I started to record my thoughts on paper (in a school copybook) almost a year ago when my patient could not take the breakfast I was feeding him, lost his consciousness, and died a week later at the age of 100. His daughter told me he never was sick in his life, not even while spending time at the nazi camp. After that I somehow was out of work, and left free to my own devices.

I always dreamt I was a writer, I composed in my head, but never wrote it down. When I remembered the time of my virtual writings, in the first version of my draft I related it thus:

"Strange but all these streams of good, brilliant writing now seems are lost maybe I would remember something but it is pale compared to ecstasy in making, like somebody who discovered the greatest truth of the world in narcotic enlightenment and wrote it down and it was: All smells gasoline. But nothing ever gets lost, your thoughts are like those mottoes rode by planes so everybody sees them though doesn't know whence they came about". Then, in another place, I compared this situation to the loss of the Greek literature of 10-2 centuries BC. Nevertheless, I started out, and began to excavate my childhood, high school, and later years' memories, combining them with book criticism and my impressions of current events as I saw them through the media eyes.

When I was eight, I thought once the Sun was falling down onto the Earth, and the scientists knew about it but hid from everybody. I looked , I stared at the Sun like a rabbit looks at the python, I saw it whirled madly becoming bigger every second, I felt it was getting warmer outside(though it was winter then) and I do not remember how I got rid from this nightmare.

My mother and me at Boris' place in the communal flat in Avtovo, the Stalin era district of Petersburg where many officers just returning from the war got their apartments (the German prisoners of war have built them). I am lying on the bed, Boris sits at the table among old radios, cables, tuning in on various stations, catching music, foreign voices. The lamp lits the table, the rest of the room, crammed with technical things, is in the darkness.

When still in Russia, I once bought a book for prospective writers but it scared away rather than encouraged the fledglings. I remember only one thing from it: If you write a barbarity - cross it out. Some time ago, when I decided the time came for me to start my writing career, I bought more books on writing. But it was all the same. Lillian, the freelance poetess, told me books are useless for a writer, you have to write what is your own. Being a dyslexic, it was natural for her to say so. But even she could not induce me into writing; I had a writer's block. I enjoyed typing her poems and looking for words in my mental glossary but I couldn't write a thing.

Yesterday I've read Montaigne "On Presumption". I have him in French, but in English it was easier. Then I have read two chapters from Chuan Tse. The weather is cloudy, not hot yet. Boris leaves for Russia, I am alone with my mother, Lilia, and Chicka.

Twenty years ago I was living in Leningrad, studying medicine and reading about the Artificial Intelligence. I remember reading a fat philosophical book discussing possibilities of machines' thinking and whether they could pass the Turing test which consisted in putting a man in a room, and conversing in writ with two entities one of whom was human, and another was a machine. If he could not tell which was which, then a machine, naturally, passed the test. Some people argued machines can think or can be made to think in future, others argued against it. I don't know if any computers nowadays were so successful, but I know many psychically not stable persons were enamored of some AI computer programs and even got dependent on them. Even funnier situation arose when two programs, one of which was made to be maniacal paranoid male, and another schizophrenic female, had an opportunity to converse. While I was reading this, sitting on the back desk on seminars on pharmacology or something else, one of my fellow students, a dark-skinned, slender, short boy from Ceylon, his name was Nilanga Madigasikeira, was reading James Bond adventures. He looked with certain awe at my reading. I had a nurse practice in summer at a hospital on Vasiliev Island (Vasilievsky Ostrov where you could get through the metro station of the same name - Vasileostrovskaya - I remember one Israelite complained Russian words were so long while Hebrew were nicely short), had a birthday party where I got drunk, and my ex-girlfriend, disgusted with my behavior, left it, I run after her and followed her in metro to her house.

She told me never to see her again.

I quit the medical school in late autumn and spent some blank weeks, after that I found a job looking after the sick persons.

. During this job I have had two patients. I spent a night with a dying from cancer woman, in the end of this night she died. Her daughter was near me, she also did not sleep that night, in the morning she paid me my money, and I left. Another was a stroke victim, he could not move, he could not speak. The half of his body was paralyzed. I visited him in the hospital. I tried to speak to him, but he did not answer. I worked there for some weeks, after which I have a blackout in my memory. Next thing I remember

is the Institute of Cardiology where I was to develop an expert system

(a computer program supposed to help a physician to reach a diagnosis and administer a treatment).My idea was to use my knowledge of programming and medicine. I wanted to work as a lab assistant there, for a pay. But my boss, the doctor-researcher whom I got to know through my mother (she studied with him), did not want to pay me. He wanted me to return to the medical school and continue with him on a non-pay basis. Before me, he had worked with one programmer, and that guy left an unfinished program in Prolog, the language I did not like and thought it would not work. Talking with my boss, I could not understand what he wanted from this system. I wanted to write a program in LISP, I studied cardiology books, printings of the old program, I went to the scientific library and read there books on AI.

During this year I came often to the Fortress, as we called it, where medical students worked as janitors. The Peter and Paul Fortress was a first, 18 century fortification in the city. It is situated on a small island on the river Neva, in the very centre of the city. In the cathedral tsars used to be buried. Also, this fortress served as a prison for `political' convicts during the tsars' era. I worked and lived there myself for some time until I got fired. There were two big apartments there, in which about ten students lived and many more people came from all kinds of places to visit. I had a romance with one girl during which we traveled to Tallinn and Moscow, we two or in bigger company. But by the end of the year I was through with this girl also, and I decided to go for a study to America.

Our previous cat, Zoui, lived with us in Jerusalem. He was black-and-white; his mother was a Siamese, his father - of impure blood, some lucky street cat of indeterminate blood. One American woman, our neighbor, gave him to us as a gift. At this time he was 12, and when he died, he was already 20. He used to go out for a walk through the window in my room to the back side of our building where an apricot tree grew (we collected apricots) and where our neighbors threw their

`zevel'- the garbage. There he is buried. We with Boris dug a hole in the ground, put him there, and a big stone over it. We also put a stick there, but it fell down soon.

We had a nice view out of the balcony. We lived on the slope of the big mound where several streets crossed it, one above the other.

Our street was one but lowest. On our arrival to Jerusalem, and, in general, on the holy land, we landed on the lowest street; we had a balcony on the upper storey, where you could play soccer. The flat itself was two-roomed, and somewhat less than the balcony. Directly opposite the balcony, on the mound half mile from us, we enjoyed the view of the minaret, dominating the Arab village and five times a day also listened to muezzin high-pitched voice, starting 5A.M. Some high school girls also held the floor there sometimes speaking of their girlish problems. This minaret dominated the whole neighborhood including Jewish, and often I ran my morning jog persecuted by the thundering political Arab voice calling to arms and to end with these Jews.

We moved three times in our first three years, demonstrating upward social mobility, though somewhat thwarted. We lasted five years in our third apartment till our landlady told us she was going to sell it and we had to seek our fortunes elsewhere, as it happened, on the shores of the Mediterranean.

But the view was really nice and it was good to sit on the balcony in the morning, or in the evening, when it's not so hot yet. They say it's possible to see the Dead Sea from the upper storey of the house on top of the mound. One of our friends did yoga on the roof of his building and bathed in the sunrise looking at the Dead Sea.

On the street below, a bus line went, and then a piece of the waste land, where the Arab boys liked to ride their Arab horses. Old men from the village rode on their asses sometimes through our streets. Sometimes an Arab would stab a Jew. Still, before the outbreak of Intifada, we sometimes went to Arabs to buy bread and other things, they were cheaper there (I could not get the beer in their minimarket, it was not sold for strange religious reasons).

I worked in the cinema in Tel Aviv as a janitor the previous winter. One colleague when I told him about my trip to Czechoslovakia (now without Slovaks) told me he also was there. He did not like it. It reminded him of Soviet ways. He did not like their service, people were boorish and uncooperative. He said you have to pay for the quality. For him the cheap prices of Czechs reflected the 'cheapness' of their country. But, though the prices in supermarkets were much lower, the products were not worse, but better than in Israel whose inhabitants go for vacations abroad because they cannot afford the prices of Israeli resorts. . Lilia and me stayed in the three-star hotel in the centre of the city, which was to our liking, visited Karluv most( the historical bridge across the river, Vltava it's name, I think, Visla is in Warsaw, Poland), the Gothic cathedral of St. Vitt, ate in Chinese, American, and Czech restaurants(one American ex-pat served me chips, beef and beer there), took hundreds of pictures of old Prague, bought souvenirs (my mother was happy to find a blue-glass ash-tray with Czech inscriptions on it, though she broke it soon as she has the habit of breaking plates, ash-trays is they're breakable), and other things.

I quit my medical school in November. One dreary morning I came there late, like a couple of other students from my group, and was not admitted. I stood in the corridor, near the room where the seminar was held, looked through the window outside, at the heavy November rain. I wanted to sleep; I did not want to study. I was in my fourth year. The worst (they said) was over; we started clinical disciplines, dermatology, cardiology, etc. But I did not care for dermatology, and the rest. I was interested in AI, in rock music, America.

I don't write about Israel at all,

I live as though in my Ioknapatofa, communicating with Lilia, sea, the BBC, performing the tasks my mother assigns to me. And I, though living in Israel, don't notice its realities, living in my past, reading books, browsing internet.

Talking of study in America, I felt nostalgia for GRE, the American general graduate exam. I decided to check if I can take it better now, whether my intelligence has deteriorated since 1991, or improved, due to my better command of English and life in general.

Zhvanetsy, the Russian humorist, was shown on TV yesterday. He was hard on internet, saying it's all rubbish. Internet rivals tv, and Zhvanetsky is 80 years old, he has difficulty adapting to new media. I myself feel something like antipathy to cell phones (though I use one, the cheapest model, to talk to Lilia and mother). But I feel myself at home in the internet though I walk in those parts of it the majority never visits and avoid places where majority mingles (I catch some of its pornography and sensationalism still, but don't react).

About the military- the siren blew, we went into the lobby for a couple of minutes, and that was it. But I cannot meet Lilia for three weeks now.

The guys from the Learning Strategies offer to teach their staff. I once bought a video and five cassettes from them for $150 but I cannot bring myself to work with it.

But I need some income besides welfare.

I worked with Lillian as a computer teacher. I did not teach her anything about the computers but she claimed she learned a lot from me. About the computers, she was completely dumb. She said she hated computer but it was useful but as a poetess she was antagonistic to it. I typed her poems, cut the vegetables for her, but she also liked to talk. She tried to raise my Jewish consciousness, guided me to the Jewish religious sites, besides, she always took some courses on how to live better which is strange in retrospective because she died after two years .

I lie thinking of East and West. The whole of the Moon -the words from a song Kate brought me from England. She came to Russia to see the whole of the Moon.

East-West connection is very controversial, Kipling wrote East is East, and West is West, and They won't go together. Some say Western science and Eastern philosophy are incompatible- discursive and illogical. But the `Tao of physics' and photo reading

imply combination of Western and Eastern approaches. I think it was Foucault who said Chinese cannot do mathematics because of their ways of thinking. But he was wrong.

Meditative poetry fades away as the Literary Dictionary says. The passions and struggles don't leave place for a quiet soliloquy. Blake says: Expect poison from the standing water. Chuan Tse remarks : still water reflects eternal light. I like to be in a car during the rain. You are like in a bubble surrounded by water, nobody gets you.

When I studied physiology, many of the students avoided making experiments with frogs. The task had been to dissect a frog, destroy her brain, and look at her reflexes. I dumbly did what I'd been told. But later it began to torture me. I would never engage in physiology, biology, and experimental medical sciences in general.

I choose to write in English because I like the way American underground writers write, in between other jobs, not like 'stable', 'professional' Soviet, now Russian writer, instrument of propaganda.

Lillian, talking of her famous friend, said in ordinary life she was quite an ordinary being. She thought greatness existed in books only.

Once on TV some prominent pianist (or composer, I don't remember) explained how the staff should be learned. He opened page 1, studied it thoroughly, and then went to page 2, and so on. I could never bring myself to it. If I was interested, I immersed myself in whatever I learned, and then stopped, and did something else. Maybe, it's due to my disturbance of thinking, I don't know.

In the morning, I thought of my first love. Then I wrote about it in my copybook. I could not bring myself to tell the story logically, from the start to the end. I started, then my memories overwhelmed me, and I quit. Next time I remembered something different. This moment I evoked how we'd started. I never before made it with girls though in my elementary and high school I've had my 'favorites'. I was finishing my second year of the medical school, and wrote some papers in anatomy, biology, and physiology. I passed my exam in anatomy with an `A' grade (I remember the interest we had for the women corpses, their pudenda). My friend, who was also a celibataire, was finishing his study at the Polytechnic (in due time he persuaded me to go for it, as earlier to go to the math school. His father was a physicist, and he had a strong tendency to natural sciences from the beginning). Once he called me and asked could I fix him up him with a girl from our medical college. He reasoned there are many girls studying medicine ( and he studied in strictly manly company , in his group of nuclear physics a joke was popular about a physicist who was not saved by his leaden underwear from the nuclear radiation) , and I could easily procure him one. I said I was not familiar with many girls, but we could attend together a KVN game. KVN was (and is) a kind of student artistic club where the teams from many colleges and universities compete in jokes and witticisms. We attended one competition but he had not succeeded in meeting his dream-girl. Meanwhile I with company of my friends traveled to Moscow to see the paintings of Dali , for the first time being exhibited in Russia. When I returned, he called me again, this time I found out he was dating a girl, had problems with her, and wished us to meet while he met another girl, her friend. I agreed, we were to meet on the Finnish Railway station to go to the beach in Solnechnoye, we four.

We met near the cash counters, and took the train to the resort. On the way to the beach we separated into pairs, and I talked a little with Katya. We talked about our studies (she also was graduating from the Polytechnic in cybernetics), about Dali exhibition (she also went to Moscow to see it). She was very beautiful( she had blue eyes, a nose that had an angle to it, long straight legs, light-brown hair, her breasts also were ok), and had a very good figure, and even clumsy green skirt she later confessed to me she hated and felt in it ugly, was not damaging to her. I have not noticed her inner beauty; her exterior was fine with me so far. A picky pick, you would say, you fell in love with the first girl you met, after one day of seeing her. But she really was nice, as many girls are, and I was not so choosy. Truly, I did not notice her green skirt (I usually don't notice how people, and girls, are dressed), I remembered it because of her telling me about it later. Everything went smoothly though I don't remember any details of this day. When we returned to Leningrad, I went to see Katya off, went up with her to the fourth or fifth storey on an old, shabby stairway ( the house had not a lift, and the ceilings were high) where she lived in a small two-room apartment with her parents in an old building which was near of my mother's apartment where she lived many years, and she had (and still has a powerful nostalgia for this district where she went to school, had her girlfriends and beloved places. It's in the centre of the city, close to the Letnyi Sad and Neva, built of the houses of 19^th century, with high ceilings and sculptured figures on the facades which vary in every house in contrast to the uniform houses in the new, `sleep' districts where my mother and I lived then. By the way, a poet Brodsky, 1988 Nobel laureate, had lived in the house across the street from ours( until the Soviet government, after convicting him to five years of prison for 'faineance' and judging him insane, kindly sent him out of Russia, he having had safely landed in America). Anyway, we drank tea, glanced at the reproductions of Dali in the

fat book she had ( one wall of their living-room was all filled by the books, and I browsed through them with an avid eye) - I remember one which was called `Evocation of Lenin' with a piano and somebody striking a button. We kissed outside the door to the flat, and we parted agreeing to meet again.

Thursday I'm visiting Lilia in Jerusalem. We would go to a basin, then to the forest near her place, and, as she cut off the cable TV to economize, we would not watch it. I am to collect the working details of her two broken computers and to throw the rest into garbage .At that time Lilia was living without a computer. I tried to set up one old model assembled by Boris in our apartment (from the parts found in this same garbage), to assemble it anew in her place. My efforts were in vain, always some part refused to work, and I had to go back and Boris repaired or changed it, and in two weeks' time I arrived to her again, and again something was wrong, and then her German (Jewish but living in Germany) relative (her relatives scattered on the Earth's surface) presented her a laptop he assembled from garbage in Germany. Meanwhile, Lilia enjoyed herself by playing poker with her son and his friends visiting home after spending two weeks in the army.

I was counting my treasures, the English words. I got myself an Oxford English Dictionary on computer, and was augmenting my vocabulary( there are well over half a million words in this dictionary, with ancient examples, but many words are not used, actually you would do fine with a thousand, like the British high society, but you'll need some nuances).

I was in three weeks to fly for Russia. I've been there a year before, and couldn't get adjusted to our flat (which we've changed just before leaving for Israel). Our tenants painted all the furniture in red, white, black, and dirty grey, imitating IKEA design. They were designers. As I travel to Russia, I take the books from our Russian library, with me, to Israel (it is allowed to carry on board 20 kg per person so I can take very few books with me, and the custom prohibits taking books issued before 50 years from now). During my last years in Russia I used to go to the foreign library to read books in English and French. I hardly remember what I read then.

I worked with a guy who was terminally ill with Parkinson disease, and, by the way, he boasted he has read three thousand books. I thought, maybe the books 'did' it, moreover, two more cases of Parkinson I came into contact with, also were `literary', one was a Kodak scientist, other also had a big library. Though, the first guy, the composer, told me a characteristic joke reflecting his attitude and I suspect it was the cause of his troubles too: He said all is shit save the urine. One girl volunteering to help him merrily repeated in my presence this joke as a kind of a secret password (I would say this is a kind of negativism probably negatively influencing the health, I myself don't believe that 'all is shit').

Last year in Petersburg I was cut off the TV, computer, newspapers, radio. It was a happy life then (but it has not lasted long, since then, I was listening to the radio, in Petersburg also).

My mother reads mainly crime fiction, so does Lilia (and romance, soap-opera too). I hate crime fiction but I like rock, jazz, and 'general' fiction. Boris watches Hollywood movies. In `The Art of Essay' published in 60s, all these kinds of art are frowned upon, one guy specifically writes about how Soviet films (of his era) ape American ones but even more dull and primitive. So, we all are products of `brainless American masscult', like one Russian critic wrote lately.

I found a vocabulary program in the internet (a program that claims to boost your vocabulary). My vocabulary was estimated as ranging between 280000 and 2,500000 dollars a year - I am a successful fiction writer (or a top manager, or the President of the United States him or herself).

At 11 the siren blew, we went into the corridor and stood there, with our neighbors, listening for the BOOM. It was just a military exercise. I cannot go to Jerusalem this Friday.

I was a teacher of computer for one American Jewish woman-poetess in her terminal stage of spread-out cancer. Besides teaching computer (which she could never learn from me), I, strangely, helped her with the words, sought 'right' words for her poems. If I couldn't find one, she looked up a word in her Roget's thesaurus. We also did a lot of talking, she liked to talk very much, I also shopped a bit for her, washed the dishes, did some massage and acupressure, and presented her with my drawings (she liked them a lot calling me a genius). She urged me to write volunteering to edit 'my staff' but I couldn't.

I bought a book by an Australian author, `Seven Types of Ambiguity', I liked the title, and the book itself looked nice with her black cover and elegant design( there are over 600 pages in it). But I stopped on page 50 not being able to continue.

It was 'The Art of Writing Essays', the book published in 60s, that I bought in the old books shop that finally induced me to write. I always liked the word 'essay' though I did not connect it with the high school and college exercises assigned to American students. I thought of Camus' essays, Montaigne's 'Essays ', Charles Lamb' 'Essays of Elia'.

When I was a child, in the house of our Jewish relatives who left for Israel still in 70s, I saw once a photo of Jerusalem West Wall. The deep blue sky, the yellow stony wall on the background of that blue sky, struck me as a thing I never saw in my life, it was completely out-of-this-world-picture.

Strangely, when I found myself in Israel, twenty years later, the sky did not seem to me so deep blue. And the stars were very few, not the starry sky I watched outside Leningrad, in the country, at nights.

I have memories of English since my childhood.

I studied it, besides the school, on my own, and with a teacher, a Jewish relative of my mother, an old lady. It had a xenic attraction for me, these Latin, Anglo-Saxon sounds and letters.

In 2003, I found an old book named 'Greek Drama'. There were plays by ancient Greek playwrights, I liked them, and this was a beginning of my library in Israel, and beginning of my antiquity reading. In 2004, there was an Olympiad in Athens, I was reading Platon and Aristoteles.

In 2005, my mother and I even went for five days to Rhodos. For my mother, it was a deep province, but I liked it in Greece. We bought an ash-tray there, stylized after ancient Greek motifs (these things Greeks make better than Hebrews, who excel in literature and science but not in art), and it stands since in our changing apartments, in Jerusalem and here, in Ashdod. My mother doesn't allow using it for cigarette ash.

While preparing for the GRE, I met one Jewish fellow who took earlier this test and spent a year in an American university. He was studying philology

at the Petersburg university . We found a common interest in the person of Michel Foucault, the French structuralist( he was the single individual whom I met who knew this name). He gave me his book on Western medicine called 'The Birth Of The Clinic' to read. He also talked about Kuhn and his paradigms. Once he invited me to the party. There had been his acquaintance from America, an American girl, a student. I had no opportunity to talk to her because she evidently was very much afraid of me ( I don't know what he could have told her about me). During the party, everybody got very drunk, and this guy asked what meant 'element' in English. I thought it meant the same, as in Russian, a chemical element. But no, it meant also things like storm and ambience which is translated by the Russian word 'stichia', and he illustrated this meaning putting on a musical band called ' Element of Crime'. I took my test, and later had some more encounters with this guy, though not connected to American Universities or Michel Foucault.

I was a shoplifter once. My friend and I were sitting drinking coffee in a cafe by the sea waiting for our train home. I watched waves and glistening sea feeling bittersweet. I did not want to leave the sea.

I asked the barman to play my 'Velvet Underground' cassette. The music played, then stopped. We came up to the counter. The barman (actually, there were two of them) disappeared with my cassette, he liked it. Two bottles of cognac stood in the reach of our hands. Instantly I took the bottles and placed them into the bag my friend prepared in the same moment. On the train to Kharkov, we opened the bottles and discovered they were fake - reddish alcoholic liquid impossible to drink instead of cognac.

I've read "The Great Gatsby", I took the book in the library, and I liked it. But I wouldn't like to be a Great Gatsby; first, I don't feel like gathering a fortune. And I'm not great, I'm not steel, I'm not a Superman. I don't want even to write a "Great Gatsby".

Before I went to Germany, I spent some time on Black sea. Once, when I swam not so far from the shore, my friend called me and said my clothes were stolen. I went to Germany looking like a bum and caught in my shoes all the water I met on my way (it was November). Later, we searched for the thief (my friend said he saw how he ran off with my things and claimed to know him).We went to the place where this guy could be found - I remember I did not like the place, morbid and

gloomy - but he was not there.

We had to study Nabokov's 'Pnin' in the Hebrew university (the Russian surname meaning 'of stump, stub', what remains of a tree after it's been cut down). Not that I liked the book and the idea of studying it at the university very much. It went in line with general treatment of Russians in the West showing them, this time, as comical, pathetic beings.

Of course, Nabokov also was a Russian but we learned he was 'an unreliable narrator'. While still in Russia, I've read his early novels and 'Lolita'. Once, in the book shop, I've heard a guy calling Nabokov 'shit'. It was due to his pedophilia but, probably, because he was writing in English, too.

While I was in Petersburg this August, I liked to sit on the balcony in the evenings and watch the sky. It was mostly grayish, of course, not of this Parisian gris which Henry Miller so liked, but not altogether leaden. Sometimes golden clouds of intricate forms flied slowly through it, it was not dark late into the night even if white nights ended in June. I also liked to sit in the bath in the mornings which I cannot do in Israel due to saving water; also the bath is small and not quiet, cozy, like in Petersburg where you are totally cut out of the world in this closed room with designed ceiling and dilapidating walls with Chinese painting on them.

When we with my mother drove a bus on our endless routines, she asked me the name of one street in our old district where we had lived for 30+

years. It was Vernosti street, the street of Fidelity (not spouse fidelity; fidelity to Motherland, our district had streets named after science, from one side, and in honor of heroism in WWII, from the other one. Not so far Piskarevskoe memorial cemetery was located, with its Soviet eternity memorial architecture and sculpture and its million dead during 'blokada'. I liked a forest near the cemetery, round which I used to ski and where we with my friends used to drink alcoholic beverages in the nature surrounding, when we had just started drinking in the upper classes of our high school.

The forest then wasn't much of nature, it was some twenty years old, the trees not grown up much, dirty, untidy, uncivilized. But we liked it nevertheless. Now it looks like the real forest, trees very high, birches, pines, winding gravy paths, old women walking with their dogs. Looking at Fidelity Street, I noticed a pair of aboriginal girls in trendy clothes strolling in our direction and not aiming at keeping my fidelity, to my Lilia.

Barthes in his 'Mythologies' writes the leftist myth is rather thin compared to the rightist one. The bourgeois have money and hundreds of years of controlling the fates and the minds of the public. The lefts are being controlled and persecuted, ignorant in differing degrees, and busy working. But is the set of strategies of the ruling classes is so invincible? Are the proletarian myths so uncompetitive, barbarian and having no future?

I had nostalgia for the Leningrad Radio, the programs of which I used to hear in my school years (the radio was constantly on). This time it was my sole media source during the month I spent there. I was disappointed by its commercialism and degradation, as it seemed to me.

Lilia said once she remembered well her years in Ukraine, and the 15 years she spent in Israel, were lost in her memory. Interesting that she doesn't regret these 'lost' years in Israel. You can say you have had history in your 'pre-historic' motherland. Here, in high-tech Israel, you don't remember anything.

Interesting, when I started studying French words in French-Russian dictionary of circa 1913, I found many cute Russian words rarely used in contemporary Russian but still not obsolete I believe.

While visiting 'Asuta Shalom' in Tel Aviv to check my mother's 'fields of vision'(she had some black spots there, glaucoma threatening), I sat waiting beside the door where she was being checked, above my head a big TV set was blaring maliciously about that son of bitch Abu Mazen who wouldn't give up, opposite sat a group of Israeli sick citizens in the queue and watched simultaneously me and television. I sat and in tune with loud tones of television, aggressive thoughts began to roll through me. But I thought of Christian love, and Jewish love, and Buddhist love, and tried to quiet down. By this time they began selling some new, 'sophisticated' computer program don't know what its purpose, being just developed by Israeli developers, and my mother got out. A bit later the doctor also got out, with printed results of the check. Everything was good, black spots almost gone. We went to the balcony to smoke and I observed sophisticated high buildings sticking out in various points of wide Tel Aviv panorama. I hypothesized good results due to our not watching television in Petersburg (I said I did not know how to switch it on and mother did not press me), and her not reading late into the night -she got into the bed, took the book and a minute later the book fell out from her hands and she was asleep.

One more impression of Petersbourg. One morning I awoke in my 'raskladushka' (equally could be said 'dushegubka'), the original Soviet appliance which serves as a bed at night, and in the morning you fold it away, and your back aches from the contact with the metal frame, one of the parts of which is directly under the middle of your body during the whole night. As I used in my Ashdod home, I inspected the bookshelves, poor in this Petersburg home compared to what they used to be and to my current library. Still, I had a thought about Pisarev, the mid-19 century Russian progressive critic. I thought how he maimed poor Pushkin's Onegin exposing his soul emptiness, his parasitic life-style, and his meanness towards his friend (whom he killed on a duel). I thought this is the positive thought antagonistic to poetry still judging it. I walked into my kitchen and switched on my 'trekhprogrammnik'(radio switched into the city radio wire which can transmit three channels, one Petersburg, and two all-Russian caught from Moscow). I got to an exalted eulogy of Derjavin, 'his fantastic deepness of thought, his funny Russian style' (he lived in 18 century). They cited his verse which started 'I, the worm and the tsar...'

I studied medicine, doctors were apolitical in my city, and I can well understand Gogol when he complains of France -wherever you come they give you a paper, come to a cafИ- a paper, come to a lavatory - a paper.

The Pushkin 'firm' is monumentally entrenched in Russian school and Slavistics. There were attempts to translate him into Hebrew but it's a futile enterprise.

.

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In October 1989 I dropped out of the medical, in spring 1990 Leva, our Krepost' guru, acquainted me with Natasha, the medical student in her last year of study, who was from Tallinn and rented a room on Petrogradskaya. Natasha was a very energetic girl, and collected a company around her. Somewhere she picked up a boy from Georgia (the Russian Georgia, not American one), he was a tall, bearded, beautiful, strong fellow engrossed in Eastern teachings. One young lad was her page, and there were some other males hanging around. We read Bhagavad-Gita, Sri Aurobindo and other enlightened books and spent time merrily in Krepost' and other places. Once, she and I went to Tallinn to visit her parents living there in the centre of the town in the six-roomed flat. Her father was an colonel

and kept Russian interests in Estonia. I remember from this trip my wet feet, snow, and some Estonian krepost' (fortress) somewhere above us in the dark winter sky as we scrambled through the snow to her place. She had unpleasant memories of Tallinn (I couldn't understand why - I had always had warm feelings toward Petersburg, my hometown), but met some acquaintances on the streets and talked to them. We went to Estonian bars, drank coffee and cocktails, once we came to an Orthodox priest. He said Protestants knew a lot, and it's good to discuss with them some Christian questions. On the way back, on the train, we met a couple of American students, a boy and a girl. Later we went with them to Moscow, I tried to get them visa back to Russia, and the girl gave me an old copy of Barron's guide to American colleges.

But we did not sleep together, Natasha and me. She had her lover but I doubt she slept with him either; she was too religious for such things. She had a Finnish friend, and tried to get to some international school in Holland (free of charge), and in the end she succeeded. We parted in the end of the year, but I saw her a couple of times afterwards, once, when I was invited to a wedding of one of our guys and this Finnish girl (she had seven or nine sisters, and I liked one small cute sister of them but this wedding had no continuation), and once in Sochi, before my trip to Germany (where my clothes were stolen while I swam). I remember she said she wanted to buy a groovy motorcycle. We met once again, after my return from Germany, in winter Petersburg, there was present this newly wedded pair too. Then I saw no more of her.

I remembered one boy in my elementary school. He was a hooligan, I even fought him on one occasion, he received nothing but 'ones', 'koly' (in America this is equal to 'D',

the worst grade). He hated the school and every teacher, and used four-letter words answering their questions. He was seven years old only. They sent him to the 'internat', a special school where you study and live. He studied Chinese there which amazed me; probably, I would like to study Chinese myself. I met him several years later. He was very quiet, polite, and totally 'reformed'. Maybe now he is a big figure in Russia with his Chinese. This guy from the 'special' school was very 'quiet.'

Nothing can prevent me from dreaming I'm somewhere in Leningrad ( or Petersburg), I felt sick for Leningrad rains, here the last rain pours in April, and that's the end till October(while in Leningrad rains fall every day of the year if it's not snow).

When I asked Lilia, she said she did not remember anything about these shorts. I said everybody lives like in limbo, nobody remembers anything anymore.

I remembered one more Soviet propaganda stereotype. Americans, especially women, on reaching 60 (or 65), put on dark glasses and spend the rest of their life in round-the-world travel, taking everywhere their puddle with them. Lillian, though not a typical American female, still responded, at least partly, to this stereotype. She did not travel throughout the world (though she'd been to Europe), but she moved to Israel. She said, by the way, that French very 'too much civilized', in her opinion. She herself was not 'too much civilized', in my opinion, still she was very enthusiastic about the Apple computer I was supposed to teach her, and numerous self-grow courses with a Judaist bias. She was very open-minded and outgoing, despite being in the last phases of cancer devouring her.

I remembered how I crossed the city from north-eastern corner to the south-western. It took me 30 minutes roughly in metro, from 'Academicheskaya' to 'Avtovo', I'm sure less time than this motorist would take now, and without visiting Kronstadt (the road on the dam is rather boring). Once, in Moscow, I asked the way, and from the answer of a passer-by I understood if I take a slightly different road, all my fate would be fatally different. Americans also have this optics of their own. Some bridge in some city (usually planned for destruction to exchange for a new, better one) takes dimensions of a global communication point.

Today I saw an ad of a new movie "The Ides of March'. I've read the book, by Thornton Wilder, it was my and my mother's favorite, and I doubt many of those who would watch the movie, ever glanced at the book.

Though Cesar was a Cancer, like me, I wouldn't model my life after him.

I said the image of an old American traveling lady in dark glasses, with a puddle was created by the Soviet propaganda, but actually it's not so. I've read a book by Vassiliy Axyonov 'My Grandfather is a Monument' written approximately in 1969, and there a Soviet pioneer Gennadyi Stratophontov saves a drowning American lady in dark glasses , with her puddle, because some marine pirates who got somewhere a WWII rusty submarine, explode a cruise ship somewhere off the shores of Japan.

In this winter of 1987-88 when I fled my home to work and live in Petropavlovskaya Krepost, I spent most of my time to lie in the bed and read 'Bhagavad Gita' . On the wall were hanged multipled copies of a picture of some Indian beauty, it seems she danced, periodically came people, drinking, dancing, and fucking went, but I just read about three gitas (it seems, passion, ignorance, and goodwill) which a wise man should overcome. Also, I studied anatomy (I was in the second year of my medical studies). I was 86-ed from the Krepost' soon ( for unknown reason), but continued to hang around there, enjoying the aquarium in the darkened room with high ceilings, lightened by a small electric lamp and its gold fishes, among whom swam an axolotl, who once swallowed too much food and had to be rescued - these medics used a pincet to extract the piece of meat back from his mouth.

Boris thinks Diogenes was a rich guy who lived on a villa, and this story about his barrel is a myth. He thinks Van Gogh also was a rich guy who sold many of his paintings. He thinks the stories of Diogenes and Van Gogh, and any others are a communist propaganda which he feels he must debunk. I had once 'Letters of Van Gogh' from which it seemed to me he was poor as a church mouse. These letters were printed in the Soviet Union.

I thought of Christianity and Taoism. Somewhere I've got an idea it's good to learn a bit about two at least other religions (preferably world religions) but your own. At one time, I even tried to read some medieval Rashi commenting on Torah. But my other interests produced a kind of chaos in my head. Christianity from the Taoist point of view (as I understood it) is incomprehensible in its sorting out chosen and doomed. Still, you can have at the same time Christianity and Taocism.

Talking of Moscow, I remember how we (my mother, me, and a company of other 'sportsmen') went once in a boat ('baidarka', a sort of canoe or something, you have to assemble it yourself when you are near water) journey in the Middle Russia. My mother and I remember quite different things from it. I remember the stinging mosquitoes, how I boiled once my foot with cacao while preparing breakfast, how I had to carry the fucking baidarka and all our luggage on land because the river (which was there not more than three meters wide) was blocked by fallen trees. I liked to sit by the fire after the supper while the rest of our crews (there were 4 or something baidarkas in our flotilla) retired to their tents instantly. I remember ruins of the Orthodox Church near one village. It was 1980, Olympics in Moscow. One evening we heard on the radio Vysotsky has died. Vysotsky was a famous guitar singer and an actor in Russia, and my mother and me loved his songs. We arrived to Moscow by electrichka, with our baidarka and other luggage. I remember having to spend the night in an elevator shaft because the woman, who, we were told, could lodge us, refused. My mother remembers Moscow 'very clean'. Towards the Olympiad all the 'dregs of society' was gathered and packed off to 101 kilometer from Moscow.

Somewhere (in the Internet) I got an idea it's good to lead a diary. All outstanding people led diaries. Diaries help to clarify thought, to express you; they are good even as a therapy. Writing in English helps to activate your command of the language. You begin to understand (and love) your own mother tongue. Studying languages, reading books, writing diaries helps to fight mental rust which never sleeps, I was told. Studying mathematics is also good, all good mathematicians have an IQ of 170, or like that -and it's not accidental. But trying to be as good as I might, I cannot bring myself to differential quotations and integral calculus. Maybe I'm affected with that 'word' disease. Literature subconsciously drives my pen.

I still want this memoir to be not 'useful', as these Internet marketers, together with Steve Jobs, mean, in the sense they draw financial and designer's gain out of it (did you watch the movie 'The Secret"?) but as some kind of , say, a list, of personal resources at disposal of any computer user and a reader of a library. You may not only play the 'active' computer games till you drop dead, reduce your weight, aficionado in favor of a political party, make dates (for example, with a girl from Ramallah -and when you come out there for a real date, some Arab guys proudly make their score in Palestinian liberation, cutting you in several parts in some remote place where they would get you in the car , appearing before you instead of that young beauty), read newspapers - you can train your memory, speed-read, learn about Buddhism, and a thousand more things.

You needn't become a celebrity; go to Paris, breakfast at Tiffany's.

Probably, my efforts at the Angel's bakeries or elsewhere are not part of this project or some other. But, still, I'm interested but, my interests lie rather in international projects with participation of Israel and Russia, or just wide international projects (not atomic, not military, something cultural, and humanitarian).

Actually, I myself, personally, cannot boast of especially great energy resources. My muscular energy is less than a robust horse's, my mental energy (I'm officially considered 75% incapacitated, and receive 100% disability pension) is probably, not what you consider as a 'human potential'. But I believe humanity needs new resources of energy, green energy, of course, Aeolian, sun, water, natural (but not natural gas and oil).

I've read people living in the underwater laboratory in isolation, asked to send them popular music, but soon they were fed up with it, and switched to classics. I continue to listen to rock music, but I listen to J.S. Bach also. I lost track where are my current whereabouts - in an underwater laboratory, in a spaceship, monotonously swallowing light years away from the Earth, on the North Pole, or somewhere else.

Once I copied a J.S. Bach disc for one guy, a taxi driver. Later I asked him how he liked it. He said he never was in a mood to listen to it. Something about the job of a taxi driver scuttles the possibility to enjoy the organ music. He once told me, when he wakes up, his first thoughts are about checking the wallet to see if any money is there to buy a bottle of wine (it was before he started his driving job, probably, now he refrains from the morning drinking).

Swedish poet received a Nobel Prize in literature. I keep reading poets who did not receive the Nobel (not that I think they're better, but I don't think they are any worse not getting the Nobel). Take for example Arsenyi Tarkovsky, the father of a genius movie maker.

Once, I tried to sell tickets to the Mariin Opera House to foreigners. I did not sell a single ticket; I remember one foreigner said to me: I don't want anything to buy -this unusual phrase, different from our school manuals phrases, stuck in my memory, and I often repeated it in appropriate and not appropriate moments, like a parrot.

Pushkin liked fashion(he, rather, took a fatalistic stance on it : You can be a reasonable man, and still care about your fingertips' beauty, habit is a tyrant, why quarrel futilely with changing times?), he painted a dandy, describing fashions in dress, food, entertainments, literature, which this fellow followed in the beginning of 19 century. Duels were in fashion then, the dandy kills his best friend on a duel( the cause for which was foolish, and could be resolved elementarily, and the dandy regretted deeply of his act, but the code of honor implacable) and Pushkin perished on a duel himself. Pushkin had been in and out of fashion since; he has his fans and adversaries in Russia.

Greek philosophers somehow succeeded to reach the state of 'ataraxie', 'apathy', in one word, bliss, when nothing could influence their happiness. They prescribed divers paths to 'get there' (interesting they could do so without Jesus Christ). Apathy, probably, it's not a total freedom from emotions, feelings; it's an ability to overcome them. Stoics, cynics, epicureans, Democritus - they lived in a world far different from ours. But perhaps their teachings are not 'cancelled' by Freud, Marx, and Dostoevsky?

. Is repression and self-restraint a basis of the civilization (as Freud thought)?

I wonder if the Bible is Absolute truth. For example, Ecclesiastes says all is vain.

Maybe he just had a surfeit out of his innumerable treasures and wives; maybe Diogenes is right that all you need you can carry on you(not literally, perhaps; my mother had a friend who was fond of this saying, and he carried in his 'porte-feuille' mainly bottles of wine and books which he used to steal from our library).

I once read an article in a paper. The author wondered if we drive Japanese cars, keep food in German fridges, use Italian olive oil - how we can keep our roots.

Probably all wars started as a language misunderstanding. In the 70s Soviet movie 'The Autumn Marathon' a hero, an English language professor, says to one of his students: Your translations instead of fostering mutual understanding bring about discord and misunderstanding.

City patriotism and national parochialism, be it Israeli, Russian, or American won't do me any good. Russia has in her heritage the idea of universalism, not in the sense of a global empire but an ability to talk with and understand all nations.

When Oliver made a first visit to me, he gave me to listen a tape of the Red Hot Chili Peppers 1991 album 'Blood Sugar Sex Magic' and presented me with their T-shirt. I worn this T-shirt in the metro, and in the Philarmony, where we listened to a classical music concert(years later, my mother reproached me for this saying I was totally crazy in going to the Philarmony in this T-shirt, was I totally crazy, was this the reason for starting my treatment?) . Still, I worn it till it's got completely washed out and continued to listen to 'Blood Sugar Sex Magic' but when Oliver asked me to guide him to one of the factories 'to learn about workers' conditions', I said it was nothing interesting, for me a work on the factory did not represent anything worthy of Oliver's attention. Actually, I sabotaged some of the more 'cultural entertainments'. Oliver got then an impression I was something of a poet, deeply steeped in European, especially French culture. Then he was disappointed in me. Later, I called to him from Israel. He wasn't at home, and when he called me back later, I wasn't at home, and he talked to my roommates which deeply embarrassed him (my roommates were rather peculiar, one of them was 'a businessman' though he walked everywhere on foot because he had no money. He used to be a waiter in Russia, and he was a rock music fan, he loved Alice Cooper, we lived in a four-room two-storey flat in Ramat Gan, district of Tel Aviv, and everything went fine till my absorption money ran out(we'd had a 'common' household). Then my mother came from Russia and 'rescued' me.

I don't remember in which year I learned about Mayakovsky foreign languages library but I remember the first book I took from there was 'A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man'. I didn't finish it, the language was too difficult, and the story told was too remote from me. Later I have read his 'Ulysses'(in Russian, I remember I liked it in Russian save some ridiculous passages translated anachronistically- Old English rendered by Old Russian which sounded not Irish but Old Slavonic totally unlike Joyce).

The Lilia's son, Sasha, a year ago released from the army, spent a year serving as a guard on an Italian cruise ship, and now is about to start his study 'in communication'. He did not have to take a psychometric exam, and it seems, did not wish to take it. Probably, from my experience they (Sasha and his school-army friends) deduced psychometrics and books would lead you in the wrong direction, and they want to reach success in their lives.

. My word processor did not like the word 'Sheilock', marking it by the red wavy line. I clicked on the right button of my mouse and he offered 'Sherlock' as an alternative.

I remember once, when I got out of Lillian's place into the night street, waiting for my bus, I've heard music from a car passing by. It was 'The Spleen', the Russian rock group I recently listened to, and after hours of English and years of Hebrew in a heavily Jewish-religious Jerusalem, I felt some relief.

Schweik does my Word admit him? (I wrote to check out). He offered me alternative Sheik, Schwerin, Sheikh, and Sheiks It would be interesting to try all the cultural heroes to find out my Word's literary tastes.

By the way, the brave Schweik absolutely does not fulfill modern male ideals of beauty. Being low, with 'beer belly', idiotic smile, just like Mr. Pickwick -he is absolutely not to take with us to iOS5 and 21^st century.

As a self-appointed historian and a chronicler of Canaan Chronicles, I must say we're now in 10s. Zeroes, with George W. Bush, and the victory of Barak Obama, are past now. I kept lingering in 80s, and 90s, and almost left untouched zeroes. For two and a half years I've been looking behind, they say you must write French for 45 years to begin to feel it, maybe the same goes about English. In the 80s I had no personal computer, no cell phone, did not watch television. Maybe that made me happier.. I've got me a lot of music lately through my computer. The music is from the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. Not that I don't like music from the zeroes, I just haven't reached it yet.

While I was in Petersburg, we with my mother went to the Pargolovo Northern cemetery. There my mother ordered to do the old grandmother's grave in cement basis and set up a cross on the grave. She said my granny was a Christian. In 1972, when she died, crosses were almost forbidden so there was not any cross there. Now, the grave is tidy and Christian, with my granny's name on it : Engovatova Ekaterina Petrovna. Engovatova is a very rare surname; I think it spreads to one village in Tambov region only where she grew up. The family legend has it some Tartar knight (Engu?) had this village, and all the peasants there were named after him. My grandmother looked a bit like a Tartar.

In one of my visits to Petersburg I purchased bestselling book by John Grey 'Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus'. The author states his observation (which he made communicating with his wife) about the basic difference between men and women and then devotes more than 300 pages to elaborating it. Men like tech, they like to solve problems, and they need to retire sometimes into their den when they need to work things out. Women have feelings; they need to talk when in trouble. But usually men and women think the spouses function like themselves, for instance, when a woman begins to whine and complain, a man or not listens, or tries to come up with solutions which woman doesn't need at all, she needs a listener to pour out her troubles to , relieved, she works out the solution for herself. This is the reason for all gender conflicts.(simplistic, it seems, I wonder if all men 'work' like this and all women 'feel' like this, looks like a sign of spermatozoid and ovule, it's not clear why waste 300 pages, it all can be explained in one phrase)

I thought about Lermontov, the Romantic poet who was banished to war on Caucasus and was soon afterwards killed in a duel. I thought how he would be helped by a course of group therapy, and drugs, like I'm getting.

The role of mass media: informer, amuser, diverter.

At this moment my mother smashed the monitor. Boris had to distract himself by listening to the radio which promptly played a sad tune( Boris finds parts of computers in garbage, but my mother hates 'the iron' as she calls computer details, and periodically makes 'pogroms' of this tech).

When I look at my baby pictures, I find, with surprise, I was blond at that time. I don't know whose genes are responsible for this: my both grandmothers were black-haired; I saw pictures of my grandfathers when they were grey already. Now, I grow grey hair, I'm 46. One of my classmates, Lyosha Sannikov he was called, had a grey spot somewhere on the behind of his head. I asked him where it came from (we were 16 at the time). He said he did not know. He was the first of our class to die. I remember Lena Stuchinskaya invited me to his funerals (the reason for his death I don't know, maybe rare disease, maybe some scientific experiment). I did not want to go, I don't like funerals.

I like languages, though I had not had much occasion to talk to real foreign people, I get short-circuited by dictionaries. I keep gathering them, I've got about 10 English dictionaries, monolingual, English-Russian, Russian-English, a dictionary of English idioms, a dictionary of slang. The author of this dictionary also was a dictionary lover, and he ended up making a dictionary of his own carefully collecting all the dirty speech in English emerging for centuries. But I'm not so dirty. I don't indulge in obscene language, I tend to indulge in highly abstract words, mixing them with elementary school mistakes in English, what can I do, I'm a self-made man.

We locked in the attic of our Petersburg flat, among other books, 'The Day of The World', a fat book assembling excerpts from the papers all over the world appearing on one certain day in history, something like September 27^th, 1935. It's an ugly reading, the atmosphere in the world press, in Russian I would say it could be cut with a knife, so heavy, Fascist-Communist struggle everywhere. Michael Koltsov, a Soviet journalist, invented the idea of such a book. He was later killed by Stalin, like millions of others. My grandfather, who got this book, worked in typography, he was a printer. He visited the House of Journalist these times, and brought every day people for a dinner to his room in a communal flat, where he, his wife (my grandmother), and his daughter, my mother (born in 1937), had lived. My mother remembers (of course, not 1937, the year she was born, but some years later) he brought Jews, Russians, Georgians, people of many nations, not making any difference between them. He was not killed by Stalin, he somehow escaped, though was arrested. He even was not mobilized in the war, his typography had been evacuated to Omsk in Siberia, it was considered part of war effort. So he survived.

I went for a swim. The beach was empty; one guy only took pictures of a kite in the cloudy sky. I smoked a cigarette and went to the water. When I got out, a pair came up to the beach and stationed them nearby. I went to the water again, and some guy went in near from me. Coming to me, he said there are whirlpools farther from the shore. When I got out of the water, the pair came in. I looked for the guy, but he was nowhere in the waves and on the shore( such a routine mystique surrounding my life, I even don't notice it, I don't know was it a Jewish angel, or just an ordinary guy whom I missed somehow from my view).

Once, in one of my visits of Petersburg, I decided to visit my father. He is divorced from my mother since 1970, but I made visits to him during the elapsed time, from time to time. He had lived in the Far North many years, working as a doctor specialist on tuberculosis. Then he moved to Ukraine, to the 'family estate' near Kharkov, the deep provincial village of Merefa. When I finished my high school, I went there for a month, and he taught me how to drive a car (he had a Soviet -made 'Moskvich', 'the Muscovite', and drove it in times free from his alcoholic excesses, naturally, he had nothing else to do in these God-forsaken times, in this Ukrainian province). Then he moved again, this time nearer to Petersburg, where he grew up and went to the medical school (where he befriended my mother). I don't know if he preferred to live in the village but he choose some industrial outskirt of Petersburg (about 70 kilometers from it, near the great lake Ladoga)and made his living now working in the 'policlinic' as a X-ray man. He had a wife, she had a daughter from the first marriage, the daughter learned to be a nurse and was quite happy about it not aspiring to become a doctor like her adopted father.

I went there with Lilia, on my birthday. The bus which was to go to Priladozhsky from the metro station 'Dybenko' (located in the industrial-'sleep' district uptown)for unknown reason didn't come, they told us 'marshroutka' ( the big taxi)would take us there. We crammed into the car, about eight of us, the conditioner was nonexistent, record-breaking hot temperatures were felt fully there, and we began to quarrel. The fellow passengers started making some insinuations, I began responding, they finished by invoking the key-word 'tolerantness' (from the English 'tolerance')(the official Petersburg policy toward non-Russian fellows), how they diagnosed our we were not 'locals', I have no slightest notion., I thought I had not a magendoid on me , and I look not like a Jew, how they found out us? Then I fell asleep, and awoke when we arrived (on the way, 'marshroutka' suddenly refused to go further and we stood for a while). We went out, Lilia bought me a pair of strange-looking shorts on a local small market, I bought me a can of 'Baltika', and we went to my father's apartment.

I wouldn't say my father was very much pleased to see me; he regarded me as some failed doctor, a vulgar masseur, with dubious national origins and political (if not sexual) orientation. As it was my birthday, he offered to present me collections of Gorky and\or Mayakovski. I said I didn't like them both. He is a doctor, but his interests are art and history. He showed me some historical book (on Russia's 18^th or 19^th century history) which he bought recently. I glanced through the pages of a volume of 'The World History'(his parents and my grandparents both were historians by education, they have met in Kharkov University before the WWII), we went out to make pictures, talked awhile, and then he walked us to the bus stop.

We with Lilia marked my birthday in a cafИ on Mayakovski street called 'The Red Fox' (I don't know if Mayakovski frequented this cafИ, they say so). I don't remember what we ate; I drank a cocktail 'The Green Eyes". The photographs on the walls pictured some American black jazzmen, the TV showed their concerts, there was to be a live music (for an additional fee), but meanwhile there were two fellows besides us in the cafИ, one of them intensely tried on his cell to make some deal on computers or some parts of computers , I didn't understand. We quickly finished our meal and drinks and decided not to wait for the music.

My sad story was compared to Andersen tales, to downright lying, to SF, and to... what it was not compared to...So I have to bring the image out of 'The Theatrical Novel' by Bulgakov. There author describes one theatrical female secretary with 'squinted due to permanent lying eyes'. When I meet various reactions in the media of whatever country on my awkward rendering of what has happened and happens to me, invariably these squinted eyes come to mind. They twist my story to such grotesque proportions, and have the cheek to call me a liar. Probably, the media shouldn't defend the 'oppressed', like someone said, but I don't understand why it's essential function should be to distort the truth in somebody's interests so that everybody should go about completely misinformed and disoriented.

Actually, I choose English as 'a vehicle for my thought' because somewhere I've got an idea English is less prone to the universal lying I got so accustomed to in Russia. But one time I've got into my hands 'Our Gang' by Philip Roth, and read an epigraph there which was a citation of Swift's 'Gulliver Travels' where guingnms fail to take into their heads what 'Lying', 'this so universally understood and commonly practiced ability', means. But at least there was Swift writing in English, and later, Philip Roth succeeded him, who also was surprised by this humans' canny ability. The question of truthfulness, and respectively, lies, I have not met discussed at any length in Russian literature. If anyone can educate me on this question, I would be grateful. Maybe, the Great Russian writers and Lenin as well, were considered 'conscience' of the Russian people and, maybe, 'Truth' itself, 'Truth incarnated'. But where else this truth abided in Russia, I just couldn't find out.

Maybe this is the reason communism fell in Russia while it continues to flourish in China, for example. Maybe Chinese are not such pathological liars as Russians and honestly tried to do communism by the book. The Soviet Union was lost in its numerous mythologies, when no single entity was so stupid as to tell the truth. But maybe, communism or capitalism, this lying makes out of Russia what Saltykov-Shedrin so vividly painted in his 'History of Glupov town'.

But the truth is never one-sided and theoretical, or legalistic. From the other side, perhaps due to their ability to freely interpret reality, to form their own reality, Russians are such a talented people? Recently, my mother watched the old Soviet movie 'Beware the automobile!' A typical Russian idealist Detochkin ('Babyish') hijacks the rich crooked peoples' cars, sells them, and donates the money to Children's homes. He says to a militiaman who pursues him: And together we do the same business, you do it your way, I do it mine. He didn't say it to admit his crime, at the moment they're friends with a road patroller, whose motorcycle cannot start up and Detochkin gives him a lift. He lied to the militiaman about his professed 'law-abiding' identity. But, more deeply, he said truth; he fights crime in his own, criminal way, because his activity in a lies-abundant country in legal terms doesn't lead him anywhere. His fellow-actor, who turns out to be a detective investigating his case, when he learns the facts, doesn't want to persecute him; he wants to give him freedom. But, in the movie, law is law, and Detochkin is locked away from society for five years, I believe.

I wouldn't say my mother's watching this movie should be interpreted as a call to criminal activity, as a sign of my infantilism, not to say worse, or as a crusade against crooks. I don't want to say I'm such a talented because I have Russian blood in me. Any crook, and not even a crook, would dupe me in two minutes. I don't want to say I'm in love with Russia, or that I abhor Russians. A bit of truthfulness wouldn't hurt Russia, or Israel, or America, or Europe, or Palestinian Autonomy, I believe. And it wouldn't hurt me, or anybody (save lie-mongers wherever they be situated). I don't want to write a fairy-tale, I want to disabuse myself from fairy-tales of those in power.

It's a rainy morning outside. I listen to The Faith No More, which I listened with Oliver on a concert in Hamburg. There I felt communion with those German youths, which otherwise was not felt. The concert was near a stadium, and before the concert we walked nearby, mingling with the crowd. There were people I never met in Russia or any other places, dressed like 'bomzhi' (bums in Russia), drinking, smoking, and looking not very happy. Oliver drove me to Berlin railway station in a car one of his friends lent him. It was a late night, some posh dressed pair said farewell to each other, a train attendant stood near the gate with very totalitarian air. Strangely, The Faith No More made me think about the 9^th symphony of Beethoven, how all political people adored it (Hitler, too, though the symphony was inspired by the French Revolution). Some say it's the top of everything but I came to dislike enthusiasm of Beethoven so easily vented into all kinds of abnormal aspirations.

As I landed in Hamburg in my shabby clothes, the Oliver's brother seeing my attire offered to get me some decent second-hand ones. But Oliver forbade this (maybe he thought I was proud to walk this way- actually, I didn't care, but my shoes very easily got wet - but I didn't fell ill). When he walked with me to the University Mensa (the place where they eat, also a name of a high IQ society, so I'm not sure it was called Mensa), he felt uneasiness dining together with me-I don't know what they've made out of me -probably, 'Russische schwine' or something like that. Outwardly, they did not give me to understand their feelings demonstrating outstanding restraint.

The father of Oliver, I don't know why, considered him a car, I don't know the car he drove (they had an old 'Volvo') or some other. This father came up to me with ideas about the Russian 'Lada' cars which he said were much cheaper and certainly no comparison with famous German quality, but still on four wheels and running(during the war he was young, and, naturally, served in the German army, I don't know if he had any 'guilty conscience', actually, I don't know how deeply Fascist ideas infused him if any -in Russia he would naturally be called 'a Fascist', one time Fascist -all time Fascist, but we didn't talk on political topics. He worked as some minor functionary I didn't understand or don't remember, 20 years lapsed, in what department) and Oliver rejected the fatherly 'car' ideas as pure bullshit. I helped to the father with some home repairing during which he turned on the music radio with pop hits. Once, we saw some Indiana Jones movie on TV. I said I watched this movie in a cinema in Russia, and the father was very much surprised. He had another idea for me (and other Russians). Why I could not start up a farm, and get rich on it? Oliver, during my stay, went away to some camping or I don't know, and proposed I go with his father to their 'dacha' in Sweden. I thought I didn't have a Swedish visa, but they said visa wasn't needed. They said I would have some quiet out there. But I preferred to stay in Hamburg.

When I had my nurse practice at one Petersburg hospital, one guy gave me to read William Blake's book in Russian. I was so impressed with 'The Marriage Of Heaven & Hell', I typed out it on my typewriter. Later I learned the Englishmen know Blake mainly by his 'children's' verses. When I got to Jerusalem, in one used books store I found Blake in English (I walked in this area some years later, but the store was nowhere to be found). I tried to read other verses than ''The Marriage', but evidently I fixated on this poem. Some of the proverbs I found rather not to my temper, but some I cite when I think appropriate moments in my life arrive. For example: 'Always be ready to speak your mind, and the liar will flee you.'

I have a Literary Dictionary which I've bought in 1987, in Belorussia. We went there to work on construction sites, as a 'stroiotryad', after my first year in the medical institute. It was a year after the Chernobyl which was not so far from there, and radiation was felt. I felt tired, so we worked hard, it was still different tiredness. But nobody said to us anything about the catastrophe,. It happened more than a year ago, and in another republic (Ukraine). Somewhere in the middle of the term, my future friend, Andrei Pavlysh, felt we were making too little money, and we deposed our commander, the komsomol appointed leader. Pavlysh has made me his deputy (I was reading by this time 'All the King's Men', and this change was not surprising to me). I wouldn't say we made perfect leaders but still we've made some money there (no slightest idea how I spent this money, though I wanted to earn, the actual money never remaining for long in my pockets). Pavlysh played the guitar, and we walked empty forest Belorussian roads singing on a pair 'Beatles' songs. He befriended with me because he thought I would help him in his love affair he had with one Polytechnic girl I studied with before the army (how he learned about that, I don't know). But I was of no avail, I've seen this girl once only after the army, and was not on friendly terms with their company. After the 'stroiotryad' we went together to Lvov, his hometown in Western Ukraine, then to Caucasus where he shot back to Leningrad, to his girl, after three days with me near the sea. I lay on the beach and watched his train slowly going away, making a curve on the rail beside the sea. I was left alone and had to care for myself.

Still, I made transfer into his study group, together with two more guys from my first group. We went about together, but he was older (25 by this time) and not a Petersburger, though he sang songs playing his guitar, he was very practical-minded and our ways diverged soon. Then I was in my first love troubles and Pavlysh, as well as studying in the medical institute, stopped to interest me.

Yesterday I worked 'on papers', in the warehouse where I was to bring the packs of 'homer'('material') to the people standing at the desks and inserting this homer into the main paper. We finished at 4.15, and went outside to wait for the bus home. I sat at the side of the rest, in the corner, near to a truck on the board of which was a picture of some wide river and bridges across it lit by the lamps. Opposite me was a motorcycle looking at me with its six 'eyes'. I later looked at this motorcycle from all sides, and was satisfied with my look, it looked powerful and comfortable. There were clouds in the darkening sky but thunders and rains, as weather whizzes promised, there was not. Right above me went descending or ascending planes; the airport is not far from there. I counted three, but then stopped to count. Our bus came two hours later, everybody crowded into it. I was in the last wave, and six or seven of us stood in the way. The driver said he won't go until we go out. He said the second bus was coming in two or three minutes. We stood there for some time, nobody seemed to move. Then I said to the Negro girl standing before me, go outside. We went out, the bus drove away. The next bus was not a bus but a big car. We got inside, and the car started. On the front seats sat one Israeli boy (I asked before if he had a cigarette, he said he did not understand Russian so I understood he was Israeli, he looked otherwise very Russian) and a Black boy. They talked all the way to Ashdod, laughing. Behind them sat us, I between a Russian lady who had her birthday this day, and her friend, of the same age. She was dressed accordingly, this was her first day 'on papers', and she enjoyed the work. She said it was not hard, she understood her task quickly, and the waiting did not bother her, she said you can walk 'on the fresh air'. Behind us sat a couple of Israeli girls, probably, also in their first day of 'papers'. When I got home, nobody was in yet. Boris sat in the first bus, but the bus came here later than my car. My mother was out in Jerusalem, giving to the Russian consul living evidence that she was still alive as she has to do once in a year.

The question of belief naturally arouses the question of true belief, and, uncomfortably, of inquisition. And, what is interesting, this inquisition, invoked by communists as an evidence of the Church crimes against the freedom of conscience, was widely practiced in Communist times, and, less widely, by anti-Communists in McCarthy times. Wilson ventured a hypothesis, according to which, as some individual or a group of individuals declines a bit from the general line and the needed harshness of life, some local department of inquisition immediately sets to work.

In the 11 years I'm hanging out here, I read Israeli papers from time to time. But there was not a word about people like me who speak Russian, speak Hebrew with difficulty, are interested about points of contact between Israelis and Russian olims, have studied somewhere, and interested about Israel not only to decide for whom to vote, how to most quickly learn Hebrew and forget Russian, where to buy the cheapest goods, how to reach Judaic enlightenment, and what to do with Arabs. Russian alya is represented in Israeli papers by odious (for many) figure of Lieberman, and the Russian woman-seller who is been satirized by Israeli stand-up comedians One guy I met 'on papers', started to say English is a very easy language from which I reasoned Hebrew is not so simple and involves some challenges in mastering.

Yesterday, on Mount Hertzl, in Jerusalem, a ceremony was held in memory of Itzhak Rabin killed by a Right-wing extremist. I remember, when I have just arrived to

Israel, and was accepted to the Hebrew University, I was sent as a guard (shomer)to guard the high guests on the same annual ceremony. I hardly remember what happened there, some pompous speeches were heard from the bushes where we were located. Some outstanding figures dressed very posh, arrived in their limousines, but I couldn't find any connection between me and those figures. Probably, they keep the faltering fire at the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, but their activity is too lofted and remote from my everyday life. The left establishment, seated in the tall fashionable buildings of Northern Tel Aviv, and my modest 'papers' establishment, is like sky and ground.

Andrey Pavlysh was the guy who advised me to buy the Literary Dictionary, and also I bought 'The Quiet American' there, about an American spy in Vietnam, and some more books I don't remember now which. It was easier then to buy good books in Belorussia, In Petersburg mainly Soviet 'makulature' ( bumf) was sold. I then began to make my own library. In this Dictionary, I found existentialism, Freudism, all kinds of isms, figures of speech, hermeneutics, literary terms, etc A lot of space was given to diverse metres and rhythms of poetical speech, and this is foreign language for me. I'm no philologist.

In the end of the book there was a list of all prominent writers of all times and nations. Roughly three fourths of it comprised the Soviet authors, members of the Writers' Union. One of my mother's friends was a children's poet, a member of that Union. He lived comfortably in the Soviet times, with the coming of perestroika he fell ill with cancer and soon died. He couldn't adapt to the new times, which was the cause of his cancer. His books no more published, no money from the sale of those books, the family starve.

Thinking of Ukraine. Once I was in Kiev with my mother and I remember crossing the Dniepre on metro. I remembered Kiev from my childhood as a very 'green' city. When I was 12, our Jewish relatives from Lvov came to visit us. I remember our picture on the background of 'Zenith' sport complex. I, looking very sportive, stood beside them with my bicycle. I remember them saying Leningrad is like a museum, all very fine but you can't live there. That summer I spent a month there. They had two daughters, the older one married, the younger my age. I did not befriend her. She had these teenager pimples on her face, seemed to me rather hysterical, and I did not know what to do in Lvov. I read some 'Arabian Nights' from their library, she tried to teach me some Ukranian, but when I tried to speak Ukrainian with the boys on the street, they advised me to speak Russian, because they did not understand my Ukrainian. I was glad to get away from there, when my mother returned from her Far North ship travel (she worked as a physician on this ship which went then to Europe, but she had no permission to go abroad, so she stepped back from it, though, I visited with her these sailors when they stayed awhile in Leningrad, and they all gave me chewing gum and chocolate, and played 'The Pink Floyd's 'The Dark Side of The Moon' album). We went to Georgia for the rest of my summer vacations. The next encounter with Ukrainians was in my army. The 'grandfathers' from the first, truck drivers' platoon was mainly from Ukraine. I belonged to the second platoon, and at nights, they summoned us, one by one, to their room, for a beating. I did not wish to fight, and after several blows, they admitted, it's not interesting to beat me, and started to talk with me. I think they did not know about my Jewish roots, happily (And I don't look like a Jew). My father is a Ukrainian (though he has a Russian surname), but he is skeptical about Ukrainian longing for independence. Somewhere, he was given a form to fill, and there was a question about his sex ('stat' in Ukrainian). 'Stat', he said scornfully, what does it mean? ('Stat', in Russian, means vigor, manliness, but it's an antiquated word) In Ukraine, they speak mostly Russian in the cities safe in Western Ukraine where they speak their own version of Ukrainian. Lately, in Ukraine, they forced the transition to Ukrainian but they don't have a sufficient vocabulary in fields of science, jurisprudence, etc

Lillian was a dyslexic, she didn't read too many books (I wonder how she managed to get two B.A.'s), and she told me not to read all too much you should write what is your own. But: No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.

More on education: when I was in Israel in 1993-94, one of my roommates told me about one yeshiva student who being asked a question on whatever topic, pauses a bit, then gives a citation from the Torah or Talmud. I remember about this now, when I drive a bus and see young people reading their Bibles in Hebrew. They don't see the green hills of Judea, they don't see the scintillating seas, for them, Mediterranean coast of Israel is Shfela (the lowland, also symbolically meaning 'mean' land, the fall from Jerusalem grace). One guy told us Jews always have had their history in high lands, in mountains, in Jerusalem. The coast did not exist for them. And it doesn't exist for them now. They don't like to swim in the sea, they gather at the beaches in August, in the most unsupportable hot, and stand as a crowd, in water, near from the shore, in the delineated area.

Kate, the English graduate, wrote to me several letters. 'The French teacher's talking about something, ya nichego ne ponyayu (I don't undstand a thing)'. Or: this is to tax your vocabulary. I looked up 'tax' in the dictionary and couldn't understand what this meant how I was 'taxing' her? When she arrived to Petersburg, she brought a postcard on which was depicted a boiling kettle and written 'The kettle's fucked'. I sent her a parcel in which, besides Chukovsky's children's verses I enclosed some Soviet ugly condoms (some stupid joke of mine, to 'epater', gag her). She said when her parents opened the parcel, they were very much surprised.
When she had arrived to my Petersburg apartment in winter 1991, along with her Norwegian girl-friend, from the Moscow suburb where she worked as a babysitter for Americans, she was very much relieved. I don't think she liked her stay there. But I did some stupid things which repelled her, like those condoms. Once we walked in winter Petersburg, near the river, when the weather was very chilly and rainy, and I began to cite some Blake's verses, not those intended for children. She's got afraid, and she led me to a nearby cafИ, where it was warm, there was light, and people loudly talking. We'd had a drink and it soothed her.

We talked with Kate about languages a bit. She said she hated grammar and thought it was not necessary to learn a language. She said why do you need to learn the grammar of English when you lived in England (but I wasn't living in England - so what was I to do?).

My most serious blunder with Kate was I have not understood her feelings when, the evening of her first day at my place, she faintly smiled to me and said she was going to bed. The morning after, I awoke in my dining room (Kate slept in my bed) and Kate stood furiously over me as I innocently looked up at her, sleepy and perplexed.

I met Oliver, a tall, serious, young fellow from Hamburg, Germany, soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He came to our family on exchange, we hosted him, and it was hoped his family would host me, in turn. So it happened. Oliver liked his stay in Russia so much he came to Petersburg for the second time, in summer, and I paid him a visit in November, November 1992.

I sent my application to American universities in the autumn of 1991 and meanwhile, waiting for my results, I entertained Oliver.

Oliver was a waiter in 'Literaturisch CafИ' in Hamburg, he was 23, a poet and a student of Hoethe. He also studied Russian and has read a lot of English books.

Shakespeare, 'a village, semi-literate boy', how could it be that he was the author of his plays, many people cannot still believe it, they feel it's not right, a person from nowhere, from Stratford-upon-Avon, not from London or Paris, like Bacon, emerged, wrote his immortal plays, collected a fortune, and retired to his Stratford to buy a house and promptly die.

About literary dictionaries and encyclopedias. There was a 20-volume Alden's encyclopedia of universal literature published in 1885-91. Oxford companions cover Western European, American and Canadian literatures. The Soviet Literary Encyclopedia was published in 1929-39, (vulgar-sociological tendency, outdated).

there was another encyclopedia in 9 volumes, issued in 1962-78 in Russia. In Italy: 'Dizionatio letterario Bompiani della opera e dei personaggi di tutti I tempi e di tutti letterature', v.1-9, Mil.,1947-52, appendice, v.1-2, 1964-66. In Zurich: 'Kindlers Literatur-Lexikon', Bd 1-12, Z., 1970-74.

So I'm not so prepared to become a great writer really with my one-volume dictionary. There is much more to the literature.

I think it was in the summer of 1989. After my final birthday, after which my Katya said she did not want to see me anymore, the guy I did a course of massage under invited me to his father's village in Archangelsk region, to help him to make a roof for his house. On the way, we stopped in Vologda. The whole day we looked at the ancient Russian churches there. Then, some relative of his took us into his car and we went to the village. I was very business-oriented, I worked like crazy on that roof, and I set tiles in the ever quickening pace. People come to our house and gave advice, but I didn't care, I used this massage guy as an assistant, and tried to forget my unhappy love life. There was another guy with us, Sasha Dubchak, a future psychiatrist and a homosexual. He spent his days on the river with the fishing-rod. He did not take part in our games. The father of this massage guy was a literary man. In this Archangelsk village, in this dilapidated house, we found some books of his father, medical and I noticed "The Flowers of Evil" in Russian. We did our work, and the next year I came to this village again, but the guy said our work busted. The roof just broke down.

I remember the next year I was fed up with the mother of this guy and her friend or a relative, equally old, and I decided to hitchhike to Archangelsk. I walked the road, and then I greeted the cars passing by, and tried to make them stop. Some frenzy overcame me, instead of enjoying the forests and fields I passed; I wanted to get to Archangelsk as soon as possible. I remember by the end of the day I was some 15 km away from the town, the late summer rain began, I was walking the wet road, passed by the cars with their fares, and finally somebody agreed to move me to some hotel for a charge. I spent a day in Archangelsk, the local guys looked at me like as some freak, I did not visit any museums there, I did not make any interesting acquaintances there, I just stupidly walked the town, walked on its embankment (the town is on the White Sea, on the North of Russia, Lomonosov originated from a village nearby), and then returned. I hitched a hike to get back to Leningrad from this village, I just reached the road after boggling down in the marshes surrounding the village, and some car took me ( the guys there were angry but still drove me to the very outskirts of Leningrad, some thousands kilometers, and did not take a kopeck from me).

When I was a boy, I've read several times "Two Captains' by Caverin. There was a motive of a fiendish, archetypal enemy, accompanying the principal hero, Sanya Grigoriev, from his childhood through all his adventures making his surreptitious evil deeds to Sanya.. Probably, in real life there are dozens of guys like this making their ugly business to me. I don't know if they were my friends in school or have known me since that time, or they are 'fresh' enemies. But Sanya overcome his Romashka, the Good won over Evil. Am I so good? Am I to win?

Lillian wrote in her computer swallowing letters, making mistakes.

At the time I was struggling with my computer which was beginning to expire. Boris, step by step, changed almost all of its parts, still it was dying. Now I'm writing on a new one.

Chicka, my muse, as I began to write, I began to write about her too. But later, my unhappy memories, arch-enemies like BBC and other media began to occupy my thoughts, and I stopped writing about her.

By the time, we were going to move back to Jerusalem, and I even packed my books, and my mother had a dream of living there.

Andre Gide retired to some lake to write his first book 'Cahiers de Andre Walter'.

I don't have any lake to flee to; but I can write here, in my house, I don't need a lake (perhaps, I can write better here, in my house, in the mornings, than I would by the lake)

Foreigners complain about Moscow's overwhelming grey sky. Petersburg sky is even more depressing. Strange, when I was young, I never noticed this. Here, I miss rains and grey skies, also snow which falls, if ever, for two days in winter, but for the last three years it did not fall.

I don't like the traditional histories because they deal mainly with tsars, mutinies, uprisings, wars, or socio-economic number- and ideology-crunching. I prefer the stories of ordinary people, like myself.

Somewhere in 1995 I decided to learn French. I worked like crazy, and I've studied the four-year course in one year, but I have not succeeded. I was a kind of a hermit, and did not talk to anybody in French. I studied a course by some Mauget, issued in France in 50s, and reprinted in Russia in 90s.

Here one text from that book.

La maison de M. Vincent a Montrreal (Canada).

Voici un jardin et des fleurs; dans le jardin, voici une maison blanche, avec un toit rouge et une haute cheminee. Cette maison a un grenier, deux etages, un rez-de-chaussee et une cave. Devant les fenetres du premier etage, nous voyons une balcon.

-Ou est le grenier?

-Il est sous le toit.

-Ou est la cave?

-Elle est sous le rez-de-chaussee.

-Y a-t-il un garage pour l'auto?

-Oui, le garage est a droite.

A gauche du garage, voici un petit escalier: il a quatre marches. Nous montons cet escalier. Sur la porte nous voyons un nom:" Francois Vincent".Monsieur Vincent habite avec sa famille dans cette maison.

Je sonne. Nous attendons quelques minutes.

Then M. Vincent moved to Paris and 's'installe' in six-room apartment in the centre of the City.

I never called at journalists' doors. Usually they called me from the pages of newspapers, radio transistors and television screens. But I wanted other thing. Let alone the fact I could never meet M. Vincent in the real life (the more so because he vanished somewhere in 50s-60s), to be invited in his house, I had this writer disdain for journalists.

And now I'm working at the bottom level in newspaper business. I never saw a real journalist in my life. I communicate with some low-level managers; journalists spend their time in some other places.

A bit about Andronnikov, who figured in my first love night. The parents forced him to study philology but he preferred music and visited every night the Leningrad Philarmony. Upon graduation, he went to work in the magazines for children. One day, on a tramway, he met a man whom he describes as an erudite with a phenomenal memory. Ivan Ivanovitch Sollertinsky worked at a senior position in the Philarmony. He told Andronnikov he found out about his ability to impersonate people and offered him a job of a compere. Andronnikov agreed and quit his job in childrens' magazines. But Sollertinsky remembered about Andronnikov in eight months time only. Finally, he was about to appear as a compere in the Philarmony. Andronnikov got very fearful of his first appearance and tells about this as this : ' I had already entered the orchestra. The inspector did what I expected the least, he mumbled something, and lifted his hand off my back.

I held to it, so I nearly fell down, while falling, I gripped the shoulder of the double-bass player. I said :'Sorry!' and drove my elbow into the cello player face. I said: ' It's by mistake only', hit the violin stick, whisked away the notes from the music-stand by the flip of my jacket. When I had finally reached the conductor's stand I met a new trouble: my legs refused to bend in the knees.

The story succeeds with his being blown out of the job; his turning to the literature, his move to Moscow and start of reading his stories on stage, and his story of completely failing on his first appearance in the Leningrad Philarmony was appreciated as his best story. He told this story many times, but the real triumph came to him as he was telling it in the White Hall of Leningrad Philarmony, from the same conductor's stand.

I don't know if this is all right, but my second love went as follows: we kissed in some ' paradnaya' in the old part of the city, once she brought me to a cafИ, where one of theatre actors she was acquainted to was present. I did not say anything, I was not an actor. She seemed to love me but she stated she had a 'lover', she spent her time in Moscow totally fucking in and out, when I tried to catch her there, I was told the stories of her parties. She was a bit Jewish, as Katya was a bit Jewish. We made a kissing with my Alice in front of Engineer Castle, she was somehow reluctant to love me, she had a 'regular' lover-boy, and probably fucked some other people, but I loved her.