In this thread I will collect previously published stories and poetry of my talented father, science fiction writer Yuri Nevsky
Time to buy black rings
Do you hear? Do you see? - here again, endless winter bracelets wrapped around the wrists, night rings with frost adorned the fingers, the cross of black roads lay on the chest with a twisted cord of days of blue melancholy. As soon as the grainy dark spruce blinks away the grain, the pines - gypsy needles tucked into the canvas harshness of the sky - begin to breathe stringily, and the earthly wind scatters the running and snoring of its shaggy-legged horses...
I live on the pearl rim of the eyeball of the forest, my soul is tied with silver threads from the Lord’s beard. Upper Berezovka - a narrow knife of the valley in a snow sheath sewn with shiny beads - lay away from me, and there were all the inhabitants: a small handful of lights, the pattern of veins of cold rivers, glass tubes of roads, where our local, respected bus crawls, making its way like a mercury column of heat. And what is there?! Where are Kolyma, Magadan, Chukotka, Kuril Islands? - I’m here, out of reach, and with my arms outstretched, to the jagged edge of the Urals, the cottony snow of the Central Russian strip, churches and plains...
Wolves are not wolves, wild, city dogs sweep their tracks, covering the tonsils of the outskirts of the village with inflammation, interrupting with a vindictive and predatory fang the arteries of late lives, the lace of well-worn paths, the very memory that connects with human impermanence. Fugitive soldiers or prisoners live in dachas empty in the echoes of the July afternoon, warming their hands with homemade “goats,” and the dogs will not touch them, observing professional courtesy; Yes, they are found numb or electrocuted, they die again, they are poisoned, having grabbed the summer supplies of zealous summer residents: raspberry jam and mushrooms.
I live at the Government dacha, heat the stove, and constantly turn on the electricity. The house has been emasculated by the frost - a huge pink ghost, and the stoves are not installed correctly: there are no ancient masters. Just two reference books: “Operation of Heating Systems” and “American Country House” (in English) while away the evenings with dashes of letters. But the bread does not go stale, and the water does not spoil here, there are no alien electromagnetic fields - grace!..
Do you know how to chop firewood? At first, you scratch yourself out into the cold with your sheepskin-and-doh hulk, stupidly baling grinning logs... - and then anger drives up the leisurely swaying of your heart - to hell with the doha! It’s more convenient to layer fidgety yellow-mustard resin in a sweater; the sweater glues the back with a plaster - with the shirt chest, with the whole weight of the percussion mechanism of the body, you dive from the slope behind the silvery fish of the butt, continuing the arc, semicircle, half-year of the finest ringing of the singing steel... Why, one wonders, do I stab the wood in the winter? We know the matter - mismanagement... They brought the truck in the fall, dumped it anywhere, that's all for a short time.
Previously, the Government came to drink vodka, and for other, necessary business - everything was fine, they ruined the bathhouse - whatever the cost! And now the times are different, and it doesn’t seem to suit him. The timber tower is freezing wildly, and I, along with him, pay one and a half times the wages of a stoker and a watchman - not from a good life, of course. By the evening you will convince yourself - what do you care about Papa Carlo! On all fours you crawl into the little room on the second floor where I live, just to fall into the grave of a sheltered sleep... Well, at least you won’t get sick - drafts are blowing with all their might from under the floor of a stupid house, blowing everything out - tomorrow morning again, oh well, that’s how I live...
Everything is big, huge: felt boots, mittens, an ax, a sheepskin coat, the Great Soup, fate, distances, winter - if only I could live until spring, Lord! It happens that you get lost during the day, fall asleep, forget to put some kind of hook on the front door; in the corner the grease on the barrel of a small-caliber vintar, issued to special units on a pledge of the soul, is getting cold: “Ah, the partisans are playing pranks...” Although they are not evil, these men are covered with wild, unwashed hair up to their eyes, in padded jackets burned by the fires, and all with PPSh machine guns (model 1943), rapid-fire MG-4, Berdans.
They get tired of sitting in the woods - they go out onto the Barguzinsky tract, shoot at the wheels of passing cars, slow down taxis, and drain gasoline for their signal lights. They will not touch the passengers, they will give them some kind of cedar cone or a trifle type-set cigarette holder, and they will be sent on their way. They burn unknown signal fires, clear abandoned logging roads suitable for landing a single-engine airplane or glider.
It’s difficult to get to us: the fall before last, their plane crashed into a wedding of crows, a black horde swarming over the forest (it was rumored that it was carrying a load of freely convertible currency from Indochina) - and there was a fire. There was an abusive article about this in the local press, so they gave it to them - on the first day! But I won’t save you from the crows! The airport is closed for weeks due to their air piracy. A lone motorcyclist will be covered in thick, seething darkness - and there is no motorcyclist.
Therefore, if motorcyclists gather in numbers of more than a hundred, then they only go where they need to go; well, they will give way - perhaps to a tank or to the Master of the Highway (one guy, about three years ago, drunkenly crashed into a bus stop, beat up the kids and so on to the people, so his soul rushes everything, and rushes in a shabby green Ural). Even though the “car” goes empty, it will never catch passengers - it’s still scary! A private owner will undertake to give you a lift: take out half a hundred stakes and put them down...
I was once given a lift by two people in a stolen car, drunk to the point of insensibility; one explained to the other on his fingers, using the deaf-mute method, the road and what he saw ahead. In such and such Tmutarakan, and I was not afraid to ask for change (I had a steward with one piece of paper) - they even sobered up a little from such disgusting, however, they scraped together the change. It also happened: a huge timber truck stopped on Strelka, and there were aliens in red flannel shirts! Everything about them is different: different words and gestures, different things and smells, different affairs and problems that do not concern me...
The road of cosmic transformations included a swirl of stars, the iridescence of the folds of the cloak of a streamlined night, cliffs of black trees, blocks of rocky clouds - this is how they disperse timber trucks along the Barguzinsky tract, sending them into zero-transportation. Old trams are stolen, horses are stolen at the hippodrome, they are sold there to space antique dealers or to a museum: prestigious, probably.
Therefore, it is better to get to us in an armored personnel carrier with soldiers, as I had the chance to participate in the everlasting memory of the All-Union Population Census. If you wander into such a wilderness, nothing will happen to you. In the worn teeth of rickety huts, my faithful great-grandmothers leaf through the calendar of the yellowed century; primordial Time sours there in splayed tubs, the primordial Father laughs dimly from black holes woven with the dynamic lines of Kazimir Malevich. The last daggerotype memory of the Royal Family holds together the wretched dilapidation of the blotter walls from the inexorable atomic decay.
Again, not at the second, but at the third old woman, you notice a Japanese refrigerator with software, a portable boiler-autoclave, tucked away in a secluded nook, silent scooters, video cameras, and night vision devices dumped in the hallway. This is probably where the corpses sawed with the Druzhba chainsaw are kept - for witchcraft, divination, and change of appearance.
I now understand suspiciously athletic young people on midnight buses - all of them, as if chosen, with incredible volume of container-like bags, and frequent advertisements in newspapers and on TV about here and there missing young girls and women. But the drifting snow knits the gray sweater of winter, my bulky stoves are heated according to the provisions of the holy scripture “Operation of Heating Systems”, the creaky well gate shakes the iron chain of signs and events, bringing me dissolved fire with icy fragments of stars and reptiles from the very earthly interior.
The starchy, blue, tight nights stand standing still; one can see how frequent silent darning cuts through the unsteady fabric: then the Korean paratroopers, like Christmas tree decorations, descend into the soft chests of the snow valleys on their urgent reconnaissance missions. Forest guards, if unemployed in the winter, shoot at them with revolvers when they happen to be on guard, having buried themselves in advance in the taiga windfall. And so they ride in the bus in the morning with frost-scorched, tired, but happy faces, in clothes that are not of our sturdiness. Yes, they, the poor fellows, have nothing to buy a ticket for yet: they exchange it from passengers for foreign-colored packs of cigarettes, tights, cosmetics, or from children for chewing gum.
My house stands on a hillock, in a hollow between two hills. From above you can see the houses of the village behind the road; many are empty in winter, living only in summer. This area is called Boarding School, because there is a boarding school further down there, beyond the frozen river. Opposite is Marya Ivanovna’s house, where I get the most delicious earthly water from the well. They have a cheerful dog Timka, an extremely fertile cat Moore, an additional shepherd dog, grandfather Arkady and two motorcycles. A family lives opposite, but they are shady people: they make, it seems to me, moonshine, or at least breeding a computer virus - what can I say about them?
And to the left - Princess Olga lives there in a house as fine as a strong moss bag. Princess Olga has two children: one goes to kindergarten, the other goes to school. Princess Olga warms life in the old mother. In the summer she still runs around the yard, doing housework, but in the winter she doesn’t show her nose - it’s hard, you see.
Princess Olga carries nunchucks in her purse: unknown sticks, polished by the warm palms of centuries, connected at the end, like two destinies, with a rawhide vein - the ancient weapon of Tibetan wandering monks. She masters them according to the secret scheme of a half-erased hieroglyph tattoo, and, presumably, to perfection. When we, the sad residents of Verkhnyaya Berezovka, supporting each other, climb onto our favorite bus, I notice an increase in gloomy men, either with a tied jaw, or with a nose slid to one side, or with a frozen dinosaur with a bandaged hand on a lanyard... - I know whose precious hands this is.
Princess Olga ignores the bus; she walks to the city route. I think in this she finds pure joy, while we are all, entangled in biofields, flattening our chests and suffocating from the fumes of yesterday’s delivery of local bottling to the village point.
Princess Olga looks into the blue tea of the strongly brewed sky, barely whitened by the frozen milk of the emerging day from the refrigerator of the night. She goes out naked into the snow - she will be doused with two buckets of scattered silver moonlight! The bucket rides upward in a heavy train, and following the lever movement of the hands, the dark-skinned pebbles of the anatomical atlas of muscles flow over... A moment - the equilibrist vibrates the chilling heaviness of the sky, all the spacious snow, the dissolved sugars of the smiling stars, and now - she ascends, vertically cast in a column of broken folds of a crystal cloak, boiling around the body with a fog of diamonds and splashes!
I see her point blank (at this time I am walking along the path between the fences to the switchboard to turn on the hateful electricity) - she does not notice anything from our world... Oh, Hosanna! Hallelujah! Boginch Kali! - a rocket in the fire of swirling stars and reptiles, the same stick of a nunchuck with the dark polish of centuries!.. Looking ahead on the bow of a Viking yawl, the island watch of Easter, children's drawings of Martians, the mermaid foolishness of Polesie, chronops with nadykas, the poplar faith of the Old Believers... Everything rattles around with the tin of ritually thrown down buckets, while I run, stumbling in the brain and the floors of a sheepskin coat, to the saving stubbornness of the Government Ark.
This happened the first time and then - I got used to strange Internet procedures: I threw a hook on the door, negated the waste of small-caliber weapons, thickly applying the gloss and gloss of the Swiss Gillette lubricant, magnetized the barrel, directed the target gun from people knowledgeable in the depths of the slaughter business, sawed off the tips of the bullets with a poacher’s cross for a hidden explosive action. My eye correctly chose the spherical black circle of the target in the flickering ear sockets of city wolves - forest dogs, who surrounded the borderlands of my possessions with their predatory mark; My rifle carefully baled, creating devilish shadows, tearing the gray foam of the bloody snow.
December and January crept past - all deserters and defectors; the wind-drift and frost-freeze surrounding the Cosmos stoked the dull stoves.
She came running to me darkly, in a fur coat with hare's feet on the monogram of her night shirt - there was no face on her! She needed medicine, a lot of medicine, antipyretics and bandages. I searched through the bottom of the barrel - you never know what the need was in our pitch-black kingdom - I gave away what I had. There was a tongue-tied movement in their house, carrying a vague smell of anxiety.
Another day I was in the city, bought some pharmaceutical drugs, remembering the darkness of the night. In the evening he knocked on the gate of their house, kicked away the mongrel that had rolled away, and walked into the hallway (the wet sigh of a nearby horse appeared, the frozen clatter of horseshoes stepping over, some ineradicable spirit of a soldier's station).
There is no one in the upper room, the mighty food floats like smoke on the jaundiced skeletal table: a stack of pies under the heartiness of an embroidered towel, cast iron with cabbage soup, probably frozen cabbage with drops of crimson lingonberries and green scouts of crunchy cucumbers in a wooden dotted boat... Why such an attack?
He hesitantly called the owners into the darkness of the windows and corners showered with suspicion, put him aside and stepped behind the Chinese screen with quietly smiling peacocks - there was a small room, there I saw him: he seemed to be sleeping, opening with a crazy suffering sign, shot all over and across, with a heavy rail attached to his bandaged hand.
Another brush, blued and flexible, was fiddling with the African hairiness that covered the sealed Mauser envelope. OH, IS IT YOU, VLADIMIR OSKAROVICH?! - the winter killer of Eastern Siberia, my old acquaintance from Vereisky’s illustrations to “Quiet Don”, Ioganson’s painting “Interrogation of Communists” that have sunk since childhood...
How can I not remember the bestial cardiogram of these hands on the oscilloscope tip of a cavalry pike, which outlined the thin tree of my spine? Me, driven by a wolf in the year one thousand nine hundred and eighteen, covered in blood and mortally fermented wine, an idiotically jumping overcoat in the middle of the shaggy fields of all the civil wars?..
I immediately recognized everything, remembering: the silver of a Cossack saddle with a worn-out seat, braided spurs on gloved-crumpled boots, a banana string of grenades, a crossroads of cartridge railways, a lunar stripe of a saber with a twisted banner lanyard and, of course, a sneaky uniform with crosses and stripes - now tiredly crucified on plastic hangers...
And his head is squeezed between the kneecaps of the stereo headphones; a snake of wire runs and gets tangled in the glass threads of the beard to the bicycle reels of the tape recorder. The face - the copper mask of Buddha - is pierced by blue electric discharges from the eyes: he sees me, he distorts the rusty tin of sepulchral words, crushes the heavy Mauser pear! Headphones are cracking, sliding off the torn head, and all over Africa, bedspreads are rolling out on the larch floor blocks, “...God Save the Tsar.”
I am breaking out of the vile stealth, I am tearing apart the blue web of dreams and doubts - Princess Olga disappears into the distance, entering with some kind of bucket, all blue from the frost. But he nailed a handful of medicine on the yellowish tabletop with Cain’s seal, broke through all the thickets of doors and, wrapping a stuffy scarf of darkness and snowstorm around his throat, went, yes! - went to his mortal vale of electricity and alarms. And the wind, with an iron comb, scratched out for me the tears of civil wars, unshedded because of that accursed death...
OK! I will dilute dry alcohol, rip open tins of Finnish canned pancakes, and pick at the fragrant frozenness of briquettes of black caviar from the Government cellars with a bayonet knife! I will heat the bathhouse - a golden core - I will call all the pilgrims, pilgrims, pioneer counselors, mass entertainers, witches... Let the night rise with blue fires of their skirts, ties, running bags - crumble, my sadness, with the clicking of their heels, sneakers, hooves!
I’ll run to a dance at the “Teacher” rest house, hand over the screw cutter and cap to the wardrobe, take a trophy accordion from a crippled veteran of the Afghan war - I’ll break off Ice Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven...” to everyone’s surprise - they’ll dance with me! Shugan the partisans from the Barguzinsky tract, I will drive them into wild valleys; I will put up barriers to alien tyranny on the roads; I’ll shoot insulators on power lines - I’ll rid the residents of their sadness from their favorite program “Italian language, 14th year of study”; I’ll conduct a public raid on the buses - I’ll throw out all the free-rider saboteurs: don’t wander around anywhere!..
I will open the endless bracelets of winter, I will drown the night rings with frost in the earthen interior of the Maryivanovsky well, I will break the twisted cord of days of blue melancholy with the cross of black roads and the inescapability of the eternal Circle: farewell, farewell, Heating Season! I will settle accounts with you, Princess Winter! Do I feel sorry for your children: December and January, your old mother Autumn? I’ll point the magnetized barrel into the transom of a slightly open window from the second floor of the lighthouse...
With the adoration of the Magi in the Snowfall - here are your buckets of heavy ionic water, here are the fawn scenery of the dawn... So my iron soldier of the fly walked along the valleys of her legs and the rocky steep slopes of her knees, spacious thighs like the spring song of a herdsman, the secret curlyness of a secluded hemp wedge to the sloping darkness of her belly, to the hollow of a partisan airfield between two pointed-topped figurative Fujis, where a silver, single-engine cross-… ka airplane takes off…
O woman! You are my Upper Berezovka! From Strelka’s fingertips to the armpits of the Kulakovsky dachas and the Salyut pioneer camp, I love you and I see, up close and telescopically, all the light feathery hairs, the volcanic pimples of chilly skin - let everything be eclipsed by the diamond rainfall! I understood the symmetrically traversed path, here it is - the LINE, here it is - WINTER’S GOLDEN SECTION, THE WORLD SIGN OF YIN-YANG: yes and no, even and odd, ice and fire, “M” and “F”, heavenly and earthly...
So the whole world froze on the weight of my finger, maintaining the elastic explosiveness of the sprinter of the trigger mechanism, and I thought: here is a moment equal to Eternity, a second of centuries, a sigh of a life lived - let the dogs bark, and the buses leave without a schedule, and at the stops all the inhabitants of sadness, fugitive Martians, otherworldly convicts, cheerful old women navigating the area and gloomy ski tourists-sorcerers...
May the tea with raspberry jam not get cold in September, may the mushrooms and other pickles not go sour during the Epiphany rose-ringing, may the warm houses and dances in the House of Recreation and Culture, the trophy accordion and cute mass entertainments not go out. Let December give way to January, followed by February and March in the end... - I'll go! I’ll go sift through the stale coal, chop intolerable logs, because mismanagement is a known fact, I’ll heat the stupid, useless stoves in the house. Otherwise, a small hole will appear in the Universe, and everything that is unique, unfortunate, evil, mine will flow into it, as if drawn in...
The ominous stereo ruler of glass Siberia will gallop there on an apocalyptic coffin in the violators of two horses: even and odd, whooping and squealing with the whip of twisted destinies in his newly repaired hand; Princess Olga, silently waving her ancient nunchucks, will walk to the final route of the underground bus; old woman Autumn will sneak around in a scuba mask, smeared with iodine, on a silent video bicycle for night riding, with a chainsaw of “Friendship” software under her arm; two orphan children, December and January, scurry around in snow-white YAMAHA padded jackets, taken from electrocuted fugitive soldiers celebrating their eternal day of the Roman holiday.
And so it was: he galloped past, covered in the glow of world revolutions and the scraps of trampled battalions, and jumped out of the snuffbox of Olga’s house. I was dragging my master’s net with kefir through the snows of my biofield, and he was jumping around like a slate horse, rattling bridles, hooves, lezginkas, teeth, hats, crosses and sabers, firing from all Mausers into the light of day, like a pretty penny.
- Hey, you! — I took him on his black-winged run. - Finish this almshouse, come today - we’ll heat the bathhouse, we’ll have to carry water, it’s easier to chop wood together... - La-dy-y!
He definitely came in the evening: half-drunk, cheerful - angry. I wanted to chop up Mitka the cat, but I gave up. I scattered fur coats, grenades, hats everywhere, piled up a pile of firewood, breaking two of my “not grippy” axes, interspersing my military-sexual folklore with quotes from Vl. Solovyova. We harnessed the horse into a sled and quickly filled all the containers with water from the harsh earthen well of Marivanna. The bathhouse hummed like the Wind Rose, steam wandered and stumbled through the relict groves of our heads.
I scraped it with a circular saw from a horse-scraper, captured from the First Cavalry, lathering up the golden sand of the naturally tanned skin. I galloped across it with battalions of green brooms and all the reserve regiments of scalded boots. But he, remembering all the saints and apostles, strangled me with the iron of the hands of the Black Hundred. And only once (I was waiting for this) his heart beat unevenly, touching with an animal memory the hardened purple of the oblique tear that had opened my back like a meteorite.
- Who did this to you... sandals him? - he asked thickly, remembering. “Yes... it was,” I answered, and said nothing, smoking flatly, like freshly laid asphalt.
We both remained gratefully silent about the shaggy fields of all civil wars and, perhaps, star wars. We sat at the very edge of Russia's grain table, eating a small boarding school ration that was just given to us. The hangover of the pure night was pouring in like a cosmic revelation, forest patrolmen were still shooting in the distance, and someone’s paratroopers were squealing faintly.
I diluted some dry alcohol and taught him to eat mechanical pancakes from Finnish cans; he put in a quarter of the moonshine and, having poured it all into 76 faceted stopars, poured them one by one - I passed them through once. Olga sat down next to her, looking sad and joyful like a woman. Intertwined with the sleeves of pink embroidered shirts and the wild uncut forelocks, like Heroes of the special maneuverability of troops, we sang the original Cossack songs.
Princess Winter covered us, crumpled and worried, with the Iron Age, a bearish cavity of simple accomplishments, and she went off to measure the distances to the droopy and shaggy human hearts with a sliding tape measure.
In this thread I will collect previously published stories and poetry of my talented father, science fiction writer Yuri Nevsky
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