Schnderovich corner: Part 5

Instead of a year on Broadway, the Soviet government allowed us two weeks of tour in Hungary.

And in the last days of May 1980, I walked along Budapest-free, like a feather in the sky. I liked Budapest, but even more liked the feeling of absolute freedom. I wandered where my eyes look, and I came across a bench, in the window of which jeans lay with stacks. Real! Not Podolsk “self -building”, welded in a pan, but natural “levis”!

The peers will understand my feelings without words, but the young people still can not explain.

I frantically slapped myself in my pockets - and realized that all my frail forints remained in the hotel. The heart broke, but intelligence worked like a clock. I went to the nearest corner, recorded the name of the street, returned to the bench, recorded the house number, identified the place on the map - and rushed to the hotel.

Already with the forces in my pocket, running out of the hotel, I ran into Katarina, our translator and guide.

- Oh, Victor! She was delighted. - How good that you are here! We go to the museum: El Greco, Goya ...

What El Greco - Levys with stacks! I, as best I could, explained to Katarin the extreme of the situation, but did not convince.

“Jeans are tomorrow,” she said. And then I scared Katarina:

- Tomorrow may not be.

- Why not be? - In the eyes of Magyarki anxiety flashed: maybe I know something about the plans of the Warsaw Treaty? Why in Budapest to jeans tomorrow - not to be? But I was not like a person from the General Staff, and Katarina calmed down.

- Be! She said. - Tomorrow jeans - to be! And now - a museum ...

The reputation of the cultural young man was dear to me, and I surrendered. And I went to the museum, and went along this El Greco, and cats hung up on my heart, and I thought: oh, I would fly. Will not get it. Grack. Close ...

But Katarina was right - the jeans of "be" in Hungary and the next day. On every corner and as much as you want. I wore them for fifteen years.

There was eighty -fourth year.

I stuck out, as if dug, in front of the TASS building on Tver Boulevard. Official photo chronicle shone in the spacious windows-vitrins. In central photography - on the Cathedral Square in the Kremlin, strictly Anfas, next to the Spain King Juan Carlos and Comrade Chernenko stood. In hand with the King of Spain, Huan Carlos was Queen Sofia; Near Comrade Chernenko there was a spouse. The hands of the wife of a comrade openly tenaciously held a handbag like Ridikul. But God with her, with a handbag - faces!

Two - and two others nearby.

I was seized with anthropological horror.

I was not a dissident, I was a freedom within the framework, but this contrast struck me in the very heart. I suddenly felt a terrible shame for being represented by me, my country in the world and the universe - these, not those.

In one second I became an anti -Soviet - for aesthetic reasons.