The theme of lost illusions in the story is "they sat on the golden porch." Tatyana Tolstaya's prose On the golden porch Tolstaya sat analysis of the work

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Tatiana Tolstaya
“They sat on the golden porch…”

Dear Shura

Then she came across to me on a hot boulevard - softened, touched by a sweaty, lonely child stuck in a baked city - she never had her own children. A terrible lingerie hangs from under a black, dirty skirt. Someone else's child trustingly dumped sand treasures on Alexandra Ernestovna's knees. Don't get your aunt's clothes dirty. Nothing ... Let it be.

I met her in the stale air of the cinema (take off your hat, granny! you can’t see anything!). Inappropriate to the screen passions, Alexandra Ernestovna breathed noisily, crackled crumpled chocolate silver, gluing fragile pharmacy jaws with viscous sweet clay.

Finally, it spun in a stream of fire-breathing cars at the Nikitsky Gate, rushed about, losing direction, grabbed my arm and swam to the saving shore, losing the respect of the diplomatic Negro who lay behind the green glass of a low shiny car and his pretty curly children for life. The negro roared, smelled of blue smoke and rushed off towards the conservatory, and Alexandra Ernestovna, trembling, frightened, bulging, hung on me and dragged me to her communal shelter - knick-knacks, oval frames, dry flowers - leaving behind a trail of validol.

Two tiny rooms, high stucco ceiling; on the lagging wallpaper, a delightful beauty smiles, thinks, capricious - dear Shura, Alexandra Ernestovna. Yes, yes, it's me! And with a hat, and without a hat, and with loose hair. Oh, what a ... And this is her second husband, well, this is the third - not a very good choice. Well, what can I say now... Now, perhaps, if she had then decided to run away to Ivan Nikolaevich... Who is Ivan Nikolaevich? He is not here, he is squeezed in an album, stretched out in four cardboard slots, slammed by a lady in a bustle, crushed by some short-lived white dogs that died before the Japanese war.

Sit down, sit down, what can I treat you to? .. Come, of course, for God's sake, come! Alexandra Ernestovna is alone in the world, but I really want to chat!

…Autumn. Rain. Alexandra Ernestovna, do you recognize me? It is me! Remember... well, never mind, I'm visiting you. Guests - oh, what happiness! Here, here, now I'll clean it up ... So I live alone. Survived everyone. Three husbands, you know? And Ivan Nikolaevich, he called, but ... Maybe it was necessary to decide? What a long life. This is me. This is also me. And this is my second husband. I had three husbands, you know? True, the third is not very ...

The first one was a lawyer. Famous. They lived very well. In the spring - to Finland. In the summer - in the Crimea. White muffins, black coffee. Hats with lace. Oysters are very expensive… In the evening, go to the theater. How many fans! He died in the nineteenth year - they stabbed him to death in the alley.

Oh, of course, she had romances all her life, how could it be otherwise? Women's heart - it is! Yes, three years ago, the violinist rented a nook at Alexandra Ernestovna's. Twenty-six years old, laureate, eyes!.. Of course, he hid his feelings in his soul, but the look - it betrays everything! In the evening, Alexandra Ernestovna used to ask him: “Tea? ..”, but he just looks like that and doesn’t say anything! Well, you understand?.. Kov-va-arny! So he was silent while he lived with Alexandra Ernestovna. But it was clear that everything was on fire and that it was bubbling in the soul. In the evenings, together in two cramped rooms ... You know, there was something in the air - it was clear to both ... He could not stand it and left. To the street. Wandered somewhere late. Alexandra Ernestovna held firm and gave him no hope. Then he - out of grief - married some - well, nothing special. Moved. And once, after his marriage, he met Alexandra Ernestovna on the street and threw such a look - incinerated! But again he didn't say anything. All buried in the soul.

Yes, Alexandra Ernestovna's heart was never empty. Three husbands, by the way. With the second before the war lived in a huge apartment. Renowned doctor. Famous guests. Flowers. Always fun. And he died cheerfully: when it was already clear that the end, Alexandra Ernestovna decided to call the gypsies. Still, you know, when you look at the beautiful, noisy, cheerful, it’s easier to die, right? It was not possible to get real gypsies. But Alexandra Ernestovna - an inventor - did not lose her head, hired some grubby guys, girls, dressed them up in noisy, shiny, fluttering, flung open the doors to the dying man's bedroom - and rattled, screamed, hummed, went in circles, and a wheel, and squatted: pink , gold, gold, pink! The husband did not expect, he already turned his eyes there, and then they suddenly burst in, twist their shawls, squeal; he got up, waved his hands, croaked: go away! - and they are more fun, more fun, but with a flood! So he died, the kingdom of heaven be upon him. And the third husband was not very ...

But Ivan Nikolaevich... Ah, Ivan Nikolaevich! It was all: Crimea, the thirteenth year, the striped sun through the blinds saws the white scraped floor into blocks ... Sixty years have passed, but after all ... Ivan Nikolaevich was simply distraught: now leave your husband and come to him in the Crimea. Forever and ever. I promised. Then, in Moscow, I thought: what to live on? And where? And he threw letters: “Dear Shura, come, come!” My husband has his own business here, he rarely sits at home, and there, in the Crimea, on the gentle sand, under blue skies, Ivan Nikolayevich runs like a tiger: “Dear Shura, forever!” But the poor man himself does not have enough money for a ticket to Moscow! Letters, letters, letters every day, for a whole year - Alexandra Ernestovna will show.

Oh, how I loved! To go or not to go?

Human life is divided into four seasons. Spring!!! Summer. Autumn winter? But the winter is over for Alexandra Ernestovna - where is she now? Where are her weeping colorless eyes? Throwing back her head, pulling back her red eyelid, Alexandra Ernestovna puts yellow drops in her eye. A pink balloon shines through the head through a thin cobweb. Was that mouse tail sixty years ago wrapped around the shoulders like a black peacock tail? Did the persistent but not rich Ivan Nikolaevich drown in these eyes - once and for all? Alexandra Ernestovna grunts and fumbles with her knotted feet for her slippers.

- Now let's drink tea. I won't go anywhere without tea. No-no-no. Don't even think.

Yes, I'm not going anywhere. Then I came to drink tea. And she brought cakes. I'll put the kettle on now, don't worry. In the meantime, she will get a velvet album and old letters.

You have to go far to the kitchen, to another city, along an endless shiny floor, rubbed so that for two days traces of red mastic remain on the soles. At the end of the corridor tunnel, like a light in a dense robbery forest, a speck of a kitchen window glows. Twenty-three neighbors are silent behind clean white doors. Halfway there is a phone on the wall. A note, once pinned by Alexandra Ernestovna, turns white: “Fire - 01. Ambulance - 03. In the event of my death, call Elizaveta Osipovna.” Elizabeth Osipovna herself has long been gone from the world. Nothing. Alexandra Ernestovna forgot.

In the kitchen - painful, lifeless cleanliness. On one of the slabs, someone's cabbage soup is talking to themselves. In the corner there is still a curly cone of smell after a neighbor who smoked Belomor. A chicken in a string bag hangs outside the window, as if punished, dangling in the black wind. The bare wet tree drooped from grief. The drunkard unbuttons his coat, leaning his face against the fence. Sad circumstances of place, time and manner of action. And if Alexandra Ernestovna had agreed then to drop everything and run south to Ivan Nikolaevich? Where would she be now? She had already sent a telegram (meet me), packed her things, hid the ticket away, in the secret compartment of her purse, pinned her peacock hair up high and sat down in an armchair, by the window - to wait. And far to the south, Ivan Nikolaevich, alarmed, not believing in happiness, rushed to the railway station - to run, worry, worry, dispose, hire, negotiate, go crazy, peer into the horizon overlaid with dull heat. And then? She waited in the armchair until evening, until the first clear stars. And then? She pulled the pins out of her hair, shook her head... And then? Well - then, then! Life has passed, that's what then.

The kettle boiled. I'll make it stronger. A simple piece on a tea xylophone: lid, lid, spoon, lid, rag, lid, rag, rag, spoon, pen, pen. Long way back along the dark corridor with two teapots in hand. Twenty-three neighbors behind the white doors are listening: will it drip its filthy tea on our clean floor? It didn't drip, don't worry. With my foot I open the Gothic doors. I was gone forever, but Alexandra Ernestovna still remembers me.

She took out raspberry cracked cups, decorated the table with some kind of circles, rummaged in the dark coffin of the sideboard, stirring the bready, rusk smell that crawled out from behind his wooden cheeks. Don't go, smell! Catch him and pinch him with faceted glass doors; like this; stay locked up.

Alexandra Ernestovna gets marvelous jam, they gave her, you just try it, no, no, you try it, ah, ah, ah, there are no words, yes, this is something unusual, isn’t it amazing? true, true, as long as I live in the world, never like this ... well, how glad I am, I knew that you would like it, take more, take, take, I beg you! (Oh shit, my teeth will hurt again!)

I like you, Alexandra Ernestovna, I really like you, especially in that photo where you have such an oval face, and in this one, where you throw back your head and laugh with amazing teeth, and in this one, where you pretend to be capricious, and throw your hand somewhere on the back of the head, so that the carved scallops purposely slipped off the elbow. I like your life, no longer interesting to anyone, somewhere out there noisy, youth running away, your decayed admirers, husbands who followed the solemn procession, everyone, everyone who called you and whom you called, everyone who passed and disappeared behind a high mountain . I will come to you and bring you both cream and carrots that are very useful for the eyes, and you, please, open the velvet brown albums that have not been aired for a long time - let the pretty schoolgirls breathe, let the mustachioed gentlemen warm up, let the brave Ivan Nikolaevich smile. Nothing, nothing, he can't see you, what are you talking about, Alexandra Ernestovna!... I should have made up my mind then. It was necessary to. Yes, she has already made up her mind. Here he is - reach out your hand! Here, take it in your hands, hold it, here it is, flat, cold, glossy, with a gold edge, slightly yellowed Ivan Nikolaevich! Hey, you hear, she made up her mind, yes, she is going, meet, everything, she no longer hesitates, meet where you are, ay!

Thousands of years, thousands of days, thousands of transparent impenetrable curtains have fallen from heaven, thickened, closed in dense walls, filled up the roads, do not let Alexandra Ernestovna to her beloved, lost in centuries. He remained there, on the other side of years, alone, at the dusty southern station, he wanders along the platform spitted with seeds, he looks at his watch, kicks off dusty spindles of corn nibs with his toe of his boot, impatiently picks off gray cypress cones, waits, waits, waits for a locomotive from a hot morning gave. She didn't come. She won't come. She cheated. No, no, she wanted to! She is ready, and the bags are packed! White translucent dresses tucked their knees in the close darkness of the chest, the travel bag creaks with skin, sparkles with silver, shameless bathing suits that barely cover the knees - and the arms are bare to the shoulders! - waiting in the wings, closing their eyes, anticipating ... In a hat box - impossible, delightful, weightless ... oh, there are no words - white marshmallow, a miracle of miracles! At the very bottom, leaning back, raising its paws, the box is sleeping - hairpins, combs, silk laces, diamond sand pasted on cardboard spatulas - for delicate nails; small trifles. Jasmine genie is sealed in a crystal bottle - oh, how it will sparkle with a billion rainbows in the dazzling sea light! She's ready - what's stopping her? What always bothers us? Well, rather, time goes by! .. Time goes by, and the invisible layers of years are getting denser, and the rails are rusting, and the roads are overgrown, and the weeds along the ravines are getting more and more magnificent. Time flows, and sways the boat of dear Shura on its back, and splashes with wrinkles in her unique face.

…More tea?

And after the war they returned - with their third husband - right here, in these rooms. The third husband whined and whined… The corridor was long. The light is dim. Windows to the courtyard. Everything is behind. The elegant guests have died. Flowers withered. The rain drums on the glass. He whined, whined - and died, but when, why - Alexandra Ernestovna did not notice.

I got Ivan Nikolaevich out of the album, looked at it for a long time. What did he call her? She has already bought a ticket - here it is, a ticket. There are black numbers on thick cardboard. If you want - so look, if you want - turn it upside down, it's all the same: forgotten signs of an unknown alphabet, an encrypted pass there, to the other side.

Maybe if you find out the magic word... if you guess... if you sit down and think carefully... or look somewhere... there must be a door, a crack, an unnoticed crooked passage there, that day; they closed everything, but at least a crack, they gaped and left it; maybe in some old house or something; in the attic, if you bend the boards... or in a back alley, in a brick wall - a gap, carelessly bricked up, hastily plastered over, hastily hammered crosswise... Maybe not here, but in another city... Maybe somewhere in the tangle of rails, aside, there is a carriage, an old, rusty one, with a caved-in floor, a carriage into which dear Shura never got into?

“Here is my compartment… Allow me to pass. Excuse me, here is my ticket - everything is written here! Over there, at that end - rusty teeth of springs, red, crumpled ribs of walls, blue sky in the ceiling, grass underfoot - this is her rightful place, hers! No one ever took it, they just had no right!

…More tea? Blizzard.

…More tea? Apple trees in bloom. Dandelions. Lilac. Phew, how hot. Get out of Moscow - to the sea. See you soon, Alexandra Ernestovna! I will tell you what is there - on the other side of the earth. Didn't the sea dry up, didn't the Crimea float away like a dry leaf, didn't the blue sky fade? Has your tormented, agitated lover resigned from his voluntary post at the railroad station?

Alexandra Ernestovna is waiting for me in the stone hell of Moscow. No, no, that's right, that's right! There, in the Crimea, invisible but restless, in a white tunic, Ivan Nikolayevich walks up and down the dusty platform, digs out a watch from his pocket, wipes his shaved neck; back and forth along an openwork dwarf fence stained with white pollen, agitated, perplexed; pass through it, without noticing, beautiful muzzy girls in trousers, hippie boys with rolled up sleeves, braided with impudent transistor ba-ba-doo-bang; grandmothers in white kerchiefs, with buckets of plums; southern ladies with plastic acantha clips; old men in rigid synthetic hats; through and through, through Ivan Nikolaevich, but he knows nothing, notices nothing, he waits, time has gone astray, stuck halfway, somewhere near Kursk, stumbled over the nightingale rivers, got lost, blind, on the sunflower plains.

Ivan Nikolaevich, wait! I'll tell her; and there is a ticket, I know, I swear, I saw it - in a velvet album, stuck there behind a photograph; he's shabby, it's true, but that's okay, I think they'll let her in. There, of course ... you can’t get through, something interferes, I don’t remember; well, she somehow; she'll think of something - there's a ticket, right? - this is important: a ticket; and, you know, the main thing is that she made up her mind, that's for sure, for sure, I'm telling you!

Alexandra Ernestovna - five calls, the third button from the top. There is a breeze on the landing: the doors of a dusty stained-glass staircase, decorated with frivolous lotuses - the flowers of oblivion, are ajar.

- Who? .. Died.

I mean, how is it… wait a minute… why? But I just... Yes, I just go back and forth! What are you?..

White hot air rushes to the entrance coming out of the crypt, striving to get in the eyes. Wait a minute... Garbage hasn't been taken away yet, has it? Around the corner, on an asphalt patch, in garbage cans, the spirals of earthly existence end. Where did you think? Behind the clouds, right? There they are, these spirals - they stick out like springs from a rotten, gaping sofa. Everything was dumped here. An oval portrait of dear Shura - the glass was smashed, the eyes gouged out. An old woman's junk - some stockings ... A hat with four seasons. Do you need peeled cherries? No, why? A jug with a broken nose. And the velvet album, of course, was stolen. They are good at cleaning their boots. You are all fools, I do not cry - why would I? The garbage steamed in the sun, spreading black banana slime. A stack of letters is trampled into the goo. “Darling Shura, well, when…”, “Dear Shura, just tell me…” And one letter, dried up, spins like a yellow lined butterfly under a dusty poplar tree, not knowing where to sit down.

What should I do with all this? Turn around and leave. Hot. The wind drives the dust. And Alexandra Ernestovna, dear Shura, real as a mirage, crowned with wooden fruits and cardboard flowers, swims, smiling, along the trembling alley around the corner, to the south, to the inconceivably distant shining south, to the lost platform, floats, melts and dissolves in the hot afternoon .

Fakir

Filin himself will not offend the eye either - clean, small, in a homemade velvet jacket, his small hand is heavy with a ring. Yes, not stamped, zhlobsky, "for a rupee fifty with a box" - why? - no, straight from the excavations, Venetian, if not lying, or even a coin in a frame - some, God forgive me, Antiochus, otherwise raise it higher ... Such is Owl. He sits in an armchair, shaking his shoes, his fingers folded into a house, his eyebrows are tar, beautiful Anatolian eyes are like soot, his beard is dry, silver, with a rustle, only his mouth is black - like eating coal.

Yes, there is something to see.

Owl's ladies are also not just any - collectible, rare. That circus performer, for example, - curls on a pole, shining with scales, to the thunder of drums, or just a girl, her mother’s daughter, smears watercolors, - she’s crazy, but the very whiteness is extraordinary, so that Owl, calling to the bride, even warns: by all means, they say, come in black glasses to avoid snow blindness.

Someone secretly disapproved of Filin, with all his rings, pies, snuffboxes; they giggled about his crimson dressing gown with tassels and some kind of silver Janissary slippers with turned-up toes; and it was funny that in his bathroom - a special brush for a beard and hand cream - at a bachelor ... But all the same, he would call - and they ran, and secretly always turned cold: would he invite again? Will he let me sit in warmth and light, in bliss and cold, and in general - what did he find in us ordinary people, why does he need us? ..

“…If you are not busy with anything today, please come to me by eight o’clock.” Meet Alice - a lovely creature.

- Thank you, thank you, absolutely!

Well, as always, at the last moment! Yura reached for the razor, and Galya, crawling into tights like a snake, instructed her daughter: porridge in a saucepan, do not open the door for anyone, lessons - and sleep! And don't hang on me, don't hang on, we're already late! Galya stuffed plastic bags into her bag: Owl lives in a high-rise building, under it is a grocery store, maybe they will give herring oil or something else.

Behind the house, a ring road lay like a hoop of darkness, where frost whistled, the cold of the deserted plains penetrated under the clothes, the world for a moment seemed graveyard scary, and they did not want to wait for the bus, crowded into the subway, but caught a taxi, and, lounging comfortably, carefully scolded Owl for a velvet jacket, for a passion for collecting, for an unfamiliar Alice: where is the old one, Ninochka? - look for fistulas; they guessed whether Matvei Matveich would be a guest, and together they condemned Matvei Matveich.

They met him at Filin’s and were so fascinated by the old man: these stories of his about the reign of Anna Ioannovna, and again pies, and the smoke of English tea, and blue and gold collectible cups, and Mozart murmuring from somewhere above, and Filin caressing the guests with their Mephistophelian eyes - fu-you, the head is stupefied - they asked for Matvei Matveich to visit. Run away! He took it in the kitchen, the floor was plank, the walls were brown, bare, and in general the area was a nightmare, fences and pits, he himself was in sweatpants, already completely whitish, he had drunk tea, candied jam, and even then he blurted out on the table right in the jar, put a spoon: pick out, they say, dear guests. And smoking - only on the landing: asthma, do not blame me. And with Anna Ioannovna the puncture came out: they settled down - God bless him, with tea - to listen to the murmuring speech about palace shura-murs, all sorts of coups, and the old man kept untying terrible folders with ribbons, poked something with his finger, shouting about some plots of land, and that Kuzin, mediocrity, bureaucrat, intriguer, does not allow to be published and sets up the whole sector against Matvei Matveich, but here, here, here: he has been collecting the most valuable documents all his life! Galya and Yura wanted to talk about villains again, about torture, about the ice house and the wedding of dwarfs, but Owl was not around and there was no one to direct the conversation to something interesting, and all evening only Ku-u-uzin! Ku-u-uzin! - and poking at folders, and valerian. Having laid the old man down, they left early, and Galya tore her tights on the old man's stool.

- And the bard Vlasov? Yura remembered.

- Shut up!

With that, everything seemed to turn out the other way around, but a terrible shame: they also picked up Filin, invited him to his place, called friends - to listen, defended for two hours behind the log cake. They locked the daughter in the nursery, the dog in the kitchen. The bard Vlasov came, gloomy, with a guitar, the cake did not even try: the cream would soften his voice, but he needed it to be hoarse. He sang a couple of songs: “Aunt Motya, your shoulders, your cheeks and cheeks, like those of Nadia Comanechi, are developed by physical education ...” Yura disgraced himself, got out with his ignorance, whispered loudly in the middle of singing: “I forgot, Persian - what places are these?” Galya was worried, asked to sing “Friends” by all means, pressed her hands to her chest: this is such a song, such a song! He sang it at Filin's - softly, sadly, mournfully, - here, they say, "at a table covered with oilcloth, having gathered for a bottle of beer," old friends, bald, losers are sitting. And everyone has something wrong, everyone has their own sadness: “one cannot afford love, and the other does not like the prince,” and no one can help anyone, alas! - but here they are together, they are friends, they need each other, and isn't this the most important thing in the world? You listen - and it seems that - yes, yes, yes, you also have something like this in your life, yes, that's it! “Whoa song! Crown number! Yura whispered. The bard Vlasov frowned even more, made a distant look - there, into that imaginary room where baldheads loving each other uncorked the distant beer; plucked the strings and began sadly: “At the table covered with oilcloth…” Julka, locked in the kitchen, scratched the floor with her claws and howled. “Having gathered for a bottle of beer,” the bard Vlasov pressed. “Y-y-y,” the dog was worried. Someone grunted, the bard held down the strings in an insulting manner, and took a cigarette. Yura went to give Dzhulka a suggestion. "Is this autobiographical?" some fool asked respectfully. "What? I have everything somewhere autobiographical.” Yura returned, the bard threw down his cigarette butt, concentrating. “At the table covered with oilcloth…” An agonizing howl came from the kitchen. "Musical dog," the bard said angrily. Galya dragged the stubborn shepherd dog to the neighbors, the bard hurriedly finished singing - the howl dully penetrated through the cooperative walls - crumpled up the program and in the hallway, pulling the "zipper" of the jacket, said with disgust that in fact he takes two rubles from his nose, but since they do not know how to organize a creative atmosphere, then a ruble will do. And Galya again ran to the neighbors - a nightmare, borrow a gold piece - and they, also before the payday, collected change for a long time and even shook out the children's piggy bank to the roar of the robbed children and the barking of the torn Dzhulka.

Yes, Owl knows how to deal with people, but somehow we don’t. Well, maybe next time it will.

There was still time until eight - just to stand behind the pate in the grocery store at the foot of Filinov, because here, too, - on our outskirts, cows wander around in broad daylight, but you can’t see the pate. Three minutes to eight to enter the elevator - Galya, as always, looks around and says: "I want to live in such an elevator," then the waxed parquet of a boundless platform, a copper plate: "I. I. Filin," the bell - and finally he himself is on the threshold - shines with black eyes, bows his head: "Accuracy is the courtesy of kings ..." And it's somehow terribly nice to hear this, these words - and indeed kings - Galya in an inexpensive coat and Yura in a jacket and a knitted hat.

And they will swim, the royal couple, chosen for one evening, into warmth and light, into sweet piano roulades, and proceed to the table, where exhausted roses do not know about any frost, wind, darkness that surrounded the impregnable Owl Tower, powerless to get through inside.

There is something subtly new in the apartment… well, it’s understandable: the display case with beaded knick-knacks has been moved, the sconce has moved to another wall, the archway leading to the back room has been curtained, and, having pulled back this curtain, Alice, supposedly a lovely creature, comes out and offers her hand.

- Allochka.

- Yes, actually she is Allochka, but you and I will call her Alice, right? I ask to the table, - said Filin. - Well, sir! I recommend the pate. Rare! Such pates, you know ...

“They took them downstairs, I see,” Yura was delighted. - And we're going down. From the pack-karenny peaks-n. After all, once the gods descended to earth. Right?

Owl smiled thinly, raised his eyebrows - they say, maybe, yes, he took it from below, or maybe not. All you need to know. Galya mentally kicked her husband for his tactlessness.

Today, for some reason, he called pies tartlets - probably because of Alice.

- And what happened - the flour is removed from sale? On a global scale? - Yura was having fun, rubbing his hands, his bony nose turned red in the warmth. Tea gurgled.

- Nothing happened. What flour! Filin waved his beard. - Check mark, sugar ... What flour! The secret is lost, my friends. Dying - I just got a call - the last owner of an old recipe. Ninety-eight years old, stroke. You try. Alice, can I pour you a drink in my favorite cup?

Owl clouded his eyes, as if hinting at the possibility of a special intimacy that could arise from such intimate contact with his beloved dishes. The lovely Alice smiled. What's so lovely about her? Black hair shines like oiled, crochet nose, mustache. The dress is simple, knitted, the color of pickles. Think about it. Here they sat not like that - where are they now?

- ... And you think, - said Filin, - two days ago I ordered tartlets for this Ignatius Kirillich. Yesterday he baked them. I received them this morning, each in a tissue paper. And now, a stroke. They let me know from Sklifosovsky. - Owl bit the puff bomb, raised his beautiful eyebrows and sighed. - When Ignatius was still a boy, he served at Yar, the old confectioner Kuzma, dying, gave him the secret of these products. You try. - Owl wiped his beard. - And this Kuzma at one time served in St. Petersburg with Wolf and Beranger - famous confectioners. They say that before the fatal duel, Pushkin went to Wolf and asked for tartlets. And Kuzma that day lay drunk and did not bake. Well, the manager comes out, shrugging his hands. No, Alexander Sergeyevich. Such a people, sir. Wouldn't you like Bushe? Tru-bait, maybe with cream? Pushkin was upset, waved his hat and left. Well, the rest is known. Kuzma overslept - Pushkin in a coffin.

“Oh my God…” Galya was frightened.

- Yes Yes. And you know, it had such an effect on everyone. Wolf shot himself, Beranger converted to Orthodoxy, the manager donated thirty thousand to charitable institutions, and Kuzma - he just went crazy. Everyone, they say, repeated: “Eh, Lexan Serge-i-ich ... They didn’t eat my tarts ... They would have waited a bit ...” - Owl threw another pie into his mouth and crunched. - Lived, however, this Kuzma until the beginning of the century. With decrepit hands he passed the recipe to the students. Ignatius dough, someone else stuffing. Well, after - the revolution, the civil war. The one that knew the stuffing went to the Socialist-Revolutionaries. My Ignatius Kirillich has lost sight of him. Several years pass - and Ignatius is still at the restaurant - suddenly something jerked him, he goes out of the kitchen into the hall, and there this one, with a lady. Monocle, mustache grown - not to know. Ignatius, just as he was, in flour, to the table. "Let's go, comrade." He rushed about, but there was nothing to do. Walks, pale, into the kitchen. "Speak, you bastard, meat stuffing." Where are you going, the past is tarnished. Said. "Say cabbage." The whole trembles, but betrays. "Now sago." And his sago was absolutely secret. Silent. Ignatius: "Sago!" And he takes a rock. He is silent. Then suddenly: ah-ah-ah-ah-ah! - and ran. This one, eser. They rushed, tied, looked - and he started to move in his mind, his eyes lead and foam from the mouth. So the sago was not recognized. Yes ... And this Ignatius Kirillich was an interesting old man, whimsical. How he felt the puff, God, how he felt! .. Bake at home. He pulled the curtains, he locked the door with two bolts. I told him: “Ignaty Kirillich, dickhead, share a secret, what do you want? ..” - in no way. Everyone was waiting for a worthy successor. Now here is a stroke ... Yes, you try.

"They sat on the golden porch..."

Sister Shura

On the golden porch sat:

King, prince, king, prince,

Shoemaker, tailor.

Who are you?

Speak quickly

Don't delay good people!

Children's rhyme

First there was a garden. Childhood was a garden. Without end and edge, without borders and fences, in noise and rustle, golden in the sun, light green in the shade, thousand-tiered - from heather to the tops of pines; to the south - a well with toads, to the north - white roses and mushrooms, to the west - mosquito raspberries, to the east - blueberries, bumblebees, a cliff, a lake, bridges. They say that early in the morning a completely naked man was seen on the lake. Honestly. Don't tell mom. Do you know who it was? .. - It can't be. - Exactly, I'm telling you. He thought there was no one. And we were sitting in the bushes. - And what did you see? - Everything .

That's lucky! This happens once every hundred years. Because the only naked one available to view - in an anatomy textbook - is not real. Having torn off his skin on this occasion, impudent, meaty and red, he boasts of the clavicular-sterno- nipple muscle (all indecent words!) in front of eighth grade students. When (in a hundred years) we go to the eighth grade, he will show us all this too.

The old woman Anna Ilyinichna feeds the tiger cat Memeka with the same red meat. Memeka was born after the war, she has no respect for food. Clinging with four paws to the trunk of a pine tree, high, high above the ground, Memeka froze in motionless despair.

“Memeka, meat, meat!”

The old woman shakes the bowl of entrecote, raises it higher so that the cat can see better.

- Look at the meat!

The cat and the old woman look at each other longingly. Take it away, Memeka thinks.

“Meat, Memeka!”

In the stuffy thickets of red Persian lilac, the cat spoils the sparrows. We found one such sparrow. Someone had ripped the scalp off his toy head. Naked fragile skull, like a gooseberry. Painful sparrow face. We made him a lace cap, sewed a white shirt and buried him in a chocolate box. Life is eternal. Only birds die.

Four careless dachas stood without fences - go wherever you want. The fifth was "one's own home." The black log house climbed sideways from under the damp canopy of maples and larches and, brightening, multiplying windows, thinning to sunny verandas, pushing nasturtiums apart, pushing aside lilacs, evading a hundred-year-old fir, ran out, laughing, to the south side and stopped over a smooth strawberry-dahlia down, down, down, to where the warm air trembles and the sun shatters in the flipped glass lids of magic boxes stuffed with cucumber babies in orange rosettes.

At the house (and what's inside?), opening all the doors of the veranda pierced by July, Veronika Vikentievna - a huge white beauty - was weighing strawberries: for jam for herself, for sale to neighbors. Lush, golden, apple beauty! White chickens roam at her heavy legs, turkeys stick out obscene faces from burdocks, a red-green rooster squinted his head, looks at us: what do you girls? "We have strawberries." The fingers of a beautiful merchant's wife are covered in berry blood. Burdock, scales, basket.

Queen! This is the most greedy woman in the world!

They pour her overseas wines,

She eats a printed gingerbread,

Around her stands a formidable guard...

Once, with such red hands, she came out of a dark barn, smiling: “The calf was slaughtered ...”

They hold axes on their shoulders...

Ah-ah-ah! Get out of here, run, a nightmare, horror - a cold stench - a barn, dampness, death ...

And Uncle Pasha is the husband of such a terrible woman. Uncle Pasha is small, timid, stuffy. He is an old man: he is fifty years old. He serves as an accountant in Leningrad: he gets up at five o'clock in the morning and runs through the mountains, through the valleys, in order to catch the steam engine. Seven kilometers on the run, an hour and a half on a narrow-gauge railway, ten minutes on a tram, then put on black armlets and sit on a hard yellow chair. Oilcloth doors, smoky basement, liquid light, safes, invoices - Uncle Pasha's work. And when the merry blue day passes by, noisy, Uncle Pasha crawls out of the basement and runs back: the clang of the post-war tram, the smoky evening station, the fumes, the fences, the beggars, the baskets; the wind drives crumpled papers along the empty platform. In summer - in sandals, in winter - in hemmed boots, Uncle Pasha hurries to his Garden, to his Paradise, where evening silence blows from the lake, to the House, where an immense golden-haired Queen sways on a huge bed with four glass legs. But we saw glass legs later. Veronika Vikentievna quarreled with her mother for a long time.

The fact is that one summer she sold an egg to her mother. There was an indispensable condition: the egg should be immediately boiled and eaten. But the frivolous mother gave the egg to the country mistress. The crime has surfaced. The consequences could be monstrous: the hostess could lay an egg on her hen, and she, in her chicken ignorance, would hatch exactly the same unique breed of chickens that ran in Veronika Vikentievna's garden. It's good that everything worked out. The egg was eaten. But Veronika Vikentievna could not forgive her mother's meanness. They stopped selling strawberries and milk to us, Uncle Pasha smiled guiltily as he ran past. The neighbors closed in: they reinforced a metal mesh on iron poles, poured broken glass at strategically important points, extended a steel rod and brought in a terrible yellow dog. This, of course, was not enough.

After all, could mother, in the dead of night, jump over the fence, kill the dog and, crawling over broken glass, with her stomach torn open by barbed wire, bleeding, contrive and with weakening hands pull out a mustache from a rare variety of strawberries in order to graft it into her stunted strawberry? After all, she could, she could run with prey to the fence and, with a groan, panting, with the last effort to throw a strawberry mustache to dad, who was hiding in the bushes, round glasses gleaming under the moon?

From May to September, tormented by insomnia, Veronika Vikentyevna went out into the garden at night, stood for a long time in a spacious white shirt with a pitchfork in her hands, like Neptune, listened to night birds, breathed jasmine. Recently, her hearing has become aggravated: she could hear how at our dacha, three hundred meters away, covering her head with a camel blanket, dad and mom agree in a whisper to beat Veronika Vikentievna: to dig an underground passage into a greenhouse with early parsley.

The night went on, the house blackened dully behind her. Somewhere in the warm darkness, in the heart of the house, lost in the bowels of a huge bed, quietly as a mouse, lay little uncle Pasha. An oak ceiling floated high above his head, an attic floated even higher, chests with good-quality black coats sleeping in mothballs, even higher - an attic with pitchforks, tufts of hay, old magazines, and there - a roof, a horned chimney, a weather vane, the moon - through the garden, through a dream they swam, swam, swaying, carrying Uncle Pasha to the country of lost youth, to the country of fulfilled hopes, and then the chilled Veronika Vikentievna returned, white and heavy, and crushed his small warm legs.

Hey, wake up, Uncle Pasha! Veronica is about to die.

You will wander without thought through the empty house, and then you will rise, blossom, look around, remember, drive away memories, crave and bring - for help with the housework - Veronica's younger sister, Margarita, the same white, big and beautiful. And it is she who in June will laugh in a bright window, bend over a rain barrel, flicker among the maples on a sunny lake.

Oh, how in our declining years ...

But we didn’t notice anything, and we forgot Veronica, and we had winter, winter, winter, mumps and measles, floods and warts, and a Christmas tree burning with tangerines, and they sewed a fur coat for me, and the aunt in the yard touched it and said: “ Mouton!"

In winter, the janitors glued golden stars to the black sky, sprinkled the passage yards of the Petrograd side with crushed diamonds, and, climbing the airy frosty stairs to the windows, prepared surprises for the morning: with thin brushes they painted the silver tails of firebirds.

And when winter bored everyone, they took it out of town on trucks, pushed the skinny snowdrifts into the barred dungeons and smeared fragrant black porridge with the germs of yellow flowers in the squares. And for several days the city stood pink, stone and resonant.

And from there, from behind the distant horizon, the green summer with ants and daisies was already running, laughing and making noise, waving a colorful flag.

Uncle Pasha removed the yellow dog - put it in a chest and sprinkled it with mothballs; let summer residents into the attic - someone else's dark-haired grandmother and fat granddaughter; invited the children to visit and treated them to jam.

We hung on the fence and watched how a strange grandmother every hour opens the colored windows of the attic and, illuminated by the harlequin diamonds of ancient glass, calls out:

- Rolls of milk hotchsh?!

- I do not want.

– Poop-write hotchsh?!

- I do not want.

We jumped on one leg, treated scratches with saliva, buried treasures, cut earthworms with a knife, peeped at an old woman washing pink pants in the lake, and found under the master's sideboard a photograph of a surprised eared family with the inscription: “For a long, long memory. 1908".

Let's go to Uncle Pasha! Only you go ahead. No you. Watch out, there's a threshold here. I can't see in the dark. Hold on to me Will he show us the room? He will show, but first you need to drink tea.

Twisted spoons, twisted legs at the vases. Cherry jam. Frivolous Margarita laughs in the orange shade of the lampshade. Yes, drink up soon! Uncle Pasha already knows, he is waiting, he opened the cherished door to Aladdin's cave. O room! O childhood dreams! O Uncle Pasha - King Solomon! You hold the Horn of Plenty in mighty hands! A camel caravan passed through your house with ghostly steps and lost its Baghdad luggage in the summer twilight! A waterfall of velvet, ostrich feathers of lace, a downpour of porcelain, golden pillars of frames, precious tables on bent legs, locked glass columns of slides, where delicate yellow glasses are wrapped around black grapes, where Negroes in golden skirts shimmer in impenetrable darkness, where something transparent, silver is bent ... Look, a precious watch with not our numbers and snake hands! And these - with forget-me-nots! Ah, but those over there, over there, look! Above the dial is a glass room, and in it, at a golden table, is a golden Cavalier in a caftan, with a golden sandwich in his hand. And next to it is a golden Lady with a goblet - the clock strikes, and she beats the goblet on the table - six, seven, eight ... The lilac is envious, peering through the glass, Uncle Pasha sits down at the piano and plays the Moonlight Sonata. Who are you, Uncle Pasha?

Here it is, a bed with glass legs! Translucent at dusk, invisible and powerful, they lift high to the ceiling a tangle of laces, babylons of pillows, a lunar, lilac fragrance of divine music. The white noble head of Uncle Pasha is thrown back, the smile of Mona Lisa on his lips, the smile of Mona Lisa on the golden face of Margarita, who silently stood in the doorway, the lace of the curtains sways, the lilacs sway, the dahlia waves sway on the slope to the horizon, to the evening lake, to the moon pillar.

Play, play, uncle Pasha! Caliph for an hour, enchanted prince, star youth, who gave you this power over us, bewitched, who gave you these white wings behind your back, who lifted your silver head to the evening skies, crowned you with roses, overshadowed with mountain light, fanned by the moon wind ?. .

O Milky Way, dear brother

Milk rivers of Canaan,

Should we sail through the starfall

To the nebulae, where merged

Bodies of lovers fly!

Well, everything. Let's go. It is inconvenient to say to Uncle Pasha the simple word "thank you." It should be more ornate: "Thank you." - "Do not mention it".

“Have you noticed that they only have one bed in their house?” “But where does Margarita sleep? In the attic?" - "May be. But in general, there are summer residents there. ” - "Well, then she is in the hallway, on the bench." - "Maybe they sleep on this glass bed, jack?" - "You're stupid. They are strangers." “You yourself are a fool. What if they are lovers? - "Duck after all, lovers are only in France." Really. This I did not realize.

Life was changing the glass in the magic lantern more and more quickly. With the help of my mother, we penetrated into the mirrored nooks and crannies of an adult atelier, where a bald trouser cutter took shameful measurements, saying: "I'll trouble you," we envied girls in nylon stockings, with pierced ears, we drew in textbooks: Pushkin - glasses, Mayakovsky - mustaches, and Chekhov - otherwise quite gifted by nature - a large white chest. And he immediately recognized us, and the handicapped model from the anatomy course, waiting for us, rushed to us, generously holding out his numbered insides, but the poor fellow no longer worried anyone. And, looking back one day, with perplexed fingers, we felt the smoky glass, behind which, before sinking to the bottom, our garden waved its handkerchief for the last time. But we have not yet realized the loss.

Autumn came to Uncle Pasha and hit him in the face. Autumn, what do you want? Wait, are you serious? The leaves have fallen, the days have darkened, Margarita hunched over. White chickens lay down in the ground, turkeys flew away to warm countries, a yellow dog came out of the chest and, embracing Uncle Pasha, listened to the howling of the north wind in the evenings. Somebody, girls, take Indian tea to Uncle Pasha! How we have grown. How did you pass, Uncle Pasha! Your arms are swollen, your knees are bent. Why are you breathing with such a whistle? I know, I guess: during the day - vaguely, at night - you clearly hear the clanging of iron shutters. The chain is frayed.

Why are you so fussy? Do you want to show me your treasures? So be it, I have five more minutes. How long have I been here. How old am I! Well, this was the one who captivated? All this rags and junk, shabby painted chests of drawers, clumsy oilcloth pictures, rickety jardinières, frayed plush, darned tulle, clumsy market crafts, cheap glass? And it sang and shimmered, burned and called? How stupid you joke, life! Dust, ashes, ashes. Having emerged from the magical bottom of childhood, from the warm shining depths, let's unclench our chilled fist in the cold wind - what, besides a handful of damp sand, have we taken with us? But, as if a quarter of a century ago, Uncle Pasha winds his gold watch with trembling hands. Above the dial, in a glass room, small inhabitants huddled - the Lady and the Cavalier, the masters of Time. The lady hits the table with a goblet, and a thin ringing tries to peck through the shell of decades. Eight nine ten. No. I'm sorry, Uncle Pasha. I have to go.

Uncle Pasha froze on the porch. He was unable to reach the iron door ring and fell face down into the snow. White frosty daisies grew between his stiff fingers. The yellow dog quietly closed his eyes and went through the snowy groats along the starry staircase to the black heights, taking with him a trembling living light.

The new mistress, the elderly Margarita's daughter, poured Uncle Pasha's ashes into a tin can and put them on a shelf in an empty chicken coop - it was troublesome to bury.

Bent in half for years, lowering her face low to the ground, Margarita wanders through the cold through garden, as if looking for lost traces on the silent paths.

- Cruel! Bury him!

But the daughter indifferently smokes on the porch. The nights are cold. We'll light the fires early. And the golden Lady of Time, having drunk the cup of life to the bottom, will knock on the table for Uncle Pasha last midnight.

Tatiana Tolstaya

“They sat on the golden porch…”

Dear Shura

Sit down, sit down, what can I treat you to? .. Come, of course, for God's sake, come! Alexandra Ernestovna is alone in the world, but I really want to chat!

Oh, how I loved! To go or not to go?

- Now let's drink tea. I won't go anywhere without tea. No-no-no. Don't even think.

Yes, I'm not going anywhere. Then I came to drink tea. And she brought cakes. I'll put the kettle on now, don't worry. In the meantime, she will get a velvet album and old letters.

…More tea?

…More tea? Blizzard.

- Who? .. Died.

I mean, how is it… wait a minute… why? But I just... Yes, I just go back and forth! What are you?..

Fakir

Yes, there is something to see.

“…If you are not busy with anything today, please come to me by eight o’clock.” Meet Alice - a lovely creature.

- Thank you, thank you, absolutely!

- And the bard Vlasov? Yura remembered.

- Shut up!

Yes, Owl knows how to deal with people, but somehow we don’t. Well, maybe next time it will.

- Allochka.

- Yes, actually she is Allochka, but you and I will call her Alice, right? I ask to the table, - said Filin. - Well, sir! I recommend the pate. Rare! Such pates, you know ...

“They took them downstairs, I see,” Yura was delighted. - And we're going down. From the pack-karenny peaks-n. After all, once the gods descended to earth. Right?

Owl smiled thinly, raised his eyebrows - they say, maybe, yes, he took it from below, or maybe not. All you need to know. Galya mentally kicked her husband for his tactlessness.

Today, for some reason, he called pies tartlets - probably because of Alice.

- And what happened - the flour is removed from sale? On a global scale? - Yura was having fun, rubbing his hands, his bony nose turned red in the warmth. Tea gurgled.

“Oh my God…” Galya was frightened.

“Oh, what a pity ...” lovely Alice was upset. - How do you eat them now? I always feel so sorry for all the latter ... My mother had a brooch before the war ...

- The last, random! Owl sighed and took another pie.

“The last cloud of the scattered storm,” Galya supported.

“The last of the Mohicans,” Yura remembered.

- No, my mother had a pearl brooch before the war ...

“Everything is transient, dear Alice,” chewed the pleased Owl. “Everything gets old—dogs, women, pearls. Let us sigh about the transience of being and thank the Creator for giving us a taste of this and that at the feast of life. Eat and wipe your tears.

- Maybe he will come to his senses, this Ignat?

"It can't," said the owner. - Forget about it.

Chewed. Music sang overhead. Was good.

- What do you like about the new one? Yura asked.

- Ah ... By the way, they reminded me. Wedgwood - cups, saucers. Milkman. You see - blue on the shelf. Yes, here I am now ... Here ...

- Ah ... - Galya carefully touched the cup with her finger - white carefree dances across the blue foggy field.

- Do you like it, Alice?

- Good ... Here is my mother before the war ...

Do you know who I bought from? Guess... A partisan.

- In what sense?

- Here, listen. Curious story. - Owl folded his fingers into a house, lovingly looking at the shelf, where, cautiously, afraid to fall, the captive service was sitting. - I wandered in the autumn with a gun through the villages. I go to the hut. A man brings me fresh milk. In a cup. Look - the real Wedgwood! What! Well, we started talking, Uncle Sasha is his name, somewhere here I have an address ... well, it doesn’t matter. What turned out. During the war, he was a partisan in the forest. Early morning. A German plane is flying. Zhu-zhu-zhu, - Owl portrayed. - Uncle Sasha raised his head, and the pilot spat - and hit him right. By chance, of course. In Uncle Sasha, of course, the character somehow jumped up, he was a broadsword from a pistol - and the German was spot on. Also by accident. The plane crashed, examined - please, five boxes of cocoa, the sixth - here, the dishes. Apparently, he was taking it to breakfast. I bought from him. A milkman with a crack, well, nothing. Once such circumstances.

- Your partisan is lying! Yura admired, looking around and pounding his knee with his fist. - Well, what a lie! Fantasy!

- Nothing like this. Flynn was dissatisfied. - Of course, I do not rule out that he is not a partisan, but just a vulgar thief, but, you know ... somehow I prefer to believe.

He frowned and took the cup.

Of course people need to be trusted. Galya trampled on Yurina's leg under the table. “I also had an amazing experience. Yura, remember? I bought a wallet, brought it home, and there were three rubles in it. Nobody believes!

Why, I believe. It happens, said Alice. - My mom's...

We talked about the amazing, about premonitions and prophetic dreams. Alice had a friend who foretold her whole life in advance - marriage, two children, divorce, division of an apartment and things. Yura told in detail, in detail, how a car was stolen from an acquaintance and how the police wittily figured out and caught the thief, but that was the point - somehow he won’t remember exactly now. Owl told about a familiar dog who opened the door with his key and warmed up dinner while waiting for the owners.

- No, well, in what way? the women gasped.

- Like what? They have a French stove, electric, with a drive. You press the button - everything turns on. The dog looks at the clock: it's time, he goes to the kitchen, works there, well, at the same time he warms himself up. The hosts will come home from work, and the cabbage soup is already boiling, the bread is sliced, the forks and spoons are cooked. Conveniently.

The eagle owl spoke, smiled, shook his leg, glanced at the contented Alice, the music stopped, and the city seemed to appear outside the windows. Dark tea was smoking in cups, sweet cigarette smoke was curling, it smelled of roses, and outside the window the Garden Ring was quietly squealing under the wheels, merry people were pouring down, the city was shining with bundles of golden lanterns, iridescent frosty rings, multi-colored creaky snow, and the metropolitan sky was sowing new lovely snow, fresh, just made. And, just think, all this feast, all these evening miracles are scattered for the sake of this nothing special Alla, magnificently renamed Alice, - there she sits in her vegetable dress, opened her mustachioed mouth and looks with delight at the almighty gentleman, with a wave of her hand , the movement of the eyebrows transforming the world beyond recognition.

Soon Galya and Yura will leave, crawl away to their outskirts, and she will stay, she can ... Galya was taken by melancholy. For what, oh, for what?

In the middle of the capital nestled the Filin's palace, a pink mountain, decorated with semo and ovamo in the most diverse way - with all sorts of architectural features, pieces and fintibryas: on the socles - towers, on the towers - teeth, between the teeth of the ribbon and wreaths, and from the laurel garlands climbs a book - a source of knowledge , or a compass sticks out its pedagogical leg, and then, you see, an obelisk swells in the middle, and on it stands tightly, hugging a sheaf, a dense plaster wife, with a bright look that denies snowstorms and night, with immaculate braids, with an innocent chin ... It seems so, that now some trumpets will sound, somewhere they will strike cymbals, and the drums will play something state, heroic.

And the evening sky above Filin, above his curly palace, plays with light - brick, lilac - a real Moscow, theatrical and concert sky. And they, on the district ... my God, what a thick, oily-frosty darkness there is now, how empty it is in the cold gaps between the houses, and the houses themselves are not visible, merged with the night sky, burdened with snow clouds, only the windows are burning here and there uneven pattern; gold, green, red squares are trying to push through the polar darkness ... It's late, the shops were closed with bolts, the last old woman rolled out, taking with her a pack of margarine and fighting eggs, no one walks the streets just like that, examines nothing, does not stare around, each one fluttered at his own door, drew the curtains, and reached for the TV button. You look out the window - a circular road, an abyss of darkness traced by double scarlet lights, yellow beetles of someone's headlights ... Something big drove by, nodded with lights on a pothole ... There a light stick is approaching - lights in the forehead of the bus, a trembling nucleus of yellow light, alive the eggs of people inside... And behind the circle, behind the last weak streak of life, on the other side of the snow-covered ditch, the invisible sky has slid down and rests with a heavy edge on the beet fields - right there, right behind the ditch. After all, it is impossible, unthinkable to think that this deaf darkness stretches further, over fields merging into a white rumble, over somehow woven hedges, over villages pressed down to the cold ground, where a doomed light trembles, as if squeezed in an indifferent fist ... and then again - dark-white cold, the hump of the forest, where the darkness is even denser, where, perhaps, the unfortunate wolf is forced to live - he comes out on a hillock in his hard woolen coat, smells of juniper and blood, savagery, misfortune, gloomy, with looks with disgust into the blind windy distances, snow spools are crowded between yellow cracked nails, and teeth are clenched in sadness, and a frozen tear hangs like a stinking bead on a woolen cheek, and every enemy is him, and every murderer ...

Finally ate pineapple. And then I had to get out. And to the house - wow, how many ... Avenues, avenues, avenues, dark blizzard squares, wastelands, bridges and forests, and again wastelands, and sudden, blue from the inside, sleepless factories, and again forests and snow flying in front of the headlights. And at home - dull green wallpaper, a faceted glass lampshade in the hallway, dull crampedness and a familiar smell, and a colored cover taped to the wall women's magazine- for decoration. Ruddy, nasty spouses on skis. She grins, he warms her hands. "Chilled?" - is called. "Chilled?" To break the damn thing, but Yura does not allow - he loves everything sporty, optimistic ... So let him catch a taxi!

Night fell into the dead hours, all the gates were closed, idle trucks rushed past, the starry roof was petrified by the cold, and the rough air fell into clods. "Chief, to the district? .." - Yura rushed about. Galya whined and tucked her legs, jumping on the side of the road, and behind her, in the palace, the last window was burning down, the roses were drowsing, Alice babbled about her mother's brooch, and Owl, in a dressing gown with tassels, tickled her with a silver beard: uh, expensive! More pineapples?

This winter they were called again, and Allochka was already hanging around the apartment like her own, boldly grabbing expensive dishes, smelling of lilies of the valley, yawning.

Filin showed the guests Valtasarov - a dense bearded man, remarkable for his ability to ventriloquize. Beltasarov depicted knocking on the door, milking a cow, the rumble of a cart, the distant howl of wolves, and how a woman beats cockroaches. Industrial sounds were not given to him. Yura really asked to pull himself together, to portray at least a tram, but he did not agree to any: "I'm afraid of a hernia." Galya was uneasy: in Valtasarov she imagined that degree of savagery, to which she and Yura were at hand - through the district, beyond the ditch, to the other side.

She was tired, or something, lately ... Six months ago, she would have rushed to invite Valtasarov to her place, would have called friends, would have served crushed sugar, rye cakes, radishes, for example - what is the miracle peasant used to eat there? - and the peasant would rattle with a cow bottal or rattle a well chain to the general astonished hubbub. Now, somehow, it suddenly became clear: nothing would come of it. To call him - well, the guests will laugh and disperse, but Valtasarov will stay, perhaps he will be asked to spend the night - free the room, and it is a walk-through; he would fall asleep from nine o'clock, smell of sheep, shag, hayloft; at night he will grope his way to the kitchen to drink water, roll up a chair in the dark... A quiet obscenity, Dzhulka will bark, her daughter will wake up... Or maybe he is a lunatic, he will enter their bedroom in the dark, in a white shirt, in felt boots... He will fumble... And in the morning, when you don’t want to see anyone at all, when you are in a hurry to work, and your head is disheveled and it’s cold, the old man will sit in the kitchen, have tea for a long time, then drag illiterate papers out of the zipun: “Daughter, they wrote down the medicine for me here ... He heals everything ... How to get it…”

No, no, there is nothing to think of messing with him!

It is only Owl, tireless, able to pick up, feed, entertain anyone - well, us, and us, of course! Oh Filin! A generous owner of golden fruits, he distributes them right and left, feeds the hungry and waters the thirsty, he waves his hand - and gardens bloom, women become prettier, bores are inspired, and ravens sing like nightingales.

That's what he is! Here he is!

And what wonderful acquaintances he has... Ignatius Kirillich, a dough-taker. Or this ballerina, to whom he goes - Doltseva-Elanskaya ...

- This, of course, is a stage name, - Owl shakes his leg, admiring the ceiling. - In girlhood - Sobakina, Olga Ieronimovna. According to the first husband - Koshkin, according to the second - Myshkin. So to speak, a game for a fall. Thundered, thundered in due time. The Grand Dukes stood in line, dragging topazes in sacks. She had a weakness - smoky topazes. But a very simple, sincere, progressive woman. After the revolution, she decided to give the stones to the people. No sooner said than done: removes the beads, breaks the thread, pours it on the table. Then the doorbell rang: they came to compact. Well, for now, this and that, it returns - the parrot pecked everything clean. Birds, you know, need rocks for digestion. Got drunk on five million - and out the window. She followed him: “Kokosha, where?! And the people?!” He's south. She follows him. I got to Odessa, how - do not ask. And then the ship sets off, the chimneys smoke, screams, suitcases - the public flees to Constantinople. Parrot - on the pipe and sits. He's warm there. So this Olechka Sobakina, what do you think, hooked her trained leg on the ladder and stopped the steamer! And until they caught her parrot, she didn’t let go. She shook every penny out of him and donated to the Red Cross. True, she had to amputate her leg, but she did not lose heart, dancing with crutches in hospitals. Now she is a lot of years old, lying flat, plumper. I go to her, I read Stern to her. Yes, Olechka Sobakina, one of the merchants ... How much strength our people have! How much power unspent ...

Galya looked at Owl with adoration. Somehow, suddenly, he immediately opened up before her - handsome, disinterested, hospitable ... Ah, this mustachioed Alka is lucky! But she does not appreciate it, she looks with the indifferent, brilliant gaze of a lemur at the guests, at Owl, at flowers and cookies, as if all this is in the order of things, as if this is how it should be! As if far away, at the end of the world, Galina's daughter, the dog, "Frozen", are not languishing - hostages in the darkness, on the threshold of an aspen forest trembling with malice!

For dessert, they ate grapefruits stuffed with shrimp, and the magical man drank tea from a saucer.

And there was a stone on my heart.

At home, lying in the dark, listening to the glassy chime of aspens in the wind, the hum of the sleepless ring road, the rustle of wolf fur in the distant forest, the stirring of frozen beet tops under the snow cover, I thought: we will never get out of here. Someone nameless, indifferent, like fate, ordered: this one, this one and this one, let them live in the palace. May they be well. And those over there, and those, and these, and Galya and Yura - live there. Yes, not there, but in-oh-oh-he is there, yes, yes, that's right. By the ditch, beyond the wastelands. And do not climb, there is nothing. The conversation is over. Yes, for what? Allow?! But fate has already turned its back, laughs with others, and its iron back is strong - you won’t get through. If you want - fight in hysterics, roll on the floor, thrash with your feet, if you want - hide and quiet the animals, accumulating portions of cold poison in your teeth.

They tried to climb, they tried to change, they glued ads, they cut exchange bulletins to lacy holes and gutted them, they humiliatedly called on the phone: “We have a forest here ... wonderful air ... the child is very good, and she doesn’t need a summer house ... she herself is like that! I hear from a psycho! .. ”They filled notebooks with hasty notes:“ Zinaida Samoilovna will think ... ”,“ Ksana will call back ... ”,“ Pyotr Ivanovich only with a balcony ... ”Yura miraculously found some old woman, she was sitting alone in a three-room apartment in the mezzanine on Patriarch's ponds, capricious. Fifteen families swirled in the exchange chain, each with its own claims, heart attacks, crazy neighbors, broken hearts, lost metrics. The capricious old woman was taken in a taxi back and forth, they got her expensive medicines, warm shoes, ham, promised money. Everything was about to happen, thirty-eight people trembled and snapped, weddings collapsed, summer vacations burst, somewhere in the chain a certain Simakov fell, a perforation of an ulcer - it doesn’t matter, away! - the ranks closed, another effort, the old woman is wriggling, resisting, under terrible pressure she signs documents, and at that moment, when somewhere there, in transcendental spheres, the pink angel was already filling out orders with an air pen - bang! she changed her mind. So - I took it and changed my mind. And stay away from her.

The cry of fifteen families shook the earth, the earth's axis deviated, volcanoes erupted, typhoon Anna swept away the young underdeveloped state, the Himalayas became even higher, and the Mariana Trench even deeper, but Galya and Yura remained where they were. And the wolves laughed in the forest. For it is said: whoever is commanded to chirp, do not purr. Those who are told to purr, do not tweet.

“A denunciation, perhaps, to write about the old woman,” said Galya. "Yes, but where?" - haggard Yura burned with a bad flame, it was a pity to look at him. Figured this way and that - nowhere. Is it to the apostle Peter not to let a toadstool into paradise. Yura collected stones from the quarry and went to the Patriarch's Ponds at night to break the windows in the mezzanine, but returned with a message that it had already been knocked out - they were not the only ones so smart.

Then they cooled off, of course.

Now she lay and thought about Owl: how he folds his fingers like a house, smiles, shakes his leg, how he raises his eyes to the ceiling when he speaks ... She would have so much to say to him ... Bright light, bright flowers, a bright silver beard with a black spot around mouth. Of course, Alice is not a match for him, and she cannot appreciate Wonderland. And didn't deserve it. There must be someone who understands...

“Blah blah blah,” Yura smacked in his sleep.

... Yes, someone understanding, sensitive ... Steaming a raspberry robe for him ... Filling a bath ... Slippers something ...

Divide things like this: let Yura take an apartment, a dog, furniture. Galya will take away her daughter, some linen, an iron, a washing machine. Toaster. Mirror from the hallway. Mom's good forks. Violet pot. That's all, perhaps.

No, nonsense. How can he understand Galina's life, Galina's third-rate existence, humiliation, poking in the soul? Will you tell! Can you tell me - well, at least how Galya got it - by cunning, bribery, the necessary calls - a ticket to big theater- to the stalls!!! - a single ticket (although Yura was not interested in art), how she washed, soared and curled herself, preparing for a big event, how she left the house on tiptoe, cherishing the golden atmosphere of the sublime in advance - and it was autumn, the rain came, and you can’t find a taxi, and Galya rushed about in the slush, cursing heaven, fate, city planners, and finally reaching the theater, she saw that she had forgotten her shoes at home, and her legs - oh ... Tops in blots, red cakes on the soles, and from them the grass sticks out in shreds - vulgar wheatgrass, marginal gout, ubiquitous gnat. And even the hem is in rubbish.

And Galya - well, what did she do? - she just quietly crept into the toilet and washed her boots with a handkerchief and washed the shameful hem. And then some kind of toad came up - not from the staff, but also a lover of beauty - all like purple jelly, shaking cameos: but how dare you! at the Bolshoi Theater! scrape your filthy but-ogs! yes you are not in b-an! - and suffered, and suffered, and people began to turn around, whisper, and, not understanding, sternly look.

And everything was already spoiled, perished and gone, and Galya was no longer up to high excitement, and the little swans in vain played out their famous dance with a slow trot, - boiling up with evil tears, tormented by unavenged resentment, Galya, without any enthusiasm, crushed the dancers with her eyes, distinguishing through binoculars their yellowish working faces, working neck veins, and sternly, ruthlessly told herself that they were not swans at all, but members of the trade union, that they had everything like ordinary people - both ingrown nails and unfaithful husbands, that now they would dance as ordered , warm leggings are pulled - and home, home: to the icy Zyuzino, to the liquid Korovino, and even to the terrible ring road itself, where Galya silently howls at night, to that impassable horror, where only predatory non-humans would roam and croak like a crow . And now let such a white careless trembling, even that one, make the daily path of Galin, let it fall through the belly into the tormenting clay, into the viscous Precambrian outskirts, and turn around, getting out - this will be a fuete!

Will you tell!

In March, he did not call them, and in April he did not call them, and the summer passed in vain, and Galya got nervous: what happened? tired? unworthy? She was tired of dreaming, tired of waiting for a phone call, she began to forget her dear features: now he seemed to her a giant, ifrit, with a frighteningly black look, huge hands sparkling from rings, with a metallic rustle of a dry oriental beard.

And she did not immediately recognize him when he passed her in the subway - small, hurried, preoccupied - passed her without noticing, and goes to himself, and no longer call out!

He walks like an ordinary person, his small feet, accustomed to waxed parquets, spoiled by velvet slippers, step on the shuffled bath-house tile of the passage, run up the jointed steps; little fists rummaged in their pockets, found a handkerchief, kicked - boof, boof! - on the nose - and again in the pocket; here he shook himself like a dog, straightened his scarf - and further, under the arch with stunted gold mosaics, past the statue of the partisan patriarch, who was perplexedly spreading his bronze hand with a painful mistake in the location of the fingers.

He walks through the crowd, and the crowd, now thickening, now thinning, rustles, pushing towards him - a cheerful stout lady, an amber Hindu in snow-white Muslim underpants, a warrior with boils, mountain old women in galoshes, deafened by the bustle.

He walks without looking back, he doesn’t care about Gali, her greedy eyes, her outstretched neck - he jumped up like a schoolboy, slid onto the escalator - and away, and disappeared, and he’s not there, only a warm rubber wind from an oncoming train, a spike and the knocking of doors, and the murmur of the crowd, like the murmur of many waters.

And on the same evening, Allochka called and indignantly said that she and Filin went to apply to the registry office and there, filling out the documents, she discovered that he was an impostor, that he was renting an apartment in a high-rise building from some polar explorer, and that’s all things, most likely not his, but polar explorers, and he himself is registered in the city of Domodedovo! And that she proudly tossed him the documents and left, not because of Domodedov, of course, but because her pride does not allow her to marry a man who, at least utterly lied. And that they also know who they are dealing with.

That's how it is ... And they knew him! Yes, he is no better than them, he is the same, he just pretended, mimicked, a miserable dwarf, a clown in a padishah's robe! Yes, they are a thousand times more honest with Yura! But does he even understand now that he is guilty, exposed, caught?

Even from the platform it was audible that someone had cooked fish. Galya called. Owl opened and was amazed. He was alone and looked bad, worse than Dzhulka. Tell him everything! What to stand on ceremony? He was alone, and brazenly ate cod to the music of Brahms, and placed a vase of white carnations on the table in front of him.

- Check mark, here's a surprise! Don't forget... Please - pike perch orly, fresh. - Owl moved the cod.

“I know everything,” said Galya and sat down, as she was, in her coat. Alice told me everything.

- Yes, Alice, Alice, a treacherous woman! Well, fish?

- No thanks! And I know about Domodedovo. And about the polar explorer.

- Yes, a terrible story, - Owl was upset. - A man spent three years in Antarctica, and he would have been sitting - it's romantic - and suddenly such a disaster. But Ilizarov will help, I believe. We do it.

– What are they doing? - Galya was taken aback.

- Ears. You do not know? The polar explorer froze my ears. Siberian, broad nature, they celebrated the Eighth of March with the Norwegians, one Norwegian liked his earflaps, take it and exchange with him. On a cap. And on the street the frost is eighty degrees, and in the room it is plus twenty. One hundred degrees temperature difference - is it conceivable? From the street they call him: "Lech!" - he stuck his head out, his ears - one! - and fell off. Well, of course, panic, they slapped him with a stricter, his ears - in a box and immediately by plane to Kurgan, to Ilizarov. So... I'm leaving.

Galya searched in vain for words. Something more painful.

“In general,” Filin sighed. - Autumn. Sad. Everyone abandoned me. Alice left... Matvey Matveich doesn't show his nose... Maybe he's dead? One you, Galochka... One you could if you wanted to. Well, now I'll be closer to you. Now closer. Eat bastard. "Einmal in der Vohe - fish!" What does it mean: once a week - fish! Who said? Well, which of the greats said?

- Goethe? Galya muttered, involuntarily softening.

- Close. Close, but not quite. - Owl perked up, rejuvenated. – We forget the history of literature, ah-ah-ah… Let me remind you: when Goethe – here you are right – as a deep old man fell in love with the young, charming Ulrika and had the imprudence to marry, he was rudely refused. From the threshold. Or rather, from the window. The charmer leaned out the window and barked at the Olympian - well, you know this, you cannot help but know. Old, they say, but there too. Faust turned up. You need to eat more fish - there is phosphorus in it so that the head cooks. Einmal in der Vohe - fish! And she slammed the hatch shut.

- Well no! Galya said. - Well, why ... I read ...

“We all read something, dear,” Owl blossomed. - And I'm giving you the bare facts. He sat back comfortably and raised his eyes to the ceiling. - Well, the old man wanders home, completely broken. As they say, goodbye, Antonina Petrovna, my unsung song!.. Hunched over, a star around his neck - break-break, break-break... And then evening, dinner. Served game with peas. He greatly respected the game, with this, I hope you will not argue? Candles are burning, silver is on the table, of course, so German, - you know, with cones, - the aroma ... So - the children are sitting, so - the grandchildren. His secretary, Ackerman, perched in a corner, scribbling. Goethe picked a wing and threw it away. The piece doesn't fit. Peas even more so. Grandchildren to him: grandfather, what are you doing? He got up like that, shook his chair and bitterly: once a week, he says, fish! I cried and left. Germans are sentimental. Eckerman, of course, immediately brought all this into his conduit. Read if you haven't had time: Conversations with Goethe. Instructive book. By the way, this game - absolutely already petrified - until the thirty-second year was shown in Weimar, in the museum.

- And where do you put the peas? Galya asked furiously.

- The cat was fed.

Since when does a cat eat vegetables?!

- Try not to eat the Germans. They have discipline!

- What, Ackerman also writes about a cat? ..

Yes, it's in the notes. It depends, of course, which edition.

Galya got up, went out, downstairs and out into the street. Farewell pink palace, farewell dream! Fly on all four sides, Owl! We stood with outstretched hands - in front of whom? What have you given us? Your tree with golden fruits has dried up, and your speeches are only fireworks in the night, a minute run of a colored wind, a hysteria of fiery roses in the darkness above our hair.

It was getting dark. The autumn wind played with papers, scooped from urns. She took a last look at the store that had gnawed like a transparent worm on the leg of the palace. She stood at the gloomy counters - beef bones, Dawn puree. Well, let's wipe away the tears with our fingers, smear them on our cheeks, spit on the lamps: our god is dead, and his temple is empty. Goodbye!

And now - home. The path is not close. Ahead is a new winter, new hopes, new songs. Well, let's sing about the outskirts, rains, gray houses, long evenings on the threshold of darkness. Let us sing of wastelands, brown grasses, the cold of earthen layers under a timid foot, we will sing of a slow autumn dawn, a dog barking among aspen trunks, a fragile golden cobweb and the first ice, the first bluish ice in the deep imprint of someone else's footprint.

Limpopo

Judy's grave was dug up last year and a highway was laid in that place. I didn’t go to look, they told me: so, they say, and so, everything is already finished there, the cars rustle and rush, in the cars the children eat sandwiches and the dogs smile, rushing in an embrace with the hostesses - they flashed and gone. What should I do there?

In such cases, they usually send a mournful letter to their relatives and friends: hurry up, they say, take your dear ashes, otherwise we have a shock construction site here, the fires of the five-year plan and all that. But Judy had no relatives - at least in our hemisphere - and only Lenechka was among her relatives, but where can you find Lenechka now? Although, of course, all sorts of enthusiasts are looking for him, and who is not lazy, but more on that later.

And last year it was fifteen years since Judy died, and I, knowing nothing about the highway, as always on this day, lit a candle, put an empty glass on the table, covered it with bread, sat down opposite and drank rowan liqueur for the remembrance of the soul. And a candle burned, and a mirror looked from the wall, and a snowstorm rushed outside the window, but nothing danced in the flame, did not pass through the dark glass, did not call from the snow flakes. Perhaps this was not the way to commemorate poor Judy, but, let's say, wrap yourself in a sheet, light smoking sticks and beat the drum until morning, or, say, shave your head, anoint your eyebrows with lion's fat and squat face down in a corner for nine days, - who knows how they do it in Africa?

I don’t even really remember what her real name was: I had to howl in a special way, clatter my teeth and yawn - so I said it; you can’t write on paper with our letters, and the name, Judy said, is actually very gentle, lyrical, means – according to the reference book – “a small plant from the order of lilies with edible tubers”; in the spring they all go to the hills, dig this thing out with sharp sticks and bake it in the ashes, and then dance all night until the cold dawn, dance until the huge red sun rises, to in turn dance on their faces, black as oil, on blue poisonous flowers stuck in wiry hair, on dog-tooth necklaces.

So it all happens with them or not - now it’s hard to say, especially since Lenechka - inspired by himself and even encouraged by Juda’s smile from ear to ear - wrote a bunch of poems on this subject (I still have them lying around somewhere); truth and fiction are so mixed up that now, after so many years, you can’t figure out whether black shiny people ever danced on the hills, rejoicing at the sunrise, whether a blue river flowed under the hills, smoking at dawn, whether the equator curved with a morning rainbow , hanging, melting in the sky, and did Judy really have sixty-four cousins, and is it true that her maternal grandfather imagined himself a crocodile and hid in dry reeds to grab the feet of bathing children and ducks?

And everything is possible! Why not? It's exotic for them there, but for us, nothing at all happens.

Dancing dancing, but Judy, apparently, managed to intercept somewhere a scrap of some kind of education, because she came to us for an internship (in the veterinary part, my God!). Unwound scarves, scarves, scarves; scarves, checkered shawls, shawls made of goat yarn with knots and splinters, gauze shawls, orange, with gold streaks, shawls of blue linen and striped linen; unwound; looked: why train there? - there’s nothing to train there, let alone fight with cattle: horns, tails, hooves, tripe and abomasum, droppings and udders, moo-o-o and b-e-e, it’s scary to think, but against this clumsy army - just something: a column of living darkness, a piece of darkness, trembling from the cold, brown dog eyes - and that's all, and nothing more. But Lenechka was immediately fascinated and smitten, and the reasons for this sudden surging passion were, like all Lenechka's reasons, purely ideological: mental whirlwind, or, to put it more simply, rational dominant, was always his main feature.

Well, firstly, he was a poet and the dust particles of distant lands weighed heavily on his poetic scales, and secondly, he, again, as a creative person, constantly protested - no matter what, the object of protest was revealed in the process of indignation, - and Judy emerged as an embodied protest, as a challenge to everything in the world: a piece of darkness, coal in a snowstorm, tangerine shawls in a strong Moscow January near Candlemas! I am quoting Lena. For me, it's nothing special. Thirdly, she was black for a reason, but - like a stoker, - Lenechka admired, - but a stoker, along with a janitor, a night watchman, a forester, a gatekeeper, and in general anyone who is freezing in a sheepskin coat under cruel stars, whether he wanders into felt boots, creaking with snow, guarding the night construction site bared with piles, whether he carries a drowsy watch on the hard chair of a state-owned house, or in the dim light of the boiler room, at the pipes wrapped in rags, looks at the pressure gauges - he was Lenechkin's favorite hero. I'm afraid that his idea of a stoker was too romantic or outdated - stokers, as far as I know, are not so black at all, I knew one - but let's forgive the poet.

Lenechka respected all these professions as the last springboards where the true intellectuals retreated, for the time hung in the yard when, according to Lenechka, the spiritual elite, no longer able to look at how its weak but honest candle crackles and smokes in the smelly air of the era, she stepped back, turned around and went under the hooting of the mob into cellars, gatehouses, makeshift houses and crevices, so that, hiding there, she would save the last candle, the last tear, the last letter of her scattered alphabet. Almost no one returned from the cracks: some drank themselves, others went crazy, some according to the documents, some in reality, like Seryozha B., who was hired to guard the cooperative attic and somehow in the spring he saw heavenly bouquets and silver bushes with lights, beckoning his feral soul with the harbinger of the Second Coming, towards which he went out, stepping out of the window of the fourteenth floor straight into the fresh air and thereby overshadowing the pure joy of the workers who came out to admire the festive fireworks.

Many thought up a strict bright thought about the pure princely air, about girls in green sundresses, about dandelions near wooden fences, about bright water and a faithful horse, about patterned ribbons, about sentinel heroes - they became saddened, twisted, cursed the course of time and grew themselves golden important beards, chopped birch chocks - to cut spoons, bought samovars, cuckoo clocks, woven rugs, crosses and felt boots, condemned tea and ink, walked slowly, they said to smoking women: “Lady, you stink”, and the third eye that opens into forehead after long fasts and mental downtime, magic and witchcraft began to see everywhere.

And there were those who tore the collar, freeing the choking throat, tore off their clothes, poisoned with poison and pus, and renounced packs and packs, crying: anathema to Augeas and his deeds, his wives and his heirs, his horses and his chariots, his gold and his servants, his idols and his tombs!.. And, having made a noise and wiped off their saliva, they tightened the belts and ropes on knots and sacks, took the children in their arms and the elderly - on the backs of their necks, - and, without turning around and without crossing themselves, they dissolved into the sunset : a step forward - along a humpbacked bridge - across the Lethean waters - a wooden springboard - darkened air - whistling in the ears - the sobs of the globe, quieter and quieter, and behold: another world, blooming thistles, spring thorns, wormwood infusion, capers crumble and the grasshopper grows heavier, and ... - oh, and the new stars are innocent, and the golden clusters of lights below, as if passed, stepping wide and unevenly, leaving traces, someone burning, - and swarming, wriggling, golden segmented worms and shining tentacles, and now - bloody -blue, doused with rum and set on fire, burning the eyes behind and fingers, spinning, hissing in black water, the cake of a strange city, and the sea with smoking tongues of rivers creeps into the cooling, darkened, already slowed down and twitching with a film space - goodbye, hesitating, goodbye, remaining, forever, forever goodbye! ..

But others survived, survived, saved themselves from changes, lay motionless behind a strip of peeling wallpaper, behind a lagging jamb, under a leaky felt, and now they came out, honest and old-fashioned, smelling of old virtues and discounted sins, they came out without understanding, not recognizing the air , no streets, no souls - this is not the city, and midnight is not the same! - came out, carrying under their arms the jewels saved in a lethargic dream: rotten novelties, leaky audacity, musty discoveries, overdue insights, amen; squinted, strange, rare and useless came out, just as a white cockroach, a museum rarity, comes out of clotted paper, from an old pile of newspapers, and the owners, amazed at the play of nature, do not dare to beat with a slipper a noble animal, like a Siberian fox.

But it is now. And then - January, black frost, two-sided cruppy love, and these two, standing in my hallway former apartment facing each other and looking at each other in amazement - well, to hell with them, it was necessary to immediately pull them apart in different directions and root out future misfortunes and outrages.

Okay, now what to say.

We forgot her real name and just called her Judy, as for the country where she came from, I somehow couldn’t find her in the new atlas, and I handed over the old one to waste paper - in a hurry, without thinking, because I urgently it was necessary to buy out the junk edition of P. Raskovyrov’s “Supon River”: they still remember that this two-volume book changed well for Baudelaire, and Baudelaire was needed by one masseur who knew that broker who finally helped me with an apartment, although he spoiled a lot of blood . That's not the point. I didn't find the country. Apparently, after another fight, carve-up, witchcraft and cannibalism, Judina's compatriots pulled the hills, and the smoky river, and the fresh morning valley in different directions, sawed the crocodiles into three parts, dispersed the people and burned thatched huts. It happens. There was a war there, that's the thing, that's why Judy is stuck with us: no money, no home, and no one answers letters.

But at first she was just a wrapped up, frozen and little understanding girl, who was going to treat animals and trusted Lenechkin's every word.

I knew him well, Lenechka, from my school years, and therefore I could neither trust nor respect, but others - well, I never bothered others to respect. After all, he was a nice fellow, a childhood friend—they don’t respect them, but they love them—and he and I once hurried through the same morning iron haze, past the same snowdrifts, fences, and swaying lanterns into the same a red brick school girdled on the outside with medallions with alabaster profiles of frostbitten literary classics. And what we had in common was the anguish of green walls, floors smeared with red mastic, echoing stairs, the warm stench of locker rooms, and the scary-eyed Saltykov-Shchedrin on the landing on the third floor, painful and obscure, writing vaguely about some kind of crucian who needed to be convicted in a six-month test purple gorono stamps. This Saltykov either “flagged ulcers”, or “opened birthmarks”, and behind his frantic, fixed gaze, a bloodied sadist’s apron, the executioner’s tense tongs, a slick bench, which it would be better not to look at, stood up.

These painted floors, and muddy crucian carp, and ulcers, and the whistle of the belt with which Lenechka was flogged by his father - all this has passed, the horizon, as they say, has been shrouded in haze, and it doesn’t matter! Now Lenechka was an inspired liar and a poet - which is one and the same thing - a small, bow-legged youth, with a ram-blonde head and a round, loosely closing mouth of a beaten rabbit. Friends, they are. They are not beautiful.

He was, of course, a fighter for the truth, wherever it seemed to him. Did you come across liquid coffee in the dining room - Lenechka ran into the catering corridors and, calling himself a public inspector, demanded a report and an answer; did they spread damp linen on the train - Lenechka ignited and, ramming the cars, smashing the vestibules, broke through to the head of the train, declaring himself the auditor of the Ministry of Railways, and threatened to smash to shreds this thieves' carriage, and the driver's cab, and the radio room, and especially - the car -restaurant: trample on mashed potatoes, tear borscht and semi-borscht with blows of mighty fists and bury everyone, everyone, everyone under an avalanche of boiled eggs that collapsed.

By the time we are talking about, Lenechka had already been expelled from the editorial office of the evening newspaper, where, under the slogan of truth and sincerity, he tried to arbitrarily give a literary luster to obituaries:

DIED IN TERRIBLE TORTURE

Ter-Psikhoryants Ashot Ashotovich,

chief engineer of a sugar refinery, member of the CPSU since 1953. We can’t say for the whole team, but most of the workers in the packaging shop, two from the accounting department and the deputy chairman of the local committee, L. L. Koshevaya, will remember him with a kindly quiet word for some time.

LONG-EXPECTED DEATH

Popov, Semyon Ivanych,

former factory manager soft toys, came on the night of February 2 to 3, not particularly surprising or upsetting anyone. Lived and will be. 90 years is no joke! Maybe someone wants to attend the funeral, so they, most likely, on Wednesday, the 6th, if they bring coffins, otherwise it happens with us.

ENOUGH ONLY IN A WEEK

Poluektova Klarissa Petrovna,

a person with no definite occupation, born in 1930, a bitter drunkard. Found by neighbors on the balcony, she did not show signs of life, and now, clearly, she will not. We will all be there to say the least. Ehehe.

Or finally:

baby Peter playing with fire,
I have now reached the threshold of paradise.
Tasting heavenly pineapple
baby Peter, pray for us!

Lenechka was indignant at the narrowness and callousness of the newspaper staff, who did not accept his style, he saw in their position stupidity, standard, lack of wings and persecution of the creative intelligentsia - and, in my opinion, quite rightly; he saw neglect of the Russian word, powerful and poisonous, but at the same time tender and flexible, he saw a reluctance to expand the scope of the genre, and most importantly, deceit, deceit and contempt for the simple and terrible, waiting for us all, the act of death of a simple person.

He drank tea in my communal kitchen, involving my neighbor Spiridonov, who was also exhausted in the fight against the indifferent, into the argument and shouting: the tear-off paper coin invented by Spiridonov cost him an early heart attack, divorce from his wife, exclusion from the party and loss of illusions. A former enthusiast, and now an extinct, gray-haired man, Spiridonov went out with a glass of tea in a railway cup holder, donated by his colleagues for the anniversary, exhibited vanilla dryers, and they, these two, mumbled and shouted to each other: “Hegels are fucked up ... he says to me: and you Was the documentation substantiated?.. The fantasy of a worm... I say: how much metal do we throw under the dog's tail, these are the Altai Mountains... fly brains with sclerotic plaques... all the bus depots - right? the whole subway - so? .. ”- and wept, embracing, about clean, fresh, spotless, about trust in thought, about love for a person, about a simple smile - but you never know what they cried about in those years! Eh, ba, chu, fu-you, alas, wow - how sadly the compilers of the textbook of sighs once wrote mother tongue Barkhudarov and Kryuchkov. “Pushkin was yelled at! - Spiridonov got excited. - Oh, Pushkin would be here! .. "-" There will be Pushkin! Let's make Pushkin! Lenechka promised.

He outlined his plan to Spiridonov. I seem to be an intellectual, right? - said Lenechka. An intellectual… have you seen the posters, you know?.. this is the one who is depicted behind, behind a worker and a peasant woman, wearing glasses, and asking to be driven over, say, with a piece of pipe or a piece of hardened cement, with a thin, uncertain smile, ready go to the humiliated: I know, they say, I know my place! .. He, the poster, knows his place: it is behind, in the doorway, at the threshold, - and one undrawn foot is already groping for a step down, a reverse course, a way to retreat; this is the place where they throw, so be it, cast-offs, scraps, leftovers, sawdust, cigarette butts, cleanings, scraps, remnants, mussels, stonecrops, ovidki, hearsay and slander. What, they say, got up! .. I love you! .. Oh, don’t like it ?!. Don't love?! Here's to you, here's to you, here's to you! Call him!.. p-bastard... He strives to bite... He grinned, you see - he doesn't like it... Well, get out of here! s-cattle ... Drive, drive vzashey, hey, men, attack, break him! .. Ah, run! Run, run… You can’t run far… you were still talking here, aphids…

Not without reason, not without reason, the intellectual is depicted in official pictures - that is, posters - from behind, is depicted as the second and last grade, just as, by the way, as on posters calling for the friendship of peoples, the black goes second grade - behind the white, slightly retreating. Like, friendship is friendship, but after all, comrades, a black man still needs to be understood ...

And therefore, the intellectual (Lenechka) and the Negro (Judy) must unite by marriage, and this union of the humiliated and insulted, wounded and rejected, this minus multiplied by a minus, will give a plus, - such a curly, pot-bellied, dark-skinned plus; if you're lucky - Pushkin will be right away, if you're not lucky - we'll sigh again, and we'll sigh again, otherwise we'll wait for grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and, going into the coffin, I will bless! Lenechka decided. “Dare,” Spiridonov sighed and left, carrying away a jubilee coaster on which three silver satellites circled the earth's pea with a single country on its convex side.

Lenechka began to dare.

The moment for this was the most, I must say, vague, since it was at that time that it became clear that Judy, or whatever her real name was, remained without civil status, that is, completely without any status - in the place of her African homeland, a theater of war, one country does not recognize it, another pushes it out, a third invites internment for an indefinite time, and ours is extremely sorry, shrugging it off, combing its hair, blowing a comb, smiling kindly and absent-mindedly looking out the window, but to offer absolutely nothing comforting at this foggy moment can not. Does not hit, and then thanks.

Aunt Zina, Lenechka's aunt, not yet suspecting what kind of a pig her nephew was going to put on her and her well-being, said to Judy: “Daughter, hold on. It’s hard for everyone, ”but Uncle Zhenya, her husband, who, by the way, was at the peak of his diplomatic career and was waiting, as it happened, for an appointment in the opposite corner of the African continent to Juda, did not approve of contacts with a foreign citizen, even if she was homeless, and As the hour of the final execution of his documents approached, he watched himself more and more sharply and vigilantly so as not to take a false step in one direction or another. So, he forbade Aunt Zina to subscribe to Novy Mir, mindful of its recent, not yet dried up poisonousness, he deleted from the notebook all the names he knew with suspicious endings of surnames and even, after hesitating, some Nurmukhammedov (which he later bitterly regretted and, tormenting his eyes, he looked at the sheet in the light in order to restore the phone number, since it turned out to be just a car repair crook) and in the last, crisis week he even beat and lowered all imported canned food into the garbage chute, up to Bulgarian apple jam, and already attempted to republican products, but Aunt Zina defended beetroot horseradish with her body.

And here you are, at the very moment when he brought himself to an unheard-of, incredible, inhuman ideological purity, when he almost glowed like a good, ripe persimmon, all the bones are translucent and not a single speck, no matter how you believe, you will not find - no, no, no, did not participate, was not involved, do not have, did not consist, did not intend, did not pronounce, did not meet, never thought about, never heard in my life, did not keep in my head, did not have I didn’t have the slightest idea, and neither day nor night I had no rest, crying out: holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was, is and is to come, - at this very moment a boy, a jerk, a nephew, and, scientifically speaking, a close relative , you see, stains his reputation, in comparison with which the hermits of Mount Athos are just hooligans writing indecent words in elevators, dogs, and sorcerers, and fornicators, and murderers, and idolaters!

So, Uncle Zhenya made a piercing squeal and beat on the floor, because because of Lenechka's matrimonial aspirations, his career hung in the balance, and he had already mentally gone, served and returned, and brought a bunch of good things: both wall masks, and rugs, and a floor lamp with a fleece, not to mention large-sized things; he already foresaw how the future guests, in five or six years, having to appear guests, going from boots to slippers, will go around the perimeter of the living room, seemingly impartial, but in their souls torn by envy; how he would defuse the atmosphere of the evening with jokes: he would take a rubber Hong Kong spider out of the bag and throw it against the wall so that, clinging and breaking, and clinging again, it ugly crawled along the wall to the happy screams and fright of the ladies; how they will drink tea from a blue jar, where such a chick in shalwars is dancing on the lid - a diamond in the nostril, and in the eyes, you know, such a false innocence; they will drink Indian tea, and some, a small pan, will get by with Georgian tea - in short, Uncle Zhenya intended to live luxuriously, to live forever, but God judged otherwise, and I will say, looking ahead, that when he, after several brilliant months of his successful African career, visited a national reserve, where he teased a baboon with a stick, then gaped and was torn to shreds by some passing animal of theirs. As if anticipating something, as if languishing, he nevertheless managed to send the aforementioned sticky spider as a gift to Lenechka before his death, but the parcel went so long that upon arrival the spider turned out to be overdue and did not want to crawl, but simply slapped; so long that even the newspapers, which promised that the bright memory of Uncle Zhenya would forever remain in our hearts, were handed over to waste paper to turn into, in the eternal cycle of the transformation of matter, eighty kopecks of wallpaper, the queue for which is long and sad, like a mockery over our aspirations.

But all this was later, and at that moment Uncle Zhenya was still a living and happy man: he had the right wife - the daughter of a serviceman, and the tiles in the toilet were light green, Czech, and on the wall - for reliability - hung a balalaika. So his screeching was quite natural and justified.

He squealed - as a younger but successful brother - at Lenechka's father, pointing out to him what the devil knows what kind of upbringing given to children: Lenechka, disgraced on the sidelines of the press - and after all, he could, a puppy, grow into a strong, international sports journalist, if would obey uncle; Svetlana, Lenechkina's sister, a dissolute girl, inclined to hang around cafes and drive cars with no one knows whom; at the same time, the youngest, Vasilko, a fifth-grade student, was absolutely innocent and even just won second place at the city sledding Olympiad. He screeched at his wife, Aunt Zina, accusing him of connivance, rotozey, indulgence, and that her great-aunt's husband was once going to get a job in the Design Bureau, and meanwhile the grandfather of one of the former employees of this Design Bureau lived next door to a peasant who owned a 1909 by two cows; and this can be regarded as a deliberately dangerous proximity to the kulak circles; he squealed at the cat, which, as March approached, was looking out of the window more and more often, at the janitor, at the radish sellers in the alley, at the elevator attendant, at the watchman of the cooperative parking lot, at the head of the housing office, and even at the hamster who lived in a cage in the kitchen, moreover, the hamster, having listened to Uncle Zhenya , died immediately.

Be that as it may, Uncle Zhenya's squeal was terrible, just as terrible must be the screech of a man falling, sliding into an abyss and holding only on tufts of grass: the pliable dry soil is dusty and crumbles, and the roots swell, emerging from earthen nests - close, close to the eyes; and an alarmed spider or ant has already run out of its house - it will remain, and you will fly, blooming for a short moment as a bird, a towel, still warm and lively a flyer swaddled by its own cry; your feet are already scratching the empty air, and the world is ready, spinning and turning, to offer you its magnificent, green, rough cup.

And I felt sorry for him, as it always happens, I feel sorry for the crushed, broken in the blood, who dreamed without eyes.

Meanwhile, Lenechka, having ordered Vasilko to start sawing out a shelf with a jigsaw, on which he would put the works of the future Pushkin, came to grips with the education of Judy and her conversion to his poetic faith. He could not bring her to his own home, nor, of course, to his uncle's, and my communal kitchen, animated by the disabled Spiridonov, resounded with Lenechka's insane texts, protests and toasts.

"So what do you want? Speak! I will do everything!" - Lenechka scattered standard love promises, having drunk tea with disabled gingerbread.

Judy was embarrassed. She wants to become a veterinarian as soon as possible... She wants to be useful and treat small animals... Cows, horses... - Honey, it's not called: animals, these are cattle!.. - Horses are not horned... - They think so in vain! In vain! - seethed Lenechka. - The horses had horns, but they disappeared in the process of evolution, when the horse got down from the trees, obeying social needs, and went out into the field, to the peasant, where the horns only interfered. Do you have cows and horses in Africa? Do they go into hibernation? the poet rejoiced. And he explained to Judy that the cow, having handed over all the affairs and ordered about the calf, goes into the forest, digs a hole and, comfortably sitting, curled up, sleeps until spring, swept with snow, with a gentle smile, closing her lovely eyes, sung in our and not our epic, and she dreams of fast streams and green meadows in placers of daisies - and the hunters, lined up in a chain, are already going to winter fishing with lanterns and red flags, and rummaging through the snowdrifts with a rake, and raising a sleeping woman with tongs - that's why we have meat only ice cream, this is not a zebu for you.

But the snows will come down, Judy, dear, let's go out of town, into dense forests and wide fields - dark spruces, huge stumps - you will see our northern fauna: curly silk nightingales with blue eyes, white-fleeced sheep with silver hooves that sing wonderful songs with refrains over running waters, and what kind of cats we have in dug velvet caftans with copper buttons, and what kind of goats - you would know - politically literate, neat, with a firm civic position, in steel glasses! And our spiders, and the flies - funny, in red boots, with gingerbread under their arms - say, Spiridonov! Keep your head up, Spiridonov, let's drink to the spider!

It cannot be said that I really liked this nightly Sabbath, this pantyhose and tea drinking in my small territory - I had my own plans for life and some dreams: to get married, bring my mother from Fryazino to me or change for a one-room apartment; all this, however, somehow, as soon as it was outlined, got confused and fell apart, and it’s not that there were no husbands or exchange options - everything was, but some kind of shabby, wretched, fifth grade, with flaws and caverns, fluxes and distortions .

It was impossible to take seriously, for example, the groom Valery: strong, tall, very self-respecting for this, with the face of a policeman or a responsible worker, Valery ate a lot of meat, kept weights, expanders, a bicycle, skis and some other optional sports at home. squiggles; his dream was to buy a blue jacket with metal buttons, but that was not given for any money. Without a jacket, Valery felt like he had fallen out of the grooves of life. One autumn we walked with him along the windy embankment of the Yauza, it was an orange cold evening, the last leaves were flying, a pure star lit up in the sky and it blew in the coming winter, longing, a new, meaningless, inevitably approaching year; the wind picked up and threw the urban, freezing dust at us. Valery stopped and sobbed. I stood, waiting, looking at the sky and the star in the void; I understood that words are nothing, that consolation is not needed, I understood that this is grief, collapse, collapse: the blue jacket went out of fashion, floating past Valery; like a pink morning cloud, a fleeting vision, cranes, an angel in the moonlit heights, a jacket floated away - beckoned, disturbed, confused the soul, entered dreams and passed, as they passed, noisy and gleaming, luxurious, colorful and spicy kingdoms of the East. After weeping, Valery wiped his inflexible Komsomol face with his red hand, and we walked on, hushed and sad, and parted at the greengrocer's on the corner, never to meet again.

Not suitable for suitors and Garik, spiritual man. Not that I was embarrassed by constant searches in his kennel: the state kept attacking Garik, taking away his spiritual papers and pictures, taking away his favorite books, and sometimes taking Garik himself; it’s not that his six children from his previous wife scared me - Garik was a kind, loving, sweet and extremely dodgy young man: he fed the children, and somehow quickly, tirelessly bustling, restored the papers, - but something is boring to me it was: to listen to him - everything is “veterograd” and “veterograd”, yes paths, yes searches, yes grace, yes everything sweet and not made by hands, and life goes on - bad, but the only one, and in his kennel he has trash, rags, dust, and bottles of glue on the windowsill, and lean porridge in a burnt saucepan, and rags on a shaky carnation... and is it really this, this world, frail and ugly, that was promised and whispered, proclaimed and anticipated when everything began, when the invisible gates opened and an inaudible gong sounded?

To tell the truth, I wanted love, and it was, because love is always there, right here, in you, but you don’t know with whom to share it, who to entrust to carry a wonderful, heavy burden - that one is weak, and this one will soon get tired, and those over there - run away from them until you are snatched up like jam pies at the "Children's World", throwing a piglet and wrapping your booty in oiled paper.

Yes, I wanted something like that - heavier than Valeriev's weights and lighter than Garik's homegrown wings, I wanted to leave or leave, or talk for a long, long time, or maybe listen, and I imagined someone obscure: a companion, friend, passerby, and I imagined the way : a night path, the smell of preli, drops from wet bushes, laughter in the dark, and a fire ahead: a wooden house, and a washed floor, and a book in which everything is written, and all night, until morning - the noise of tall, invisible trees.

And one more thing...but whatever. There was reality: the kitchen, screams, Spiridonov's gray bristles diving into a glass of tea, crowding, and these two, this unnatural couple with far-reaching plans. We closed the window tightly so as not to hear the distant, needle-sharp, endless and painful cry of Uncle Zhenya.

“Well, old woman,” Lenechka hinted, “if the fate of Russian literature is dear to you, why don’t you take the cot into the kitchen?”

I didn’t want to sleep in the kitchen, or “go out for a walk,” or go away to Fryazino for a week, and Spiridonov didn’t want to either, but Lenechka cursed, fought and abused us, both privately, in working order, and in verse, for eternity, - and bought Spiridonov and me tickets to the cinema for two-part films with newsreels.

Spring was already noisy - cold, nocturnal; the wind was already humming in the trees, and water was flying in the wind, and the birds, cawing, huddled into balls over the through trees, over the rusted domes; clean puddles trembled, reflecting the fires of dumplings, wine glasses, chebureks, and in the air breathed, flew, ran anxiety, life, desires - common, unclaimed, no one's - and I walked arm in arm with the gloomy, dragging invalid Spiridonov along the the Moscow, Muslim moon, and his foot, laced into a shoe for fourteen rubles and thirty kopecks, drew a long, winding line around Moscow, as if plowing the barren urban asphalt, as if preparing a furrow for unknown industrial seeds. And then in the cinema hall, in wet coats, ruffled, scowling - I and a disabled person - were looking at some kind of flashing rolling mill, blanks, clumsy heroes of labor, red-hot bars of iron, tractors, record-breaking pigs, at bald, well-eaten people in Cheviot suits, rubbing spikelets in their fingers, at the stream of ideologically seasoned grain pouring on us, they watched, dutifully waiting until somewhere, out of the fact of friendship of homeless peoples, the lawless baby Pushkin would be tied up as our last hope.

By the summer, Pushkin was still gone, and my life had become completely unbearable: international lovers settled in my room as if at home, ate noodles from a saucepan, played the zurna, walked around naked and even tried to make a fire on the floor in some kind of iron bag ; Lenechka bought Judy white mice and a white male cat for scientific entertainment; being a convinced pacifist, Lenechka imposed his views on the cat: he developed a system of educational lectures and conducted practical seminars on refraining from mouse-eating.

The Hannibals were always bad with money: Lenechka got a part-time job in the women's calendar as a reviewer of recipes for national cuisines. But truthfulness did him a disservice here too, because they didn’t want low truths, criticism and revelations on the calendar, they didn’t want to start the May salad recipe with the words: “Let’s be frank: there’s nothing to eat,” they didn’t want messages and sermons like: “If you need a market tomato within your means, stop and ask yourself: did you live like this? Where did you sin? When did she stumble, turning off the narrow path of virtue onto the beaten road of temptation? .. ”- and they again kicked him out, and he again became proud and indignant, and immediately made himself a couple of friends, or rather, disciples and followers, bearded, in rumpled clothes, hung with crosses and bells, with wandering smiles and distant cow-eyes, and, inviting them to his place, or rather, to me, he read edifications to them, taught them to choose the right paths and presented as a clear example of a cat who, having experienced the power of the True Word, became already the most perfect Buddhist and transcended everything earthly and transient, as well as running through.

Warm summer, empty Sunday city - I went to wander along the alleys, choosing old, deaf corners, where it smells of beer spilled in the dust, cheap plaster, building fence boards, where shingles sticks out of the walls of houses, and dandelions - trample them, don't trample - innocently and stupidly make their way at the foot of sheds and temples since the time of Ivan Kalita. The heavy gleam of a church dome in the distance, the incessant and senseless rustle of leaves that have already faded, running patches of sunspots, the stink and rags around garages, grass in the shade of lindens and earthen bald patches in courtyards, on areas where clothes are dried - here to live, here to die, so without meeting anyone, without saying anything to anyone.

Maybe there was one person in another city ... but it doesn’t matter if nothing came of it, and now, after so many years, I alone will drink a glass of rowan liqueur for the mention of Juda’s soul and stare into the flame of a candle for a long time, and I will not see anything in it, except for a radiant petal with a white core, except for emptiness, burning in emptiness?

Goodbye, Judy, I'll tell her, you're not the only one missing for a penny, I'm disappearing too, all the animals of my breed have fled in all directions - gone beyond the green Lethean waters, behind the glass wall of the ocean - it will not part to give passage; those who gape are shot, the hunters hunt gloriously, their mustaches are in blood, and fresh feathers are stuck to their teeth; and those who jumped in all directions in a desperate thirst for survival, hastily changed into other people's skins: they adjusted horns and tails at the fragments of mirrors, pulled on gloves with claws, and now it is no longer possible to tear off the sham, dead hair. I meet them sometimes, and we look at each other dully, as if from under water, and we must probably say something, but it is pointless to say, as when you are leaving, and the other one sees him off, and you are standing in carriage, behind double unwashed glass, and the other one is on the platform, in gusts of night rain, and both of you are smiling tensely: all the words have been said, but you can’t leave, and you nod your head, and draw a wave with your finger in the palm of your hand: “write”, and the other one also nods: I understand, I understand, I’ll write, but he won’t write, and you both know it, but the train still stops, everything doesn’t move, the tremors still won’t start, linen, rubles, a long conversation of neighbors , dark sugary tea, oiled paper, a dim flash of lanterns on an empty half-station, beady, flashing gold of a rain dotted line on the glass, an oblique and sinful look of a soldier, the swaying crampedness of the corridor and the shameful cold of the toilet, where the rumble of wheels is stronger and more offensive, and from the twilight close and your own reflection looks at you unflatteringly - humiliation - defeat ... - in this is ahead; and the train is still standing and not moving, and your smile is strained and ready to slide, to shed a tear, and in anticipation of a push, an end, a last stroke, you move your mouth, whispering meaningless words: eighty-seven, seventy-eight; seventy-eight, eighty-seven, - and on the other side of the deafness, the other one also stirs and lies with relief: "definitely."

It was here that Spiridonov, who had ruined his teeth with cheap dryers and crushing boiling water every night, was forced to order new crowns for himself. The absent-minded invalid believed that he was betting gold, but he was robbed right in the mouth for a decent amount, as it turned out later. However, the variety of metals in his elderly mouth created a rare but wonderful effect: Spiridonov himself, without any additional devices, began to receive radio transmissions. Quiet tangos floated from it, distant foreign voices, prayers, football matches screamed, raging no one knows where; he usually worked on short waves and turned on in the evening. In the early hours he broadcast some kind of rubbish - "To you, inquisitive" or a concert at the request of machine operators, but the more the darkness thickened, the more mysteriously the world muttered and laughed, and the lights broke out of the darkness, and some colored lights, and drums ... and somewhere water was running, all in lights - what kind of water is this, and what kind of lights are these, and what are the drums talking about - how can we know! .. And at midnight, the invalid was broadcasting, it seems, in Portuguese. Or maybe not in Portuguese, how should we know! Oh, what a beautiful language it was! The flat, taut ocean rhythmically beat the shore in a long wave like a whip, motley sails entered the harbors, and stone steps descended to the water, and there was a smell of shells and boiled rice, and stern women sang loudly under red roofs about flowers, about murderers, about ships loaded with bast and lacquer boxes, birds and beads, purple silk and allspice. Or maybe everything was completely different there - how can we know if we have not seen it and will never, never, never see it - never, until death, to the creak of a cheap painted coffin made of raw croaker, lowered on a hairy rope jerks, jerks, the last earthly arshins into the autumn sandy loam, loam, red soil! .. - to the last aster, the royal flower, pressed into the November earth, with the head bitten off by the heel of a gray-haired, hurried gravedigger! “Never, never,” Spiridonov sang; “never,” I cried, “never,” shouted Lenechka, “time stood still, space dried up, people hid in the cracks, the domes rusted and the fences were braided with white bindweed, you shout - you can’t hear it, you look - don’t raise your sleepy eyelids, the dust is standing up to the cloud, and Pushkin's grave was overgrown with a dense swan! shouted Lenechka. Geese-swans fly over a thick swan! They will howl like a beast, then they will knock with their feet! Geese-swans with mustaches - scary for a girl alone; is that you, Ivan Susanin? Take me, dear! There is no limit to our plans, all the people are rushing up, and black crayfish have dug into the swollen body! The Greeks go through the rivers, through the blue seas; all the Varangians go to the Greeks without saying anything. Chill runs for the gate, the nightingale opened its mouth: the fierce enemy does not surrender to my dear homeland. The nightingale wheezes on a branch, the tree bends under it; “Crow!” screams the six-winged seraph in the cage; the bird of God knows neither mercy nor shame: it rips out the heart with meat and devours it without a trace. And the string rings in the fog, and the road is all dusty ... If life deceives you, it means that the homeland orders.

But Spiridonov, deaf to Lenechka's decadent poetry, dreamed of his own, and his plans were grandiose: some kind of antennas, amplifiers, coils of wire, radio tubes, color music - yes, color music, he was already going to voice imaginary dance floors and stadiums, he was already dreaming about television images, about festivals, friendship crosses, the presentation of Olympic medals, the installation of congratulatory statues in the homeland - in marble up to the neck, in bronze up to the boobs, in granite, with a sword in hand, five stories tall; he has already tore down mountains and cut tunnels, blocked rivers with dams and reshaped the republics, he has already gone into outer space and from there, flashing with fixes and rotating telescopic eyes, huge as King Kong, shot down ballistic missiles and established eternal peace throughout the world. But Pushkin was not there.

Here, vigilant comrades from the house administration, headed by old man Dushkin, visited the apartment, who, if he slipped on the street or if the sour cream turned sour, did not write to the Politburo except. The comrades wanted to know: why noise and music, and why light at night? I'll ask for documentation. Spiridonov took the blame on himself: he is an inventor, he works at night, the sounds of the zurna and the drum stimulate him. He also took out and showed his certificate of honor for the 8th grade of the 415th male school of the Krasnogvardeisky district, a publication in "Science and Life": " Turn old toothbrushes into a handy new mop”and a museum piece: the text of Lenin’s work“ How can we reorganize the Rabkrin ”, made by an unknown craftsman from fish bones on a walrus tusk. But if it is impossible, Spiridonov said, then he will no longer be, and the documents are in order, we know the rules of residence. We, thank God, are not small, we know that everything is forbidden: to stand at night on the side of the Moscow Ring Road, to work without stopping, to pull unnecessarily, to obscure the driver's cab, to receive more than 600 grams in one hand, to violate the integrity of the packaging, to bring and drink, to put things handrails, hand-trading, opening to a full stop, walking without a muzzle, carrying fetid, poisonous and lengthy things, talking for more than three minutes, going down and walking along the tracks, leaning out, climbing in, taking pictures, resisting, croaking, whistling, shouting three times at dawn basilisk and sawing firewood after 23 pm local time.

With comrades from the house management it was better not to joke; I kicked out Lenechkin's students, White cat he left on his own, having persuaded the mice to wander together - by the way, by the autumn this company was seen in the upper reaches of the Volga: the cat walked, leaning on a staff, in a wreath of forget-me-nots, detached; mice, six of them, ran after them, carrying small belongings, salt and matches - I'm afraid that they lit fires in the wrong places, and we are responsible for them; and in addition, Uncle Zhenya, who had already arrived at his destination, had already walked slowly through the state-owned rooms of his new housing, had already twitched, checking for a fortress, windows, doors, locks, blinds, had already unpacked his suitcases with striped ties, plaid ties, ties in the peacock eye, who had already explained to Aunt Zina how to use the air conditioner (“Zhen! Ah, Zhen! I’m here for something ... I don’t understand something!”), Uncle Zhenya did not lose his vigilance for a minute and sent Lenechka a letter by diplomatic mail - a copy to Lenechkin's parents, warning him to stop he knows what and not to think of it; that someone has been warned and will follow with all severity, for he is authorized to do so; and if Lenechka does not stop something, then Uncle Zhenya will let you know somewhere and then it will be ah-ah-ah. And let Lenechka not think that if Uncle Zhenya is somewhere, then at least henna is for him. No, everything is very serious, because - you yourself understand, and even more so now, when ... - that's it. So that.

Poor Uncle Zhenya, he wrote, thought, picked up shades of meaning, and his death had already come out of the distant forests and, sniffing the air, ran on soft paws, playing with muscles, towards him. Uncle Zhenya finished writing, drank affordable coffee and looked into an empty cup - and all the coffee grounds of the world, all the daisies, all the lines on the palms, and the drawing of distant stars, and decks of cards with frowning kings and arrogant jacks have already formed into a simple coffin pattern, trustingly revealing to Uncle Zhenya his close fate, but he did not read it, because this knowledge was not given to him. And Uncle Zhenya sealed the envelope and thought about the fruits of future years, about swimming in the sea, about tires for a new car, about paper reports and loops of intrigue - sweetly and sweetly thought about things that, of course, happened, but had no to him already not the slightest relationship. It is strange to think that he died almost at the same time as Judy and, piercing the metaphysical heights, collided with her, perhaps in the gray light of otherworldly luminaries, without recognizing her.

End of introductory segment.

The childhood of the heroes of the story. They saw a naked man on the lake, hiding in the bushes. Lucky. An old woman feeds red meat to a cat, which hunts sparrows, cripples them in lilac bushes. Four cottages. A neighbor is weighing strawberries for jam. Mom quarreled with her because of her meanness. In winter, the janitors painted patterns on the windows at night, and in the spring they took the frost out of town in cars. Growing up, the heroes noticed how quickly the glass in the magic lantern changes. A neighbor in the country house died, her husband froze to death on the porch. The garden has faded. Everything comes to an end.

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The river Okkervil Simeonov cannot get old Vera Vasilievna out of her head. She conquered many men, beckons as the mysterious name of the station “Okkervil River”. Opening doors for native Tamara - no. Came to visit his passion. Fifteen people at the table. Felt Read More ......
Enchantress in Winter ... The work is dedicated to winter beauty, biting frost and dripping thaw, with its fluffy snow, unique patterns on the windows, the creak of fresh snow under the sleigh runners. The author, fascinated by the Enchantress-winter, describes her as a sorceress who puts the forest to sleep, wraps it in a fringe of snow, fetters it with a light Read More ......
You love - you don't love Nanny Marya Ivanovna hates her job. Her ward children pay her back. Marya Ivanovna does everything that a teacher is supposed to do. She performs her duties well: walks on time, looks after. Reading poetry and telling interesting stories cannot hide Read More ......
Tatyana Nikitichna Tolstaya TOLSTAYA, TATYANA NIKITICHNA (1951) is a Russian writer. She was born on May 3, 1951 in Leningrad. Father - academician-philologist Nikita Tolstoy, grandfathers - writer Alexei Tolstoy and translator Mikhail Lozinsky. In 1974 she graduated from the department of classical philology of the philological faculty of Leningrad State University, after which Read More ......

Summary On the golden porch they sat ... Fat

Dear Shura

For the first time Alexandra Ernestovna passed me by early in the morning, all bathed in the pink Moscow sun. The stockings are lowered, the legs are under the gateway, the black suit is greasy and worn. But the hat! .. Four seasons - bulldenezhi, lilies of the valley, cherries, barberries - curled up on a light straw dish, pinned to the remains of hair with such a pin! The cherries have come off a little and are tapping woodenly. She is ninety years old, I thought. But six years wrong. Sunny air escapes along the beam from the roof of a cool old house and again runs up, up, to where we rarely look - where a cast-iron balcony hung at an uninhabited height, where there is a steep roof, some kind of delicate lattice erected right in the morning sky, a melting turret, spire, doves, angels - no, I can't see well. Smiling blissfully, with eyes clouded with happiness, Alexandra Ernestovna moves along the sunny side, rearranging her pre-revolutionary legs with a wide compass. The cream, the bun, and the carrots in the net pull the hand away, rubbing against the black, heavy hem. The wind has come from the south on foot, it blows with the sea and roses, it promises the way along the light stairs to the heavenly blue countries. Alexandra Ernestovna smiles in the morning, smiles at me. A black robe, a light-coloured hat jingling with dead fruit, lurks around the corner.
Then she came across to me on a hot boulevard - softened, touched by a sweaty, lonely child stuck in a baked city - she never had her own children. A terrible lingerie hangs from under a black, dirty skirt. Someone else's child trustingly dumped sand treasures on Alexandra Ernestovna's knees. Don't get your aunt's clothes dirty. Nothing ... Let it be.
I met her in the stale air of the cinema (take off your hat, granny! you can’t see anything!). Inappropriate to the screen passions, Alexandra Ernestovna breathed noisily, crackled crumpled chocolate silver, gluing fragile pharmacy jaws with viscous sweet clay.
Finally, it spun in a stream of fire-breathing cars at the Nikitsky Gate, rushed about, losing direction, grabbed my arm and swam to the saving shore, losing the respect of the diplomatic Negro who lay behind the green glass of a low shiny car and his pretty curly children for life. The negro roared, smelled of blue smoke and rushed off towards the conservatory, and Alexandra Ernestovna, trembling, frightened, bulging, hung on me and dragged me to her communal shelter - knick-knacks, oval frames, dry flowers - leaving behind a trail of validol.
Two tiny rooms, high stucco ceiling; on the lagging wallpaper, a delightful beauty smiles, thinks, capricious - dear Shura, Alexandra Ernestovna. Yes, yes, it's me! And with a hat, and without a hat, and with loose hair. Oh, what a ... And this is her second husband, well, this is the third - not a very good choice. Well, what can I say now... Now, perhaps, if she had then decided to run away to Ivan Nikolaevich... Who is Ivan Nikolaevich? He is not here, he is squeezed in an album, stretched out in four cardboard slots, slammed by a lady in a bustle, crushed by some short-lived white dogs that died before the Japanese war.
Sit down, sit down, what can I treat you to? .. Come, of course, for God's sake, come! Alexandra Ernestovna is alone in the world, but I really want to chat!
…Autumn. Rain. Alexandra Ernestovna, do you recognize me? It is me! Remember... well, never mind, I'm visiting you. Guests - oh, what happiness! Here, here, now I'll clean it up ... So I live alone. Survived everyone. Three husbands, you know? And Ivan Nikolaevich, he called, but ... Maybe it was necessary to decide? What a long life. This is me. This is also me. And this is my second husband. I had three husbands, you know? True, the third is not very ...
The first one was a lawyer. Famous. They lived very well. In the spring - to Finland. In the summer - in the Crimea. White muffins, black coffee. Hats with lace. Oysters are very expensive… In the evening, go to the theater. How many fans! He died in the nineteenth year - they stabbed him to death in the alley.
Oh, of course, she had romances all her life, how could it be otherwise? Women's heart - it is! Yes, three years ago, the violinist rented a nook at Alexandra Ernestovna's. Twenty-six years old, laureate, eyes!.. Of course, he hid his feelings in his soul, but the look - it betrays everything! In the evening, Alexandra Ernestovna used to ask him: “Tea? ..”, but he just looks like that and doesn’t say anything! Well, you understand?.. Kov-va-arny! So he was silent while he lived with Alexandra Ernestovna. But it was clear that everything was on fire and that it was bubbling in the soul. In the evenings, together in two cramped rooms ... You know, there was something in the air - it was clear to both ... He could not stand it and left. To the street. Wandered somewhere late. Alexandra Ernestovna held firm and gave him no hope. Then he - out of grief - married some - well, nothing special. Moved. And once, after his marriage, he met Alexandra Ernestovna on the street and threw such a look - incinerated! But again he didn't say anything. All buried in the soul.
Yes, Alexandra Ernestovna's heart was never empty. Three husbands, by the way. With the second before the war lived in a huge apartment. Renowned doctor. Famous guests. Flowers. Always fun. And he died cheerfully: when it was already clear that the end, Alexandra Ernestovna decided to call the gypsies. Still, you know, when you look at the beautiful, noisy, cheerful, it’s easier to die, right? It was not possible to get real gypsies. But Alexandra Ernestovna - an inventor - did not lose her head, hired some grubby guys, girls, dressed them up in noisy, shiny, fluttering, flung open the doors to the dying man's bedroom - and rattled, screamed, hummed, went in circles, and a wheel, and squatted: pink , gold, gold, pink! The husband did not expect, he already turned his eyes there, and then they suddenly burst in, twist their shawls, squeal; he got up, waved his hands, croaked: go away! - and they are more fun, more fun, but with a flood! So he died, the kingdom of heaven be upon him. And the third husband was not very ...
But Ivan Nikolaevich... Ah, Ivan Nikolaevich! It was all: Crimea, the thirteenth year, the striped sun through the blinds saws the white scraped floor into blocks ... Sixty years have passed, but after all ... Ivan Nikolaevich was simply distraught: now leave your husband and come to him in the Crimea. Forever and ever. I promised. Then, in Moscow, I thought: what to live on? And where? And he threw letters: “Dear Shura, come, come!” My husband has his own business here, he rarely sits at home, and there, in the Crimea, on the gentle sand, under blue skies, Ivan Nikolayevich runs like a tiger: “Dear Shura, forever!” But the poor man himself does not have enough money for a ticket to Moscow! Letters, letters, letters every day, for a whole year - Alexandra Ernestovna will show.
Oh, how I loved! To go or not to go?
Human life is divided into four seasons. Spring!!! Summer. Autumn winter? But the winter is over for Alexandra Ernestovna - where is she now? Where are her weeping colorless eyes? Throwing back her head, pulling back her red eyelid, Alexandra Ernestovna puts yellow drops in her eye. A pink balloon shines through the head through a thin cobweb. Was that mouse tail sixty years ago wrapped around the shoulders like a black peacock tail? Did the persistent but not rich Ivan Nikolaevich drown in these eyes - once and for all? Alexandra Ernestovna grunts and fumbles with her knotted feet for her slippers.
- Now let's drink tea. I won't go anywhere without tea. No-no-no. Don't even think.
Yes, I'm not going anywhere. Then I came to drink tea. And she brought cakes. I'll put the kettle on now, don't worry. In the meantime, she will get a velvet album and old letters.
You have to go far to the kitchen, to another city, along an endless shiny floor, rubbed so that for two days traces of red mastic remain on the soles. At the end of the corridor tunnel, like a light in a dense robbery forest, a speck of a kitchen window glows. Twenty-three neighbors are silent behind clean white doors. Halfway there is a phone on the wall. A note, once pinned by Alexandra Ernestovna, turns white: “Fire - 01. Ambulance - 03. In the event of my death, call Elizaveta Osipovna.” Elizabeth Osipovna herself has long been gone from the world. Nothing. Alexandra Ernestovna forgot.
In the kitchen - painful, lifeless cleanliness. On one of the slabs, someone's cabbage soup is talking to themselves. In the corner there is still a curly cone of smell after a neighbor who smoked Belomor. A chicken in a string bag hangs outside the window, as if punished, dangling in the black wind. The bare wet tree drooped from grief. The drunkard unbuttons his coat, leaning his face against the fence. Sad circumstances of place, time and manner of action. And if Alexandra Ernestovna had agreed then to drop everything and run south to Ivan Nikolaevich? Where would she be now? She had already sent a telegram (meet me), packed her things, hid the ticket away, in the secret compartment of her purse, pinned her peacock hair up high and sat down in an armchair, by the window - to wait. And far to the south, Ivan Nikolaevich, alarmed, not believing in happiness, rushed to the railway station - to run, worry, worry, dispose, hire, negotiate, go crazy, peer into the horizon overlaid with dull heat. And then? She waited in the armchair until evening, until the first clear stars. And then? She pulled the pins out of her hair, shook her head... And then? Well - then, then! Life has passed, that's what then.
The kettle boiled. I'll make it stronger. A simple piece on a tea xylophone: lid, lid, spoon, lid, rag, lid, rag, rag, spoon, pen, pen. Long way back along the dark corridor with two teapots in hand. Twenty-three neighbors behind the white doors are listening: will it drip its filthy tea on our clean floor? It didn't drip, don't worry. With my foot I open the Gothic doors. I was gone forever, but Alexandra Ernestovna still remembers me.
She took out raspberry cracked cups, decorated the table with some kind of circles, rummaged in the dark coffin of the sideboard, stirring the bready, rusk smell that crawled out from behind his wooden cheeks. Don't go, smell! Catch him and pinch him with faceted glass doors; like this; stay locked up.
Alexandra Ernestovna gets marvelous jam, they gave her, you just try it, no, no, you try it, ah, ah, ah, there are no words, yes, this is something unusual, isn’t it amazing? true, true, as long as I live in the world, never like this ... well, how glad I am, I knew that you would like it, take more, take, take, I beg you! (Oh shit, my teeth will hurt again!)
I like you, Alexandra Ernestovna, I really like you, especially in that photo where you have such an oval face, and in this one, where you throw back your head and laugh with amazing teeth, and in this one, where you pretend to be capricious, and throw your hand somewhere on the back of the head, so that the carved scallops purposely slipped off the elbow. I like your life, no longer interesting to anyone, somewhere out there noisy, youth running away, your decayed admirers, husbands who followed the solemn procession, everyone, everyone who called you and whom you called, everyone who passed and disappeared behind a high mountain . I will come to you and bring you both cream and carrots that are very useful for the eyes, and you, please, open the velvet brown albums that have not been aired for a long time - let the pretty schoolgirls breathe, let the mustachioed gentlemen warm up, let the brave Ivan Nikolaevich smile. Nothing, nothing, he can't see you, what are you talking about, Alexandra Ernestovna!... I should have made up my mind then. It was necessary to. Yes, she has already made up her mind. Here he is - reach out your hand! Here, take it in your hands, hold it, here it is, flat, cold, glossy, with a gold edge, slightly yellowed Ivan Nikolaevich! Hey, you hear, she made up her mind, yes, she is going, meet, everything, she no longer hesitates, meet where you are, ay!
Thousands of years, thousands of days, thousands of transparent impenetrable curtains have fallen from heaven, thickened, closed in dense walls, filled up the roads, do not let Alexandra Ernestovna to her beloved, lost in centuries. He remained there, on the other side of years, alone, at the dusty southern station, he wanders along the platform spitted with seeds, he looks at his watch, kicks off dusty spindles of corn nibs with his toe of his boot, impatiently picks off gray cypress cones, waits, waits, waits for a locomotive from a hot morning gave. She didn't come. She won't come. She cheated. No, no, she wanted to! She is ready, and the bags are packed! White translucent dresses tucked their knees in the close darkness of the chest, the travel bag creaks with skin, sparkles with silver, shameless bathing suits that barely cover the knees - and the arms are bare to the shoulders! - waiting in the wings, closing their eyes, anticipating ... In a hat box - impossible, delightful, weightless ... oh, there are no words - white marshmallow, a miracle of miracles! At the very bottom, leaning back, raising its paws, the box is sleeping - hairpins, combs, silk laces, diamond sand pasted on cardboard spatulas - for delicate nails; small trifles. Jasmine genie is sealed in a crystal bottle - oh, how it will sparkle with a billion rainbows in the dazzling sea light! She's ready - what's stopping her? What always bothers us? Well, rather, time goes by! .. Time goes by, and the invisible layers of years are getting denser, and the rails are rusting, and the roads are overgrown, and the weeds along the ravines are getting more and more magnificent. Time flows, and sways the boat of dear Shura on its back, and splashes with wrinkles in her unique face.
…More tea?
And after the war they returned - with their third husband - right here, in these rooms. The third husband whined and whined… The corridor was long. The light is dim. Windows to the courtyard. Everything is behind. The elegant guests have died. Flowers withered. The rain drums on the glass. He whined, whined - and died, but when, why - Alexandra Ernestovna did not notice.
I got Ivan Nikolaevich out of the album, looked at it for a long time. What did he call her? She has already bought a ticket - here it is, a ticket. There are black numbers on thick cardboard. If you want - so look, if you want - turn it upside down, it's all the same: forgotten signs of an unknown alphabet, an encrypted pass there, to the other side.
Maybe if you find out the magic word... if you guess... if you sit down and think carefully... or look somewhere... there must be a door, a crack, an unnoticed crooked passage there, that day; they closed everything, but at least a crack, they gaped and left it; maybe in some old house or something; in the attic, if you bend the boards... or in a back alley, in a brick wall - a gap, carelessly bricked up, hastily plastered over, hastily hammered crosswise... Maybe not here, but in another city... Maybe somewhere in the tangle of rails, aside, there is a carriage, an old, rusty one, with a caved-in floor, a carriage into which dear Shura never got into?
“Here is my compartment… Allow me to pass. Excuse me, here is my ticket - everything is written here! Over there, at that end - rusty teeth of springs, red, crumpled ribs of walls, blue sky in the ceiling, grass underfoot - this is her rightful place, hers! No one ever took it, they just had no right!
…More tea? Blizzard.
…More tea? Apple trees in bloom. Dandelions. Lilac. Phew, how hot. Get out of Moscow - to the sea. See you soon, Alexandra Ernestovna! I will tell you what is there - on the other side of the earth. Didn't the sea dry up, didn't the Crimea float away like a dry leaf, didn't the blue sky fade? Has your tormented, agitated lover resigned from his voluntary post at the railroad station?
Alexandra Ernestovna is waiting for me in the stone hell of Moscow. No, no, that's right, that's right! There, in the Crimea, invisible but restless, in a white tunic, Ivan Nikolayevich walks up and down the dusty platform, digs out a watch from his pocket, wipes his shaved neck; back and forth along an openwork dwarf fence stained with white pollen, agitated, perplexed; pass through it, without noticing, beautiful muzzy girls in trousers, hippie boys with rolled up sleeves, braided with impudent transistor ba-ba-doo-bang; grandmothers in white kerchiefs, with buckets of plums; southern ladies with plastic acantha clips; old men in rigid synthetic hats; through and through, through Ivan Nikolaevich, but he knows nothing, notices nothing, he waits, time has gone astray, stuck halfway, somewhere near Kursk, stumbled over the nightingale rivers, got lost, blind, on the sunflower plains.
Ivan Nikolaevich, wait! I'll tell her; and there is a ticket, I know, I swear, I saw it - in a velvet album, stuck there behind a photograph; he's shabby, it's true, but that's okay, I think they'll let her in. There, of course ... you can’t get through, something interferes, I don’t remember; well, she somehow; she'll think of something - there's a ticket, right? - this is important: a ticket; and, you know, the main thing is that she made up her mind, that's for sure, for sure, I'm telling you!
Alexandra Ernestovna - five calls, the third button from the top. There is a breeze on the landing: the doors of a dusty stained-glass staircase, decorated with frivolous lotuses - the flowers of oblivion, are ajar.
- Who? .. Died.
I mean, how is it… wait a minute… why? But I just... Yes, I just go back and forth! What are you?..
White hot air rushes to the entrance coming out of the crypt, striving to get in the eyes. Wait a minute... Garbage hasn't been taken away yet, has it? Around the corner, on an asphalt patch, in garbage cans, the spirals of earthly existence end. Where did you think? Behind the clouds, right? There they are, these spirals - they stick out like springs from a rotten, gaping sofa. Everything was dumped here. An oval portrait of dear Shura - the glass was smashed, the eyes gouged out. An old woman's junk - some stockings ... A hat with four seasons. Do you need peeled cherries? No, why? A jug with a broken nose. And the velvet album, of course, was stolen. They are good at cleaning their boots. You are all fools, I do not cry - why would I? The garbage steamed in the sun, spreading black banana slime. A stack of letters is trampled into the goo. “Darling Shura, well, when…”, “Dear Shura, just tell me…” And one letter, dried up, spins like a yellow lined butterfly under a dusty poplar tree, not knowing where to sit down.
What should I do with all this? Turn around and leave. Hot. The wind drives the dust. And Alexandra Ernestovna, dear Shura, real as a mirage, crowned with wooden fruits and cardboard flowers, swims, smiling, along the trembling alley around the corner, to the south, to the inconceivably distant shining south, to the lost platform, floats, melts and dissolves in the hot afternoon .

Fakir

Owl - as always, unexpectedly - appeared on the telephone receiver and invited him to visit: to look at his new passion. The program of the evening was clear: a white crispy tablecloth, light, warmth, special puff pastries in Tmutarakan style, the most pleasant music from somewhere in the ceiling, exciting conversations. There are blue curtains everywhere, showcases with collections, beads hung on the walls. New toys - a snuff box with a portrait of a lady reveling in her naked pink powder, a beaded purse, an Easter egg, perhaps, or something else - unnecessary, but valuable.
Filin himself will not offend the eye either - clean, small, in a homemade velvet jacket, his small hand is heavy with a ring. Yes, not stamped, zhlobsky, "for a rupee fifty with a box" - why? - no, straight from the excavations, Venetian, if not lying, or even a coin in a frame - some, God forgive me, Antiochus, otherwise raise it higher ... Such is Owl. He sits in an armchair, shaking his shoes, his fingers folded into a house, his eyebrows are tar, beautiful Anatolian eyes are like soot, his beard is dry, silver, with a rustle, only his mouth is black - like eating coal.
Yes, there is something to see.
Owl's ladies are also not just any - collectible, rare. That circus performer, for example, - curls on a pole, shining with scales, to the thunder of drums, or just a girl, her mother’s daughter, smears watercolors, - she’s crazy, but the very whiteness is extraordinary, so that Owl, calling to the bride, even warns: by all means, they say, come in black glasses to avoid snow blindness.
Someone secretly disapproved of Filin, with all his rings, pies, snuffboxes; they giggled about his crimson dressing gown with tassels and some kind of silver Janissary slippers with turned-up toes; and it was funny that in his bathroom - a special brush for a beard and hand cream - at a bachelor ... But all the same, he would call - and they ran, and secretly always turned cold: would he invite again? Will he let me sit in warmth and light, in bliss and cold, and in general - what did he find in us ordinary people, why does he need us? ..
“…If you are not busy with anything today, please come to me by eight o’clock.” Meet Alice - a lovely creature.
- Thank you, thank you, absolutely!
Well, as always, at the last moment! Yura reached for the razor, and Galya, crawling into tights like a snake, instructed her daughter: porridge in a saucepan, do not open the door for anyone, lessons - and sleep! And don't hang on me, don't hang on, we're already late! Galya stuffed plastic bags into her bag: Owl lives in a high-rise building, under it is a grocery store, maybe they will give herring oil or something else.
Behind the house, a ring road lay like a hoop of darkness, where frost whistled, the cold of the deserted plains penetrated under the clothes, the world for a moment seemed graveyard scary, and they did not want to wait for the bus, crowded into the subway, but caught a taxi, and, lounging comfortably, carefully scolded Owl for a velvet jacket, for a passion for collecting, for an unfamiliar Alice: where is the old one, Ninochka? - look for fistulas; they guessed whether Matvei Matveich would be a guest, and together they condemned Matvei Matveich.
They met him at Filin’s and were so fascinated by the old man: these stories of his about the reign of Anna Ioannovna, and again pies, and the smoke of English tea, and blue and gold collectible cups, and Mozart murmuring from somewhere above, and Filin caressing the guests with their Mephistophelian eyes - fu-you, the head is stupefied - they asked for Matvei Matveich to visit. Run away! He took it in the kitchen, the floor was plank, the walls were brown, bare, and in general the area was a nightmare, fences and pits, he himself was in sweatpants, already completely whitish, he had drunk tea, candied jam, and even then he blurted out on the table right in the jar, put a spoon: pick out, they say, dear guests. And smoking - only on the landing: asthma, do not blame me. And with Anna Ioannovna the puncture came out: they settled down - God bless him, with tea - to listen to the murmuring speech about palace shura-murs, all sorts of coups, and the old man kept untying terrible folders with ribbons, poked something with his finger, shouting about some plots of land, and that Kuzin, mediocrity, bureaucrat, intriguer, does not allow to be published and sets up the whole sector against Matvei Matveich, but here, here, here: he has been collecting the most valuable documents all his life! Galya and Yura wanted to talk about villains again, about torture, about the ice house and the wedding of dwarfs, but Owl was not around and there was no one to direct the conversation to something interesting, and all evening only Ku-u-uzin! Ku-u-uzin! - and poking at folders, and valerian. Having laid the old man down, they left early, and Galya tore her tights on the old man's stool.
- And the bard Vlasov? Yura remembered.
- Shut up!
With that, everything seemed to turn out the other way around, but a terrible shame: they also picked up Filin, invited him to his place, called friends - to listen, defended for two hours behind the log cake. They locked the daughter in the nursery, the dog in the kitchen. The bard Vlasov came, gloomy, with a guitar, the cake did not even try: the cream would soften his voice, but he needed it to be hoarse. He sang a couple of songs: “Aunt Motya, your shoulders, your cheeks and cheeks, like those of Nadia Comanechi, are developed by physical education ...” Yura disgraced himself, got out with his ignorance, whispered loudly in the middle of singing: “I forgot, Persian - what places are these?” Galya was worried, asked to sing “Friends” by all means, pressed her hands to her chest: this is such a song, such a song! He sang it at Filin's - softly, sadly, mournfully, - here, they say, "at a table covered with oilcloth, having gathered for a bottle of beer," old friends, bald, losers are sitting. And everyone has something wrong, everyone has their own sadness: “one cannot afford love, and the other does not like the prince,” and no one can help anyone, alas! - but here they are together, they are friends, they need each other, and isn't this the most important thing in the world? You listen - and it seems that - yes, yes, yes, you also have something like this in your life, yes, that's it! “Whoa song! Crown number! Yura whispered. The bard Vlasov frowned even more, made a distant look - there, into that imaginary room where baldheads loving each other uncorked the distant beer; plucked the strings and began sadly: “At the table covered with oilcloth…” Julka, locked in the kitchen, scratched the floor with her claws and howled. “Having gathered for a bottle of beer,” the bard Vlasov pressed. “Y-y-y,” the dog was worried. Someone grunted, the bard held down the strings in an insulting manner, and took a cigarette. Yura went to give Dzhulka a suggestion. "Is this autobiographical?" some fool asked respectfully. "What? I have everything somewhere autobiographical.” Yura returned, the bard threw down his cigarette butt, concentrating. “At the table covered with oilcloth…” An agonizing howl came from the kitchen. "Musical dog," the bard said angrily. Galya dragged the stubborn shepherd dog to the neighbors, the bard hurriedly finished singing - the howl dully penetrated through the cooperative walls - crumpled up the program and in the hallway, pulling the "zipper" of the jacket, said with disgust that in fact he takes two rubles from his nose, but since they do not know how to organize a creative atmosphere, then a ruble will do. And Galya again ran to the neighbors - a nightmare, borrow a gold piece - and they, also before the payday, collected change for a long time and even shook out the children's piggy bank to the roar of the robbed children and the barking of the torn Dzhulka.
Yes, Owl knows how to deal with people, but somehow we don’t. Well, maybe next time it will.
There was still time until eight - just to stand behind the pate in the grocery store at the foot of Filinov, because here, too, - on our outskirts, cows wander around in broad daylight, but you can’t see the pate. Three minutes to eight to enter the elevator - Galya, as always, looks around and says: "I want to live in such an elevator," then the waxed parquet of a boundless platform, a copper plate: "I. I. Filin," the bell - and finally he himself is on the threshold - shines with black eyes, bows his head: "Accuracy is the courtesy of kings ..." And it's somehow terribly nice to hear this, these words - and indeed kings - Galya in an inexpensive coat and Yura in a jacket and a knitted hat.

Tatiana Tolstaya “They sat on the golden porch…”

Dear Shura

Fakir

Dear Shura

Fakir

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