I came to visit my father's grave. The cemetery is far outside the city (there is no more burial place nearby). The grave is opposite the workshop for making wreaths and headstones. It's a convenient point of orientation. Close to it is the grave of Marina Snegiryova with a high cross, which also eases orientation. Head for it and my father will be there, easy to find. Marina was 33. My father was 96.
I'm standing near him, looking around. A few meters away from his grave, a blue-yellow-green flag of Russian paratroopers is flying on a flagpole. I approach it. Sergeant Andrei Viktorovich Pakhomov. January 1995 - March 2024. So, somewhere near Kiev he died at the very beginning of the Special Military Operation (a special military operation, which cannot be called a war. If you do, you'll get a prison sentence).
I step aside a little. I see a large and expensive monument at the very edge of the cemetery path. I read the surname. It’s rare, but familiar to me.
Under this gravestone lies the father of my pupil. His age is venerable, over 80.
I remember the pupil well. He was a very smart and quick-witted boy. Back then I asked myself a question - how will his fate turn out and what will he become? Time has passed. Now I see and know the answer to that question.
The boy became a big man; a member of government structures (buried his dad in high style). He was head of a large and serious enterprise, where I (so it happened) worked as an ordinary employee. The enterprise develops and manufactures ‘soft toys’, currently in great demand
by Russian troops on the territory of Ukraine. Paratrooper Andrei Pakhomov, lying next to my father, played with those toys.
Everything is so close, within a dozen meters. And in just a dozen years.
