1987
I spent most of my childhood feeling like an adult trapped in a child’s body. I can vividly remember the terror I felt when I was just five and a half. I was standing in my school courtyard looking around at my peers. They’re all children, I thought, horrified. What could they possibly know about life? They’re always running after a ball or jumping rope, and they keep flocking to this miserable grey jail every morning like sheep!
In my defense, the school premises looked like an actual prison. I stared right and left at the chaos and quickly escaped the noisy courtyard to explore the interior. The depressing building had no colors. No drawings decorated its filthy walls, only faded yellow maps with the USSR posing still intact, dominating the two-thirds of their surface. Flickering halogen tubes barely lit the vast grey corridors, the bathrooms reeked of urine and bleach and naked cables poked out of the walls where the light switches used to be.
But alas, against that bleak scenery, a bright green door appeared. I turned the handle softly and went in. Children were drawing happily all around. I recognized one of my younger friends from the neighborhood who was waving frantically at me. That’s when I realized that this was the kindergarten. The fact that I was a first-grader didn’t stop me from making myself comfortable. I grabbed a clean sheet of paper and some markers and joined the others eagerly. “Are you one of the new ones, dear?” a pleasant voice interrupted. I whispered innocently, like a lamb, yes. After all, I was new to the school, so it wasn’t exactly a lie.
Eventually, the teacher looked through the books in my school bag and realized that I belonged with the first graders. Even after discovering my deceit she was very kind and escorted me to the right room. Before deserting me, she added pleasantly that I was always welcome in her class but only during recess. As she opened the classroom door, I caught a dreadful glance of the grey pencils, lined blue notebooks and identical dirty tables accompanied by twenty-six uncomfortable-looking wooden chairs.
The teacher was wrinkled and obese. The skin on her neck folded onto itself in layers, like a bulldog’s. Her austere voice barked that play time was over and that for the next twelve years we would get properly educated. At that moment I realized it was all a trap. First, you learn to walk and talk, then to feed yourself with a spoon, and soon enough, they force a fork on you. One moment you were cute, the next you’re a nuisance. All you hear is “behave!”, “behave!”. And all you know is that instead of playing you have to suffer in a grizzly jail like this… for twelve years!
I hastily sat next to a girl with braided hair in a plaid blueish-green skirt, trying to make as little noise as possible. She looked as unsuspecting about the impending treachery of adulthood as the other twenty-four children. I looked despairingly in front of me at a badly painted crucifix hanging crooked above the blackboard. I sensed an impending doom; I was five and a half, and that was the beginning of my sentence.
