When you stand at the crossroads of life, close your eyes before you step. You do not need them. Your road has already chosen you ...
Part 1
So, I decided "to return to people." I thought about my mother's motherland - Ukraine and felt within me the desire to leave my mark on it. To tell the truth, I had no idea where, to whom and why I was going.
Arriving in Kiev, I bought at the airport newsstand a map of Ukraine and poked it with a ballpoint pen with my eyes closed. The blue dot appeared on the Khmelnitsky region. It was there, in a small village of Ivashkivtsi, that my mother was born in a large family. Her name was Evdokia, Dusya.
The first thing I did was to see the relatives. The last time I saw them during the summer holidays after the end of the eighth grade of the school ...
In that hot summer of 1973, my friend Yurka Redey entered the Suvorov Military School and I decided to join him. The stories about the military service of our boarding school teacher, former combat intelligence officer Vladimir Mikhailov, were painfully beautiful.
My friend was strong from the early childhood. As for me, I came to the medical checkup with a medical record, which resembled a multivolume edition. The doctor glanced at it quickly, then looked at me, asked how I had finished 8 classes. Having learned that with honors, he advised me to go on studying. He said that with such a medical record, I require strict medical control, and not a military school.
Until the end of the summer there was still a whole month and instead of returning to the boarding school, I went to my mother's brothers in the village. I helped my relatives to harvest, first kissed a girl, grazed cows. However, the thought that I was "not suitable" for the military school, bothered me and strongly affected my male pride.
I met September at a new boarding school in a neighboring city, because in the old school there were only eight steps.
The newcomer was met well only by the girls. A frail student with long eyelashes ... N-yes, it was difficult to understand them. Guys constantly dragged me into fights and I constantly lost. It had to be changed.
One day when I was rummaging through the drawers of the music room, where I went to play the guitar, I suddenly saw, instead of notes, a lonely and tattered pamphlet about the Sevastopol Higher Naval School. I understood where I will enter after the school.
Our tutor explained that it is extremely difficult to study for an aviator or a naval officer. But I could not stop. And I decided to start running. Initially, only at the stadium of the school, then along the main rural road, and later - along the mountain paths of the Carpathians, which gradually descended to our village.
I got up an hour earlier than the rest of the students. I ran in any weather: in the rain, in the wet snow and in a snowstorm. The problem was only in the leaky sports clothes, which we were given only for classes in the gym. When the physical education teacher found out about my training, he asked the director of the boarding school to give me a sports suit. I was handed to him on the school meeting.
By spring, my authority among the boys has increased. At school competitions I took the second place and was enlisted in the national team for participation in regional races in running. I graduated from the school in the rank of the winner of a number of competitions in athletics. I also tried my strength in the decathlon. The only problem was my medical record.
Since my visits to the medical office of the orphanage were frequent (mainly because of a blue-eyed nurse with a long black braid), my request to look through my medical record did not cause any suspicion. And as soon as the weighty history of my diseases was in my hands, I immediately went with it to the mountains.
Sitting by the fire and tearing page after page my frail past, I mentally said goodbye to my childhood ...