There was a time - they walked under the tables, and there was a little life of its own.
And above, where adults lived and feasted (as it should be in our great days - on a grand scale), more often than another in May days one sounded: "If only there was no war! .." - and the glasses converged.
It remained forever in the blood.
Like a spell, a conspiracy from the fury of a dull and well-fed life.
An almanac of 1961, I found, when I was eight and carefree, in the library of the Forestry School (there was such a project of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions), where there was a lot about the war.
About our bitter and terrible Victory.
About pilots and sailors.
Infantry and tankers.
About everyone.
It was then that I fell ill with that war.
And for a long time I dreamed at night that I was running through a grain field and did not have time - German submachine gunners cut off.
This dream persistently overtook me for several years.
I don’t know why - whether it’s a memory of the past, or maybe the present past.
A dark room with a screen for eternity and a scarlet inscription: "Arc of Fire".
Songs from which our small and stupid, honest hearts shrank.
I watched Liberation in movies with friends many times (almost every year the film was played across the country on the big screen).
Ten kopecks - and the war is yours.
We walked in a gang, yelled something, they shouted at us sometimes, but not really.
Most of all we loved, of course, the fifth episode - "The Last Assault".
This is where we first heard:
“A little more, a little more,
The last fight is the most difficult one.
And I want to go home to Russia,
I haven't seen my mother for so long! "
Since that time, Nozhkin's song has stuck in my head, and on occasion when it was especially sickening to do something unloved (to study, for example), I repeated to myself: "A little more, a little more!"
It's funny, of course.
It's funny now.
About mom - after the words of the song, for the first time I felt an unearthly inner cold: what if mom is not there?
Then the grievances of children and all nonsense retreated.
I stood before a precipice, and there was nothing and no one - if there was no mother.
The music of that time, those films, was dissolved in our thoughts and feelings.
She was with us relentlessly: concerts in the Column Hall of the House of Unions, radio, films.
And the Bolshoi Theater square.
I was almost eleven.
1980th.
We got there in the morning, and I watched people "from the movies", alive and laughing, crying and singing.
I don't know how long I was there.
Long.
On that day, it covered me for good - when he gave his three carnations to a hefty, overweight guy in a tunic with shoulder straps and orders (it seemed to me then that they had no account, and what kind of troops I couldn't remember), and he pressed me so that cracked inside, kissed him on the cheek, and the medals rang, and he smelled of tobacco and cologne.
And more tears.
He cried.
And they, tears, remained on my face too.
Like a sacrament.
As if God pointed with his finger: "Remember!"
At first, Belorusskiy Vokzal disappointed me.
At that age I could not understand at all: a film about a war, but there is no war!
Conversations, conversations.
But the song ...
This is when you grow up, you find out that Okudzhava wrote it, and the words and music, or rather, the melody.
And that Schnittke liked it, and he decided to arrange it, turn it into a "breakthrough march".
And something incredible came out, piercing through and through, right through.
And then there were words.
Together with the guitar busting, they are like the stones of a fortress: if only they are demolished to the ground, in any other case, they are imprinted forever.
I was able to understand the heroes of the "Belorussky Station" at a very mature age, probably thirty years old.
And since then, when it boils inside from the fact that people around the simplest things do not know about the war, they no longer understand where their own, where is the stranger, who was on whose side and for whom the truth is, I look at him.
Nothing has changed.
The front-line soldiers are leaving ...
But our own red rocket for each of us happens on any of the days.
Our business is to remember.
“Birds don't sing here,
Trees don't grow
And only we are shoulder to shoulder ...
... The planet is burning and spinning,
Smoke over our Motherland ...
... A red rocket takes off,
The machine gun beats indefatigably ...
... to the very enemy gates,
Such, brother, things ...
... A deadly fire awaits us,
And yet he is powerless ...
... And now we need one victory!
One for all, we will not stand for the price ”.
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On that day, a merry grandfather-accordion player in a peakless cap played at the Bolshoi.
And ditties poured.
And all kinds of things.
And then he sang: "In the forest at the front."
“From birches, inaudible, weightless,
A yellow leaf flies ...
... So, friends, since it's our turn -
Let the steel be strong!
... And if you have to lie in the ground,
Well, this is only once ...
... And what is due to whom -
Let everyone do it. "
And a kind of universal silence reigned.
It smelled in the fall.
Smoke from 1941.
When nothing is known for sure, except for one thing: the path to a peaceful life lies through war.
Also fleetingly, at the level of a reflex, with my skin, I caught the instinct: here it is, the horror of the instantaneous collapse of everyday life.
A glass of water and then maybe you won't have to drink ...
And again, only years later, when he had finally grown up, he sniffed "to read, find out what's what," I learned that these verses were by Isakovsky, and the music was by Blanter.
And that they wrote "Katyusha" in 1938, and that Isakovsky, who did not get to the front due to poor eyesight, wrote to Blanter: "Maybe with these verses I will ensure at least some participation in the war ..."
Together they wrote and "Enemies burned down their home."
In childhood, it was a particularly terrible song, its inner doom and the incredible price of victory, a song.
Even now ... I slow down when I hear or remember:
“I went to you for four years,
I conquered three powers ...
And on his chest shone
Medal for the city of Budapest ”.
“What is that Budapest to us?
Let ours bomb them all! "
“You should have had Berlin with Katyushas!
A thousand Katyushas!
Or ten thousand! "
- it is in the dark, in the general ward of that same Forestry School (they lived like in paradise - thanks to the USSR).
We made military plans, thought about how best to "knock down and smear" the Germans so that the Soviet soldiers would return home without losses.
And they sang on May 9 "The Holy War".
They shuddered on stage from the first notes, a lump rose in the throat - and somehow not very smoothly, but they deduced:
“The black wings dare not
Fly over the Motherland! .. "
And it seemed that you could change a lot, you can step into the hell right from here and chase the Fritz.
The devil knows what it is when you are little, but inside it is bubbling, like in a cauldron, and now it will tear down the tower ...
It turned out that Lebedev-Kumach had one more verse in the first version (and we did not know then, I think this opposition of light and darkness would have lifted our childish passions to a completely unattainable height):
“Like two different poles,
We are hostile in everything:
We are fighting for light and peace
They are for the kingdom of darkness. "
Strange, why didn't it go?
They don't sing like that now.
And Aleksandrov's music (at first, in the first months of the war, it was considered too tragic and gloomy, but since mid-October 1941 ...) - there are no words to explain what it affects, maybe a dead man can be picked up from the field and thrown into the attack ...
As well as the anthem of the USSR, written by him.
There are things in the world that cannot be erased by the eraser of history.
Shostakovich's "Leningrad" symphony.
As if he saw (received his sight) marching columns, an iron reptile crawling into our borders.
In my mind, everything was confused - a black and white chronicle, opening bomb bays, a demoniac on the podium, rolled up sleeves of the Wehrmacht, fires of books ...
Execution of it in besieged Leningrad on August 9, 1942.
The orchestra of the Leningrad Radio Committee under the direction of Karl Eliasberg, supplemented by musicians from the regimental orchestras.
Who in what, are barely alive, but such a will, unbending, steel will ... Where can we get this now ?!
The Great Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic, packed to capacity with exhausted people who found the strength to listen to music, flooded with the light of crystal chandeliers - every one of them burns, in spite of the air raid and the roar of sirens.
Fire of all calibers, with all the artillery forces of Leningrad - to crush the Germans even for a while, while the music is being broadcast to them, on the front line, in their cast-iron heads with fat spread eagles on their helmets.
May they burn in hell.
Forever.
Add degrees to them.
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When this comes into consciousness from childhood, there is nothing that can make you look at the past "from a slightly different angle."
And I pronounced only one name of the city - LENINGRAD.
Nothing worse than music.
Nothing more beautiful ...
"Officers".
Reviewed and revised.
I always wanted a different end, so that they would come back, so that every last one at home ... But there is such a profession - to defend the Motherland.
And there is no choice in the middle of fate ...
How Agranovich (a soldier and heroic guy, many of his texts went to the people) composed, heard from heaven ...
“Sometimes there are no names left from the heroes of the past,
Those who accepted mortal combat became just earth and grass ...
These are those who rose up with hostility as one, those who took Berlin.
There is no family in Russia where its hero would not be remembered ...
And the boys can neither lie, nor deceive, nor turn off the path. "
In winter and summer they played war games: the first thing was to appoint who was “for the Fritzes”.
Nobody wanted to.
And they often stormed, do not understand what composition (all together) of the mythical enemy.
And only then, wet, excited, yelled: “And I have him!
Have you seen?
Saw?!"
There were snowballs in winter.
And for some reason (well, how - why ...) our fortress was always called Brest.
And they fought for her, losing mittens, felt boots, hats and scarves.
Is it funny?
Not.
Each age has its own battles.
But the children of the war were not old enough.
And all the sons and daughters of the regiment, everyone we learned about from films and books, everyone who did not live to see the Victory, but brought it closer to the last sigh - were and remain our saints.
Guardian angels.
And we do not care about "a slightly different opinion from a slightly different angle."
And the survivors! ..
Sasha Kolesnikov, about whom the film "It Was in Intelligence" was filmed in 1968.
I remember when I saw in the movies, and then I also read that the Germans crucified him, nailed his arms and legs with nails, but ours managed to beat him off, and that he lived for a long time afterwards, came to the places of those events - he became numb.
As if something turned off inside - and then again ... It went.
War songs.
Songs and poems about the war.
"Cranes" and the voice of Bernes.
And tears in my eyes - from year to year it is more and more difficult to contain them.
And in that ranks there is a small gap
Maybe this is the place for me ...
"For the rest of my life"...
"For the rest of my life
We have enough feats and glory
Victory over the bloody enemy
For the rest of my life.
For the rest of my life..."
I cannot list them all.
I don't even know, at least write a list ... But why?
You, too, remember and know.
It can not be in any other way.
And one song (I'll say about it anyway) hooked me in a very special way.
Solovyov-Sedoy and Fatyanov wrote it in May 1945 near Königsberg (“Where are you now, fellow soldiers”, “On a sunny meadow ...”, “Nightingales” are also they) - “We haven't been home for a long time ".
As a child, I could not really make out the words, especially about the flowering spruce and honey cones-twigs.
And I didn't even strive - most of all I liked the beginning, incredible, as if it were even cozy.
How is this possible in the midst of the chaos and hell of war?
And there was the magic of a fairy tale, the magic of the impossible.
The triumph of an early and sure victory over the sworn enemy.
The victory is all the more fabulous, epic, because the path to it lay through suffering, which there is no way to understand it with a "peaceful mind" ...
"Candles are burning,
A short-range battle is thundering.
Pour, my friend, a glass,
On our front line!
Pour, my friend, a glass,
On our front line!
Wasted no time
Let's talk to you ...
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We haven't been home for a long time ...
The native spruce is blooming,
As if in a fairy tale, it was not,
For distant lands.
As if in a fairy tale, it was not,
For distant lands.
She has new needles
Honey on it ... "
Often I catch myself thinking: here I go and sing "The candle is burning ..." That war is near.
She is always there.
Because...
Our business is to remember.
We cannot forget.
There is nobody but us.
Outside our borders - a creeping unconsciousness.
Even if not everywhere.
It's good that not everywhere ...
"And tomorrow there will be a fight again, -
It is already so appointed by fate,
Чтоб нам уйти, не долюбив,
От наших жён, от наших нив;
Но с каждым шагом в том бою
Нам ближе дом в родном краю.
Соловьи, соловьи, не тревожьте солдат,
Пусть солдаты немного поспят...»
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