Return

And here I am again... I’m walking along the familiar streets of those old places, “where I was young at heart,” through my childhood district, which I haven’t been to for almost twenty years... How everything here has simultaneously changed and at the same time remained the same, the way I remembered everything. The same “nine-story buildings”, wrapped in uneven asphalt, once new and foreign, but now painfully familiar and shabby, the same spreading ailanthus, perhaps five times larger and reaching the windows of the second floor, clotheslines stretched from one house to another, on which someone’s underpants and shirts are dried, and that same dazzling sun over the houses that I missed so much all the time these twenty years... And around there is an incomprehensible fog, a haze, as if after rain or as in some movie, on the set. But there is no rain, but there is a hot, almost at its zenith, white sun of the sultry city and the heat familiar to those parts, which I dreamed of more than once in my restless dreams, forcing me to oversleep and almost cry from the familiar sight of the leaden sky in my dirty window, generously washed by inhospitable rains. Just think, twenty years, twenty of the best years, flashed past, flew past my temple, and turned into a phantom, into a ghostly Fata Morgana, into a foggy paradise cloud that floated beyond the horizon of my youth... And here I am again walking along these dusty alleys, as if these twenty years never happened, as if I left for a minute, for a day and quickly returned. Unfamiliar, but painfully familiar images of some people are moving towards me, as if in a silent movie. They don’t seem to see me, they look past me, but I see them, and I am incredibly happy that I see them and that I am there again. I go into my entrance. Everything was as it was: next to it was an unstoppable puddle in a muddy hole, an old lopsided bench made by Uncle Kolya from the first floor, gray dust with cobwebs huddled in the corners. The elevator, as was often the case then, does not work, but I am not at a loss, I rise and look with interest at every crevice, every bend of my entrance, in which the quiet steps of my summer sandals were once heard, tens of thousands, hundreds, and maybe even a million times.

On this wall on the seventh floor, next to the door of Aunt Larisa’s neighbor, I drew some imaginary cosmic monster with the door key, putting the author’s signature - this is an almost monumental picture, of which, of course, nothing remains in twenty years, but it still seems to me that on the dusty wall I am looking at that same invisible signature with the apartment key... But here lived my neighbor Tanya, a girl with brown eyes, awkward and smoking, two years older than me, towards whom I then experienced my first clumsy youthful impulses, and even covered her entire door with poems by M. Tsvetaeva, as an impulse of dedication, but who gave preference to some shaggy-bearded hooligan already older than her. And here, on the sixth floor, behind a dermantin-upholstered room with golden studs, my friend Sashka lived then. Sashka was the son of a general. Yes, yes, without exaggeration, a real major general, but this fact itself then hardly made it easier for Sashka to grow up, since when Sashka was fifteen or sixteen, his father, in the spirit of the beginning of the nineties and the complete chaos in the country, left the family for some young bitch, a lover of still young major generals, and Sashka himself, like a real freak and fatherless, went into all sorts of troubles. He either spent the night in some brothel, or came home after midnight, completely drunk, or ran away from this very house and his fat teacher mother, who was sad for her husband, a major general, who had left the family. Then Sashka left, either to Yaroslavl, or to Siberia, where he became a policeman, lost all his red curls and his boyish snub nose, and I even heard rumors that Sashka was even killed... Without much enthusiasm, I ring the bell on the familiar leatherette door without the slightest hope of seeing any of the faces I know, the door reluctantly opens and on the threshold, barefoot and in a T-shirt, like some kid, I see the same Sasha...

I can't believe my eyes, but it's definitely him! Red-haired and with a snub nose, as in childhood, he also stands awkwardly on the threshold, jabs from side to side with his slanted eyes, like those of a Kalmyk boy, and, shifting from foot to foot, looks at me and as if through me. I shout, without holding back at all, something banal, like “Sashok! Hello! Do you recognize?!”, and we awkwardly shake each other’s hands, and I even try to hug him even more awkwardly, but I’m not good at it, and he doesn’t want to hug, and in the end we shake hands and agree that I will definitely come to him again in the evening. Just think, Sashka returned and nothing seemed to have changed, everything was almost the same as before. It's crazy, but it's incredible! Almost without shortness of breath and still in the feeling of the meeting, I reach the eighth floor, where my another friend Rusik lived, and, to my great surprise, I see not just anyone, but my dear friend, standing, as then, leaning on the railing and clumsily smoking his cigarette, as if he had never really learned to smoke. To my even greater surprise, Rusik has hardly changed - still the same, large eyes with downturned corners with girlish long eyelashes, looking slightly either to the left or to the right, a freckled nose wounded in a fight and pinkish plump lips, like a teenager. No, Rusik really hasn’t changed amazingly, unless something different appeared in his eyes, an adult or even an old man’s, almost lifeless, as if they looked at you without smiling and didn’t see you, and his hand automatically reached out to the cigarette in his mouth and back. We awkwardly get to know each other again, as if for the first time, I find out how he was all these years, and we agree that in the evening we will go together to the Sim-Sim restaurant, where we had visited several times before, which is very close, to celebrate the meeting and talk.

I’m dizzy, I don’t have enough oxygen... Both my friends, they are there, as if they were still in childhood... It’s just incredible, it doesn’t happen! Finally, I reach my ninth floor, where we lived, first with my mother and dog Kesha, and then with my wife Oksana and daughter Angelina... The same door in yellow boards on small nails, the same massive handle and a large keyhole. I still stand in front of the door for a long time, crushed by a heavy blanket of memories, not knowing whether to press the bell button or not... I still end up in our apartment, I don’t even remember how, everything is like a fog and everything floats before my eyes... My room... Here my bed stood against the wall, and then a wide Arab bed, which I “expropriated” from a neighbor for a debt that he did not return to my mother, there were shelves for books, on the wall there is a carpet, like all Soviet people at that time... A table with glass, under which there were clippings from "The Same Age" with Tom Cruise, Kevin Kaestner, Seryozha Yesenin and someone else... A transom window through which on long summer evenings we "talked" with Rusik long after midnight, indulging in stories about summer adventures, fishing or some other harmless boyish activities fun... The room hangs like fog, I have the feeling that there is the same hot air in which my molecules, my invisible neurons and the vibrations of my stupid heart are still flowing and flowing, but this is not accurate, but only me it seems so, although it seems somehow too obvious that I feel uneasy... I so want to die at that moment, but not from grief, irreparable misfortune, but from happiness and bright sadness, sweet pain of the past and the one who has returned, and at the same time, at the same time, I so want to live, live and die, die and live, and so these two desires are closely intertwined, I feel so bitter and so sweet that I am completely lost, that my head is spinning and, in order not to fall, I am forced to sit on that very Arab bed on which the three of us slept, me, my wife and daughter...

Suddenly, from somewhere, a burning thought comes into my head that Rusik and Sashka shouldn’t be there, they shouldn’t be there anymore, at all... they should have died and can’t be either there or anywhere else... and how strange it all is that they are alive and even at home... On the street for a long time I catch the hot air with my open mouth, in which there is a sultry evening, and the aroma of melons from the local market, and the chirping of crazed cicadas, I pass by one house and the memories associated with him, another, tenth... Then I sit for a long time in that same pub, around the corner, which I sometimes went to for a mug of cold beer in an icy glass from the refrigerator, I look through the large dirty window across the street at the indoor market, which I visited ten thousand, maybe a million times, where we bought sturgeon at a bargain price, and hot pasties, I catch myself feeling that everything is the same as then, and everything is completely different and that there is no such thing as it used to be... And then I understand that all this is not true... Everything is a lie, and only a thin haze of memories connects me with my past, and nothing is there anymore and will never be again... Everything was and all this will never, never be again... Just as there will be no me, this one, and this me... I will never be there either, me, myself, that never again, and soon this, never and forever... Through the thin haze of memories I hear muffled the rumble of the car... the slamming of doors... conversations... the sound of raindrops on the metal window sill... and I understand that all this is outside my window, but already in my present, where I am now... and then I wake up, with my face wet from tears and my heart ready to jump out of my chest...