After her duty, VSK walked past the corner once again.
It’s a quiet corner, right next to the river, and a ship parks on the side of the riverbank.
The ship was here ever since she was produced. A metal plate next to the riverbank denotes the vessel’s name, “Avrora, 1903”. VSK assumes the number is the year where the ship was made.
Putting a cigarette in her mouth, she turned her head to the ship. The graffiti is the same as a week ago. There is nothing new painted on, as if even those Gopniks have also forgotten about the ship.
Humans seem to care about the ship, or at least pay special attention to it. A few years ago, people would paint all over its gun, bow and bridge. Those graffiti represented all sorts of messages there, some painting even fighting against each other.
VSK never understood why people would do it. For her, it’s just a ship; nonetheless, it still seems interesting to her, so she stops by and sees what’s new every day after duty- even nowadays when no one does that anymore.
She still likes the ship; there’s a particular “niche” to the century-old machine, she figured, that attracts her to stop by.
There was another human back then, an old man, always wearing an old chechenka, who would come with a plastic bucket in the morning, and spend the rest of the day carefully cleaning the ship. But as the day passes, he walks slower and slower and comes less and less often until a year ago, when VSK never saw him again.
The government now cleans the ship. Once in a month or two, men carrying big cans of grey paint on their back would come and spray the ship with grey colour in an attempt to cover the graffiti underneath. Layers and layers of paint gradually make the surfaces where people draw uneven, so those that paint nice images stop coming.
VSK sometimes wonders if that old man and the graffiti artists formed a weird friendship. When the old man was cleaning the ship, no one would come and disturb him. And there’s light in that old man’s eye as if he is needed, he had a purpose, and those people…… well, those people need a place where they can express themselves.
She shook her head and left. Kindergarten will finish soon; she doesn’t want to miss seeing the kids going out when she passes there.
“What do you dream of? Croiseur Avrora?”
“In this dawn, by the Neva river?”
“Did you dream of rain and storm;”
“Of artillery and guns firing afar;”
“Of vigilant soldiers passing by;”
“And are they in their black uniforms, as it always was?”