"Leo Frankowski - Stargard 6 - Conrad's Quest for Rubber" - читать интересную книгу автора (Frankowski Leo)

shoulder when my father had none, but there it was.
My father was a man of peace, and in the family, he ruled. He had kept us at our normal work for as
long as possible, but now Mother ran the bakery with the help of my sisters and a dozen other women,
and we men walked away through the first snow of the year to answer the call.
We men were all in our oldest, shabbiest clothing, for we had been warned that we would be
issued uniform clothes, and that anything we had with us would be thrown away. The women were
dressed in their best to see us off, and the difference in clothing was somehow unsettling.
All of us, the men as well as the women, were soon crying at the shock of this first sundering of our
family. My people had never before been parted for more than a few hours, and now we would be
separated for months even if all went well.
If it didn't, we might never meet again.

Strangeness, the seeing of new things, the hearing of new sounds, the sampling of new smells, does
odd things to one's sense of time. A day spent in the bakery, doing the same things I had done on
countless other days, went by in a seeming moment. A year spent in mixing dough, baking it, and
selling bread seemed to go by even faster.
That first day away from home—walking over a trail I had heard about all of my life but never seen,
except for the few hundred yards of it visible from the gates of Okoitz—took forever.
Even years later I can remember with crystal clarity the shape of bare oak branches, the flecks of
rust on the railroad tracks we walked beside, the squish of wet snow beneath my sodden birchbark
shoes.
 I can close my eyes and see the white clouds forming from my breath, smell the tang of fresh-cut
pine trees, and feel the cold breeze against my back. Yet of my father's old bakery, where I had
worked for years, I find I can remember very little.
An odd thing, memory.
A long walk has healing powers, I was convinced of it, even though I had never been out of sight
of my hometown before. Not accustomed to hours of walking, I was sore and tired, yet I felt less
lonely and depressed by the time we arrived at the Warrior's School.
A friendly guard at the gate directed us to the Induction Center, where they gave us a meal,
warned us a bit about what to expect, and found us a place to sleep for the night. In the morning they
had us line up and raise our right hands to the rising sun. They led us through the army oath:
"On my honor, I will do my best to do my duty to God and to the army. I will obey the Warrior's
Code, and I will keep myself physically fit, mentally alert, and morally straight.
'The Warrior's Code:
"A Warrior is: Trustworthy, Loyal, and Reverent. Courteous, Kind, and Fatherly. Obedient,
Cheerful, and Efficient. Brave, Clean, and Deadly."
We were told that we would be repeating that oath every morning for the rest of our lives. My father
said nothing, yet I could see a bit of doubt in his eyes.
I had heard all sorts of descriptions of the Warrior's School, but none of them prepared me for
the unbelievable number of people we found there, or for the organized confusion that prevailed.
People in apparent authority were constantly shouting incomprehensible things at us, talking so
quickly, in so many strange accents, about such unfamiliar things, that it seemed almost as though
they spoke some foreign language. When they did say something simple, something we could
understand, it was such a rare event that we did not at first react to it, and then the shouting got only
louder and longer.
We spent two days standing in long lines, something none of us had ever done before, interspersed
with numerous embarrassing interruptions as we were washed, shaved, deloused, fed, inspected by a
half-dozen medical people, and, finally, after being naked for an entire day in a huge, cold building,
issued uniform clothing.
We were a vastly changed group when at last we were counted off, assigned to our companies, and