Road to heaven
Introducing the winners of the contest dedicated to the Defender of the Fatherland Day. Third place.
June morning 1991 of the year before the one-story headquarters stood five. Two sergeants - in paradkah, with badges, with Insignias on the shoulder straps, which turned yellow letters "CA", a cap with a glittering in the sun visors; three privates - in civilian.
Yura was the closest to the checkpoint. His shirt, tucked into pants, slightly swell from the steppe wind that was walking along the military unit.
Conduct them out the battalion commander himself.
“I apologize to demobles every time,” said Lieutenant Colonel Zhanibekov. - That in December, then in June. Might let you go early. But while these dunce, change your, wits teach until suitable tolerances as curator approve ... Lad Camp - one army - the other, you know. Part of our regime, every person counts. Here's looking at you - he looked somehow at Yura - and feel like a school teacher on the last call. Sorry to part with you guys. Correct cap, demob brave. No not like this. - Zhanibekov himself corrected his cap sergeant Orlov. - Thanks for the service guys.
The lieutenant colonel shook hands.
“And you, Yura,” having reached the last in the line of Yuri, for some reason, the commander addressed him in a polite manner, “send your poems to Youth or Change.” The person said, you have wonderful poems. In my opinion, he understands this issue. Read.
- Thank you ... - said Yuri in response. He felt embarrassed. - I am not Lermontov, comrade lieutenant colonel ...
“I will wait for you to send you a magazine with a magazine,” said Zhanibekov sternly. - And now - come!
The rank immediately fell apart.
- Do not remember dashing! - shouted the lieutenant colonel to the former soldiers in the back, when they walked in a short chain to the checkpoint.
A commanding "UAZ" was waiting for them at the gates.
- Happy! - said the driver. - I have half a year to drag the service.
- Sit down in front. - Orlov pushed Yura. “You're the farthest from home.”
Leaving behind the gate with red stars, crowded "UAZ" rolled along the concrete fence lined with maples. The construction of a divorce will now begin on the parade ground, but this does not concern Yura any more. Orlov with the guys in the back seat singing "There is a soldier in the city", and Yuri laughed and then pulled up.
At the bus station in the village of Moscow, after saying goodbye to the commanding driver, demobels dispersed on suburban and intercity buses - who are to the east, who are to the west, and who are to the north. Jura was on the way with Orlov - to the regional center, and there to the airport.
They rode in a loose "LAZ", rumbling with iron and bouncing on a broken road. Together with the "LAZ" jumped on the harsh slippery seats and demobilization.
- The girl is waiting? - too loud, as it seemed to Jura, Orlov asked.
Yura nodded.
- You have a cool girl, Yuri! - continued Orlov. - You wrote her poems! I also had to write poems with my Galka. Maybe I would have waited then. Only I do not know how to write poetry. There is no talent!
Outside the windows were green fields. Clear sky above the fields.
Yura thought that Galka probably did not like Orlova. If you love - how not to wait?
If no one waited, it was necessary to conclude long ago: no love exists.
Jura flights and Orlov bought in advance, in May, presenting a military airport in cash requirements and pay the difference because of the requirements was repaid only a trip by rail. Now they had to wait for the registration - to each his own - and take to the air on the Tu-134 or Tu-154.
At the airport, they ate a tasteless ice milk, and then a woman's voice in the speakers announced registration for Tyumen flight. At the counter number seven, two hugged goodbye.
In flight, Yura looked out the window, at the white, gray clouds and endless sky. “Tu” fell into the air holes, as if falling, suddenly and swiftly, and the back of the head across Yurino, ran down his neck and shoulders, and rolled in a wave of goosebumps. From the unsmiling stewardess Yura took a cardboard cup with mineral water. Nothing but water, a strange gloomy stewardess on her trolley did not bring. The women sitting in the seats in front, in a low voice, talked about the shortage in the country. The mineral water was warm and salty-nasty, but Yura finished it to the end. Then he threw back the chair and closed his eyes.
First of all, he will go to Mary. On the thirty-fifth shuttle bus will reach the air agency, to the final stop, and there - on foot. He wrote to her in the last letter. Maria doesn’t have a phone at home, and to order long-distance calls in advance, to get from the military unit to the city of t., Where there was a telegraph and a long-distance communication point, is a whole story. Therefore, having bought a plane ticket, Yura wrote to Masha on the same day: “There is no need to meet. Be at home. ”
After a couple of hours, the Tu-154 landed at Roshchino. Yura did everything as planned: he defended a small queue for a minibus taxi, got into a close Rafik and in thirty five kopecks drove to Tyumen, to the agency Aeroflot. From there, admiring the lilac that had not yet faded off, recently washed by the rain, knocked down city dust from the delicate matte leaves, with a small suitcase in hand and a smile on his lips, which looked like a silly, childish, Yura walked towards Maria - across the traffic light, along Republic Street, in Odessa, then courtyards. He walked and thought it was good that he hid his parade uniform and his cap in a suitcase, and did not put it on. Not that he would stand out, would look at him. But he didn’t want people to stare at him - happy, with a childish smile. His happiness, the happiness of return, he wanted to share first with Maria. Two years! One hundred and forty-eight Maryin's letters, full of love, lay in his suitcase. The first letters were dripped tears, it tears the ink from a ballpoint hands on exercise book slips here and there changed the blue to pink.
Here is her yard. Brick five-story building, a strip of asphalt, birch, lilac and acacia at the entrances. All familiar - maybe just a little older. On the field, fenced net, boys of twelve chasing the ball. Briefly stripped forward, seemingly older than others, deftly avoided the young midfielders and defenders and inexorably dribbled the ball to the gate. Jura angrily thought that Mary did not buy any color - no daffodils or tulips or roses last.
On the sidewalk, by the walkway to the porch, stood the brand-new white Zhiguli of the seventh model. With wedding ribbons. Behind the Zhiguli, the black Volga froze with the same ribbons and rings on the roof.
Holding the door handle, Yura heard a scream somewhere behind.
- Uya-II!
So the boys scream in pain. When they kicked or hit.
Turn around, running - and Yura behind the net, on the sand of the field. The short-haired boy who recently led the ball into the goal bent over the fallen boy. He was lying on his back, like an animal that recognized the primacy of another animal, covering his face with his elbows.
- You, bitch, gave me a bandwagon? I know you. - The attacker straightened up, looked away, caught Yura with his eyes, and spat. His face was evil, wrinkled. An old face like that.
- Get away from him. - Yura approached.
- Get out of here, sack! - The attacker looked up at him.
Yura was taken aback. Saga The boy breathes in his chest!
- Do not suck, freak? I bitch you, I will cut the belts! .. - A blade flashed in the boy’s left hand. Razvochka.
- Come on, stop it!
A woman with a shapeless figure, covered with a dress, hobbled to the crowd.
- Damned criminal! Said the big woman, looking with hatred at the wrinkled, old face that was drilling her with a sassy look. The razor of the teenager ku-da has disappeared. As if she was not there.
“I'm not a criminal, Aunt Clara.”
- Brother is your felon. And you will sit down. All of you are the same, said Aunt Clara. - Get up, Borechka. How many times did she say to you: do not play football with this rabble.
- Where to go! - wrinkled face spat in the sand and smiled, looking like Borechka gets up and dusts himself off. - We live in the same yard.
- Nothing, we will soon move.
- I will dream of you, Bo-talk! - And he hoarsely laughed in a breaking voice, breaking into a screech. - And you, greenhorn, - he said, instantly removing the smile from her face and wrinkling her narrow forehead, - already a corpse. I know who you are pinned. To Maschke.
Yura caught sight of Aunt Clara. She looked back from the edge of the grid. In the eyes of her frozen curiosity. Little Borechka from her legs also looked back.
- Go, kondybay, what Zenk goggled, - said the attacker. - Get up again. Do you know Lyoshka Poker? .. You don't know anything. This is my brother. He will rule your Arkadyevitch.
"What else Arkadyevich?"
- Now wallow. Stomp to your slut. You demob, yes? - Shrunken shook his head, just like an adult.
Without looking back, Yura went off behind a thick aunt, hearing behind him quiet conversation and shrill boys hohotki. Aunt Clara, stopped for a moment in neighboring Maria's door, I looked back at Yuri, but said not a word. I opened the door and let Borechka ahead. Gritting spring, the door slammed. Yura noticed that many colored confetti was scattered on the steps of the Mariinsky Porch and on the steps. As if someone had got the New Year party crackers and was pampered. Oh yeah, this is someone's wedding. These machines with ribbons ... Dance music came from above. "Modern Talking". Yura met Masha at a disco in a technical school just for these songs. Masha came to the company from the culinary school girls - so shy, so slender, in a modest dress with a belt. Then she told Yura with a smile that she dressed herself on purpose - to be different from others. “You noticed me,” she whispered. And Yura told her that he thought that all the girls from the culinary industry were bbw buns.
He went up to the fourth floor. Music came from behind the Mariina door. Someone with English pins attached a paper scarlet heart pierced with an arrow to a leatherette.
“Has she moved?”
Yura looked at the landing. Confetti was scattered on the stairs leading to the fifth floor.
"Maybe the wedding is there?" But why is the picture here? ”
A crazy, almost fantastic idea came to his mind.
Masha agreed with the mother and father recorded in advance on the registration in the registry office, who should be handed an invitation, I agreed about the machines - and is now waiting for him, Yuri, for a wedding. To their wedding! On the day of his return. There is nothing more wonderful. And the music included exactly the one under which they met.
- She is waiting for me! Disco our remembers! - Yura whispered so softly that he barely heard himself.
He can not hesitate. They need to hurry - not so late in the registry office.
And he pressed the bell.
The button was the same, covered with paint on the edges. But instead of the usual crackling "zzrrrrrr" speaker inside the apartment deafening chirped like a bird. Yura flinched and again thought that maybe Masha had moved. No, no, she would have written to him about it.
Door opened. The hall was the father of Mary - in white, unbuttoned to the belly shirt and black trousers with the battered hands and slippers. His face was filled with purple, alcoholic, his eyes gleamed, and he was carrying vodka and tobacco from his mouth.
- Oh, Yurok ... And what about the suitcase? Present?
- I'm from the army, - said Yura.
- Right from there? Well, you're great. Right on the wedding! Praise.
The tape recorder in the apartment was silent.
- Who came there, dad?
Her voice.
- Georgy Fedorovich, who is it?
Unfamiliar male voice.
And there were different voices in the living room.
Well, yes, the wedding.
Confetti on the street, confetti on the stairs, "Volga" with rings and "Lada" with ribbons. And the picture on dermatin.
Yura stood in the hallway, holding the suitcase in front of him with both hands - just hiding behind them.
Georgy Fedorovich is married to Albina Iosifovna. He did not seem to be going to divorce and marry another woman. Masha would have written, of course.
And here is Albina Joseph herself, holding her chin high. With such women are not divorced.
Maria has no brothers and sisters.
- Hi, Yura! - Fancy Mary, bright cornflower blue dress to the knee with short sleeves, with a shallow cut on his chest, gently hugged him - through the suitcase, which he did not let go - and kissed on the cheek, showering the smell of spirits and champagne. - You come through. Do not be embarrassed. This is Yuri Arkadyevich, well, Yura, like you. Your namesake
Behind her, hugging her shoulders, under her dress the underlined foam, smiling plyugavenky dark-haired fellow with the appearance of bureaucratic worker. Thirty years or so. In a black two-piece suit, with a blue striped tie. The typical owner of the office in the district committee of the Komsomol or in some other house of bureaucracy. His gentle smile credible and location.
The dark-haired man gave him a small palm, Yura shook it gently.
“We just call him Arkadyevich,” said Maria. - Oh, I did not say ... He is a groom, that is, my husband. Yesterday we had registration, and today we are walking for the second day. But you put a suitcase something. - She squatted down and began to unhook his fingers from the suitcase handle. On her ring finger flashed a gold ring. - Well, you're like a child. Everything is good. Life goes on. Now drink vodka. Cognac. And do you want three-year-old champagne, Crimean? .. What are you all here crowded? - She rose and spoke louder. - Arkadyevich, who turned off the music? Do you need instructions? You men, without a firm female hand, will surely bend everything.
- Ttaak nauseous! - barked Mariin father. - A Jura - a penalty!
- I do not need a penalty.
- Do not cross it, - said Maria. - Dad, you drank a lot today. Think better of the liver.
- I'm talking about you, docha think. About your holiday. If I do not have fun, what will be the wedding?
- Yura, come on in. Sit down here.
In the drawing room, Yura sat down where Mary had pointed him, on a slightly shaky chair. Unoccupied this chair, clean plate - as if they were waiting for him. A wide folding table covered with a pink tablecloth was filled with crystal, porcelain and bottles. Strangers sat on the couch, on chairs. They introduced themselves, Yura nodded or shook their hands - and immediately forgot their names. There were about ten guests. Except machinery uncle, younger brother George Fedorovich, who held a chair in the corner, Jura none of these people had not seen before. Albina Iosifovna explained to him that today is the second wedding day, for relatives. The first day was yesterday: after registration they gathered in a cooperative cafe.
“There were ninety guests,” she said proudly.
Yura began to eat, trying not to look at anyone. Turns out he was damn hungry. He ate a salad, then the other. He ate wheat bread, cut into triangles, as in a restaurant. Maria herself brought him hot - steaming potatoes, pork with onions and sauce. He did not drink vodka, brandy, or champagne, but drank black tea.
The guests were already good shout recorder, chorus repeated "bitter", forcing Mary and Arkadyich long time, at the expense of kissing Arkadyevitch, rustling, crawl thin fingers of Mary on the blue back, and Jura, thinking about the fat in pork and gravy, lips kissing , swallowed the tea, pouring boiling water from an electric samovar and forgetting to pour sugar, and told himself that he was in a parallel world. In a world where everything is turned inside, perekoverkano, ruined, brought to the absurdity where everything goes wrong, as in the native world, the present.
Breaking with the flushed, as if naplakal, bride, groom rose from his seat at the head table. Yura looked into his approaching eyes. Arkadyevich, already without his jacket, without a tie, was drawn to him with a bottle of vodka.
- Drink a glass with us. What are you - tea and tea ...
The bottle was lemonade. In such bottles with a short neck began to pour vodka at Gorbachev. On the label of "Russian" Yura saw a little blue slanting post: "Regional Executive Committee". Not otherwise, the groom did not just buy vodka, but took out.
Arkadyevich splashed him into a glass, helpfully, but too sharply pushed up by Georgi Fedorovich, spilled vodka on the tablecloth. Not wanting to either speak or listen to any toast, Yura drank it. Vodka was warm and nasty. Yura felt his face twist. Arkadyevich himself knew how to drink vodka with a smile. A rare skill, I guess. Or maybe the muscles of his face have long been adjusted to a constant smile.
Maria's father pushed back the curtains, opened the window.
- Stuffy something.
Having washed down vodka with tea, Yura rose, moving the chair back. The carpet under my feet was soft, new. Yura went to the window, thinking maybe George Fedorovich would say something to him. Someone had to tell him something.
Arkadyevich spoke to him instead of Maryina's father. With a cup of tea, he stood at the window sill, drummed on it with his fingers, trying to get to the beat of the music.
“It smells good of lilacs,” he said.
From the street came a sweet aroma.
Yura shrugged.
“You seem to have served without leave,” said Arkadyevitch. - Maria said you were on the rocket "point".
“Holidays there are bad,” said Yura.
“I see,” said the groom husband.
- Did you serve?
- It did not happen.
"Then what do you understand?"
The groom-husband drank tea. Coughing.
Turning away from the window, Yura caught the eyes of several guests. Among others, Albina Iosifovna also looked at him. Pity flashed in her eyes. Quick, tiny such pity. Or maybe it seemed to him. Albina Iosifovna - a harsh woman. At work - the boss. Veal tenderness from it you will not wait. But a portion of ridicule and poisonous remarks shlopotat - it's easy. She is more likely to announce him, Yura, as a loser, rather than begin to regret and stroke his head.
Will not Mary tell him anything? “I love, I wait” is in the letters. What is there? Sticky kisses and a trip to the cinema first, and then to the registry office with this thirty-year-old bureaucrat, or who is he there? It is impossible to believe! There must be some explanation. Accidental pregnancy? From this thought, Yura threw heat.
“Arkadyevich, I will talk to Yurik,” said Maria, getting up. She said this in a pause between tape recordings, and everyone heard her words.
"Of course," Arkadyevitch answered with a smile from the window. - You need to talk.
- Come on, Yurochka-fool. - Maria gracefully gave him her hand. - In the bedroom. There, no one will hurt us.
- Yes, yes, in the bedroom! - happily repeated Arkadyevitch and laughed. Guests laughed after him.
- Here it is, a democracy! - said George Fedorovich. - We did not have time to get married, as the husband sends his wife to the bedroom with ... with ... a familiar guy.
“This is how I am called now,” thought Yura, walking along the wall behind Maria.
He remembered how she hugged him in the hallway — it was so easy, barely touching. Perhaps, like this, the girls embrace friends.
The guests behind his back laughed. "Modern Talking" played louder. Some kind of relative of Arkadyevich made a singing with a school accent, trying to raise his baritone to a tenor and therefore a fake. The guests laughed again. They laughed at the singer, but it seemed to Jura that he was above him. Through the corridor, their laughter sounded dull, gravestonely.
- Yes, you put something raseyskoe! - said the voice of Mariinsky uncle.
Masha led Yura to the room she used to call “hers”. His, and all. And now it's a “bedroom.”
She closed the door on the latch, leaned back against the door.
- Sit down.
Yura sat on the bed made. The springs of the mattress creaked a little. Perhaps, on this very bed, Maria and Arkadyevich staged their wedding night yesterday. Or Arkadyevich own apartment? Cozy, furnished? And he just does not want her to scratch, destroy, turn into a wedding drunk mess?
Maria unfolded the mirror of the pierum, put lipstick on her lips. The lips kissed by Arkadyevitch glittered.
A dress with a neckline — probably tailor made by a tailor — made Maria older. And also cosmetics. Stroke here, eyeliner there, dash here. And not twenty years old, but twenty-five.
He left an eighteen-year-old girl waiting for himself, and now he has a mature woman in front of him.
- You know, Yurik, we have big plans. I and Arkadyevich. - Maria sat beside her and moved closer. Yura felt her warm side. - You need to get used to and understand.
“And what is first to get used to or understand?”
- Why are you silent? I could not miss the chance! - She moved it warm sideways. He swayed sitting. - Sorry. Well, I don’t say that ... You see, while you served, a lot has changed. That is, not much - everything. You can not yawn. Who did not - he was late. You see a piece - grab and burst, while others have not eaten.
“This is what piece?” Thought Yura.
“Arkadyevich — he works in the city committee of the Komsomol,” said Maria.
She called the post. Yura looked in the glass of the bookcase in front of him. In the glass, he saw dark Mary peering into his face from the side, trying, apparently, to read his thoughts, his attitude towards the sounded post. And Yura thought he almost guessed, only not the district committee of her fiance, but Gorkomovsky. Take it higher!
“Connections, friends, opportunities,” Maria listed. “Well, and one more thing ... He has a car, flat.” Garage capital. Cottage at St. Andrew’s Lake. It is foolish to live in the present, it is necessary to look into the future.
"Arkadyevich - your future?"
“Arkadyevich and I see our life like this,” she said. - Business. Do you understand your business? .. Cafe, then another cafe. And then, probably, more. In general, we are not going to stop. Arkadyevich now has one cafe, but a cooperative one, on equal footing. And we want ours. There is one dining room on the Gorkomovsky balance, and the area is the most. - She was silent. - We want to open a special cafe. With a twist. Art Cafe. Say, literary. You will like this idea.
Yura felt her cheek with the look of Mary at his profile. To tell her not to look at him, but to look in front of her, in the bookcase, like him.
- Wine, poetry, candles - it's so romantic! Arkadyevich came up with the name: “Northern Muse”. Yesterday we walked in a cafe, well, in the cooperative, Surgut and Nizhnevartovsk friends of Arkadyevich came to the wedding, so he came up with the northern name. And in a literary cafe, we will invite poets. And we ourselves honor something.
Yourself? Her Arkadyevich also writes poetry? Or did she start writing? But why then did not send a single poem to him in the army? Doesn’t it matter to him? Or do they want him to participate in this their ... family business? Hell no!
The bed springs creaked under his arms.
- Do not freak out, Yurochka-fool. Well, who is now waiting for two years? The best years are gone. Don't be such a willow.
- willow?
- Well, they say that.
- Never heard.
“You have not heard a lot of things there, in your steppes, at your“ point ”. Do not be naive, well? .. While you were giving a debt to the Motherland, we were doing business here. All these your rockets will soon be cut down and cut into scrap. Life has changed, you know, my friend? Everything was different, Yura. The communists are now in the span.
- Do not rush things.
- You do not understand anything. Arkadyevich - he is Gorkomovsky. He is in the know. Yes, and on television talking about a market economy. The rails of socialism led to a dead end, and so on. In Tyumen won a commodity exchange opened. In Rodniche, American cigarettes sell French cognac Napoleon. Beer "Milwaukee" in the banks! ..
From the living room came Tsoi's voice recording. “Changes require our hearts! Changes require our eyes! "
- Did you have a telly in part, Yur?
- was. We watched "Time." According to the daily routine ...
Yura remembered Gorbachev’s gloomy, anxious face on the Rubin TV. Earlier, in April eighty-fifth, Gorbachev looked different: cheerful, vigorous. It seemed that he had already stepped into the future and now calls the country after him. Next year - party congress, applause. Acceleration, publicity. Yura believed Gorbachev. But in the eighty-ninth, the general secretary became too much and too often talk. As if trying to resist with words the strong current that carried him somewhere. And do not understand: whether swimmer crappy, or cunning enemy of the people.
- Here you are in a cooperative cafe you can normally have dinner, but for fifteen rubles. And in the dining room - for one and a half rubles, but there they will give you water instead of soup, bread instead of cutlets and brown weed instead of tea. People deserve the best, and it’s not a sin to take some money for it.
“My father earns 200 rubles a month, his mother 180,” thought Yura. - How many better they "deserve" the price of the machine? "
“Poverty under capitalism is inevitable,” Maria scuffled, as if responding to his thoughts. - That is why it is important to be not among those who buy, but among those who sell.
This phrase seemed to Yury memorized. Masha is beautiful and slim, but she is not able to speak intelligently and stylishly. Probably from Arkadyevich picked up. From the Komsomol-market.
How is it: today a Komsomol member, tomorrow - the enemy of socialism and communism? How so: the United States is the ideologist of the Cold War and the enemy, and now is a peacemaker and friend? In the USSR, speculators were imprisoned, and now they will be declared the best people, a role model? In literature classes at school, it was taught that opportunists are nits and scum, and now these skins are going to rule the ball? Spin it up? Yura believed that all this would not go further than talk and petty cooperative activity. And those who try to sell their homeland, will give a hand. And they will give hard. So that the fingers will fly. It is only necessary to end the deficit, to establish a system. There were difficult times in the country, but everything was always adjusted.
But how? Yesterday - his bride, and today - someone else's wife?
“You prepared plans for me too?” - Yuri asked, looking at Mariino reflected in the casement of the bookcase. He was suddenly seized by a strange calm. He looked at Maria.
Her face rose pink.
- Well, you see - you guessed it yourself! No, you are not completely lost to a market economy. I will attach you. You will go far with me, Yurik-Durik. If I said it will be so. - She patted him on the shoulder.
- Yah? - Yura almost laughed. - In the letters you said that you are waiting for me and love. BUT…
- And I have not ceased to love you. Why do you think so? Well I wrote to you. You think lied? You don't understand anything, Yuri-Durik. I just did not say everything.
She folded her fingers into the lock in her lap. Like an old woman.
Now they both sat on the bed and looked at their vague reflections in the doors of the bookcase.
Persons who have appeared through the colorful roots of books.
I wrote.
Squinting, Yura looked out the window at the sky. Lots of clouds. Stretch one after another. Oblong, thick, gray. It will be raining.
Yes, she wrote to him. First, often, two or three letters a week. They quickly accumulated, creating a thick wad. Yura kept them in the bedside table, wrapped in cellophane. Closer to winter, Masha began to write less often - by letter per week. Under demob, he received from her only a couple of letters a month. Now it became clear: the letters were given her more and more difficult. It was getting harder and harder to call Yura loved, say “I wait”, “send a passionate long kiss” and fill in paper sheets with other suitable ones. And yet she coped with the task.
I wrote.
The lines drawn in the notebook cells lined up in front of his eyes in straight and slanting rows. His visual memory is like a photographic film.
“Do you remember Kostya Kislov? It is still as sour as if it justifies the last name! ”-“ Vasya Gorsky gave you his regards. All stamps collects. Funny, huh? Some brands ... Tweezers, blaster ... And she loves to tinker with model cars. "Young Technician" writes. And it looks like a child. ” - “From your friend Sasha Sivtsov to you hello big. Met him in the market. He asked how you served there. ” - “Yurik-Murik, do you remember how we skated sleds in the winter? How I screamed for fear? Here is a fool! Is it possible to be afraid of something with you? "-" Do you remember our first disco in the technical school? "-" Do you remember ... "
Remember, remember, remember!
Letters from the past. Well, of course. These were letters from the past. How could she tell about the present? All the more about the future?
For example, to say hello to him not from Sashka Sivtsov, but from Arkadyevich. From the Komsomol-Gorkomov cones, enviable smiling groom with an apartment, cottage, car and even a capital garage. Enumerate in the letter the material and summarize: everything is built, everything is bought, it remains only to live. Start as usual: “Do you remember ...” And then, somewhere at the end of the letter, throw out the main thing in one paragraph: “Yes, I almost forgot. Listen, Yurik-Murik, I'm getting married here ... "
I wonder when there was a change in it? Months ago? A year ago? One and half year? How long has she been cheating on him?
Maria said something.
- ... No, my friend, I did not stop loving you. You let the sour stop. You compare yourself with Arkadyevich. Well this is it, half-man, future henpecked, sweet for sweet ... And I want you, Yurochka-fool. Both of you are called Yurami. In bed you will not be mistaken! - She giggled. - You will be mine, willow-barefoot. You will be my lover. I will teach you kamasutra.
Yura turned to the window. Felt red. Why blushes, did not understand. Human feelings are faster than thoughts.
Probably Masha right. He is naive. And stupid, it must be.
But for some reason he wanted to remain both naive and stupid.
And he blushed because he really wanted to hug Masha, undress Masha. And lie down with her, here, behind the locked room door. And at the same time it was disgusting, it was disgusting. He wanted her, and wanted to push her away, but the first felt more than the second, and for that reason he blushed. And Mashka, of course, noticed his sudden blush of embarrassment. Women are incredibly difficult to object, Yura realized.
Maria got up, adjusted her ultramarine dress. She took a magazine from a bookcase on top of books. With a paper rustle, she flinched at him.
- You asked about the plans. Watch it.
Yura silently accepted the opened magazine. It was the most popular youth publication. Circulation - several million copies.
From the page on him looked the face of Mary. The photographer took it, leaning against the birch. Under the black-and-white photograph there are cursive lines: “... she dreamed of writing poetry from childhood,” “the dream has finally come true,” “the young poetess, promising,” and so on.
Below is the name of the poetess: Maria Nekrasova.
- I left myself a maiden name. It sounds so poetic, huh? .. Arkadyevich’s surname is not literary at all, well, it's her ass.
So she writes poetry. And they are published in the capital. Well, you can congratulate her. But he has something to do with it?
His eyes slid from the surname to the verse. For titles, stanzas, rhymes. Yura turned the page, another.
“You have a cool girl, Yuri! You wrote her poems! "
Someone else - probably the editor of the poetry department, the executive secretary, or whoever else is doing it with them - has redid it. A little bit here and there corrected, edited. It was corrected in some places, but Yury would not agree with something.
However, he was not asked.
And you can't prove anything to anyone now. The letters in which he sent these poems are with Masha. Hidden somewhere. No, rather, burned. Yura grinned. It seems that he begins to think in the spirit of modern times.
She wrote him letters full of love and passion, and he sent back verses to her. She, preparing to marry the garage with the car, just it was necessary. He called her and his letters a love story and thought that, after returning from the army, he would collect them all and tie them up with a thread, and then, years later, 20 or 40, would turn to this love document - with her, Maria.
And she extracted poetic material from his letters. Like a rock ore. Received a letter, opened the envelope, rewrote poetry with a pen or reprinted it on some Komsomol typewriter, signed each sheet with its maiden name, and destroyed letters. Over time, accumulated poetic collection for the magazine. And no evidence. Mosquito nose is not undermined.
She says she hasn't stopped loving him, but isn't that a lie? In this world they lie, almost without thinking. Moreover: here they believe in a lie, as in the truth.
Yura watched the poems to the end.
The first poem from the compilation he composed at the age of nineteen, on the train, on his way to the army, to the school book. Composed without paper in my head. The last poem was written and sent this spring, in March. Quickly, however, typed.
“I especially like it, Road to Heaven.” - Maria sat down beside her, jabbed a finger at the lines. The nail hit the paper. Jura was in pain. He felt like a heart was pricked. - The last stanza is generally chic and brilliant:
Yura was silent.
- And where do you get these thoughts from? - asked Maria. “You’re twenty-one years old.” Such an inspiration, yes?
He felt Marie's arm hugging him. He closed his eyes. They were sitting close by, close, her fingers were moving on his stomach, and that was like many, many years ago. Yura forced himself to open his eyes. Before him was the same closet. Disturbed dust particles circled in the air.
- In short, just awesome! - Maria sighed with frank envy. The arm that hugged Jura quietly removed. - This is an editor in Moscow, he told me so. Well, not exactly ... Amazing ... No, penetrating ... that is, heartfelt ... I forgot how. And he said that such poems are unusual for a female poetic look. Something like that. You write at least a little bit like a woman, okay, yur?
For the poetess, albeit false, she expressed too vulgar. Even primitive. She would expand the lexicon. Classics read. Instead apologists of a market economy.
- Publications in magazines, then a book, the second ... Union of Writers ... Translations into English, French, German ... into Japanese!
Surprisingly, a woman sat near him, cherishing someone else's dream.
“A poetess at a husband-restaurant owner,” thought Yura. - One came out of the Komsomol dining room, the other - from other people's poems. And so these are the modern market marchers who show the unenlightened crowds a shining path to capitalism? ”
Masha twisted a wide (too wide) gold ring on the ring finger. Such a ring would harmoniously look at a plump finger of some forty-year-old Western bourgeoisie: ladies with a gilded handbag and in a hat, from under which mocking contempt eyes stare.
- You would write, and I would seek publications. We will divide the fees. We agree. I won't hurt you, firefly fool. You know, the second role is also great. This is not a crowd. One writes, the other attaches and sells - this is normal.
“The division of labor,” thought Yura. He smiled to himself. Everything they have thought out.
“In America, it would simply be called a business,” said Maria.
"I will wait from you for a magazine post." Lieutenant Colonel Zhanibekov said this today, but it seemed that a whole historical epoch had passed since then, and Zhanibekov was nine hundred years old, like the biblical Methuselah.
- In your opinion, am I not able to send poems to "Youth" or "New World"?
- My sunshine! .. I had to go to Moscow and lie under the editor. To poems appeared in the magazine. Now appeared, and not in a year. And to appear at all. Now everything is done for the interest, you still do not understand, dear, right? So I will explain to you. - She reached for the pierce, fished out a cigarette from a slightly opened red-white pack of “Marlboro” with a thin finger, flicked a lighter, lit a cigarette, threw a stream of bluish smoke towards the door. - You yourself will not get through, you're my naive fool. Listen to me, and you will come to success.
“To success”, - as if an echo, echoed Yura’s thought.
Where did the girl from the cooking school? In front of him sat, blowing nostrils smoke and teaching him life, some kind of cinematic creature. Not real! It seemed that the session would end, the film in the reel would rustle, the mechanic would stop the film projector, and the creature would fade, dissolve into the dusty air. Yura could not believe that Maria was alive next to him. He needs to get out of bed, leave. Leave, think. To be alone. So he will come home, remember how everything was with them before the army - and it will all return. We just need to remember how. And this is all happening here, no. It seems to him.
No, not imagining. It was as if someone had taken his life and slipped another one to him.
In the tobacco smoke, the ghostly wrinkled face of a teenager swung from a football field. "Stomp to your slut." A yard boy with a blade, a brother of a gopnik, suddenly grew to become a moralist.
- Hey where are you? - Maria rose, extinguished a cigarette butt in an ashtray on the desk.
It would be necessary to answer something - you can’t sit and be silent like that. But what answer? He could talk about something with that Masha whom he met at the disco. He could talk to Zhanibekov or Orlov, or other guys from their military unit. But with cinema characters, with aliens, Yura could not speak.
“You have to digest everything, I understand,” said the future owner of the literary cafe. She was talking about food. - A little unexpected, huh? You know, now all life consists of turns. And fast all of them, turns. It would not miss. Hey, feathers wonder, wake up!
“I'll go,” said Yura, looking into the glass of the bookcase. - I'll go.
- I got a phone. Arkadyevich struck the installation on the GTS. Call We live here for the time being, repair in the apartment of Arkadyevich ...
He tiredly thought that she hadn’t written to him about the phone either. Apparently, she was afraid that he would call. Anyone could have picked up the phone: Arkadyevich, Albina Iosifovna, or Georgy Fedorovich. It is unlikely that Maria dedicated her kin and new lover in the subtleties of her game.
Maria turned to the table, tore a scrap from a sheet from a notebook. She brought a number on a scrap with a pen - it seems the same one that she wrote to the army. The ink color was exactly the same. Only tears on the lines for a long time did not drip.
- Call, if that. At your house on the Tula telephones put.
"What is she doing at my house?"
- I went to yours. To spend
“Of my parents, too, made fools. I love, I wait. Well, of course. Mine, too, must be sure that she is waiting for me. If I knew from someone that she was not expecting me, she would have remained without verses. So she collected greetings from Vasya and Sasha, and others, purposely meeting with them - in order to inform her that she was waiting for me and loves me. She even started the wedding before my demobilization only because she was afraid that someone would find out and write to me. How it's called? Prudence? And there is no stronger word? Mother and father probably think that Masha and I will get married soon, we will make them grandchildren. Kondrashka's father is enough if I tell him about Arkadyevich and tell him the poems in the magazine. And most importantly - about love has not ceased. Why, she "did not cease" to this, it seems, she believes! He sleeps with his Komsomol husband, steals poetry and loves a robbed poet. ”
Thoughts in Yura began to get confused.
“Arkadyevich would give you a lift, he has a Zhiguli, but he drank,” said Maria.
“I'll go,” Yura repeated, staying on the bed.
- Listen, no one will enter here. - Holding the dress, Maria knelt before him. - The door on the latch. Arkadyevitch will not climb here, he is well trained. And there they have a tape recorder ...
As if frightened boy, Yura moved away from Masha on the bed, resting his hands on the spring mattress. She was on her knees, watching him with his eyes. From the edge of the bed, Yura jumped up, rushed to the door, as if escaping from the plague.
In the living room just silenced the music. Passing along the corridor, Yura saw that the dark-haired Arkadyevich, showing the outlined baldness, was rummaging in cassettes.
“Oh, Yurok ...” said Maria's father. His face was purple, like a drunken alcoholic. The voice sounded monstrously drunk. - You are…
Uncle Maria was dozing in the chair.
- Drink vodka with us, namesake! - happily shouted the groom-husband, and his cry uncle slammed his eyes and reached for a glass.
Arkadyevich's happy mood struck Yura. Here, right in this apartment, dystopia was born. Not a book, not fictional, but authentic. Here was formed one of the centers of the new world. A creepy, inverted world, in which he, Jura, would not fit in anything. A world in which they say they love and wait, but they go to bed with another. And for the sake of of interest sleep with the third. It is possible that this is not the limit.
Two people were smoking in the kitchen by the open window, he and she, who did not say anything to Yura. Both were staggering; he supported her waist. Yura completely forgot who they are. Absolutely everything in this apartment was a stranger. On the windowsill were two glasses, a half-empty bottle of brandy, a plate with the remains of a Russian salad and one fork. Street wind drove tobacco smoke into the hallway. Yura got watery eyes. Whether from smoke, or from grief.
He laced up his sneakers and picked up the suitcase.
- Take a magazine. - Maria gave him a room with poems. - I have one more.
Like a child, ready to be lightened up, but Jura shook his tears in the future, shook his head. Holding his suitcase between his legs, he turned, clicked the English lock and climbed into the concrete coolness of the stairwell.
- Bye, Yurochka-fool!
He did not answer this ghost. To a fearful ghost, half-dead, half-dead, one half of which held the past in itself, the second carried the future. Somewhere in the middle between the halves was the thinnest layer of the present. And this is the real Yura did not want to admit to himself. To take a magazine from Mashka, a reminder of the intruder who had broken into the present, meant to let the nightmarish ghost go home.
Departing from Mary, Yura repeated his previous route. The path of a man who was returning to one world, and got into another. Odessa street, the central street of the Republic, traffic lights, transition. The Aeroflot Agency was still the same, and the life around it was already different. In an effort to get rid of his obsession, Yura shook his head.
He passed the “Start” store, which always smelt of brand new rubber to the throat (favorite smell of the city boy), and now on the shabby doors there was a sign “Accounting”, crossed the Geological Survey, passed school 6 and stopped at career where as a child I caught minnows with the bait. A lone seagull silently flew over the quarry, now silted, stretched along the banks of the river and densely overgrown with cattails. On the other side, on which there was a little more bare sand, sunbathed, spread a blanket, a couple. The two of them were arguing about something: they raised themselves on their elbows and bickered. Brave new world does not give them peace, thought Yura.
He approached, swaying and, it seemed, slightly bouncing, like on springs, a young, unshaven type in sports leotards and a crumpled t-shirt. Type stood in front of the rack "at ease", keeping a small distance. His lips danced.
- Hey, man, give me a ruble!
The Jura suitcase fell out, and the tongue and teeth themselves folded the answer:
- And in your ear?
He would gladly put the insolent into a cutlet state. His head ached, his fists clenched; vision focused on a human target. The whole damned new world concentrated, it seemed, in this rude face, in these loose little movements. The master “give” requirement was designed exclusively for the cowardly and malleable. But the trick is that the most cowardly and malleable are just such types.
Lips opposite dance.
- What are you, bro? You do not understand jokes?
“I don't understand,” snapped Yuri.
- Che, because of the ruble neighbor is ready to kill, right?
Often looking around, the neighbor began to move away, ridiculously jumping up and down, swaying.
That would be all this new world shake off the same with yourself. To say to him: “And in the ear?” - and make a false movement with the body. That he was scared and disappeared. Forever and ever.
The key to the apartment, he took from a neighbor, a pensioner Aunt Ani. It was not yet five o'clock; the mother and father would return from their work no earlier than six. Aunt Anya said that Yura had grown very much, and she remembers him “like this” (which was surprising: it was as if he was taken from the kindergarten to the army), and she had just bought sugar from the grocery store for coupons, and in the evenings and it is dark at night, even if the eye is poked out, there are no bulbs anywhere, because the thieves, trailing on the entrances, they are unscrewed and then at the market they sell at an exorbitant price. “They say,” the neighbor said, “You need to spread the bulbs with toothpaste so that they don't steal.” Paste prikёtsya something to the glass, not washed. But it, the paste, too, need to get it. Everything is now in short supply, Yurochka. They say there is no shortage in a market economy. ”
In the two-room apartment in which Yura lived from the age of seven, everything was the same as before his call-up into the army. He even smiled. An island of the past. The same things, the same desk with polished cracks from school (ceramic pencils on the table, a lamp under the woven lampshade, a stack of books, a pair of cassettes and the Aelita radio tape recorder, as before, as if Yura did not go anywhere), paper political world map on a whitewashed wall, on the opposite wall - a black and white portrait of a gloomy Lermontov and a quietly ticking round clock with Roman numerals. On the windowsill - white geraniums in green plastic pots.
On the bookshelf, leaning against the backs of the books, is a picture of him and Masha, from June 1989 of the year. My father filmed at Zenit, at the military registration and enlistment office of the Leninsky district — before Yura sat down with other conscripts on the bus, which then took them to the regional military registration and enlistment office, where they were later dismantled by the “buyers” officers. Jura spent about half a year in a study, and then got to the distribution point. Masha was eighteen in the picture, he was nineteen. He looked at the photo and thought that this Masha and the one he had seen today were different. It can not be that they were the same.
In another picture, Yura was captured with his best friend. January, school skiing competitions, eighth-graders in tracksuits, knitted hats, skiing, with sticks. Jura and Sashka Sivtsov have strained faces, ready to jump forward in the snow. In the background - fizruk Pal Palych, blowing a whistle to his mouth. All school fizrukov is called Pal Palichi or San Sanychami.
“I'll call Sasha,” whispered Yura.
He reached into his pocket, counted the money, put a two-kopek coin in his palm, closed the apartment, ran down the steps, said hello to the old alcoholic Makar Kuzmich, who appeared on the first floor steps (he stared at him like a ghost, did not recognize, probably) and went out into the yard. Circled the house. At the corner, at the overgrown acacias, there are indeed two chenille telephone booths.
Having visited one and the other booth, Yura said:
- Barbarians.
Somebody pulled out the tubes from both phones, as they say, with meat. The crippled springs in which the wires were hiding looked like mutilated hands with hanging tendons.
Why do we need a pipe? It is clear why they steal, unscrew the light bulbs: they can be sold or screwed into a cartridge, but what to do with the tube from the machine?
The telephones themselves, enclosed in metal shells, were cut with knives, speckled with small and large inscriptions. Rock signs, parking primitive people.
The inscriptions were less obscene, often offensive. It was as if they didn’t come to these boxes, but to revenge.
In the booth, which stood on the right, smelled urine.
“I will take a taxi,” walking along Tula, thought Yura. “If a taxi is not in short supply here.”
The sky was frowning. From the slowly floating, swollen in the sky of gray, brick houses acquired a steel shade. The windows of the five-story building and the glass showcases of the Yubileyny deli blackened. On the palm of Jura, a drop of rain broke.
Taxi, he caught a cafe "Fairy Tale".
“Not by the meter,” the chauffeur announced. - To Maurice Thorez? For treshku. If to an entrance, then for four grouse.
Three rubles for such a distance was a triple price.
- Do not be up to the entrance.
Yura was silent all the way. Before leaving the Volga, I handed over a taxi driver to the taxi driver. He looked at him strangely from his seat.
- We agreed on four rubles.
- This is if the entrance. Do you have a bad memory? Or is it really all unreal? - added unexpectedly for himself Yura.
The driver removed the outstretched hand.
- Where are you from such a philosopher?
- From the army.
- Demob, what? Somewhere in the places forgotten by God and hell served? .. Everything is clear with you. Hey, brother, so you need to fill a glass with something. Will you take a waterman for a quarter? Or muttering. For the tag give. Cheaper no one will find. For fourteen - as demob. So in the newspaper wrapped.
With a bottle of "72", wrapped in "Soviet Russia", Yura took the elevator to the ninth floor. The door, without removing the chain, opened the disheveled curly guy, in which Yura recognized the matured Sasha. Three years have not seen! Sasha unfastened the chain, opened the door wider. But only in order to slip out onto the platform, on the mat.
- Hello…
- Hello! You ruin the whole raspberries for me, Juran! - Sasha whispered hotly. - I have a 30-year-old girl here, the most gusto. Married. Neighbor, count up! The husband and son stayed at the dacha, annihilated the potatoes, and she was at eight o'clock in the morning tomorrow on duty at the hospital, well, she returned to the city. And in the city she was bored. And here - me. With me you will not get bored. My ancestors also drove to the cottage. I'm sorry, Juran, but today you are superfluous. I'm here until the morning to burn with fire of love going.
And he closed the door without even saying goodbye.
A few seconds later the door opened. Yura was still standing by the rug. Sasha's hand gently took the bottle from him.
- What did you bring there? Oh, thanks, the ink will come in handy.
The door closed again. Behind her, the chain clinked.
It was anyone, but not Sasha Sivtsov.
With this Sivtsov Yura went to one school until the eighth grade inclusive. Then Sasha's parents moved from Tula to a new apartment on Maurice Torez. But the friendship continued up to the army itself - where Sasha, a student at an industrial institute, was taken in June of 1988, a year earlier than the Jura. And in August, the 1989 th Gorbachev’s decree sent Sivtsov and other university students who were called up to the “ranks” after the first course, to the reserve. The motherland decided that it was impossible to tear off students from their studies to a dumb army.
Yura pressed the elevator call button. Well, of course! He had not seen Sasha for too long. The one on the "citizen" for almost two years. It's a lot. During this time, the brave new world made Sasha his man. Slowly, day by day, Sasha got used to this world, grew into it, became its organic part. And he, Yura, on the "point" seemed to freeze, was conserved.
All this Yura perceived, fixed by consciousness. But his mind did not want to put up with the changed reality, but his heart could not.
Towards the cinema "Cosmos" buses were crowded, leaning to the curb, almost touching the sidewalk curbs with the orange sides. The floors of the jackets, fragments of jackets, shirts and pants, sandwiched in the bus door, stuck out. It was drizzling rain. The sky has become lower, the air has darkened. Slowly going nowhere, Yura went home on foot.
People who came across him did not smile. The faces of the men and women seemed gloomily gloomy. As if in their works, men and women had left misfortune, to which they would have to return tomorrow, and at home in the evening they also had grief. To bitter facial expressions, rain painted on wet stripes on the cheeks. Everyone seemed to cry. Here and there over their heads opened umbrellas. They were covered by people from Yurina curiosity.
Yura looked under the umbrellas in the hope of catching at least one happy or carefree face through the veil of rain. But not one came across. Yura, a man in a drenched shirt, tried to smile at passersby, but this did not work, and once caused the effect opposite to what he had intended: the old woman darted away from him like from a psycho, pounded quickly on the sidewalk with a wand. At the Rodnichok grocery store, the rain stopped falling, the sun peeped out, the windows of the houses gleamed, steam began to rise from the asphalt, but no one smiled here, as if there was a thief of smiles in the city that had long taken over all the streets without exception.
And Mary did not smile, suddenly understood Yura. Despite the wedding. Maria's face could be persuasive, persuasive, arrogant, or that can say “you understand nothing” and teach life. But Yura did not see the smile on her lips. Anything could have been expected from this person, from sighs to, perhaps, tantrums, but not just a simple happy smile.
All the people here, he thought, were waiting. Waiting for the future. The coming of the day when at last they are allowed to smile. The onset of the moment when the thief of smiles will take, will announce that the game is over, and will distribute the smiles to their owners.
But is not Arkadyevich happy? A smile, joyful toasts, kisses with a young wife, finally, a cafe-car-flat ...
"This is so, half-man, future henpecked ..."
Instead of turning to the Explorers, Yura turned to Odessa. The legs themselves carried him to the house of Mary. No, he was not going to rise to her. To see Arkadyevich, the drunken guests, Alina Iosifovna, pleased that 90 guests, the crimson father Maria, had gathered at the wedding cafe, she herself - no, no, a thousand times no. He just wanted to stand at her house on the west side, throw back his head, look at the window of her room. Such a small desire, after the fulfillment of which he will return home, will shake hands with his father and embrace his mother.
When he got up where needed and looked up, his shirt was almost dry. The evening sun poured yellow brick into the Mariinsky brick house and warmed Yurin's nape.
This is good, Yura thought, that she did not stick out the window with a cigarette. That would be awful.
He looked at the window, burning with yellow fire from the sun's rays. The window was exactly the same, and the five-story building itself was exactly the same as two years earlier. And it seemed to Yura - for the sake of this instant he came here - that time had turned his shafts and gears back, and he was again nineteen. Maria will now come down to him, they will go around the city, holding hands, twisting their fingers, it will smell all around the summer that has begun, rain, lilac, and ...
- Aaaaa! ..
This cry, dissolved in the wind, seemed to continue aloud to Yuri a fantasy that was about to threaten to fall into a nightmare.
They shouted from there - from the lilac thickets behind the steel improvised garages. Behind the lilac bushes rose, half-century-old poplars rustled noisily.
- Pu-ti! .. - it came to Yura.
And all was quiet. Only the wind rustled in the crowns of the poplars.
Having flown from rusty garages smelling of urine, feeling the elasticity of the wind with his cheeks, Yura burst into the lilac with a bang.
In his ears were someone's words, flown with the wind:
- He has no attendants. With Parfyon in his woods. Everything.
The speaker's lips moved. He probably said something else, but Yura did not hear. Between the lilacs and the poplars, Yura saw three people: an almost naked, bobbed peer with a gray little and some kind of shrunken face, very much like some other person; A dark-skinned man lying on his back with a mouth plastered with a plaster and a body bound with a rope - from legs to chest; a boy from a football field - with a wrinkled physiognomy. The bound man had a hand in the blood - a young aggressive football player, who was holding an awl in his lowered hand, apparently worked with his fingers.
“Wow, demob,” the teenager said quietly. “Meet me,” he nodded at the elder, “this is my brother, Lyoshka.”
Lyoshka hostilely looked at his younger brother.
- Why did you bring him here?
- I brought? What are you driving, Poker? .. He hangs out with his shmara, Mashka Nekrasova. I saw him during the day. Basurman, ”he pointed to the bound one,“ screamed, when I asked about my grandmother, this one pinned. I probably waited here for Mashka in the bushes ... I don’t know how to fuck here ...
“Ah,” said Poker. - Well, I'm sorry, brother, I didn’t run into business. Masha, then waited. Or have you forgotten something else here, citizen? Basurman - not your spine? - He glanced at the bound one.
- Itself arises, fraer, - put the younger one, lighting up a match. There was blood on his fingers, his cigarette was stained with blood. - Curious Varvara in the bazaar nose tore off. You still owe me for football.
- Mashka told me that she had expected a soldier from the army. - Poker hoarsely laughed. - I unzipped my pants, but about her, fraera, she was waving. This is psychology or something. Maybe she imagined him in my place. Dick disassemble them, slut these. Hey, demob, your fucking served me for a week. Everyday. Arkadyevich owed me for the roof, and she worked off the interest. Arkadyevich, count, decided that we went to meet him. Well, I later explained to him who was going to meet someone. And it would still zazharnichal, Komsomol member fucking. - Poker laughed softly. “Masha is a good bitch, but marrying such a ...”
Yura hit him precisely for these words. He beat him for the wrong guy, who had his mouth sealed and stuck under his nails, he attacked the gangster for insulting Mary, the Mary who lived behind the window and who was no more than eighteen years old.
“She served me too.”
The younger one still spoke these words, and Jura’s fist was already flying into the poker cheekbone. Leshka's face, a little bewildered, turned slightly, as if to get a better look at the enemy, and his fist hit him in the nose. Knowing what to do next, Jura left the bandit under the lungs with his left, and then, striving for the whole body behind his hand, he hit the bottom with his right.
Lyoshka disappeared from sight. And then something flashed briefly in the air. Somewhere below and to the side, Lyoshkin's brother, fascinated, with frozen eyes, flashed his face, losing clarity in motion. Yura never recognized his name.
Dry lips on a blurred, wrinkled face moved, but Yura did not hear a word. All the sounds of this world suddenly disappeared as if they were turned off.
From the Jura pulled out something that was firmly stuck in it. As a plug from the outlet. For a moment, the picture cleared up: a boy with a contorted face, with an open mouth, a hand, whitened fingers, squeezed around the handle of a knife, from which red drops drip.
Trembled in his knees and yukin yanked his legs, poplars recoiled, and the lilacs overturned. Yura suddenly felt the soft leaves of dandelions with his palms, and his back - the solidity of the earth. The sky caught his eye. Many, many sky.
It is real, he thought.
Two dark figures covered the sky, but Yura was no longer seen.
June morning 1991 of the year before the one-story headquarters stood five. Two sergeants - in paradkah, with badges, with Insignias on the shoulder straps, which turned yellow letters "CA", a cap with a glittering in the sun visors; three privates - in civilian.
Yura was the closest to the checkpoint. His shirt, tucked into pants, slightly swell from the steppe wind that was walking along the military unit.
Conduct them out the battalion commander himself.
“I apologize to demobles every time,” said Lieutenant Colonel Zhanibekov. - That in December, then in June. Might let you go early. But while these dunce, change your, wits teach until suitable tolerances as curator approve ... Lad Camp - one army - the other, you know. Part of our regime, every person counts. Here's looking at you - he looked somehow at Yura - and feel like a school teacher on the last call. Sorry to part with you guys. Correct cap, demob brave. No not like this. - Zhanibekov himself corrected his cap sergeant Orlov. - Thanks for the service guys.
The lieutenant colonel shook hands.
“And you, Yura,” having reached the last in the line of Yuri, for some reason, the commander addressed him in a polite manner, “send your poems to Youth or Change.” The person said, you have wonderful poems. In my opinion, he understands this issue. Read.
- Thank you ... - said Yuri in response. He felt embarrassed. - I am not Lermontov, comrade lieutenant colonel ...
“I will wait for you to send you a magazine with a magazine,” said Zhanibekov sternly. - And now - come!
The rank immediately fell apart.
- Do not remember dashing! - shouted the lieutenant colonel to the former soldiers in the back, when they walked in a short chain to the checkpoint.
A commanding "UAZ" was waiting for them at the gates.
- Happy! - said the driver. - I have half a year to drag the service.
- Sit down in front. - Orlov pushed Yura. “You're the farthest from home.”
Leaving behind the gate with red stars, crowded "UAZ" rolled along the concrete fence lined with maples. The construction of a divorce will now begin on the parade ground, but this does not concern Yura any more. Orlov with the guys in the back seat singing "There is a soldier in the city", and Yuri laughed and then pulled up.
At the bus station in the village of Moscow, after saying goodbye to the commanding driver, demobels dispersed on suburban and intercity buses - who are to the east, who are to the west, and who are to the north. Jura was on the way with Orlov - to the regional center, and there to the airport.
They rode in a loose "LAZ", rumbling with iron and bouncing on a broken road. Together with the "LAZ" jumped on the harsh slippery seats and demobilization.
- The girl is waiting? - too loud, as it seemed to Jura, Orlov asked.
Yura nodded.
- You have a cool girl, Yuri! - continued Orlov. - You wrote her poems! I also had to write poems with my Galka. Maybe I would have waited then. Only I do not know how to write poetry. There is no talent!
Outside the windows were green fields. Clear sky above the fields.
Yura thought that Galka probably did not like Orlova. If you love - how not to wait?
If no one waited, it was necessary to conclude long ago: no love exists.
Jura flights and Orlov bought in advance, in May, presenting a military airport in cash requirements and pay the difference because of the requirements was repaid only a trip by rail. Now they had to wait for the registration - to each his own - and take to the air on the Tu-134 or Tu-154.
At the airport, they ate a tasteless ice milk, and then a woman's voice in the speakers announced registration for Tyumen flight. At the counter number seven, two hugged goodbye.
In flight, Yura looked out the window, at the white, gray clouds and endless sky. “Tu” fell into the air holes, as if falling, suddenly and swiftly, and the back of the head across Yurino, ran down his neck and shoulders, and rolled in a wave of goosebumps. From the unsmiling stewardess Yura took a cardboard cup with mineral water. Nothing but water, a strange gloomy stewardess on her trolley did not bring. The women sitting in the seats in front, in a low voice, talked about the shortage in the country. The mineral water was warm and salty-nasty, but Yura finished it to the end. Then he threw back the chair and closed his eyes.
First of all, he will go to Mary. On the thirty-fifth shuttle bus will reach the air agency, to the final stop, and there - on foot. He wrote to her in the last letter. Maria doesn’t have a phone at home, and to order long-distance calls in advance, to get from the military unit to the city of t., Where there was a telegraph and a long-distance communication point, is a whole story. Therefore, having bought a plane ticket, Yura wrote to Masha on the same day: “There is no need to meet. Be at home. ”
After a couple of hours, the Tu-154 landed at Roshchino. Yura did everything as planned: he defended a small queue for a minibus taxi, got into a close Rafik and in thirty five kopecks drove to Tyumen, to the agency Aeroflot. From there, admiring the lilac that had not yet faded off, recently washed by the rain, knocked down city dust from the delicate matte leaves, with a small suitcase in hand and a smile on his lips, which looked like a silly, childish, Yura walked towards Maria - across the traffic light, along Republic Street, in Odessa, then courtyards. He walked and thought it was good that he hid his parade uniform and his cap in a suitcase, and did not put it on. Not that he would stand out, would look at him. But he didn’t want people to stare at him - happy, with a childish smile. His happiness, the happiness of return, he wanted to share first with Maria. Two years! One hundred and forty-eight Maryin's letters, full of love, lay in his suitcase. The first letters were dripped tears, it tears the ink from a ballpoint hands on exercise book slips here and there changed the blue to pink.
Here is her yard. Brick five-story building, a strip of asphalt, birch, lilac and acacia at the entrances. All familiar - maybe just a little older. On the field, fenced net, boys of twelve chasing the ball. Briefly stripped forward, seemingly older than others, deftly avoided the young midfielders and defenders and inexorably dribbled the ball to the gate. Jura angrily thought that Mary did not buy any color - no daffodils or tulips or roses last.
On the sidewalk, by the walkway to the porch, stood the brand-new white Zhiguli of the seventh model. With wedding ribbons. Behind the Zhiguli, the black Volga froze with the same ribbons and rings on the roof.
Holding the door handle, Yura heard a scream somewhere behind.
- Uya-II!
So the boys scream in pain. When they kicked or hit.
Turn around, running - and Yura behind the net, on the sand of the field. The short-haired boy who recently led the ball into the goal bent over the fallen boy. He was lying on his back, like an animal that recognized the primacy of another animal, covering his face with his elbows.
- You, bitch, gave me a bandwagon? I know you. - The attacker straightened up, looked away, caught Yura with his eyes, and spat. His face was evil, wrinkled. An old face like that.
- Get away from him. - Yura approached.
- Get out of here, sack! - The attacker looked up at him.
Yura was taken aback. Saga The boy breathes in his chest!
- Do not suck, freak? I bitch you, I will cut the belts! .. - A blade flashed in the boy’s left hand. Razvochka.
- Come on, stop it!
A woman with a shapeless figure, covered with a dress, hobbled to the crowd.
- Damned criminal! Said the big woman, looking with hatred at the wrinkled, old face that was drilling her with a sassy look. The razor of the teenager ku-da has disappeared. As if she was not there.
“I'm not a criminal, Aunt Clara.”
- Brother is your felon. And you will sit down. All of you are the same, said Aunt Clara. - Get up, Borechka. How many times did she say to you: do not play football with this rabble.
- Where to go! - wrinkled face spat in the sand and smiled, looking like Borechka gets up and dusts himself off. - We live in the same yard.
- Nothing, we will soon move.
- I will dream of you, Bo-talk! - And he hoarsely laughed in a breaking voice, breaking into a screech. - And you, greenhorn, - he said, instantly removing the smile from her face and wrinkling her narrow forehead, - already a corpse. I know who you are pinned. To Maschke.
Yura caught sight of Aunt Clara. She looked back from the edge of the grid. In the eyes of her frozen curiosity. Little Borechka from her legs also looked back.
- Go, kondybay, what Zenk goggled, - said the attacker. - Get up again. Do you know Lyoshka Poker? .. You don't know anything. This is my brother. He will rule your Arkadyevitch.
"What else Arkadyevich?"
- Now wallow. Stomp to your slut. You demob, yes? - Shrunken shook his head, just like an adult.
Without looking back, Yura went off behind a thick aunt, hearing behind him quiet conversation and shrill boys hohotki. Aunt Clara, stopped for a moment in neighboring Maria's door, I looked back at Yuri, but said not a word. I opened the door and let Borechka ahead. Gritting spring, the door slammed. Yura noticed that many colored confetti was scattered on the steps of the Mariinsky Porch and on the steps. As if someone had got the New Year party crackers and was pampered. Oh yeah, this is someone's wedding. These machines with ribbons ... Dance music came from above. "Modern Talking". Yura met Masha at a disco in a technical school just for these songs. Masha came to the company from the culinary school girls - so shy, so slender, in a modest dress with a belt. Then she told Yura with a smile that she dressed herself on purpose - to be different from others. “You noticed me,” she whispered. And Yura told her that he thought that all the girls from the culinary industry were bbw buns.
He went up to the fourth floor. Music came from behind the Mariina door. Someone with English pins attached a paper scarlet heart pierced with an arrow to a leatherette.
“Has she moved?”
Yura looked at the landing. Confetti was scattered on the stairs leading to the fifth floor.
"Maybe the wedding is there?" But why is the picture here? ”
A crazy, almost fantastic idea came to his mind.
Masha agreed with the mother and father recorded in advance on the registration in the registry office, who should be handed an invitation, I agreed about the machines - and is now waiting for him, Yuri, for a wedding. To their wedding! On the day of his return. There is nothing more wonderful. And the music included exactly the one under which they met.
- She is waiting for me! Disco our remembers! - Yura whispered so softly that he barely heard himself.
He can not hesitate. They need to hurry - not so late in the registry office.
And he pressed the bell.
The button was the same, covered with paint on the edges. But instead of the usual crackling "zzrrrrrr" speaker inside the apartment deafening chirped like a bird. Yura flinched and again thought that maybe Masha had moved. No, no, she would have written to him about it.
Door opened. The hall was the father of Mary - in white, unbuttoned to the belly shirt and black trousers with the battered hands and slippers. His face was filled with purple, alcoholic, his eyes gleamed, and he was carrying vodka and tobacco from his mouth.
- Oh, Yurok ... And what about the suitcase? Present?
- I'm from the army, - said Yura.
- Right from there? Well, you're great. Right on the wedding! Praise.
The tape recorder in the apartment was silent.
- Who came there, dad?
Her voice.
- Georgy Fedorovich, who is it?
Unfamiliar male voice.
And there were different voices in the living room.
Well, yes, the wedding.
Confetti on the street, confetti on the stairs, "Volga" with rings and "Lada" with ribbons. And the picture on dermatin.
Yura stood in the hallway, holding the suitcase in front of him with both hands - just hiding behind them.
Georgy Fedorovich is married to Albina Iosifovna. He did not seem to be going to divorce and marry another woman. Masha would have written, of course.
And here is Albina Joseph herself, holding her chin high. With such women are not divorced.
Maria has no brothers and sisters.
- Hi, Yura! - Fancy Mary, bright cornflower blue dress to the knee with short sleeves, with a shallow cut on his chest, gently hugged him - through the suitcase, which he did not let go - and kissed on the cheek, showering the smell of spirits and champagne. - You come through. Do not be embarrassed. This is Yuri Arkadyevich, well, Yura, like you. Your namesake
Behind her, hugging her shoulders, under her dress the underlined foam, smiling plyugavenky dark-haired fellow with the appearance of bureaucratic worker. Thirty years or so. In a black two-piece suit, with a blue striped tie. The typical owner of the office in the district committee of the Komsomol or in some other house of bureaucracy. His gentle smile credible and location.
The dark-haired man gave him a small palm, Yura shook it gently.
“We just call him Arkadyevich,” said Maria. - Oh, I did not say ... He is a groom, that is, my husband. Yesterday we had registration, and today we are walking for the second day. But you put a suitcase something. - She squatted down and began to unhook his fingers from the suitcase handle. On her ring finger flashed a gold ring. - Well, you're like a child. Everything is good. Life goes on. Now drink vodka. Cognac. And do you want three-year-old champagne, Crimean? .. What are you all here crowded? - She rose and spoke louder. - Arkadyevich, who turned off the music? Do you need instructions? You men, without a firm female hand, will surely bend everything.
- Ttaak nauseous! - barked Mariin father. - A Jura - a penalty!
- I do not need a penalty.
- Do not cross it, - said Maria. - Dad, you drank a lot today. Think better of the liver.
- I'm talking about you, docha think. About your holiday. If I do not have fun, what will be the wedding?
- Yura, come on in. Sit down here.
In the drawing room, Yura sat down where Mary had pointed him, on a slightly shaky chair. Unoccupied this chair, clean plate - as if they were waiting for him. A wide folding table covered with a pink tablecloth was filled with crystal, porcelain and bottles. Strangers sat on the couch, on chairs. They introduced themselves, Yura nodded or shook their hands - and immediately forgot their names. There were about ten guests. Except machinery uncle, younger brother George Fedorovich, who held a chair in the corner, Jura none of these people had not seen before. Albina Iosifovna explained to him that today is the second wedding day, for relatives. The first day was yesterday: after registration they gathered in a cooperative cafe.
“There were ninety guests,” she said proudly.
Yura began to eat, trying not to look at anyone. Turns out he was damn hungry. He ate a salad, then the other. He ate wheat bread, cut into triangles, as in a restaurant. Maria herself brought him hot - steaming potatoes, pork with onions and sauce. He did not drink vodka, brandy, or champagne, but drank black tea.
The guests were already good shout recorder, chorus repeated "bitter", forcing Mary and Arkadyich long time, at the expense of kissing Arkadyevitch, rustling, crawl thin fingers of Mary on the blue back, and Jura, thinking about the fat in pork and gravy, lips kissing , swallowed the tea, pouring boiling water from an electric samovar and forgetting to pour sugar, and told himself that he was in a parallel world. In a world where everything is turned inside, perekoverkano, ruined, brought to the absurdity where everything goes wrong, as in the native world, the present.
Breaking with the flushed, as if naplakal, bride, groom rose from his seat at the head table. Yura looked into his approaching eyes. Arkadyevich, already without his jacket, without a tie, was drawn to him with a bottle of vodka.
- Drink a glass with us. What are you - tea and tea ...
The bottle was lemonade. In such bottles with a short neck began to pour vodka at Gorbachev. On the label of "Russian" Yura saw a little blue slanting post: "Regional Executive Committee". Not otherwise, the groom did not just buy vodka, but took out.
Arkadyevich splashed him into a glass, helpfully, but too sharply pushed up by Georgi Fedorovich, spilled vodka on the tablecloth. Not wanting to either speak or listen to any toast, Yura drank it. Vodka was warm and nasty. Yura felt his face twist. Arkadyevich himself knew how to drink vodka with a smile. A rare skill, I guess. Or maybe the muscles of his face have long been adjusted to a constant smile.
Maria's father pushed back the curtains, opened the window.
- Stuffy something.
Having washed down vodka with tea, Yura rose, moving the chair back. The carpet under my feet was soft, new. Yura went to the window, thinking maybe George Fedorovich would say something to him. Someone had to tell him something.
Arkadyevich spoke to him instead of Maryina's father. With a cup of tea, he stood at the window sill, drummed on it with his fingers, trying to get to the beat of the music.
“It smells good of lilacs,” he said.
From the street came a sweet aroma.
Yura shrugged.
“You seem to have served without leave,” said Arkadyevitch. - Maria said you were on the rocket "point".
“Holidays there are bad,” said Yura.
“I see,” said the groom husband.
- Did you serve?
- It did not happen.
"Then what do you understand?"
The groom-husband drank tea. Coughing.
Turning away from the window, Yura caught the eyes of several guests. Among others, Albina Iosifovna also looked at him. Pity flashed in her eyes. Quick, tiny such pity. Or maybe it seemed to him. Albina Iosifovna - a harsh woman. At work - the boss. Veal tenderness from it you will not wait. But a portion of ridicule and poisonous remarks shlopotat - it's easy. She is more likely to announce him, Yura, as a loser, rather than begin to regret and stroke his head.
Will not Mary tell him anything? “I love, I wait” is in the letters. What is there? Sticky kisses and a trip to the cinema first, and then to the registry office with this thirty-year-old bureaucrat, or who is he there? It is impossible to believe! There must be some explanation. Accidental pregnancy? From this thought, Yura threw heat.
“Arkadyevich, I will talk to Yurik,” said Maria, getting up. She said this in a pause between tape recordings, and everyone heard her words.
"Of course," Arkadyevitch answered with a smile from the window. - You need to talk.
- Come on, Yurochka-fool. - Maria gracefully gave him her hand. - In the bedroom. There, no one will hurt us.
- Yes, yes, in the bedroom! - happily repeated Arkadyevitch and laughed. Guests laughed after him.
- Here it is, a democracy! - said George Fedorovich. - We did not have time to get married, as the husband sends his wife to the bedroom with ... with ... a familiar guy.
“This is how I am called now,” thought Yura, walking along the wall behind Maria.
He remembered how she hugged him in the hallway — it was so easy, barely touching. Perhaps, like this, the girls embrace friends.
The guests behind his back laughed. "Modern Talking" played louder. Some kind of relative of Arkadyevich made a singing with a school accent, trying to raise his baritone to a tenor and therefore a fake. The guests laughed again. They laughed at the singer, but it seemed to Jura that he was above him. Through the corridor, their laughter sounded dull, gravestonely.
- Yes, you put something raseyskoe! - said the voice of Mariinsky uncle.
Masha led Yura to the room she used to call “hers”. His, and all. And now it's a “bedroom.”
She closed the door on the latch, leaned back against the door.
- Sit down.
Yura sat on the bed made. The springs of the mattress creaked a little. Perhaps, on this very bed, Maria and Arkadyevich staged their wedding night yesterday. Or Arkadyevich own apartment? Cozy, furnished? And he just does not want her to scratch, destroy, turn into a wedding drunk mess?
Maria unfolded the mirror of the pierum, put lipstick on her lips. The lips kissed by Arkadyevitch glittered.
A dress with a neckline — probably tailor made by a tailor — made Maria older. And also cosmetics. Stroke here, eyeliner there, dash here. And not twenty years old, but twenty-five.
He left an eighteen-year-old girl waiting for himself, and now he has a mature woman in front of him.
- You know, Yurik, we have big plans. I and Arkadyevich. - Maria sat beside her and moved closer. Yura felt her warm side. - You need to get used to and understand.
“And what is first to get used to or understand?”
- Why are you silent? I could not miss the chance! - She moved it warm sideways. He swayed sitting. - Sorry. Well, I don’t say that ... You see, while you served, a lot has changed. That is, not much - everything. You can not yawn. Who did not - he was late. You see a piece - grab and burst, while others have not eaten.
“This is what piece?” Thought Yura.
“Arkadyevich — he works in the city committee of the Komsomol,” said Maria.
She called the post. Yura looked in the glass of the bookcase in front of him. In the glass, he saw dark Mary peering into his face from the side, trying, apparently, to read his thoughts, his attitude towards the sounded post. And Yura thought he almost guessed, only not the district committee of her fiance, but Gorkomovsky. Take it higher!
“Connections, friends, opportunities,” Maria listed. “Well, and one more thing ... He has a car, flat.” Garage capital. Cottage at St. Andrew’s Lake. It is foolish to live in the present, it is necessary to look into the future.
"Arkadyevich - your future?"
“Arkadyevich and I see our life like this,” she said. - Business. Do you understand your business? .. Cafe, then another cafe. And then, probably, more. In general, we are not going to stop. Arkadyevich now has one cafe, but a cooperative one, on equal footing. And we want ours. There is one dining room on the Gorkomovsky balance, and the area is the most. - She was silent. - We want to open a special cafe. With a twist. Art Cafe. Say, literary. You will like this idea.
Yura felt her cheek with the look of Mary at his profile. To tell her not to look at him, but to look in front of her, in the bookcase, like him.
- Wine, poetry, candles - it's so romantic! Arkadyevich came up with the name: “Northern Muse”. Yesterday we walked in a cafe, well, in the cooperative, Surgut and Nizhnevartovsk friends of Arkadyevich came to the wedding, so he came up with the northern name. And in a literary cafe, we will invite poets. And we ourselves honor something.
Yourself? Her Arkadyevich also writes poetry? Or did she start writing? But why then did not send a single poem to him in the army? Doesn’t it matter to him? Or do they want him to participate in this their ... family business? Hell no!
The bed springs creaked under his arms.
- Do not freak out, Yurochka-fool. Well, who is now waiting for two years? The best years are gone. Don't be such a willow.
- willow?
- Well, they say that.
- Never heard.
“You have not heard a lot of things there, in your steppes, at your“ point ”. Do not be naive, well? .. While you were giving a debt to the Motherland, we were doing business here. All these your rockets will soon be cut down and cut into scrap. Life has changed, you know, my friend? Everything was different, Yura. The communists are now in the span.
- Do not rush things.
- You do not understand anything. Arkadyevich - he is Gorkomovsky. He is in the know. Yes, and on television talking about a market economy. The rails of socialism led to a dead end, and so on. In Tyumen won a commodity exchange opened. In Rodniche, American cigarettes sell French cognac Napoleon. Beer "Milwaukee" in the banks! ..
From the living room came Tsoi's voice recording. “Changes require our hearts! Changes require our eyes! "
- Did you have a telly in part, Yur?
- was. We watched "Time." According to the daily routine ...
Yura remembered Gorbachev’s gloomy, anxious face on the Rubin TV. Earlier, in April eighty-fifth, Gorbachev looked different: cheerful, vigorous. It seemed that he had already stepped into the future and now calls the country after him. Next year - party congress, applause. Acceleration, publicity. Yura believed Gorbachev. But in the eighty-ninth, the general secretary became too much and too often talk. As if trying to resist with words the strong current that carried him somewhere. And do not understand: whether swimmer crappy, or cunning enemy of the people.
- Here you are in a cooperative cafe you can normally have dinner, but for fifteen rubles. And in the dining room - for one and a half rubles, but there they will give you water instead of soup, bread instead of cutlets and brown weed instead of tea. People deserve the best, and it’s not a sin to take some money for it.
“My father earns 200 rubles a month, his mother 180,” thought Yura. - How many better they "deserve" the price of the machine? "
“Poverty under capitalism is inevitable,” Maria scuffled, as if responding to his thoughts. - That is why it is important to be not among those who buy, but among those who sell.
This phrase seemed to Yury memorized. Masha is beautiful and slim, but she is not able to speak intelligently and stylishly. Probably from Arkadyevich picked up. From the Komsomol-market.
How is it: today a Komsomol member, tomorrow - the enemy of socialism and communism? How so: the United States is the ideologist of the Cold War and the enemy, and now is a peacemaker and friend? In the USSR, speculators were imprisoned, and now they will be declared the best people, a role model? In literature classes at school, it was taught that opportunists are nits and scum, and now these skins are going to rule the ball? Spin it up? Yura believed that all this would not go further than talk and petty cooperative activity. And those who try to sell their homeland, will give a hand. And they will give hard. So that the fingers will fly. It is only necessary to end the deficit, to establish a system. There were difficult times in the country, but everything was always adjusted.
But how? Yesterday - his bride, and today - someone else's wife?
“You prepared plans for me too?” - Yuri asked, looking at Mariino reflected in the casement of the bookcase. He was suddenly seized by a strange calm. He looked at Maria.
Her face rose pink.
- Well, you see - you guessed it yourself! No, you are not completely lost to a market economy. I will attach you. You will go far with me, Yurik-Durik. If I said it will be so. - She patted him on the shoulder.
- Yah? - Yura almost laughed. - In the letters you said that you are waiting for me and love. BUT…
- And I have not ceased to love you. Why do you think so? Well I wrote to you. You think lied? You don't understand anything, Yuri-Durik. I just did not say everything.
She folded her fingers into the lock in her lap. Like an old woman.
Now they both sat on the bed and looked at their vague reflections in the doors of the bookcase.
Persons who have appeared through the colorful roots of books.
I wrote.
Squinting, Yura looked out the window at the sky. Lots of clouds. Stretch one after another. Oblong, thick, gray. It will be raining.
Yes, she wrote to him. First, often, two or three letters a week. They quickly accumulated, creating a thick wad. Yura kept them in the bedside table, wrapped in cellophane. Closer to winter, Masha began to write less often - by letter per week. Under demob, he received from her only a couple of letters a month. Now it became clear: the letters were given her more and more difficult. It was getting harder and harder to call Yura loved, say “I wait”, “send a passionate long kiss” and fill in paper sheets with other suitable ones. And yet she coped with the task.
I wrote.
The lines drawn in the notebook cells lined up in front of his eyes in straight and slanting rows. His visual memory is like a photographic film.
“Do you remember Kostya Kislov? It is still as sour as if it justifies the last name! ”-“ Vasya Gorsky gave you his regards. All stamps collects. Funny, huh? Some brands ... Tweezers, blaster ... And she loves to tinker with model cars. "Young Technician" writes. And it looks like a child. ” - “From your friend Sasha Sivtsov to you hello big. Met him in the market. He asked how you served there. ” - “Yurik-Murik, do you remember how we skated sleds in the winter? How I screamed for fear? Here is a fool! Is it possible to be afraid of something with you? "-" Do you remember our first disco in the technical school? "-" Do you remember ... "
Remember, remember, remember!
Letters from the past. Well, of course. These were letters from the past. How could she tell about the present? All the more about the future?
For example, to say hello to him not from Sashka Sivtsov, but from Arkadyevich. From the Komsomol-Gorkomov cones, enviable smiling groom with an apartment, cottage, car and even a capital garage. Enumerate in the letter the material and summarize: everything is built, everything is bought, it remains only to live. Start as usual: “Do you remember ...” And then, somewhere at the end of the letter, throw out the main thing in one paragraph: “Yes, I almost forgot. Listen, Yurik-Murik, I'm getting married here ... "
I wonder when there was a change in it? Months ago? A year ago? One and half year? How long has she been cheating on him?
Maria said something.
- ... No, my friend, I did not stop loving you. You let the sour stop. You compare yourself with Arkadyevich. Well this is it, half-man, future henpecked, sweet for sweet ... And I want you, Yurochka-fool. Both of you are called Yurami. In bed you will not be mistaken! - She giggled. - You will be mine, willow-barefoot. You will be my lover. I will teach you kamasutra.
Yura turned to the window. Felt red. Why blushes, did not understand. Human feelings are faster than thoughts.
Probably Masha right. He is naive. And stupid, it must be.
But for some reason he wanted to remain both naive and stupid.
And he blushed because he really wanted to hug Masha, undress Masha. And lie down with her, here, behind the locked room door. And at the same time it was disgusting, it was disgusting. He wanted her, and wanted to push her away, but the first felt more than the second, and for that reason he blushed. And Mashka, of course, noticed his sudden blush of embarrassment. Women are incredibly difficult to object, Yura realized.
Maria got up, adjusted her ultramarine dress. She took a magazine from a bookcase on top of books. With a paper rustle, she flinched at him.
- You asked about the plans. Watch it.
Yura silently accepted the opened magazine. It was the most popular youth publication. Circulation - several million copies.
From the page on him looked the face of Mary. The photographer took it, leaning against the birch. Under the black-and-white photograph there are cursive lines: “... she dreamed of writing poetry from childhood,” “the dream has finally come true,” “the young poetess, promising,” and so on.
Below is the name of the poetess: Maria Nekrasova.
- I left myself a maiden name. It sounds so poetic, huh? .. Arkadyevich’s surname is not literary at all, well, it's her ass.
So she writes poetry. And they are published in the capital. Well, you can congratulate her. But he has something to do with it?
His eyes slid from the surname to the verse. For titles, stanzas, rhymes. Yura turned the page, another.
“You have a cool girl, Yuri! You wrote her poems! "
Someone else - probably the editor of the poetry department, the executive secretary, or whoever else is doing it with them - has redid it. A little bit here and there corrected, edited. It was corrected in some places, but Yury would not agree with something.
However, he was not asked.
And you can't prove anything to anyone now. The letters in which he sent these poems are with Masha. Hidden somewhere. No, rather, burned. Yura grinned. It seems that he begins to think in the spirit of modern times.
She wrote him letters full of love and passion, and he sent back verses to her. She, preparing to marry the garage with the car, just it was necessary. He called her and his letters a love story and thought that, after returning from the army, he would collect them all and tie them up with a thread, and then, years later, 20 or 40, would turn to this love document - with her, Maria.
And she extracted poetic material from his letters. Like a rock ore. Received a letter, opened the envelope, rewrote poetry with a pen or reprinted it on some Komsomol typewriter, signed each sheet with its maiden name, and destroyed letters. Over time, accumulated poetic collection for the magazine. And no evidence. Mosquito nose is not undermined.
She says she hasn't stopped loving him, but isn't that a lie? In this world they lie, almost without thinking. Moreover: here they believe in a lie, as in the truth.
Yura watched the poems to the end.
The first poem from the compilation he composed at the age of nineteen, on the train, on his way to the army, to the school book. Composed without paper in my head. The last poem was written and sent this spring, in March. Quickly, however, typed.
“I especially like it, Road to Heaven.” - Maria sat down beside her, jabbed a finger at the lines. The nail hit the paper. Jura was in pain. He felt like a heart was pricked. - The last stanza is generally chic and brilliant:
I will be cheerful, fresh and young,
Your old age wrinkles in the shade.
But will embrace a green loach
Portrait where a young genius.
Your old age wrinkles in the shade.
But will embrace a green loach
Portrait where a young genius.
Yura was silent.
- And where do you get these thoughts from? - asked Maria. “You’re twenty-one years old.” Such an inspiration, yes?
He felt Marie's arm hugging him. He closed his eyes. They were sitting close by, close, her fingers were moving on his stomach, and that was like many, many years ago. Yura forced himself to open his eyes. Before him was the same closet. Disturbed dust particles circled in the air.
- In short, just awesome! - Maria sighed with frank envy. The arm that hugged Jura quietly removed. - This is an editor in Moscow, he told me so. Well, not exactly ... Amazing ... No, penetrating ... that is, heartfelt ... I forgot how. And he said that such poems are unusual for a female poetic look. Something like that. You write at least a little bit like a woman, okay, yur?
For the poetess, albeit false, she expressed too vulgar. Even primitive. She would expand the lexicon. Classics read. Instead apologists of a market economy.
- Publications in magazines, then a book, the second ... Union of Writers ... Translations into English, French, German ... into Japanese!
Surprisingly, a woman sat near him, cherishing someone else's dream.
“A poetess at a husband-restaurant owner,” thought Yura. - One came out of the Komsomol dining room, the other - from other people's poems. And so these are the modern market marchers who show the unenlightened crowds a shining path to capitalism? ”
Masha twisted a wide (too wide) gold ring on the ring finger. Such a ring would harmoniously look at a plump finger of some forty-year-old Western bourgeoisie: ladies with a gilded handbag and in a hat, from under which mocking contempt eyes stare.
- You would write, and I would seek publications. We will divide the fees. We agree. I won't hurt you, firefly fool. You know, the second role is also great. This is not a crowd. One writes, the other attaches and sells - this is normal.
“The division of labor,” thought Yura. He smiled to himself. Everything they have thought out.
“In America, it would simply be called a business,” said Maria.
"I will wait from you for a magazine post." Lieutenant Colonel Zhanibekov said this today, but it seemed that a whole historical epoch had passed since then, and Zhanibekov was nine hundred years old, like the biblical Methuselah.
- In your opinion, am I not able to send poems to "Youth" or "New World"?
- My sunshine! .. I had to go to Moscow and lie under the editor. To poems appeared in the magazine. Now appeared, and not in a year. And to appear at all. Now everything is done for the interest, you still do not understand, dear, right? So I will explain to you. - She reached for the pierce, fished out a cigarette from a slightly opened red-white pack of “Marlboro” with a thin finger, flicked a lighter, lit a cigarette, threw a stream of bluish smoke towards the door. - You yourself will not get through, you're my naive fool. Listen to me, and you will come to success.
“To success”, - as if an echo, echoed Yura’s thought.
Where did the girl from the cooking school? In front of him sat, blowing nostrils smoke and teaching him life, some kind of cinematic creature. Not real! It seemed that the session would end, the film in the reel would rustle, the mechanic would stop the film projector, and the creature would fade, dissolve into the dusty air. Yura could not believe that Maria was alive next to him. He needs to get out of bed, leave. Leave, think. To be alone. So he will come home, remember how everything was with them before the army - and it will all return. We just need to remember how. And this is all happening here, no. It seems to him.
No, not imagining. It was as if someone had taken his life and slipped another one to him.
In the tobacco smoke, the ghostly wrinkled face of a teenager swung from a football field. "Stomp to your slut." A yard boy with a blade, a brother of a gopnik, suddenly grew to become a moralist.
- Hey where are you? - Maria rose, extinguished a cigarette butt in an ashtray on the desk.
It would be necessary to answer something - you can’t sit and be silent like that. But what answer? He could talk about something with that Masha whom he met at the disco. He could talk to Zhanibekov or Orlov, or other guys from their military unit. But with cinema characters, with aliens, Yura could not speak.
“You have to digest everything, I understand,” said the future owner of the literary cafe. She was talking about food. - A little unexpected, huh? You know, now all life consists of turns. And fast all of them, turns. It would not miss. Hey, feathers wonder, wake up!
“I'll go,” said Yura, looking into the glass of the bookcase. - I'll go.
- I got a phone. Arkadyevich struck the installation on the GTS. Call We live here for the time being, repair in the apartment of Arkadyevich ...
He tiredly thought that she hadn’t written to him about the phone either. Apparently, she was afraid that he would call. Anyone could have picked up the phone: Arkadyevich, Albina Iosifovna, or Georgy Fedorovich. It is unlikely that Maria dedicated her kin and new lover in the subtleties of her game.
Maria turned to the table, tore a scrap from a sheet from a notebook. She brought a number on a scrap with a pen - it seems the same one that she wrote to the army. The ink color was exactly the same. Only tears on the lines for a long time did not drip.
- Call, if that. At your house on the Tula telephones put.
"What is she doing at my house?"
- I went to yours. To spend
“Of my parents, too, made fools. I love, I wait. Well, of course. Mine, too, must be sure that she is waiting for me. If I knew from someone that she was not expecting me, she would have remained without verses. So she collected greetings from Vasya and Sasha, and others, purposely meeting with them - in order to inform her that she was waiting for me and loves me. She even started the wedding before my demobilization only because she was afraid that someone would find out and write to me. How it's called? Prudence? And there is no stronger word? Mother and father probably think that Masha and I will get married soon, we will make them grandchildren. Kondrashka's father is enough if I tell him about Arkadyevich and tell him the poems in the magazine. And most importantly - about love has not ceased. Why, she "did not cease" to this, it seems, she believes! He sleeps with his Komsomol husband, steals poetry and loves a robbed poet. ”
Thoughts in Yura began to get confused.
“Arkadyevich would give you a lift, he has a Zhiguli, but he drank,” said Maria.
“I'll go,” Yura repeated, staying on the bed.
- Listen, no one will enter here. - Holding the dress, Maria knelt before him. - The door on the latch. Arkadyevitch will not climb here, he is well trained. And there they have a tape recorder ...
As if frightened boy, Yura moved away from Masha on the bed, resting his hands on the spring mattress. She was on her knees, watching him with his eyes. From the edge of the bed, Yura jumped up, rushed to the door, as if escaping from the plague.
In the living room just silenced the music. Passing along the corridor, Yura saw that the dark-haired Arkadyevich, showing the outlined baldness, was rummaging in cassettes.
“Oh, Yurok ...” said Maria's father. His face was purple, like a drunken alcoholic. The voice sounded monstrously drunk. - You are…
Uncle Maria was dozing in the chair.
- Drink vodka with us, namesake! - happily shouted the groom-husband, and his cry uncle slammed his eyes and reached for a glass.
Arkadyevich's happy mood struck Yura. Here, right in this apartment, dystopia was born. Not a book, not fictional, but authentic. Here was formed one of the centers of the new world. A creepy, inverted world, in which he, Jura, would not fit in anything. A world in which they say they love and wait, but they go to bed with another. And for the sake of of interest sleep with the third. It is possible that this is not the limit.
Two people were smoking in the kitchen by the open window, he and she, who did not say anything to Yura. Both were staggering; he supported her waist. Yura completely forgot who they are. Absolutely everything in this apartment was a stranger. On the windowsill were two glasses, a half-empty bottle of brandy, a plate with the remains of a Russian salad and one fork. Street wind drove tobacco smoke into the hallway. Yura got watery eyes. Whether from smoke, or from grief.
He laced up his sneakers and picked up the suitcase.
- Take a magazine. - Maria gave him a room with poems. - I have one more.
Like a child, ready to be lightened up, but Jura shook his tears in the future, shook his head. Holding his suitcase between his legs, he turned, clicked the English lock and climbed into the concrete coolness of the stairwell.
- Bye, Yurochka-fool!
He did not answer this ghost. To a fearful ghost, half-dead, half-dead, one half of which held the past in itself, the second carried the future. Somewhere in the middle between the halves was the thinnest layer of the present. And this is the real Yura did not want to admit to himself. To take a magazine from Mashka, a reminder of the intruder who had broken into the present, meant to let the nightmarish ghost go home.
Departing from Mary, Yura repeated his previous route. The path of a man who was returning to one world, and got into another. Odessa street, the central street of the Republic, traffic lights, transition. The Aeroflot Agency was still the same, and the life around it was already different. In an effort to get rid of his obsession, Yura shook his head.
He passed the “Start” store, which always smelt of brand new rubber to the throat (favorite smell of the city boy), and now on the shabby doors there was a sign “Accounting”, crossed the Geological Survey, passed school 6 and stopped at career where as a child I caught minnows with the bait. A lone seagull silently flew over the quarry, now silted, stretched along the banks of the river and densely overgrown with cattails. On the other side, on which there was a little more bare sand, sunbathed, spread a blanket, a couple. The two of them were arguing about something: they raised themselves on their elbows and bickered. Brave new world does not give them peace, thought Yura.
He approached, swaying and, it seemed, slightly bouncing, like on springs, a young, unshaven type in sports leotards and a crumpled t-shirt. Type stood in front of the rack "at ease", keeping a small distance. His lips danced.
- Hey, man, give me a ruble!
The Jura suitcase fell out, and the tongue and teeth themselves folded the answer:
- And in your ear?
He would gladly put the insolent into a cutlet state. His head ached, his fists clenched; vision focused on a human target. The whole damned new world concentrated, it seemed, in this rude face, in these loose little movements. The master “give” requirement was designed exclusively for the cowardly and malleable. But the trick is that the most cowardly and malleable are just such types.
Lips opposite dance.
- What are you, bro? You do not understand jokes?
“I don't understand,” snapped Yuri.
- Che, because of the ruble neighbor is ready to kill, right?
Often looking around, the neighbor began to move away, ridiculously jumping up and down, swaying.
That would be all this new world shake off the same with yourself. To say to him: “And in the ear?” - and make a false movement with the body. That he was scared and disappeared. Forever and ever.
The key to the apartment, he took from a neighbor, a pensioner Aunt Ani. It was not yet five o'clock; the mother and father would return from their work no earlier than six. Aunt Anya said that Yura had grown very much, and she remembers him “like this” (which was surprising: it was as if he was taken from the kindergarten to the army), and she had just bought sugar from the grocery store for coupons, and in the evenings and it is dark at night, even if the eye is poked out, there are no bulbs anywhere, because the thieves, trailing on the entrances, they are unscrewed and then at the market they sell at an exorbitant price. “They say,” the neighbor said, “You need to spread the bulbs with toothpaste so that they don't steal.” Paste prikёtsya something to the glass, not washed. But it, the paste, too, need to get it. Everything is now in short supply, Yurochka. They say there is no shortage in a market economy. ”
In the two-room apartment in which Yura lived from the age of seven, everything was the same as before his call-up into the army. He even smiled. An island of the past. The same things, the same desk with polished cracks from school (ceramic pencils on the table, a lamp under the woven lampshade, a stack of books, a pair of cassettes and the Aelita radio tape recorder, as before, as if Yura did not go anywhere), paper political world map on a whitewashed wall, on the opposite wall - a black and white portrait of a gloomy Lermontov and a quietly ticking round clock with Roman numerals. On the windowsill - white geraniums in green plastic pots.
On the bookshelf, leaning against the backs of the books, is a picture of him and Masha, from June 1989 of the year. My father filmed at Zenit, at the military registration and enlistment office of the Leninsky district — before Yura sat down with other conscripts on the bus, which then took them to the regional military registration and enlistment office, where they were later dismantled by the “buyers” officers. Jura spent about half a year in a study, and then got to the distribution point. Masha was eighteen in the picture, he was nineteen. He looked at the photo and thought that this Masha and the one he had seen today were different. It can not be that they were the same.
In another picture, Yura was captured with his best friend. January, school skiing competitions, eighth-graders in tracksuits, knitted hats, skiing, with sticks. Jura and Sashka Sivtsov have strained faces, ready to jump forward in the snow. In the background - fizruk Pal Palych, blowing a whistle to his mouth. All school fizrukov is called Pal Palichi or San Sanychami.
“I'll call Sasha,” whispered Yura.
He reached into his pocket, counted the money, put a two-kopek coin in his palm, closed the apartment, ran down the steps, said hello to the old alcoholic Makar Kuzmich, who appeared on the first floor steps (he stared at him like a ghost, did not recognize, probably) and went out into the yard. Circled the house. At the corner, at the overgrown acacias, there are indeed two chenille telephone booths.
Having visited one and the other booth, Yura said:
- Barbarians.
Somebody pulled out the tubes from both phones, as they say, with meat. The crippled springs in which the wires were hiding looked like mutilated hands with hanging tendons.
Why do we need a pipe? It is clear why they steal, unscrew the light bulbs: they can be sold or screwed into a cartridge, but what to do with the tube from the machine?
The telephones themselves, enclosed in metal shells, were cut with knives, speckled with small and large inscriptions. Rock signs, parking primitive people.
The inscriptions were less obscene, often offensive. It was as if they didn’t come to these boxes, but to revenge.
In the booth, which stood on the right, smelled urine.
“I will take a taxi,” walking along Tula, thought Yura. “If a taxi is not in short supply here.”
The sky was frowning. From the slowly floating, swollen in the sky of gray, brick houses acquired a steel shade. The windows of the five-story building and the glass showcases of the Yubileyny deli blackened. On the palm of Jura, a drop of rain broke.
Taxi, he caught a cafe "Fairy Tale".
“Not by the meter,” the chauffeur announced. - To Maurice Thorez? For treshku. If to an entrance, then for four grouse.
Three rubles for such a distance was a triple price.
- Do not be up to the entrance.
Yura was silent all the way. Before leaving the Volga, I handed over a taxi driver to the taxi driver. He looked at him strangely from his seat.
- We agreed on four rubles.
- This is if the entrance. Do you have a bad memory? Or is it really all unreal? - added unexpectedly for himself Yura.
The driver removed the outstretched hand.
- Where are you from such a philosopher?
- From the army.
- Demob, what? Somewhere in the places forgotten by God and hell served? .. Everything is clear with you. Hey, brother, so you need to fill a glass with something. Will you take a waterman for a quarter? Or muttering. For the tag give. Cheaper no one will find. For fourteen - as demob. So in the newspaper wrapped.
With a bottle of "72", wrapped in "Soviet Russia", Yura took the elevator to the ninth floor. The door, without removing the chain, opened the disheveled curly guy, in which Yura recognized the matured Sasha. Three years have not seen! Sasha unfastened the chain, opened the door wider. But only in order to slip out onto the platform, on the mat.
- Hello…
- Hello! You ruin the whole raspberries for me, Juran! - Sasha whispered hotly. - I have a 30-year-old girl here, the most gusto. Married. Neighbor, count up! The husband and son stayed at the dacha, annihilated the potatoes, and she was at eight o'clock in the morning tomorrow on duty at the hospital, well, she returned to the city. And in the city she was bored. And here - me. With me you will not get bored. My ancestors also drove to the cottage. I'm sorry, Juran, but today you are superfluous. I'm here until the morning to burn with fire of love going.
And he closed the door without even saying goodbye.
A few seconds later the door opened. Yura was still standing by the rug. Sasha's hand gently took the bottle from him.
- What did you bring there? Oh, thanks, the ink will come in handy.
The door closed again. Behind her, the chain clinked.
It was anyone, but not Sasha Sivtsov.
With this Sivtsov Yura went to one school until the eighth grade inclusive. Then Sasha's parents moved from Tula to a new apartment on Maurice Torez. But the friendship continued up to the army itself - where Sasha, a student at an industrial institute, was taken in June of 1988, a year earlier than the Jura. And in August, the 1989 th Gorbachev’s decree sent Sivtsov and other university students who were called up to the “ranks” after the first course, to the reserve. The motherland decided that it was impossible to tear off students from their studies to a dumb army.
Yura pressed the elevator call button. Well, of course! He had not seen Sasha for too long. The one on the "citizen" for almost two years. It's a lot. During this time, the brave new world made Sasha his man. Slowly, day by day, Sasha got used to this world, grew into it, became its organic part. And he, Yura, on the "point" seemed to freeze, was conserved.
All this Yura perceived, fixed by consciousness. But his mind did not want to put up with the changed reality, but his heart could not.
Towards the cinema "Cosmos" buses were crowded, leaning to the curb, almost touching the sidewalk curbs with the orange sides. The floors of the jackets, fragments of jackets, shirts and pants, sandwiched in the bus door, stuck out. It was drizzling rain. The sky has become lower, the air has darkened. Slowly going nowhere, Yura went home on foot.
People who came across him did not smile. The faces of the men and women seemed gloomily gloomy. As if in their works, men and women had left misfortune, to which they would have to return tomorrow, and at home in the evening they also had grief. To bitter facial expressions, rain painted on wet stripes on the cheeks. Everyone seemed to cry. Here and there over their heads opened umbrellas. They were covered by people from Yurina curiosity.
Yura looked under the umbrellas in the hope of catching at least one happy or carefree face through the veil of rain. But not one came across. Yura, a man in a drenched shirt, tried to smile at passersby, but this did not work, and once caused the effect opposite to what he had intended: the old woman darted away from him like from a psycho, pounded quickly on the sidewalk with a wand. At the Rodnichok grocery store, the rain stopped falling, the sun peeped out, the windows of the houses gleamed, steam began to rise from the asphalt, but no one smiled here, as if there was a thief of smiles in the city that had long taken over all the streets without exception.
And Mary did not smile, suddenly understood Yura. Despite the wedding. Maria's face could be persuasive, persuasive, arrogant, or that can say “you understand nothing” and teach life. But Yura did not see the smile on her lips. Anything could have been expected from this person, from sighs to, perhaps, tantrums, but not just a simple happy smile.
All the people here, he thought, were waiting. Waiting for the future. The coming of the day when at last they are allowed to smile. The onset of the moment when the thief of smiles will take, will announce that the game is over, and will distribute the smiles to their owners.
But is not Arkadyevich happy? A smile, joyful toasts, kisses with a young wife, finally, a cafe-car-flat ...
"This is so, half-man, future henpecked ..."
Instead of turning to the Explorers, Yura turned to Odessa. The legs themselves carried him to the house of Mary. No, he was not going to rise to her. To see Arkadyevich, the drunken guests, Alina Iosifovna, pleased that 90 guests, the crimson father Maria, had gathered at the wedding cafe, she herself - no, no, a thousand times no. He just wanted to stand at her house on the west side, throw back his head, look at the window of her room. Such a small desire, after the fulfillment of which he will return home, will shake hands with his father and embrace his mother.
When he got up where needed and looked up, his shirt was almost dry. The evening sun poured yellow brick into the Mariinsky brick house and warmed Yurin's nape.
This is good, Yura thought, that she did not stick out the window with a cigarette. That would be awful.
He looked at the window, burning with yellow fire from the sun's rays. The window was exactly the same, and the five-story building itself was exactly the same as two years earlier. And it seemed to Yura - for the sake of this instant he came here - that time had turned his shafts and gears back, and he was again nineteen. Maria will now come down to him, they will go around the city, holding hands, twisting their fingers, it will smell all around the summer that has begun, rain, lilac, and ...
- Aaaaa! ..
This cry, dissolved in the wind, seemed to continue aloud to Yuri a fantasy that was about to threaten to fall into a nightmare.
They shouted from there - from the lilac thickets behind the steel improvised garages. Behind the lilac bushes rose, half-century-old poplars rustled noisily.
- Pu-ti! .. - it came to Yura.
And all was quiet. Only the wind rustled in the crowns of the poplars.
Having flown from rusty garages smelling of urine, feeling the elasticity of the wind with his cheeks, Yura burst into the lilac with a bang.
In his ears were someone's words, flown with the wind:
- He has no attendants. With Parfyon in his woods. Everything.
The speaker's lips moved. He probably said something else, but Yura did not hear. Between the lilacs and the poplars, Yura saw three people: an almost naked, bobbed peer with a gray little and some kind of shrunken face, very much like some other person; A dark-skinned man lying on his back with a mouth plastered with a plaster and a body bound with a rope - from legs to chest; a boy from a football field - with a wrinkled physiognomy. The bound man had a hand in the blood - a young aggressive football player, who was holding an awl in his lowered hand, apparently worked with his fingers.
“Wow, demob,” the teenager said quietly. “Meet me,” he nodded at the elder, “this is my brother, Lyoshka.”
Lyoshka hostilely looked at his younger brother.
- Why did you bring him here?
- I brought? What are you driving, Poker? .. He hangs out with his shmara, Mashka Nekrasova. I saw him during the day. Basurman, ”he pointed to the bound one,“ screamed, when I asked about my grandmother, this one pinned. I probably waited here for Mashka in the bushes ... I don’t know how to fuck here ...
“Ah,” said Poker. - Well, I'm sorry, brother, I didn’t run into business. Masha, then waited. Or have you forgotten something else here, citizen? Basurman - not your spine? - He glanced at the bound one.
- Itself arises, fraer, - put the younger one, lighting up a match. There was blood on his fingers, his cigarette was stained with blood. - Curious Varvara in the bazaar nose tore off. You still owe me for football.
- Mashka told me that she had expected a soldier from the army. - Poker hoarsely laughed. - I unzipped my pants, but about her, fraera, she was waving. This is psychology or something. Maybe she imagined him in my place. Dick disassemble them, slut these. Hey, demob, your fucking served me for a week. Everyday. Arkadyevich owed me for the roof, and she worked off the interest. Arkadyevich, count, decided that we went to meet him. Well, I later explained to him who was going to meet someone. And it would still zazharnichal, Komsomol member fucking. - Poker laughed softly. “Masha is a good bitch, but marrying such a ...”
Yura hit him precisely for these words. He beat him for the wrong guy, who had his mouth sealed and stuck under his nails, he attacked the gangster for insulting Mary, the Mary who lived behind the window and who was no more than eighteen years old.
“She served me too.”
The younger one still spoke these words, and Jura’s fist was already flying into the poker cheekbone. Leshka's face, a little bewildered, turned slightly, as if to get a better look at the enemy, and his fist hit him in the nose. Knowing what to do next, Jura left the bandit under the lungs with his left, and then, striving for the whole body behind his hand, he hit the bottom with his right.
Lyoshka disappeared from sight. And then something flashed briefly in the air. Somewhere below and to the side, Lyoshkin's brother, fascinated, with frozen eyes, flashed his face, losing clarity in motion. Yura never recognized his name.
Dry lips on a blurred, wrinkled face moved, but Yura did not hear a word. All the sounds of this world suddenly disappeared as if they were turned off.
From the Jura pulled out something that was firmly stuck in it. As a plug from the outlet. For a moment, the picture cleared up: a boy with a contorted face, with an open mouth, a hand, whitened fingers, squeezed around the handle of a knife, from which red drops drip.
Trembled in his knees and yukin yanked his legs, poplars recoiled, and the lilacs overturned. Yura suddenly felt the soft leaves of dandelions with his palms, and his back - the solidity of the earth. The sky caught his eye. Many, many sky.
It is real, he thought.
Two dark figures covered the sky, but Yura was no longer seen.
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