Enemy of the people

When I was in daycare at the age of five, we had one really nasty teacher (we also had a few simply nasty ones, and a few that were OK). Her name was Natalya Anatolyevna.

We were supposed to sleep every day 3pm-5pm. A lot of kids can't really sleep during the daytime, but we still had to pretend to be asleep, for 2 hours every day. If we could stay in bed and read these two hours, or talk quietly to the person next to us, this would be no problem. But no, we were not allowed to read or to talk. Not that we didn't try. Two hours in bed without being allowed to talk or to read and without being able to sleep feel like a hellish eternity. (I had discovered masturbation already by that point, but I was not very good at it, certainly not good enough to do it in a room full of people without anyone noticing. I discovered that technique at the age of 14 in a physics class, but that's going too much ahead...) The more reasonable teachers allowed us to lie in bed with our eyes open, the less reasonable demanded that we keep our eyes closed, but Natalya Anatolyevna demanded that we actually sleep, or pretend well enough to be undistinguishable from a sleeping person. Such pretense is difficult: when a person is only pretending to sleep the eyelids tend to tremble a bit. When she noticed something like that she always started screaming like a rabid baboon, so that even the people who were actually sleeping woke up in horror.

Another problem with sleeping is that people want to piss, and having a dinner just before going to bed does not help. Going to the toilet during the quiet hour was a problem: on one hand, we were not allowed to go to the toilet or even get out of bed without a permission, on the other hand, we were not allowed to open our mouths to obtain said permission. The solution given to us was to raise our hand and hope that a teacher notices it. Sometimes they noticed it; if they didn't, we had a choice of pissing in bed or rising without permission, and the latter usually caused so much yelling that almost everyone preferred the former. Natalya Anatolyevna never gave permission even if we asked.

If people were treated in such a way in Guantanamo bay, Amnesty International would have made noise, and for a good reason. Unfortunately this was just a daycare on the 12th Line in Leningrad, and therefore did not come to the attention of Amnesty and similar organizations.

Those who have pissed in bed were punished by yelling in front of a formation of everybody else (standing in military-style formations was the first thing they taught you in a Soviet daycare - I still have nightmares about people screaming "eyes right!", "attention!" and "at ease!"), but this was not a big source of shame, because it happened to everybody fairly often. Besides, their linen was given to their parents to take home and wash. The biggest problem was having wet underwear for the rest of the day, although the rest of the day was not much. At some point I got a great idea: if you take the panties off, piss in bed and then put them on, you can piss in bed and still have fairly dry panties. This pissed the teachers off terribly. They made me stand in front of a formation of kids and yelled at me, saying that Izrailit is a really bad person, since she pisses on society's sheets but prefers to keep her private panties dry. I didn't feel very ashamed, in fact quite amused at the absurdity of life. I guess this was the start of me as a right-winger and a general enemy of the people. This was also probably the moment I developed a taste for absurd comedy.

My technique did not catch on, though. I guess nobody else wanted to be called an enemy of the people.