It is not easy to answer this American duty question to the man of my biography. Rather, it is not easy to answer briefly, because the question does not imply a half -hour confession. It is necessary to name the staff or country. And I answer: "Prague, the Czech Republic." I lived in five countries, although I was born only in one of them, and in America - in five states. They ask at every step: sellers in stores, pivotes in roadside restaurants, administrators in hotels. Sometimes I can’t hold back and start explanations: they say, I'm not a case at all. Which of me is a Czech - I have a Chevron with a Norwegian flag on my vest. Listen with a sympathetic curiosity. He went out, as it was started in America, to smoke in the courtyard - a passerby asks: "Are you a guy from Norway?"

I returned home, but no one takes me for my own.

And who, in fact, asks? The saleswoman at the Nordstrom department store immediately reported that she herself was from Egypt, and in response to my clarifying question, Arab or a handle, shrugged perplexedly. Say, of course, Arab, but I didn’t hear about the kopts. That's all the glory of the bitss bitros Gali and hundreds of thousands of his fellow tribesmen.

In another department store, Deuton, they bought a female handbag. The saleswoman recommended that she purchase a special humidifier for her, wipe the seams, but our companion in a ordered Russian conversation stated that this is already superfluous. The conversation, fortunately, was quite parliamentary, because the saleswoman suddenly confessed that she was a Ukrainian, and the deal to general pleasure ended already in the third language.

In the Krebtry and Evelyn store there is a young girl who came from Belgrade a year ago. She recognized the Russians at once: she said that nothing is clear, but very similar. This, by the way, is a real linguistic curiosity: Serbian-Khorvatsky is closer to Russian in sound than a much more related Ukrainian one. We agreed that in St. Polish it was better than in Belgrade.

This year, acting trade unions and human rights organizations sent petitions protest to Hollywood and television companies due to a lack of ethnic diversity on the screens. This is a real problem, and not only legal. The Aryan exteriors of Hollywood inspire stranger ideas to strangers. How many times have you heard: such and such looks like an American, or unlike. In fact, any resident of the Earth is similar to an American, and according to the messages of the Boulevard newspapers about the introduction of aliens, then not only land. In the worst case of such a resident, you just need to feed and cope.

We go to the farmer market of St. Pola. The mountains of vegetables and herbs - half of the names twenty years ago in America did not know, I still do not know some. The faces of trading farmers prompt guesses: Koreans, or what? But there are no Korean farmers in the USA. These people are homs, or, as they used to be called, meo, representatives of the vast South Asian nationality. During the Civil War in Laos, they opposed the Communists and helped the Americans. The Communists won, and tens of thousands were forced to flee: most to Thailand, America sheltered many. In their homeland, the homs lived with primitive agricultural communities, worshiped the spirits, and it is not easy for them to fit into the twentieth century. But now they have settled down, and the grown youth is melting schools and universities. These Americans will never be like supermen from the advertising "Malboro". However, real cowboys are not similar to them - only the third -rate actors of Hollywood, feeding from advertising agencies.

On the way to Northfield, we see dozens of machines at the highway: auction. Not "Sotbis" or "Christis" with van-gogs and Faberge eggs, but the sale of farm property.

In the courtyard built in a series of agricultural equipment: tractor, combine, platform-printing and something else iron, unknown to me, unknown to me. The bidders stand in a semicircle: these are not suburban homs, stubborn vegetables, but the cultivators of corn and soybeans, strong men with weathered profiles, all in jeans and baseball caps with solids, which they do not wear anywhere else. American farmers of the Midwest West are just closest to the Hollywood stereotype, only without its moronre root. This human breed has never met me anywhere else.

At a distance, at the porch under the elm, the old man, woman, child are sitting on the performed chairs, are inseparablely monitor the performance. The word "performance" will not seem excessive here: a trading is a professional who has rented an employee of the auction company. He sits in a special booth on wheels, which is alternately moved to each of the exhibited exhibits, and sings. Anyone who at least once heard the song of an American auctioner will never forget it and will not confuse it with anything. This song is the fruit of many years of practice, a large art of narrow purpose. I can’t pass the melody at all, it’s rather a recitative with Statto's clearance and ascending waves, and the words are approximately the following:

“John Dir Tractor, only three years, in excellent condition, twenty thousand, who will give more, I want to hear twenty -one ...”, and so on. High -class masters reach such a speed of chant that a stranger does not make a word.

The owner of the farm, meanwhile, climbs into the car’s cabin and starts it, demonstrating the aforementioned excellent condition. From time to time, one of the audience screams or throws his hand forward, and then the assistant to the ceremonymist pokes his finger in it, and the maestro himself sings a new figure. We, Rotosems, have to stand petrified, because one careless movement can turn a person into the owner of the John Dir tractor in excellent condition. True, they will immediately figure it out, because registered participants have numbers, but you risk causing fair irritation.

For some reason, these people do not want to annoy: their life seems much more serious than your own.

The auction on the farm is a sign of trouble. The crop this year is very scarce, and in the past, on the contrary, it was high, and the bins of buyers are still full. As a result, both of the two evils erupted: both prices are low, and there is nothing to sell. Small farming, despite federal subsidies, is not very profitable, and two bad years in a row can destroy the work of generations. The revenue for the equipment will depart the bank, and he, most likely, will get the selling value of land and at home. Losing a farm is not just losing work; Anyway, that the academician is left without a school certificate.

The auction is a long business, and therefore they adjusted the trailer with hot dogs and coffee to reinforce the participants. Farm wives at the rack discuss soy futures. I feel like a Monter who mistakenly hit the Congress of nuclear physicists.

The city of Northfield in the state of Minnesota is a province according to Russian concepts, but Russian concepts are poorly applicable here. The city has two colleges, Carlton and St. Olaf, both of the best in the country. A girl from New York is an honor for happiness to study in Carlton, while the Moscow young man is unlikely to be delighted with the prospect of moving to Penza.

Another difference: in Russia there are many lovers of homeland in general, inseparably with Chechnya and Kuril Islands, but I almost never met people who would really love their native place. In America, the opposite is true: patriotism is always local. Each of the landing town has its own local historians, holds festivals and parades. Northfield's main pride is the unsuccessful robbery of the first National Bank by the legendary bandit Jesse James. This happened on September 7, 1876, and for many years, residents have celebrated the anniversary of the event with a theatrical action.

We stand in the crowd opposite the place declared by the bank to be robbed. The scene of the event is cleared, as well as the access path to it. The bandits themselves, Jesse James with his brother Frank and the Youngers brothers, on horses, hats and white anthers, will shift around the corner, waiting for the signal to the exit. Meanwhile, the presenter devotes the audience to the course of business, calling all the characters who are already pacing along the street. Jesse and his brother were veterans of the Civil War, fought on the side of the southerners, and after the victory of the North began to rob trains and banks. The adventure in Northfield almost put an end to their firearms.

The speech southerners dismounted near the bank, tied their horses and started a distracting conversation with the townspeople about the purchase of livestock. In addition to the accent, they were given the smell of alcohol: apparently, they decided to take the bank with a hangover, and local Lutherans did not touch alcohol. In the ensuing shootout - now it is already happening before our eyes, of course, idle - everyone died except the James brothers. Jesse was subsequently killed by a member of his own gang, flattered by the declared reward. Frank surrendered to the authorities, he was tried in Missouri for the murder, in Alabam for robbery and once again for the armed robbery in Missouri. He was justified all three times, and died in 1915 at his home, in the same room in which he was born.

Jesse and Frank were not just bandits, but criminals with ideology: they took revenge for the defeat and treachery of the northerners who seriously wounded Jesse after his detachment capitulated. Jesse James is the American equivalent of Stenka Razin.

According to the same Northfield public narrator: Jesse James loved Shakespeare very much and often quoted by heart, and at his leisure with his comrades played scenes from his plays. Our cynical time really lacks such bandits.

American coffee is commonly and firmly scolding for weakness and transparency. There is no need to scold, you just need to understand that this is a completely different drink, which is drunk differently. Nevertheless, a stall has already appeared on the main street of the town of Castone in South Dakot, in which expresso is released. But then the native version is listed in the menu, under the contemptuous Italian nickname "Cafe Americano."

Cystone, translated “Cornial Stone”, is the very center of the American “Wild West”, which is actually placed in the middle of the continent. This place is black hills, where in the seventies of the last century another “gold fever” broke out. You can only get here by car, and in those legendary times - on horses on exhausting mountain roads.

The Wild West was much less wild than is now considered to justify the statistics of crime. Arriving at a new place, the pioneers first chose a sheriff with assistants and adopted a minimum set of laws. The robberies and murders were not, of course, specially a rarity, but, as archival studies have shown, they took place less often than in modern New Orleans or in Moscow.

Many of the dead are known and became heroes - according to merits or contrary to them. The “frantic” Bill Hikok is one of the true heroes, a wrestler with slavery, a scout of the merchants, then a charioteer, something like a current taxi driver, at one time a policeman. There are many stories about his exploits, real and imaginary, no longer subject to verification, but his death became simply epic. In the seventies last century, along with hundreds of seekers of good luck, Hikok arrived in black hills, to the town of Dedwood. Here, fate overtook him: he was killed by an unknown in the saloon behind the card game, and two eights and two aces that were in his hands at the time of death were nicknamed in poker with a “dead man’s combination”.

And here is the heroine of the American epic: Bill Kalamity Jane, Jane Bed. She arrived at the Wild West with her parents with her parents, lost them at an early age, and since then she earned a living in all possible ways, at one time she was even a container of a brothel. Different stories are associated with Hikok, all partly apocryphal: either she was his mistress in the last months of her life, or his wife, but much earlier. Kalamity hit the heroine not so much because of the exploits as because they wrote many so -called “penny novels” about her - at the end of the last century, when the Wild West moved from history to literature. The "frantic" Bill Hikok and Kalamity Jane are buried in the city cemetery of Dedwood.

In these places of Dedwood there is a rather noticeable city, a thousand hundred inhabitants. The main and only industry is casino. The city consists of almost the only street, because it no longer squeezes into the narrow gorge. On this street, a girl with Valdai facial features looked at us with curiosity. "Sorry, are you talking in Russian?"

Her friend married an international announcement in a neighboring rodge, a noisy metropolis of several thousand inhabitants. The husband was not in demand by a non -demanding cousin in Dedwood, and she immediately wrote out our sweet interlocutor from her native Tver. The conversation was sincere and very short, because the former Tver woman was in a hurry to work - either to the restaurant, or in the casino, there are no others in Dedwood. For two years now, she recalls the Russian language only by raids in the rodzis.

Going to the black hills, where the Indians live for the most part, and bison grazes in the valleys, I least expected to meet a former compatriot, believing that the Russian leg did not step here. But statistics are capable of any paradoxes: it is possible that in Tver they still remained unmarried, and the Dedwood cousins have a third. I warn you: only one street, restaurants and casinos.

The town of Ice - a few miles south of Dedwood. Here, after the opening of the new gold deposit, most of the seekers of happiness moved, so the Dedwood was practically empty in several days. In Leda to this day, there is a valid gold mine, but rather for tourist fun than seriously. Otherwise, the city, where there is no casino, is immersed in lethargy. We went into the antique shop, and the immediate question of the owner followed: "Where are you from.

I went into the usual explanations. After hearing, the owner said: "I am blind."

He sat behind the cash register, looking at the walls at the wall, and commented on the goods, by which, according to his representation, we passed: a rag doll, glass bottles, a solo and a list of busts of George and Martha Washington. He said that half the Czech himself, a quarter from the maternal and paternal side - many immigrants from the Czech Republic settled in these places. Unlike the overwhelming number of Americans, he even heard about the Radio "Freedom". When we chose the purchase and it was time to pay, it suddenly dawned on me that American bills were all the same size. “I believe you,” said Khozin, “I have no other choice.” I carefully counted and handed him three to twenty and ten, out loud, declaring the dignity of each. He was wearing a non -storage shirt and crumpled trousers, signs of a lonely life. I thought in my thoughts that all other buyers were as honest with him as I was, and then blushed ashamedly. Fortunately, he was blind.

One of the attractions of the black hills is Mount Rashmore, on which the faces of four US presidents are carved: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. Another local monument, even more grandiose, is known so far.

According to legend, the hero of the Indian resistance of Krezie Hors (a mad horse) promised his people that he would return in stone. The leader of the Lakota tribe, the standing bear turned to the sculptor-self-taught Korchak Zelkovsky with a request to realize this idea. The work began in 1948, but unlike Mount Rashmore, where a large team worked and federal funds were spent, Zelkovsky crushed his mountain alone for more than forty years. He was helped by his wife Ruth and children. Sometimes volunteers were connected, and funds were raised with donations or from tourists.

Crazy Hors, the son of the leader of the Siu tribe, fought with the white conquerors in the north of the Great Plains in the second half of the last century. He won a lot of victories and contributed to the famous defeat of the detachment of Lieutenant Colonel Castor on the Little-Big-Khorn River in Montana. But the story was not on his side, and ultimately had to surrender. In 1877, he was treacherously killed by American soldiers.

Zelkovsky, who was always called Korczak, is no longer alive, and volunteers continue his work. A museum of culture of American Indians has been built near the sculptor’s house: ceramics, silver with turquoise and carnelian, painting on bison skins. On the book shelf are dictionaries of disappearing languages. The name of Krezie Hors is on the Siu Ta-Sunko-Uitko.

The Indian hero is depicted on a horse, but so far only his face is completed, recreated according to the memories, because there are no photographs. The horse’s face is still drawn on a granite slope, but the contours of the hand are already distinguishable, stretched towards the great plains. Crazy Hors kept his promise and returned home, and Korchak's feat shame the creators of the Egyptian pyramids: freedom is capable of more than the most helpful slavery.

This strange country, these casinos and bison are my house. I lived here for thirteen years, ten years since I left. For a long time I have no stake or yard here - as, indeed, in any other country.

In every motel, in each room there is a TV. Including, you see rescuers who are born in ruins, the dumbfounded faces of eyewitnesses, the tears of a few survivors. In Moscow and Volgodonsk they explode at home. In this country, I also once lived, its tongue is transparent to me like English in America, and the grief of these people is more clear to me than the troubles of Turkey or Taiwan. But even there I have no home that someone could blow up. There has never been.

Сент-Пол, столица штата Миннесота, - практически один город с Миннеаполисом, без зазора. Их называют Твин-Ситиз, города-близнецы. В общем пригороде - Молл-ов-Америка, крупнейший в мире крытый торговый центр, сотни магазинов, рестораны, кинотеатры. Во внутреннем дворе под стеклянным куполом - детские аттракционы, поддельные скальные пейзажи, фальшивая итальянская траттория. Это - Америка, которую знает каждый. Не моя.

В Сент-Пол я прилетаю почти наобум, давно наскучив Нью-Йорком и Вашингтоном. Здесь у меня друзья по Мичиганскому университету, отсюда рукой подать до Великих Озер, до Анн-Арбора, до тех же Черных Холмов - пара дней на прокатном «понтиаке». Это уже Америка.

Откуда я? Десять лет назад я ненадолго вернулся в Европу, визит затянулся, но у меня есть, куда возвращаться, и куда однажды вернуться навсегда. Не обязательно в камне.

Что такое дом? По словам поэта Роберта Фроста, дом - «это место, куда тебя обязаны впустить». Такое место есть. И я по-прежнему его люблю.