Baba Yaga

To write a master's thesis, Anna Klepikova went to an orphanage for children with developmental disabilities. In addition to scientific work, the result was also the book “Probably I am a fool: Anthropological Roman” about all the inhabitants of the boarding house-and children, orderlies, volunteers, and doctors

Anna Klepikova photo: Sofya Razumovskaya

The group has unusual silence, all children sit on beds and do not move. Today I have to meet for the first time with another Inna Sergeyevna-Inna Sergeyevna Elder, or Scary, or Baba Yaga, as volunteers sometimes called her among themselves. It is unlikely that she was very older than Inna Sergeyevna the youngest, but she looked really scary: large, shaggy, humpbacked, with warts, beard and without several teeth. She had a low smoky voice and long gray -haired booklings. Sometimes she wore two pairs of glasses at the same time. Sometimes it even seemed to me that countless shawls and rags were probably on her neck, like an old woman-percentress.

Almost immediately, she began to yell at me, turning to “you” and only “Girl”: “Forever will leave the mess. Are we going to clean the strollers for you? Divorced the people. Coordinators - why are they at all? Let then work instead of orderlies! Do you help us given or interfere? Here are freaks! " Freaks are we, volunteers and teachers.

When Tonya comes, she is indignant even more: "What did you come?" “I came to tell about the children, I will leave soon,” Tonya answers. "What about them to talk about them?"

Inna Sergeevna let me do almost nothing. I put the children in strollers and chairs, went to the game, and when I came, they were again in beds. Pogochkin lay with her all the time. It was impossible to argue with her, to defend the right of Podchkin into her duty to slide out of bed, neither I nor any of the teachers. Their skirmishes with her always ended in her victory: they retreated. Inna Sergeevna managed to bring some to tears. Sometimes it happened that she almost allowed to take the child from the group, but at that moment someone went to the group-the teacher, nurse or a hostess sister, and then she began to loudly and for showing the volunteers of all mortal sins, and the child remained in the group. The teacher Kristina could not bear these systematic demonstrations of loyalty in the face of higher and refused to work on the days of the duty of Inna Sergeevna.

Many children, due to developmental features, suffer from incontinence, others with constipation-both for psychological reasons, and due to impaired metabolic processes, tossing muscles (for cerebral palsy), lack of movement, lack of fluids, and simply because they were not accustomed to a pot. Outside the boarding school, for example, when the children went to the camp, these problems were solved by themselves. The volunteers dreamed of “taking off the children from the candles”, planted them on pots, secretly fed with prunes and beat kefir. Sometimes they even managed to achieve results in a boarding school.

But the nurses strictly adhere to the rules to put candles. Inna Sergeevna sticks me some kind of crumpled fragment of newspaper paper and ask to read out the surnames soared on it. She herself does not see points without glasses. POSHOKIN, FILA, Lesha and Roma. “So, take off from strollers, I will now put candles,” she says.

Inna Sergeevna the eldest dresses up for the children of diapers and puts laxative candles at exactly eleven o'clock, although on the schedule this was supposed to do after dinner. In the morning, she does not allow to take from the group or plant those children who were intended with a candle on this day on the “chart of the chair”. It was useless to bicker with Inna Sergeevna, but I managed to agree with her that I would specially return with children from the game or from a walk to put the children sitting in strollers, and she could change everyone.

During the days of Inna Sergeevna’s duty, I tried to observe order, not to take children's clothes without demand, not to move the cabinet doors, to arrange strollers and so on. True, she still continued to call me “girl” and “you”, curse and in every possible way to brand volunteers. In addition, she was also deaf and, fortunately, she did not hear half of my objections. Maybe her hearing loss was the reason that she always screamed at someone.

“The duck has a back in some acne, like an outrage. Who whipped him? Volunteers or who? Did you lie on the grass? On the eve of my duty, they say, volunteers drove him for a walk. Volunteers are to blame, and then they blame the nurse, but we report! ” Doguchkin has really some scratches on his back-one of the children could scratch him. The orderlies for any children's trauma, if it is discovered by medical staff during inspection, has to write an explanatory, and from their point of view, volunteer classes only increase the danger of injuries. It happened that the volunteer dropped the child, having carried out an unsuccessful maneuver with a stroller, for example, but to deliberately whip the child on the back? It is difficult to say whether Inna Sergeevna really believed that the volunteers were such animals to deliberately apply the child injury. But at any opportunity, she tried to humiliate representatives of an alien community and remove responsibility from her.

Sometimes small injuries in children occurred by accident: fell from a chair, fought. To look after everything that happens in such an active group as mine, and even one person, is not easy. Sometimes the children were found guilty, but it was really difficult to find out or not. “Children have bruises, this is Savva, and it gets to the nurse,” says the teacher.

But behind the traces of the body could stand the guilt of the staff. So, Seraphim said that several girls in her group - Alena, Zoe, Faina - regularly discovered bruises or fingal under the eye. Serafima even sent me photos of the battered Zoya: a five-year-old child with a trowel syndrome with a swimming blue-violet eye. One of the orderly, Zinaida, in her group, these girls were extremely annoyed, and she periodically broke into them when she was not entirely sober. According to Seraphim, "Zina does not endure a children's cry, and when the children scream, it is clear how every muscle walks on her face." After that, in an explanatory orderly, she wrote that the children fell from the chair or hit the side of the bed. I don’t know how convincing these explanations looked for higher personnel, but it is known that Zinaida periodically deprived part of the salary.

Once the orderly beat Faina. This was told by Seraphim Zhenya, one of the wards from the same group. According to Zhenya, Zinaida wound a diaper in her hand and moved Faina in the face, and then tied her with a diaper to the bed. Eugene asked Seraphim to tell anyone about it, because the orderly threatened to beat her if someone recognized. But Seraphim nevertheless conveyed this story to the responsible nurse of their group Veronika Stepanovna. “How can you believe a sick person,” Rearing in mind Zhenya, said Veronika Stepanovna. Nevertheless, the orderly was called to the director.

In my group, nothing like that has never happened. They could shake or plop the child, and even quite openly, in front of the volunteers, thereby making it clear that there is nothing shameful in this. But I never found traces of beatings. Vitalik once said to me that one of the orderly beats the children and for this he does not love her. But this was at the very beginning of my work, and I did not remember who exactly he mentioned, and I was not sure that I could believe him (after all, he was really a dreamer). In addition, I did not ask for any details. In any case, since half of the children in my group spoke and had good intelligence, they could tell everything to volunteers, another nurse, doctor, nurse or teacher. So even if someone had the motivation to hit the child, this was an additional restraining factor.

Inna Sergeevna the eldest was jealous of her duties, clearly knew their boundaries and observed the zones of her own responsibility: “This is my job, why are you climbing my work!” But after a few months, she began to allow me to participate in the “her work” on her assistant - she allowed me to change diapers, pick up clothes and even participate in the distribution of food. Most likely, it was really difficult for the orderly to understand that the charity organization gives volunteers not to help them, orderlies, in their hard work, but in order to entertain children. After all, children, according to many nurses, did not need this.

I was afraid of Inna Sergeevna the Elder. She made me feel worthless, unnecessary and even harmful. The children were also afraid of her, and they did not even try to make her noise, hooligan or slide from the bed without her permission. Even her educators were afraid of her. Their main goal in her duty was to prevent her from criticizing - it is important to maintain the usual normal order of things, to avoid scandals and extra nerves. Therefore, they adjusted to her harsh temper.

Interestingly, I thought how Inna Sergeevna the eldest won such unquestioning power over children? Screams? But other nurse shouted at the children, and none of them, nevertheless, achieved the ideal observance of discipline. The educators said, noting the positive aspects of Inna Sergeevna that she did not beat children-generally speaking, this meant that some other nurses were beating. At some point, I thought that the children really respected Inna Sergeevna for something and her power over them was founded not exclusively on fear. For all her anger, she was somehow honest and predictable, and in this sense it was easier for children with her-they knew what could be expected from her. She screamed not only for children and on me, but also on educators, nurses and doctors. “She’s with us with oddities - even yelling at me,” Inna Sergeyevna the youngest said about her. In the same way as volunteers and their orders, she opposed her innovations that did not suit her by the administration of the institution.

Inna Sergeevna the eldest responsibly approached food: she fed children quite slowly and neatly. Children who were able to unambiguously give her feedback, she offered a choice in food and asked if they wanted supplements. It was especially attached to the fillet, and the presence of such attachment meant a human indifferent attitude to work for volunteers. “Filya-filled, a simpleton,” she said affectionately when she fed or changed her. After its change, the children are always dressed, clean. I do not know to what extent this is concern for children, and to which - the desire to formally and carefully fulfill its duties in order to find fault is impossible. But Inna Sergeevna loved to emphasize that she and other nurses are informally. She called this “good will”: for example, good will is to rub fresh fruits and give them to unequal children who formally relied on packaged juice. Surprisingly, Inna Sergeevna generally sympathized with weaker children - fillet, step, Lesha - to those who did not speak, quieter with his tantrums. And everyone suffered apples equally.

Once, Inna Sergeevna put a candle on Lesha right in the morning. It was a sign that today he would not go anywhere and they would not even put him in the stroller, because, from the point of view of Inna Sergeevna, in such a situation it was necessary to lie, although the effect could occur in a couple of hours. He began to cry and scream. She began to yell so that he calmed down, but at the same time somehow sympathetically and not viciously. “I will dance around you, I have more thirteen such! She says, standing by his bed, with some care in her voice. - Stop crying. Think ... - She is stabbing, really, what could he think of? “... Think about food.” She pity him, but sincerely convinced that he does not need anything but food, and he can’t console anything, and nothing else - he cannot wait for a game with his beloved teacher Yaroslav, nor a walk or exit - he cannot expect. “You see badly? How do you distinguish me by voice? Lesha, do you see me or hear me? - She continues to "dance" near him. “I want to wear it because it seems to me that it’s cold.” For her, this is a sick child who needs to eat, go to the toilet, lie and be warm. In general, get sick.

“He lay quietly, good. Planted - now cries, ”she said when I put Lesha in a stroller, and he began to be capricious. And when Lesha once again suffered from intoxication, she was clearly worried about him, did not leave for a long time, brewed tea. On one of these days, my attitude towards her has changed. For the first time, while we looked after Lesha, changed clothes, attributed to the bathroom for the procedures, despite the fact that she continued to shout at me, there was a feeling that we were doing some kind of common cause. Evil Baba Yaga more and more acquired the features of a magic assistant.

She loved to drink, Vitalik, and other nurses, and educators told me about this. To soak the throat, they retired with the nurse Elena Antonovna in her office. In working hours, she used to smoke for a long time on the balcony in the end of the corridor, next to the group. Drinking and cigarettes calmed her nerves a little. And once I heard her complained to one of the nurses on her children: “They gave birth to grandchildren, and I have to sit with them! I did not ask them to give birth! I need these grandchildren, I will not be with them! " It was evident that her life is not easy, and in return for horror, she began to cause sympathy in me. Maybe it was Stockholm syndrome.

I discussed with other volunteers my changed attitude towards Inna Sergeyevna the Elder and even began to frown when others called her Baba Yaga. Vika, Arina, Tonya confirmed my feelings. It turns out that there was a similar revaluation with them: those nurse that initially seemed “good” to them, later began to be perceived as indifferent to children. And with the "bad" in the end it was possible to find contact. They were actually more caring and responsible. One day the hay was bad, and Tone and Inna Sergeevna had to treat him from poisoning. At that moment, she admitted to Tone that, they say, “you all think that I am angry, but I just have a life”, after which Tonya looked at her differently and their relationship went in a way.

Tonya told me that one of the volunteers dared to express a rebuke in the face (“How such a cruel person could come to work in an orphanage!”), And Tonin, a friend, volunteer Maxim, generally responded to her screams with the language of the working outskirts, and she calmed down. But most of us were afraid of her.

When I read in the book of Masha Berkovich about N. N. naive, even at some point I thought that it was written about Inna Sergeevna. But Masha wrote about another orderly, from another boarding school, incredibly similar to her.

The first thing I heard from N. N.:

- Get out of here! Don't you see that you are bothering me? When I finish washing the floor, then you will enter!

Second:

- I will not feed him like that! They themselves planted, and feed yourself!

Third:

- What bastard pants on the shelf stuffs a lump on the shelf?

Therefore, the first question I asked myself was this: how will I work with this terrible woman?

Two weeks later, N. N. stopped driving me out of the group. True, sometimes she threw poorly folded pants or a T -shirt into me. As for the feeding of the child in a sitting position, then the progress was evident: N. N. began to yell at Kolya: “Lower your head! Open your mouth! They plant you so that you eat, and not swallow! ”

My next question sounded like this: what did the children find in it? (And they obviously found something, rejoice when they see N. N.) She constantly yells at them! And so that even I shudder.

However, N. N. yells at all. He yells at me, on other nannies, to the senior nurse and even at the head of the department. I am sure that she would have screamed on the director if she had ever crossed with him.

And N. N. also yells on his own children and grandchildren. She tells herself.

<...>

N. N. is completely devoid of any duality. She is not different with everyone, but at different times with each:

- Lesha, bastard! Why did I put a clean shirt for you? So that you chew the sleeves?

And today Lesha is not good, he coughs, and N. N. sits for a long time near him, claps on the back to clench his throat. He calls the doctor to look at Lesha. I see she is worried.

As for the scream, the reasons for him are as many as you like.

You can yell from aversion to work, where you are out of strength for a penny. From irritation for all children in a group or one particularly gifted. Or, finally, from pure and inspired hatred to everyone and everything.

And N. N.?

I was lost in conjecture until I heard a conversation.

Senior nurse: why are you yelling? Quiet!

NN: And I am not yelling! I always talk like that! My voice is like that! And do not indicate me!

When N. N. is satisfied with me, which is almost never happening, she addresses me to “you”, and when it is angry, “you”. Needless to say, she yells at me all the time? But I'm not offended.

Our children for N. N. are the same children as her own granddaughter, who can be scolded, you can slap on the pope, but it is impossible to allow her to be really bad [1] .

Inna Sergeevna the eldest never once called me by name.

Klepikova Anna. I must be a fool: Anthropological romance. Publishing House of the European University in St. Petersburg, 2018.