Essay 11. petya kozlov and a pipe

If to be formal, something can be written about any of my former fellow students. Yet, I believe that one should choose extraordinary personalities and remember impressive events (more precisely retro-events). As it seems to me, what I am going to write about now meets the both criteria.

Petya Kozlov had a personality type, which could be described as: “A plain fellow, though tightly buttoned up”. He came to Kemerovo to enter the Medical Institute from Belovo (a town in Kemerovskaya oblast). He entered not only the Medical Institute. Simultaneously he entered a Kemerovo Music College to major in grand piano.
 
Being a gifted guy with an ear for music, he easily and naturally joined any group. In our student group everyone liked him, though I doubt if one of us could say “I know him thoroughly”. Yes, everybody knew that he played in a student brass band and during October holidays he always had spirits, which members of the band were given to pour into their instruments as antifreeze, but Petya and the others used to dilute the spirits with water and find more appropriate use to it, as it seemed to everybody then.

Though, one day Petya “unbuttoned one of his fasteners” and confessed to me that although in his passport it was written that his birth date was 1 March, 1948, he was born on 29 February. Then Petya asked me to promise that I would not tell anyone about that while we studied. I think I fulfilled the promise. I kept it to myself when we studied and 39 years longer. On one of Petya’s birthdays the group greeted him and gave him some trinkets, one of which was a toy clarinet. We were in absolute astonishment, when the next day during a break between classes Petya took the clarinet and played any tune we ordered on it. Everyone in our group loved Peter, and we missed him, when he transferred to the Tomsk Military Medical Academy.