t the next training, we warmed up before the beginning of the exercises as usual. A crowd of men with imposing appearances headed by Volodya entered the hall.
“Oho, what a crowd!” Andrew was surprised.Victor smiled and said to Stas, “This is what’s known as ‘a couple of guys.’”
“What do you mean?”
“Volodya called me yesterday and said that he would come to the training with a couple of his guys.”
“Not so bad, there’s half a regiment here, I’d guess,” Stas said with a smile.
“Exactly, that’s what I’m telling you.”
Volodya came up to greet Sensei, who was standing not too far from us. The senior guys hurried to join them.
“Sensei, do you mind?” Volodya pointed towards his guys.
“No problem,” as always, Sensei answered easily.
“Did you watch TV last night?”
“When? I barely have time for it.”
“Would you believe they showed our San Sanych yesterday?!”
“Our San Sanych?!” Eugene was surprised. “It’s been ages since we last heard from him!”
“Oh! But now he is really famous! He says that he lived in a cave somewhere and learnt a Russian martial art. And now he calls himself a Russian ninja. What’s most interesting is that he demonstrated your techniques, Sensei. With the only difference being that he tells everybody that it is a long-forgotten Slavic style revived by him.”
“Not bad!” Stas grinned. “You see, Volodya, if you hadn’t kicked Sanych so hard last time, you would’ve been his partner.”
“No, he wouldn’t,” Eugene said archly.
“Why not?”
“What do you mean why not? If Volodya hadn’t beaten him down so well, he would never have seen the light.”
The guys roared with laughter.
“You shouldn’t have treated him like that last time,” Sensei said. “He is an old man, and we should respect our elders.”
“It was his own fault; why was he asking for trouble?” Volodya began to make excuses but added softly, “I barely touched him, just struck him by accident.”
“Exactly, exactly, Sensei, that’s the way it was,” Eugene joined in. “I remember it as if it happened yesterday. Volodya put forward his fist, and San Sanych was knocking it with his head for almost five minutes. And now look how useful it was! The man saw the light and became a Russian ninja.”
The guys burst out laughing again.
“Ah, let him amuse himself,” Sensei waved his hand with a good-natured smile. “The man found his gold mine, let him live.”
“Yesterday we were on duty in the barracks,” Volodya continued the story, “and saw on TV how Sanych flapped his legs and kicked his opponents. We had a good laugh, recalling our youth. Even my newcomers are far and away better… That’s why we decided to come today, in order to gain some knowledge of the real Art, to enrich our reserve knowledge.” “It’s a noble deed,” Sensei agreed.
The guys continued to tell stories of bygone trainings and a whole range of funny incidents during them. At the very end, Volodya’s guys joined the conversation, and it turned from martial arts issues into a philosophical dispute about relations between people. “Well, I dealt with them this way on principle,” one of Volodya’s guys impulsively defended his point of view.
“Principle is a stupid resistance to reality, akin to idiocy. Principle…”
Sensei had hardly finished this sentence when the senior guys almost as one continued his thought, “…is applicable only in exact sciences as synonym to axiom.”
“Exactly,” the Teacher confirmed.
Volodya got a bit embarrassed, “Well, I’ve done my best to explain it to them.”
“Well, then you haven’t tried very hard. And what can’t be understood through the mind…”
“…will be hammered in through the body!” “Good, since you all know this so well, you shouldn’t laugh.”
I realized the meaning of Sensei’s last words when the training began. Sensei warned that that day we were going to train in full power, and those who couldn’t endure that tempo should step aside to the left corner of the sports hall and polish strikes there, without disturbing the others. We ruffled up, like sparrows, and whispered with pride among ourselves.
“We couldn’t endure?!” Andrew said quietly. “Don’t even say it,” Kostya added. “We will show right now what we are able to do!”
“It wouldn’t be the first time,” I uttered carelessly, remembering the warm-up of the senior sempai.
But our arrogance flew away immediately after the first few minutes of the warm-up. I have never before seen such a tough training. It was a real school of survival. The crowd was running through the sports hall in a mad tempo, overcoming constantly changing barriers. In less than forty minutes, many of us already were crawling over these barriers almost grappling, including me.
Groaning nearby, Tatyana murmured, “It’s so awful! Almost like a joke, ‘Dear ladies and gentlemen! Colleagues and colleagues! Koryak crooked girls and boys…’ The last one is for sure related to us. I feel like I’m a native of that region.”
The first ‘victims’ appeared in the left corner of the sports hall. But our group carried on stubbornly. However, later it became even worse. After that marathon race with a series of different exercises, we did so many push-ups. I don’t know how many times, I just remember that it was over one hundred. My hands were shaking as if I had been using a jackhammer, and my body curved like a caterpillar when trying to get up, not so much due to the vibrations, but due to the jerking of my gluteal muscles. Because it seemed to me that only this part of my body had any power left. I started to look more and more often towards the left corner, where a growing number of people crawled to this saving oasis. Tatyana traitorously joined them and was alluringly waving at me.
At that time, the senior sempai counted push-ups. In order to raise people’s mood, he jokingly kept saying, like a toastmaster, “Sensei has a sheep dog that lets everybody into the house, but doesn’t let anyone out. So let’s do ten push-ups for the quick wit of this smart dog that doesn’t eat its bread in vain.”
While everybody was getting more exhausted with each counting, Sensei walked around the big human circle of sweating people, searching for someone to whom he should add weight with his palms. When he presses you with his palms, it feels like a truck has driven over you. During the second round, when he came up to me jerking through the push-ups as if in convulsions, I thought, “This is the end! If he puts his hand on me, I will surely be flattened like a fly against the glass.” Despite my expectations, the Teacher seized me by my kimono from above like a kitten by the scruff on the neck and started to help me come up from the ground, evoking laughter from the surrounding guys.
While Victor went on, “Sensei also has a cat Samurai, which became so self-confident that it started to fight with dogs. Let us then push-up ten times for his desires to always correspond with his abilities.”
My bones were aching because of the strain. While Victor continued telling his funny puns, I was cursing Samurai’s flea Mashka that jumps so far, and the mice that live in the shed and run so fast, and those Siamese battle fishes that have lightning reactions and a piranha’s manners, in other words, all those living creatures that dwell in Sensei’s house. Finally, the last round of push-ups was for the parrot Keshka, which made an effort to breed five nestlings, and we felt down to the floor completely exhausted. However, in less than one minute, we were laid out again in stacks, and the crowd started to jump over its long-suffering brethren, accidentally crushing our extremities on the way. In the hall every now and then under staring eyes, one could hear a restrained howl. I couldn’t stand it and joined the left flank of weak-nerves.
“It’s high time,” Tatyana said.
But our rest didn’t last for long. When the warm-up was finished, we started intensive work on base techniques and exercises of strikes and movements. I noticed that Sensei devoted more time to Volodya’s guys, explaining and showing them a series of new techniques. They were throwing each other so easily while practicing strikes that I was simply shocked by their endurance and inexhaustible force. It was as if there had been no wearisome warm-up.
After two and a half hours of intensive training, we had power enough only to think about how to survive additional training. Of course, nobody forced us; if we wanted to leave, we could have. But our curiosity was bigger than physical tortures. Since Volodya had brought his guys, the most interesting should be ahead. And we weren’t mistaken.
