History is not what we were wearing, It is how we had been utterly ruined. B.Pasternak.“Spektorsky” In the spring of 1999 the police found me lying unconscious with a broken forehead next to my bike in the outskirts of Paris, and delivered me to a hospital. It took a few weeks for French doctors to bring me to consciousness. But I did not recognize my son and said about my wife: “this woman says that she is my wife”. A doctor asked me how many years we had been married. I answered correctly, “twenty four”, and the doctor wrote down: “arithmetical abilities are preserved”. Later, French doctors told me that with such a trauma any Frenchman would succumb immediately. But then they added: “Russians are very tough so you should live several months more”. In a Western textbook I had read regarding effects of poisons: “as for alcohol the lethal dose for Russians is several times higher”. Perhaps the same applies to traumas.
