Esoteric Vitamins: Barnaul

The winter has come and while we sit in the EasyJet terminal of Schiphol airport I finally found courage to talk about them. The esoteric vitamins, the friends and the foes of every neurodivergent person. What are they? A mystery? A logical consequence of human development? The triumph over the despicable physiology, or the very manifestation of the feebleness of our minds? What are they?

My way towards esoteric vitamins was very queer. Well, like everything else about me is queer, I suppose. And I'll tell you the story, sit at the fire and listen. By the way: typing this I'm so beautifully high on vitamin W.

When I was a kid growing up in rural Russia, even thinking about esoteric vitamins was quite a sin. A sin that was scolded and demonized by adults, seeing those who gave up to their various attractions. I don’t judge those, as our stories follow us and strike us from the past, so plausible is leaving this reality for good, even in such a seemingly lowly way. And the rot of it was everywhere.

When the Soviet Union was gone, you could see how in stages the society structures disappeared. For a child like me, it wasn’t clear why it was happening, but one of the earliest memories I have is a (atheist) New Year celebration in a concert hall of the worker’s dormitory, where my parents, my brother and I were living. Adults and children around, music and some light effects illuminate the common communist place of pleasures, neighbors reenacting the scenes of Russian fairytales and an overall feeling of a lingering order in the air. It must have been 1993.

And then the wind changed. The life and all its laws were not only put in question, they were tested with violence, decomposition, abandonment and betrayal. The next frame in the film of my childhood is the same space, that we crawl in through a broken window because first, there was no adult to take care of us, and second, there was a broken window. A broken window, so conveniently broken by a brick, that followed first. Glass shards on the floor, Chernobyl like, were spread on the floor, human presence was no more, order and purpose had left those rooms forever.

Next frame. A friend named Denis rang the door, we were friends, but with the very strange friendship, where he made stories up. I pretended to believe them. For example, there was a story, that he had a flying skateboard at home, like in “Back to the future”, that you could ride on to whatever destination, that came to your mind. The magic board to take you away to whatever ungodly circus is happening in front of your child's eyes right now. I liked that idea. And Denis would also finish his stories with an epilogue, that I could only see those magical things, if I shared some food with him. Of course, just to load before the long exhausting trip with the flying skateboard, just not to be hungry on the way because it’s not an airplane, food is not served there. I somehow knew what he really wanted, and somehow wanted to believe the story.

All the inhabitants of the lost-its-purpose workers dormitory in the Industrial District of Barnaul Russia (appealing name isn’t it?), the workers' dormitory of “Crystall” factory that processed the Yakut diamonds and made them to pure money, were once decent people. They were born in a country that told them, that they were to build the most progressive society in humanity’s history, the one without lies and abuse, where every human is a brother to another. Where every person is equal to another. And that turned out to be a lie. A lie, that seems to infect so many minds today.

Their very normal lives, were destroyed in a blink of an eye, as was the life of Denis’ mother was destroyed. What was she in the body of the Soviet leviathan? Was she a computer operator? What did she dream of? Did she dream of a happy family of three children? And a man who loved her? Instead, her entire life crashed into ashes. As of other 300 million people. Their lives were destroyed.

And when your life is not balanced, when nothing but the attractive esoteric vitamins fill the void, you crash with your life. And so Denis' mother crashed into an abyss. And his brother followed. And his sister. He has somehow managed not to die.

Another edge of this very same story happened, so much nearer to me, than I would want. Another crashed family story, unfolded in a painful proximity. In Soviet Russia, young specialists who finished whatever education were distributed around the country. This was somehow a guarantee of a job for them, but at the same time meant you could have gone to wherever the vast Soviet empire spreads. And so my mother and my father were distributed to that very diamonds-who-are-the-Soviet's-best-friends-factory mentioned above. And their friends were a couple, Moldovans, Marina and Sergey. They were in the same age and my mother and my father were assigned to adjacent rooms in a section, so they practically shared every aspect of their lives for a couple of years. I’ve met my best friends of my life in a dorm, so is it really a sin?

After a birth of the second child, the Soviet (is it supposed to be written in capitalized? I don’t think so, but my spellchecker was paid by the KGB) Empire granted you a two room section in the dormitory, so my parents and their friends had almost a real apartment to themselves. And the friendship moved on. Aunt Marina and uncle Sergey were really like seconds parents to me, and their children, Anastasia and Anton, were friends for life. We grew up together, and it seemed nothing was in a way.

After the Soviet Empire collapsed, Marina and Sergey too had a hard time putting bread on their table. Marina tried hard with all the jobs that came around, nobody really cared that she was an educated engineer, nobody. The shop assistant was the best she could have counted on. Him – well, driving a truck was the best deal the collapsed post soviet society could have offered. The worst times for the best people of the soviet empire.

This happened right before I went to school. I saw the adults getting extremely agitated by a minute, everybody started whispering to each other and running from one room to another, so nervously trying to throw on a good look and neutral face. This was so we children don’t get it. Uncle Sergey died. He was actually killed, as I found out later, no one really cared to control the damage as this overwhelmed them as much as it deserves. They were all around 25–27 years old, they had no idea, but my happy child life has just turned adult in one second.

Sergey was killed for the payload of his truck. The gangsters took him out of it and killed, put his body on the road and rolled over the truck over his body. It was so deformed, that only the pathologist's expertise could match his remains to the person. We were roaming around the building as the adults didn’t really pay attention to us, and Anton and Anastasia visited the Marina’s parents in the countryside and Sergey’s brother brought them as quick as possible to Barnaul. Out of the sudden, they both showed up and my mother tried to take us in, but Anastasia ran up high to the fourth floor where they lived. My mother ran after her, but she was quick, and she slipped into the apartment to see if that was really her father. We stayed outside in the hallway, but my mother ran right after her and disappeared into the apartment, where Marina and Anastasia were. I’ve heard Anastasia screaming and just suddenly silenced, and then my father slipped into the apartment and fetched her. He laid her on the floor and tried to blow on her face, she was consciousless.

She woke up in a minute only to realize it was not a dream and that it really happened. The horror was imprinted in her face in a second, and she started screaming again. My father took the rest of the children away. I saw the very collision with a black hole happened in their heads. The very unfillable void this event left in their hearts, as much as I would be never the same after that evening.

And after Sergey died, Marina’s life, and herewith Anastasia’s and Anton’s had no way but downwards. She started drinking and beating them, with all logical consequences.

After a couple of years, they moved and the contact between my mother and Marina faded away, especially after an accident with golden earrings, that have mysteriously disappeared at a common friend’s party.

I moved to Novosibirsk for study and that quite a common drama just vanished from my radar for good. Until I met a common friend in the city, when I was visiting, and she said Anton died from the vitamin H addiction, the one that can erase the entire life in months. I don’t judge him, at that point everything made sense. Him coming over and borrowing even more 100 rubles and never coming back. She also told me, that before he died he was in a juvenile prison for participation in a group rape.

He and six other teenagers drank vodka together with one of the residents of that same worker's dormitory, apparently in hope of having sex with her. When she refused, they raped her and the oldest of the group, Maxim, has decided to hit her head with a brick, so she forgets it ever happened. They then left and the woman was found in this state by her roommate, and so she landed in a hospital. After several weeks, she came out of a coma and identified the rapists. All the teenagers were arrested, and those who were underage put into the juvenile prison. Maxim was 18 at that moment, so he was put in prison for 11 years.

Life leaves invisible scars on our souls, unlike those on the body. The power of forgiveness lies in our ability to empathize, don’t alienate those who seem beneath you, as you may land in their place tomorrow. Since Anton’s death, I could never think of taking esoteric vitamins ever in my life. The image of it Russia, the tough punishment for any contact with it, especially in the Russian province, has created quite an impenetrable buffer between me and the vitamins. Nothing seemed to be able to push me that way.