How they lived! My brothers, how well we lived! You will drink vodka, eat a sausage with a white bar, light a cigarette ... and no worries about the future, because the party on TV has already decided everything: stability.
Yes - they did. And what is needed - they condemned. And whoever needs to be shot in time would still be a great power.
Would be draped, because they are not allowed anywhere anymore. They don't let me in, I mean. Not like before: everywhere they opened their arms to the victims of Sophia Vlasyevna ...
Remember, it’s even amazing what inventions our Soviet human genius dared to illegally cross the sacred border and escape into the class alien world of capital. When military pilots were blowing into Japan and Turkey in MiGs - well, the fighter was created for that, so that no one and nothing in the air could interfere with it. But when two burgher families from East Germany self-made a balloon in the barn and, singing: "If only the night is darker! .." they climb into the basket and leave with a favorable wind to the West! - so after all, they also grabbed their beloved dog, tying its face more reliably, so that barking from the darkness of heaven would not disturb the peaceful service of the border guards. Ugh on Jules-Verne and his artistic foresight! ..
What, one wonders, had to be done over a common Ukrainian villager, so that in the opposite end of the world, in Korea, under the gaze of a native tourist group and the machine guns of vigilant North Korean border guards, he could rush in counter-aimed zigzags into the arms of the reactionary South Korean regime. Scratched across the Baltic in the fog on a high-speed boat - okay, the soldier was stupid for two years to stare at the radar screen, he got drunk well and smokes in dreams of demobilization, and still there is nothing to catch up with that boat, and from a helicopter through such turbidity you can't see a damn thing: and while that helicopter takes off! .. But from Novorossiysk one navigator successfully departed for Istanbul on an inflatable mattress, adjusted by a bora: calculated the course, speed, time, tied the second mattress and a bag of vodka and chocolate from below, and if they spotted it from the air - ah, thanks to the saviors, it was carried into the sea, they say. And there is also one little boy, a sub-underwater viper, he simply crawled from Karelia to Finland through a drainage pipe: he smeared himself with grease for warmth and sliding, tied clothes in a rubber bag to his leg, a hacksaw in his teeth - and forward, cut out the steel grate until the outfit went back ... Lord, but what did that Count Monte understand in escaping, you know, Christo in his loose liberalism in France! Yes, not so much dangerous as narrow, he says, and it was wet: no persecution, but I just dreamed terribly to go around the world on a yacht, and who would let me in? .. They sat down.
In general, this topic was inexhaustible, tickling with seditious gloating - they saw abroad in three forms: through a telescope, in a coffin and on TV; so let me at least gossip about those who showed the law a big fig. Although the law was simple and sound: did you want to run away? - here's seven years of hard labor for you, and work for the good, learn to appreciate the freedom that you had at least within the borders.
The main evil was, of course, aviation: it flies, such rubbish, and not always where it should be. Soon after the war, for the good of the people, air taxis were invented for the good of the people, Yak-12 airplanes, so they flooded over the gorges over the hill in the Caucasus, and the authorities did not mean such a service to citizens, that they rather preferred to transfer citizens back to donkeys. It was then that Comrade Voroshilov was in charge of DOSAAF, and he, full of the old horseman's inveterate hatred of aviation, pressed all the flying clubs to his fingernails, leaving only glider pilots and parachutists with a creak: without an engine, it means that you are not far away, contra.
All kinds of non-returnees - it was not interesting, why not stay if you already got there in a comfortable way: they only savored - who of the responsible officials would then be bullied for weak ideological work with subordinates. It looked piquant, however, when the whole group returned in a kind of bashful confusion, and its leader, a hundredfold checked by the KGB employee with a profile so brilliant that it was just right to receive a big gold medal at an international exhibition of purebred hounds - cowardly, as the newspapers wrote then, looking around, he trotted like a lackey in the direction of the bourgeois embassy. Then the leading hand gave responsible comrades especially strong cuffs, someone's careers gurgled into a swamp, and even though on a global scale this is a trifle, but still, ordinary people are pleased!
Although here, too, we have not been without injustices. At the port, his wife came to the navigator, so he took her to England in a box for bed linen. The fact that they stayed in England is already the sadness of the British, with our guys you will not get around the trouble, and on the ship - three more navigators, tea will not sink, and in reserve - so just a crowd of navigators are just kicking around, they want to go to England; but for what they closed the visa, slapped a stricter and applied other repressions to the captain and first mate? Well, the first - for the cause, then they keep him on the ship so that the Soviet system surpasses all the others in everything, but how do you order the captain to educate the navigator? Sleep with him in ports instead of his wife? No, I'm sorry for the captain ...
Fortunately, all this is in the past ... Now it is different. Everything just became. A ticket to America? for God's sake - free. Save up your salary for ten years - and for an entry visa. Who will give it to you, who needs you there? ah, how many years have the Bolsheviks been telling you this: no one needs you there, is it now convinced? It's boring, gentlemen ... That's when one in winter in a blizzard blew into Sweden across the bay in a Zhiguli, on the ice, with a whistle - and rushed off, again there was nothing to catch up with - oh: it was - romance; adventure, impulse.
But - there were completely different stories, even - the opposite: unforeseen stories happened; unpredictable! ..
2. Victim of the mushroom sport
Sunday summer at the Leningrad plant "Hammer and Sickle" organized a day of health. We overstocked ourselves with vodka, dressed in tracksuits and went to pick mushrooms in our own bus. Noble mushrooms grow on the Karelian Isthmus. Again, in salted and pickled form, they fly unusually under vodka. Fresh air, coniferous forest, homemade snack - what else does a person need for health? They drove in, drank, the soul asked for songs.
They drink to themselves and sing. They sing and drink. And they have a snack.
Get drunk. They began to collect mushrooms. Mushroom, by the way, turned out to be a year. Birds chirp, lakes shine; pick mushrooms. Collected. We sat down to dinner, laid out a fire: drank. We finished it. And tired, but happy, got on the bus.
On the bus, the sporttorg made a roll call. And it seemed that there were one more of them. We counted it twice - it’s not enough. The drunken heads were counted - still not enough. They checked the list with a finger: there is not enough engineer Markychev!
They got angry: it's time to go, it's not easy to wear it! Buzzed. They waited. They shouted. There is no engineer Markychev.
Well, they fell out of the bus, greeted with robbery voices, bawled through the forest, planted them with swear words: Markychev was gone. The sports organizer responsible for the event is worried, jumping: look for him, comrades! forest, after all ...
Until dusk they wandered and hooted, the buzz weathered all to no avail: Markychev was gone. Lost, or something. And to hell with him! do not spend the night here! cattle, the whole team drove up, and he himself, probably, dumped home on the way. Let's go too!
From home at night the sports organizer called Markychev - no: no.
The next day everyone comes to work - there is no engineer Markychev.
What a nuisance. Not good ... The man got lost. The missing comrade was abandoned.
Well, sports organizer went to the trade union committee and reports: so and so ... one got lost, everyone decided that he got to the station and returned home by train, or they waited until night on the way ... Yes, a little, there were no obscenities. It’s true, they say, the driver also said that this time no one hopped the bus.
1. Victim of the mushroom sport.
Sunday summer at the Leningrad plant "Hammer and Sickle" organized a day of health. We got too much vodka, put on tracksuits and went in our own bus to pick mushrooms. Noble mushrooms grow on the Karelian Isthmus. Again, in salted and pickled form, they fly unusually under vodka. Fresh air, coniferous forest, homemade snack - what else does a person need for health? They drove in, drank, the soul asked for songs.
They drink to themselves and sing. They sing and drink. And they have a snack.
Get drunk. They began to collect mushrooms. Mushroom, by the way, turned out to be a year. Birds chirp, lakes shine; pick mushrooms. Collected. We sat down to dinner, laid out a fire: drank. We finished it. And tired, but happy, they got on the bus.
On the bus, the sporttorg made a roll call. And it seemed that it was leaving one more. We counted it twice - it’s not enough. The drunken heads were counted - still not enough. They checked the list with a finger: there is not enough engineer Markychev!
They got angry: it's time to go, it's not easy to wear it! Buzzed. They waited. They shouted. There is no engineer Markychev.
Well, they fell out of the bus, greeted with robbery voices, bawled through the forest, planted them with swear words: Markychev was gone. The sports organizer responsible for the event is worried, jumping: look for him, comrades! forest, after all ...
Until dusk they wandered and hooted, the buzz weathered all to no avail: Markychev was gone. Lost, or something. And to hell with him! do not spend the night here! cattle, the whole team drove up, and he himself, probably, dumped home on the way. Let's go too!
From home at night the sports organizer called Markychev - no: no.
The next day everyone comes to work - there is no engineer Markychev.
What a nuisance. Not good ... The man got lost. The missing comrade was abandoned.
Well, the sports organizer went to the trade union committee and reported: so and so ... one got lost, everyone decided that he reached the station and returned home by train, look on the way, waited until nightfall ... Yes, a little, there were no obscenities. It’s true, they say, the driver also said that this time no one hopped the bus.
Another day or two: Markychev did not appear. They officially declared to the police: our comrade got lost, in such and such a place and at such and such a time, dressed in a blue tracksuit and brown sneakers, about thirty-seven years old, average height, brown hair, please return to life and the team: traffic police, morgue, railway security, traumatology. Markychev is gone, like a cow licked her tongue!
Wanted announcement, photograph on a poster, billboards in lobbies and train stations; colleague Markychev passes into the fifth dimension, into a kind of abstract substance ...
Well, in the meantime, the sports trade was re-elected, deprived of the prize, instead of a ticket to September in Yevpatoria, they were reprimanded with entry into the Komsomol card; trade union reprimand; the party organizer was also reprimanded; how we lost a man, comrades. In the morning we discussed: how? no? how long can you wander in the Karelian forests, not the Siberian taiga after all, you don’t know the Karelian swamps, armies there disappeared, let alone an engineer; no, he must eventually go to the dwelling, to whom is it that he owes? aha! a city intellectual, he pushed his leg, you don't walk around on berries-mushrooms for a long time, and the lost person walks in circles ... he will eat a toadstool and stop suffering ... there will be, but they thought to themselves that, of course, they would meet; I have enough of my worries ...
Accounting - with a problem: when there is - to pay him how? vacation at your own expense? forced truancy? or a sick leave? Absenteeism - so down with the thirteenth salary and the queue for an apartment. Administration: how long to wait, what new to take in his place? And how to fire him, under what article?
And behind all the flowing and urgent living matters, the engineer Markychev finally sailed into the fog, stopped even being remembered as a living person, but turned into a kind of conventional human unit that must be correctly written off, having managed to comply with and take into account all the complex requirements of labor legislation and the civil code. what is not so easy in our conditions; he is not easy! .. This Markychev was a contagion; disentangle yourself now for him ... brute!
And it even became clear to imagine that they themselves were burying him.
2. The appearance of Balda to the people.
On a clear, fine autumn day, the bell rang at the door of the Soviet embassy in Helsinki. The door was opened by some small embassy fry, beautifully, of course, dressed, with a diplomatic face; and I saw a frigid ugly and hard-to-explain image. Average between Bigfoot and Trash Rat. Obrazina was bristling with brown rags, wiggling her tattered beard and swaying in the breeze, holding on to the lacquered joint with her black clawed paw.
The ambassadorial bipod snapped its jaw and asked in confusion:
Do you speak English?
Yes, - confirmed the moron, - but very bad. Sir, ay wont rashn ambassador, please ...
How can I be of help to you, ”the bipod inquired, stunned, courageously trying to shield his native embassy with a medium-sized body from an unexpected and indefinite threat.
I lost my way, - said the moron in horror, hiccupped and sobbed, washing the bright paths on his brown face with tears.
The small fry thought about the provocations of the White Guards and emigrants, looked out cautiously in search of photojournalists and quietly groaned:
Lord why am I ...
A camera lens stuck out through the window of a car standing by the sidewalk and rustled: shooting!
The bipod jumped up, smoothed himself, bared a kind smile and groaned:
Very nice! What problems brought you? .. - He squinted at the camera and assumed the pose of secular friendliness, but pressed his hands to his hips so that the visitor would not shake hands - out of harm's way.
The visitor wiped his eyes with shreds of sleeves, blew his nose onto the sidewalk (he takes off, noted the fry depressingly) and said intelligibly:
Comrade! I am a Soviet citizen. I got lost and ended up abroad.
How? the bipod asked idiotically.
On foot! - the visitor explained tragically.
Damn journalist or whoever got out of the car and adapted to shoot them in profile.
T-wee! he threw to the bipod in a friendly manner. - Russian People Ar Veri intresting! May varnish! Would you like a traveler, yeah? Hippie? Green pee?
Let's get through! - took responsibility for the decision of the bipod, squeezed the visitor's dirty, skinny shoulder in disgust and drew him inside.
The ambassador walked down the hall with the stone face of a hardened fighter and professional. The visitor insulted the pearl gray kid chair with his special one. His knees trembled in the gaps. A cigarette in black talons showered them with ashes. Seeing the important figure of the ambassador, he got up, swayed on his legs and fell back into his chair.
I'm listening to you, what's the matter, ”the ambassador said with the dispassionateness of a robot.
The visitor put his cigarette butt in the urn and, while sitting, tried to take a stand at attention.
Comrade, I am a Soviet citizen, ”he reported, passing from wheeze to whistle. - I violated the border by a monstrous misunderstanding. I am ready to take any punishment according to the law. I ask you to help me return to my homeland.
The ambassador raised his right eyebrow a millimeter, sat down opposite and took out a cigarette, under which the bipod clicked a lighter.
Do you have documents? the ambassador inquired.
What documents, - the visitor howled, - I collected mushrooms!
Mushrooms, - the ambassador nodded and exchanged glances with the bipod. - Where?
The visitor made a murdered gesture:
In Karelia.
The ambassador choked on his cigarette and blew smoke from his eyes.
A - kh-h - more precisely?
Health Day ... they brought us by bus ...
Which bus? Number?
At the factory. Trade union.
Which plant? Where?
From the Hammer and Sickle factory.
Then the visitor issued a soft mouse squeak and asked:
To eat ... not to be found ... just a little, at least something ...
The ambassador paused and made a movement with his chin. There was a small bustle in the lobby, which resulted in a tray with two sandwiches and a bottle of Pepsi.
The visitor growled and gulped his sandwiches and poured the pepsi over his beard.
When he wiped his beard, instead of the ambassador, a counterintelligence officer sat in front of him.
3. Who do you work for?
So, - began the counterintelligence officer: - Who are you?
A? the visitor asked. - Comrade...
How did you get here?
What's the date today? the visitor asked instead of answering.
The twelfth of September, - the bipod has obligingly informed.
My God ... - whispered the visitor and closed his eyes.
The counterintelligence officer took him by the elbow with two iron fingers and escorted him to his office, behind the double impenetrable doors. The visitor glazed over and braced himself:
My name is Markychev. Passport series VII-AM number 593828, issued on October 10, 1977 by the 31st ROM of Leningrad ...
Show.
Passport.
I didn't take it with me.
Did not know.
What I didn’t know.
What do you ask.
Naturally, - the counterintelligence officer smiled badly.
Continue.
Tell.
A ... Bukharestskaya street, 68, building 2, apartment 160 is registered.
And why aren't you there?
In apartment 160?
Do you have a workshop in the forest?
Where is your workshop located?
The visitor thought.
We have a regime, - he said - What is it?
Well. Mode.
Why do you need the location of my workshop? the visitor asked with unexpected alertness.
It's day in the workshop, and you got lost in the forest? - the counterintelligence officer smiled thinly.
Health Day!
And what?
Let's go to the forest!
Who? Surnames, nicknames, quickly! Do not hesitate !!
No-no-I don't remember ... - the visitor chuckled. - The sports merchant has a list. You call, ask ...
Phone number! Phone number!
I do not know!!!
And what do you know?!
I want to go home...
Where is your house?!
Bukharestskaya, house 68, building 2, apartment 160 ...
How did you get here?!
Through the forest...
Where? Coordinates! What was the task ?!
I'm lost!!!
Leave the legend !!!
Why did you come to the embassy?
To be sent home ...
Stop delirium !! - screamed a counterintelligence officer and slammed his fist: a bust of Dzerzhinsky jumped on the table. “If you want to go home, then why the hell didn’t you sit there?”
I got lost in the woods.
Where?! Where?! Where?!
In Karelia.
What did you do there?!
Collected mushrooms.
Where are the mushrooms?
And went here?
Why not home, club ?!
Mixed up the sides ... the forest ...
Ten years, - the counterintelligence officer summed up ominously. - Ten years of strict regime for illegal border crossing under aggravated circumstances. And you mean you preferred ten years of camp to living here?
I didn't know ... why ...
What did you think - they will pat you on the head ?!
What should I do?..
Shoot up!
What - what !! Cooperate! Tell everything! Honestly confess!
But you know this better, ”the counterintelligence officer smiled tenderly, took out a paper and a pen, turned on the tape recorder and stroked the bust with his index finger soothingly. - So?
Markychev's stomach fidgeted uncomfortably and unchewed sandwiches rumbled. He shivered, scratched his armpit, and snapped his claws. An involuntary sound crackled.
The counterintelligence officer jerked his Adam's apple, moved away and stood farther away. Markychev scratched his groin.
Excuse me, ”the counterintelligence officer asked disgustedly,“ you don’t have ... these? ..
This? There are some ... I don't know. They bite, - complained Markychev.
When was the last time you bathed?
Markychev moved his lips.
On the eve of ... the fifteenth of July ...
Stand up! Take the chair with you. I let it go here! ..
4. There is happiness in life.
Markychev was handed over to the ambassador's doctor. The doctor looked at Markychev with squeamish pity and put on rubber gloves. The forgotten military word "sanitary inspection" began to spin in his head. The assigned guard watched closely, ready to neutralize the suspect at the slightest danger.
In the bathroom, Markychev was told to put his clothes in a plastic bag. The security guard delivered this bag to the counterintelligence officer and he, spitting and grimacing, began to smack the seams and lining for the discovery of ciphers, instructions, secret cards and other spy items.
Markychev groaned voluptuously under the hot shower and closed his eyes. The doctor took a washcloth, thought, took a toilet hedgehog, lathered it with laundry soap and began to rub. The brown crust, melting, broke and fell off under the hot streams, revealing a thin ribbed body. In ecstasy, Markychev took out his throat rolls. The doctor brushed a hedgehog lice from the edges of the tub into the drain hole.
Oh, - groaned Markychev, - brothers ... comrades ... darlings ... it's good how! .. and here, here, rub it! .. God, you got it!
The doctor solved the problem: to cut the client's hair in all places, or spend on him a handful of anti-flea dog shampoo, bought for twenty-two dollars in blood. Curiosity won: he poured a green smelly liquid on his hairy places, iridescently foaming, noted the ten minutes recommended on the package, and began to wait to see if the insects really died, and whether the fur would really come out on Markychev.
The shampoo was good. Disinfected Markychev combed his head for a long time and rubbed himself with a towel. Then he trimmed his fluffy beard and shaved with a disposable blade. Then he rubbed himself with Finnish Barracuda lotion and sprinkled liberally with Finnish Barracuda deodorant. Then he reached for the French eau de toilette, but the doctor did not give it:
Enough with you ... not at the reception! Shoes - what size?
While the doctor went to collect humanitarian aid for the victim, Markychev stealthily brushed his teeth with a doctor's toothbrush, drank half a can of the doctor's beer "Heineken" and smoked a Rotmans cigarette from the doctor's pack.
He was outfitted in disused chauffeur jeans, a second secretary's shirt, military attache boots, and a security guard's socks. The doctor gave him his own panties, Soviet-made. And he took him to the kitchen to feed.
Breathing in the smell of abundance, Markychev shook and began to cry. Fearfully and restraining impatience, he moved the plates closer and began to eat at an incredible speed: soup, bananas, chicken legs, oatmeal in milk, bread, margarine, tea with sugar and sugar just like that, pickled beets and sour meat salad. After forty minutes, he still showed no signs of fatigue. Swollen and puffed up, like a ball-fish, he finally settled down and, tilting his head to one side, began to snore, farting and belching. He felt good.
The doctor gave him two festal tablets to ease digestion and put him in the isolation ward on clean sheets. Sleepy and relaxed Markychev kissed the doctor on the cheek, the doctor jerked his cheek and said that medicine welcomes all types of sexual relations, but he personally is skeptical about homosexuality. He advised me to save my strength for now.
5. Rotosei - but ours!
An hour later, Markychev, choking with zeal and delight, told his odyssey to the consul, special officer and secretary, which he then performed ready for an encore at the first request of anyone.
Deeper into the forest for mushrooms, Markychev certainly lost his way. Alcohol helps to navigate the terrain only in one case - when a compass rose floats in it. Poured into the same alcohol was pretty much. Purring a song about a mushroom that will be salty, Markychev filled the basket with an excellent snack - he took only white, aspen and boletus mushrooms. But when he returned to the bus, there was a dense thicket in the place of the bus. Markychev recalled a pioneer tourist's handbook, which taught that a person's left leg is longer than the right one, so the left step is several centimeters longer than the right one, so in the forest a person always takes to the right, so you need to take it to the left, and then you will come out straight. He tried to measure the difference in the length of his legs and walked to the left. Towards dusk, he realized that he had taken too much to the left, and went to the right. The hops weathered, the night fell on a dense forest, and Markychev was horrified at his position: tomorrow's absenteeism, a reprimand, a scandal! He made a fire, ate the two surviving sandwiches and, without hope, shouted help again.
The owl gave a hoot in response. The pioneer tourist's guide taught that the owl lives only in remote, deserted places.
The guide also taught me how to determine the path by the stars, but there were no stars, but on the contrary - it began to drip. The handbook taught that the moss on tree trunks grows from the north side. This turned out to be a lie, because the moss on the trees either did not grow at all, or was distributed evenly around the trunk.
By dawn Markychev finished his cigarettes, kicked his basket into the bushes and, firmly knowing that the sunny side in the apartments is the south, walk in the sun during the day, because Karelia is north of Leningrad, and, therefore, Leningrad is south of Karelia - he realized as the only true in his position route.
Unfortunately, the day came overcast and the sun did not shine out of nowhere, and Markychev's navigational abilities were limited to the three at school in geography, which was incoherently taught by a bitter drunken teacher, who was more pressing on the new buildings of socialism, and fragmentary information from that tourist guide, false, like the whole pioneer ideology. Armed with such a theory for travel, Markychev had no idea where he was and where to go. Most of all, he was afraid of running into border guards and getting a sentence for attempting to illegally cross the border - they were warned that the restricted area is not far away.
For half a day, he ate a forest raspberry, ready to strangle a competitor bear, if it appeared, with his bare hands. On the third day I ate a russula and began to dream of border guards. He dreamed of a salutary shout: "Stop! Who is coming?", Dreamed of an automatic rifle, resting between the shoulder blades, of interrogation in a warm, dry room, of leftovers from a soldier's kitchen, of a grate on the window and a calm sleep under a roof on clean bunks.
Then he began to dream of a camp. The fear of the penitentiary system, as he dragged day and night through the windbreaks, tormented by hunger, fear, dampness, mosquitoes, was replaced by an ardent desire to sit down. The obvious advantages were revealed: three meals a day, sleeping quarters, clothes and shoes for the season, an eight-hour working day in the company of other people, and early release with a clear conscience for good behavior. Or maybe they won't be imprisoned yet ...
He lost count of time, the clock became from the rain moisture, the matches were long over, he ate berries and russula and walked, walked, walked.
Great is my dear country!
Markychev measured this range with his own legs, until one day he discerned the distant jerking of a tractor with a sharpened forest ear. He jumped up and almost ran!
A collective farm tractor was plowing something in a small field!
A-ah-ah! - shouted Markychev and rushed to him, waving his hands in greeting. - Friend! Expensive! Great! Hooray!!!
A healthy white tractor driver in clean overalls looked at him and said:
Eat no? - yelled Markychev. - I'm lost!
Antexi? - asked the tractor driver through the crackling of the tractor.
“I heard, - said Markychev, - that in this Karelo-Finnish Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic there are local people, but so that they do not speak Russian at all ...
Havat! Shamat! Burst! - Markychev danced with impatience, growled and gagged with his own teeth, showing, then, what he wants.
The tractor driver jumped to the ground and walked back a few steps, patting his huge palm with a tire iron.
Leningrad! - convinced Markychev. - Engineer! Russian! Eat! Um!
Russian, - repeated the tractor driver without much enthusiasm. - Um ... Onko sinulla vodka?
Vodka! I will put it, do not hesitate! I'll put the box! - Markychev depicted with his hands how he puts a box of vodka to the tractor driver, and how delicious it will be to drink it.
The tractor driver, who turned out to be a very taciturn guy, brought him home, and Markychev was amazed at the wealth and luxury of a simple Karelian-Finnish collective farmer: the house is a tower, a bowl is full in the tower, a Japanese TV and a foreign car under the window. At the sight of food, his mind left him.
Reason returned when the stomach was full, and the owner's wife began to speak English words, and the TV did not show our programs, moreover, in color and with sound, but did not show ours at all. Then consciousness left him. Markichev knew that survivors of a disaster have hallucinations and mirages.
He was in Finland.
And what is characteristic: now the prison was provided for him, so he, the viper, was not at all happy. He firmly knew that the Finns, famous for their accuracy and law-abidingness, would give our people back, and then go and explain that they would have crossed the border by accident ... Police, KGB, show trial, Siberia: goodbye, life ...
There were two ways out: either voluntarily surrender to the authorities, or go home the same way. There was also a third way out: to return to the forest and hang on the first bitch.
Finn did not call the police. On the contrary, he took out a map and, with the help of a semi-English-speaking wife, sympathetically explained that his dad had fought with Marshal Mannerheim, and if Markychev crossed the border to Sweden there, he would receive political asylum there. He turned out to be a kind man, but he did not understand the aspirations of the soul of a Soviet man. Two worlds - two systems ...
He gave Markychev this map and rations for the road, drove him to the highway in his car, pointed his finger to the West, and clapped him on the back encouragingly:
Hyuva uterus!
Markychev waved after him, got off the road into the bushes, and like this, in bushes, he went to Helsinki to look for the Soviet embassy ... A confession and sincere remorse should have eased his guilt.
"Yes, so that I still have mushrooms in my life ... not a sip! Rest only in the library!"
Dying of hunger and fatigue, fearing the police and not making any contacts with foreigners, he limped to meet his own: and here I am, comrades. I am ready to bear responsibility under the law and hope for mitigation of the fate.
6. We sew a case from the customer's material.
The consulate and its external counterintelligence GB informed their superiors in Moscow: here is such an eccentric ... please believe.
Moscow: for God's sake - no information leaks to the press! Feed him for now, until further notice, and keep an eye on him. And he calls to Leningrad: find out, clarify, figure it out. What a mess you have there in the proletarian collectives and on the sacred border! ..
From Liteiny they call the personnel department of the "Hammer and Sickle" plant: how is Markychev doing there? Such calls are understood in the frames. Ah, they say, Markychev ... What Markychev is an engineer? Yes, you can say, and does not work. How? - Yes, he's on vacation ... Since July 30 ... he has a week, they say, from last year, plus time off ... When will it be released? yes must on monday. What, order number? now, just a minute ... And then, retroactively, they draw Markychev's vacation. What is it? And nothing, they answer ominously, you will soon find out.
And they call the director. So we give state criminals a vacation in August? The director is the old guard, you can literally hear his armored visor clank, sinking: what kind of holidays, comrade? what criminals? Your worker, engineer Markychev, has been detained for crossing the state border in a bourgeois state. Excuse me, says the director. Markychev is not an engineer for me. This does not work for us. Which means we have information ... Yes, it was. But fired. When, why? Wait a minute ... here: the thirtieth of July. For negligence and repeated violations. And the personnel department says! Not ours. God forbid from such workers. How can you characterize it? Extremely negative. Politically illiterate, morally unstable. He misunderstands the party's politics. Good; transfer the characteristic to the mode department. Director - to the personnel department: come up to me to pick up the signed order ... a chatterbox is a godsend for a spy! Instantly !!!
But at Liteiny there are thoughtful guys, they also called the housing office. There is such a tenant! There is; what? What are the signals, complaints, violations against him? So ... you know ... why? He was detained in Finland for illegal border crossing, an investigation is underway, and we are now dealing with his case. Ah ... he was always suspicious, not our man - he paid for the apartment inaccurately, the neighbors complained, so we are going to write him out for the noise and fights. So; clear.
Well - it falls out to someone a foreign business trip! They call the embassy: tomorrow, they say, our man will come for him, pick him up; while you are on guard better, he, apparently, is a hardened enemy, an antisocial element, clearly wanted to escape. They are answered: what do you mean, he drove all of Finland with an infantry, he came to us, cried and asked to go home. And now Judas is crying - he realized that there is no honey abroad! But don't let him back in! - let him live there in the capitalist jungle, eat his mushrooms! Comrades, you can't do that, we have humanism and mercy ... You have mercy, but we have vigilance. Do you know how abstract humanism differs from socialist one? Yeah: nine grams of difference. Did he ... really come by himself? And the doctor says - not crazy? You see - the characteristic technique of a double agent.
And the frontier posts report firmly and unequivocally: no violations of the state border have been recorded, accidents are excluded!
In short, a big-faced kid in a low-key suit arrives in the morning, feeds Markychev with breakfast, injects him into a vein against any desires of the body, loads a submissive body to everything on a bus, and the kid takes him home, singing "Migratory birds are flying." And at the border - in the car and to Liteiny.
They shook him for a week. How, yes that, yes where, yes why: they knocked down in every possible way with cunning questions and repetitions. But he firmly repeated the story of his misadventures and shouted that a prison is better, but his own, they won't give much, right? I came myself! What will you take from the fool? ..
The main thing is that he could not indicate in any way where he crossed the border. If I had known where, I would not have crossed it! There, after all, there are alarms crammed, heaped up obstacles - all measures are powerless against a fool. They set up an investigative experiment: they brought it to the place of that picnic - go! Shrugs his hands - he was drunk, sorry. That's right - the bottles in the bushes were found to hell.
What if he crossed the border by plane? And if you put on cow hooves - to deceive the trackers? and if all the mushroom pickers like this, without hindrance, will trample across the border ?! They told the head of the border area about incomplete official compliance for prevention, and nothing more can be done.
He would, of course, be caulked for four years. Violated? - violated. Receive and sign. But he screwed up the Finnish TV man. He filmed not only the arrival of Markychev at the embassy, he watched the departure, and interviewed the consul: here, they say, what a staunch and conscientious citizen - he was afraid that he had unwittingly violated Finnish laws and could be punished by the Finnish authorities and even cause an international incident! He will starve - for the sake of maintaining friendly state relations with the neighboring country. And the ambassador, the old wolf of the Foreign Ministry, presented the case in this light as an act of great respect and a guarantee of good neighborliness.
And in this form it went on Finnish television and, of course, on the BBC. And now, in the light of the international situation, it would be ideologically unprofitable to put Markychev in prison. And it is better, on the contrary, to chide fatherly and mercifully allow a lost, but faithful citizen to return to the ranks. Shined through - a Soviet mouse ...
And they let go with God. Go and do not sin!
7. I returned to my city, familiar to tears.
When I worked in the propaganda department of a newspaper, a reproduction of Repin's painting "The Arrest of a Propagandist" hung over my desk. But Repin also has a no less famous painting - "They Didn't Expect".
Markychev was dismissed from his job. In the personnel department, he was handed a work book with an article. And they announced that now, with a self-propelled gun across the border, not a single security company would take it. Yes, and no regime will not run away.
And also he was discharged from the living space, and his room was already occupied by neighbors with many children on the waiting list. That is, he was discharged from Leningrad.
At the same time, for the sake of order, he was removed from the military register.
As they say, Motherland opened her arms, and in each hand she had a knockout.
Markychev was not in that weight category to compete with his mother-homeland. But he drove a terrible wave.
He spent the night at his acquaintances and scribbled complaints to all instances - up to the commission for the rehabilitation of the repressed. I came with an article to Leningradskaya Pravda. He took the authorities home and fearlessly threatened punishments. He informed the city party committee of the cohabitation of the director with his secretary. Signaled to OBKhSS about theft at the plant. I drove the cart to the Trudovye Rezervy sports community about the booze organized by the sports trade. I taunted the city's prosecutor comrade Karaskov about bribes extorted in his own housing office. He showed a style, and with this style he expounded all the ins and outs of ill-wishers: that the head of the personnel department in 1937 tortured the communists, that the head of the department bought his diploma at a flea market in Tashkent, and that the trade union organizer was unnaturally corrupting underage student trainees; and the party organizer announced on the anniversary of the blockade that Zhukov almost wanted to hang Comrade Zhdanov, who ordered Leningrad to be mined and prepare for surrender. He shitted everyone as best he could, but he could not do it well, because every paper was followed by at least some kind of nerve-wracking check.
Dangerous and terrible is the Soviet man, who has stuck to death in the struggle for his rights. The injured engineer took his soul away.
The Party organizer said that he regretted only one thing in his life: that he could not petition the authorities for the application of the highest measure to the enemy of the people. And Sportorg said that he would volunteer to personally enforce it.
And engineer Markychev, a kamikaze pioneer, handed over the last letter by registered order, took money from the savings bank and walked with two classmates in the "Neva" restaurant. He sent fives to the orchestra and ordered to play "Migratory birds are flying" and "Gunners, Stalin gave the order!"
They will also find out who is better oriented in space, he promised.
And a week later he was blown away.
With ends.
Through this very border.
With a backpack, with food, with all the valuables prepared, with a map, a compass and currency. I ate it, so I corrected it and blew it away. There I got on the bus and drove off quickly to Sweden, which does not give out.
And I went to see that Finn, the farmer, and honestly gave him a liter of vodka.
Mikhail Weller
The Legend of the Lost Patriot
How they lived! My brothers, how well we lived! You will drink vodka, eat a sausage with a white bar, light a cigarette ... and no worries about the future, because the party on TV has already decided everything: stability.
Yes - they did. And what is needed - they condemned. And whoever needs to be shot in time would still be a great power.
Would be draped, because they are not allowed anywhere anymore. They don't let me in, I mean. Not like before: everywhere they opened their arms to the victims of Sophia Vlasyevna.
Remember, it’s even amazing what inventions our Soviet human genius dared to illegally cross the sacred border and escape into the class alien world of capital. When military pilots were blowing into Japan and Turkey in MiGs - well, the fighter was created for that, so that no one and nothing in the air could interfere with it. But when two burgher families from East Germany self-made a balloon in the barn and, singing: "If only the night is darker! .." they climb into the basket and leave with a favorable wind to the West! - so after all, they also grabbed their beloved dog, tying its face more reliably, so that barking from the darkness of heaven would not disturb the peaceful service of the border guards. Ugh on Jules-Verne and his artistic foresight! ...
What, one wonders, should have been done over a common Ukrainian villager, so that in the opposite end of the world, in Korea, under the gaze of a native tourist group and the machine guns of vigilant North Korean border guards - - rush in counter-aimed zigzags into the arms of the reactionary South Korean regime. Scratched across the Baltic in the fog on a high-speed boat - okay, the soldier was stupid for two years to stare at the radar screen, he got drunk well and smokes in dreams of demobilization, and still there is nothing to catch up with that boat, and from a helicopter through such turbidity you can't see a damn thing: and while that helicopter takes off! .. But from Novorossiysk, one navigator successfully departed for Istanbul on an inflatable mattress, adjusted by a bora: calculated the course, speed, time, tied a second mattress and a bag of vodka and chocolate from below, and if they spotted it from the air - ah, thanks to the rescuers, it was carried into the sea, they say. And there is also one kid, a sub-under-water viper, he just crawled from Karelia to Finland through a drainage pipe: he smeared himself with grease for warmth and sliding, tied clothes in a rubber bag to his leg, a hacksaw in his teeth - and forward, cut out the steel grate until the outfit went back ... Lord, but what did that Count Monte understand in escaping, you know, Christo in his loose liberalism in France! Yes, not so much dangerous as narrow, he says, and it was wet: no persecution, but I just dreamed terribly to go around the world on a yacht, and who would let me in? .. They sat down.
In general, this topic was inexhaustible, tickling with seditious gloating - they saw abroad in three forms: through a telescope, in a coffin and on TV; so let me at least gossip about those who showed the law a big fig. Although the law was simple and sound: did you want to run away? - here's seven years of hard labor for you, and work for the good, learn to appreciate the freedom that you had at least within the borders.
The main evil was, of course, aviation: it flies, such rubbish, and not always where it should be. Soon after the war, for the good of the people, air taxis were invented for the good of the people, Yak-12 airplanes, so they flooded over the gorges over the hill in the Caucasus, and the authorities did not mean such a service to citizens, that they rather preferred to transfer citizens back to donkeys. It was then that Comrade Voroshilov was in charge of DOSAAF, and he, full of the old horseman's inveterate hatred of aviation, pressed all the flying clubs to his nail, leaving only glider pilots and parachutists with a creak: without an engine, it means that you are not far away, contra.
1. Drap
How they lived! My brothers, how well we lived! You will drink vodka, eat a sausage with a white bar, light a cigarette ... and no worries about the future, because the party on TV has already decided everything: stability.
Yes - they did. And what is needed - they condemned. And whoever needs to be shot in time would still be a great power.
Would be draped, because they are not allowed anywhere anymore. They don't let me in, I mean. Not like before: everywhere they opened their arms to the victims of Sophia Vlasyevna ...
Remember, it’s even amazing what inventions our Soviet human genius dared to illegally cross the sacred border and escape into the class alien world of capital. When military pilots were blowing into Japan and Turkey in MiGs - well, the fighter was created for that, so that no one and nothing in the air could interfere with it. But when two burgher families from East Germany self-made a balloon in the barn and, singing: "If only the night is darker! .." they climb into the basket and leave with a favorable wind to the West! - so after all, they also grabbed their beloved dog, tying its face more reliably, so that barking from the darkness of heaven would not disturb the peaceful service of the border guards. Ugh on Jules-Verne and his artistic foresight! ..
What, one wonders, had to be done over a common Ukrainian villager, so that in the opposite end of the world, in Korea, under the gaze of a native tourist group and the machine guns of vigilant North Korean border guards, he could rush in counter-aimed zigzags into the arms of the reactionary South Korean regime. Scratched across the Baltic in the fog on a high-speed boat - okay, the soldier was stupid for two years to stare at the radar screen, he got drunk well and smokes in dreams of demobilization, and still there is nothing to catch up with that boat, and from a helicopter through such turbidity you can't see a damn thing: and while that helicopter takes off! .. But from Novorossiysk one navigator successfully departed for Istanbul on an inflatable mattress, adjusted by a bora: calculated the course, speed, time, tied the second mattress and a bag of vodka and chocolate from below, and if they spotted it from the air - ah, thanks to the saviors, it was carried into the sea, they say. And there is also one little boy, a sub-underwater viper, he simply crawled from Karelia to Finland through a drainage pipe: he smeared himself with grease for warmth and sliding, tied clothes in a rubber bag to his leg, a hacksaw in his teeth - and forward, cut out the steel grate until the outfit went back ... Lord, but what did that Count Monte understand in escaping, you know, Christo in his loose liberalism in France! Yes, not so much dangerous as narrow, he says, and it was wet: no persecution, but I just dreamed terribly to go around the world on a yacht, and who would let me in? .. They sat down.
In general, this topic was inexhaustible, tickling with seditious gloating - they saw abroad in three forms: through a telescope, in a coffin and on TV; so let me at least gossip about those who showed the law a big fig. Although the law was simple and sound: did you want to run away? - here's seven years of hard labor for you, and work for the good, learn to appreciate the freedom that you had at least within the borders.
The main evil was, of course, aviation: it flies, such rubbish, and not always where it should be. Soon after the war, for the good of the people, air taxis were invented for the good of the people, Yak-12 airplanes, so they flooded over the gorges over the hill in the Caucasus, and the authorities did not mean such a service to citizens, that they rather preferred to transfer citizens back to donkeys. It was then that Comrade Voroshilov was in charge of DOSAAF, and he, full of the old horseman's inveterate hatred of aviation, pressed all the flying clubs to his fingernails, leaving only glider pilots and parachutists with a creak: without an engine, it means that you are not far away, contra.
All kinds of non-returnees - it was not interesting, why not stay if you already got there in a comfortable way: they only savored - who of the responsible officials would then be bullied for weak ideological work with subordinates. It looked piquant, however, when the whole group returned in a kind of bashful confusion, and its leader, a hundredfold checked by the KGB employee with a profile so brilliant that it was just right to receive a big gold medal at an international exhibition of purebred hounds - cowardly, as the newspapers wrote then, looking around, he trotted like a lackey in the direction of the bourgeois embassy. Then the leading hand gave responsible comrades especially strong cuffs, someone's careers gurgled into a swamp, and even though on a global scale this is a trifle, but still, ordinary people are pleased!
Although here, too, we have not been without injustices. At the port, his wife came to the navigator, so he took her to England in a box for bed linen. The fact that they stayed in England is already the sadness of the British, with our guys you will not get around the trouble, and on the ship - three more navigators, tea will not sink, and in reserve - so just a crowd of navigators are just kicking around, they want to go to England; but for what they closed the visa, slapped a stricter and applied other repressions to the captain and first mate? Well, the first - for the cause, then they keep him on the ship so that the Soviet system surpasses all the others in everything, but how do you order the captain to educate the navigator? Sleep with him in ports instead of his wife? No, I'm sorry for the captain ...
Fortunately, all this is in the past ... Now it is different. Everything just became. A ticket to America? for God's sake - free. Save up your salary for ten years - and for an entry visa. Who will give it to you, who needs you there? ah, how many years have the Bolsheviks been telling you this: no one needs you there, is it now convinced? It's boring, gentlemen ... That's when one in winter in a blizzard blew into Sweden across the bay in a Zhiguli, on the ice, with a whistle - and rushed off, again there was nothing to catch up with - oh: it was - romance; adventure, impulse.
But - there were completely different stories, even - the opposite: unforeseen stories happened; unpredictable! ..
Current page: 1 (the book has 2 pages in total) [available passage for reading: 1 pages]
Mikhail Weller
The Legend of the Lost Patriot
1. DRAP
How they lived! My brothers, how well we lived! You will drink vodka, eat a sausage with a white bar, light a cigarette ... and no worries about the future, because the party on TV has already decided everything: stability.
Yes - they did. And what is needed - they condemned. And whoever needs to be shot in time would still be a great power.
Would be draped, because they are not allowed anywhere anymore. They don't let me in, I mean. Not like before: everywhere they opened their arms to the victims of Sophia Vlasyevna.
Remember, it’s even amazing what inventions our Soviet human genius dared to illegally cross the sacred border and escape into the class alien world of capital. When military pilots were blowing into Japan and Turkey in MiGs - well, the fighter was created for that, so that no one and nothing in the air could interfere with it. But when two burgher families from East Germany self-made a balloon in the barn and, singing: "If only the night is darker! .." they climb into the basket and leave with a favorable wind to the West! - so after all, they also grabbed their beloved dog, tying its face more reliably, so that barking from the darkness of heaven would not disturb the peaceful service of the border guards. Ugh on Jules-Verne and his artistic foresight! ...
What, one wonders, should have been done over a common Ukrainian villager, so that in the opposite end of the world, in Korea, under the gaze of a native tourist group and the machine guns of vigilant North Korean border guards - - rush in counter-aimed zigzags into the arms of the reactionary South Korean regime. Scratched across the Baltic in the fog on a high-speed boat - okay, the soldier was stupid for two years to stare at the radar screen, he got drunk well and smokes in dreams of demobilization, and still there is nothing to catch up with that boat, and from a helicopter through such turbidity you can't see a damn thing: and while that helicopter takes off! .. But from Novorossiysk, one navigator successfully departed for Istanbul on an inflatable mattress, adjusted by a bora: calculated the course, speed, time, tied a second mattress and a bag of vodka and chocolate from below, and if they spotted it from the air - ah, thanks to the rescuers, it was carried into the sea, they say. And there is also one kid, a sub-under-water viper, he just crawled from Karelia to Finland through a drainage pipe: he smeared himself with grease for warmth and sliding, tied clothes in a rubber bag to his leg, a hacksaw in his teeth - and forward, cut out the steel grate until the outfit went back ... Lord, but what did that Count Monte understand in escaping, you know, Christo in his loose liberalism in France! Yes, not so much dangerous as narrow, he says, and it was wet: no persecution, but I just dreamed terribly to go around the world on a yacht, and who would let me in? .. They sat down.
In general, this topic was inexhaustible, tickling with seditious gloating - they saw abroad in three forms: through a telescope, in a coffin and on TV; so let me at least gossip about those who showed the law a big fig. Although the law was simple and sound: did you want to run away? - here's seven years of hard labor for you, and work for the good, learn to appreciate the freedom that you had at least within the borders.
The main evil was, of course, aviation: it flies, such rubbish, and not always where it should be. Soon after the war, for the good of the people, air taxis were invented for the good of the people, Yak-12 airplanes, so they flooded over the gorges over the hill in the Caucasus, and the authorities did not mean such a service to citizens, that they rather preferred to transfer citizens back to donkeys. It was then that Comrade Voroshilov was in charge of DOSAAF, and he, full of the old horseman's inveterate hatred of aviation, pressed all the flying clubs to his nail, leaving only glider pilots and parachutists with a creak: without an engine, it means that you are not far away, contra.
All kinds of non-returnees - it was not interesting, why not stay if you already got there in a comfortable way: they only savored - who of the responsible officials would then be bullied for weak ideological work with subordinates. It looked piquant, however, when the whole group returned in a kind of bashful confusion, and its leader, a hundredfold checked by the KGB employee with a profile so brilliant that it was just right to receive a big gold medal at an international exhibition of purebred hounds - cowardly, as the newspapers wrote then, looking around, he trotted like a lackey in the direction of the bourgeois embassy. Then the leading hand gave responsible comrades especially strong cuffs, someone's careers gurgled into a swamp, and even though on a global scale this is a trifle, but still, ordinary people are pleased!
Although here, too, we have not been without injustices. At the port, his wife came to the navigator, so he took her to England in a box for bed linen. The fact that they stayed in England is already the sadness of the British, with our guys you will not get around the trouble, and on the ship - three more navigators, tea will not sink, and in reserve - so just a crowd of navigators are just kicking around, they want to go to England; but for what they closed the visa, slapped a stricter and applied other repressions to the captain and first mate? Well, the first - for the cause, then they keep him on the ship so that the Soviet system surpasses all the others in everything, but how do you order the captain to educate the navigator? Sleep with him in ports instead of his wife? No, I'm sorry for the captain ...
Fortunately, all this is in the past ... Now it is different. Everything just became. A ticket to America? for God's sake - free. Save up your salary for ten years - and for an entry visa. Who will give it to you, who needs you there? ah, how many years have the Bolsheviks been telling you this: no one needs you there, is it now convinced? Boring, gentlemen ... That's when one winters
end of introductory snippet