One day you will face your past. Curly or straight hair. Green-eyed or brown. With jeans or a skirt. Such an ordinary past, just a little aged. And only you will understand that you love him. This is just the past.
You cared, you respected, you wanted all your other “ex”s, but you just loved “this one”.
Dovlatov (born September 3, 1941, how much water flowed under the bridge, he would have turned eighty-one today – there are people whose old age cannot be imagined: Dovlatov is one of them) has a story. The immigrant hero meets his old love at a dissident symposium in Los Angeles. Dovlatov, as always, is autobiographical: he tells about his real meeting with a real ex, there is no doubt about it.
It will just add an extra “t” to it in the text (as if by adding someone else’s letter to the name we’re going to hide something: no, rather, we’re just going to introduce a comic effect where we don’t want it).
It will add a “T”, but the flicker will not hide. “Suddenly I noticed that my hands were shaking,” writes Dovlatov in the story “Branch”. “And they do not tremble, but tremble. Until the sound of a teaspoon in a glass. Jing-ding.
Earthquake, handshake, body shake – this is how we meet our ex for the first time after a long separation. Moreover, as it should be in an earthquake, the first tremor will pass, while the door has not been opened yet, the curtain on the window did not tremble.
Dalmatov (again in this disguised disguise), another, already feels that something is about to happen. And everything happens. His first love enters through the door of his hotel room. What he still felt as “death” in his youth.
…quite aside. Nina Berberova once wrote in her book “My Italics”: “And now I know that I did not know then: I cannot live with a person all my life, make him the center of the world forever, I cannot. always belong to one person without injuring yourself. I’m not a rock, it’s a river and people are fooling me into thinking it’s a rock. Or is it me who deceives people and pretends I’m a rock when I’m a river?
We ourselves did not know. And Dovlatov did not know. We are the river. But here is the river, Tasya, who met another river in her youth, is sitting in her bed at home and feeling unhappy. (The river’s hair is flowing, the river’s sleeves, its trousers, all its will to the river’s life come forward, but it sits on the riverbed and thinks: I can live in a dam. a lake or pond. Or better, a rock”).
Even at the meeting in Pavlovsk, he realized that everything had changed fatally. There he gets on the bus with Tasya and sees a sleeping woman by the window. Pink and yellow ticket reels hang from his chest. We readers do not immediately understand that this is a conductor: such women with tickets used to get on buses. But the main thing is that Dovlatov saw these chiefs all his Soviet life, but did not understand at first. This technique is called “elimination”. When all the usual objects and details are seen, as in a flickering dream.
Dalmatov is like Adam here. For the first time in his life he saw animals and birds in heaven, and most importantly – apples, apples, not apples, but figs. We remember that the Greeks, Slavic elementary teachers, incorrectly translated for us the name of the forbidden fruit of good and evil from Hebrew: it actually reads “fig”. It is also a kind of anti-alienation to translate an incomprehensible fruit into the language of Central Russian poplars and apple trees.
But now “Dalmatov” and “Tase” are not according to the Slavic script, it does not depend on whether there are apples, they just need to pluck. And they break. “It was the best day of my life. Or rather, the night. We arrived in the city in the morning.
Both Vasily Aksenov and Joseph Brodsky were noted as fans of Asya Pekurovskaya (the prototype, more precisely, the documentary original of the heroine of the story). In 1968 she divorced Sergei Dovlatov, who lived with her for eight years, and then emigrated to America in 1973, taking her daughters with her.
Dovlatov will move to America only on the 78th.
Then they meet there.
Literary critic, prose writer and essayist Andrey Ariev recalled: “When I met her, I thought that the most important thing in life for Serezha was girls. Then I thought it was the drink. And only then did I begin to understand that the main thing for him was literature. He himself recently argued that the main thing for him is family.
But what to do with the river? Are we really a rock, not a river?
They say that Asya (Tasya) broke the life of the writer (hero), because she could not live without him, but she could.
I don’t really believe in lives destroyed by love. Especially in a man. Yes, yes, it hurts, yes, it gnaws, but it hurts, it hurts and it stops, gnaws, gnaws and lets go. Well, it’s not Saturn devouring your children, it’s love for a man, like a dark crazy Goya.
After all, Dovlatov is not a gentleman, either, as someone who knew him noted, is not Grieux, and Asya is not Manon Lescaut.
– Do you want to know who you look like? – Bookstore Tasya, who has an extra letter, told her on their first date. “Without pity for a paralyzed gorilla kept in a zoo.
And when she shyly tried to straighten her hair, she finished: – They do not scratch their heads, but wash them!
And yet.
Extra letter. An extra letter of our foreign name. Why do we need it?
Perhaps to rehearse the undestined? Isn’t it immeasurable to live for a short time? Repeat (at least half an hour) What cannot be repeated?
For this reason. After meeting with her ex, the indecisive Tasya breaks up with Roald Manevich, the author of the manuscript “Me and the Abyss”, who hardly knows him. (This is how we should call our books, we should learn).
“I can’t understand what’s going on. We broke up twenty years ago. We haven’t seen each other in fifteen years. I have a wife and kids. Everything is fine. And suddenly…”
He cannot understand and continues to collect himself: “Taska does not change. It’s still the same – headstrong, silly and immoral like a child.
And this is where everything “works”. The word “kid” pops up. And this oral fig can no longer be replaced by any apple.
So it’s all about that. Here it is, an extra letter, an extra word, an extra life, an extra history.
And right after that – butt: “Here’s my past: a sultry and desperate woman who abused cosmetics.”
And again this word is “helpless”, a kind word that does not fit into the general order.
Everyone we love will be rude, exhausting, already useless, old, stupid, empty, ungrateful, living quietly without us, but forever helpless.
Source: Gazeta
