Arts and Arms

Writing the story of how my love affair with the performing arts, and ballet in particular, began many years ago (Art-and-Ballet), it took my thoughts to the faraway green pastures of the past. The happiest memories of carefree early childhood; the teenage years spent growing up as a student of the prestigious Republican School of Fine Arts, a place that was private and privileged on the one hand, and extremely demanding on the other. This was the subject of marvel and speculation for the general folk whose access to the school was practically non-existent. People probably thought that we, the chosen few who made it there through vigorous entry exams attended by invitation only, were walking on air and fed exclusively on meringues. It was true that we ate a lot of those from the canteen of the neighbouring school of ballet where ballerinas, having to watch their elf-like bodies, seemingly were not allowed to eat anything at all. Our guess was that their teachers kept the desserts coming only to torture their dieting students further – or maybe that was for character building, we were not entirely sure.

But this is not what my story is about, and so, let me take you to a very different corner of life in the Soviet Union in the early 80's.

The time was tense, as the Cold War was still in full swing, which prompted the Soviet leaders to bizarrely believe that if students at high schools knew how to throw fake wooden grenades as far as they could, or use a Kalashnikov with their eyes closed, it must help to win the nuclear war, should one have a misfortune of finding themselves fighting. No joke then – all schools had an obligatory subject called 'Public Defence' that the kids had to endure from the age of fifteen onwards. It could slightly be compared to the CCF in British schools now, the difference being that the British Cadets are taken by the Army on helicopter joy rides and are taught to build a wood fire while the Soviet school children were taught to take apart and re-assemble a Kalashnikov to the stop watch (the craft I am sure I can master even now) and how to use the assembled weapon afterwards. In addition to that we had to know how to march, military style, in nice formation - but that is a different story entirely.

In my particular school (of Fine Arts speciality) the subject was taught by the retired army colonel – who, to us, looked rather ancient. He must have literally been through wars. He loved pleasing looking objects, female students notwithstanding. Surely we were more pleasing to the eye than the soldiers he had to deal with through his career of active duty. He was just happy to be surrounded by arts and budding artists, as opposed to the sore sight of army barracks. He was a nice man on a mission of discovering the world of art for a change. Sensing that, we put a bit of an extra effort in 'glamming up' for the weekly 'military lesson' (which mostly meant wiping colourful drops of paint off our little faces and tying our hair up in mandatory pony tails); it is always nice to be appreciated. So, the colonel was not particularly demanding with military training for the girls, and deep inside he probably didn't believe that we would be able to protect the country efficiently enough by throwing our wooden grenades too far, nuclear war or not.

This said, the curriculum was a thing never to be broken, and a part of it was learning how to shoot from the said Kalashnikov at the military style target shooting range. The one allocated to our school was in an abandoned bunker underneath a high-rise building. And so, one sunny day we were brought to that dimly lit unpleasant place. Target shooting had to be mastered, the country was at risk. We were given five bullets each, and taught how to set the weapons to non-automatic shooting mode. The target, a small piece of white paper with the black dot in the middle was fifty metres away – a huge distance not helped by the dim light contrasting with the sunshine outside. The paper was clipped to the wall, and the goal was to hit it as close to the middle as possible.

We took our positions, and on command 'Fire!' duly discharged our weapons. In all the hustle and bustle of trying to get the right aiming position of my own, and that of my Kalashnikov, I didn't see my target immediately after the first few seconds of the shot. But when I squinted into the distance, not only did my eyes became square and mouth open – my head span, and for the first time in my life I thought I had truly lost it. Ahead, in the place which only a few moments ago was a solid wall with my little paper target on, was a hole, with sharp concrete edges to its sides, and a tunnel beyond that could have probably been created by a missile – or, indeed, aliens at the very least. I knew for a fact that no Kalashnikov was capable of causing such damage, otherwise the world would've been in a whole more trouble than it was already in. And yet, there it was – a hole in the wall which would make an artillery unit proud.

Having looked in disbelief at my rather worn down Kalashnikov – maybe to check again that I didn't just fire some new and technologically advanced weapon no one had noticed I was given – and having made sure it was indeed the same contraption, I suddenly felt very lonely and desperate. The colonel was at the other side of the range, showing one of the students how to hold their position properly. There were still four more bullets assigned to me to do something with. And there I was, wondering what would happen if I fired all four, not just one – whether it would take the building down, or the metro line underneath, or indeed the kindergarten across the street. I sighed; I had no answers in mind. Then I fired all four bullets on the 'Fire' command shouted from afar – in the direction of the tunnel I had just created.

And then the colonel appeared.

His face was red. A short statured man, he suddenly seemed so much bigger. He jumped up and down, yelling at me from the top of his voice : 'What the hell do you think you are doing?!' To tell you the truth, I would find that question hard to answer at the best of times – what an art student was doing practising automatic weapon shooting in the dark basement of an abandoned construction site? On this particular occasion I was more desperate to know the answer than the colonel himself. I stared at him. Then I stared into the distance at the blow hole I had just created. Then, in desperation, I stared back at him. I was completely speechless.

Harry Potter had not yet been invented. I was pretty sure I was no magician. Having come from a scientific family, I was brought up in the belief that everything had to have a logical explanation. On that memorable occasion though I had a moment of doubt similar to that of a child who happened upon a next door neighbour putting a Father Christmas costume on. I kept silent. I was truly lost for words.

As it turned out, the colonel had lost much of his vocabulary also. In his case it was on the account of me 'wasting' all four of the remaining bullets and not doing much of a target practice. He made me march all the fifty metres on broken concrete towards the place where my target once was. He made me look at the ground and pick up what was there. And what was actually there was a billboard-sized piece of plywood with which an abandoned basement tunnel was boarded off to look like a solid wall. To which the target papers were in turn pinned.

As it turned out, I was clearly such a rubbish marksman at my first ever shooting practice that I had put the bullet neither into the centre of the target, nor anywhere near the target itself. I put it in the corner of the plywood board, thus prompting it to collapse to the ground. But I promise, you will never see a thin flat board on the floor of a dimly lit basement at fifty metres away unless you are specifically looking for it. There it was, lying in disgrace. And no one knew where my other four bullets went!

Many years passed. I can still assemble a Kalashnikov in my sleep (I think; not that I have had much chance or inclination to check this assumption). I learned to shoot, then forgot about it. Most importantly, I learned to paint. But any time I hear someone saying they believe in magic, my thoughts go back to that memorable day and I know that once, for a few unforgettable moments, I believed in it too, with every fibre of my being, angry colonel or not.

A food for thought: the power of perception. A piece of plywood humbly lying on the ground. What story would I be telling now had I not been shown it then?