| T H E B O Y W I T H T H E P A T C H E S |
In 1996, Jurii Kirnev went to school, and with that step his childhood came to an end and the harsh period of boyhood began.
Jurii, being an intensely curious child, wished to go to school with great pleasure, for in his naïve mind school represented the acquisition of knowledge. He had no idea that such institution, in reality, provided anything but knowledge. Discipline — yes. Systematisation — yes. Limitation of thinking — absolutely. One hundred percent conformity. Anything at all, except genuine knowledge or the thirst for it.
All that Jurii knew about school came from the stories of his elder brother. Yet those tales were completely unreliable, for, as has already been said, Evgeny was the golden boy whom everyone loved, with or without reason. Therefore, everything Evgeny brought home from school was praise and excellent marks. The only negative thing Jurii ever heard from his brother was that there might be some “arsehole” among the classmates. In Evgeny’s class there was one boy who was incredibly stupid and had been left back for the third year in a row because he simply refused to study. He was the son of some Russian oligarch, and was not only several years older than his classmates but also physically enormous. This arrogant, wealthy kid would casually hand out slaps and kicks to the other children, knowing perfectly well that no teacher would stop him and no one would dare fight back. Years later, it is worth noting, this same boy never finished school, yet eventually became an important deputy in the Russian Federation… which gives one a clear understanding of who sits in the Kremlin writing laws.
Thus, if Jurii feared anything about school, it was the possibility of encountering such a bully in his own class. He remembers his very first day, when he crossed the gate into the schoolyard. Russian Embassy School in Hungary. It was the first of September. All the children stood in the courtyard in their best clothes, holding flowers, lined up for the ceremonial school assembly. Jurii looked around and saw many familiar faces among his new classmates… children from the same residential complex where he had grown up. But there were also many new faces… and among them he saw… a beast! An enormous, fat boy who was twice as tall and three times as wide as anyone else in the class. This giant stood in the very same row as Jurii… a small, frail boy who could barely stand on his own two feet. At that moment, Jurii realised that there would be such a bully in his class as well.
As the school celebration drew to a close, the class teacher told Jurii that he could be the first to go up to the classroom and choose any desk he liked. Jurii went upstairs and, entering the empty room, faced a difficult choice: which desk should he take, having never been to school before? He didn't want to make the wrong decision. Should he sit at the front? What if that was bad? At the back? What if that was wrong too? Left or right? After much thought, he decided to sit exactly in the centre so as not to make a mistake. The moment he chose his place, the other children burst into the classroom and randomly took their seats. Suddenly Jurii felt an enormous shadow fall over his back. It was clear that the huge boy had sat down directly behind him. In that instant, Jurii became horrified, realising that from now on this big kid would probably hit him on the head from behind every single day, and there was nothing Jurii could do about it. And it was too late to change seats.
And then Jurii understood: if he could not defeat evil, nothing prevented him from making friends with it. That very second, he turned to the large boy and greeted him. The boy greeted Jurii back and turned out to be far less of a bully than Jurii had imagined in those anxious few minutes. His name was Rodion Meshkov, and he became Jurii’s best friend throughout his school years. The boys quickly formed a gang and became the chief hooligans of the school. They truly resembled cartoonish gangsters… one a small, sharp-witted mastermind, the other a two-metre-tall giant standing behind him, ready to carry out any mischievous request. Thus, these two first-graders held half the school in fearful respect.
Because of the physical weakness in Jurii’s legs, he had to wear heavy orthopaedic braces made of metal with hinges at the knees and feet in order to walk. From beneath his trouser legs, these strange, heavy metal contraptions were always visible. With every step they produced a slight, creaking metallic clank. And if he fell even once while walking, these same iron braces immediately tore holes in the knees of his trousers. As a result, he did not own a single pair of trousers without patches or holes. Many simply called Jurii “the boy with the patches.” Because of these metal legs, he was often nicknamed the Terminator or Robocop. Children were afraid to fight him, knowing that Jurii could strike back with his iron limb.
It is worth mentioning here that the school had its own semi-official currency among the pupils, introduced by Jurii’s brother Evgeny. He was a great fan of basketball, particularly the NBA, and collected basketball cards featuring portraits of famous players. Since everyone loved Evgeny and wanted to be his friend, they eagerly adopted all his hobbies as their own. Very soon the entire school was collecting basketball cards… even those who had no interest in the sport. As part of the school trend, every kid had to carry a deck of these cards. It became a form of currency: one could trade them for a lighter, exchange them for a school breakfast, or make someone to do their homework. The cards were sold in kiosks in sealed packs, but one never knew what one would get… it was always a lucky dip. Some packs contained one or two particularly rare and valuable cards that were considered worth their weight in gold. Naturally, every pupil tried to obtain them. A whole system of speculation arose: some traded one card for two, others for three, while rare cards could be exchanged for entire collections. Each child had a favourite player for whom they were willing to bargain fiercely.
At the same time, there was a special magazine called "Beckett" that contained a catalogue of all existing cards, their estimated value, and rarity level. The boys used it to build their collections and conduct trades. It was the mid-1990s, and the undisputed favourites were Michael Jordan and Dennis Rodman. Everyone tried to collect their cards, and people were prepared to give almost anything in exchange for them. Many of the cards were worth far less than the services traded for them, yet this mattered little. What truly counted was the thrill of the hunt and the burning desire to possess the coveted card.
Jurii and Evgeny quickly realised that assembling complete collections of Jordan and Rodman was practically impossible… and, more importantly, pointless. These players were everywhere and owned by everyone. Instead, they became valuable assets for trading rather than objects of collection. Evgeny’s favourite was Scottie Pippen, and to this day he still possesses what is likely the largest collection of Pippen cards from that era. I am almost afraid to discover its financial value years later. It may well be worth millions now.
Jurii’s favourite was John Stockton, whom he chose deliberately in opposition to the universally adored Michael Jordan. His reasoning was simple: if Michael Jordan was the best player whom no one could stop, then who was the only one capable of making him sweat? After analysing countless matches, the answer was obvious — only John Stockton. He triumphed not through physical strength, but through strategy and intellect. In a certain sense, Stockton was not playing basketball at all, he was playing chess upon the court. And since he was considered the main enemy by all Jordan fans, no one wanted to keep his cards. As a result, people gave them to Jurii quite easily, without much bargaining. Thus, he too assembled a large and impressive collection of Stockton cards.
It is amusing that this passion for collecting and speculating on rare items never left the brothers. Many years later, Jurii would deal in antiquarian books, while Evgeny would trade in collectible art.
Jurii’s class teacher was a woman whose real name I shall not mention here for reasons that will soon become apparent. Let us simply call her Mrs TV. I consider this the perfect designation, for this woman was inextricably associated with television and the entire televisual culture of Russia in that era.
In those years, every woman was television-dependent. Anyone who appeared on the screen was regarded as a god on earth. Pop stars such as Alla Pugacheva, Philipp Kirkorov, Valery Leontiev, and their like were seen as the highest form of life, to which all aspired. Mrs TV’s daughter was a songwriter who composed lyrics for these famous musicians. Thanks to her daughter, Mrs TV maintained constant contact with these celebrities and was always the first to share the freshest gossip from the yellow press with all the school moms. For this, the local women worshipped her. Meantime, these same women openly discussed rumours that Mrs TV had murdered her own husband, and that the circumstances in which his body was found pointed directly to her guilt. Her prolonged business trip to Budapest was seen by many as nothing more than an escape from justice and investigation.
Now ask yourself: was it truly appropriate to entrust such a woman with the education of young children? According to the logic of their mothers and the Russian embassy, the answer was a resounding yes!.. simply because Mrs TV's daughter was a famous poetess who wrote songs for celebrities. Oh, you know… logic.
Incidentally, regarding her daughter: she became so popular on television and so confident in her own importance that at one point she grew excessively arrogant and filed a lawsuit against the Mikhalkov family, claiming authorship of the Russian national anthem. The girl soared so high into the heavens that, like Icarus, she burned her wings in that legal battle. From that moment on, nothing more was ever heard of her. Her songs continued to be performed, but her name was erased from everywhere… even from these very memoirs.
In any case, I believe that this family received precisely what it deserved. And I must confess that while writing these memoirs, just as when recalling the period of her teaching career, not a single child was harmed… not one — except for Jurii Kirnev. In truth, this teacher does not deserve even to be mentioned in history, were it not for the significant influence she exerted upon the formation of Jurii’s character.
You see, before Jurii became her pupil, Evgeny had studied in her class and had been her absolute favourite. When she was forming a new class and young Jurii appeared before her, she naturally assumed he would be nothing more than a smaller, obedient copy of that same exemplary Evgeny. How profoundly mistaken she was. Jurii was not an obedient boy, ready to carry out any command simply because some adult had issued it. He always thought with his own head, and from the very first days this caused problems.
It was the first grade. The children were being taught to write and recognise letters and numbers. On the very first lesson they began learning to write the letter “A”. Jurii had come to school to learn and gain new knowledge, not to copy the same letter a thousand times in his notebook, page after page. Writing it once, or at most twice, was enough for him to understand how the letter was formed. Of course, he understood that there might be children in the class who needed something explained a million times, but he was not one of them. Yet the school programme demanded strict adherence to such instructions.
Even when Jurii fulfilled these demands against his own wishes, new problems arose. In the first grade, children wrote in special exercise books with lines and squares. Every letter had to fit perfectly between the lines or inside the little boxes. Because of his unsteady hands, Jurii could not make the letters perfectly uniform. Each one would deviate slightly — a millimetre higher here, a millimetre to the side there. But the school was determined to turn him into a copying machine with an ideal script, even though anyone could clearly recognise the letter despite its slight imperfections. For example, they required that the number zero be drawn not as a circle, nor even as an oval, but as an egg form tilted at a precise angle. When Jurii drew a circle, the teacher was displeased and demanded he redo the entire page, although the meaning and knowledge itself remained unchanged, and only an idiot would fail to recognise that it was the number zero.
Thus, the teacher found fault with Jurii not because he lacked knowledge, but because of tiny, entirely subjective imperfections that had nothing whatsoever to do with actual learning. Completing the assignments was only half the problem, for Mrs TV also criticised how he sat at his desk, how he held his hands, and even the precise angle at which he raised his hand to ask a question. Jurii immediately understood that this was not education, but an attempt to transform a child into a machine… something he had no desire to become. And so, time and again, he entered into open confrontation with the teacher.
Back then Jurii did not fully understand what had truly been happening. Every school and every teacher, upon seeing a child with a disability, immediately sought to extort money from the parents. Yet Jurii’s mother and father were opposed to paying even a single coin. The teachers therefore declared that they were accepting Jurii only because the law did not permit them to refuse. However, they placed him on what they called a “probationary period”, ostensibly to see whether he could cope. The plan was always the same: to fail Jurii as thoroughly as possible, to find fault with every minor imperfection, so that they could later tell his parents with feigned regret: “You see, he cannot manage.” The ultimatum would then follow — either remove him from the school, or pay a special price for “special treatment.” Jurii’s parents, of course, never fell for such a cheap attempt at extortion. And so the teachers began to fail him even more diligently, finding fault at every opportunity. Jurii was forced to work a hundred times harder than all his classmates simply to prove that he was no worse than them… and perhaps even better.
He remembers with absolute clarity the moment when he finally understood what was truly happening. According to school assignments, all the children were required to read books outside of class. Each pupil had a special reading diary in which their parents recorded how many pages the child had read each day. Jurii could easily read ten, twenty, or even fifty pages a day, and he did so with genuine pleasure. He loved books. One day, as he placed his diary on the teacher’s desk, Mrs. TV looked at the numbers and expressed her dissatisfaction, claiming that, in her opinion, Jurii was not reading enough. In response, he took the first diary that came to hand, belonging to a girl the teacher considered one of the best pupils, to see how many pages he was supposedly expected to read. Opening it, he discovered that this exemplary girl read no more than one or two pages a day. Yet she received the highest marks. It was in that moment that Jurii fully understood the injustice and bias that lay at the heart of the school system.
From that moment onward, Jurii began sending this teacher to hell and stopped following any rules that he himself did not consider necessary. Moreover, from the earliest years he started noticing the incompetence of people in their professions, and many things taught at school struck him as utter nonsense. For example, he constantly argued with the teacher on questions of biology. Jurii, who had spent his entire childhood in hospitals, possessed a solid understanding of medicine, and had spoken with some of the best doctors in the world, now found himself sitting in a classroom with a completely incompetent person who spouted nonsense about biology. Yet according to the school hierarchy, he was supposed to agree with her simply because she was older. Jurii, of course, refused to do so and defended the truth to the very end.
These teachers found themselves in a completely hopeless situation that severely damaged their self-esteem. In reality, they could present nothing substantial against Jurii, for he possessed flawless knowledge of every subject. Yet he categorically refused to respect their authority or submit to the rules. Therefore, the bad marks Jurii received were never for poor knowledge, but solely for behaviour or failure to complete assignments. Throughout his entire life, he never once did his homework.
One day Mrs TV thought she could outsmart Jurii… yes, outsmart that very chess player. Another Icarus spreading his wings.
The pupils were reading children’s books in class… mostly Soviet-era stories about captains, children of war, or boys playing at war. One such story was called “Honest Word.” It told of children who asked a friend to guard a garage. The boy gave his honest word that he would not leave his post until properly relieved. In the story, all the other kids eventually went home and forgot about the boy. Yet he stood there all evening in the rain. When people told him to go home, he refused, saying he had given his word. In the end, to allow the child to leave, the neighbours called an old war veteran who came, saluted the young guard, and formally accepted the post so the boy could finally go home. The end. A typical tale about what is good and what is bad. Mrs TV believed she could trap Jurii with it. In the middle of the lesson she announced that Jurii had supposedly once given his honest word that he would obey her and complete all her assignments, and that by not doing so now, he was breaking that very word. What a disgrace, she implied, hoping to shame him before the entire class. Jurii stood up, straightened his back proudly, looked her straight in the eyes, and said that he had never given any such word. Let her remind him exactly when this had happened. The teacher realised her ploy had failed. She quickly changed tactics and said: “In that case, give me your honest word right now.” Jurii looked at her coldly and replied: “No, I will not.”
After this, Mrs TV knew that such childish tricks would not work on Jurii. And Jurii himself understood that one must always firmly resist people, regardless of their authority or status. Notably, after this incident Mrs TV stopped nitpicking Jurii directly, but instead began looking for ways to find conflict with his parents. If even before this incident Jurii had never justified himself or bowed before anyone, then after the “honest word” episode he consciously and finally adopted a firm position: always stand his ground and never submit to anyone. For this lesson, Jurii is actually grateful to Mrs TV. It simply turned out to be a different lesson from the one she had intended to teach him.
Because of Jurii's health he never strove for high academic marks, even though he always possessed a thirst for knowledge. From his earliest childhood, while spending endless time in hospitals, he had heard from various doctors that he was not expected to live long. From birth they told him he would last five years at most. When he was six, doctors claimed Jurii might reach puberty at best, after which hormonal changes could make everything fatal. Knowing that he was supposed to die within a few years, what was the point of good marks, if Jurii was aware that he might never finish the school at all?
Despite all the horrors described above, there was still something truly wonderful in school that Jurii loved. From the very first grade, he began attending piano class and solfeggio. These were optional lessons, and the absolute majority of pupils did not want to go. But Jurii went with genuine pleasure. It was there that he found solace and the true joy of education. Just imagine: while in the main classroom he was forced to read boring fairy tales about the three little pigs or Soviet child propaganda, in the music room, surrounded by beautiful instruments, teachers named Irina Izyaevna and Olga Nikolaevna told him how Salieri poisoned Mozart, and how Mozart later composed his great Requiem without realising he was writing it for his own funeral. Divine beauty! The very reason Jurii went to school with pleasure. He only regretted that music class occurred just once, or at most twice, a week. He wanted more. More stories, more legends, more music and beauty!
And so Jurii began to learn to play the piano. It came to him with remarkable success. Even despite the weakness of his hands, he played well and considered it excellent training for his fingers. By the age of seven or eight, he had fully mastered musical notation. He was captivated by the idea that by writing these beautiful symbols on paper, only a narrow circle of the initiated could understand what was written there. Neither his brother, nor his parents, nor most people in his surroundings could read this language. Yet it possessed meaning, beauty, and profound depth. The language of musical notation became for him his secret tongue, his personal cipher. He had always been drawn to the idea of mystery. If earlier Jurii had merely played the childish role of an alchemist, now, through the interweaving and union of musical symbols, he truly became one.
Jurii played the piano exceptionally well. He could perform entire classical concerts with the most demanding variations. He says that his favourite and most difficult piece was Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2. Every time he played it from beginning to end, with all its most complex variations, it felt to him as though he were making violent, passionate love to the piano in the harshest and most pleasurable way imaginable.
Very soon Jurii entered the circle of young musicians, for every two or three months the children gave recitals and performances. Jurii adored these evenings. At every concert, girls would arrive in their most elegant dresses. Often they were older girls of sixteen who spoke to him as an equal. For in music, as in chess, no one judged by age — only by mastery. The concerts always took place in the evening, in beautiful halls with subdued lighting, creating a special aesthetic: soft whispers and an electrifying sense of anticipation. At the same time, the guests spoke of the biographies of great musicians, recounting various musical legends and stories. For Jurii, this became his first personal secret society.
Jurii recalls that at one of these recitals he met what turned out to be his very first love. She was a teenage girl, twice his age and perhaps twice his height. He no longer remembers her name. All that remains in his memory is her image: very slender and tall, with long, thin fingers, endless legs, high heels, and a black elegant dress with a daring décolleté. Her face was completely covered in freckles. And most importantly she had a magnificent mane of curly, fiery red hair. From that moment onward, Jurii developed a lifelong fetish for tall girls with voluminous, curly, light hair. So it is hardly surprising that he eventually chose me as his wife.
But if you think that because of all the above Jurii was a diligent and obedient pupil in music, you are mistaken. Since he mastered the material very quickly, he constantly wanted to run ahead. Every time he played a piece, he began to interpret it according to his own rules, without violating the laws of music. He would accelerate or slow the rhythm where he felt it served greater expression, while his teachers demanded metronomic precision and strict adherence to a single tempo. Soon Jurii began to improvise and even allowed himself to rewrite the compositions of great masters at his own discretion.
The teachers scolded him on one hand for committing musical vandalism, yet on the other they were forced to admit that his changes were more than justified from the standpoint of musical grammar. Soon Jurii acquired a private teacher named Marina Lvovna, who, recognising his talent, began to instruct him in the most complex techniques of jazz improvisation. And when Jurii discovered modulation and how to employ it, he began to improvise unexpectedly and alter pieces right during concerts and performances, without the teachers’ approval… simply because, in his opinion, it sounded far more beautiful that way. Because of such escapades, Jurii never won a single music competition, nor did he particularly try. However, every jury always acknowledged his mastery… not so much in technical execution as in his profound musical literacy. To perform such complex modulations, they said, the child must possess an excellent understanding of mathematics. Thus, Jurii’s intellect was recognised by everyone… except his main class teacher, Mrs TV.
During these same years, the Kirnev family purchased a large plot of land for the construction of their family Château in Budapest. The story of this acquisition is interesting in itself. The man selling the land had made a mistake in the advertisement, causing everyone to believe the plot was located in a completely different district. As a result, for a long time no one even came to view it. Zahar Kirnev turned out to be the only person in all of Budapest with the intellect to verify the actual address. When he finally found the seller, it became clear that Zahar was the sole potential buyer who had appeared in all that time. Believing his land was unwanted, the seller lowered the price again and again. And so, as if by the hand of fate itself, this land came into the possession of the Kirnev family.
They immediately began construction of their family residence, naturally keeping the project in strict secrecy, for they continued to live the Russian building — a place filled with too many enemies and, even more so, envious eyes. By 1998 the Château had been completed to a stage where the family could move in. The Kirnevs relocated there. From that moment on, keeping the existence of the castle secret became impossible.
Rumours about this place began to spread in the most varied and fanciful forms. All the teachers tried to ingratiate themselves with the Kirnevs and secure an invitation to visit, particularly Mrs TV, under the pretext of being Jurii’s class teacher. But the family never allowed any outsiders into their home. This, of course, greatly irritated the haughty Mrs TV, and as a result she began to press Jurii even harder.
And when, in that same year of 1998, Jurii travelled with his mother to the United States of America, it became the final straw for Mrs TV. Her envy could no longer be contained and poured forth in the most venomous form. Jurii visited the city of Houston and stayed there for about two weeks as a special guest for medical examinations. This relatively short period was more than enough for him to become disillusioned with the New World and lose any desire to ever cross that part of the Earth again… at least its northern half. In any case, the trip was not for leisure, but for medical research. For his teacher, Mrs TV, however (like all Russian-speaking women of that period raised on television propaganda) America seemed like the Kingdom of God on Earth, the best place imaginable, a true paradise. Therefore, the fact that Jurii had walked upon that sacred soil made him, in her eyes, the most special boy among all her pupils. It is worth noting that even Mrs TV herself, for all her snobbery and the fact that her daughter worked in television, had never had the opportunity to visit the New World. This severely wounded her self-esteem. When Jurii returned from the journey, the teacher questioned him about America for months afterwards, genuinely convinced that everything there was somehow extraordinary. To which Jurii honestly replied that there was nothing particularly special about it. But the propaganda had long since rot her brain, and so she once again entered into confrontation with him.
All these conflicts escalated to such an extent that Jurii could no longer continue his studies at that school. Every time he crossed its threshold, he prepared himself for yet another psychological battle in defence of his sanity. As a result, in the first quarter of his third school year, Jurii Kirnev was expelled from the Russian Embassy School in Hungary amid a tremendous scandal.
The Kirnev family began searching for a new school, and here his mother made a grave mistake. She had never learned the Hungarian language despite living in the country for years. Like any caring mother, she wanted to be able to communicate directly with the teachers and understand what they would be teaching her son. Therefore, it was important to her that the new school had Russian-speaking staff. However, she failed to consider the deep cultural and historical context of Hungarian-Russian relations. These were still the 1990s, when the wound of Soviet occupation remained fresh and painful. If any Hungarian spoke Russian, it was not by choice, but because they had been forced to learn it. Thus, anything Russian-speaking was perceived as inherently hostile. Although Jurii had never belonged to the Russian nation, this detail was irrelevant. If he spoke Russian, he was automatically considered Russian in their eyes.
Now imagine a school receiving not only a child who had just been expelled from his previous institution in a major scandal, but also a Russian-speaking one — an a priori enemy… and moreover, a child with a disability. It was a nuclear explosion. As in the previous case, the administration immediately attempted to extract money from the Kirnevs for Jurii and, of course, placed him on yet another "probationary period". All according to the same familiar scam methodology.
The school was called Saint László. It was attached to a church and distinguished by its strictly conservative, traditional, and deeply patriotic spirit. Thus, Jurii once again found himself caught beneath the pressure of yet another ideology. This time it was even more difficult, for he did not yet possess sufficient command of the Hungarian language to offer a full and worthy resistance. Although Jurii acknowledges that the Gothic architecture of the church itself was very beautiful. During breaks, wandering around its grounds and especially climbing the patterned arches up to the spire of its roof was considered a special charm… something the teachers, of course, also waged war against.
It was in this institution that Jurii first began to draw and tell stories through visual narrative. Perhaps the reason was his still insufficient command of the Hungarian language; for communication it was easier for him to draw a picture than to grammatically articulate all the madness of Hungarian language. As one might easily guess, the teachers greatly disliked what Jurii drew, and this provided yet another excellent pretext for conflict with him.
At the end of the school year, he was expelled from this school as well, amid a scandal no less resounding than the previous one. A special regional pedagogical council was even convened to demonstrate how utterly unfit Jurii was for education. They issued him a particular certificate, by which he was officially labelled an idiot. With such a document, finding a new school became significantly more complicated… except, of course, for special institutions intended for the mentally retarded.
After that scandal, Jurii was left back a year. And so Jurii moved on to his third school. Once again, everything unfolded according to the same familiar scenario: another "probationary period", another new environment in which the young boy was forced to prove his authority among his peers. New boys, new fights. The same cycle repeated itself. Fortunately, this time the administration and teachers were able to understand the situation and simply left Jurii in peace. They no longer tried to prove anything to him. All that was required of Jurii was to come to school every day and take his examinations at the end of the year. Jurii had nothing against this. He simply arrived at school each day, sat at the very last desk, listened with one ear to whatever the teachers were droning on about, and spent the entire day drawing various pictures and comics in his notebooks. For Jurii, this was a bitter defeat and a deep depression. He was now the oldest in the class. While his friend Rodion and other former classmates from Mrs TV’s school due to special program had advanced from the third grade straight into the fifth, Jurii found himself repeating the third. He had fallen behind by a full two years.
He made no attempt to form new friendships in the new school. His class consisted of twenty girls and only three boys, and he had no desire to spend time with little girls. The two boys who were there turned out to be even more girlish than most of the girls. He tried only once to make acquaintances with boys from other, preferably older, classes so he could communicate with peers of his own age. For this purpose he even organised his first art exhibition. Since his Hungarian was still imperfect, it was easier for him to express himself through drawings. He thought of a simple way to make sure all the boys in the school would see his work: he hung his best drawings, torn from his notebooks, in the central boys’ toilet. You could say that Jurii Kirnev's first art exhibition took place in the male lavatory.
However, once he met the local boys, he realised he was incredibly bored with them as well… even with those who were significantly older than him. In his solitude and creative work, Jurii began to find far more meaning than in any communication with those around him. He became very quiet and withdrawn into himself, although from time to time he would insert some clever remark in the middle of a lesson that would cause the entire school to erupt in laughter. It is notable that ten years later, when the class organised a reunion, it turned out that these now-grown children had almost nothing to remember from their school years except for Jurii’s jokes. The other pupils were so unremarkable that even they themselves were forced to admit it.
The only true joy for Jurii in that school was its strong musical orientation. According to the rules, every pupil was obliged to play a musical instrument. Those who could not were at least required to master the simplest flute and understand musical notation. It was here that Jurii deepened his musical knowledge and uncovered the hidden secrets of folk music. The school also regularly organised cultural programmes, during which the children visited various museums and ancient castles as part of their education. In their free time, the children also arranged cultural programmes for themselves, wandering through ancient cemeteries and recounting the bloody legends of Hungarian history. Every day on their way to school they passed the house of one of the most notorious serial killers in Hungarian history. Jurii eagerly absorbed all these myths, legends, and real stories, many of which would later reappear in his own creative work. He himself remembers those years as remarkably calm and quiet, for everyone had finally left him in peace.
Notably, because the school had a musical focus, Jurii joined the the children’s choir. From the age of ten he possessed a remarkably low baritone voice and became the principal bass of the choir. Every year they performed at national Hungarian holidays in front of the Hungarian Parliament, singing the anthem and the Szózat before presidents and prime ministers as exemplary Hungarian children. The irony, of course, was that Jurii was not Hungarian at all and, at that time, did not even possess Hungarian citizenship. As for his status as an “exemplary” child… oh, you know — that same bad boy who had been expelled from school twice and officially certified as an idiot.
