This book is dedicated to Ivan, Mary and their son Semen.

“… on days when you do not fight for peace, you are helping the war.”

N. Grieg

I am the man who looked for peace and found

My own eyes barbed.

I am the man who groped for words and found

An arrow in my hand.

I am the builder whose firm walls surround

A slipping land.

When I grow sick or mad

Mock me not nor chain me:

When I reach for the wind

Cast me not down:

Though my face is a burnt book

And a wasted town.

“War poet”, Sidney Keyes

(1922 – 1943)

© Elena Speranskaya, 2018

ISBN 978-5-4490-9492-6

Created with Ridero smart publishing system

Prologue

The monotonous sound of the wheels announced the appearance of a column with the wounded and killed. The paratrooper rose on his elbows and fell. He was found when all the marines were loaded into covered cars and sent to a hospital in the territory adjacent to Iran. Two Red Cross nurses from the French Legion – one of African descent, the other from the Transcaucasian regions, speaking in a mixture of Anglo German dialect – tried to drag the body on stretchers. On the way, they came upon a mine.

The mine of the time of war in Dagestan exploded, leaving three corpses lying on the ground: two young women and a guy, presumably of the same age, that is, reached of the adulthood that arrived to this remote country from the Chechen aul, where he served along with his other comrades from Russia. The three of them were crowned by death. They are nobody and nothing.

The body of the guy, torn to pieces, with turned insides, the paratroopers carefully wrapped in a cape-tent, put in a barely survived, dust-covered armored car of self-propelled gun and drove to the nearest point where all the wounded and killed were together.

They were transferred to the boards that had appeared from near the point, and all the attendants lit cigarettes stuffed with tobacco, causing a gag vomit reflex among the Kurds children standing next to them.

The tall boy, Ramil, dirty appearance stayed at the curb and accidentally pushed his bare-foot a cord – a silver color metal chain with a jetton – a token of appreciation and the number of the paratrooper killed during the explosion. Having rummaged in the dust, he found more scraps of scarves and letters, blood-soaked female nurses. Ramil collected all the contents, except the tattered fabric, including a token, and, hanging it himself on his neck, fled into the village. His family ate up the remains of dinner, consisting of dried bread and drinking water from mugs.

“When we solved the Afghan question, we forgot to put an end to this area,” recalled the major, the battalion commander in the fight against terrorism, barely remembering the Russian words. His age did not tell anyone anything. He tensed and spit out the remnants of a viscous makhorka stuck in his yellow teeth. “May he rest in peace.”

Getting accustomed, everyone recognized in this short man a helicopter pilot of landing troops, a pensioner and a professional warrior. All those killed on the same day were taken to the port, where they loaded it on a submarine with the letter “K” at first and taken to an open ocean. The submarine met the cargo with the least losses for itself, having arranged final send-offs to the heroes.

The whole structure of the unit lined up on deck. Wreaths of foreign countries, twined with black, mourning ribbons, swam through the dark water, changing greatness and morality in everyday life and habit. Moving bodies to the sound of music blurred throughout the space. Who will find their corpses in a faraway country, where they did not come of their own free will? Seagulls, usually sitting on the handrails of the upper and the only deck, met these victims with a preference never to fly away from here, favorably having got in touch with the boat until the end of the voyage and demanding more and more new gifts from the attendants on duty in the galley. Their guttural cries lost their power and slowed down with the advent of aircraft, in which the combat power was several times greater than a nuclear-powered submarine.

The fatigue of the living sailors made it clear to the commanders of the divisions that the only way to follow the voice of reason is to swim in an endless voyage along the road of revenge and insanity. All the rest is a foolhardy carnival of shadows, costumes, faces.

Night views perished in the day’s hustle and bustle. Shredded in small handwriting, the sheets were strewn all over the bottom of the submarine, when three representatives of the commander-in-chief, one of them a doctor, full, in a white coat, checked the condition of the cabin.

“It is required to clean the room before mooring,” concluded, on the right holding, the captain of the second rank.

They went back to the cabin and began to straighten their things to land on the beach in the morning.

1. August. Memories

Warm August days were standing. Hot summer to everyone’s pleasure came to an end. Everyone was waiting for the autumn. The season of holidays was more than ever stifling and dry. Even the most ardent opponents of sunburn have visited the beach and at least once bathed in the Volga. The winners were those who had vacation for any other time of the year. To escape from the heat they could only be in the walls of institutions where air conditioners are installed or on the banks of a cool river. The shadow inspired the idea that winter is an invention of evil people who have never experienced the “charms” of summer heat.

Examinations in higher education institutions were handed over and new-born freshmen were attached to student life at the construction site, in dormitories and subsidiary farms as trainees.

Those who did not enter the university were also not saved from the heat, but it was easier for them – all the year it was possible to prepare for the next entrance exams. The specialists who left from the city to their destinations no longer had a black envy for those who were fortunate enough to stay on the distribution, at least they were avenged.

For Lucy Uvarova summer flew faster than ever before: State exams, a trip to the Crimea, and then to Moscow. By the time she practically did not prepare. Everything that had been done in the last year was repeated. They did not pass new themes; only in practice they used the received knowledge. Therefore, the time for self-training was enough, and to go to the beach, and have fun in the cinema, after watching a blockbuster – action-packed movie with the participation of Bred Pete or Steven Seagal.

To the cinema, Lucy loved to go alone, so as not to spoil the impression of the movie because she had her own, special approach. With many actors of Russian and foreign pictures she was familiar in absentia and was with them on “you”.

Lucy, like all the girls, when she was at school, dreamed of becoming an actress, so that her photos would be displayed in all the windows of newsstands. But she perfectly understood the minuses of her face, and she could not really reincarnate. Her appearance did not meet the standards of female beauty. Everything spoiled, in her opinion, a rather long and unsympathetically extended nose, like an owl. Lucy’s eyes were light green, the mermaid’s, her hair was chestnut, thick, shoulder-length. With them she had to constantly fight. A female braid from hair has long out of fashion, so after graduation, the first independent step was going to the hairdresser and to do a haircut in the fashionable style of “square”. She took the braids with her, as a reminder of her school years.

One day, Lucy read in the medical journal that in Moscow at the Beauty House plastic facial operations are being done, and the next step was to fix the nose.

Money she accumulated for a trip to Moscow, where she intended to buy something fashionable and make a plastic operation of the nose. All the plans were fulfilled exactly.

Operation was successfully completed. Now her profile, corresponding to the world standards, could easily be placed on the pages of a fashion magazine.

Studying at the university attracted Lucy. She was well aware that mathematics was much more important for her than theatrical farce or philology. In mathematical precision, she found her romance. It gave her a pleasure to make discoveries for herself in geometry, astrophysics, and mathematics. … Einstein, Curie, Landau… She wanted to learn about these scientists as much as possible. How did they live, who surrounded them, were they happy, whether they loved or not? She found answers to these questions in fiction about their lives. But this seemed to her little, often stayed late in the scientific library of the university. Classes took a lot of energy and time.

But there was no regret, as the wide perspective and research work abroad opened in one of the successful and prosperous scientific laboratories of Belgium, Germany, Canada, the USA, Japan or France.

2. New Meetings

Two years of study passed unnoticed. But after the first course there were complications. Lucy was sick. The sudden death of a blind mother was unsettled. The whole household was on her. It was necessary to cook, to wash, and to clean the apartment. To do this, it took time, but it was almost not there.

Lucy and during her mother’s life helped her, but she did not suspect that everything would not be so easy when the native person died. The blind father was a weak support and continued to teach Braille in a school for blind children.

Her nerves shook, she began to smoke and because of this often hurt. She had to skip classes. It so happened that they did not allow Lucy to pass the winter session, and they offered to take an academic leave at the dean’s office, otherwise she would be expelled on poor grades. Academic leave was issued without unnecessary ceremony. It was necessary to work a year, not forgetting about studying, to read that did not have time. Uvarova went to work to the post as the postal operator. There was no special preparation, although she had to learn the speed. The work was replaceable. Sometimes, about once a week, she had to go out into the night.

At the post Lucy was not tired; she even liked to be a conductor of thoughts and feelings. When she picked up a bunch of letters, it seemed that she was holding all of Russia in her hands. Joys, sorrows, grieves, victories, failures – all these fit on ordinary sheets of paper, despite the fact that the Internet has conquered the whole world, the letters did not decrease.

There was more work for the holidays, so they did not indulge in the days off, but the vacations were paid doubly, and the money to Lucy was very useful. She wanted to dress nicely, buy model shoes, and generally look no worse than others. The collective was purely female, even the chief of the shop was a woman, however, several men of retirement age worked at the delivery.

Lucy befriended one girl. Her new girlfriend was Marina. She came to the city from an area where she had elderly parents. She lived here with her aunt. Aunt helped Marina get a job and wanted her to go to college, because she said “now you can not break through with school education”. But Marina did not think about any studies, she met Alik, and devoted all her free time to him. Alik was an Azerbaijani and, apparently, was going to marry. Lucy knew all the details of their relationship, up to what he was wearing, and how much each of his things cost.

Lucy also wanted to get acquainted with some nice male representative, but to ask Marina about this Lucy was shy, and there was practically no time for walks. She did not want to leave the university before the time, especially since Marina was younger than Lucy, and Lucy was too proud to drop herself in the eyes of a friend younger than herself for two years. Therefore, Lucy kept mum, and when the conversation came about her personal life, she tried to translate into another topic, which she successfully managed.

Soon Lucy got acquainted with Natasha and Larissa. Communicate with them was interesting. Natasha was older than all of them. She was twenty-five years old, serious, but her appearance caused a smile: small and very plump, like a donut. She traveled twice to the Czech Republic and told many interesting things about her trips, about the sights of the Czech Republic, about the castles, the palaces of Emperor Charles IV, the church of St. Vitas, the picture gallery of the Prague Castle.