Photo: RIA Novosti
Today, of course, everyone is frantically guessing: will it or won't it? They listen intently — who is in what, and believe — who is who. However, they try not to pronounce the key word once again.
One could, of course, believe the voice of one or another official who confidently and authoritatively asserts: “No, it will not and cannot be. Just because it can't be.»
I would, having heard the next words of this kind, exhale with relief. And instead, for some reason, I recall from War and Peace:
“Less fear, less news,” the poster said, “but I answer with my life that there will be no villain in Moscow.” These words for the first time clearly proved to Pierre that the French would be in Moscow.”
I remember this and chase this quote away from myself, but I can’t help myself. And how can I believe the voice of an official, if I have long and firmly known that all these “officials” lie not only always and for any reason, but they lie cursedly and, if you like, with inspiration …
The people of my generation cannot be called the «military generation». We are post-war, we are «boomers», as we have been called for some time now.
We were born after the war, but the war was too short a distance from us. She bruised and abscessed. It poisoned the air we breathed with a heavy smell of burning and covered everything around with layers of greasy soot.
She reminded of herself everywhere — trophy little things in our meager dwellings, gathering dust in sheds and attics with caps without cockades and overcoats without shoulder straps.
For us children, this painful trace took the form of our specific post-war games and toys — field glasses without lenses, officer tablets, brass buttons with stars, gas masks canvas bags or gas masks themselves, wearing which we played divers — before astronautics was still far away.
But the loudest and most piercing war reminded of itself by the abundance of commodities of the crippled people around us. On the street, in transport, at train stations and shops, in courtyards and pubs, in communal apartments, for some — directly in families. My father used to take me to the bathhouse when I was little. That's where I've seen enough for many years to come.
My father was at the front from the first to the last day of the war. And he never said anything about the war, no matter how much I pestered him. «Nothing interesting,» he said curtly, his face visibly darkening. I still have several of his front-line photographs, several letters to my mother, a newspaper clipping (cut out by my mother), where his name was on the long list of those awarded the medal «For Military Merit». And that's it. The «Leningrad Front» is all I know.
The fact that war, any war is, first of all, death, pain, fear, ugliness, hunger, homelessness, it was not necessary to say and remind . This understanding was almost universal.
For me, a post-war boy, this word still resonates with paralyzing horror and mortal longing. And the war — despite the fact that I did not find it — I dreamed of for a very long time. I dreamed of bombings and a chilling air raid howl. It's me. And then what can we say about my mother, who covered her ears every time a siren sounded in a movie about the war that was on TV.
I know — and no one will knock me down with talk that there are just wars — I know for sure that any war is primarily immoral and physically ugly.
We all read books about Indians in childhood, and we remember the name of that ax that was either buried or dug out, depending on, so to speak, the current moment.