Roundtrip

In the spring of 1982, I returned from the Soviet army and lay down on the sofa. There were no commands from outside, and for a while I lay there enjoying it. Around the middle of the summer, it suddenly dawned on me that there would be no more teams. And that if I don’t plan to lie like this until the grave, I need to do something with myself.

I went outside and got on the bus. The bus went to the subway. It was possible to get off at the vegetable one, but I decided that the metro was more strategically correct. You could take the subway anywhere else. But where? There were still no orders from outside.

I drove, listening to my body, and got off at the Kirovskaya station, now Chistye Prudy, and walked along the boulevard towards my native Tabakov studio, which no longer (yet) existed. So moose go to a dry watering place for some time. Then I returned to the metro in the same way, went home and lay down on the sofa. And yearned for the army!

There, in the last six months of service, everything was so clear: getting up - beating pears - hanging up ... Since I won the struggle for existence, my life has been subordinated to the expectation of demobilization. The brains burned out in the aforementioned struggle in the first year of military service and did not want to think about anything - the body still belonged to the state of workers and peasants.

Neither the workers, nor even the peasants, figured out what to adapt it to before demobilization, and a day that was screwed up in the most insensitive way was considered good luck. My life was to be resumed in Moscow, and before that I was not responsible for anything and was not to blame for anything, and this was wonderful in its own way ...

And now it was time to come up with the plot of the day! To decide on something, to fill bumps ... There were still three years left before Gorbachev's appearance in the world, and the release from the barracks to freedom was not yet a metaphor for me. I understand those cursing Gorbachev and everything that followed perestroika - what to do with it, with freedom?

Under Brezhnev, the Soviet government was to blame for everything, and it was so convenient! We wiped ourselves with her, as in the barracks closer to the demobilization. Some of the inconveniences were a form of bad weather: well, gray skies, not Naples, but that's okay! Stock up on an umbrella, get a Bologna cloak by appointment ... - and kochumai.

Before the army, as far as I can remember, I lived under Brezhnev. It was neither good nor bad - it just was! I was not even upset that I would not see Rome and Paris, I just knew that this could not be, because it could never be. Emigration was not considered, and the non-Party Jew from his youth knew the limits set by nature. If I defend myself, I will get one hundred and forty a month. I will defend myself again - the limit of my career! - one hundred and ninety. Then - a wreath from the local committee. Even cozy.

And then suddenly - no eyebrows, no generalissimo, no seedy sergeant. And you yourself have to decide at which station you get off and why. You need to have a plan for your own life, and for this you need to answer yourself a few quiet, but inevitable questions of a philosophical nature. Simply put, decide: who are you and why? And after all, it is impossible to avoid an answer: silence is also counted as an answer, what meanness!

This is your life - and no one but you is to blame for the fact that you live the way you live. The same is across the country. And the hands grow from the same place as before, and the fun is still "eat and drink", and they steal, as under Karamzin, only much more. Yearning!

Democracy is to blame! We are not with you.

And the unfortunate blind monkey, having never learned how to deal with complex democratic optics, out of annoyance and sadness, finally grabbed it on the Lubyanka stone. And it immediately felt better - at least psychologically, because the commands again come from outside, and from a single primate and bribes are smooth.