– When one remembers the past, one begins to tremble. All this was so disgusting, – the old man signed bitterly, – low and meanly. We defeated the Nazis, won a victory over the hunger, rebuilt the cities. Over time, we began to feel that life was getting back to normal. And it turned out that there was some internal enemy in the country, hiding and waiting for the right time to destroy everything. And the consequences of his attack were even more catastrophic than those caused by all the previous wars together. What for did our fathers and grandfathers die during the Great Patriotic War, clearing the land from the ‘brown evil spirits’? Well, certainly, it was not for the fact that their children would die from counterfeit vodka, gangster and police lawlessness, bureaucratic indifference. It was unlikely for the descendants to put up their medals for sale, to glorify traitors and executioners, to consider true heroes to be the occupants, destroying their monuments with the frenzied hatred. Despising the Soviet symbols, they would raise their hands in a Nazi salute, tattooing the bodies with the Nazi symbols and the swastika. What made them betray the memory of their fathers and follow the doctrines of the Nazi ideology? Most young men were not the descendants of the traitors but the usual Russian teenagers. Many families preserved the photographs of smiling soldiers and officers, together with the tearful death notices. And the great-grandfather died not from old age but from the bullets of the Nazis. Those, whom they fanatically imitated these days, killed him.

If the ancestors were able to see all this, they would turn over in their graves, being ashamed of the crazy things of their careless children.

‘Everything was better before than now’. These were only excuses. When before? During the war? During the hunger? During the devastation? There were always difficulties. Only in the past, there was no such epidemic moral decline. False idols were not worshiped. One could understand a simple truth: if you were with us you were a friend, if you were against us you were an enemy.

Young people perished in the vague era of changes. They could not be brought back to life, and making their children orphans, they unwittingly pushed them to the edge of the abyss too. Raving about some imaginary freedom, they mixed the sacred meaning of the expression with permissiveness and promiscuity. The generation of the seventies, who failed to adapt to the new realities, gone nowhere, crashing into the wall of the nineties. The youth of Klyuevka, who ‘escaped from the swamp of stagnation’, as the USSR was called by the democrats, suddenly discovered that they did not get out but only sunk deeper into hopelessness. It turned out that the surrounding swamp had no end and no edge, and the bloomy bank was only inspired by the phantom, masking the bottomless quagmire. The eyes faded on sad faces. The ability to enjoy life dissipated, leaving a faint trail of children’s dreams. And a black deep longing took its place. There was no work. The timber industry enterprise, once thundering throughout the Soviet Union, was closed and looted. The workers were fired and aimlessly roamed around the streets. Only sellers of denatured alcohol thrived. After a year of life in the fast lane, young healthy men and women turned into swollen weak-willed ‘pests’ with the only purpose to find funds for the next bottle. They took the last thing from the house that had at least some value, including tools and window frames. They did not think how they would spend the winter, how they would dig up a vegetable garden. But ‘hunt’ was worse than captivity. They resigned to many things: poverty, hunger, and, most importantly, daily alcohol consumption.

Having lost themselves, people lost the meaning of life.

Painful and bitter. It was painful to remember the past, and it was bitter to live in the present. The dull present had no place for anything good, for joy, for hope, and all the dreams were buried alive.

The old man looked at the neighbour’s houses with sad eyes and sighed heavily. Once blooming, now the street was a pitiful sight. The paths, leading to the gates, now were overgrown with grass and weeds. The vivid images of their location popped up out of memory. They were wide and narrow, lined with Baikal pebbles or boards. But every visible path sort of implied that it was still there, that somebody was still walking on it, leaving an immutable track every day. Here the owner returned in a joyful state of mind, humming something. He was not walking but flying, not touching the ground. Having forgotten about the current affairs, he was mentally in another dimension. At some holiday. The neighbour invited to the birthday party, and the man got out of the wardrobe the former wedding suit and the lacquered shoes, which he was wearing for all occasions. The prints of black shoes were rare, one could count them on the fingers during the year. But they left a bright clear trace. This was the trace of happiness and joy. Rapidly dissolving seconds of the fleeting happiness in the solid grey mass of ordinariness. Unique, memorable event. It was a pity that it would not last forever. The next day, he would feel sad and would go slowly, rapt in contemplation. Life went on, it did not stop in one place. Everything was on schedule. On weekdays: he was rushing to work early in the morning, and in the evening he was almost running back home to have time to go into the forest to pick mushrooms or berries before dark. On weekends: having put on the waders, he was going fishing, or out with friends to Baikal to have a drink. Sometimes, he was combining these things. In rainy autumn weather, he was kneading mud with kersey boots, in winter – with valenki. Each footwear was marked with the stigma of the weather. And the cleaned carpet – with a broom or a shovel. There were women’s, children’s, and men’s prints. Familiar and strange. If there were a lot of them, it meant that the family was large and hospitable. If there was one type of prints, it meant that the owner was a loner and preferred solitude. But he/she was not always sitting indoors, rarely leaving his/her lair.

Who needed now these disembodied ghosts of people lost in time? Was there anyone interested in their life philosophy, the way of life, the role in society, political correctness? What would they teach others? And did they leave an indelible mark in history that would be an example for the next generations? Or did they come and leave traces by simply bringing dirt and dust, making a thorough general cleaning necessary? After this cleaning, there would be no mention of their existence. There would be only a pit dug in haste, the farewell words spoken in a hurry, and a nameless grave. No fence. No monument. In a year, the ground would collapse, the wooden cross would fall down, grass would grow on the ploughed ground, and nothing would remind of the human burial.

– Vanity of vanities, – the old man shook off the ashes and took a deep puff again. – Everybody is rushing somewhere, making enthusiastically grandiose plans for the future. But when one looks back, it turns out that there is nowhere to rush. Regardless the efforts to reach the horizon, they still did not come any closer. All our ‘achieved’ goals – only the visibility of success, nothing more than the usual rat race.

Having leaned on the fence exhaustingly, he wearily covered his watery eyes and turned back to his memories. So many years passed, and he clearly remembered the events of the past years in details, like it was yesterday. He remembered sitting on the bench and using the new TV set with Semyon and Varya. He remembered celebrating the wedding of the neighbour’s son, and a year later – of his daughter. And now, the family house, after their death, was put up for sale by their children. But time was running, and the new owners were not coming. The announcement on the plywood burned out, the paint cracked, the phone number could not be disassembled, only from the close distance. But it was still hanging lonely on the wall, hopefully watching the rare passers-by go, often weeping out of despair and loneliness together with the rain. It was consumed by resentment at the people, who grew up in this house, but did not pay a visit for several years.

– The time is merciless, – the old man uttered aloud and opened his eyes, – both to people and the houses. No matter how many times you were fixing the house, it would not become new. And the same thing happens to people. Despite attempts to fix their health and beauty, they do not become any younger. And nobody needs this lopsided peasant house, without windows and doors, with cracks, thick as a finger, between the logs, and with a slate roof reminiscent of a large sieve. It will not save from the rain and will not shield from the wind. The tottering barn, which is standing next, with black, due to the mold, boards, would be useful only for the firewood. The lopsided fence, reminiscent of a gap-toothed mouth of a toothless old man, was still retaining the faded and cracked colours of the old paint in some places. And it turns out that only a plot has a price, and the rest is just a free addition. And they write in the advertisement ‘house for sale’, which will be cheaper to be demolished than to be repaired. And around… Visible peace, resembling the atmosphere of the cemetery. Tranquillity of the soul, in which vanity receded into the background. In reality – lifeless desolation. The real burial ground of civilization. Withered grass up to the waist. Lopsided benches. And the road asphalt, creeping away into the distance like an atrophied snake, mangled up with potholes and pits, survived after the massive bombing as if by chance. Having escaped from the hustle and bustle of the city, one could not enjoy peace and solitude. The apocalyptic view of the village was only adding more depression and despondency.

The gate abruptly hit the fence, caught unexpectedly by a gust of the wind, twisted, and sank heavily, resting its lower corner on the ground. The old man sighed heavily and shook his head helplessly. He would have fixed it, ‘God damn it’. Thank God, he was still able to hold a hammer and would not hit past the nail. But it was not about his hands. He needed construction material. He needed to get new hinges and, most importantly, to replace the columns, which eventually had turned into dust. But buying the necessary things was an acute problem. He did not have enough available funds. Living on a pension, he could not afford himself much. He had to choose: ‘to leave things as they were’ but to eat well, or to buy lumber but to stay hungry. At his age, the choice was obvious. He smiled, but the smile turned to be sad. During the war, when he was a child, he went through the hunger, and today he did not want to experience that feeling again. A pensioner – a person living in poverty. Certainly, if you were not a deputy or an underground millionaire. Pension is a wake-up call for a ‘citizen’ that his/her time went out, the state ‘expelled’ him/her to the well-deserved rest. In plain language, the state got rid of the citizen, throwing him/her to the backyards of the society, having solemnly paid the last ‘well-deserved monthly payment’ in the amount of the minimum subsistence level. And the person could live at his/her leisure. But the leisure could fit in the amount of some coins, less than a rouble. Overseas, pensioners enjoyed life, travelled, rested by the seas, and here people were only fighting for their lives, surviving on bread and water. But he did not complain about his fate. It was somewhat tragic but happy. That was a shame that the state rated so low his long-term work and health ruined for the prosperity of the country. Today, paradoxically, he was ‘not exactly a beggar’. ‘Not exactly’ because he had a house and a loaf of bread, so he should be proud of his poverty. And the loud statements of politicians that the pension increased by three per cent were very annoying. It was enough to make a cat laugh. Well, they added three kopecks to three rubbles, but that did not make life easier. One needed to save many kopecks to a full rouble. For years. And the products cost over a hundred. So, one kopeck was the most useless thing at the present time. Yes, he was retired. For a long time. Since the forestry stopped its work. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was replaced by the CIS, but it did not function for a long time. Nobody wanted to share the stolen property, and it was better to be a king of one’s own state than a noble vassal of a wealthy lord. So, Russia remained in bitter loneliness, presenting a tempting ‘sweet cake’. What a great scale for enrichment! Here the local elite began to act. It began plundering the national economy. Its appetite grew, and the number of places, where one could ‘reap’ the benefit, became less. Russia turned to be not such a big country, and its wealth was not that never-ending. And then the greedy eyes turned to the people: ‘to get even a flock of fur from a outbred dog’. Nothing personal. Just business. And all hell broke loose. The idea of privatization was accepted ‘as smooth as silk’. ‘Without a hitch’. They took away everything from people, leaving without the last shirt, but with a voucher. The authorities implied that the owner of the ‘precious papers’ was almost the owner of the business, where he/she was working. There were assuring that a person, as a shareholder, was entitled to solve any problem of his production. A person did not even need to work but to live on the income from the interest. One could sit in front of the TV on the couch and get the dividends. People got the wings, not realizing that the wings were ghostly. They could not fly. ‘The first step was the hardest’. Six months without a pay check… and the vouchers were sold for a song to those, who had arranged this whole monetary collapse. To senior management. People tried to rebel, but the authorities quickly pacified them, clearly demonstrating the dissatisfied ones, as in the couple: with ‘bird cherry tree’ and a rubber bludgeon, professionally interacting police arbitrariness. And those, who did not get everything from the first time, the judicial system began its work, grinding out its fifteen-day verdicts. The slogan ‘Russia for the rich’ flourished. And these ‘celestial beings’ indulged in every pleasure. Respectable mansions. Luxurious yachts. Fashionable apartments. Exclusive cars. Platinum chains. Diamond necklaces. Sable fur coats. The avid elite gathered into the predatory pack, obsessed with greed for gain. And they began to ‘rule’. They were spitting ‘from a high bell tower’ on the illegality of their criminal deals, which gave them millions in profits. They were flouting the law. Wolves in human appearance sort of enraged, trying to outdo each other. In luxury and intrigues. They were ‘generously’ inculcating ‘the former workers and farmers’ with progressive western values.

And for some of them, under the triumphant howling of trumpets, the century of ‘the golden calf’ began, but the country dipped into darkness.

It was democratic Russia, where there was no place for the common people. Actually, some place was chosen, though, far from prosperity. Like for dogs, their independence was indicated by the size of the aviary. And to be on the safe side, they would be chained. It would even stop them from thoughts of escape. And a dog was sitting on the chain, absurdly wasting time. There was the desire for freedom, but there was no enough strength. The chain was made of a robust metal, the rings were thick and forged. The collar was not simple, but the timber-hitch with sharp spikes. The links strained but did not tear. The dog went round in circles, pulled the chain, made sure of its strength, hopelessly lied down, and closed the eyes humbly. And there were a bowl of slops for the dog not to die of starvation and a whip, in case if the animal would go mad and try to attack the master. And so people lived. Different strokes for different folks.

– I am too grumbling today, – the old man said mockingly, enjoying stretching his legs. – Looks like I am getting old.

He threw his head, exposing his face to the warm night breeze, somewhat blindly considering the low starry sky. His look froze mechanically on the Big Dipper, then moved to the Little Dipper. Absently looking at these constellations, he felt how painfully his heart sank, and tears flowed from his eyes, a flood of memories about the tragedy of the past years echoed with mental anguish. He was instantly transferred to the past.