Sergey Voronin

 

 

 

 

Son of God Ra

 

 

 

 

                         Childhood

I was born on a sunny June morning in a small, very cozy Siberian town, spread out on the left bank of the majestic Ob. My mother tried to get rid of the burden for a long time, but I, apparently anticipating the future vicissitudes of Destiny, stubbornly did not want to leave the warm, sheltered place. "Probably, we'll have to impose a" paw "," said obstetrician Sergeev gloomily, with the ominous smile of Dr. Goebbels approaching the table, on which lay obstetric forceps, called "paw" in professional jargon. His words definitely had an effect on me, and I hastened to leave the shelter which had become painful to my native people, announcing the world about its emergence as a thin, disgusting squeak. And even then, according to statistics, about 90% of the cases of using the "paw" end with a birth trauma and dementia of the child. This is clearly not included in my and the Creator's plans.

Roddom number 2 in Barnaul, where this "space" event happened, is still in the center of the city. To the left, the maternity house adjoins the chic, very beloved city dessert shop "Lakomka", on the right - with the city morgue and the adjacent morphological corps of the medical institute. The architect, conceiving this existential architectural composition, seems to have been a great philosopher, giving the mothers the opportunity to watch the sad picture of death day after day from the hospital window and think about the frailty of human existence. As I understood much later, it was under the sign of the earthly pleasures symbolized by Gourmand, and the constant sense of death that did not frighten, but it always caused almost morbid curiosity and mystical respect, and whose presence, like the sword of Damocles, I constantly felt by everyone Fibers of the soul, and my whole life will pass. "Memento mori" - remember death, "said the ancient Romans, and how right they were! Only the finitude of being causes mankind to slowly, but still move forward. If the Lord suddenly, for fun, decided to give Man immortality, He would condemn the world to eternal stagnation and absolute chaos. Death is the eternal engine, the universal source of progress, with the ingenious perspicacity given to the Creator by our perishable world. 

My childhood was cloudless and quite happy. My parents were upset only by the fact that I grew up in an incredibly frail "tree", in which it is not known what and how the soul flickered. I could not eat for days, at the same time I was always the ringleader of all boyish companies, games and fights. Surprisingly, but more anti-child than I, I did not have to meet in my life. In me, as if, there was a little imp, making me constantly make disgusting people around me and arrange minor provocations, for which I, quite legitimately, received a neck from my older comrades, but the lessons of education were short enough - bruises and abrasions did not have time to come off, As I started another dirty trick. In general, the old woman Shapoklyak has always been for me an incredibly attractive way and almost a native being. Some of my children's actions still cause me a feeling of burning shame, as if I did it yesterday.

The fact is that as a child I was a pathological nonsense. By provoking the guys and bursting into conflicts, I immediately ran to complain to my father, who always had a tough temper. This was inevitably followed by the father's "vendetta", about which legends went about in the yard. Boyish folklore from mouth to mouth handed over "legends" in which the glorious Batman "Papa Edik", then working as an investigator of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, arranged a stand shooting from the gun in the park of the Melanzhevy Combine for a running wild boar, whose role was successfully performed by the retarded son of our locksmith 33 apartments in Lenya. And although the bullets from Makarov's pistol only whistled over the head of poor Leni, cutting off the birch twigs like machetes, the rumor about the heroic exploits of the home-grown Batman quickly spread from the VRZ area to the Housing Square - these two historically conflicting territories of Barnaul, as well as in the well-known American Musical "West Side Story". I do not know if this fact really existed, but my father refuses to do this in every possible way, but the event had an undoubted positive effect - I was afraid and my father respected. And here again my nasty, rotten nature was manifested. Instead of "resting on my laurels," peacocking my tail and enjoying life, I rushed with renewed vigor to carry out new provocations and dirty tricks, forcing the guys to beat me, despite the fear of retribution. And again, the usual scheme has worked: the child is offended, the slanderer runs to his father, another "vendetta". My father's patience was already over and before each "special operation" he "imposed" on my full program already to me, expressing thereby a vexation that through the efforts of his son turned into Frankenstein - a scarecrow for the whole court. And the guys finally boycott me. This was the first boycott in my life, which made a very strong impression on me. Until now, from this boycott, I had a feeling of cold and oppressive loneliness. And the reason was the following event.

In the neighborhood with us in 35 apartments (and we lived at the address Komsomolsky Ave., house 132, apartment 34) lived the family of the hereditary builder Victor Epifanov. He had two children: Lena, my same age, and Sergei, older than me for 2 years, which according to children's standards is a very significant difference. Lena Epifanova - my first love - the first aching and joyful feeling without any admixture of sexuality; The real quintessence of Love achieved by boys only at an early age - from the kindergarten "Snegirek", in which we were in the same group. The love of this swarthy girl, like a charming lemur monkey, was given very simply and cost me numerous cuffs and blows of Destiny. My peacock essence actively protested against someone else's success; Zealously concerned with any, even insignificant, signs of attention given by Lena to another, but not to my person. In order to attract her attention, my creative nature embarked on various tricks.

One autumn, our group of kindergarten was taken out by the teacher Valentina Aleksandrovna for a walk. There was a classic "Boldin Autumn", a real riot of colors withering nature. Children, as always, played on the veranda. Valentina Alexandrovna, usually in a gloomy, irritated state, was unusually gay this morning. Lively paint in the overall palette of joyful excitement was added by the boy Vasya, who brought yellow, crimson and orange leaves in a bucket, which he poured out on the verandah and began to throw up his arms. The leaves swirled enchantingly in the air, fascinating the look and causing universal rejoicing. "Very beautiful! What a fine fellow you are, Vasya! "- said Valentina Alexandrovna, and Lena gave Vasya such a look, for which I was ready to jump off the bridge across the Ob. This I could not forgive the boy Vasya. I took a bucket and, without specifying where he took such beautiful leaves, went to the nearest garbage dump, picked up leaves, which generously heated the janitor, came and with great pathos dumped the contents on the veranda. All would be nothing, but the leaves, as it turned out, contained "naturprodukt", namely - dog feces. Needless to say, what effect produced my action! Valentina Alexandrovna in one instant for ever got rid of depression, as a real karatek with an edge of the hand slammed my neck, and then grabbed my ear and twisted it so that the blood gushed from the auricle with a fountain. This strange physiological feature of my body, which is apparently explained by too thin capillaries, close to the tympanic membrane, more than once later rescued me in army fights. Abundant bloodletting from the ear at the slightest blow, not causing serious harm to my health, plunged opponents into panic horror and forced them to abandon further violence. Valentina Alexandrovna, I remember, was very frightened then, took me to the shower, where I hastily washed off the "traces of the crime," and then, before the father who came to take me, spilled such oil that it disgusted me. I did not say anything to the parents about the incident; I was not so ashamed - when I remembered the scornful look Lena had given me - the witness of the failed "Golden Autumn Festival".

There were other, no less "successful" attempts to win the love of this cute girl. Once, after watching the feature film "The Red Tent", I decided to demonstrate to Lena and the whole court my contempt for the cold. Let me remind you that the main character, a hardened polar explorer, gives his clothes to his freezing comrades, remaining only in his underwear at 50 degrees below zero. I really liked this episode. And one frosty February morning, when I found the worthy audience and Lena in the courtyard, I loudly declared: "Look at everything!" - began to throw off his clothes in the snow, left only in shorts and a vest. On the home-grown asshole came out to see almost the whole of our house, in which mainly police officers lived. But my mother came back from my store, which did not let me get warm in the "rays of glory", immediately showered the "polar explorer" from the heart, and, grabbing her clothes from the snow, dragged her "scumbag" home. Another attempt to win a woman's heart failed!

And yet, I do not remember how and when, but I managed to reverse the situation - Lena, at last, answered me with her. We became friends, and this friendship lasted from 1 to 3 classes. The main mistake of adults is that they underestimate children, their undoubted emotional maturity, sometimes on equal terms, competing with the emotionality of adults. Sometimes it seems to me that the Creator, by the age of 5 completing the formation of consciousness and perception of a person, carries them, practically without change, through the whole human life. Anyway, now I fully identify myself with that boy in love with Sergei, I perfectly remember my then shame for unseemly acts and my love experiences, which are still fresh in memories, as if it were yesterday. The tender love of two small creatures manifested itself in rather chaste things: together we left and returned from school, and I, of course, carried Lena's portfolio; They clung to each other in awkward embraces at the corners; I do not remember exactly whether they kissed, but if they kissed, it was only on the cheek.

And I also gave Lenochka gifts from my mother's wardrobe. The fact is that the 70s of the last century gave a message of modest existence in virtually all spheres of human life. Women of that time dressed in much the same way as the Chinese during the "cultural revolution" - not gray jackets, of course, but very monotonous and miserable. The eye had nothing to catch on the streets of the city: everywhere flashed products of the Barnaul factory "Avangard" of the same cut and color. My mother, a proud Polish girl, would never have accepted such a monotonous "disgrace". Wherever we came, in the new place, my mother always got a personal tailor, who was "wrapped" in patterns from Soviet fashion magazines. And things from her, I tell you, at that time were very exclusive. For every thing: a dress or a suit - my mother carefully chose jewelry, modest in price, but matched with taste and indubitable decorative delights. All this mother's treasure was kept in the malachite casket. It was to this casket with jewelry that I "laid eyes", and it was she who caused the story, which I can not tell you in any way, without being distracted by anything.

The tactics of taking jewelry for Lena from the casket was developed by me in full accordance with the laws of psychology - I chose discreet decorations so that my mother did not notice the loss before the time, taking into account the seasonality of the clothes for which the jewelry was intended. But if you only saw how much happiness shone in the brown eyes of Lenochka, when I solemnly handed her another gift from my mother's magic casket! No, of course, my adventure was worth it. However, the celebration of the soul ended also suddenly, as it had begun.

One day, with my friend Andrei Markinov, I went for a drive from the hill in the park of the Melanzhevy Combine. It was a real bobsled, where a stretcher was used as a bean. With a deafening roar, we were on a stretcher and rushed along the ice slide, experiencing a sense of enthusiasm and adrenaline of the regular riders. On our trouble, on the hill came the moron Lenya (classic oligophrenic in the degree of debility from the "bad" 33 apartments) and brother Lena Seryozha, who immediately started teasing me: "The bride and groom, they made a dough! Well, Lenkin Khachal, when will you come in? I've already given a brooch! "I do not know why, but his words hurt me very much. I felt terribly ashamed before Andrei Markin. The fact is that at that time all those who were friends with girls deserved universal contempt in the boyish environment. Some devil began whispering to me mean, treacherous words - and I burst out: "Ha, I found a bride! Yes, if you want to know, I did not give her anything, she stole that brooch, and you're a goat, the real one! "After these words, Sergey attacked me and gave me quite weighty kicks. He was joined by the debaucher Lenya, and Andrei Markin also came under the distribution. Arriving home with a tear-stained face and obvious signs of beating, I had to tell my father everything, which immediately went to find out the relationship to the locksmith, Father Leni, in the next apartment. After a while a noisy procession reached our apartment: a locksmith, his wife and Lenya himself decided to arrange a big "psychopathic show" for us. And, although I hated this moron because he tied the paws to the cats and threw them to the inevitable death from the parachute tower in the park, this heartbreaking scene still stands before my eyes. Tandem kickboxers - a locksmith and his wife - with the words: "Why did you offend Seryozha?" - Conducted academic series of accurate, well-placed punches and kicks on the moron head and fillets of the trunk of Leni. At the same time he squealed like a pig, and from his eyes, like a real clown, fountains were beating with tears. Then, already in my childhood, I finally realized that I would never be able to work as the executor of death sentences, although, as is known, "... all works are good, choose to taste!"

But troubles do not come alone. No wonder the folk wisdom says: "The trouble has come - open the gates." Once - at this time, my mother noticed the loss of the brooch, and Serezha kindly conveyed my vile words to his sister Lena. Mom made a very serious "debriefing", according to the results of which she went straight to Lenin's parents and finally returned the lost brooch. Lena, as expected, stopped talking to me, and, on top of everything, Seryozha fell under the "hot" hand of my father, who was returning from work far from in the best mood, saw the offender of his son and, in front of the whole court, arranged an impressive, Stunning in the literal sense of the word scene "vendetta", in which the pope - the actor surpassed himself. The next morning, when I went out into the yard, it became clear that the world had changed, and for me - far from the best. Ahead, near the sheds, stood a group of conspiratorial guys, among whom was my best friend Andrei Markin. When I approached them, animatedly talking about something, the guys fell silent at once, and Andrei pointedly turned away when I greeted him. "You see, they've already done a good job with him!" - I thought sadly and wandered from them where my eyes looked. Lena silently proffilirovala Lena with an offended face and a look full of contempt. Well, now I had to get used to this new status of an outcast for me, in which I would have to live for several months until my family left for permanent residence in Kazakhstan.

Then, in my childhood, I could not even think that, it turns out, the Lord had already since childhood begun to teach me to be alone - this is truly the most valuable gift of Destiny, and that it is in this state that I will learn, after all, to draw inspiration and To fully enjoy life. Now, thanks to this harsh school of life, I am like a submarine in an autonomous voyage - unsinkable, with tightly closed hatches, only occasionally surfacing to the surface, once again to remind people that I'm alive, I'm still a fighting unit and that me It's too early to discount. However, then in my childhood, I suddenly realized with sadness that along with this first serious lesson in human communication taught to me by Life itself, my cloudless childhood was forever ended - the young man Sergei was born, already endowed with some life experience of responsibility for his words and deeds , And this is an indispensable attribute of adult life already.

 

                               Adults

In the autumn of 1974, in connection with the transfer of my father to a new duty station - to the Higher School of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs - we moved to Karaganda with our family. The glorious period of my "Kazakh" life began, which lasted until the summer of 1981. "Remember the rule number 1 - never call the Kazakhs" kolbitami "," Igor Sidorov, my classmate and neighbor in a new house on Yerzhanov Street, taught me the universal rules for dealing with the title nation. "For Kazakhs, this is the same insulting word as for African Americans The word "nigga". "But why, what's wrong with that? - I protested weakly. After all, the word "kolbit" is derived from two English words: "count" - coal and "bit" - to beat, which is an analogue of the word "miner". It is well known that the British, who had numerous coal concessions in Kazakhstan at the beginning of the 20th century, actively used local Kazakhs to work in mines. " "I will not argue with you," Igor said. "Call it that and see what happens." Only I will not help you, so know. My business is to warn. "

Yes, the local color in Karaganda was felt in everything, and Asian exoticism at first caused all of us, especially the father, a feeling of real euphoria. And, indeed, in comparison with the order boring Barnaul, Karaganda appeared before us in an amazing splendor. We walked with my father along the wide avenue named after Nurken Abdirov, a Kazakh pilot, who repeated Gastello's feat during the Great Patriotic War; Drank koumiss, which was sold at every step instead of kvass; Ate beshbarmak in the cafe "Botakoz", which means in Kazakh "camel's eye" - in general they enjoyed life in full in this, as we then thought, a fertile Asian region. There was one more circumstance that favorably distinguished Karaganda from Barnaul in the early 70s of the last century and especially pleased mother - food abundance in the stores. After the chronic "torricelli emptiness" on the Barnaul shelves, we really thought that we were in paradise - it affected the miners' special supply in the city of all-Union significance.

One thing only at first exasperated us, the forest inhabitants of Altai - the absence of nature outside the city. After the rich ribbon pine forest - the relic coniferous forest of the glacial period in Barnaul - the Kazakh steppe, with the endless ocean stretching around Karaganda, looked very poor. It took time to find delights in this ascetic nature. And indeed, the steppe in its own way, too, can please the eye, unless you are, of course, agrophobic, and no less than forests and mountains.

The steppe in Kazakhstan is especially good in the spring. The red disk of the Sun, rising above the horizon like a giant UFO, transforms the steppe in an instant, adding soft, surreal shades to the colorful palette of spring flowers and grasses; Fragrant herbage, as in a slow motion picture, gently sways in the plasma of the solar wind; Languishing in the sun, plunging you into the magical world of steppe scents. All your senses are working at the limit, eagerly trying to embrace, sense, absorb all this splendor! Creator only once a year allows himself "in full" to relax in the steppes, turning after a bored winter from a grumbling misanthrope into a real merry fellow and an impressionist artist. The range of colors used by Him is impressive: red and yellow tulips, crimson poppies and undersized irises with yellow and purple flowers, fragrant violets and mauve anemones, frivolous buttercups and appetizing shrubs of wild asparagus all merge into a multicolored rainbow, a many-voiced chorus of smells and watercolors of spring Steppe. I happened to visit both the Gobi Desert and the Roerich sacred corners of the Altai Mountains. And one can argue where the breath of the Cosmos is felt stronger. In any case, I was able to make sure on my own experience that the meditative practices of Mongolian nomads are not inferior to the spiritual practices of Tibetan monks.

While finishing work was taking place in our new house, my father settled us at the hotel "Chaika" - the only hotel of the representative class at that time. She looked like an imposing manor surrounded by a high fence, with a park and even a fountain inside. At our disposal was a three-room suite, with a luxurious bathroom and even a queer bidet for that time. On the territory of the hotel there was an exclusive two-storey bungalow for VIP persons, namely cosmonauts, who after returning from space, tired of long overloads, were brought from Baikonur to restore their strength. I, the ubiquitous child, quickly became friends with the hotel staff, who took care of me as my son, arranging improvised excursions to local attractions. The old resident of the hotel, Uncle Semyon, a janitor with a 30-year experience, told me in a "big secret" that the walls of this mansion were remembered by Yuri Gagarin, Herman Titov and Valentina Tereshkova. "My dearest woman, by the way, and very modest in my life!" - Uncle Semyon recounted, remembering with warmth the eminent hotel guests. Fantasy Uncle Semyon knew no boundaries. In the hotel lived the general favorite of the staff of the elderly mongrel Belka - folded bitch - albino with a pointed but very expressive muzzle. Uncle Semyon whispered to me "the most important state secret", having first taken with me the obligation of non-disclosure: "This is the same Squirrel that flew into space with the Arrow!" I was struck to the core of this news, although the worm of doubt continued to gnaw my childish Consciousness: "And where is the Arrow?" "We buried her a year ago," Uncle Semyon answered unperturbedly. "Do you want me to show you the grave?" I did not look at the grave of the heroic dog, at last, having believed in the legend of the "1960 space odyssey". At the same time, I began to treat Belka with such reverence and trembling, which, probably, would not apply to Valentina Tereshkova, whether she is at the hotel now. Unfortunately, Squirrel did not reciprocate me and even tapped my hand lightly when I tried to get her newborn puppy, another blind kitten, from the dog's cot in the stokehouse of the hotel.

     The territory of the hotel "Seagull" closely adjoined to a high fence, fencing us from the city park-arboretum - an object of special pride of Karaganda botanists. The fact is that to break such a rich forest park in Kazakhstan is an incredible effort. Only at a depth of 1 meter in Karaganda soil there are deadly solonchaks for all plants that do not allow the roots of trees to go deep into the soil, and, therefore, do not give the opportunity to draw from it the necessary for life juices and minerals. Therefore, the work of local botanists, who turned the steppe Karaganda into a green oasis, certainly deserves all due respect. Perhaps, except Barnaul, which is rightly called the "Green Athens", and a glorious city on the Amur of Khabarovsk, drowning in lush greenery as a real southern city, I did not meet such greened cities in the vastness of our then immense homeland. Park - arboretum with a wide ribbon stretched for many kilometers across the city and ended with a botanical garden, next to which was our new five-story house on Erzhanov Street. Looking back at the years I lived, I can say with certainty that in Karaganda at that time there were two genuine miracles of the Light: one man-made is the Botanical Garden, and the second is not made by hands - the Fedorovsky Reservoir. Once in the Botanical Garden, you could fully feel yourself in the forests of the middle part of Russia, get lost among the numerous birch trees and oak groves. The young birch trees were so delicate and thin that their snow-white trunks caused a full sense of human flesh to touch, and touching them was almost erotic. The pride of Karaganda botanists, of course, was a greenhouse in which palm trees, baobabs and other exotic trees of the tropical flora grew. But the object of the "carnal" lust of boys in the Botanical Garden, of course, were berries irgi, which in Kazakhstan is called, for some reason, Irgis. It is a very beautiful tree, a small grove of which was a real decoration of the Botanical Garden. Irga in May is covered with white foam flower brushes, reminiscent of bird cherry. By the way, and its astringent taste, the irge also resembles a bird cherry and a chokeberry at the same time. The bushes are plentifully hung with tassels of green, red and almost black color, which the bird's and boy's brothers greedily fall into early autumn. Especially good is the autumn iride, when its foliage is painted in orange-red and purple tones. Let me remind you that all this miracle was created by people in a practically lifeless solonchak zone, which cost them truly titanic efforts; Labor and efforts of these beautiful people, fanatically devoted to their work.

Another miracle of nature is the Fedorov reservoir, named after Fedorovka, a suburban settlement. Despite the fact that this lake was located on the territory of the coal mine, that is why it reached a depth of up to 200 meters in places, it had a unique, non-manual nature. Once it was a prosperous state enterprise - a coal mine in which coal was mined in an open way. But in one of the unlucky days a giant excavator touched and damaged the water artery of the earth; The water poured into the cut with a powerful stream, burying under its thickness all the machinery and tons of coal that had already been mined. However, despite the rapidity of the events, people managed to evacuate on time. Scuba divers, who occasionally plunged into the depth of the reservoir, told that there, at the bottom, you see a completely surreal picture of a fantastic blockbuster - excavators, trucks and other mining equipment rests under the water almost intact, as if left and abandoned by people on Fate of fate only yesterday.

Fedorovskoe reservoir has always been a favorite place for Karaganda residents. The cleanest, almost spring water, which has the properties of self-purification and regeneration, was pleasantly cooled in hot summer days, and an improvised boat station on which it was possible to rent a boat "Kazanka" inexpensively, made the rest simply unforgettable, especially for a thirteen-year-old teenager who " Sweeter "dirty pond in the Melange Park of Barnaul did not even try.

One day, my dad and I, like two captains, took the boat for two hours and set out on an open voyage between the islands formed by former waste tanks, on which the luxuriant vegetation settled for a long time already. Landing on these uninhabited islands, we fully felt like Robinsons, but on one of the islands we were waiting for some disappointment - there was already a mighty sporting party of drunken young guys, thus depriving us of our "sea" journey adventure fleur. "Eduard Ionovich, Comrade Major, join us!" One of the young men shouted, waving a friendly hand to us. This guy turned out to be Seryozha Girko, a cadet of the Karaganda Higher School of the USSR Ministry of the Interior. I imagine how surprised we would have been if we had learned that in 30 years I, the police colonel and doctor of law, will work in Moscow under the rank of Major General of Militia Sergei Ivanovich Girko at the All-Russia Research Institute of the Ministry of the Interior. "Lesha Shirvanov caught crayfish once and we will cook them now!" - Sergey reported joyfully, preparing a smoked pot for the future "exquisite" dish. - True, it's - well, very small crayfish, but three rubles, like Roman Kartsev! "

Surprising pirouettes still sometimes write Fate - with Colonel Militia Aleksey Amirbekovich Shirvanov we will sit in the Research Institute in one office, putting "our precious lives" on the altar of departmental science. I watched with curiosity the mustachioed creatures I had seen for the first time in my life. One such creature I even put my finger in the claw, for which I paid immediately. Angered by the boorish behavior of the cancer and angrily waving a bitten hand, as punishment for this mustached scoundrel I sent the first into the boiling water, with almost sadistic satisfaction watching him blush from the strain and viciously "puffed up" in boiling water. The whole honest company, we began to greedily weave crayfish, which turned out to be insipid, because the children had no salt in the "meanness law", but this did not spoil our appetite, and soon the crayfish was forever destroyed - only armor and others remained on the ground Inedible rachium ammunition.

One day, on one of the hottest July days, we met on the Fedorov reservoir my classmate from 47 schools of Sergei Novikov, who was resting on the local beach with his father and elder sister Natasha. With Sergei at school, I almost did not communicate, since he seemed to me a very arrogant little man, to which he could not be approached. And then to say, he had something to be proud of and rise above all the guys. The fact is, in this same school his mother Tamara Semenovna worked as a teacher of Russian language and literature, which provided Serezha with a special position among classmates and teachers. The special status of Sergei was also promoted by his living natural mind, developed by years of rather strong intellect and an extraordinary sense of humor. Contrary to expectations, on the beach, finally, "this deity descended from heaven" - the good thing that we are all naked - and I had a pretty nice talk with Novikov in a very relaxed and conducive environment. As it turned out, this became the pledge of our future friendship, which we will carry through many years.

The Novikov family lived next door to us in a two-story brick house built in the 50's on Poletaeva Street. From the same street, a very impressive microdistrict of two-story buildings began, which, on the one hand, rested directly in the territory of our secondary school №47, and on the other - in the grocery store "Ayman". First of all, this grocery store was remarkable because it acted as a kind of "state" border for two boyish rival factions: the so-called "Aiman" or railway stations, and the "flying" or "green transit" groups. The groupings were in a state of permanent war: the wall to the wall was periodically converging on the Stony River, a city sewage channel crossing across the vast area of ​​the "greentrust" - the urban park zone; Arranged forays into the enemy's camp at the station square and retaliatory actions of intimidation on the territory of our 47th school. I never took part in these mass fights for two reasons.

Firstly, our house in Yerzhanova Street stood apart from all the other yards, therefore, formally, all the children living in the house did not join any permanently operating group at the time.

Secondly, in adolescence and adolescence, I was a cowardly and incredibly frail boy, so I was never considered by the organizers of brawls as a serious fighting unit. However, there was also a third, very formidable force, in the face of which the "Aimanovs" and "Flying Men" forgot all their past grievances and, if possible, united in one grouping to give a worthy rebuff to the enemy. They were Chechens from the Old City, a small suburb of Karaganda, in which the Chechen diaspora was then compactly residing. These victims of the Stalinist national resettlement policy from the North Caucasus have always differed in Kazakhstan with an incredibly malicious disposition, cunning and cruelty. In addition, they did not disdain to use cold steel, which made skirmishes with them deadly. The acts of intimidation organized and conducted by the Chechens were distinguished by an excellent organization and were conducted according to all the rules of military tactics. In my memory, one such action, held by Chechens in Karaganda on May 9, 1977.

This festive day began, as usual, lightly and joyfully, not foretelling any cataclysms. A military parade and a parade of veterans of the Great Patriotic War were still running along the main street of Karaganda, and a group of radical Chechen youth from the Old City was already preparing to arrange an "enchanting" show - an act of retribution for the mistakes of our ancestors. The matter is that on May 9, 1944 - a special day in the Chechen calendar. This is the day of the end of the special operation under the code name "Lentil" by the NKVD troops for the resettlement of Chechens to remote areas of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. And the Soviet government had more than enough reasons for that. The fact is, the Chechens during the war actively cooperated with the fascists in the fight against the Soviet Army.

For example, there were such connections of the Abwehr as Sonderkommand "Bergman", which in German means "Highlander", manned exclusively by Chechens. The tasks of the "Bergman" included sabotage and terrorist operations against our troops, coverup of the Wehrmacht troops, struggle with the Soviet partisans. The North Caucasian legion of the Wehrmacht was quite a serious force: the number of Bergman alone consisted of about 1,200 spetsnaz people, that is, it consisted of serious, skilful and hardened fighters.

So the operation "Lentil" under those conditions was historically absolutely justified and, of course, necessary action, and, moreover, hand on heart, quite humane in the conditions of wartime. It is clear that the Chechens evaluate the historical events that have taken place from their "bell tower", forgot nothing and never missed the opportunity to painfully bite the authorities, demonstrating their independence and the "famous" Caucasian pride. Only for all the global historical decisions taken by the authorities, for some reason, it is necessary to be puffed up by a simple Russian person. So it happened this time. About 21 hours a group of Chechens on four buses arrived from the Old City to Karaganda. Having built himself in a harmonious column, a gloomy Kuklukkslanovskaya procession moved from Privokzalnaya Square to Lenin Avenue. The Chechens silently marched along the central street of the city, occasionally, in a Chechen guttural manner, shouting: "Zig hail!" - and throwing up his right hand. The cowardly Kazakh militia, as usual, hid in their homes along with the frightened residents. Then the column was divided into several groups, which flowed into the courtyards of urban courtyards and squares. And bloody fun came. Beat all the Russians indiscriminately, whether it was a guy with a girl, a disabled person or a teenager. If someone offered resistance to the Chechens, he was stabbed. The city hospitals were overcrowded by those who suffered from night skirmishes, but the authorities were still inactive, and the famous, best in the world special service of the KGB of the USSR kept a "proud" silence and pretended that nothing was happening. Having finished the intimidation action, "faithfully" having fulfilled their "political" mission, the Chechens, in the same organized order that they arrived, with a feeling of deep satisfaction, finally left Karaganda. This "epoch-making" event was overgrown with such speculation and fables in boyish folklore, according to which the Chechens did not roll out howitzers and volley-fire installations "Grad" to Lenin Square. For a long time word-of-mouth "deep traditions" were transmitted from mouth to mouth, where young homegrown "homers" did not spare colors for greater effect and forcing the horror, clearly maintaining the classic genre of thriller and horror film at the same time. The event described above physically passed me by, as in Karaganda I was absolutely a home child and in the evening on May 9, fortunately, was already at home. But, alas, I could not avoid the second, real meeting with the Chechens from the Old City. And it was so.

One day, on one of the sunny April days, Sergei Novikov, with whom we were already friends, periodically quarreling and enduring long artistic pauses in communication, invited me to go for a company with him to the Old Town. The fact is that in the only store of industrial goods of the Old City "thrown out" for sale very scarce at that time magnetic tape "TASMA" for reel tape recorders. "Sarafan radio" in Karaganda instantly reported that a large batch of this "sacral" for boys was brought to the Chechen department store from Kazan, and the most popular length of the magnetic tape is 480 meters. From the very beginning, we did not have a voyage - we arrived just in time for a lunch break at the department store. I did not have time to figure out how to approach Novikov, right at the bus stop, a sturdy Chechen of 25 years approached, who put his arm around his shoulders and passionately (at least that was the impression he had from the outside) whispering something in his ear, leading him aside One-story building of the district executive committee (above it the USSR national flag fluttered), separated from the stop by a tall wooden fence. I had no choice but to follow them - obediently, like a sheep to meet Fate. Vano (that's the name of a Chechen, judging by the tattoo on his right hand) had an expressive, shaved skull, deep-set brown eyes, a predatory cartilaginous nose and tightly compressed sad lips of a sadist. "Well, guys, get the small change out of your pockets, the" shmona "begins!" Vano solemnly proclaimed and, for the sake of convincing his intentions, took out a knife of zek work from the back pocket of his trousers. Sergei had a bill of 5 rubles (a huge amount for a boy of that time), I had a small change of 2 rubles 80 kopecks - all that I could scrape out of my mother's box for "working" trivia. All this "wealth" safely migrated to Vano's pocket. "And what's that you have," Piston "?" Asked the Chechen cheerfully, running two fingers into the secret pocket of my trousers. "No," I answered. "These are old grandfather trousers, sewn by my mother to me. And the pocket was intended for watches on a chain, which used to be worn either in a waistcoat or in trousers, just like in these same "pistons".

In this extremely dirty situation, I decided at full power, as they say, "to include a fool," and, I must admit, it turned out very well for me - my Chechen idiotic behavior was clearly to my liking. "Well done, you know!" - Vano praised me, who after a successful "hunt" wanted to talk culturally. "And who are your parents?" - He asked me with genuine interest. Apparently, I liked him, unlike Sergei. This is - a rare case in my life: usually in the face in unpleasant situations of childhood I always got it, and Novikov managed to safely avoid this fate. But here everything happened exactly the opposite. "Mom is a musician, and Dad ...," I hesitated a bit (try to say that Dad is a lieutenant colonel of the militia), is also a musician, a horn player. " "Look at you - the intelligentsia. And what is a horn player? "Asked the Chechen puzzled. "Well, you know, it's such a healthy curved pipe, it's necessary to blow there, that there are forces!" - I answered with some familiarity, as if we had been good friends with Vano. Sergei with envy looked at me - my inspired delirium clearly surprised and puzzled. "What a fine fellow you are, you understand everything in everything!" - Vano again praised me and smiled with a broad, radiant smile. "Well, and who are your parents?" - he turned to Novikov with a completely different face. "Dad and Mom are teachers," Sergei answered, and immediately received a sharp punch in the face. He cried out, and I burst out: "Do not beat him!" "Do you still have dengi?" Vano Novikov asked with a strong Caucasian accent and, without waiting for an answer, bent down, took off his boots from Sergei's feet and a professional reception (" Apparently, there was some experience of inspections in prison) with a knife forged insoles. Not finding anything interesting there, the Chechen was disappointed, more likely for pro forma, again asked Novikov: "Why did you come here, gondon?" It became clear that Sergei was elected to them as a victim of mockery and the reason for it was clearly not needed. The absurdity of what was happening was especially striking in the face of the screaming scenery of this more than a strange spectacle. All this "gop-stop," all this hypocritical action took place, very everyday, and therefore especially cynical, on a beautiful April day in front of the government building of the district executive committee, in which there was no one (as luck would have it, it was a non-working Saturday). In a break between our "friendly communication" to the building of the district executive committee, two very beautiful Chechen boys, apparently acquaintances of Vano, suddenly came up. They exchanged several phrases with him in the Chechen language, gave him a cigarette, and looking closely at me and Sergei, they retired proudly. "Come on, come with me," Vano told Sergei and dragged him into the cubicle near the building of the district executive committee, which was apparently used as a wood warehouse. He started Novikov for a small fence, through a narrow crack in which I could see what was happening there. "We must go there and hit the Chechen with a brick on the head," - feverishly knocked in my head and threw in sweat from the thought that I might have to kill a man. Nearby, on a flowerbed, lay a heavy brick. My legs became wadded, I sank to the ground and felt that not only was I not able to hit someone, but simply to take a step.

Suddenly I saw the Chechen begin to strangle Sergei. We had to act. Some unknown force picked me up and carried me to a stop on which there were quite a few people - adult men and women. "Help! "I shouted." There the Chechen strikes my friend! "The men at the bus stop looked at each other in fright. "You see, we do not have time. We are late for work! "- At last one of them, the Russian man (Russian in the Old City, at that time were absolutely" zadrochennymi "Chechens of the national minority) guiltily blamed) 40-45 years. Then I ran towards the pub, which was located next to the stop. At one of the tables I saw two men, obviously "exhausted with narzan," with beer mugs in their hands. "Help, please, there the Chechen beats my friend, as small as I am!" - I asked one of the stocky Russian men at the table. "Petya, do not get involved!" Said the lanky drinking companion to the stocky. He thought a little and briefly left me: "Show me where it is!" We passed for the fence of the district executive committee; Lanky, something grumbled discontentedly under his breath, followed us. As soon as we entered the fence, the Chechen, like a wild panther, jumped out of the cot and, furiously spinning with thorns, yelled at the stocky man: "What does tebe need? I - chechen, I live here! "" Take at least a brick, "I said to Peter, who only looked at me in amazement. "Do not, not to anything! Did he offend you? "He asked Sergei, who, with a pale face, while buttoning his jeans, left the room. He only nodded in silence and whispered to me: "Seryoga, we run away from here!" We ran as though Death was following us with a scythe and with all his court retinue. Fortunately for us, the bus pulled up to Karaganda, we jumped into it and, already departing, saw with horror how Vano was rushing to the stop, maliciously looking out for us among the passengers of the bus. All the way to Karaganda we were silent - Seryozha was clearly in shock. It was clearly visible that this is the first most powerful shock in his still short life.

When I arrived in Karaganda, I, of course, told everything to my father, who was just furious with what I heard: "It is necessary to find this nit!" Through the graduates of the Karaganda school of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, working in the criminal investigation department, he struck a file of the tried Chechens of the Old City, the more so I gave a pretty good description of the exterior and special features of Vano. His capture was just a matter of time. However, soon afterwards, Sergei Tamara Semyonovna's mother came to our house, who asked her father to "put the brakes on", because Sergei has a sick heart, he is still in a terrible depression and will finally finish his trial. As Father Tamara Semyonovna did not convince, that such things can not be left unpunished, she remained adamant.

After this event, my rating among the boys is incredibly grown. The next morning I went out into the courtyard where our courtyard guys and Sergei Novikov were sitting on the bench, like perches on a perch. "Here it is, our hero!" - shouted Borya Morozov, and the guys looked at me with obvious respect. By the way, about whom - about, but about Bora, certainly, it is necessary to tell more in detail.

Boria Morozov, was, in general, an outstanding personality in our yard. The pendulum of my boyish sympathies constantly swung from Novikov to Morozov and vice versa. To say that Borya was always charming and in all cases an attractive person, of course, it is impossible, but that, he was a charismatic guy - this can not be denied. First, he was older than us with Novikov for two years, which, of course, us, the salag, bribed. Secondly, he was a very well-read, inquisitive person, which greatly raised him in our eyes, especially considering Borino proletarian origin. And then, such funny funny things were always associated with him, that Bore was forgiven very much - and his incredible greed, and natural cowardice, and small growth, which in the tenth grade made him look like an eighth-grader. One of these curiosities especially crashed into memory. Boris had an older brother, Valera, a finished drunkard, whose alcoholic adventures were the subject of numerous anecdotes of our court. Especially funny was Borina's interpretation of the anecdotal events of this very entertaining family chronicle. "One night I woke up from a strange sensation," Borya told us another story of the adventure of his "legendary" brother, - it seemed that someone was standing over me. I peered into the darkness and saw ... the penis right in front of my face. Looked closely - and this is as always a drunk brother Valerka. "What are you doing, you goat?" I cried. "Be silent, bitch," said his brother, and he hit me hard with his fist in the jaw. I got angry and ... (here we all froze in anticipation of active fighting from Bori) turned on his side and fell asleep! And this asshole still pissed me off at night! "Here we all could not stand it - the courtyard burst into a homeric laughter, which did not stop for a long time and spread to the botanical garden itself with a reverberating echo.

At one time we approached the charismatic Boreas Morozov even more than with Sergei Novikov. The reason for this was our new enthusiasm for astronomy. I must say that by 1980 the country's craze for ufology began, and our proximity to Baikonur and the frequent occurrences of contact with UFOs, apparently in an interesting zone for the aliens, constantly fueled the boyish interest in the problem of "flying saucers." To a large extent our interest in astronomy was also contributed by my father's fascination with the works of the well-known Soviet ufologist, Academician Azhazh Vladimir Mikhailovich, who periodically shocked the public of that time with his sensational statements about extraterrestrial civilizations and their constant visits to the Earth. It was then that my father constructed my first telescope, finding instructions on how to make it in the popular journal "Technique of Youth." On the balcony of our house (and we lived on the last fifth floor) I equipped the most "real" observatory, covering the balcony with a blanket and fixing it with pegs, with a porthole for the telescope, a starry sky map, a notebook for recording astronomical observations, a compass and a flashlight. In general, all necessary, that is supposed to be a real "astrologer" in his space position.

All the evening long we spent with Boreas on the street, peering at the starry Abyss and trying to view the signs of life there. Borya also made a telescope, which in terms of workmanship was much inferior to mine, but he, unlike me, had already undergone a school course in astronomy, so he approached the study of the starry sky more thoroughly.

 Fortune once smiled at us and we saw a more than strange phenomenon, from which, I remember, then goose bumps went on the back. In the autumn evening, armed with telescopes, we, as always, settled in the courtyard, causing ridicule of the children, who, apparently, envied our enthusiasm and in every way tried to humiliate us along with Her Majesty the Astronomy. Among the guys was a famous hockey player of the Karaganda team "Motorist" my classmate Misha Petrov and Sergei Novikov - an incorrigible skeptic, compared to which Thomas the Unbeliever simply "rests." Borya gave us a lengthy lecture about the constellation of Orion, showing him in the sky, like a real lecturer in a planetarium. Suddenly across the sky, right above our heads, apparently at very high altitude, a strange object, like a boomerang, swept past. Two bright glowing points, located at a distance of about 40 cm from each other (it is clear that the actual dimensions of the object at such an altitude can not be estimated), were connected by transparent spheres through which the sky and sparks of numerous stars could be seen. The object flew absolutely silently, swiftly, but slowly enough that it could still be clearly discerned. The first to see him was the trained view of astronomers I and Boris. We only managed to exclaim from surprise and amazement, feverishly peering into the night sky, hoping to once again see a strange stranger. After about 15 minutes, the object again appeared in the sky like a fantastic bird, silently hovering over the earth. This time, Misha Petrov saw him, who afterwards, like us, could no longer tear off the enchanted gaze from the starry sky. Vexed Novikov, who again could not see anything, began to point outly defiantly us, urging him to turn to the clinic named after Kashchenko. However, exactly in the same interval of time the object flew over us again, and this time it was seen by all the guys, except ... Sergei Novikov. His annoyance at the same time did not know the limit - in the end he frankly "splashed" with us and proudly retired home, saying that he was sorry to waste time with such accomplished assholes as we are.

As with most telescopes of refractive (lens) type, ours had a significant constructive drawback - an inverted image that made them not very convenient for observations, especially not related to astronomy. The fact that our telescopes can be used not for their intended purpose and much more "interesting", we were prompted by the resourceful Sergei Novikov. It is clear, what kind of "interest" can have a pimply, "anxious" teenager, "expiring sexual genitalia" - spying on naked women in the windows of neighboring five-story buildings. In general, the idea of ​​Novikov, of course, was not very novel and original, nevertheless, this message from Lukavoy found response in our fragile children's souls.

Observant point young "paparazzi" equipped on a pointed roof of a two-story building of Sergey. It was a very dangerous roof, with a rather impressive angle, so in slippery shoes, especially in rainy weather, there was nothing to do. Work shoes "hunters before the strawberry" - Soviet-made shoes, in which you could still feel more-less confident on this extreme slate roof. We spent long hours in our lair in anticipation of suitable subjects-nude. If the long wait was rewarded with such a "cheerful" story, at least with bare chest, it was for a whole week a subject of noisy discussion in the yard, and "lucky" - the voyeur, although for a short time, became the object of undisguised boyish envy. Our society of young erotomaniacs has now been replenished by Sergei Novikov and Misha Petrov, with whom we have already gone to the roof as a work, that is, with enviable constancy. Soon, and our roof was not enough for us. We began to master the sloping roof of my five-story building. It came to curiosities bordering on a deadly risk.

One summer evenings, Misha Petrov, armed with my telescope, spied a suitable plot with nudity - a mature attractive person on the fourth floor of a nearby building was preparing for the next beach season, "rolling" a collection of Soviet unpretentious swimsuits in front of the mirror. If she was all right with the chest, then everything that was below the belt, to Misha's great disappointment, was hidden by the outer wall of the house at the level of the window sill. Having taken a great interest in this "fantastic" spectacle, Mishan slid forward in a plastunistic way, and without calculation, with his telescope began slowly, but surely, to crawl from the peak of the cornice. "Hold me by the feet!" - only he managed to shout to us, and Morozov and I, that there are forces, grabbed his legs and dragged him. "What a wonderful evening today!" - enthusiastically said below, right below us, my mother, who went out on the balcony to breathe a full breast with the elastic July air and, fortunately, did not hear our noisy fuss on the roof. Mishan flushed like a cancer, and was sweating profusely, the sweat streamed down his face and neck - it was obvious that he had survived not the best seconds of his life. After this unpleasant incident, we no longer changed our own, become native, roof of the Novikov house, which also became a savior for me in the most direct sense of the word. And it was so.

One day, resting from pretty podnadoevshih erotic sessions, we Morozov, armed with telescopes, looked with curiosity at the full moon. A lanky guy with a sheepdog passed by - as I found out later, it was Vova Pashko from the parallel 9 - "in" class. I do not know why, I gave a loud meow, causing his dog's nervous barking. "Now like meow, goat, learn to bark!" - Grumbled with a quiet threat Pashko and went on. On that incident, and would have been exhausted, but the devil pulled Morozov to blurt out: "If I were you, I would have caught up and let into the face!" Without thinking twice, I did so. "Come on, stop, you fool!" - I caught up with Pashko. He stopped with a brazen smile, comfortably, turning his nasty, pimply face to me deliberately, and I seriously and very efficiently conducted a beautiful, put "hook" to his left in the jaw. He was taken aback, grabbed his cheek, and then panicked, along with the frightened sheepdog, shouting: "Well, all right, now we'll kill you, you bastard!" It was not long before I heard the noise of the approaching crowd, which foreshadowed absolutely nothing good for me. Ahead were tall men, holding miner's lanterns. "I would have fled if I were you," Morozov said unperturbedly, sitting on the wooden table for dominoes. "Run with me," I said. "What for? I did not do anything. " "Well, as you know!" - I already threw on the run and rushed that there are forces to the entrance, where our beloved hatchway was located. Quicker than the monkey, I jumped on the stairs and quickly climbed to the attic.

Through the embrasure of the attic hatch, I could clearly see Vova Pashko running into the entrance, followed by me, holding a bicycle chain. He wanted to climb up the stairs to the attic in a fever, but when he saw my arm with a brick brought over him, he changed his mind and ran out of the entrance. "The boys, who climbs on the roof with me?" - I heard his trembling voice, and, without waiting for possible volunteers, climbed on the roof. The calculation in this case was simple - on the roof I felt myself like God or almost like God. Even if the guys suddenly climbed on the roof, I would successfully attack them with cobblestones that were abundant here, and in case of unfavorable developments, there was always a reserve path of retreat to the roof of the neighboring two-story building. And then, in the attic, there were so many hidden secluded corners to bury, that even with miner's flashlights, the enemy would need a very long time to find me. In this case, the time worked for me.

As was to be expected, there was no one wishing to climb to the roof, so I sat quietly on the roof, listening attentively to what was going on below, and when the noise died down there, cautiously descended the stairs and left the entrance. In front of me there was a depressing picture. Boria Morozov, with a battered face, stood in the middle of the yard children, among whom was Sergei Novikov (he left the house exactly to the end of this tragicomedy) and Misha Petrov. Strongly gesticulating with his hands, Borya heatedly told the guys how Voronin's pricker was beaten by Egor's gang. The name of Egor, an ethnic German with pathological criminal predilections, caused horror throughout the 47th school. It was a burly marginal from a family of criminals with a height of 190 cm, who already in the tenth grade looked like a 25-year-old man. They told us that Yegor had been living with him since the age of 15 with a 30-year-old woman who had a child in his arms, and at school, in his mistresses, a tall girl Tanya from a parallel class named "Baby" walked in her mistresses. This Baby was a real gangster who was afraid not only of girls, but even of guys. I witnessed how Tanya kicked a strong guy in the groin with a powerful kick - a hockey player nicknamed "Fatima". In "apprentices" Yegor went to a large Tatar from 10 - "B" class Albert Gilmanov. It was he who "froze" for me Bora Morozova. In general, according to my humble person, all the local "beau monde" gathered from the neighboring criminal court, which of course, of course, could not but "please" me. "Tomorrow you will have a" Karachun "in school!" Morozov hissed maliciously. "They said that they will get you in school, there you can not get away from them." I just did not reply, because the prospect of being beaten, if not killed, was so obvious in the school. "No need for words, gentlemen of the jury!" I thought glumly and went home. My dejected state could not remain unnoticed for the parents. "What happened?" - asked my father and frowned when I told him my sad story. "So, tomorrow, when Pashko approaches you, and he always comes to you between lessons to enjoy your fear, you will say to him:" If something happens to me, my father, the police lieutenant colonel, will send a platoon of cadets to school The Ministry of Internal Affairs and then we will talk with your whole honest company in another way! "This was a brilliant move by my father. From myself, I added a little improvisation, peeped in the then popular movie "Petrovka -38". There the criminal investigation inspector said the key phrase, which I really liked, to the "hot" Caucasian man who unreasonably jealoused him of his companion: "Dear, if you are satisfied with my apologies for the injury done, I bring them." The next morning everything happened as predicted by the pope. In a break between lessons Vovan came up to me and hissed like a snake: "Well, get ready, you dick, after classes you will have a kayuk!" I gave him the learned words of my father, adding the phrase I liked. And - about a miracle! When I said it, in the eyes of Vova Pashko there were tears. He silently gave me his hand, I shook it with feeling and we, very pleased with ourselves, proudly parted. Then, after the lessons, I noticed how Pashko approached Yegor and gave him my words. He looked at me with obvious respect, and the incident was exhausted - for me, but not for Boris Morozov! Since he had already finished his studies at school, Pashko's friends undertook to catch and bang him near the house in the courtyard, in the Botanical Garden, on the way to the store. It got to the point that he tried to walk on the street either at night or accompanied by his parents, and this continued until his very call to the army. So I got my first lesson of how severely, but fairly punishes the fate of provocateurs and instigators.

The inhabitants of the glorious house, on the roof of which these remarkable events of my childhood happened, deserve special attention in our narrative. On the second floor, as we already know, the Novikov family lived, which was five times in a two-room apartment of the old type, the so-called "subcompact". The fifth member of the family was elderly, very nice and neat grandmother Seryozha from Tselinograd (present-day Astana) - apparently, the mother of Eugene Yegorovich. The situation in the apartment was so tight that Serezha had to sleep on a chair-bed, which he in turn shared with his sister Natasha. To the right of Novikov there lived the well-known "rastoman" in the district (an auth-an addict who consumes cannabis plants) with an impressive experience of Sabir Tuleubayev. This young Kazakh, who does not know Russian well, from the "tender" age with might and main consumed Chui hemp growing in the mountainous regions of Kyrgyzstan (not to be confused with the Chui valley of Gorny Altai). As usual, in the morning, nowhere else working Sabir occupied a favorite observational position on the balcony of his house, rotten from the chronic "breaking" view of the inhabitant of Chinese opium establishments peering at the faces of passers-by. "Zholdas, tenge bar?" ("Friend, money is"?) - he asked when he saw me. "Tenge Jok" ("There is no money") - I answered, having exhausted all my stock of Kazakh words. "Ket, ball!" ("Get out, boy!" - Kazakh analogue of the Russian letter in three letters) - Sabir threw evil and grabbed a nearby cleaver, began to cut furniture rubbish stored on the balcony, apparently, just for these Goals. The yard had long been accustomed to these psychopathic concerts Sabir and was not surprised by anything.

To the left of Novikov lived the Polyakov family. Seryozha Polyakov nicknamed "Pulik" from the parallel 9 - "B" belonged to the category of people whom the outstanding Russian psychiatrist Peter Borisovich Gannushkin called "constitutionally stupid". That is, it can not be said that he was a moron or mentally handicapped in the literal sense of the word, but his judgments were so infantile that he seemed to have in his brain a certain blocker that does not allow him to rise above his simplest physiological needs such as "eating" And all that successfully rhymes with this word. At the same time, Sergei was so skinny that, against his background, I, myself a rare geek, felt like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Apparently, speech in this "clinical" case was already about dystrophy, but Sergei Polyakov did not care and did not depress him at all, and he was always in an even cheerful state of mind, which caused me genuine envy. To the left of Pulik lived a family of taxi driver Kolymberger nicknamed "Baryga." Baryga had the appearance of a classic, very untidy Jew - fat, with a huge belly-like watermelon; With short crooked legs, overgrown with hair; With completely absent neck. At the same time, to the envy of the whole court, this garden scarecrow was married to a very pretty Tatar woman, who gave birth to this Shrek daughter Olya - a real oriental beauty. It's amazing how sometimes such different genes are intertwined, forming in the union a magnificent gentle pattern full of charm and harmony. If Olya's appearance was in order, then her character can not be said at all. It was a spoiled young woman, spoiled by her father, who allowed herself such things as no girl in our yard could afford. Once, during a joint game, I quarreled with Olya, and she, for no reason, hurt me with a foot in the groin. I did not even have time to figure out how my hand had slapped her so hard that she fell to the ground and even traveled some distance back on the grass. She looked at me with eyes full of tears, but ... even with obvious respect. With sadness, I recently learned that Olga had died before she was 18, from criminal abortion and the general blood infection caused by him. And the culprit of the tragedy was "a happy father" (who would have thought ?!) - her neighbor - the "brains" Seryozha Polyakov.

In the summer Baryga, when he had a good mood, arranged for us in the courtyard of improvised discos. He exhibited 100-watt columns on the balcony, included the "Arcturus" turntable for those times, with a diamond, as they used to say, "the eternal head" and started the company's vinyl records of the ABAV Group and Boney M, extracted from the speculators. It was on the basis of foreign pop music that Baryga became friends with Vitya Zlobin ("Katipupa"), who lives with her mother on the ground floor, right under Kolymberger. Katipupa (that is, "Pup of aunt Kati - moms Vitya Zlobina), so named Novikov, who was always a great inventor of households" chased ", was a stocky, brutal boy with manners of a real fist, but a lumpen proletarian mentality. The fact is that Vitya was lazy to the point of disgrace (which later greatly spoiled his life), and Aunt Katya, as a weak and insecure mother, a loner, finally waved him down, refusing to educate a long-time slacker than Finally spoiled Katipupu. After the eighth grade, Vitya Zlobin entered the mining college, where he taught physics and mining the father of Novikov, Eugene Egorovich.

One summer, after studying, Katipup went to the peninsula of Mangyshlak, located on the eastern coast of the Caspian Sea in Kazakhstan, where for a month he passed industrial practice on a drilling rig. He returned from there as a mother, a "hardened" peasant - an oilman, who "fully" knew women and Life. The fact is that there, at the drilling site, only two girls worked as chefs in the company of hungry peasants - plain-looking girls, with an obvious inferiority complex and infantile ideas about Life. Once these girls muzhichki strongly podpoili on one of the impromptu festivals, and the entire team drill, taking advantage of their helpless condition, missed the girls "through the system" - as they say, "took the choir." Vitya told this with such ecstasy and gleam in his eyes that it was evident how this event of "group sex" changed all his existing ideas about the world. But most of all I was struck by Katyupupa's story that on the morning the chefs were so obstructed and humiliated by lascivious males that they were forced to quit and go away from shame and shame where their eyes are looking. In the second entrance of our famous house there lived personalities even more charismatic and unique in all senses. On the ground floor to the right lived an eternal bachelor - a photographer of 40 years, nicknamed "Associate Professor", in his old-fashioned glasses with a thick frame, really, like a scientist or a teacher of a classical university. The senior lecturer was engaged in pornography, which he manufactured and himself distributed in the form of playing cards for Kazakh prisons and correctional institutions. The docent had a regular clientele from local putans, not disdaining youngsters who were brought to the "photoshoot" by adult prostitutes. It is clear that everything happening in the "bad" apartment of the Associate Professor, excited our children's imagination, causing burning curiosity and irresistible physiological interest. To our great disappointment, the attention of the militia and the "paparazzi" to the Associate was to nothing, and he always so carefully curtained the windows of his apartment with a sheet that, in addition to the light of the soffits making their way through the washed sheet, nothing was ever seen.

One autumn, as usual, we sat on a bench and tweeted like a flock of sparrows, when another "sweet" couple appeared in our yard, heading towards the Associate Professor. It was Kazasha Rosa, who was leading a hand, apparently on a photographic test, to a charming Russian girl of 14. Rosa, who looked like a person and figure for the singer Masha Rasputin, always considered herself unlike her colleagues in the "shop", "educated" Confused, hosted by clients, mostly married men, in his one-room apartment on the second floor, located directly above the docent's lair. Sometimes Rosa, in order to replenish her budget, was also earning money from the Assistant Professor, while simultaneously supplying him with a new clientele for taking photos. Katipupa, wishing to impress us with his brutality, rushed across to the girls. "Rose, take me to the shooting, I would gladly have given you both!" - very voluptuously, with great feeling and aspiration, said Witek. "You first grow up, young fagot! And then the "suvalka" has not yet grown, "- retorted Rosa to our universal laughter. Katipupa blushed like a cancer, not expecting such impudence, and hurriedly retreated from brisk girls.

Next to the Associate Professor, on the first floor in a one-room apartment, lived the great-grandmother Rosa - the old woman who survived from her mind 92 years old with the explicit complex of Plyushkin. Obsessed with the idea of ​​providing a dowry to her expensive great-granddaughter Rosa, the old Kazakh woman devastated local garbage dumps, dragging their "precious" contents into her apartment, which she turned into a real "Ali Baba cave". At the same time, the old woman, making with enviable constancy her shuttle tours to local garbage dumps, was so hilarious that I could not resist the temptation to joke on her. From afar, seeing her, I stood on the edge of the balcony and, folding my hands like a speaker, screamed from the fifth floor: "Allah, Allah akbar!" (Grandma, Allah is Great!) Grandma froze, laughingly put her hands to the sky and sang the creaky old woman In a voice like a mullah on a minaret: "Allah akbar!" I shouted again: "Allah Akbar!", The old woman immediately echoed me and so continued indefinitely. In the end, the grandmother forgot about the purpose of her voyage, and I could no longer restrain myself from the Homeric laughter on the balcony, holding my stomach and sinking from the stifling laughter to my heels. When the grandmother, finally, to the relief of the neighbors gave God a soul, the local ZHKO (house,s department)  needed eight trucks to bring all of its "treasure" to the city dump. It remains only to guess where the old lady managed to live, eat and sleep! And one more character of our story should say a few words: it's Sasha Tkachenko, nicknamed Bandera. The reader may have a natural question: was there a nickname in the childhood of the author of these lines? Responsibly I declare: yes, the Count was "chasing" (apparently, by analogy with Count Vorontsov), which completely superseded the "Crow" bored with me since my childhood. I was very proud of this nickname and tried to behave in the courtyard as befits a true bearer of a count's title. Bandera was a native of Western Ukraine (from here he "drove") and lived with his mother on the second floor next to the already known to us Rose. Sasha's character was bad - vindictive, aggressive and mercenary. It was this self-interest led by Bandera in 1982 to the disciplinary battalion - during his service in Afghanistan he managed to sell grenades to Afghan mujahedin. In his free time Tkachenko taught languages: Kazakh and Ukrainian, apparently, seriously intending to become a "polyglot". "Do you know how the" Nightingale the Robber "will be in Kazakh?" He would say to me. "No!" "Babu is a basmach! And do you know how the Little Red Riding Hood will look like in Ukrainian? Chervona the Capun! A sexy maniac? Sinister pisukaty! "- and Bandera burst into joyful screeching laughter, exposing brownish nicotine large horse teeth. To play with Bandera in our courtyard games - mostly "leapfrog" and "goat" - was always a very risky occupation. Sasha Tkachenko was unpredictable and extremely touchy, and the offense sometimes arose on a flat spot, but immediately followed by a merciless revenge Bandera. In my memory, during the game in the "goat" Pulik inadvertently touched Tkachenko, slightly dirty boots his trousers. Bandera's answer did not take long - when Pulik, in order of priority, became a "goat" in a well-known position, Tkachenko dispersed and foolishly shoved Polyakov's knee in the ass, that is, as they say, "ruined the goat". Pulik only managed to gasp, went into a "shaving" flight, piercing the face with asphalt. At the same time, he broke his nose and lips so severely that we did not see him more in this game. I was surprised to see how the blissful smile of the sadist froze on Bandera's face at that time.

The game of "leapfrog" in our yard has always been an extreme activity, but it became an "extreme" on the verge of a "foul" when Vova Sadovsky - 120 kg weight, 2 m tall, the candidate for master of sports in heavy Athletics. Lord, how lucky it was for those who had Vova in the team, and how great was the luck of the one against whom the team of Sadovsky played. Not only that to sustain the "live" weight Vovik almost no one could, but grief was especially for those who fell under the cannon ball Sadovsky. According to the rules of the game, the losing team was in the gate, and Vova began to methodically break through the "fat", i.e. shoot unfortunate victims with a soccer ball. In case of a successful hit on the victim's body, a crimson trace was formed, as if from a burn with boiling water, and then a huge hematoma. I remember how Misha Petrov, accustomed, in general, to the pain and injuries of a hockey player, after another such ball hit Vova Sadovsky in the waist area fell to the ground and sobbed! It was then that an event of esoteric nature took place, which especially crashed into my childhood memory and I want to tell about it. Once, on an April evening, we divided into two teams, as usual, began to play "leapfrog." Everything went fine until the moment when Vova Sadovsky appeared at the school yard and asked to play. Cast lots, and Sadovsky, to our great dismay, was in the team of the enemy. We fell out to be a "horse". The tactic of "leapfrog" is very simple and well known - one must find and jump into the weakest link of the "horse". It is clear that I was such a weak link - as my mother sometimes called me, "a mosquito with thin legs". In this situation, the victory of Vova Sadovsky's team was ensured. I stood in the middle, ahead of me was Sergei Novikov, behind - Katyupupa. The first to us jumped Boris Morozov. He landed safely on Novikov, so we did not even feel his weight. It's time to jump to Sadovsky. He fled, noisily breathing and hard, like a rhinoceros, stamping his knives (it seemed that the earth was shaking and walking with staggering under his weight), loudly grunted like a boar and jumped straight onto me. It seemed to me that a bulldozer fell on my back, my bones cracked, but strangely enough, my legs, slightly bent at the knees, still withstood an incredible weight for me. Complementing this "oil painting" and, apparently, wishing to finish me, Sasha Tkachenko perched on top of Vova Sadovsky. Thus, all this astonishing weight fell on my poor bony back. "Count, hold on!" - yelled Kathipupa, and, surprisingly, at some point I really ceased to feel this heavy weight. The blood poured into my head with a hot wave and noisily knocked at my temples, as if I wanted to pierce the temporal bone. But now all this cumbersome construction had to go twenty long, endless steps to the football goal. The "horse" slowly but surely moved into its last, tragic way. All the way, while we walked "horse", before my eyes stood the image of a beardless man about 40 years old in a white chiton, sitting in some white room. Yes, I forgot to say that this image has haunted me since my earliest childhood and always appeared when I was ill (for example, during pneumonia) or when there was a real danger. Many years later I learned in this man the third Angel with the amazing and most mysterious in the History of World Art icon Andrei Rublev "Holy Trinity." Then, in my childhood, I did not attach any special significance to this fact and quickly forgot about it. And yet we reached the end, defeating our more than worthy rivals. Vova Sadowski looked at me with obvious perplexity, not fully understanding what had happened. "Voronin, you now put the world record in weightlifting, if you take into account your" hare "weight!" - he muttered. "Well, you, Count, give!" - Seryozha Novikov said with admiration, and with great piety Katipupa extended his wet hand to me. This was the first serious recognition of my merits of a male in this harsh male world. However, the titanic "struggle against gravity" did not pass for me in vain - I have earned varicose veins in the groin, which occasionally reminds me of past victories and which I now "proudly" bring through life. 

The next morning, as was to be expected, I fell ill - apparently, seriously overstrained and, in addition, caught cold. The temperature is under 40, a runny nose, a dry, nasty cough, a semi-bodily condition - in general, a "gentlemanly" set of universal "joys" in such cases. In the inflamed imagination, the image of an Angel from the icon "Holy Trinity" and another strange subject with a bird's beak, which the Ankh holds in his hands - an ancient Egyptian cross with a loop at the end, arose from the childhood. Many years later I saw this picture in real time in the Krasnoyarsk museum of local lore, which, for some reason, was originally conceived and built as an accurate, only a small copy of the ancient Egyptian museum on Tahrir Square in Cairo. It turned out that it depicted the ancient Egyptian God Ra with the head of a bird, giving with the help of Ankh ("the key of the Nile") the life of his son - the pharaoh. Many millennia later, the symbol "Ankh" will be called the "mirror of Venus" and will be used in genetics to refer to the female X chromosome, that is, the feminine origin. Believe me, this was not the first message of God Ra, addressed exclusively to my "humble" person. 

Once in the program "Obvious-improbable" Academician Sergei Petrovich Kapitsa talked about mysterious circles in the fields, the origin of which is still unknown to science. In one of the circles I saw the familiar symbol of the female principle - the "mirror of Venus". Above the "mirror" was a sphere - a symbol of God Ra, and inside the "mirror" is placed a five-pointed star - a symbol of the Divine Man. I immediately guessed that this composition in the meaning exactly repeats the fresco of ancient Egypt known to me - God Ra with the help of Anha (earthly woman) gives life to his Son - Pharaoh - "the governor of God on Earth." And one more, more than strange image during the illness was remembered to me then. My whole brain, filled with heat, was filled, crushed by an absolutely black Void, a huge Abyss. It was infinite, but at the same time it did not frighten me at all, but attracted me with some special magnetism, sucking in myself, like Malevich's Black Square. Suddenly, in this Abyss, a spinning hourglass appeared from nowhere. They, as in computer graphics, began to grow from a small point and turn into huge vessels, which are now a terrible burden, that there are forces that put pressure on my entire child's being, completely filling the inflamed consciousness with its transparent heavy spheres. Then all this vision just as suddenly disappeared, as it appeared, and I already, as from above, saw the same hour glass, only in miniature, which lay on a huge male palm. Despite the fact that I saw this image from above, I had a full feeling that this palm is still mine, because through the feverish delirium I could physically feel on the wet child's palm the enormous, incommensurable weight of these cosmic hourglasses, although they And looked, compared to the hand, like a microscopic grain of sand. Surprisingly, after decades, I saw and recognized this hourglass in a photograph taken by the American Hubble Space Telescope. In the picture, a stunning picture of the death of a supernova was recorded, which I immediately mentally dubbed "a greeting from a distant childhood."

In general, I must say, the state of trance is familiar to me from the very early childhood. The thing is that I suffered from "sleepwalking", which only added extra touches to my odious image of a "very strange boy". My somnambulism sometimes caused very curious and frightening parents of incidents. 

One autumn of 1980 (it was November 16th, for some reason I remembered this date well), my classmate and friend Igor Kupriyanov, whom I will talk about a little later, gave me just one day to read a unique book about astronautics and the conquest of the moon. It was a chic, beautifully illustrated edition, where the author, a very knowledgeable man, called "in the subject," allowed himself to dream about the future of mankind on the path to the development of the distant and near cosmos. I was so carried away by reading that I did not notice how deep the night had come. My mother was already quietly snuffling in the next room (my father was already serving in Khabarovsk and was expecting my graduation from Karaganda high school), when I decided to go to the "side" too. What happened to me further, can be called a state of deep trance or somnambulism - I think that it is unlikely that these definitions will fully explain the nature of this psychic phenomenon. In short, as soon as I got up from the chair and turned off the floor lamp, my mind went out. A quiet male voice ordered me to take the scissors, to go to our large Persian carpet hanging over the bed of my mother, and cut out a large piece of it. I started to work, and the thick carpet of my mother's miniature scissors with bent ends cut easily and at ease. Finally, I finished my "black" case, and then came a complete "failure" in my memory. I woke up from the loud cry of my mother in the morning, sitting on the bed with a large piece of carpet in my hands. Mom looked at me in horror, not understanding anything. Later, she told me that I was really scared at that moment - my blind eyes in pink povoloka made me look like a real zombie. Without saying anything, Mom only sobbed softly, took a gypsy needle and with great difficulty sewed a cut piece to an unhappy carpet. Only the next day she dared to ask me: "Why did you do this?" "I do not know, Mom, there was a voice, there was no possibility to resist!" - I answered. "And if this voice next time orders you to kill me, huh?" - Mom asked nervously. I did not answer, because I was shocked by what I had done. The existence of some powerful influence on my consciousness from the outside, to admit, I was very frightened myself then. Although intuitively, from the very childhood I sensed that There, Above, (for some reason I immediately mentally called His Ra), there is a Living, Loving Being that has clearly put an arm or some other part of its body to my birth; Always protects me and helps me Live! This time, apparently, It arranged for me another, somewhat exotic "communication check". It's an amazing fact, but on November 16, 2010, I read on the Internet a message from NASA scientists that they were able to open the youngest "black hole" in our universe using X-ray telescopes. With the help of these telescopes, it was possible to "detect" the birth of this "black hole" only 30 years after the explosion of the supernova. Having made some simple calculations in my mind, I came to the conclusion that on this day on November 16 30 years ago I made a big "black" hole in our family carpet that is still hanging in my children's daughters' room and has long become a family legend ". Well, now it's time to talk about music and the place that she occupied and occupies in my life. Since my childhood with music, I have, frankly speaking, formed a complex and very contradictory relationship. My mother, the teacher herself in a children's music school in piano class, tried to send me to her school at the age of seven. From the very beginning, this attempt was doomed to failure. From the very first moments I hated the school, the initial lessons of solfeggio, which were led by a bearded young man, from whom was blatantly bluish and an obvious complex of male inferiority. The tasks he gave us on a musical score were evaluated on a six-point scale, with two grades: one for correct writing of notes, a violin key and signs of alteration; Another - for "calligraphy", i.e. Accuracy and elegance of the task. The highest score "6/6" according to the established "blue" tradition was rewarded with loud applause of the whole group, consisting mainly of girls.

Since I was retrained "left-handed", I was particularly hard at giving small marks and musical symbols; However, as well as uppercase letters and numbers. On the musical camp, huge freaks in the form of a curved violin key danced and lived their strange life; Strongly crumpled, as if with a hangover, "notes" that did not fit on two or even three lines of musical staff. It is clear that my stable estimates because of this quite rightly varied in the range of "2-3", so I did not threaten to hear applause in my address in the foreseeable future. But my envious nature every time desperately rebelled when we clapped the next happy girl who received the cherished "6/6". But the cup of my patience was overflowing, when my esteemed competitor and my contemporary Kostya, the son of my mother's friend Lyudmila Konovalova, who worked as a teacher at the same school, was awarded the highest rating. I frankly "hit" my mother, after which she elegant calligraphic handwriting, while trying not to "overdo it", she painted for me another task of the teacher.

By the way, already being in Karaganda, my mother, talented in everything, obviously overdid, performing for me my homework on drawing for the 7th grade. She "drew" to the point that I, who can not properly represent the right circle on paper, were nominated for an international competition for young artists of Asia. And now just imagine just for a moment what a great intellectual resourcefulness and resourcefulness at the age of 14 was required to fight back from participating in this ill-fated competition, and then another year to fool a poor drawing teacher who seriously believed in my outstanding talent as a painter!

It's clear that the woman's handwriting was too obvious to belong to me, and one very correct girl with a voice full of indignation said: "He did not draw this himself!" The teacher looked at me with obvious condemnation and said: "My friends , Let's pat Serezha! "- but none of the class, in protest, naturally, did not clap. It was quite a sensitive blow to my vanity, and every time after this incident I raped myself, going to these lessons of the initial solfeggio.

Finally, to my great relief, two weeks of this torture ended, and my mother identified me in the specialty classes for the best teacher in Barnaul in the class of "piano". But here again I was in for another embarrassment. I do not know, maybe this woman was a wonderful teacher (unfortunately, I did not have time to appreciate it), but the fact that she suffered a very severe strabismus is a fact, immutable and "reinforced", like the construction of a sarcophagus at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. For my subtle nature, the fate of this teacher was finally solved and irrevocably in the first lesson. I decided to feign illness. "Serezha, the musical style consists of 7 notes: before, re, mi, fa, salt, la, si", explained the unhappy teacher, stubbornly looking past me sideways. "And here beans, lentils and other legumes?" - I thought evil and decided to cry. "What's wrong with you, Seryozha?" The teacher seriously took fright. "My head hurts, I want to see my mother!" - I whimpered, and she ran in panic after mother to the next class. My evacuation from the lesson was, as they say, "without noise and dust," and more I never showed up at this school. Discouraged teacher for a whole year was interested in my mother, when I still come to the next lesson, my mother explained something inaudible to her, but time went on, everything was quietly forgotten, and soon I became absolutely free from nasty lessons and all obligations On learning music. Only after decades I realized that Ra deliberately took me away from the routine of academic music education, developing the natural talent of an improviser. In the meantime, I sincerely and carefree enjoyed the music, listening to vinyl records on our old Rigonde, like a bee, saturated with the nectar of the Italian Capriccio, Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, under which we with the woman Sasha (the elderly mother of his father, who he brought to Barnaul from the Moscow region ) Arranged a "simultaneous crying" session. Then the heartbreaking, whiny "Capriccio" was replaced by the first Soviet musical of Gennady Gladkov "The Bremen Town Musicians", two plates of which for a long time in 1971 his father got it. This life-affirming music was then broadcast from every apartment house in Barnaul, and the song of the Bremen musicians "Nothing is better in the world" was a real hit of the season.

I was absolutely not burdened by the fact that when I'm a mom-teacher I do not know how to play the piano, but when my neighbors' grandmothers put this in a perfectly legal reproach, I felt very ashamed; In a fit of feelings I "pressed" on my mother, she unfolded notes, and we proceeded to exercises and sketches, but here, at home, I was missing for a maximum of one month, and then again I abandoned my studies for many years with music. Mom could not find the best method of my piano teaching, as I was extremely unsure and, in addition, quickly tired of the instrument. One Ra knew how to entice and interest my irrepressible "twin" nature (on a horoscope I am a classic Gemini). "Scherche la lama" - as the French say in such cases, which means: "Look for a woman!". And Ra found for me such a "woman". She was a black-haired pretty girl with blue eyes from my class, Lena Mitereva, surprisingly similar to my first love to Elena Epifanova; Besides, by chance it is or not, but just like her, she studied at the music school in accordion class.

As Lewis Carroll wrote in her Alice in Wonderland, there is always a "lot of confusion" around a beautiful girl. So it was in our class. It turned out that Lena Mitereva had at least 4 secret "admirers": Igor Kupriyanov, Misha Petrov, Seryozha Novikov, well, I, your humble servant! And it all started with a banal boyish rally. One day in grade 5, at the beginning of the lesson, I, as usual, climbed behind the textbook in my satchel, when suddenly a note dropped out. I lifted her from the floor and with surprise read: "Sergei, I love you! Let's meet after the lessons. Lena Mithereva. " The color of rabies rushed to my face - I, for some reason, immediately thought of Vadik Makarov, a hooligan boy with whom he had been sitting for one year at one desk. Our class teacher, Elsa Grigorievna Rain, had such a peculiar tactic for seating the students in the classroom: the hoodlum was always seated next to the "right", from her point of view, boy. Vadim Makarov, a native of the hereditary "zek", lived in Karaganda village Unsha, one name that terrified the then-kids. There were always a lot of settlements like Unsha in the USSR, as, indeed, now in Russia: this is the village of Queta near Barnaul, and the village of Chesnokovka near Novoaltaysk, and many other "green" places in the vastness of our vast homeland. They were united by the fact that in such settlements the criminals and their marginal families, who had been "abandoned" after serving their sentences, lived predominantly. Apparently, wishing for Vadik other than their Destiny, his parents gave him to the people's circus, then working on a voluntary basis in the Palace of Miners. Strangely enough, Makarov really liked this study and work in the circus, he became an excellent acrobat and always at school physical education classes, at the numerous requests of boys, surprised us with elegant flips and other acrobatic exercises. However, the genes did take their toll, and criminal tendencies, no yes no, from time to time showed themselves. Vadik was an "honest kleptomaniac" - there was no bagatelle, by which he could safely pass without pocketing. The logical result of this "god-forgiving" activity was Makarov's statement in the children's room of the police, which, incidentally, he was always very proud of. Naturally, the shadow of my suspicion immediately fell on this "charismatic" person closest to me. In indignation, I slipped the note into his face, and even then struck him painfully in the shoulder with his bony fist. "Voronin, what do you allow yourself at the lesson?" - angrily screamed Elsa Grigorevna, for which my actions on the first row, of course, did not go unnoticed. Makarov, in bewilderment, picked up the crumpled note, skimmed it over and whinnied like a horse. At the same time, he slyly looked at Lena Mitherev, who was sitting behind, with a flirtatious wink, "I'm aware of your secret." Then, many years ago, in a fit of anger, I did not even have time to figure out that the handwriting was not Vadik in the note. But it was too late - the flywheel of the "public scandal" was spinning. The note went along the rows, causing Homeric laughter from the "leaders" of the class - Vitya Chernysheva and Boris Arsenyev; Well, then, as usual, the "chain reaction" went on - soon the whole class was already aware of this incident. Even now, decades later, I do not know for sure who was, after all, the author of this scandalous note, but the obvious resentment for me of Lena Mitereva and her condemning gaze, which occasionally afterwards I caught on myself for a long time , More and more often make me think about the fact that it was this "unknown" author! In general, I "lopuhnulsya" with a beautiful sex once again.

However, the whole story with the note aroused the genuine interest of the male half of our class to the brave girl - "emancipse", and for four youngsters became a kind of detonator of a powerful "hormonal explosion" that drew them, as the well-known glamorous pimp, Petya Listerman, would say The last and decisive battle for "shaggy gold." In this "quartet of courageous", as usual, leaders were immediately outlined (Sergei Novikov) and outspoken "outsiders" (Igor Kupriyanov). And even then, Igor did not have the slightest chance of winning in this frenzied "obstacle race". It was an ugly young man with a pock-marked face; As he himself put it, the son of simple "menes" (junior research associates in the laboratory of the metallurgical plant in Temirtau), constantly complaining about the poverty and everyday problems of his large family. In addition, Kupriyanov's socks exuded such an "ambre" that only added additional unpleasant strokes to his already unattractive image. By the way, the latter circumstance played a fatal role in the fact that Igor could not get accustomed to our VIA (vocal-instrumental ensemble), where he longed to be a guitarist - we were able to withstand just one rehearsal his unique "ambre".

It was truly brilliant and at the same time adventurous idea of ​​Sergei Novikov - to create an ensemble with people, practically (except for my meager piano skills) not able to play musical instruments, to perform with the ensemble at a school evening, make a splash and conquer, finally , The heart of the young beauty Lena Metereva. The backbone of this musical "gang", as usual, was I (keyboards), Sergei Novikov (bass guitar) and Misha Petrov (drums). But these "brand" musical instruments, of course, deserve a separate story.

With great difficulty I managed to "untwist" my mother on a miniature keyboard instrument "Faemi", from which only for 70 rubles of magic sounds, of course, did not have to wait, but when I put it on a stool under our family piano "Petrof" and tried With all the foolish clatter on the two keyboards at the same time, the view was just as good (at least then it seemed to me so) than the best organist of the world, John the Lord. Sergei in the "folding", we acquired the last squeak of the then fashion - pickup and timbre - a block for the guitar. Removing superfluous strings on the usual Soviet "wooden", with the help of a timbre - block we managed to achieve the sound of an almost real bass guitar. Pope Novikova is a national craftsman, having conjured with a soldering iron over an old bus loudspeaker, according to our flaming order and to "joy" my neighbors in the house from the bottom "piled" us a miracle - an amplifier of 10 watts, equipped with a similar mixer console with inputs for several instruments and Sound speakers. But with the drums there were unforeseen problems. It turned out that this, in general, the most necessary tool in the variety ensemble, is also the most expensive one. Entering the store of musical instruments, we were shocked at the cost of Amati shock equipment - two and a half thousand rubles with an average salary of an engineer of that time of 120 rubles. It is clear that there could be no question of buying an installation or even something remotely resembling it. The solution to the problem came, as always, unexpectedly. One day I was caught in the corridor by the recess of our school's Komsomol - the ugly 30-year-old German Isolda, who asked me to help her remove all unnecessary trash from the pioneer room. As soon as I crossed the threshold of this room, I realized that Luck itself was hurrying to our hands - it turned out that we had to write off a dozen of the pioneer drums, from which it was quite possible to choose worthy and more or less whole copies. After the lessons, Misha and I carried all this "treasure" to our main musical base - to my apartment, where I carefully selected the most suitable drums in tone, timbre and coloring. After Borya Morozov donated an old can of white enamel from his garage with a "lordly shoulder" from his garage (though, at one of the last rehearsals, this exclusive jar exploded under the pressure of the accumulated gases, pouring on Mishani's face and clothes with paint, So he looked very pale), which produced such a marvelous sound that it became Misha's most favorite percussion instrument in his probably exotic percussion band in the world, the process of manning the drum set could be considered complete. 

And finally, in one of the autumn days of 1979, all this splendor burst into all its "natural" power, "stretching" after a long sound "abstinence", Niagara Falls suddenly collapsing on the "happy" tenants of my house (good, father in it Time already served in Khabarovsk, and my mother worked almost daily until 22 hours). Soon after the tsunami began, a frightened neighbor from the bottom of the house, twenty-year-old pretty Lusya Frolov, came running to me, but the "old" seducer Seryozha Novikov quickly enchanted her and calmed him, promising that torture "music box" would last only once a week and not More than 4 hours. On that and decided, and Luce in the course of time even liked listening to our rehearsals. But now the most important thing was to come up with a name for our group. The "old" hooligan and inventor Sergei Novikov offered an outrageous, in the Western manner, the screaming title of "Mоdis Liplis", which in translation from the Tabarar language meant "Moody stuck together". It is well known that "as a ship you will call, so the ship will sail." To sail into the history of world rock music by "sticking mud", of course, was not very desirable, so we came up with another, more academic, although slightly napthalline-tied "Passage". If only we knew then, what kind of future our musical "gang" was predicted by this name! Indeed, the "passage", and even what, did not take long to wait.

Once our informal team leader, as they would say now, the creative director of the art group "Passage" Sergei Novikov came up with the brilliant idea - to perform at a school party, a concert timed to a meeting of graduates of the 8th grade. The fact is that in the ninth grade, we with Misha Petrov and three other boys, practically, remained in "proud" solitude among the girls of the 9th grade: the majority of the guys went to vocational schools and technical schools, Novikov and Kupriyanov were transferred to the elite school №3 with Physico-mathematical bias, and Lena Mitereva and another girl Larissa Migranova - in the Karaganda musical school. Teachers of our school decided to arrange a meeting of alumni "a la nostalgia", which was planned to invite a musical team from our sponsor organization "Autopark No. 9" "Songs of the Far-Shoulder", which Novikov, in his characteristic Bernese manner, immediately dubbed "Song Dolbo ... Ba ". We decided to use this circumstance. The chefs had equipment that was excellent for that time, in which we could show our "uncommon" talent and "outstanding" musical abilities in full blaze. And in order to give this event a greater importance and officiality, Seryozha decided before the beginning of the speech to address a fiery speech to our former classmates and devote this "epoch-making" speech to them. On the advice of the collective, from our, quite frankly speaking, quite small repertoire, we selected only two suitable works: the famous song of the rock group "Animals" "House of the Rising Sun", the Russian text for which was written by Novikov, and the instrumental play of the French group "Space "From the 1978 album. The evening was held on Friday October 13, 1980 - I will remember this "Friday the 13th" for the rest of my life! From the very beginning, things did not go very well for us.

First, according to a strange tradition in Kazakhstan, all boys of pre-conscription age in the tenth grade of the military enlistment office forced them to shave in those years. As a result, Misha Petrov and I, with our bare skulls on the eve of this sacred evening, looked like some kind of humanoids or Hare Krishnas waiting for the arrival of the long-awaited God of Krishna, which, of course, did not add any attraction to our still very young musical image. But this fate successfully escaped Sergei Novikov, since his elite physics and mathematics school did not allow the military commissariat to produce such executions over his expensive pets.

Secondly, on the day of his speech, Serezha caught a severe cold, having earned a sore throat and completely lost his voice. He ran into my house in a panic in the morning and screeched in a nasty voice: "Seryoga, do you have eucalyptus?" Mom was still at home and gave him a gum solution for eucalyptus. "You know that we have one more" bummer "- Misha went to hockey competitions today, - struck me one more blow" below the belt "Seryozha .- So we, with the same, remained without the drums!" "Serge, it all comes down to canceling the speech," I summed up grimly the current state of affairs. "That's really shit, we'll still perform, we can not lose that chance to be heard. Moreover, yesterday I called Lena Mitereva and invited her and Larisa Migranova to our performance! "Well, now there was nowhere to retreat. Taking into account the current situation, we decided to play "Space", and the drummer from the chef's team would ask us to accompany us on the drums.

With a heavy heart, like Golgotha, we walked with Serge in a stuffy, crowded gymnasium of the 47th school in which, in a few minutes, one of two things must happen: either world glory befallen us, or we'll be showered with rotten eggs, or else They will also give from the pure soul to the neck for arrogance. Seeing Lena Mitherev standing near the window with Larisa Migranova, we approached to say hello, after which Seryozha solemnly declared: "Soon we will play with the Count!" Lena looked at me with genuine interest. It was obvious unconcealed female curiosity, and in the blue eyes of the young prelestress the almost professional challenge was read: "Well, well, let's see what you, laps are capable of!" "Truckers" worked five or six songs under the approving roar of the crowd, wriggling a huge snake in the dance "Neck" - the forerunner of modern "hip-hop", when we ventured to approach the musicians and invited them to take a coffee break, giving us the tools. I went up to the red long-haired drummer and asked:

- You could not play the first song of the 1978 band "Space", or else the drummer got sick!

- Yes, it's not a question. Of course, I can! We also play this song. Do you have it in A-minor?

- Yes!

- Well, that's great! We will play. We took places according to the "combat calculation": I, respectively, for the two-row German body "Vermona"; Serezha - with a deathly pale face and a huge bass guitar on his shoulder behind the microphone stand. Yes, frankly, it was why it was pale. We saw professional tools of such a high class for the first time in our life! Even if I have the kind of body that has, in general, the same keyboard as my favorite Petrof, caused a quiet panic in the soul by the only kind of toggle switches and registers, what should we talk about Serezha, who is the first time in his life Picked up a bass guitar, the giant neck of which was almost 1.5 times longer than his "wooden" with a pickup. "I immediately realized that I will not play on it; I just did not know where and what notes to take on these huge frets! "- Novikov later told me, but I did not know that and started as a right musician, to play the introduction to the play in good faith, trying not to notice the huge crowd, curiously moving Practically close to me and my instrument. As I bowed my head above the organ, the view was absolutely surreal - the crowd could only see my bare skull and the keys that ran along the keys. The sound from the organ was absolutely squeaky and very quiet, which was also repeatedly reflected from the walls of the acoustically unsuitable sports hall, but I could no longer switch registers, since my hands were busy; Besides, I was afraid that as a result of my manipulations on an unfamiliar instrument, the picture with sound could become even worse. The second bar of my introduction was coming to an end, I was already on the third circle, and the promised sound support of the "virtuoso" bass guitar and drummer was not there. I threw a quick glance over Novikov's shoulder, who in confusion twisted and flipped the bass guitar tumblers, pretending that he was trying to make the sound louder. The drummer sat unperturbably behind the drum set and, judging by his detached mind, was not going to play along. "We do not play like that!" - he shouted to me through the increasing rumble of the crowd.

At such critical moments in my life, from somewhere deep in my soul, boiling lava raises anger at myself and the whole world, which makes me suddenly gather, completely blocks fear, makes me angry and stubborn. As if nothing had happened, as if experiencing the patience of the crowd, I began to play a very long and rather monotonous part of the "Space". In minutes, two of my "passages" the crowd began to lose patience: "Hey, you bald dick! We ... from there on x .., and then right now we're piling so that my mother does not mourn! "I, as if nothing had happened, continued to play coolly, and the crowd of such unheard-of audacity fell into some strange numbness and Suddenly quieted down - I think it was unlikely she was so fascinated by "marvelous" sounds, quietly flowing in the stale air of the sports hall from under my fingers wet with excitement! The respectable audience was simply stunned by such unprecedented impudence of a bald-headed dude! The last measures I finished in absolute grave silence, which did not bode well. Finally, I finished this long-suffering play, and we, as in a dream, descended from Serezha from the stage; The crowd at the same time quietly parted and menacingly let us through the system, to the exit from the hall. As we passed Lena and Larisa, I caught their frankly compassionate glances, and my ear caught scraps of a girl's conversation:

 What kind of play was it?

 Yes, in my opinion, something from the repertoire of "Space".

Coming out of the stuffy hall to the dank autumn street and having experienced a great deal of relief, Sergei and I sincerely rejoiced that they did not begin to devote their "enchanting show" to the graduates of the 8th "A" class. Then, in the schoolyard, in the midst of the fallen leaves, under the cold autumn rain, two comrades ardently vowed each other to remember forever this damned "Friday, the 13th!" Yes, we had to drink this bitter cup of defeat to the full, and, nevertheless, I am grateful to Ra for this my first "baptism of fire". How can you not remember the great prophet Zarathushtra: "Everything that did not kill us today, tomorrow will do more!"

However, this incident made us fundamentally reconsider our attitude to music.

First, we decided to completely abandon public speaking. It became absolutely clear that it was impossible to play well on foreign, completely unfamiliar instruments, but I did not want to play badly.

Secondly, we decided to work on recording to fix and save for ourselves and "grateful descendants" all our musical exercises. Thirdly, we took a rather bold decision to record only "large formats" - large genre works such as rock operas or musicals. I must say that 1980 was very interesting in terms of musical discoveries. Just this year, because of the Iron Curtain, finally, the cult opera of Andrew Lloyd Webber, "Jesus Christ the Superstar", broke out of England in the USSR from us in 1970. Under the clear impression of this brilliant musical work, Alexei Rybnikov wrote his first rock opera "The Star and Death of Joaquin Murietta" in 1980 about the fate of the famous Chilean bandit, which was successfully staged by director Mark Zakharov in the Lenin Komsomol Theater - Lenkom. And, finally, in the same year, the iconic English band Pink Floyd, playing the famous psychedelic rock, hit the world with its most powerful epochal work - the album "The Wall", in which, in an absolutely surrealistic light that turns the "Wall" into almost The biblical parable, in front of the enchanted listener there is a horrifying panorama of the life of a modern Man, horrified by his hopelessness.

Surprisingly, in only six months, after listening to the stupidity of all this brilliant music, we managed to write two major musical "canvases" - a musical "The Happy Life of the Golden Klondike" based on works by Jack London and the rock opera "Jimmy the schizophrenic "- the piercing story of an American teacher - a hippie who accidentally killed a policeman and was executed in an electric chair, written under the sheer impression of Pinkfloed's" Wall "and" American tragedy "by Theodore Dreiser (genius described in Oman fate Clyde Griffiths executed electrocuted). Of course, most of the musical material was borrowed from famous rock operas, but there were also original findings, for which I am still not ashamed. I, for one, am very proud of my finale in "The Happy Life of the Golden Klondike" - in fact until this moment I have never been very fond of poetry and much more writing:

"Yes, that Klondike showed us his predatory grin,

His face is ugly like death.

Here a person loses the meaning of life,

Is he a crown of nature? No!

 

He is a slave of his desires and aspirations,

He is lost here in the dusk of nights,

Here begins his fall

In a world where the light of rays does not penetrate!

 

In a world where indifference reigns,

Where a man is at the mercy of yellow sand,

Where the thirst for gold incinerate souls,

In a world where there is a mortal struggle between good and evil! " After these words of the author, full of existential meaning, followed by a piercing, soul-taking requiem, the main theme of which I use after 30 years in my later rock opera "Spetsnaz: The Story of My Contemporary".

The last six months before graduation we worked as possessed, afraid not to have time to finish "Jimmy the schizophrenic". Especially surprised and at the same time pleased Mishan - he, with great difficulty finding time in his hard sports schedule, as a routine, went to all rehearsals, mastered his unique drum set and sometimes gave out such "tasty", intricate syncopes and virtuosic rhythmic drifts, Which he himself could not repeat in just a couple of minutes. Now, to save time on the road, Misha always came to me with a huge bunch of hockey equipment, which caused admiration and curiosity (then hockey was in special honor among the people) of all the children of our house. All the musical parts and scenes of the rock opera we recorded on my quite good for that time reel tape recorder "Saturn -201", and in order not to take precious rehearsal time, in the absence of the guys, I tried, by trial and error, to find in the room the optimal, From the point of view of acoustics, sector, where it was necessary to put microphones.

We worked like catechesis, with a fanatical gleam in our eyes, until June 1981 - my last summer in my beloved Karaganda. Suitable time for final exams was appropriate and it was necessary to finish urgently with music. Finally, "Jimmy the schizophrenic" was completely recorded, but we lacked a "grateful" listener to appreciate the merits of our titanic work. Soon a solution to this problem was found - we decided to put the speakers on the balcony and arrange, thus, our first public appearance in the courtyard of my house. So we did, and while doing so, having descended incognito down the street, from a secluded place, we began to observe with interest the reaction of the improvised auditorium to our debut. t was a beautiful June afternoon, the street was full of the people who were muffled by the heat, so the time for demonstrating the audio was chosen at the right time. And our "Jimmy the schizophrenic" burst into the whole Universe. The rock opera started very effectively - with the heartbreaking cry of Sergei Novikov: "Killed!" - and immediately, "off the bat", very dynamic, as in Chase's detectives, unfolding an exciting, almost detective story about the fate of the unfortunate hippy, who finally Was entangled in his search for the meaning of life and found peace only in the electric chair. Music produced in the courtyard the effect of a bomb exploding. A few minutes after the recording ended, there was a grave silence in the courtyard, and then the tenants of the house, among whom were young women with children and numerous teenagers, began to discuss loudly what had been heard, trying to understand that, after all, they were so interesting and At the same time a very strange thing was shown. As far as we could judge from scraps of phrases that came to us, none of them even had the thought that it was made in the artisanal conditions of an ordinary apartment, and their own houses. They all came to the same conclusion that they were shown some new production of a radio play on an American story, in which, of course, professional artists played. I confess that this gave us a lot of pleasant moments then. Then I suddenly clearly understood what, after all, this is a contagious thing - "star" disease! When our music sounded on the air, we looked sadly at each other, suddenly realizing that not only our joint creative life ended at this premiere show of the rock opera, but also a happy, carefree childhood.

Finally, the long-awaited summer of 1981 came, and with it the hot, well, just very hot time of graduation examinations. Here, I believe, it's time to say a few warm words about my dear and ardently beloved teachers of the 47th school, which I, truly, owe everything I have in this life!

The teacher of mathematics Vera Gavrilovna Krasnov (to my great regret I recently found out that she was dead) taught mathematics in my class from grades 5 to 10. She lived with her husband and adopted daughter in the neighboring porch of our house. It was a very affable, tall, slender woman with the kind face of Saint Matrona of Moscow and a very friendly attitude to people. Quite recently, in 2008, in Moscow, I learned from my mother Sergey Novikov Tamara Semenovna that Vera Gavrilovna always loved me almost with maternal love. I, of course, felt this and understood that it was not for nothing that this wonderful woman for five years did not call me to the mathematics board, taking care of my mental health, and at the end of the 10th grade I did everything so that I had a "good" algebra in the certificate And geometry instead of a legitimate "triple". The matter is that since childhood absolutely exact sciences have not been given me, and Vera Gavrilovna, of course, immediately understood this. And the wisdom of this woman consisted in the fact that she calmly accepted this fact, not arranging a scene of jealousy for her subject, as the young physicist constantly did, believing that I was ignoring her subject, giving preference to other academic disciplines. The problem was also that I always shone in all the subjects of the humanitarian cycle, which, of course, gave me some reason to think so. But no (now I can say it at the top of my voice), this woman was deeply mistaken - I was hopelessly stupid for the natural sciences, and when it came to trigonometry, in general turned into an idiotic soldier Svejk. Already Sergei Novikov, a born teacher, hastily promised to my mother, tried to do something in this direction, especially on the eve of the final exams, but he hopelessly waved his hand with the words: "Well, you, my friend, and the dumbass!" Of course, wise Vera Gavrilovna, the Kingdom of Heaven, did the very best that was possible in this situation, protecting me from public appearances and demonstrating my "extraordinary" mathematical abilities, but at the same time she turned me into a hostage to the situation - it cost her only To abolish and change to the teacher, as the journal in my graph on algebra and geometry instantly began to dazzle with "deuces". So there was no question of moving our family to another city before graduation - I really risked to remain in the new school without a certificate of secondary education. The second, dear to me, the person I want to talk about is Elza Grigorievna Rain, our class teacher, teacher of the Russian language and literature, who has been unchanged for a long and happy 6 years. Elsa Grigorevna was a purebred German, who was resettled in Kazakhstan from the Volga region during the Great Patriotic War. Our daughter Lilya also studied in our class - elegant, like a porcelain doll, always neat, in a snow-white apron, with a constant blush on the plump cheeks. The nature of the mother, and her daughter was God grant to everyone! They were very friendly, sincerely friendly to people, nice women, always ready to help everyone and everything. From the very beginning, Elsa Grigoryevna and I had mutual sympathy, which over the years only grew stronger and grew into almost a kindred affection. Elsa Grigorevna was an excellent teacher: for every lesson she, in German pedantically, very carefully prepared, each time coming up with something something to interest us. In my memory, such a remarkable lesson on literature in the 6th grade was cut. Elza Grigorievna with great feeling told us about the most amazing in the World History of Art icon Andrei Rublev "Holy Trinity". "Guys, look, this is amazing! The whole icon abounds in animals, and in fact the Byzantine school of iconography, to which Andrei Rublev belonged, was categorically forbidden to draw animals. You see, above the third Angel on the right is depicted a lizard, as if clinging to a rock, in it we see a bear with a raised muzzle, and in a bear - a howling dog. What Andrei Rublev meant to say is that none of the experts in the field of iconography can answer this question. In the lower left part of the icon, look - right on the frame, you can see the handle of a saber or dagger, and under it - the face of an unknown man. At the bottom of the icon, in the green platform on which the Angels sit, the ocean clearly looks out, from which outlandish fish look and miniature boats sail. Here's a strange, mysterious icon, guys! I think that the three angels depicted on the icon "Holy Trinity" are aliens who flew to Earth from the Cosmos. Look, the haloes around their heads are very similar to the helmets of astronauts, and in their hands - ray weapons! "As enchanted we peered at what seemed to be so familiar and, it turns out, a completely unfamiliar icon, marveling that we had not noticed all these intriguing Details. After many decades, Ra will make me remember this sacred lesson of Elsa Grigorievna and seriously, in all the rules of science, to study the "Holy Trinity".

It is clear that with such wonderful teachers at the final examinations in mathematics and the Russian language, you could not particularly worry. And so it happened - Vera Gavrilovna started the finished solution of the problem in the rows, and Elsa Grigorevna in her composition autographically placed the missing punctuation marks. But with the exam in physics came a complete "bummer"!

On the eve of the physics exam, I decided to relax and, despite a warning on the radio about high solar radiation (in Karaganda there was constantly monitoring the ultraviolet associated with the activities of Baikonur), went to sunbathe the lake in the city park. The result of this adventure did not take long to come-I received a very palpable dose of solar radiation with symptoms typical of her, so that the next morning I hardly managed to get up and, like a zombie, sadly wandered to the ill-fated exam.

Truly, the "starry" hour of the physic has arrived. She did not enter into the state of my, frankly, much shaky health (too much was her antipathy towards me) and decided to finally "break away" in full. As I remember now, I got on the ticket the principle of the generator. And after all, like, I was teaching, but in my sick head now felt an absolute "Torricelli emptiness". In general, my answer at the exam was very reminiscent of the well-known anecdotal situation, when the teacher asks the student: "How does the generator work?" "Uh-uh!" - buzzed the resourceful student. "All right, you can go, you're free!" The physicist said gloomily. "Is this" deuce" (2)?" I asked indifferently. "Well, why did you say the first question of the ticket for the" three" (3)?" I left the audience and, completely lost, wandered home. Strange, but the "troika" (3) in physics in the certificate did not upset me at all, there was only a slight annoyance at myself - after all, I taught this damn physics in the "sweat of my face", and the result still exceeded all my expectations! When I got home, I collapsed, as if it had been knocked down, on the bed and briefly forgot a painful dream. I woke up from the fact that the apartment doorbell rang. I opened the door - Lilya Rain stood on the threshold. "Seryozha, my mother sent for you, so you went to retake physics, you are already waiting!" - she said. Elsa Grigorievna, as always, again acted as my Savior and with great difficulty agreed with the physicist about the retake of my ill-fated "troika" (3). As she did not frown, she did not puff in displeasure, but still this obstinate woman did not dare to go against the teachers' team (Voronin will leave, and she still has to work and work there) and was forced to put me this exhausted "four" (4).

The day of our separation was approaching, as Novikov liked to say, "a trio of bandura players from the city of Odessa." I already had a ticket for the plane to Barnaul exactly the day after the prom. Our last school evening was held in a quiet, almost family atmosphere, with the parents of graduates, champagne and dancing until the morning, a night walk "a la nostalgia" with classmates and Elsa Grigorievna in the Botanical Garden. My mother could not come for the evening, because at this time, together with his former colleagues, my father was engaged in moving from our posh two-bedroom apartment to a two-room "Khrushchev" on Diesel Street near the station. This unequal exchange mom started in order to somehow save the Karaganda apartment for the family. The fact is that the main reason for the transfer of his father to a new duty station in Khabarovsk was his very serious interpersonal conflict with the chief of the Karaganda school of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR, General Besenov, a rare tyrant and "maramoy" (that is, a marasmus in prison jargon), although the deceased And do not say bad. Besenov, to somehow annoy Voronin - the eldest, gave a command to his "six" to take away from his family a three-room apartment, once provided to us by this famous police institution in Karaganda. But the idea was not successful: and even then say that the well-known Kazakh sluggishness and natural dullness of the nomads of Polish passionarity and my mother's ingenious ingenuity can oppose everything! She very quickly agreed with her colleagues - musicians who with great pleasure gave us their "half-burglary" "Khrushchev", operatively, until we changed our minds, having entered our luxurious apartments. The only problem was that when I left for the graduation party, I did not specify the address of our new apartment on Diesel Street with my mother. For more than two hours, thoroughly tired after a night vigil, I wandered like a shadow near the station, finally getting lost in the gray five-story buildings, until finally I happened to see my mother taking out the garbage from our new home. Going into the "killed" "bohemian" tenants "kopeck piece", thoroughly soaked with foreign smells, I immediately went to bed and slept through a deep sleep until the evening. The next morning, Sergei Novikov and Misha Petrov came to the airport to see me off. Here, our roads completely disagreed - I went to enter the Altai State University in Barnaul, Serezha - to the Moscow Power Engineering Institute, and only Misha stayed in Karaganda, deciding to enter the local polytechnic institute. Tu-154 with me on board was dispersed on the runway, heavily pulled away from the ground and, making a farewell circle over the city, a silvery cloud disappeared in the ultramarine sky. Friends for some time gazing intently into the horizon, as if trying to catch the disappearing phantom plane, and then suddenly with sadness and aching longing looked at each other - in the eyes of both guys there were tears. After all, and the hedgehog is understandable - who wants to forever part with a cloudless childhood and change the quiet, cozy harbor to the open, raging Ocean, in which if you can find peace, it is probably only at the bottom! Then involuntarily you will reflect - how, all the same, it is good to be a submarine!

 

                             

                             Youth

"Why did you give in to this juridical - the Faculty of the Faculty! Whether it's a medical institute, "Lena, a Polish grandmother on the maternal line, urged me passionately. - Imagine, you - a young, talented therapist, and you come to the medical examination pretty girl with a beautiful chest! It's not work, it's a song, an eternal holiday of the soul for a young man! "Baba Lena knew very well which strings of my passionate nature can be played best. "Can it be better then a gynecologist?" - I continued the theme of eroticism in the professional activities of a doctor. "No way, because this is a natural" zagrebilovka "men in a sexual relationship. I tell you this from the experience of my colleagues and doctors, "my grandmother strongly objected. The fact is that she spent her entire adult life as a surgeon, and in an ambulance, which is actually the same as the work of a military surgeon in the front line, only in peacetime. This entertaining conversation took place on July 2, 1981 in the apartment of my grandfather and grandmother on my mother's line, which for a while turned into a base for the preparation of the future student of the Altai State University. It was exactly a week ago that I left Karaganda and flew to Barnaul, my hometown, and all the time my grandmother urged me to go to the medical institute day after day to continue the dynasty of doctors. And after all, she practically persuaded me! I was stopped only by the fact that I had to take physics and chemistry to the medical institute, with which I had, frankly speaking, very complicated relations with my child. In addition, it was a pity, painfully sorry for the titanic work of my parents, who from the eighth grade purposefully prepared me for admission to the Faculty of Law - Dad, respectively, engaged with me in the History of the Fatherland; Mother, the philologist herself by education, the Russian language and literature. In general, with all these soul-saving conversations, my whole mind went to the "Nagaska" - I turned into a solid lump of "torment and doubt." Fortunately, my father came to Barnaul, insure me on admission, and everything fell into place - on the family council it was decided, to the great chagrin of my grandmother, to continue the dynasty of lawyers.

And the "hot" time for preparing for the exams began. I was shut up along with the textbooks in the grandmother's room, from which I went out only for want and for food, and I began, from day to day, intensively "gnawing the granite of science." Soon I could easily "flash" on any issue of military history, and illustrate my answer on the card with a map - a scheme of military operations in world-class battles, and confidently quote them with a capacious quote from the works of the classics of Marxism-Leninism. Even better things were in literature. I learned such a volume of poems that when in the examination of literature and the Russian language I had a question about the work of Fedor Tyutchev, the examiner simply "caught my eye on my forehead" in surprise - I not only cheerfully recited a whole cascade of poetry of this great poet, but also made Their detailed philological analysis, which could be envied by Mr. Belinsky, himself Vissarion Grigorievich. "Well done, Voronin, I put you" excellent! "- exclaimed the examiner, who, as it later turned out, was Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Doctor of Philology Vera Anatolievna Pishchalnikova - the largest in Russia and Europe specialist in psycholinguistics. We would probably be surprised then if we found out that in 2001 Vera Anatolyevna would work (admittedly, a full-time employee) under my supervision at the Criminal Procedure Department of the Barnaul Law Institute of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia.

I had some difficulties in the entrance exam in English. The fact is that the entire 10th grade foreign language teacher in Karaganda was ill, so I thoroughly forgot English, which, by the way, was very good at 8th and 9th grades. It was necessary, once again, to connect my "peacock" to become - I boasted in completely wild English with an unknown "Altai" dialect, so that two charming young examiners laughed affectionately, listening to my frank delirium, and, apparently, pitying me, All the same, put "excellent".

In the final of the entrance exams, I approached with a very good result, scoring 22, 5 points. However, already during the exams, the "passing" point for applicants who did not serve the army rose to 23 units, and I was catastrophically short of the coveted 0, 5 points for entering the university. For such "problematic" children, the dean of the Faculty of Law Valentina Platonovna Kolesova arranged a personal interview with a view to getting to know more about future students. I had to "fluff the peacock's tail" again, remembering the unforgettable "Jimmy the schizophrenic"; A little bit, just a little bit, for a brightening blezer, while at the same time, promising to make a real breakthrough in the amateur art of the faculty in the case of my admission.

My great portfolio, definitely, had an effect, and here we together with the father almost faint with joy, finding our name on the coveted list of enrolled applicants. In honor of such a case, my father took me to the restaurant "Central", near the main building of the university, and I, for the first time in my life, grown up drinking vodka with my father, sitting in a posh restaurant and getting something new for me, hitherto Untested, "zhlobskoe" pleasure from lackey servility of the waiter.

The next day my grandmother made a festive family banquet in honor of my admission to the university. God, how I loved these family banquets! Our heroic grandfather, a front-line soldier, a KGB colonel in reserve Vasily Fedorovich Sokolov, wore his military medals and medals and appeared to the festive table as a deity from Olympus.

Yes, my grandfather Vasily Fedorovich had an outstanding military past, which, of course, could become the theme of a separate military - patriotic narrative: after a serious injury and a concussion in battles for Moscow in December 1941, he was transferred for further service in military counterintelligence " SMERSH "(" Death to Spies "), where during the period from 1942 to 1945 inclusive actively fought with spies and saboteurs of various stripes, as well as suppressed the bloody uprising of" Bandera "in Western Ukraine.

Grandfather was always very stingy for the details of that terrible war. From childhood, I only remember his shocking story about how the "Bandera", who, as you know, never voluntarily surrendered to the "Chekists" before launching a bullet in his temple, from some special gangster courage ( They say that even after death, nothing worthy of this "filthy Moskali"!) Shot themselves in the left hand, where almost everyone had a personal watch - a gift from the Wehrmacht "to the faithful sons and true liberators of Ukraine").

      After a short "heroic" foreplay of the grandfather - the order-bearer, the grandmother solemnly placed on the table a decanter, like water in a mountain stream, with chilled vodka of her own preparation (she absolutely did not trust the factory vodka, preparing an exclusive home drink from the purest, 90-degree, medical Alcohol); The table was bursting with all sorts of phenomena, from which I have with Zhenya (Zhenya is my younger cousin with whom we grew up in the family as brothers), just "drooling" in anticipation of the upcoming "royal meal." Soon the whole family "beau monde" is important at the table, and the traditional family "show" begins, which I, with almost "sadistic" impatience, expect all evening - a stormy family debate about the role of Stalin's personality in History.

The tradition of festive banquets in our family begins already from the sixties of the last century, when Aunt Vitya's own sister, Victoria Vikentievna, was still alive. The father of his grandmother and aunt Vitya - Vikenty Pavlovich - was a Polish revolutionary, exiled in 1905 by the tsarist regime to the Siberian city of Tomsk, from where, in fact, the entire lineage of our mothers originates. In fact, her grandmother's name was Helen, therefore, until she came of age she passed Galina, and only with the receipt of a passport at the age of 18 began to be called Elena. Unfortunately, the woman Vitya did not have her own children, so she poured all her unrealized maternal tenderness onto me and Zhenya. Is it any wonder that my brother and I always fled with enthusiasm, we hurried to visit my aunt Vitya, where we were caressed, fed all sorts of "delicacies", presented with generous gifts.

Only my aunt Vitya and my grandmother could cook such amazing Polish dishes as "begos" (in Altai it is called "bigus") - stew from fresh cabbage with smoked sausage and pork ribs; Duck in apples and salad with fish balls and prunes! Everything is so tasty, and there are so many, too many on the table, that my father, who always had a hungry military childhood before his eyes, always had a terrible indigestion after the banquet. The first ideological attack, traditionally, begins with Aunt Rita. She recently graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy of the Sverdlovsk State University and with all the fibers of her soul hates Stalin's "personality cult". Grandfather, on the contrary, was an ardent Stalinist; His father always treated the so-called moderate opposition of the "waverers", from time to time changing his political views on the History of Russia, so that the "show" promises to be very bright and memorable! In vain, the grandmother before the start of the banquet from all its participants takes a "subscription" about not "getting" grandfather - after the first glass of vodka, everything repeats with enviable constancy.

"Daddy, I'm telling you - Stalin was a real demonic person, a match for Hitler! Hitler and Stalin are "two boots - a pair". What can I say? Even Hitler, a fascist, did not mock his people as Stalin did! "" You understand a lot, little fellow! - began to start a grandfather. - Do you know what a terry counter-revolution flourished in the late 1930s? Yes, if Stalin did not start repression, "kirdyk" would have come to the country! "

"No, Dad, you're wrong," Father entered into a dispute. - Here Uncle Sergei, for example, says: what Stalin did in the army is a real sabotage. Interrupting the whole army commander on the eve of the war is just a complete insanity! "" Many of your uncle Seryozha - a penal battalion - understands (his father's uncle, being a fighter pilot, was captured in German at the very beginning of the war, and after escaping from the camp - Battalion, and in the assault of his company, specially assembled from the officers - penal officers, so he hated Stalin pathologically and everything connected with him!) "Dad, in the fact that he was captured at the beginning of the war without even having to take off from the airfield - also the share of Stalin's guilt. What, did not Richard Sorge warn him about the coming war? Even the exact date of the beginning of the war informed our intelligence service, and nothing, no reaction from Stalin, "his father defended Uncle Sergei, while at the same time he stuttered with excitement-the consequence of a strong fright in a distant military childhood. "Edik, you have no idea what was happening on the eve of the war," Grandfather heated himself. - "Deza" (author - disinformation) pearl from all sides - from Germany, Japan, England. Go and understand this stream of lies! "" Therefore, it is better, just in case, to shoot the military genius of Tukhachevsky, Uborevich, Blucher! "Insisted his father. "What a genius he is, this rascal is Polish! - Finally, my grandfather exploded. "Do not you know how the Poles treat us historically?" This scumbag prepared a real military coup - this is now openly spoken by all historians. What was left for Yoska? Sit and wait for the Polish Jews to come and hang him? "" Friends, maybe enough, eh? - Grandmother prayed. "Can not you just sit and celebrate quietly and without scandal at least once?" "And your uncle Seryozha is a real traitor to the Motherland, once he was taken prisoner to the Germans. The order "alive not to give up" everyone knew then very well! "- could not calm down the grandfather in any way. Well, that was too much for my father! "Who, Uncle Sergei - a traitor? Yes, if you want to know, Dad, in captivity, he was in the Kiev anti-fascist underground in the hero of the Soviet Union Mironchuk, - with a hurt in his voice, stuttering more than usual, his father cried. - And after that they "packed" in the filtration camp, and then - in the penal battalion! And then, you know, the traitor of the Motherland will not be the chief engineer of the LiAZ plant after the war! "" Yes, I wanted to put the "appliance" with eggs on your uncle Seryozha and this - how is it? - Mironchuk! "- So, in a traditional manner, with his crown phrase from the glorious army past, Grandfather triumphantly finished this noisy political discussion at the table. And the family holiday went on as usual until late in the evening, but only without a grandmother, who fled in tears to the kitchen, once again upset because of her "homegrown pranks." Sometimes the tactical situation at the festive table developed in a completely different scenario - all were silent, like guerrillas, not wanting to be the first to start a dispute. In this case, the grandfather, who became very bored at the table, himself began to provoke the debaters, setting up his old ripped "song": "No, do not say that, and Ioska (author - Joseph Stalin), after all, is a super-genius of a planetary scale - What a great country "raised"! Not that modern political "dwarfs"! Well, tell me, please, what is Brezhnev? The complete insignificance and one pity! "Such a" political short-sightedness and criticism ", the philosopher Aunt Rita, of course, could not stand it - with the enthusiasm and enthusiasm of the real fighter, she again and again, like an embrasure, threw herself into an ideological battle, raising her" thrown glove " And delivering him a huge, incomparable pleasure. I suspect that his grandfather definitely had a dependency, almost a narcotic dependence on such ideological disputes - and he felt "not at home" if the holiday was going on "dry".

Finally, the long-awaited morning of September 1, 1981, and with it the first Day of Knowledge in my university life, came. Having come to our legal building on the Prospekt Socialist, despite the festive entourage of this event, I was completely taken aback by so many unfamiliar, too adults, as I then thought, people. This was aggravated by the fact that subjectively, against the background of these adults, "uncle" and "aunts," I felt like an absolute child. Apparently, in a similar way, judging by their contemptuous views, in reality I was perceived by these "uncles" with "aunts." At some point, I terribly wanted to turn around and run away from the university, where my eyes were looking - suddenly panicked that I had to spend five long years with these absolutely foreign, adult people. And I did not even have an idea that in 5 years I myself can grow up - it seemed that I will forever remain a little boy Seryozha.

These adults, of course, were rabfakovtsy (applicants from the faculty) - the guys who have already served the army and have a decent work experience (from 3 to 5 years) in law enforcement and national economy. And we can imagine the degree of irritation experienced by us - yesterday's schoolchildren these already "lived" people. Some of them, for example, Valya Osipova, three times unsuccessfully entered the university, storming the impregnable "bastions" of the law department. All these three years, lost for university studies, Valya worked as an inspector of the military attire in the pretrial detention center of Barnaul - she saw enough of that God forbid anyone!

Among the Rabfakovites there were immediately distinguished by some special, special article and amazing charisma, two giants - Sasha Kalinichev, nicknamed "Kalina" and Sergei Kandrin with the appearance of the famous French actor Gerard Depardieu. Even now, in the lobby of the main building of the university, they stand on top of a head, let's say, too, quite a bit of army men who arrived at law school this year. "Kalina" 2 years served "urgent" in the secret unit of the GRU, preparing submariners - saboteurs (the so-called "combat swimmers"), which we then did not even know and even did not know. It was a detachment of super-professional killers (agent "007" James Bond is just resting here), who in special diving equipment were dropped from an airplane or helicopter into the water, they went to the depths and put mines on enemy ships. You can only imagine the level of training of people who can do this! In addition, Sasha had such a huge physical strength, which, coupled with secret techniques of hand-to-hand combat of the special forces, turned him into a formidable military "superweapon".

One day our student group, as usual, sent us with the "Kalina" for beer to the nearest beer garden in Peschanaya Street. When we came there, as always, we were met by a huge "kilometer" line of "suffering" - a picture typical for that time in Barnaul - there was a catastrophic lack of beer spots for a strong drinking local population. Our "saboteur", of course, was not going to stand modestly in line and wait patiently, but calmly approached the hand, grabbed the hand with a slight movement of his hand and pushed aside a dozen bruises, and with the second hand handed the seller two empty jerricans. The indignant crowd seemed to be jerking at first, but immediately bitterly regretted it - on the dirty, beer-filled floor, there were already three "lifeless" bodies - this "Kalina" with lightning movement of the hand "turned off" them.

I told this story to my grandfather, and he liked it so much that he again and again asked me to repeat it. I gladly fulfilled his request, completing the story with new funny details, in "faces" and paints depicting the picture of this happening in the "brewing" of the "sacred" event. "In short, we go to the pub," I once again told this heart-rending story, "and there shaking" bruises "(auth - former" zeks "or alcoholics in prison jargon), such nasty and smelly - brrr !!! "Kalina" grabbed them with this hand - I showed my grandfather how and what he did - and easily pushed from the bar, and there was a man of 30! And then, as he gave to the five, they all immediately fell! "Grandfather laughed with a joyful, giggling laugh, imagining this entertaining picture. Very much he, a truly Russian person, loved strong, brave people; Their insolence and valiant daring! "Prefect, Sergey, prefect! - it was my grandfather's favorite word. "Ahhh, yessss, Kalina, ahhhh, you, son of a bitch!" Strong, a tramp, nothing to say! "So grandfather forever, in absentia, with disinterested" platonic "love fell in love with this Russian, almost epic, soldier  from the special forces. The second character, which should be told, was Sergei Kandrin ("Depardieu") - the most grown-up student in our course - he was already 26 years old. He was born from the Mamontovsky district - one of the most picturesque forest areas of the Altai Territory, managed 3 years to serve "urgent" in the navy and work in agriculture. Particular attention, of course, deserves his service in the Pacific Fleet. The fact is that Seryozha, thanks to his outstanding abilities and knowledge in the field of radio electronics, served as a cipher on the flagship missile cruiser, which, moreover, did not get out of combat campaigns on the far seas and oceans. The cipherer is the second person on the ship after the commander of the ship, and one can only imagine what kind of service DePardier had. "Not life, but raspberries!" - as is sung in the famous chanson of those years. When Kandrin took out his dubborn album from under the bed in the student hostel and began proudly to show his naval photographs, we, salagians who did not serve in the army, simply caught breath with envy.

Here, Seryozha, tanned to black, in shorts and a tropical cork helmet under the huge palm trees is in an embrace with charming flip flops, which he just waist-deep and "breathe in the navel." And in this picture he is already posing in front of the camera, sitting on an elephant in Sri Lanka. Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam - it is difficult to name a place where the ubiquitous "Depardieu" would not have visited. And, mind you, it was in Soviet times, in which, beyond the friendly countries of the socialist camp, it was simply impossible for an ordinary person to break through abroad.

Once at the university, I, remembering my solemn oath, given to the dean of the law faculty at the interview, went to the local student club - to offer my exclusive services to the musician. But here I was awaited by a cruel disappointment: at the Law Department, with the exception of the ensemble of the political song "Gloria", there was nothing else. In this ensemble, completely zaideologized, at that time Yura Dranishnikov (my classmate), Sasha Petrov, Oleg Pronin and Galya Lisitsyna (the student of the last, 5th year) sang, which, in fact, was the initiator of me, after all, Took in this ensemble - the male part of the group rested "horn" and was categorically against the new member of the team. At that time, Valentina Platonovna Kolesova, the dean of law faculty, displayed simply outstanding organizational skills, having managed somewhere to get for the faculty a magnificent concert grand piano "Estonia", at a cost equal to the car "Volga". This grand piano was so good for its sound and design that it came to him to study on it beforehand, asking the dean for permission in advance, the teachers of the Barnaul Musical College (for example, the well-known organist Sergei Budkeev in Russia), located near the building of the law faculty. It was this piano that became the main Teacher in my life, defining for many years my musical preferences and developing an uncommon technique for playing the piano.

Once in the ensemble of the political song "Gloria" I, as always, with all my heart, fell in love with my patroness Galya Lisitsynu. Galya, of course, felt her instinct of a married woman, but she treated me with an emphatically maternal tenderness, as a child, which I, in fact, was at that time. Wishing me, as it should, to consolidate in the ensemble, Galya made me even sing with her cackling "syphilitic" voice in the cold room of the Altai Regional Drama Theater named after Vasily Makarovich Shukshin, but this should not be done with my voice and my "breath"! Having swallowed during rehearsals and a concert in the drama theater of cold autumn air, I worked six months ahead, until the summer, to get such a bronchitis that teachers of the law faculty with angry screams drove me out of the audience when I balked them with my barking cough. I had to abandon my "uncommon" vocal data and use me only as an accompanist. But here it was not without curiosity.

Once the ensemble "Gloria" was invited to a concert in honor of February 23 in the Palace of Culture, secret at that time, the enterprise "Rotor" in the village of Southern Barnaul. Since the morning, this day, on the eve of the concert, immediately somehow did not work out. I woke up in my bachelor two-room apartment on Potok (the result of a well-planned apartment exchange with Karaganda, very competently produced by my talented mother) and felt that my left cheek was swollen. Going to the mirror, I was just horrified - on the cheek, in the most bad place at the junction with the neck, a huge boil was ripening. It should be noted that at that time in my life, apparently, something weakened organism, endlessly attacked all "evil spirits" - various infections, so I managed to get used to the attacks of harmful bacilli. But this time I immediately understood that everything was much more serious. Feeling the disgusting chill in my soul from the imminent death threat, I ran to the second city polyclinic, serving students of the Altai State University. The young woman who met me, a surgeon with a trainee, did not conceal her anxiety, immediately put me on the operating table and began gently opening the abscess, surprisingly with this trainee: "Look, what a deep cavity formed, a little more, that's all!" I Gladly realized that my intuition did not fail me this time, and I caught myself in time. Getting up from the operating table, I, with the pride of a soldier wounded in battle, found on my cheek a huge bandage through which blood was dripping abundantly. "Well, the concert show promises to be fun and memorable!" - With the irony of the man who had the worst thing left behind, I thought, and went to university. Seeing my bloody bandage, Galya flung her arms in horror and nearly collapsed. "How are you going to perform now, Seryozha?" She exclaimed. "It's all right, we'll sort it out on the spot," I said optimistically and, really, figured out - after arriving at the South, I ordered to put the piano in such a way that my left, raspornovannaya surgeon cheek was turned in the opposite direction from the hall - directly to the chorus. Accompanied on the piano in the song "Streets without end" with a very tragic, military content (as in the topic of my "combat" injury), with the satisfaction of the "peacock" I managed to note to myself how the choristers from the first row, With pity and fear watching my bloody bandage. At the same time, I was extremely proud of myself and my "unprecedented" courage, certainly appreciated by these pretty girls from the choir.

In "Gloria" I still worked for a while and even managed to star in some idiotic program on regional television, dedicated to political song; But as soon as my permanent "producer and philanthropist" Galya Lisitsyna, Petrov and Pronin left the ensemble after graduation, they "squeezed" me out of the collective, referring to my absolute "incompetence" and too noisy instrument. Then they made their "musical - political" career without me, and I went to the student theater of law department named after Commissioner Magre (the so-called STEM - student theater of pop miniatures).

At the theater named after Commissioner Magre for that period, as it is not surprising, there were at once two art directors. They were teachers of the Barnaul Institute of Culture Zhenya Sinitsky and Sasha Vitruk, who consistently put their director's experiments on us. One of them (Sinitsky) represented the school of the so-called "theatrical cubism", building from our, let's say, absolutely not "gutta-percha" bodies, some idiotic figures in the style of the 30s of the last century. The second (Vitruk) was absolutely obsessed with the works of the Italian director Federico Fellini and, in particular, his cult film "Amarcord". This "modernist horseradish" absolutely tortured us with his bicyclists, scooters and scooters, now and then, appearing on the scene in the midst of the theatrical action, shocking the respectable audience, who apparently did not yet grow to the genius " "Of this home-grown" Fellini ". However, in the middle of all this director's "husks" sometimes came across the most real "nuggets".

Such a "diamond" in the "crazy" repertoire of our theater, I believe, was the production of The Three Musketeers, in which our permanent theater choreographer Natasha Deyun played a special role (unfortunately, this real Russian beauty with a luxurious, up to the waist, Undoubtedly a talented choreographer, recently died, finally drunk and ended up in Barnaul, without the support of relatives and friends, on the lowest social "day" - oh, this is our mean, cruel, indifferent time!).

The actions of this wonderful performance took place approximately in the same chronological sequence as in the novel of Alexandre Dumas, only they were transferred already in our time and to our beloved law faculty. With this theatrical performance in 1985, we successfully toured in Khakassia, where in the famous after August 17, 2009 to the whole country, thanks to the terrible accident at the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydropower station, the settlement of the hydro-builders "Cheremushki" after the performance, we even got a real ovation!

In the play I got, as always, the most interesting work for me - writing musical score to this "grandiose" vocal - choreographic "oratorio". Of course, I did not bother myself with the exorbitant volume of writing work, but, without a long time thinking, for some scenes in the play I took well-known arias from "Jesus Christ the Superstar"; In the final scene - "tutti" used Karl Weber's "Invitation to Dance", and in a few vocal numbers - the time-tested hits of the famous Beatles Liverpool four.

The role of D, Artagnan in the play is absolutely brilliant, in my opinion, was performed by Sergei Bulygin - known at the law department as "buzoter" and a drunkard with the beautiful face of the famous actor Igor Kostolevsky. The role of Porthos, also very talented, was performed by Oleg Kazakov - our "informal" leader in the theater, a lanky undergraduate student who, despite his size and excessive obesity, performed such breathtaking "cabbage rolls" in the air during the final " We have already captured the spirit! Unfortunately, in 2001, the lawyer Oleg Rudolfovich Kazakov, who is famous in Barnaul, graduated from the university with a red diploma, got into some very strange sect, from which he could still get out, though with great difficulty. But, of course, the most brilliant actor's work, recognized even by high professionals from the Altai Regional Drama Theater, visited our performance somehow, was the role of Athos performed by Zhenya Sysoyeva. Stunning natural plastic, bright appearance and unmatched actor's charisma have done their work, and, to date, Evgeny Sysoev is the highest paid "bandit" lawyer in the city of Barnaul, and this, as they say, "is worth a lot!"

The long-awaited summer of 1982 came, and with it - the most terrible and the most difficult, because the first, summer session at the Faculty of Law. However, this session, to which all students were frightened from the beginning of the academic year, to everyone's surprise, passed without much shock - and even the most "terrible" teacher of Soviet state law, Aleksandr Pavlovich Vlasov, the party organizer of the university (in fact, the same zampolit in the army) Despite all the severity during the seminar sessions in relation to me and Oleg Korobkov, with whom we already became friends, set us both "excellent". We did not know then and, of course, we could not know that Fate would again bring us together with Alexander Pavlovich, but in completely different circumstances. And it was so.

With Oleg Korobkov, a student from Novosibirsk, we agreed on the first course on the basis of tourism. Oleja was an avid tourist, and every summer, as a routine, he left for the Altai campsite in Biysk, where he worked as a guide for tourist groups in the Altai Mountains for almost the whole summer. Subsequently, to this worthy occupation, he introduced me, which I will talk about a little later. But there was one more thing, one thing that united us: it is an unlimited love for literature.

One day Oleg offered me to write a novel on one of the most boring lectures of associate professor Adikhanov about the tragic story of the old zoophile Afrikanych who fell in love with his "goat" love to his goat Zorka and fell down with her at the hands of the accursed evil creature, the sexy maniac, Zootechnician Arnold. I do not know where I saw or overheard this instructive story of Korobkov, but I did not see anything more idiotic and absurdist in my life. It was decided to write the most boring lectures: Adikhanov had environmental law, Tena had civil law and Fedoseev had a civil process. And the work went on, the painstaking literary work about which Vladimir Mayakovsky said so well at the time: "You produce a single word for the thousand tons of verbal ore!"

We worked as obsessive, covered with literary "fever": paragraph - Oleg, paragraph - I. Finally, this immortal work was written, and we decided at the lecture of Tena to read it completely in order to form a holistic impression of this "classic of modern times".

Yes, "Mankina love", indeed, impressed with a gallery of carefully prescribed images and characters, took for the soul the "majestic" panorama of the rural life of the modern Soviet village! Especially the tragedy was astonished by the scene when the unfortunate Afrikinych, bending over the lifeless body, brutally raped and killed by Arnold the goat Zorka, with the scream of the poor Karandyshev from the "Dowry": "So do not get you anybody!" - a sickle blow, in an instant , Oskoplyaet itself. While we were finishing this terrible bloodthirsty scene, we hardly both cried for pity for the unfortunate old man, who had lost his precious eggs in the name of Great Love to the animal; I just wanted to sob out loud at this senile, simply "lame" lecture by Leonid Vasilievich Tena, who, with an unflappable air of the Dalai Lama, tells us about some sort of useless supplies. And here deliveries, fines and other penalties, when such serious passions are boiling here! After reading my literary "bestseller," Oleg and I were horrified only by the thought that this "criminal fiction" can get into the wrong hands, and swore to no one and never show it. But, as they say, "fresh legend"!

One day, Oleg, noisily marking some other significant event in the student hostel, could not resist and arranged a loud group "reading" of "Mankin love" in one of the girlish rooms where our dear classmates lived. During the reading of this "epoch-making" work in the maiden room, there was such an eerie, simply Homeric laughter that passing neighbors on the "hostel" were simply perplexed: what could cheer these frivolous girls so? They literally rolled on the floor with laughter, holding on to their bellies, but .... Not long music played! As usual, there were "goodwill", which this event did not quite like; Rather, I did not even like it at all. And soon a storm struck: we were summoned to our office by the party organizer of the university - our old "kind" friend San Palych Vlasov. We did not even immediately know what the rendezvous was for.

As soon as we entered the office of the party organizer, we immediately saw an angry, somewhat irritated San Palych who was standing by the window in the strained position of Dr. Goebbels, and already from a distance, for some reason, showed us a very ugly, simply ugly "faqa" ( Author - a very indecent and offensive gesture in the youth subculture), because of which I immediately mentally dubbed him "Faker". Only then did Olezhi and I realize that as a child, San Palych apparently broke his middle finger on his right arm, he did not properly grow up, and the Party organizer for life was doomed to the world, so imperfect, the world to show this involuntary "fake" to his superiors, his wife , Friends, children; And now here we are, unhappy students, like rats driven into a corner. "Well, guys, they played hard, they got to know that you were already interested in the KGB! - "off the bat" went into the attack "Faker". "Well, tell me, what did you write for the rubbish?" Oleg and I exchanged glances at each other in perplexity. After all, I, unlike Korobkov, did not yet know about the "literary readings" in the hostel. San Palych began indignantly, back and forth, walking through the office. "Well, why are you silent, like schoolchildren who have been attacked? Here, read what kind of paper was sent to you from the KGB! "He threw us a paper on the table with the stamp" The Administration of the KGB of the USSR for the Altai Territory, "in which we read the heavy lines of death sentence:" Students of the Law Faculty of the Altai State University Voronin S .E. And Korobkov OL Wrote and arranged in a student's hostel a public reading of a literary work of anti-Soviet content "Mankina love", discrediting the way of life of the Soviet village. " "Well, have you read it? "Faaker asked us when we, stunned, finally raised our heads from the paper." In general, sit down and write the explanations! "He seated us at different tables and gave us a pen and a blank sheet. When we finished writing, he ordered Korobkov to leave, but I stayed. Left alone with me, the Party organizer began his insinuating soul-saving speech: "Seryozha, how did you do it? After all, we have been friends with your father for so many years (this, indeed, was so). Can you imagine how upset he will be when he finds out about what he did? Why did you contact this Jew (Oleg's father is Russian, and his mother, Elena Naumovna is Jewish)? Yes, surrender this Korobkov with all his "giblets", and let him go into the army - away from sin! "" No, Alexander Pavlovich, I can not do this, if necessary, we will join the army, but only together! " "Well as you know! You made your own choice, Sergei! "- Sadly said angrily and called Oleg back into the office. "So, guys, today go to the military registration and enlistment office, fall at the feet of the military commissar and persuade him to take you to the same spring call! This is the only way out for you in this situation. But first bring the notebook! "

We rushed to my house with all my might and feverishly rewrote the novel in a specially bought for this general notebook. For 3 hours of titanic work we managed to turn "hardcore" into "light eroticism", throwing out all the most frank scenes, while retaining the main literary hero of the novel - the charming goat Zorka.  When we brought in a new, fairly "slippery" version of the novel "Fakeru", he read it reluctantly, loudly grunted and said, somehow without much enthusiasm: "Yes, you have all the golimaya pornography here!" We did not go into the nagging stuff Discussion, than differs "porn" from "eroticism", and went straight to the military registration and enlistment office of the Oktyabrsky district at the place of my registration, went to the military officer and told him my sad story. He turned out to be a very wise man. "Guys, do not you even imagine what it means to serve in the army with an incomplete higher education? You will immediately be given "chased" by the "student", and you will never get out of the outfits - well, they do not like half-educated people in the army. With higher education, it is difficult to serve, and, in general, horror! In general, do not fool, go and calmly finish your 5th year, everything will resolve by itself. And then - "welcome", as they say! "

No, I still get lucky, oh, how lucky it is for good people, who occasionally, from time to time, thanks to Ra, come across on my way. On that and decided. We continued to take the session, as if nothing had happened, when Vera Vasilievna Tikhonova, the curator of our group, came to us one day in the corridor of the law faculty (the wife of the well-known criminalist, Professor Yevgeny Nikolaevich Tikhonov). I have never loved this woman, because the heart of a musician has always felt in it some carefully concealed falsehood. "Guys, what happened to you with Alexander Pavlovich Vlasov? "Vera Vassilyevna asked, opposing grimacing." I heard that you are going to join the army? "" We are not going anywhere, not into any army, only through the "corpse" of Alexander Pavlovich! "- suddenly I got angry, so much so that at Tikhonova The spectacles crawled upwards in surprise and surprise. "Well, then I'll tell him so," she said softly and menacingly and went to the pulpit. And soon we learned from our classmate Vali Dolzhenko about how Vera Vasilyevna solemnly announced in our group that "the boys are leaving for the army-to protect the Motherland!"

Fortunately, we successfully surrendered the session and "hiccupped" all summer with Oleg to the Altai Mountains, which reliably sheltered us from these half-crazed "Pasha, from their all-seeing eyes, from their ears," as Mikhail once wrote in his heart Yurievich Lermontov, leaving to serve in the Caucasus.

In September 1985, my frightened neighbor, my university friend Misha Tatyanin, came running to my house and told me a "terrible" secret: it turns out that on September 1 there was an enlarged board at the party's regional committee, attended by Misha's father, the editor of a large regional newspaper. At the collegium, the first secretary of the regional committee of the CPSU, Popov, made a report and told the audience about the state of affairs on the ideological front of the Altai Territory. At the same time, he read out a certificate prepared by the KGB, from which it followed that the students of SF Voronin and Korobkov were expelled from the university for the anti-Soviet work "Mankina Love" together with 30 "punks" from the Pedagogical Institute. Thus, San Palych decided to reinsure, giving in extreme false information about our deduction from the ASU. This incident with Alexander Pavlovich Vlasov and his powerful organization was exhausted.

All this time, while we were "hammering" with San Palych, we were supported, as they could, by our good university friends - Kolya Makeyev and Yura Korchak.

Kolya Makeyev (Makesha), born in a family of ordinary workers and without any serious social support from outside, did everything himself in life. He became, forever spitefully "croaking" to doctors, an excellent fighter, although he had a congenital heart disease; He made an excellent career for that time on the Komsomol line, although he had neither "pusher" nor, as it is customary to call now, any serious "sponsors". In addition, Makesh with all the power of his passionate nature selflessly loved animals and birds, which were always abounded in his house, which already says a lot - an evil and cruel person can not so much like animals as he did Kolya Makeyev. He very early, from high school, began his conscious journey along the Komsomol line; And, went very persistently and purposefully for a nondescript teenager from the working family, rising to the secretary of the Komsomol organization of the university. Despite the career growth so rapid for that time, this did not affect his human qualities at all - Makeda was and remains a generous, kind and sympathetic comrade; Even now, when he rose to the first deputy prosecutor of the Republic of Khakassia. Yura Korczak came to us on a law faculty from the Barnaul Higher Military Flight School, which then trained pilots for assault aviation. In the second year of the school, he seriously contracted a kidney and was written off for health reasons. The disease greatly affected Yura's character; Yes, and this is understandable - permanent renal colic and associated with nephritis intoxication of anyone you want will lead to rabies. Despite constant irritation and quick temper, Yura was and remains a good companion, and just a good person. Unfortunately, Fate struck him with a terrible, crushing blow - Korczak several years ago became ill with multiple sclerosis, and today this terrible disease is firmly bedridden in the city of Kherson, which is in Ukraine.

We met each other in the second year, and, since then, became friends "do not pour water," in the literal sense of the word. Always and everywhere we were together. Our general student life is replete with such "epoch-making" events as: cleaning the multistage Gothic roof of the Rossiya cinema from the snow in March 1984 (Oleg and I used this experience for our future service in the army very much), numerous trips to restaurants and "girls" "(Here I already" banked ", as often, in the evenings, in the" dead "season for musicians, moonlighting as a" session "keyboardist in the restaurants" Central "and" Siberia "); An extreme alloy on a holey plywood boat along the Ob River, which had just been freed from the April ice, from the Ob basement camp to Bobrovka village, which then nearly ended badly - and much more, which sometimes with nostalgia and great warmth is remembered by "fighters" With rare, especially in recent times, friendly meetings.

"To go for girls" - on our, only to us four intelligible slang, meant "to descend into" Cockerel ". This legendary ice cream shop on Lenin Avenue near the cinema "Russia" has long been famous in Barnaul for the unusual accessibility of girls of very "easy" behavior (apparently, at the time of the opening of the "Cockerel" in 1984, the peak of the "sexual revolution" in Barnaul had happened) Which were always there a lot every night, with a bored look waiting patiently at their tables next erotic adventure. For us, it was just a kind of usual hunting, only without guns (we will start hunting with Metsha only in 1998, and we are still doing this) and not on waterfowl, as usual, but on some previously unknown scientists Fauna called "girls from the" Cockerel ". Surprisingly, in this "sexual hunt" of the four of us, Yura Korczak was particularly successful. Obviously, there was in him some kind of charisma - something that energetically irresistibly attracted representatives of the fair sex. As a winner, he always got the most "tidbit" place - my room with a wide bed, where he could indulge in sexual pleasures until the very morning. We, the three "losers", had to share a relatively small room in the hall for three. The places in the "reserved seat", at the same time, were traditionally distributed as follows: The make-up got a very narrow space between the sofa and the storeroom, for which we called it "pent-up master"; The box was comfortably located with the partner on the couch, somehow standing on four piles of book volumes because of the lack of legs; Well, I, your humble servant, modestly fit with the next, got to me a passion on the floor near the piano. All these evenings of "rest" (almost, but not yet promiscuity) represented a very comical sight - everything around puffed, groaned and groaned; Behind the couch near the pantry throughout the night, some kind of terrible fuss did not stop, which was periodically interrupted by an exhausting maiden cry and a selective mat of the Mashi - it was on him and his partner, once again, the sofa with the Box and his girl overturned.

The poles of attraction in our "brave" quartet, surprisingly similar to the famous French quartet - D, Artagnan and the three musketeers - were distributed as follows: I was more drawn to Korobkov, and Kolya was more drawn to Korczak. The role of D, Artagnan in this four, obviously, I performed - this, of course, had to match, so the role of the "gatekeeper" - Gascon in our company, I always took the decisive step.

One thing only surprised our gay Barnaul "musketeers", and surprised to the depths of my soul - how did I manage to live without special problems and nervous shocks for 5 years alone, in my two-room apartment ?! I could not tell them that I live not alone, that I live with Ra! I'm afraid that then, as well as now, they would misunderstand me.

I really loved and love my "bachelor bungalow" on Potok (the most industrial microdistrict of Barnaul since Khrushchev's time). This love is not overshadowed even by the fact that under the windows of my apartment on the second floor there is a lively industrial highway along which heavy and heavy trucks rush through the streets and nightly. All my "lair" is imbued with the sounds of the piano "Tyumen", which my grandfather and grandmother gave to my mother on my birthday on June 4, 1964. Thus, we are absolute coevals; He is my brother, friend, wife and mistress in one bottle. On this occasion, my classmate Misha Galtsov devoted me a remarkable epigram that reflects the essence of this phenomenon:

"Do not think that our Serge is impotent.

Saying this, you would not be right.

It's very simple: a tool for Serge - a woman,

A woman is just an instrument! "- Ra has long been careful to protect me from women - these ideal" vessels for sin "; Apparently, I need Him absolutely for another!

 We are absolutely matched with him, with this plain black "guy" from Tyumen - a gift from God Ra on my birthday. I could sit for days at the piano in my free time, something softly playing under my breath. Not knowing the musical notation, we had to learn how to fix the music that emerged from nowhere from our old, but robust, like a Kalashnikov rifle, the "Saturn" tape recorder.

One day, in the spring, as usual, I sat at the piano at home and suddenly felt: "She came here as a spring like paranoia!" - as Nikolai Noskov's famous song says. Something in the soul "sang", "whistled", "zasverbilo" and "ziskryabalo", trying to write something like that, significant, - that all the surrounding people are finally "stunned"! In the end, the "peacock" slept the whole winter. It's time to finally wake up and shake this eternally sleeping world with your moss-tailed tail! So the idea came to write a rock opera "Steppe Wolf" based on the famous novel by Hermann Hesse.

And it all began with Andrei Voznesensky's poem "Fragment of a self-portrait" from his 1975 Michelangelo poetic collection. I liked these verses, which corresponded to my hypochondriac mood at the time, that I immediately "put" blues on them. Also has gone, and has gone!

"I'm a poor carrion. I am food for the morgue.

I feel stifling, like a gin in a rancid,

As in the darkness of the spine to the bone marrow!

 

In my closet, as in the tomb of a dank,

Arachne wove her cobweb.

My Dolce Vita smelt of garbage.

 

I hear urea talking about the wall.

The gloomy giant of the sacred hose

My house washes away. He's drunk, obviously.

 

Full in the yard of human slag.

Shit swayed like a cathedral head.

Excess of shit in this world, however.

 

I'm not your public restroom!

Proud of your confidence. But I'm not an urn.

My fate is modest and miserable.

 

Now I will describe my appearance from life:

My face is terrible, my beard is like a brush.

Zubariks dance like a keyboard.

 

Besides, I'm deaf. And in the throat tickling!

The spider inhabited my left ear,

And in the right cricket roars like a rattle.

 

My voice buzzes like a glass fly.

From the lower throat, archangelsky booming,

The fugue of the captive spirit will not break out.

 

Where are the blue eyes? Raised burkaly.

But seriously - I'm glad that I'm sad,

I'm glad that I was dressed, how crows were scared.

 

A great misfortune supplants a smaller one.

The more bitter, the sweeter is the fate.

Now slap in the face of the kisses.

 

The paradox is cheap, but I'm happy, tormented.

More truly I find pleasure in grief.

In a desperate share there are a number of advantages.

 

Let the wallet empty. What details!

But in the bladder, like coins

Three stones solemnly zabrenchali.

 

My madrigals, my triolets

Will serve as a wrapper in grocery

And they will become toilet paper.

 

Why did you, the artist, soar in empyrean,

To other generations, he raised his tripod ?!

All the dust and vanity. In poverty I'll die.

Such is your result, venerable artist! " The last quatrain of Andrei Voznesensky will become a programmatic, key, and soon will serve as an epigraph to my new rock opera.

Roman Hermann Hesse "Steppe Wolf", published in Germany in 1927, immediately became an epoch-making, landmark event for his time. The fact is that in it, as in a mirror, the unusually increased public interest in the so-called psychoanalysis of Josef Lang, the pupil of the famous Karl Jung, was reflected. In fact, the Magic Theater, described in the novel, is nothing more than a psychoanalysis of Lang. The protagonist of the novel "The Steppe Wolf" Harry Galler, certainly the prototype of the Hessian himself, is in an eerie mental crisis, in strange half-mad rumors between the world of the Spirit and the world of Matter. Once, during the aimless walks around the city, he meets a "black man" who gives him a small book - "Treatise on the Steppe Wolf", which tells of a certain Harry Galler, nicknamed "Steppe Wolf." Naturally, the main character immediately recognizes himself in this "Wolf" and he becomes terrified of this; Especially since life at it from this moment begins to develop in that chronological order, as it was described in this "Treatise". Completely entangled in his own experiences and pretty tired of his almost schizophrenic "split personality", Harry eventually decides to commit suicide, but meets a strange girl in the restaurant, which discourages him from suicide, offering to kill himself first. In general, the plot of the novel is more than strange and very psychedelic. How - just what was needed in my current spring - depressive mood.

The role of the girl was decided to give my brother Zhenya, who just turned 14 years old, so his voice was not yet mutated and was surprisingly similar to the girl's. As soon as the erotic sound appeared in the tape recording, with the enchanting hoarse of a pretty roaming girl, Zhenya's voice, Vitaly Fefelov and I could not help smiling. Vitaly Fefelov is a sound engineer for the DK "Motorostroitelei", in which I played then in a local rock band. He kindly agreed to my request to help record all the soundtracks for the rock opera, and at the same time brilliantly played the role of director of the Magic Theater. All theatrical scenes we recorded in my pantry to achieve a "flat", natural sound and get rid of the absolutely unnecessary reverberation effect in our case. Only now I understood and appreciated the whole complexity of the work of actors working in radio performances - try it with a voice, only with its intonations and nothing more, to convey the whole gamut of human experiences!

Finally, "Steppe Wolf" was recorded, but clearly there was not enough audience that could appreciate this "epoch-making" work. Fefelov, a radio electronic engineer from God, suggested using the latest achievements of scientific and technological progress. To do this, he brought to my house a powerful 100-watt amplifier, which we connected to the radio in my apartment. The recorder was connected to the amplifier and at 21.00 (when the majority of people are already at home) the rock opera "Steppe Wolf" was aired. The amplifier at the time of the broadcast completely cut off local radio broadcasting in the region of approximately two quarters (and this, then, and now it was a legal matter), and people were simply forced to listen to our existential, "beyond meaning" for human understanding, musical and literary composition. It is a pity that we could not "enjoy" their reaction, and without this, of course, there was no complete satisfaction from what was done.

Unfortunately, my personal copy of Steppen Wolf was lost somewhere irretrievably - from all this titanic work I had only one left, though the central theme of Harry Haller himself, written specifically for the clarinet (see phonogram 1). But I know for a fact that the original of this "imperishable" rock opera still remains with Vitaliy Fefelov, who still carefully keeps it in memory of our joint Creativity.

On July 1, 1982, with great "enthusiasm" I went to my first student construction team "Rusichi" of the Faculty of Law of the ASU (then there will be two more). We were 30 guys from different courses and only 5 girls - a cook. So, apparently, a big "gender" show was expected, especially when we learned that the place of deployment of the construction team is a huge Altai field 30 km from the village of Shelabolich in the Pavlovsky district. We were "bought" from the faculty by the famous in the Altai Territory director of the state farm "mirror carp" Hero of Socialist Labor Sapunov, whom we, for his too boring character, immediately dubbed "a precursor".

When we arrived at the site of the construction squad, I was simply shocked by the majestic panorama that opened to us such a familiar and, it turns out, completely unfamiliar nature of the Altai. What a beautiful, after all, this "small" my Motherland! In front of me was a magnificent emerald field, as in Alexander Volkov's fairy tale "The Wizard of the Emerald City". Solar spots from the burning July sun lifted from the magical field of a jet of hot, hot-white air, in the haze of which the silhouettes of distant skeletons, disorderly scattered across the field, and our two construction wagons, wretched on the edge of a birch grove, wavered. All the space around the trailers, even on those rare black and white photographs that remained of this construction team, is flooded with some fantastically unreal, dazzling white sun.

Next to our trailers was a large van on wheels, in which there were drivers of scrapers and graders (road construction machinery) who came here to the "red-hot" of Talmenka. Together with them we had to build a new pond for the "mirror carp".

The first night in building trailers for all passed just a nightmare. For a day, the heated, sheeted iron car was transformed into a sauna that it was impossible to sleep until 3 am. Then, at last, somehow falling asleep in the morning, an hour later you were already waking up from the wild cold - it turns out that these thin, plywood walls of the trailer could not keep the heat and were completely defenseless before the icy Altai morning. 

The morning of the next day was immediately clouded by a sad incident in which we all saw a bad sign and an omen. When I got out of the car, I saw that some very bad movement was taking place near the van of the workers from Talmenki: the workers were running, excitedly waving their arms and shouting something, while on the ground at that time lay absolutely indifferent to what was happening, two A man between whom the doctor of the construction team of the Light of Samoylov was worn, as if it were a routine. Sveta graduated with honors from the sixth year of the Altai Medical Institute and was now an intern. She was sent to the construction team for the post-graduate training and production practice, which was so tragic and, at the same time, so ridiculously started today.

It turns out that two workers, wishing to get drunk after yesterday's noisy feast, already from the early morning they slurped up the brake fluid, from which one died instantly, and the second, apparently stronger, continued to torment and torment our Light for a long time, sobbing in its voice from its own impotence and screaming "If I only had serum, an antidote, he would not have died!" The corpses lay all day under the scorching sun, and the hard workers now found a "legitimate" occasion to drink again and not go to work - dignified, as it should , In Russian to remember "without time" but gone. " 

Sveta liked me at first sight. She was ugly, but with some special charm, which actresses with a similar appearance have - Andy McDowell and Barbara Streisand. I fell in love with her purely platonic love, and for many years we became real friends, which rarely happens between a man and a woman. Already on the second day of our stay in the construction team, we went to the production facility. The essence of our work was as follows: as I said, we built a pond for an elite "mirror carp" - scrapers and graders were preparing a "bowl" of the pool for him, and we had to, respectively, prepare and concreate the space around the lock Sections and pipes that feed water into the pool of the pond. From the very beginning, the capricious Altai nature began to avenge us for our arrogance, disorder and frivolity.

Pyotr Semenov, a man of 45, who recently graduated from the Faculty of Melioration of the Altai Agrarian Institute, recently supervised all the works of the very "cheerful" technician from Pavlovsk, and therefore, like all the present part-timers, he feels in himself simply extraordinary forces and the desire to "turn the northern rivers backwards." It was a real "giant" of hydraulic engineering thought, which did not get tired from day to day, surprising us, miserable and stupid students. Every time he invented something for us, something innovative, we again and again took in the hands of heavy birch chocks for ramming the soil, and, like slaves on the galley, sweating afterwards under the ruthless July sun, with great "warmth" remembering all Closest relatives of hydraulic engineering, began to frenzy knead some very strange blue clay, disgusting "porridge" appearing through the earth in the sluice channel.

A very complicated hydrotechnical situation arose at the site. The fact is that in the Altai the groundwater lies very close to the surface of the earth. Even photography from space (I personally saw this at the scientific and practical conference of the geographical faculty of the ASU, which I visited in 1993) showed that a vast artesian lake stretches along the entire territory of the Altai Territory, relatively in shallow depths. This underground lake, as time, and nourish numerous waterways and "capillaries", which now ruthlessly broke scrapers and graders that cut off the upper layer of the earth. As a wounded beast, the earth now just blew "blood", every minute highlighting the abundant groundwater even under the action of a simple shovel.

Every time when we arrived at the site in the morning, we were disappointed to find out that our entire three-day work per night was washed away with water and mixed with a strange blue clay, which I met in such quantity only in Altai and which locals attribute incredible healing properties. Under the influence of groundwater in the earth formed numerous "pockets" and "voids", in which it was easy to drive the most "hat" three-meter armature. And again our "cheerful devil" - a hydro technician resorted, sanguine waving his hands and enthusiastically insane calling us not to "lower" our hands, but "fun and easy" to start everything from the beginning. And again we, as catechumens, began to ram the slopes and the bottom of the lock, and the next morning there was the same familiar picture of destruction. It resulted in some worthless, completely useless "Sisyphean labor". The first could not stand Valera Khmykin. "Yes, e ... this n .... technician (author - swearing at the bad gynecologist)! He cried angrily one day. "How long will this" gambler "still experience our patience?" Valera Khmykin is a tall, prominent guy of 24 years with the appearance of the then famous actor Yevgeny Kindinov and an unmatched, simply extraordinary sense of humor. He came to our university already "grown-up" from the Soviet Army, where he served an "urgent" in the militia battalion of internal troops in Irkutsk and even contrived to guard the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Valera by that time was already a married man, having a dependent wife and a small child, that's why he used unconditional authority in the construction team, being our "informal" leader. The difficult material situation in the family will soon force him to transfer to the correspondence department of the law faculty and get a job at the police.

With the water element, of course, it was possible to cope with the condition of proper organization of the production process, which, as at the "hero of labor", Sapunov was not in sight. "And why did they only give him the" Hero of Social Labor "?" Khmykin was perplexed all the time. As soon as we prepared the site, carefully ramming it with heavy birch chocks, it was necessary to urgently concreate it, and Sapunov, as always, did not have a mortar ready. Again a day of forced downtime, and in the morning it was necessary to start everything from the very beginning. In the end, as a result of this blatant disorder and mismanagement, the state farm of the "mirror carp" was left without a pond, and without profit, we went to the construction team idly, unlike the happy colleagues in "Ermak" and "Skif".

Once, during breakfast, I found that I can not keep a tablespoon at all - a huge lump flared on my right palm. In a panic, I ran to Sveta Samoilova, who immediately pronounced her disappointing "verdict": "Seryozha, it's bad! You have torn the inner corn and formed a vast abscess. We must urgently operate, otherwise we can lose the whole hand. Here, in the field, I will not risk doing this operation on your "precious hand". Go to the city, and it's urgent! "Yes, why did Bozhenka get so angry with me that I did such a thing to him, seditious - it's the second time in a year that I have to lie under the surgeon's knife!

Arriving in Barnaul, I immediately, at full speed, rushed to the already familiar to me the second clinic, where this time I received an elderly doctor, a man. "It's okay," he said optimistically and assigned me a warm-up for UHF. And by the evening the hand "diluted" already on the wrist itself. "Seryozha, you can not pull until Monday," my grandmother said, looking at her hand anxiously, "now it's Friday, for two weekend abscesses it will rise to the elbow. It is necessary to cut, and immediately, but it will be very painful. I just nodded my head in silence. Brother Zhenya, who was just 12 years old, was sitting with interest next to him, waiting for a soul-stirring spectacle. Grandmother wiped off the nail scissors with her alcohol, worked her hand, and with a lightning movement of her hand she cut out to me a pretty decent piece of inflamed flesh. In my eyes it turned dark, and Zhenka shouted loudly: "What are you doing, it hurts!" I ran to the toilet and immediately vomited from the pain. When I returned, my grandmother began to force me to squeeze out pus from my palm, and then forced me to lower my hand into the hot brine.

When I came to the clinic on Monday morning, he looked jealously at my renewed, almost healthy hand and asked, obviously wounded: "Who did you have the operation for?" "Grandma, she's also a surgeon!" I replied. "Well done," - only and could say this doctor - a loser.

During this ill-fated construction team, I again had to turn to Sveta for medical help. And it was so.

One day, together with Sasha Safronov, a rare drunkard and a drunken fellow from my own academic group, I went to the nearest nook to feast on strawberries, which scattered all the surrounding meadows like precious nuggets in a plentiful scattering. After eating enough strawberries, we began to frolic fun in the sun, as is usual in such cases, throwing a jagged berry into each other. And then they began to fight noisily and to ride on the emerald grass, as if they were jokingly disheveled cubs, covering their bodies with abundant ruby ​​drops from the crushed under our weight of meadow strawberries. However, the severe payment for this childish prank and frivolity soon did not keep itself waiting. Returning to the camp, I was horrified to find three hefty ticks, a "dead" grip on the scrotum. "Valera, what should I do?" - almost crying, I turned to Valery Khmykin, our unconditional "authority" in the construction team and just a reliable friend, showing him his scaly swelling from the tick bites. "Yes, however! Eka "thrashed you," Valera said sympathetically, and apparently wanting to at least somehow reassure me, he added: "You, Serega, do not worry much about your eggs; You know how I was bitten by one bl ... at the Moscow Olympic Games in 1980 - still hiccups noisily, as I recall. We stood then in patrol with one sergeant from Novosibirsk in the Gorky Park of Culture. Us, "Pepsi" (the author - PPS patrol service) then in Moscow from all over the country chased. We go in the night through the park, not a soul around; Suddenly, we hear - somewhere the woman yells! We are friends in the bushes and we see: a woman is lying, and two naked peasants "treat" her. Here are such unsightly, "scotomogilnye" affairs (it was his favorite expression)! We both thought then - in the park commit group rape. One muzhik, the fact that the woman, I did not think for a long time, shoved the handle of the pistol on the head, so much so that he lost consciousness. I chased after the second, but he hid somewhere, naked, in the bushes. My friend, as in a stupor, all this time stood side by side, open-mouthed, and simply watched as I heroically deal with the "gang of maniacs". A woman, instead of gratitude, tells us, very angrily: "Have you done anything, garbage? Say, we had everything here by voluntary consent, and you almost killed my fuck! "It turned out that this" holy trinity "was working in some Moscow research institute, and each weekend arranged for itself a" great erotic show ". It was my turn to get angry. "Well, then suck," I say, "a bitch, for a" false challenge! "So she" sucked "," biting "her cock with all her heart, so that I would continue to be polite with the ladies. Such a story happened, and you say: "My eggs, eggs! Member - that's it! "Very much I was amused and a little calmed by this" instructive "story of Valery Khmykin.

My situation was "worse than the governor's" - after all, we should not show our "economy" to our doctor Sveta Samoylova, to whom I had such tender and sublime feelings. But there was nothing to do-it was necessary, after all, to go to the medical unit. Sveta listened attentively, gave threads and petroleum jelly, explaining how to extract ticks from such tender flesh. And soon I, already happy, cut through the camp with a proud look of the winner of this nasty creature, sent by the Creator to Earth, apparently, for edification to people.

The further fate of Valery Khmykin was very dramatic. Immediately after the construction team, he for family reasons transferred to the correspondence department of the law faculty and found himself an inspector of the criminal investigation department at the Leninsky District Department of Internal Affairs of the city of Barnaul. Soon, only after six months of service, he was detained, arrested and convicted, fortunately conditionally, for imprudent murder during the detention of a criminal. And it was so.

Once in the autumn, a criminal message was received from the desk of the duty officer on the Leninsky district police department that two unknown persons on KAMAZ had stolen a trailer from the forest with a forest. To detain the criminals immediately sent a rapid reaction group (GDB), which included a young criminal investigation inspector Valery Khmykin. The car with the stolen forest was found very quickly. Behind the wheel of KAMAZ was a young soldier - the term of service for the first year, and next to him was a captain - an artilleryman from the air defense division deployed in the village of Berezovka near Barnaul. Chase began, during which Khmykin, as in a detective movie, effectively jumped on the step of a military truck and began to fight the soldier behind the wheel, forcing him to stop. At that moment, a spontaneous shot occurred (this was fired by a pistol fired from the safety guard in Valera's right hand), the bullet hit the captain next to him, killing him on the spot.

And long, painful ordeals Valera began. The whole ROVD rushed to the defense of Khmykin (admittedly, he was loved by him, after all, the people) - experts - criminologists deliberately cut the trigger's trigger spring from his "PM", proving thereby that the shot was, nevertheless, For the technical defect of weapons; The ROVD leadership put three whole public defenders on trial and hired the best lawyer in Barnaul-Spiez to protect Khmykin. But all these truly titanic efforts proved futile and the convictions, even the conditional, still could not be avoided. Khmykin was fired from the bodies, expelled from the university, and he was forced to maintain a family for a long time working as a turner at the Altai Motor Plant (AMZ), making diesel engines for the excellent domestic tanks "T-72" and "T-80". Somehow, many years after the event described, I accidentally met Valera in Barnaul Street - in front of me there was a mature man with a gray head who had survived a lot in his life. "Eka" pokolbasilo you ", however!" - I thought then.

Only Valery Khmykin, with his extraordinary combinatorial thinking of the real operative, could come up with and twist such an existential conception in the construction squad as a tragic-comic production called "Korablin hanged himself". And it was so.

One day in August 1982, Volodya Korablin, incredibly frail and skinny, just like Kashchei the Immortal, a 25-year-old student from a parallel group, received a letter from a beloved girl who informed him that she was leaving for another man. Khmykin and a couple of undergraduates who had conceived all this "operational-tactical combination" tried to make sure that on the eve of such an exciting event all the guys in the construction team learned about this shocking letter. Volodya, completely "crushed by grief", spent the whole day, hungry, lying face down on his armored bed in our stuffy trailer and grabbing at his heart, showing his whole life that "his life is not nice." I, really frightened of attempted suicide, summoned Sveta Samoilova to Korablin, who immediately gave him a sedative. This continued until the evening.

At night, we all woke up from a horrible hysterical scream, almost like in an unforgettable "Jimmy the schizophrenic": "Hangs!" This was screamed passionately by our cook Olga Marshina. A terrible news ran through the chain: "The ship hanged himself!" Then a real hysterics happened to me. "After all, I knew, I knew because I did not do anything to keep him alive! I, only I am to blame for his death! "- I cried to the whole car and sobbed loudly. "Well, I hanged myself and hung myself, dick with him!" - philosophically spoke Misha Tatyanin and turned on the other side - to sleep on.

With the whole crowd we ran to the edge of the forest, where in the light of the full moon the body of the unfortunate hanging man was swaying ominously in the wind. On arriving at the place, we all froze in horror, not daring to approach the "deceased": Korablin's pathetic, lean body in his immovable, very touching blue-haired hood on his head (the loop he threw over his head) swayed from side to side under the disgusting creak of an old birch. "Guys, he can still be alive!" - Sasha Kashirsky shouted and grabbed Korablin's legs, trying to pull him out of the loop. However, only sneakers remained in his hands, and two clumsy birch sticks protruded from under his old tattered trousers. "What the fuck is this?" Kashirsky asked in surprise and tore off the sham body from the birch. It fell to the ground, and our favorite soccer ball rolled out of the hood. "I'm really hanging this Korablin!" - Sasha shouted, and with a noisy, very excited crowd we began to search for Korablin throughout the camp. However, that night we did not find it, because the prudent Khmykin, expecting such a reaction of the masses, hid Vova in his car ahead of time.

Only two days later Volodya Korablin ventured to appear in public, approached me and said with a great sense of gratitude: "Thank you, Seryozha, for your sympathy and humanity - only you really regretted me in that difficult situation!" Despite the totem "Dry Law", proudly and hopefully standing in the middle of the camp, which masterfully carved from the tree a mountaineer Slava Tyukhtenev nicknamed "Marshal", Khmykin and the senior students living with him in the trailer regularly "puffed up". A disgusting swill, a product of village brewing, was brought to them, day after day, by local children from Shelabolichi. They came to us with their noise and crash on their motorcycles, and for a long time, after midnight, lingered over alcohol in a neighboring trailer.

One day, late in the evening, on the eve of my departure to Barnaul after the construction season, I lay in my trailer and was suffering from a terrible toothache (from the ice spring water we drank every day, the periosteum of the tooth was inflamed) when a cute young guy came to us Shelabolichi and asked: "Who is Sergei Voronin here?" I am his second cousin. " It turned out that this is my distant relative of Petya along the lines of my cousin Zhenya. My uncle, Valery Stepanovich Gulimov, himself from Shelabolhi, joyfully informed his family in the village that I was in the neighborhood of them in the construction squad. So Petya decided to get to know me - his distant relatives from Barnaul. A very unpleasant and at the same time amazing story happened to this "cheerful" relative.

One day Petya was riding his favorite motorcycle "Java" (the most fashionable and prestigious at the time), completely drunk. Asleep behind the wheel, he, along with the motorcycle, made an incredible acrobatic sway from the 20-meter cliff to the Ob, broke his pelvic bone in several places, but, most surprisingly, he did not drown in the very precipitate of a mighty river and did not even wake from the pain . The river safely delivered him, asleep, to the shore, where he was picked up by fishermen. Once again, with his personal unique experience, Petya proved to the whole world that "to the drunk - really, the sea is knee-deep!"

Finally, it's time to part with our wonderful natural place, in which two months of my happy, cloudless youth passed. With sadness and great tenderness we looked at two wagons running off into the distance, wretched and sad standing in the midst of a huge meadow - abandoned and forgotten for many years temporary dwellings for three dozen young dunces (according to the stories of my classmate Yura Dranishnikov, who recently went there, they are up to Are still there, in the same place, together with the wooden totem "Dry Law" lonely sticking out in the middle of the meadow, quite green with time and dampness).

Arriving at the end of August 1982 in Barnaul, I, first of all, went to a local polyclinic, where "on the path" put an injection of anesthetic medication. Ahead of it was 5 days of a difficult journey - the first time I went to my parents in Khabarovsk by train.

Arriving in Khabarovsk, I was pleasantly amazed by the nature and people of this wonderful land. Especially I liked the girls of Khabarovsk - languid southerners with piercingly burning black eyes, with perfect Greek noses and sumptuous seductive figures - a successful cross between Cossack and Jewish blood (the proximity and influence of the Jewish Autonomous Region affected).

In front of me was a majestic and absolutely mesmerizing panorama of the great Amur: its picturesque banks and beautiful waterfront, river port and surprisingly inscribed in Ussurian nature of old, but very wide and spacious (even by modern standards) streets.

Beautiful landscapes (a view of the arrow of Ussuri and Cupid) were opened even from the balcony of the parental apartment, overlooking the Amur River, so I could not resist and on the first day of my stay in Khabarovsk I made some wonderful photo sketches. In one of the photographs (see photo 12) the boat berth was recorded once, from which we set off shortly on a boat to the "legendary" trek along the Amur River (Dursu Uzala was not "lying around" nearby, I answer!). Once in September, the deputy head of the Far Eastern legal institute of the Ministry of the Interior of the Russian Federation for training Alexander Plotnikov suggested us with his father an exclusive walk down the Amur River. We, the "old sea wolves" and adventurers, gladly agreed to this. And although the old "Kazanka" Plotnikova endlessly swallowed, choking on its own gasoline, we still managed, with God's help, to get started and move into this "dangerous" adventure-filled way. At first everything went smoothly. We walked along narrow canals, diligently bending around the numerous islands overgrown with dense willow and inhabited by hordes of completely distraught mosquitoes - "crocodiles" (I never met such huge ones anywhere else in my life), making some of them short-term because of mosquitoes. I was even allowed to steer a little boat as a sign of special trust, and I was proud of this incredibly, famously laying bends and pouring cold seawater on the left side of my father's side. We were smoothly smooth until we began to approach the state border of the USSR and China. San Sanych Plotnikov, in view of the importance of the moment, moved behind the wheel of the boat and with an imperturbable air he headed straight for our border guard, about 100 meters from which was already a boat of Chinese border guards. Behind the Chinese,

 

The pagoda of the Chinese village of Fuyuan (now a developed industrial and tourist center in the northern province of Heiludzyan, from which thousands of "barygs" from the Khabarovsk Territory are currently feeding) are now on their way.

At first, the Soviet border guards did not pay us any attention at all, apparently taking for themselves, pretty "podguljavshee" bosses, but then, having clearly seen through binoculars, obviously nervous - and here the border boat had already started the engine and menacingly moved in our direction. There are already jokes aside - we did not begin to tempt fate any more, but sharply took to the left of the fairway, mooring to our Soviet shore, where there was a lonely border pillar; They took a cognac and a snack from the glove box, solemnly celebrating such a significant event. Border guards, seeing the usual drunkenness of "our compatriots", and even on the border, immediately lost all interest to us and returned to their original position in the center of the fairway, and we, having emptied the bottle, with a joyful feeling until the end of duty, set off on the return journey.

One day, on a warm September day, my father and I went to visit his good acquaintance - the former deputy head of the Khabarovsk police department, Pavel Sigismundovich Shelutinsky, who, now retired, worked as an archivist in the Department of Internal Affairs of the region. "Guys, I have such a criminal case in the archive, from which your hair" will stand on end "! - cheerfully told us Shelutinsky. - This - the case of Private Terekhov, who moved from 1941 to 1948! It's just some kind of mysticism! "He gave us to read this unique case, from which my father and I really had hair on his head. This story occurred in July 1941 near Orsha. During the reconnaissance, private Terekhov's battle was stunned by the explosion of mines, after which he came to his senses already in the German dug-out. Seeing the enemy machine-gunner, he immediately attacked him. Enraged by the act of captive the Germans decided to shoot him. When the soldier was led to the nearest forest, the unexpected sky lit up with dazzling light and a shrill whistle was heard. Opening his eyes, the Soviet soldier discovered that he was lying on the green grass among the trees, and next to his guards, unconscious. He quickly assembled their submachine guns, pushed them through, ordered them to raise their hands up, led the Germans in the direction where our unit was supposed to be. Soon, to Terekhov's amazement, the forest was over, and on the road he saw an approaching cart in which sat an old man and a girl.

"Hello, Father!" The soldier greeted them as they approached quite close. "Our far?" I've been in trouble, yes, you see, I've got out, I've been leading three reptiles.

At these words the old man opened his eyes, began to baptize fiercely and inartically moo.

"Are you deaf and dumb?" The rank-and-file asked sympathetically. Then the girl came to the rescue, saying that he was with the captured Germans in the ... Far East, and in the courtyard - the summer ... 1948 ... And then almost froze Terekhov ...

The Enkevedists, suspecting some sort of provocation, carefully studied the file of the soldier and found that he had actually participated in the ill-fated reconnaissance fight at Orsha and then was listed as missing. In Vladivostok, several soldiers were summoned from the unit in which Terekhov served. They identified their colleague and noted with surprise that in the past seven years he had not changed and looked as if he had been "spirited." Tireless Chekists in one of the camps for prisoners of war on the Volga found an officer from a company in which soldiers of the Wehrmacht, captured by Terekhov, served in 1941. He confirmed their testimony.

Despite the fact that the investigation was conducted for a long time by the best "experts", to answer the question of how the Soviet soldier along with the three Germans "transferred" to the Far East, and where all four were for 7 years, it was not possible. In the end, the case was closed: the Germans were sent to the camp for prisoners, and Terekhov was ordered to hold his tongue tightly, which he did for more than 50 years. Such amazing stories happened to me in my first, most interesting and memorable, visit to Khabarovsk - a wonderful city on the great Amur, which became for me the second Russian family, very dear and spiritually close to me.

In July 1985, hiding from the ubiquitous "Faker" San Palych Vlasov, Oleg Korobkov and I arrived at the Altay camp site, located in a picturesque corner of the ancient "merchant" city of Biysk. Arriving on the spot, I had to decide urgently - on what, all the same, the route to conduct "dummies" - tourists. On the eve, in April, I, as expected, "in the adult", completed additional university courses of the Faculty of Public Professions (FOP) for instructors in mountain tourism, and in May passed the most real "spetsnaz" training in the tourist center "Katun" under the leadership Known in the Altai super professional in the tourist business of Sergei Zyablitsy. For us, "Dummies", this person was charismatic and extraordinary in every sense. In 1980, Sergei, along with his future wife, successfully graduated from the Faculty of Law of ASU, but, naturally, he did not work in his specialty, but devoted himself entirely to his favorite business - tourism, which was betrayed to absolute fanaticism, and in which he excelled extremely, In the tourist world. By the way, at the present time the Zyablitskiye spouses are successful masters of a very decent tourist complex in the village of Manzherok, which is in the Mayminsky district of the Altai Republic, which was once dedicated to his famous song by the famous Soviet composer Oskar Feltsman. Zyablitsky taught us, future instructors in mountain tourism, a real spetsnaz school of survival in the taiga, and then organized such "epoch-making", such a memorable ascent for us - descent in full climbing equipment into the crater of an extinct volcano on Mount Lukovka (there, at the bottom of this crater , We were met by such a fantastic spectacle that it is simply impossible to convey words in words - ready-made scenery for the film based on the novel by Jules Verne!), So "I was eager to fight" to apply my theoretical knowledge in practice in full. At the same time, I always envied the "white" envy of Oleg, who by that time was already a seasoned "tourist" and drove "dummies" along the most difficult walking routes of the Altai Mountains - "76" and "77", on which he felt equally confident. Because of this, Boxes on arrival at the base were instantly transformed and behaved emphatically, even arrogantly - as, perhaps, experienced in numerous "alterations" a fighter from the German division of mountain rangers "Edelweiss" behaves with neobstrelyannymi fascist "suckers".

However, for me the problem of walking routes in general has never stood in view of the total absence in my head of a "natural compass". I could spend hours wandering "even in the three pines" of my native Barnaul, not to mention the Mountainous Altai with its impassable, sometimes completely impenetrable taiga. With such "extraordinary" abilities, I could really start a group in such a deafness (such precedents were already at the camp site with other instructors, when the poor, exhausted by many days of wandering tourists had to be evacuated from the taiga by helicopter), where "Makar did not drive calves." Therefore, my choice, in the end, I stopped on the so-called "mattress", 318th route.

The 318th route is a rafting along the Biya from the "gold - bearing" village of Artybash, in which historical events of the Civil War, shown in the famous Soviet militant of 1975 "The Missing Expedition", occurred right up to Biysk. Objectively it turned out that this frightening title of the film mystically determined all the future fate of our tourist group - we also "disappeared without a trace", not meeting the schedule schedule and being late for the base for as long as 4 hours.

"The route, in general, is quite uncomplicated - just one threshold and two shivers near Artybash (the author - small reams on the stony bottom of the river) on the way," explained the deputy director of the Altay camp site, very obese and Always drunk Vitya Mazurov nicknamed "Diesel" .- Your main task is to go on rafts clearly along the fairway and follow its signs along the river banks. The most unpleasant thing that can happen to you is to accidentally wander into the "predilection" - then "write - it's gone", you will not get out forever! "" And what is this "zapon"? I asked with genuine interest. "And this is a very narrow channel of Biya, to the very top clogged by a half-rotten forest left by the rafting. Yes, and more. Stay away from the "bumpers" (the author - wooden structures on the river, "beat off" during the rafting of the log from the shore). We had a case recently, when two kayakers were delayed under the "bump", and they both died. Now in Artybash for three days your friend Yura Korchak is sitting with a group of tourists from 10 people and is looking forward to seeing you with a sailing boat. Blow there, as quickly as possible, and then the tourists, they say, have already started to rebel from lack of work! "

Having reached the Artybash on the Rocket, which easily overcame this distance upstream in just 4 hours (our rafting down the river will take exactly one week), I saw Korczak, "blackened" from the "booze," in the absolute "depresnyak" sitting in the smelling Some disgusting sour percale tent. "But could it be faster to go! Yura muttered with obvious irritation. "I do not know what to do with them." Just pulled out the "teapots"! A Th sent you? I was told that there will be an experienced instructor! "I calmly explained that it was not up to me. I was told - I immediately came, what can be claims to me. "Well, then let's agree," Korczak, his usual "song", "always attracted the authorities in any form," "sang". "I will be the captain, since I already know this group well, and you are a pilot!" "Yes for God's sake, Yura!" I exclaimed joyfully, which was always oppressed by the responsibility for other people-the constant companion of any kind of power.

The main core of the group (and this is 6 people - 2 girls and 4 guys) were graduates of Barnaul secondary school No. 79 - the most dangerous contingent by its unpredictability. In addition to them, there were 3 students of the Pedagogical Institute and one extremely unpleasant type - Major - the Zapolit of Chelyabinsk Tank Regiment Vitaly, who, "as always in bad time", broke out a sultry affair with one of the students - Tanya. In general, the alignment of forces for an impeccable campaign was, frankly, not "hot." At our disposal were two inflatable life rafts (FPS), four tents and many - many different kinds of food - stews, condensed milk, which was always abundantly allocated by the tourist center "Altai" to the tourist groups of the water route. We have appointed the start for tomorrow, and today we decided once again to thoroughly prepare for the rafting, carefully checking out the equipment for marching. Water - it is water in Africa! As they say, does not forgive!

I will not bore the reader with the completely uninteresting details of the camp life, which is everywhere and always the same. I will only say that in my life I was not so psychologically tired as on this accursed water route. The entire campaign was spent in perpetual fear of "crouching" in jail for some teenager who had perished in the "abyss", accompanied by a grumbling grumbling of the "fucking" political deputy, who, for some reason, absolutely did not like this campaign, and he tried to establish Their own, familiar to him, army order. Remembering well Oleg Korobkov's order that it is necessary, whatever it takes, to break down the "informal" leader (it's easy for him to say - try to break the 35-year-old -tankist major who owns 200 people himself) who appeared in the group , The whole trip was the only thing I did, completely exhausting myself and the group, but without achieving the desired result - this stubborn major remained "in his interest." The only bright spot in this frankly unsuccessful hike is the delightful nature of the floodplain part of Biya - one of the most beautiful rivers in Western Siberia, the second in terms of water content in the Altai Territory and the Republic of Altai after the Katun.

Biya - the mother, unlike the frenzied Katun, with a roar rushing from the mountains and sweeping everything in its path, originates in the "pearl" of the Mountainous Altai - Teletskoye Lake, therefore in its current is the same unhurried and even somewhat phlegmatic, A sensible woman is a northerner. Nevertheless, in its upper reaches, this calm, in general, river is happy with rapids - it is full of whirlpools and rushes (shivers), of which the largest is "Circled" (2nd category of complexity) and the last one, which is 2 km from the village Turochak, threshold "Boiling water" (1st category of complexity).

Despite the fact that Katun ("Kadyn") in translation from ancient Turkic means "woman", in my opinion, there is very little female origin in this river. She, unlike Biya, nevertheless, personifies the rough sexual Energy - from morning till night, she hammers on the stones with the insistence of a sexual maniac, producing the thresholds of unprecedented power and the roar of a never-ceasing construction site. Have you ever tried to sleep in a tent near Katun? Try it, get an unforgettable impression! It will be just great luck, if you can close your eyes in this inhuman roar for at least an hour!

In the area of ​​Biysk, this fast-moving, sexually anxious young man-kjigit named Katun nevertheless catches in horror the fleeing very calm and very positive girl Biya, terrified of him, without the permission of her permission, while giving birth to the girl even more Brutal kind and behavior - the Ob, on which, as once, was born and grew up your humble servant - the author of these "imperishable" lines. Such is the ancient Altai legend in the new, as it is fashionable to say now, actual reading of "a la Roman Viktyuk!"

The main "cheese - boron" with the deputy political officer Vitaly always happened because of the parking lot. Every time the night was up, there was a rowdy debate about where the group was best placed. In an active dispute with the major, yesterday's schoolchildren were involved, turning a "principled" discussion into an ordinary bazaar. In the end, I got fed up with all this cursing, and I showed "unprecedented" hitherto "voluntarism" - personally determined the parking place.

In one of such "discussion" days, the night found our group in the village of Ust-Pyzh, in which an event happened, which gave a lot of mysticism.

Having dragged the rafts full of food stuffed with food to the boat pier of Ust - Pyzhy, Yura Korchak and I stayed on guarding tourist property (mainly from local residents), settling directly on the banks of Biya, and the group was sent to rest - after all, for us it is - Work, and for them - paid summer vacation. To somehow resist the sleep, Yura and I boiled the pot of hot water and threw a pack of Ceylon tea. Of course, we obviously overdid it, and although the "chifir" case obviously did not come up, the "merchant" turned out to be very notable (aut.- very strong tea in prison, but not "chifir"). With pleasure sipping tea and seizing his pleasant bitterness with condensed cream, suddenly we dropped the cups with tea from our hands and froze with horror - right along the river bed, about 20-30 meters above us, a huge translucent sphere in the form of a bird's wing or a boomerang , Surprisingly similar to the one we saw with Morozov in far Karaganda. Korczak even cried out in surprise and surprise when he saw such an impressive sight. After about 15 minutes, the sphere reappeared, but it flew much slower, so this time I managed to see it quite well.

This was clearly not a material object, in any case, in the sense in which it is customary to understand it. "Boomerang", apparently, had the consistency of some kind of ultralight gas, still unknown to science. In this translucent sphere, through which it was easy to see the river, the trees and the village houses standing on the other side, there was nothing that would indicate at least some signs of life - unless one could assume that the spheroid itself was alive.

We were silent for a long time, shocked by what we saw. "What was that, Yura?" I finally said. "Damn, it was definitely a devil!" Whispered Korczak and, superstitiously, three times, made the sign of the cross.

The next morning zampolit, as always, ran out to his traditional morning run. He ran up to us with Korczak, greeted him with obvious mockery, and was about to run further, when Korczak suddenly blurted out: "Vitaly, and yesterday we saw the devil - there!" And he pointed to the river. Zampolit looked at us with surprise at our "narzan-worn" faces with huge circles under the eyes from the night vigil, scooped up a mug of thick, rich tea from the pot, sipped it, spat at once, poisonously remarking at the same time: "However! Yes, with such a "chifir" is still not a pride! "And here an event occurred, a harbinger of which, apparently, was the appearance of the night" boomerang ".

Student Tanya, waking up in the morning and razmolev from nightly sexual pleasures with a political deputy, decided to cool off a bit, bathing in the morning cool of Biya. But how - only the girl went knee-deep into the water, suddenly she uttered a cry and, like knocked down, fell into a swoon right into the river, the good it was in shallow water. Vitali ran quickly nimbly, picking her up in his arms. From the right leg of Tanya, the bloody red blood flowed from the right side of the throat - she jumped all the way to the jagged bottleneck. We put the girl on an old camel blanket and, taking the four of us, carried her to the medical station in the village of Ust-Pyzh. While carrying, Tanya came to herself. "Do not worry, Tanyusha, do not worry - we'll fold the whole group and buy you a posh denture!" I said cheerfully, wanting to cheer her up a little. She smiled back and thanked me gratefully. In the medical unit the paramedic carefully processed the girl's wound and stitched, making an injection of tetanus. With all these events, we lost about 4 hours and completely got out of the "control time" set by the local control and rescue service (KCC is a prototype of the modern MOE), which earned strong idiomatic expressions from the incredibly angry and excited "Diesel" , Who met our group on the river wharf of Biysk.

Arriving at the Altay camp site, I saw a very nice girl there, similar to the Australian singer Kylie Minogue, whose fan I am up to now, walking in proud solitude in the shady alley of old poplars. Something unrealized, very powerful pushed me then to her, forcing me to approach the girl. We met - her name was Olga Istomina, she was from Novosibirsk, where in 1984 she graduated from the Institute of National Economy and was distributed to the personnel department of the Barnaul garment factory "Avangard". Tomorrow she ended the tour, and she left for Barnaul. The whole evening we walked with Olya and cheerfully and casually communicated. Olya was an extremely pleasant interlocutor and immediately I liked. But the devil pulled me, however, to take her home address, which she shoved to me the next morning right in the arm, taking a bus to Barnaul.

Arriving in August 1985 in Barnaul, I first of all ran to Olga. She met me more than cool, explaining this as follows: she was facing a very painful break with a young man with whom she was bound by a two-year close relationship. With my help, that is, the person to whom she had such strong and tender feelings, she hoped that this gap would pass more or less calmly. Even after these words, I should have turned around and left - it was obvious, it was quite clear that I had been drawn into a very bad story from the very first meeting, turning myself into a victim of an incomprehensible intrigue.

"You see, Volodya is a good man, he has a lot of things, something unspoken," Olya explained her decision to break with her beloved. "But I waited too long for him from his cherished words, waited for him to finally" be born! " "It was not difficult to guess which words Olya was waiting for from him, of course, the proposal to get married, but Volodya obviously had something to keep from this step. What exactly - I'll soon understand on my own skin.

I can imagine how surprised I would be if I learned that Olya is horoscope Gemini, the same as me, only with a difference of 3 days (she was born on June 7, and I am 4). But, probably, I would be even more surprised when I learned that all women without exception meeting on my life path will be absolute Gemini (my wife Natasha is also Gemini, born on June 9). No, without the intervention of Heaven, of course, there could not have been - it is hardly possible to explain such a strange pattern by mere coincidence. And I have certain considerations in this regard.

It was a "casting" of God Ra, and Ra is a Time that Always knows what it does! "And he knows thoughts and actions in advance!" - Mikhail Lermontov wrote brilliantly in his famous poem "The Death of a Poet". Time is a living, thinking and feeling Being! Man is created in His image and likeness! Emotional sphere of Man - this is an accurate "tracing-paper" of the sensually-emotional sphere Ra. Just like Man, Ra loves and hates. He rejoices and is sad. He laughs and cries, with a cold autumn rain mourning his bitter, boundless disappointment in the human nature he created!

And with Olga began problems, and "specific" problems, which can be fully explained by the duality of her "twin" nature. We did not have time to get rid of the master from the boiler factory Volodya, as on the horizon, unexpectedly, "sailed out" agronomist Seryozha (what we with him - namesakes, even more offended), which Olya met at the farm, where she went with the factory To harvest potatoes. And went - gone! It was necessary to me, probably for the next Experience, to fully understand the depth of female cunning. One day, in the fall of 1985, Olya came to me in an unusually high spirits mood and stayed up all night. In the morning she tenderly kissed me and went to work, saying that she had a very responsible duty at the factory today. Classes in my fifth year have already ended, and the training and production practice in the ROVD has not yet begun, so there was absolutely nothing to do at that time. No worse than Harry Haller from the Steppenwolf, I went to wander through the autumn Barnaul, "winding" on the wet gray asphalt tens of kilometers. Soon my feet brought me to the cinema "Rodina" and the factory "Avangard" located next to it. Suddenly I saw a familiar silhouette in, painfully familiar, spotty, "under the leopard", an artificial fur coat. It was my "precious" Olenka in an embrace with a handsome tall guy (above her and me on the whole head) who gently cooed, and I obviously did not have time to notice. I swiftly darted into the nearest gateway and began to watch them closely from there. The couple went to the box office of the cinema and bought tickets for the afternoon session of the movie "One Hundred Days in Palermo". I stayed for a while near the cinema, and then went home - "digest" what I saw.

In the evening, about 21 hours, I went to Oli's hostel on Yurin Street. They were all well-known in the district 4 hostels called "CPH" (central storehouse), as they were cynically christened by Barnaul muzhiks, who sometimes use the services of this treasured "storehouse". In the third nine-storey building, on the third floor, as once, Olya lived. There was a light in her room, which means they were already at home. I entered the entrance to the next hostel, and, having risen to the seventh floor, I began to watch the window of the room of the olgin.

The view from here was just wonderful - even without the theatrical binoculars, I could see everything that was happening in every detail. In front of me was an enchanting picture of human passion and "bestial" lust worthy of the "brush" of the great master of erotic cinema Tinto Brass. As in a slow frame, slowly swaying downwards-upwards, frying, the sporty ass of an agronomist, making frictional movements in the intimate, muffled light of a night lamp, under which I once lay and forgotten by everyone the unfortunate "boilermaker". "I'll kill a bitch!" - I thought evil and with horror realized that, really, I'm ready at this moment to kill a man, as I began to think very coolly about the plan of killing and avoiding criminal responsibility.

Finally, the agronomist ended his "dirty" business and left, apparently, to wash himself. And Olya stayed in bed, painting her legs "beautifully" and dreamily put her hands behind her head. More to look at all this, for some reason, not at all. I went home, completely crushed by female cunning and human meanness, feeling nothing in my soul except contempt for myself. So that's why the "boilermaker" Volodya persistently conveyed to Olga the request to meet with me - he wanted to sincerely warn me about this side of the character of the "fatal" girl.

Olga came to me exactly after 3 days, as she promised, and, as if nothing had happened, began to tweet, telling the latest news of the "secular" life of the Avangard factory. I listlessly listened to her, and then, with no reason, never said: "And I recently went to the wonderful film" One hundred days in Palermo! "Olya immediately stopped and looked at me with studying eyes. "When did I go?" I called the day and the session of her "legendary" campaign in the cinema. She was even more embarrassed. "No, they say the film - so-so!" - Only the girl could pronounce. "You know what, Olya," I said decisively. -We need to stop our relationship. This is not love for a long time, but solid lies and deceit! For both of us it will be better to leave, to part for ever! "" Please! "Shouted Olya and wept bitterly. She ran to the door, hurriedly dressed and left - gone forever from my life, to occasionally return from oblivion in the form of a long forgotten, sad image.

However, after severing all relations with Olya, I clearly overestimated my capabilities. Stefan Zweig has a marvelous novel "Amok" on this subject (the author is a painful state of mental fatigue caused by an obsession). The hero of the novel is a gynecologist, obsessed with a passion for her patient, chasing her around the world to take possession of it, and finally becomes completely insane after learning about the death (partly through his fault) of this girl, who became "forbidden" Fruit, which he did not manage to disrupt. Something similar seems to have happened to me. For a long time, for 5 months, right up to the army itself, I could spend hours standing by her hostel, feverishly peering into the window of her room in the hope of seeing at least the silhouette of this "fatal" beauty, which caused such severe spiritual pain. Some kind of sadomasochism, a real sadomasochism in Altaic! In March 1986, finally, our three-month training and production practice ended at the ROVD. Oleg Korobkov came to Barnaul, who, in order to distract me from the love experiences caused by the break with Olga, offered me another stunning adventure - an "extreme tour" to Tashkent and Samarkand, with only 50 rubles each and using as a hotel for spending the night Train car. And that the trip had a more or less specific goal, it was decided to make a friendly visit to a good acquaintance of Oleg Rafael Hizmatullin, whom he met in one of the campaigns in the Altai Mountains.

In just two and a half days we covered a huge distance almost to Uzbekistan, driving along the dull Kazakh steppes in the compartment car on the branded (then still very decent) train Irkutsk-Tashkent. Everything went smoothly until we arrived in Shymkent, located directly on the state border of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. There, in Shymkent, with our train there was an extremely unpleasant story, which could be regarded as a bad sign at the beginning of this "epoch-making" journey.

And what happened was that our locomotive with all the foolishness rammed the truck at the crossing, which resulted in the death of two Kazakhs, who are in the cab of the truck. We all left the train and waited for four hours until finally the investigative team arrived and examined the scene of the incident. All this time, while the train was standing, the Kazakh driver continued to agonize and died literally before our eyes from injuries incompatible with life.

I walked around our diesel locomotive and just admired how the child is the same power as this unit, that it so easily faked and threw a three-ton truck by itself like a toy, and then dragged it 50 meters more like a baby carriage , Their wagons on the railway line! From all this terrible, just murderous action, the locomotive left, on memory, only a slight scratch on the bumper and several cars - and nothing more!

Arriving in Tashkent, Oleg and I immediately plunged into the marvelous atmosphere of the famous Alai market, not having enough time to saturate our insatiable student's womb with the most real Uzbek chebureks and manti, seizing all this magnificence with a fragrant lagman. Yes, then we could afford it!

 For tickets back and forth we had postponed 40 rubles each, and 10 rubles (as much as 10 rubles!) Still remained for food. So we really "chic"!

Looking at the strange subjects, for the next cheeks chewing another fourth cheburek, the charming Uzbek girl finally broke down, languishing with feminine curiosity, and asked the beautiful, like a murmur of a stream, with a voice: "And where are you guys from?" "We - from Siberia! "- proudly said Oleg, vainly trying to straighten his eternally stooped back. "Oh, how you are there, probably cold! - With pity and great compassion extended the Uzbek. Wishing to make an even greater impression on her, I said meaningfully, once again "loosening my peacock's tail": "We belong to a very rare Siberian nation, listed in the Red Book -" chaldones "!" I just, on the eve of the trip , Read "King - Fish" by Viktor Astafyev, where for the first time in his life he met this strange name of Siberians in the Krasnoyarsk Territory. The girl enthusiastically threw up her hands and from the bottom of her heart gave us another cheburek, wishing, apparently, to feed this amazing "endangered species". Wandering aimlessly around Tashkent, we decided to go to the first police department we came across. According to the legend, we came to Tashkent to find out about our future work in the militia, where we got by distribution (at that time we actually had one place in the investigation department of the Central Internal Affairs Directorate, not Tashkent, but Shymkent). Once inside the ROVD, we went into the office, on which hung a sign "deputy chief of the investigation department, Major Mukhamedshin." In the office we were very polite, orientally hospitable, met by a huge Uzbek, fattened during the years of "heavy" service in the police to the size of a thoroughbred "elite" boar at the Exhibition of Economic Achievements, to which we shoved our trainee certificates into the face (nothing with an expired validity ), Remaining from the training and production practice, and blatantly stated at the same time: "We were distributed to your department! I would like to get acquainted with the working conditions in advance! "Inspired by the" magic "perspective to work with" the chaldones themselves "(I already had time to fool around with all my heart), a trustful Uzbek, like Ostap Bender, began to paint us with wonderful fires the wonderful prospects of working in the" glorious " The Tashkent police. We understood from his lengthy speech only one thing: if we behave correctly with the leadership of the ROVD, we will not only make a brilliant career here, but also earn a lot of money!

We did not know then, and, of course, we could not know that the "cotton business" of Gdlyan and Ivanov, which is famous for the whole country, is coming, which will soon thoroughly shake and update the entire law-enforcement system of Uzbekistan.

Soon Tashkent was fed up to us, and we decided to change the disposition - to go to ancient Samarkand (I wanted something "new" or "well forgotten very old").

Our choice for Samarkand did not fall by accident. This was preceded by an active "promotion" Oleg, who almost shouted at the top of his voice, convincing me: "Well, when will you still be in life in Uzbekistan? You do not specifically go on an excursion to Samarkand! And to be in Uzbekistan and not to visit Samarkand is a total absurdity! Imagine - the grave of Tamerlane, Avicenna, Registan! It's just a song! No, of course, Bukhara is also not bad (we were originally going to go there), but Samarkand is better, much better! "

And soon we already rode on the sighted train in an almost empty seat reserved car. Falling asleep, I just had time to notice how an elderly Uzbek-conductor was looking suspiciously at us, lying on the lower shelves.

 We did not have time to wake up, when an obliging Uzbek guide came to us in the compartment again, who informed us in an almost voluptuous whisper: "The guys in the next compartment are playing a class game -" sec. " You are invited to play! "We looked at him indifferently, without showing any interest, at least for two reasons: firstly, we were always indifferent to cards and other gambling games with Oleg; Secondly, after an internship at the Police, we felt like motherly "traces", which you simply can not spend on chaff. But "an old woman, as they say, happens to be an old woman"!

Once the mountain does not go to Magomed, then Magomed goes to the mountain. And soon a cheerful trio appeared in our compartment: Russian started for about 45 years with the appearance of a mother "zek" and an incredibly hoarse, drunken voice; And two young pretty Uzbeks. "Guys," Siply greeted us cheerfully, actively portraying himself as a mass audience - an entertainer. "You are bored, we are bored, let's get bored together!" And he began to pour out a joke of jokes - jokes that clearly belonged to the genre of prison folklore, and therefore we were well acquainted with the course of criminalistics. "And let's play the" interest "in a cool game -" secka "is called. Only two cards - and how much happiness! "" No, we do not play this shit, "I snapped, but Siply did not calm down. In the end, Oleg, unable to withstand his onslaught, said to me: "Let's play, Serega, there's still nothing to lose." And we sat down to play. "Seca" is a fairly primitive map game, where the principle of the game is about the same as in similar card games, such as "borax" and "azi". As usual, the card wins by seniority, and "jack-off" here, for some reason, are two jacks. The second combination of "nebitki" is a jack and a lady. In Karaganda, I played quite well, and even occasionally won from Novikov and Morozov, who were all recognized in the yard as carte "aces", but here, in the car, in a foreign country - quite another thing!

The first one, as usual, this trio gave us 10 rubles each. All the fun, as always according to the law of the genre, began in the second game. I got almost "nebitka" - jack with a lady. But, obviously, these three came also a good card, because they immediately raised the stakes up to 25 rubles. But the worst thing in our situation was that Oleg, apparently, had a very good card, because his eyes caught fire. And he began to raise the stakes, but we had money in common. Soon the bank reached 200 rubles (our 100), and there was nothing for us to support the con. It was necessary to determine urgently - who to stay in the game. "Seryoga, go away, I have a great card!" - whispered Oleg. "So, in fact, I, quite frankly, are not bad at all!" - I objected weakly and still dropped the cards. The game continued. "All bets are accepted! - solemnly proclaimed "Siply" and opened his cards - he had a "nebitka" in two jacks. We have the same with Oleg he gave to the lady and jack, psychologically, everything is very accurately calculated. The maps, of course, were "sprinkled".

Thus, in just 10 minutes of the game Siplom managed to get all our money from us, including money for the way back to Barnaul. I decided to act. I grabbed an ID card from my pocket, and I cried out loud: "Stand, the police, the bank is confiscated!" - and covered the money with his hand. The Uzbeks became very pale; Siply also was at first confused, but then quickly "took himself in hand" (apparently, the prison hardening affected) and hissed like a snake: "What is it, cops, lost, so pay, you that do not know whether you know what ? "- and he quickly cleared all the money from the table into his pocket with the words:" Here you guys are not Siberia, here you guys are Asia! Here, such things do not pass, and you can very quickly turn out to be a "blunder", dropped from the train. No one will even look for you here. Okay, the road is a road - here you have 3 rubles each for "maintaining your pants", and walk, Vasya, "chew the filings"! "

The trio rose and proudly retired to the next car, very pleased with herself. We were sitting with Oleg, completely crushed, seeing absolutely no way out of the situation.

Arriving in Samarkand, we immediately took tickets for the return trip to Tashkent (he once cost 3 rubles - "Siply" that turned out to be a real humanist). It was necessary to pass the whole day in a pocket without money for the hungry in Samarkand.

But once came, we must travel, no matter what. And we went to Registan. 

Registan (from "reg" - sand, "stan" - place, literally - "a place covered with sand") - the traditional name of the main squares in the cities of the Middle East. Registan Square in the center of Samarkand refers to the famous architectural ensemble of the 15th-10th centuries, centered on Ulugbek madrasah, Sherdor madrassa and Tilla-Kari madrasah. Thus, Registan in Samarkand is nothing more than an architectural and religious complex consisting of three madrasahs, connected in series, and the area between them (see photo 13).

Oleg and I liked Registan very much, especially its mosaic panel with geometric ornamentation, made of colored bricks, irrigated and carved ceramics. And, of course, the traditional attributes of the madrasah are magnificent minarets, domes and pointed arches.

 Only now, after leaving Registan, we felt - what you want to eat! With water without money in Samarkand, too, there was a big "strained" - I had to drink tap water in the toilet of the railway station. A little inspiration only thought that in Tashkent, Oleg has a longtime acquaintance in tourism Rafael Khizmatullin. All our hope was only for him. What if he's not at home? I did not even want to think about it. Wandering aimlessly through Samarkand to "kill" the time remaining before the train, we accidentally wandered into the Muslim cemetery, standing on a hill between the highway and a small apricot grove. By the cemetery, "healthy" boogies of the Asian type "defile" with hideous, brutal faces. They angrily looked at us and, apparently surprised by our arrogance (ignorance of the real situation gives sometimes courage - "courage of insanity"), for some reason, did not dare to attack first. I only later realized that this Ra had taken away from us a real death threat - they were Crimean Tatars, who always had incredible cruelty. They are not in vain so angry with us, because in the cemetery of the Crimean Tatars at that time the Russians were generally categorically forbidden entry.

Finally, we, somehow, held out until evening, and now we are sitting, "happy", in a stuffy dirty car, packed with Uzbeks like herring in a barrel. After all, it was necessary to know that for the weekend, according to the ancient Asian tradition, Samarkand relatives go to visit relatives of Tashkent. And we once happened to be on the road in this unfortunate car just on such a "family" Saturday - eight people on one shelf and the drunken Uzbek always fell to us on top (he probably broke all his ribs during these falls!). In the car periodically someone turned off the light and there was a heartrending female cry in Uzbek, understandable and without an interpreter: "They stole!" A gang of thieves was running all the way in the car.

Arriving in Tashkent, we first went in search of our Raphael, praying to God that he was at home. However, God did not hear us, and no one discovered us in an apartment on the third floor of an ordinary five-story "Khrushchev" (unlike ours, there are no heating systems in the entrances). "But where is your Michelangelo?" I asked Korobkov with sarcasm and immense bitterness. Our situation was "worse than the governor's".

In order to somehow earn money for food, Oleg offered to go to the station - unload the wagons. But not here - it was ("Here you have Asia, not Siberia," - correctly said "Siply"). Arriving at the station, we saw a brigade of quick homeless people unloading a car with meat carcasses. Approaching their Russian "brigadier", I asked how much the car was worth and offered its services to the loader. He reacted very sharply: "10 rubles for the car, but you guys, you better get out of here, for good - great! We do not need competition. Go to the second platform, where today the fish is unloaded, but only the prices are very low - only 4 rubles per car. " But even for such money, for these unfortunate 4 rubles, us and from there resolutely pogled the local, threatening to pound well.

There is nothing to do - there was only one way out - it is, after all, to try to find our only Savior Raphael. And again we went to the house we already knew, cherishing the secret hope with the help of the Tartar to get to our native Siberia, after all. We walked along the avenue dotted with white petals from cherry blossoms and apricot trees (all the same it is amazing - in March, in an instant, as if by magic, to move from the cold Siberian winter to the warm Asian spring, almost Siberian summer!), When Saw a young Uzbek with a knife sticking out of his belly. Uzbek with a suffering view was directed directly to us. In the head immediately a scary legal reality about the detention on suspicion of the murder of a local resident of two incomprehensible "chalcedons" appeared, it is not known why and to whom the money arrived to Uzbekistan without money. We, frightened by such a prospect that there is spirit, "hurled" through the avenue from the wounded man into the Uzbek stomach, periodically looking around and horrified to see that he, as before, is running after us. This time, fate was more favorable to us - our kind genius Rafael was at home. "Guys, how lucky you are! After all, today we all gathered for two days to go to the dacha! "With great sympathy, Rafael listened to our sad story of an unsuccessful voyage to Samarkand (we concealed only the shameful fact of the game of cards, saying that there was an ordinary theft in the train), but especially pitifully and Gently looked at us by his 18-year-old daughter Dinara - a charming Tatar woman, looking at which I suddenly clearly understood that I had to "get my legs off faster", otherwise I risk staying in Tashkent forever!

Raf without excessive questions allocated to us from the family budget 100 rubles, which we will send him by mail immediately upon arrival in Barnaul; We bought two tickets for the train to the "capital of the world", and another huge fragrant melon "Torpedo" - for what, I will say below.

The Tashkent melon "Torpeda" was intended for one wonderful, very talented tailor - Oleg's distant relative on the maternal line - a huge two-meter-tall Jew with magnificent Persian eyes and inordinately large Morfan hands, with which he cut a thick double-layer cloth with tailor's scissors easily, like cardboard paper. And Oleg's idea was the following - he started after awarding the diplomas "a campaign of the century" - rafting along the Peschanaya River on a catamaran consisting of two nacelles filled with inflated condoms. It was Korobkov's know-how; It, simply brilliant, engineering thought - the gondons performed the role of compartments in a submarine, making the catamaran practically unsinkable. When we explained this idea of ​​the rafting to the tailor, he laughed for a long time, and then suddenly became gloomy and said, already in a sad tone: "Guys, I will not take this job - I do not want to take sin into my soul. After all, you will drown in this terrible mountain river! How can I look after Auntie Lena (Oleg's mother) in all eyes?! "Here Oleg showed all his gift of eloquence, convincing him, nevertheless, to sew to us from a strong canvas fabric these two coveted gondolas. To give greater strength to this unreliable, from his point of view, design, the tailor folded and stitched the tarpaulin in two layers (then, on the river, we often remember the kind word of this remarkable man who, for his titanic work, except melon, We are not a penny).

June 25, 1986, the second day after the delivery of university diplomas, our "expedition" started.

     The Sandy River of the third category of difficulty for the alloy we chose, of course, is not accidental. The fact is that on this river there is everything that makes up the "blue" dream of a real waterman: in the upper Peschanaya you can completely relax in the absence of rapids of any complexity category and enjoy the "mattress" tourist, sweeping with great speed and laying bends, like A real racer, on a winding, rushing down river route.

But there is also a special place, which attracts even the real "water leopards" (it is customary to call experienced pilots in the tourist world), hungry for another portion of adrenaline. It is a 23 km canyon - a canyon near the village of Solonovka, at the very bottom of Peschanaya, whose banks are dotted with numerous sad crosses erected here in memory of the water workers who gave their soul to God in this picturesque place. Arriving with their huge "trunks" - easel backpacks (the author - only in the backpacks on the aluminum frame can accommodate a large water tourist equipment) in Biysk, we were met there by the permanent director of the tourist center "Altai" Viktor Petrovich Vasilyev - the waterman himself with a great experience: "Oh, guys, you did not start your event on time! "Big water" has not yet come, you will sit on the stones until completely blue. And then, see what's going on !? "- and he pointed to a large package in cellophane, lying in a military truck under the scorching June sun. "What is it?" I asked. "A military pilot, just graduated from the Barnaul military school and decided to celebrate this event with a single kayak trip. Tightened into a "meat grinder" in the Akkem "pipe"! " 

 "Akkem breakthrough" or as it is also called - "Akkem pipe" - on the Katun river, named after the mountain village of Akkem, next to which it is located - a sacred place familiar to any tourist of the water route (see photo 14). It is a very narrow canyon, on all sides clamped by impregnable rocks, about 5 km long and a very large angle of incidence - at times the water level drops reach 10 meters, actually forming waterfalls in miniature. I know this place well - once we with Oleg floated from the village of Ust-Koks and passed it. Particular danger in this "pipe" is the so-called "meat grinders" - rocks standing right in the middle of the Katun, in which a powerful stream of this crazy river forms deep underwater rills - the so-called "pockets". We threw logs, like crazy people, into these gullies and watched in horror as it broke into pieces, completely disfigured, swam out on the other side of the rock. It was in this "meat grinder" that this pilot, who risked alone, got himself without insurance to go through this ruinous place.

I went to the cellophane convolutions and slightly unfolded it in the head area. In front of me lay a young handsome guy in a fine suit of foreign production (the dream of any waterman), on the petrified, sculptural face of which there was already no emotions and emotions - the soul - his "violin" was already very far from here, and here there was only a lifeless, No one needed "case". The fate of this unfortunate pilot on the eve of our "epochal" campaign, which will, in fact, also without any insurance, seemed to me a very bad omen.

Having registered in the KSS (leaving the rescuers a "checkpoint" for our return), on the same day we went to the German village of Ilyinka, which is in the upper Peschanaya, where we planned the beginning of our rafting.

We arrived late at night in Ilyinka, went into the nearest courtyard and asked the pretty, elderly woman where the exit to Peschanaya is located, from which, usually, the water workers start rafting. "Tomorrow is my son," she pointed to a sullen blond German about 30 years old ("A true Aryan," I thought about him then), will go there on his milk car and take you. And now for the time being settle down for the night in our yard, only do not freeze - at night we are cold. "

In this our "exclusive" in all respects, we decided to retreat from the usual rule and not take a tent with us, but only sleeping bags and a cellophane bag from the rain. Quietly located in a clearing near the house of the Germans and hiding behind a warm camel blanket, carefully taken by Oleg from the house, we immediately fell asleep with the strong sleep of the righteous.

In the morning, dawn dawned, the woman woke us up and generously treated her with fresh milk. Our "cheerful milkman", with the sullen look of the "SS punitive man", loaded the heavy milk backpacks on the "milk cart", carefully tying them to the side of the car, and did not utter a word for the whole journey. Similarly, without a word, he rudely dropped our backpacks on the ground and left without even saying goodbye. "However, the" affectionate German "was caught!" - I thought, somewhat surprised at the harsh customs of the local Nordic population.

As soon as our small, frankly speaking, the team descended to the river, we immediately lost no time in preparing the willow for the future catamaran frame. This was very difficult to do in those conditions - the willow growed on the left bank, and to get to it, it was necessary to cross the waist in the water for 15 meters in the seething stream of Peschanaya. The current was so strong that even knee-deep in the water the river was completely knocked down and did not allow it to rise. A swollen, fetid carcass of a cow swam past us, which apparently got into a similar situation and, crossing the river ford, was knocked down and carried away by a swift water flow. I had to bind myself with a climbing rope and already with the insurance of Oleg to move to that shore. In a similar way, I went back, loaded on the chin with willow branches for the future frame. Finally, the frame for the catamaran was almost ready when suddenly a loud human voice was heard from the nearby willow - we even froze in surprise. We went to these voices, and soon a very strange picture appeared before us: a large perkalevaya tent for 8 people (very expensive and scarce for that time), two rafts on wheels from KAMAZ, on which were tied with ropes, two halves split in half Kayaks. Near to all this "economy", in fair podpitii, there were 3 guys and one girl. We talked. It turned out that they were Muscovites, who frivolously, without preliminary exploration, decided to overcome the Sandy (at this time of year!) On kayaks. The trek ended very badly, without having had time to start - kayaks immediately broke on the rocks in the shallow water. Then the guys came together with the local population, who built two rafts for money and alcoholic Muscovites, but, not wanting to let "the rich sponsors", decided to draw out of them all the money to the end. As a result, the whole four have simply "blackened" from drunkenness, forced from morning to evening to "abuse" with "hospitable" owners. We only sympathized with the guys, drank a glass of vodka and went to our "miracle" - a catamaran on the "big" way. More to us about the fate of Muscovites is not known, but only once, already swam to Solonecka, we suddenly saw the remains of their ruined raft and one of the kayaks floating past us. Are the owners of this kayak still alive? I do not even know now.

The Peschanaya River on all existing sites is clearly divided into areas that are very different in nature and complexity. Below Ilyinka, near the village of Baragash, the water workers, as a rule, have the most unpleasant problems one can imagine: the so-called "combs" (low-lying fallen trees above the water), which always unexpectedly "float" Because of the steep turn of the river, blocking the way of a catamaran in the narrow channels of Peschanaya. In one of these "combs" once pleased me and Oleg. It happened so.

Sandy, once again, gracefully made a bend, turning almost 90 degrees to the right, and suddenly, pouring out from behind a turn, in a dark tunnel from twisted trees, we saw a huge "comb" lying across the river. "Seryozha, hold on!" - just managed to shout to me Oleg, as it had already picked up some unknown force, rudely ripped off the catamaran and dropped into the bubbling around the "comb" water. Now it's my turn to fall. Under the influence of all the existing laws of physics, unexpectedly left alone on an unstable "ship", I make a spectacular "overkil" (an automatic - overturning a catamaran) and I am underwater, losing my paddle. Then I was "kolbasit" and hurled the river from side to side, and only the life jacket did not let me drown and drown in this situation. Remembering that it was completely useless to resist the mountain river, I completely surrendered to the power of a boiling stream, which, fortunately, soon took me wet, like a water rat, to a sandy desert beach.

A little later, on the horizon appeared wet through Oleg, who angrily looked at the overturned catamaran to my own shore. "After all, I cried to you - hold on! And why did you jump off the catamaran? "He said angrily to me with some kind of another stupidity, in order to somehow shed some of the irritation that had accumulated during the cold bathing in the mountain stream. "Who, I jumped off? - I exclaimed in surprise .- Oleg, what are you talking about? The first "comb" you first knocked off the catamaran, and then it overturned me! "" And why did you lose the paddle? "- Oleg was already calmer, more for the pro forma, which, after all, Then I "eat". "I could not hold it in my hand, so what can I do?" And, really, nothing terrible happened. The good thing is that Korobkov, a resourceful one, in advance, tore off from the chairs in the university audience with a dozen backs for future wooden oars. On this sandy beach and it was decided to make a parking for the night, to dry off properly and put himself in order after an unsuccessful "overquisition". I, as always, "cooked", cooking on a fire noodles with meat stew (such as "pasta in the Navy"). With us we had a full flask of pure medical alcohol and a bottle of semi-dry red wine, to which, most surprisingly, we did not even touch during the whole trip - there were already enough "hormones of joy" caused by the majestic, simply indescribable nature of the Mountainous Altai The Swiss Alps simply "rest"). Located near the fire, we surrendered to memories and dreams - the cherished dreams of these "water leopards", which we ourselves felt at that moment. And our dream was one for two - to pass the Chulyshman River of the 6th (most dangerous) category of complexity, not accidentally chosen for the international competitions of the "Splav-Raft" watercraft, held annually in the Altai Mountains.

The Chulyshman river, which is the most vigorous and beautiful in Siberia, is the main feeding artery of the Teletskoye Lake - this genuine "pearl of Altai". It flows in the highland zone of the eastern part of the Altai Republic, located in the very picturesque nature reserve of Ulagansky district. The beauty of Chulyshman, his simply indescribable beauty has long been appreciated by many tourists, including because of the "hillock": it is not by chance that Chulyshmansky canyon, amazing imagination, was successfully nominated for the contest "7 Wonders of Russia" in 2008 ( See photos 15 and 16). The deep narrow canyons of Chulyshman are comparable only to the famous Grand Canyon in America, and, in my opinion, in no way inferior to it. The valley of Chulyshman is amazingly picturesque, full of beautiful waterfalls and mightiest rapids, in places absolutely not passable for catamarans. By the way, the most cascading waterfall Uchar (Chulchinsky) is also located in the valley of Chulyshman - not on the river itself, but on its right tributary Chulche (the left inflow of Chulyshman, to the attention of the reader, is the legendary Bashkaus - also "not at all feebly Mountain rivulet "of the 6th complexity category), which is 12 km from the confluence of this relatively small river in Chulyshman.

Oleg told me that the director of the Altay camp site Viktor Petrovich Vasiliev in May 1986 also took part in Splav-Raft on Chulyshman as a member of the USSR water slalom team. The Americans are kayakers (kayak is a type of rowing boat, like a single kayak designed for rowing slalom), having gone far beyond the most complex plums of the Tudan cascade (see photo 17) stated that "only crazy Russians can raft along this insane Siberian river" And refused to further raft the Chulyshman, shamefully withdrawing from international competitions. The team of Petrovich, who, as is known, "is not bastard of shita" and "not done with his finger", bravely walked the whole river to the end, which earned a huge "respect and respect" in the entire "water world" (see the clip on You Tube "Rafting - an extreme on Chulche »).

After talking about water sports, as usual, they started talking about women - these lovely natural creatures that bring us, men, as much joy as misfortune. Once again, having complained about the insidiousness and inconstancy of Olga Istomina, with whom Oleg was also familiar, like me, since the summer of 1985, Boxes told me an almost anecdotal story of his unsuccessful acquaintance with the adorable girl Marina. And it was so.

At the end of August 1983 Oleg's mother Elena Y. Naumovna decided to introduce him to the girl Marina from a good Jewish family of the well-known Siberian scientist - nuclear scientist, who lives in Akademgorodok near Novosibirsk. The girl immediately liked our "happy" groom, and the next "weekend" young people, in honor of the upcoming engagement, decided to have a picnic on one of the picturesque islands of the Ob Sea. The picnic was timed to coincide with the opening of the autumn hunting season and was to be held in the style of the "Siberian safari". To this end, Oleg prudently took with him an inflatable boat and an old 12-caliber tozovka gun belonging to his still heroic Jewish grandfather - a front-line soldier. Marina, however, assumed the quartermaster role, ensuring this promising erotic expedition with all the necessary provisions. And so that the picture of "jolly sexual hunting" was logically completed, Oleja took with him his beloved Airedale Terrier Beliash. As it turned out later, this he made a fatal mistake!

"You see, Serega, when Marina laid out the sausage, cucumbers and milk on the grass - my heart jumped," said Box with a nervous laugh. - There was a spontaneous feeling that I was doing something wrong, consuming all this still life. But then we started talking and under the conversation "crushed" cucumbers with milk. When the boat was inflated, I already felt "Puccini" in my stomach. They sat, swam and somewhere halfway to the island, I felt that I was just going to die, and here in the boat, if I did not let the air out of my stomach. The "congenial" solution to the problem ripened in my head almost instantly. Seeing a low flying duck over me, I threw up my gun, loudly shouting to Marina: "Duck down!" And fired, simultaneously with the shot "booming like a horse, having made obscenity." However, to my horror, the old gun of my grandfather misfired, and my uterine sound rumbled through the whole Ob reservoir in a thunderous sound. Marina turned out to be a girl who was extremely educated and only said quietly: "It's okay: everything that is natural is not at all ugly!" Eh, I also at first thought that nothing terrible had happened until I realized that here, in this damn boat , Not only loudly farted, but also crapped with liquid diarrhea! Now the task was to quickly get to the island and wash, so much so that Marina did not notice it. Approaching the shore, I told Marina that she was going to choose a parking lot, and while I was dragging ashore and unloading our rubber boat. As soon as Marina left, I quickly threw off the soiled panties, disgustedly threw them into the willow bushes and thoroughly washed. I returned to Marina already clean, deeply pleased with myself and my incredible resourcefulness. In the eyes of the girl, I realized that an unpleasant incident on the water, fortunately for me, has already begun to forget. We lit a fire, opened a red semi-dry wine (by the way, the same as we have now) and have already prepared for pleasant erotic games, as at the same time fucking Belyash brought to me from the bushes my crocked cowards! "Here we both laughed loudly , In colors and faces, presenting this, in fact, quite unhappy situation. "You would only see Marina's eyes, those girlish eyes that were rounded with horror and disgust, when this horrible, simply disgusting sight of my cowards appeared in front of her bewildered gaze!" Oleja exclaimed nervously with a homeric laugh, recalling with dismay the extremely unpleasant incident he had endured . It is clear that soon the girl hastily zasobiralsya home, while not even caring about the plausible pretext, and the romantic acquaintance at the stake at them on this ingloriously ended. As they say, "love has passed, wilted tomatoes!"

Of course, if this unpleasant story occurred in the midst of the novel, at the peak of sexual relations, when people are already getting close enough, it's not so bad. But when romantic relations between young people are just beginning, as Stendhal wrote in his famous Treatise on Love, while in the stage of the so-called "crystallization of feeling," here even the most insignificant trifle in the appearance of a partner can turn out to be fatal and put an end to what has not begun Love relations. Reflecting on all these vicissitudes of fate, I quietly fell asleep in my favorite sleeping bag near a dying fire, faintly flickering in the summer night with its reddish sparkling coals.

The next morning I woke up, sweating, when, judging by the sun, standing at the zenith, it was already about 12 o'clock in the afternoon. Nearby I slept, sweetly snoring in my sleeping bag, Oleg Korobkov. In front of me I saw an absolutely fantastic sight of the Alpine meadows of the Altai Mountains. Until now, this unforgettable mountain landscape stands before my eyes.

We lay (it seemed, together in the whole Universe) on this huge emerald glade, flooded with a dazzling mountain - Altai sun. Everything around was fragrant with smells of mint, fragrant forget-me-nots and bright yellow bathing suits (for good reason, Altai honey from the herbage of alpine meadows is one of the most delicious and useful in the world). Around life boiled - a magic range of smells and sounds. The bees buzzed, the grasshoppers chirped, birds sang to all voices. I noticed that the colors of the surrounding nature in the midday reddish sun still remained somehow muted, not bright, as in the famous paintings of Flemish artists.

About 800 meters from us proudly towered an impregnable rock, in the sunlight of some special, golden color, which, with its snow-capped peak, as a sharp peak, ruthlessly pierced the ultramarine heavens. "The picture of oil" was complemented by a rustling mountain river beside us, which once in this place did its charming, very erotic bend.

Next stop for the night we made in the camp with the Altaic shepherds, who drove the cattle from Mongolia. The shepherds kindly provided us with two berths on the edge on huge wooden bunks, apparently designed for ten to twelve people, completely covered with greasy mattresses, which had long since lost their form and color, exuding a hideous smell of mustiness and mold. For this we, "from our bounties," gave the shepherds two cans of sprats in tomato, to which they immediately threw themselves greedily, like the natives who had never seen canned food. Grateful peasants for this piled on us a huge plate of freshly caught and well-fried grayling, which Oleg and I, thoroughly hungry, instantly ground for "both cheeks", asking for more supplements. The delicious silvery grayling was brought to the parking lot by a tall young cowboy, sunburnt in the sun to an eerie black that was fishing for a spoon-bait, without going straight down from its short, stocky Mongolian, standing on the horse's knee in the icy water on a ridge of a mountain river.

After dinner, well-fed and satisfied shepherds, as usual, wanted spectacles. Under the loud hooting of the barbarians, which, apparently, symbolized a simple "muzhik" happiness, the cowboys arranged, right here in the pen for livestock, the most real dog fights, squashing among themselves huge shaggy wolfhounds. Looking at the costumes, the natural make-up of all these extraordinary, simply amazing actors, and the surrounding mountain landscape as the scenery of such a thrilling sight of dogfight, the long forgotten images of Jack London's favorite stories about White Fang and the courageous prospectors from Klondike , Who lived in Alaska during the "gold rush". It seems to me that little has changed since then in the way of life of these so surprisingly similar people living on such different continents and talking in such different languages.

Two days later we finally reached that sacred place, because of which the whole "cheese-boron", the great canyon of the Peschanaya River, was being conceived. About its approach, we learned already 2 hours before entering the gorge - a terrifying roar from the water falling from above stood on the whole district within a radius of 5 km.

We begin on the catamaran slowly and smoothly, just like a woman, enter the canyon, still not even knowing what awaits us ahead. Caught at the top point of a falling river, clamped on all sides by black granite rocks, I was simply horrified to see Peschanaya swiftly disappearing somewhere very deep down. From this point of view, there was a complete sense that there was simply no exit from the canyon (apparently, because of this visual effect, the gorge on Peschanaya was called "grand canyons" at the peak of the Grand Canouon American). Then I manage with great difficulty to make out a narrow gap between the rocks on the right, into which the capricious river "dived", and where, in the end, it drags us, madmen. And now we are already caught up in the powerful water flow of the river, with a roar that carries our catamaran towards the four-hour nightmarish "meat grinder" of the "big", but not American, but Altai canyon. Ahead of us was an unforgettable spectacle - a test - a continuous cascade of rapids, which for a single moment made it impossible not only to relax, but at least just to catch our breath.

The oars had to work continuously, so much so that the hands were finally numb with fatigue. Despite our "titanic" efforts, the river did with us all that it wanted, exposing our absolute, total nonentity. Now, two decades later, I understand that it is our duty to live only to the God of Ra, who, in fact, arranged for us this transcendental test of water. There were times when we were just doomed to throw the oars, completely abandoning ourselves to the will of the crazy stream, and we, after a powerful throw to the next "barrel" (the author - a mini-waterfall on the mountain river), when we head down to the bottom again and again plunged into Boiling foam, the catamaran was suddenly thrown out from under the water to the surface, miraculously avoiding, as it were, such an inevitable, terrible blow to the rock, threatening imminent death. Nothing really depended on us here. Ra completely gave us to the river.

However, Oleg is already very tired and more and more often throws an oar, dangerously substituting the left side of the catamaran for blowing a roaring stream, trying to knock us into a boiling foam. I scream in frenzy at him, because the second gorge of the canyon begins with the most powerful water.

Suddenly, we are blocked by a huge rock of pinkish color - the "Pink Boom", which extends to the right of us almost half the river and is famous for the so-called "imitation of the clamp" (that is, pressing water to the rock according to all the laws of physics, as it should be , But its, for some reason, no). Here the river again makes a big loop around the rock, turning 180 degrees, and here it is, the most terrible, especially in the "big" water, the threshold is "Jaws", it is "Abramych". For normal, not "psychoballic" water experts before the passage of the "Jaws", thorough preliminary investigation is always necessary - so for normal people, and for us, "dummies", this is just another adventure. Fortunately, Abramych, contrary to expectations ("dummies" is always lucky for the first time), we pass without much difficulty.

And now, finally, the long-awaited way out of the canyon. The last time the river dispersed our catamaran to "supersonic" speed, and with all its foolishness struck a granite rock; So much so that the front crossbeam of the frame was cracked and cracked in half like a match. And all - here Sandy - as if "turned off" - from the turbulent mountain river, she suddenly turned into a calm flat river. There was absolutely no sense to go farther. We pulled the catamaran ashore and began to collect things.

At this very time a shepherd of an indefinite age with a black face from an eternal sunburn rode up to us on a horse. Right on his stocky, powerful Mongolian "powerful" pectoral muscle, he drove to Oleg with words full of threats: "Eh, little one, and now give your wetsuit!" Wetsuits that we with great difficulty, honestly, borrowed from Lena Yadryshnikova - also a waterman, and with a very decent experience - to give, of course, no one was going to. I calmly lifted my ice ax from the ground and walked with an imposing gait to the rider, having a sincere desire and a very serious intention to cut off his leg. Apparently, there was something in my glance that made him turn and quickly retire.

Only when I arrived in Barnaul did I understand what exactly had frightened this unfortunate shepherd. When my mother opened the door to my apartment and came to Barnaul to visit her grandfather and grandmother, she screamed in horror at me with the words: "My God, Seryozha, is this you?" "And what's the matter?" I was surprised at the unexpected Mother's reaction. "Yes, look only at whom you looked like!" - and I rushed to the mirror. From there I was staring at a horrible, scabby, scabby from the merciless mountain-Altai sun, a hideous face of completely incomprehensible age and sex. As a result of the constant action of the "lens" of water and sun, all the skin on the face and hands turned into an absolutely non-elastic parchment, and the hands - so generally swelled up to incredibility and under the effect of maceration of the skin very much resembled the famous "death glove" from the drowned man.

That's how I "happily and at ease" went to his last campaign of his happy youth!

Two days after returning from Gorny Altai, I looked in my mail box and found a summons there in the military registration and enlistment office. "Well, everything, the ice has started, gentlemen of the jury!" - I thought gloomily, looking curiously at a sheet of gray paper, where I was invited tomorrow at 10.00 in the 16th cabinet. Arriving on the following morning at the military registration and enlistment office of the Oktyabrsky district, I looked into the 16th room - there was nobody for some reason, and on the table there was a cardboard box with the personal files of the recruits. Some unknown force (now I know for certain that it was Ra) pushed me in the back, and I confidently, in a farmer's way, went into an empty office, quietly shutting the door behind me.

Considering the box with the cases and the inscription on the side "Team 23 - Chernobyl" (in April 1986, he just "rumbled" to the whole world), I found in my weighty pile my personal file and another matter of Yuri Pavlov, a student from the Economics Faculty, With whom we together in 1986 played in the ensemble of the club VRZ (auto - car repair plant) and to which I immediately called, informing about "unpleasant news".

I am still very far from the idea that an empty office in the military enlistment office was a mere coincidence. Apparently, my service in Chernobyl was not at all part of Ra's plans.

My mood fell below the "waterline". When I got home, I told my mother everything, which was extremely upset. Striving to somehow dispel my painful thoughts, my mother and her own sister, Rita, often took me to the city beach - the Bulyginskoye reservoir (the so-called "Pioneer Lake").

In one of these visits to the city beach, I met with the charming investigator from the Oktyabrsky District Department of the Internal Affairs of Barnaul Irina Sheveleva. Ira was two years older than me, and we liked each other so much that she immediately gave me her home address. I went to the army a couple of times to visit her, but the novel did not work out for us. Yes, and what kind of "hot" novel, tell at the mercy, can develop from the relationship that arose on the "brotherly sexual grave" - ​​on the city beach ?! Unless "Notes from the Crypt" - and nothing more!

Everything changed dramatically, suddenly, when Oleg Korobkov came to Barnaul to resolve the issue with the military enlistment office of the Central District (he decided to join the army with us from Barnaul to get into one team). "Sergei, are you a cretin? Do you want to become impotent and work for a lifetime on medicines? He persuaded me passionately. "Do not fool around!" Tomorrow, go to the military registration and enlistment office, withdraw from military records and go to the distribution of this "fucking" Pankrushi. And then, in October, we'll all leave for the army, from one recruiting station! "

I am very grateful to Oleg for that sensible advice, and for "the coffin of life" owes him! The next day I did it - I withdrew from the military register, presenting the military order with an order to my distribution to the glorious village of Pankrushikha of the Altai Territory, and for the whole 2 months I fell out of the turnover of the regional military enlistment office (on arrival in Pankrushy, due to the negligence of the personnel officer of the district police, I And did not register the local military commissariat). And now I'm on the train to the "treasured" village of Pankrushishha, in which two months of my already very young student's youth will pass.

These two months of life in Pankrushieh flew absolutely imperceptibly and so rapidly that there is nothing special to remember. My constant attributes of the "external" form of life in the village were the absolutely incompetent, meaningless work of the legal adviser in the regional consumer cooperative and the unrestrained, general, simply "universal" drunkenness of the local population. Pankrushisha turned out to be a perfect illustration to our immortal work "Mankina Love" - ​​the same images, the same characters, the same closeness to nature, the same Love! (And where only our unforgettable San Palych "Faker" saw in our and Oleg's novel an outright lie and slander against the Soviet village ?! He would come here!) Particularly clear parallel with the "Manka's love" was seen in the local village bakery, where I occasionally worked as a baker, to somehow reduce the "ends meet." There, right before my eyes, a "sultry" village novel developed between the technician-alcoholic Mikhailich and the brutal woman, two meters tall, a woman-baker Varvara, who easily, playfully, juggled hot "forms" with bread and moved huge jugs along the hall with Test. When we all had dinner at the same table, the enamored Mihailitch with tender tenderness in his gaze asked Varvara affectionately: "Come on, pig pork, send me some bread!" And the happy "kunka," laughing joyfully, flirted with coquettishness Mihalich with fragrant hot bread. Looking at this touching, "idyllic" scene of village Love, I involuntarily recalled the words of the popular folk song about the unforgettable Akulka:

Do you remember, native Akulka,

That first our love,

That's our first date

In the cowshed near the cows?

 

You swallowed the swill of the cow,

I cleaned the sovkhoz shed,

You stepped on my foot,

As if, quite accidentally.

 

And I'll fool you, fool,

Warmed on the broad back,

You cried: "Damn hairy!"

In response, she smiled at me.

 

 

Now, native Akulka,

You long and gently revenge,

Then you'll throw bugs into the kettle,

You'll piss me off the roof!

Once I rashly, without "preliminary intelligence", went into the shower bakery, where the "beautiful" Varvara was at that time in the absolute "negligee". She was not at all embarrassed, unlike me, and very so eroticly called me in a passionate whisper: "Well, come to me, my doll!" From horror I asked a baker from the bakery that they only saw me there. Bless and save! So in fact not for long, and without the unfortunate Chernobyl, to become impotent - "IMPO -1986"!

Finally, it was October 1986 - the autumn call began.

The draft company and its accompanying medical commission is not by chance, already long in Russia, is the subject of numerous "male" anecdotes. The thing is that in these commissions very often young people - doctors - are interns. Already this fact itself contains a significant element of intrigue - after all, we have to bare ourselves naked, and a woman, even a doctor, "she is also a woman in Africa!" So, my draft company did not become a "pleasant" exception to this rule.

Another embarrassment on the medical board occurred because of my pants. I always wore army grandfather's pants, richly spattered with greasy stains (my grandfather had a strange habit of dining at the table in his underwear). Moreover, this time, apparently half asleep, I put my grandfather's pants directly on my naked body, and the elderly ensign in the military registration and enlistment office, tightly clinging to my underwear, forced me to remove them altogether. I can imagine how I looked on the general "dressed" background of the draftees with their genitalia, bored with cold and shame.

Looking into the office, where the young doctors were sitting, I realized that I would never, even under pain of death, go there in Adam's costume. Quickly ran into the locker room, put on his pants, tucked them like a golf trousers.

But this did not save me from the curiosity. A pretty young girl, a doctor, gazing intently at my defecating spots, asked me straight and plain: "Are you engaged in masturbation?" I was taken aback by surprise and blurted out without thinking: "Yes it's not me, it's grandfather!" She She laughed loudly. A tall, pimply guy of a degenerate kind came in after me, to whom the girl said softly, in a low voice: "Take off (she meant his swimming trunks) and put it on the table!" The guy, without a long thought, took off the trunks, and, in turn, lifting his legs, neatly Put his "farm" on the table, right in front of the stunned doctor. "Yes you are today, all conspired, or what? What do you allow yourself, young man, what kind of rudeness !? "- she angrily exclaimed and hit the guy, though not much, a pointer over the genitals. "Yes, there is much in nature, Horatio's friend, which our wise men did not dream about!" - just want to exclaim in the words of Shakespeare's Hamlet when you remember these "golden dots".

Finally, these long medical tortures ended and we were taken to the regional assembly point, where teams were being formed to be sent to the troops. In this fairly crappy institution - "bomber" we spent three whole days, while we, dirty and pretty overgrown with bristles, finally were not scattered around the teams (Oleg was immediately pulled out by some tall handsome major - the "buyer" from the Far Eastern motorized rifle division, Located in the city of Obluchye Amur Region). I, along with 15 of my classmates, were sent by train to the city of Omsk. As I remember now - it was already November 11, 1986, and Barnaul, "dropping his tears," said goodbye to me with a warm, almost summer rain. Arriving in Omsk, we realized that this, it turns out, is also not all. In the 14th military town of signalers, where we were brought, in the large sports hall the second and last stage of the formation of the military commands began. Hefty major - tanker immediately separated from the rest of our group of 15 people, leaving only me alone, standing in the middle of the hall. "And why do not you take it?" Asked his lieutenant-colonel with the emblem of the communications troops. "To hell with this" dystrophin "," said the major, the Tankist, pointing contemptuously at me. "He'll be dumped in a tank when a 40 kg shell is lifted!" And I, already unnecessary, were taken away from the tank crew of my fellow students. So, incidentally, incidentally, the Fate of the "slave" in this Omsk "slave market of Zanzibar" was solved.

A sergeant with an artillery emblem (only later, after a while, I recognize Sergeant Mezentsev in it) took me and Kashirsky to the empty barracks of the 14th town. Sasha Kashirsky (with whom we were practically not friends and did not communicate at the university) silently perched on the second tier of the soldier's bed and fell asleep.

I could not sleep for a long time in this first army night, overwhelmed by strong feelings and emotions. In my head, the sharp piercing melody for the saxophone - the theme of nostalgia, which will pass a sad leitmotif through my entire army service (see phonogram 2) - was piercingly winding from where it came from.

After all, there, behind, somewhere very far away, my bright and happy Youth has remained. Waiting for me was only gloomy darkness and complete uncertainty!

 

 

To be continued ……

 

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Сконвертировано и опубликовано на http://SamoLit.com/