Title of the book: Typewriter and Great or Simplifying Dublin (gaga saga) (magazine version). Typewriter and Velik or 'Dublin Simplification'

Abstract

"Machinka and Velik" is a novel-history in which a comical view of things rapidly turns into a cosmic one. The descent to the bottom of the abyss, where the fundamental questions of being move like blind fossil monsters, is carried out here on a light, maneuverable transport with an unknown source of energy. The opposites form an unconditional unity: the detective intrigue that sets the plot in motion is tightly fused with religious mysticism, and the grotesque and rather risky humor are with a sincere lyrical message. Old and new Russian images, whirling in a multi-colored round dance, acquire the credibility of a 3D frame, while remaining primordially exaggerated and disproportionate, as in an icon or children's drawing. The idea of ​​salvation, which turns out to be the key here, is considered from several angles at once - metaphysical, ethical, psychedelic, social. "Mashinka and Velika" cannot be classified in the currently accepted genre terms. It is only clear that this is that rare and ever-necessary type of literature in which life is alchemically transformed into myth, thereby hinting at the possibility of a reverse transformation.

Before you is a new work of the mysterious Nathan Dubovitsky, the author of the novel Near Zero. This is not just a book, this is the real and first wiki novel in Russia, written on the Internet by Dubovitsky together with his readers, who have become full-fledged co-authors. "Machine and Velik ( gaga saga)” is an unusual book, unlike anything else. Read on and see for yourself.

Nathan Dubovitsky

Appeal to writers

Nathan Dubovitsky

Car and Velik

Or

Simplifying Dublin

Appeal to writers

My writers! what a bore to read novels! And what a punishment, what a misfortune to write them! That would not write! But how? if, as Benya Krik and Alex said. Pushkin, the hand itself reaches for the pen. It stretches, however, or does not stretch, but there is still no time for writing, and most importantly - laziness. And most importantly, the thought overtakes the word: the whole novel is already complicated in the head, all the pleasure from its addition has already been received by the author, so that the physical writing turns into a stale retelling, an uncreative routine.

And, finally, what is even more important than the most important thing - the unlucky ascetic, who heroically overcame the dense thickets of laziness, which grows in our climate above nettles and oil prices, having completed his little book, finds out that there is absolutely no one to read his letters. But even in the last century, Borges warned: there are no more readers, there are only writers. Because - all educated have become, proud, on their minds. No one wants to know his place and humbly listen to poets and prose writers. Nobody wants some unknown untidy people to burn his heart or some other part of the body with a verb.

If in the past a person with an idea was a curiosity, like a woman with a beard, who came to see and listen to the whole fair, today every broker, blogger and corporate evangelist has ideas small, convenient and cheap as toothbrushes. It was deified in the 19th–20th centuries. Literature has now become a matter of common people, publicly available, like eating sea basses or driving a car. Everyone can, all writers.

Writers, as you know, only read what they write. Not their own texts, if they notice, they look through in a writer's way, that is, with contempt, inattentively and not to the end. Just to write (or speak) a review, short, inattentive, contemptuous. So that later you can read (or repeat) only this review of yours with pleasure and respect. And reread (retell) repeatedly with non-decreasing respect. And praise yourself, gently calling you aidapushkin, aidasukinsyn.

I don’t remember whether Borges himself discovered the degeneration of the mass reader into a mass writer or, as usual, quoted someone, but he seems to have been the first brilliant writer who did not even try to write novels, but directly made the review of books a literary classic, in including those that don't exist. That is, he learned to judge texts that he had never read (for the reason that they were never written). A review, response, comment, tweet about a work thus became little by little more important than the work itself, and then are possible on their own, without the work, and have now become a self-sufficient genre of modern literature.

So, to replace the reader who lived in the 20th century, the man-with-a-book-in-the-metro, the-man-with-a-book-in-accounting, the-man-with-a-book-on-an-icon, the-man-with-a-book-on-a-fire, a man-with-a-book - in the 21st century, a special, unlike anything writer of a new type, a man-without-a-book, but ready, it seems, at any moment to amaze everyone, to write any book on any occasion, appeared. This writer is highly cultured, and therefore lazy. Innocent and therefore arrogant. He feels an immense strength in himself and would write himself no worse than anyone (which is why he does not read anything), but he has no time.

A modern writer is found, like an old reader, in the accounting department, and in the subway, and, praise democracy, in the Maybach. But it was not seen on icons and bonfires. That is what is different.

As one of these writers, I appeal to all such writers with the following proposal.

(I appeal to you through RPioner, the first magazine to keep pace with the times, which has almost as many readers as writers.) Listen to me, writers. Let's make a good romance together.

Each of us: 1) can write a book, but writes a tweet and sms; 2) wants to become famous, but cannot find in his schedule the fifteen minutes necessary for this; 3) a passionate admirer of everything that is his own and an acrimonious critic of everything else.

And after all us, such, darkness. If everyone sends at least an SMS on a given topic and pays common cause for five minutes, then it will be a thing thicker than Goethe's Faust and at least half a century of great glory. And if each of us, writers, later buys this thing of ours, then it will be unheard of circulation. And if he also reads, at least not all, at least his own fragment, then the folk path will not overgrow to us.

Encouraged either by success or failure, by something indefinite, but obviously stormy of my Near Zero, I set out to utter a new composition. This time in the "gaga saga" genre called "The Car and the Great". Or Dublin Simplification.

"Near Zero" was named one famous critic"A book about scum and for scum." Although, as it seemed to me, I was trying to talk about ordinary people. And even about the good ones. Apparently it didn't work. We will consider "Simplification ..." the second attempt to make a book about good (they are sometimes called simple and poor) people for good people.

Starting to implement my daring plan, I quickly discovered that I was “unable to reason”, that I was still exhausted there, “near zero”, but here, on a “typewriter and bike”, I was moving very slowly and could hardly cope. For the reasons stated in the first paragraph of my appeal.

Remembering that many seem to be very intelligent and even famous people expressed confidence that I was not one person, but several at once, that “gangsta fiction” was written by a whole brigade of literary Tajiks, I thought to myself: why not! Why not try it this time? I must say right away that the Tajiks took it, but retreated - it's tricky!

Then I remembered a more progressive method - crowd sourcing, or, as they used to say, people's construction. You turn to anyone via the Internet or the press: help make a loss-making mercury mine profitable, develop a new flu vaccine, make soft for managing a pig farm, a network of fur farms, prepare a new urban planning code ... Thirty-five thousand volunteers immediately come running - and the job is done!

Nathan Dubovitsky

Car and Velik

Simplifying Dublin

Appeal to writers

My writers! what a bore to read novels! And what a punishment, what a misfortune to write them! That would not write! But how? if, as Benya Krik and Alex said. Pushkin, the hand itself reaches for the pen. It stretches, however, or does not stretch, but there is still no time for writing, and most importantly - laziness. And most importantly, the thought overtakes the word: the whole novel is already complicated in the head, all the pleasure from its addition has already been received by the author, so that the physical writing turns into a stale retelling, an uncreative routine.

And, finally, what is even more important than the most important thing - the unlucky ascetic, who heroically overcame the dense thickets of laziness, which grows in our climate above nettles and oil prices, having completed his little book, finds out that there is absolutely no one to read his letters. But even in the last century, Borges warned: there are no more readers, there are only writers. Because - all educated have become, proud, on their minds. No one wants to know his place and humbly listen to poets and prose writers. Nobody wants some unknown untidy people to burn his heart or some other part of the body with a verb.

If in the past a person with an idea was a curiosity, like a woman with a beard, who came to see and listen to the whole fair, today every broker, blogger and corporate evangelist has ideas small, convenient and cheap as toothbrushes. It was deified in the 19th–20th centuries. Literature has now become a matter of common people, publicly available, like eating sea basses or driving a car. Everyone can, all writers.

Writers, as you know, only read what they write. Not their own texts, if they notice, they look through in a writer's way, that is, with contempt, inattentively and not to the end. Just to write (or speak) a review, short, inattentive, contemptuous. So that later you can read (or repeat) only this review of yours with pleasure and respect. And reread (retell) repeatedly with non-decreasing respect. And praise yourself, gently calling you aidapushkin, aidasukinsyn.

I don’t remember whether Borges himself discovered the degeneration of the mass reader into a mass writer or, as usual, quoted someone, but he seems to have been the first brilliant writer who did not even try to write novels, but directly made the review of books a literary classic, in including those that don't exist. That is, he learned to judge texts that he had never read (for the reason that they were never written). A review, response, comment, tweet about a work thus became little by little more important than the work itself, and then are possible on their own, without the work, and have now become a self-sufficient genre of modern literature.

So, to replace the reader who lived in the 20th century, the man-with-a-book-in-the-metro, the-man-with-a-book-in-accounting, the-man-with-a-book-on-an-icon, the-man-with-a-book-on-a-fire, a man-with-a-book - in the 21st century, a special, unlike anything writer of a new type, a man-without-a-book, but ready, it seems, at any moment to amaze everyone, to write any book on any occasion, appeared. This writer is highly cultured, and therefore lazy. Innocent and therefore arrogant. He feels an immense strength in himself and would write himself no worse than anyone (which is why he does not read anything), but he has no time.

A modern writer is found, like an old reader, in the accounting department, and in the subway, and, praise democracy, in the Maybach. But it was not seen on icons and bonfires. That is what is different.

As one of these writers, I appeal to all such writers with the following proposal.

(I appeal to you through RPioner, the first magazine to keep pace with the times, which has almost as many readers as writers.) Listen to me, writers. Let's make a good romance together.

Each of us: 1) can write a book, but writes a tweet and sms; 2) wants to become famous, but cannot find in his schedule the fifteen minutes necessary for this; 3) a passionate admirer of everything that is his own and an acrimonious critic of everything else.

And after all us, such, darkness. If everyone sends at least an SMS on a given topic and devotes five minutes to the common cause, then it will be a thing thicker than Goethe's Faust and at least half a century of great glory. And if each of us, writers, later buys this thing of ours, then it will be unheard of circulation. And if he also reads, at least not all, at least his own fragment, then the folk path will not overgrow to us.

Nathan Dubovitsky's new novel "The Typewriter and the Velik" or "Simplifying Dublin"

I did the dragon "s will untill you came.

Through the cracked dirty Ryazan sky, rattling from the wind in several places, stared at the empty and sonorous, like the early morning street, the space of retired police Major Yevgeny Chelovechnikov, nicknamed Man. There was not a soul in space, only a lone eared satellite was chirping, and a nameless black hole gaped in the midst of the non-shining blue stars of the icy Milky Way.

The man stood on the porch of his log office, dog-legged like a St. Christopher, head. An old uniform jacket without shoulder straps fluttered on a tired torso, fingers fingered a sparkling cigarette, a pack of cigarettes, a burnt match, a matchbox. The toes were moving from the cold in cold woolen socks and felt slippers - The man walked in the office at home. He went out into the air to smoke, but he saw space above and began to examine it.

It almost always happened to him during morning smoke breaks: he would go out for a minute, and he would be delayed for an hour, or even two, three. Fortunately, there was no particular hurry. Although his business was theoretically round-the-clock, there was absolutely nothing to do at work.

Once Chelovechnikov was the chief of militia. I was waiting for a transfer with a promotion to a city more decent than ours, like Vorkuta or Naryan-Mar. But when an order came from the center to scold the Soviet government, to become all without exception scoundrels and introduce capitalism everywhere, Captain Chelovechnikov, being a disciplined and then very party comrade, immediately, as expected, became a capitalist. Tried and scoundrel, but somehow did not work out. Having celebrated his farewell rank of major, he retired from the state and was the first in the country to engage in private investigation. He called for his subordinates, but they only lowered their eyes, sweated stupidly and rhythmically creaked with belts.

“Well, watch here for wooden pennies,” the major taunted them and went out of the department to freedom. “And I will get as much as I want, private traders have unlimited salaries.”

He begged his wife for a house of a recently deceased mother-in-law in the suburban village of Ryazan, nailed a plywood sheet on this house with the inscription “Private detective 24 hours” and sat down by the stove to wait for customers.

I waited two years, did not wait, put it in an old refrigerator cheap beer, nailed to the house another sheet of plywood with the inscription "And beer" and again sat down by the stove.

Things that had hitherto been going neither shaky nor swathing, now went rather shaky. On some Mondays, blue and green citizens, blue and green from wine and fights, who had tragically rested over the weekend, wandered from the barracks opposite. They borrowed beer, drank it right there at the refrigerator, beat themselves with the help of each other, stole something unimportant - whether it was a door handle or a fountain pen - from a detective and went to the plant to start their week of work. So, if before there was no income, no expenses, that is, no business, now the business was definitely unprofitable, but real.

But if the beer trade brought, if not profit, then at least a loss, that is, still more than nothing, then the detective trade did not give any return. And this was a shame to the Man, because he considered himself a pro and caught so many crimes while serving as a policeman that if he had been paid an old gold piece for his head, he would have had a solid capital long ago. But then they did not pay, and they did not pay now, albeit for different reasons. An inert client did not go to a private trader to look for a lost car, to catch a walking wife, to ask for protection from dashing people.

Once only a grandmother with a grandson of seventy / fifteen years old came to him, vying with each other squealing about a shoe store and a tire shop. Like, their son / dad owns them, who is unfair and harmful, and drunk. And he keeps fierce mistresses, who separate him from his relatives and absorb the entire tire fitting dividend and shoe, shoe and shoe gains almost completely too. And so, not a cent, not a euro cent, not a penny, not a penny, not any other money remains on his mother, and on his wife, and his child.

Only on the tenth time asked by the major the question “What, in fact, would you like from me?” the grandson finally took a piece of paper and a pencil from the table, wrote something down and handed it to the detective. Chelovechnikov read: "At ... dad." "What's dad?" he didn't understand. The grandson took the paper back and, hastily finishing a few words, returned it. Now it was: “Kill dad. Two thousand c.u. Payment after. The major stared at the visitors in surprise. Then the grandson snatched the note from his hands and, having added something else, handed it to him again. It was added: “after the murder. Cache. Straightaway. How did you understand? The detective didn't understand. Then the grandson again selected the paper and put it in his pocket. The man looked at his grandson very thinly. The grandson shifted the paper to another pocket. "I don't understand," said the Man. The grandson took a piece of paper from another pocket and carefully tore it up. “I am a private detective, not,” said Evgeny Mikhailovich. The young customer threw the crumpled scraps out the window. And running. Grandmother rushed after him with a cry of “Forgotten, boss! There was nothing!" The chief cursed after them and looked out the window to see if they had left. The grandmother was already far away, but the grandson was still here, right under the window, collecting scattered pieces of his note from the grass and puddles and eating them. Noticing the major at the window, he did not finish his meal and was like that. On that commercial investigation and stalled.

Chelovechnikov's wife loved Chelovechnikov and supported everything, but the other day she could not stand it and began to say: “And Sergeant von Paveletz has a Mercedes. And Ninka Akipova sent her children to Switzerland to study. And her husband was the most stupid of your deputies, you yourself said. And Lieutenant Krivtsov is now a general, and his house in Chervontsevo has three floors. We don't even have oil. And the cops are now the richest people in the city. And you could, too, if you stayed. And you left. What if you're private? The husband was silent, he was lazy to quarrel, but there was simply nothing to object to. The wife continued: “And soon they will all be renamed from the police to the police. Just then, as if people will live. Like the most natural cops. And you? And we?" Here the Man could not stand it, turned purple all over, pouted with shame and seemed to burst, flying around the room with disgusting curses: “They are thieves, thieves. Bribe-takers, assholes, hoopoes. They rob, torture, kill, worse than any bandits. The bandits are also served. What kind of cops are they? Asses! They are assholes! I'm private, but honest. If you don't like it, tell me to leave. I need nothing. Who knew it would turn out like this? That under our capitalism the militia will be richer than the capitalist. Just as our socialism was once the best suited for the laziest and most evil idiots, and impassable and poisonous for normal and sensible people, so our capitalism turned out to be the same - for the evil and lazy. Only they are good. But normal..” Yevgeny Mikhailovich took a long time, and here Angelina Borisovna (for that was the name of Yevgeny Mikhailovich’s wife) pouted and hissed: “Von Paveletz pulled out two old women from the burning nursing home and their director. Is he a hoopoe, is he an ass? And sergeant Podgoryacheev, they said on the radio, after a business trip to Ingushetia, he lost two legs. He is angry? He is lazy? As for socialism...Under socialism, you were waiting for a raise. And now what are you waiting for? Hangings? Until we all die here with you? Socialism, capitalism... Spread philosophy! Ksenia will go to school in a year, Irka will get married at the same time, it's time to do philosophy! The philosopher was found, the same to me! Spinoza, you fucking frying pan! - and without transition. - Come back, my love, come back to the cops. Don't ruin your innocent family."

The beloved fled, without having finished dinner, to his dear office, he spent the night in it, but he spent the whole night on his porch, staring at the leaky space, stuck up until the morning and was about to go to the department to ask back to the police, and already looked at his watch , and saw eight there, and decided "it's time!", And the sky was already covered with white and gray shrouds - a morning cloud, instead of the sun, rose on it, a boring cumulus cloud, when suddenly ...

Suddenly, the gorge between the snowdrifts of the street was filled with the light of a headlight, the murmur of an engine, the creak of patterned tires on the dead snow, the aroma of gasoline burned in the engine, the quiet rumble of a strong rap over a side window not lowered in winter - and a car stopped near Chelovechnikov, judging by the alien , high-quality, perhaps even imported dirt, rolled in from a beautiful place far away, from places much better than these, at least from Moscow.

A tall young Tungus got out of the car in an inexpensive but good-quality coat and smart black glasses raised to his forehead. And his forehead, and nose, and eyes, and his very face were, like almost all Tungus, flat and yellow and seemed soft, oily. His voice was just as soft and oily.

Major Chelovechnikov? - asked the visitor.

Yes sir. Retired, said the major.

I am Major Mayer, - the Tungus gave the Man a hand, warm, soft, fat, like a croissant.

His hand is like... a cracasson, thought the Man.

It was his last thought, the last thing he thought in the first, insignificant and unremarkable part of his life, which ended. For immediately after this curious, illiterate phrase, from the very second that Mayer began to state the purpose of his arrival, the second life of Man began, a wonderful life that revealed his high destiny, a terrible and glorious life.

People, people, what are you all for? There is a woman, a fool is a fool, for nothing that she is cute, and even then for an amateur, her head is hollow, her soul is like a small cow. If such a woman would pass through the world peacefully, she would give birth to children, and she would be afraid of her husband, and cook soup for him, for him and the children - and that’s it. But no, look, some important guest fell in love with her, took him away, and his name is Paris, and the Trojan War begins, and Homer writes the Iliad, Virgil the Aeneid, and Aeneas flees from Troy to the banks of the Tiber, and now Rome is already being built , first one, and then the second and third, Nashensky. And that woman has been gone for a long time, and she did not even understand with her hollow head, the cause of what great achievements she was. And vice versa, there is a commander who has lived in the world for ninety years, of which seventy-five fought, victorious, striking everyone with his mind, strength, beauty, eloquence, audacity, courage, cunning, kindness, generosity and other things. Wrote a memoir studied in schools and universities. brilliant fate cluttered with great events. And meanwhile, providence sent this, let's say, even though Belisarius, or the same Augustus, or Buonaparte, or Konev, not for all these Rubicons, Prokhorovka and St. Helen. And only for the fact that the great commander, even in childhood, long before his greatness, being, for example, six years old, would fall, for example, in the garden and skinned his knee. And I would have plucked a plantain leaf and patched up the scratches on it. And so that this leaf of this very plantain should be plucked at this very, and not some other minute, and God sent the aforementioned Augustus to the ground. Because in order to achieve a higher goal, unknown to us, but known only to God, this leaflet cannot be dispensed with, without plucking it. And the whole life of a commander after the leaflet, after he, having torn it off, fulfilled his destiny and served, unknowingly, an unknown higher goal, his whole life with all the unforgettable Thermopylae and Boston tea parties, rolled simply by inertia and no longer had any the slightest sense from the point of view of true history.

The story didn't need thermopylae from a tireless hero, it needed a plantain leaf from him. And having received its own, the will of God rushed higher, to its mountainous goals, along the chains of selective causes and consequences, forgetting about the one who did his duty and leaving him to stupidly mess with the loudly thundering steel trifles of this worldly greatness - power and war.

So on that morning, out of a certain propensity for satirical deeds, the desire came to God to make the confessor of his path and the rod of his anger, and the word of his law, and the measure of his judgment, the most insignificant of creatures, trembling in the cold near a poor hut opposite the barracks, feeding on the most contemptible craft bloodhounds at the very bottom of the hated and formidable class of security forces - Evgeny Chelovechnikov. Boch called to him with the voice of Major Mayer and revealed him to the city and the world, saying "here is your savior."

However, none of the majors understood - at least that morning - that they were no longer on their own, that they had become tools of the creator. Between them, in their understanding, just took place, as they say, a business conversation, albeit important, but completely out of this world. What to do? - although he was called, the servant of God is still dumb and deaf, like the butt of an ax, with which the fate of the things of the universe is nailed to the places allotted for them.

About what our savior lived for, about recent, fresh in every memory, glorious and terrible events, in which he participated so actively, about the labors and wounds of this outstanding creature, about him, about Man - the forthcoming legend, a sad story with an unclear ending, affects.

In the morning they played a gloomy wedding. They gave Jeanne to Mehmet. The bride and groom, swollen from lack of sleep, signed at about nine minutes past eight. Why so early, no one understood. The winter sun had risen, or not - it was impossible to make out from under the mighty heaps of frozen steam that filled up the suburban sky and the city itself, and the townspeople in it. The guests were half late, half crowded silently, rumpled, almost unwashed, stupid early in the morning. Waking up, not able to stir up the brain that is on the brake.

From the side of the groom, from somewhere in the mountains, on Korean squat lopsided cars, strict people some southern nation which have never been seen in these parts. In appearance - like our Jews, of those that no-no, and they will meet little by little in our inhospitable region, either in the form of a physics teacher, or a surveyor, a gynecologist, or suddenly a military commissar. The same black-haired and non-snub-nosed. Only the Jews, as you know, have kind, mocking views. And these eyes were yellow, angry, sharp as teeth.

Having signed, they took a bunch of imported daisies to the statue of an unknown poet, in the far left corner of the main square, where all weddings were wrapped before going on a spree. Then we went to the hospital to drink alcohol, drink water, eat in the hospital canteen. Zhanna worked as a nurse, and the team took into account her straitened circumstances, which did not allow her to arrange a wedding feast either at home (9 sq. M.) Or in a cafe (no less than ten thousand rubles). And although the dining room was provided neatly in the interval between breakfast and dinner, several patients who chewed heavily did not have time to finish their meal before the wedding and were still fiddling here and there with their spelled and roach.

One slurped from a bowl with a leaky, broken jaw fastened somehow with copper wire. The other, tormented by a fierce tick like an electric current, could not, could not, could not, in any way, hit a huge plate with a spoon. There was also someone with a plaster head, like the fake Adonis from the drawing school. In front there was a gurgling hole in the plaster for feeding spelled inside, into a real head, dented by a truck and hidden away like a nesting doll from sin, further away into an external, artificial head.

There were other different ones, some in bandages and plasters, some without bandages and even without hands; and the crazy forty-degree old man who had escaped from the infectious diseases department was blazing like a kumachovo in a flu-like heat.

Jeannine's relatives and friends, and Jeanne herself, who became his wife, got drunk headlong, began to respect the sick, whirled them in a dashing waltz, started talking with them about all sorts of sobchaks and kandelaki. And about the lost football. And about global warming. From which, God willing, it will flood all low-lying Europe with oceans and seas, and they will run, begin to climb towards us on the Central Russian upland, like Noah's creatures on a new Ararat - the British, French and Dutch; and they will serve us instead of Tajiks in thawed, high-yield fields dotted with mangoes, grapes and fat pigs. The debate was about whether our own so far skinny gilts would disperse widely in the global heat, or whether fugitives from the west, already fat, would arrive after the British. From a plaster head, an untrained, cracked tenor sang hits from ancient times, a few screams of "bitter" and just screams.

Jeanne was beautiful with that unforgettable, partly idiotic beauty that differs from female portraits friesian school XVI century. She had seen Mehmet a month ago at the market, where he, according to the custom of his tribe, was selling Uruguayan horseradish. What she was doing there, whether she was looking for hell, or not looking for horseradish, and what else she solicited, it’s impossible to say for sure now. Because I went for something, and when I got to the market, I forgot what for. It turns out that she went for Mehmet. And here is love, here is marriage, here is fate.

The fiancé, Mehmet of unidentified nationality, was no one knows by profession, but he was certainly far from a mekhmat and therefore was silent, thinking little in Russian; and in his own way understanding hardly, it seems, more. The guests from the mountains were also silent, faithfully avoiding alcohol; they did not talk to kafirs and giaurs. They averted their gaze from the unholy fat to the south, prayed half aloud, filling the hospital cloaks with a deaf pious rumble.

By ten a.m. spirits were drunk, songs were sung, two or three persons were beaten, as it should be; and besides that - one kind of mug. The holiday is empty, dried up. The groom and his southerners left, took Jeanne, took her to their mountains. They also took an old man from the infectious disease, who somehow turned out to be from one of these mountains.

Guests from the locals either wandered off to sleep in the hospital wards, or lay down here, in the dining room, some on the tables, and some simpler under the tables. Not so tired, they went to work. On the street and in the doorway, they encountered latecomers hurrying to drink and horrified by the news of the hat analysis, the closing of the wedding and the lack of drinks. From horror, the guests who were late, sober and angry because of sobriety, fought with those who had time and therefore successful, deservedly drunk guests. The drunkards waved them away, loudly teaching the losers: “Don't sleep, don't sleep; who gets up early, boh serves him, ”and they dragged them along to the mining plant to forget themselves together with hot stone-crushing labor, from which the head went crazy no worse than from vodka.

Gleb Dublin was one of the latecomers. He jumped around the hospital yard, struggled with the fidgeting wind that jumped over the concrete fence, somehow dodged it, ran behind the garage, almost fell and asked Jeanne's mother, who was leaning against the garage, if it was true that everything was over. From the noise of his questioning, a large and old woman, like an atomic bomb, swayed, and different-sized pupils, similar to dull bubbles of emptiness, surfaced on the surface of her vast face from a drunken fog. “Well, there will be no sense here,” Gleb guessed. - And so it is clear that everything. It's over, it's over ... And so you can see .. ".

And as if deliberately forming an emblem of hopelessness, a flock of silent black all-weather birds nesting in the ventilation pipes of the general surgery building suddenly took off and twisted into a furious tornado over the outgoing wedding, over the hospital, over his aching head. With a long, aching glance, he looked at the boundless, monotonous, flat, like a hungry, callous steppe, Thursday, stretched out in front of him, as if in a swoon, on which not a single living soul was visible, in any way suitable for lending out, even the meager means, for the sake of the simplest needs.

Not the slightest amount of money, not a drop of saving aquavit around - only barren, good for nothing local time. There was absolutely nowhere to put this stupid time, there was nowhere to go. Previously, in such an extreme case, one could go to work, but Gleb had been unemployed for two weeks. In view of the fact that he was expelled from the mining plant for absenteeism in drunk, it was difficult to get a job somewhere, because the plant was vengeful and omnipotent, controlled almost all the institutions of the city. The city itself, in fact, was attached to the plant, completely dependent on it.

Secret tightly in the experienced mysterious country of the USSR and still not really declassified, this plant took out a gray prickly stone from deep mines, meaningfully called product-forty-four. Then this stone was crushed, made into rubble, more precisely, the product-forty-four-one. And only then it was erased in powerful mills into the final finished product - the product-forty-four-one-um, that is, into gray prickly dust. For what the dust was obtained, it was forbidden to know. She fell asleep in cars with the inscription for some reason "sugar" and dragged somewhere to the north-north-east, as they say, where she should.

The city was called Konstantinopyl, because this dust was found by some mysterious and most important use of Academician Konstantinov. A native, by the way, is local, from the now suburban village of Ryazan. As a result of its discovery after the Second World War and from the premonition of the Third, a mighty industrial giant grew out of Ryazan, acquired a city and a railway, and even an airstrip. Even some highway has grown at the side of the giant, but reaching out for half a century with interruptions and interruptions somehow almost to the nameless village, where today a joint German-Nenetian enterprise produces marsh gas, and before, it seems, no one produced anything, - ended a bunch of ancient Russian firewood, from which a pointer to Moscow sticks out, turned, however, by the winds and hooligans in the wrong direction at all.

The people of Constantinople were very proud of themselves, because it was believed that without the products of their plant, our fatherland could not stand even a day. They whispered: whether secret dust was used for fertilizer, without which nothing but mold would be produced by the earth in our annoying climate, so that we would not see either rye, or turnips, or honey mushrooms; or on the stuffing of formidable dusty bombs, instilling fear in the insidious establishments of adversary powers and keeping them from attacking us, but they would have attacked us, fools, they’ve been covetous and envious for a long time. But whatever it was, whether it was bombs or fertilizers, everyone agreed that it was impossible without dust. And that in the administration of the President there is a special official who performs only one, but very honorable and troublesome duty, night and day, to think hard and think carefully about Konstantinopyl and its inhabitants.

The city spreads freely in seven ravines on the gentle shore of the legendary Mediterranean swamp, the largest swamp in the world, an area of ​​​​fourteen and a quarter square Austrians; in those blessed latitudes where you don't have to constantly dodge heatstroke. Where they don't spend happy people for sunscreen, caps and glasses. Do not wear ridiculous shorts and Bermuda shorts, do not inflate with soft drinks to a spherical state. On the contrary, they prefer drinking hot and intoxicating and corresponding conditions.

The local summer, about one and a half or two ordinary months in size, reminded Dublin of hell, as it seemed to the noble heresiarch pseudo-Phocius of Albigens. In his not the most important work, but which became popular in the 19th century, “The Flesh That Became the Word, or the Hammer of the Pope and Papists,” it is written: “In the underworld there is no fire that fools and Guelphs talk about. It's not hot, just stuffy and humid. It always rains there and there is nowhere to hide, because everything is soaked through and for centuries. Sinners do not burn there, but rot alive, indulging not in an unquenchable flame, but in insatiable boredom. The native land, continuously watered by all kinds of rain, turned into mud. In the short inter-rain pauses, mosquitoes and midges rushed in and crowded, rushed after the scattered people and cattle, overtaking them, drank their blood. Millions of years of bad weather directed the evolution of all living beings without exception in one direction. Gophers and sparrows, moose and people, mushrooms and grasses learned to live on liquefied soils under drizzling water, and because of this they were somehow nailed in appearance, they all settled and spread somewhere below, and the colors became completely gray. The floating tanks and battle barges of the First Swamp Flotilla guarding the plant were painted in the same protective color of mud.

For such a summer, the townspeople went on a drinking binge, or played in turn, transferable and other fools, slapping damp sticky tambourines and worms on the tables. Or from morning to evening, some stared out the window, some at the TV, some on the Internet, and there, and there, and there, watching the same entertaining reflection and winking, twitching and bouncing with the stoop of their fate. From these spectacles it became somehow stupid, awkward in the soul. An unkind merriment, exhausting like a chronic cold, was attached to the heart. Days filled with unbearable strange joy. Citizens were drawn to mischief, play tricks and mischief, so they hid from each other in all directions.

The sky above the citizens was pockmarked, gray as a puddle on the pavement, and so shallow that airbuses were larger and fastidious dreamliners could not fly in it. And not all of the constellations fit in it, only some left ones, pale, as if fake. And the moon is not the whole, but only the edge, no more than an eighth. Cranes and falcons flew around these air shallows, shunned this non-flying sky. Only shaggy flies walked along it and fluttered in the wind on horseback, cunning, plump crows, resembling flies, popularly called pigeons.

But sometimes this difficult summer also ended. And winter came on so quickly that three short weeks of autumn barely had time to slip in front of it, like frisky children behind a sparkling ball in front of an inevitable Kamaz. But what autumn, what weeks!

Clouds of rain and midges moved over the horizon. The shy sun dried souls and warmed hearts. The days cleared up, and some nights turned out to be even clearer than the days: it was painful and sweet to look at the dazzling silvering and silvering everything around the moon and Venus.

The leaves on the trees and under them became soft, rustling, multi-colored, like money. They dazzled and fell; and the alders were the first to fly around, followed by aspens, smooth-bore wild garlic and bird cherry. But on the other hand, the apex, late honeysuckle and curly nonsense bloomed, and bloomed, though not for long, but excessively, furiously, impudent armfuls of screaming flowers. Viburnum with lush, overweight clusters of berries proudly reddened in the alleys and gardens, but not like burgundy, or a fire, or sunset and blood, but just like God knows what. The gentle, cool sun wandered like amber mash among the red translucent maples, warmed itself near their smoldering crowns, wrapped itself in thinning gardens, in crumbling torn parks. Gardens and parks were yellow, red, brown, fiery. Autumn shone like a festive hallucination. Tall, thin ship fir trees, which had lived here before the advent of Russia, were knocked together by the Chukhons who lived here before the advent of Rus', their fat-assed, fast-sinking spruce ships, were getting dark only with dark green tops flying up from the dense forests that survived among the city. Chukhonians rushed back and forth on those ships, along rivers, lakes, sometimes the seas, not for trade, war and fishing, but so, according to the stupidity of their Chukhon and zrushash prowess. Sharp, spear-like Christmas trees looked like Italian pine trees on frescoes against the background of the morning (from morning to evening - all morning) blue written directly on the dry sky.

People from this blue went happy, in love, tanned. The gophers rejoiced. Sparrows cooed. At the direction of the General Staff, two demobilized corporals covered pot-bellied tanks seasonally with gold leaf and crimson specks. So restless enemy, if he had attacked in the autumn, he would never have distinguished where our army was, and where the forests were dressed in crimson and gold, he would have been confused and retreated in embarrassment.

Dublin thought, and he thought not with words designed to separate and distance a person from love and pain, but just like that, over words, with an immediately sharp, hasty longing that replaced his reason. I thought, I felt: behind the oppressive distance of this day, there is another long distance of the same day, and then another of the same, and many of the same. Hundred, thousand, million whole winter such days. There is only one way out from under the winter - into a dull, unhurried, stale, unfaithful spring. And whoever is able to endure the spring, again, will not come out, but the cloud-covered one already knows what a summer is. And only then, and only for those who waited, endured - finally, a beautiful autumn. "It won't be autumn soon," thought Dublin. And yawned piteously. And I thought: “Well, there’s nothing to drink.” He was a drunkard.

Of those, however, drunkards, which one should wish for more, that is, a quiet person, in some cases industrious, always compliant. He drank not that much, but he was constantly either on edge - before he drinks; or tipsy - after. In such a partly mad, high spirits, he soared above reality. Like many of our compatriots, he did not live in life, although not far from it, he did not lose sight of it, but still not in it, but a little aside. He walked in the air, now intoxicated, now with a hangover, not a single thought, not a single moment of his touching the ground. Such people do not fall, do not disappear, not because they know how to fly and know how not to fall, and they plan how to soar and not fall, but quite the opposite: precisely because they do not understand anything, they hear the wrong thing, they talk about the wrong thing. , draw inadequate conclusions, have inappropriate desires, evaluate their capabilities incorrectly. They are alive because they have lagged behind life. And life, like a gypsy wagon loaded with stolen junk, did not rock them, did not shake them to death, but rushed off without them, jumping on potholes, to the promised cliff.

Here it is impossible not to notice, by the way, that in general our tribe, referred to in the historical chronicles as holy Russia, somehow in ordinary life does not fit. And he doesn’t know how to get into it, and if he does get into it, he won’t use his mind what to do in it, having about the structure of reality and about its practical laws some irrelevant, often fantastic performances. It will take it, it will take it, it will start like, it will catch fire, it will heal; and suddenly get bored and freeze. He sits down for a smoke, sits, sits, and drinks. Paris is taken, and Berlin is taken; a semi-global imperial estate was labored, prayed for from the sixth part of the land, and suddenly distributed for free in a fit of shame and repentance; instead of the empire, parliaments were instituted in the English style and liposuction in the American style; billions of dollars were stolen from the dear fatherland and successfully deposited in a foreign bank. The Holy Russian citizen smiles, sings, is proud. And his eyes are all sad, everything itchs to him, he can’t, everything seems to be - it’s not right, it’s nonsense, and all this nonsense is in vain.

Let's get out of here, - Gleb gently said to a boy of about ten, dressed in a red cap, an inopportune blue coat and fairly new uggs, on which homemade wasps, flowers and dragons sparkled. The boy had the same as Gleb's, huge light-autumn eyes, which made him look somewhat like a firebender from a Japanese comic book, and hair of the same color, thick, heavy, like gold. A chupachups stalk protruded from his mouth.

Dad, you said that there would be a cake, - the boy was surprised.

Well, you see, you and I didn't get it. Everything has already been eaten. And they drank.

Is it my fault? Because it took so long?

No, no, we're not late. They hurried.

Where are we going, pa?

Wherever you want.

To Jeanne.

Where is she?

Far already. Married. Came out. She got married. She left.

Then to Uncle Sasha. He has sugar.

Uncle Sasha is not at home.

Taken again?

Got into a fight with Aunt Sasha again?

Again. And with Kolupaev. And with Alyosha Syropov, Petrushka's brother from your class. And with the conductor. With a pianist, with three violinists. And in general with everyone who was there. At the Philharmonic. On Netrebka. And with Netrebka. And with the policeman who was called.

You, dad, spoke to him in New Year so that he does not drink cognac with champagne.

Said.

I drank, I must think.

Well, wow, - the boy fell silent, not understanding why to ignore good advice.

Gleb scratched the right ear of the dog's earflaps, covered with hoarfrost, after his left, suggested:
- To father Abraham? The pilgrims sometimes give him sweets.

And the virgin?

It will turn around, don't be afraid.

Then you can, - agreed the son. - Though candy is rare. More wine is given. You're a lot, dad, don't drink.

No, no, Great, I'm just a little, just for vigor. Yes, maybe he has no wine today.

And maybe no candy. Went.

Gleb and little Velik went from the hospital to the swamp, to the outskirts, where their friend monk Abram lived. Excommunicated, stripped and angry, he nevertheless continued to arbitrarily monasticism and led such an ascetic life that he was noticeably more popular among local Orthodox than other hereditary career priests.

He was a master at pronouncing insignificant words with a kind of uplifting gratitude; communicate to his essentially weightlifting physiognomy a non-general expression of sugar-coated transcendence. The pilgrims clung to him, and the pilgrims in particular. The paralyzed, the poor in spirit, the possessed were brought to him to be healed. Sometimes they even dragged the dead to revive them. It was believed that the city was saved from extermination by bird and swine flu solely because it sheltered this righteous man. True, whether someone was healed, whether he came to life, they spoke about this indistinctly, more interjections; but they went to Father Abram willingly. It’s not so much to be treated and learn how to obey clever words. Look into the bumpy, glossy, round, like a sweet pie with a beard, father's face. Some were touched and left on the windowsill a bottle of wine and beer, some candy, a dozen eggs, three hundred rubles, fifty rubles, a business card, a postcard, woolen socks, deodorant that repels mosquitoes, no prices were set. In addition to alcohol and confectionery, the father distributed the rest to neighbors. He saved sweets for visiting children. He saved himself with alcohol, for he held a special post, very understandable for ordinary people and among them glorified him so much that many tried to repeat. Only wine and vodka, in extreme cases, moonshine and beer, and hot, unceasing prayer, and two hours a day not even sleep, but visions of fanned half-asleep. When there were hitches with intoxicating offerings, he allowed himself to relax a little, ate soaked cereals and apples, prunes sausage, but he prayed hotter and slept less.

Father Abram, like Dublin, was a non-native. Erupted from a certain monastery, which, according to him, was drifting on an ice floe in the Northern Ocean, he crossed the Kara Sea on foot, climbed to its southern shore and moved even further south on dry land, to St. land for the truth, but in the first city he met on land, specifically in Konstantinopyl, he lashed himself to the position of a jintonik's garment from a can, fell asleep and settled down for a long time.

The reason for Father Abram's expulsion from the monastery and excommunication was miraculous to a certain extent. Gleb and Velik knew that they would have to listen to the story of the miracle again, countless times already. Unless, of course, the black man is at home. What could not be known in advance, since Fr. did not use anything electrical. It’s not that he considered demonic, or he disdained telephony and the internet as public places, but just over the years of his stay in a drifting monastery, where, as he put it, everything was light and everything was known without wires, antennas, chips and gadgets.

Dublin and his son drove off in an elderly chrome jeep, which was somehow going sideways, some kind of breathless jogging, with squats and whistles. Its name has been erased from the hood and from memory, as well as the name of the manufacturer, which went bankrupt when Dublin Jr. in the world was not, but there was a full economic growth. And the company still somehow managed to crash.

They rolled along the streets, which now looked like wastelands, then like kitchen gardens, in some places like landfills. In some places, instead of streets, ditches were vigorously dug, from which steam came. There were also those from which steam did not go, but also deep. There were many ditches, not much less than the canals in Venice. But still, the city was not without a peculiar charm, it vaguely resembled not only Venice, but even Paris. Mainly due to the fact that here and there poles of high-voltage power lines protruded from it, very similar to the Eiffel towers.

The houses, however, even in the rain were somewhat less than the Doge's palaces, and even the Parisian ones, too. Two-story baroque barracks of the post-war revival period dominated, decorated with stars, sheaves, mysterious allegorical curls, figures of graceful miners, and in some places miraculously preserved spots of antique earthy plaster. Crooked walls and columns, swollen roofs, cracked sheaves and curls, and the very miners of these amazing buildings were molded by captive Romanians from some kind of trophy dust. From some Great German rubbish taken out as reparations from the defeated Reich: from the wreckage of the Fuhrerbunker, asphalt stripped from the Prussian Autobahn, Auschwitz barbed wire, Silesian metallurgy slag, Leipzig firebrands and charred bricks. Over the years, works of national industry have been added to these imported houses. People began to settle down higher and more comfortably, in separate apartments, in panel housing on four and five floors. There were also nine-story buildings.

At first, the houses were like at home, nothing superfluous, no columns and slag miners, only cracks, seams and windows. But somewhere later, the townsfolk began to show an unexpected thirst for glazing and expanding balconies and loggias. They glassed it with anything, and sheet glass, and glass blocks, and stained-glass windows from somewhere, and plexiglass, roofing felt, masks, plywood, and foil. They also expanded in all directions. Protruding from the houses were some metal cages and cages stuffed with skis and bicycles. Hanging tin dachas and cellophane greenhouses hung over the entrances and courtyards. Branched off from the six-meter kitchens were plank pantries knocked together in the manner of outhouses, from which sometimes leaked into the sidewalk. currant jam. Hung out of the windows when it was cold, bags with planed meat, lard and boiled dumplings for future use, attracting flocks of stray crows, which, by the way, always flew away without prey due to the strength of the bags and packages. All these outgrowths, outbuildings and outbuildings were wrapped around with all sorts of cables and clotheslines; pants, bodices, pillowcases fluttered everywhere.

The new time, which will go down in the history of Russian architecture as the age of large, small and very large stalls, supplemented the urban space with showcases of retail outlets, in which stuck out all the same, everywhere known and everywhere the same canned gin tonic, Martian chocolate, some unshaven Ali or Mehmet and expired cigarettes. There was also a paid-for remake temple, similar to a stall with bells, by raiders and brokers who were on a spree. And inevitable elite village beyond the northern border of the city of rebuilt and unfinished red-brick "cottages" overlooking the swamp and the wide city beach washed by its sluggish waves.

Gleb drove the car to this near-bog village, on the outskirts, to the suburbs. There, Father Abram lodged in the rich house of the straw merchant Syropova, an eccentric millionaire, a collector of rarities and absurdities, a self-taught ballerina, a seeker of something spiritual, almost an Illuminati.

At the turn of Chervontsevsky Prospekt towards the beach and the village of Chervontsevo, a disheveled billboard with a smiling face of Captain Arktik was crooked, inviting him to visit his show on January 12th. Today was the eleventh of January, and Dublin had long been going to be sure to visit, but knew that they would not visit. Since the advertisement was last year, it had depended since the announced tour of the famous captain was canceled at the last moment. Father and son looked at the shield, at each other, sighed.

While we were driving, Gleb kept thinking and forced himself to think like people, with words, so that at least some sense would come from thinking. Words to thoughts he chose with difficulty; the logic of life was so simple and monotonous to his ear that he did not know how to grasp it properly and distinguish it among the confusion in his head. And yet I had to strain, because the problem was worth it.

More than just a dream of drinking darkened his sadness under the crown of his head. There was a topic that was both darker, and more subtly, meaner: money stopped flowing into his account. It's been a month and a half since the first Thursday of December - and nothing.

On the first Thursdays of March, July, September, December - four times a year - interest from the deposit was transferred to him. For the first time in all these years there was a failure. And worst of all, Shylock's phone was silent. Also for the first time in all these years. Until last night. Yesterday I answered - in the voice of an answering machine, repeating angrily in French and, it seems, about massage. But Shylock was a British lawyer, not a Frenchman or a massage therapist.

So what's now? Wait? Maybe, of course, there will be, Shylock himself will get in touch, but after all, it doesn’t come out and he doesn’t pay money. And some kind of automatic lady appeared in his place in the telephone network, as if he had never existed.

Go look for a lawyer? There is no money for a ticket. Borrow? Who has? At o. not so much. It is inconvenient to ask Daria, and why is she richer than Father Abram? Krokodiltsev and Krakhmaler on vacation in Sakhalin. Valkiria Valeryevna seems to have accumulated a lot, but she won’t give it away, because she is saving further, being stingy. Seryozha, Yuryich, Jeanne's mother - if everything that they, his acquaintances, have, is taken away on loan, and they themselves are sold into slavery, then even then the proceeds will get on a ticket only to Salekhard or Syktyvkar, but not to the island of Boyan , where several dwarf kingdoms are crowded, living on the sale of postage stamps and coins with portraits of cows and queens, the modeling of luxurious milk chocolates and the utter impenetrability of savings bank accounts.

In our city it was known that Gleb was from Moscow. He comes from a small family of textile teachers, tortured, pressed down to a state of almost complete stiffness, turning into a petrification in places, by hordes of aggressive and indestructible, relentlessly reborn in each new generation of the dumbest C students. Escaped, as if as a reward for the labors and troubles of humble parents, into real scientists. At twenty-five, he became a prominent mathematician, the pride of the academic Institute for Nontrivial Structures. His contribution to thinking about fractal objects, about self-similar phantoms with fractional dimensions was considerable, his work was published in Antipolis and Santa Fe. He was even nominated for the prestigious Prigogine Prize for conjecturing about a cascade of topological transformations of some kind, something so unintelligible. Thinking hard from a young age and calmed down, it seemed, forever among his strange attractors and eerie Julia sets, he would definitely have received this award, since he was completely absorbed in science and did not understand at all those two things that are the only ones capable of distracting a person from higher mathematics and without whom, if they suddenly disappeared, all, perhaps, would become higher mathematicians - in money and in sex.

At that time, only scattered comic nightmares were known about the last Gleb - falling hollow towers and long bare, sunken squares of ghostly St. Petersburg dreaming of rain and cold. A little confused in a dream with Textile Workers and a textbook of Lobachev's geometry, and with a reproduction of de Chirico's painting from my father's from the bedroom. These St. Petersburg, no matter how dream, then new, had little in common, however, with the natural St. Petersburg, the city on the Neva, which, by the way, Gleb never visited. They were one of those special cities that our imagination piles up on the borders of habitable reality in a relentless pursuit of the colonization of chaos and dream to us when we reach these borders.

The streets and squares here are deserted, unbearably straight, echoing. Narrow abysses of lanes poked into them, in the disturbing blindness of which pale eyeless sounds swarm - someone's confused breathing, careless steps, hiding cries and unkind laughter. The stairs here are ornate and endlessly meaningless. Half-open doors and half-bewitched rooms are innumerable. The expressionless brown windows of swarthy buildings overlook the setting light of an invisible sun.

These cities are as deserted as the moons. But everyone who has ever wandered through them knows that there is always someone here. Someone chasing us, overtaking us in parallel routes, guarding around every corner. Or, on the contrary, someone who is running away from us, whom we are looking for, looking for and not finding. Flickering in the distance and disappearing again; suddenly appearing very close. And from our greedy, closed hands, suddenly slipping out, to the side - with a characteristic, reminiscent of an inaudible explosion of the heart in the depths of anguish, infrasound, with which even the most expensive dreams are broken, from the choicest, purest crystal and porcelain.

Some kind of shadow was running away from Gleb. On the most mysterious and melancholic street of sleep. In a flowing dark dress. With straightened, like a dark flag on the stopped wind, dark hair. Someone not his, another, unknown to him sex. The shadow rolled a zero-shaped elongated wheel in front of it like a thin reed like a bow. Gleb Freud did not read and could not interpret his dreams, even such uncomplicated ones. They were vaguely remembered, the next morning they tingled and springy in the groin, and the insides were slightly spinning.

As for the money, he received it from the institute's accounting department, without thinking whether it could be obtained from anything else, and took it to mom / dad, an elderly couple of pensioners falling apart into ugly parts, with whom he huddled together in a two-room collapsing apartment in the Moscow region Textile workers.

It’s not that he didn’t notice women and didn’t guess about the role of rubles in human comedy. Noticed, of course, and guessed. But he couldn't focus on them. The glamours of fractal geometry interfered. A debilitating habit of mentally moving all objects that come across the eye into various non-three-dimensional spaces. Like other manifestations of severe forms of talent and professionalism, this habit did not allow one to see things as such, subordinated them to one interest, and distorted them out of necessity. So, for example, a fanatical nephrologist, before falling in love with a girl, will automatically determine the subtle signs of mild renal failure by the shade of her skin. He will stumble about them, will be carried away by his thoughts God knows where, into some medical reference books and portals. And now a whole council of world luminaries-budologists has already been assembled and is buzzing in his head, and everyone is climbing with his own - some with pills, some with an optimistic “it will pass by itself”, some with a diet or a sanatorium. And it seems to him that in his arms it is no longer this or that young Polina who is trembling, but that he is clutching to himself a thickly powdered, long-legged, languorous, insufficient kidney, which one must not so much love as passionately and selflessly treat.

If it’s so hard for a nephrologist, what should be a specialist in a subject that is completely unimaginable. A five-dimensional girl can not only be loved or even treated, not everyone can imagine her. And Gleb imagined, stretched a young laboratory assistant into five hyperspace dimensions, folded Eisenazer's secretary into a two-and-a-half-dimensional hypospace. But all these were innocent activities, only exercises, thought experiments that Gleb's brain spontaneously set not only on women, but also on everything that surrounded him: cars, houses, people, furniture, money, trees. Even food, so Gleb sometimes forgot to eat. He used to stare at a plate and begin to model himself either a hypocutlet or a hyperpotato. And he fiddles and fiddles with them, and in the meantime, ordinary, edible three-dimensional things will get cold and become tasteless, so that when he wakes up, he will not want to eat them.

Thus, neither gluttony, nor fornication, nor money-grubbing could turn Dublin away from the prize to them. I.Prigozhin, it would surely come to their turn in their turn. A. Nobel, but then in the middle of the night academician Aizenazer Leonid Leonidovich came to his house. Further in our city was unknown for the time being, and that's what it was.

This Leonid Leonidovich was the director of the Institute of Nontrivial Structures. And he was also the rector of the University of Applied Proctography. And vice-rector for economic affairs of the National Academy of Sacred Brass Music. And the chairman of the pop council of the Fund for Innovative Projects. And the board of directors of JSC "Chemistry-Invest". And so on and so forth. He was a patron and producer of Dublin from a young age, when he noticed in one of the schools where he visited in search of the geniuses of geometry, a boy named Gleb, who sculpted from paper, plasticine, or simply painted super-complex images of supernatural figures. The boy squinted blindly all the time, it was believed that he could not see well, and Leonid Leonidovich instantly guessed that Gleb's vision was actually bad, but not due to myopia and farsightedness. And because everything in his eyes becomes more complicated and confusing to the limit, turns into endless self-repeating abstractions that reproduce themselves on all possible scales, in all unthinkable coordinate systems, at all levels of stretching, curvature, compression and confusion of space. So he sees all these best of possible worlds worlds pulsating, foaming, motley, spreading and flowing over each other, infinitely detailed, bottomlessly deep - with iridescent fractals swirling, wriggling in the radiant depths.

Leonid Leonidovich led the blind child prodigy into scientists and was going, moreover, to bring him into the people. He himself came to science from somewhere near the village of Chmarovka, from a collection point for glass containers, more precisely, from a penitentiary of a non-strict regime, where he ended up for the most ingenious manipulation of empty bottles and empty boxes. He reached the academic rank from glass affairs indirectly, with his own mind, having traded kupats and tulips along the way, having figured out not at once, but forever, that science is a sure thing and can give no less return than a meat-packing plant or a network flower shops. Of course, if you deal with geometries and chemistry with your soul, in a creative way, so to speak.

Leonid Leonidovich? - looking through Eisenazer into his brain, how arthropod formulas with blinking wings of variables and ringing knuckles of constants run around it, Gleb muttered, opening the door. - What are you?

Hello, Gleb Glebovich, - the academician was a sixty-year-old Jew, not kosherly resembling a gray-haired boar, with a large mouth, fangs, eyebrows, with sloping powerful shoulders, with blunt, black-haired, fleecy and clawed fingers at the ends of short hook-shaped hands. - Can you imagine - wandered around here. Sorry for late and no call. Uninvited, uninvited Jew... Who could be worse? Near here. At acquaintances. They baptized Marik. Now many are baptized. It's none of my business, but somehow ... Russians are not enough for them? And what will God say? What if it gives gray?! Or locusts!?! What then? Do we need it? Let's make a problem empty place! Not enough, perhaps, the Jews, and so the problems? Circumcision, of course, is also not honey. But if it's supposed to be... And by the way, it's me! You, Gleb Glebovich, do not believe in God. Neither ours nor yours. And I'm talking about sulfur, about circumcision. It's not about them. And that I ended up on Sirenevaya, on your street, that is, and I remembered your address. Give, I think I'll come in, suddenly I'm not sleeping.

I'm not sleeping, - said Gleb.

And I think - not sleeping, I'll go.

So will I go?

Ah, yes, - Gleb seemed to wake up. - Excuse me... Come in... Into my room... Here is my mother. And then dad gets up. Sometimes. And my room is over here, on the left...

Gleb's room turned out to be a kitchen, littered to the ceiling with books, manuscripts, pots, pans, and used tea bags, whose long tails with yellow and red pieces of paper hung from everywhere.

Tea? - asked Gleb.

Yes. If it's easy.

Have a seat.

Leonid Leonidovich thanked, but after looking around, he did not understand where to sit. On a single tripod stool, the multi-volume "Theory of Chaos" collapsed, and on the theory lay a large tambourine with bells, on the tambourine - a shriveled bagel, a bent tube of dermowaite and a sandwich with something brown-burgundy bitten in the side.

Dublin handed the guest a red-hot glass of thin glass, stained with prints of father's and mother's fingers. Having burned himself on the glass and looking at the shreds of some kind of burnt porridge floating on the yellow tea, the guest put the glass on the sandwich and said:
- They say you play the tambourine well.

I play, - said Gleb. - Helps to relax. When I hit the tambourine, I see better. That is, it's easier.

Like everyone else, in three dimensions, - Eisenazer clarified for some reason.

Apart from time, Dublin clarified.

They paused, looked out the window and into another window that was clearly visible in it - in the house opposite - in which someone thin, long, in pajamas sipped something like cabbage soup with a glaring ladle straight from the refrigerator. Then they were silent for more.

Let it lie with you for a while, - the academician finally said, holding out a large white envelope to Gleb.

Article? Gleb asked.

Article? You said it well. Exactly - the article! Leonid Leonidovich chuckled.

Let it lie down.

Just please store in a dry place. Somewhere darker. Out of sight,” Eisenazer asked, looking doubtfully at the stained walls and furniture. - Maybe dad?

Maybe daddy too.

I'll pick it up in a couple of months. I just need to go to the market. There will be many purchases. I'm afraid I wouldn't mind. The article, that is ... - the guest commented unconvincingly. - Just... Don't be offended... Don't open it. It's personal there.

I'm not offended, - Gleb was not offended.

I'll pick it up in a few days. Or in a month, - the academician continued to get confused. - In six months, maybe. to from

Yes, dada, Leonid Leonidovich, you are very timely, very opportunely, - answered Gleb. - My dad just died. The room has been vacated. Taken away an hour ago.

Eisenazer was taken aback. - And mom?

Mom did not die, - said Gleb. But she said she would definitely die. Because without a dad there is no life.

That is, you are not right, Gleb Glebovich, understood. I wanted to ask how is she? And yet, it is clear how ... How else? .. Forgive me, fool. I will go. Please accept condolences. I'll go.

No you! Stay overnight. I'll just ask my mom's permission. I'm sure she will agree. She has heard a lot, respects ... About you, - Gleb, holding the academician with gestures, backed into his mother's room and returned after about three minutes. “Mom died too. As I promised. Now you can definitely spend the night.

Eisenazer called a doctor, a policeman, Glebov's evil aunt from the neighbors. The chores dragged on until the morning, so that in fact Leonid Leonidovich, although sleeplessly, nevertheless spent the night near Dublin. The aunt felt bad at the sight of her dead sister, the doctor and the policeman forced her to pump out, having pumped out, they quarreled among themselves about how best it was to pump out - the way they pumped it out, or as the doctor advised. Having quarreled, they handed over aunt Gleba, while mother's body was taken away together somewhere for further processing. Eisenazer, having uttered tonic compliments to the aunt who was recovering and promising Gleb to come in a week for an envelope, also left.

A car was already waiting for him outside. A large, heavily armed driver with an unscientific face, seeing the chief from afar, crouched affably. On the way, Leonid Leonidovich helped the doctor and the sergeant, who had again climbed in, to drag mother Dublin to the ambulance. The ambulance didn't start. But the policeman and the doctor started up, already restless. They argued about how best to start and quarreled completely, while the sickly young man sitting behind the wheel of an ambulance fell asleep soundly and gaped unpleasantly at passers-by with an open throat. Eisenaser, with the help of his driver, caught them all a taxi. He placed a policeman with a dead mother and a doctor in the back seat, but he pulled the unawakened young man from behind the wheel, put him forward, leaning against the taxi driver. [The taxi driver allowed him to be leaned against him for an extra pay of one hundred dollars.] Feeling tired, he approached the stall near the vegetable market, crouching down, said “ice-cream and marlboro” at the window; and then a bullet flew into his mouth rounded with the syllable “ro”, followed by another. Falling, fearfully reflecting the immeasurable torment, like a window into hell, with his right eye, swollen and wet, he managed to catch the third, bursting, useless (because without it everything was bad, one would be enough, the first, so that there was nowhere worse) . Leonid Leonidovich fell. In the midst of passers-by splashed with his academic brain. He became mostly motionless. He only nodded and twirled around with a fountain of blood of a brightly leavened color, disheveled and bubbling in place of a head on a wide and sinewy, like a stump from a thick poplar broken by lightning, high.

The assassin left the stall with cola and colt, went around the outlet, approached the deceased, meticulously and proudly looked at him, like a sculptor who successfully cut off all the excess of his sculpture, or better, like a carpenter famously knocked together a stool from the heart. Having apparently been pleased, he wandered off to the bus stop, a handsome guy of about twenty-five, in black glasses and black boots and very ordinary pants and a t-shirt. While the crowd was pushing, stomping, cackling and calling the police and galloping near the corpse, he chatted at the bus stop with some inquisitive grandfather who was not in a hurry about explosive, tracer and off-center bullets, read the pager, sent answers, got on the one hundred and sixth bus and went home as there were no more orders for that day.

The doctor and the policeman, who had already managed to drive off decently, were returned by a new call, got out of the taxi and, after questioning the witnesses, they were chasing the one hundred and sixth, but it was already too late. They recklessly got involved in a conversation with the unhurried grandfather and, having wasted a quarter of an hour, remembered Leonid Leonidovich. The taxi driver, however, flatly refused to take Leonid Leonidovich to the morgue, because, unlike Gleb's mother, Gleb's mentor was literally brainless and very splashed and dirty. They all quarreled, so that the taxi driver dumped out of the car right on the stalls of the vegetable market and my mother, and the ambulance driver who was partly awake. The driver of Leonid Leonidovich ran away, sped away, rattling his weapons, along with the chief's official car, so the chief had to lie untidy in the middle of the beautiful morning Tekstilshchikov.

So, almost overnight, GG Dublin lost his mother, father and director. He began to sit on his father's couch. He remembered how once - he was seven years old, eight then - his father / mother lured him to his aunt, aunt Vera, promising marshmallows and bird's milk. And having lured (there was little bird's milk, a drop of everything; there was a lot of marshmallow, but stale, dried up, tasting like plaster with saccharin), they ran away on tiptoe, without saying goodbye to their son (they knew - they would not let go), on vacation. On whole month- left with Aunt Vera, my mother's sister. "Where is mom?" - asked Gleb, breaking the marshmallow. “He will come soon,” aunt lied. “Where is mom? He will come now, ”it was repeated an hour later. Half an hour later: "Where is mom? She will come now." And then again, and again, when he crumbled all the marshmallow. And I wanted to wash my sticky hands. And he wanted to go home. And wanted to drink and cry. Aunt Vera was a childless, restrainedly vicious, intensely patient lady. Never raised her unkind voice. She put Gleb to bed unusually early, when it was just beginning to get dark, simply because she did not know what to talk about with him and how to get rid of his whining.

Pressed against the rickety cot by a prickly electrified blanket, the boy watched through tears as the faded half-lilac lilies imprinted a thousand times on the wallpaper merged into the stern faces of barmaley and angry lions. These terrible visions surrounded a black-and-white photograph hanging on the wall, in which, among the black foliage of lilacs, the very young physiognomies of aunt, mother and father were white. Aunt was in a veil, dad was also in something wedding, groom; Mom is in a simpler outfit. All three, huddled far out of focus, were staring at Gleb merrily. eyes closed. Daddy's dad volunteered to save money to be a wedding photographer, but turned out to be a blind man and a drunkard. He only managed to take this idiotic picture, then he got drunk and spent the rest of the film on, as he put it, Bacchic still lifes, running around the table with wild laughter and photographing half-eaten aspics pierced by cigarette butts, chicken skeletons on plates and salads on chairs.

Gleb did not know then that dad married first his aunt, and only then his mother. The fact is that Aunt Vera, being to the extreme, to the last degree of probability medical worker, exhausted dad very soon with constant conversations at the table about a chair. He left her for her sister. And then to say, the appearance, in general, is the same, but not a doctor, but, like dad, a math teacher. My sister gave birth to Gleb's dad and discussed only school gossip at the table.

The child watched the twilight, the lions and barmaley devour the photo-parents, crushed, like a dusty dead bear, by a shaggy blanket. Twisted and suffocated, like a trembling birch cub straying from a grove with a sticky dodder and a quick-tempered whirling wind, with a wet and domineering longing. The wound on the soul, in that place where the parental warmth was torn out, was huge and seemed incurable. Tears gushed out of her and - like from stigmata - hot light. From the loss of light, the boy grew dim and cold, but at the same time he felt that everything was fixable. There is much ahead of life. Mom will come. And dad will be back. And these tears are not from loss, grief or shame. They - from the continuity of love, flying across the torn plain of time, stumbled for the first time on an unexpected pit, hit very painfully, but still crazy, ever daring, flying farther and farther.

Now everything was different. Mom/dad won't come. And Uncle Lenya will not come. Nobody will ever come. Nobody ever.

The yellow bear gallops along the ice-cold ocean as slippery as an endless skating rink. With his swiftness and perky smile, he looks more like a dashing black horse than a running polar bear, which he really is. To his right, a frost-covered joyful wolf rushes at a gallop, then at a trot, to the left - a blizzard. By the name of Yellow, he is nicknamed for the light light-autumn ebb of thick and heavy, like white gold, wool.

He is heading for the Pole, on a north-north-north course, up the echoing dome of the Arctic, to the very heart of the north, to zero longitude, zero latitude, zero everything. He is in a hurry, because in a week and only for a week only - impenetrable storms and darkness will part there, and on pure blue ice, on pure blue air, the road will be cleared to the floating ice floe Ararat, in size, shape and partly the purpose of repeating the biblical mountain of the same name.

At the top of the ice floe, like seven suns on a crystal cloud, the seven golden domes of the drifting polar monastery shine. The seven fabulous monks fleeing in it call themselves skitters, their abode is called the Semisolar Skete. The walls of the skete are cast from an excellent Orthodox alloy of ringing copper and pure snow; The cells are cut down from a good bottom oak, a noble underwater tree growing in spacious groves under the thickness of the icy sea, on the branches of which the winged singing fish Banana winds openwork nests from seaweed. And in the cells of the monks and icons; and from the monks and icons - they stretch up, to God himself sweet smoke incense, glory initial Word and the white-stone church of the Savior-on-the-Border.

Here, on the edge of the sky and the sea, once every hundred years there is a week on which there are neither Fridays nor Tuesdays, but all Sundays. And in this week of seven Sundays, here, at the pole, on the Ararat ice floe, seven miracles are performed. Seven mistakes are corrected, seven sins are forgiven. Seven wishes come true.

The bear and the blizzard and the pale wolf do not rush by themselves. They point the way to the colossal ship rushing after them, half a mile behind them. This is the sailing icebreaker Arktik, crushing the stubborn firmament of the frostbitten ocean with a terrifying roar and crack. Raising giant clouds of ice chips and snow dust, swirling powerfully and hugely behind the ship, soaring into a terrible height and shimmering like an explosion of a diamond factory. The sun is repeatedly reflected in this sparkling foam, in these mirrored smokes and fogs; and now - in the sky above the ship, seven suns sparkle, one real, six reflected; and in relation to each other they are located in the same way as the stars of the Big Dipper, and are outlined by a circle of an incredibly fierce rainbow.

The sails of the icebreaker are transparent and filled with fresh light. His captain confidently holds the helm in his strong, tanned, weathered thoughts. With a smooth shift of meanings, he sets in motion the most sensitive telekinetic steering mechanism. And the bulk of the ship responds, turns to the right and to the left, sometimes slowing down, and then attacking in a new way - with new joy, fury and speed - on an endless wall of ice two human heights high, five thousand miles thick.

Captain Arktika is famous: sailor and master of ceremonies; spy and billionaire; illusionist and philanthropist, and psychic healer. Women adore him, adore and love him. Men imitate him, envy him, admire him; some also love - no worse than women. Systems of men and women, organized humanity, asexual bureaucracy - they hate him, who lives like not everyone. The criminal police of ten respectable states have been frantically looking for him for several years now, and they still don’t find him, although he is not hiding. In the categorical demands sent to airports and train stations for his immediate detention, the column "special signs" reads: "He is magnificent."

He is holding the helm. He is in the captain's cabin. In front of him are six billion monitors, small, iPad size, each of which shows what is happening to every person on the planet at any given second. Clearly, different things happen: birth and death; joy and old age; sex and sex, war, laughter, sex; torture; getting awards, getting ideas about, getting in the snout with a log, knee, stake, mallet, fist, drill, door, snout, two snouts, lightning, motorcycle, pillow; drunkenness, swagger; eating food and reverse processes; sepsis, inflammation of the middle ear, HIV, inflammation of the snout, swelling of the snout, influenza, cancer, lymphogranulomatosis; cutting off the heads of the warriors of Allah, cutting off the heads (decapitation) of the warriors of Allah; dancing, love, love, a lot of love, sadness, bright sadness, beautiful sadness, simple joy, difficult joy - life happens. Six billion lives in live mode. 6 109 screens - the same number of destinies happening here and now. The spectacle is ambiguous, for an amateur, so to speak. Or for those who need it for work, for duty, for work.

Therefore, sailors and passengers, even those few who are generally allowed to, try not to enter the wheelhouse where this unique device of eternal omniscience is installed. Usually there is only the captain himself, still young, in essence, a man about ninety meters high, thin-boned, with a face of those about whom there is almost nothing to say, how amazing it is about almost all of them. beautiful faces; and the captain has a taciturn talking parrot on his shoulder. A bird of a rare hunting breed, which is found only in the floodplain of the Taz River, bordering the reserved Little Land Tundra. Almost completely exterminated because of the most delicate, warmest and lightest fur that replaces down and feathers.

Not with fur, however, a single one, these birds are also valuable for their amazing, almost dog-like fidelity, courage and ingenuity to help a person on a hunt. Useless, however, for the prey of all other inhabitants of the tundra, small-land hunting parrots are absolutely indispensable for luring out of the reindeer moss thickets, chasing and catching small-land hunting parrots. So they, poor fellows, are used to hunt each other. There are only fifty or fifty-five of them left today on the entire planet.

Captain Arktika keeps a parrot, however, not for hunting, but out of friendship. The parrot is sitting on his right shoulder strap, but from the shoulder straps it is clear that the rank on the captain is high, not lower than the Arkhangelsk one - or field marshal or something, if according to the usual account.

The archangel asks not a parrot: “How did the lady sleep?” In response, yoongi’s head pops into the slightly opening door and, looking at the floor so as not to see the monitors, reports: “Mistress woke up and invites you to breakfast. porridge, fresh, good mood. As always. Like yesterday and the day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow. “What are these details for? Captain Arktika frowns good-naturedly. “I only asked about how she slept.” “To give a banal message a metaphysical hue. Flat news - existential, as they say, volume. For beauty, but I slept sweetly, I saw you in a dream, ”the cabin boy reports. “Are you calling me a parrot for beauty?” - the parrot intervenes from the shoulder. Yunga takes his head back. The parrot wants porridge.

The captain transfers the ship to the smallest self-propelled vehicle and leaves for breakfast. The cabin is empty, only numerous monitors are winking and whispering. On one of them, in the upper right corner, Velik is visible, next to him is Gleb. On the other neighboring - Gleb, next to Velik. It can be seen how they enter the house of the merchant Syropova. One can also see the shadow of a dragon hovering, then hanging over them, pale as ice and trouble.

Gleb and Velik entered the house of the merchant's wife Syropova.

If people did not betray their beliefs, did not renounce their faiths, did not change ideals, did not violate oaths, did not violate oaths, they would still live in caves and worship idols.

Sorrow passed through the ashes of days
the most delicate tornado.
I became rich, like the king of kings -
in my stone collection
is your heart.

Nathan Dubovitsky. Car and Velik

But time, time! It is everywhere, gushing from all cracks like caustic alkali, corroding the mortal body and the prophetic soul, and eternity in the soul, and perishable things in the hands. And if you do not spend it on work and rest, on meetings and debates, on preparing breakfasts and dinners, then on eating them and dancing after them, on fishing, twittering and preference; if you don’t drain it, don’t take it away from a life overflowing with it somewhere to the side, on nonsense, on anything, then, perhaps, it will flood the brain, like seething madness.

Nathan Dubovitsky. Car and Velik

Gleb thought that he should not be lazy today, finally find time and hang himself. Or there, in the swamp, there is a polynya, they drove - they saw it, into it, into it and immediately under the ice, and swim under the ice away from the polynya until all the air runs out in the lungs, so that on way back not left.

Nathan Dubovitsky. Car and Velik

Having considered the past half-day, Velik began to look at the fence and the house of General Krivtsov. He had been in love for five years with the general's daughter Masha Krivtsova, a nine-year-old beautiful girl from his school. In love not yet with love, but with an anxious, tender and pure premonition of love. As if the first morning wind quietly touched the flowers and leaves, touched and calmed down. And the flowers and foliage swayed and sang, not knowing that this weak wind was only the first movement of a roaring storm rushing here, carrying here dust raised from all over the earth, rubbish plucked from untidy life and various rubbish pulled from it. That a storm will quickly come here, tear off the leaves, hit the flowers with hot dusty air, suffocate, stun, spin. And real adult love will come with its happiness and misfortune, unheard-of joy and stupidity, and lies, boredom.

Nathan Dubovitsky. Car and Velik

Then Velik clung to himself, there was no one else. He wrapped himself in his loneliness, as he would wrap himself in his mother's warmth if he had a mother. This loneliness was great for him, not childish in size, large, spacious, heavy; as if it were an adult, as if from someone else's shoulder it was given to him for growth. Whoever had alcoholic parents will understand what it was like for him, what a formidable expanse he felt, what a terrible freedom, unbearable for an inept childish soul that has not yet isolated itself. Not learned to prowl in the cold and jump over their heads, catch, grab their neighbors and, sitting on their necks, nestling in their brains, suck out all the juices from them, squeeze out warmth, gnaw out joy. His being had not yet precipitated, not petrified in the form of some kind of dunduk or ***, but should have been still scattered, clear, transparent, dissolved, like light and love, in the blood and will of someone older.

“Eala eala Earendel,” sings Yellow.

“Engla engla beorhtast,” Volkhov howls.

- Ofer middangeard monnum sented, - the cabin boy squeaks two fifths higher.

They crowd on the bow of the sailboat, looking straight at the target. Every minute, light, quick smiles fly up from the face of the bear. The approaching Ararat is reflected in the silver face of the wolf. A pious squeak comes from under Jung's face. Soon the final, soon the skete and prayer. Is the resurrection coming soon? The wolf and the bear believe, the cabin boy does not; impatience covers all<…>

The Archangel looks at the multicolored eyes of his warriors for a long time, hesitates, hesitates, for a long, long time does not dare to start, and then suddenly hurries, hurries, speaks quickly, stunningly:

- Soldiers of love! Warriors of Light! I turn to you, my friends.

For some time now we have been arguing about good and evil. About whether we are rightfully going to ask God to resurrect the glorious Kursk submariners. And we see that even we, the angels of the Lord, are ignorant of His providence. Our covenant with God seems to be written in a language that we do not understand. We know that the treaty is valid, but we do not know what its subject, what is its purpose. What obligations, rights and penalties does it provide<…>

“And this is what the Lord struck me with,” the captain hurries on. - He inspired me with extraordinary pity for the boy named Velik from the monitor ATAT4040VVKU764793. This boy, who lives in the town of Konstantinopyl, is in trouble. He was kidnapped by a vile tormentor. Every day I am compelled by the Lord to see how a pure child suffers. You know how strong I am, God knows this, and Dennitsa knows, but I am unable to see this misfortune.

Many people are suffering, many of them are children. Why am I so obsessed with Velika? Why do I only think about him? Not about the millions of others in need. Not about the sailors of the Kursk. And about him. Only about him.

Isn't it a miracle? Isn't God's compulsion amazing? Is it not by His will that I am chained to this smallest being? And for what? Why to this? Unfathomable! Inscrutable!<…>I believe that the Lord, by this pity, tells me - save the boy! And I proclaim to you His Word - we must, having reached Ararat, ask the schemamonks to pray to the Almighty for the mercy of the Great. About his release.

- Unheard of! the bear growls.

- I can not believe it! the wolf barks.

The parrot covers its face with wings.

“I can’t believe it,” Volkhov jumps out of line, almost throwing himself at the archangel. - This is a betrayal! How can we betray the sailors of the Kursk? The same children are waiting for them at home! We've decided! We promised!

- Got it! Volkhov interrupts the cabin boy. “Captain,” he addresses the archangel, “you violate the charter and custom. The purpose of our pilgrimage never changed on the go. The Lord will not accept a petition from a fickle, unfaithful, confused spirit! You can't even think about it! We decided to ask for the resurrection of submariners - so be it! Watch out, captain! You, of course, decide, but - come to your senses! What a great one! What a boy! What's up here<…>

Of poor people, courtesy says that they live modestly. However, the poverty of Lieutenant Podkolesin in itself was somehow immodest, almost blatant. As if for show to everyone, deliberate, incomprehensible, because how can the closest ally and assistant of the mighty Krivtsov live so badly, not every mind can comprehend.

Podkolesin flaunted in a jacket made of overcoat wool and in a sixteen-year-old Chevrolet overcoat<…>

He sat in a hostel in a noisy bare room on an awkward stool and objected across the table on top of paper boxes of milk:

- So you say - Putin, Medvedev, Putin, Medvedev ... Well, I read ... both of them ... And you know what - everything seems to be right, smart words like a lot ... modernization, glonass, banderlog ... But, you know, it doesn't catch on for some reason. Akunin writes better<…>

Suddenly from behind the door came:

“Open up, Lieutenant. There is a case.

"Comrade General, is that you?" - Podkolesin did not believe his ears<…>

- Can you hang yourself? I wanted to go home, and I already got used to it, but Nadya won’t let me through. There is nothing here, he says, to hang himself. The house, he says, is not for this. That's it, Podkolesin! He built a house with these hands, but they don’t even let me die in it ...

- Why? So? the lieutenant was taken aback. “Maybe you’ll spend the night after all ... better? ..

- And you, Podkolesin? And you, son? Eh<…>

The morning was an unusual color - some kind of sugar. [Evgeny Mikhailovich] Chelovechnikov looked from the office at his mother-in-law's garden in surprise and pride: the beauty in the garden was amazing, rare. The new downy, even warm, snow covered everything, smoothed out all the corners, evened out bumps, rounded ledges and cliffs, hid the unclean, stupid<…>

The machine and Velik were not found, and every day weakened hope. The income received from participation in the investigation could very soon stop, because now, when Krivtsov was gone, and Margot worked openly and directly with von Paveletz, Podkolesin and other personnel, the value of major services became near zero. But, and without stopping yet, this income already brought confusion to Chelovechnikov directly into the family: his wife Angelina Borisovna and daughters became quarrelsome from this income; when there was no money, Angelina, of course, was sometimes worried, but very sometimes; when the money appeared, comparisons began with other money that some acquaintances had, and it often turned out that others had more and harder money; this resulted in chagrin and hubbub. And yet, Yevgeny Mikhailovich would have calmed down his humming wife and the daughters who joined her, but he did not understand how to cure himself of Margarita. For the first time he fell in love with someone other than his wife, and this first illicit love shook his primitive organism so much that he imagined himself almost a criminal, a liar to his wife's face, a traitor to his children. And in front of Margo he was trembling, he could not get used to her. Every time she rose above him unexpected, strong, bright, hot, high, like an explosion, he bent down to the ground, she blinded, knocked his heart out of rhythm, concussed<…>

He remembered the ill-fated Gleb Glebovich, the day of his terrible descent from his mind. He remembered how the madman had patiently waited for everyone to leave his apartment. And everyone left, only Che hesitated, felt sorry for Dublin, although he understood that he could not wait to be left alone. He remembered how, after awkwardly saying goodbye, he finally left, went down the stairs and - remembered! - noticed out of the corner of his eye, touched his right side wide view something sticking out of the wall. It was a green mailbox that had not been emptied for a long time, overflowing with newspapers, magazines, brochures, leaflets and envelopes, swollen to the size of almost a cabinet. It hovered over smooth rows of similar, but not as run down, green tin boxes with apartment numbers. However, for some reason, there was no number on it. Che thought that this box must be from Dublin, which, of course, had no time for newspapers and booklets all these days. I thought and passed by, thought weakly, out of the corner of my head and immediately forgot.

“Hello, I just remembered something,” putting the fish aside, he took up the phone. “Hello, Major, can you hear me well?” he called Meyer. Have you checked the Dublin mailbox? Where where. Like everyone else, in the entrance. How not to be? Why shouldn't he have mailbox? Here's something I completely forgot. Somehow they didn't think about it. Well, it happens ... What kind of opera are we after this? Well, let's see together? I'm in my Ryazan ... Yes, I'm leaving right now ... Well, in minutes ... in half an hour. That's it, we'll meet there.<…>

The detectives laid out the correspondence on the windowsill, dug it carefully, but to no avail, and began to stuff it back into the box. And then a thin envelope without addresses and stamps fell out of the folds of the thick Komsomolskaya Pravda<…>

“The letters are pasted on—cut out of newspapers. Like in an old movie. Here, read, - the Tungus turned the sheet to Chelovechnikov.

“Your son is with us The imprint of his thumb on the left hand is attached in the corner of the note Serves as evidence

You must - collect all documents for the trust DE company in one file and put it in an abandoned boiler room on the banks of the Novoleningrad ravine

In the second oven from the entrance

Then Velik will live Term ten days Then receive Velik

No need - withdraw money from Trust DE

No need to tell the police

Then you will never see Velik,” was pasted on a piece of paper.

Bur, right? Meyer suggested.

— And the Stub? But what about the Dragon? Che doubted.

— At the same time they?

“Or are they the Dragon?”

I'm calling Margot!<…>

The captain was lying with his temple on the floor. On the linoleum, smooth and slippery as a skating rink, a yellow cockroach jumped past his eyes, running away from the blood spreading over the hotel room. Blood, he knew, was pouring out of his shot through the stomach, quickly flowing away from him to the door to the balcony. In an attempt to stop and bring it back, he grasped its receding edge with a slow hand. But the hand went numb, the fingers unclenched against their will, and the blood rushed on.

Both the cabin boy and the mistress, everyone, everyone left him as soon as they heard that Vitya Vatican had sent Boer and Stupa to him. And although Blevnov always controlled all income from tours and expenses, now he had to answer. Unfair, insulting, but such is the retribution for success. And the devil pulled them then, at the beginning of the business, to borrow money from the Vatican<…>

Then Margot jumped up and said to Yevgeny Mikhailovich, who remained at the table:

- Three letters on the same paper on behalf of different characters - either a hint of the Dragon, then the Probe and the Vatican, then some kind of red partisans. Some stupid joke? Or is the criminal playing? Hamit? So bold? Or deliberately abundantly watching so that we catch him as soon as possible? It happens… a tired maniac… Or was Velik really taken away by Drill and Probe for Trust D.E.? Was the Machine stolen by political idiots? And in some incredible way, these different and unrelated criminals accidentally used similar envelopes and tore sheets from the same notebook? Little, unlikely, but possible! Or perhaps Arkady Bykov. He also has a tattoo - a dragon ... Not just, maybe so ... But if he is, then what about the Machine? Just went looking for Velik and got lost? But Podkolesin and Panteleev could. Could. And now they're lying... No, I can't! And Dublin Sr. has disappeared somewhere. To the pole! What a whim! No, I can't, my brain hangs! Hangs, Che, hangs! Tell me, Che, you love me, don't you think?..

- As ... As you please ... as you please ... As you ... please. How convenient ... You ... If you need, if you need, then very, very<…>

“Then listen, my knight. Find the Car and Velik. Do it for me. If, God forbid, it’s bad and too late already, if… they’re not alive, then find this freak, this creature… punish<…>

Gleb stood at the entrance, looking at the window of his apartment, and trembled, froze.

He went out to the store to buy food for Velik and for himself, but he didn't buy it because he forgot, stomped between the shelves, touched at random several packs of something floury with insensitive fingers and indifferent glances.

After that, he stared at the floor and, after talking to himself, went out. Returning to the house, he froze in front of the entrance door, sensing a slight call from above. Outside the window of their apartment, on the windowsill, the ghostly Velik disappeared and called him in a melting whisper.

What are you, son? Why are you disappearing? shouted Gleb.

- I must disappear.

Why, my little one?

Because as long as I'm with you, you won't find me. You do nothing to save me because you have me. But I'm not real, you know? You don't even try to save the real me. You can't do that, dad!<…>

Full text from fresh issue"Russian Pioneer" read .