It seems to me that his vocabulary is much larger than most of the guys who are the same age as these girls. Every time I walk by the dormitory, there are males smoking by the entrance — and I feel an urge to interrupt someone’s profane mumblinb:
Doesn’t it upset you that you’re already twenty years old, and you’re still a complete moron?
I’m probably getting old, if I’ve become so irritable. Ten years ago I drank a wonderfully large amount of alcoholic beverages with guys like this — and at the time I thought they were fine fellows.
I’m getting old, I didn’t even go to the girls who were being entertained by Gleb at the playground. When I saw myself as a lively father perched on the neighboring bench with some stupid phrase on his lips such as Having fun there? — when I imagined this picture, I squirmed all over with disgust.
And I’m not even thirty.
I’m not even thirty, and I’m happy.
I don’t think about the frailty of life, I haven’t cried in seven years — since the moment that my darling told me that she loved me and would be my wife. Since then I haven’t found any reason to cry, and I laugh a lot, and even more often I smile in the middle of the street — at my thoughts, at my darlings, who with their three hearts lightly beat the melody of my happiness.
And I stroke my darling’s back, and my children’s heads, and I also stroke my unshaven cheeks, and my palms are warm, outside the window there is snow and spring, snow and winter, snow and autumn. This is my Homeland, and we live in it.
Only sometimes my elder son ruins my mood with his voice, persistent as a stick:
“Mama, does everyone die, or not everyone?”
“Only the body dies, son. The soul is immortal.”
“I don’t like that.”
I avoid these conversations and smoke in the corridor. Pointlessly, as if I am intentionally halting the movement of my thoughts, I stare at the wall.
I thought about this for the first time when I was a little older than he is now — probably when I was seven.
In my grey village, which was only slightly pink in the evenings, I hacked with my little axe at the woodchips spread out on a stump when this thought unexpectedly doused my childish heart with clammy cold — and from horror bordering on anger, I hit my finger, splitting the nail in half.
Afraid to scare my grandma, who was turning hay not far away, I hid my hand, clenched it in a fist with the index finger sticking out, dripping red and smarting terribly.
My grandma — I called her “Gramma” — immediately guessed that something unpleasant had happened, and she was already running to me, asking:
“Dearie…what is it? What’s happened… dearie?”
Then only I twisted my lips, and my tears burst out — they ran and flowed down all the sides of my childish face, the reflection of which I often try to see in the faces of my children.
Grama bandaged my finger, and I didn’t tell her anything, and never told anyone about it in my life, because I completely stopped thinking about it.
Death, as annoying as the toothache, I only remembered when I heard my son, and I had completely forgotten the incident with the axe — it unexpectedly appeared in my memory together with the clamminess in my heart, and the feeling of bleeding flesh, when my darling told me:
“There was a phone call. Your grandma is dead. Gramma.”
The village where I grew up is a long way away. It takes a long time to get there, and trains don’t go there.
I went to the garage, to my large, white car.
There was a large, white snow lying by the garage, and I spent a long time clearing it away with a spade, and was soon wet and angry.
Then I used a crowbar to crack the ice that seemed to be trying to get into the garage. The broken ice lay in crooked, sharp pieces on the snow and on the uncovered asphalt.
I spent a long time warming up the car, and I smoked, sweating, exhausted, broken into frozen pieces myself — a shard of white forehead flashed in the rear vision mirror, and a white, freezing hand holding a cigarette stuck out the window.
Ten minutes later I pulled out of the garage, hearing the crack of ice and the crunch of snow under the wheels.
It was completely dark now, and it was clear that I would have to drive all night to help my grandfather organize the funeral.
I ran home, and my darling came out to meet me and see me off, holding Ignatka in her arms, with Gleb standing by her, his lips trembling. He couldn’t bear it, and sobbed that he didn’t want me to go away. Scared by his cry, the baby also gave a thin screech. Completely broken up, I ran down the steps, hearing the heart-wrenching voices of the two children, afraid to hear a third crying voice in addition to theirs.
“What’s wrong with you, damn it!” I cursed; the car door slammed, and forgetting to turn on the headlights, I tore through the yard in complete darkness. When I switched on the lights, I saw a dog running and looking around in terror. I slammed on the brakes, the car skidded, I frantically spun the steering wheel in the opposite direction, and pressing the accelerator, I shot out onto the empty street.
Half an hour later, I had calmed down a little, but the road was awful; the constantly falling snow was wet and immediately congealed into ice on the windshield.
Once every half hour I forced myself to stop, ventured out into the nasty, cold darkness, and scraped the frozen snow off the parts of the windscreen that the constantly crawling windscreen wipers could not reach.
There were no officers at the checkpoints, and there were increasingly fewer cars coming in the opposite direction. I was overtaken several times, and I stepped on the gas so as to drive in company with someone, unobtrusively staying one hundred meters or so behind. But soon these cars turned off to the left or the right, to the villages alongside the roads, and in the end I found myself alone, among the snow and the Middle Russian plateau, on the way from Nizhny Novgorod to a Ryazan village.
Sometimes I started talking out loud, but the conversation didn’t catch on, and I fell silent.
You remember how Gramma brought you tea in the morning, and biscuits with country butter… You woke up and drank, warm and happy…
I don’t remember.
You remember.
I tried to perk myself up, to stop myself from being sad, from drowsing off or moping painfully and drearily.
Remember: you are a child. I am a child. And your body is still weak and stupid. My body. Remember…
Gramma is nearby, she loves me without measure, she is attentive and tender. And around me the world, which I measure with small steps, still believing that as soon as I grow up I will walk across it in its entirety.
Gramma and I talked a lot, she played with me and sang to me, and I also loved her very much; but everything that I remembered so vividly suddenly feel apart from some reason, not a single happy event from the recent past became living and warm, and with a screech the wipers dispersed the memories from the windscreen.
The road wound through the Murom woods.
There were endless little creeks covered with ice, and villages without a single light burning.
I wanted to see at least a street light — so that it would wink in welcome — but who needed streetlights here but me.
The car travelled smoothly, although the road, I could see and feel, was slippery, uncleared and not sprinkled with sand.
After several hours I came to an intersection — my path was cut off by a four-lane highway. And here at last I saw a massive truck coming from the left, and I was happy to see it, because I wasn’t lost on this frozen earth alone — here was a trucker going full speed ahead.