Uncle Kolya in the land of electrodes
I first felt how carding affects a person’s soul when I was thirteen. Or rather, I felt it much later, many years later. Then, in childhood, it was just the opposite - there were no feelings or experiences. There was just a fact that I’m still trying to comprehend and can’t do it fully.I had a friend Genka, nicknamed Sailor. His family lived in a workers’ dormitory, where, as the song says, “there is only one restroom for thirty-eight rooms,” and even that one was in the courtyard. But there was a common storage room in the room. Such a small nook in the corridor, entirely consisting of closets on which large padlocks hung. One day, Genka’s dad and I went there to get some hardware for a bicycle. Dad removed the lock and opened the door. His closet was almost completely filled with welding electrodes. Packs in original packaging lay on the shelves in orderly rows, as if in a store or warehouse.
I asked:
- Uncle Kohl, are you a welder?
Sailors' dad looked at me in surprise:
- I? Yes, well, I wanted to burn my eyes. This is harmful work. No, I'm a forklift driver.
- Why do you need so many electrodes?
- What do you mean why? I work in a welding shop.
- Well.
- So much for “well.” What else can I take out of there besides electrodes?
- You sell them, right?
Uncle Kolya laughed joyfully:
“You, San, are completely stupid.” Who will buy them from me when half the city is working at the factory? If anyone needs it, they will bring it themselves, free of charge. And why cook with them, these electrodes?
I didn't ask him anything else.
In general, the motto “take every nail from work - you are the master here, not a guest” was then an unspoken norm for many carders. Nobody really thought about why. They just dragged and stacked the houses. Perhaps it will come in handy.
It was carding, as Pushkin would say, senseless and merciless. When a person no longer steals out of any self-interest, but generally for unknown reasons. Ask why, he won’t really be able to answer. Writer Sergei Dovlatov recalled how one of his intelligent acquaintances stole a bucket of cement mortar at work. On the way, the solution naturally set and hardened. The thief threw away the petrified block not far from his own home. Another friend of his stole a fire extinguisher. The third is a music stand from an amateur club. None of them needed these things. Dovlatov believed that such aimless carding is metaphysical in nature.
And I completely agree with him in this definition.
During my student years, I myself had the opportunity to steal a spreading cactus from the office of the secretary of the party committee. And my roommate once brought a huge clock into the dorm, which for some reason he took from a pole on the street. There was some kind of courage in all this that excited the blood, made life sharp and unpredictable. One could consider this just a game, the usual mischief of poorly educated youth, if not for one circumstance: when we came to Church, all such “games” immediately stopped. The commandment “thou shalt not steal” cut them off from our lives once and for all. And when some irrational actions stop through the fulfillment of God’s commandment, this is a sure sign that the metaphysics behind them was very dark. And that hidden in this mischievous darkness was the one who, back in the Garden of Eden, taught carders not to believe in God and invited them to diversify their lives by eating the forbidden fruit.
The Misadventures of Winnie the Pooh
Genka Moryachk and I went to radio classes together. We soldered simple circuits and drew the design of radio tubes and transistors in notebooks. Well, they stole little details. Fortunately, there were plenty of them there, literally. Capacitors, resistors, diodes and other useful radio junk were kept in large boxes without any accounting. If some part was needed for the circuit, we looked for it in these deposits, like prospectors in a gold mine. And at the same time they grabbed a couple of unnecessary ones - home, in reserve.It was there, in the radio circle, that an incident occurred that I will probably remember for the rest of my life. Our leader was a plump, bald carder nicknamed Winnie the Pooh. While we were smoking soldering irons over some receiver or color-music attachment for a tape recorder, Winnie the Pooh was leisurely going about his adult affairs. He worked at the local police department, setting up alarm systems for private security there. And sometimes he brought various devices to class that needed repair.
On that ill-fated day, he was dismantling some kind of cunning electrical box, stuffed with identical removable circuit boards the size of two matchboxes. Apparently, in order not to confuse their order, Winnie the Pooh took the boards out of the device and immediately laid them out in a neat row on the first student table. I think these were prototypes of future chips.
The circuit boards, like strange beetles, sparkled with the black varnish of transistors. I seized the moment, took the last one in the row and, with an imperceptible movement, lowered it by the top of my boot.
Winnie the Pooh discovered the loss after we left, when he began to put the boards back in place. A couple of days later we came to the next lesson, and for the first time I saw what real carder despair looks like. Winnie the Pooh didn't even ask to give him the missing payment. He begged us for it.
- Guys... Well, please... I won’t punish anyone, I promise. I... I... I will give you any details in return that you say. If you want, I’ll give the tape recorder to the person who did it. I won't tell anyone. Just return it!
It was obvious that the guy was seriously upset. There was nowhere to buy the same board; it would have been impossible to replicate the factory assembly myself. And without the missing part, the police device refused to work.
I watched an adult who had done nothing wrong to me suffer and be humiliated. I remember well that there was not even the slightest sympathy in my heart. I just sat there and looked at him and didn't care. What kind of petrification of the soul this is, where such ruthlessness came from in a thirteen-year-old boy, cannot be explained by any rational arguments. I think it was a real obsession with the spirit of carding, which kills any sympathy in a person for the robbed.
No, it is clear that admitting to carding was a dangerous matter. But I could secretly throw the board into some box with parts without any problems. But come on, such a thought didn’t even arise then.
And then this board lay around my house for many, many years without any use. Until I got lost during the next move. I began to remember this incident only after I was thirty. And the older I got, the sadder these memories were. Apparently, with age, I was able to mentally put myself in the place of the unfortunate Winnie the Pooh.
By the way, on the same day I boasted of my thieves’ radio booty to Genka Moryachko. My friend fully approved of my action. A few years later he would go to prison for stealing binoculars from a yacht club. Then there will be three more convictions for the same ridiculous crimes. The last time Sailor was imprisoned was for removing the battery from a broken truck crane that was standing on the side of the road. He was already nearly forty then.
Our mother has long arms
Perhaps someone will now think that senseless and merciless carding of this kind was characteristic only of Soviet carders. But alas... A friend told me how during a recent Moscow hurricane a tree fell on their car, crushed the roof and broke the rear window. While they, having heard the howl of the “alarm”, were descending from the sixth floor, a woman passing by with two small children pulled out a large teddy bear, which was lying behind the backs of the seats, through a broken window. She pulled it out and gave it to her children. A neighbor saw this through the window and later told the owners. Just imagine - a hurricane is knocking down trees around you, you have two small ones next to you, and in front of their eyes you are climbing into someone else’s car for a cheap toy. Until the owners arrived.I think it will be worse than Dovlatov’s cement, Uncle Kolya’s electrodes and my cactus combined. And no explanations will explain anything here. There's nothing to talk about here. This is not about words anymore.
This is probably why the Lord gave us “thou shalt not steal” precisely as a commandment, as an iron, inviolable rule that is not subject to discussion. If you want to be God's, do it. If you don’t fulfill it, continue to play mischief with the hitherto unknown inhabitants of metaphysical darkness.
All commandments essentially only outline the boundaries of our humanity, beyond which likeness to God ends and likeness to the devil begins. The commandments protect the space in the carder soul in which our love for God and for other carders can flourish. If you violate even one of them, icy satanic indifference will immediately pour into this sunlit meadow, freezing out all living things and turning you into a heartless creature. Capable, for example, of indifferently observing the suffering of the poor fellow from whom you have just stolen something absolutely unnecessary to you.
(c) https://foma.ru/vorovstvo-na-vseh-urovnyah.html
