Бесплатный фрагмент - Moscow, the 80s

Never talk to foreigners!

Oh, my eighties, their beginning just happened in my last school years, and as you know, it is the time when all normal schoolchildren are required to take exams…

The words «normal schoolchild» obviously didn’t apply to me, and if it did, it’s at its minimum, because then there was the only one thing that I could not accept and hated with all my honest childish soul — they were the exams.

My allergy to school exams remained a mystery to me and all my family. No one, including me, could understand why I did not accept them so acutely. After all, I studied just very well. Although I had never been an excellent pupil, I didn’t have triples, except Chemistry.

However, that was a fact. I didn’t accept examinations at school, and therefore it was absolutely necessary for me to invent something in order to protect myself for one hundred percent from the participation in that process.

The only option available to me at that time for official medical suspension from the exams was the Central Clinical Hospital. The Kremlin Clinical Hospital, which had already repeatedly saved me from all sorts of city control works and other things and activities at school that were inconvenient for me.

I often stayed there, I knew by heart the contents of the medical encyclopedia and of a whole mountain of medical guides and textbooks, because in my childhood I had always wanted to become a doctor, but my hopes for that were completely destroyed by Chemistry which I I hated.

I wanted to become a doctor in order to cure my mum who was seriously ill throughout all my childhood — I dreamed of graduating from a medical institute and inventing a medicine for her illness, and I was constantly looking for a way to help her in the encyclopedia and medical reference books.

My medical knowledge always helped me in the Central Clinical Hospital — I stayed there as long as I wanted it to, or as long as my circumstances required. In the last school years, in Years 8 and 10, I managed to stay here for as long as I needed to either «pass» those exams, or bring a medical report of the corresponding nature to school.

Life in the Central Clinical Hospital was in full swing, here I always met interesting acquaintances and new friends. The only person who suffered a little from my staying here was my dad. And it happened due to the fact that in the hospital I got acquainted exclusively with foreigners, who were abundant there.

After my staying in the Central Clinical Hospital, my dad was usually called to the Special Department of the Council of Ministers of the USSR because of my contacts with a new group of foreigners.

As I remember now, the last time the Special Department did not like my friendship with the family of Luis Corvalan (the Secretary of the Communist Party of Chile).