Reluctantly, Elena Nikolaevna gave Vadim to an orphanage. The boy didnt cry. He was young, but he knew exactly what was going on. He understood that he was seeing his mother and sister for the last time and said goodbye properly, without yawning and shouts of indignation. Vadim understood that without him, Anya would be able to get enough food and warmth from her mother, but he would somehow cope on his own.
It was raining fine that day, and Elena Nikolaevna had no face. She gives her blood, her son to an unfamiliar place. Then orphanages were poorly funded, and it was great luck to live under a good roof and eat soup with bread and meat.
A year passed, and Vadim got used to his situation. He did not stop thinking about his family and often poured those unshed tears into his pillow, he was madly homesick for his father. The orphanage was not poor and not rich, often the boys were driven to work in the fields or to repair holes in the fence and roof. So they gained experience in construction and not only.
The building was brick with an iron roof, these plates were rusty and some had holes. The walls were covered with charcoal, there were not only inscriptions, but also childrens drawings that no one erased. The perimeter was surrounded by a fence, which was painted once a year. There was a garden where children could play and eat the fruits of apple trees.
The situation inside was quite good. Because of the l-shaped shape of the building, a lot of children who lost their parents could be placed there. There was a kitchen, a common dining room, common rooms for sleeping, and the playground was on the street, as our reader remembers. The teachers had their own room, there was a samovar and an old radio.
Vadim continued to go to school, but to another one. The boy dreamed of becoming a fisherman and catching the best fish and selling it. He talked about this to his friends in the common room, and they talked for a long time about which fish is more expensive. The teachers only quietly laughed at him, because now you cant get normal money in this profession. Sometimes they spoke directly to Vadim, saying that he would be an excellent teacher of the Russian language, because he had good grades in this subject. The boy then did not really understand the difference in professions, despite the mature outlook on life.
Vadim was respected in their orphanage, there were many children who asked him for help with Russian. Of course, he helped them just like that, because he appreciated their friendship, and he didnt know how to take something in return yet.
In his spare time, Vadim did various things like climbing trees and helping the cook in the kitchen. The cook was an extremely pleasant person to communicate with. He was bearded and spoke with a funny accent, only then the boy at an already mature age will understand that he was talking to a Kazakh man. His name was Davlet, and he was a former cook and sailed in very distant lands. A cook is a position on a ship, this man cooked food for the whole crew, but when necessary, he fought on cables, boarded ships and received his share in robberies on various merchant ships. It seems that such people were called pirates and it was safe to say that Davlet looked like him.
He was scarred and healthy, but gray-haired and smelled of alcohol all the time. He talked a lot about his adventures and instilled in the boy a passion for reading adventure books, headed by a story about sailors, pirates and treasures.
Vadim changed his mind about the profession and decided that he would become a sailor and sail, blown by a cold breeze and feel a salty taste on his lips all the time.
At school, he had problems with the exact sciences, such as mathematics and drawing. With the rest, he more or less coped. And it just so happened that he got into a class where there were children with their parents, and Vadim became a frequent object of ridicule and bullying. The boy was calm and quiet during his school years, but could have rebuffed even three bullies in the classroom. He just didnt want to have problems with the director, with their parents, and to be ambushed after school by grown-up guys who decided to avenge younger friends or brothers. Therefore, he came with bruises, but with a smile on his face, because the day was still interesting.
Vadim was also good at telling stories when he and his friends went to the forest to burn sticks and fry sausages, which they hid in the pockets of shorts or pants to carry past adults. The boy told stories about pirates and their adventures.
In the summer, when the forest bloomed with its greenery, when the river finally froze and the ice melted, the boys went fishing and swimming. The stream there was not so strong and there were a lot of fish, Vadim caught them more than once with his bare hands or accidentally stepped on the fry while he was getting out of the water.
The boy didnt need anything and he grew up like an ordinary child, but some emptiness and resentment towards his mother still remained. Vadim did not try to find her or escape from the orphanage, no one adopted him. He saw his future without his mother and sister, but he still loved and missed them, they sometimes dream of him in a dream, in them he imagines a house, father, mother and sister with smiles from ear to ear, and a vegetable garden and fragrant trees with grass and flowers bloom around.
The orphanage was also surrounded by greenery, but not as lush as at home, it was sparse and yellowish, and the trees grew far away in the forest a kilometer away. Firs, oaks, and birches grew there. The boys made swords out of their sticks and played knights or pirates.
Such was Vadims childhood and youth. But soon his life will change unexpectedly and irrevocably
Chapter two. Teacher
At the age of twenty-two, Vadim was well built and had some popularity. But nevertheless, he did not allow himself to look at anyone. It was like a mantra that he repeated every time. And it wasnt that he didnt like the girls, on the contrary, he noticed their beauty and strength, but he was afraid of something more and didnt really like children.
It is a strange irony that he eventually joined the Russian language teacher after graduation. Vadim had a rented house and moved to Tver, where he taught his subject. The apartment was small and rather dusty. The air here was musty, so as soon as Vadim arrived here, he opened the windows on the balcony. No one lived in this apartment and therefore the man was left to himself and only. He came here with a heavy, black briefcase, which he still had since his studies. In this briefcase he kept a mug, a brush, toothpaste, a diary, a pen and clothes.
Life played a cruel joke with the young teacher, already at twenty-eight, when Vadim had experience in teaching and settled in the city, he was diagnosed with a hereditary disease, because of which his vision was lost faster. Therefore, he wore glasses and began to look older, and when he began to grow a beard, he looked like a forty-year-old.
At school, he showed good abilities in communicating with children, he taught in high school, and students always thanked him for his patience and calm character. In the circle of teachers, he was remembered as a gloomy and thoughtful man who, when he was on duty in the corridor of the school, wrote something in his diary.
The school itself was old, built since the war. Its walls were with peeling wallpaper, but gradually they were replaced with newer ones. The ceiling was crumbling, but this was also fixed. The floor was stone, the doors were wooden. The school was not very big, but it could accommodate more than three hundred children, which is the limit for this school personally.
Vadim gradually settled into a new place, as already mentioned, old things began to appear in his musty apartment. There wasnt much that could be bought for a teachers salary, but over time Vadim learned to be content with little. He had a small kitchen combined with a dining room, there was a samovar on the table. Vadim was sleeping on the sofa, which he bought at a discount, because the spring in it was broken. What the man was proud of was an old radio, it was covered with duct tape and peeling paint, but for him this purchase was very successful.
He did not go outside, just looked through the balcony at how children were playing on the playground or how people were coming from work. Cars were passing by, they were making loud noises with their motors under the windows of houses. Vadim had no friends among his neighbors, they came to him only on business, buy potatoes or borrow honey and sugar. The neighbors were good, although some were often noisy. Then, slowly, televisions appeared in every family, but the man did not have the money to buy it, because when he bought a couple of books on sale, he again became infected with the idea of swimming.
He wont be able to be a sailor or a pirate anymore, but he still wants to feel this breeze and salt on his lips. The Volga River was just passing through the city. And its not so difficult to buy a ticket for a liner, its left to save exactly a thousand rubles and you can go on the road.
Despite such successes in life, but there were also hardships. The death of his father never left Vadims soul. The father, like a ghost, came after his son and haunts him in dreams. In nightmares, he sees his mother and sister, he woke up in a cold sweat on his couch in the middle of the night. Then he started smoking. He read that it helps to relieve stress, but the effect was small, the maximum removed the tremor of the hands during work.
I had to forget about the idea with the liner. Vadim could not live with this mental pain. The ghosts of his father, mother and sister, whom he barely remembers, followed him everywhere, it seemed to him that they were whispering in his ear in a particularly strong current of wind, in every rustle of leaves and the creak of snow under his shoe. Vadim became withdrawn at this point in his life, dressed even warmer, because during work he shuddered in chills. From such stress, he seemed to have aged another ten days, but he was well immune. His brown eyes had darkened and seemed just black.
As a result, when he was sitting on the couch, hunched over and thinking about a jar of change and banknotes that were on the table next to a smoking cigarette butt, Vadim decided to spend the accumulated money on a psychologist to whom he could tell about his problem. Personally, the man assumed that he was developing schizophrenia and so far he did not know how to get rid of it. He noticed the cigarette butt and angrily threw it out the window. Then I took a whole pack out of my coat and threw it in the same place so that he definitely couldnt smoke again.
After that, he went to a psychologist and made an appointment on Friday evening, when Vadim would return after work. Of course, he will come with a loaded briefcase, but the documents and notebooks of the children will wait until night.
The psychologist had a spacious office, his own chair, coffee table and sofa. On the nightstand there was a phone and an aquarium in which a fish was splashing, there was food in an orange package next to it. The walls were covered with gray wallpaper.
The psychologist was extremely flexible in communicating with Vadim. The man was lying on the sofa, having previously taken off his shoes. The psychologist, Nikolai Mikhailovich, listened attentively to his client. Vadim spoke in a crumpled and torn manner and sometimes got up from his seat or took a sitting position, before grabbing his hair and as if tearing it out. Nevertheless, Nikolai Mikhailovich showed full tolerance for Vadim and at the end of the session expressed all his suspicions, which he sorted out by points while writing in a notebook.
You are troubled by nightmares, you are seeing relatives, and you also have a tremor, Nikolai Mikhailovich began. You do have symptoms of schizophrenia, but you should not worry, only to improve your condition you need to be in public and on the street more often. You also have depression from a mental trauma, you have lost your father, nightmares are caused because of it and, perhaps, you feel guilty about what happened, try to get a pet or friends to somehow forget yourself, but I will prescribe antidepressants if folk methods do not help. all this time, Vadim listened to the speech of the psychologist, he felt the emptiness of this conversation, as if he had expressed everything that had boiled over, but he still did not tell something in more detail.
Thank you, Doctor, Vadim thanked hoarsely, he managed to raise his tone while he was talking.
He got up and took a torn piece of paper from the psychologists notebook. Vadim said thank you again and left.
To be honest, Vadim really followed the instructions of a psychologist, as he listened to his father as a child. He didnt get a pet, but he started going out more often and talking to people. For the sake of interest, he even went to a local bar, but apart from a black eye and a spoiled mood, he got nothing.
To some extent, Vadim began to like living like this, the tremor passed, but the nightmares still did not go away, but the man swallowed like food for lunch or dinner, they were a tasteless mass that he hid somewhere inside and it seemed that they festered and turned black. Vadim again returned to the diary, which he abandoned when he had been working at school for three years.
He took the diary outside and, sitting on a bench, wrote down thoughts, fauna around. Thats when he started writing short stories. And to be honest, I smiled at this case. He took the work for granted, did it right and did not show his anxiety, but Vadim was already used to it while he worked for six years in these walls. People here began to merge with the walls, the same white and faded. Every day he met gray and gloomy. He did not shave his beard at all, it reached the end of his neck and already fell a little on his chest.
Vadim took care of her, tied her with a blue silk ribbon, combed her with a wooden comb that he carried in his jacket pocket. The first wrinkles and barely noticeable gray hair appeared on the face. At home he continued to read, but the lines of the books turned into ordinary black, ink spots, without meaning, color and taste. Vadim could imagine anything with the help of lines from the book, the great battle, the azure and transparent seas of the Caribbean islands that are inhabited by pirates with and without honor, but gradually he could only see clumps of blots in his head.
He was saving up for a dream, gradually moving towards the goal, but without that enthusiasm in his youth. He is already thirty-four, the USSR has collapsed and a new era has begun in the Russian state, but Vadim continued to live in the past. He remembered his family, but these ghosts stopped hurting him, rather because of them he lost the meaning of his existence. He had no friends, had no family of his own, and hoped with all his heart that the descendants of his dear sister Anya were already walking on this sinful earth. He did not cry when he said goodbye to his mother and sister, it seemed that all the tears had been dried for a long time in that pillow with a blue pillowcase, in that bed of the orphanage where little Vadim slept and quietly choked with tears, but at the age of thirty-four, when he thought that nothing could surprise or impress him except for the ships on the water, as he abruptly began to cry.