Fellow traveler

He is the captain of the police, and between us a table of a compartment with a metal holder

This text was released in the first issue of the New Review magazine.

Car disputes are the last thing when there is nothing more to drink.

"Time Machine", USSR, 1983

I was traveling from the city of Stary Oskol to Moscow. At night, I got in a fast train from the south. He stood in Old Oskol for two minutes. An empty snowy platform with rare lanterns was surrounded by darkness. In the trouble -free darkness, the town disappeared, in which I spent three days icy mounds, from which water columns sticking out, hills, from which a view of the steppe white in the black bushes was opened. Everything disappeared. Only a high, with illuminated windows, a train, conductors in black overcoats and earflaps, a metal voice that puts on a loudspeaker: “The train to Moscow goes fifty -six at an hour ...” The carriage twitched with a roar, swam back, disappearing from my life forever, dull winter lights, warehouses and fences.

Immediately after me, a short policeman vigorously entered the compartment in a gray overcoat, a cap and light shining shoes, strange minus at a temperature. On his wide, open, with light eyebrows, blush with frost, his face was a shy smile of a man, secretly rejoicing in something. In the hands - a diplomat with digital locks. He moved in a close space of the compartment very freely, with the ease that is given to people whole and in the right relationship with the material, subject world. The policeman (he was on the rank of captain) sat opposite me. Between us was a plastic table with a metal holder, in which, rattling, a vase with a monogram of the MPS dangled. Outside the window with white slid curtains, a dull night flew under the knock of the wheels.

For a moment we, smiling, looked into each other's eyes, as if knowing in advance that the acquaintance and mutual sympathy of two random fellow travelers are inevitable.

“Well, let's get acquainted,” said the captain. - You, I see, a business trip, return to Moscow?

I don’t know where he saw this, but he was right.

- Yes. And you too? By state need?

“Captain Ermolaev, investigator for especially important matters,” he introduced himself. - Near the old Oskol there is a village of Zvyagino. I investigated the murder case there. Here I have where, - he put a wide palm with his short fingers on the diplomat. “And something else,” he laughed, turning the wheels of the digital castle, throwing his lid and taking out a liter bottle of vermouth, full of brown liquid. - Do you have a drink?

“It would be nice for glasses,” I answered. - But the conductor is already sleeping ...

- It's nothing! - on the fly he picked up, lively and joyful at two in the morning. While he was walking for glasses, I took out sandwiches with cheese and sausage, wrapped in cellophane, two apples, a pack of “anniversary” cookies from my bag. Three minutes later, the sliding door opened - Captain Ermolaev was the winner, carrying in his hands two glasses in the cup holders, seized from a gloomy conductor, which was already to sleep. But this did not bother the captain. He went to the goal directly: after investigating the murder case in the far village, started a drink with a random fellow traveler, woke the conductor at night and rushed to Moscow in the morning to report to the general who was waiting for him in a huge office in Petrovka. "The general loves me." It had a pressure and a grip, disguised as a pretty embarrassment.

The sharp disgusting smell of Sivukha spread throughout the compartment.

- Well, for acquaintance!

We moved glasses in the cup holders, and for a second I looked at his thrown face with a small white scar over a bright eyebrow and at a disproportionate thick neck in the capture of a hard collar. Then he made an effort and jerked into himself a smelly liquid. Silently looking at each other, we sat with burnt sips. The gift of speech returned to Captain Ermolaev the First. He took a deep breath, freeing his heel from the burn, and carefully took the sandwich.

- Well, Lesha! - He told me with the familiar simplicity with which they say with an old friend. - Listen to me! I'm going from places where there is no Soviet power yet!

- From Italy? - I joked, a disorderly resident of the country, in which there were completely non -traveling citizens, but he did not understand the jokes and answered seriously:

- No, I told you, from Zvyagino. You understand that there the third chairman of the collective farm was killed in five years! Zvyagino is ...-And since he had no words to explain to me what a place is on the globe of Zvyagino, he shook his head with a blonde with a smile and said, either surprised, or admiring: “There is a percentage of murders three times higher than in New York. Do you understand?

The train knocked on the joints, rushing along the snowy forest -steppe strip. The electric locomotive was cut by the black air in two. The wagons were dangling. The windows were dark. Only in one light was burning - behind him, in a compartment filled with a stink of sivuhi, were inclined above a small table with a cookie scattered along it with cookies.

We fell into communication, like boxers in a clinch - tight and tenacious. In the glasses in front of us, moonshine made by a grandmother in a dark village hut, where an investigator for especially important cases lived a month.

- We will come to Moscow - immediately to the shower! - unbuttoning the collar on the mighty neck, he dreamed. - I didn't wash a month! Grandma, my mistress, never washed! I waited for the day, two, three, for the fourth I ask: "Granny, when are you washing?" - "And in the summer, son." - He laughed not without pride in the harsh places where he visited, and again wrapped his shirts with his short fingers.

At night, on the train, having investigated one thing and having not yet received another, Ermolaev was resting. His face flushed from the heat and drink, a scar clearly stood out above the eyebrow. He took off his tunic and was now in a white nylon shirt. Murders, according to him, overwhelmed the country. People killed each other with knives, shovels, rakes, nails, hammers; They strangled each other with pillows; The corpses in the bathrooms were divided and their arms and legs scattered through the bushes. Local internal administrations could not cope with work, could not and did not know how to investigate crimes. Hundreds of applications from all over the country went to Moscow, to Petrovka, to Moore, from where a few investigators in particularly important cases went to the rescue. They rushed around the country by trains, flew on airplanes, lived in crazy hotels, ate a snack in a snot with green peas in buffets and rushed further to see the same thing everywhere: the people destroyed themselves. In the clear head of Captain Ermolaev, who had served in the fleet for three years, who worked for five years by the district police officer, who graduated from the Higher School of the police, with the work and hump of the captain's epaulets, all this did not fit. There should be a reason. And he expressed the reason to me, pouring moonshine from the Big Vermutoy bottle:

- This is a focused CIA policy. They decompose us!

- Yeah. And Stalin and Beria, they were also from the CIA.

- No, I tell you the truth! And Beria, by the way, is an English spy, the secrets showed us documents at school. You don't know.

In the war that Ermolaev tirelessly waged against the criminal world, he acted as a partisan who knew that success depends on his determination and cunning. He arrived in the district center Ermolaev in the evening and came right from the station on foot to the Internal Affairs Directorate. He unhinderedly passed the sleeping duty officer and, leaning his shoulder, squeezed the door to the office of the boss. On the table, he had the business that were not put into the safe. Ermolaev took things under the arm and, going downstairs, yelled with hatred to the sleeping duty officer: “Get up! Smiryo! Rise! " “You can take you all here with your bare hands! - the local radical captain from Moscow nails. A pale, bewildered fifty -year -old major with gray -haired buckwheat and a tattered belt, ran to give him a black “Volga”. “Idiots! - All surviving anew in a quick -lit night compartment swinging at a fast move, Yermolaev cried out. His face was now bright red, his eyes laughed and shone. - How will I go to the village on the Black Volga? Have you thought? Who will talk to me there after that? With a cop! With Moscow! I arrived on a cock! ” To the horror of the major, he ordered himself to serve a quilted jacket, earflaps, felt boots, changed his mind - and went to Zvyagino in a snowball for eight kilometers.

In Zvyagino, he knocked on the poorest hut. It was his way - to collect information in social bottoms, for women and aunts, noticing at the authorities and neighbors no worse than secret agents. He was opened by a hunched over, black, like her rotten house, an old woman in a scarf and kirsa boots. "Who are you? “I'm from Chuguevka,” he called the nearby village. - In the summer I want to go to your agricultural machinery, I came to agree. Let me go, I’ll live a bit. ” In his open pink face, in the gray honest eyes there was something very pleasant and displaying.

He was believed. He penetrated Soviet life as a scout: had a legend, was all the time on his guard and collected information about the people of interest to him. He found out, weaved the network, looked simpler, delved into a relationship.

- Listen, they have there, in Zvyagino, it means that the agricultural engineering is in which I came to enter. And his new director is the brother -in -law of the tractor drivers Rubtsov. Do you understand? I ask my grandmother: "Who is his wife?" - "And Masha Antipieva, the sister of the chairman, who was stabbed with a pitchfork a year ago and threw into a well!" -From a wide face, from under the light strand, transparent gray eyes looked at me.

Of all the intricacies of rural relations, self -interest, names and persons that I was not able to remember in the wagon flying through the night, from the dark struggle of the two families for state farm and agricultural engineering, who was there for bribes, with the immutable logic of the chess party followed the murder, which he calculated and investigated and now it was going on. A meeting with his general with an open murder, as with a valuable gift for a date. But the brown disgusting moonshine instantly erased all the details from my memory.

The level of rubbish in a bottle of vermouth slowly dropped under the knock of wheels. The radiance of the lamp under the ceiling of the coupe was getting brighter, our voices were louder. The moonshine gave Ermolaev a grandmother, in whom he lived in Zvyagino. The grandmother called the sivuha compotist, and he, following her, also called him that.

- Come on a compot! - with affectionate pressure said a pretty captain. It had a huge vitality, and optimism stained his worldview. He was sure that socialism was generally built, and for his final victory there was only two things: to undermine America and destroy the criminal world that he hated. On his flushed cheerful face, a triangular scar was clearly stood out over the eyebrow.

- SHAM where?

“It was in the train,” he explained. - I was driving in civilian clothes, next to me - an officer in uniform, even further - a woman. Three began to pester her. I hate it when an officer is in the form of an officer! - Sitting and pretending to see nothing! He said, suddenly pale and blessed. - He got up and went out with them in the vestibule. The first one caught at the reception, the second-with his head against the wall, the third from somewhere in the hand of an iron rod. I noticed him late. I almost killed him.

“Do you beat them in interrogations?”

- No. Once just hit.

The thirst to tell, share everything that he knew and what did not exist, because the newspapers did not write about it and the millions of serene Soviet citizens did not suspect, and burst it out.

- So you think there are no vampires? And they are! I personally did not sleep for three months - I caught a vampire!

- Well, how, caught?

- But how. They began to find the corpses of children with traces of bites on the neck in garbage dumps. With drunk blood. It turned out - a woman. Mother of three children. When she was brought for the first interrogation, I told her: “How did you, bitch, could, how could you, bitch?! You are the mother yourself! " I hit her ... Okay, come on.

The train rushed to Moscow. We were returning. Poor black and white landscapes appeared slowly and reluctantly from lighting darkness. Moonshine remained on the bottom. We overcame the night and with the heads buzzing after a sleepless night we pulled over a day. The train stood in a town near Moscow near Moscow at a non -Black -Russian -Russian -style single -storey station painted. In his high windows, under the vaulted ceiling of the empty hall of expectation, yellow lamps were burning. The platform was covered with sticky, hardened and icy snow. A woman in the apron came out of the door of the station and put a cardboard cup in the snow. The dog with a cautiously clenched tail went up to a glass. She poked her face, fussed and worried. We silently looked out the window.

- Bastard! - with quiet rabies, Ermolaev suddenly spoke. I looked at him carefully. The hatred, which he kept in the fart with the effort of his will, now, at the dawn hour, on the train, freed by moonshine, was torn out. - Bastard! I would kill such, do you hear? I would kill!

- What are you?

- Who gives the dog in a glass? She needs to be given in a flat! She cannot eat otherwise, she does not know how! You look at how to wave. In a plate, you need to give, in a plate!

In Moscow, we went out at the Savelovsky station. Together we walked around the square. It was my Moscow, my city, which I returned to, a city with dirty snowdrifts along the sidewalks, with morning buses and black figures of somewhere traveling people.

And I did not know anything about anyone. I didn't see him anymore.

This text was released in the first issue of the New Review magazine.