The Boy Who Shouted Stalin

We had gone out that evening.

I do not remember where. Maybe we walked around the city, maybe we drank tea somewhere, maybe we simply wanted to escape the dormitory for a few hours. In those years, you did not need a serious reason to leave the building. Sometimes the smell of the corridor was enough.

When we came back, something was wrong.

There was blood on the walls.

Not a dramatic amount like in a film, but enough to stop us in the corridor and look at each other. A few dark red marks had dried on the paint. Someone had tried to wipe part of it, which somehow made the whole thing look worse.

The dormitory was unusually quiet.

Normally there was always noise. Doors slamming, someone laughing, someone arguing about football, a radio playing from a room, slippers dragging along the floor. That night people were speaking more softly, as if the building itself had heard something unpleasant.

We asked what had happened.

There was a boy staying in the dormitory. I knew his face, but not much more. He was one of those people you see many times without ever really meeting. Someone told us that he had suddenly lost control.

Apparently he had been shouting:

“Stalin! Stalin!”

Again and again.

He had hurt himself somehow. That explained the blood on the walls.

By the time we arrived, the ambulance had already taken him away.

The story travelled quickly from room to room, and as always in a dormitory, every person added one more detail. Someone said he had been reading too much. Someone said he had not slept for days. Another said he had become obsessed with political books.

The sentence everybody repeated was simple:

“He read too much and lost his mind.”

At the time, we almost accepted that explanation.

We were young. A strange event needed a strange reason, and this one sounded good enough. A boy reads Stalin, reads history, reads politics, fills his head with revolutions and dictators, and finally starts shouting in a dormitory corridor.

It had the structure of a story.

Reality is probably less neat.

A person does not lose his mind because of one book. A bookshelf does not suddenly attack its owner. There must have been things inside him that none of us knew. Fear, pressure, loneliness, sleeplessness, illness, perhaps something else completely.

But we did not know him well enough to understand any of that.

We only knew the blood.

We only knew the shouting.

And we knew that an ambulance had taken him away before we returned.

A short time later, we heard that he had been expelled from the dormitory.

That was how such problems were often solved. A person created trouble, then the person disappeared. The corridor became quiet again. The wall was cleaned. Another student probably moved into his room.

Life continued.

We never saw him again.

Years later, what stays with me is not really Stalin.

It is the empty space after the incident.

One evening there was a boy living among us, reading his books, walking through the same corridors and eating in the same cafeteria. Then there was blood on a wall, an ambulance, a few rumours.

And then nothing.

No ending.

No explanation.

No chance to ask what happened to him afterward.

Sometimes memory works like that. It does not preserve complete stories. It keeps one corridor, one dirty wall, a name shouted by someone who was no longer there when you arrived.

Then everybody grows older.

But somewhere in your head, that corridor remains exactly as it was.