They and us

I will not say anything about the spilled state demoniament. I will not say anything about how the epic scale of loud vulgarity converts into evil, into fire hazardous hatred, which becomes almost the norm of social life. That the appropriation and monstrous vulgarization and the picking of all the alien - foreign land, other people's achievements, other people's pain and sorrows, alien sacrifice, someone else's social, cultural, sensory experience - it seems that it should not amaze anyone, but still amazes. Amazes because we are alive.

Remember from the poet’s children's book, a color that rhymes the “stick” with a “herring”?

For a person, at least superficially familiar with poem, bad rhymes are always painful.

Fans densely and untidily mix the story with the myth, real historical facts and events with fictitious ones, about the same as the “stick” and “herring”, blasphemously and meanly rhyme the liberative sacrificial war of the seventy years with the recent Crimean gop-stop and other shameful arts of recent times. Differently mediocre, and therefore especially blasphemous, rhyme and thus, as it were, as if equalize in the historical rights of real front -line soldiers from that real war with a rolling and loud sleeper, wrapped in striped ribbons, as they wrap them with tape or tied with twine scattered boxes. After all, they really think that the degree of patriotism and the depth of historical memory are measured in the linear meters of two -color fabric.

I do not want to talk about it about it. This is too clear. And a lot has already been said.

“My holiday was taken away,” a friend recently told me, my peer. “But my father was a front -line soldier.”

“They didn’t take anything away,” I say to him. “And they can’t. Because the only indestructible sovereignty is the sovereignty of personal memory. And this sovereignty will not be able to do something that break, but even shake.”

I do not like to speak on behalf of the generation and do not like it when others speak on behalf of the generation. Speaking on behalf of the collective - generation, people, professional community, denominations, gender - always gives an attempt to evade personal responsibility for their own actions or statements.

But in this case, it seems to me.

We, the people of my generation, at least those whose memory and a sense of real history did not quite show off on historical and biographical bumps and buoyes, will not be able to knock down with this accurate and piercing note.

We are not front -line soldiers, we were born later. But we are children of front -line soldiers.

And we are the younger brothers and sisters of those who were then called "children of war." And this is also a special generation. A generation of half -starved children who have never forgotten the sounds of sirens, the smell of heat, the taste of American stew and, if you are lucky, bread with margarine and sugarin. It was a generation of my older brother, born three and a half years before the start of the war and all his life, as I remember him, who has kept a childhood habit of raking up a tablecloth or from an oilcloth in a palm of bread crumbs.

And almost all adult men during my childhood were war veterans. Some women too. And they were young then. Although, of course, they seemed elderly.

The sounds and smells of the recently ended war were taken out of the atmosphere of the coming world for a long time. As you can see, they have not yet been completely disappeared, mutating in something completely incomprehensible in those years.

The word "war" was pronounced everywhere. “It was before the war,” “It was immediately after the war”, “during the war” ... The “front”, “evacuation”, “cards”, “gap”, “bomb shelter” were important and frequent words. My mother covered her ears when the sound of a siren was heard in the cinema.

The word "victory" rarely sounded and was associated - at least - rather with a car than with a war.

As far as I remember, this holiday emanated an unclear sensation of splitting, a vague sense of ambiguity. It seemed to me all the time that on the same day, different things were celebrated and not even very similar to each other. Although there and there it was about victory, about the war, about valor, about severe deprivations and losses. And there and there. But there was a very different stylistics. Intonations were completely different.

Hastily, who hastily perched on the edge of the kitchen stools with glasses in my hands, the one -legged accordionist Uncle Seryozha, from whom I first heard the terrible and unpronounceable word "Koenigsberg", a golden -toothed woman Larisa, a former signalman, and in those days a cashier in a vegetable store, and my father, who returned from the war in the rank of Major and continued Wear the form until the middle of the 53rd year, noted one thing that is understandable only to them and did not require any words. They silently and concentratedly clouded their glasses, they did not say anything at all, they at one swing, with a characteristic grunt, drank the contents of their glasses, grimacing, biting their slices of hastily chopped black bread with salt and also silently, slightly patting each other on their shoulders, diverged in their pressing affairs. This day was a weekday then. And my father was completely nonsense, by the way. Unless four times a year. In the birthdays of relatives. For the New Year. Well, on this day by itself.

And the radio and newspapers seemed to celebrate the same thing, but something is clearly different. Something completely different.

Utroble, with light vibration of the radio head, solemnly and carefully pronouncing the name of the great commander, drowned and replaced by themselves, without that, the already quietly and uncertainly pulsating moral law within us. And immense, wide, like "my native country", densely showered by the stars of the breasts of the marshals, blinding us from the pages of the "light", as if obscuring the starry sky above our heads.

The breakdown of the holiday into ceremonial and human began even then. And over the years, this gap became deeper and deeper, gradually turning into a seam, not into a gap, but, frankly, into the abyss.

But then, during the years of blessed childhood, it was difficult for me to make a choice in favor of one or the other, it was made later. Then, perhaps, I preferred loud elegant music from the reproduct and ceremonial portraits from magazines not at all elegant and boring in appearance to the Misanszen with the participation of three too familiar and too mundane for me silent people, it was even for me that my father was among them.

But childhood usually passes. Although, as we see, far from everyone.