True love

"It was impossible to look without participation on their mutual love"

No, this is not aesthetics and not a mental freak show: the main European history of the outgoing year is not Greece with Spain, not the trouble with the euro, not even pedophiles on the BBC or Depardieu, who ate its French passport. Money, as a topic, is generally exaggerated, lust - even more so. The main thing is love. The story of Eve and Hans Rausing about true love.

Let me remind you, on July 9, 2012, London police officers stopped a car that made, as noted in the report, “disordered movement”. A strange man was sitting in the car, as they say, not in himself, a warm tube for smoking Crack was lying on the floor, in the trunk - a large bag of unknown mail in the name of Eve Rausing. Called explanations of such a combination of actions and objects (random riding, CREK, mail) could not give (and was hardly able to), which is why he was left in the site to clarify the circumstances, but the police themselves went to one of the most expensive areas of London, to Kadogan Plais, where the Russian oli (and mini-) Garchs with the oil princes from “thousands and one nights ".

It was Kadogan Plais who came out of the unnecessary mail, it was there that the addressee lived, Eve Rausing. When the police hacked the door, on the second floor, in a bedroom closed to the key, where he led a disgusting sweet smell, the police saw the bed, on the bed - a pile of strange things, as chaotic as chaotic, attracted their attention a few hours ago. I think that it was then that the police first arose a suspicion of the connection of two - so similar in form and so different in essence - phenomena. In a heap that towered on the bed, one could see God know that, from a fifty -inch TV to a chair, a blue tarp was laid under a heap. When they removed the TV, a chair, another rubbish (and a sweet stink was becoming more unbearable), when a tarp was thrown back under which the layer by layer, pieces of cellophane, blankets, covers, there, at the very base of the heap, lay the body. More precisely, what can remain of the body that lay like this for two months.

The tests of the arrested person followed, the searches, after a while, became obvious - under the mountain of home trash, in the mansion in the road area of ​​London (the mansion, which was more like a squat or a drug addict), was Eva Rausing, forty -eight years old, a millionaire, a philanthropist, a daughter of Pepsico Executive Director Tom Kemeeni. The implanted power pacemaker showed that Rausing died on May 7, 2012, almost two months before the incident described above. The detained (and then arrested) driver (baseball cap, dirty crumpled clothes) turned out to be her husband, millionaire Hans Rausing, the heir to one of the most famous European companies Tetrapak.

Eve and Hans met in 1992 in an expensive rehabilitation center for drug addicts and alcoholics in the States, and after a while they got married. The family had four children; The spouses led the way of life adopted in the highest bourgeois society: quiet entertainment, a selected circle of acquaintances, charity; They especially tried in the latter, spending millions on rehabilitation centers in different countries (and even at their own expense built a clinic at Barbados). As we know from fiction, boulevard newspapers and cinema, such a life almost always has a different, shadow side. In relation to rausing, this is a perfect truth: having lasted several years in a “pure” state, they (in fact, at first Eve) fell into 1999; As Hans recently admitted, the wife drank champagne at a New Year's reception. And it all started new.

The peak of the drug addicts of the Rausing was 2008, when they were arrested while trying to carry 10 grams of CREC, 2.5 grams of heroin and 2.35 grams of amphypramon at a party at the American embassy in London. The car on which the millionaires arrived at the diplomatic reception. Then they searched their house. Found: 52 grams of cocaine, almost 3 grams of heroin and much more. The case was healed, the rausings continued a swift turn down, occasionally interspersed with attempts to escape. Eve was kicked out of the last rehabilitation clinic to Malibu, discovering Valium among her things. Hans assures that he never supplied his wife with drugs, and she, in turn, did not reveal her dealers. So they lived in parallel, each at its own speed. Only love kept them together, only love.

After the fateful July 9, 2012, the rausing history began to be discussed in all ways; Comments made a very different sense, from sympathetic (ah, poor thing!) To gloating ones (here they are, these rich! They also hide behind philanthropy). Conspirological versions did not go unnoticed-three months ago they reported that Eve Rausing allegedly transmitted some important information about the mysterious (and undisclosed) murder of the Swedish Prime Minister Polom in 1986. However, the case (first a police officer, then the court) moved quickly: Hans was held under the pledge, and then they gave a conditional term “for preventing the burial of the dead body”. He pleaded guilty. And finally, the other day, the coroner Darren Raynolds made a final decision on the cause of Eve’s death: she died from the effect of cocaine on a sick heart.

As the inquiry showed, in the morning of the fateful day the Hans, shaving in the bathroom, heard the fall of the body in the bedroom. Running, he discovered his wife without signs of life. Nearby lay a pipe for Crak. Being unable to endure the very thought of parting with the body of the spouse, Hans Rausing decided to hide it in the same room where she died, although, honestly, he did not show much cunning - he simply filled up the corpse that turned up by his arm. Hans forbade the servants to go to the bedroom, reported to his relatives and acquaintances that Eve drove into California, and pulled for two months, so much so that when he was detained, he could hardly explain who he was.

In addition to the absurd sensation of this story, in addition to the possible socio-political morality regarding the decomposition of a large bourgeoisie, in addition to unbearable wretchedness of both the entire plot and its individual details, one can find another important, perhaps the most important thing here. Before us is a classic European story about love: Hero and Leandra, Romeo and Juliet and Old Svetsky landowners in one dose. Like Shakespeare with Gogol, the hero cannot survive the death of his beloved; Only in the classical works of the past he voluntarily goes after her, and in the millionaire Belgravia, the hero, on the contrary, does not let her wife into the world of the dead, keeping her body near him. Or is the drama of the latest Orpheus and Eurydice here? It is difficult to judge. One thing I can say without a doubt - it was true love.

And this puts another, perhaps more important, “European question”. On the continent “Love” (despite “Macbeta” and some still literary arguments) is perceived by the public as undoubted good. That is, “love” - well, “love” is useful or even pleasant (and this happens), in general, “love” better than “not to love”. In old European times, love was somehow connected with the marriage and production of children, even the part that went on the side (trumpeters, romance, etc.); It was associated with the reproductive and economic function of marriage, albeit through denial.

Having lost these functions in the 20th century, love remained only with “sex” and “affinity of souls”. By the end of the last century, sex gradually migrated from the grasses of love in gymnastic halls of pornography; Yes, and to imagine a copulation of Eve and Hans Rausing insanity from drugs. But what do we have in the rest, even if the spouses were different for the dealers? But this is a "kinship of souls." True Love . In a strange way, the life, martyrdom and death of Eve Rausing proves the existence of the soul-because otherwise the “kinship of the void” turns out, some kind of Buddhism.

Podcasts and other materials of K. Kobrin - on the website of Radio Liberty, Project page Europe