Posted on 01/05/2006 6:34:23 AM PST by doc30
YEKATERINBURG, RUSSIA Gennady Varlamov, 67, never wondered much about his childhood during the Second World War. He assumed he grew up in a happy family, living with his mother in a three-room wooden house in a village near the Ural Mountains. It was a modest place, with no electricity or running water, but Mr. Varlamov remembers it as a pleasant home with a garden and farm animals.
His questions started in October of 1993, when he suffered a bad headache. In retrospect, he says, it was probably just a flu symptom. But he went to the doctor anyway, and was referred for X-rays at a hospital in Yekaterinburg, the industrial city at the western edge of Siberia where he lives as a pensioner and part-time security guard at a military tank factory.
An elderly neuropathologist gave him the results, with a quizzical look on his face. Three sewing needles were lodged in Mr. Varlamov's brain, near the top of his skull. Mr. Varlamov still has the doctor's diagnosis, scrawled in blue ballpoint: Three needles -- with lengths of 6, 5.4, and 4 centimetres -- and an average thickness of 0.01 millimetres each.
Other than the sharp steel lurking somewhere underneath his balding scalp, the doctor declared Mr. Varlamov to be quite healthy.
"The doctor seemed surprised," Mr. Varlamov said, chuckling. "But he said I'm in good condition and I'll live many more years."
The doctor said surgery wasn't an option, and wasn't necessary because the needles didn't seem to be bothering him.
The needles didn't bother him physically, but they nagged at his mind. They would eventually lead him to think about the desperate situation many Russian families faced during the Stalin era, but for the moment he considered them proof of his good luck.
He had escaped several other perils in his lifetime, and he thought maybe this was further proof of his durability.
As a child, his grandmother had saved him more than once from poisoning after a gas valve was left open inside the house. He once slipped into a river and fell beneath a logjam floating downstream. A three-metre length of heavy pipe fell on his head at work, but that also failed to kill him.
"I'm like a cat with nine lives," he said.
Mr. Varlamov wanted to tell other people about the needles in his brain, but his wife advised him to keep quiet. Still, he learned about other cases similar to his own.
Many people around the world have lived with strange objects in their heads: a construction worker in Colorado whose nail gun sent a nail four centimetres into his brain; a Korean who discovered a five-inch nail in his forehead; a Malaysian man who endured a wood splinter in his head for five years until his doctors removed it.
But these people were victims of accidents, while Mr. Varlamov was eventually forced to wonder who wanted him dead.
Russia suffered the worst of the Second World War. Some young mothers, faced with the burden of unwanted children, resorted to killing their babies with needles slipped into the soft tissues of their unformed skulls.
"There was a tendency during the war to get rid of children like that. And the doctors couldn't discover the real cause of death," Mr. Varlamov said.
The old man's eyes grew moist as he considered the question of whether his own mother's situation had been that desperate. He chose his words slowly.
The year after Mr. Varlamov was born, his father, a railway worker, was killed in the disastrous Finnish-Russian war. His mother told him he was the youngest of three children, but that his older sister and brother had died of unspecified childhood diseases.
Mother and son moved several times, until she finally got a steady job as a janitor in a kindergarten at a small town south of Ufa, about 1,200 kilometres east of Moscow.
Mr. Varlamov says he would like to ask his mother whether life was so hard that she wanted to kill her son. But she died 22 years ago, and he has no other family members to question.
He might never have told the story to anyone, except for an advertisement he saw recently on the local Channel 4 news, offering viewers a chance to win a big television for calling the station about an unusual story.
Such a large appliance would hardly fit in his tiny apartment, but he's still hoping.
In the meantime, he said, the smile returning to his face, the station has already given him $60, a T-shirt and a beer mug.
Well, considering the context of this thread, I will stay away from said book. The only thing in life to really disturb me is things that involved children.
Maybe, self-abortion attempt
They lived like Palestinians? Who knew!
That is amazing. On so many levels.
I have needles in my brain, salt in my eyes, and lye on my tingly bits.
I love a creative journalist. :o)
He's one lucky man.
"The needles didn't bother him physically, but they nagged at his mind."
Especially being rusty and all.
It would seem that an MRI would have been very dangerous for this fellow!
Kosinski wrote some odd tales.
.01 cm would be .004 in; that's possible through drawing steel; who knows?
This story isn't just odd, it is the most horrific thing I've ever read and it's autobiographical.
Bad mother... He lived and obviously she was able to take care of him. He's alive. "Mom" probably murdered his siblings too. If he gets to her grave, I hope he has time to unzip...
This was during WWII in Russia - probably one of the most brutal and harshest places to live at the time. Living under the hell of Stalinism while trying to survive Hitler's attacks. I don't condone what his mom did, but I can see the desparation and savageness of the times that could lead someone to do this.
Partially autobiographical. Kosinski also mixed fiction into his writings. Read "Blind Date".
Jerzy Kosinski[jr´zE kuzin´skE] Pronunciation Key, 193391, American writer, b. lOdz, Poland. He taught at the Univ. of lOdz before emigrating to the United States in 1957.
In his best-known novel, The Painted Bird (1965), the horrors of war and the violation of a human being are rendered in language of remarkable beauty. The novel depicts the nightmarish wanderings of a young boy among brutal peasants in a nameless country during World War II.
Kosinski's other novels include Steps (1968, National Book Award), Being There (1971), The Devil Tree (1973), Cockpit (1975), Passion Play (1978), and The Hermit of 69th Street (1988). For several decades the wittily urbane author was a literary, social, and media celebrity.
However, during the 1980s Kosinski was shaken by scandal as critics charged that other authors had helped him to write his books and that his supposed roman A clef, The Painted Bird, which had made his personal and literary reputation, was not remotely autobiographical. This discrediting may have been a factor in his suicide. Kosinski also wrote under the name Joseph Novak.
See Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography (1996) by J. Park Sloan.
http://reference.allrefer.com/encyclopedia/K/Kosinski.html
I've never read a book before or since where I would finish reading a paragraph and have to stop because of nausea. The scene with the retarded woman and the villagers is one I wish I could get out of my head.
LOL...maybe that explains something as I read some of his novels while still in middle school. Went through a Kosinski and Vonnegut phase while in 7-8 grade.
Don't look for meaning where there is none. So it goes.
The scene in the NFL playoffs against the Broncos with the retarded quaterback and the fumbling running back is one I wish I could get out of my head.
Sorry, couldn't resist poking fun at a Browns fan.
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