Simple Truths of Life - стр. 5
In my preschool years, I did not go to kindergarten and often spent time in the village with friends. I really enjoyed being there. Clean air, greenery, nature – everything gave me joy in my carefree childhood. For a long time, I was the youngest in our company. While my friends one by one started going to school, I continued to stay in the village with my mother for the warm autumn months, so that later my father would take us to Moscow for the winter.
In Moscow, I lived with my mother in a small one-room apartment. Although there was a time when we lived with my father in his two-room apartment. But then Mom found photographs in his closet where my father was with another woman. Her hair was dyed red and, as we learned later, her name was Marina…
My parents had a big argument, and my mother and I never visited my father for a long stay at his place again.
At the age of seven, I went to study at school No. 376, which is located next to my house on Khalturinskaya Street. I sat at the first desk in front of a young beautiful teacher who once suddenly told me to go down from the clouds, and then: “Wake up and sing!” – Did I dream in class that day? My desk mate was B.
In the first grade, everything was fine – or I thought so. The only thing I remember is how every time I cheerfully answered at the blackboard in front of the whole class, one guy sitting at his desk in the back rows always clearly stuck his head out to look at me. And I thought – why?
On the summer holidays of that year, I got my answer. About when I was six years old, my parents brought me to a doctor who studied and treated stuttering. I was prescribed some medications that I had to drink with water in slow sips. In my eyes at that time, it all did not seem negative. Visiting a doctor, taking medications – it was just another new experience in my childhood life. And in those summer holidays, I finally understood what stuttering had in store for me.
A and C were constantly teasing me because of my speech. They gave me a nickname, and for a long time I could not understand its connection with me. Did I look unusual? It did not seem to be so – many people called me beautiful in my childhood and youth. They did not answer my question – “What’s that got to do with me?”, and I received the answer only many years after…
Around the same early years of my life, I sometimes began to fantasize before going to bed. I clearly remember how I once fantasized about death. The fantasy took place in the village, and, I think, that fantasy arose because I subconsciously understood that my life was starting to go not the same way I would like it to go. Of course, I, like many others, did not want to be the object of ridicule, even though only a few people projected this negativity on me.