sky above Russian Island?
That is sky! How could it be there?
But it was there and I never looked at it.
So that...
don't turn with this question to me.
Then motorboat arrived...
and it began!
Motorboad arrived sooner, it's just that
telling takes long time.
Imagine...
Imagine, you wake up in the morning,
you wake up and you're a hussar.
Hussar, real military hussar,
you have hat with this thing...
buttons
those strappings
sword and a horse.
And there was no carnival yesterday where you could've
get drunk, forget to undress and wake up like this being a hussar. No.
You are real hussar.
You know in what regiment you serve,
and horse knows you.
And just like this, imagine, every morning,
every morning during those three years I woke up
with one and the same thought:
I am a deckhand.
Real one.
Imagine, real one. Much more real than those in monuments
and movies.
Real one. The longer I served, the more I was astonished.
But, thank God, on Russian Island...
not that we weren't allowed to think about it, we didn't have
to think about it much
and that was due to those men which met us there.
Such people met us there...they were officers.
Those were people with such I hadn't earlier, well, until then,
well, not that I haven't met any, I hadn't talked to such people until then.
It can't be said I had talked with officers because they always did the speaking.
But I always had strict feeling of dialogue after that!
We were ordered in line...morever, I had this feeling
like exactly I was ordered in line but as if I were three hundred men.
And I was greeted...until then nobody had greeted me like that.
[They] said to me:
Good day..rades...mariners...
Officers, officers never used swerawords, never.
They felt themselves to be important men, almost aristocrats,
but their lips themselves whispered needed ideas!
It's not that phrases became so-so,
they became absolutely no-how.
They tried not to do senseless things, those officers.
That's why they said:
Good day..rades...mariners...
We understad...it's hard and complicated...for you now...
You want to go home to mommy!
No way!
You think you'd become men beside mommy.
No way. But here (sh...) we will make you such (sh...), and fast way (sh...).
And remember (sh...) that following three years (sh...)
you will have no closer relatives than us (sh...).
But you want to go home to mommy.
And this urge distracts you from serving your fatherland (sh...)!
But we will make sure each one of you has only three (sh...)
simple (sh...) manly (sh...) urges left:
that is, to eat, to drink, to sleep!
And to achieve this, understand us correctly,
we don't don this for the first time, thank God, you are not
the first ones and you are not the last ones...
we will give you little to eat (sh...), to drink (sh...), to sleep (sh...)!
They did as they had told.
And it became easier.
Not because we liked to get little of all this...no.
Earlier there was some military service waiting in future,
it was somehow frightful, then we were put in train-cars,
we were brought to far east, it became more frightful,
then we were put on motorboat and brought to Russian Island,
it was totally/in general frightful. That's the thing
that it was frightful in general.
But then we arrived and it became frightful in the concrete.
And that's why it became easier.
Officers were such people...they were such people...
how to say? To say they were energic is to say nothing.
They were...they were attaboys.
As if they were winded up once and it never comes to end.
For example, they said...being winded up, they talked like this:
just a moment...
Chinese are attacking! You have thirty seconds to protect your fatherland!
We had nothing against it.
What was required to do that?
It was required to get dressed fast
and we got dressed fast.
They were not satisfied.
It was required [to do it] faster...
We got dressed really fast.
They were not satisfied but it's