About compliments

By the way, I got my first compliment in the first grade. I voiced the primer briskly, but I have not yet loved to read. Mom, who washed the frame, did not cause a desire to open another book. Nevertheless, our teacher Anna Pavlovna, after the end of the first grade, gave me the book of Charushina “Stories”. With her calligraphic (Pisary?) Handwriting, her forked feather and her purple ink, she brought out: “For excellent performance and approximate behavior of Uch. 1 cl. “B” 59 School named after N.V. Gogol Meshcheryakov Alexander ”. It’s necessary - for the first time in my life I was called not Sasha, not Sasha, not a sled, not a sled, but Alexander!

June 1959 turned out to be cold and rainy, and although we lived in the country, I walked little. It was then that I read from the beginning to the end this first book with a green cover and strange drawings and suddenly realized that the letters set in the correct order caused a wind that could disperse the clouds. Indeed, sunny days came with the last page, and I healed on a twin street.

* * *

By the end of the third year, we already knew how to somehow explain ourselves in Japanese and we were sent to practice at the Intourist. I was worried - the first meeting with the living Japanese was coming. I got a large group that filled all the chairs on the Ikarus bus. I more or less cope with my duty, but everything else was not in my power, and then I burned with shame in full. Customs and passport control lasted madly for a long time, the bus was late, they gave muck in the restaurant, there was no hot water in the hotel, things disappeared from the rooms. The Japanese demolished all this stoically and without a single Okha, I did not hear a word of complaint, Intourist colleagues with other languages ​​envied me. They especially got from the Americans, who, at the sight of a rotten, did not consider it necessary to politely leave the table, but began to brazenly scandalous, demanding immediate satispration and resorting to the arguments inadmissible in a decent society: “I Paid My Money!” In a word, the restaurant servant of the Americans hated, not different in this respect from the Soviet government.

My then naivety is not amenable to description. When the head of the Japanese group intended to appease the waitress in the Ukraina hotel with tights, I firmly said that it was indecent to give intimate objects to unfamiliar women. An experienced traveler was surprised at such an Afront - he did not come to the Union for the first time and knew what was happening. In general, he showed wisdom and did not listen to me, and I personally became convinced of his rightness.

Presenting a couple of tights with a low bow with the beetroot cheeks, he exclaimed in delightedly: “Ah, what is your equipment!” She liked the compliment, she was even more blurry, although it was not easy to do with her beetroot cheeks. I saw how she whispered something like a bandit of a cook, and the next day meat and sour cream appeared in the borsch, and the apron of the waitress herself was cleanly washed. I do not think that it was a simple coincidence.

Import tights then cost as many as six rubles, but they still could not buy them for this price. As a young man, a item of high art, pure from Japanese generos, got - an engraving reproduced on a dense cardboard, on which a sophisticated geisha flaunted. I was very proud of this thing and hung on the wall, although if we were better taught, I should have abandoned the gift: after all, in fact, all these “geisha” are the most ordinary medieval prostitutes, but only with knowledge of the Japanese language. I would have known - he didn’t take it for anything, but we were not informed at the university. The leader of tourists also seemed to be unknown.

I should have abandoned the gift and for another reason - the gift received from the Intourists should have been attributed to the hidden cabinet of the hotel, where the secret police officer with a confiscate to confiscate with wary eyes took the verdict: you can leave the little thing for yourself or it is subject to nationalization. He would definitely seize my beauty for himself or for the state, which, however, was the same in his view. But I did not go to that office. The writer and four -time seat, Yuri Dombrovsky, owns the suffered thought: “They” know about you only that you told them to yourself. I did not read Dombrovsky then, did not suffer and came to this thought on my own. Probably from the shock experienced from a meeting with real art.

Leaving Moscow, my Intourists thanked me intensely, unnaturally stinging my hand and praised my Japanese language. I was touched to the core, I did not want to part, I wanted to say that I would be bored, I wanted to invite to come again, but the language did not turn. I was tormented by the question: showing my country, whom we get more - friends or enemies?

Getting compliments regarding the knowledge of the Japanese language was pleasant. Then I still did not know that such praises are intended only for those foreigners who own Japanese. If you know him really good, compliments are inappropriate. I got to such knowledge only after many years.

* * *

Under the Soviet regime, my poems did not print, but restructuring came, and although this power was still alive, it became easier to breathe. In 1990, I had a collection called "Life Line". After long thoughts, the director of the Eastern Literature publishing house O.K. Dreyer agreed to print the collection “at the expense of the author of the author”. Then this form of publication was new and even served as a certain guarantee of quality. For insurance, Dreyer wanted to get a review from some respected writer, and Anatoly Nyman wrote a subtle and positive review, but Dreyer threw a few “dubious” poems anyway. “In order not to substitute you and not be substituted yourself,” he formulated. The cover was drawn by the sweetest Valera Lokshin. He looked at the poems, and he did not take the money from me. Apparently, he himself liked his own work - not sparing time, he made a poster copying the cover and handed me. The reduced option was glued to the matchbox and also gave it. I left Lokshin’s workshop on Gogolevsky Boulevard, cooked from those matches and was glad of humanity spilled in the air. The cover was really good. Black and white, white and black ... Soon, the computer will kill drawn covers, and they will become similar to candy wrappers.

The collection was published by a huge circulation of three thousand copies to the present time and turned out instantly, I “repelled” my money. There were many connoisseurs of poetry, people did not spare rubles for books, they liked the poems. Someone on duty said: "Old man, you are a genius!" - But I received the most original praise from one linguist: “Great! You have such a non -standard use of the genitive case! ” Although she did not say anything about the sophisticated rhyme, shiny metaphors and bright imagery, I considered it for a compliment. What else to take from a linguist, except for case and declination?

* * *

The natives of Peter are not a Moscow couple, they understand the polites. Here I am going in the St. Petersburg tram. Nearby is a senior married couple of gomes. "Well, you, prostitute!" He screams. It’s not good, of course, but the Muscovite would have printed stronger words. And then this semi -coming corpse adds a completely inconceivable: “Shut up! You have the aggressive stage of alcohol intoxication! ” They went on the hay, leaving behind the smell of an unwashed body and living to the bottom of life.

However, some Petersburgers also use obscene vocabulary at times. Seeing me, an elderly father, walking his young daughter along the street of Decembrists, a store loader broke away from the boxes and busily asked: "Granddaughter?" - "Daughter". Having decided that he had put me in an awkward position, the loader decided to make amends and theatrically exclaimed: "Bednish!" Then he thought about something of his own and said severely: “While small ones are all pretty. And how to grow - they become such bitch! "

Then I saw him in the extinct. He took 150 grams of vodka and 50 milliliters of Baikal. So he said: “Be kind, please pour me one hundred and fifty grams of vodka and fifty milliliters of Baikal.” He did not recognize me. In that powerful I was affectionately asked: "As always, you?" Without waiting for an answer, a tidy barrier poured one hundred grams of piercing and gave out a salty cucumber. On the wall there was a reproduction of the "unknown" artist Kramsky. I liked her since childhood, so I went to that powerful. True, flies stared there, which, however, was not surprising: the picture was painted in 1883. In any case, this did not prevent me from enjoying painting. And there’s nothing to say about pepper.

Alexander Meshcheryakov