Tears flowed from the eyes of the old man, but he sort of ignored them, motionlessly contemplating the distance of the past days.
Sturdy cedar walls, carved freshly painted shutters, well-tended garden, in which the wife planted flowers every spring. Crowds of children going to school, joined by his son and daughter. Favourite work in forestry. He was a senior forester, a chief, who never pulled rank. And all the former friends were his subordinates. They worked and spent vacations together. And then…
Wet optically challenged eyes of the old man were covered with pain and anguish.
There was darkness. And he, as if for real, went back to the past. The years turned into a second. A moment. A deep groan. He and his wife, discussing his work day, usually sat on the couch and turned on the TV to see breaking news. He carefully covered her with a blanket and absently turned around… He was listening to the speaker. The news about the conflict between the Parliament and the President struck like thunder. Reports showed crowds of angry people, frozen tanks, strained faces of the soldiers, and ‘the White House’ blackened by soot. Back then, he did not realise that this was only the beginning of the bloody show. The Soviet Union was hit by the hammer, splitting a united, strong state into independent republics, and the greedy little hands of foreign speculators were reaching out for the wrecks of a great empire in anticipation of winning a big jackpot. And they were naive, ordinary workers and anxiously worried about the fate of the Motherland. These were the days of tension. They were full of rumours and speculation. At work, they were arguing until they got hoarse. Young people sided with the new government, taking for granted the colourful speeches on the indispensable coming of the Golden Age. And politicians, who had sold themselves, were happy to try ‘to sing like a nightingale’ to butter up the path to the hearts of the people with illusory freedom, cheap vouchers, and American chewing gum. The elderly people, having learned from bitter experience, did not want to change anything, arguing that the western innovations would lead to no good. They were proving that there was no such thing as a free lunch. And they were right. And time proved it… The puppeteers became obsessed. People were explained that they lived in a wrong way. Unworthily. Communism was the same fascism, only of red colour. It turned out that people needed freedom. Democracy. And only this could help them live a wealthy and happy life. And restructuring rattled around the country with forged boots, maiming human destinies, exasperating hearts, and making souls stale. It was quietly pressing people into the small suffocating enclosure, leaving behind abandoned country sides, impoverished villages, robbed state-owned enterprises, and empty wallets.
The old man smiled bitterly blowing out a puff of smoke. And he took a puff again. His thoughts were twisted like a disturbed swarm. For so many years, he had never found a clear answer to the main question: who should be punished for all this mess? And he sighed heavily again, having dully waved his hand.
– God will understand himself, who is guilty of thousands of ruined souls… He will identify and punish the villain. I will mind my own business. – But the belief in just punishment did not find the proper relief. He limply lowered his head, which became very heavy in one moment, and turned in upon himself, unable to soothe pain, gripping his soul.
He felt sorry that their cosy little world faced the same fate. The trouble did not pass by. The once densely populated village was dying out today. His fingers involuntarily clenched of the feeling of despair. He knew that he was deceiving himself, hiding behind the words: ‘everything was going to be alright’, a terrible reality. Klyuevka was not dying out. The truth was worse. It was already dead. It was remaining only as the name of the settlement marked on the map of Russia with an inanimate point. A settlement without inhabitants. A haven of abandoned houses and fallen fences. Another ghost station on the railway atlas of Russia, with an empty platform. And regardless of one’s emotional experiences and attempts to turn back the clock, the past was gone. One could not breathe life into a dead decomposed body. But even if one could, it was unlikely worth doing. It was possible that one’s efforts would resurrect a new Frankenstein. And its fate would be more disastrous. It’s all in God’s hands. ‘What must be, will be’. One needed to accept the terrible reality. People were surrounded by the frightening reality, and there was no way to break free. And a single voice had no value. All posts in the world were allotted long time ago. The position of ‘the saviour of the world’ was already taken by those, who had destroyed this world by themselves.
– One can accept many things, but not outright injustice, – he said sadly. He wearily bowed down and, hiding his face in his palms, ruffled his thick grey hair with naughty fingers. – People have become too callous and aggressive, not like our generation. They are ready to rip each other’s throats. And they have bags of envy. They smile in the face, and when one turns around they spit on the back. But the worst thing is that the death of a person today is measured by dry figures. Today, twenty people died in a car accident, three of them were children of preschool age. Yesterday, the explosion of domestic gas in a residential building claimed the lives of one hundred people. The day before yesterday, the ship sank and took the lives of another hundred people. And here the ink writes out the soulless statistics: weekly, monthly, annual… ‘So much’ departed. But last year, this figure was better – it was smaller. For whom was it a better figure? For the family? For friends? For relatives of the deceased? Unlikely. It was better only for the report. And that’s it. We do not know what will happen tomorrow, but something will certainly happen and someone will die. There is no doubt. Hundreds of thousands are put in the coffins, and their entire course of life, the way of life and the lifestyle are reflected at the impersonal tags. Hundreds of thousands… but few of them are known by the names, and even fewer – by the surnames. And one could write off all the deaths on the concourse of circumstances or the evil will of fate if most of the tragedies were marked by the trace of alcohol. Some reckless deadly demon, trapped in a vodka bottle for hundreds of years, broke free. It was his time… The time of confusion and despair. And he began his mad dance, smiting hopes, trampling the will, smearing conscience and shame, destroying what was formerly a person, showing a raging monster.
– And its vicious influence reached us too, – the old man hopelessly forced himself to speak, helplessly listening to the melancholy howl of the neighbour’s dog.
Out of eight thousand residents of Klyuevka, only less than one thousand remained. And almost all of them were the elderly ones. Young people, who did not run away to the cities, went on the bottle, trying to cope with sorrow. The demon of drunkenness firmly held the lost souls, injecting doses of poison into the minds fogged with alcohol, creating the illusion of universal prosperity. And in the morning, the hangover came. Sharp and painful. And there was the realisation that the world was not ‘pink’, not even with black and white stripes, but solid grey. The power in this world belonged to the gloomy cardinal named hopelessness. He ruled with an iron fist, brutally suppressing any attempt to escape from captivity. It was dissolving the remnants of the human mind in tonnes of cheap surrogate alcohol.
Unscrupulous businessmen. Bandits. Police. Officials of all sorts and ranks. Like ticks, they stuck to the extremely profitable ‘feeding through’, and no force could tear them away. Yes, there was no such power in the state that was able to keep order. All the ‘politically unreliable’, going against the decrees of the oligarchic elite, honest and decent police chiefs and business leaders were put out to pasture. They were replacing with obedient servants. And corruption began to thrive. One only needed to reap benefits on time. Dollars. Marks. Pounds. They flowed, like the river, settling in the pockets of thieving dealers. Shadow bigwigs came out of their holes, beginning to build their own world order. Under the motto: ‘scratch my back and I will scratch yours’. The article about speculation was seized from the Criminal Code. There was no speculation in Russia, but there were free market relations. There began the wave of legal democratic relations between the seller and the buyer. And nobody cared that the product was not created with their own hands and was just resold at exorbitant prices. Coupons for alcohol were out of use, and vodka itself disappeared from the shelves of the shops as well. The notorious ‘dry law’ was gaining momentum. The state rushed to fight alcoholism at breakneck speed, uprooting vineyards and closing liquor factories, depriving people of high-quality alcohol. Meanwhile, hundreds of cisterns of denatured alcohol ‘Royal’, ‘made in China’, flooded the railway siding of Transbaikalia. Dealers launched a brisk trade of real poison in the country sides and villages. Excitedly rubbing their sweaty palms from anticipating the profits, they fell into the greedy trance. They were enriching the offices of funeral services, which they owned at times. These were the market relations. The double income was obvious: kill and then bury. The business on blood was profitable. People were dying like flies, dozens a day. During the year, the local cemetery grew to immense size, turning into a horrible and sad sight. Any new grave belonged to a man or a woman, younger than forty years old. And there was not a single initiated case, not a single conviction. Everybody knew the perpetrators of the crimes, but nobody was imprisoned. And it was impossible to put someone into prison as government officials were controlling everything. Everybody was in the mix: prosecutors, regional chiefs of police, investigators, and chiefs of local departments. Therefore, everybody knew and said nothing. And there was nothing else to do. One could write to Moscow and there would be no result, if not worse. Or one could be put in prison for ‘slander’. Or a more serious article could be fabricated. Or one could be simply killed by some criminals, who would be set at a certain person. In those troubled 90s, it seemed that all the atrocities took place under the connivance of the higher management from the capital. The country was ruled by oligarchs, who were happy with drunken people, as they required less, were satisfied with the crumbs, did not interfere their enrichment, their ‘cutting’ of the budget. And if someone died, it would be even better, as the number of people dissatisfied with social injustice would be smaller.
– When one remembers the past, one begins to tremble. All this was so disgusting, – the old man signed bitterly, – low and meanly. We defeated the Nazis, won a victory over the hunger, rebuilt the cities. Over time, we began to feel that life was getting back to normal. And it turned out that there was some internal enemy in the country, hiding and waiting for the right time to destroy everything. And the consequences of his attack were even more catastrophic than those caused by all the previous wars together. What for did our fathers and grandfathers die during the Great Patriotic War, clearing the land from the ‘brown evil spirits’? Well, certainly, it was not for the fact that their children would die from counterfeit vodka, gangster and police lawlessness, bureaucratic indifference. It was unlikely for the descendants to put up their medals for sale, to glorify traitors and executioners, to consider true heroes to be the occupants, destroying their monuments with the frenzied hatred. Despising the Soviet symbols, they would raise their hands in a Nazi salute, tattooing the bodies with the Nazi symbols and the swastika. What made them betray the memory of their fathers and follow the doctrines of the Nazi ideology? Most young men were not the descendants of the traitors but the usual Russian teenagers. Many families preserved the photographs of smiling soldiers and officers, together with the tearful death notices. And the great-grandfather died not from old age but from the bullets of the Nazis. Those, whom they fanatically imitated these days, killed him.
If the ancestors were able to see all this, they would turn over in their graves, being ashamed of the crazy things of their careless children.
‘Everything was better before than now’. These were only excuses. When before? During the war? During the hunger? During the devastation? There were always difficulties. Only in the past, there was no such epidemic moral decline. False idols were not worshiped. One could understand a simple truth: if you were with us you were a friend, if you were against us you were an enemy.
Young people perished in the vague era of changes. They could not be brought back to life, and making their children orphans, they unwittingly pushed them to the edge of the abyss too. Raving about some imaginary freedom, they mixed the sacred meaning of the expression with permissiveness and promiscuity. The generation of the seventies, who failed to adapt to the new realities, gone nowhere, crashing into the wall of the nineties. The youth of Klyuevka, who ‘escaped from the swamp of stagnation’, as the USSR was called by the democrats, suddenly discovered that they did not get out but only sunk deeper into hopelessness. It turned out that the surrounding swamp had no end and no edge, and the bloomy bank was only inspired by the phantom, masking the bottomless quagmire. The eyes faded on sad faces. The ability to enjoy life dissipated, leaving a faint trail of children’s dreams. And a black deep longing took its place. There was no work. The timber industry enterprise, once thundering throughout the Soviet Union, was closed and looted. The workers were fired and aimlessly roamed around the streets. Only sellers of denatured alcohol thrived. After a year of life in the fast lane, young healthy men and women turned into swollen weak-willed ‘pests’ with the only purpose to find funds for the next bottle. They took the last thing from the house that had at least some value, including tools and window frames. They did not think how they would spend the winter, how they would dig up a vegetable garden. But ‘hunt’ was worse than captivity. They resigned to many things: poverty, hunger, and, most importantly, daily alcohol consumption.
Having lost themselves, people lost the meaning of life.
Painful and bitter. It was painful to remember the past, and it was bitter to live in the present. The dull present had no place for anything good, for joy, for hope, and all the dreams were buried alive.
The old man looked at the neighbour’s houses with sad eyes and sighed heavily. Once blooming, now the street was a pitiful sight. The paths, leading to the gates, now were overgrown with grass and weeds. The vivid images of their location popped up out of memory. They were wide and narrow, lined with Baikal pebbles or boards. But every visible path sort of implied that it was still there, that somebody was still walking on it, leaving an immutable track every day. Here the owner returned in a joyful state of mind, humming something. He was not walking but flying, not touching the ground. Having forgotten about the current affairs, he was mentally in another dimension. At some holiday. The neighbour invited to the birthday party, and the man got out of the wardrobe the former wedding suit and the lacquered shoes, which he was wearing for all occasions. The prints of black shoes were rare, one could count them on the fingers during the year. But they left a bright clear trace. This was the trace of happiness and joy. Rapidly dissolving seconds of the fleeting happiness in the solid grey mass of ordinariness. Unique, memorable event. It was a pity that it would not last forever. The next day, he would feel sad and would go slowly, rapt in contemplation. Life went on, it did not stop in one place. Everything was on schedule. On weekdays: he was rushing to work early in the morning, and in the evening he was almost running back home to have time to go into the forest to pick mushrooms or berries before dark. On weekends: having put on the waders, he was going fishing, or out with friends to Baikal to have a drink. Sometimes, he was combining these things. In rainy autumn weather, he was kneading mud with kersey boots, in winter – with valenki. Each footwear was marked with the stigma of the weather. And the cleaned carpet – with a broom or a shovel. There were women’s, children’s, and men’s prints. Familiar and strange. If there were a lot of them, it meant that the family was large and hospitable. If there was one type of prints, it meant that the owner was a loner and preferred solitude. But he/she was not always sitting indoors, rarely leaving his/her lair.