| B A T T L E G R O U N D |
Having stepped onto the path of war with fate, no one has the right to retreat without defeat. And in 2004, Jurii decided to go against the current of his fate by returning to the Russian embassy school, where his school journey had once begun. To mark his return, he bought himself a school bag styled in grey military aesthetics with the inscription “Battleground,” for that was precisely how he perceived school in those years.
Firstly, he knew that although many teachers and administrators had changed since his expulsion, quite a few still remained and remembered the scandals with which he had once left. Therefore, he knew he would have to face them again in conflict.
Secondly, he was once more entering a new school, meaning the boys would perceive him as a newcomer. That meant new fights in the rest rooms and corridors, where a boy had to prove his place in the pack. This had happened to Jurii repeatedly… every time he changed schools.
Thirdly, the school itself truly resembled a battleground. All around the perimeter it was enclosed by a fence with military barbed wire and old CCTV cameras to monitor everyone who entered and left. After all, it was embassy territory. And since it was a Russian school, there was a strange and, to Jurii, still incomprehensible cult of death and war. The walls of the corridors were covered with military posters glorifying the tragedies of the Second World War. On every poster was depicted either a tank, an automatic rifle, or some military killer whom, for some reason, all the pupils called heroes worthy of admiration and imitation. And every time Jurii questioned what value they were trying to instil with these militaristic propaganda slogans, the teachers and children would bare their teeth at him with near-religious fanaticism. For all those people, this cult of war was sacred, and any attempt to question it was immediately regarded as betrayal. At the same time, this mourning for the Second World War was presented not as anti-war slogans to ensure such a tragedy would never be repeated. On the contrary, it was delivered in the most pompous and heroic manner, so that the children regretted not having had the honour of participating in that war. Jurii, who had studied the history of Russia and the Soviet Union very thoroughly, had several inconvenient questions regarding such a view of history… and especially of children’s education. Because of this, he made quite a few enemies among both adults and his peers.
And finally, the echo of a distant contemporary war really reached the walls of school. Fortunately, not to Jurii’s own… but the news of it still touched him deeply. It was the first of September 2004, when terrorists seized a Russian school in the city of Beslan. Since Jurii studied at the embassy school, the embassy was immediately contacted and maximum security measures were implemented for the pupils. Embassy territories have always been highly vulnerable points in political conflicts. Jurii remembers how all the children were gathered in the central corridor and told what was happening in Beslan. They were asked to be vigilant and report any suspicious activity. Jurii admits that these events made an impression on him. In his mind he began to imagine how his own classmates would behave if terrorists seized their school.
He also recalls how, during the last lesson of that day (the history lesson) the teacher, visibly nervous given the events, posed a rhetorical question: “Is there anything dearer in this life than life itself?” Jurii, being a young maximalist in those years, raised his hand and answered that honour is dearer than life. To support his point, he cited historical examples from various peoples where individuals gladly chose death in order to preserve their honour: Japanese samurai, Scandinavian Vikings, even the Russian intelligentsia who went to duels for the sake of their honour. And to give you an idea, Jurii would put teachers in awkward positions in almost every subject by answering to their rhetorics or questioning their point of view. Although, as Jurii admits today, if asked such a question now, he would no longer be so certain in his answer and would find it difficult to reply at all.
In the following days he read the news from Beslan attentively. He even later managed, via the internet, to speak with several survivors… a boy who had escaped the attack in the first hours, and a girl who had survived the final assault. Each told a story quite different from what the world’s media reported. It was then that the idea was born in Jurii’s mind which would later become his novel Are You Going to Watch the Sunrise?.
Jurii remembers how, as a fifteen-year-old schoolboy, he read various news portals and was always struck by the fact that, regardless of whether the source was loyal to the authorities or oppositional, they all avoided the same topics… most notably, the perspective of the terrorists themselves. One could speak of anything, except perceiving those armed and desperate people as human beings. Trying to piece together this fragmented mosaic with incomplete information, Jurii began in his mind to draw the events and stretch a red detective thread connecting all the people and incidents. A clear picture formed in his head of what was happening. He understood with certainty that if the political system did not change, a major military conflict would soon break out in the Caucasus… specifically on the border between Russia and Georgia. Yet youthful self-restraint kicked in. He looked at his deductive board and asked himself: what if everything fits together so perfectly, but only in his head, given the limited sources available to him? He did not have the full picture. Perhaps he was missing something or did not understand. He had no ironclad proof, nor could he have any. But looking ahead, in 2008 the very war he had foreseen did indeed break out. Russia declared war on Georgia… and no further proof was needed.
From then on, Jurii never restrained himself in his observations. No more self-censorship or doubt. Better to be called a madman or a conspiracy theorist than to remain silent about what he saw. And as Jurii says, there is nothing wrong with the term “conspiracy theorist”… on the contrary, the label was invented quite recently. It was only after the assassination of Joseph Kennedy that the word began to be used pejoratively for those who did not believe the official version of his murder. And now, in the 21st century, as government documents are declassified, it turns out that those very people labelled “conspiracy theorists” were right.
In any case, years later, Jurii would write his novel Are You Going to Watch the Sunrise?, which would prove remarkably prophetic regarding Russian politics and its leaders.
But let us go back to the year 2004, when Jurii’s creative path was only just beginning.
When he returned to his old school, he went there with a clear intention: from now on he would be a diligent pupil. Not that Jurii had previously studied poorly. He had always grasped knowledge well, but he had been extremely careless and never did his assignments. Now, he told himself, he would be conscientious. Yet such attitude lasted only one day. He remembers the first homework assignment: to write a composition on “how I spent my summer”… the usual task given at the beginning of every school year. Jurii wrote an interesting story about himself, filling half a notebook. But he missed three commas, and for each the teacher deducted marks. In the end he received a 2… the worst possible grade in that school. Seeing this mark, Jurii tore up the notebook, threw it in the bin, and declared that from now on he would once again not do his homework and would be the same bad boy he had always been. He had tried to be good… honestly, and it had not worked. Teachers had not judged him by his deep story and memoir, but by three missing commas. And so Jurii made new enemies among the new teachers.
However, among his peers he managed to gain a great many friends. There were many boys who still remembered Jurii from the first grade. For them, his return was like the return of a hero. This naturally aroused curiosity among those pupils who did not know him. Thus, in the first few weeks, he managed to win authority throughout the entire school.
He reunited with his old friend from the first grade, Rodion Meshkov… and also made many new friends: Egor Tuchin, Grigory Lyakhov, Kirill Insarov and his younger brother Fyodor Insarov, Dmitry Klimov, Alexander Gusev, and a multitude of other bright personalities.
Every day during breaks they played the hooligan, telling each other the most outrageous jokes, and after lessons they would go to the petrol station directly opposite the school, where their teenage madness continued. They also went to the railway line situated right across, which led to the train station, where the lads painted graffiti on the walls of carriages, and waged a full-scale graffiti war in the district. Their tag LPK (Liquid Paint Krew) terrorised the 13th and 14th districts of Budapest, and any other graffiti crew that dared to paint over their logo was immediately declared an enemy, against whom a full war was waged with spray cans. Jurii himself did not run much through back alleys, rooftops, and stations, due to the difficulties with his mobility, especially in dangerous places. However, he was the artist who drew sketches… the very graffiti that Rodion would later paint in the city. The tandem of the two boys — mastermind and executioner, as it had been established back in their first grade, was now restored once more.
It is worth noting that in this school there was no strict division between older and younger boys. In other schools there was always a clear age hierarchy: if someone was a year older than you, you were of no interest to them. Here it was different. Age did not matter to the boys… what mattered was what kind of person you were. Thus, seventeen-year-old lads could easily befriend ten-year-old boys, and vice versa.
They constantly organised parties and various gatherings, at which Jurii was the main DJ. Thanks to his hacking skills, he could always obtain any music he desired for free. And the main music of the district was rap, and the dirtier and more underground it was, the better. Rodion particularly loved this genre, and all his friends involuntarily absorbed this culture. Later, the lads did not even notice how they too began to listen to and even compose rap in this style. Guys such as Fyodor Insarov (FEDUK) and Grigory Lyakhov (OG BUDA) would later go on to build successful rap careers in Russia precisely thanks to Rodion’s influence.
Jurii also composed rap in those years, yet he never considered this genre his own music. By the early 2000s, he already regarded rap as outdated. This was connected to the fact that he and his brother had listened to rap back in the mid-1990s, when this music was considered dirty and completely inappropriate for a European listener. He recalls how, around the year 2000, his music teacher (who considered nothing music except Mozart) began telling Jurii that her daughter listened to Eminem. He then caught himself thinking that it should have been he telling the old teacher about this rapper, not the other way around. Already then Jurii understood that the rap genre had reached its peak and couldn't surprise him anymore, and therefore there was nothing left to catch there.
Yet since rap and hip-hop were still incredibly fashionable, if Jurii did compose pieces in this genre, he did so exclusively for parodic purposes. He took the most idiotic themes, the most repulsive sound, but wrote this trash with deadly seriousness and uploaded it to the most hardcore rap forums as a mockery of the genre. Yet rap enthusiasts listened to his compositions attentively and gave quite serious criticism regarding his tracks, not understanding that it was simply a send-up of them. Some lads were so offended by Jurii’s work that they began writing diss tracks against him, wishing to arrange an online diss battle. According to the laws of the genre Jurii should have written a rap song in response, insulting his opponent in turn, but he did not do so, understanding that any attempt to insult someone back… especially by writing a song about them… was proof of the opponent’s victory, for Jurii would be wasting his precious time in honour of his adversary. No, Jurii chose a different position. He simply wrote comments to these boys, saying that he thanked them for spending time composing good songs about him. As it turned out, for a rapper this was the harshest insult possible, because of which in 2005 one such Moscow rapper even specially flew to Budapest to arrange a fight with Jurii. Seriously. An adult guy flew in from Moscow who waited for Jurii after school. But when he saw that he had made such a long journey only to beat up a disabled boy, he himself became embarrassed first and gave up.
In truth, the real music that Jurii listened to in those years was symphonic metal. Rhapsody of Fire was his favorite band. It was the mid-2000s, when what a person listened to largely defined their subcultural belonging. Jurii himself did not particularly like to assign himself to any group, yet many people from the outside assumed he was unquestionably a metalhead because of his long hair and the metal braces on his legs, and perhaps even a goth. And although Jurii loved gothic aesthetics, he never dressed that way in those years. On the contrary, to go to school he wore a baby-blue shirt with a baby-pink tie. What could be less gothic than that? But his interests and views apparently spoke for themselves. And his views differed greatly from those of all his schoolmates.
When everyone around was fanatical about rap, Jurii listened to metal. When Half-Life 2 video game came out in 2004 and everyone went crazy for it, Jurii played Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, not understanding what was so good about Half-Life, just as everyone else did not understand what was so good about Bloodlines. When, in 2005, all the boys seemed to drown in The World of Warcraft, Jurii was playing The Matrix Online. His appearance also always set him apart, as he was the only boy with long hair. As for his disability and extraordinary sense of humour, there is no need to repeat it.
It was a period of the wildest teenage revelry. Jurii often invited his friends to his Château, where he organised the most absurd parties, and he attended every gathering his school friends arranged. Jurii does not recount the details of those parties. However, looking at the old photographs, I see that there was the most unrestrained fifteen-year-old youth and the most unrestrained alcohol in the most unrestrained quantities.
Speaking of alcohol, it is fitting here to recall Alexander Gusev, whom everyone simply called Goose. This big fat boy always smelled of the foulest pipe tobacco and constantly brought cans of beer to school, which he and Jurii would drink during lessons. The teachers became so accustomed to the fact that they drank beer every day in class that they eventually stopped paying any attention to it. It is amusing, but Jurii never actually liked beer. And now, looking at events from this angle, it is clear that what mattered was not the drink itself, but the fact that doing it was forbidden. The taste of thrill was more interesting than the taste of beer. However, when he reached the legal age for alcohol consumption, that very alcohol ceased to interest him, for the sense of thrill had disappeared. Thus, Jurii believes that alcohol is primarily for teenagers and only for them. And the person who came up with the idea of forbidding the sale of alcohol to teenagers was simply an idiot… or a marketing genius.
To a certain extent, Goose was the only boy in the entire school who shared Jurii’s tastes. In truth, he was a Tolkienist and a biker without a bike… not entirely Jurii’s scene, but still far better than all the other boys playing first-person monkey shooters and listening to rap and drum’n’bass. Goose was a fellow who had at least read more than one book in his life, and therefore the they had something to talk about.
One day, while discussing literature, Jurii told him that he too wanted to write a book. Goose was very interested in this idea and even offered his co-authorship. Thus, in the early autumn of 2004, work began on Jurii Kirnev’s first serious literary work, Lips of the Colour of Blood. According to the original conception, the novel was not supposed to have historical chapters. The entire action was to take place in contemporary Budapest. However, Goose very much wanted to write the historical chapters, and therefore he was to write a third of the book. But as is always the case with co-authorship, when two people work on a project, in reality one will work while the other merely says that he will soon begin. By the time Jurii realised that his friend would never write a single word, it was already too late to change the structure of the book. Therefore, the entire work had to be written by Jurii himself.
As the chapters were written, they were posted on the internet on various gothic Russian-language forums, where the book instantly acquired cult status among followers of the gothic subculture. In those years there were not so many Russian-language books freely available on the internet, and on gothic themes this book was the only one. If one entered “Gothic” into a search engine, Jurii’s book would immediately appear among the very first results. The first chapters were known by heart by many, yet the paradox was that people did not understand that it was a plot from a specific book by a particular author. Many believed that the story of the fallen angel Virginia who becomes the bride of Satan was not the plot of a novel, but simply an integral part of gothic subculture… yet it was Jurii who first introduced this plot trope. People later wrote fanfiction and even got tattoos of these characters, without realising that they came from just a few chapters of a larger novel. Although, of course, those who knew, knew.
This work became the main starting point of Jurii’s serious creative path. It was his opus number one. He wrote it during lessons, during breaks, in the car while travelling to or from school. Some drafts he sketched simply on school desks and even on walls, gathering inspiration while wandering through Budapest.
When, in 2006, the book was fully written, some enthusiastic girls, without even asking Jurii, printed it and bound it into a homemade folder. And the work began to circulate from hand to hand among the schoolchildren, and even among the teachers. Very often Jurii found himself in situations when completely unfamiliar pupils would approach him and ask questions about the characters in his novel. And Jurii could not even understand where they could have read it. The book changed many of the teachers’ attitudes towards Jurii. Those who had hated him now began to respect him, as they saw his labour and now understood what exactly he had been occupied with when he did not do their homework assignments.
Sometimes even now Jurii can hardly imagine how energetic he was in those years. His typical day looked something like this: he would rise at six in the morning so that his parents could drive him to school by seven. The school bell for the first lesson rang at eight, but Jurii wanted to be at school an hour earlier so as not to miss anything that might happen with his friends. Therefore, he arrived at school almost first and greeted everyone who came during that hour. Then the daily school routine began… boring lessons and wild breaks, during the long break the boys would run to the neighbouring petrol station to commit all sorts of mischief. Lessons usually ended around one or two in the afternoon, but Jurii asked his parents to collect him at three so that he could once again be the last pupil to leave the school, for during that hour the lads very often gathered on the school benches in front of the main entrance, where they told each other jokes and composed rap. If it so happened that by that time all the people had already gone home and Jurii remained alone, he was glad of that too, for he loved to wander through the school in solitude. Especially in winter mornings, when it was still dark. Those long, liminal corridors gave him a special aesthetic charm and atmosphere. There was something mystical in it.
Unfortunately, Jurii never found any school ghosts, but he did discover a secret classroom that no one knew about… not even the school caretaker. It was strange because this classroom was located almost in the most visible place. Everyone walked past it every day without even noticing that it was there. And all because there was one classroom that was not used and was simply filled with broken school furniture. When people opened the door, they saw only a dusty heap into which no one ever wanted to venture. However, people did not realise that if one went a little further inside, there was another such classroom. This secret place in plain sight became for Jurii his hidden refuge, where he could hide when he wanted to escape the school bustle.
After three o’clock, when Jurii returned home, he would lock himself in his room, turn on the heaviest metal music at full volume, and sit before the computer until deep into the night. With one hand he managed to type new chapters of his novel, while with the other he chatted with friends online, played video games, watched new films, and engaged in hacking. He would usually remain like this until one or two in the morning, after which he would fall asleep right in front of his computer, only to wake up again at six and head to school.
On weekends he often met with his friends in the city. They would go to the cinema, where they threw popcorn at each other and disrupted people trying to watch the film, or simply wandered through shopping centres, where they would enter shops selling new computers and infect them with viruses, setting the homepage to the dirtiest gay porn sites. In those years people did not have mobile internet, and many came to these malls solely to gain access to the internet on public computers. Therefore, when someone opened a browser, viruses and the most loud pornography would immediately appear. Moreover, many of these computers were connected to large advertising monitors displaying beautiful images to attract buyers. And so the entire shopping centre would see all the vulgar rubbish that the lads left behind in jest. And sometimes, if the boys found themselves in some café or fast-food restaurant to have lunch, Jurii would use the Bluetooth of his mobile phone to search for a random nearby device that was ready to receive files. He would take a photograph of the most disgusting and repulsive scene, rename it with the name of the establishment as though it were a special offer from the restaurant, and send it via Bluetooth to a random individual. Then he and his friends would sit in silence, waiting for the moment when, a few seconds later, some unsuspecting person nearby would suddenly cry out with vomiting horror: “Fuuu, that's disgusting!”
Social terrorism in its finest form.
Such pranks Jurii repeatedly played on the teachers at school as well. In particular, those who thought they were above everyone simply because they were adults and held the status of teacher. He subjected them to the most cruel moral humiliation… not directly, but through internet jokes, hacking school presentations during celebrations, strange telephone calls, and so on. Once he managed, in the middle of a lesson, to call his chemistry teacher and speak to her in Hungarian, which she, being an embassy teacher, did not know, and bring her to tears and hysterical horror. And all this while sitting right before her eyes… something she did not notice because she was too absorbed in that strange call.
At the same time, Jurii actively participated in the organisational life of the school. Being the DJ, it was he who organised the school discos. He was also the main musical director during school celebrations or theatrical productions. Because of his distinctive voice, which he could alter theatrically, he always performed as the narrator for off-stage texts. And if he was given any role in the plays, he always played a seated part… that is, some king, sultan, or mafia boss.
Once, quite by chance, Jurii played a game of chess with the school director. During that game he realised just how obsessed the director was with chess. For him, the thrill of chess was like alcoholism — something he could not resist. In the young student the old man saw a truly worthy opponent with whom it was interesting to play. Having discerned this weakness in the director, Jurii began to use it for his own selfish purposes. That is, if Jurii wanted to skip a particular lesson without receiving the status of “absent” in the school register, he could approach the director and offer him a game of chess. And the director would remove Jurii from any lesson he requested, for the sake of the game.
They enjoyed the game so much that together they later organised an entire chess tournament in which all the classes of the school participated. The tournament was conducted according to professional chess rules. Each team fielded four of its players and played for chess points. Jurii’s class won all the tournaments from 2005 to 2007. Very often during chess games many players tried to demonstrate their intelligence by saying such nonsense to Jurii as “This piece is not a castle but a rook” or “This is not a bishop but a runner,” and so on. Every person called the chess pieces according to their own education. At one point this so irritated Jurii that he decided to proclaim publicly that from now on he would call the knight a “pussy”… and from then on he would recognise no other name for this piece. And since Jurii was a good player and had authority, the entire school subsequently began to call it “pussy.” And every time someone said “knight,” everyone immediately corrected them: not “knight,” but “pussy.”
Jurii recalls that although he played very well, he did lose once. And this is a revealing story for him.
During the chess tournament in 2005, by the draw of lots, he was paired against a girl. He was then in the ninth grade, while she was already finishing the tenth. Jurii did not even remember this girl and had never noticed her in school. She simply existed. And when he saw that he would be playing against a girl, he treated the game with complete nonchalance, knowing for certain that he would win without much thought. In reality the girl played well, but she did not reach Jurii’s level. He easily checkmated her, completely breaking all her strategies. An interesting detail: the way Jurii played chess, because of his crooked hands and his fear of knocking over the pieces, he very often did not move the pieces himself but simply pointed with his finger at which piece to move where, and the opponent did it for him. And when delivering checkmate to the girl, he pointed at the knight and said: “Madam, place this pussy here.” When she did so, Jurii declared checkmate. Usually, when the players finished a game, they would then stand up and go to other tables to watch how others were playing. But that girl remained sitting in shock, staring at her lost game, trying to comprehend how such a thing could have happened.
A year passed, and in 2006 Jurii’s team was again the leading one. In points they reached such heights that even if each of them lost in the final round, they would still take first place. And the last games arrived. Now Jurii was in the tenth grade and they were playing against the eldest class, the eleventh. That is, again the class in which that girl had been. And this time she herself, on her own initiative, declared that she would play against Jurii and only against him. She sat down opposite him without a draw.
Jurii, seeing this girl again, treated her with the same scepticism, playing without particular attention. However, this time the girl, moving each piece, immediately recorded it coldly, like a bookkeeper, in her notebook. This even amused Jurii. But then… in the mittelspiel she made a completely inadequate move, at which Jurii even raised an eyebrow — as if wondering what sense there was in moving the piece there at all. Then Jurii made a counter-move, but she followed with yet another strange displacement of a piece. And only then did Jurii understand that he was no longer playing against the naïve girl she had been a year earlier. No, over that year she had strengthened her chess abilities so much that now Jurii was playing against a true grandmaster. But it was already too late, for Jurii had already lost the move capable of stopping her crushing strategy. From that moment the battle was fierce and merciless on both sides, and Jurii was forced to admit defeat. He extended his hand to her for a handshake and said only one phrase: “That was beautiful.” The girl said nothing in reply, merely stood up silently, closed her notebook with the moves, as if with offended pride, and walked away with dignity. For her, this was her last game, and she had won. She was finishing school, and therefore the following year Jurii could no longer arrange a rematch. From then on he never underestimated girls again, nor gave them any slack on the grounds that they were women.
There were so many events during those school years that no matter how much I describe them here, it will always be too little. If there were times in Jurii's life when he was truly happy, then those days were unquestionably among the happiest and most carefree of all.
For me, as his wife, it is interesting to mention here that it was precisely during those days that Jurii had his first girlfriend… and not just one. To preserve the honour of those girls, I shall not mention their real names. However, they still need to be referred to somehow, so I shall either use the nicknames they had at the time or give them new ones if none existed. As for Jurii’s first girlfriend, judging by the old photographs, she gives me the impression of an emo, although she was probably not one… but the general edgy aesthetic of the early 2000s speaks for itself. Therefore, I shall call her the Emo Girl.
According to Jurii’s memories, that young lady caught his eye almost on the very first day he arrived at the new (old) school, but for a long time he lacked the courage or simply a pretext to speak to her. There were no points of contact between them, and they did not even greet each other when passing by. In the ninth grade, when the first quarter of studies came to an end, many pupils left the school and were replaced by completely new ones. This was connected with the fact that their parents, being embassy workers, frequently changed their place of residence due to various assignments. And Jurii had heard somewhere… though he no longer remembers exactly where, for it later turned out to be false information… that at the end of the second quarter the Emo Girl might also leave this school. He did not want to miss his chance and the short time that might exist between them. And one day he gathered his resolve, deciding that it was better to try and be rejected than to let the opportunity slip away and regret it for the rest of his life.
One afternoon after lessons, he approached her, led her aside, and looked her straight in the face as he told her exactly how he wanted to fuck her. He began to describe his sexual fantasies about her in vivid detail. It must have been an incredibly amusing scene for anyone who might have witnessed it from the side… a fifteen-year-old boy telling a fourteen-year-old girl (who was way higher then him) his most intimate sexual desires. At first the Emo Girl listened to Jurii in silence, even attentively. But then, apparently when the descriptions became particularly crude, she could bear it no longer and slapped him across the face with all her strength. She turned and walked away immediately. From that slap, Jurii’s legs buckled and he was on the verge of falling, but he waited until she had gone before slowly sliding down the wall to the floor. Epic fail.
The hardest part afterwards was deciding how to look her in the eyes the next day.Jurii decided not to justify himself or apologise. He had offered, she had refused. No hard feelings. That was his position. Therefore, in the following days when they met in the corridors, Jurii looked at the girl in exactly the same way as before, as if nothing at all had occurred. And a couple of weeks later he had all but forgotten that the conversation had ever taken place.
He may have forgotten, but she remembered everything. And two weeks later she herself approached Jurii and asked him a direct question: “Jurii, is everything you told me that day still valid?” As it turned out, being a girl she too had a great many sexual fantasies and wanted to experience them. But besides Jurii, no one else had approached her with such topics. Perhaps her initial slap had been caused by his words catching her completely off guard. He had probably been too vulgar in his expressions. Besides, as a girl she was socially expected to defend her honour, but ultimately she was still a woman, and hormones dictated her thoughts more than she could admit. And so, after thinking it over in the following days, she herself was ready and gave Jurii permission to carry out everything he had described.
And so Jurii experienced a woman for the first time, realising that with women one must always take a direct and courageous approach. And if a woman says “no,” it does not necessarily mean that a minute later she will not say “yes.”
Jurii and the Emo Girl never became a couple. Having lost their virginity, both understood that they were not truly interested in each other. The surge of hormones had passed, desire had faded, and beyond that there was nothing binding them together. At the same time, Jurii had an online pen-pal girlfriend at that time whom he valued far more and considered his real girlfriend than the one with whom he had slept. However, that pen-pal girl deserves her own full chapter and will be told about later.
You see, at the age of fifteen or sixteen, when teenagers begin to explore their sexual lives, all the boys bragged about their achievements. If someone started a relationship or even simply kissed, everyone knew about it immediately. But Jurii kept such details secret. No one knew about his encounter. However, the Emo Girl apparently shared it with her friends, particularly noting that Jurii was a reliable boy who will not brag. After that, many girls at school began to seek his company as a close friend with whom they could explore new horizons without fear of judgement or the information spreading. Thus, by the time he was sixteen or seventeen, Jurii had become the main deflowerer at school. Perhaps for boys, especially at that age, this would have been considered an achievement, but Jurii viewed it differently. The girls loved Jurii for his character and sense of humour, and they wanted to be in his company… however, because of his health problems, building a relationship with him was considered taboo. God forbid anyone found out that a girl was dating Jurii… that short, hunchbacked disabled boy. It would be a disgrace before her parents and friends. Yet they could not tear themselves away from him, and thus he became their guilty pleasure… or, more accurately, their love-training machine, on which they could try out all their wildest female fantasies before finding a “normal” boyfriend with whom dating would not invite public condemnation.
Jurii understood from the very beginning that he was being used as a toy-boy, but he was willing to play by those rules, reasoning that it was better for him to touch girls than not to. At the same time, Jurii found it interesting simply to study women, to understand their psychology, since all the other boys at school ran after girls like obedient calves, believing that women were divine, unearthly creatures of pure beauty, whereas Jurii learned to see through them… to see all their filth and hypocrisy. And so he continued to keep all the girls’ secrets… so well, in fact, that none of his male friends even suspected anything. For all the boys, Jurii was considered simply a virgin, while for the girls, he was the main stud. And I, as his wife, understand perfectly well why this was so.
There was always something animalistic in him... the purest manifestation of raw masculinity, which exerted such a powerful influence upon the mmost feminine girls. It was that very primal instinct which compels beauties to lose their minds over the beast.
Jurii admits that there were not that many girls… they could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Yet even this was enough for him to begin understanding women not only in theory, but in practice, and to recognise that they all shared the same patterns of behaviour.
Those final three years of school left a very deep mark on Jurii’s character and life. Yet he himself also left his own indelible trace upon the school.
After his graduation, many of the stories and events connected with him became part of the school’s folklore and legends. I myself was a witness to this when we visited the place twenty years after his departure. Many children continued to recount stories invented by Jurii, even though they had not the slightest idea who he was.
One of those stories was the tale of a certain boy who went into the school library and never returned. Jurii had invented this story as a joke, and now it lived its own independent life, acquiring new interpretations and details with each new generation. Yet few knew that the boy who had disappeared into the library was none other than Jurii Kirnev himself.
He recalls an incident: somewhere in the tenth grade he came to a literature lesson and saw that all his classmates had a collection of poems by the poet Sergei Esenin, while he did not. The teacher told Jurii to go to the library and not to return without the Esenin collection. Jurii was only too happy… an opportunity to escape class. When he asked the librarian where the collections of Esenin’s poems were, she told him they were at the very far end of the library. And Jurii began to wander among the tall bookshelves, right to the furthest corner. There he found the very books that every one of his classmates held. But they were completely new, recently printed, with a very bright yellow-orange colour and modern cellulose paper, which Jurii had no desire to touch. Moreover, this was the exact edition that every one had, and Jurii did not want to be like everyone else. Since the teacher had not specified which exact collection of Esenin’s poems he should bring, he began to look for other books bearing the name Esenin. And Jurii found one such book. It was the oldest, most worn volume in a grey cloth binding, torn with pages falling out and yellowed paper. It was a Soviet edition of the complete works of Esenin, including his most vulgar, obscene, and even pornographic poems. This book clearly did not belong to the school library. It had most likely been left there by an older pupil or accidentally handed in from someone’s private collection. Thus, he became the only one in the school in possession of the poet’s obscene verses. For Jurii it became his personal Necronomicon. And every time the teachers said something to Jurii that he did not like, he would simply reply by quoting Esenin’s poems… naturally, the most vulgar ones. After that the teachers would immediately fall silent, for they might argue with Jurii, but they had no right to argue with Sergei Esenin.
Jurii cannot say that he likes the poetry of this author. However, he acknowledges that it influenced him very strongly… especially at that age. In this way Jurii became that very boy who went into the library and never returned… in the sense that the book changed him and he emerged from there a completely different person. And no one ever saw that previous boy again. Such is the danger of sending children to the library. One never knows what they will learn there. There is nothing more dangerous than a book in the hands of a man.
When Jurii graduated from school, he returned that book to the school library and even wrote a secret letter, which he hid among its pages, describing many secrets of the school, its history, jokes about certain teachers and pupils, as well as his own tales and adventures. Perhaps that book is still there, or perhaps it has already fallen into the hands of some other pupil upon whom it has had the same influence.