“And who are you, you devil?” he cut me off, whacking my nose. I didn’t see when he put his hand out.
“Lem,” I said to him, leaving the blood to run down my chin and below, over my throat and onto my chest. “I am called Lem,” I said, “the nephew of Ilo Kostadinovski.”
I left my blood flowing in a gentlemanly manner. Curse me, when I mentioned the name of my uncle lie Kostadinovski, I felt I’d said something important, that I’d said it all. The blood cooled me off a bit, my whole body was burning. I was happy when I thought of my uncle Ilo, I swear, I thought, well, what an uncle I have, the good Ilo Kostadinovski.
The dear Headmaster certainly was not expecting such an answer, and much later we understood how crazy it was to give any answer, the dear Headmaster preferred his underlings not to have their own answers. Curse me, no answer at all. Not permitting me to stand open-mouthed any longer, he hit me to the ground with his heavy butcher’s hand, into the new dust of the Spring which came up from the ground like a flame. After that, he returned to the son of Kejtin.
“Does anyone know about this traitor?” the Headmaster asked the other boys.
You understand, no-one lifted his head. The son of Kejtin stood alone, distanced like a wave, exactly like a lone wave, some lone wave, like some free and unruly wave he stood in the middle of the Home’s desolateness. I saw the Big Water, I heard her voice, I flew over her huge expanses. The thin voices of the children were unreal, they begged the son of Kejtin to fall.
“Stupid,” called out some of the older residents, “stupid. Drop down, fall! He won’t leave you alone until you fall, he could even kill you.”
The son of Kejtin was not listening, he was already on one of his long trips, his thin lips quivered as if the first butterfly, as if a butterfly had landed on his lips, his eyes were full of light, he was far away, he was travelling.
“Don’t big note yourself,” called out that voice, “there isn’t anyone who has managed not to fall.”
The son of Kejtin nodded his head toward the ground, and when he did that, then it was useless for anyone to try to dissuade him. He can’t fall in the dust seeing me in it. “Be a man, son of Kejtin,” I begged him, “hold out, don’t fall!” Again he smiled with his eyes and hugged me with two winks.
“You’re laughing,” said Ariton Jakovleski, amazed, “you devil, you’re laughing.”
But the son of Kejtin didn’t say anything now. And he didn’t fall, I swear, he didn’t fall. He bent down much later to lift me up from the ground.
“Get up little one,” he said. “Get up, strong Lem, we’ve arrived!” (Curse me “we’ve arrived”. I was still seeing stars, like someone drowning I held onto the son of Kejtin). I let him take me along.
From that day, the son of Kejtin was a personality in the Home. It was not, at the time, a desirable thing to be. No-one in the Home was allowed to have his own free will, his own thoughts. The sooner you realised, the lesser the suffering, the greater the success. Your character appraisal would be excellent. Curse me, the character appraisal was most important. That’s what made a person, a person or a thug, yes, exactly that, a thug.
At the end, the strange penalty was imposed. For a certain time, we were separated, one from the other, we weren’t allowed to be in the same place in the Home. In the same way, everyone was banned from going to the Big Water. They couldn’t think up a harsher punishment. Curse me, that was the worst punishment they could impose on us. I was separated from the son of Kejtin, and now they banned all of our dreams about the Big Water. The dear Headmaster knew, if you want to punish someone, just separate him from the thing that’s dearest to him. Rip out the one thing that’s in his heart, cripple him, blind him, so he can’t get away from you. Idiots, how can you destroy something if it’s in a person’s heart. I know, I know another century would pass before we understood the voice of the Big Water. But I can already see the frozen assembly line felling apart, columns of unfree children under one command, in one line, under the bell, listen, she is coming, I swear. Curse me, my friend, she is coming.
With each day that passed, I believed more in the tale about the Senterlev Mountain. You couldn’t just think up a whole mountain, a huge mountain from which the sun is born. Surely it existed and to climb this mountain would take a hundred centuries, a whole lifetime. A whole lifetime and still you wouldn’t know how far up you’d reached. Curse me, what a road. Not even comrade Sekule the Meteor knew it. He taught geography and couldn’t hear properly when we asked “If there isn’t a God in heaven, then what is there?” Once we even asked him about the mountain, the Senterlev. He spat on his glasses to clean off the dirt, he took an old notebook from his coat pocket and became immersed in its pages which had yellowed with age. “There isn’t any such mountain,” he said with a sincere voice, sighing deeply. Good-heartedly he added “We were fighting on the Endriev mountain,” some Endriev mountain, curse me. “Then on the Klenoechku mountain, a number of our comrades fell there, just before liberation,” he said it with the sort of voice you just had to believe. He listed a further one thousand three hundred mountains through which the brigades had passed, but he couldn’t think of the Senterlev mountain. “It exists,” Verna Jakovleska’s voice was heard, “it exists, my dears.”
Auditions, choosing the talented ones
Curse me, a circus. Poets, artists, opera singers, ballet dancers, musicians, cross country runners, talents. At that time, who knows how, a strange sick feeling arose in me. I thought them unfortunate people, sick, incurable. Poor unloved beings, I thought, brothers of man. It’s clear, they know life, they love it, they love life. Man is in their hearts, they know his own unfortunate face. Surely, when they are unfortunate, insulted, downtrodden people as well. They were apparently also hungry, probably pushed back over the threshold of many homes, inhospitably treated, Oh God, they know what to sing, to draw out the pain of man, they know what to tell someone, where to send him. That’s why I always listen to them with an open mouth and that cursed habit has stayed with me from my youngest years. Just say someone is telling me about the stupidest thing, for example, that he’d spent all day with his son’s bicycle (it had probably a blown tyre) and I open my mouth to listen to him. That wasn’t the reason later to hate them so much, to call them ruffians, the biggest liars. I didn’t know then they were special people, cursed, that for them, the angel comes from one side, the devil from the other. I wanted to talk about that, the talented, about that extraordinary event in the life of the Home.