Бесплатный фрагмент - A bottle with a secret

Sergei. The first chapter

That summer was unsettling, bleak, but very beautiful. I stayed at my grandmother’s dacha, and occasionally, in order to have at least some communication, we went out into nature with our neighbors. Our dachas were located not far from each other, but we saw each other infrequently. A middle-aged neighbor named Clara invited my grandmother to a picnic, and I came with her. There were five of us in total, because she brought her other two nieces, Tara and Rita. Rita and I didn’t have much contact, she wasn’t interested in us, but we almost became friends with Tara. Almost, because what kind of friendship can there be under the strict supervision of adults?

We drank lemonade that summer. Klara and the girls made it themselves, it looked like slightly fermented kvass, but it was easy to drink, toned.

I still remember that wild August: a sea of flowers spread out like a blanket, we sit and look at sandwiches, try to talk. My grandmother and Klara do it easily, they discuss onions and potatoes, who has what tomatoes, apricots and cherries, flowers this year, and we didn’t have much to talk about. Teenagers are a gentle, timid people. So, in order not to sit completely idle, I took the already drunk, empty bottle of lemonade and said to Tara: «Let’s go make"secrets». Now I’ll make a «secret», we’ll bury the bottle, and then we’ll see in ten years who wrote what! It will come true or not.“ Always despondent, sad, and tortured by her aunt’s moralizing, Tara seemed to come to life: „Yes, come on!“ she exclaimed. She didn’t understand what „secrets“ were, but I explained that we should write wish notes and then see what happens in ten years. I also added that her thoughts were material enough to get her fully involved in my game. I pulled out my travel notebook, tore out a couple of pages, and gave one to her, keeping the other for myself. „Just don’t peek! I said. «Write!»

She nodded. I don’t know what she wrote there, but she thought for a long time — sometimes she turned to look at me, but it was as if she was looking right through me, then she lowered her eyes again, thought, and wrote again. Finally, she finished, rolled up the paper, came over to me, and carefully put it in the bottle.

— But only exactly, so that in ten years and not a year earlier! — No, «she said firmly. «Well, let me see,» she said, smiling. «Geez, in ten years I’ll be old, almost twenty-five.

— yes! I exclaimed. — I’m almost the same age.»

We both remembered the three-month age difference, in fact I was older, but we looked as if she was several lifetimes ahead of me, she already had such a thoughtful, piercing look. I was pleased that she enjoyed this adventure. For the first time in a long time, I saw her smile from the bottom of her heart. We buried our bottle of notes under a lonely tree and, as it turned out, passed the time very well, because they were already looking for us. I could hear my grandmother’s voice calling for Tara and me. They seemed to have lost us, talking about something of their own, for a while forgot about our existence, while we were planning the future in our dreams.

In general, memory is a strange thing. It seems that nothing special happened, and there were events in my life that were much brighter, more powerful and significant than this, but this picture stood and stood before my inner eye: a tree, a bottle with notes, and we bury it deep and for a long time.

***

Twenty years have passed. My grandmother died that year, my mother and stepfather sold their dacha and breathed a sigh of peace. They never liked her, then split up the money and went their separate ways. I got married twice, then divorced, then lived with a woman named Linda. A good woman, but she was a gamer, not from this world, she preferred virtual communication to everything. It was somehow difficult to catch her in reality. So the question of whether there was a woman was always up in the air. I think we broke up long before we broke up, physically separated from her. I don’t know if she was suffering, but I was suffering all the time. True, not because of her, but just like that, apparently, this need to suffer has been sitting in me for a long time and forever. The shortness of time, which is difficult to describe, greatly upset me. And then there’s my worthlessness, my mental distress, and my eternal, never-ending fear of the future. Fortunately, everything was fine with my career, but this external well-being made my fear of the future even greater, as if it fed it.

Of course, I forgot about that bottle of notes, and I didn’t think about it until the summer of twenty years later, when I was depressed. You could say that she had me covered from scratch, because I didn’t have any obvious reasons for her. But there was a devilish play on words in this very formulation — in an empty place — because I mercilessly felt the emptiness of life, as if this life did not exist at all, and everything that was — was as if not with me.

***

I was quite good-looking, as they say, in the prime of life. I had no problem meeting the woman — they called me themselves. But something imperceptible crept up and enslaved my peace of mind, as if I began to bury myself more and more. I was more and more drawn to look into the dark forest of my past, and I couldn’t help thinking that I had lived wrongly. And because of this, I woke up in a cold sweat. My friends and I often went out to ride motorcycles, and they called me, but I didn’t want to talk at all. On another camping trip, I thought of Tara, but only because the guys and I were sitting under a tree, and the wife of one of our comrades was with us. She suddenly said: «And we buried „secrets“ in the sand, and then opened them, that was a joy!» And then I remembered the bottle with the secret.

She said it so easily, so directly, that I couldn’t help but remember that last summer at my grandmother’s dacha. I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Funny, I wanted to understand more about what Tara had written, even though I couldn’t remember what I’d written or if I’d ever written it. At night, when I closed my eyes and sleep gradually took hold of my sanity, I would dream of this bottle being thrown into the loose, black soil under the tree. Although I clearly understood that I would probably never find this tree. And all this is nonsense. But I didn’t have the energy to work anymore. I gathered my last strength and took a vacation — I left earlier than I was going to. Two months earlier, it just became unbearable.

Probably, someone else in my place would certainly попhave taken theback road of fate in search of a skilled psychiatrist, but I got into social networks and started looking for Tara. How do you find her?» What is it like now? I couldn’t even remember her last name. The only thing I remembered was that she was 35, because she was three months younger than me. The lack of information was compensated only by the determination to find it, for some reason it became so important. The image of that blooming, anxious summer kept coming back to me, as if an invisible conductor of fate had waved his wand so that everything around me would pick up an anxious note and freeze on it.

***

I looked through dozens of accounts with roughly the same date of birth, but it was almost impossible to find it that way. There are many women who were born on the first of March 35 years ago with the name Tara. And how would I know her if I hadn’t seen her in twenty years? I wasn’t sure if that was her full name at all, because it was quite possible that her name was Tamara or Tamila, and Tara was just a shortened name. I sighed. My grandmother was the mother of my stepfather, whom my mother had separated from almost 20 years ago. It seemed to me that I needed to find my stepfather, if he was still alive, and then find out from him who his mother was friends with at the dacha. But that didn’t hold water either, because I hadn’t seen him since my divorce from my mother. It was a stalemate, but she wouldn’t let me go.

I started looking for a list of mental disorders where the entire focus of attention converges in the past, and at its not most significant point. Well, there are people with schizophrenia who may be desperately preoccupied with the same question, which sometimes has no answer. For example, why is the Earth round? I was also interested in the question of what we wrote in those notes under the tree.

***

«How do I find her? I kept telling myself. «How do I find her?» — the question tormented me. Then I decided to go to this dacha. It was a rather strange idea, considering that I didn’t have any friends or relatives there. My imagination, fueled by my fears, painted a wild picture: here I was, knocking on the door of a neighbor’s house. «Hello,» I say, «you probably don’t remember me, but I need Tara, she once lived here, about twenty years ago, although I don’t remember what she looks like… And, frankly, I’m not sure that this is the same house…

The neighbors look at me carefully, then ask me to wait at the door, and then the police come for an unexpected guest. By the way, such a plot is quite justified if I decided to go the direct way, but there were still detours, and it was possible to go through vegetable gardens. So I decided to take a chance, it was still worth a try. I packed my bags, bought a train ticket, then turned it in, gave up on the case, and decided to drive my own car at the last moment.

Suddenly, just before leaving, I got a call from my ex, the same gamer Linda, who didn’t give a damn about reality and pointedly didn’t notice it, but the fact that we broke up still didn’t escape her sharp eye. She said she wanted to come to my place to pick up her things. An old trick that worked. At first, the woman says that she wants to come for things, and then comes and stays forever. I didn’t say anything. Let him take it. She wasn’t as important to me as this twisted memory of the past. I had lived with this man for almost two years, and now it was as if she had never been in my life. But I still hoped that she would stop me from going on this trip that I both wanted and dreaded.

***

When she arrived, I pretended to be busy, so as not to fall prey to her fierce charms. She was circling me like a shark, and all I could see was her fin. You’d probably be gone by now, dear, I thought, and then she leaned into me and put her arm around my shoulders. «Remember how good we used to be together,» she said, and her black pupils met mine. I don’t know how it happened, but when we woke up in the same bed the next morning, I couldn’t help thinking that I’d made another mistake. So I hurried away, hoping that she would understand that you can’t go into the same water twice. I wanted her to understand, but I wanted to step into the same water, only twenty years ago.

A person often makes an even bigger mistake when it seems to him that it can’t get any worse. Fate will show you what it can do. I felt like I was burying myself deeper into this «nothing happens» routine. So I ran, not knowing where I was going, and this «secret», like a small beacon flickering from the ground, was almost a salvation.

***

The seven-hour journey didn’t go away without a trace, and I stopped to take a leak a couple of times and went to the cafe to buy something to chew on, but I didn’t really feel like eating. The paper bag of hamburgers still lay untouched in the backseat, where I’d thrown it. I finally reached the city. It was strange, but I remembered these places well, so I could understand how much двадцать летeverything had changed in twenty years. Well-developed infrastructure, the thought flashed through my mind, and I grimaced in disgust. Too much was built up, at first glance it was difficult to distinguish even from the usual area of Moscow, although I used to like their small houses, tiny cafes. We didn’t live in this town for very long, but the dacha village was adjacent to it and was special. Now it has almost merged with the city, has become the same «advanced».

I set up the navigator and went to the dacha, which by that time was no longer there. The only question in my mind was whether I could find that clearing, that tree. I didn’t drive very long, only about thirty minutes, and yes, I saw the clearing where we were going to sit with my grandmother. It was almost the same, almost as it used to be, only the trees were bigger and bigger. Visual memory didn’t give out the exact location. And now in May, everything looked a little different than in that August. I was glad the place hadn’t been built up yet. After walking in circles and getting some fresh air, I stopped and raised my head to the sky. I exhaled: clouds were passing in the sky, and how good I felt! I don’t remember when I felt so good. However, I wasn’t happy for long. It was getting dark, and I had nowhere to spend the night.

I turned around because I felt like I was being watched. And so it was. Some strange grandmother came out of the house to see who had arrived. I could see her in the distance. I got in the car and decided to drive past our old country house, but the house was already gone. In its place was a large two-story house, and that was a shame. I hadn’t been here very often, but I still remembered my grandmother’s warm welcome, and she was always happy to see me. Or at least she pretended to be happy. But I tried very hard to be accepted here. Since childhood, I had a fear that I was very much in the way. I prevent my mother from building a career, and my father from leaving the family. So I tried to behave as well as possible, and my grandmother appreciated that.

«I lived with you because of the child!» -I remember the curse thrown at my father’s back when he left the family in an unknown direction. To be honest, I didn’t even remember him after that, there were no catchy memories, he didn’t shine. He was neutral, and I rarely saw him. It was the invisible father. «A thing in itself». My mother said he drank, but I don’t remember him drunk, I don’t remember him very well at all. I was six when they divorced. My mother must have felt a sense of liberation. Now it is fashionable to gather in a circle around the child and say that we still love you, despite the divorce, and there will be twice as many gifts. But then, almost thirty years ago, such tenderness was not bothered. Fortunately.