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.