Евгений Мешков - Simple Truths of Life

Another incident occurred when I was sitting on the porch of the Little House while repairing my bike. I remember clearly how I felt then that someone was looking at me from behind. I turned around, but there was nobody – neither in the kitchen, nor on the terrace. But I could feel someone's presence.

Many years later, when I began to sleep on the terrace, something hit twice very hard on the door of the terrace. A couple of seconds before that, my mother went outside, but she never slammed the doors like that, on the contrary, she always closed them very quietly and calmly.

And the other night, when I was lying in the bed of the terrace, preparing to sleep, I felt a cool clot fly slowly over my face.

The next unusual event occurred when, not far from my house, I was digging a hole for a pillar with two village friends. As far as I remember, it was a clear, cloudless summer day. There were three female friends with us. During our excavations, we came across a rounded gray stone. It was a little smaller than a human head, as far as I remember. We noticed that it was as if the features of a human face could be distinguished on the surface of the rock… Having put the gray stone on a bench, we continued digging. Soon we came across a long black stone. Its length was approximately equal to the diameter of the gray stone, and the width was much less than its length. We put it near the gray stone. Not much time had passed when we noticed how from the south a cloud of gray-brown color began to cover the whole sky. It was unusual. But it was another cloud that made us nervous, also quickly moving from south to north… That cloud was black and stretched out across the sky from west to east, but in width it was clearly very narrow – that is, the gray cloud was for some time as if divided into two parts by the black one. The wind picked up. We realized that stones we dug out somehow affect the clouds, however strange it may sound, and we decided to bury them back. Both clouds disappeared very quickly… We never talked about this incident.

Another unusual experience happened in Moscow in my apartment. It was night. Darkness. I went to bed after a long day, but I could not fall asleep for a very long time. I do not remember exactly why, but I decided to slightly hit my head on the pillow three times. For the first two times, everything was fine, but when I raised my head after the third hit, I found that it was already day – the sun was shining high in the sky, people were walking the street. That is, from my point of view, the night changed to a day in a split second that I was with my face in the pillow. It is worth noting that I no longer wanted to sleep and was completely awake.

Many years later, I accidentally found a story that tells about the exact same instant “loss” of time. [1]Two girls played with an Ouija board at about 9pm. They began to receive strange answers, and the next thing they knew it suddenly was 7 o’clock in the morning. It was as if they blinked and the sun was already up. They just sat, as before, not understanding what had happened.

I have no suppositions as to why such a “loss”, or someone can say a “leap”, in time happens. This is one of the new mysteries of the Universe for me.

Such events were rare for me, but they left a very big impression in my life.

Mostly I spent summer time in the village outdoors, walking with friends from morning to evening. I really enjoyed cycling, and I often rode my bicycle around the countryside immediately after breakfast. My friends and I often went cycling to neighboring villages, and in the evenings, we sat by the bonfire. Sometimes I helped my mother with village housework. My father visited us for the weekends, and every time I was very glad to see him. Sometimes I deliberately returned home to see him. As I said, we lived separately in Moscow, and I did not often see my father. As for my speech problems, I remembered deep down that he was the cause of their occurrence, but as a friendly and cheerful child, I almost forgot about that long-standing incident…

The same is true with friends who laughed at my inability to pronounce words. Despite all the difficulties that I experienced during the school seasons of the year, I almost did not hold back the anger at them. In the end, when we matured, they were able to change for the better.

However, the old memory of numerous acts of ridicule did not leave me.

But there were also cases when, after returning from the village to Moscow, I not only spoke and answered during school lessons without any problems, I also myself raised my hand for an answer – I would become so confident in myself. In one period of my life, I was full of enthusiasm to wake up in the morning and go to school, because I liked the learning process and the fact that I could speak perfectly, like all other people.

Moreover, during such periods of my life, I was by no means taciturn. So, I remember my mother's story how she rode in the same tram with me and Anton, my childhood friend, and she said that I was constantly chatting then. We did not know that my mother was in the car and just decided not to interfere with our conversation.

But sooner or later, confidence always went away. The reasons could be very different. For example, I remember how one day on New Year's Eve, when I was still in high school, a man rang the doorbell of our apartment. He rang other people in our corridor too, as he was just looking for a company to celebrate the New Year. I think that our neighbor, an elderly woman, recognized him as a resident from the adjacent block of our apartment building, and mom agreed to let him into our tiny one-room apartment. He behaved completely normal and adequate, but this could not console my appearing concern for my mother. I simply could not know what could happen next, and I was worried about this unexpected situation and the unknown. After he left, he rang the doorbell again after a couple of moments to ask if I would like to walk with him sometime. At that moment I felt very embarrassed for my father, and I felt like I was betraying him, just by being in this situation. My mother and I politely refused. After this moment, I had to go out with my Moscow friends to celebrate the New Year, as we did in previous years. But when my best friend came after me, I spent several minutes refusing to go out, because I was afraid for my mother, afraid that that man might come back again. At that time, I could not tell the whole truth to my friend, as I was ashamed. I simply kept refusing to go outside for celebrations, until he was finally tired, and he went to celebrate with the rest of the friends without me. This was the first moment when my touch with friends began to break. Having returned to school after the holidays, I again began to have problems with speech and again became insecure – which I constantly remembered about. As for that man, I never saw him again.

However, there was another case in elementary school when I lost a friend for an absurd reason. He was my classmate, and we often walked together after school, or played Dendy at his home. He lived far from school and, I think, because of this, he started going to another. One day I came home after being outside for a long time with friends and the telephone rang. It was that same friend who called me to go outside. Then, without thinking, I said that I had already been outside – I understood how my “I had already been outside” sounded when it was too late. He hung up and never called again. We had an old drum phone without a caller ID at that time, and I did not have my friend’s phone number because, as I recall, he did not have a phone before. I could not contact him in any way, and thus I lost my first friend. I am not sure exactly, but maybe many years later I saw him and his grandmother while riding in a tram not far from my school and home. He also saw me. If that was really my old school friend, then he clearly remembered me and, judging by what reached me from his conversation, he remembered our very last telephone “conversation”. Perhaps I should have approached and apologized, explaining the misunderstanding, but then I was not in the best shape, and I was not sure if it was him because more than ten years had passed since we saw each other.

My first serious wrong choice was made when I was thirteen years old. If before I used to have sexual fantasies about my female friends at bedtime – a trace of my childhood sexual experience – then at the beginning of the eighth grade I started having a real sex drive. And if before my fantasies did not interfere with my life in any way, now I just could not help but think about sex and girls. The obvious solution would be to look for a girl, but then another thought appeared in my head – the thought that because of my stumbles in my speech, no girl would want to get involved with me. Perhaps the reason for this conclusion was the memory of how in the village at the bus stop my friend C sang a song that was clearly aimed at making fun of me, and our female friend, whom I sort of liked, had a characteristic expression on her face, saying what she was thinking about me at that moment.

And then I remembered about the existence of masturbation…

This was the first time that I first began to touch myself for sexual pleasure. I enjoyed doing this with myself.

I think it was about that time when many people, including relatives, friends and even guys, had been telling me that I was a handsome boy. At one time, my mother tried to cheer me up about my speech problems, saying that the girls would want to get to know me themselves since I was beautiful. Then at school one of the senior students came up to me to ask if I had an older brother. At another time, my aunt Zina asked where I got my handsome look from; then in the kitchen of the Big House sat my father who was already almost completely bald and full-bodied, and I felt somewhat uncomfortable in front of him. My female cousin noted my beauty a couple of times. Then one of my village female friends said that I was a very handsome boy. I remembered those words, and I too began to think of myself as of a handsome guy. Of course, I liked being beautiful, and I liked that fact that girls were glancing at me.

Meanwhile, it was time for ninth grade. Everything was the old way for me – stutters and self-doubt continued to cloud my life. By then I already began to be afraid of phone calls, fearing that my classmates were calling me, and I would again have to struggle to pronounce the words. Plus, I was always shy to talk on the phone about my personal life in front of my mother who was always nearby in our one-room apartment – this could not but affect the fact that I almost did not learn to talk with people and did not acquire a good understanding about what to say, and how to say it.

In general, I was a very shy child in my childhood, which made the whole situation much more difficult.

So, I remember one summer evening in the village, when we were burning a fire by the spring, and some friends were playing spin-the-bottle. One of my female friends clearly, at least it seemed to me so then, wanted to teach me how to kiss – she was saying that otherwise I would have a girlfriend one day, but I will not know what to do. She insisted for a while. To some extent, I had certain feelings towards that friend, and I think I would have agreed to become her apprentice, so to speak, if it were not for the presence of my male friend who was two years older than me, and who refused to play spin-the-bottle. At that time, he was a decent and the right guy, and the thought of what he would think of me played an important role in my refusal to play the game.