"What are you thinking about?" someone asked him. But Mark didn't answer; he was staring intently at a point. It grew every second, turning into a large black hole around which an ocean raged, flooding all remaining space, the darkening, gloomy sky. "Here they are, the gates!" Mark realized. "The name is written above: 'Moments', where two paths collide – the past and the future."

He heard the voice again:

"Enter these gates, my friend, and the question of everything: 'Do you want this again and again, countless times?' will weigh heavily on all your actions. If you say 'yes' to joy, you will also say 'yes' to all sorrows. Everything is interconnected…"

And Mark entered that space.

Chapter 1.

Mark's father's parental home, where they settled after moving, was in Kashgarka. It was a typical old district of a Central Asian city, with clay fences and houses. The windows of the houses faced only the inner courtyards, where it smelled of latrines and grass didn't grow because it was traditionally uprooted to leave the ground bare. Every morning, a young Uzbek woman swept the yard. Immediately after waking up, she usually covered her face with her hand as she was supposed to be ashamed of sleeping with her husband at night. So before starting her routine of sweeping the yard, she had to wash.

In these courtyards, trees grew, creating shade where topchans, covered with carpets and bolster pillows, were laid. Topchans were Uzbek table-beds where people reclined during meals or when receiving dear guests.

The age of Tashkent, as this city was called, where they moved to live, was over two thousand years. At the end of the nineteenth century, it was part of the Russian Empire, a province where high-ranking nobles who were displeasing to the royal family were exiled. For instance, Nikolai Konstantinovich Romanov, the grandson of Emperor Nicholas I, ended up in Tashkent.

Here, in the sunny land with fertile soil, an abundance of fruits, and rich wheat harvests from which rosy flatbreads were baked, many celebrities found temporary refuge. Some were exiled by the Bolshevik government after the 1917 revolution. Some fled from hunger, cold, others – from World War II. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a Russian writer in exile and future Nobel laureate – an outstanding "Russian imperialist," nationalist, and anti-Semite, was treated in Tashkent for cancer. He wrote a famous novel about the suffering of his people in communist prisons and camps, revealing the crimes of Joseph Stalin. Solzhenitsyn, by the will of fate, became a victim of the communist regime, while Stalin, also an "imperialist," became a dictator and tyrant. Another Nobel laureate, Joseph Brodsky, a highly talented poet but with a rather vile soul, also visited Tashkent.

For some time, Konstantin Simonov, a Russian novelist, poet, and playwright with outstanding talents, lived in Tashkent. He told people the whole truth about the Patriotic War. Thanks to his efforts and contacts in literary circles, the world learned about Mikhail Bulgakov's immortal work "The Master and Margarita." However, Simonov himself did not heed the Master's wise advice given to the poet Ivan Bezdomny in this novel. The advice was: "Don't write anymore!" As a result, Simonov had to become a correspondent for the newspaper Pravda – part of the large Bolshevik lie and persecute writers who truly depicted the whole truth.

This city was visited by people with great talent and great soul – poet Sergei Yesenin, poetess Anna Akhmatova, director Solomon Mikhoels. People from all republics of the Soviet Union came here in search of warmth and bread, and some peoples, such as the Crimean Tatars and Germans, were forcibly exiled to these regions by Joseph Stalin.

This city also exiled former aristocrats and their descendants who failed to emigrate abroad. Former bourgeois, capital owners, and private property owners, that is, enemies of the people, also found themselves here.

But the main population of Kashgarka, where Mark's family settled, consisted of Ashkenazi Jews, immigrants from Ukraine and Belarus. They fled to the warm, bread-rich lands of Central Asia from pogroms, hunger, and poverty. Kashgarka somewhat resembled the poor districts of Odessa – chaotic, neglected courtyards, old sagging balconies, local quarrels, and scandals. It was also known for Jewish humor and Yiddish jargon, poverty, and the high intelligence of most of its inhabitants.

In such an exotic Uzbek-Jewish place, which arose where the Great Silk Road from China to Europe passed in the second century BC, Mark spent several years of early childhood.

Mark often visited Lusik, his elderly and incredibly overweight relative. Lusik lived with his Jewish mother, who loved him immensely, and his sixteen-year-old son Emanuel. His mother separated Lusik from his wife so she wouldn't get in their way. As they said in Odessa, "she moved their happiness."

Uncle Lusik, however, was not upset about this and was content with other joys. For example, he loved to eat deliciously. Mama Sonya cooked Jewish dishes well, and "stomach" happiness was always a celebration for him. Possessing an extraordinary intellect, Lusik, having finally broken off with women, enjoyed spiritual values. A feast for his soul was reading books, newspapers, and everything he could find in the Soviet press with its ruthless communist censorship. He had unique encyclopedic knowledge, and it was incredibly interesting to talk to him. Mark often went up to the second floor where Lusik sat on an old dirty balcony among scattered newspapers and books and left enriched with interesting facts, intellectual discoveries, and impressions of what he heard about poets, writers, composers, politicians, unusual people, or interesting historical events. Lusik was visited simply to chat, to talk about this and that by ordinary youth – school friends of his son Emanuel. Lusik attracted not only with his unique erudition but also with his ability to love those around him, sincere interest in them, attention without which you can't even communicate with pets.

When Mark visited him, the incredibly fat Lusik, delighted, would get up heavily from his chair, greet the guest, and then loudly and admiringly quote one of Mark's childhood statements about girls: "I hate girls! They are worse than Hitler and the Tsar!" So, Mark once declared to him. In this confession, Lusik was most amused and delighted by the comparison with the Tsar as a negative image. Being a very educated person, he understood all the stupidity and obscurantism of communist propaganda that even affected children's imagination. Considering his attitude towards the female sex, Mark's first impression of women sounded like wonderful music to him. "How beautifully said!" he repeated, laughing. "And exactly – worse than the Tsar!"

In this Uzbek mahalla, all the Jews knew each other. On the shabby narrow streets where Mark ran with local kids, old Jews often met him and, seeing little Mark, shouted to everyone: "Ah, this is Yosef's son!" An unfamiliar Uzbek woman, passing by, could lovingly pinch Mark's plump pink cheeks, as healthy and well-fed Jewish children have. You could observe an old Uzbek who unexpectedly spread a small rug in the middle of the road and began to pray right on the sidewalk. You often heard the cries of a junk dealer: "Old things, buy!" But the children especially liked when an old Uzbek with a long white beard, looking like a character from Persian tales, came in a cart drawn by a donkey, selling oriental sweets and exchanging them for empty bottles.

Yosef's father, Grandpa Arkady, who had long dreamed of a grandson, was now happy. He spent all his free time with little Mark, walking through the streets of Kashgarka and proudly showing his beloved grandson to acquaintances. Old Jews, shuffling along dirty sidewalks in house slippers, always greeted him with joy and special warmth. Everyone knew Arkady as a courageous and noble man who went through the entire war. He was externally handsome and physically very strong. But a head wound during the war did not go unnoticed – after a severe illness, Grandpa Arkady died, not having enjoyed communicating with his grandson.

Many years after Mark left this ancient district of old Tashkent, where he spent carefree time in childish pranks, Kashgarka would disappear from the face of the earth. A powerful earthquake would destroy the city, and the epicenter would be here, under this legendary place where the Kashgar Gates stood in past centuries, through which caravans entered the city from China. And where, in the twentieth century, the local Uzbek population sheltered those fleeing hunger, cold, and poverty – the "happy" citizens of the great communist country. The country of victors!

Over time, the people, inhabitants of this exotic place, will disappear too. The country – the great power that united citizens into a communist march to the happiness of all peoples on earth will also disappear. And these peoples will scatter to their ancestral lands, and they will hate each other, and they will turn to wars and barbarism, destroying all hopes for happiness, equality, and brotherhood. Obscurantists and liars will replace communists. And Satan will reign there!

But all this is yet to come! And now little Mark with his parents moved to another district of the city, where mainly Russian proletarians lived, in all their splendor and diversity. The "hegemon" that dominated during the revolutionary class struggle of 1917. Among them lived the descendants of former bourgeois and aristocracy exiled to these places. As a rule, it was a more educated stratum of society. For all, there was a huge yard the size of a stadium, with tall trees and lush green vegetation. People from simple families lived in houses with their small courtyards and toilets in the corner of the common yard. And the descendants of the aristocracy lived in a newly built four-story house with all conveniences and high ceilings, as they were built in Stalin's time. Large terraces were entwined with grapevines, the fruits of which could be enjoyed.

The common people treated their intelligent neighbors with respect, dreaming that their children would become equally educated. However, in the depths of their souls, they disliked them. The descendants of the former aristocracy treated simple people with some contempt. However, the residents of the large yard successfully coexisted, and the communist idea of equality and brotherhood temporarily united everyone into one big family, despite each having their own family history, traditions, material and intellectual capabilities. And most importantly, their unique genetic potential, a phenomenon not yet fully appreciated by science.

Here nine-year-old Mark walks in the yard. Neighbor girl Lyudmila approaches him. She asks Mark to talk to his mother: "Could I wash the floors in your house? We have no money, nothing to eat at home. Father drinks away his entire salary." Mark conveys her request to his parents, but they shrug and say: "What can be done for this family if their father is a chronic drunkard? And our floors are clean."

Mark spends the entire day running around the yard with Russian kids from humble and low-income families. Their parents work hard at the factory. They work as carpenters, locksmiths, laborers, drivers. Although many fathers often come home tipsy after work, the myth of universal Russian drunkenness is unfair. The children are very worried and embarrassed about their drinking parents, while the non-drinkers, in turn, despise neighbors who drink themselves into a state of degradation. Yes, exactly – degradation! Proletarians respect themselves, despite limited material and intellectual resources. Communist ideology supports their confidence that "poverty is not a vice," but rather a virtue.

Once among the children loitering around the yard, the conversation turned to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Someone explained that Lenin considered the poor the masters of life. Then little Petya, the brother of Lyudmila, who sought to earn a bit of money by washing floors, proudly said: "And we are poor!" And thereby he respected himself even more, despite the constant feeling of hunger. Mark was ashamed at the time that he lived in material prosperity: his mother was a doctor, his father a teacher.

But an even more serious accusation he often heard directed at him: "You are not only Jewish but also Armenian – the worst of the worst," Mark accepted this rebuke as deserved and didn't particularly worry about it. After all, his mother was indeed Armenian, and his father an Ashkenazi Jew.

But the neighbor in the yard Nyuska Penzina, a drunken forty-year-old woman, when she was drunk, and she was always drunk, yelled at little Mark: "You salty Yid! Fat-assed Armenian!"

And one day, when Mark was visiting his beloved relative, he asked him: "Uncle Lusik, what does 'salty Yid' mean? Drunk Nyuska always calls me that." Lusik's delight was indescribable! He couldn't stop laughing and exclaimed: "How brilliantly said! This is folk art. Only the Russian folk genius in a state of intoxication could come up with something like that!" Then Lusik explained to little Mark that Armenians are Orthodox but baptize their children in saltwater. However, this didn't stop Lusik from continuing to laugh.

And Nyuska Penzina didn't calm down. Mark's father was very popular with women because he was a handsome man. When Nyuska, always drunk, saw him in the large yard, she shouted: "I will rape you someday, Yosef. I'll corner you somewhere and rape you." All this was also part of the humor that, like rays of sunshine, illuminated the communal life in the large yard when everyone was young, cheerful, and full of hope. Even in this strange socialist experiment of equality and brotherhood, there was something that impressed and inspired.

Once, Mark accidentally found a collection of classical music records at Uncle Yakov's house, his mother's brother. Yakov's wife, Tamara, was a musicologist, and he was an engineer but had graduated from a vocal studio at the conservatory and even sang in the opera. Uncle Yakov often warmed up in the toilet – there was no other place, as his parents, wife, and young daughter all lived together in a three-room apartment. Their family was intelligent in every way, sharply contrasting with the proletarian contingent of the large yard. Mark enjoyed listening to records for hours when everyone was at work, and only the housemaid, a simpleton Lyubasha, was at home.

One day, Mark was sorting through records and playing excerpts. Suddenly, he froze, struck by a short musical theme of a few notes. He continued listening and was so captivated by the development of the motif that he listened to all parts of the symphony to the end. Mark fell in love with Beethoven's music, and later the music of other great composers, and this passion for classical music stayed with him forever.