For a second it seemed to Sasha that this crumpled ZIL would stop - it was such an old, rattling car, ripe for an automobile cemetery, that, according to the same law, according to which in old men and old women, who used to be rude and unresponsive, attention and helpfulness wake up before death - according to the same law, only related to the world of cars, she had to stop. But nothing like that - with drunken senile impudence, clinking a bucket suspended from the gas tank, "ZIL" rattled past, drove tensely onto a hillock, made an obscene triumphant sound at its top, accompanied by a jet of gray smoke, and silently disappeared behind an asphalt rift.

Sasha left the road, threw his small backpack into the grass and sat on it - completing the movement, he felt something hard from below, remembered the melted cheeses lying under the top flap of the backpack, and experienced a vindictive satisfaction, usual for a person who got into trouble, when he finds out that someone or something is nearby - also in difficult circumstances. Sasha was just about to think about how difficult his current circumstances are.

There were only two ways to proceed - either continue to wait for a ride, or return to the village three kilometers behind. As for the ride, the question was almost clear - there are, apparently, such regions of the country or such separate roads where, due to the fact that absolutely all drivers passing by belong to some secret brotherhood of scoundrels, it is not only impossible to practice hitchhiking - on the contrary, you need to make sure that you are not doused with dirty water from a puddle when you walk along the side of the road. The road from Konkovo ​​to the nearest railroad oasis—another fifteen kilometers if you go straight ahead—was just one of those enchanted routes. Of the five cars that have passed by in the past forty minutes, not one has stopped, and if some aging woman with purple lips from lipstick and a hairstyle like "I still love you" hadn't shown him the fig, sticking her hand long out the window of the red Niva , Sasha could decide that he became invisible. After that, there was still hope for some kind of approximate truck driver who would silently peer at the road ahead through the dusty glass all the way, and then with a short movement of the head would give up Sasha’s five (and suddenly a photograph of several guys in paratrooper uniform hanging over the steering wheel would catch your eye against the backdrop of distant mountains), but when the only ZiL in the last half hour passed by, this hope died. The autostop is off.

Sasha glanced at his watch—it was twenty past ten. It will be dark soon, he thought, he must have hit it... He looked around: on both sides, behind a hundred meters of rough terrain - microscopic mounds, sparse bushes and too tall and lush grass, making one think that there was a swamp under it - a liquid forest began, what something unhealthy, like the offspring of an alcoholic. In general, the vegetation around was strange: everything a little larger than flowers and grass grew with strain and anguish, and at least reached normal sizes in the end - like, for example, a chain of birches from which the forest began - but there was such an impression that all this had grown, frightened by someone's shouts, and if not for them, it would have spread like a lichen on the ground. There were some unpleasant places, heavy and deserted, as if prepared for demolition from the face of the earth - although, Sasha thought, one cannot say that, because if the earth has a face, it is clearly in another place. Not without reason, of the three villages we met today, only one was more or less plausible - just the last one, Konkovo, and the rest were abandoned, and only in a few of their houses did someone else live out their lives, the abandoned huts looked more like an ethnographic museum exposition than former human ones. dwellings.

However, Konkovo, which had some connection with the roadside inscription "Collective Farm" Michurinsky "" and the plaster sentry by the highway, seemed like a normal human settlement only in comparison with the deaf desolation of neighboring, already nameless, villages. Even though there was a shop in Konkovo, a club poster flapping in the wind with the name of a French avant-garde film written in green gouache, and a tractor screeching somewhere behind the houses, it was still almost uncomfortably. There were no people on the streets - only a grandmother in black passed, smallly crossing herself at the sight of Sasha's Hawaiian shirt covered with multi-colored Freudian symbols, and a bespectacled boy rode a bicycle with a string bag on the handlebars - the bicycle was too big for him, he could not sit in the saddle and rode standing , as if running over a rusty heavy frame. The rest of the residents, if there were any, stayed at home.

In my mind, the trip looked very different. Here he sits down from a flat-bottomed river boat, reaches a village where, on the mounds - Sasha did not know what a mound was, and imagined it in the form of a comfortable wooden bench along a log wall - old women are sitting peacefully going out of their minds, a sunflower is growing around, and under His yellow saucers quietly play chess on gray plank tables, shaved old men. In a word, some kind of endless Tverskoy Boulevard was imagined. Well, the cow is still mooing

Further - here it goes to the outskirts, and a pine forest warmed by the sun opens up, a river with a floating boat or a field cut by a road - and wherever you go, it will be wonderful everywhere: you can make a fire, you can even remember your childhood and climb trees. In the evening, by passing cars - to the train.

And what happened? First - the frightening emptiness of abandoned villages, then the same frightening habitation of the inhabited. As a result, to everything that could not be trusted, one more thing was added - a color photograph from a thick, peeled book with a caption that mentioned "the old Russian village of Konkovo, now the main estate of a millionaire collective farm." Sasha found the place where the picture he liked was taken from, and was surprised how different the same view can be in a photograph and in life.

Having mentally given himself the word never again to succumb to impulses for meaningless travel, Sasha decided to at least watch this film in a club - it was no longer in Moscow. Having bought a ticket from an invisible cashier, - he had to speak with a freckled, plump hand in the window, which tore off the ticket and counted the change - he ended up in a half-empty hall, got bored in it for an hour and a half, sometimes turning around to a pensioner who was straight as a sleeper, whistling in some places (his criteria were not at all clear, but on the other hand, there was something roaringly robbery and at the same time sad in the whistle, something from the departing Russia), then - when the film ended - he looked at the whistler's straight back moving away from the club, at the lantern under the tin cone, on the identical fences around the houses and walked away from Konkovo, looking askance at the plaster man in the cap, who stretched out his hand and raised his foot, doomed to wander forever to his brother in existence, waiting for him by the highway.

Now three kilometers had already been covered, another had managed to flow into the road - and for all the time not one of the cars passing by had even slowed down. And they went less and less often - Sasha waited so long for the last truck, which finally dispelled illusions with its bluish exhaust, that he managed to forget what he was waiting for.

“I’ll go back,” he said aloud, addressing either a spider or an ant crawling on his sneaker, “otherwise we’ll spend the night here together.”

The spider turned out to be an intelligent insect and quickly climbed back into the grass. Sasha got up, threw his backpack behind his back and went back, thinking about where and how he would arrange to spend the night. I didn’t feel like knocking on the door of some grandmother, and it was useless, because grandmothers who let me spend the night usually live in those places where nightingale robbers and kashchei, and here was the Michurinsky collective farm - a concept, if you think about it, no less magical, but magical in -to another, without any hope of an overnight stay in an unfamiliar house. The only suitable option that Sasha managed to think of was the following: he buys a ticket for the last session to the club, and after the session, hiding behind a heavy green curtain in the hall, he stays. It was possible to spend the night quite decently on spectator seats - they did not have armrests. In order for everything to work out, he will have to get up from his seat until the lights are turned on and hide behind the curtain - then a woman in a homemade blue uniform who accompanies the audience to the exit will not notice him. True, you will have to watch this dark film again - but there's nothing you can do about it.

Thinking about all this, Sasha went to the fork. When he passed here about twenty minutes ago, it seemed to him that another, smaller one was attached to the road on which he was walking, and now he stood at a crossroads, not understanding which of the roads he had come here: both seemed exactly the same. He tried to remember which side the second road came from and closed his eyes for a few seconds. It seems to be on the right - a large tree still grew there. Yep, that's it. So, you need to go on the right road. In front of the tree, it seems, was such a gray pillar. Where is he? Here it is, only for some reason on the left. Nearby is a small tree. It's unclear.

Sasha looked at the pole that once supported the wires, but now looks like a huge rake threatening the sky, thought a little more and turned to the left. After walking twenty paces, he stopped and looked back - suddenly, from the crossbar of the pillar, clearly visible against the background of the red stripes of sunset, a bird took off, which he had previously taken for an insulator covered with many years of mud. Sasha went on - in order to make it to Konkovo ​​in time, he had to hurry, and he had to go through the forest.

It's amazing, thought Sasha, what a lack of observation. On the way from Konkovo, he did not even notice this wide clearing, behind which he could see a clearing. When a person is absorbed in his thoughts, the world around him disappears. He probably would not have noticed her even now if they had not called out to him.

And a few more voices whinnied. Among the first trees of the forest, just near the clearing, people and bottles flashed - Sasha did not allow himself to turn around and saw the local youth only out of the corner of his eye. He quickened his pace, confident that he would not be chased, but still unpleasantly agitated.

- Oh, wolf! shouted from behind.

"Maybe I'm on the wrong road?" Sasha thought as the road zigzagged, which he didn't remember. No, it seems like that one: here is a long crack on the pavement, reminiscent of a Latin double-ve - something similar has already happened.

Gradually it got dark, but it was still decent to go. In order to occupy himself with something, Sasha began to think about ways to enter the club after the start of the session, starting from a preoccupied return for a cap forgotten on the seat (“you know, so red, with a long peak,” in honor of his favorite book) and ending with the descent down through a wide pipe on the roof, if there is one, of course.

The fact that he had chosen the wrong road became clear after half an hour of walking, when everything around was already blue and the first stars cut through the sky. This became clear when a high steel mast appeared by the road, supporting three thick wires, and a quiet electric crackle was heard: there were no such masts on the road from Konkovo. Having already understood everything, Sasha, by inertia, reached the mast and stared point-blank at a tin plate with a lovingly traced skull and a threatening inscription. Then he looked back and was amazed: had he really just passed through this black and terrible forest? Going back to turn in the right direction meant meeting the guys sitting by the road again - to find out what state they had come under the influence of port wine and dusk was, of course, interesting, but not so much as to risk their lives because of this . To go forward meant to go no one knows where, but still: if the road goes through the forest, must it lead somewhere? Sasha thought.

The buzzing of wires overhead reminded me that normal people live somewhere in the world, generate electricity during the day, and watch TV with it in the evening. If we were going to spend the night in a deep forest, Sasha thought, it would be best under an electric mast - then it would be something like sleeping in a front door, and this is a tried and true thing.

Suddenly, there was a roar full of age-old anguish - at first it was barely audible, and then it grew to unimaginable limits, and only then did Sasha realize that it was an airplane. He raised his head in relief, and soon multi-colored dots appeared above, gathered in a triangle, while the plane was visible, it was even comfortable to stand on the dark forest road, and when he disappeared, Sasha already knew that he would go ahead. (He suddenly remembered how a very long time ago - maybe ten or fifteen years ago - he also raised his head and looked at the night side lights, and then, growing older, sometimes imagined himself a paratrooper dropped from an airplane that had just flown through the summer night , and that thought helped a lot.) He walked forward along the road, looking straight ahead at the chipped asphalt, gradually becoming the lightest part of the surroundings.

A weak light of an indefinite nature fell on the road, and one could walk without fear of stumbling. For some reason - probably out of urban habit - Sasha had the certainty that the road was illuminated by rare lanterns. When he tried to find such a lantern, he came to his senses - of course, there were no lanterns around: the moon was shining, and Sasha, raising his head, saw her clear white crescent. Looking at the sky a little, he noted with surprise that the stars were multi-colored - he had never noticed this before, or had simply forgotten about it for a long time.

Finally it got dark completely and completely - that is, it became clear that it would not be darker. The steel mast was left far behind, and now only the asphalt under their feet testified to the existence of people. When it became cool, Sasha took a jacket out of his backpack, put it on and fastened it with all the zippers: this way he felt more prepared for all sorts of nightly surprises. At the same time, he ate two crumpled processed cheese "Friendship" - the foil with this word, faintly gleaming in the moonlight, for some reason reminded of the pennants that the humanity of the motherland constantly launches into space.

Several times Sasha heard the distant hum of car engines. It had been about an hour since he passed the mast. The cars he heard were driving somewhere far away, probably on other roads. The road that he was walking on did not please him with anything special - once, however, she left the forest, walked five hundred meters across the field, but immediately dived into another forest, where the trees were older and taller, and narrowed: now it was darker to go, because the strip of sky above his head also became narrower. It began to seem to Sasha that he was sinking deeper and deeper into some kind of abyss, and the road along which he was walking would not lead him anywhere, but on the contrary, it will lead you into a dense thicket and end in the realm of evil, in the midst of huge living oaks moving their hand-shaped branches - like in children's horror films, where in the end such good wins that it becomes a pity for the defeated Babu Yaga and Kashchei, pity for the inability to find a place in life and constantly betraying their intelligence.

The noise of the engine came up again ahead - now it was closer, and Sasha thought that a car would finally drive out towards him and throw him somewhere where there would be an electric lamp overhead, walls on the sides and he could fall asleep peacefully. For some time the humming approached, and then suddenly subsided - the car stopped. Sasha almost ran forward, waiting for it to start moving towards him again, but when he again heard the hum of the engine, it came from afar - as if the car approaching him had suddenly jumped silently a kilometer back and now repeated the path already traveled.

Sasha finally realized that he heard another car, also driving in his direction. True, it was not clear where the first one had gone, but it did not matter - as long as one of them nevertheless appeared from the darkness. In the forest it is difficult to accurately determine the distance to the source of the sound - when the second car also stopped, it seemed to Sasha that she had not reached him some hundred meters, the headlights were not visible, but this was easily explained by the fact that there was a turn ahead.

Suddenly Sasha thought. What was happening around the corner of the road was not clear. One after the other, two cars suddenly stopped in the middle of the night forest. Sasha remembered that before, when he heard the distant rumble of engines, this rumble approached for a while, grew, and then broke off. But now it seemed very strange: two cars, one after the other, stopped or were stopped - as if they had dropped into some kind of deep hole in the middle of the road.

The night prompted such explanations for what was happening that Sasha, just in case, went to the side of the road so that he could quickly dive into the forest if circumstances required, and moved forward with a crouching gait, carefully peering into the darkness. As soon as he changed his way of moving - and before that he was walking in the very middle of the road, shuffling loudly with Chinese rubber on the remnants of asphalt - then most of the fear immediately disappeared, and he thought that if he did not get into the car now, then it will go on like this.

When there was already a little bit left before the turn, Sasha saw a faint reddish reflection on the leaves, and at the same time voices and laughter reached him. Then another car drove up and stopped somewhere very close - this time he even heard the slamming of doors. Judging by the fact that they were laughing ahead, nothing particularly terrible happened there. Or just the opposite, he thought suddenly.

After such a thought, it seemed that it would be safer in the forest than on the road. Sasha entered the forest and, feeling the darkness in front of him with his hands, slowly walked forward. Finally, he was in a place where he could see what was happening around the corner. Hiding behind a tree, he waited for his eyes to adjust to the new level of darkness, carefully looked out - and almost laughed, so ordinary the picture that opened up did not correspond to the tension of his fear.

Ahead was a large clearing, on one side of it, about six cars stood in disarray - Volga, Lada and even one foreign one - and everything was illuminated by a huge fire in the center of the clearing, around which stood people of different ages and differently dressed, some with sandwiches and bottles in their hands. They were talking and laughing and behaving exactly like any large company around a night fire - they lacked only a tape recorder with dead batteries, struggling against silence.

As if having heard Sasha’s thought, one of those standing by the fire went to the car, opened the door, put his hand inside, and rather loud music began to play, though not suitable for a picnic: as if hoarse gloomy trumpets howled in the distance and the wind hummed between the bare autumn trunks.

However, the campfire company did not express bewilderment at this choice - on the contrary, when the one who turned on the music returned to the others, he was clapped on the shoulder several times approvingly. Looking closer, Sasha began to notice some oddities in what was happening - and oddities, as if emphasized by the absurdity of the music.

There were a couple of children around the campfire - quite normal. There were guys of Sasha's age. There were girls. But for some reason, an elderly policeman was standing a little to the side of the high stump, and talking to him was a man in a jacket and tie. A military man stood by the fire alone - it seems, a colonel, he was bypassed, and he sometimes raised his hands to the moon. And a few more people were in suits with ties - as if they had come not to the forest, but to work.

Sasha pressed himself against his tree, because a man in a spacious black jacket, with a strap intercepting the hair on his forehead, approached the edge of the clearing, near which he was standing. Another face, slightly distorted by the jumping reflections of the fire, turned in Sasha's direction ... No, no one noticed.

"It's not clear," thought Sasha, "who are they?" Then it occurred to me that all this could be explained quite simply: they were probably sitting at some kind of reception, and then they rushed into the forest ... A policeman - for protection ... But where did the children come from then? And why such music?

Sasha went cold. He slowly turned around and saw in front of him a girl in a sports, it seems green, suit with a delicate Adidas lily on her chest.

— What are you doing here? she asked just as quietly.

Sasha opened his mouth with some effort.

“I… so easy,” he replied.

- What is so simple?

- Well, I was walking along the road, I came here.

- That is, how? the girl asked almost in horror, “didn’t you come with us?”

The girl made such a movement as if she was going to jump to the side, but still remained in place.

“So you came here on your own?” Did you take it and come? she asked, calming down a bit.

“It’s not clear what’s wrong here,” Sasha said. It began to occur to him that she was mocking him, but the girl suddenly shifted her gaze to his sneakers and shook her head with such frank bewilderment that Sasha dismissed this thought. On the contrary, it suddenly seemed to him that he had thrown something out of nowhere. The girl was silent for a minute, then asked:

- And how do you want to get out now?

Sasha decided that she meant his position as a lone night walker, and answered:

— How? I'll ask them to take me to any station. When are you returning?

The girl was silent. Sasha repeated the question, and she made an incomprehensible spiral gesture with her palm.

The girl looked at him with doubt and regret.

— What was your name? she asked.

"Why - called? - Sasha was surprised and wanted to correct her, but instead he answered, as he once answered policemen in childhood:

— Sasha Lapin.

The girl chuckled. After a moment's thought, she lightly nudged him in the chest with her finger.

“There is something inviting about you, Sasha Lapin,” she said, “so I’ll tell you this: don’t even try to run away from here. Truth. Better get out of the forest in about five minutes and go to the fire, be braver. They will ask you, who are you and what are you doing here. And you answer that you heard the call. And, most importantly, with complete confidence. Understood?

- What call?

— What, what. Such. My job is to give you advice.

The girl looked at Sasha once more, then walked around him and moved into the clearing. As she approached the fire, a man in a suit patted her on the head and gave her a sandwich.

"He's mocking," thought Sasha. Then he saw a man in a black jacket, looking into the darkness at the edge of the clearing, and decided that he was not mocking: somehow strangely he peered into the night, this man, not at all the way it should be done. And in the center of the clearing, Sasha suddenly noticed a wooden pole stuck into the ground with a skull impaled on it - narrow and long, with powerful jaws.

After some hesitation, Sasha made up his mind, stepped out from behind the tree and went to the yellow-red spot of the fire. He walked swaying - and did not understand why, and his eyes were riveted to the fire.

When he appeared in the clearing, conversations in it somehow immediately fell silent. Everyone turned and now looked at him, somnambulistically crossing the empty space between the edge of the forest and the fire.

"Stop," someone said hoarsely.

Sasha walked forward without stopping - they ran up to him, and several strong male hands grabbed him.

— What are you doing here? asked the same voice that had commanded him to stop.

“I heard the call,” Sasha answered gloomily and rudely, looking at the ground.

— New.

Sasha was handed a cheese sandwich and a glass of "tarragon", after which he was immediately forgotten - everyone returned to their interrupted conversations. Sasha came closer to the fire and suddenly remembered his backpack, which was left behind a tree. "To hell with him," he thought, and got busy with his sandwich.

A girl in a tracksuit approached from the side.

“I am Lena,” she said. - Well done. Did everything right.

Sasha looked around.

"Listen," he said, "what's going on here?" Picnic?

Lena bent down, picked up a piece of a thick branch and threw it into the fire.

"Wait, you'll find out," she said. Then she waved her little finger at him - some kind of completely Chinese gesture turned out - and walked away to a small group of people standing near the stump.

Someone from behind pulled Sasha by the sleeve of his jacket. He turned around and shuddered: in front of him stood the dean of the faculty where he studied, a major specialist in the field of something that was supposed to start only in the next year, but even at that it caused Sasha feelings similar to the first spasms of impending nausea. . Sasha was stunned at first, and then he told himself that there was nothing supernatural in such a meeting: after all, the dean is only the dean at work, and in the evening and at night he is a person and can go anywhere. But Sasha could not remember what his patronymic name was.

“Listen, newcomer,” said the dean (he clearly didn’t recognize Sasha), “fill it in.”

A scribbled sheet of paper and a pen fell into Sasha's hand. The fire illuminated the professor's high-cheeked face and the inscriptions on the sheet he held out: it turned out to be an ordinary questionnaire. Sasha squatted down and on his knee, somehow, began to write down the answers - where he was born, when, why, and so on. It was, of course, strange to fill out a questionnaire in the middle of the night forest, but the fact that the daytime authorities were standing overhead somehow balanced the situation. The dean waited, occasionally sniffing the air and peering over Sasha's shoulder. When the last line was finished, the dean snatched a pen and paper from him, grinned grinningly, and, jumping up and down with impatience, ran to his car, on the hood of which lay an open folder.

Getting up, Sasha noticed that during the time he filled out the questionnaire, a noticeable change had taken place in the behavior of those gathered around the fire. They used to resemble, apart from some minor inconsistencies, ordinary tourists. Now it was different. The conversations continued as before, but the voices became somehow barking, and the movements and gestures of the speakers became smooth and dexterous. One man in a suit walked away from the fire and with professional ease tumbled in the grass, throwing off the tie that had come out from under his jacket with movements of his head, the other froze like a crane on one leg and prayerfully looked up at the moon, and the policeman, visible through the tongues of fire, stood on all fours at the edge of the clearing and, like a periscope, moved his head. Sasha himself began to feel ringing in his ears and dry mouth. All this had an undoubted, if vague connection with the music rushing from the car: its pace quickened, and the trumpets wheezed more and more alarmingly, as if foreshadowing the approach of some new and unusual theme. Gradually, the music accelerated to impossibility, and the air around became thick and hot - Sasha thought that one more such minute, and he would die. Suddenly the trumpets stopped on a sharp note, and the howling sound of a gong resounded.

For a second it seemed to Sasha that this crumpled ZIL would stop - it was such an old, rattling car, ripe for an automobile cemetery, that, according to the same law, according to which in old men and old women, who used to be rude and unresponsive, attention and helpfulness wake up before death - according to the same law, only related to the world of cars, she had to stop. But nothing like that - with a drunken senile arrogance, clinking a bucket suspended from the gas tank, the ZIL rattled past, drove tensely onto a hillock, made an obscene victorious sound at its top, accompanied by a jet of gray smoke, and already silently disappeared behind an asphalt rift.

Sasha got off the road, threw his small backpack into the grass and sat down on it - something inside leaned over, crunched, and Sasha experienced a malicious satisfaction, usual for a person in trouble, who learns that someone or something is nearby - too in difficult circumstances. How difficult his current circumstances are, Sasha was already beginning to feel.

There were only two ways to proceed: either continue to wait for a ride, or return to the village - three kilometers. As for the ride, the question was practically clear: there are, apparently, such regions of the country or such separate roads where, due to the belonging of all the drivers passing along them to some secret brotherhood of scoundrels, it is not only impossible to practice hitchhiking - on the contrary, you need to make sure that you are not doused with dirty water from a puddle when you walk along the side of the road. The road from Konkovo ​​to the nearest oasis near the railway - fifteen kilometers in a straight line - was just one of such enchanted routes. Of the five cars that passed by, not one stopped, and if some aging woman with purple lips from lipstick and a touching hairstyle “I still love you” hadn’t shown him the fig, sticking out her hand long out of the window of the red Niva, Sasha could decide that he became invisible. There was still hope for the driver promised by many newspapers and films, who would silently peer at the road through the dusty windshield of the truck all the way, and then with a short movement of the head would refuse money (and suddenly a photograph of several guys in paratrooper uniform hanging over the steering wheel against the background distant mountains), but when the rattling ZIL passed by, this hope died.

Sasha glanced at his watch - it was twenty past ten. It’s going to get dark soon, he thought, wow, he’s got it ... He looked around - behind a hundred meters of rough terrain (microscopic mounds, sparse bushes and too tall and juicy grass, making one think that there was a swamp under it) a liquid forest began, some unhealthy, like the offspring of an alcoholic. In general, the vegetation around was strange. Everything that was larger than flowers and grass grew, as it were, with an effort and anguish, and although it eventually reached normal sizes, it left the impression that it had grown, frightened by someone's shouts, otherwise it would have spread like a lichen on the ground. There were some unpleasant places, heavy and deserted, as if prepared for demolition from the face of the earth - although, Sasha thought, if the earth has a face, then obviously in another place. Not without reason, of the three villages he saw today, only one looked more or less plausible - just the last one, Konkovo ​​- and the rest were abandoned, and only in a few houses someone else was living out his life; the abandoned huts looked more like an exposition of an ethnographic museum than human dwellings.

Even Konkovo, marked by a plaster sentry by the highway and a roadside inscription “Kolkhoz Michurinsky”, seemed to be a settlement of people only in comparison with the deaf desolation of neighboring, already nameless, villages. Although there was a shop in Konkovo, a club poster flapping in the wind with the name of a French avant-garde film written in green gouache, and a tractor screeching somewhere behind the houses, I still felt uneasy. There were no people on the streets - only a grandmother in black passed by, smallly crossing herself at the sight of Sasha's Hawaiian shirt, covered with multi-colored magic symbols, and a bespectacled boy with a shopping bag on the handlebar rode by on a bicycle. The bicycle was too big for him, he could not sit in the saddle and rode standing up, as if he were running over a rusty heavy frame. The rest of the residents, if there were any, stayed at home.

In my mind, the trip looked very different. Here he sits down from a flat-bottomed river boat, reaches the village, where on the mounds - Sasha did not know what a mound was, and imagined it in the form of a comfortable wooden bench along a log wall - old women who have gone out of their minds sit peacefully, a sunflower grows around, and under His yellow saucers quietly play chess on gray plank tables, shaved old men. In a word, it was Tverskoy Boulevard, only overgrown with sunflowers. Well, a cow is still mooing in the distance.

Further - here it goes to the outskirts, and a forest warmed by the sun opens up, a river with a floating boat or a field cut by a road, and wherever you go, it will be wonderful everywhere: you can make a fire, you can remember your childhood and climb trees - if, of course, after that as he remembers it, it turns out that he climbed them. In the evening - by passing cars to the train.

And what happened?

The culprit was a color photograph from a thick, peeled book with the caption: “The old Russian village of Konkovo, now the main estate of a millionaire collective farm.” Sasha found the place where the picture he liked was taken from, cursed the Tatar word "collective farm" and the American word "millionaire" and was surprised how different the same view can be in a photograph and in life.

Mentally making a promise to himself never again to succumb to impulses for meaningless travel, Sasha decided to at least watch this film in a village club. Having bought a ticket from an invisible cashier - he had to speak with a freckled, chubby hand in the window, which tore off a blue piece of paper and counted out the change - he ended up in a half-empty hall, got bored in it for an hour and a half, sometimes turning around to his grandfather, straight as a sleeper, whistling in some places (his criteria were completely unclear, but on the other hand, there was something nightingale-robber in the whistle, something from the outgoing Russia); then, when the film was over, he looked at the straight back of the whistler moving away from the club, at the lantern under the tin cone, at the identical fences around the houses, and walked away from Konkovo, squinting at the plaster man in the cap, who had stretched out his hand and raised his leg, doomed to forever wander to his brother along the nothingness waiting for him by the highway.

Sasha waited so long for the last truck, which finally dispelled illusions with its bluish exhaust, that he managed to forget what he was waiting for.

Getting up, he threw his backpack behind his back and went back, thinking about where and how he would spend the night. I didn’t want to knock on the door of some grandmother, and it was useless, because the grandmothers who let me spend the night usually live in the same places where the nightingale-robbers and koshcheis, and here was the Michurinsky collective farm - a concept, if you think about it, no less magical, but magical in a different way, without any hope of an overnight stay in an unfamiliar house. The only suitable option that Sasha managed to think of was the following: he buys a ticket for the last session to the club, and after the session, hiding behind a heavy green curtain in the hall, he stays. In order for everything to work out, it will be necessary to get up from the spot until the lights are turned on, then a woman in a homemade black uniform will not notice him, accompanying the audience to the exit. True, you will have to watch this dark film again, but there's nothing you can do about it.

Thinking about all this, Sasha went to the fork. When he passed here about twenty minutes ago, it seemed to him that another, smaller one was attached to the road on which he was walking, and now he stood at a crossroads, not understanding which of the roads he was walking on - both seemed exactly the same. It seems to be on the right - a large tree still grew there. Yep, that's it. So you have to go right. There seemed to be a gray post in front of the tree. Where is he? Here it is, only for some reason on the left. Nearby is a small tree. It's unclear.

Sasha glanced at the pole that once supported the wires, but now looks like a huge rake threatening the sky, and turned to the left. After walking twenty paces, he stopped and looked back: from the crossbar of the pillar, clearly visible against the background of the red stripes of sunset, a bird flew up, which he had previously taken for an insulator covered with many years of mud. He went further - in order to be in time for Konkovo ​​in time, he had to hurry, and he had to go through the forest.

Surprising, he thought, how unobservant. On the road from Konkovo, he did not notice this wide clearing, behind which he could see a clearing. When a person is absorbed in his thoughts, the world around him disappears. He probably would not have noticed her even now if they had not called out to him.

And a few more voices whinnied. Among the first trees of the forest, just near the clearing, people and bottles flashed - Sasha did not allow himself to turn around and saw the local youth only out of the corner of his eye. He quickened his pace, confident that he would not be chased, but still unpleasantly agitated.

- Oh, wolf! shouted from behind.

"Maybe I'm not going there?" Sasha thought as the road zigzag, which he did not remember. No, it looks like there: here is a long crack on the pavement, similar to the Latin double-ve; something similar already happened.

It was getting dark a little, but it was still decent to go. To keep himself occupied, he began to think about ways to get into the club after the session began - from the anxious return for a cap forgotten on the seat to the descent through the wide chimney on the roof, if there is one, of course.

The fact that he chose the wrong path became clear after half an hour, when everything around was already blue and the first stars cut through the sky. This became clear when a high steel mast appeared on the side of the road, supporting three thick wires, and a quiet electric crackle was heard: there were no such masts on the road from Konkovo. Having already understood everything, Sasha, by inertia, reached the mast and stared point-blank at a tin plate with a lovingly traced skull and a threatening inscription. Then he looked back and was amazed: had he really just passed through this black and terrible forest? Going back to the fork meant meeting the guys sitting by the road again and finding out what state they had come to under the influence of port wine and dusk. To go forward meant to go no one knows where, but still the road must lead somewhere, right?

The buzzing of wires reminded us that normal people live somewhere in the world, generate electricity during the day, and watch TV with it in the evening. If we were to spend the night in a deep forest, Sasha thought, it would be best under an electric mast, then it would be something like sleeping in a front door, and this is a tried and true thing.

From afar came a roar full of age-old melancholy - at first it was barely audible, and then grew to unimaginable limits, and only then did Sasha realize that it was an airplane. He raised his head in relief - soon multi-colored dots appeared at the top, collected in a triangle; while the plane was visible, it was even comfortable to stand on the dark forest road, and when he disappeared, Sasha went forward, looking straight ahead at the asphalt, gradually becoming the brightest part of the surroundings.

A weak light of an indefinite nature fell on the road, and one could walk without fear of stumbling. For some reason - probably out of urban habit - Sasha was sure that the road was lit by rare lanterns. He tried to find a lantern and came to his senses: of course, there were no lanterns - the moon was shining, and Sasha, raising his head, saw her clear white crescent. Looking at the sky a little, he noted that the stars were multi-colored - he had not noticed this before, or noticed it, but had long forgotten.

Finally it got dark completely and completely, that is, it became clear that it would not be darker. Sasha took a jacket out of his backpack, put it on and fastened it with all the zippers: this way he felt more prepared for the night's surprises. At the same time, he ate two crumpled processed cheese "Friendship" - the foil with this word, faintly gleaming in the moonlight, for some reason reminded of the pennants that humanity constantly launches into space.

Several times he heard the distant hum of car engines. The cars were driving somewhere far away. The road left the forest once, walked about five hundred meters across the field, dived into another forest, where the trees were older and taller, and narrowed: now it was darker to go, because the strip of sky overhead had also become narrower. It began to seem to him that he was sinking deeper and deeper into some kind of abyss and the road would not lead him anywhere, but, on the contrary, would lead him into a dense thicket and end in the realm of evil, among huge oaks moving their hand-shaped branches, as in children's films horrors, where in the end such goodness in a red shirt wins that it becomes a pity for the defeated Babu Yaga and Koshchei.

The noise of the engine appeared ahead again - now it was closer, and Sasha thought that at last they would throw him somewhere where there would be an electric lamp above his head, walls on the sides and he could fall asleep peacefully. For some time the buzz was approaching, but suddenly it subsided - the car stopped. He quickly went forward and soon heard the hum of the engine again - now it came again from afar, as if the car had suddenly jumped silently a kilometer back and repeated the path already traveled.

He realized that he heard another car, also going in his direction. In the forest, it is difficult to accurately determine the distance to the source of the sound; when the second car stopped, it seemed to Sasha that she did not reach him some hundred meters; no headlights were visible, but there was a turn ahead.

It was incomprehensible. One after the other, two cars suddenly stopped in the middle of the night forest, as if they had dropped into some kind of hole in the middle of the road.

Sasha, just in case, turned to the side of the road to dive into the forest if circumstances required, and moved forward with a crouching gait, carefully peering into the darkness. The fear immediately disappeared, and he thought that if he did not get into the car now, then he would continue in this way.

Just before the turn, he saw faint reddish reflections on the leaves and heard voices and laughter. Another car drove up and stopped somewhere very close; doors slammed. Judging by the fact that they were laughing ahead, nothing particularly terrible happened there. Or just the opposite, he thought suddenly.

He turned into the forest and, feeling the darkness in front of him with his hands, slowly walked forward. Finally, he was in a place where he could see what was happening around the corner. Hiding behind a tree, he waited for his eyes to adjust to the new level of darkness before carefully peeking out.

Ahead was a large clearing; on one side of it stood about six cars in disarray, and everything was lit by a small fire, around which stood people of different ages and differently dressed, some with sandwiches and bottles in their hands. They talked and behaved like any large company around a night fire - the only thing missing was a tape recorder, struggling against silence.

As if hearing Sasha's thought, a stout man approached the car, put his hand inside, and quite loud music began to play - though not suitable for a picnic: some hoarse gloomy trumpets howled monotonously.

However, the company did not express displeasure - on the contrary, when the person who turned on the music returned to the others, he was clapped on the shoulder several times approvingly. Looking closer, Sasha began to notice other oddities.

A military man stood apart by the fire - I think it was a colonel; he was bypassed, and he sometimes raised his hands to the moon. Several people were in suits and ties, as if they had come not to the forest, but to work.

Sasha pressed himself against his tree, because a man in a spacious black jacket with a leather strap on his forehead approached the near edge of the clearing. Someone else turned his face, slightly distorted by the jumping reflections of the fire, towards Sasha's side ... No, it seemed that no one noticed him.

It occurred to him that all this is easy to explain: they probably sat at some kind of reception, and then rushed into the forest ... The military - for protection or sells tanks. But why such music?

Sasha went cold. He slowly turned around and saw a girl in a tracksuit with an Adidas lily on her chest.

– What are you doing here? she asked just as quietly.

He forced his mouth open.

“I… so easy.

– What is so simple?

- Well, I was walking along the road, I came here.

- So how? – the girl was surprised. - You didn't come with us?

She made a movement as if she was going to jump away from him, but still remained in place.

“So you came here on your own?” Did you take it and come?

“It’s not clear what’s wrong here,” Sasha said. It occurred to him that he was being bullied, but the girl shook her head in such sincere bewilderment that he actually pushed the thought aside. On the contrary, it suddenly seemed to him that he had really thrown something out of nowhere.

She thought for a moment in silence, then asked:

- And how do you want to get out now?

Sasha decided that she meant his position as a lone night walker, and answered:

- How? I'll ask them to take me to a station. When are you returning?

She said nothing. He repeated the question, and she twirled her hand vaguely.

The girl looked at him with regret.

“I’ll tell you what: don’t try to run. Truth. And it’s better to go to the fire in five minutes, be bolder. And make your eyes crazy. They will ask you: who are you and what are you doing here. And you answer that you heard the call. And most importantly, with complete confidence. Understood?

- What call?

- Such. My job is to give you advice.

The girl looked at Sasha once more, walked around him and moved into the clearing. As she approached the fire, a man in sneakers patted her on the head and gave her a sandwich.

"He's mocking," thought Sasha. But he peered at the man with the strap on his forehead, who was still standing on the edge of the clearing, and decided that he was not mocking: it was very strange that he peered into the night, this man. And in the center of the clearing suddenly became visible a wooden pole stuck into the ground with a skull impaled on it - narrow and long, with powerful jaws. Canine? No, more like a wolf...

He made up his mind, stepped out from behind the tree and moved towards the yellow-red spot of the fire. He walked swaying - and did not understand why, and his eyes were riveted to the fire.

The conversation in the clearing immediately fell silent.

“Stop,” they said hoarsely from the pillar with the skull.

He did not stop - they ran up to him, and several strong male hands grabbed him.

“I heard the call,” Sasha answered gloomily and rudely, looking at the ground.

They let him go, everyone around laughed, and someone said:

- New.

Sasha was given a sandwich and a glass of water, after which he was immediately forgotten. Sasha remembered his backpack, which was left behind a tree. To hell with him, he thought, and got busy with his sandwich.

A girl in a tracksuit walked by.

“Listen,” he asked, “what's going on here? Picnic?

- Wait, you know.

She waved her little finger - some kind of completely Chinese gesture turned out - and walked away to the people standing by the pole with the skull.

Sasha was pulled by the sleeve. He turned around and shuddered: a military man was standing in front of him.

“Listen, newbie,” he said, “fill it out.”

A scribbled sheet of paper and a pen fell into Sasha's hand. The fire illuminated the military man's high-cheeked face and the inscriptions on the sheet; it turned out to be a simple survey. Sasha squatted down and on his knee, somehow, began to write down the answers - where he was born, when, why, and so on. It was, of course, strange to fill out a questionnaire in the middle of the night forest, but the fact that a man in uniform was standing overhead somehow balanced the situation. The military man waited, sometimes sniffing the air and looking over Sasha's shoulder. When the last line was finished, he grabbed a pen and a piece of paper, smiled grinningly, and with a strange jump ran to the car, on the hood of which lay an open folder.

While Sasha filled out the questionnaire, noticeable changes took place around the fire. People were still talking, but their voices became somehow barking, and their movements and gestures were smooth and dexterous. Some peasant in an evening suit was deftly somersaulting in the grass, throwing off his dangling tie with the movements of his head; the other froze like a crane on one leg and looked prayerfully at the moon, and someone else, visible through the tongues of fire, stood on all fours and shook his head. Sasha himself began to feel ringing in his ears and dry mouth.

All this had an undeniable, if vague connection with the music: it became faster, and the pipes wheezed more and more disturbingly, so that their sound gradually began to resemble a car alarm turned on. Suddenly the trumpets fell silent on a sharp note and a howling gong rang out.

– Elixir! the colonel ordered.

Sasha saw a thin old woman in a long jacket and red beads. She was carrying a jar covered with paper, the kind they sell mayonnaise in. Suddenly there was a slight commotion near the pole with the skull.

“Wow,” someone said admiringly, “without the elixir…

Sasha looked there and saw that his friend in a tracksuit knelt down. She looked more than strange - her legs seemed to have decreased, and her face, on the contrary, stretched out, turning into an improbable, terrible half-wolf muzzle.

“Great,” said the Colonel, and turned around, inviting everyone to admire. - I have no words! Fabulous! And our youth is being scolded!

A wave passed through the body of a terrible creature, another one, the waves accelerated and turned into a large tremor. A minute later, a young she-wolf stood between the people in the clearing.

- This is Lena from Tambov, - someone said in Sasha's ear, - she is very capable.

The conversations subsided, and somehow naturally everyone lined up in an uneven line. The woman and the colonel walked along it, letting everyone take a sip from the can in turn. Sasha, completely stupefied by what he saw, found himself in the middle of the line. For a few minutes he stopped perceiving what was happening, and then he suddenly saw that a woman in beads was standing opposite him and holding out her hand with a jar to his face. Sasha smelled a familiar smell, the way plants smell when rubbed in the palm of your hand. He recoiled, but a hand caught up with him and poked the edge of the can into his lips. Sasha took a small sip and at the same time felt that he was being held back. The woman stepped forward.

He opened his eyes. As long as he kept the liquid in his mouth, the taste even seemed pleasant, but when he swallowed it, he nearly vomited.

The sharp vegetable smell intensified and filled Sasha's empty head - as if it were a balloon into which someone had blown a jet of gas. The ball grew, swelled up - it was pulled upwards more and more, and suddenly it broke the thin thread that connected it with the earth, and rushed up - far below there was a forest, a clearing with a fire and people on it, and rare clouds flew towards, and then stars. Soon there was nothing to be seen below. He began to look up and saw that he was approaching the sky - as it turned out, the sky was a concave stone sphere with shining metal points sticking out of it, which seemed to be stars from below. One of the sparkling blades rushed straight at Sasha, and he could not prevent the meeting in any way, he flew up faster and faster. Finally, he ran into the point and burst with a loud crack. Now only a shrinking shell remained of him, which, swaying in the air, began to slowly descend to the ground.

He fell for a long time, a whole millennium, and finally felt a solid surface under him. It was so pleasant that Sasha waved his tail widely from pleasure and gratitude, rose from his belly to his paws and howled softly.

Several wolves stood next to him. He immediately recognized Lena among them - but it was not clear how. Those human traits that he noted in her earlier, now, of course, have disappeared. Instead, the same features appeared, but wolf-like. He would never have thought that the expression of a wolf's muzzle could be both mocking and dreamy if he had not seen it with his own eyes. Lena noticed that he was considering her, and asked:

- Well, how?

She did not speak in words. She squealed thinly and quietly - or whined - it did not look like human language, but Sasha caught not only the meaning of the question, but also some swagger, which she managed to give to her howl.

“Good,” he wanted to reply. There was a short barking sound, but that sound was what he was about to say.

Lena lay down on the grass and put her face between her paws.

“Relax,” she howled, “now we will run for a long time.”

Sasha looked around - a military man was rolling on the grass under a pole, growing hair right over his tunic before his eyes; a thick, shaggy ponytail sprouted from his pants like a blade of grass in a biology film.

A pack of wolves now stood in the clearing - and only the woman in beads carrying the elixir remained human. With some apprehension, she walked around the two seasoned wolves and climbed into the car.

Sasha turned to Lena and howled:

Is she not one of ours?

She helps us. She herself throws a cobra.

– Will it be now?

It's cold for her now. She travels to Central Asia.

The wolves walked across the clearing, approached each other and quietly barked. Sasha sat on his hind legs and tried to feel all aspects of his new quality.

First, he distinguished many odors penetrating the air. It was like a second sight - for example, he immediately sensed his backpack, left behind a rather distant tree, felt a woman sitting in a car, a trace of a gopher that recently ran along the edge of a clearing, a solid, masculine smell of old wolves and a gentle wave of Lena's smell - it was, probably the freshest and purest shade of the whole unimaginably huge range of dog smells.

The same change occurred with the sounds: they became much more meaningful, and their number increased noticeably - it was possible to distinguish the creak of a branch in the wind a hundred meters from the clearing, the chirping of a cricket in a completely different direction and follow the fluctuations of these sounds at the same time, without dividing attention.

But the main metamorphosis that Sasha felt was in self-awareness. It was very difficult to express it in human language, and he began to bark, squeal and whine to himself, just as he used to think in words. The change in self-awareness concerned the meaning of life: he thought that people can only talk about it, but they cannot feel the meaning of life in the same way as wind or cold. But Sasha had such an opportunity, and the meaning of life was felt continuously and distinctly, as some eternal property of the world, and this was the main charm of the current state. As soon as he understood this, he also understood that he would hardly return to his past nature of his own free will - life without this feeling seemed like a long, painful dream, implausible and cloudy, such as one dreams of with the flu.

- Ready? the former colonel barked from the pole with the skull.

- Ready! howled around a dozen sips.

“Now… A couple of minutes,” someone croaked from behind. - I can't move...

Sasha tried to turn his muzzle and look back - he failed. It turned out that the neck does not bend well, it was necessary to turn the whole body. Lena came up, poked him in the side with her cold nose and whined softly:

- Do not turn around, but squint your eyes. Look.

Her eye flashed red as she turned. Sasha tried - and indeed, squinting his eyes, he saw his back, tail and the dying fire.

- Where shall we run? he asked anxiously.

- In Konkovo, - Lena answered, - there are two cows on the field.

"Aren't they locked up now?"

- Specially arranged. Ivan Sergeevich arranged a call from there, - Lena pointed her face up, - they say, we are studying the effect of night grazing on milk yield. Something like that.

- And what, there, - Sasha repeated her gesture, - also ours?

– And you thought.

Ivan Sergeevich - a former man in a black jacket and with a strap on his forehead, which has now turned into a strip of dark wool - nodded his muzzle significantly.

Sasha squinted at Lena's eyes. She suddenly seemed surprisingly beautiful to him: shiny smooth hair, a gentle curve of the back, slender and strong hind legs, a fluffy young tail and touchingly rolling shoulder blades under the skin - at the same time one felt strength, a slightly shy bloodthirstiness and that special charm inherent in young she-wolves, which so powerless to express the wolf's howl. Noticing his gaze, Lena was embarrassed and stepped aside, lowering her tail and spreading it over the grass. Sasha was also embarrassed and pretended to bite the burdock out of the wool on his paw.

I ask again, are you ready? – the low barking of the leader covered the clearing.

- All! Everyone is ready! answered a friendly howl.

Sasha also howled:

- Then go ahead.

The leader trotted to the edge - it seemed that he was deliberately moving slowly and laxly, like a sprinter waddling up to the starting blocks, in order to emphasize the speed and composure that he would show after the shot.

At the edge of the clearing, the leader bent his muzzle to the ground, sniffed the air, howled, and suddenly jumped into the darkness. Immediately, with barking and squealing, the others rushed after him. The first seconds of this race in the darkness, studded with sharp branches and thorns, Sasha felt the same as when jumping into the water, when the depth is unknown - the fear of breaking his head on the bottom. However, it turned out that he feels the oncoming obstacles and easily bypasses them. Realizing this, he relaxed, and running became easy and pleasant - it seemed that his body was rushing by itself, releasing the power hidden in it.

The flock stretched out and formed a rhombus. Seasoned, powerful wolves flew along the edges, and in the center - she-wolves and cubs. The cubs managed to play on the run, catch each other by the tails and make unimaginable jumps. Sasha's place was at the top of the diamond, right behind the leader - from somewhere he knew that this was an honorable place, and today it was given to him as a beginner.

The forest ended, and a large deserted field and a road opened up - a flock rushed along the asphalt, gaining speed and stretching into a gray ribbon on the right side of the highway. Sasha recognized the way. On the way to the clearing, it seemed dark and empty, but now he noticed life everywhere: field mice scurried along the road, disappearing into their holes when wolves appeared; a hedgehog curled up on the side of the road and flew off into the field, thrown off by a light blow from a wolf's paw, two hares rushed by jet fighters, leaving a thick trail of smell, by which it was clear that they were scared to death, and one, in addition, was a complete idiot.

Lena ran next to Sasha.

“Careful,” she whined, and pointed her muzzle up.

He looked up, leaving his body to choose its own path. Several owls were flying over the road - exactly the same speed with which wolves raced along the asphalt. The owls hooted menacingly, the wolves growled in response. Sasha felt a strange connection between the owls and the flock. They were hostile to each other, but somehow similar.

- Who is it? he asked Lena.

- Were-owls. They are cool... If you were alone...

Lena growled something else and looked up with hatred. Owls began to move away from the road and climb up. They flew without flapping their wings, but simply spreading them in the air. Having made a circle high in the sky, they turned towards the rising moon.

“They flew to the poultry farm,” Lena growled, “in the afternoon they seem to be sponsors there.

They ran to a fork in front of a familiar roadside pole and a tall tree. Sasha smelled his own, still human, trail, and even some kind of echo of thoughts that had crossed his mind on the road a few hours ago - this echo remained in the smell. The flock smoothly entered the turn and rushed to Konkov.

Lena lagged behind a little, and now the colonel was running next to Sasha - he was a large reddish wolf with a kind of scorched muzzle. There was something strange in his movements - looking closer, Sasha noticed that he sometimes strays into an amble.

- Comrade Colonel! he howled.

It turned out something like: "X-rrr-uuuu-vvyy ...", but the colonel understood everything and turned his face in a friendly way.

– How many werewolves do we have in the army? Sasha asked for some reason.

“A lot,” said the Colonel.

– How long ago?

They jumped high, flew over a long puddle and rushed on.

“From the very beginning,” the colonel barked, “how do you think the whites were driven through Siberia?”

He let out a series of raucous growls that sounded like laughter and disappeared ahead, high as a flag at the stern, his tail up.

“Yes, he went with his Siberia,” Sasha thought.

A plaster sentry rushed past, followed by a sign with the inscription "Michurinsky Collective Farm", and now the rare lights of Konkov flared up in the distance.

* * *

The village prepared for the meeting reliably. It was like a ship consisting of many watertight compartments: when night fell and darkness poured into the streets, of which there were only three, the houses were battened down from the inside and now supported the yellow electric radiance of intelligent life independently of each other. And so it met the werewolf wolves of Konkovo ​​- with yellow curtained windows, silence, desertion and autonomy of every human dwelling; there was no longer a village, but a few closely spaced spots of light in the midst of the world's darkness.

Long gray shadows swept down the main street and swirled in front of the club, dampening the momentum of running. Two wolves separated from the pack and disappeared between the houses, and the rest sat down in the middle of the square - Sasha also sat in a circle and looked with a vague feeling at the club where he had recently planned to spend the night, about which he had already forgotten and near which he again found himself under such unexpected circumstances. “This is how it happens in life,” said a wise voice in his head.

“Len, where are they…” he turned to Lena.

- They're coming now. Shut up.

Even when they ran up to Konkovo, the moon had gone behind a long ragged cloud, and now the area was lit only by a lamp under a tin cone swaying in the wind. Glancing around, Sasha found the scene ominous and beautiful: the steel-colored bodies sat motionless around an empty, arena-like space; dust raised by wolves settled, eyes and fangs sparkled, and the painted houses of people plastered with television antennas and chicken coops, garages made of stolen tin and the slanting parthenon of the club, in front of which the rejected leader wandered into nowhere - all this seemed not even a decoration for reality, concentrated in the middle square, but a parody of such a decoration.

Several minutes passed in silence and stillness. Then something moved out of the alley onto the main street, and Sasha saw three silhouettes of wolves jogging towards the square. Two wolves were familiar - Ivan Sergeevich and the military man, and the third - no. Sasha smelled him, full of stale complacency and fear at the same time, and thought: who could it be?

The wolves got closer. The military man lagged behind and, with acceleration, ran into the third with his chest, pushing him into the circle, after which he and Ivan Sergeyevich sat down in the places left for them. The circle closed, and in the center of it was now the unknown.

Sasha sniffed at the stranger - he made an impression that, in human terms, a man of about fifty could make, conically expanding downwards, with an impudent and fat face - at the same time strangely light and as if puffed up with air.

The stranger squinted at the wolf who had kicked him and said with uncertain gaiety:

- So. The flock of Colonel Lebedenko is in full force. Well, what do we want? Why all this pathos? Night circle?

“We want to talk to you, Nikolai,” the leader replied. (Sasha by this moment realized that he was a military man.)

“Willingly,” Nikolai whined, “it’s always me ... For example, you can talk about my latest invention. I called it the bubble game. As you know, I've always loved games, and lately...

Sasha suddenly noticed that he was not following what Nikolay said, but how he spoke quickly, each next word ran into the previous one, and it seemed that he was using words to protect himself from something he did not like very much - like if it was something climbing up the stairs, and Nikolai (Sasha for some reason imagined his human version), standing on the platform, would throw at him all the objects that came to hand.

- ... to create a round and shiny model of what is happening.

- What is the game? the leader asked. - Tell. We love games too.

- Very simple. Any thought is taken, and a soap bubble is blown out of it. Show?

- Show me.

- For example ... - Nikolai thought for a second. “For example, let’s take the closest thing: you and me.

“We and you,” repeated the leader.

- Yes. You sit around and I stand in the center. This is what I will blow the bubble out of. So…

Nikolai lay down on his belly and took a relaxed pose.

- ... So, you are standing, and I am lying in the center. What does it mean? This means that some aspects of the reality floating past me can be interpreted in such a way that I, rather rudely dragged out of the house, are supposedly brought and allegedly planted in a circle of supposedly wolves. Perhaps I am dreaming, perhaps you are dreaming, but one thing is certain: something is happening. So, we cut off the top layer, and the bubble began to inflate. Let's take care of the more delicate fractions of what is happening, and you will see what delightful colors will pass through its thinning walls. You, as you can see from your muzzles, brought with you the usual set of dull reproaches. I don't have to listen to you, I know what you will say. Like, I'm not a wolf, but a pig - I eat in the garbage, live with a mongrel, and so on. This is low in your opinion. And that half-witted fuss, which you yourself are busy with, in your opinion, is high. But right now, exactly the same gray bodies are reflected on the walls of my bubble - any of you and mine, and the sky is also reflected in them - and honestly, when viewed from there, the wolf, and the pooch, and everything they do will look very similar. You are running somewhere, and I am lying among the old newspapers in my garbage dump - how, in essence, the difference is insignificant! And if you take your mobility as the starting point, pay attention to this! - it turns out that I'm actually running, and you are marking time. - He licked his lips and continued: - Here is the bubble half ready. Further, your main claim to me emerges: I violate your laws. Please note - yours, not mine. If I am bound by laws, then they are of my own creation, and I believe that it is my right to choose what and how to obey. And you can't resolve it for yourself. But in order not to look like idiots in your own eyes, you assure yourself that the existence of people like me can harm you.

“Here you hit the nail on the head,” said the leader.

- Well, I do not deny that - hypothetically - it can bring you certain inconveniences. But if it does, why don't you consider it a kind of natural disaster? If hail began to beat you, I think, instead of turning to it with admonition, you would try to hide. But am I, from an abstract point of view, not a natural phenomenon? In fact, it turns out that I - in my, as you say, disgusting - is stronger than you, because it is not I who come to you, but you to me. And this is also a given. See how the bubble grows. Now it remains to blow it. I'm tired of these late night visits. All right, when you walked one at a time - now you have pinned the whole flock. But since it happened, let's find out our relationship once and for all. How can you really stop me? Nothing. You can't kill me - you know why. To convince - too, for this you are simply not smart enough. As a result, only your words and mine remain - and on the walls of the bubble they are equivalent. Only mine are more elegant, but in the end it's a matter of taste. In my opinion, my life is a magical dance, and yours is a meaningless run in the dark. So isn't it better for us to run away as soon as possible? Here the bubble separated and flies. Well, how?

While Nikolai howled, gesticulating with his tail and left front paw, the leader silently listened to him, looking at the dust in front of him and occasionally nodding. Having listened to the end, he slowly raised his muzzle - at the same time, the Moon came out from behind the cloud, and Sasha saw how it glittered on his fangs.

- You, Nikolai, apparently think that you are performing in front of stray dogs in your garbage dump. Personally, I'm not going to argue with you about life. I don’t know who visited you,” the leader looked back at the other wolves, “this is news to me. Now we're here on business.

- For what?

The leader turned to the circle:

- Who has the letter?

A young she-wolf stepped out of the circle and dropped a rolled-up paper from her mouth.

The leader spread it with his paw, which for a moment became a human palm, and read:

- "Dear editors!"

Nikolai, who had been wagging his tail before, lowered it into the dust.

“One of the residents of the village of Konkovo ​​is writing to you. Our village is not far from Moscow, and the detailed address is indicated on the envelope. I do not give my name for a reason that will become clear from what follows.

Recently, a number of publications have appeared in our press, telling about phenomena that were previously indiscriminately denied by science. In this regard, I want to inform you about an amazing phenomenon, which, from a scientific point of view, is much more interesting than such phenomena that attract everyone's attention, such as x-ray vision or Assyrian massage. What I said may seem like a joke to you, so I will immediately make a reservation that this is not so.

You have probably come across the word "werewolf" more than once, which means a person who is able to turn into a wolf. So, behind this word is a real natural phenomenon. We can say that this is one of the ancient traditions of our fatherland, miraculously surviving in all the dashing years that have befallen us. In our village lives Nikolai Petrovich Vakhromeev, the most modest and kindest person who owns this ancient skill. What is the essence of the phenomenon, of course, only he can tell. I myself would not have believed in the possibility of such things if I had not accidentally witnessed how Nikolai Petrovich, turning into a wolf, saved a little girl from a pack of wild dogs ... "

– Is it a lie? Or agreed with the homies? - interrupting himself, asked the leader.

“I gave Nikolai Petrovich my word that I would not tell anyone about what I saw, but I break it, because I think it is necessary to study this amazing natural phenomenon. It is because of the word I have given that I do not give my name - besides, I ask you not to tell about my letter. Nikolai Petrovich himself never told a lie in his life, and I don't know how I'll look him in the eye if he finds out about it. I confess that in addition to the desire to promote the development of science, I am driven by another motive. The fact is that Nikolai Petrovich is now in distress - he lives on an insignificant pension, which, moreover, he generously distributes right and left. Although Nikolai Petrovich himself does not attach any importance to this side of life, the value of his knowledge for everything, I am not afraid to say, of humanity is such that he needs to provide completely different conditions. Nikolai Petrovich is such a sympathetic and kind person that, I am sure, he will not refuse to cooperate with scientists and journalists. I will tell you the little that Nikolai Petrovich told me during our conversations - in particular, a number of historical facts ... "

The leader turned over the paper.

- So, there is nothing interesting here ... nonsense ... what does Stenka Razin have to do with it ... where is it ... Aha, here. “By the way, it’s a shame that a foreign word is still used to define a native Russian concept. I would suggest the word "werewolf" - the Russian root indicates the origin of the phenomenon, and the Romance prefix places it in a common European cultural context.

“Just from this last phrase,” concluded the leader, “it is completely clear that the sympathetic and kind Nikolai Petrovich and the unknown resident of Konkovo ​​are one and the same muzzle.

There was silence for a few seconds. The leader threw away the paper and looked at Nikolai.

“They will come,” he said sadly. “They are such idiots that they can. Maybe they would have been here already if this letter hadn't gotten to Ivan. But you sent it to other magazines, right?

Nikolai slapped the dust with his paw:

"Look, what's all this talk about?" I do what I think is necessary, it’s not worth convincing me, and, to be honest, I don’t really like your company. And let's forgive this.

He lifted his belly from the ground, about to stand up.

- Wait. Do not rush. It's sad, but it looks like your magic dance in the garbage dump will be interrupted this time.

- What does it mean? Nikolai asked, raising his ears.

- And the fact that soap bubbles have a property to burst. We can't kill you, you're right - but look at him. The leader pointed at Sasha with his paw.

“I don’t know him,” Nikolai barked. His eyes dropped to Sasha's shadow.

Sasha also looked down and was dumbfounded: the shadows of all the others were human, and his own was wolf.

- This is a newbie. He can take your nominal place in the pack. If it wins you. Well, how?

The last question of the leader clearly mimicked the characteristic howl of Nikolai.

“And you, it turns out, are a connoisseur of ancient laws,” Nikolai answered, trying to growl ironically.

- As are you. Aren't you going to trade them? Only you are not smart. Who will pay you for this? Most of what we know is of no use to anyone.

“There is still a smaller part,” Nikolai muttered, feeling the circle with his eyes. There was no way out - the circle was closed.

Sasha finally understood the meaning of what was happening. He had to fight that fat old wolf.

But I'm here by accident, he thought. “I didn’t hear any call and I don’t even know what it is!”

He looked around, all eyes were on him.

“Maybe tell the whole truth? Suddenly they let go…”

He remembered his transformation, then - as they raced through the night forest and the road - he had never experienced anything more beautiful in his life. “You are just an impostor. You don't stand a chance, a familiar voice said in his head. And another voice - the leader - said at the same moment:

- Sasha, this is your chance.

He was about to open his mouth and confess everything, but his paws stepped forward of their own accord, and he heard barking hoarse with excitement:

- I'm ready.

He realized that he had said it himself, and immediately calmed down. The wolf part of his being took control of his actions, he no longer doubted anything.

The flock snarled in approval. Nikolai slowly raised his dull yellow eyes to Sasha.

“Just keep in mind, my friend, this is a very small chance,” he said. - Very small. Looks like this is your last night.

Sasha was silent. The old wolf was still lying on the ground.

“They are waiting for you, Nikolai,” the leader said softly.

He lazily yawned - and suddenly flew up; his straightened legs threw him into the air like springs, and when they hit the ground, nothing in him looked like a big tired dog - it was a real wolf, full of rage and calmness; his neck was tense, and his eyes looked through Sasha.

The roar of approval went through the flock again. The wolves discussed something quickly; one of them ran up to the leader and brought his mouth close to his ear.

“Yes,” said the leader, “that is certainly so.

He turned to Sasha:

- There is a squabble before the fight. The flock wants.

Sasha yawned nervously and looked at Nikolai. He moved along the border of the circle, not taking his eyes off something located behind Sasha, and Sasha also walked along the living wall, watching the enemy. Several times they went around the circle and stopped.

“You, Nikolai Petrovich, are disgusting to me,” Sasha squeezed out.

“About this,” Nikolai answered readily, “you will tell your dad.”

Sasha felt that the tension had passed.

“Perhaps,” he said, “at least I know who he is.

It was, it seems, a phrase from an old French novel - it would be more appropriate if Notre Dame towered somewhere to the left, flooded with the moon, but nothing better came to mind.

“It’s easier,” he thought, and asked:

"What's so wet under your tail?"

“Yes, I blew the brains out of some Sasha,” Nikolai growled.

They went on again, in a slowly converging spiral, keeping opposite each other.

“Probably, this doesn’t happen in garbage dumps,” Sasha said. - Don't smells bother you there?

Your smell annoys me.

- Be patient. Soon death will come and it will pass.

Nicholas stopped. Sasha also stopped and narrowed his eyes - the light of the lantern hurt his eyes unpleasantly.

“Your effigy,” Nikolai said quietly, “will stand in the local secondary school, and under it they will be accepted as pioneers. And there will be a globe nearby.

- Okay, let's finally say "you," Sasha said. - Do you love Yesenin, Kolya?

Nikolai responded with an indecent alteration of the late poet's surname.

- In vain you are. I remembered a wonderful line from him: "You whine like a bitch in the moonlight." Isn't it true, stingy and capacious ...

Nikolai Petrovich jumped.

Sasha had absolutely no idea what a fight between two werewolves was like. However, somehow everything became clear as events unfolded. As he and his opponent walked in circles and quarreled, he realized that this was done not only to entertain the pack, but also so that the opponents could look at each other and choose the moment to attack. He made a mistake - he was carried away by a skirmish, and the enemy jumped on him when he was blinded by the light of a lantern.

But as soon as this happened - as soon as the front paws and the grinning mouth of Nikolai rose high above the ground, time changed: Sasha saw the continuation of the jump in slow motion, and while Nikolai's hind legs left the ground, he managed to think over several options for his actions, and his swift thoughts were completely calm. He jumped to the side, first giving the body a command, and then just watching as it began to move, lifted off the ground and flew into the dense dark air, passing the heavy gray carcass falling from above. Sasha realized his advantage - he was lighter and more mobile. But the enemy was more experienced and stronger and probably knew some secret tricks - it was necessary to be afraid of this.

Landing, he saw that Nikolai was standing sideways, crouching, and turning his face towards him. It seemed to him that Nikolai's side was open, and he jumped, aiming with his open mouth at a spot of lighter fur - from somewhere he already knew that this was how a weak spot looked like. Nikolai also jumped, but in a strange way - turning around in the air. Sasha did not understand what was happening - the entire back of Nikolai was open, and it was as if he himself were putting his flesh under his fangs. By the time he realized, it was already too late: the tail, as hard as a steel whip, lashed him over his eyes and nose, blinding him and depriving him of his sense of smell. The pain was unbearable - but Sasha knew that nothing serious had happened to him. The danger was that a second blindness could be enough for the enemy for a new - last - jump.

Falling on outstretched paws and already considering himself a loser, Sasha suddenly realized that the enemy must again stand sideways to him, and instead of jumping to the side, as pain and instinct suggested, he rushed forward, still not seeing anything and feeling the same fear, as during his first wolf jump - from the clearing into the darkness between the trees. For a while he floated in the void, then his numb nose bumped into something warm and pliable; then he closed his jaws with force.

In the next second, they were already standing opposite each other, as at the beginning of the fight. Time accelerated back to normal speed. Sasha shook his muzzle, recovering from a terrible blow with his tail. He was waiting for a new jump of his enemy, but suddenly noticed that his front paws were trembling and his tongue was hanging out of his mouth. So several moments passed, and then Nikolai fell on his side and a dark spot began to blur near his throat. Sasha took a step forward, but caught the leader's eye and stopped.

He looked at the dying werewolf. He twitched a few times, fell silent, and his eyes closed. Then a shiver went through his body, but not the same as before - Sasha clearly felt that an already dead body was trembling, and it was incomprehensible and creepy. The contour of the lying figure began to blur, the stain near the throat disappeared, and a fat man in shorts and a T-shirt appeared on the trampled earth with his paws - he was snoring loudly, lying on his stomach. Suddenly his snoring stopped, he turned on his side and made a movement with his hand, as if adjusting a pillow. A hand seized the void, and, apparently, because of this unexpectedness, he woke up, opened his eyes, looked around and closed again. A second later, he opened them again and immediately yelled at such a piercing note that, as Sasha thought, one could tune the most heartbreaking of all police sirens. With that yell, he jumped up, jumped over the nearest wolf with an absurd movement, and rushed off into the distance along the dark street, making the same unchanging sound. Finally, he disappeared around the corner, and his groan subsided, replaced at the very end by some meaningful cries - the words, however, could not be made out.

The flock laughed wildly. Sasha looked at his shadow and instead of an elongated muzzle he saw a semicircle of the back of his head with a protruding tuft of hair and two protruding ears - his own, human. Looking up, he noticed that the leader was looking straight at him.

- Do you understand? - he asked.

“I think so,” said Sasha. Will he remember anything?

Sasha did not remember the way back. We returned by another route, straight through the forest - it was shorter this way, but it took the same amount of time, because we had to run more slowly than along the highway.

The last embers of a fire burned out in the clearing. The woman in the beads was dozing behind the glass of the car - when the wolves appeared, she opened her eyes, waved her hand and smiled. However, she did not get out of the car.

Sasha felt sad. He felt a little sorry for the old wolf, whom he had bitten into people, and, recalling the squabble, and especially the change that had taken place with Nikolai a minute before the fight, he felt almost sympathy for him. Therefore, he tried not to think about what had happened and after a while he really forgot about it. His nose still ached from the blow. He lay down on the grass.

For some time he lay with his eyes closed. Then he felt a thickened silence and raised his muzzle - from all sides the wolves were silently looking at him.

They seemed to be waiting for something. "To tell?" thought Sasha. And I made up my mind.

Rising to his paws, he walked in a circle, as in Konkovo, only now there was no enemy in front of him. The only thing that accompanied him was his shadow - a human shadow, like everyone else in the pack.

“I want to confess everything,” he whined softly. - I deceived you.

The flock was silent.

“I didn't hear any call. I don't even know what it is. I ended up here quite by accident.

He closed his eyes and waited for an answer. There was silence for a second, and then there was an explosion of hoarse, barking laughter and howls. He opened his eyes.

- What?

The answer was another burst of laughter. Finally, the wolves calmed down, and the leader asked:

– How did you get here?

- Lost in the forest.

- I do not mean it. Remember why you came to Konkovo.

- Just. I love driving out of town.

“But why here?

- Why? Now... Ah, I saw one photo that I liked - the view was very beautiful. And in the signature it was said that this is the village of Konkovo ​​near Moscow. Only here everything turned out differently ...

– Where did you see this photo?

- In the children's encyclopedia.

This time everyone laughed for a very long time.

“Well,” the leader asked, “why did you climb there?”

- I ... - Sasha remembered, and it was like a flash of light in the skull - I was looking for a photograph of a wolf! Well, yes, I woke up, and for some reason I wanted to see a photograph of a wolf! I looked for it in all the books. I wanted to check something... And then I forgot... So that was the call?

“Exactly,” the leader replied.

Sasha looked at Lena, who hid her muzzle in her paws and was shaking with laughter.

"So why didn't you tell me right away?"

- What for? - answered the old wolf, keeping a calm look amid the general fun. “Hearing the call is not the point. It won't make you a werewolf. Do you know when you really became one?

- When you agreed to fight Nikolai, believing that you had no hope of winning. Then your shadow changed.

Sasha was silent. His thoughts wandered randomly. Then he raised his face and asked:

“And what is this elixir that we drank?”

There was so much laughter around that the woman sitting in the car rolled down the window and leaned out. The leader could hardly restrain himself - his muzzle was distorted by a wry grin.

“He liked it,” he said, “give him more elixir!”

And laughed too. The bottle fell to Sasha's paws - straining his eyes, he read: “Forest joy. Elixir for teeth. The price is 92 kopecks.

“It was just a joke,” the leader said. “But if you knew what you looked like when you drank it… Remember: a werewolf turns into a man and back at will, at any time and in any place.

- What about cows? - Sasha remembered, no longer paying attention to the new flash of fun. - They said we were running to Konkovo ​​to ...

He didn't finish and waved his paw.

Laughing, the wolves dispersed across the clearing and lay down in the tall thick grass. The old wolf was still standing opposite Sasha.

“I’ll tell you one more thing,” he said, “you must remember that only werewolves are real people. If you look at your shadow, you will see that it is human. And if you look at the shadows of people with your wolf eyes, you will see the shadows of pigs, roosters, toads ...

“There are also spiders, flies and bats,” Ivan Sergeevich said, stopping beside him.

- Right. And also - monkeys, rabbits and goats. And also…

“Don’t scare the boy,” Ivan Sergeevich growled. “After all, you make everything up as you go. Sasha, don't listen.

Both old wolves laughed as they looked at each other.

“Even if I make it up as I go,” the leader remarked, “it is nevertheless true.

He turned to leave, but stopped when he saw Sasha's gaze.

- Do you want to ask something?

Who are werewolves, really?

The leader looked into his eyes and grinned a little.

- Who are the real people?

Left alone, Sasha lay down in the grass to think. Lena came over and sat next to me.

“The moon will now reach its zenith,” she said.

Sasha raised his eyes.

Is this the zenith?

- This is a special zenith, you should not look at the moon, but listen. Try.

He raised his ears. At first, only the wind swaying the leaves and the crackling of nocturnal insects was heard, and then something like distant singing or music was added; this happens when it is not clear what sounds - an instrument or a voice. Having caught this sound, Sasha separated it from the rest, and the sound began to grow, and after a while it was possible to listen to it without strain. The melody seemed to come directly from the moon and was similar to the music played in the clearing before the transformation. Only then it seemed threatening and gloomy, but now, on the contrary, it calmed. She was beautiful, but there were some annoying gaps in her, some emptiness. He suddenly realized that he could fill them with his voice, and howled - first softly, and then louder, raising his mouth and forgetting about everything else - then, merging with his howling, the melody became perfect.

Soon the whole flock howled. Sasha understood both the feelings filling every voice and the meaning of everything together. Each voice howled about its own: Lena's - about something light, similar to the impact of raindrops on the ringing tin of the roof; the low bass of the leader - about the immeasurable dark abysses, over which he soared in a jump; treblers wolf talk about joy because they live, that in the morning there is morning, and in the evening - evening, and also about some incomprehensible sadness, similar to joy. And they all howled together about how incomprehensible and beautiful the world is, in the center of which they lie in a clearing.

The music got louder. The moon swam over my eyes, covering the sky, and at some point fell on Sasha, or it was he who broke away from the earth and fell on its approaching surface.

When he regained consciousness, he felt faint tremors and heard the rumble of an engine. He opened his eyes and found that he was reclining in the back seat of the car, with a backpack under his feet, Lena sleeping next to him, resting her head on his shoulder, and the leader of the pack, colonel of tank troops Lebedenko, was sitting in front of the wheel. Sasha was about to say something, but the colonel, reflected in the mirror over the steering wheel, pressed his finger to his lips; then Sasha turned to the window.

Cars raced along the highway in a long chain. It was early morning, the sun had just come out, and the pavement ahead seemed like an endless pink ribbon. The toy houses of an impending city appeared on the horizon.

Current page: 1 (total book has 3 pages) [available reading excerpt: 1 pages]

Werewolf problem in the middle lane

For a second it seemed to Sasha that this crumpled ZIL would stop - it was such an old, rattling car, ripe for an automobile cemetery, which, according to the same law, according to which in old men and old women, who used to be rude and unresponsive, attention and helpfulness wake up before death - according to the same law, only related to the world of cars, she had to stop. But nothing like that - with a drunken senile impudence, clinking a bucket suspended from the gas tank, the ZIL rumbled past, drove tensely onto a hillock, made an obscene victorious sound at its top, accompanied by a jet of gray smoke, and silently disappeared behind an asphalt roll.

Sasha left the road, threw his small backpack into the grass and sat down on it - completing the movement, he felt something hard from below, remembered the melted cheeses lying under the top flap of the backpack, and experienced a vengeful satisfaction, usual for a person who got into trouble, when he finds out that someone or something is nearby - also in difficult circumstances. Sasha was just about to think about how difficult his current circumstances are.

There were only two ways to proceed - either continue to wait for a ride, or return to the village three kilometers behind. As for the ride, the question was almost clear - there are, apparently, such regions of the country or such separate roads where, due to the fact that absolutely all drivers passing by belong to some secret brotherhood of scoundrels, it is not only impossible to practice hitchhiking - on the contrary, you need to make sure that you are not doused with dirty water from a puddle when you walk along the side of the road. The road from Konkovo ​​to the nearest railroad oasis—another fifteen kilometers if you go straight—was just one of those enchanted routes. Of the five cars that have passed by in the past forty minutes, not one has stopped, and if some aging woman with purple lips from lipstick and a hairstyle like “I still love you” hadn’t shown him the fig, sticking her hand long out the window of the red Niva , Sasha could decide that he became invisible. After that, there was still hope for some kind of approximate truck driver who would silently peer at the road ahead through the dusty glass all the way, and then with a short movement of his head would give up Sasha’s five (and suddenly a photograph of several guys in paratrooper uniform hanging over the steering wheel would catch your eye against the backdrop of distant mountains), but when the only ZiL in the last half hour passed by, this hope died. The autostop is off.

Sasha glanced at his watch - it was twenty past ten. It will be dark soon, he thought, he must have hit ... He looked around: on both sides, behind a hundred meters of rough terrain - microscopic mounds, sparse bushes and too tall and juicy grass, making one think that there was a swamp under it - a liquid forest began, some unhealthy, like the offspring of an alcoholic. In general, the vegetation around was strange: everything a little larger than flowers and grass grew with strain and anguish, and although in the end it reached normal sizes - like, for example, a chain of birches from which the forest began - but there was such an impression that all this had grown, frightened by someone's shouts, and if not for them, it would have spread like a lichen on the ground. There were some unpleasant places, heavy and deserted, as if prepared for demolition from the face of the earth - although, Sasha thought, one cannot say that, because if the earth has a face, it is clearly in another place. Not without reason, of the three villages we met today, only one was more or less plausible - just the last one, Konkovo, and the rest were abandoned, and only in a few of their houses did someone else live out their lives, the abandoned huts looked more like an ethnographic museum exposition than former human ones. dwellings.

However, Konkovo, which had some connection with the roadside inscription “Kolkhoz Michurinsky” and the plaster sentry by the highway, seemed like a normal settlement of people only in comparison with the deaf desolation of neighboring, already nameless, villages. Even though there was a shop in Konkovo, a club poster flapping in the wind with the name of a French avant-garde film written in green gouache, and a tractor screeching somewhere behind the houses, it was still almost uncomfortably. There were no people on the streets - only a grandmother in black passed, smallly crossing herself at the sight of Sasha's Hawaiian shirt covered with multi-colored Freudian symbols, and a bespectacled boy rode a bicycle with a shopping bag on the handlebars - the bicycle was too big for him, he could not sit in the saddle and rode standing , as if running over a rusty heavy frame. The rest of the residents, if there were any, stayed at home.

In my mind, the trip looked very different. Here he sits down from a flat-bottomed river boat, reaches the village, where on the mounds - Sasha did not know what a mound was, and imagined it in the form of a comfortable wooden bench along a log wall - old women are sitting peacefully going out of their minds, a sunflower is growing around, and under His yellow saucers quietly play chess on gray plank tables, shaved old men. In a word, some kind of endless Tverskoy Boulevard was imagined. Well, the cow is still mooing ...

Further - here it goes to the outskirts, and a pine forest warmed by the sun opens up, a river with a floating boat or a field cut by a road - and wherever you go, it will be wonderful everywhere: you can make a fire, you can even remember your childhood and climb trees. In the evening, on passing cars - to the train.

And what happened? First - the frightening emptiness of abandoned villages, then the same frightening habitation of the inhabited. As a result, to everything that could not be trusted, one more thing was added - a color photograph from a thick, peeled book with a caption that mentioned "the old Russian village of Konkovo, now the main estate of a millionaire collective farm." Sasha found the place where the picture he liked was taken from, and was surprised how different the same view can be in a photograph and in life.

Having mentally given himself the word never again to succumb to impulses for meaningless travel, Sasha decided to at least watch this film in a club - he was no longer in Moscow. Having bought a ticket from an invisible cashier - he had to speak with a freckled chubby hand in the window, which tore off the ticket and counted the change - he ended up in a half-empty hall, got bored in it for an hour and a half, sometimes turning around to a pensioner who was straight as a sleeper, whistling in some places (his criteria were completely unclear, but on the other hand, there was something roaringly robbery and at the same time sad in the whistle, something from the departing Russia), then - when the film ended - he looked at the whistler's straight back moving away from the club, at the lantern under the tin like a cone, onto the identical fences around the houses, and walked away from Konkovo, squinting at the plaster man in the cap, who stretched out his hand and raised his foot, doomed to wander forever to his brother in existence, waiting for him by the highway.

Now three kilometers had already been covered, another had managed to flow into the road - and for all the time not one of the cars passing by had even slowed down. And they walked less and less often - Sasha waited so long for the last truck, which finally dispelled illusions with its blue exhaust, that he managed to forget what he was waiting for.

“I’ll go back,” he said aloud, referring to either a spider or an ant crawling on his sneaker, “otherwise we’ll spend the night here together.”

The spider turned out to be an intelligent insect and quickly climbed back into the grass. Sasha got up, threw his backpack behind his back and went back, thinking about where and how he would arrange to spend the night. I didn’t want to knock on the door of some grandmother, and it was useless, because grandmothers who let me spend the night usually live in those places where nightingale-robbers and kashcheis, and here was the Michurinsky collective farm - a concept, if you think about it, no less magical, but magical in a different way, without any hope of an overnight stay in an unfamiliar house. The only suitable option that Sasha managed to think of was the following: he buys a ticket for the last session to the club, and after the session, hiding behind a heavy green curtain in the hall, he stays. It was possible to spend the night quite decently on spectator seats - they did not have armrests. In order for everything to work out, it will be necessary to get up from the spot until the lights are turned on and hide behind the curtain - then a woman in a homemade blue uniform who accompanies the audience to the exit will not notice him. True, you will have to watch this dark film again - but there's nothing you can do about it.

Thinking about all this, Sasha went to the fork. When he passed here about twenty minutes ago, it seemed to him that another, smaller one was attached to the road on which he was walking, and now he stood at a crossroads, not understanding which of the roads he came here: both seemed exactly the same. He tried to remember which side the second road came from and closed his eyes for a few seconds. It seems to be on the right - a large tree still grew there. Yep, that's it. So, you need to go on the right road. In front of the tree, it seems, was such a gray pillar. Where is he? Here it is, only for some reason on the left. Nearby is a small tree. It's unclear.

Sasha looked at the pole that once supported the wires, but now looks like a huge rake threatening the sky, thought a little more and turned to the left. After walking twenty steps, he stopped and looked back - suddenly, from the crossbar of the pillar, clearly visible against the background of the red stripes of sunset, a bird took off, which he had previously taken for an insulator covered with many years of mud. Sasha went on - in order to get to Konkovo ​​on time, he had to hurry, and he had to go through the forest.

It's amazing, thought Sasha, what a lack of observation. On the way from Konkovo, he did not even notice this wide clearing, behind which he could see a clearing. When a person is absorbed in his thoughts, the world around him disappears. He probably would not have noticed her even now if they had not called out to him.

And a few more voices whinnied. Among the first trees of the forest, just near the clearing, people and bottles flashed - Sasha did not allow himself to turn around and saw the local youth only from the corner of his eye. He quickened his pace, confident that he would not be chased, but still unpleasantly agitated.

- Oh, wolf! shouted from behind.

"Maybe I'm going down the wrong road?" Sasha thought as the road zigzag, which he did not remember. No, it seems like that one: here is a long crack on the pavement, reminiscent of a Latin double-ve - something similar has already happened.

Gradually it got dark, but it was still decent to go. In order to keep himself busy, Sasha began to think about ways to enter the club after the start of the session, starting from a preoccupied return for a cap forgotten on the seat (“you know, so red, with a long peak,” in honor of his favorite book) and ending with the descent down through a wide pipe on the roof, if there is one, of course.

The fact that he had chosen the wrong road became clear after half an hour of walking, when everything around was already blue and the first stars cut through the sky. This became clear when a high steel mast appeared by the road, supporting three thick wires, and a quiet electric crackle was heard: there were no such masts on the road from Konkovo. Having already understood everything, Sasha, by inertia, reached the mast and stared point-blank at a tin plate with a lovingly traced skull and a threatening inscription. Then he looked back and was amazed: had he really just passed through this black and terrible forest? Going back to turn in the right direction meant meeting the guys sitting by the road again - to find out what state they had come to under the influence of port wine and dusk was, of course, interesting, but not so much as to risk their lives because of this . To go forward meant to go no one knows where, but still: if the road goes through the forest, must it lead somewhere? Sasha thought.

The buzzing of wires overhead reminded me that normal people live somewhere in the world, generate electricity during the day, and watch TV with it in the evening. If we're going to spend the night in a dense forest, Sasha thought, it's best under an electric mast - then it will be something like sleeping in a front door, and this is a tried and true thing.

Suddenly, there was a roar full of age-old longing - at first it was barely audible, and then it grew to unimaginable limits, and only then did Sasha realize that it was an airplane. He raised his head in relief, and soon multi-colored dots appeared above, gathered in a triangle, while the plane was visible, it was even comfortable to stand on the dark forest road, and when he disappeared, Sasha already knew that he would go ahead. (He suddenly remembered how a very long time ago - maybe ten or fifteen years ago - he also raised his head and looked at the night side lights, and then, growing older, sometimes imagined himself as a paratrooper dropped from an airplane that had just flown through the summer night , and that thought helped a lot.) He walked forward along the road, looking straight ahead at the chipped asphalt, gradually becoming the lightest part of the surroundings.

A weak light, of an indefinite nature, fell on the road - and one could walk without fear of stumbling. For some reason - probably out of urban habit - Sasha had the confidence that the road was lit by rare lanterns. When he tried to find such a lantern, he came to his senses - of course, there were no lanterns around: the moon was shining, and Sasha, raising his head, saw her clear white crescent. Looking at the sky a little, he was surprised to note that the stars were multi-colored - he had never noticed this before, or had simply forgotten about it for a long time.

Finally it got dark completely and completely - that is, it became clear that it would not be darker. The steel mast was left far behind, and now only the asphalt under their feet testified to the existence of people. When it became cool, Sasha took a jacket out of his backpack, put it on and fastened it with all the zippers: this way he felt more prepared for all sorts of nightly surprises. At the same time, he ate two crumpled processed cheese "Friendship" - the foil with this word, faintly gleaming in the moonlight, for some reason reminded of the pennants that the humanity of the motherland constantly launches into space.

Several times Sasha heard the distant hum of car engines. It had been about an hour since he passed the mast. The cars he heard were driving somewhere far away, probably on other roads. The road that he was walking on did not please him with anything special - once, however, she left the forest, walked five hundred meters across the field, but immediately dived into another forest, where the trees were older and taller, and narrowed: now it was darker to go, because the strip of sky overhead had also become narrower. It began to seem to Sasha that he was sinking deeper and deeper into some kind of abyss, and the road along which he was walking would not lead him anywhere, but, on the contrary, would lead him into a dense thicket and end in the realm of evil, in the midst of huge living oaks moving their arms. branches - like in children's horror films, where in the end such goodness wins that it becomes a pity for the defeated Baba Yaga and Kashchei, it's a pity for the inability to find a place in life and the intelligence that constantly betrays them.

The noise of the engine arose again ahead - now it was closer, and Sasha thought that a car would finally drive out towards him and throw him somewhere where there would be an electric lamp overhead, walls on the sides and it would be possible to sleep peacefully. For some time the humming approached, and then suddenly subsided - the car stopped. Sasha almost ran forward, waiting for it to start moving towards him again, but when he again heard the hum of the engine, it came from afar - as if the car approaching him had suddenly jumped silently a kilometer back and now repeated the path already traveled.

Sasha finally realized that he heard another car, also driving in his direction. True, it was not clear where the first one had gone, but it did not matter - as long as some one still appeared from the darkness. In the forest it is difficult to accurately determine the distance to the source of the sound - when the second car also stopped, it seemed to Sasha that she had not reached him some hundred meters, the headlights were not visible, but this was easily explained by the fact that there was a turn ahead.

Suddenly Sasha thought. What was happening around the corner of the road was not clear. One after the other, two cars suddenly stopped in the middle of the night forest. Sasha remembered that before, when he heard the distant rumble of engines, this rumble approached for a while, grew, and then broke off. But now it seemed very strange: two cars, one after the other, stopped or were stopped - as if they had dropped into some kind of deep hole in the middle of the road.

The night prompted such explanations for what was happening that Sasha, just in case, went to the side of the road so that he could quickly dive into the forest if circumstances required, and moved forward with a crouching gait, carefully peering into the darkness. As soon as he changed the way he moved - and before that he was walking in the very middle of the road, shuffling loudly with Chinese rubber on the remnants of asphalt - most of the fear immediately disappeared, and he thought that if he did not get into the car now, then further it will go that way.

When there was already a little bit left before the turn, Sasha saw a faint reddish reflection on the leaves, and at the same time voices and laughter reached him. Then another car drove up and stopped somewhere very close - this time he even heard the slamming of doors. Judging by the fact that they were laughing ahead, nothing particularly terrible happened there. Or just the opposite, he thought suddenly.

After such a thought, it seemed that it would be safer in the forest than on the road. Sasha entered the forest and, feeling the darkness in front of him with his hands, slowly walked forward. Finally, he was in a place where he could see what was happening around the corner. Hiding behind a tree, he waited for his eyes to adjust to the new level of darkness, carefully looked out - and almost laughed, so ordinary the picture that opened up did not correspond to the tension of his fear.

Ahead was a large clearing, on one side of it, about six cars stood in disarray - "Volga", "Lada" and even one foreign one - and everything was illuminated by a huge fire in the center of the clearing, around which stood people of different ages and differently dressed, some with sandwiches and bottles in their hands. They talked and laughed and behaved exactly like any large company around a night fire - they lacked only a tape recorder with dead batteries, struggling against silence.

As if hearing Sasha’s thought, one of those standing by the fire went to the car, opened the door, put his hand inside, and rather loud music began to play, though not suitable for a picnic: as if hoarse gloomy trumpets howled in the distance and the wind hummed between the bare autumn trunks.

However, the campfire company did not express bewilderment at this choice - on the contrary, when the one who turned on the music returned to the others, he was clapped on the shoulder several times approvingly. Taking a closer look, Sasha began to notice some oddities in what was happening - and oddities, as if emphasized by the absurdity of the music.

There were a couple of children around the campfire - quite normal. There were guys of Sasha's age. There were girls. But for some reason, an elderly policeman was standing a little to the side of a high stump, and a man in a jacket and tie was talking to him. A military man stood by the fire alone - it seems, a colonel, he was bypassed, and he sometimes raised his hands to the moon. And a few more people were in suits with ties - as if they had come not to the forest, but to work.

Sasha pressed himself against his tree, because a man in a spacious black jacket, with a strap intercepting the hair on his forehead, approached the edge of the clearing, near which he was standing. Another face, slightly distorted by the jumping reflections of the fire, turned towards Sasha... No, no one noticed.

“It’s not clear,” thought Sasha, “who are they?” Then it occurred to me that all this can be explained quite simply: they were probably sitting at some kind of reception, and then they rushed into the forest ... A policeman - for protection ... But then where did the children come from? And why such music?

Sasha went cold. He slowly turned around and saw in front of him a girl in a sports, it seems green, suit with a delicate Adidas lily on her chest.

– What are you doing here? she asked just as quietly.

Sasha opened his mouth with some effort.

“I… so easy,” he replied.

- What is so simple?

- Well, I was walking along the road, I came here.

- So how? - the girl asked almost with horror, - didn't you come with us?

The girl made such a movement as if she was going to jump to the side, but still remained in place.

“So you came here on your own?” Did you take it and come? she asked, calming down a bit.

“It’s not clear what’s wrong here,” Sasha said. It began to occur to him that she was mocking him, but the girl suddenly shifted her gaze to his sneakers and shook her head with such frank bewilderment that Sasha dismissed this thought. On the contrary, it suddenly seemed to him that he had thrown something out of nowhere. The girl was silent for a minute, then asked:

- And how do you want to get out now?

Sasha decided that she meant his position as a lone night walker, and answered:

- How? I'll ask them to take me to any station. When are you returning?

The girl was silent. Sasha repeated the question, and she made an incomprehensible spiral gesture with her palm.

The girl looked at him with doubt and regret.

– What was your name? she asked.

"Why - called?" - Sasha was surprised and wanted to correct her, but instead he answered, as he once answered policemen in childhood:

- Sasha Lapin.

The girl chuckled. After a moment's thought, she lightly nudged him in the chest with her finger.

“There is something inviting about you, Sasha Lapin,” she said, “so I’ll tell you this: don’t even try to run away from here. Truth. Better get out of the forest in about five minutes and go to the fire, be braver. They will ask you, who are you and what are you doing here. And you answer that you heard the call. And, most importantly, with complete confidence. Understood?

- What call?

- What, what. Such. My job is to give you advice.

The girl looked at Sasha once more, then walked around him and moved into the clearing. As she approached the fire, a man in a suit patted her on the head and gave her a sandwich.

"He's mocking," thought Sasha. Then he saw a man in a black jacket, looking into the darkness at the edge of the clearing, and decided that he was not mocking: somehow strangely he peered into the night, this man, not at all the way it should be done. And in the center of the clearing, Sasha suddenly noticed a wooden pole stuck into the ground with a skull impaled on it - narrow and long, with powerful jaws.

After some hesitation, Sasha made up his mind, stepped out from behind the tree and went to the yellow-red spot of the fire. He walked swaying - and did not understand why, and his eyes were riveted to the fire.

When he appeared in the clearing, conversations in it somehow immediately fell silent. Everyone turned and now looked at him, somnambulistically crossing the empty space between the edge of the forest and the fire.

“Stop,” someone said hoarsely.

Sasha walked forward without stopping - they ran up to him, and several strong male hands grabbed him.

– What are you doing here? asked the same voice that had commanded him to stop.

“I heard the call,” Sasha answered gloomily and rudely, looking at the ground.

- New.

Sasha was handed a cheese sandwich and a glass of tarragon, after which he was immediately forgotten - everyone returned to their interrupted conversations. Sasha came closer to the fire and suddenly remembered his backpack, which was left behind a tree. To hell with him, he thought, and got busy with his sandwich.

A girl in a tracksuit approached from the side.

“I am Lena,” she said. - Well done. Did everything right.

Sasha looked around.

“Listen,” he said, “what is going on here? Picnic?

Lena bent down, picked up a piece of a thick branch and threw it into the fire.

"Wait, you'll find out," she said. Then she waved her little finger at him - some kind of completely Chinese gesture turned out - and walked away to a small group of people standing near the stump.

Someone from behind pulled Sasha by the sleeve of his jacket. He turned around and shuddered: in front of him stood the dean of the faculty where he studied, a major specialist in the field of something that was supposed to start only in the next year, but even at that it caused Sasha feelings similar to the first spasms of impending nausea. . Sasha was stunned at first, and then he told himself that there was nothing supernatural in such a meeting: after all, the dean is only the dean at work, and in the evening and at night he is a person and can go anywhere. But Sasha could not remember what his patronymic name was.

“Listen, newcomer,” said the dean (he clearly didn’t recognize Sasha), “fill it in.”

A scribbled sheet of paper and a pen fell into Sasha's hand. The fire illuminated the professor's high-cheeked face and the inscriptions on the sheet he held out: it turned out to be an ordinary questionnaire. Sasha squatted down and on his knee, somehow, began to write down the answers - where he was born, when, why, and so on. It was, of course, strange to fill out a questionnaire in the middle of the night forest, but the fact that the daytime authorities were standing overhead somehow balanced the situation. The dean waited, occasionally sniffing the air and peering over Sasha's shoulder. When the last line was finished, the dean snatched a pen and paper from him, grinned grinningly, and, jumping up and down with impatience, ran to his car, on the hood of which lay an open folder.

Getting up, Sasha noticed that during the time he filled out the questionnaire, a noticeable change had taken place in the behavior of those gathered around the fire. They used to resemble, apart from some minor inconsistencies, ordinary tourists. Now it was different. The conversations continued as before, but the voices became somehow barking, and the movements and gestures of the speakers were smooth and dexterous. One man in a suit walked away from the fire and with professional ease somersaulted in the grass, throwing off a tie that had come out from under his jacket with movements of his head, another stood like a crane on one leg and prayerfully looked up at the moon, and a policeman, visible through the tongues of fire, stood on all fours at the edge of the clearing and, like a periscope, moved his head. Sasha himself began to feel ringing in his ears and dry mouth. All this had an undoubted, if vague connection with the music rushing out of the car: its pace quickened, and the trumpets wheezed more and more alarmingly, as if foreshadowing the approach of some new and unusual theme. Gradually, the music accelerated to impossibility, and the air around became thick and hot - Sasha thought that one more such minute, and he would die. Suddenly the trumpets stopped on a sharp note, and the howling sound of a gong resounded.

- Elixir, - they started talking around, - faster elixir! It's time.

Sasha saw a thin old woman in a jacket and red beads, carrying from one of the cars a jar covered with a piece of paper - they sell sour cream in the market. Suddenly there was a slight commotion.

“Wow,” someone nearby said admiringly, “without the elixir…”

Sasha looked to where the voices were heard, and saw the following: one of the girls - the one who spoke earlier with a man in a black jacket - was now on her knees and looked more than strange: her legs had somehow shrunk, and her hands, on the contrary , stretched out - and the face also stretched out, turning into an improbable, terrible to laughter, half-human, half-wolf muzzle.

“Great,” the colonel said, and turned to the others, making a gesture inviting everyone to admire the terrible spectacle, “there are no words!” Fabulous! And our youth is being scolded!

A woman with red beads approached a wolf-like girl, put her finger into a jar and dropped a few drops into the mouth substituted from below. A wave passed through the girl's body, another one, then these waves accelerated and turned into a large tremor. A minute later, a young large she-wolf stood between the people in the clearing.

- This is Tanya from In-yaz, - someone said in Sasha's ear, - she is very capable.

The conversations subsided, somehow naturally everyone lined up in an uneven line, and the woman and the colonel walked along it, giving everyone in turn a sip of a tiny sip from the can. Sasha, completely stupefied by what he saw and not understanding anything, found himself approximately in the middle of this line, and Lena appeared next to him again. She turned her face towards him and smiled broadly.

Suddenly Sasha saw that a woman in beads - she, by the way, differed from the others in that she behaved in a completely ordinary, country style, without any oddities in her movements and an unusual gleam in her eyes - was standing opposite him and stretching her hand to his face with jar. Sasha felt a strange and somehow familiar smell - this is how some plants smell if you rub them in the palm of your hand. He recoiled, but a hand had already caught up with him and poked the edge of the can into his mouth. Sasha took a small sip and at the same time felt that someone was holding him from behind. The woman stepped forward.

Sasha opened his eyes. As long as he kept the liquid in his mouth, the taste even seemed pleasant, but when he swallowed it, he nearly vomited.

The sharp vegetable smell intensified and filled Sasha's empty head - as if it were a balloon into which someone had blown a jet of gas. This ball grew, swelled, it was pulled upwards more and more, and suddenly it broke the thin thread that connected it with the earth, and rushed up - far below there was a forest, a clearing with a fire and people on it, and rare clouds flew towards, and then stars . Soon there was nothing below. Sasha began to look up and saw that he was approaching the sky - as it turned out, the sky was a concave stone sphere with shiny metal points sticking out of it, which seemed to be stars from below. One of these sparkling blades rushed straight at Sasha, and he could not prevent the meeting in any way - on the contrary, he flew up faster and faster. Finally, he ran into him and burst with a loud crack. Now only one shell was left of him, which, swaying in the air, began to slowly descend.

He fell for a long time, a whole millennium, and finally reached the ground. It was so pleasant to feel the hard surface under him that Sasha waved his tail widely from pleasure and gratitude, lifted his muzzle and howled softly. Then he got up from his belly to his paws and looked around.

For a second it seemed to Sasha that this crumpled ZIL would stop - it was such an old, rattling car, ripe for an automobile cemetery, that, according to the same law, according to which in old men and old women, who used to be rude and unresponsive, attention and helpfulness wake up before death - according to the same law, only related to the world of cars, she had to stop. But nothing like that - with a drunken senile arrogance, clinking a bucket suspended from the gas tank, the ZIL rattled past, drove tensely onto a hillock, made an obscene victorious sound at its top, accompanied by a jet of gray smoke, and already silently disappeared behind an asphalt rift.

Sasha got off the road, threw his small backpack into the grass and sat down on it - something inside leaned over, crunched, and Sasha experienced a malicious satisfaction, usual for a person in trouble, who learns that someone or something is nearby - too in difficult circumstances. How difficult his current circumstances are, Sasha was already beginning to feel.

There were only two ways to proceed: either continue to wait for a ride, or return to the village - three kilometers. As for the ride, the question was practically clear: there are, apparently, such regions of the country or such separate roads where, due to the belonging of all the drivers passing along them to some secret brotherhood of scoundrels, it is not only impossible to practice hitchhiking - on the contrary, you need to make sure that you are not doused with dirty water from a puddle when you walk along the side of the road. The road from Konkovo ​​to the nearest oasis near the railway - fifteen kilometers in a straight line - was just one of such enchanted routes. Of the five cars that passed by, not one stopped, and if some aging woman with purple lips from lipstick and a touching hairstyle “I still love you” hadn’t shown him the fig, sticking out her hand long out of the window of the red Niva, Sasha could decide that he became invisible. There was still hope for the driver promised by many newspapers and films, who would silently peer at the road through the dusty windshield of the truck all the way, and then with a short movement of the head would refuse money (and suddenly a photograph of several guys in paratrooper uniform hanging over the steering wheel against the background distant mountains), but when the rattling ZIL passed by, this hope died.

Sasha glanced at his watch - it was twenty past ten. It’s going to get dark soon, he thought, wow, he’s got it ... He looked around - behind a hundred meters of rough terrain (microscopic mounds, sparse bushes and too tall and juicy grass, making one think that there was a swamp under it) a liquid forest began, some unhealthy, like the offspring of an alcoholic. In general, the vegetation around was strange. Everything that was larger than flowers and grass grew, as it were, with an effort and anguish, and although it eventually reached normal sizes, it left the impression that it had grown, frightened by someone's shouts, otherwise it would have spread like a lichen on the ground. There were some unpleasant places, heavy and deserted, as if prepared for demolition from the face of the earth - although, Sasha thought, if the earth has a face, then obviously in another place. Not without reason, of the three villages he saw today, only one looked more or less plausible - just the last one, Konkovo ​​- and the rest were abandoned, and only in a few houses someone else was living out his life; the abandoned huts looked more like an exposition of an ethnographic museum than human dwellings.

Even Konkovo, marked by a plaster sentry by the highway and a roadside inscription "Collective farm" Michurinsky ", seemed to be a settlement of people only in comparison with the deaf desolation of neighboring, already nameless, villages. Although there was a shop in Konkovo, a club poster flapping in the wind with the name of a French avant-garde film written in green gouache, and a tractor screeching somewhere behind the houses, I still felt uneasy. There were no people on the streets - only a grandmother in black passed by, smallly crossing herself at the sight of Sasha's Hawaiian shirt, covered with multi-colored magic symbols, and a bespectacled boy with a shopping bag on the handlebar rode by on a bicycle. The bicycle was too big for him, he could not sit in the saddle and rode standing up, as if he were running over a rusty heavy frame. The rest of the residents, if there were any, stayed at home.

In my mind, the trip looked very different. Here he sits down from a flat-bottomed river boat, reaches the village, where on the mounds - Sasha did not know what a mound was, and imagined it in the form of a comfortable wooden bench along a log wall - old women who have gone out of their minds sit peacefully, a sunflower grows around, and under His yellow saucers quietly play chess on gray plank tables, shaved old men. In a word, it was Tverskoy Boulevard, only overgrown with sunflowers. Well, a cow is still mooing in the distance.

Further - here it goes to the outskirts, and a forest warmed by the sun opens up, a river with a floating boat or a field cut by a road, and wherever you go, it will be wonderful everywhere: you can make a fire, you can remember your childhood and climb trees - if, of course, after that as he remembers it, it turns out that he climbed them. In the evening - by passing cars to the train.

And what happened?

The culprit was a color photograph from a thick, peeled book with the caption: “The old Russian village of Konkovo, now the main estate of a millionaire collective farm.” Sasha found the place where the picture he liked was taken from, cursed the Tatar word "collective farm" and the American word "millionaire" and was surprised how different the same view can be in a photograph and in life.

Mentally making a promise to himself never again to succumb to impulses for meaningless travel, Sasha decided to at least watch this film in a village club. Having bought a ticket from an invisible cashier - he had to speak with a freckled, chubby hand in the window, which tore off a blue piece of paper and counted out the change - he ended up in a half-empty hall, got bored in it for an hour and a half, sometimes turning around to his grandfather, straight as a sleeper, whistling in some places (his criteria were completely unclear, but on the other hand, there was something nightingale-robber in the whistle, something from the outgoing Russia); then, when the film was over, he looked at the straight back of the whistler moving away from the club, at the lantern under the tin cone, at the identical fences around the houses, and walked away from Konkovo, squinting at the plaster man in the cap, who had stretched out his hand and raised his leg, doomed to forever wander to his brother along the nothingness waiting for him by the highway.

Sasha waited so long for the last truck, which finally dispelled illusions with its bluish exhaust, that he managed to forget what he was waiting for.

Getting up, he threw his backpack behind his back and went back, thinking about where and how he would spend the night. I didn’t want to knock on the door of some grandmother, and it was useless, because the grandmothers who let me spend the night usually live in the same places where the nightingale-robbers and koshcheis, and here was the Michurinsky collective farm - a concept, if you think about it, no less magical, but magical in a different way, without any hope of an overnight stay in an unfamiliar house. The only suitable option that Sasha managed to think of was the following: he buys a ticket for the last session to the club, and after the session, hiding behind a heavy green curtain in the hall, he stays. In order for everything to work out, it will be necessary to get up from the spot until the lights are turned on, then a woman in a homemade black uniform will not notice him, accompanying the audience to the exit. True, you will have to watch this dark film again, but there's nothing you can do about it.

Thinking about all this, Sasha went to the fork. When he passed here about twenty minutes ago, it seemed to him that another, smaller one was attached to the road on which he was walking, and now he stood at a crossroads, not understanding which of the roads he was walking on - both seemed exactly the same. It seems to be on the right - a large tree still grew there. Yep, that's it. So you have to go right. There seemed to be a gray post in front of the tree. Where is he? Here it is, only for some reason on the left. Nearby is a small tree. It's unclear.

Werewolf problem in the middle lane

Taken: , 1

For a second it seemed to Sasha that this crumpled ZIL would stop - it was such an old, rattling car, ripe for an automobile cemetery, which, according to the same law, according to which in old men and old women, who used to be rude and unresponsive, attention and helpfulness wake up before death - according to the same law, only related to the world of cars, she had to stop. But nothing like that - with a drunken senile impudence, clinking a bucket suspended from the gas tank, the ZIL rumbled past, drove tensely onto a hillock, made an obscene victorious sound at its top, accompanied by a jet of gray smoke, and silently disappeared behind an asphalt roll.

Sasha left the road, threw his small backpack into the grass and sat down on it - completing the movement, he felt something hard from below, remembered the melted cheeses lying under the top flap of the backpack, and experienced a vengeful satisfaction, usual for a person who got into trouble, when he finds out that someone or something is nearby - also in difficult circumstances. Sasha was just about to think about how difficult his current circumstances are.

There were only two ways to proceed - either continue to wait for a ride, or return to the village three kilometers behind. As for the ride, the question was almost clear - there are, apparently, such regions of the country or such separate roads where, due to the fact that absolutely all drivers passing by belong to some secret brotherhood of scoundrels, it is not only impossible to practice hitchhiking - on the contrary, you need to make sure that you are not doused with dirty water from a puddle when you walk along the side of the road. The road from Konkovo ​​to the nearest railroad oasis—another fifteen kilometers if you go straight—was just one of those enchanted routes. Of the five cars that have passed by in the past forty minutes, not one has stopped, and if some aging woman with purple lips from lipstick and a hairstyle like “I still love you” hadn’t shown him the fig, sticking her hand long out the window of the red Niva , Sasha could decide that he became invisible. After that, there was still hope for some kind of approximate truck driver who would silently peer at the road ahead through the dusty glass all the way, and then with a short movement of his head would give up Sasha’s five (and suddenly a photograph of several guys in paratrooper uniform hanging over the steering wheel would catch your eye against the backdrop of distant mountains), but when the only ZiL in the last half hour passed by, this hope died. The autostop is off.

Sasha glanced at his watch - it was twenty past ten. It will be dark soon, he thought, he must have hit ... He looked around: on both sides, behind a hundred meters of rough terrain - microscopic mounds, sparse bushes and too tall and juicy grass, making one think that there was a swamp under it - a liquid forest began, some unhealthy, like the offspring of an alcoholic. In general, the vegetation around was strange: everything a little larger than flowers and grass grew with strain and anguish, and although in the end it reached normal sizes - like, for example, a chain of birches from which the forest began - but there was such an impression that all this had grown, frightened by someone's shouts, and if not for them, it would have spread like a lichen on the ground. There were some unpleasant places, heavy and deserted, as if prepared for demolition from the face of the earth - although, Sasha thought, one cannot say that, because if the earth has a face, it is clearly in another place. Not without reason, of the three villages we met today, only one was more or less plausible - just the last one, Konkovo, and the rest were abandoned, and only in a few of their houses did someone else live out their lives, the abandoned huts looked more like an ethnographic museum exposition than former human ones. dwellings.

However, Konkovo, which had some connection with the roadside inscription “Kolkhoz Michurinsky” and the plaster sentry by the highway, seemed like a normal settlement of people only in comparison with the deaf desolation of neighboring, already nameless, villages. Even though there was a shop in Konkovo, a club poster flapping in the wind with the name of a French avant-garde film written in green gouache, and a tractor screeching somewhere behind the houses, it was still almost uncomfortably. There were no people on the streets - only a grandmother in black passed, smallly crossing herself at the sight of Sasha's Hawaiian shirt covered with multi-colored Freudian symbols, and a bespectacled boy rode a bicycle with a shopping bag on the handlebars - the bicycle was too big for him, he could not sit in the saddle and rode standing , as if running over a rusty heavy frame. The rest of the residents, if there were any, stayed at home.

In my mind, the trip looked very different. Here he sits down from a flat-bottomed river boat, reaches the village, where on the mounds - Sasha did not know what a mound was, and imagined it in the form of a comfortable wooden bench along a log wall - old women are sitting peacefully going out of their minds, a sunflower is growing around, and under His yellow saucers quietly play chess on gray plank tables, shaved old men. In a word, some kind of endless Tverskoy Boulevard was imagined. Well, the cow is still mooing ...

Further - here it goes to the outskirts, and a pine forest warmed by the sun opens up, a river with a floating boat or a field cut by a road - and wherever you go, it will be wonderful everywhere: you can make a fire, you can even remember your childhood and climb trees. In the evening, on passing cars - to the train.

And what happened? First - the frightening emptiness of abandoned villages, then the same frightening habitation of the inhabited. As a result, to everything that could not be trusted, one more thing was added - a color photograph from a thick, peeled book with a caption that mentioned "the old Russian village of Konkovo, now the main estate of a millionaire collective farm." Sasha found the place where the picture he liked was taken from, and was surprised how different the same view can be in a photograph and in life.

Having mentally given himself the word never again to succumb to impulses for meaningless travel, Sasha decided to at least watch this film in a club - he was no longer in Moscow. Having bought a ticket from an invisible cashier - he had to speak with a freckled chubby hand in the window, which tore off the ticket and counted the change - he ended up in a half-empty hall, got bored in it for an hour and a half, sometimes turning around to a pensioner who was straight as a sleeper, whistling in some places (his criteria were completely unclear, but on the other hand, there was something roaringly robbery and at the same time sad in the whistle, something from the departing Russia), then - when the film ended - he looked at the whistler's straight back moving away from the club, at the lantern under the tin like a cone, onto the identical fences around the houses, and walked away from Konkovo, squinting at the plaster man in the cap, who stretched out his hand and raised his foot, doomed to wander forever to his brother in existence, waiting for him by the highway.