THE UNIVERSE IN THE FORM OF A FICUS

Slowly and firmly walking, swaying, Trufelev carried home half of the stolen beef carcass. At that moment, it resembled the American Challenger spacecraft, but in which the launch vehicle and the spacecraft itself seemed to have swapped places.

And behind him, driving silently in a luxury foreign car with tinted windows, was Sofya Andreevna Kolabsova, director of the most famous store in Lyubinsk, “Hunting only by license.”

Even from the very back door, just approaching the place of work, Sofya Andreevna was going to record the crime of the presumptuous loader, but the excitement of sports stopped her - whether she would inform or not. So they moved around the sleeping, sun-baked Lyubinsk. Trufelev - through passage yards, disappearing and appearing from gateways. And then, as a silent escort, like a “tail” in spy films, Kolabsova. Sofya Andreevna tried several times to force herself to call out to Trufelev, but, as if under hypnosis, she continued the pursuit, marveling at his inhuman strength and not taking her eyes off the calf muscles, pulsating in time with his steps, covered with training pants.

Finally, Trufelev reached an old, rotten house about to be demolished, rose, breathing noisily and powerfully, into the only residential apartment on the second floor, bent in front of the door, moving his legs and balancing, took out the key, while pulling the back pocket of his pants all the way to the ground.

Behind him stretched a bloody trail from the carcass thawed by his hot shoulder blades and the sun.

Trufelev stopped in the middle of the room, carefully placed the beef on the floor, turned around and saw the director standing on the threshold. They looked at each other without blinking. Full, tightly tied in the middle by Kolabsov’s fashionable but strict dress. And Trufelev, all smeared with fat and blood, with the carcass of a bull at his feet, small, cast, in a gray satin robe, looking from under his brows... His chest heaved, his thick fur moved, a wheeze escaped from his chest.

Gradually, the breath of the power-hungry and arrogant Sofia Andreevna became more and more frequent; in those moments Trufelev seemed to her like some kind of ancient bloodthirsty priest, having strength and power over everything that exists... She timidly approached him, carefully closing the softly clicking door...

It seemed that the walls of the room were still pulsating and the ficus tree, which constituted Trufelev’s only furniture, was swaying. Kolabsova's diamond earrings quietly rattled across the floor, flashing, rolling into different corners. Finally, already in the dark, she quietly dressed in what was left of the dress, ran a trembling hand along Trufelev, whispered: “Sleep, sleep, my huge friend,” and groped her way to the door. On the way, she tripped over a beef carcass that had completely softened and even smelled a little from the heat of their love.

And again, as during the day, no one saw in night Lyubinsk how Sofya Andreevna circled around the city in a luxurious foreign car, turning the steering wheel with one hand and crumpling the remains of her dress on her luxurious chest with the other. Captivated by insane determination and desire to act. With previously unspent and unclaimed imagination and enormous connections. With a sudden burst of love that filled her large body. Yes Yes Yes...

Alone, alone while her master lies, freely stretched out in the middle of the room.

For three days and three nights, like an epic hero after a pitched battle, he sleeps. And now Trufelev is fenced off from Lyubinsk with a fence with the inscription: “The construction is being carried out by a company like this.”

He doesn’t hear the bulldozers starting to rumble around and the jackhammers firing in volleys. He doesn’t see the pot-bellied short dump trucks constantly delivering construction materials... He doesn’t see the huge closed trailers from which endless packed containers are unloaded. Workers, under the leadership of a young man with a maliciously disproportionate face, were constructing new partitions and walls inside the house. He doesn’t see or hear how three refrigerators are being installed in the basement of the house, completely new, written off from the “Hunting by License Only” store, each almost the size of a house...

And so, connected to their own autonomous power supply, they hummed rhythmically, radiating heat outward, keeping inside, in the permafrost, almost every edible creature in pairs.

And finally, a transparent bulletproof canopy-tent was installed at the top, through which Trufelev and Kolabsova will look at the sky. And Kolabsova whispers and whispers future words with naughty lips:

“My great friend and master.” I built this house for you... This world, that’s everything. I say it's good. And it will be so now and forever...

The king of the movers Trufelev slept for another three days and three nights and woke up only on the sixth under an armored cap, behind which the stars twinkled. I woke up surrounded by a labyrinth, lulled by the rhythmic hum of refrigerators. He saw naked Kolabsova near him, looking at him with tenderness.

- Where am I and who am I? - Trufelev asked.

“In heaven, my chosen one,” Kolabsova answered and rushed to kiss him frantically.

And at this time of cosmic passion, by the end of the sixth day, metamorphosis begins to occur with the ficus in the tub.

First, the tub of earth burst with a crash and crumbled into slices of planks. The ficus tree, strangely swaying, twisting and writhing in time with the love above, began to grow creakingly.

The roots wriggled and spread in all directions like cockroaches. They found tiny cracks on the floor, penetrated them, dissolved them with some mysterious liquid, went deeper, through the first floor, further into the permafrost of refrigerators.

Wriggling, the trunk grew by leaps and bounds, like a blind man, tapping the walls with branches, penetrating and stretching along the passages of the labyrinth to the darkened bulletproof cap.

And the old leaves rustled, fell, withered, and soon the whole house was covered with them, like city streets in autumn.

And all the time a thousand new ones grew, and then they themselves grew old, rotting like humus under their feet.

And with the last cry of passion, the ficus tree also shuddered convulsively and froze.

It clung tightly to the three-story paradise of Kolabsova and Trufelev, and it is unclear how it did not damage any communications, and now it could be torn off if EVERYTHING was destroyed.

The bones of the stolen half of the bull, from which, in fact, it all began, lay sucked down to the last extremity by the monster ficus tree. And then the lovers just separated from each other and saw a new world around them...

And the life of Trufelev and Kolabsova flowed endlessly in the newly-minted Eden.

Strange, but they were not surprised by the changes that had taken place. Trufelev - because he thought that this was what his goddess intended. And Kolabsova... Kolabsova was like in a narcotic dope. Maybe she thought that something was wrong here, but then she remembered that she had planned a winter garden during construction. And there should have been ficus trees in it, that’s for sure.

And they became like children. Well, almost like Adam and Eve before the Fall. They wandered, hand in hand, along the slopes covered with emerald moss growing on fallen leaves.

Trufelev immediately forgot that he was a loader and almost homeless. At first it was more difficult for Kolabsova, because sometimes, when Trufelev slept like a baby, she had to go outside to work. But it became more and more unbearable for her to live a double life. And leading a thieving team, pleasing the district authorities, dealing with bandits and the tax service - it became completely unbearable. And it also seemed to her, and then it generally turned into an obsession, that in a house with a ficus tree, with their beloved Trufelev, they could live happily until the end of their days, without communicating with the outside world, fortunately the house allowed this - it generally had supplies and everything else. was like a spaceship flying to the stars and designed for the autonomous existence of at least three generations of travelers.

Kolabsova did everything so that no one would find the entrance to her paradise. Ordinary Lyubinsk residents were already stopped by a fence with an inscription about construction “under the leadership of a company like this” and a sign: “Stop! Dangerous area!" For smarter and more criminal people, Kolabsova left the facade of her nest-fortress the same, rotten and abandoned, and inside she built new serpentine labyrinths and all sorts of traps, no worse than in the Egyptian pyramids.

And this was the last time Kolabsova was going to go to her place of work, quietly, secretly, while her master was sleeping, to write a letter of resignation and tell everyone that she was flying to live for permanent residence in distant countries. At the same time, thinking to myself: “Well, they don’t understand, stupid ones, that you can create paradise without leaving anywhere...”

Isn’t the tall, handsome man with a marble body her chosen one?

Isn't the young beauty with long hair and peach skin his chosen one?

Aren’t there edible creatures roaming the meadows and fields around them, each creature in pairs?

Strange only at first glance. It is so understandable and natural that many of them do not have heads and hair with skin, and sometimes there are no inedible parts of the limbs.

It is for simplicity and convenience, for the comfort of consumption, that they wander closer to the lower floors, already cleaned, headless and slightly frostbitten. And Trufelev hunted for half-frozen edible creatures, little by little, as needed, crawling out of the basement refrigerators. The lovers warmed up the caught food for themselves, either in the oven, or on the grill, or simply by lighting a fire of dry branches... They drank red and white wine, gushing with cool springs straight from the ground.

Swimmed in tiled lakes illuminated in the depths. We looked at ourselves in countless mirrors - so young, in love and innocent...

They lit three suns above the horizon in each part of the world, and in the evening among the stars they burned five moons in the four corners. Everything was calm and happy in this best of all worlds. Everything, everything in him was pure coin...

Oases appear in the desert, it is not clear how and it is not clear why. And they suddenly disappear under the pressure of sand and time.

And now there is nothing where the gardens of paradise bloomed. Only dead dunes and the remains of trees and houses, gnawed by the wind and sun. Are there external or internal reasons for this? Few people know the answer, probably only the smartest. And even then they can only think that they know. Or pretend...

Rock is inexorable. Everything ends, even in the most imaginary of worlds. Everything seems to have been foreseen by the highly experienced Kolabsova. In addition, all the moves and traps were known by their creator - a young man with a malicious and disproportionate face.

And the bandits rehired him, and gave him the choice of prison and money from the cops and the tax police.

Because the house of Kolabsova and Trufelev looked like a very tasty morsel, truly an oasis in the middle of the poor and neglected Lyubinsk, when rumors about it passed the critical point. And they wanted to privatize it ALL...

And so, from four sides, an attack began on the house with the tree of good and evil, with the tree of life and death, with the tree everywhere and in everything, with the ficus tree. Suddenly, the roar of rams, shots, the howl of police sirens burst into the hum of refrigerators, closer, closer, it is already in everything - the purple reflection of flashing lights and the stomping of feet from all sides of the labyrinth. Everyone has gathered here: greedy officials, city rulers, bandits, cops, tax police, and even representatives of foreign capital. The greedy ninth wave of expropriators is hanging over the lovers' nest.

But the ficus began to grow again. And the consequences of this were terrible. At first, countless disturbed herds of frozen edible reptiles crawled out of the refrigerators.

They were very reminiscent of all the evil spirits from horror films about ghouls and vampires, giant spiders and squids, other lobsters and sea cucumbers, as well as characters from Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings and characters from Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol’s story “Viy.”

Everything was mixed up in the house of Trufelev and Kolabsova. Howl of sirens, shots, screams, screams, trumpets. The entire attacking lads fired in vain at the monsters from all types of small arms, including automatic and even rocket weapons; they approached in a continuous impenetrable landslide stream. The attackers, overcome with horror, began to retreat, but it was not to be. Now deprived of the love energy of Trufelev and Kolabsova, no longer content with frozen supplies from refrigerators, but sensing a huge amount of spiritless protoplasm around, the ficus tree finally turned into a carnivorous monster.

The branches grabbed bandits and corrupt officials and dragged them to the roots. And there, spraying them with a mysterious liquid-juice, they began to carry out external digestion.

Screams, screams, moans, the last useless shots, a mess of scarlet with green and brown...

And then, the apotheosis of everything - a huge black hole-failure that opened up at the foot of the ficus tree, into which everyone fell, including Trufelev, who for the last time continued to love Kolabsova with terrible force...

The next morning the area near the house was unrecognizable. Everything around was some kind of frozen glassy-woody-liana-like mass interspersed with the faces of corrupt officials and thieves in law framed by ficus leaves.

Screams of horror escaped the lips of ordinary Lyubinsk residents. And they ran away, overwhelmed with awe. And they wanted to forget the roads to the damned place. But after that, troops quickly arrived in large numbers and surrounded the unclean place with a triple cordon.

And the place became super secret and also very similar to the Zone - as science fiction writers describe it.

The car rushed silently through the night.

The light from the dashboard slightly illuminated the exhausted but peaceful faces. A new life was stirring in Kolabsova’s womb... And the firm confidence in them that everything should continue to be fine continued to stir and grow stronger.

Therefore, those who have experienced heaven on earth will not just give up. Besides, for future happiness, they took with them a small ficus sprout...

Igor TIMOFEEV

The material uses drawings by Evgenia DVOSKINA