Victory.
In my all-powerful childhood, when we are still alive and no one needs to die, it was spilled, dissolved in the air.
Cities were not hung with holiday posters.
Fireworks - yes, thundered, the parade happened - not every year.
Every year there was a ringing of medals at the Bolshoi and many other places in the city.
I remember that my first victorious salute both seemed and was remembered as a Palekh box: the bottomless black of the sky, illuminated by sparkling exploding bouquets - asters and dahlias, as if on a Kupala night, never seen by anyone, blossomed and fell in an instant of one ...
And I shouted “Hurrah!”, Sitting on my father’s neck, and waved a small red flag, and Palekh heavenly blossomed and blossomed, and there was no end to it ...
My grandmother had a box like this.
How she beckoned me... I would sneak up on her in the evenings, even though no one really followed me.
I kept thinking about finding something there that would turn the world upside down, and rivers of milk would flow to the jelly banks.
On the lacquered black lid - a trio of white and gold horses, scarlet and blue skies, a wide road, an oak of the Lukomorsky - as if in a fairy tale.
And inside the casket there are letters, some badges of honour, silver rings and even one gold one, notes, a tiny telephone book, small ones, from documents and passes, photographs, larger photographs - everything, and no special magic: life as it is thanks to the Victory - after all, the casket might not have happened.
It's not that easy to explain.
Then everything was divided into pre-war and post-war.
The box was given to my grandmother after the war.
“We watched the film, pre-war still ...”
“After the war, they bought a buffet, stood in the apartment for ten years, and then they took it to the village ...”
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“Before the war, grandfather worked at a flour mill, and then the front ...”
“When they came back from the war, there was nothing! .. For how many years I walked in an overcoat ...”
In the village, to which the said carved sideboard was taken, I began to gather immediately after May 9th.
I saw her in a dream - a hut and a yard, went in a dream for mushrooms and each time I went out to a modest, silver-painted, repainted obelisk with a red iron star - nameless, behind a low fence, already in June lost in the tall summer grass.
He stood on the edge of a birch grove.
It is still there now.
The cars on the roads are different.
And the planes in the sky are different.
And the general store completely ceased to look like a general store, but it is still the same.
All those who survived under it and who defended us are sleeping ...
I never saw him in winter.
Maybe it will cover him up to the very star with snow.
Maybe she's the only one in the middle of the edge of the field, gleaming dimly in the moonlight.
Nothing to disturb their peace.
No storms of today.
The victory then was very simple and understandable.
She was everywhere.
Grandfather and I shook for a long time in the train, then by bus for more than an hour, then ... We were met by our grandfather's cousin (and why did I always call her Aunt Tonya?), And we had tea and went to the neighboring village to my grandfather's second cousin - for milk.
There were cows and goats on the farm, and me, a Moscow suffocator, they gave this milk to drink "for greater health", and grandfather's second cousin with one hand passion how deftly chopped firewood and controlled the samovar.
He didn’t have another hand, and on his jacket, which was more decent (in which he smoked in the evenings on a bench near the house), a lot of order bars fit.
It's a pity that I never once persuaded him to wear a jacket with all the awards.
“Let him... Hang somewhere.
Grandma hid.
This was the victory.
And all summer every other day I went for milk with a can, and all summer there was Victory.
Because grandfather's brother has no hand, there is silence and the sun in half the sky, birds, water from a spring, at home - Aunt Tonya and her pies with blueberries, a Russian oven, rugs ...
Aunt Tonya was a nurse during the war.
She told something, not particularly willingly, a couple of times she briefly showed “For Courage”.
In 1944, she fell in love without a memory, and in 1945 she arrived in the village, home, two months before the Victory.
And she gave birth to a son.
But the father ... did not come.
Not because he didn't want to.
Because he didn't make it.
Until Victory.
With his son, whom he himself had never seen, we drank tea many times, looked at the carved sideboard, gnawed lump sugar, strong as Soviet power, and Gagarin and Stalin looked at us from behind the glass of the carved sideboard.
And it was a victory.
Because they won.
Because to the stars.
In the hallway near the hut there was a summer extension - a room for one with a bunch of files of all kinds of magazines.
There, too, there was victory everywhere.
And war stories.
With it, with that war, I woke up and fell asleep - and somehow I didn’t become a militarist or the devil knows who else, but I don’t like to throw away food terribly: I read and re-read about Leningrad, and the words of almost all the songs of the military in my memory are by heart .
There I first read Bogomolov's "Moment of Truth" - in the "New World" for the 74th year.
Just before sunset, already closer to the stars, I got out on a bench by the gazebo, completely overgrown with hops, and quietly led myself out under my breath (what singing was there ...):
I walk at a good sunset hour
At the brand new pine gates.
Maybe a familiar soldier to us here
The wind will blow.
Kind of funny now, no?
It's not funny to me.
Solovyov-Sedoy for life in my head.
And all films with his songs.
And all his songs with films... Honestly, I don't understand what's wrong with us.
How can one “not quite understand”, “not be completely sure of expediency”?
The scope of the celebrations, huh?
Persistence of reminder, huh?
Tiring ... Previously, it did not tire.
Apparently, they felt more acutely.
Not how to live better, but how to be better.
With a full basket - whether mushrooms, blueberries, or strawberries, raspberries - almost every time my grandfather and I went out of the forest through a birch grove past the obelisk.
And then one thing was simple and clear: here I am walking with my own feet, I will be wrapping stewed cabbage soup in the oven with delicious gray bread-brick from selpo, after tea I will drink as much as I like with sour delicious caramels - because they are there.
Is this not enough to understand and understand?
In my childhood, more and more people went to cemeteries on Easter (right, wrong - that's not the point).
I will always, forever remember another, large and granite obelisk in the direction of Leningradka, Skhodni, where cigarettes lay in mountains on Easter - and how men, passing by, with some transcendent dignity, took out half a pack and left it on granite ... And candles .
Grandmothers (many women then seemed like grandmothers to me) left Easter cakes, eggs, but how many cigarettes there were! .. And candles.
Then nothing seemed too much.
And the anti-tank hedgehogs on Leningradka - up to the sky - also did not seem too much.
And if somewhere it suddenly fell out to stand in the guard of honor, in a white shirt, with an ironed tie, it was also not too much.
A lump in the throat - yes ... I'm too sentimental, because it's a tube, 69th year of assembly?
No guys.
All wrong...
May, short nights,
Having died down, the fighting ended.
Where are you now, fellow soldiers,
My combat companions?
There are almost none left.
Only in songs.
They went into the stars, into the sky above the field.
In the opportunity to just drink a glass of water when they are not poisoned by shepherd dogs, they are not hung up with a sign “commissar-partisan”, they are not finished off with rifle butts if they fell, on the way to the death camp.
Say: "A set of stamps!"
Maybe it’s the same for you, if you didn’t come across your own, personal obelisk, past which with quick feet in worn-out sneakers or rubber boots - as it turned out according to the weather.
We will build a house for you by the collective farm,
To be seen all over:
The family of a Soviet hero lives here,
Who defended the country with his breast.
They don't need a home.
Where they live forever, we cannot build a house.
Think about it: you are walking while they are watching.
They look at you.
On me.
For all of us.
Without appreciating - those who have passed through fire and death are higher than that.
But they are watching.
What is too much for you?
St. George ribbons?
Victory Marches?
Go then to your obelisk.
Buy a pack of cigarettes even if you don't smoke.
Buy a jar of silver, a brush.
Buy a can of red paint.
It won't be too much, will it?
We have nothing to pay them.
There was always nothing, and the more years pass from the day of the Victory, the more exorbitant is the debt to them.
We drink cold spring water, pour bitter water into a glass of light glass - and they look at us and say: “Eh!
Good water! .. Yes, the Soviet power is strong!
May short nights...
It seems to me (or so it is), the entire sky is made of stars from the caps of the soldiers of that war.
That Great Patriotic War, from which only memory and obelisks will soon remain among us.
Nothing is too much.
Two photographs in a rustic canteen behind glass - Gagarin and Stalin.
Whatever anyone says.
Whatever anyone thinks.
Candles are burning,
A close fight rages.
Pour, my friend, in a cup,
On our frontline!..
We haven't been home for a long time.
Native spruce blossoms
As if in a fairy tale, they were not,
For distant lands...
The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editors.