Queen of Spades

1

             The June Sunday morning surprised with an unusual stuffiness, and the day promised to be just as hot and stuffy. Neighbors engaged in the usual weekend business: women tinkered with the housework, their husbands lazily talked, discussing the results of yesterday’s football match and solving pressing problems. Sitting at a handmade wooden table, Keira enjoyed summer, sunshine and short-lived vacation freedom.

- All right, warm," Mil's uncle said thoughtfully, "but it's only a three-hour drive to the sea. Far away.

- “Who dreams of what,” said Sen’s uncle, “who lacks the Black Sea and who lacks a little money.”

He waved his hand in the direction of his three-wheeled wheelchair - again it does not start, repairs are needed.

- Oh my God, what primitive talk, what mercantile desires, said Anna Lvovna from the wide open window.

The lace of mussel curtains framed her head and made her look like a merchant from the canvases of the Wanderers artists. - Sea, resorts, money. Anyone who has a heartache thinks about it. You have to think about the soul.

She opened a black platmass fan and began to wave it; a thick bangs slightly rose above the gray bristling eyebrows and again covered them, falling on the nose.

- Wow, thought Kira, for some reason everyone is sure that it is the soul that hurts or rejoices, although no one really knows where it is located and how it looks. Maybe it just looks like this old fan: children – small, light, openwork, and the old – leaky from experiences. Or perhaps not, it is of indefinite shape and color – white, black, gray, maybe even colorless – depending on the life lived.

- You write everything," Anna Lvovna addressed her, "you write down, like a stenographer, who, what, who told whom. Come on, come on, write a new human comedy, comedians are full. Small topics. Small people. She cast a contemptuous glance at her neighbors, deliberately ignoring both her and the line she threw.

Anna Lvovna moved into the apartment on the left a couple of years ago. Before her, an elderly couple lived there, who, as a result of a complex exchange, moved in with her doctor son. At first, the neighbors took the appearance of a new neighbor with enthusiasm, hoping to take a break from their eternal scandals, but Anna Lvovna also turned out to be a difficult nature - although not scandalous, but uncooperative.

Kira again leaned over a wooden table and wrote in a school notebook: “The soul rested on the tiled roof of an old one-story house. She knew she couldn't be seen, but she felt like a colorless, jellyfish-like clot. Not a fan, a sunshine, a bird, or an angel-like creature born of the helpless human imagination.

- “Kira, why are you sitting in the sun with your head bare,” Aunt Sima shouted from the opposite window. - And you, Anna Lvovna, would pull the curtains. It'll be cooler in the apartment.

- I'll have time to enjoy both the silence and the darkness there on Doyne in the cemetery. And you, Sima, apparently, have already rested for two weeks from your hooligan son, who was sent to a pioneer camp, and now you do not let people live with unnecessary advice.

- Don't say a word, you'll turn everything upside down.

She defiantly opened the covered half of the window and built on a sewing machine. - I don't know how much Vera tolerates you. She needs a monument in her lifetime.

Vera was Anna Lvovna a relative of her husband, a retired colonel. Ten years ago, after his sudden death from a stroke, Anna Lvovna wrote Vera to her, and she, without hesitation, moved from the rainy, slushy Bryansk here to the south, hoping to brighten up her and others' loneliness. She considered herself a companion, although she knew that Anna Lvovna called her a bait for her eyes. Once, even before the war, Vera was married to a poet, quite famous in Bryansk and neighboring Orel. She was more proud of her husband’s profession than her own – she worked as a kindergarten teacher – and for a time believed that her husband would become famous, and that they would move to Moscow, then they would give birth to a child. That’s why she tolerated his bohemian habits: constant partying with fellow writers, when, sitting at the table she covered, they read their poems, called each other geniuses, argued with shrill voices and drank again. Sometimes we stayed overnight. In the morning, sipping brine, they were silent and hastily dispersed, leaving behind smelly cigarette butts, dirty dishes, seized glasses with the remains of vodka and the smell of stale socks. And Vera loved cleanliness and order – to go to bed on time and get up on a fresh head. But at night, the husband was tormented by rhymes, so he jumped up and down, turned on the lights, grabbed a sharp pencil with a notebook always lying nearby, and frantically wrote down the lines that visited him. After one day, the griffle is turned in a dream Faith in the thigh, she suddenly realized that divorce is inevitable. But being a man of indecision, I waited another fifteen years. Two days after the divorce, the war broke out, and the traces of her husband were lost forever.

The war has changed many things, but not habits. She still liked to get up early, disapproving of the barbarity of Anna Lvvnya, who woke up at ten, and had breakfast almost at lunchtime, according to Vera.

- He who gets up early, God gives him.

“Foolishness,” said Anna Lvovna, “you stand up all your life with roosters, and what did He reward you for this?” There you go. And I tell you, sleep is the rest of the soul, otherwise it will not have the strength to live the next day. When a person has a tired soul, he does not want to live and nothing is interesting. So let me eat something dietary for breakfast. Did you buy cottage cheese at the bazaar yesterday?

Faith could not get used to the Bessarabian meaning of the word bazaar. In Russia, clothing and all kinds of utensils were traded at the bazaar, and products were bought on the market.

“I bought it,” she replied, “I’ll get it out of the refrigerator now.” – and put an enameled tray with a yellowish, porous round of cottage cheese in front of Anna Lvovna. Nearby there was already a saucer with a Melchior spoon lying in it and a napkin.

- I had to put the iron in the kitchen in a saucer. And the cottage cheese is icy.

- So let me rinse the saucer with boiling water, the cottage cheese will become warmer, Vera suggested.

- No way! In such heat! The cottage cheese is just wonderful, melts in the mouth, said Anna Lvovna, gaining a crumbly mass directly from the tray.

Grape leaves climbed the wall of the house, so that half of the table at which Kira sat was in the shade. From there it was very convenient to watch everything happening in the yard and in the windows of apartments.

Anna Lvovna shook curd crumbs off the satin in bright colors, a robe, like most of her outfits brought by her husband from Germany. These trophy dresses have long been small in the waist and chest, and now full of colorful inserts sewn up by the trouble-free aunt Sima.

- There are no such fabrics here, explained Anna Lvovna, the quality is not that, let alone cut. Vera, look at the shoulders, no wrinkles.

- They are not so tall, he said.

- They do not wear, because they have not learned how to sew, Anna Lvovna interrupted, putting a bold end to the unbeginning discussion. - Let's take care of the face.

Vera placed a mirror on the windowsill, forceps, cotton balls, a jar of cream and, wearing glasses, bent over Anna Lvovna. Then he turned to his upper lip and said, “Music!”

- "Evening." The clouds smacked the edges ... sang the played record.

The face of Anna Lvovna instantly relaxed, she folded her hands on a colorful, satin chest, closed her eyes. Once Anna Lvovna studied at the conservatory, and at the final exam she, a young singer, was entrusted to sing the part of the Countess from the Queen of Spades. The manifested acting skills impressed the commission so much that it was offered a place in the theater troupe. But in the fall, she married a military man and sacrificed her career – at first she wandered around the garrisons, and after the war she got a job as an administrator in the opera house – I wanted to be closer to the stage.

Keira recorded: Hearing the duet of Lisa and Polina, the soul cried, shuddering in the beat of the music. She had to go back to other worlds, but she feared it as much as she feared coming here before.

Weekly plucking of vegetation over the lip and on the chin, applying masks under the "Lady of Spades" became a Sunday ritual. So Kira knew this opera by heart. But I saw it for the first time only a month ago, in the production of the local theater, and the shock from what I saw did not go away, but on the contrary, gave rise to strange thoughts, made me think about things that had not previously bothered her. For example, what is the soul, what is it for, and what happens to it after the earthly life.

- Vera, put on the third act, my favorite aria, you know, – whispered Anna Lvovna, amusingly bulging the upper lip.

- I'll just pinch it here. Wow, that's a long hair.

And the introduction sounded, like either the battle of the clock, or the sweeping bells. Kira, even then, in the theater, it seemed that the movements of the conductor's hands are similar to those with which the bell ringer pulls the ropes of bells, desperately and tirelessly - down, towards, upwards, upwards ...

" It's midnight, and Herman's gone. “I know he will come...” – but there was no hope in the music or in Lisa’s singing, only doom, the same as from the first notes of the overture. The cardboard bridge was a little wobbly. Lisa, holding on to the railing, stared doomedly into the gray darkness, knowing that Herman would not appear, would not come out from around the corner of the painted cardboard house, and that she would have to jump into the mouse-colored void of the Winter Groove.

- No matter what, they whispered nearby.

But for Kira, both the bridge, with its sandy railings, and the house, with its blind windows and balconies, and the tree powdered with snow, were real. Looking at the scenery, she saw St. Petersburg and perceived what was happening there, in its damp, never warmed by the rays of the sun space, and not at all on this stage.

And even the ridiculous knock of shoes jumping “in the water” Lisa didn't make her smile. She did not react to the laughter in the hall before that, when the distraught Herman tried to learn from the Countess the secret of the three cards, and at this time from the right scene came out thin, black as night, cat, and, slowly, walked through the proscenium. Kira smiled and thought, why not? The cat is fine. could She's got a life of her own, and she doesn't care about the obsessive Herman or the old woman sitting in an unnatural pose. After completing half of the planned path, the cat stopped and screamed in her uterine voice, her short coat stood on end. Herman threatened the Countess with a pistol, in pauses swinging it at the numb animal. But the cat left only after he said, “She’s dead.” Herman took the Countess's hand and recoiled.

- How's he playing? And what composure! – admired the neighbor on the right, wiping away tears of laughter. - Here's the provincial actor! And the light effects! Even the Big One didn't think of that.

Kira followed his gaze and saw a shadow shifting from stage to hall. The Countess did not bow, and a small square man in a checkered jacket, who turned out to be the director of the theater, loudly announced that she had died.

- All right, turn it off, then on the scratch record. God, Vera, you just tortured me today, complained Anna Lvovna.

You have a heavy hand.

- And who makes you do this in such a hell? It was possible to postpone such an “important” procedure to the evening. No, you need everything on schedule.

The music subsided, and Kira wrote, "" The soul cannot be seen, but perhaps its presence can be felt. I'm pretty sure every time we have "Lady of Spades" in our backyard, the soul of the Countess who died on stage is somewhere here, right next door. Does this music from a flirty record attract her, keep her from leaving? Is it scary to be here? between worlds? And whether there music?

2

When it got dark, the yard was empty. And only under the cherry tree sat Tanya, the heavily pregnant niece of Uncle Mili, who came from Kamenka to stay. Cherries were planted by Kirin Papa, however, as well as carnations on the same triangular flowerbed in the center of the asphalted courtyard. Dad wanted to plant fragrant tobacco, but Mil's uncle insisted on the cloves - he somewhere read that the cloves drive away mosquitoes. Where exactly he drove away, he did not specify. However, Kira seemed to be exactly where she was. Frozen with stuffy Tanya, peacefully napping. On the knees - a saucer with an undergrowth carrot. Tanya, who worked as a hostess sister in a holiday home, believed that carrots help strengthen bone tissue in a child, as well as hair growth. But Mil's uncle was very concerned about the amount of carrots Tanya eats and warned that, firstly, a child can be born red, despite the dark suit of his parents, and secondly, yellow skin due to an excess of vitamin A in the forming liver. Uncle Mil always spoke of this threat publicly, as if calling everyone to witness and thereby absolving himself of the blame if his prophecies were confirmed.

- Milya, you are a literate person with a higher education, – Anna Lvovna indignantly complained, – and you talk nonsense? What is the relationship between carrots and hair color? Even in sixth grade, she stared at Kira, children already know that it depends on heredity. Don’t listen to him, little girl, eat whatever you want. In fact, I don't understand why you're so unceremoniously stuck at your uncle's house instead of going to your husband's. Are you going to give birth under this cherry?

- Oh, hospodie, Tanya yawned, what did I not see in that Kamenka?

- Nature, fresh air, not without reason there people go on trips, recover.

- Oh, hospodie, they get better by idleness. When you are not working, wherever the sanatorium is. – Tanya lazily explained.

And now she was sitting on a folding stool in the shade of thick foliage. Seeming to be black, the cherries hung over her bowed head like torn and frozen beads in the fall, and Kira thought that this picture lacked only the frame. And then the cherries shook near the tannin ears, and the picture swayed. The tree trembled, and a rope with linen stretched from it to the shed, and the sheds themselves, and the house. The surrounding dogs howled alarmingly, and a hum was heard incomprehensibly coming from where. Then Kira felt a sharp push, followed by another and another. From the windowsill, dishes fell, from the shelves - banks. From the wall to the ceiling, the lizard crept a crack, and when part of the ceiling collapsed along the contour indicated by it, the insides of the attic appeared above the resulting void. Kira ran into the yard, to the flowerbed, to Tanya, numb with horror. The ground under my feet was shaking and creeping.

- Get out of there! cried Mil's uncle, who jumped out of the door. - Over the wire tree!

Tanya stood, freezing, clutching her stomach. She couldn't take her eyes off the moving flower bed. Kira pushed her to the asphalt. A linen rope popped over their heads, and Mil's uncle automatically caught someone's pink mill. Everyone was silent. Uncle Senya looked puzzled at the twitching garage in which his three-wheeled Zaporozhets stood. Aunt Sima held her husband's crutch and sadly shook her head. Mil's uncle looked at his half-naked wife, clearly expressing his disapproval of her inappropriate appearance. He was wearing blue striped pajamas out of his chest pocket with passports sticking out. Kira snuggled up to Tanya. She, who loved to stay home alone, regretted for the first time that she did not go to visit her parents. But they had already run from the gate, looking for her with their eyes, and, finding her, somehow limp and stopped suffocating. Then my mother asked, “Where are Anna Lvovna and Vera?” And everyone sounded alarmed, but then the door opened, and Anna Lvovna floated out of it. She was wearing a white, lacy, nightgown, multi-layered ruffles foaming at her chin. The hair was braided in a short pigtail, which ended in a thin, three-haired tail, grabbed by a pharmacy gum. In her hands she held a table lamp with a white lampshade in brushes. Neighbors who started talking again fell silent.

- She had been strange for a long time, explained Vera, who seeded behind Anna Lvovna, but how shook, quite bad became. I grabbed that lamp, I can't take it off. It's dark, he says, you can trip. I have a shower in my heels. There were no earthquakes in Bryansk. I thought the war was starting again. And the hum is like tanks coming.

Holding the lamp on the outstretched arm and raising it to shoulder level, Anna Lvovna solemnly walked the flowerbed around the perimeter. Under the thin cotton of her shirt, her breasts swayed at pace. The cord was dragged from the side, and Vera stared tensely at her feet, trying not to step on the plug bouncing along the asphalt. Start drizzling. It smelled like wet dust.

- I never thought that she had such luxurious breasts, age after all, Senya’s uncle said thoughtfully, breaking the silence.

- Why did you even think about it? – Aunty Sima was outraged.

- Do you have any more to think about, your mother said? Especially at this moment, when the earth is literally falling out from under your feet!

- Let’s not forget that the most important thing in a woman is the soul, not the size of the bust.

His feeble wife nodded in agreement.

- Oh, hospodie, said Tanya, I am pulled down like something falls out. It hurts, it hurts.

- Get inside now! Lie down!' ordered Mile's uncle. - And you, Vera, run to the machine, call an ambulance.

- I told you, she will give birth under the cherry, stated Anna Lvovna, without slowing down.

- Oh, – said Tanya, with pain missing another “hospodi”, – Maybe I’d rather stay here? It might shake again.

But Mil's uncle was already leading her to the house, while advising the others to stay in their seats because of the likelihood of aftershocks. The ambulance did not come, the tannins of the groans became louder, and the women went to Uncle Mila, hoping to jointly bring the child into the world. Anna Lvovna was tired of walking in circles, complained of dizziness and went home. Kira got tired of fear and, sitting at a wooden table, fell asleep.

3

She did not sleep long, but it turned out to be dawn. A barely perceptible breeze lazily moved the curtains in the wide-open windows. Anna Lvovna sat in a chair and napped, restlessly turning her head from side to side. A long white shirt with a bell clapped on a wool carpet of rotten cherry. The sun's rays had not yet looked into the room, so it was gloomy. Kira even seemed to pull the dampness. From the suddenly revived radio point, the sounds of the anthem flew, then the news. Anna Lvovna shuddered, stood up and began to shake her hand on the table where the medicines were standing. She tried to get up, but somehow could not, and settled heavily, leaning on the velvet of worn armrests.

- Faith, she called, and again, Faith.

No one responded. Having tilted her torso and stretched out her arm, Anna Lvovna groped the desired bubble, but she did not keep her balance and brushed it off to the floor with an awkward movement, touching the adjacent plates. Kira ran to the window.

- I will find Vera now, she shouted.

But Anna Lvovna fell asleep again, hanging her head and opening her mouth. On the floor at the edge of the carpet interspersed with scattered pills lay broken plates.

Kira climbed over the windowsill and jumped onto the carpet. He was unexpectedly tough and resilient. Near the face of Anna Lvovna was very pale, and closed eyelids – yellowish and translucent, like parchment. Kira leaned over and began to pick up fragments of the Queen of Spades from the floor, making them into a black, sharp, uneven edges, pile. Her gaze fell on Anna Lvovna's wax arm, lying on a round knee protruding from under her shirt. Kira recoiled, hurting against the booth on which the record player was standing. He staggered. Sliding from track to track, the needle vibrated, And the music filled the silence of the room and burst out into the courtyard. “She’s dead, but I haven’t learned the secrets,” Herman, a man close to madness, sang desperately., drowning out the news.

Kira rushed to the window and saw Vera opening the door with her key.

Running in, she turned off the screaming radio, then turned the recorder knob. When I ran across the plate, the needle froze.

- Go," said Vera, pushing Kira to the exit, "you don't have to be here. The ambulance is here. Tanya and the child will be taken to the hospital - otherwise at night it was not possible to call, we took birth ourselves. Go look at the girl.

There was an ambulance at the gate. The tired unshaven driver, huddled to the cabin, smoked, periodically spitting under his feet. Aunt Sima and Kirina mother led under the arms barely moving the legs of Tanya. She was wearing the same short cotton dress she had been dozing under the cherry the day before. Only now it looked crumpled and its hem covered with dark spots.

- Oh, hospodie," sailed Tanya, "did I yell so much that there was no voice left?

Uncle Mil came down the porch. On his hands he held a package from which a head with rare red hair looked out. Seeing the chauffeur smoking, Mil's uncle frowned and often breathed, which meant the highest degree of indignation.

- Stop the outrage immediately, he ordered. You, as a citizen, do not know where and by whom you work. You don't even belong in the stables, let alone work with the sick and especially newborns.

- “Are you from a dream, Dad?” the chauffeur replied, respectfully looking at Uncle Mili’s striped pajamas. What do you have to do with it? stable?

- And despite the fact that if a drop of nicotine kills a horse - and this, as we know, has long been proven by scientific research - then for a baby born an hour ago, inhaling the poison you spew can have the most tragic consequences. And I will not be too lazy to report to your superiors such a flagrant violation of all health standards.

Disgusted by the eloquence of Uncle Mili, the chauffeur choked with smoke, coughed and put out the cigarette on the sole of the sandal. The child suddenly woke up and cried loudly in a strangely low voice for such a tiny creature.

- Wow, what a bass pours, the doctor was surprised, helping the exhausted Tanya get into the car.

- An opera singer will be, Mil’s uncle said with confidence, and remembering the previous predictions, this time no one dared to argue with him.

4

The summer days, like everything good, flew too fast. And although the calendar was only the beginning of August, Kira was already yearning, thinking about the upcoming autumn rains, wet, uncomfortable winter and the long wait for next summer. The court lived its normal life. Her husband came for Tanya, and together with a white freckled girl, they returned to Kamenka. The apartments were repaired, patched and painted cracks, put new tiles. Vera, who remained as hostess in Anna Lvovna’s apartment, threw away the old junk, bought, on occasion, a new carpet and replaced the yellowed mussaic curtains with cotton curtains in a flower. Kira still loved to write in a thick glued notebook, sitting in the shade of grape leaves, where you could quietly watch what was happening and reflect on topics that she did not dare to talk aloud. Now on Sundays, instead of the "Lady of Spades" from all the windows, the call signs of Uncle Mili's favorite radio program "Good Morning" ran from all the windows.
- This is what a working man needs, he repeated, a charge of cheerfulness for a week. And operas are for those whose soul is not quite healthy and needs treatment.

- Maybe he's right about that, Kira thought and wrote down: The record broke. The soul listened to the ensuing silence, but could not catch anything but the knock of the pendulum, impartially counting the time between death and life. Nothing else kept her here. She now knew that life and death were independent of human desires or possibilities, and that is why she, who had experienced her own earthly death, would never be able to speak of it. When he returns, he forgets everything he has done before. It is time to continue on the path to the promised peace. But whether there music?

Zoe Master.