Translated material
About the cottage - 2
Mom came to the country only on Saturday evening - up to five days did not think of it. To meet her at the bus stop located on the top of the hill, I went out in advance. Along the way, he collected strawberries on the side of the road and string the berries on a blade of grass, which became like an elegant thread with savage beads. I was in a shabby T -shirt and black shabby satin trousers, my mother in a jacket and a checkered outdoor skirt, ironed on an interested citizen. Pantyhose was not invented then, nylon stockings were not worn in the summer. Neat white socks were witnesses of the last day. Mom smelled of the metropolitan powder, it seemed to me that she was stuck in my lungs, but I hoped that over time I would also become an adult who smells on the drum. Probably, my mother and I made an absurd couple. I believed that my mother is more beautiful than everyone in the world, she was worried about my thinness, but her appearance excited me little. Mom rejoiced at me and strawberries, I intercepted a huge black bag with urban provisions from her, broke in two, experienced happiness, felt like a man for a short time. We went down from the hill, not thinking about the past and future of time. It is enough that we were together.
By her mother’s arrival, the grandmother gathered water leaking from the drain pipe into a bucket, poured her mother with her soaped head. The hair was cast with fanned silk, scattered through the delicate air.
On Sunday, my mother left, so Baba Anya commanded me. The country won the war and was exhausted, its female half was much more male. Half of my class grew without fathers, almost no one had either brothers or sisters. But by inertia, my grandmother treated me as if she had a bunch of grandchildren - without unnecessary guardianship. When in the morning I ran away from the porch in the hope of enjoying strawberries, she briefly admonished me: "Just do not go far!" I obeyed her.
Here, in a utility, crossing the bumps, the asthmatic truck creaked, leaving a smoke curtain behind a body, a precipally smelling gasoline burning. Hot dust of the road to Ermolino strangles the summer air, slowly settles, covering strawberries on the side of the road with a delicate stomatic plaque. Tear the berry, ride to the dirty redness between the sweaty fingers, send it in your mouth. The larynx is not a fragrant pulp, gray lumps of dirt stuck to the pillows. Berries burn in the grass with red eyes ah . Having eaten to easy sores, you plunge barefoot in soft red -hot dust - like a cold boy in a basin with hot water. The soles burns, you can’t resist the place, jump out in the saving and steep grass, behind which a dark and terrible ravine with an ice stream rushes down. Having flattened, you rest your hands on a sandy bottom, you catch your ticking water with your lips. The teeth are harassed, the throat is numb, you are doing - it's hard to imagine! - Even happier.
* * *
Grandmother let me go alone and in the forest for mushrooms with the same parting words: "Just do not go far!"
I perceived the forest as my estate, in which other mushroom pickers were engaged in grass, the cuts of mushrooms collected to me turned me into a misanthrope, so I jumped out of a warm bed early, put black bubbling satin trousers into narrow shafts, picked up a light bush and went along its secret route. Mushrooms gave me solitude, I did not like group campaigns with their aukani and boastful presentation of intermediate trophies. My forest wanted concentration and dumbness from me. I was accompanied by only squeaky mosquitoes and a vow of silence of butterflies. I did not look for mushrooms, I collected them like a voluntary tribute: under this sprawling birch, you will certainly cut the exiting leg of the white, the brigades stick out along the edges of the strengthened needles of the trenches. And here is the favorite aspen, surrounded by bright candles of Krasnogolovikov. Slippery oils scattered from the pines on all sides of the world. If the expectations turned out to be deceived, I was lurking and fixed the arrears in my mind.
The skin itched from mosquito bites, a suffocating sun was punning through the patterned foliage, an insatiable throat was dry. Filling the bush, I moved the most beautiful mushrooms into the upper layer and, when I admired, threw a primitive fern on them - so that no one saw my trophies and requested that the next time take it with me. In the mushroom affairs, I avoided admiration, it was a pure heartfelt feeling that did not require applause. Mushrooms were hunting luck, and not going to the predictable store, where on each candy - according to the price tag. And this despite the fact that I was almost indifferent to mushroom taste - I collected a bouquet.
Nature in those days was generous and was perceived to taste. Heated strawberries, long twigs with sweet raspberries, ink dots of blueberries, red droplets of dots, pesty cherries, sour shoots of pines, bunches of nuts ... In addition to cuckoo tears, vulgar sorrel and clover, together with local boys I eating a variety of herbs, the names and appearance of which I have now forgotten. Collective farm fields and gardens were not guarded and also seemed to be part of the good land. Sour summer apples, delicate pods with underdeveloped peas, sweet cobs of dairy and high corn, sweet strawberries, juicy tubes of the tournament ... The unripe grains of wheat also went to the body, although they required a fair amount of time for chewing. We lived the lives of primitive collectors for whom the world is a source of food, and not an object for idle admiration and curiosity.
* * *
Grandmother let me go alone to the river, but with another parting words: "Just do not bathe on the cliff!"
It was deep under the cliff, there were older children dived from the bridges. Reaching the bottom of the palms closed over their heads, they raised a clay dump. I got a sandy beach slightly upstream - where the river was briefly divided into two sleeves. It was very fine in the duct, the water did not reach the ankles, it almost stood in place and was warming in the sun, there was tushing, tickling the skin, nimble fry. Basically, the water ran briskly, adults did not swim against the current. They did not bathe for long: the Istra feeds on keys, the water there is extremely cold. But we lived in that water - we sprayed drops tracing in the sun, fought, drowned each other, dived. It was supposed to dive with open eyes - in order to then lie, what a huge fish you noticed. I dived clinging my eyes, but shouted on the surface too: "Pike!" The larger fish was really found in the river, but we did not bathe in the whirlpools, but on the rapids. There we beat a small fish with prisoners - with a jail in a file with a copper wire to a stick, then strung sagged perch, roach, and sandcarics on a cocoon. There were small bones in a pan, wrapped in oiled crispy skin. The bones were thick, they had to choose them, a tiny fish was eaten for a long time.
From ice water, the lips became blue, the teeth knocked. Then they spread a fire on the shore, dug thinly potatoes from the collective farm field with their hands, baked it in coals, rolled out with a stick, chased their palms into the palm of your hand, pulled a hard crust with their nails and teeth, bite into a hot fresh pulp. The lips from the blue became black. By our lips, one could judge our classes. We led an amphibian lifestyle.
* * *
Those guys who bathed on a cliff were already smoked. The cigarettes were considered more profitable to cigarettes: they were documented in a circular to the mouth of the mouthpiece, but a goby always remained from a cigarette without a filter. When the fingers already burned, the boys clamped the cigarette with two twigs and reached it to the heat in the lips.
We, who are younger, curtailed the semblance of cigars from dry leaves, some scattered in a pharmacy with iron boxes with Astmatol, in which a side of asthmatics cigarettes poured side by side. They looked like real ones, but stink of a hospital. Basically, we were limited to theory - the study of tobacco brands. Empty packs were lying everywhere, making up an important part of the picture of a cluttered world. Such a game was accepted between us: one of the lazy, crazy company attacked a pack of noted by him and shouted: “Guess!” Sometimes you managed to see what he had come for. From past walks, you could remember that it is placed in this place - say, firmly fading the bluish “North”. If the children's foot did not completely cover the pack, it was possible to restore the whole. A red piece of paper sticks out - for sure “Prima” (14 kopecks). If the brown, it means “Pamir” (the wits dubbed it “mountain air”) with an unlucky silhouette of a brown climber (10 kopecks). If there were no guns, the spontaneous theory of probability began to work. Each boy knows that the cigarettes "Belomor" (22 kopecks) smoke more often than the expensive cigarettes "Friend" (40 kopecks) in a solid pack. Rare places of the location of this "friend" were well known to me. I really liked the pretty dog face on a red background.
But for the first time, I was not at all a “friend” at all. Once I found half a package of the strongest “Ray” cigarettes near the road. He scattered in the forest - coughed, his head was spinning, my legs were jammed, I did not like it. So I had to give the rest of my patron - the master's son of Vovka Tsarev. He was three older than a year, on Kerogaz he melted lead and carefully merged it into clay molds - the real soldiers turned out! And it doesn’t matter that they looked like alapled stone women! Lead was spraying, but Vovka was not afraid. I helped him dig a dugout - the beginning of the underground passage, which, as Vovka promised, will lead through the globe directly to America, where people walk up their feet. We did not have time to fight to America that season and decided to complete earthwork next summer. In the meantime, they sat in a dugout on a clay ledge, which depicted a bench, Vovka smoked my “ray”, let the puffs of smoke into a low clay ceiling, and I seduced in the damp air and dreamed of finding myself at home as soon as possible. In addition, Vovka had a real Berdanka found in a landfill. Someone threw her there when, after the war, an order was ordered to take weapons. But the population was afraid of the authorities, the men preferred to deal with a landfill, and not with the police.
I held Berdanka in chickens, aimed from it in a potential enemy, but I naturally could not give me a Vovka gun. But he gave me another treasure - with his own handed wooden dagger. He wound his pen, wrapped a snake, which allowed to firmly squeeze the dagger in a sweaty palm. I was afraid of the serpent, but Vovka commanded: “Not BE!”, Which meant: “Do not be afraid!” There was really nothing to be afraid of, it was necessary to be afraid of the Nazis who depicted burdock thickets. The dagger easily cut off his tenacious dragons of heads, which did not fly towards the ground, irrigating her imaginary filthy blood.
* * *
Summer is the time of the boy, the girls were absent there. And if they appeared, then it did not end with good for them. The time of sighs has not yet come, we considered the girls the boys of the third grade. Local boys taught me to whistle first in two fingers, then four and a “ring”, as well as curse a terrible obscenity, which was part of the young fighter for peace and justice. We sat on bridges, chatted with dirty bare feet, competed in the range of spitting and knowledge of scabble expressions. Feeling with these badges, I felt my coolness. At this unsuccessful moment for her, the sweet country girl Lena came up to me and held out a flower. Perhaps she liked me. The scorching vertical sun was shining, we were both in tiny panties. In response to Lenin, kindness I immediately lowered my underpants, took my fingers by my processes and waved them in greeting with the words: “On, here you have a flower!” Lenochka was a good Jewish girl, she complained to her parents, those were my Puritan mother. In general, I don’t want to remember further: they say that my only son turned out to be much worse than my most pessimistic forecasts, he, they say, does not think about my bitter suffering. The surroundings were announced by my roar: "I am not so no more!"
I really kept the word. In my future life, I was familiar with many female specialists, but I never did it again.
Lenochkin father, doctor, to his honor did not remember this trick to me. When my temperature suddenly jumped up, he thoroughly crushed me with his hands. Actually, the professional disease of doctors is indifference, but Lenochkin dad did not suffer from them. He put huge sensitive ears to my hollow chest and grunted disapprovingly. Diagnosis: everything is in order with the boy, even if at least a couple of days he lies in bed and does not bathe in a cold river, but it would be better to add a little in weight. At least kilograms to forty. I weighed twenty -eight then. In my current understanding, in the doctor of kilograms there were no less than a centner, he looked like a good -natured hippo with ambitious ears. For the first time I met with a person whose hair shake in my ears. That is how I imagined the evil Karabas-Barabas, but the doctor was kind. So I had to reconsider my worldview views and admit that there is no correlation between my hair in my ears and character. In general, I inevitably recovered, but still remained in the lightest weight of the pen, despite the excellent appetite.
* * *
It remains to add that after the death of my grandmother they stopped shooting the cottage, I again came to Istru at the university time to visit my friends. Someone shook the deadline, someone has already left. They sat for drunken fights and the same drunken theft. I arrived inappropriately, did not find anyone except Borka. He had already served in the army and had already managed to leave prison. Borka never waved his tall, but his shoulders thoroughly rang out, her chest was sticking out, as if she had been pumped up with a car pump, a narrow eye narrowed even more, became angry and hard, like his short -haired red hair. I gave him two rubles, he drove behind a bottle in a tent near the hospital. In the old days, we bought ice cream or marvelous corn flakes in that tent that Khrushchev liked so much in America. The flakes crunched on milk teeth and seemed to cost ten cents. Khrushchev was a man with fantasies that he believed in. He wanted to catch up with America for the production of milk, oil and everything else. Having shutting in front of him, the artist from the Crocodile drew a burly drill with a sagging amendment and a cartoon stretching from his mouth: “Hold on, a cow from the state of Iowa!” Kukuruza, Nikita, boldly called the "sausage on the stem." But by the time of my repeated phenomenon in Istra Khrushchev, corn fields had disappeared from the middle lane, and corn flakes disappeared from the whole country, so that the willy-nilly we had to celebrate the meeting with Portvein. We drank a bottle, Borka complained that his leg was bothering - in the sports battalion he had to play football not in the lamp, but to disgust on the field sprinkled with traumatic slag. I nodded sympathetically, then asked if he still catches the fish in our pond with him. His eyes were somehow suddenly pursued: “No, they lowered the pond, and they collected crucians from the bottom. There was enough for everyone, you know how many there were! " After that, I left Istra forever.
It’s good that I did not see my cute boys filled with malicious power and turned into cocky guys on the dance floor, then in predatory boor with poured vodka eyes and reinforcement in tattooed criminal hands. I am happy that I did not see how the features of vice and boredom appeared on their pure freckle faces. I have not seen anything of this and continue to love them as they have never been.
Alexander Meshcheryakov