe, a drum, unpretentious plastic and metal soldiers. There were, however, a whole bunch of them, and they lay in a large cardboard box, which I called "The War". I remember how it appeared. One day they threw out the crib in which I had slept before and bought a new one. I did not like it at all, I wanted the old one, and that evening I could not fall asleep, I lay there crying quietly. Mum said, "Don't cry. We'll buy you a lot of soldiers." And they started to buy them for me, and in the end there were probably several hundred of them. I had a favorite teddy bear named Son; there's even a photo of me with him. I had other toys also.
Besides, my imagination was in full order, and that's why the role of toys was fulfilled by everything. I took dominoes — and the knuckles became building blocks, cars, ships, planes, soldiers, and anything else. The same roles could be played by matches, buttons, leaves, pebbles, and even beans. Pencils and fountain pens were spears, swords, rifles. Et cetera, et cetera... I wasn't the only one. In those days and for those children, such things were the order of the day. Now I look at modern children, who are used to fancy toys and games, and I think — where is your imagination? Is it no longer needed? And what about taking a chess pawn, imagining it to be a spaceship or a robot, and getting carried away with the game, forgetting everything? Do they even know how to do that now? Fancy toys aren't bad, that's for sure... But there is a suspicion that they oppress the imagination. I hope I'm wrong.
I've had some expensive toys. Two. The first was a railway. It was the coolest thing you could imagine back then. I got it for my birthday, I think. The second, later, was a motorcycle track. Four tracks on the track in the form of a big eight, on which tiny motorcyclists rode.
But let's go back to Evpatoria. There was a lot of interesting — almost everything — and memorable.
Since I mentioned motorcycles twice, I will mention them for the third time. At the local stadium, we saw a motoball match. It was an exotic event, which we could not even imagine before, because football on motorbikes — how is that even possible?.. However, there was such a rumbling there that my mother and I could not stand it and ran away. But my father didn't mind, watched to the end, and then went to another match.
Or it's interesting to remember how we ate shrimps. Also unimaginable exoticism and luxury for us, but as a food. We had never tasted them before. On both trips, we lived in an apartment with the same family. Kind and not greedy people — a husband, a wife and two girls a little older than me. They bought shrimp in kilograms, cooked them, and then put a bowl of shrimp and an empty bucket on the floor. All of us, two families, sat around, and began to peel them like seeds, throwing empty shells into a bucket that filled as the bowl emptied. Even now it is remembered as something incredible and brings a smile.
There was also an incident of a different kind, a different mood. We were sitting in a cafe, having a snack. At the next table sat a family with a disabled boy about my age. He ate his portion — I think it was vermicelli or something like that — small even for a child, and asked for more. His parents said, "No, you've had enough." My mother and grandmother intervened — what do you mean, do not let the child eat? They replied, "And you limit your child's food too. Don't overfeed him. Because if he gets fat, you will suffer with him." The recommendation was rejected with indignation — how can you not be ashamed to give such advice?! Those people may not have been morally right in their practicality. But they were not wrong in their prediction. Indeed, after a few years, I got fat and my care became more complicated.
I also visited the puppet theater there for the first and last time in my life. It was "Three Little Pigs". I remember it very vaguely. The best thing to remember was that there was a man sitting right in front of us, laughing very loudly all the time. Everyone said to him, "Young man, you're disturbing the view!" to which he replied, "It's funny, isn't it!", and continue laughing.
Two trips, between which there was about a year's interval, in my head combined into one vivid picture. Evpatoria made an indelible impression. It completely enchanted me, and returning there became my biggest dream for the next ten years. And then it always remained one of the warmest and brightest memories. I am drawn there even now.
Concluding the sketch of my physical condition in those years, i.e. health problems, I will mention the frequent nosebleeds. They started in early childhood. Apparently, the vessels there were somehow particularly fragile, because if I pressed my nose a little, or if I blew my nose, it would start bleeding. Sometimes I just sat quietly, when suddenly something burst in my nose, and red splashes flew on my shirt. It was very scary, I was panicking and screaming. I had my nostrils plugged with cotton swabs soaked in salt water and ice applied. Usually these actions were enough to stop the bleeding. But sometimes the pressure of the blood was such that it pushed out the swabs and poured in streams over the face and chest. Then someone would put their fingers on my nose, and I would have to struggle to keep my fingers from separating from the pressure. At such times blood would flow from my eyes, apparently through the tear ducts. I remember one such case clearly, and it was even more frightening. The bleeding continued for many years, gradually becoming less frequent and weaker. The last one happened sometime in the second half of the nineties.
Due to the combination of problems and the fact that no treatment had any positive effect, the doctors agreed that I, even with the best care, would not live longer than 12-13 years, and advised my family to prepare for the worst. But I'm still alive.
I can't explain it by anything but the support from the Teaching, its energetic feeding, its healing influence, fighting against destructive processes in my organism. Of course, you can't go against the laws of Nature. The Teaching acts in unity with them, and can help, support me, but it cannot miraculously fix everything. That's why I continue to weaken, albeit slowly. One day there will come a day when nothing can keep me afloat. Although the fact that I have lived to this age, with all the odds against me, already looks like something on the verge of a miracle.
The two trips to the south became a kind of watershed in my memory. I remember little before them, and not always clearly. What happened afterwards I remember much better and more clearly, and there is no longer such an urgent need to rely entirely on someone else's stories.
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