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right place for it. You took a mop and started knocking it at the half-dried laundry hung over the rope. My mother yelled at you and darkened in the face, but you already were too big to lose your footing, and only the mop was snatched from your hands.

It was time to start for the streetcar terminal, Lenochka volunteered to take you there on the trunk of her bicycle. Eera agreed though I was against the idea. My misgivings increased when I noticed the glances exchanged by my mother and Lenochka. The most frightening about it was that they did not look at each other, but into the ground at each other's feet, while their averted eyes kept a mute dialogue:

"Sure?"

"Yes, do it!"

I do not invent, neither distort reality by wacky fantasies, which is proved by what followed the unspoken dialogue overheard by me with I don't know what.

You left, sitting on the trunk behind Lenochka. Yet, Eera and my mother were ping-ponging empty clues for one minute more, before we left going out into the street. With the bags in my hands, I hurried along leaving Eera behind.

There stayed about a hundred meters to the street corner, when I knew that I was right being so hasty because I heard your shrill scream. You stood by the fence and kept screaming. Lenochka, holding her bicycle, tried to persuade you not to cry, but you did not listen to her and just screamed on and on. The rusty iron pipe stuck up from under the ground in between you 2. The only iron pipe in the half-kilometer leg between 13 Decemberists and Streetcar 3 terminal… Everything fell into place, I got it all. Very calmly, so as not to show that I was aware, I asked Lenochka to go home, no need to see us off any farther, no, thanks.

Then Eera also came up and tried to comfort you, but you cried while walking on to the terminal because of such a big bump on your forehead… We rode by the streetcar in silence, Eera was blankly looking out the window. You sullenly sat in her lap, and I in the opposite seat, feeling crushed. How to live in a world where a grandmother blesses her granddaughter to kill another granddaughter of hers – this beautiful kid with the copper 5-kopeck coin pressed by her mother to her forehead for the bump to dissolve?. Eera was silent on the train too, and I never attempted at sharing what shouldn't be shared…

(…now Lenochka has 2 children, beautiful daughters.

You and she are strangers to each other, and no one of you remembers anything of all that, especially that pipe thanks to the mind’s conventional blessing—forgetfulness

My mother, eventually, became a witness of Jehovah amassing piles of glossy eye-candy booklets for the saved or those who want to get saved. And it's only I am to blame for all what happened then but, upon my word of honor, in that recreation camp I wouldn't stand Lenochka on my stomach – she was already 9 years old…)

~ ~ ~

When I joined our team after my vacation, the pavement before the 50-apartment block was cut with a transverse trench for the tie-in to the main communications under the road on Peace Avenue. However, the carpenters of SMP-615 assembled a robust lumber bridge, wide and secure, with beam railings for the convenience of pedestrians.

I was at the trench bottom, digging, when I saw Beltyukov on the bridge. He strolled up there dressed in a dapper colonial style. I did not want to attract his attention, but he recognized me from above even in my spetzovka and helmet, stopped on the bridge to greet me and introduced to his mother, a lady in an aggressive neckline.

Then they went along. He was nervous and she guarding him way too closely, so that I understood the roots of his bitter resentment at the matriarchy when under the influence of insulin. And I also thought that our meeting in Romny was not his final stay in a mental hospital, that they wouldn’t let him run loose for long because he was wandering up there, defenseless, controlled by so exacting mommy which would imminently bring about the next relapse. Learn from me, sonny! See? I'm below, in the trench, with my helmet on, no SOB of a paramedic buster would ever reach me here. As for my stay in the madhouse, I went there of my free will and got fed up to the ears, when they were making me wiser thru my busted ass…

Accepting another of my translations, Zhomnir, in return, handed me a thick hardback volume. It was a monograph about schizophrenia which he bought when his daughter had problems with it before she got married. Monograph means a collection of articles by different authors concerning some mutual subject. I thoroughly studied the friendly shared volume; after all, that was not boiled sausage with admixed charms to win my love.

(…in their articles, the contributing authors considered diverse aspects of the same subject from different standpoints, each one according to their respective specializations. Thus, a chemically trained writer presents the listing of biochemical blood components in a number of notorious schizophrenics at the peak of their spiritual activity compared to the periods of relative calm in the same persons. Alas, no exacerbation of amino acids level in leukocytes was detected.

Another contributor scrupulously measures anything which turns up to their measuring devices, which data showed equally indefinite results.

The third one just takes a seat next to the bed with a fixed up patient and, while the aberrating fictionalist drives him a fool, he writes down some tremendously fabulous stuff. Like, he was boarding his trolley 47 awfully careful not to touch anyone and all the same there suddenly was a sand desert all around and he had just a tattered cloth round his loins, as anyone else in the pack of similarly skinny, naked, and sunburned fellers, when a band of horsemen galloped from behind a dune and started to massacre the unarmed fugitives sticking them by spears…

Yet, on the whole, it's quite a useful monograph because the authors, despite the fact of their being representatives of the decaying West, had the courage of real scientists to honestly put their hands up and acknowledge, "Okay! I do not fucking know what the fuck is this fucking schizophrenia about!"

"Try to approach her tenderly,

Look deeply in her eyes,

You'll find the treasure you have never seen!.."

Presently, despite the progress in the methods of modern research, all the finds by this particular field of science is just that nicely scientific term – "schizophrenia", everything else is wrapped in the dense mist of uncertainty.

The main trump ace, the touchstone and litmus test, provided by the science, are "the voices" which you meet in any textbook on the psychiatry. If you hear some voices and there is not a living soul around, then you are a schizophrenic. But if them those unsubstantiated voices tell you, "Save France!" then you're the hero Saint – Joan of Arc.

The only weak point in the said monograph is absence of an expert in theology. Suffice it to recall St. Inez, whose body in a jiffy got covered with long fur, so that the rapists were stripped of any chance of breaking her hirsute chastity…

They are enjoying cakes and ale in their picnic in the bed of roses, those specialists in the trade whose luminaries can't see the misty core of what they are, actually, about. To concoct a diagnosis is easier than making a fig. Pour half a glass raw schizophrenia, spice it with a pinch of double-barreled adjectives, shake the ingredients…Enjoy! "Fur-coat form of schizophrenia", the favorite drink of St. Inez!

Tamara at the fourth kilometer on the Chernigov outskirts was not in the know of all of my exploits. For the burned down plantation of cannabis, I could be easily stamped with "autodafic form of schizophrenia aggravated by Torquemada complex" to commemorate that absolutely normal inquisitor who regularly sent packs of heretics to the stake.

As for the term itself, they used (as is the tradition in producing scientific nomenclature) the words from old Greek which, when putting ancient roots together, reads "cracked mind". And now – lo! – "The mind cracked in the form of a fur coat."

So, who of us is schizophrenic after all?!. Do they think that if they don the white smocks, and trumpet a trump from the terminology they don't know a damn thing in, I will trust them more than I trusted the Ichnya sorcerer in his khaki shirt and mambo jumbo about the moon "quarters"?

Oh, my dear aesculapius-kindergarten kids! Mind you, I am from Konotop. My classmate Volodya Sherudillo could casually give out: "I cannot ignore the data of pseudo-quasi-illusions to avoid the ultimate diffusion of my transcommunicability skills."

After the eighth grade, he went to "the seminary", aka GPTU-4, to become a turner, otherwise, by now he would be Head of the Academy of Sciences, and you would be sitting in the ante-room to his office, waiting in nervous jitters if he would admit you, the petty CEC khannoriks.

In short, while no one knows where schizophrenia comes from and where goes to, and how much is her fee for a visit, you could just as well go and f-f..er..fumble yourself against something else. I mean it, and shove all the hep-talk-blah-blah up you know where, the Settlement fellas can share a more detailed route to those in doubt…

That is to say, get along, sweethearts, keep moving…)

the most final
concluding work

:from the personal
site
of
a graphomaniac

~ ~ ~