GUELPH AND GHIBELLINE

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- Stalin is better than Bush! - Which one? I asked. “Anyone,” Ellen answered easily, deftly dodging her husband, who was trying to take the glass from her. For Americans, the couple was a strange one. Bill served as a lawyer for deserters, spoke...

“Better Stalin than Bush!”

- Which? I asked.

“Anyone,” Ellen replied easily, deftly dodging her husband, who was trying to take the glass from her.

For the Americans, the couple was strange. Bill served as a lawyer for deserters, spoke Japanese and picked mushrooms (!). Ellen preferred undiluted, ancestral to the second president, and hated all subsequent ones. In her spare time, she published books about the crimes of the American government.

We became friends at a picnic on Independence Day. They celebrated their national holiday, as we do - the First of May, making fun of the authorities. There were actors and musicians, Jews and Arabs, vegetarians and lesbians. There were no hunters and furriers, military and republicans. And yet there was not a single American flag, although the left in America considers itself no less patriotic than the right.

They sincerely love their homeland and do everything to annoy her.

In short, our people.

It is easier for me to find a common language with American dissidents, because they are no different from Russians - the same mixture of enthusiasm, intoxication and paranoia. (Contrary to the obvious, this is an extremely optimistic worldview: protecting from chaos, it allows you to always find someone to blame and never get bored in the kitchen for tea.) It must be said that a fanatical love for freedom makes both the first and second intolerant of the third - dissidents. In this environment, they understand only their own, because there are no others here.

“It’s not worth it,” Dovlatov told his friends, “to complain that they don’t let us into literature. We wouldn't let them on the tram either.

I myself was like that. In my youth, it never occurred to me that generals were articulate. A gray plume of power covered all its distant neighborhoods, causing an unconditional reaction. What the authorities liked was automatically excluded from my sphere of interest. Possessed by carefree madness, I did not read Tolstoy, did not listen to Tchaikovsky, and did not watch Repin, considering them secret agents of the Politburo. I didn’t have a pioneer childhood, and I still don’t know how to call a female Octobrist in Russian.

It would seem that I belong among the American hawks, who shared all my views on communism, except for the extreme ones. This is what usually happens to Russians in America. For example, with my father.

In Russia, in disgust, he hung on the walls a reproduction of Pollak, sloppily (anything goes) cut with nail scissors from the magazine "Poland". In America, with the first money, my father was relieved to buy a star-striped banner and plaid pants. He got a portrait of Reagan for nothing - he was sent by his party comrades.

We don't even argue with him. My father considers my unnatural beliefs to be a chronic disease like an ulcer, only a social one.

“Better Stalin,” he said when I voted for Democrat Dukakis.

“… or Brezhnev,” he added, when Clinton, with my help, became president.

Even knowing that I will go to choose John Kerry, my father does not pronounce Putin's name in vain, respecting any authority except the toothless one.

I'm also offended that the family has its black sheep, but I can't help myself. My political views are determined by the same Fronder impulses as in my youth. Faced with a choice, I always give preference to things that personally do not really concern me, like war or homosexual marriages. That does not prevent me from having unshakable confidence in my rightness.

For example, the right to bear arms seems to me stupid, and the right to abortion is indisputable. I would abolish the death penalty and leave education. I understand God in the church, but not in politics. Ecology seems to me more important than gasoline prices. And I am suspicious of every person with a flag, even if he lives in the White House.

There is nothing in this standard liberal menu, like a set lunch in a factory canteen, that I could not justify with reason. But to be honest, I don't need to do it. Not reason, but instinct incites me to choose the least popular of two evils.

Perhaps it is innate, and the Guelphs will never forgive the Ghibellines. After all, there are always two parties, like hemispheres of the brain: one is for, the other is against.

“Even cannibals,” I think, looking at my friend Pakhomov, “have a right wing.

However, over the years, my political instincts wear out like teeth, and I become a conservative. If not yet in politics, then already in aesthetics.

“In London,” I recently read a newspaper to my wife, “a hangar with masterpieces of fashionable British artists burned down, including one that successfully exhibited a dismembered cow.”

“Oh, the drama,” my wife quipped, and I did not find the strength to pull her up.