Revenge opera

A police officer was investigating a murder that he himself committed. Shakespeare is resting

From the very beginning, everything about them was not like people. And it’s not even the corpse at the end of this story that is to blame, but its heroes themselves. Since the days of Romeo and Juliet, rarely have relationships been so beautiful, the circumstances of the relationship so cruel, and the story itself covered with such a coating of painful passion, except perhaps for Nabokov’s couple. The difference is that this novel will have a continuation, because where life puts an end to it, they simply take a break, even an intermission. The second branch is in 15 years. Strict regime.

He was expecting exposure every minute
Andrei Videnin and Masha Zavarzina were an odd couple. Residents of Petrovsk, Saratov Region - a textbook Griboyedov town - spent a long time watching a local police officer and a deaf-mute seventeen-year-old girl walking in an embrace. He had been happily married for a long time, she was small, like Thumbelina, and so beautiful that she seemed to have fluttered out of a foreign melodrama straight from the TV screen, which Petrovites who thirsted for passion turned to in the evenings. She was lonely and raped more than once, he was taken by surprise by unexpected love. He was for her a guardian angel and a light in the window, for him she was the youngest daughter and wife - one of those marriages with whom are made in heaven. And in the courtroom, without listening to the questions of the lawyer and the prosecutor, they only looked at each other and smiled at the fact that they could stay together a little longer: he was in the cage, she was nearby. And when the jury announced the verdict (“Andrei Videnin is imprisoned for 15 years”), they continued to look at each other.
What preceded this trial, which took place exactly a year after they met? In May, the body of Armen Atogliyan, strangled with a wire, was found in forest plantations. He was 17 years old. The Petrovsky prosecutor's office, losing its feet, developed several versions, even suggesting that this was a showdown between Russians and Armenians, who could not get along in the small town.
At what exact moment after the start of the investigation the deputy. The head of the criminal investigation department, Panferov, understood who the killer was, Andrei Videnin did not know. But he waited every minute for discovery, realizing that a couple more days and he would be figured out. He worked in the investigative team and conscientiously interviewed witnesses, step by step investigating his own crime. And with some impatience he waited for his colleagues to come and handcuff him at the moment when he might be interrogating another suspect. That's exactly what happened.
Months later, in a pre-trial detention center in Saratov, fiddling with a strong cigarette, the former detective will remember the day they met. And he will say: “I saw her and felt that this was my girl, that she and I would be together forever, not only in this world, but also in the next. And I wanted to die for her and give my whole life.” And he gave only 15 years.

“I want our son to bear my name”
Getting to know a girl you met on the street was not at all as easy as it might seem at first glance. Firstly, in all 7 years of living together with his wife Zhanna, the senior detective never thought about another woman. And secondly, the deaf-mute beauty would not have understood anything that Andrei could have told her. Only her only friend and mother Lidiya Nikolaevna communicated with Masha without any problems. Even in childhood, complications from the flu robbed the girl of her hearing, speech and friends, leaving only otherworldly beauty and limiting her life circle to home and school.
It was difficult at first. Andrei came to her house, which later became her home, and said to “Mama Lida”:
- I want to make her happy.
And mother Lida immediately became his accomplice. And when he saw that the cold-blooded beauty, upon closer examination, looked more like a frightened 14-year-old teenager, he realized that this was fate. Overcoming Masha's fear of men was not easy. Later, when the elder opera and the woman-child became friends and lovers, she would tell him where this fear came from. In the meantime, they had to learn to understand each other, and they wrote poems every day and copied them into notebooks. Now both notebooks - both with his poems and with hers - lie at Masha’s house along with a stack of letters from the Saratov pre-trial detention center.
Early spring dawn
The heart of seventeen years.
Quiet and mysterious house
With the last cherished window.
The curtain is on it, and behind it -
The sun of my Universe!
“You are my sun, Maria!” — Andrei wrote to Masha in the first days, and her heart slowly melted. And champagne, and kisses, and flowers, and the meager restaurants of Peter the Great, and a cozy car - everything was a first for her, and she marveled at everything with childish spontaneity. And with a woman’s intuition she always felt when her beloved would return from duty to her house on the outskirts. “Sex is not important for me with Masha,” Andrey reassured his mother Lida. And the lovers walked around Petrovsk for a long, long time, like brother and sister, like father and daughter.
Then the magpie brought news on its tail that Andrei was married. He was on duty when he was informed that Masha had run away into the forest and they had been looking for her for a long time. When Zhanna found out about everything, at first she put her husband’s things out on the street, went to the house of her deaf-mute rival, and after a while she reconciled herself.
“This has never happened to me: my heart loved both of them.” My wife is sacred, and I would never leave her, and Masha was my girl, who would have been lost without me.
This is what he writes to them from the pre-trial detention center: for his wife to play football with her son and prepare to move to the south after the end of his term. Masha - that more than anything in the world he wants her to bear his last name, and their son to bear his first name.
“I close my eyes and imagine myself in our favorite room in your house. How I miss our sofa and the pillows on it. And our cat! Remember, I came to you on February 14, Lida’s mother was not at home. He then lay down on the pillows and saw so much! But he won’t tell anyone about this, will he, anyone?” (From Andrei Videnin’s letter to Maria Zavarzina, intercepted by the Saratov prosecutor’s office in pre-trial detention center-1 on Valentine’s Day.)
When they began to sleep together, Andrei saw that at night, in his sleep, his girl was crying. That's when everything became clear.
Somehow, even before Andrei appeared in her life, the wild beauty was noticed by the Armenians of Peter the Great. The main offender's name was Armen Atogliyan. One day she was dragged into the park... This was repeated several more times. And then the Armenians started a hunt for the deaf-mute: they pressed the car from behind, and only by miracle did Masha, who did not hear the rustling of the tires, jump to the side at the last moment; appeared as if out of the ground and pointed on their fingers: “We’ll fuck you yet.” Before Andrey there was an abortion and even, it seems, a rope and a box of pills. Masha had nowhere to go. And if it weren’t for the opera lover, it is unknown what would have happened to her now. Andrei took his Maria in his arms, took her to gynecologists and clairvoyants and vowed to take revenge.

Wedding behind bars
The connection between the murdered Armenian, Masha and the opera Andrei Videnin suddenly became clear to the deputy. the head of the Petrovsky criminal investigation department Panferov, he only had to remember in time and compare two facts. Firstly, that six months ago Andrei asked to introduce him to his niece Maria; and secondly, that even earlier, Masha’s mother had come to him, to Panferov, and complained that her daughter was being raped and was not being given access by the Armenians, and it would be nice if “you did something to protect the girl.” So this is the kind of protector she found for herself!
The investigative team, which, after voicing this version to a select circle, stopped introducing the alleged criminal into the investigation, pulled the thread and discovered even more interesting coincidences. Some time ago, a boy named Sasha Kadyrov, a great friend of the murdered Armen, disappeared. “The body is most likely in the river,” the investigators assumed. Everyone knew that the last time Sasha was seen was at the Petrovskaya prosecutor’s office: that evening he was leaving an interrogation with detective Andrei Videnin in a case of some kind of beating. The boy has not been seen since. But then no one attached any importance to the fact that on the same day, January 31, Andrei had a birthday. They rushed to look when Armen disappeared: everything fits, Atogliyan was killed on May 6, when Masha Zavarzina celebrated her 17th birthday! “Does he give himself gifts?”
— What happened to Sasha Kadyrov will most likely remain a mystery. The fact that he shared the fate of the “gift” with his friend Armen can only be assumed, says Mikhail Shuvalov, prosecutor of the Saratov Regional Prosecutor’s Office.
The events of that evening, when Videnin decided to avenge the honor of his girl, are well preserved in the memory of Andrei and in the memory of Masha, who was nearby when her beloved killed the rapist. But prosecutor Mikhail Shuvalov told me about what happened on that May night.
No, this trio in the red “troika” was not going to kill. The owner of the car agreed to help his friend and give him a ride somewhere, the cute girl in the back seat thought that they were going to celebrate her birthday, and the organizer of the “trip” just wanted to look into the eyes of one scumbag.
At about 9 pm Masha, Andrey and his old friend Lekha Zakharov drove up to Atogliyan’s house. He showed up an hour later. By that time, the unknown person, who later became a witness in the murder case, had already noticed the car in a dark alley and wondered: why, exactly, were these strangers standing here for so long? When the investigation comes to Zakharov, he will be so scared that he will confess himself, despite the killer’s assurances that, they say, “I’m in the group, don’t be afraid of anything.”
Armen was coming back from dancing that day. Masha pointed her finger at the side window: he. Andrey “invited” him to sit in the car. When he saw Masha, he understood everything and sank into the seat. They got out of the car again. Andrei threatened and swore, shaking with anger and resentment. Further, the testimony differs: either Andrei, not remembering himself, began to kick and strangle the offender with a wire pulled from the back of the car and did not stop until he realized what he had done, or Armen, who was still alive, was stuffed into the trunk, taken to a planting near the village of Komarovo and killed there - the body was found 10 days later.
“It’s as if my bar has been broken.” I didn’t want to kill him, I wasn’t going to - otherwise I would have thought everything through, I wouldn’t have just left the corpse in plain sight. But you see how it turned out. “From the experienced and lost happiness, from boiling anger, from bewilderment at the tricks of fate that put the former cop behind bars, Andrei’s eyes are darting crazy and he can’t gather his thoughts.
“You are writing to ask me to wear those green trousers that you like so much to the wedding. But you need to think about your outfit. Start choosing a dress for the wedding with your mother” (from a letter from Andrei Videnin).
And just this thought that in 15 years everything will be as it should be - he, she and Andreika - does not leave him for a minute. He sits in a pre-trial detention center in the company of a prosecutor and a security guard and writes her a letter, which I will take 120 kilometers to the textbook Griboyedov city of Petrovsk. Where she sits in the company of two notebooks with poems, an album with photographs and a stack of letters on government paper.

Polina Ivanushkina
Moscow—Saratov—Petrovsk—Moscow
The author expresses gratitude to the Saratov Regional Prosecutor's Office and personally to Mikhail Shuvalov.