A twenty-seven-year-old woman is sleeping and dreaming.
Heaven Office. In a dream, of course, she does not understand this, but for a woman it is clear that this is something heavenly and religious: either high buildings or huge shelves, all borders and edges are drowned in fog; red marked sections (such as giant cells) – too high from the ground; there are no doors anywhere and the cells are completely transparent.
There are no ceilings either.
Everything just flows into the sky. To the sides. As if dissolving in transparent air.
…and no asphodelia, no violets…
“Departments were set up, but according to a logic I don’t know,” he later said, “not in the way we use to combine things by our usual standards. Their membership or commonalities. For example, technology, music, books, ponds. No, it was different there.”
For example, somewhere – in the text, in life, in love – there is a red color, and this is where everything gathers “red”.
“I was looking for something there and I still couldn’t figure out which section I should go to, what logic I should follow. It may be in one of the departments I need, but in which?
All this was further complicated by the fact that the names on the signs were often impossible to read: a mixture of Chinese, Latin and some kind of nonsense – the language of computer programmers.
“In one of these episodes (and I walked in like a honeycomb asking the same thing) they told me they had a thing for me and gave me a letter my mother had written years ago when I was a baby. . And now, apparently, it was time to read.
And for some reason they also gave him a box. Square, low, three centimeters high. Blue, with a kind of white circle or just a flowing pattern of white.
And there was something in the box, metal. And the woman realized that the box was not hers. She even knows who she is.
And now she brings all that goodness into her room, or rather a room with one big window (as if everyone in there – in heaven or elsewhere – had their own room with a big window, and if you’re lucky, then someone’s window – one of your good friends will be across and somehow in the palm of your hand. will be able to shake it inside), puts the box on the table, clearly visible from the opposite window, and I am in the room opposite building.
He is ashamed and says:
“I have to give you something. yours. It’s from your childhood, not mine.
And I, in a very miserable voice – from the opposite window:
– Sweet. And I’m still waiting for when that will happen because this thing is exactly me.
… I still wonder what’s in that box.
Maybe a key? And why did I fight so much because of him?
However, the keys are different, strange.
What did Repin’s son Yuri want to say with his incomprehensible behavior? While her father was already in the land of asphodelia and misty violets.
When everyone gathered at the artist’s coffin and the priest began the funeral, Yuri was not at home.
His sister asked the priest to wait and explained that his brother had gone hunting early in the morning and could return at any time. And he’s back.
He tied the two rabbits he had killed with his ears and hind legs, making it look like a wreath, and holding it in his hand, he went to his father’s coffin and tried to put this wreath inside the coffin.
The priest was enraged, he was definitely ordered to remove this disgrace.
Then the artist’s son said that he would put them in the grave.
But the priest said aloud: “I will not allow carrion to be placed on the holy tomb.”
Just Cain and Abel. The exact opposite. According to the priest, those brought from their “oil” were objectionable. And the flowers in the coffin are appropriate, and by the way. It goes without saying that both Repin’s daughter and son were very upset by this rejection. Later they said that the priest, because of his darkness, did not understand the meaning of the last gift from the son to the father.
… A black mad soul, not a dark madman, who loves the soul of a brother… Fields of Asphodelia, fearless meadows and wild violets…
Repin’s son Yuri He would commit suicide in Finland after World War II.
These are difficult times – all the time one of your old friends is trying to put in the “coffin” of your friendship a wreath of bunny ears and daisies trembling with weight. But all this will pass sooner or later. (I don’t have time to take a bath without looking, and I don’t want to understand that either.)
All will pass. But we will not forget anything.
As Chukovskaya angrily wrote in her Notes on Anna Akhmatova:
“During this work, Blumikha entered, who was not the least ashamed of our profession. [они переписывают «Поэму без героя»]said that the day before yesterday Zheleznova called him stupid, yesterday garbage, this morning a bastard, and this afternoon he called to care for a sick child.
So it will be with us.
Everything will pass: shootings, deaths, fire. But we will not forget that yesterday someone called us a synonym for garbage, bastard in the morning, condom in the afternoon, and today suddenly we will be called to care for a sick child.
We can’t go.
We have a dark but bad good memory. The key rattles in our box.
We remember what they did to us. What you said about us. What our old friends wrote about us today. There will be no forgiveness.
Valery Bryusov once – in his collapsing attack of self-disclosure – said:
“…I said that my brother was about to die, that he was sick; dying slowly in bed, blind and insane. My heart clenched in pity for him. But I was logically convinced that pity, like all sentimentality, was stupidity. I resolutely overcame this feeling inside of me … they had occasional spasms and then they rubbed their hands and feet. I joined this friction one evening with his former nurse, his nurse. He rubbed his legs, I rubbed my hands. But instead of rubbing, I tried in every possible way to press, to twist his hands, to cause him great pain. He struggled, groaned more, but I persisted.”
We are no longer dead brothers. We will not forget anything.