Valentin Petrovich Kataev has already written Werther. And the air smells of death Valentin Kataev has already written Werther read

The rails run back, and the train takes him in the opposite direction, not to where he would like, but to where the unknown, disorder, loneliness, destruction await him - further and further and further.

But now, no one knows how, he finds himself at a quite prosperous country stop, on a semi-familiar board platform.

Who is he? I don't represent. I only know that he lives and acts in a dream. He's sleeping. He is sleeping.

He is glad that he is no longer carried away into the unknown and that he stands firmly on the summer cottage platform.

Now everything is all right. But there is one small complication. The fact is that he needs to cross the railway track to the opposite side. This would not be at all difficult to do if the opposite side were not blocked by a train that had just arrived, which should stand here for only two minutes. So it would have been more prudent to wait until the train had left, and already calmly, without interference, cross the rails to the other side.

But the unknown satellite, although gently, but persistently, advises to cross to the other side through the blocking train, especially since such crossings were made many times, especially during the civil war, when the stations were packed with echelons and constantly had to make their way to the other side for boiling water under the cars , under bandages, fearing that every minute the train would move and it would fall under the wheels.

Now it was much safer: climb the steps of the car, open the door, go through the vestibule, open the opposite door, go down the steps and find yourself on the other side.

Everything was simple, but for some reason I didn’t want to do it that way. It is better to wait until the path is cleared, and then calmly, without haste, cross the buzzing rails.

However, the satellite continued to seduce with the ease and simplicity of crossing the vestibule.

He didn't know who his companion was, didn't even see his face. He only felt that he was intimately close to him: maybe the deceased father, or maybe his own son, or maybe it was himself, only in some other incarnation.

He got off the platform onto the railway track, climbed the uncomfortable, too high steps of the car, easily opened the heavy door and found himself in a vestibule with a red brake wheel.

At this time, the train moved very lightly, almost imperceptibly, slowly. But that's not a problem. Now he will open another door and go down to the opposite platform on the way. But suddenly it turned out that there was no other door at all. She doesn't exist. Tambour without another door. It's strange, but it's true. There are no explanations. The door just doesn't exist. And the train turns out to be a courier, and it speeds up everything.

The rails are moving fast.

Jump back on the move? Dangerous! Time is lost. There is nothing else left but to ride in the vestibule of a courier train, which is again blowing away somewhere in the opposite direction, even further from home.

Annoying, but nothing. Just a little waste of time. At the nearest station, you can get off and transfer to the oncoming train, which will return him back.

Trains are supposed to run on a summer schedule, very frequently. However, the nearest station turns out to be immeasurably far away, an eternity, and it is not known whether there will be an oncoming train at all.

It is not known what to do. He is completely alone. The satellite is gone. And it gets dark fast. And the courier train turns into a freight train and carries it at the same speed in the open area into the coal darkness of the autumn railway night with a cold, dusty wind blowing through the body.

It is impossible to understand where it is taking and what is around. What area? Donbass, right?

But now he is already on foot, having completely lost all idea of ​​time and place.

The dream space in which he is located had a spiral structure, so that, moving away, he approached, and approaching, he moved away from the goal.

Space snail.

In a spiral, he passed by a seemingly familiar unfinished Orthodox cathedral, abandoned and forgotten among a wasteland overgrown with weeds.

The bricks are blackened. The walls are somewhat loose. Dry cereals protruded from the cracks. A wild cherry tree grew from the base of an unrealized Byzantine-style dome. The painful impression of the incompleteness of the structure was intensified by the fact that the almost black bricks seemed painfully familiar. It seems that some other building was once built from them, not so huge, but much smaller: perhaps the same garage, at the half-open gate of which stood the man who killed the imperial ambassador in order to disrupt the Brest peace and kindle the fire of a new war and world war. Revolutions.

His nickname was Naum the Fearless.

A low-incandescent light bulb, hung on a pole with a crossbar near the garage, illuminated it from above. He stood in the pose of a ruler, his leg aside and his hand behind the side of his leather jacket. On his curly head was a Budennovsky helmet with a cloth star.

It was in this position that he recently stood at the gates of Urga, where the revolution had just taken place, and watched how two shorn cyrics with faces resembling clay bowls, armed with shears for shearing sheep, cut off the braids of everyone entering the city. Braids were a sign of overthrown feudalism. A fairly tall stack of these black, serpentine-shiny, tightly braided braids could be seen at the gate, and next to it, Naum the Fearless seemed like a ghost in the clouds of dust. Smiling with a gap-toothed mouth, he not only spoke, but seemed to even broadcast, addressing his descendants with a lisping exclamation:

“Cut off scythes are the harvest of reform.

He was very fond of the grandiloquent expression "harvest of reform" he invented, as if uttered from the rostrum of the convention or written by Marat himself in "The Friend of the People." From time to time he repeated it aloud, each time changing intonations and pushing the words through the thick lips of a vicious overgrown man, who still had not yet managed to overcome his lisp.

Mouth full of porridge.

He looked forward to how, returning from Mongolia to Moscow, he would utter these words in the "Pegasus Stall" in front of the frightened Imagists.

And perhaps he will be able to pronounce them in front of Lev Davydovich himself, who will certainly like them, since they were quite in his spirit.

Now he, impatiently waving his Mauser, was waiting for all four of them - the former pre-gubchek Max Markin, the former head of the operational department nicknamed the Angel of Death, the sex woman Inga, who hid the fact that she was the wife of an escaped junker, and the Right Social Revolutionary, a Savinkovite, a former commissar of the provisional government , a certain Seraphim Elk, - they will finally undress and throw off their clothes on a flower garden of dove-eyed petunias and a night beauty.

In the midst of the blackness of the night, the lamp glowed so weakly that only the naked bodies of those who had undressed phosphorically whitened. All the rest, not undressed, hardly saw each other.

Four naked people entered the garage one after another, and when a woman entered, one could notice that she had a wide pelvis and shortish legs, and in the guise of the fourth, in his silhouette, there really was something horny.

They were inexplicably submissive, like everyone who entered the garage.

... But this picture suddenly disappeared into the impenetrable space of dreams, and the sleeper was already among the unfinished buildings of the dead city, where, however, as if nothing had happened, an electric tram, well lit inside, passed with quite prosperous, somewhat old-fashioned, pre-revolutionary passengers, people from another world.

Some of them read newspapers and were wearing panama hats and pince-nez.

Unfortunately, the tram route was not suitable, as it led in the opposite direction, in the direction of yellow poppies on frail decadent legs, to where in clouds of dust one could guess the multi-tiered tiled roofs with raised corners of Buddhist temples, depressingly deserted, exorbitantly vast, monastic monasteries heated by the sun. courtyards and tiled gates, guarded by four idols, two on each side, their terrible, slanting, painted faces - lime-white, yellow, red and black - repel evil spirits, although they themselves were evil spirits.

The evil spirits of heaven frightened away the evil spirits of hell.

However, if there was a tram, then somewhere there was a taxi rank. Indeed, there was a long line of free taxis with fireflies, promising to get out of a hopeless situation.

He approached the parking lot and suddenly found that he had forgotten where to go. The address disappeared from memory, just as the second door in the vestibule disappeared, thanks to which it was carried away to no one knows where.

Oh, how good it would be to get into a free taxi, pronounce the magic words of the address and plunge into sweet expectation.

I had to move alone again in the hostile space of the dream, which carried me further and further away from the goal.

Removal at the same time was also an approximation, as if simulating the perpetuum mobile of blood circulation.

Probably, at this time, the heart muscle contracted intermittently, even stopped for a moment, and then suddenly the cabin of the damaged elevator fell into a shaft made of the same brick.

He was in the elevator and with it fell into the abyss, although at the same time, as if from the side, he saw the falling box of the damaged elevator in the abyss of the stairwell between the third and fourth floors of this terrible building.

Everything around was spoiled, barely holding on, every moment threatened to collapse: a fall from a swooning height of an extinguished lighthouse, once new, beautiful against the background of a summer sea with Italian clouds above the horizon, and now decrepit, with peeling plaster and exposed bricks of the same venous color.

The collapsing dacha was pulled down by a landslide, half of it was already moving ashore along with part of the cliff, the sleeper clutched at the roots of the weeds and hung on their fragile threads, risking every moment to break loose and fly into a beautiful abyss.

An exposed grove of the nervous system. Bicolor monogram of blood circulation. Drops in blood pressure.

From the depths of memory, long-dead people were involuntarily retrieved. They acted as if they were alive, which made the dream unreliable.

Some of these briefly revived seemed not at all what they could be mistaken for, but were werewolves. For example, Larisa Germanovna. Remaining Dima's mother, she simultaneously turned out to be another woman - also already deceased - much younger, viciously attractive, insidious, from whom all misfortunes originated.

However, she did not escape retribution.

The late Larisa Germanovna ran as if alive past the waterworks, built all of the same damned bricks.

She was in an old summer suit, soaked through under the armpits, and high boots made of worn suede, with buttons. She seemed unnecessarily hurried, which did not correspond to her usual ladylike gait, full of dignity.

Once he saw her at the festive table, covered with a starched tablecloth, as if cast from plaster. Larisa Germanovna sat in the master's place and scooped soup-cream d "asperge from a rectangular porcelain tureen with a silver pouring spoon, which she distributed on Kuznetsov's plates, and the maid carried them around to the guests. Tiny puff pastries with meat were served with soup-cream d" asperge, such delicious, that it was impossible to resist taking one or even two more, and then furtively wiping the oily fingers on the gymnasium trousers, which was never hidden from her supposedly absent-minded glance through the lenses of her golden pince-nez, and her thoroughbred nose wrinkled slightly, although she she pretended not to notice anything.

In the spring and early summer she suffered from hay fever.

Sunday lunch on an open terrace overlooking the sea, reflecting the column of the lighthouse and dividing it into horizontal stripes. The society of friends of her husband, a well-known lawyer - architects, writers, deputies of the State Duma, yachtsmen, musicians. Long wine corks with burnt-out French inscriptions. The smell of Havana cigars, the tightness, the place at the table just opposite the table leg, on which the knees knocked.

Of course, Dima was the center of attention.

- My boy is a born painter! - Dimin's dad exclaimed at dinner with his lawyer viola - sweet and convincing. - Isn't it true, he has something from Vrubel, from his lilac?

White vest. Wedding ring. Golden cufflinks.

The dream carried, along with all the guests, up the stairs to that cherished room, penetrated by the afternoon sun, which was called "his studio." Large easel with three-yard cardboard: "Feast in the gardens of Hamilcar." On the chair is a large flat drawer of pastel pencils stacked in silky cotton wool like premature babies.

The guests stared at the painting. Larisa Germanovna also looked at the picture with her fist. Everyone admired Dima. But it seems that Larisa Germanovna felt awkward. Still, it was a childish work of a realist boy who had read "Salambo".

She introduced herself as Empress Catherine II. Even in her hay fever, which made her nose swell and turn pink and her eyes water, there was something august.

But with what speed it all collapsed!

Now her movements against the backdrop of the brick wall of the waterworks were helplessly impulsive. A purse of dimly gleaming tomatoes dangled beggarly in her hand.

She looked unrecognised. And then suddenly I found out. Her face contorted.

– Imagine! she said, sobbing.

It was not difficult to imagine how she first ran to prison, where they did not accept her parcel, saying "not listed." So he is still there.

She cracked her unringed fingers and ran away, hurrying to do some unknown thing to save her son.

We were carried along the hot streets, but it was impossible to catch up with her, and she kept getting smaller and smaller in the prospects of an unrecognizably changed city, as if made up of houses not yet destroyed by an earthquake, but already deprived of their usual signboards.

It turned into a speck, barely visible in the airless space, and the blood circulation of sleep carried the sleeper in the opposite direction, inexorably moving away from the obscure goal and at the same time, the farther, the closer to the semi-circular hall of the former Ostrovsky illusion, and now a public dining room, where behind the square the so-called co-workers and workers of Isogit dined at tables covered with newspaper slips instead of tablecloths, among whom one could recognize - though not without difficulty - Dima, who was unlike himself, since he had short haircut like a typewriter and instead of a tunic he wore wearing a sweatshirt sewn from a tent - the universal clothing of that time.

Or, if you like, that legendary era, even era.

The delicate neck is more of a girl than a young man, a former artillery cadet.

... When they, Dima and his companion, were finishing their lunch, which consisted of a bar of pressed barley porridge with a drop of green engine oil, two people approached them from behind. One in a satin shirt with an unbuttoned collar, in a round cap, the other in riding breeches, a leather jacket, black-curled like a sheep.

One has a revolver. The other has a Mauser. They didn't even ask his name, but with an indestructible Rostov accent they told him not to turn around, go out into the street without noise and go down Grecheskaya, but not along the sidewalk, but in the middle of the pavement.

His wooden sandals clicked on the granite paving stones. Rare passers-by felt, looking at him, not sympathy, but rather horror.

One old woman with the painfully familiar face of a kind nurse peeked around the corner and crossed herself.

Oh yes. It was Dima's nurse, who died before the revolution. She followed him with a sad look.

But why did they take him, and not take the one with whom he dined?

She threw into her mouth the last crumbs of rationed bread, collected from the table in a handful. There was a small white scar on her upper lip, which did not spoil her coarse but beautiful face.

The dining room was full of diners, artists and poets Izogita, Dima's comrades at work, but none of them seemed to notice anything.

Dima just disappeared.

Now the dream carried down the Grecheskaya River, following Dima, along the rusty rails of the long-inactive electric tram. The rails, built into the paving stones and covered with dry fallen flowers of a white acacia, seemed to take him down to that unimaginable world that was hiding somewhere on the right hand of the massive Saban barracks.

There, near the entrance booth, stood a Chinese sentry in black windings on thin legs.

The faster they went down the street, the faster Dima's consciousness deformed. Until very recently, it was the consciousness of a free and free-thinking person, son, lover, citizen, artist ...

... Even a husband.

Well, yes. He was already a husband, because the day before he married this woman, which turned out to be strangely easy: they went into Asvadurov's former tobacco shop, where the smell of Turkish and Sukhumi tobaccos had not yet disappeared, and left there husband and wife.

Regional office of registration of acts of civil status.

Documents were not required, and there were none, except for service mandates. They just put their signatures. She hesitated a little, and, biting her lip, wrote out her first name and her new surname in neat philistine handwriting. Her name turned out to be Nadezhda, Nadya. But she immediately wished to take advantage of the opportunity and changed it first to the Guillotine, but changed her mind and settled on the name Inga. Now she was Inga, which seemed romantic and in the spirit of the times.

For him, all this was so new, and so beautiful, and so frighteningly risky! After all, he really did not know where she came from and who she was.

When they became husband and wife, they never even kissed. It was not in the spirit of the era. They came to the fiery Deribasovskaya, where in those years gone forever stood the only huge pyramidal poplar, perhaps from the time of Pushkin, doused from top to bottom with the refractory glass of noon. A hundred-year-old poplar seemed to head the street.

Dima walked down the Greek stammering gait, as if hurrying to his end. Those two walked behind. He smelled the smell of their hot, unwashed bodies, the smell of their shoulder straps, the smell of gun oil on the Mauser.

The smell of a sewing machine.

Life is divided into before and after. Before - his thought was free, it floated freely in time and space. Now she was chained to one point. He saw the world around him, but did not notice its colors. Until quite recently, his thought either flew into the past, then returned to the present. Now she became motionless: he noticed only that which brought him closer to the denouement.

A moth-eaten effigy of a Ussuri tiger with a broken mustache was still visible in the window of the former fur store, which had not been washed for a long time, and it brought it closer to the denouement, as well as the sun-bleached flag over the marble entrance to the former banking office, which now houses the City Council.

Red-lipped, blood-soaked hands, twisted fingers.

This vision exhausted Dima's consciousness during the endless night of typhus fever, and the inescapable light of the electric bulb hanging above him doused the ward with a magical glow of icy aurora. And at the door of the ward stood his mother, Larisa Germanovna, with a clutch in her hands, and Mitya read despair on her face.

(But still, why didn't they take Inga with him?)

Now he was approaching the denouement, and it was no longer typhus delirium, but a boring reality that left no hope for a miracle.

But maybe they do not know about his participation, but only assume. No material. There is no proof. In that case, there is still hope. You have to be alert. Tongue behind teeth. Ear up! Not one extra word.

Still, how could they know? Everything was so well hidden. Yes, what exactly is his fault? Well, let's suppose he really handed over the letter! But after all he could not know its contents. One single letter. He did not participate in meetings at the lighthouse. Only attended, but did not participate. And then only once. By chance. So it can be considered - did not participate at all. Anyway, how could they know? In general, he did not sympathize with this undertaking, which may now be considered a conspiracy.

Maybe at first he sympathized, although he did not take part. But he soon became disillusioned.

After all, he was already on the platform of Soviet power. Enough revolutions. There were at least seven of them: Denikinists, Petliurists, interventionists, Hetmanists, Greens, Reds, Whites. It's time to stop at one thing. He stopped. Let there be Soviet Russia.

He honestly worked in Isogita, although he turned out to be not a very good artist, an amateur. Lots of unnecessary details. Wandering. The other artists of Isogita were real masters compared to him - sharp and modern. Their revolutionary sailors, painted in the spirit of Matisse on huge plywood shields installed on Feldman Boulevard, were almost conventional. Black flared trousers. Saffron-yellow faces in profile. St. George's peakless ribbons curling in the wind. Ultramarine sea with gray irons of armadillos: red flags on the masts. This fit into the landscape of the seaside boulevard with plane trees opposite the former palace of the governor-general and the former London Hotel.

Left! Left! Left!

Cans of glue paints were heated on a cast-iron stove. Thick paint brushes. Piece of cardboard. On it is a roughly painted figure of Baron Wrangel in a hat, in a white Circassian coat with black gazyry, flying in the sky over the Crimean mountains, and below is a rhyme:

“Across the midnight sky, Wrangel flew and sang a dying song. Comrade! Take aim at the baron so that the baron does not have time to gasp.

Wrangel was still holding out in the Crimea and could land troops at any moment.

The White Poles advanced from the west, defeating Trotsky near Warsaw, who carried the world revolution on bayonets, although Lenin proposed peaceful coexistence. Pilsudski had already cut off the road to Kyiv, and his army was stationed somewhere near Uman, near Belaya Tserkov, near Kodyma, near Birzula. There were rumors that Vapnyarka and Razdelnaya were already occupied.

Maybe he did something stupid that he began to work in Isogita and painted Wrangel?

However, he did not believe in the possibility of a new coup. Oddly enough, he was attracted by the romance of the revolution.

…Convention… Palais Royal… Green branch of Desmoulins… Saira!

He had already read The Gods Are Thirsty, and the soul of Evariste Gamelin, a member of the New Bridge section, seemed to have moved into him. How magical it sounded, although he himself was already being led over another bridge, over the Stroganov Bridge, beyond the peaks of which, in the hot midday haze, one could see a deserted port with all its bare piers and the remnants of a burnt overpass.

... and his sudden passion for a girl from the people, in whom he saw Théroigne de Méricourt, leading a crowd of sans-culottes.

Red Phrygian cap and classical profile.

Something from Auguste Barbier, whose verses “A Dog's Feast” translated by Kurochkin, his father liked to recite to the guests, barely holding back tears of delight.

These verses were repeated in Dima's memory to the beat of the castanets of his wooden sandals:

“Freedom is a woman with an elastic powerful chest, with a tan on her cheeks, with a lighted wick attached to the gun, in a smoking hand; freedom is a woman with a wide, firm step, with a gaze of fire, under the smoke of battle, and her voice is not a feminine soprano; neither the vents of the cast-iron rows, nor the copper of the bells, nor the skin of the drum will drown it out ...

... Freedom is a woman, but in generous voluptuousness she is faithful to her chosen ones, the powerful wife accepts only the mighty ones to her bowels ...

... "Once ardent, like a mad maiden, she suddenly appeared, ready to bear fruit from a virgin womb, the future wife."

She was his wife, but why wasn't she taken along with him?

He was almost running. With amazing clarity, he realized that he was dead and nothing could save him. Maybe run? But how? The other day, a lieutenant fled, who was being led through the city from the Special Department to the gubchek. The lieutenant threw a handful of tobacco crumbs into the eyes of the escort and, having reached the parapet, jumped down from the bridge and disappeared into the labyrinth of port lanes.

He quickly walked to the denouement and envied the lieutenant. But he himself was not capable of such an act. And there was not a crumb in the pocket of tobacco. Oh, if only a pinch... or salt!... He would... But no, he wouldn't have done anything anyway. He was a coward. They would have fired at his shoulder blades from behind anyway, those two.

They immediately read his mind.

- Mister junker, go carefully. Do not rush. You will succeed.

He was horrified by the word "you'll have time."

The door on the block screeched open, as if it were not the entrance to hell, but the door of a shed. Past the yellow figurine of a Chinese, all three entered the commandant's office, boring as a provincial post office, with the only difference being that instead of the tsar's portrait, a lithographic portrait of Trotsky was pinned to the wall with cogs in his eyes behind rimless pince-nez glasses.

The world has narrowed even more.

Passing through the neglected flower garden, he saw the same garage, about which the city spoke with horror. Nothing special, dark bricks. Locked gate. A vague smell of gasoline.

The white butterfly was also a fan in his mother's hand, young and beautiful, like that beautiful high school student named Vengrzhanovskaya, with whom he once danced a hiawata on a slippery parquet strewn with multi-colored circles of confetti.

End of introductory segment.

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Valentin Kataev

Already written by Werther

Tale

The rails run back, and the train takes him in the opposite direction, not to where he would like, but to where the unknown, disorder, loneliness, destruction await him - farther and farther and farther.

But now, no one knows how, he finds himself at a quite prosperous country stop, on a semi-familiar board platform.

Who is he? I don't represent. I only know that he lives and acts in a dream. He's sleeping. He is sleeping.

He is glad that he is no longer carried away into the unknown and that he stands firmly on the summer cottage platform.

Now everything is all right. But there is one small complication. The fact is that he needs to cross the railway track to the opposite side. This would not be at all difficult to do if the opposite side were not blocked by a train that had just arrived, which should stand here for only two minutes. So it would have been more prudent to wait until the train had left, and already calmly, without interference, cross the rails to the other side.

But the unknown satellite, although gently, but persistently, advises to cross to the other side through the blocking train, especially since such crossings were made many times, especially during the civil war, when the stations were packed with echelons and constantly had to make their way to the other side for boiling water under the cars , under bandages, fearing that every minute the train would move and it would fall under the wheels.

Now it was much safer: climb the steps of the car, open the door, go through the vestibule, open the opposite door, go down the steps and find yourself on the other side.

Everything was simple, but for some reason I didn’t want to do it that way. It is better to wait until the path is cleared, and then calmly, without haste, cross the buzzing rails.

However, the satellite continued to seduce with the ease and simplicity of crossing the vestibule.

He didn't know who his companion was, didn't even see his face. He only felt that he was intimately close to him: maybe the deceased father, or maybe his own son, or maybe it was himself, only in some other incarnation.

He got off the platform onto the railway track, climbed the uncomfortable, too high steps of the car, easily opened the heavy door and found himself in a vestibule with a red brake wheel.

At this time, the train moved very lightly, almost imperceptibly, slowly. But that's not a problem. Now he will open another door and go down to the opposite platform on the way. But suddenly it turned out that there was no other door at all. She doesn't exist. Tambour without another door. It's strange, but it's true. There are no explanations. The door just doesn't exist. And the train turns out to be a courier, and it speeds up everything.

The rails are moving fast.

Jump back on the move? Dangerous! Time is lost. There is nothing else left but to ride in the vestibule of a courier train, which is again blowing away somewhere in the opposite direction, even further from home.

Annoying, but nothing. Just a little waste of time. At the nearest station, you can get off and transfer to the oncoming train, which will return him back.

Trains are supposed to run on a summer schedule, very frequently. However, the nearest station turns out to be immeasurably far away, an eternity, and it is not known whether there will be an oncoming train at all.

It is not known what to do. He is completely alone. The satellite is gone. And it gets dark fast. And the courier train turns into a freight train and carries it at the same speed in the open area into the coal darkness of the autumn railway night with a cold, dusty wind blowing through the body.

It is impossible to understand where it is taking and what is around. What area? Donbass, right?

But now he is already on foot, having completely lost all idea of ​​time and place.

The dream space in which he is located had a spiral structure, so that, moving away, he approached, and approaching, he moved away from the goal.

Space snail.

In a spiral, he passed by a seemingly familiar unfinished Orthodox cathedral, abandoned and forgotten among a wasteland overgrown with weeds.

The bricks are blackened. The walls are somewhat loose. Dry cereals protruded from the cracks. A wild cherry tree grew from the base of an unrealized Byzantine-style dome. The painful impression of the incompleteness of the structure was intensified by the fact that the almost black bricks seemed painfully familiar. It seems that some other building was once built from them, not so huge, but much smaller: perhaps the same garage, at the half-open gate of which stood the man who killed the imperial ambassador in order to disrupt the Brest peace and kindle the fire of a new war and world war. Revolutions.

His nickname was Naum the Fearless.

A low-incandescent light bulb, hung on a pole with a crossbar near the garage, illuminated it from above. He stood in the pose of a ruler, his leg aside and his hand behind the side of his leather jacket. On his curly head was a Budennovsky helmet with a cloth star.

It was in this position that he recently stood at the gates of Urga, where the revolution had just taken place, and watched how two shorn cyrics with faces resembling clay bowls, armed with shears for shearing sheep, cut off the braids of everyone entering the city. Braids were a sign of overthrown feudalism. A fairly tall stack of these black, serpentine-shiny, tightly braided braids could be seen at the gate, and next to it, Naum the Fearless seemed like a ghost in the clouds of dust. Smiling with a gap-toothed mouth, he not only spoke, but seemed to even broadcast, addressing his descendants with a lisping exclamation:

The cut scythes are the harvest of reform.

He was very fond of the grandiloquent expression "harvest of reform" he invented, as if uttered from the rostrum of the convention or written by Marat himself in "The Friend of the People." From time to time he repeated it aloud, each time changing intonations and pushing the words through the thick lips of a vicious overgrown man, who still had not yet managed to overcome his lisp.

Mouth full of porridge.

He looked forward to how, returning from Mongolia to Moscow, he would utter these words in the "Pegasus Stall" in front of the frightened Imagists.

And perhaps he will be able to pronounce them in front of Lev Davydovich himself, who will certainly like them, since they were quite in his spirit.

Now, impatiently waving his Mauser, he was waiting for all four of them - the former pre-gubchek Max Markin, the former head of the operational department nicknamed the Angel of Death, the sex woman Inga, who hid that she was the wife of an escaped junker, and the Right Socialist-Revolutionary, a Savinkovite, a former commissar of the provisional government , a certain Seraphim Elk, - they will finally undress and throw off their clothes on a flower garden of dove-eyed petunias and a night beauty.

The rails run back, and the train takes him in the opposite direction, not to where he would like, but to where the unknown, disorder, loneliness, destruction await him - further and further and further.

But now, no one knows how, he finds himself at a quite prosperous country stop, on a semi-familiar board platform.

Who is he? I don't represent. I only know that he lives and acts in a dream. He's sleeping. He is sleeping.

He is glad that he is no longer carried away into the unknown and that he stands firmly on the summer cottage platform.

Now everything is all right. But there is one small complication. The fact is that he needs to cross the railway track to the opposite side. This would not be at all difficult to do if the opposite side were not blocked by a train that had just arrived, which should stand here for only two minutes. So it would have been more prudent to wait until the train had left, and already calmly, without interference, cross the rails to the other side.

But the unknown satellite, although gently, but persistently, advises to cross to the other side through the blocking train, especially since such crossings were made many times, especially during the civil war, when the stations were packed with echelons and constantly had to make their way to the other side for boiling water under the cars , under bandages, fearing that every minute the train would move and it would fall under the wheels.

Now it was much safer: climb the steps of the car, open the door, go through the vestibule, open the opposite door, go down the steps and find yourself on the other side.

Everything was simple, but for some reason I didn’t want to do it that way. It is better to wait until the path is cleared, and then calmly, without haste, cross the buzzing rails.

However, the satellite continued to seduce with the ease and simplicity of crossing the vestibule.

He didn't know who his companion was, didn't even see his face. He only felt that he was intimately close to him: maybe the deceased father, or maybe his own son, or maybe it was himself, only in some other incarnation.

He got off the platform onto the railway track, climbed the uncomfortable, too high steps of the car, easily opened the heavy door and found himself in a vestibule with a red brake wheel.

At this time, the train moved very lightly, almost imperceptibly, slowly. But that's not a problem. Now he will open another door and go down to the opposite platform on the way. But suddenly it turned out that there was no other door at all. She doesn't exist. Tambour without another door. It's strange, but it's true. There are no explanations. The door just doesn't exist. And the train turns out to be a courier, and it speeds up everything.

The rails are moving fast.

Jump back on the move? Dangerous! Time is lost. There is nothing else left but to ride in the vestibule of a courier train, which is again blowing away somewhere in the opposite direction, even further from home.

Annoying, but nothing. Just a little waste of time. At the nearest station, you can get off and transfer to the oncoming train, which will return him back.

Trains are supposed to run on a summer schedule, very frequently. However, the nearest station turns out to be immeasurably far away, an eternity, and it is not known whether there will be an oncoming train at all.

It is not known what to do. He is completely alone. The satellite is gone. And it gets dark fast. And the courier train turns into a freight train and carries it at the same speed in the open area into the coal darkness of the autumn railway night with a cold, dusty wind blowing through the body.

It is impossible to understand where it is taking and what is around. What area? Donbass, right?

But now he is already on foot, having completely lost all idea of ​​time and place.

The dream space in which he is located had a spiral structure, so that, moving away, he approached, and approaching, he moved away from the goal.

Space snail.

In a spiral, he passed by a seemingly familiar unfinished Orthodox cathedral, abandoned and forgotten among a wasteland overgrown with weeds.

The bricks are blackened. The walls are somewhat loose. Dry cereals protruded from the cracks. A wild cherry tree grew from the base of an unrealized Byzantine-style dome. The painful impression of the incompleteness of the structure was intensified by the fact that the almost black bricks seemed painfully familiar. It seems that some other building was once built from them, not so huge, but much smaller: perhaps the same garage, at the half-open gate of which stood the man who killed the imperial ambassador in order to disrupt the Brest peace and kindle the fire of a new war and world war. Revolutions.

His nickname was Naum the Fearless.

A low-incandescent light bulb, hung on a pole with a crossbar near the garage, illuminated it from above. He stood in the pose of a ruler, his leg aside and his hand behind the side of his leather jacket. On his curly head was a Budennovsky helmet with a cloth star.

It was in this position that he recently stood at the gates of Urga, where the revolution had just taken place, and watched how two shorn cyrics with faces resembling clay bowls, armed with shears for shearing sheep, cut off the braids of everyone entering the city. Braids were a sign of overthrown feudalism. A fairly tall stack of these black, serpentine-shiny, tightly braided braids could be seen at the gate, and next to it, Naum the Fearless seemed like a ghost in the clouds of dust. Smiling with a gap-toothed mouth, he not only spoke, but seemed to even broadcast, addressing his descendants with a lisping exclamation:

“Cut off scythes are the harvest of reform.

He was very fond of the grandiloquent expression "harvest of reform" he invented, as if uttered from the rostrum of the convention or written by Marat himself in "The Friend of the People." From time to time he repeated it aloud, each time changing intonations and pushing the words through the thick lips of a vicious overgrown man, who still had not yet managed to overcome his lisp.

Mouth full of porridge.

He looked forward to how, returning from Mongolia to Moscow, he would utter these words in the "Pegasus Stall" in front of the frightened Imagists.

And perhaps he will be able to pronounce them in front of Lev Davydovich himself, who will certainly like them, since they were quite in his spirit.

Now he, impatiently waving his Mauser, was waiting for all four of them - the former pre-gubchek Max Markin, the former head of the operational department nicknamed the Angel of Death, the sex woman Inga, who hid the fact that she was the wife of an escaped junker, and the Right Social Revolutionary, a Savinkovite, a former commissar of the provisional government , a certain Seraphim Elk, - they will finally undress and throw off their clothes on a flower garden of dove-eyed petunias and a night beauty.

In the midst of the blackness of the night, the lamp glowed so weakly that only the naked bodies of those who had undressed phosphorically whitened. All the rest, not undressed, hardly saw each other.

Four naked people entered the garage one after another, and when a woman entered, one could notice that she had a wide pelvis and shortish legs, and in the guise of the fourth, in his silhouette, there really was something horny.

They were inexplicably submissive, like everyone who entered the garage.

... But this picture suddenly disappeared into the impenetrable space of dreams, and the sleeper was already among the unfinished buildings of the dead city, where, however, as if nothing had happened, an electric tram, well lit inside, passed with quite prosperous, somewhat old-fashioned, pre-revolutionary passengers, people from another world.

Some of them read newspapers and were wearing panama hats and pince-nez.

Unfortunately, the tram route was not suitable, as it led in the opposite direction, in the direction of yellow poppies on frail decadent legs, to where in clouds of dust one could guess the multi-tiered tiled roofs with raised corners of Buddhist temples, depressingly deserted, exorbitantly vast, monastic monasteries heated by the sun. courtyards and tiled gates, guarded by four idols, two on each side, their terrible, slanting, painted faces - lime-white, yellow, red and black - repel evil spirits, although they themselves were evil spirits.

... He is sleeping, and he sees that he is at a summer cottage and he needs to cross the canvas on which the train stopped. You need to go up, go through the vestibule, and you will find yourself on the other side. However, he finds that there is no other door, and the train starts and picks up speed, jumping late, and the train takes him further and further. He is in the space of a dream, and little by little, as if he begins to recall what he meets on the way: this is a tall building, and a flower bed of petunias, and an ominous, dark brick garage. At the gate stands a man waving a Mauser. This is Naum Fearless watching how the former head of the gubchek Max Markin, the former head of the department, nicknamed the Angel of Death, the right SR Serafim Los and the female secretary Inga undress before entering the darkness of the garage and disappearing into it.

This vision is replaced by others. His mother Larisa Germanovna is at the head of the table during a Sunday dinner on the terrace of a rich summer house, and he, Dima, is in the center of attention of the guests, in front of whom his father praises the work of his son, a born painter.

... And here he is, already in red Odessa. Wrangel is still in the Crimea. White Poles near Kyiv. A former cadet artilleryman, Dima works in Isogita, painting posters and slogans. Like other employees, he eats lunch in the dining room on cards with Inga. A few days ago, they briefly went to the registry office and left husband and wife.

When they were already finishing dinner, two men with a revolver and a Mauser came up behind him and ordered him to go out without noise into the street without turning around and led him straight along the pavement to a seven-story building, in the courtyard of which there was a garage made of dark brick. Dima's thought raced feverishly. Why did they take only him? What do they know? Yes, he handed over the letter, but he might not have had any idea of ​​its contents. He did not participate in meetings at the lighthouse, only attended, and then only once. Why didn't they take Inga anyway?

... An unnatural silence and desertion dominated the seven-story building. Only on the landing of the sixth floor did the escort come across with a girl in a gymnasium dress: the first beauty in the city, Vengrzhanovskaya, taken along with her brother, a participant in the Polish-English conspiracy.

... The investigator said that everyone who was at the lighthouse was already in the basement, and forced them to sign a ready-made protocol so as not to waste time. At night, Dima heard constipation thundering and shouting out names: Prokudin! Von Diderichs! Vengrzhanovskaya! He remembered that at the garage they were forced to undress, not separating men from women ...

Larisa Germanovna, having learned about the arrest of her son, rushed to the former Socialist-Revolutionary named Seraphim Los. Once they, together with the current pre-gubchek, also a former Socialist-Revolutionary, Max Markin, fled from exile. Moose managed, in the name of old friendship, to beg him "to give him the life of this boy." Markin promised and summoned the Angel of Death. “The shot will go into the wall,” he said, “and we’ll show the junker as being deducted.”

In the morning, Larisa Germanovna found Dimino's name in the newspaper in the list of the executed. She again ran to Elk, and Dima, meanwhile, came to the apartment where they lived with Inga by another way. "Who let you out?" she asked her returning husband. Markin! She thought so. He is a former Left SR. Contra crawled into the organs! But let's see who wins. Only now Dima understood who was in front of him and why the investigator was so well informed.

Inga, meanwhile, went to the most luxurious hotel in the city, where Trotsky's authorized representative Naum Fearless, who had once killed the German ambassador Mirbach, lived in a suite in order to disrupt the Brest peace. Then he was a Left Socialist-Revolutionary, now a Trotskyist, in love with Lev Davydovich. “Citizen Lazareva! You are under arrest,” he suddenly said, and, not having time to recover from surprise and horror, Inga ended up in the basement.

Dima, meanwhile, came to his mother at the dacha, but found her dead. The doctor, called in by the neighbor, could no longer help, except for the advice to immediately hide, even to Romania.

And now he's an old man. He lies on a straw mattress in the camp infirmary, choking with a cough, with pink foam on his lips. Pictures and visions pass in the fading consciousness. Among them is again a flower bed, a garage, Naum the Fearless, who affirms the world revolution with fire and sword, and four naked ones: three men and a woman with slightly short legs and a well-developed pelvis ...

It is difficult for a man with a Mauser to imagine himself crawling on his knees in the basement of a building on Lubyanka Square and kissing the cream-polished boots of the people around him. Nevertheless, he was later caught red-handed while crossing the border with a letter from Trotsky to Radek. He was pushed into the basement, placed facing a brick wall. Red dust rained down, and he disappeared from life.

“Probably, you will not flinch, sweeping away a person. Well, martyrs of dogma, you too are the victims of the age,” as the poet said.

You have read the summary of the story "Werther has already been written." We also suggest that you visit the Summary section to read the presentations of other popular writers.

He is sleeping, and he sees that he is at a country stop and he needs to cross the canvas on which the train has stopped. You need to go up, go through the vestibule, and you will find yourself on the other side. However, he finds that there is no other door, and the train starts and picks up speed, jumping late, and the train takes him further and further. He is in the space of a dream, and little by little, as if he begins to recall what he meets on the way: this is a tall building, and a flower bed of petunias, and an ominous, dark brick garage. At the gate stands a man waving a Mauser. This is Naum Fearless watching how the former head of the gubchek Max Markin, the former head of the department, nicknamed the Angel of Death, the right SR Serafim Los and the female secretary Inga undress before entering the darkness of the garage and disappearing into it. This vision is replaced by others. His mother, Larisa Germanovna, is at the head of the table during a Sunday dinner on the terrace of a rich dacha, and he, Dima, is in the center of attention of the guests, before whom his father praises the work of his son, a born painter.

And here he is, already in red Odessa. Wrangel is still in the Crimea. White Poles near Kyiv. A former cadet artilleryman, Dima works in Isogita, painting posters and slogans. Like other employees, he eats lunch in the dining room on cards with Inga. A few days ago, they briefly went to the registry office and left husband and wife.

When they were already finishing dinner, two men with a revolver and a Mauser approached him from behind and ordered him, without turning around, to go out into the street without noise and led him straight along the pavement to a seven-story building, in the courtyard of which there was a dark brick garage. Dima's thought raced feverishly. Why did they take only him? What do they know? Yes, he handed over the letter, but he might not have had any idea of ​​its contents. He did not participate in meetings at the lighthouse, only attended, and then only once. Why didn't they take Inga after all?

An unnatural silence and desertion dominated the seven-story building. Only on the landing of the sixth floor did the escort come across with a girl in a gymnasium dress: the first beauty in the city, Vengrzhanovskaya, taken along with her brother, a participant in the Polish-English conspiracy.

The investigator said that everyone who was at the lighthouse was already in the basement, and forced them to sign a ready-made protocol so as not to waste time. At night, Dima heard constipation thundering and shouting out names: Prokudin! Von Diderichs! Vengrzhanovskaya! He remembered that at the garage they are forced to undress, not separating men from women ...

Larisa Germanovna, having learned about the arrest of her son, rushed to the former Socialist-Revolutionary named Seraphim Los. Once they, together with the current pre-gubchek, also a former Socialist-Revolutionary, Max Markin, fled from exile. Moose managed, in the name of old friendship, to beg him "to give him the life of this boy." Markin promised and summoned the Angel of Death. “The shot will go into the wall,” he said, “and we’ll show the junker as being deducted.”

In the morning, Larisa Germanovna found Dimino's name in the newspaper in the list of the executed. She again ran to Elk, and Dima, meanwhile, came to the apartment where they lived with Inga by a different path. "Who let you out?" she asked her returning husband. Markin! She thought so. He is a former Left SR. Contra crawled into the organs! But let's see who wins. Only now Dima realized who was in front of him and why the investigator was so well informed. Inga, meanwhile, went to the most luxurious hotel in the city, where Trotsky's authorized representative Naum Fearless, who had once killed the German ambassador Mirbach, lived in a suite in order to disrupt the Brest peace. Then he was a Left Social Revolutionary, now a Trotskyist, in love with Lev Davydovich. “Citizen Lazareva! You are under arrest, ”he suddenly said, and, without having time to recover from surprise and horror, Inga ended up in the basement.

Dima, meanwhile, came to his mother at the dacha, but found her dead. The doctor, called in by the neighbor, could no longer help, except for the advice to immediately hide, even to Romania.

And now he's an old man. He lies on a straw mattress in the camp infirmary, choking with a cough, with pink foam on his lips. Pictures and visions pass in the fading consciousness. Among them is again a flower bed, a garage, Naum the Fearless, who affirms the world revolution with fire and sword, and four naked ones: three men and a woman with slightly short legs and a well-developed pelvis ...

It is difficult for a man with a Mauser to imagine himself crawling on his knees in the basement of a building on Lubyanka Square and kissing the cream-polished boots of the people around him. Nevertheless, he was later caught red-handed while crossing the border with a letter from Trotsky to Radek. He was pushed into the basement, placed facing a brick wall. Red dust rained down, and he disappeared from life.

“Probably, you will not flinch, sweeping away a person. Well, martyrs of dogma, you too are the victims of the age,” as the poet said.

retold