“And chance, God is the inventor.” Did you remember, of course, whose line is this? Yes, Pushkin’s. And I remember: Chertanovo, winter, frozen buses, the subway will still be there, one payphone for the entire neighborhood.… The year is 1976. We snuggled down on the couch: my wife, me, my son, he’s seven years old. We’re watching “The Obvious is Unbelievable” on TV. As always, an invisible someone announces:
Oh, how many discoveries we have
wonderful
The spirit of enlightenment is being prepared
And experience, the son of difficult mistakes,
And a genius, a paradoxical friend,
And chance, God is the inventor.
I ask my son:
– Do you know whose poems these are? –
Instantly responds:
– Pushkin!
I’m surprised.:
“How do you know that?”
“I recognized his voice.”
How do you like it? He recognized Pushkin’s voice! But it’s true, Pushkin is unmistakable.
However, it was not that long-ago incident that prompted the plot of this note. And not the one who hundreds of times rushed a goose feather in verse and prose across an endless paper plain and knocked down a word that was inseparable from it, and that word was “chance.” No, not Pushkin, but an astronomer professor, explaining why in an infinitely expanding universe not all galaxies are moving away from Earth (some, on the contrary, are rapidly approaching it): “They have random speeds, their own directions.”
I was hit over the head by random speeds! After all, this is the life of each of us, because chance is the basis of every event, from the first breath to the last. Life has told me so many times: chance, chance, chance. But I was deaf. And stupid!
How did it happen that a Russian woman, Nastya, from the Ryazan village of Medvino, gave birth to me from the Armenian Vartkes, who survived the bloody vicissitudes of history? How did I become a father myself? How did everything that happened in my life turn out? How did you stay alive when you were destined for death many times?
September 21, 1941. Bashkiria, Ufa, where we were evacuated – the terrible war has already destroyed many lives. And I was born! Before that, seven of my mother’s children died in the hospital. My younger brother, who was born in 1946, lived only a month.
1947, summer. When my mother and I got to her village, some woman let us live in a chicken coop. Heat. The boys are running to swim. I’m following them. They throw themselves off a steep cliff into the river. I’m following them. And I’m drowning–I can’t swim. They pulled me out and saved me.
1954, summer. Moscow. Mom sent me to buy bread. The bakery is close, on the other side of Bolshaya Yakimanka, then the government highway from Vnukovo to the Kremlin. I bought bread. I see: from the Avangard cinema (a former church), a black government car is rushing along the axis at terrible speed with its headlights on.… And for some reason I rush to intercept… I woke up: I was lying on the pavement, the women were wailing: “Oh, the boy was killed!” The driver is pale, wipes his forehead with his cap, helps me up.
– Kid, I’ll take you to the hospital now.
– Don’t, Uncle, I live in that house.
Fortunately, there was no dignitary in the car, otherwise the ZIS would have rolled me into a pancake and not noticed. Someone picked up the bread, someone picked up the glasses. I came home, I didn’t say anything to my mom. I couldn’t sit down for a month, it was very painful.
1960, summer. In the mountains of Dagestan. A geological exploration party, I am a senior collector (in other words, a donkey loaded with poods of broken rock samples enclosed in cloth bags with notes on where and when the sample was taken). Suddenly we came across an abandoned suspension road, we are glad: we don’t have to go around, look for a place to cross the gorge and climb the mountain again, explore another route.
Three people got into the booth: newly married geologists and a Chinese graduate student. But I didn’t have enough space. We had a fun ride. They shout: “Wait for the next flight!” And the rusty iron cables of the “cable car” sagged, and the trolley stood in the middle, above the turbulent river at the bottom of the gorge – neither here nor there. There is nowhere to wait for help. It’s a 10-mile walk to our parking lot, where the driver is sunbathing.
I couldn’t think of anything smarter than rescuing the stranded. He grabbed the cable and hung on by his bare hands. I intercept the wire rope and climb up to the cabin.… My hands are covered in blood, but I can stand it: the abyss is below. I still got to the trailer, pushed it off, but I didn’t have the strength to hold on any longer – I fell off. I was lucky: I fell right on the very edge of the waterfall and rolled down it, as if from an ice slide, into a bubbling, furious river. Got out.
Are there enough examples? Okay, the last one. Moscow radio broadcast: “On August 23, 2003, a writer was killed…” That is, me.
It was late in the evening in Chertanov. I was staying at a friend’s cottage, and he gave me a whole backpack full of plums. I walk to the house by an asphalt path. Dark. No one. And someone (I didn’t see him, I didn’t hear him) smashed my head in with a homemade sledgehammer from behind. I was unconscious for two hours. He got up. He began to collect the spilled plums… I reached the iron staircase leading to the entrance and went up. In the entrance, I dialed the intercom code, entered, called the elevator, there was a mirror in the elevator, there was no face in the mirror – a terrible bloody mask. I went out on the 10th floor, pressed the bell, my wife opened the door… I don’t remember further, I fell. Then my wife said, “If I hadn’t been the daughter of a neurophysiologist and hadn’t graduated from medical school myself, I would have died of fright–it’s so creepy.” She called an ambulance, got in it too, and told the emergency room to wake up the neurosurgeon on duty (it was already night). He examined me: “Urgently to the operating room!”
This is not an accident… There’s a volley of cases! The wife did not faint. The ambulance arrived five minutes later. Viktor Ivanovich Rebenko, the most experienced neurosurgeon at the 1st City Hospital, one of the oldest and best in Moscow, turned out to be on duty. He has devoted more than 20 years to neurosurgery. It was his last shift, and he was going on vacation in the morning. I was on vacation at the cottage. I decided to chop some firewood in reserve. And he badly injured his hand with an axe. He didn’t operate anymore. So that operation, at night, was his last.
I woke up in the ward after six days of unconsciousness. I didn’t sleep for three weeks, just lay with my eyes closed. My head is empty, like a broken piggy bank. I don’t remember anything! I can’t even remember a single swear word. No way! And suddenly at night, in front of closed eyes… As a running line of advertising… I see letters of fire: “Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin. And divinity, and inspiration…” I began to cry. My memory is back! Pushkin returned it to me with the words: “Both divinity and inspiration” are perhaps the most important, without which life is impossible.
And the case… What is the case? He’s everything. He, like the universe, is incomprehensible and eternal. You can’t buy a case, you can’t tame it, you can’t lock it in a safe. There’s nothing you can do about him. And there’s nothing you can do without him. He is our everything. Like Pushkin.