EMIGRATION

 Later, at nine o'clock at night, a car struck a firefly, hitting me like a rag, with broken cruelty, without braking. I was standing on a street lamp-post, impatient, hot-headed, because it was the deadline for the performance, and although it was winter, I had not reached the other side of the Atlantis platform, surrounded by a holy congregation of the astonished: "He was so young.

poor thing, and already contemplating suicide!" - but it was only my adolescent grievances that had come to the surface in their disobedience! And among them, me in the true rags of my hospital emigration! And it was strange to know in advance that I was going to be run over, and that I could still limp along like a little bobbing pirate with one leg

and doctors would lie to my face and tell me the truth: "It will be all right! Relax!" - And I knew long ago that if I did not survive - if only to return from my afterlife walk, I would retaliate with the hell of humiliation.I woke up in my naked Adam suit, sat up in my bed and the iron heels of the silent pain in the tissue labyrinths of my legs, which only feels but does not speak.

 - I know that the obligatory morning rounds, the browsing through the charts, are in vain, - I can only stand up on my feet for the last time on the stubborn stilts of my will, and I have cowered on the ward bed like a chubby vombat kid, for seven days, until the morning rounds sent a general alarm into the hearts of men! Then, somehow or other, the broken-in fatigue fell upon me about daybreak, - and there could hardly be any cheap lukewarmth on the radiators. My fear gnawed at me with gritted teeth until the morning: I might end up in the operating theatre and never leave!