Film Screenplay. The Adventures of Kesha the Russian Boy

A FIREMAN carries a scorched armchair through the entrance. Sparks swirl like orange snowflakes. A curtain catches fire and disintegrates in three seconds, silk to ash, beautiful and terrible.

The boy does not move. Does not blink. Does not breathe.

ADULT KESHA (V.O.)

Since then, every time I see a fire, I literally go numb and mentally fall back to this moment. A three-year-old boy, frozen. These are the things that shape you before you know what shape means.

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Scene 8. INT. KINDERGARTEN, NAP ROOM – DAY (1988)

Rows of small beds in a dark room. Children sleeping. Afternoon light filters through thin curtains. The room smells of floor polish and warm milk. A clock ticks softly. In the corner, a rocking horse with a chipped ear stands guard.

KESHA (3) lies on his side, facing the GIRL in the next bed. She has blonde pigtails and a smudge of paint on her cheek. Her eyes are open. They look at each other.

KESHA

(whispering)

Hello. What’s your name?

A shadow falls over him. The KINDERGARTEN TEACHER (50s, Soviet steel, arms like a collective farmer, a woman forged in a system that did not value whispering) stands above. Arms crossed.

KINDERGARTEN TEACHER

(ice cold)

One more word and I’ll cut your tongue off.

Kesha’s mouth snaps shut. His eyes go wide. He pulls the blanket up to his chin and lies absolutely still, like a small animal in the presence of a predator. The girl in the next bed turns away.

He does not move for the rest of nap time. Staring at the ceiling. Processing.

ADULT KESHA (V.O.)

It sounded so threatening and so convincing that you would believe it yourself even now. Ever since that day I use my words carefully, often choosing to keep quiet. Because who knows what might happen. Words, I learned, have consequences. Some of them involve scissors.

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Scene 9. INT. KINDERGARTEN – NIGHT (1989)

The kindergarten is dark. Empty. All the other children are gone. Their hooks in the cloakroom hold nothing – all the little coats and hats have been taken home. The building creaks and settles.

KESHA (4) sits alone at a small table by the window. He does not cry. He does not call out. Outside, snowflakes fall softly on oak trees and empty pathways. The streetlamps glow orange. The world is quiet and beautiful and has completely forgotten about him.

He draws something on the table with his finger. A house. A family. He erases it with his palm. Draws it again.

Hours pass. The light changes from grey to blue to black. The radiator clicks. A pipe gurgles somewhere in the walls. Finally, a RELATIVE who works at the facility returns for something she forgot and finds him.

RELATIVE

(hand to mouth)

Oh my God. How long have you been sitting here?

Kesha looks up at her with an expression that has no business being on a four-year-old’s face: calm, steady, total acceptance.

MATCH CUT TO:

Scene 10. EXT. APARTMENT BUILDING, KLIMOVSK – EVENING (1989)

KESHA stands outside his apartment door. He turns the handle. Locked. Nobody home. The hallway is silent except for the buzzing of a fluorescent light that flickers like a dying heartbeat.

He slides down to the floor, back against the door, legs stretched out. Takes off his shoes – his feet hurt. Lines the shoes up neatly, heels against the wall. Folds his hands in his lap. Waits.

The hallway is cold. The fluorescent light buzzes. He stares at the wall opposite – it has a crack that looks like a river. He traces the river with his eyes.

Two hours pass. At nine o’clock, VERA’S MOTHER from flat 48 opens her door. She is in a dressing gown, holding a cup of tea. She sees him and her face falls.

VERA’S MOTHER

(gently, kneeling)

Oh, sweetheart. Come inside. Have you eaten?

Kesha shakes his head. She takes his hand. It is ice cold. She leads him inside without another word.

ADULT KESHA (V.O.)

Both my mother and my stepfather were, at some point in their lives, drunks. I’m not blaming anyone. Everyone has their reasons, and those reasons have reasons of their own. But, as I often say in my anecdotes – it left its mark. Several marks, in fact. Some of them are still there.

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Scene 11. EXT. APARTMENT ENTRANCE, KLIMOVSK – DAY (1990)

KESHA (5) runs at full speed through a communal garden – a shortcut under someone’s windows. Flowers blur past. Grass whips at his legs. He is flying. He is invincible.

He bursts through an entrance door and SLAMS directly into an OLD LADY carrying a bag of potatoes. The bag splits. Potatoes bounce down the steps like brown grenades. One rolls under the radiator.

The old lady looks at the scattered potatoes. Looks at Kesha. Something ignites behind her eyes.

OLD LADY

(erupting)

You little PEST! Worse than the Colorado beetle! My garden! MY GARDEN! Look what you’ve done to my flowers! And now my potatoes! Do you have ANY idea how long I waited in line for these?!

Her fury is volcanic, disproportionate, terrifying. Her face is inches from his. Spittle flies. Her finger jabs at his chest like a woodpecker attacking bark. Decades of Soviet-era frustration pour out of her in a torrent of rage directed at a five-year-old boy.

Kesha opens his mouth to apologize. His lips move. No sound comes out.

He tries again. His jaw works. His tongue presses against his teeth. The words are there – he can feel them, piled up behind his teeth like cars in a traffic jam. But his mouth will not obey.

SOUND DESIGN SHIFTS: the world goes muffled, echoing, as if filtering through water. The old lady’s mouth keeps moving but her words are distorted, distant, like shouting through a wall of glass.

Kesha stands there, mouth open, paralyzed. His eyes fill with tears – not from the scolding, but from the horror of his own silence. His body has betrayed him. His words have abandoned him.

The old lady storms off, muttering about beetles and children and the decline of civilization. Kesha stands alone in the entrance. He tries to say his own name.

K-k-k-k.

He cannot.

ADULT KESHA (V.O.)

I started to stutter at the age of about five. It all happened very fast, like someone flipped a switch inside my head. Another new page in my life had begun. A new burden had been saddled on my soul and mind. One that would follow me everywhere, like a shadow with its own agenda.

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Scene 12. EXT. BUS STOP / ROAD TO SERTYAKINO – DAY (1990)

SUPER: "Summer, 1990."

KESHA (5) and his friend ROMA (7) stand at a bus stop. Roma is the undisputed leader – taller, bolder, with a permanent scab on his knee and the confidence of someone who has been seven for years. Kesha looks up at him with total trust.

ROMA

There’s a pea field past the next village. Massive. You can eat as much as you want. Nobody guards it. It’s just there.

KESHA

(eyes like saucers)

Free peas?

ROMA

Free peas. Mountains of them. Come on.

They look at each other – two boys with nothing in their pockets and everything in their imaginations. The bus shelter is covered in graffiti: someone has written "Yeltsin = Thief" and below it, in smaller letters, "But we’re all thieves, aren’t we?"

KESHA

(reading the graffiti, not understanding)

What’s that mean?

ROMA

It means grown-ups are weird. Come on, the bus is coming.

They board a rattling bus. The DRIVER glances at them – two small boys, no adults – but says nothing. This is Russia in 1990. Children roam.

They ride for twenty minutes, faces pressed to the dusty window, watching the suburbs give way to fields and birch groves.

Scene 13. EXT. PEA FIELD, SERTYAKINO VILLAGE – DAY

They get off at a village stop. Walk along a dirt road lined with dandelions. Turn a corner.

An ENORMOUS PEA FIELD stretches to the horizon. Green, endless, shimmering in the heat. The pods hang heavy, splitting open with ripeness. Bees hum. The air smells of earth and sunshine.

Kesha’s mouth falls open. It is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen.

KESHA

(whisper)

Roma. It’s so big. It goes forever.

ROMA

(grinning)

Told you. Come on!

They wade into the field. The pea plants come up to Kesha’s chest. He picks a pod, cracks it open – the peas are young, springy, explosively sweet. Juice runs down his chin.

MONTAGE: They eat with abandon. Green juice on their chins and shirts. Stuffing pods into their pockets for later. Lying on their backs between the rows, staring at the vast blue sky, bellies stretched and full. Two tiny figures in an ocean of green. The world is simple and generous and asks nothing of them.

ADULT KESHA (V.O.)

A rush of freedom, an impenetrable sense of excitement on the edge of a big adventure. That’s what a pea field can do when you’re five. That feeling – pure, irrational joy at something free and enormous – I’ve been chasing it ever since. And every now and then, I find it.

Scene 14. INT. FAMILY APARTMENT – EVENING

Mother stands over Kesha, arms crossed. His pockets are still bulging with pea pods. The evidence is overwhelming and, frankly, green.

A spanking follows. Then the corner. Kesha stands facing the wall, nose six inches from the wallpaper with its little blue flowers. His pockets have been emptied.

He is not sorry. He is already planning the next trip.

From her bedroom, he hears his mother talking to Stepfather in hushed tones. "He was on a bus. Alone. With a seven-year-old." Stepfather’s response is too quiet to hear. Then silence. Then the TV turns on – the evening news, Gorbachev, something about reforms.

Kesha traces the little blue flowers on the wallpaper with his finger. Each one is slightly different if you look closely. He wonders if the peas are still there, growing, waiting for him to come back.

CUT TO:

Scene 15. EXT. COURTYARD, APARTMENT BLOCK – DAY (1990)

KESHA (5) stands at the base of a large birch tree, looking up. The trunk is white and smooth, the branches spread wide. Three OLDER BOYS (8–9) stand around him, hands in pockets, radiating that particular confidence of boys who have already learned to be casually cruel.

OLDER BOY #1

Go on. Climb it. It’s easy. Even a baby could do it.

OLDER BOY #2

Getting down is the hard part. But you’ll figure it out.

KESHA

(determined, jaw set)

I can do anything if I put my mind to it.

He climbs. First branch – easy, his arms strong from playground bars. Second branch – stretching, his foot finding a knot in the bark. Third – his shoe slips, he catches himself, bark scraping his palm, keeps going. He reaches a crook about two meters up and sits, legs dangling. A wonderful view of the courtyard opens up: the playground, the garages, the khrushchyovkas stretching to the horizon.

He grins down at the boys. They are gone. Vanished. The courtyard is empty. He is alone in a tree, two meters above the ground, with no plan for coming down.

Time passes. His stomach growls. The sun moves. A dog walks by below and doesn’t look up. Should he shout? Absolutely not. He is a man, not an old lady at a market stall. He will wait. Someone will come. Probably.

His FRIENDS run by below, chasing a football.

FRIEND

(looking up, delighted)

Hey, crow! Where’s your piece of cheese?

Beat. Kesha gets the joke – the Krylov fable about the crow who opens her mouth to sing and drops the cheese. He is the crow. The tree is his foolishness. The cheese is his dignity.

KESHA

(pride cracking, voice small)

Can you… can you get my mum?

MOTHER comes running, breathless. Behind her, a BIG NEIGHBOR (30s, the kind of man who opens jars for the whole building and fixes radiators without being asked). He reaches up and plucks Kesha from the tree like a ripe apple.

Mother sets Kesha down. Brushes bark from his jacket. Pulls a leaf from his hair. Looks at him. He braces for the scolding of his life.

She hugs him instead. Hard. Long. His face, pressed into her coat, shifts from fear to surprise to something warm and unnameable.

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Scene 16. EXT. VARIOUS LOCATIONS – DAY (1990–1996) – MONTAGE

A rapid-fire MONTAGE of Kesha’s injuries, scored to upbeat Soviet-era children’s music that grows increasingly ironic as the injuries worsen:

– Kesha falls backward off a metal playground ladder. His back hits dirt. He lies there, wind knocked out, staring at the sky. A cloud shaped like a rabbit drifts past. He gets up. Brushes himself off. Goes home for pancakes.

– Kesha spins off a carousel at maximum speed and lands on a board of nails. FIVE puncture wounds in his backside. His SCREAM echoes across the playground and sends pigeons scattering. Mother pulls nails from his flesh at the kitchen table while he bites a wooden spoon.

– Kesha falls from a tree – a different tree, a taller one. Dislocates his left arm. Hides the injury by keeping his arm inside his jacket, Napoleon-style. He maintains this disguise for THREE DAYS so he won’t be kept from summer camp.

– At a sanatorium, Kesha tries to impress three GIRLS by jumping over a gazebo railing. His foot catches. He slams down on his left arm. AGAIN. He wakes up in a plaster cast, surrounded by the same three girls, who now feel sorry for him. Not the attention he wanted.

– A GERMAN SHEPHERD grabs his left hand. Teeth sink in. A thick yellow thread of muscle sticks out of the wound. Kesha stares at it with scientific curiosity.

ADULT KESHA (V.O.)

My left arm was beginning to suspect I didn’t like it. In fairness, the arm had a point. We have since reconciled.

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Scene 17. INT. APARTMENT BUILDING ELEVATOR – DAY (1991)

An old Soviet elevator with large wooden folding doors. The paint is chipped in patterns that look like maps of imaginary countries. The light flickers. It smells of damp concrete, old cabbage, and someone’s Soviet cologne.

KESHA (6) and his FRIEND SASHA (7) step inside. They close the outer metal door but leave the inner wooden door OPEN. Through the gap, the concrete elevator shaft is visible – dark, endless, humming with invisible machinery.

SASHA

Arms out. Brace against the walls. Like this. Flat palms.

He demonstrates: palms pressed flat against the elevator walls. Kesha copies him, small hands barely reaching.

SASHA

Now lift your feet. Both of them. Same time.

Both boys LIFT THEIR FEET off the floor. They hang there, suspended, arms braced, legs dangling. The elevator’s weight sensor reads the car as empty. It waits, confused.

SASHA

(shouting up the shaft)

KOLYA! PRESS THE BUTTON!

Somewhere above, a button is pressed. The elevator LURCHES upward. Metal bars, concrete walls, cables – all FLASH PAST inches from their dangling feet. A strobing, dizzying blur of grey and black. Wind rushes up through the shaft, whipping their hair.

The boys GRIN. Teeth showing. Eyes wild. The flickering light makes their faces appear and disappear like ghosts. This is the greatest ride in the Soviet Union and nobody knows about it except them.

The elevator stops. They drop their feet. Catch their breath. Look at each other.

KESHA

(panting, grinning)

Again?

SASHA

Again.

They lift their feet. The sensor goes blank. Someone presses another button. The elevator DROPS. This time faster. Kesha’s stomach lurches into his throat. He laughs – a wild, uncontrolled, five-alarm laugh that echoes through the shaft.

They do it five more times. When they finally stumble out into the hallway, their arms are trembling and their grins could power the building.

ADULT KESHA (V.O.)

When these modern lifts with automatic doors came out, parents everywhere breathed a sigh of relief. The elevator game was over. But what I’d give for one more ride in that rattling, terrifying, magnificent machine. Just one more.

CUT TO:

Scene 18. EXT. TUNNEL UNDER HIGHWAY BRIDGE – DAY (1992)

A concrete tunnel runs under a highway. A shallow stream flows through it, carrying leaves and candy wrappers from the civilized world above. KESHA (7) and THREE FRIENDS wade in, water up to their knees, cheap Soviet flashlights in hand.

FRIEND #1

There are crayfish in here. Huge ones. My brother caught one the size of his hand.

KESHA

(peering into the dark)

How do you catch them?

FRIEND #1

You just grab them. Fast. Before they pinch you.

They wade deeper. The tunnel narrows. Highway traffic rumbles above them like a never-ending thunderstorm. Their flashlight beams dance across mossy walls, picking out strange shadows and dripping pipes.

Kesha spots movement. A CRAYFISH, rust-brown and armored, backing into a crevice. He reaches in. It PINCHES his finger.

KESHA

OW!

He yanks his hand back, crayfish attached, dangling from his index finger like an angry ornament. The boys erupt in laughter. Kesha shakes his hand. The crayfish holds on. More laughter.

LATER: They sit in the tunnel, wet, cold, absolutely content, having built a small dam of stones across the stream. Tiny fish dart in the trapped pool.

Scene 19. INT. FAMILY APARTMENT – EVENING

Kesha walks in. Soaked from chest to shoes. Mud in his hair, on his neck, behind his ears.

MOTHER

Why are you wet?

KESHA

(instant, confident)

I fell in a puddle.

MOTHER

(studying the mud in his hair)

A puddle. That went over your head.

KESHA

(not blinking)

A deep puddle.

She doesn’t buy it. She doesn’t push it. She hands him a towel and points toward the bathroom. He goes, dripping.

CUT TO:

Scene 20. EXT. COURTYARD – DAY (1992)

Seven-year-old KESHA stands alone, staring at a BICYCLE leaning against a wall. It is a beauty – blue frame, chrome handlebars, a bell shaped like a ladybug. Not his. The owner is inside eating lunch, unaware.

Kesha’s breathing quickens. His fingers twitch. He looks left. Right. Behind him. Nobody.

He gets on. Pushes off. The world opens up – speed, wind, freedom. Trees blur. The courtyard expands. For fifteen seconds, his face cycles through an extraordinary emotional spectrum: euphoria, joy, lightness, then anxiety, burden, fear, horror. All compressed into the time it takes to ride from one building to another.