A Flower Ungodly

Editor Yana Pospelova

Translator Yana Pospelova

Illustrator Olga Terekhova

© Anton Prus, 2023

© Yana Pospelova, translation, 2023

© Olga Terekhova, illustrations, 2023

ISBN 978-5-0060-2148-8

Created with Ridero smart publishing system

A flower ungodly

Love, roundworms and Soviet punitive psychiatry

Foreword

Most poets aren’t talented. Most writers aren’t outstanding. Take me, for example, neither the former nor the latter, and generally neither here nor there. But one day, I read my grandfather’s diary – my father had it – and this diary shook me. My grandfather wrote it in a dugout during the Winter War of 1939—1940. Of course, he wasn’t a grandfather back then, but practically a boy, just twenty-three years of age. His writing was excellent for a kid with four years of education and an accounting class. He certainly wasn’t a writer, and he never thought about it like that; these were merely some notes a military supply manager kept for himself: nature, subordinates, news. Nothing exceptional. But for me, my grandfather’s life immediately became three-dimensional, and I gained a new perspective on him. An actual poet, like the ones in a school textbook, isn’t a living person. But your father, brother, great-grandfather – it’s personal. How did they overcome their fears? What poetry did they write? Bad, obviously, but what was it? About what? About whom?

And it’s a pity that millions of people throw away their adolescent poetry; deprive their kids and grandchildren of it. The truth is, all early verses are terrible, even Pushkin’s. The first few volumes of Chekhov’s complete works are utter garbage. And if they’d been ashamed of their earlier work like Khlebnikov, who burned most of his creations, maybe they wouldn’t have become what they have become. I decided to use my poems: stupid, clumsy, imperfect, imitative, and funny, and insert them into equally flawed prose. In case some descendant of mine decides to become a genius, writes a poem or a story, and then comes across his great-grandfather’s book and thinks, huh, I’m not that bad compared to my ancestor, not a Pushkin, not a son of a bitch yet, but halfway there! This would please me in Heaven and maybe help my descendant too. So, dear descendant, please don’t mistake this poetry and prose for good poetry and prose, do not try to imitate it, but learn from the classics, which I couldn’t do due to my laziness and lack of talent. But you can! And if you’d rather not, you may amuse yourself with this funny story. After all, not everyone’s ancestors had a stint inside an asylum. But don’t tell just anyone; I doubt that in a hundred years, society will be any more tolerant towards loonies. My younger self is also no role model. If I’d met myself from back then, a neurotic poet, I would hardly have recognized or liked myself. I’m not sure whether I like myself now, either. That’s why it’s easy for me to write about that funny young fellow. But I’m also happy for him; it’s good that he saw neither his stupidity nor the dangers he avoided; it’s great that he wrote bad poetry but did not do bad things, which is far more common. Because who knows, if he hadn’t met a bear tamer, maybe he would have passed his life locked away in a madhouse… Let us be happy for him as we are for a blind man on a highway, or a sleepwalker on the roof, who always safely returns to his bed, never remembering his nighttime adventures.

My friends, the roundworms

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.

Late-night conversations in bed with the brains

It was nippy in our dorm; even a couple of anatomy textbooks froze to the windowsill. But we warmed up with hot stories about our non-existent sexual exploits. We: Dimka, Sergei, Misha, and I – four cadets at the S.M. Kirov Military Medical Academy. Studying after lights out was forbidden, but we had another retake of the brain anatomy exam in the morning. We borrowed a brined brain, brought it to our dorm, and – carefully placing the brain atop a plastic bag as it oozed brine and left yellowish spots on the sheets – opened the anatomical atlas and took terms pointing at the brain and the atlas. The brain was passed around as needed. One of us read while half-hugging the brain to swiftly cover it with a blanket and drop the atlas on the floor in case someone came in, another quietly muttered the Latin names of all kinds of convolutions, lobes, and fossae. Someone dozed while waiting their turn, and Seryoga talked about his sexual conquests in his father’s garage. He had a well-organized underworld there, with friends, girls, sex, drinking, and complete revelry – as it always is in a boy’s fantasy.

Images of girls mixed with Latin names, the stench of corpse brains – with body odor. There was also a strong smell of vodka and chokeberry jam. Dimka bought a small one, and I brought some jam from home. Our dorm’s jam was no less than legendary. Every day we had it with our breakfast tea, which was not forbidden – keeping the jam in a military school dorm was. But our Misha was a marathon runner: he ran all the time. That’s why his nickname was Jerboa, and maybe because he was so small, he probably survived on potatoes back in the village where he grew up. So, in the morning, during mandatory exercise, he filled a small plastic bag with jam which he poured from a jar hidden in a large crack in the fence of one of the clinics while warmed up and slept on a hot radiator inside a nearby entranceway. At 6:40 in the morning, we were kicked out into the street, and no one controlled us there: foremen and sergeants usually slept until breakfast, so we had to return by 7:20 sharp. Jerboa loaded the jam, and at the dorm entrance, where we were thoroughly searched by foreman Shadrin, he stuffed the plastic bag into his cap. Every day Shadrin performed a whole shakedown and could not find the jam. But he never inspected Jerboa. Misha was a good cadet, and his sweaty hat did not arouse a desire to look for jam inside it. So, the air is thick with testosterone, sweat, vodka, jam, rotting flesh, erotica, Latin… And then we distinctly hear course foreman Shadrin stomping towards our dorm.

Our door was the first down the hallway, directly opposite the duty officer locker and the office of the head of the course, Pinochet, or Captain Olshansky. This proximity developed a lightning-fast reaction in us. Once, Grisha Litvak – an outstanding, talented, and most respected friend – brought a three-liter jar of beer into our dorm. The sergeants did not bother him because he helped them with homework, so he could smuggle beer into the dorm unnoticed. But the head of the course was another matter, a vile specimen, a notorious evil monster with slicked-back hair and square glasses for which – as well as for his cruelty – he was nicknamed Pinochet. So, we are standing around the beer on the table, drooling, and suddenly the cadet on duty yells, «Course, at attention!» The table is three steps from our door, and this bastard, the head of the course, liked to dive into one of the nearest dorms to catch the cadets by surprise. Two wide steps as if on skis, and he opens our door… Grisha – a genius move – grabs a boiler, which was also forbidden, but not as criminal as beer, sticks it into the outlet, and throws it into the beer. Olshansky: «Pospelov, tea again?! Extra duty!»

Me: «Sir, yes, sir!»

Why me? Because I am the head of the room, appointed by Pinochet out of revenge so that all the problems in the room were only mine: poorly made beds, where one could see wrinkles and dust particles under a microscope, and all that. It’s just that sometimes my grandfather, the general, came to visit me and ordered the captain to let me go, me, a cadet, Pinochet’s property, his meat, his slave, and Olshansky had to let me go, gnashing his teeth, twitching his shoulders, squeezing his lips until they were blue. And then he took revenge in various petty ways.

But most of all, he liked to single me out while we were standing in formation, affectionately saying, «Cadet Pospelov, three steps forward! … Cadet, do you dry hay in your room?»

I once collected some Saint John’s wort when our course went to a potato harvest.

Or, «Who saw cadet Pospelov’s bones?»

This was when we took a bag of skull bones from the anatomy class, and they disappeared from our room. We had to do extra duty for this. It must have been someone from our course or maybe Pinochet himself.

By the way, the same brain that we are studying here while Shadrin is slowly creeping towards our room, I later put on the top shelf between some hats, it got moldy, and yes, I forgot to return it to the anatomy class.

As usual, «Cadet Pospelov, three steps forward!»

A saccharine smile plastered over Olshansky’s maniacal square face.

«Pospelov, are you aware that your brain is moldy?»

The course howls entirely out of order. So, the foreman creeps closer to our door – he must have noticed our light while smoking outside – abruptly grabs and opens the door handle. At this exact moment, our atlases fall to the floor, we feign innocent snoring, and the brain is safely covered with my blanket. The lights are off! We aren’t stupid: you have to press down the handle to open the door, there’s a thread tied to the handle, which ends with a piece of tape attached to the light switch. Snap – and it’s dark. Shadrin, without turning on the light, «Explain the mess!»

«Huh? What, where, well, it’s, sir foreman, sir, we, we were revising anatomy before lights out».

«Clean this up!»

He closes the door. Silence. I realize that he is standing outside the door, listening. Dimka is choking down laughter, exhales, and rather loudly comments, «Fucking Pinkerton!»

Foreman grunts outside the door and leaves. We didn’t pass the exam the next day – the best passed it on their fifth attempt, and the record was eighteen. At least we still remember those Latin names some 40 years later. To what end, I do not know.

Loonies from my course: kleptomaniac, schizophrenic, stupid.

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.

Love poetry and vexation of spirit. Girl number 1. Sveta.

Sad thoughts came and went, but my whole consciousness was engulfed in the flames of love. It was impossible to live without love. Love was necessary. And a necessity always finds a way to materialize sooner or later. From lack of freedom, my soul quietly dried up like a pair of socks left by the fire, and love – while providing some distraction – accelerated the process, so by the second year of service, my soul looked like fish jerky. A human in love is like a chicken with its head cut off – it still runs, but, in essence, it has already died. And a seventeen-year-old cadet in love inside a military incubator is a mad and ridiculous creature. Why I decided that I was in love, I don’t know. I just did. Maybe because Sveta – my classmate, no, I’d known her since kindergarten – was the only girl who did not succumb to my innocent proposals to examine and touch each other’s private parts. All the other girls in my kindergarten group quickly agreed to this harmless game. Sveta was an angel, both because of her purity and because she sang in an angelic voice while playing her guitar.

Moonlit panorama,

Night as clear as day.

Sleep, my sweet Svetlana,

Sleep the night away.

Little nose is nestled

In the pillow soft;

Stars are just like freckles

Shining from aloft.

She did have the prettiest little nose, although freckleless. I thought about her at school, I thought about her while fishing, during the exams, dreamily resting my cheek on my hand, thought about her at the academy while standing in formation, thought about her when falling asleep and waking up. The only moments I did not think about her was whenever our room was engaged in group masturbation. I couldn’t picture someone as pure as her during this enjoyable yet shameful activity. I must say, it turns out that I did not think about Sveta quite often. At any rate, my face towel became rigid like a tin sheet in a single week… I visited her at the edge of Kupchino; swamps and lakes overgrown with reeds started right behind her house. She sat at the table studying for her music school entrance exams, and I sat on the couch where she slept. Knowing this, I was close to losing consciousness: here, she lies undressed, resting her beautiful head on the pillow, touching the sheets with her bare legs… and I touch the same couch with my buttocks.

I knew I looked stupid just sitting there. Coming all this way to sit still for hours. So I took her big toy dog to comb it instead of staying motionless. I came to see Sveta five times, and I combed the unfortunate dog each time. It became manicured like a lawn in front of a Scottish castle. Sveta was already giving me funny looks, and I understood that it was a little bizarre to sit and comb the dog like that, especially since it was already so smooth that it could win the world championship for the smoothest toy dog hairstyle! To be honest, I didn’t just look at Sveta. Sometimes I hugged her. Yes, I hugged Sveta, but not really her, but rather, a sleeping bag. Once at school, or not even at school, but in the summer, at a pioneer camp, we harvested carrots for a whole month. When the shift ended, I asked her to lend me her sleeping bag. I said there weren’t enough sleeping bags to go fishing with the boys and that we needed just one. I, in fact, came up with all of this to at least talk with her coherently about something. So we talked, and she gave me her sleeping bag. But when I brought it home, I, of course, could not resist hugging and sniffing this sleeping bag. And maybe imagining Sveta in its place a little bit. The sleeping bag smelled of Sveta. Only its middle part had an unpleasant odor, but I achingly sniffed that part and was not at all angry with my love for smelling like that.