The youngest of all, Ihor Lyovkin, was 3 years old when, together with his brother Kostyantyn, who had already turned 9, they came to our social service to warm up and have a hot meal. A whole dozen of young guests stank so much that our eyes popped out. The condition under which they could enter the premises was to leave their drugs, glue and varnish in bags on the floor in the corridor. This did not help at all: the smell of acetone, boiled to the bottoms of pants, palms eaten by scabies, ears that had never seen water stood like a trunk above house 83 on Botanic Vavilov Street. One of the boys hit Igor on the cap, and a huge cloud of dust flew out of it. "His mother was taken to the morgue." We were paralyzed. Like in the morgue?? Kostya told how he went home to Kirovskoe, entered the house, found Igor and his mother, who were sleeping on the floor, facing the wall. Brother had been hungry for a long time, Kostyl brought him bread and meat. They ate and went to bed. In the morning, Kostya went for a walk again, leaving Igor at home. I came in the evening, my mother was still sleeping. The child realized that something was wrong, called a neighbor, the neighbor called the police. Mother had been dead for four days. Kostya often saw her drunk and considered it lucky that she did not touch them and slept. This time forever. The boys' sister, Marina, was already living in a foster family at the time, and she did not survive this horror with her brothers. The children waited for the ambulance, then at night they walked along the road to Makiivka. There was no point in staying at home: neither food, nor warmth, nor a mother, nor a conscious adult who would at least take her to the police department or the hospital. The next day at noon, they were already sitting in our office and eating mushroom soup... Igor was sent to an asylum ( Irina Sibileva , do you remember him?). AND
Kostya ran and ran, and since the child was not local, everyone had to sneeze, they didn't look for him.
Kostya lived in the Martin Club from time to time. And with us, he couldn't stand it, he would rush out into the street to "puff", he was emotional, kind and very attached to Kuzbas-lac. Tanks with this liquid stood in his native town on the territory of the zone. Someone brought it there and didn't use it. The most gifted business children risked their lives and climbed into the tank with varnish, inhaling vaporized acetone, scooped the varnish into bags, brought it to Makiivka and sold it to their friends for money. Money was spent on bread and ...glue Moment. We had a party when our children came one day and complained to us that the nail polish was all dry. It happened two years after the first of them opened this damned Klondike.
...once we played in the theater with the children, staged a home play about seven goats. Kostya crawled under the table, pretending to be a little goat, and from there he turned to the wolf: he got out of here, now my mother the goat will come, she will heap such stars on you for us that your stomach will flake!
And Kostya was the only one who loved and could read.
He hanged himself in prison when he was 17. He was convicted of murder, which was actually committed by a girl he was in love with. Oksana, nicknamed Shepelyava due to a congenital cleft in her jaw, was pregnant by someone, but she slept in the heating circuit next to Kostyl. Once, out of jealousy, another girl pounced on her, and she stabbed her. Kostya went to the zone for her, and they say that he did not survive captivity.
The girl came to us on the eve of the new year. She was 8 months old, with a broken leg, which she got when she jumped out of the window of the venereal dispensary, where she was treated for syphilis. The policemen and doctors brought her from the maternity hospital, because they were afraid to search for her again along the heating lines. It happened right at the time of the Christmas spiral, during which all those present share their dreams for the future. Oksana dreamed of giving birth to a girl in a pink hat, to be a good mother, to have a home and a husband... A month later, we found her daughter among the abandoned newborns in the hospital. My mother was 16. I don't know about her future fate.
UPD. Oksana died of drugs at the age of 20
Photo by Andrej Naterer
