Free The Librarian by Mikhail Elizarov Page A

USED TO DREAM of studying at the Medical Institute, so that, like my Uncle Maxim, I too could roam the country in search of romantic adventure. At the time I never even thought about the fact that a doctor’s profession is a stationary one and medical personnel don’t usually travel much.
    In the final year of school my plans changed. Everything was turned upside down by a theatre club that was organized at school. Unfortunately it was led by an adventurer who had absolutely no talent. After a year we had been irrecoverably inoculated with every imaginable failing of the actor’s art, but the most terrible thing of all was that each one of us firmly believed in his own genius. Instead of preparing for our future lives and choosing a profession to match our abilities, with a decent and stable income, we started dreaming about art.
    In its short existence the club didn’t stage even a single production; all we did was rehearse. Yevgeny Schwartz’s play
An Ordinary Miracle
, which we had arrogantly chosen to stage, never got any farther than the first act, but we already thought of ourselves as stage artistes.
    I remember what a terrible state of alarm I threw my father and mother into when I announced that I intended to go to Moscow, no less, and join the Theatrical Institute to become an actor.
    I must give my parents due credit, for they did try to rescue their son from the impending catastrophe. The only one who supported me in my vainglorious dreams was Vovka, but only until itwas made clear to her that her brother Alyoshka was not going to end up on the practice stage at the Moscow Art Theatre, but go straight into the army. After this sudden enlightenment, Vovka fell silent and I lost my only ally. My parents had already launched a new educational campaign. Now, to spare my vanity, they started denouncing the nepotism inherent in theatrical institutions: “No one ever gets in there without graft.”
    My courage failed me and they cunningly tempted me with a different prospect. My father said that he didn’t want to destroy my dreams, but wouldn’t it be better first to acquire a solid profession in a technical college? And then, five years later, if I still couldn’t live without art, I would be more mature, I would know myself better, and I could go to college to study directing, which already sounded more respectable in itself. I thought about it and agreed to the technical college and a “solid profession”.
    To this day that expression reminds me of something rectangular and heavy, resembling simultaneously a silicate brick and a reinforced concrete pillar. I chose the most solid area of all—“Machinery and Technologies for Foundry Engineering”. In the entrance exams in Maths and Physics I made a whole heap of mistakes and got a pretty bad fright, but they pulled me up to a “B”. After an entirely fictitious exam—a composition—I was accepted for the first year of the course.
    I wasn’t interested in my studies; every subject was alien to me. But I didn’t skip lectures and for the exams I dutifully copied out heaps of cribs, which they didn’t take away from us.
    After the mid-year exams many students were kicked out of the institute, but not out of the Faculty of Mechanics and Metallurgy. They hoisted up our grades as high as they could, and I tried hard not to fall behind too. Doing all those drawings was hard, but even that problem could be solved—for a small reward, students who specialized in perspective geometry would do them for me. My grant was just enough to cover the especially hideous course requirements in the Theory of Machines and Mechanisms—TMM—which hadbeen known since time immemorial as “This Murders Me”. I lived with my parents and didn’t have the kind of financial problems that students from out of town might face.
    It was 1991 and my assessments still contained, as a final flourish from the Soviet age, an examination on the history of the Communist Party of the