Syedyshev Oleg
Syedyshev Oleg

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Humorous Essays Based on students' memories

"All have died
except for those who are alive, and those whom we remember"Confucius

Essay 82. Let's Man The Barricades!

There is a category of people, who one can feel offended by, or can be angry at, but one cannot help loving them. It is not a representative of the XXth century, it's likely the nineteenth century. A XX century man psychologically likes to be on the winners' side. For him it is important to become a successful and advanced person, or a hero, the winner of history. Perhaps, your most humble servant, is of that kind. Zhora Chernobay is absolutely unlike me. He is physically and spiritually strong, but not aggressive; he is kind, and sometimes even too much. And the people around him shamelessly abused his kindness. For instance, if you remember the essay "Mini Dorm", where I write about how five of us together with Zhora Chernobay shared a rented apartment. So we took turns to cook then, and when a day of Zhora's turn was coming, we, the rest four of us, agreed beforehand what to order for Zhora to make. More often there were pancakes or pies stuffed with pluck. Zhora was extremely good at making those two culinary items. He was doing his best. Zhora never made simply pancakes. Though, what am I talking about? He made so many pancakes that we ate them for a couple of following days. Just imagine what it was like to make pancakes from an enameled pail (12 liters) of pancake dough.

And he stuffed them with cottage cheese and cream cheese and minced meat and pluck sausage minced with onions, garlic and bay leaves. It came out incredibly delicious. He had the same attitude to making pies. In that case he added mashed potatoes as stuffing. None of us, except Zhora had enough patience to cook that long. And he reveled in our praise so much. He literally was enjoying it. Once Zhora Romashov called: "Let's chair Zhora".

We, after we had gobbled his pies up, eagerly rushed to him. Poor, Zhora, 150 kilograms of alive weight; we dropped him on the floor with such a crash, that we thought he might break something. Luckily, he turned to be in one piece. Generally speaking Zhora was a hard nut to crack. I can't help writing about two other episodes of that life. I am not going to point at anybody specially, let it be our group mockery at Zhora. On a regular basis a ten kilogram weight was put on his bed under a sheet. And Zhora with the same masochist regularity used to fall on it with his full weight, or sit on it with all his might. Luckily we borrowed our beds from a dorm, so all of them were with wire netting, which cushioned the contacts with the weight.

Nevertheless Zhora had huge permanent bruises on his lower back and sides. After I had moved out of the apartment, the guys who stayed quitted the corporal punishment of Zhora, so he connected it with me. Well, Zhora, Zhora, you were wrong then. And there was another terrible situation. Zhora and Zhenya Romashov argued about whether a man could drink two and a half liters of vodka. And it is neither more nor less than five half a liter bottles. So Zhora was insisting that that was possible, and Zhenka was stating the opposite. There was even a phrase that that was a deadly dose for a human being said. We used everything to talk Zhora out of doing that. Kolya Kozlov, Vadik Severin and I were begging him not to risk his life.

Zhenka was a notorious parasite. He maliciously laughed at Zhora asking if he was scared. So the event was scheduled on a day off. And Zhora won! That fruitcake poured all five bottles of vodka into a huge landlord's dipper and drank all vodka at one stroke without stopping and spilling a drop. We dropped our jaws watching him. Zhora was quickly becoming drunk though he managed to put two fingers into his throat and some amount of vodka came outside. Zhenka tried to argue, but all of us stood up staunchly for Zhora. We in a very simple and easy way proved to Zhenka that the argument was about whether one could or could not drink, and nothing was said about any other actions. Zhora was sleeping for about thirty hours in a row.
He woke up our hero. Kolya Kozlov had known Zhora since they were five, he knew that Zhora loved milk and prepared for him a three liter jar to take a drink "the morning after". And Zhenka and I rushed to a market place and brought also a three liter jar but of cucumber pickle. After Zhora's waking up we offered him both, and to Zhenka's and my joy he started drinking the pickle first. Yeah, on that day Zhora was like a Persian shah. Any wish we read in his eyes was fulfilled. I will say honestly, we got scared that Zhora could die, because he did not wake up for quite a long time.

And the Zhora turned into Georgiy Nikolayevitch Chernobay, a Pathologic Anatomy Department professor. However even in that role Zhora remained Zhora. Who else could invent the following joke except Zhora? In the Morphology building at Kirovskiy district of Kemerovo, on the forth floor there was a computer class, which was also used to read lectures for the Dentistry Department students at. In the class there were armchairs as study films or horror movies, as students called them, were also watched there. Returning to Zhora; the Chernobay devised to charge the department's laboratory assistant with putting a table covered with snow white table cloth right in front of the entrance door at the beginning of a lecture and a chair in a passageway, and put a glass with water on the table. Now hearts of those who read all my essays missed a bit, they thought that there was vodka in the glass instead of water, like in case with our professors Golubevs. No, Zhora, I'm sorry, Georgiy Nikolayevitch is not from that company.



Well, have you imagined the barricade, constructed by Zhora via the laboratory assistant's efforts, it was more striking than the one of Gavroche (a fiction character from the novel Les Miserable by Victor Hugo). Poor students, they are always in a hurry and are late anyway. In all countries scientists are racking their brains over the question of why it happens so, but they cannot solve the theorem. They have no chance, as they are not Perelmans (Grigori Perelman, 1966, is a Russian mathematician who has made landmark contributions to Riemannian geometry and geometric topology) anyway, and this is not a Poincare theorem (posed in 1904 and before its solution was viewed as one of the most important and difficult open problems in topology).
This is not even a theorem, it's an axiom: no matter how much a student is in a hurry, he or she is late for a lecture anyway.

So the students who came from the main building at Khimikov avenue, rushed dripping with sweat into the Morphology building and tried to slip by the obstacles unnoticed. However none of them succeeded. So Zhora with his photographic look noticed everyone who had been late and gibed at them till the end of the lecture making comments about relations between guys and girls.
Oh, dear! What happened to Zhora? Students became afraid of the kindest Georgiy Nokolayevitch. What time does to people, my goodness!

The last story was provided by Irina Cherkas (Tykvina).

11 November, 2011.

© Copyright: Oleg Syedyshev, 2012
Publishing licence #21210010308

Translated by Viktoria Potykinato content ↑


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