Like Leo Tolstoy at Astapovo station. Or like Napoleon on the island of St Helena. I shall die like Aunt Polly, a neighbor woman. Or like John Doe in the southernmost point of South Dakota. I shall die like my best beloved university teacher VG. And like my worst hated boss VS at the research institute of monomers.
I shall die. Because ALL do it at ALL TIMES. How much is left for me? Some twenty years? Or thirty? O-ho-ho! That's quite something. But give me another hundred years - it won't make life any longer. Because it is short like a shot. My life is NOTHING compared to two eternities one of which was BEFORE me and another will be AFTER. I shall go to where I have come from. There, it seems, it was not bad. Or, to be more exact, it wasn't like anything. One must not fear it. One must take it as a given. But it's easy to say….
I shall die. What will be left after me? The only and the most important are my children. My son and daughter. In them is my continuation.
Also, my library of dictionaries will left after me, probably the richest in the world. The library has formed over the years of work. Ah,it's a hill of beans. Nobody, except a crank like me, needs this paper with foreign letters on it. And nobody has a need for my translations published somewhere in Austria and Israel. My things will outlast me. My wife's great grandfather died long ago. But I wear his Paul Bure bulb watch in my pocket. My colleague and buddy, the hunchback Yurik, has long passed away. But his present, a big blue pencil "For business" rests on my bookshelf.
I cherish the hope that my stories that relate about my life and thoughts will survive me. I wrote them very truthfully, straining my nerves and revealing my soul. But I lacked strength, talent and courage to reveal myself more fully. Maybe, I'll still write it some day? Maybe, I'll have
time?
I shall die. Who am I?
I am a little boy in shabby shoes and patched up pants, standing at a fence in some workers settlement. What awaits you, kiddy, dressed in poor clothes of the post-war era?
I am a lad, kicking the ball with boys on the parking lot for horse-drawn carts near the market. Here, by day, collective farmers potter about their carts laden with produce they have brought for sale. We help them sometimes. For this we get now radishes, now carrots, now some little money for ice-cream.
I am a student of foreign languages, rubbing my charm (a ten cent coin presented by an American) before coming up to the examination table for answering about special features of English grammar in the Middle Ages, and how those features are reflected in the works of Chaucer.
I am a trained fellow on a wrestling mat, trying to down the champion of Russia Valentin Prusov. I cannot do it. He is stronger.
I am an aide to a leader of a team of prospectors in the Sudan. We are going higher and higher into the Red Sea Hills. We don't feel tired. It seems, you can mount any hill. And the hot wind that catches our breath and throws sand into our juvenile beards is no barrier to us.
I am a school teacher. I walk along the desks, sitting over which are indescribable scamps, candidates for my slaps, unwilling to learn the third form of irregular English verbs. I remove the sauciest of them, an already mustached pupil, a repeater who had dared to be impudent to me, from the classroom on my arms (my wrestler's skills are not yet lost), and kicking open the door to chuck him into the corridor like a kitten ("sow the wise, the kind, and eternal").
I am a soldier. Our platoon is being carried from exercises in Belarus in the GAZ-66 truck like firewood. It's 30 below, plus wind. We've only got on the black leather jackets of traffic inspectors, and white silk gloves… Blustered through by the wind, frozen stiff by the frost, we huddle together, trying in vain to keep warm. We lose our senses from cold. I'm dying, it seems. From desperation, I sing, nay, I wheeze "The
Internationale"…
I am an interpreter on an installation site. With my charge, the Englishman Thompson, I break cases with equipment that had arrived from England. The factory is empty. But as I leave it (or, rather, when they kick me out of the factory) two years later, there will be here a complete cycle of chemical production, with roaring presses, toxic gases from containers and poisonous liquids spilled all over the factory floor…
I am an unemployed fellow, prowling the streets and plunging under each help wanted ad hoping to find a job. And to get married at last.
I am a happy father holding the firstling in my arms.
I am a boy, long in the tooth, running errands for carefree idlers on the hot beach of the Mediterranean where we sweat squandering heaps of easy money while our coworkers and compatriots sweat away at open-hearth furnaces.
I am a senior engineer at a very hush-hush research establishment, isolated from the rest of the world, poring from morning till night over operating manuals for anti-tank guided missiles. I am an odd Russian who has brought, together with his comrade, a batch of weapons to some exotic country. It looks however, like nobody waited for us there with that stuff. And while the circumstances of the case and the recipient of the goods are being clarified, we are kept in a stone pit. The blue sky is high above our heads. Got caught. We are really depressed and in no joking mood...
I am a foreigner roaming about the streets of a European capital, and scanning shop windows for something in memory of the tour of duty.
I am a smart, slightly tipsy interpreter at the gubernatorial banquet for foreigners.
I am a mugged drunken man, wallowing under the bush in my native town.
I am not a young gray-haired maverick jogging along the street for fitness sake. Where have you trotted to, you little boy in shabby shoes? Stop and look back...I stopped and looked. And sketchily pointed out a few, just a few landmarks of the way covered. Have I dreamed you, my life?
I shall die. And nothing will change. The world will live on as before. But without me. Other people will live their lives very similar to and quite dissimilar from mine.
I came into this world when gramophones were a rare luxury, and not in each home. Today, a mobile phone, a wonder of technology with a built-in computer in which one can watch TV shows, is practically in each schoolboy's pocket. What will be around when the time for me to go?
I have stayed in this world long enough to have seen all sorts of things and people. Alas, I have seen the hardest that may occur in life. It's when parents bury their children. Lord forbid!
I have buried nearly all of my senior relatives. And many friends, too.Standing again at the coffin of someone dear to me (there's no getting away from it), I pondered the fussiness and shortness of our sojourn on this Earth. We all hustle and bustle, shove and jostle. Try our hardest to acquire something, to grab, to grasp. And the neighbor's posh house gives no rest to our mind… As it happens, however, we don't need that much. Neither the man next door, nor you. Two meters by two is quite enough.
Recently I got in real deep trouble. Almost immobile, I ended up on the sofa. I thought that this was the end of me, as it was back then in the stone pit. I mused over the end. And got scared. Scared of what? Death agony? This, too, probably. As well of becoming a drag on somebody. Also, I got scared of the precipice I suddenly peeped into. It resembled me the abyss I first saw during my youth in the Red Sea. You wade on and on over the coral bank. The depth is a little over a meter. And then abruptly … a bottomless void! Just looking there is terrifying (though you can't drown here). The heart misses a beat from fear of the opening INFINITY.
But more than anything I got scared that I've done so little in life. I have not by far seen and experienced everything (and I'm so curious). I got scared that I have not enjoyed all yet. I haven't even cuddled my grandchildren yet! I felt sore that the sun, as always, would rise shedding purple on the horizon, but this would be not for me. And that beauty, which at one time I had watched as a boy staying with my grandmother in the country – where vistas are free and clean – I have not even described in my stories…
I shall die. It's inevitable. But as long as I'm alive I want to live.
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