"Gradsky died, but his voice flies"

Katerina Gordeeva recalls her first meeting with Alexander Gradsky: he refused an interview, but treated him with a strap and talked about childhood

People's Artist of Russia, singer and composer Alexander Gradsky died in Moscow at the 73rd year of life. "Medusa" already remembered the iconic songs performed by an incredible vocalist: from his key "how young we were" to the covers of Police. Journalist Katerina Gordeeva talks about her first meeting with Gradsky-for the first time she saw him personally in the mid-1990s and tried to interview him.

It’s very cold in Kopeisk . Wooden sidewalks, you will slip from which - snow knee -deep, and if not snow, then slush, slush, slush.

Kopeisk is brown. Dense dust from the mines flies through the penny with which he is surrounded. There is almost no white snow in Kopeisk. Maybe only frosty in the morning, when the child is taken to the kindergarten along the creaky snow. If you believe Gradsky, then in Kopeisk is always winter. And he is always a child lying face into the sky on the sled, which the father drags into the kindergarten.

I was eighteen years old and it was either a mockery or a check for lice from senior colleagues: send me in an interview to Gradsky.

Yes, I did not know that he despised journalists. No, it could not have occurred to me that he calls journalists journalists. Then I will read somewhere that he seemed to come up with this word: Journals.

In general, I just called him. It was a desperate, but understandable act: I grew up in a family where Gradsky was idolized, where the best song about love was considered “in the fields under the snow and rain” for Burns’s poems performed by Gradsky, and the best song about the eternity of “Dedov’s boat” with his own voice from the film “His among strangers ...”

My Gradsky from childhood is an absurd man in thick glasses with black hair to his shoulders, singing in a voice, from which tears pour themselves. Ordinary people do not sing like that. So only special can sing. More precisely, only one is city.

Why he didn’t send me right away, how he did it many times before and many more after, I don’t know. Maybe I managed to swing into the phone something like “I grew up on your songs”, only more sincerely? Maybe he appreciated fearlessness. In the end, the tiger, too, does not always immediately eat a stranger entering his cage. Or maybe because I was just eighteen and he regretted me.

Gradsky was the first real person in my life to live on Tverskaya Street. Right behind Eliseevsky. I recently arrived in Moscow and it seemed to me that Tverskaya was not for people's lives, but for beauty.

He opened the door to me in training, angry, open. He seems to have forgotten about me. It was then that I, introducing myself, said the fateful word "journalist". And he told everything that he thought about journalists right in the hallway. I was getting gathered.

But he stopped somewhere in the middle of his curses and asked: "Do you love Strudel?"

So it became clear that he was not angry at me, but something happened. Someone to whom he was preparing Strael did not eat it. Someone he was waiting for, did not come.

“Are you singing Strael with me? - asked Gradsky, - if you are in no hurry. I hate to eat one. "

It was a hot summer day. Outside the window, human voices were buzzing, periodically cut by the howl of sirens. Islands of poplar fluff flew into the window.

We ate with Gradsky Strudel from one court, forks, getting to the middle from different sides. Strael was, frankly, tasteless, but how to talk about it.

I asked him if he remembers Kopeisk. And he threw back his head: showed exactly how he looked into the sky over Kopeysk from his wooden children's sleds. About the mines, on the dumps of which in Kopeisk his childhood they poured slides and where they went to ride with his father. And yet, that he had a girlfriend of the Tsigac fur coat, in which it was crowded.

Then he told how he and his father and mother moved to Moscow and what a stunning impression this city made on him after Kopeisk: “White snow, you imagine. And people who are unfamiliar with each other. ”

Then he talked about the death of his mother and the fact that at the age of fourteen, when she died, his world collapsed and he forever became the most important not to let her down. I don’t remember, it seems, I knew before this meeting that the Gradsky surname is just from my mother. Or maybe he told me then.

Strudel Kis and spread out in the vessel, and it was already necessary to end him. But Gradsky went out: he brought from somewhere Billboard in the mid-1970s, showed an article in English, where they wrote about him that he was an absolute star. I was struck by the word "absolute" and how he, without hesitation, said this.

Then he talked about Japan. As he was accepted there, which offered the stunning terms of the contract in the largest Japanese recording company.

"Why didn't you stay?" - I asked, and from fright I put the remnants of Strudel in my mouth.

“They did not understand dick in my music. How can you work with the hall that does not understand? "

His surprise was sincere. Having said this, he led a fork about an empty vessel from under the strap and looked at me: he ate the last piece while he was distracted. He even said something about it, and we laughed. He smoked, tightly tightening and funny, jerking off the cigarette from his lips, exhaled noisily. I sat and tried to understand what was happening at all.

It seems to me that I have never before or after my life I have seen a person who is so confident in my own exclusivity and just as not mistaken. The idea that in the world there were extremely few people who understood his scale would be able to say this and, most importantly, would have at least some authority for Gradsky-then struck me, and never left me.

The exceptional degree of giftedness threw him on a completely inaccessible peak and made him lonely: not even someone to share the strap-somehow I understood this meeting then. Of course, he did not give me any interview, we said goodbye, I left, and he stayed in a chaotic apartment behind the Eliseevsky store alone with his voice.

Poplar fluff gathered in hefty white clubs, clogged under the curbs and became dirty. I reached the telegraph and called home to tell what I saw Gradsky. “He is really great,” I said home, lowering the details of the meeting.

Then we crossed several times in some matters: Gradsky did not become softer, did not change his relationship either to journalists or to the world. And the world, it seems, did not learn to understand it better. In the end, there are such phenomena like the Gradsky voice, the scale of which you cannot measure with an ordinary human line. This gift without any requests and, regardless of merits, condescends to the owner, dooming to difficult earthly loneliness and dazzling immortality. Gradsky died, and his voice flies. Maybe now it just flies over Kopeysk.

I looked at the weather forecast: there is already snow and it was soaked as it should.

Katerina Gordeeva