The day I broke my arm, I suddenly learned a great deal about my age.
First, from the taxi driver who drove me to the emergency room. He carefully confirmed my age and was genuinely surprised I'd been rollerblading at forty-two. "Well, now you'll sit home like a normal guy, eat his kholodets, and let the young ones ride," he concluded, dropping me right at the emergency room door.
A doctor met me there.
I open my mouth to explain, but he gets there first.
"I can see the arm is broken even without an X-ray," he says drily, writing out an X-ray referral anyway. "Scooter or rollerblades?"
"—Rollerblades," I nod sadly.
Then when I come back with the image, I ask:
"—How did you guess?"
"—It's Friday and you're sober. By the way, what are you going to do with yourself now? Two months."
I should have said "drink," but my head wasn't working straight at the time.
"—Play board games with my wife," I say.
The doctor and the nurse started laughing so hard that people began poking their heads in from the hallway. I even wondered if he was picturing some other kind of board games with my wife.
When he'd finally stopped laughing and was looking back at the papers, he asked, very thoughtfully:
"—And how old are you again?"
"—Forty-two," I say.
He burst out laughing again. "Do you still play board games?"
"—And you," I try to smile through the pain, "how do you spend your free time?"
"—I like to sleep," he says. "All right, go to the operating room across the hall, I'll be right there."
I walk in. There's a couch in the middle of the room.
One of the nurses, without looking up from her papers, commands: "On your knees!"
I'm standing in the middle of the room, completely lost, cradling my broken left hand with my right. The hand has stopped turning blue and seems to be going green, which makes it hard to think.
"On your knees — get up on the couch, put your arm there," the nurse commands again, rising from the table. "Any allergy to lidocaine?"
"I don't think so," I manage. "But I'm not sure — I've never broken anything before."
"How old are you exactly?" the other one cuts in.
I answer.
"Never broken anything?" the first one clarifies, now sounding almost sympathetic — or am I imagining it?
My arm hurts. I just shake my head.
She pulls the plunger out of a rather large syringe and pours liquid from a brown vial into it. Then she reinserts the rod, saying: "Quite a character... Where have you been going all these years without breaking anything?..." And then, almost without a pause, in that same commanding tone: "Okay. Breathe in. This is going to hurt a little..."
***
PS The photos show the gables of Kostroma houses decorated with carved ornamentation.
There's a remarkable and very local tradition of sheathing the pediment in an unusual way — with a pattern and a flourish.
Yekaterinburg comes somewhat close to Kostroma in this regard, but there it's found only on wealthy houses, and the patterns are entirely different.
