Страница 22 из 34
About these same stores need to be told separately – so much it was colorful establishments. I do not remember if I've said this before, but I'll probably repeat: in Moscow, our garages are located in separate blocks, and so when you go by subway or train, you can seethe vast quarters of garages. These areas are in the outskirts, usually near the railway, and therefore there is always full of all dark personalities. Even in Soviet times in such garages were engaged in all sorts of not quite legal things, and during my youth, Antonina Bozhenko began to open there «conspiratorial stores».
I remember how I visited one of these stores, so I can somehow describe his interior and range: an ordinary garage, along which there were racks with bottles of all sorts of rubbish, like the same rum «Mummy». There you could see «English whiskey of fusel oils», which was an incredibly foul-smelling liquid of turbid brown color, from one smell of which any normal person started vomiting. Still there was sold «People's Cognac», which they did: they took a whole vat of alcohol, poured into it oak leaves, bark, acorns, sawdust, and then waited about a week, after which the resulting liquid was bottled. There in general a lot of everything was sold: smoking mixtures, cigarettes,cigars, hemp, hashish, opium. Our conspiratorial shops were a real paradise for a lover of intoxication, and so many of our students immediately went straight to these shops, where they bought everything they liked. In conspiratorial stores one could buy only goods produced by the efforts of Tony's slaves, and therefore the assortment was, although not very large, but still acceptable for unpretentious Russian schoolchildren, aiming to swell after school. Since it was very difficult for a schoolboy to buy anything alcoholic in an ordinary store, our brothers preferred to go to Antonina for a drink. As a result of the almost complete monopoly on the sale of alcohol to schoolchildren, conspiratorial shops began to raise prices that became so great that the unfortunate schoolboy had to get into debts that he could not repay, thus falling into slavery. In a word, conspiratorial shops bred debtors, and debtors are almost slaves, but they themselves do not yet know about it.
The goods for secret stores were produced separately, in various places, but mostly in dachas, which belonged to the parents of tonic slaves. The dacha is in general a very strange Russian phenomenon, not very understandable to Europeans, and therefore I willexplain its meaning a little. This is a full-fledged country house with a plot that is kept by people permanently living in the city, but in summer and on weekends they leave it for the benefit of the village. On this countryside site, the townspeople usually break gardens, work long hours all summer, and return to the city in the autumn. It was in the suburban areas and we had organized the production of a variety of goods sold in the safe shops of the city. In a word, I'll tell you more about this from the position of one of my friends, Maxim Smirnov, who was engaged in the production of all kinds of products from ca
He told me this: «Once. In June it was. I sleep in bed after drinking. I sleep, I sleep. Then someone knocking at the window. I open it. There Misha Morozov. He said to me: «Get up, lazy freak! You're lying on your bed, like a crook. Come on, lift your fat ass and start working, lazy nigga!». The clock was four in the morning. I got up, put on my pants, went out into the yard. There stood Misha Morozov with sprouts. The seedlings of ca
Chapter seventeen.
School of aesthetic obesity.
Earlier, I had already promised to tell you about the aesthetization of obesity in our school, hitherto not entirely dedicated to this topic, but now having selected a whole chapter for it, although in fact it will be given far more space here. I have to give so much space to this topic, speaking about it in almost every chapter, though only because in our school it had a truly colossal significance for our entire public and private life.
In my era, this fashionable current densely populated in the minds of young people throughout the country, gradually grabbing more and more new supporters, who went there more actively. In the previous chapters I mentioned boys and girls who grew fat without special intentions, some of whom were trying to lose weight, as well as those who were involved in sports, and therefore did not belong to this category. In my time, however, the type of the schoolboy-athlete more and more retreats into the past, disappearing in the darkness of the old epoch, becoming an anachronism incomprehensible to contemporaries, a «guest from the Soviet past».
As the school load grew more and more every year, reaching the time when I was in the sixth grade, to a record eight or nine hours a day, burying myself in the ceiling of the maximum working day of teachers, which should be added to the multiplication of school homework, the sport did not have any strength left. The forces also took away the constant examinations introduced by the government to test our knowledge that the sword of Damocles was hanging over us, constantly recalling the need to learn the wisdom of life for the glory of the government and the president. I perfectly understand that these exams, introduced in the fourth, ninth and eleventh grades, forced us to work better than we could work without them, and therefore were a good means of combating the laziness of the students while at the same time daring them away from the sport.