VI. Compared to eternity

The new area where I now live was, until relatively recently, a village near Moscow. Traces of village life are quickly erased, but log houses with carved platbands, either huts or dachas, still stick out among the randomly placed five-story block buildings, all sorts of living creatures scurry behind the fences and fences, and sunflowers stretch their crooked, sinewy necks. From the wide asphalt streets along which city transport runs, nameless alleys run away, cramped front gardens press against the walls of buildings, summer gazebos have been built here and there and playgrounds have been laid out, boys play siskin, and fathers of families go to towns, on holidays the accordion sounds and you can see how a dressed-up and moderately tipsy company, holding hands, strolls through the places of their previous walks. Ahead, backing and dancing, a slightly overweight, but still dashing matron in a headscarf and an imported jersey suit starts a ditty, the company pulls up discordantly and uncertainly, the ditty dear to my heart is dying out, supplanted by a modern optimistic romance, which inherited from the cruel romance of our ancestors the shamelessness in depicting their intimate feelings. "I loved it! I loved it!" - a glassy voice screams from the receivers placed on the windowsills and running at full power. - “And I don’t need anything else!..” If I don’t need it, then why yell like that? They don’t sing long songs at all, and the accordion player no longer feels like the first guy, as in the village, another year or two - and his accordion will give way to a portable semiconductor radio, in comparison with which the bulky boxes placed on the windowsills will seem like an angelic choir. The city is advancing, the new is crowding out the old, all this is natural and natural, but parting, even if it is parting with something that has become obsolete, is always tinged with sadness. Until now, the bus stops closest to my house are called “Northern Outskirts” and “Selsovet”, they will soon be renamed, but it’s a pity: these names are the same monument of the past as Nikitsky Gate and Kuznetsky Bridge.

My house is the tallest and most beautiful in the neighborhood. The house is built in the shape of the letter P, the entrance to the apartments is only from the courtyard, along the facade there are shops and a household plant. Our manager Frol Kuzmich is most proud of the fact that the house entrusted to him holds first place in the area for visual propaganda. And in fact, I have never seen such a number of banners, posters and stands per capita anywhere else. The entire front part of the house is occupied by a giant poster encouraging citizens to subscribe to newspapers and magazines. There is no apartment where the post office does not deliver newspapers, but in the warm season, pensioners, who make up a significant stratum in our country, prefer to crowd around the newspaper stands installed in the middle of the yard. This is understandable: you can not only read, but also discuss. Through the efforts of Frol, a typewritten wall newspaper “For a Healthy Life” is published three times a year with bright headlines and color pictures cut out from Ogonyok.

When I moved into the house, I had only one dream: to shut myself up in an ivory tower and attract as little public attention to my person as possible. But the ivory tower is no more a reality than a castle in the air, everyone knows me, and I know many. Now I don’t regret it, the house has become for me an extension of the laboratory and a working model, in the laboratory I can observe age-related changes only in animals, here I see them in people. Of course, I don’t conduct any planned research at home, but it was here, and not in the laboratory, that I had some ideas that still require confirmation about the relationship between the physiological process of aging and higher nervous activity. It is difficult to study this relationship in experimental animals, since they do not have a second signaling system, and it is completely impossible to conduct experiments on humans. It turns out to be a vicious circle, from which we still have to look for a way out. I can’t say that I love my home as much as the Institute, I don’t have a solid relationship with it, I like some people, others are unpleasant, but I often, especially at night, when I can’t sleep, think about both .

On the day of Uspensky's funeral I leave the house early. The day before, I received a telegram from Beta asking me to come to the Institute before the announced hour and I realized that there was a conversation to be had. Last night I hardly slept, but I don’t feel lethargic; on the contrary, my sensitivity is heightened. I go down to the seventh floor and call the elevator. The cabin floats up, I grab the handle of the shaft door. At the same time there is a click behind me door lock, and from my asthmatic breathing I understand that Myasnikov entered the court. This man is the scourge of the whole house and my personal enemy. Our enmity is devoid of any real basis; I remember that about a year ago he came to me with some fantastic claims, began to threaten, and I slammed the door in his face. Since then, he has repeatedly tried to provoke me into a scandal, I stopped all these attempts without much difficulty, but I must admit that the very existence of this man somewhere nearby tires me. His hostility became even worse from the time when I stopped his severe asthma attack. I would have forgotten about this small favor long ago, but he does not forgive me for it. It’s funny, but every time I leave my apartment, I prepare myself for the possibility of meeting Myasnikov, so that out of absent-mindedness I don’t say hello, but have that harshly aloof expression on my face that keeps him within the bounds of decency.

So, Myasnikov is breathing behind my back. Since he does not ask me to wait until he locks his door, I have the right to leave without him. But this would be a demonstration and would give Myasnikov reason to think that I was afraid of him or, on the contrary, bullying him. So I leave the cabin door open and he comes in. I let him press the first floor button. If I had done this myself, he would have immediately declared that he needed to go to the third floor - a sufficient reason to start a quarrel that was sweet for him. We descend in silence, in my opinion, he even holds his breath so as not to please me with his asthma. I see his face in the mirror, it would even be beautiful if it were not for the unclean shiny skin and the contemptuous grimace frozen on his face. Myasnikov is not old, probably younger than me, and reminds me good car, which fell into the hands of a bad owner who forgets to clean and lubricate it. As far as I know, Myasnikov hardly drinks; the origins of his aggressiveness lie elsewhere. Sometimes I want to go to him and have a heart-to-heart talk, but here’s further proof of how difficult it is to experiment on people: try approaching a person whose ill will is so strong, and yet has no apparent reason. He will perceive any step towards reconciliation as weakness. We descend safely. Of the many such unmeasurable micro-stimuli that bombard our nervous system and causing microtraumas, fatigue is born.

When in our daily life death invades, we never stop noticing the little things. Vice versa. Many times, while participating in the funerals of people, including people close to me, I noticed that my vision became sharper, and my memory retained many details. This is understandable; it is not the field of view that changes, but its illumination, some little things acquire unexpected significance, while others, until now unjustifiably inflated, are realized in their true scale, that is, precisely as little things. A friend of my youth, Aleshka Shutov, had a favorite expression: “all this is nonsense and decay compared to eternity.” Today I remember Aleshkin’s saying and find that from time to time such a comparison is not only useful, but also necessary, it returns to us the ability to see the familiar and familiar as if for the first time. Today, standing on the platform, for the first time I read the message attached to the shaft door: “Take care of the elevator, it preserves your health and creates convenience.” Of course, I had seen it before and considered it a harmless fiction, but only today I saw the thickness of the iron and the quality of the enamel covering it, and mentally imagined the tons of rolled metal spent on bringing it to the residents big city this banal and not very well expressed truth. It is unlikely that the contemplation of such a sign will help prolong the life of the elevator; a smart person does not need it, but a fool will still do it his own way. And I feel sorry for those people who waste time making unnecessary things. It is not true that time is money. Time is life. Money comes and goes, only time and life cannot be turned back.

I go down to the yard at that blessed hour when the cars loading the holds of our stores with boxes, crates and cans have already rumbled and the pensioners have not yet crawled out into the yard to indulge in the game of dominoes that I hate. In the courtyard, our building manager, Frol Trofeev, greets me in a military manner. His real name is Trofimov, but all the residents of the house somehow know that in 1945 Frol was the foreman of a trophy team. I have an even more complicated relationship with this man than with Myasnikov, but for a completely different reason - he adores me, but I am deeply disgusted by him and his entire family. The respect that Frol feels for me can be easily explained - he respects me as an honored front-line soldier. My military career ended with the rank of major general, his - with the rank of junior lieutenant, and it remains to be seen who had a harder time reaching the milestone - for me to become a general or for him to become an officer. He is a completely ignorant man and, like most ignoramuses, self-confident, the little that he has learned seems to him to be the limit of human knowledge. I predict: now Frol will ask me to write a note about the dangers of drunkenness for the wall newspaper “For a Healthy Life,” and I speed up my steps. Frol prefers to fight drunkenness with slogans and notes, and at this time his own father Kuzma Nikolaevich dies in front of everyone. I often see this wizened little man in a wrinkled jacket and a greasy cap. He does not walk, but crawls, shuffling along the asphalt with hard leatherette soles. It is not that many years old, but it is already completely worn out. There are such old clocks - they are still ticking, but at any moment they can stop. This is a quiet drunkard, equally harmless, both in a drunken state and in a sober state, in which he rarely remains, only before the store opens. When I see Kuzma or Trofimov’s wife Kapa, ​​a shapeless, dyed-blonde at forty years old, who walks around the yard waddling and can only speak at the top of her voice, due to her obesity she does not have a piano, the physiologist in me awakens, I remember how beautiful and the human body is a reliable machine, and I want to shout: you crazy people, what have you done to yourselves? Not everyone is given the ability to transform the divine spark placed into them at birth into a luminous torch, but your body is the same divine gift, but what have you turned it into? A woman at forty should be beautiful and desirable, for this there is no need to etch her hair so that it turns into yellow hay, she needs to eat less pies and move more. And a man of sixty, who has not fought and has not been particularly hungry, should run a hundred meters for no longer than fifteen seconds, and not lap up poison. I'm not talking about children. The Trofimovs have two children: Valyushka and Valerka. Valerka is fifteen years old, but he already drinks. In the evenings, walking under the arch where the machine gun booths are, I often see him in the company of two or three guys from our house, they smoke, laugh and try their best to look dangerous. From a distance you might think that these are adults, but I know that they are still puppies. And they, these puppies, drink a terrible abomination, some kind of “bile mitsne” and domestic vermouth, which smells of household chemicals. Valyushka is a year older, and so far she is not in danger of her mother's fate, she is as thin as a toothpick, and eats only what the women's magazine "Elle" recommends, and since there is no asparagus or artichokes in our grocery store, she is starving herself. Her life's dream is to become a fashion model or a flight attendant on a foreign line, for this purpose she is studying French, although from my point of view she should have worked harder on Russian. Neither Valerka nor Valyushka have any books other than textbooks, and they treat textbooks in much the same way as their grandfather treats empty vodka containers. These noble offspring serve as an excellent illustration of the phenomenon called acceleration in science, and at the same time convincing proof that acceleration itself is not as good as some dissertation students seem to think. If I tell Frol all this, he probably won’t understand anything. As a self-satisfied person, he is also happy with his family; he will only realize it when Valeryka is taken to the police station for the first time, and Valeryka will have to have an abortion. Then he will flutter, run in and will obediently listen to any moral teachings, but in the meantime, standing and trying my reasoning will seem to him like intellectual tricks, and some of them, for example, the mention of a divine spark, are completely doubtful. For, as has been proven, there is no God.

Poor fellow! I myself know that there is no God.

With all these thoughts I cross the yard. As I walk, several cats cross my path, including one or two black ones. There are so many cats in the yard that a superstitious person would be better off committing suicide right away. I safely reach Unter den Linden. This name is not given to the street, but to a rectangular grassy area lined with stunted stickies, located between the end of our house and the nearest bus stop. The name, of course, is unofficial. Every spring the site becomes the scene of fierce struggle. There are two main forces fighting - the house management and the household assets consisting of pensioners, on the one hand, and the working population of the house, on the other. The former forbid walking on the lawn and demand that you go around the site, the latter, seeing an approaching bus, without a twinge of conscience cross it diagonally, and by mid-summer only two dusty corners of the lawn remain. The struggle has been going on for a long time, at first the house management acted in the spirit of visual agitation, installing pegs at the boundaries of the site with a modest plywood appeal: “Don’t walk on the lawn!” The next stage was the installation of barrier posts, which are usually installed when clearing roofs of snow and during production repair work. Then they successively used: wire, although not barbed and stretched at a low height, but with the onset of darkness it became dangerous to the life and health of citizens, a low fence painted green, and, as the latest technology, a fence made of thin railway barriers painted in classic colors pole. All this does not work; hard workers still prefer to rush to the bus along the hypotenuse rather than along the legs. It would probably be more reasonable to lay a narrow tiled path diagonally, but Frol Trofeev will never agree to such a derogation of the prestige of his power, and there are rumors that a figured cast-iron fence will be ordered from our neighboring shaped casting plant.

Out of a sense of solidarity, I also walk diagonally. I don't need a bus. For some time now, I have recognized only two types of movement around the city - the metro and walking. In rare cases - taxi. I don’t miss the lost government car at all, and I regret even less that I didn’t take on the heavy cross of my own. I love to walk; while walking I think about all sorts of abstract topics, which is something I shouldn’t do while driving. The metro attracts me because of its reliability; you don’t have to wait. In the subway, people push less and are less likely to be rude than on trams and buses. Standing on the escalator, I train my powers of observation. The escalator, like a rolling mill, snatches and forms from the seething human mess a long and straight ribbon that freezes before our eyes. People submit to a movement that does not depend on their efforts; it is a momentary rest of the will. At this moment they are most like themselves, they are not posing, they are not tense and they are most accessible to observation. During oncoming traffic, each individual takes only a few seconds, but for a trained eye this is a lot. I am not alone in my work. Among those observed, I notice that there are observers. A woman in an imported knitted blouse does not look at faces. She looks at who is dressed and jealously notes every blouse that is similar to her own. An impudent type with the insatiable eyes of a womanizer snatches only women from the crowd and instantly classifies them according to a five-point system: old women - zero, ugly ones - one, he rarely gives a five and with knowledge of the matter. A gloomy old man in a dark cloak and smoky glasses is a gambler and, like any gambler, superstitious. He always calculates something and makes wishes. Some student-looking guys are playing a kind of “blitz” - they are trying to instantly determine the profession, nationality and other parameters of the people passing by them. Probably future criminologists or sociologists.

I also play this game, but in a different way. I am a physiologist and therefore, first of all, I grasp the physiological type, my specialty is age-related physiology, and, glancing along the oncoming flow, I almost unmistakably guess the age - the real one, recorded in the metric. Along the way, I note the symptoms of premature aging and try to guess its causes: disrupted hormonal metabolism, pathological childbirth, hereditary complications, neuroses... The causes are conventionally divided into physiological and social, in practice it is almost impossible to separate them, they are so closely intertwined. A sculptor I know told me that with age human faces acquire the greatest expressiveness. A clarification is needed here. The faces of older people are characterized by a certain stiffness of features, and in the ability to express immediate sensations they are noticeably inferior to young people. But they perfectly reflect the life lived and some dominant character traits. I consider myself a good physiognomist, but I keep quiet about it. What rewarding material for Vdovin and his hidden combatants! A physiognomist means a preacher of physiognomy, condemned along with phrenology as a pseudoscience. To assert a connection between a person’s appearance and his character smells of Dombrosianism, and this is not just pseudoscience, but bourgeois pseudoscience, which is not far from racism. Nonsense, I don’t do any taxonomy, I’m just used to believing my first impression. Of all types of painting, I love portraiture most of all; it is unlikely that the great portrait painters of the past studied the dossiers of their sitters; they already saw right through them. There are, of course, deceptive appearances, but much less often than is commonly thought, most often a person looks like himself.

I was not at the Institute for a week and did not recognize it. While still at the gate I saw: the front door was wide open, the entrance seemed to be wider. As I came closer, I realized that I was not mistaken - even the narrow door on the left was open, which had never been opened in my memory. The yard is empty, except for a lone pickup truck with a green canvas top. The asphalt is clean and moist. From the pickup truck, along the wet asphalt, as if after a wet cleaning, there is a trail of fallen pine needles and small petals: wreaths have been carried. Illuminated only by the penetrating through open door In daylight, the empty lobby resembled the chapel of some cathedral. The gracious Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov was white in the depths, the photographic faces of the excellent students on the Honor Board were illegible black. The similarity was further completed by the quiet music coming through the closed doors of the conference room. I listened. Someone played the piano, and played well. There could be no doubt that the invisible pianist was playing Chopin, but the piece seemed unfamiliar to me; if I had ever heard it, it was a very long time ago, perhaps in early childhood. After the piece, the pianist took a long pause, then started playing again, and I did not immediately recognize Chopin’s well-known funeral march. However, the pianist performed not a march, but the third movement of a B-flat minor sonata, brilliant and rarely performed precisely because the third march-like movement has long been torn away from it and leads an independent existence as a universal symbol of courageous grief. The unfamiliar piece was the second movement of the sonata. Careful, trying not to creak the door, I made my way into the conference room. What I saw amazed me.

The two-light hall was darkened with thick curtains, as during abstracts with transparencies. The entire middle of the hall was cleared of chairs, as if for another ball; only the epidiascope remained in place, casting on the screen a portrait of Uspensky enlarged many times over, and I shuddered when I recognized this faded amateur card. Looking at me from the screen was a young, but already beginning to gray, recent military commissar of the squadron with a thin neck and very light fearless eyes, such as even Beta did not know him, but I remembered well. Under the screen, in the place where the Academic Council met, stood a grand piano, a wonderful instrument that the Institute inherited along with a Karelian birch tree, and behind the piano sat Lazar Nemenov, a young pianist who visited Uspensky’s house and at our Institute evenings. And only then did I see the coffin, standing on a platform draped with dark material, close to the back side of the epidiascope, a strong lamp, enclosed in a slotted and ribbed aluminum body, cast large, irregularly shaped glare on the headrest and the forehead of the deceased. I didn’t immediately recognize Antonevich in the motionless white figure frozen at the head of the room. When I approached, he didn't move. I tried not to look at the face of the man lying in front of me in the coffin, it had changed so unrecognizably. It was changeable in life, too, sometimes I saw on it the reflection of that former Pasha, whose unsteady shadow moved onto the wrinkled screen. Today it was harshly aloof, the kind of face he had at meetings when they said something that he didn’t like or didn’t want to hear.

While Lazarus was playing, I thought that in art, as in science, there are inventions and discoveries. Inventions are growing like an avalanche, discoveries are still rare. Chopin's funeral march is, of course, not an invention, but a discovery. Some universal human patterns are caught in its sounds, otherwise why is it equally intelligible to me, and to the old man Antonevich standing next to me, and to Lazar, and to millions of other people over the course of a whole century? Of course, no analogy can be complete, if Archimedes or Sir Isaac Newton had not made their famous discoveries, someone else would undoubtedly have made them, but if Chopin had not been born, there would not have been a B-flat minor sonata, and this fills me with somewhat envious surprise. I also thought that Pasha was one of those people who was capable of discoveries; he stood on the threshold of discoveries, and it was not death that prevented him, but something that burst into his life much earlier than physical death and prevented him from fully realizing his potential. He knew this and suffered. I suddenly remembered his words about the light bulb, which must be taken care of, and I thought with pain that the explanation lay somewhere nearby.

After the third part, Lazar paused again, I asked Antonevich in a whisper about Beta, and he also answered in a whisper that Elizaveta Ignatievna was “with Iago.” I didn’t understand, and he grumpily explained:

Iago is in his office.

In the deserted lobby I see my employee Viktor Pushchin and am glad to meet him. Victor is a very capable guy, gently persistent, patient, scrupulously conscientious - a born experimenter. Whenever you come to the laboratory, you see his reddish hedgehog, bending over the equipment, strong glasses sliding down to the tip of his freckled nose and a plump upper lip propped up with his tongue, like a schoolboy during a dictation. It’s not easy to guess that this bespectacled scientist is an experienced skydiver, with about thirty jumps to his name, including several long jumps. Victor tried to get me into this activity, but I wasn’t interested in it, I only jumped once, just to prove to myself that I could do it. Not a single soul knows about my jump at the Institute, and this is not the only secret connecting Victor and me. A few years ago, I foolishly put it “on myself” - animals were not suitable for this task - a rather risky experience, and Victor assisted me. During the experiment, I felt sick, and Victor showed amazing composure, gave me first aid himself and took me home, and most importantly, he did it in such a way that no one except the two of us knows about it to this day. I treat Victor with tenderness, mixed with a certain amount of irritation. The roots of this irritation are unclear to me; of the visible reasons, I can only name a beard, a red Rublev goatee on a half-childish face. It will remain this way until old age. All that I can say against bearded people is no smarter or more convincing than what the boyars of Peter the Great said about shaved ones, I remember very well that in relatively recent times Sechenov, Pavlov, Ukhtomsky, Chekhov and Tolstoy wore beards and this did not bother them to be the leading people of their era. So, most likely, this is the most common intolerance. Not religious, not political, but an even broader, all-encompassing, ancient as the world intolerance towards everything that is not me, the age-old habit of considering one’s height, skin color, clothing, language and way of thinking as a universal human standard. In my rejection of Vita’s beard, I am not much different from the pensioners from our yard, who wear wide trousers with cuffs and see off wearers of tight trousers with glances that can cause you to trip. We love to say “I would if I were you...”, but we are terribly unable to put ourselves in the place of another person, only the proximity of the coffin makes us more tolerant, and for the first time I am beginning to understand that my irritability is clearly age-related. Before the war, and even during the war, I was firmly convinced that I knew what people like that, under thirty, breathed. Today I am no longer so convinced of this. That is, I know, of course, that our institute youth do not treat me badly at all, I also know that although I am no longer young and have never been good-looking, some of the girls in white clothes that cleverly hug their hips still like me, hanging around our corridors in dressing gowns, and, I dare to think, I like you disinterestedly, however, a distance equal to the life of an entire generation separates us with an invisible but impenetrable barrier and, probably, only great love, love bordering on a miracle and equally rare, is capable of destroying this terrible barrier, much more more spiritual than physical. With Victor this barrier is less noticeable, and yet it still exists. During the experiments, he and I understand each other perfectly, but the rest of the time I am irritated by his slowness, not laziness, but precisely the slowness of a man convinced that he still has a lot of time ahead. So if you think about it, besides misunderstanding, there is also a bit of envy in my attitude towards Victor. And with all that, we love each other dearly.

“Vdovin has arrived,” says Victor in the most indifferent tone. -Have you seen it?

Indifference, of course, was done. Viktor can't stand Vdovina.

No, I didn’t see it,” I say even more indifferently. - And what?

Nothing. Curious.

But in my opinion, it’s natural. In two hours, all of Moscow and twelve languages ​​will be here.

Victor casts a quick glance at me from under his glasses: are you being a fool or really don’t understand? And delicately shifts the conversation to other tracks.

Heart? - he asks.

Apparently.

To whom? To him?

What does he need now... Everyone.

Did you love him, Vitya?

Victor thinks about it.

Don't know.

Among our candidates of science, Victor is one of the most knowledgeable, but no one says “I don’t know” so often, and this touches me. Since Vdovin defended the dissertation I rewrote, I have never heard him say that he doesn’t know something.

Why, Vitya?

Don't know. I respected him, of course. And, I must admit, I was afraid. When you are afraid, you want to persuade yourself that you love. To truly love, you need to know at least something other than what everyone knows. He was for us... (Hesitation: I wanted to say “for us, the young,” but I was embarrassed.) I don’t know how best to explain to you... Well, like a portrait.

What portrait?

Well, that's what they hang on the walls. - He moved his hand and, not finding anything suitable, pointed to the marble Mechnikov. - Did you love him?

Loved it, I say.

We part ways at the reception door. Once upon a time, the entire mansion was furnished with Karelian birch; now it is preserved only in the reception area and the director’s office. I don’t really like Karelian birch, but it’s still better than the office standard. Olga is on duty as always. Standing on a rickety table, she attaches mourning ribbons to the portrait of Ouspensky and does not immediately notice me. The table is low for her, she has to stretch, I see how her calves are tense. For a thirty-eight-year-old woman with an almost grown daughter, she looks great. As always, simply and well dressed. Dark suit and white blouse. The ideal secretary, businesslike, polite, but able to establish distance on occasion, is no longer Olechka, but Olga Georgievna.

The phone rings. Olga turns around and, seeing me, blushes. I realized that I was looking at her. The table swayed dangerously, and I arrived in time to help.

On the phone she speaks restrainedly and laconicly: yes, yes, yes, please... Another phone rings, she picks up the phone without looking and again: yes, yes, yes, of course. From twelve. Please…

They keep calling,” she explains in an apologetic tone. - Tell me, Oleg Antonovich, the guard of honor... is it honorable for whom? For the one who stands in it?

The question is unexpected, and I don’t have a ready answer.

No, in my opinion, after all, for the one who died,” I say, not very confidently.

I used to think so too. And now it’s starting to seem to me that it’s for the living. And so that it would be in the report... If you knew how many people tried to get their signature on the obituary, how many grievances there were... Well, okay. They say you performed brilliantly in Paris?

Who is speaking?

Progressive French print. I have a clipping for you...

But I have no time for Paris. I want to ask if Beta is here and if I can go see her. Olga is ahead of me, smiling sadly, she points with her eyes at a one-legged hanger standing in the corner. Undressing in the waiting room is a privilege of few; Vdovin also used it in his time. A greenish velor hat and a raincoat rolled up like a raincoat hang on a hanger. I have never seen either this hat or raincoat, but I can immediately guess whose they are.

“He’s there,” Olga explains dispassionately, pointing to the office door. If you don't want to meet, go to your laboratory. I'll call.

I really don’t really want to meet Vdovin. Who will explain why you are looking for a meeting with an active and dangerous enemy, but it is difficult to see a defeated enemy, as if you are to blame, not him? We haven't met whole year, but I always remember its existence. I never tried to find out anything about him, but he was invisibly present in my thoughts many times. Some not-so-banal idea will come to mind, and a little thought will immediately arise: I wonder what my fosterling, lurking somewhere, would say about this, my sworn friend, my bosom enemy, for whom I no longer have any personal bitterness, but there is only persistent rejection. For me, he is now more of a symbol than a person. A meeting with him will not give me pleasure, but if any of us has reasons to avoid meeting, it would be more likely for him than for me. I wanted to say this, but I didn’t have time. The office door opened and a man came out, whom I did not recognize at first, although I had been warned. I was confused by the blond, lightly graying beard on his tanned face. I have long noticed that beards explain something about a person, while shaved faces are more neutral. A merchant stood in front of me. Not from Ostrovsky, but rather from Gorky. Cool, smart, risky... He recognizes me instantly, but is also taken by surprise. It makes us both more sincere than we set out to be. We openly examine each other for about half a minute. I just remain silent, Vdovin ponders the first phrase.

It doesn’t change,” he says finally.

This is a trial balloon. A short phrase, without a pronoun and seemingly not even directly addressed to me. Understand it as you know - as a compliment, as an irony, it’s up to you.

Well, hello, or something... - He holds his hand as if it were in a sling, bent and slightly outstretched.

Hello, - it's stupid to throw a demonstration, and I extend my hand.

So, are you still offering your hand? - he says, smiling wryly.

I'm serving. It just doesn't mean anything.

This was not a prepared barb, but came out involuntarily and therefore especially hurt him. He throws up his hands, appealing to Olga and even more broadly: to the portraits of the pillars of domestic and foreign physiology hanging on the walls of the reception room. They say, what can you expect from a person who, even on such a mournful day, is not able to change his callous nature? But clever Olga at this moment remembers that she needs to call somewhere, and she looks even more detached than Ukhtomsky and Alexis Carrel.

Well, how did you like Paris?

Again, no pronoun.

Once upon a time, Nikolai Mitrofanovich really tried to get on friendly terms with me. During the memorable discussion, he had already “knocked” me out from the podium; I was persona non grata for him, a rotten liberal. Now he's testing the waters.

Paris? Paris, as you know, is my hometown.

Here Olga can’t stand it and quietly snorts. Should she not remember how, during the same discussion, Vdovin called me “a native of the city of Paris,” probably in order to expose the roots of my delusions and criminal disrespect for Russian science. The blow hits the target. But Nikolai Mitrofanovich has quite thick skin.

“We need to talk,” a man with a merchant’s beard concludes our meaningful conversation with unexpected importance. And, without waiting for an answer, he goes to the exit.

Olga and I look at each other.

Wait a minute! - says Olga.

She goes into the office and I am left alone. And suddenly I notice with surprise that I am indecently worried, to the point of trembling, like a student in front of the examiner’s door. And then Lazar started playing something fast and alarming, probably the finale of the sonata. The funeral march is over, the living have dispersed, and all that remains is the wind, blowing in gusts onto the still fresh mound and carrying dry dust.

Olya’s minute stretched out for a long time. The phone rang sharply and briefly, they picked up the receiver in the office, and it seemed to me that I heard Beta’s low, slightly drawling voice.

I don’t even have a rough idea of ​​what our conversation will be about, and therefore I am not able to prepare for it. When you love one woman for many years, and this woman belongs to another, in the end some kind of long-term mode is developed that allows you to maintain smooth and even friendly relations. You convince yourself that everything is already in the past, and you put some supports under this conviction - either she turned out to be unworthy of your love, or you yourself recognize yourself as unworthy, in both cases you feel sadness, slightly seasoned with self-satisfaction, because in the first case you you forgive, and in the second you repent, and in both there is something sweet. But now your so-called rival is dead, and, despite the sincerity of your grief, the modus developed at the cost of many sleepless nights is crumbling; Some hopes flare up, no, not for a return to the past - all life processes are irreversible - but for the future. Subconsciously, you are preparing yourself to hear: “Now I have no one in the world except you” - or even: “I haven’t stopped loving you all these years...” Letting this nonsense into your consciousness is shameful and stupid, no doubt we'll talk just about a friendly favor, which is more your duty towards the deceased than a sacrifice made to the woman you love. My confusion grows, I remember with horror that in a few hours I will have to speak to open coffin in the presence of several hundred people, and most importantly - in the presence of a woman who has never forgiven me a word of a lie, to talk about a person with whom, God willing, I will someday sort out a relationship with myself. When Olga finally leaves the office and nods as a sign that they are waiting for me, I am like an oyster with its doors open and step through the threshold with a feeling close to the one with which I once stepped onto the wing of an airplane for my first and only jump.