One one

Familiar face
A party is an unsafe place. Here is a man waving his hand at you, whom you have certainly known for more than a decade, but who is he? What's the name?.. Fog.

One year in ninety-nine, closer to night, in a closed acting club, I see the wonderful artist Maxim Sukhanov at the next table (well, you can’t confuse Sukhanov with anyone). He invites me to sit down, I land at his table, and we start chatting...

And next to Max sits a pretty young woman. Of course, I’ve seen her somewhere before, but who haven’t I seen here before, at the Mayak club? Let's get acquainted:

- Lena.

- Victor.

“I know,” she says somehow mysteriously. But I didn’t appreciate the mystery of the tone: I wish she didn’t know me, a national TV star!

“Very nice,” I say.

We chatted for a while, and when I left, I finally invited the girl to my concert. I look: she’s looking at me very strangely. Tensely testing. As if trying to understand what I mean... What do I mean? Well, let loose the peacock's tail, of course... Nothing more.

And she looks with intense eyes. Damn it, what did I say wrong? Then my gaze falls on the engagement ring on her finger, and I correct the awkwardness:

- Come with your husband, of course...

It seemed to me that the breadth of this gesture should relieve the tension, but it only intensified, and I, completely discouraged, wandered to my table. There was clearly some kind of secret knot in the collision...

At the next meeting with Sukhanov, the first thing I asked was:

-Who was this girl?

And Maxim answered, not without malice:

— Lena Berezovskaya.

Only then did the full force of my last remark reach me: “Come with your husband.” It was in '99, and Boris Abramovich was just killing NTV and Gusinsky from all his Kremlin, prosecutor's and Ostankino guns.

As they said in classic movies: “Who is our husband?”

One one

On the day of Anna Politkovskaya’s murder, I was riding in a late, half-empty Moscow metro car. The mood is appropriate. A gloomy citizen sits opposite. We make eye contact and he says:

- Into chaos!..

I nod in agreement.

“We can’t win against Israel!” — the saddened Russian finishes his thought.