The Exchange Student

He spoke with such excitement, that I thought that he could easily conduct such experiments on people.

Everyone from my neighborhood knew that he had mental disorders because of the constant scandals between his parents. That’s why everybody tried to be more polite and delicate with him, we tried not to annoy him. Looking at his appearance, he seemed to be a normal teenager. He wore glasses and looked like a smart person. But it was only his appearance. From the inside he was totally different. When he was eighteen years old, he was sentenced to 6 years in prison! I still don’t understand why he got to prison, but I think, definitely not because of experiments on cats, there must be something more than cats, something serious.

The Phantom

If you go inside of any house entrance in my neighborhood, you can immediately feel the strong smell of different food that comes from flats, especially, when someone cooks fish. Such smell is much stronger than other ones. In each stairwell there is a garbage chute, which is often clogged up and the stench spread all over the floors. Every single day, when I got back home, I could see dirty walls and broken windows. Barely working elevators made horrible sounds, it was impossible to use them because of the awful smell of dog’s urine. Almost all the buttons were burned and you had to use some force to push the button to the floor you needed.

The elevators in these houses got stuck quite often and I was once in a situation like that. I had to sit for three hours in the cab without any light until the lift operator came and opened the doors. If the elevator was out of order, you had to walk the stairs. Going upstairs, you immediately heard a crunchy sound of seed shells being broken under your feet. A large number of smoked cigarettes and beer bottles under the stairs didn’t surprise anyone. Occasionally, some tenants got tired of this garbage and cleaned the whole staircase. There was twice much dirt in the stairs when winter came. In many entrances there was no glass in the windows and the temperature was pretty much the same as in the street, -30 degrees Celsius or even lower. But in some of the stairwells all the windows were saved. In such staircases it was much warmer than in the others, but there was twice as much trash as in the cold ones, because when winter came, all the young people went inside of the warm buildings. We sat on the stairs between the first and the second floors, because the heating radiators were there. We drank beer and smoked there. When we were smoking, the floors got immediately covered in a fog of tobacco smoke. The tenants, entering the house and knowing that the first and the second floors were filled with young people smoking and drinking, covered their mouth with scarves and mittens and waited impatiently for the elevator, in which it was also hard to breathe.

It was always dark in the staircase of my building. When I was ten years old, I went for a walk and came home late quite often, when it was already dark. I was always scared to go into the building. It was too dark and the staircase reminded me of an ominous cave. In winter, the entrance door was always covered in snow, and clouds of steam were pouring out of the building to the street. I didn’t know what would happen to me on my way to the fourth floor where I lived.

I always waited for someone who would accompany me to my apartment. But sometimes no one appeared and I had to go there myself. With my heart beating fast, I jumped into this cloud and ran up to the fourth floor as fast as I could. I was really scared, because at the age of ten, I knew that there were people who caught children in the dark hallways and kidnapped them, then rape them or sell into slavery.

But there was one scary thing than every other: there was a drug addict, who lived directly opposite our door.

I was afraid of him, but I was always polite to him said hello, “Hi, Yasha, how are you?”

He barely moved his lips, pronouncing, “H-e-ll-o…”

His eyes were like glass and it was scary to me than ever. In 20—30 seconds my mother opened the door and I quickly ran inside, locking all the door locks.

The Funeral March

There was a tradition in our neighborhood. When someone died, the funeral began with the bringing of the coffin in the staircase, where the dead person lived. His family gathered around the coffin and mourned the loss of him. I saw this ceremony every single time when somebody died.

The invited musicians always played the funeral march. I could see all this from my window. It was hard for me to see the dead and the weeping people near the coffin. When his relatives and friends went away to the cemetery, they always left a lot of flowers lying in the yard. Those flowers lay for weeks in our neighborhood roads. They didn’t allow everyone to forget the funerals of people, who most of the tenants didn’t know. I still can’t understand why the relatives of the deceased could not start and finish the funerals in special places in the cemetery. But this tradition was accepted in our society.

Icy Roads

Siberia is known for its severe winters and every single year there is a lot of snow on the roads. At that time there were pretty much no services to clean it, so eventually all this snow turned into ice. All the guys from my neighborhood took that opportunity to go sledding.

We often raced on our sleds with each other, not being afraid that there was a risk of being hit by a car. The main thing was to reach the finish line first at the end of road, which was in the form of a long ice hill. When I was 10, I got a cool sled, which was really fast and I won the races quite often. Before the start of our race, we waited until there would be no cars on the road. We sped up our sleds, jumped on them and flew on the road. Sometimes there were cars that appeared on our way. So, we had to react quickly and turn away from cars to avoid getting hit. After such dangerous and cold competitions my hands and feet were totally frozen. My eyes often got stuck together because of the ice on my eyelashes. On my returning home, my arms and legs began to warm up causing pain and tears. It was a wonderful time of the year, but it was insanely cold.

The Hairdresser

I decided to have my hair cut. I took my father’s car and drove to the barber shop nearby. The hairdresser who invited me to the chair was very tall and was always smiling. He put an apron on me and asked what kind of haircut I wanted. I said that I didn’t want a short haircut. The barber, shaking his head said, “Okay.” Could you please wait a minute? I’ll be back shortly”.

I thought to myself, “Well, I can wait for a minute, there is no problem.” The barber went somewhere. I waited for five minutes. Then another five minutes passed, and I started thinking, “It’s Okay, maybe the guy is sick.” Even fifteen minutes later my hairdresser did not show up.

So, here I was, sitting on the chair with an apron tied around my neck. I continued waiting for my barber, looking at myself in the mirror like a complete idiot. Half an hour had already passed when I began to get angry. I asked myself. “Maybe it’s a TV joke and I am being taped on a candid camera that had been put directly in the mirror, which I look at for thirty minutes. Maybe they were checking my patience, watching and laughing at me behind the door with that hairdresser?” But, finally, my hairdresser got back. I looked at him and said, “Oh, you’re quick!”

And he asked me quietly, “What kind of haircut would you like?”

I answered, “Oh, you have already forgotten what kind of haircut I want after you hung out somewhere for 30 minutes, haven’t you?”

He did not respond to my rudeness, as if he had not gone out. I immediately noticed that his movements were not adequate. His eyes were big and shiny. So, I thought that he was drunk, although I did not smell the alcohol.

The barber took the electric cutting machine and started trying to plug it in. It was unforgettably spectacular. His moves were really funny and, as I learned later, all that time he spent outside he was taking drugs! After about a minute he finally managed to plug the machine in. His coordination was horrible and, consequently, he almost entirely shaved the right side of my head.

After that, I exploded with anger. I stood up, pulled off the apron and screamed on every single person in that barber shop and went away smashing the door behind me. I got into the car with my half cut head and went to a different hairdresser’s.

When I walked into the new salon, all the girls looked at me and laughed loud, then asked, “Oh, my god?! Who ate the half of your hair?”

I told them what had just happened to me. They laughed and listened to my story till the very end. They felt sorry for me and fixed my haircut. While they were working, they told me that the guy who wanted to shave me was a drug addict and that the barber shop where he worked, belonged to his mother.

The School

My school was quite usual. Some people called it “The Prison” or the “Jail”. There were criminal leaders all over the school and we lived by criminal rules. Even some schoolboys were friends with criminals and ex-prisoners. Because of my illness, I missed a year of school. So, I had lessons at home. Then, when I came back to school, I got into correctional class for weak students. That year was the most vivid and unforgettable for me. There were bullies, smokers, drunkards in my new class. I can remember one of my Physics classes. That day we had a new physics teacher, who was 70 years old. She could difficulty seeing and hearing. I was sitting in the middle of the class, and at the back of the class I could see the guys smoking something, apparently it was marijuana. They slightly opened the window, crawled under the desk and started smoking the cigarette. The whole class realized what was going on there except for our new teacher. At the end of the lesson she asked, “Who was playing with matches the whole lesson?”

The bell rang and our “stars” got out of the class laughing a lot.

One day there was a new student in our class. His name was Kostya. Unfortunately, our “stars” hated him from the very first minute. Every day they beat Kostya so much, that sometimes he could not even get up on his feet and he was always late for lessons. I was very sorry for Kostya, but I couldn’t do anything to help him.

Soon, Kostya couldn’t bear such beatings he called his dad for help.

They were standing at the main entrance of our school. Kostya’s father wanted to give a lesson to my classmates, who had beaten his son. When the bell rang, our class went out of the school. I was behind everyone, shaking hands and saying goodbye to classmates. At the main entrance, I noticed Kostya and his father saying bad words to our guys. The classmates didn’t like it and reacted very quickly. They came down to Kostya’s father and started beating him. When he fell down, they turned their attention to Kostya and beat him up too. Seeing that the father and the son were lying on the ground, they stopped kicking them and went home.

All that happened right in front of the windows of the principal’s office. The very next day, Kostya took the documents and moved to a different school, and I never saw him again.

Our teachers were not very kind either. It was Geography, and the teacher got angry at the student, who did not know something; she came up to him and hit his head with a wooden school pointer, so that it turned into chips. He stood up, yelled at the teacher and smashed the door behind him. We gave him a nickname “The Priest”. I remember that he loved eclairs.

One day we were sitting at class, and the teacher went to have lunch. The Priest made a bet that he would break the desk with his head. If he won, he would get two eclairs. Everybody, who was in the class, stopped and watched the show. The first hit on the desk did not give the wanted result. The second one was a little more powerful and the desk cracked slightly. The third hit was the most powerful and he finally broke that desk and won his bet. Everyone applauded him. They shouted.

“Hey Priest! You’re the desk breaker! Good for you!”

Three minutes later the teacher came back, and immediately paid attention to the bruises on the priest’s forehead and then to the broken desk. She asked, “What happened?”

The whole class was silent, some people were giggling. The Priest thought for a little bit and replied,

“I was running and accidentally hit the door in the cafeteria!”

“And how many times did you hit the door?”

Everybody started laughing.

“Okay, now what happened to your desk?”

“That had been broken before we got to class!”

Everybody started nodding to convince the teacher that the desk had already been broken.

“You’re savages!” the teacher concluded.

It was impossible to go to school toilet. There were clouds of tobacco smoke. Because it was winter, the students did not want to run outside to smoke in -30C. So, everybody smoked in school toilets.

The School Break

I was a first-grader when that happened. The kids were playing catchup. I was sitting on a branch and saw my friend Sergey run into another boy’s head. The hit was really bad and Sergey’s tooth got stuck in the forehead of the other boy. They both fell and started crying. The teachers called the ambulance.