Crossroads. Chapters 2 and 3

0x0001

    The first experience of a collision with an “error” Ilya received at the age of twelve. He calculated the amount of gunpowder needed to send the steel ball he received from the disassembled bearing to a distance of forty meters - just before the plate with the inscription "ANNO-1933" attached in the center of the facade above the windows of the second floor of a neighboring wooden house. The “Kryatyatnik” was the way the crooked two-story barrack, painted many years ago in green, was called by the residents of the five-story building, on the last floor of which Ilya and his parents lived.


    Over the manufacture of his weapon - a copper pipe, rolled on one side, with a drilled little hole at this edge to ignite gunpowder, Ilya worked for several days and had already shot him in an abandoned park on the outskirts of Riga.

    He exchanged gunpowder from his classmate Pasha Kononov for two belyash, which were supposed to be in Ilyushkin's thin stomach, but the powder was more important than the dough fried in boiling oil with aromatic spices soaked in spices stuffed inside. The whites were unusually tasty prepared by Azerbaijanis in the local market, located exactly halfway from school to home. Belyashi was a pity, moreover, the overweight Kononov did not spare the transaction partner who swallowed saliva and devoured the first of the two right in front of the inventor who did not have time to move away from the place of exchange.

    A bag of powder, burdening his hand, outweighed physiological experiences, and Illya almost ran to the shed in the yard of his house, where, wrapped in a rag, lay a copper tube and steel balls. Gunpowder Pashka stole from his father, a hunter, whom he helped to equip ammunition with small shots on ducks and canister on boars. but the fraction to bring Ilya Pashka refused. It seemed to him that gunpowder was somehow not very dangerous, but a fraction was almost a bullet. Therefore, the bearing balls, which were much easier to reach, became the tool of Ilyushkin's crime.

    Parents came home from work not earlier than seven o'clock in the evening, so belyashi, ten kopecks a piece, were the best way out for not straining to wait for dinner. It was lazy to warm up what mom left him for lunch every day. But hunger is not an aunt, and this time Illya turned on the gas and warmed the soup in a saucepan, ate it with a piece of white bread and immediately went to work.

    He screwed a vise to the window sill and clamped a tube with a prepared charge into them, all according to the instructions: gunpowder, a polyethylene notebook cover, a ball, cardboard pad, felt wad, cut from an old felt boot, and put it on the “rat-piece” wall. The people there lived a poor drinker, and frequent loud scandals, an unpleasant musty smell from their porch, and often a rat that slipped into the basement, reinforced the offensive nickname of the barrack.

    The shot was precisely verified by a young man, but by his twelve years he was a very experienced experimenter, an almost round excellent pupil, the best in class in physics and mathematics. He measured the distance with a folding wooden meter with accuracy, as it seemed to him, practically laboratory. I calculated, taking into account the weight of the "projectile" and that measure of gunpowder, which was exactly enough to cover the distance of forty meters to the intended target - the plates "ANNO-1933", denoting the year of construction of this two-story structure.

    But Illya did not know that one smart guy by the name of Riemann revised the fundamentals of the theory of another smart guy, Euclid, and added a bit of curvature to his straightforward world. These guys lived a long time ago, but the contradictions of their prehistoric theories had a fatal effect on Ilyushkin’s shot in the modern, so understandable, real, three-dimensional space, limited in this particular case by the target in the form of a wooden plate with traces of once brilliant four digits.

    Gunpowder ignited from a sulfuric matchstick that was brought to the hole drilled in the tube, and a ball flying out of a copper barrel flew in an arc of forty meters and ... five centimeters. Having struck at the very bottom of the plate, the ball at the end broke the glass in the window of the second floor, producing a scandalous ringing sound of flying glass fragments. Five centimeters, the error is small, but ... At the moment, there was a man near the glass destroyed by Ilyushkin in his room - Arkady Nesterenko. He was holding the White Sea Canal cigarette in his mouth, and the unexpectedly broken window did not make him throw it out, smoked only up to the middle.

    Arkady Nesterenko was wearing a faded blue jersey and green pajama pants. On the eve he was sixty-four years old, and he walked away from a drink he had drunk with a few acquaintances, made from an alcohol-infused currant and lemon, only slightly diluted with distilled water. He was a man accustomed to shooting heavy guns. At the end of the war he served in an artillery regiment, in a battery of 150-mm D-1 howitzers, and the miserable ball that broke the window did not embarrass him with a hardened, seeing a lot of things, souls. Another thing - broken glass. He could not afford to hire outsiders to eliminate this disgrace for two reasons: the first is chronic lack of money, the second is painful, on the verge of a phobia, unwillingness to let anyone into his dwelling. This silent ponderous in his dealings with those around him was embarrassed by his poverty. He was lame. His right leg was crushed by a splinter of a German mine on May 6, 1945, near Prague. Then, in the hospital, suffering not even from pain and thoughts about his future with disabilities, but from the injustice of fate that spared him during the long war years, but, as if mocking at such amazing luck, punished three days before the victory, for the first time he filtered through the squeezed teeth: "I doterplyu."

    Invite a woman to visit, or just sit with her near the house on the bench, or, for example, go with her to the dining room, he could not afford. Yes, and he did not look a gentleman. A scruffy shirt, crumpled pants, sandals barefoot, a crook, and a limp made him, as it seemed to him, just some kind of Quasimode, about which he had heard in the war from a lieutenant, a young guy, educated, handsome. He told me in moments of calm, probably to please his soldiers, many of whom were much older than him, different stories about the events that took place once in the cities and villages of those countries that they liberated, moving deep into Europe. And although they did not get to France, the story about Notre Dame de Paris and its keeper Quasimodo was remembered by Arkady forever, and it was not only the tragic fate of the hunchback told by the young lieutenant, but that the lieutenant was killed the next morning. The bullet went through the heart, but for some time he was conscious and looked with surprised blue eyes at fellow soldiers surrounding him. He died in the hands of soldiers who did not have time to bring him to the tents with a red cross.

    Arkady noticed the window from which the five-story building was shot, and, as he was in a T-shirt and slippers, he jumped into the courtyard, waving a stick in his right hand. He shouted menacingly in the direction of Ilyushkin window, using expressions consisting mainly of swear words, but still, so to speak, the second echelon of complexity: too many women and children had risen from everywhere, and he could not get hot on the whole coil. The central part of his speech was a promise to come in the evening to the parents of a jerk who broke a dear veteran with expensive glass and, developing the theme: “If I were closer, then I don’t know how it would end!”.

    Arkady was a quick-witted man, therefore, shouting out and waving a little more with a stick, he felt uncomfortable. Somehow he immediately became ashamed of his shabby appearance and disappeared into the stairwell. On a T-shirt or even a shirt — he was looking at the biker in a cell — he would have had enough money, but the habit of counting every penny made him, a poor man, also rather stingy, and there was no one to show off. He returned home, took out a fifty-centimeter ruler and began to measure the size of the window frame, which he decided to glaze on his own. Twenty minutes later there was a knock at the door. Arkady went to open it, leaving the stick by the bed, limping more strongly from it, but he remembered that he did not close the door with a key, and hoarsely shouted:

    “Who did you bring there?” Not locked.

    On the threshold formed a boy. A thin figure in a tight-fitting T-shirt with vertical yellow-blue stripes, golden, slightly curly hair to the shoulders, delicate facial features, clear clear skin, eyes of clear blue, and in them - repentance and the desire to fix it.

    “I broke the window by accident.” An error occurred in the calculations, and I came to ask you for forgiveness.

    So he began and held out his hand with an open palm, on which lay a crumpled three-ruble piece of paper.

    - It's on the glass. This is all that I have, but if this is not enough, tell me, and I will try to get more.

    Arkady, in spite of his injured leg, was not a weak man, in anger he produced a very frightening look — and not without reason. His stick with a bent handle walked on the backs of a considerable number of local wanderers. And suddenly this boy, these three of his rubles, his determination to come to an unfamiliar, unfriendly and even dangerous person ... All this very much surprised Nesterenko. But most of all struck by the similarity of the boy with the boy from the TV ...

    In his one-room refuge among the uneven walls, pasted over with cheap wallpaper, there were two decent things: a color TV and a wall clock with a fight. The clock is a military trophy which he could not refuse and which front-line friends brought him to the hospital, as a souvenir of the howitzer battery that had survived the last battles.

    And the TV ... Then he did not stint. The TV was his only reliable interlocutor, the one in front of whom it was possible to throw off the usual mask, armor, armor of everyday confrontation with the world around him. This technical device is the only creature that saw Arkady Nesterenko smiling, laughing, crying, living person. The brand new "Ruby C-266D" stood in the place of honor in the corner reserved for the bedroom. Those who knew Nesterenko would have been surprised by his knowledge of television programs and would not have believed that he especially likes to watch films about children. And here on the threshold is a boy, as if materialized from the just watched film “The Magic Voice of Gelsomino”. So Arkady took it, and called him later - Gelsomino. And at this first moment, Having not yet decided to abandon the expression of fierceness on his face, he did not cope with thick, not gray-haired, unlike his almost completely white hair on his head, his eyebrows. Arkady's eyebrows were often suggested to the attentive observer, physiognomist, before it was not at all a gloomy rusk, but a person with a more complex soul structure, capable of feelings accepted to be called thin. And the twelve-year-old boy managed to appreciate this movement of black stripes above the stern gaze of the dark eyes that twisted guiltily, which made the features of the elderly man almost ridiculous. capable of feelings accepted to be called subtle. And the twelve-year-old boy managed to appreciate this movement of black stripes above the stern gaze of the dark eyes that twisted guiltily, which made the features of the elderly man almost ridiculous. capable of feelings accepted to be called subtle. And the twelve-year-old boy managed to appreciate this movement of black stripes above the stern gaze of the dark eyes that twisted guiltily, which made the features of the elderly man almost ridiculous.

    So they met. Nesterenko took a three-ruble piece of paper, turned around with her, awkwardly looking for a place to put it, as if she burned his hand, and, not deciding where, turned to Ilya and unexpectedly in a shrill voice said:

    “Maybe tea?”

    I must say that tea in his house could be safely called the third decent thing: only selected, Indian, brewed firmly. Therefore, the offer to taste good tea was partly a desire to show this red-haired boy that Arkady Nesterenko is a man worthy of attention.

    - Tea? With pleasure!

    Ilyushka did not expect such a turn at all and immediately agreed, with relief realizing that the danger of meeting this uncle with his parents had passed.

    Arkady, marveling at himself, puffed at the kitchen table, pouring boiling water over the tea leaves, cooked in the morning, and putting a cup filled with bark with dark fragrant tea in front of Ilya, reached into the wall cabinet behind the bagels.

    Bagels were the only thing that Arkady allowed himself to bring home from the bakery. He worked as a baker, standing idle for long hours at a red-hot oven with short breaks for lunch and ten-minute smoke breaks. Lunch consisted of the same bagels or fresh bread with milk. The smell of vanilla (vanilla when kneading dough for soft bagels stretched into an ellipse was not spared), which many people after a few months did not tolerate such feeding, did not worry him. He ate a batch of muffin with a glass of milk and went out onto the porch to smoke his cigarette. He drew in himself the bitter smoke of caustic tobacco and sometimes repeated through his teeth his mantra of hopelessness: “I will take it out.” He was not disturbed, they knew: they would not support the conversation. The authorities Nesterenko valued, few were able to hold out for a long time at this work at the hellfire. Those who have really worked for many years engaged in supplying, preparing the dough and packing. This folk was not averse to profit than God sent, in this poor choice of bakery ingredients. Little by little they dragged butter, yeast, sugar, flour. Conflicts sometimes arose, especially on the eve of holidays: they all stolen at the same time and, focusing on any one product - butter or flour, put the output of planned products on the verge of failure. But in the end it all ended in peace. The head, sixty-year-old Valentina Stepashina, despite her subtlety, amazing with the abundance of products, the use of which was noticeably manifested in the figures of the rest of the female part of the team, was able to put the team in place. Nesterenko spoke of her support. Never interfering with this mouse bustle, he served as an authority, a neutral person to these manipulations,

    But the donut, a small bag, he took home: they were allowed to eat for lunch, and he believed that he deserved some of them in excess of what he ate with a half-liter bottle of milk.

    Arkady watched with what appetite Ilya eats these donuts, sipping tea, in which Nesterenko put four pieces of sugar. He was delicious. Arkady, watching the boy, thought that he himself had not had the pleasure of eating for a long time, mechanically chewing on what he himself called not food, but food. He ate only because of the need to maintain physical life - to endure.

    “And you know how we are at the front ...” he began this phrase, startled by the unexpectedness of what was said. For all the post-war years, he could count on one hand the instances when he talked to someone in a conversation, a war, that life of his own, unlike any other that smelled of vanilla, empty, useless, gray. He cleared his throat, grabbed hold of a crumpled pack with a few white belomorin, but did not smoke, overpowered himself and repeated: “Do you know how we baked bread at the front?” - and told about how bags of flour filled up with bayonets, not hoping that the battery with these bags would get their battery, and also about how tasty kulesh was made with millet porridge and hare, caught in the little forest that came along, and braked his story as if he had stopped the whole lorry with a gun attached to it along a steep river cliff all the way round,

    - What are you, fought?

    Nesterenko blushed, rose heavily, took out a cigarette and went to a far corner to the closet, lit a cigarette there, and dispersed the smoke with his broad hand, replied:

    “The whole war has passed,” and, for some reason, he added, as if reporting before the authorities: - And there are awards.

    - Can I see?

    Ilya gently put half a half-eaten bagel on a plate and wiped it off with a napkin. Arkady opened the cabinet and took a large flat box covered with brown leatherette from the top shelf. He carried it to the table and, picking up the brass latch with his fingernail, opened it. The box inside was lined with blue velvet, and on this blue field, gleaming dully, lay orders and medals in rows. Arkady looked at Gelsomino’s mouth, which opened in amazement, and sweet syrup filled his chest. He felt that for a moment more and his eyes would fill with a tear. Nesterenko could not allow this, and, having drawn on tightly already at the hot tobacco burner that had come to the mouthpiece, struggled to calm the voice, he said:

    “Here, I ’ve got enough for four years.”

    Two Orders of the Red Banner, Order of Glory of the second and third degree, two Orders of the Red Star and the medals "For Courage", "For Military Merit", "For the Defense of Stalingrad" and "For the Liberation of Prague."

    He will then tell about what, when and where he received these heavy, jewelery-made, covered with multi-colored enamel. But this time both were silent, while Ilushka sorted through orders, weighty medals like gold coins, running their thin fingers along the edges of these mysterious witnesses of the distant, terrible years of war. He will come to Nesterenko, not often, sometimes, on weekends. They will always have a topic of conversation, two completely different, dissimilar to each other and therefore, probably, so interesting to each other.

    From that day on, Arkady kept a mandatory supply of fresh bagels at home. If Ilya was not there for a long time, he would distribute the old ones to the neighbors and bring new, hot ones, and wait until their guest, with their well-brewed tea, waited them, to their mutual pleasure.

    Barak, in which this whole story happened, was soon demolished, and a multi-lane highway lined up at the place where he stood. Nesterenko received in the neighboring neighborhood one-room apartment in a new house. Ilya and his parents moved to the city center, to a large beautiful apartment in a renovated house of an old building, and for some time they lost sight of each other. But once…

    Ilyushka was told that at the entrance to the academic building of the Riga Civil Aviation Institute, where he enrolled without examinations, as a student of the school sponsored by this institute, which he graduated a year earlier, externally, some gentleman was waiting for him. His old friend Arkady Nesterenko was the master in a light gray three-piece suit with a cane with a silver knob.

    - I do not believe my eyes!

    First, Ilya did not immediately realize that this elegant type was the very Nesterenko, who remembered him in a T-shirt of an indefinite color, with a stick whose name was “Klyuk”, and therefore he was surprised most of all by an expensive elegant cane. They embraced, and Arkady invited him into the car. Ilya stared in amazement at the gray, in the color of the suit, “Audi-100” - “cigar”, these just appeared on the Riga car market. The car was not new, but in excellent condition.

    Nesterenko drove up to the restaurant "Russian" and there, over tea with pies, told that his life had changed radically. One day he went to a clothing store, decided: once a new apartment, it is necessary and dress up, finally buy a suit! - and met there a manager, a pretty cheerful woman: “Not young, but you know, with dimples and hot, - Arkady was embarrassed, you will not tear yourself away!”. Well, she washed him, as they say, in every sense.

    He twisted a cigarette in the air, describing, apparently, the diversity of these meanings. Not a cigarette with a chewed mouthpiece, "Cigarette!" - said Ilya. Everything has changed in this man, just some kind of fairy tale.

    “Did she bathe you in living water?”

    - Something like that. Bought a shop and a small shop. I am the bread maker, and she is a businessman. So now we have our own bakery business, and things are getting better every day. Ilya, I know for sure that everything started with me from your arrival in my shack. It is a pity that it is late, I already have a lot of years ... A little earlier you broke my glass in a hut.

    Ilya laughed:

    - From the stroller, or what?

    “I would like to have a glass, but I can't drive it,” Nesterenko complained. And this “behind the wheel” pounded Iliushka especially sharply. Could you imagine such a thing five years ago? "Behind the wheel"!

    They said goodbye this time forever. Ilya went to Israel, corresponded with greeting cards for holidays and birthdays, and after three years Nesterenko’s wife reported that he died, his heart could not stand.

    “I suffered, but still,” thought Illya, “he tolerated life, from which he left with dignity.”

    - And what is the essence of this fairy tale?

    Sasha asked a question, examining a dying fire through a greenish glass of glass.

    - I completely differently began to treat people, to all. It was as if I learned to see the second bottom, the second skin, thin under the thick, superficial one, I learned to delve deeper into the spiritual structure of my interlocutors, acquaintances, friends. This story has changed me. Had that miscalculation happened, I would have been a different person. And that man, Arkady ... His life has moved to another level altogether!

    Imagine that we are creating such a reality - a virtual reality, of course - that puts a person in front of an opportunity to follow an unexpectedly discovered path, an accident, an unpredictable turn of events in his life, and he may decide to try to live with this choice of some other a segment of life different from his own! He will feel what actions he would be ready for, how he would appreciate what he himself does and those with whom this virtuality will confront him.

    - Check for lice, - Dima landed the speaker.

    - You can say so, checking yourself.

    We talked until the morning. The nihilism of the young minds tried to smash the fantastic idea of ​​their comrade into atoms. But when, after a short sleep, everyone was again crowded into the “Bug”, which was moaning with springs, they somehow fell silent and spent most of the way back in pensive silence.

0x0002

    They returned to this idea of ​​"crossroads" after fifteen years.

    - Too much blood.

    Ilya was skeptical about the horrific picture projected on his expensive ODG glasses. Lie like Romeo and Juliet. A thin black-haired girl and a guy who buried his face in her chest. Hands are woven in the last rush not to leave forever. Her blue dress and his fine white wool suit are soaked in blood. In the blood that left their bodies, they lie as if in a cradle, reassured by the best soporific in the history of people's lives - death.

    - From what? Just right. In the human body is about five liters of blood. In two, if we make a simple arithmetic operation, about ten liters, and this is a whole bucket. Here, pour a bucket of water on the asphalt and you will see that the effect will be the same, only enhanced by the color of red blood.

    Smolkin said the last words, grinning ominously, portraying the pantomime of a villain brandishing a knife. Illya watched him, freeing himself from the glasses covering half of his face.

    Smolkin in such a role looked quite comical in a short black coat and light blue jeans. He never knew how to dress properly. Illya tenderly treated the wardrobe and noticed how a wide jacket does not harmonize with tight jeans. A short pigtail and unevenly trimmed mustache complemented the look of his best friend.



    They were standing in the gate of number 0X7 on Farringdon Street in London. Tiled paved passage was dimly lit by two shades, mounted on the arched ceiling of the gate. They came here for the third night in a row, sharpening the image projected on the glasses and the display of the tablet that Smolkin was holding. If not to count, as it seemed to Ilya, an excessively abundant influx of blood, otherwise it was possible to state that the scene of the central episode of their game program was a success.

    They walked through the night city, and Smolkin talked about his Canadian life, something about a new cafe near their house, where he and his wife and son liked to go on weekends. And Ilya did not leave a strange feeling that he experienced when he saw this scene of the death of the heroes of the story invented by them and heard how his friend spoke about this ordinarily. Probably, he specifically chose this tone, reduced adrenaline. Both of them understood that their three-year hard work had turned from virtual hazy dreams into reality, into “virtual reality”. Let it look like a tautology, but it goes like this: from virtual fog into virtual reality. Smolkin, damn him, don't know how to pick up colors, combine details of clothes, but does it really matter when his head is golden? Ilya laughed:

    - Smolkin, I will give you a gold-colored cap! This color matches any other.

    Ilya could not forget the photograph, which, after the end of the Second Lebanon War, he asked Smolkin at a party about his return from the front.

    In 2006, Smolkin was drafted into the army and was responsible for the repair of armored vehicles in one of the regiments of the Israeli army in Lebanon. In this photo, he was sitting on the Merkava, a Russian-made cornet tank. Dirty, smeared with oil and grease in a tehnarskoy form, with a constant pigtail sticking out from under the helmet, he looked imperturbable, despite the fact that the fire from Hezbollah did not stop. As Smolkin explained, this was the case when rabies eliminates fear and as a result is perceived as equanimity. Smolkin loved order, and there was no order in supplying the Israeli army in that ill-starred war. The tank on which he was sitting should have been pulled from the battlefield by a tractor or another tank. They were to be accompanied by a cover — one or two more war machines. But the rear command did not have consistency, therefore, it took so long to replace the failed fuel system devices. In the end, Sasha crawled to the foreman who managed the spare parts warehouse and received an incredible offer from a kondotny campaign worker:

    - You, Corporal Smolkin, first bring me the faulty equipment, and after that I will give you a serviceable one.

    And Smolkin had to crawl almost half a kilometer from the fortified area to the tank frozen in the field twice, until he cleaned it up. So, only due to some lull on this sector of the front, the tank, an excellent target for the enemy, did not undergo final destruction, and Sashka Smolkin remained intact and unharmed.

    - Smolkin, you're a hero! Just Israeli Chingachgook! Poured Gojko Mitic! Your face in this photo has the same features of deadpan courage!

    Smolkin did not fight off the words Ilyushkin admired. He saw that his friend was really impressed with this picture, even though he tried to give his words a playful tone.

    - Listen, I was really wildly indignant at the mess that prevailed in that war in our Tsakhal. I could not imagine such a thing, well, and quarreled there with everyone in the headquarters. So, as soon as it became clear that the campaign was ending, I was first sent home. But in those days I saw enough of everyone, and, you know, this kind of philosophy sometimes rolls on the frailty of our miserable bodies - a small amount of flesh, water and bones ... And how the blood leaves a person, I also saw. What is it all about, our physical entities? We are sick all the time, we treat ourselves with all kinds of chemicals, we find all sorts of supports for decrepit organisms, we cling to life, quitting smoking, doing operations, inserting prostheses. I somehow in the war all this - our vulnerability, insecurity - especially felt when I saw the guys killed in an instant. What is going on with humanity? This is some kind of phantasmagoria! After all, we all, in essence, are moving to a precipice for seventy-eighty years of our life - and we fall there, into the abyss of non-existence, everything, every minute, second, like sheep for slaughter, without any hope of a different outcome. Someone stuffed drugs into himself, someone successfully removed the tumor, someone stubbornly practiced physical exercise and found himself on the edge a little later; the difference is in a couple of years - everyone flies into the abyss So this is not enough for us, we must hurry each other with shrapnel. In war, this race to the cliff looks even clearer, especially if we abstract from all these stamps, from designating opponents facing each other with chevrons of different shapes, saluting them with the color of their camouflage and manner, then the whole picture of the battlefield can be presented to both parties, as a simple physical penetration of human bodies of various kinds with solid objects: a bullet, splinter, everything that scatters after the explosion of a projectile. In general, our picture with these cute corpses, floating in their own blood, is one hundred percent authentic. This I tell you as a specialist!

    Ilya looked at his friend in bewilderment:

    - You pushed all this speech only to convince me that the picture turned out decent?

    - No, something has rolled ... It means that we have done great today. Hurt me ... I was like an experiment on myself, because I was like a fighter tempered in heavy tank battles, but you see how I was twitched. - And Smolkin smiled: - Cool we muddied. A serious matter looms.

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