1982

This year turned out to be the beginning of the end of the empire

The world created by the photographer can be completely different from the world outside the window, it may not at all coincide with the formal external life of the planet, but it is always true, because everything that was removed once existed. At least on ...

The world created by the photographer can be completely different from the world outside the window, it may not at all coincide with the formal external life of the planet, but it is always true, because everything that was removed once existed. At least for a moment. At least for the fraction of the second, when the light fell on the film and the decay of silver ions began. Of these hundredths of a second, “stories with a photograph” were compiled.

My world existed parallel to the big world of the Earth, only sometimes intersecting with it in space.

My first successful photograph was taken at the other end of the country in 1982. The story with a photograph begins with her.

... Eight frames were left from our meeting, I threw off the rest of the film in stupidity and youth, so now it is impossible to say whether I shot them again. One of the girls was called terribly old -fashioned - Tamara, she had the hair of the color of snow and a sore on the lip, which Tamara licked all the time; The names of two more were lost, and the most funny, with small sharp teeth, in shiny shoes on buttons and bright red, to a smoke in the eyes, a coat was called a mura-like the Korney Chukovsky.

The whole street life in this small village on Sakhalin passed either in the yards with birch brooms hung on ropes and rubber boots planted on a picket fence, or on wooden, poorly planed bridges replaced by sidewalks.

It was in the summer, I studied at the Faculty of Journalism and was practiced in the Sakhalin Youth newspaper. There was then such an opportunity - to go to practice anywhere in the country for free, or rather, not free, but at the expense of the university. And our entire course crawled around the endless homeland, who could.

I got to Sakhalin for a long time, for ten days - first by train to Vladivostok, and then on a ship through the Japanese Sea and covered with a vile ripples, Laperuse Strait with its disgusting fine, harmful pitching, turning you inside out ...

Immediately behind Sakhalin, the Sea of ​​Okhotsk began, and then the Pacific Ocean. On the other side of the ocean, off the coast of South America, at the same time, my uncle was, he was a captain of the long -range voyage and, according to my estimates, could well please in the Falkland War, which had just played there.

The great writer Borges called this war "a dispute of two bald ones because of a comb." It began as follows: to the island of South George, which is actually 1300 kilometers from the falks, Argentine scrap collectors landed. The British ordered them to get out of a skewer. But the collectors of the scrap metal did not clean, but, on the contrary, hoisted the Argentinean flag, prudently supplied from one of them over the bosom. The result is 907 dead, 1843 wounded, a change of government in Argentina and the joyful Mrs. Thatcher.

The area of ​​the folklands is a quarter of Estonia.

I secretly dreamed that my uncle would end up at the Falkland Islands and would be added to someone there. The question was to whom exactly to the cord. The state line was like in the direction of Argentina, which automatically questioned her rightness, but Albion was somehow in earnest ... Then it turned out that his uncle was in Cuba, caught sea hedgehog. I even saw a photograph of him: there is my uncle on the seashore in his pants rolled above, and on his feet - boots with thick soles, so as not to tape on a hedgehog.

There were also hedgehogs on Sakhalin, but not on the shore, so the locals went to a haircut hunting in some distant bays. And on Sakhalin there were cats and annelid seals. They went to warm up on the debarcader and allowed people to come very close, so everyone who was not lazy photographed them. I also took off the lazy cats, but unsuccessfully, there were no negatives left. And the four girls sitting on the logs from the island village lived with me for a quarter of a century.

One of them - with the hair of the color of the snow - all the time told invigar stories, helping herself facing her: either she brought the edge of the house with a house, then she made a compassionate face, then thoughtfully, as in my picture, looked into the distance.

“Tamarka,” I told her. - You are such an artist! So I will leave for Moscow, show your photo there, and you will be called to act in the movie.

“Nope,” she answered, licking blood from a cold on her lower lip. - I don't want to be an artist. My hair hurts white. And then, everyone will pester. I’m better than my mother on the farm.

I have remembered this for her life for life.

The eighty -second year turned out to be the secret year of the beginning of the end of the Empire - Never died Brezhnev and Gray Cardinal Suslov. On the day of Brezhnev’s death, I was in Vorkuta-she helped a friend who went there to shoot, believing that Vorkuta’s photographs could always be stuck to some foreign correspondents. For foreigners, the entrance was ordered into Vorkuta, it was called a closed city, and even a simple word written not in Russian could cause oblique views there. On November 11, 1982, early in the morning, we, trying not to glow, took off the long line at the meat store, not even the turn, but an unorganized crowd, which was paused to the doors with the inscription: “meat”, and I remember how the aunts sobbing sobbing in the crowd and said: “What will happen now? How are we going to be now? " And then they busily discussed whether the meat was thrown out in connection with death, and if they were thrown out for happiness, then what ...

In the last days of December, an English film was released about a man whom Churchill once called “Semiyly Fakir”. The film received eight Oscars. In the USSR, this film - it was called by the name of Fakir, “Gandhi” - will appear five years later.

We will finish that year with the saying of the half -naked fakir of Mahatma Gandhi: “There are things more important in life than only to build up her pace.”

I’ll only add that the eighty -second, which began the death of the great Russian sufferer Varlam Shalamov, ended with the worthy victory - Marquez received the Nobel Prize in literature. Shalamov was erected by a tombstone, which in twenty years will be destroyed by unknown people - then it will be restored to the funds of fellow countrymen. I have a picture of the eighties in my archive - a lonely stone head on a snowy cemetery field with black squares of metal fences.

I have been on Sakhalin a few more times since then, but I have not seen Tamark anymore, I don’t know if she managed to bury at her mother’s farm, or life turned differently.