Yesterday and Long Ago

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.