Alexander, a homeless man who lives on € 250 a month: “Not everyone can suffer as much as I do” | 15MAX



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Many years ago, Alexander himself wanted to end his life, out of desperation. Desperation, he says, is very high. It affects people.

Sometimes it feels like a person who doesn’t exist. A man that nobody needs. Without loved ones, without love, without a tastier bite and with an outstretched hand in church. Less than a shadow. As if he was not born in his own time or himself. As if he had fallen on this Earth, but had been left without a place on it.

Often times, such people’s stories are like torn book pages, like school notebooks on which a teacher’s hand would have marked mistakes with a red pen. But we all have our own faults and our own mistakes. Everyone has their own bug and lesson notebooks, also marked in red. If we combine our guilt with mistakes as people, there would be a longer queue to wait in advance in Lukiškės square.

However, Alexander did not strike me as one of those who had ruined or wasted their lives in this way, until they became homeless. Maybe that’s why this story didn’t start on the way home, it hung somewhere in the heart, shrouded like a thick autumn mist, it was heavy, like an untold truth.

It just happened in Alexander’s life. It happened the way it is sometimes needed and it happens with heavy rains. You are in a traffic accident while driving in your own lane and not speeding. Like planes collide sometimes. The same is true of people’s lives. They fall, they break, they crumble.

So this story is about that.

***

We meet Alexander in Vilnius, Lukiškės square. Here at the bank and we talk. His memory did not erase events and dates. He remembers everything from childhood, whose experiences probably blocked Alexander’s future.

– Alexander, were you born and raised in Vilnius?

– I am of Russian origin, but I was born in Lithuania, Vilnius. I was born into a family of deaf people. Neither parent heard or spoke.

I was raised by my grandmother, my father’s mother. We lived on S. Konarskio Street, across from Television and radio center. There were wooden houses. Grandma taught me to speak. In 1964 he died.

– And how old are you?

– I was born in 1955.

– When your grandmother died, you were still a child.

– Yes. After we buried Grandma, about a month later, my parents died in an accident. When they left me alone, they took me to an orphanage, to a boarding school. I grew up in Naujoji Vilnia.

In those days, gifted children were admitted to art schools or other schools. So they took me to North Town, to the military orchestra. I learned to play the trio. I played there for seven years. There was such a Tiškus guide, he conducted the Trumpet for a short time. So he also invited me to this orchestra.

When I turned 18, I went to a colonel, Sergeyev, who was in charge of a tank division in Northern Town. I asked for his recommendation. In 1973 I entered the Naval Academy in Baku, Azerbaijan.

I graduated in 1979 and became a lieutenant pagonus, in Lithuanian it would be – shoulders. I was sent to serve in the north, I served in the Murmansk region, in the land of Pran Joseph. In one of the archipelagos.

It was exactly 400 kilometers from us at the North Pole. There was a German submarine base in that archipelago during the war, and then it was taken over by the Russians. It was there and our subs were there. I spent so many eighteen years.

We, the agents, had received apartments in Murmansk, where we were returning from vacation. I lived with my family, wife and son.

Alexander Nikolaev

Alexander Nikolaev

– Did you get married in Russia?

– No, not yet in Lithuania. We went with my wife. He had graduated from the then Vilnius Medical School. In Murmansk he worked at the Central Naval Hospital, was the head of the department of surgery. nurse. In 1977 we had a son.

And in 1984, his wife disappeared without a trace. She had received redirect from work to rest in the Caucasus. He went to the nursing home and disappeared. We searched for three years. And the militia, the army and themselves.

– Were there versions?

– I don’t know, maybe the disaster on the mountain, or maybe kidnapped by the Chechens. Maybe someone else. Three years later, she was declared dead and I will be a widow. He was no longer leading.

– After the disappearance of the wife, who raised the child?

– The son had already gone to school, he had to ask the management to study at the Nachimov school. She is a paramilitary, just like now the cadet school. There they were prepared for the navy. Later, the son graduated from the Navy and was sent to the island of Fiji. It was necessary to help establish a maritime border service. He stayed there, got citizenship. He now lives there with his wife and children.

– Don’t you communicate?

– Sometimes he calls me. I don’t have money to fly to him. And ask him … He has six children himself. By the way, all twins.

As for your service, how was it, what did you do?

– We went out to sea, we traveled all over the world. I have been to Nicaragua, South Yemen and El Salvador.

– Is that a lot of the world you’ve seen?

– No. What you’ll see there from the sub. We supply hot spots all over the world where there were Russian soldiers. Visame rutuliuke. Our division was named spec. maritime division. We provide weapons and organize trainings. I was a naval saboteur myself, blowing up ships.

We went out to sea, we traveled all over the world.

I had to serve in Angola for four years. Of the 500 people, only 36 returned alive. Then there was a civil war. One side wanted capitalism, the other socialism. Brezhnev sent us there.

I suffered a serious leg injury while on duty. He passed his leg. I still feel the consequences.

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