I must say that some of the boys were sent there for taking part in mass protests – either by cutting their wrists, or going on a hunger-strike – there was a lot of unrest in prisons and labor camps at the time.
Victor: The Sun was rather active that year, spurring mankind to fight for freedom, not just in our country, but all over the planet. Remember the workers’ revolution in Poland, the tragic hunger-strike of the IRA prisoners in Northern Ireland? They are good examples of this.
Andrei: Of course I remember. Their choice of freedom at the cost of their lives served as an example to all of us who were enslaved for wanting to be free.
Victor: Well, not only to them. It was this summer that I attained enlightenment: the very same freedom at the price of one’s own life.
Andrei: Excuse me, but I don’t understand this paradox or yours. If I can believe my eyes, you are more alive than dead, though maybe not quite free.
Victor: The problem is that your eyes can see no further than the outward form. Outwardly, I, indeed, am alive, though not free. Inwardly, it’s quite the contrary. Such are the dialectics.
Andrei: I didn’t get you just the same.
Victor: Never mind, you’ll learn. So what wrong did they do to you by transferring you from the observation ward to the ward for the privileged?
Andrei: I was one of their own in the observation ward. The guys who suffered a lot from the commies hated their guts – and here they send a guy who dared to go to the US embassy, well, the general attitude was understandable.
Solidarity in general was the norm in the ward, something absolutely alien to this pack of bitches called «socialist society». I remember an incident in our canteen when I was called a traitor and a CIA agent by some bastard who either wanted to show his patriotism to win favors, or was just trying to provoke me to a fight – I don’t know. Anyway, his reward was not long in coming: his first toilet sortie after that incident proved most unfortunate – he slipped and badly smashed his head on the toilet bowl. Yeah, after this none of those bitches dared to show us their fucking patriotism.
So they transferred me to the so-called recovery ward, for the bitchiest bitches, like the deputy director of our local Schelkovo steel-mill, some department head in the Foreign Trade Ministry, the head of some big supermarket in Moscow; in short, all those bossy felons, and a couple of bosses’ sons – one was a deputy principal in a prestigious English language school. The bastard screwed half of his students, undermined his health, and therefore badly needed treatment; the other one was a young sadist killer who knifed a girl in his class, and she bled to death. What surprised me most was that this scum was allowed what they called «leave», and spent every weekend at home. On weekdays they were given vitamins and electric sleep treatment. And in their spare time they lectured me on patriotism, saying that I must love their fucking country, and defend it by serving in the army, instead of selling it out to the US imperialists. The deputy director of our local steel-mill and the pedophile principal whose daddy was said to hold some high post in the KGB were the ones who persevered the most. I don’t know how much patience I had left for listening to those bitches, but luckily, on the fifth day of my hunger-strike, when they saw I was not bowing to their persuasion, they sent me back to the observation ward. And on the seventh, they gave me the hell they had total blackout induced by injections of God knows