Sensei of Shambala - страница 8

“Hey, guys! Why are you standing here? Don’t you know the law of this dojo? You either train here or you stay on the other side of the door. If you want, go back in, and if you are going out, go out, don’t disturb the others.”

Together we streamed out outside. “It’s not fair!” I thought jealously. “They’ve stayed, why can’t we?” But, of course, I didn’t say anything aloud.

We spent almost one whole hour waiting for the only bus in that district, strenuously tamping the earth that was called the bus stop. But the bus didn’t come. So we walked to the tramway, which the locals said was fairly close: only some thirty or forty minutes of walking. But since we weren’t familiar with the area, we spent an hour and a half getting there. But nobody paid attention to those unpleasant circumstances. Every body passionately shared impressions of the training.

“So,” said Kostya smiling, “are we going to the next training?”

Almost simultaneously we all said, “Yes!” “I don’t know about you,” said Andrew, the biggest fan of martial arts among us, “but I think I found what I wanted, at least for now. Cool training!”

“Yes,” Kostya interrupted him, “today I learned a lot more than during all our visits to different schools.”

The guys nodded in agreement. Suddenly Slava stopped, tapped himself on the forehead, and said with horror, “Shoot! We forgot to ask how much it costs!”

Andrew placed his hand on Slava’s shoulder and reassured him, “Don’t worry, old man, I’ve asked Sensei. He said: ‘The more the better. But not more than five rubles. Preference will be given to the pure gold of royal coinage’.”

Everybody laughed. Slava even took a deep breath of relief, which was understandable be cause he was a good guy but from a poor family. He could not afford to pay for the training in the other schools. To get fifteen or twenty rubles a month meant a real fortune for him. Loudly recalling some episodes that happened during the training and the Teacher’s funny jokes, we didn’t even notice how we got to the tram stop.

The working week had begun. We got very interested in the vagus nerve story and body innervations in general. For the remaining days of the week, we tried to uncover details from our biology and anatomy teachers. But they didn’t give us any concrete answer, saying only that most likely it had to do with advanced anatomy, which was studied in medical universities. This fanned the fire of our interest even more and gave us an impulse to search for these kinds of books through our friends and relatives.

All that time, I was trying hard to search through my memory in order to figure out where I knew Sensei from. I even took time and went through all my family photo albums. But my attempts were in vain. As before, life went on in a continuous search for answers to unknown questions.

We could hardly wait for the next training. So as not to be late, we departed two hours earlier. When our company arrived at the sports hall, we were surprised to discover that we weren’t first, even though there was still half an hour before the training. There were thirty people already waiting, like us unwilling to miss something interesting right from the beginning. Our guys, getting acquainted with some of them, jokingly came to the conclusion that we, in comparison to those poor guys, live quite close by. Because they lived in such distant districts, some people had to spend almost half a day on their journey, changing a couple of different types of transport and wearing out their soles walking a great many miles. And only a few lucky ones drove here in their own cars.