It was winter, the wind was hitting the windows, large snowflakes were sticking to the wires, and slowly fell under the feet of the rare passers-by. He opened the window and breathed in the frosty air; this winter was the coldest he had ever seen. He sucked in his breath and exhaled sharply as a cloud, the room filled with cold. Yes, so be it. He does not care. With indifference, he watched the snowflakes whirling, blew on the glass and drew ridiculous patterns, and then wrote “Angelina.” But after a few seconds it disappeared as if it had never existed. He closed his eyes and a tear rolled down his pale cheek. And although it is customary to say that men’s tears are stingy, these tears are expensive and priceless.
“I can’t…” he whispered.
He walked over to the chair and sat down. He ran his fingers through his hair and froze. I remembered.

It was spring, everything began to come to life, as if waking up from a deep sleep. That's when he met her. She walked down the street, smiled at passers-by, and took a deep breath of the air filled with the smells of spring. A green scarf fluttered behind her, brown hair spilled down her back, blue eyes shone with happiness, and he stood on the opposite side of the street and just looked at her. She seemed to charge me with her joy. As if he had woken up, he rushed to her. The cars honked at him, and he walked towards her as if under hypnosis. He could not take his eyes off her, walking behind her, he saw a woman who was selling flowers, he handed over a bill and, taking wild flowers, he followed her again. The woman shook her head and put the change back.
He no longer remembers what he said then, he only remembers how she lowered her head and inhaled the smell of flowers, and then said “I love the wildflowers” ​​and smiled. So sincere.
And my heart froze. From happiness.

And then... they were overwhelmed by a wave of love. Their meetings, their first kisses, declarations of love. Touching. Uncertain glances, all this became the most important thing in his life.
His friend once said, “She looks like a hothouse flower that will die without heat.” How right he was. And he gave her warmth, tenderness, he gave her everything, he gave her his heart, his soul. She herself gave everything to him, trying to keep the smile on his lips. And when I kissed you, it was like the last time. And every time he closes his eyes, he remembers her gentle breath on his lips.
Their love blossomed and was not going to be seen like flowers.

Then a year later he started talking about the wedding, about their children, about how he wanted them to be like her. She just gently stroked his cheek and was silent. He built their future. Alas, from castles in the air.

One morning she felt bad and he asked: “Maybe you’re pregnant?” she just roared and buried herself in his shoulder, roaring without answering the question. And he froze, shocked by her reaction.

Two days later she packed her things and left. Forever. Leaving only the smell of wildflowers.
Finding no place for himself, wandering around the city, he looked for her. He found a letter in the mail.
With a trembling hand, he unfolded it and read it.
“Forgive me, forgive me. And forget it."
He couldn't stand it and came to her. Let him explain first.
Pale and exhausted, she waited for him.
She led me into the room and said in a dull voice:
“I knew you would come. I would do the same. Then listen.
I grew up as a sickly child. I was surrounded by care and closely watched over me, but I caught a cold despite the care of my parents. I attracted illnesses like a magnet. They treated him, but without success. And then after 12 years, everything just disappeared. And everything seemed to be fine until I went to the doctor at 15. And after doing an examination, I was diagnosed. Infertility. When I left the doctor I cried for two days, I just couldn’t stop. Life seemed to have just gotten better, but my dream of my daughter was not destined to come true. She fell into depression. Time passed, the wounds healed and life seemed to return to a rut when you appeared. Like the sun in my window. I received so much love and care, and then that question and again the pain and unbearable sadness. And the eternal question, why me? So it's destined. But this is my life, and you can have children. You will be an amazing father, loving and caring. I just don’t have the right to destroy everything.”
When he tried to hug her, she moved away and simply said, “Don't.”
Then he realized that no matter what he said, she would not listen to him, he left.

He opened his eyes, shivered, the room was terribly cold, he closed the window.
He could not live further without her. Enough. He quickly got dressed and ran out of the apartment. He was walking towards her.

He knocked sharply and waited for her. Quiet steps and an uncertain “who?”
“I” is a monosyllabic answer and a quiet sigh behind the door.
"You will not leave?"
His firm “No.”
The lock clicked and she was in old pants and a stretched T-shirt. He walked in, pulled her into his arms and said firmly, “I can’t live without you. I love you. And the rest doesn’t matter.” She just sobbed and, clutching him, whispered: “I'm sorry, I'm sorry. “I love you so much,” he stroked her hair and inhaled such a familiar smell of wildflowers. And he knew that now he would not let her go. And she understood that her whole world was in his arms.

One winter evening in 1786 on the outskirts of Vienna in a small wooden house A blind old man, the former cook of Countess Thun, was dying. As a matter of fact, it was not even a house, but a dilapidated gatehouse standing in the depths of the garden. The garden was littered with rotten branches knocked down by the wind. With every step, the branches crunched, and then the chained dog began to grumble quietly in his booth. He, too, was dying, like his owner, from old age and could no longer bark.

Several years ago, a cook became blind from the heat of the ovens. The Countess's manager had since then placed him in a lodge and given him a few florins from time to time.

His daughter Maria, a girl of about eighteen, lived with the cook. The entire furnishings of the lodge consisted of a bed, lame benches, a rough table, earthenware covered with cracks, and, finally, a harpsichord - Mary’s only wealth.

The harpsichord was so old that its strings sang long and quietly in response to all the sounds that arose around. The cook, laughing, called the harpsichord “the guard of his house.” No one could enter the house without being greeted by the harpsichord with a trembling, senile hum.

When Mary washed the dying man and put a cold, clean shirt on him, the old man said:

I have always disliked priests and monks. I cannot call a confessor, meanwhile I need to clear my conscience before death.

What to do? - Maria asked in fear.

“Go out into the street,” said the old man, “and ask the first person you meet to come into our house to confess to the dying man.” Nobody will refuse you.

Our street is so deserted... - Maria whispered, threw on a scarf and went out.

She ran through the garden, with difficulty opened the rusty gate and stopped. The street was empty. The wind carried leaves along it, and cold drops of rain fell from the dark sky.

Maria waited and listened for a long time. Finally it seemed to her that a man was walking along the fence and humming. She took a few steps towards him, collided with him and screamed. The man stopped and asked:

Who is there?

“Okay,” the man said calmly. - Although I’m not a priest, it’s all the same. Let's go.

They entered the house. By candlelight, Mary saw the thin one little man. He threw his wet raincoat onto the bench. He was dressed with grace and simplicity - the candlelight glinted on his black camisole, crystal buttons and lace frill.

He was still very young, this stranger. Quite boyishly, he shook his head, straightened his powdered wig, quickly moved a stool to the bed, sat down and, bending down, looked intently and cheerfully into the face of the dying man.

Speak! - he said. “Perhaps, with the power given to me not from God, but from the art that I serve, I will ease your last moments and remove the burden from your soul.”

“I worked all my life until I went blind,” the old man whispered. - And whoever works does not have time to sin. When my wife fell ill with consumption - her name was Martha - and the doctor prescribed her various expensive medicines and ordered her to be fed with cream and wine berries and given hot red wine, I stole a small golden dish from Countess Thun's service, broke it into pieces and sold it. And now it’s hard for me to remember this and hide it from my daughter: I taught her not to touch a speck of dust from someone else’s table.

Did any of the countess's servants suffer for this? - asked the stranger.

“I swear, sir, no one,” answered the old man and began to cry. - If I knew that gold would not help my Martha, how could I steal it!

What is your name? - asked the stranger.

Johann Meyer, sir.

So, Johann Meyer,” said the stranger and put his palm on the old man’s blind eyes, “you are innocent before people.” What you have done is not a sin and is not theft, but, on the contrary, can be counted to you as a feat of love.

Amen! - the old man whispered.

Amen! - repeated the stranger. - Now tell me your last will.

I want someone to take care of Maria.

I will do it. What else do you want?

Then the dying man suddenly smiled and said loudly:

I would like to see Martha again as I met her in my youth. To see the sun and this old garden when it blooms in the spring. But this is impossible, sir. Don't be angry with me for my stupid words. The illness must have completely confused me.

“Okay,” said the stranger and stood up. “Okay,” he repeated, walked up to the harpsichord and sat down on a stool in front of it. - Fine! - he said loudly for the third time, and suddenly a quick ringing sound scattered throughout the guardhouse, as if hundreds of crystal balls had been thrown onto the floor.

Listen, said the stranger. - Listen and watch.

He started playing. Maria later remembered the stranger’s face when the first key sounded under his hand. An extraordinary pallor covered his forehead, and the candle tongue swayed in his darkened eyes.

The harpsichord sang in full voice for the first time in many years. It filled not only the gatehouse with its sounds, but the entire garden. The old dog crawled out of the booth, sat with his head bowed to the side, and, wary, quietly wagged his tail. Wet snow began to fall, but the dog only shook his ears.

I see, sir! - said the old man and sat up on the bed. - I see the day when I met Martha and she broke a jug of milk out of embarrassment. It was winter, in the mountains. The sky was clear, like blue glass, and Martha laughed. “I laughed,” he repeated, listening to the murmur of the strings.

The stranger was playing, looking out the black window.

“And now,” he asked, “do you see anything?”

The old man was silent, listening.

“Don’t you see,” the stranger quickly said, without ceasing to play, “that the night has turned from black to blue, and then blue, and warm light is already falling from somewhere above, and white flowers are blooming on the old branches of your trees. In my opinion, these are apple tree flowers, although from here, from the room, they look like large tulips. You see: the first ray fell on the stone fence, heated it, and steam rose from it. This must be drying moss filled with melted snow. And the sky is getting higher, bluer, more magnificent, and flocks of birds are already flying north over our old Vienna.

I see it all! - the old man shouted.

The pedal creaked quietly, and the harpsichord sang solemnly, as if it was not he who was singing, but hundreds of jubilant voices.

No, sir,” Maria told the stranger, “these flowers are not at all like tulips.” These apple trees blossomed in just one night.

Yes,” the stranger answered, “these are apple trees, but they have very large petals.”

Open the window, Maria,” the old man asked.

Maria opened the window. Cold air rushed into the room. The stranger played very quietly and slowly.

The old man fell onto the pillows, breathed greedily and groped over the blanket with his hands. Maria rushed to him. The stranger stopped playing. He sat at the harpsichord without moving, as if enchanted by his own music.

Maria screamed. The stranger stood up and approached the bed. The old man said, breathless:

I saw everything as clearly as many years ago. But I wouldn’t want to die and not know… the name. Name!

“My name is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart,” the stranger answered.

Maria stepped back from the bed and bowed low, almost touching the floor with her knee, before the great musician.

When she straightened up, the old man was already dead. The dawn flared up outside the windows, and in its light stood a garden covered with flowers of wet snow.

When the word “homeland” was uttered in front of Berg, he grinned. He didn't understand what this meant. The homeland, the land of the fathers, the country where he was born - in the end, does it matter where a person was born? One of his comrades was even born in the ocean on a cargo ship between America and Europe.

– Where is this man’s homeland? – Berg asked himself. – Is the ocean really this monotonous plain of water, black from the wind and oppressing the heart with constant anxiety?

Berg saw the ocean. When he studied painting in Paris, he happened to visit the banks of the English Channel. The ocean was not akin to him.

Land of the fathers! Berg felt no attachment either to his childhood or to the small Jewish town on the Dnieper, where his grandfather went blind while using grit and a shoe awl.

I always remembered my hometown as a faded and poorly painted picture, thickly covered with flies. He was remembered as dust, the sweet stench of garbage dumps, dry poplars, dirty clouds over the outskirts, where soldiers - defenders of the fatherland - were drilled in the barracks.

During civil war Berg did not notice the places where he had to fight. He shrugged his shoulders mockingly when the fighters, with a special light in their eyes, said that they would soon recapture their native places from the whites and water their horses with water from their native Don.

- Chatter! – Berg said gloomily. “People like us do not and cannot have a homeland.”

- Eh, Berg, you crack soul! – the soldiers answered with heavy reproach. - What kind of fighter and creator of new life are you when you don’t love the earth, eccentric. And also an artist!

Maybe that’s why Berg wasn’t good at landscapes. He preferred portraits, genres and, finally, posters. He tried to find the style of his time, but these attempts were full of failures and ambiguities.

The years passed over the Soviet country like a wide wind - wonderful years of work and overcoming. Over the years, we have accumulated experience and traditions. Life was turning, like a prism, with a new facet, and in it, old feelings were refracted freshly and at times not quite understandably for Berg - love, hatred, courage, suffering and, finally, a sense of homeland.

One day in early autumn, Berg received a letter from the artist Yartsev. He called him to come to the Murom forests, where he spent the summer. Berg was friends with Yartsev and, in addition, did not leave Moscow for several years. He went.

At a remote station behind Vladimir, Berg switched to a narrow-gauge train.

August was hot and windless. The train smelled rye bread. Berg sat on the footboard of the carriage, breathing greedily, and it seemed to him that he was breathing not air, but amazing sunlight.

Grasshoppers screamed in the clearings overgrown with white dried carnations. The stations smelled of unwise wildflowers.

Yartsev lived far from the deserted station, in the forest, on the shore deep lake with black water. He rented a hut from a forester.

Berg was driven to the lake by the forester’s son Vanya Zotov, a stooped and shy boy.

The cart knocked on the roots and creaked in the deep sand.

Orioles whistled sadly in the copses. A yellow leaf occasionally fell onto the road. Pink clouds stood high in the sky above the tops of the mast pines.

Berg was lying in the cart, and his heart was beating dullly and heavily.

"Must be from the air"? – thought Berg.

Lake Berg suddenly saw through the thicket of thinned forests.

It lay obliquely, as if rising towards the horizon, and behind it, thickets of golden birch trees were visible through the thin haze. A haze hung over the lake from recent forest fires. On black as tar, clear water fallen leaves floated.

Berg lived on the lake for about a month. He was not going to work and did not take any oil paints with him. He brought only a small box with a French watercolor by Lefranc, preserved from Parisian times. Berg treasured these paints very much.

For whole days he lay in the clearings and looked at the flowers and herbs with curiosity. He was especially struck by the euonymus - its black berries were hidden in a corolla of carmine petals.

Berg collected rosehips and fragrant junipers, long pine needles, aspen leaves, where black and blue spots were scattered across the lemon field, fragile lichens and wilting cloves. He carefully examined the autumn leaves from the inside out, where the yellowness was slightly touched by a light leaden frost.

Olive swimming beetles were running in the lake, fish were playing with dim lightning, and the last lilies lay on the quiet surface of the water, as if on black glass.

On hot days, Berg heard a quiet trembling ringing in the forest.

The heat rang, dry grass, beetles and grasshoppers rang. At sunset, flocks of cranes flew over the lake to the south, and Vanya said to Berg every time:

“It seems like the birds are abandoning us, flying to the warm seas.”

For the first time Berg felt a stupid insult - the cranes seemed to him traitors. They abandoned without regret this deserted, forested and solemn region, full of nameless lakes, impassable thickets, dry foliage, the measured hum of pine trees and air smelling of resin and swamp mosses.

- Weirdos! - Berg noted, and the feeling of resentment for the forests becoming empty every day no longer seemed funny and childish to him.

Berg once met Grandma Tatyana in the forest. She trudged in from afar, from Zaborye, to pick mushrooms.

Berg wandered with her through the thickets and listened to Tatyana’s leisurely stories. From her he learned that their region - the wilderness - had been famous since ancient times for its painters. Tatyana told him the names of famous artisans who painted wooden spoons and dishes with gold and cinnabar, but Berg never heard these names and blushed.

Berg spoke little. Occasionally he exchanged a few words with Yartsev. Yartsev spent whole days reading, sitting on the shore of the lake. He didn't want to talk either.

It started raining in September. They rustled in the grass. The air became warmer from them, and the coastal thickets smelled wildly and pungently, like wet animal skin. At night, the rains slowly rustled through the forests along remote roads leading to no one knows where, along the plank roof of the lodge, and it seemed that they were destined to drizzle all autumn over this forested country.

Yartsev got ready to leave. Berg got angry. How could one leave in the midst of this extraordinary autumn? Berg now felt Yartsev’s desire to leave the same way he once felt the flight of the cranes - it was betrayal. Why? Berg could hardly answer this question. A betrayal of forests, lakes, autumn, and finally, a warm sky drizzling with frequent rain.

“I’m staying,” Berg said sharply. - You can run, this is your business, but I want to write this fall.

Yartsev left. The next day Berg woke up to the sun.

There was no rain. Light shadows of branches trembled on the clean floor, and a quiet blue shone behind the door.

Berg encountered the word “radiance” only in the books of poets; he considered it pompous and devoid of clear meaning. But now he understood how accurately this word conveys that special light that comes from the September sky and sun.

The web flew over the lake, every yellow leaf on the grass glowed with light, like a bronze ingot. The wind carried the smells of forest bitterness and withering herbs. Berg took paints and paper and, without even drinking tea, went to the lake. Vanya transported him to the far shore.

Berg was in a hurry. The forests, illuminated obliquely by the sun, seemed to him like piles of light copper ore. The last birds whistled thoughtfully in the blue air, and the clouds dissolved in the sky, rising to the zenith.

Berg was in a hurry. He wanted to give all the power of the colors, all the skill of his hands and keen eye, all that was trembling somewhere in his heart to this paper, in order to depict at least a hundredth part of the splendor of these forests, dying majestically and simply.

Berg worked like a man possessed, singing and shouting. Vanya had never seen him like this. He watched Berg's every move, changed his paint water and handed him porcelain cups with paint from a box.

A dull twilight passed like a sudden wave through the foliage. The gold was fading. The air grew dim. A distant, menacing murmur swept from edge to edge of the forests and froze somewhere above the burnt areas. Berg didn't turn around.

- The storm is coming! – Vanya shouted. - We need to go home!

“An autumn thunderstorm,” Berg answered absentmindedly and began to work even more feverishly.

Thunder split the sky, the black water trembled, but the last reflections of the sun still wandered in the forests. Berg was in a hurry.

Vanya pulled his hand:

- Look back. Look, what fear!

Berg didn't turn around. With his back he felt that wild darkness and dust were coming from behind - the leaves were already flying like a shower, and, escaping from the thunderstorm, frightened birds were flying low over the small forest.

Berg was in a hurry. There were only a few strokes left.

Vanya grabbed his hand. Berg heard a rushing roar, as if the oceans were coming towards him, flooding the forests.

Then Berg looked back. Black smoke fell onto the lake. The scaffolding swayed. Behind them, like a lead wall, the rain roared, cut by cracks of lightning. The first heavy drop clicked on my hand.

Berg quickly hid the sketch in a drawer, took off his jacket, wrapped it around the drawer, and grabbed a small box of watercolors. Water spray hit my face. The wet leaves swirled like a snowstorm and blinded my eyes.

Lightning split a nearby pine tree. Berg went deaf. A downpour fell from the low sky, and Berg and Vanya rushed to the shuttle.

Wet and shivering from the cold, Berg and Vanya reached the lodge an hour later. At the gatehouse, Berg discovered a missing box of watercolors. The colors were lost - the magnificent colors of Lefranc. Berg searched for them for two days, but, of course, found nothing.

Two months later in Moscow, Berg received a letter written in large, clumsy letters.

“Hello, Comrade Berg,” wrote Vanya. “Let me know what to do with your paints and how to deliver them to you. After you left, I looked for them for two weeks, searched everything until I found them, only I got a bad cold - that’s why it was already raining, but Now I'm walking, although I'm still very weak. Dad says I had inflammation in my lungs. So don't be angry.

Send me, if possible, a book about our forests and all kinds of trees and colored pencils - I really want to draw. Our snow has already fallen and melted, and in the forest, under some tree, you look and there is a hare sitting. We will be looking forward to seeing you in our native places in the summer. I remain Vanya Zotov."

Along with Vanya’s letter they brought a notice about the exhibition - Berg was supposed to participate in it. He was asked to tell how many of his things he would exhibit and under what name.

Berg sat down at the table and quickly wrote:

“I’m exhibiting only one watercolor sketch I made this summer - my first landscape.”

It was midnight. Shaggy snow fell outside on the windowsill and glowed with magical fire - the reflection of street lamps. In the next apartment someone was playing a Grieg sonata on the piano.

The clock on the Spasskaya Tower struck steadily and far away. Then they started playing "Internationale".

Berg sat for a long time, smiling. Of course, he will give Lefranc’s paints to Vanya.

Berg wanted to trace by what elusive ways a clear and joyful feeling of his homeland appeared in him. It matured for years, decades of revolutionary years, but the final impetus was given by the forest edge, autumn, the cries of cranes and Vanya Zotov. Why? Berg could not find the answer, although he knew that it was so.

- Eh, Berg, you crack soul! – he remembered the words of the fighters. - What kind of fighter and creator of new life are you when you don’t love your land, eccentric!

The fighters were right. Berg knew that he was now connected with his country not only with his mind, not only with his devotion to the revolution, but with all his heart, as an artist, and that love for his homeland made his smart but dry life warm, cheerful and a hundred times more beautiful, than before.
1936

The numbness of calm takes possession of the shores of ancient Cimmeria - Eastern Crimea. They say that the heads of marble goddesses, the patroness of sleep and the light wind of Aeolus, were recently found in the red silica here.

I lay there, listened to the murmur of the waves, thought about the stone goddesses and felt like a happy part of this southern world.

Not far from me, an unfamiliar girl of about fifteen, probably a schoolgirl, was sitting on the beach, learning Pushkin’s poems out loud. She was thin, like a seaside boy. There were white scars on her tanned knees. She absentmindedly fingered the sand in her palms.

I saw fragments of shells and crab legs, tiny shards of green glass and Marseilles tiles fall between her thin fingers. In these places, for some reason, the sea throws up a lot of fragments of this orange and ringing tile, like copper.

The girl often fell silent and looked at the sea, squinting her light eyes. She must have wanted to see the sail. But the sea was deserted, and the girl, sighing, again began to read Pushkin’s poems in rapid succession:

I listened to her muttering for a long time, then said:

– You are reading these verses incorrectly.

The girl crawled on her knees closer to me and, pressing her palms into the hot sand, asked:

- Why?

She looked at me demandingly with big gray eyes and repeated:

Insomnia. Homer. Tight sails.
I read the list of ships halfway through:
This long brood, this crane train,
What once rose above Hellas...

Insomnia... Homer... A flash of lightning burst into the darkness. Blind woman... Homer was blind! Life existed for him only in a multitude of sounds.

Homer created the hexameter.

And suddenly it became clear to me that blind Homer, sitting by the sea, was composing poems, subordinating them to the measured sound of the surf. The strongest evidence that this was indeed the case was the caesura in the middle of the line. Essentially it was unnecessary. Homer introduced it, exactly following the stop that a wave makes halfway through its surge.

Homer took a hexameter from the sea. He sang the siege of Troy and the campaign of Odysseus in the solemn tune of seas invisible to him.

Have I found the answer to the hexameter? Don't know. I wanted to tell someone about my discovery, but there was no one around who might be interested in it. Who cares about Homer!

I wanted to convince someone that the birth of the Homeric hexameter is only a special case among the as yet unrealized possibilities of our creative principle, that living thought is often born from the collision of things that at first glance have nothing in common with each other. What does flint have in common with iron, and yet their collision sparks fire?

What do the sound of waves and poetry have in common? And their collision brought to life a majestic poetic meter.

In the end, I had the opportunity to tell only the girl Lila, who was offended at me, about Homer. I met her in Dead Bay with that boy who sometimes cried at night.

It was difficult to get to Dead Bay. We had to climb over a sheer cliff above the sea. In some places it was necessary to climb, grabbing bushes. Then the ground was a few centimeters from the eyes, and sparkles of sulfur pyrites and red ants were clearly visible on it - so small that a person could not notice them from his height.

If Robber Bay was a haven for smugglers, then Dead Bay was a bay of shipwrecks.

Scattered on the sand were bottle necks, pieces of boats with peeling blue paint, bent German helmets, depth charge casings and pieces of ribbed rubber pipes. Crabs lived in them.

Lilya wasn’t surprised at all. She looked at me with narrowed eyes and said:

- Ah, it’s you!

And then she started chatting:

“And I left at home the carnelian that I wanted to give you.” I didn't know you would come here. Bear, don’t hit the water with your feet. You splashed me all over. Impossible guy! You know, a huge fish just jumped out of the water. Must be a mullet. Will you be fishing here? There is no one here, it’s even scary. The border patrol only came through once. The bear asked them, and they shot into the water. There was such an echo - all the way to Koktebel. Look what I found - a seahorse.

Lilya rummaged through the light dress that had been thrown onto the sand and pulled out from her pocket a dry seahorse in spiky armor.

- Why does he need it? - asked the boy.

“This is a figure,” answered Lilya. - Understand? Crabs play chess with them. They sit under a rock and play. And whoever cheats is hit on the head with a claw.

Still chatting, Lilya put the seahorse back into the pocket of her dress, then suddenly frowned, squinted her eyes, slowly pulled her hand out of her pocket and carefully unclenched it. In Lily’s palm lay a carnelian with smoky veins.

“It turns out he’s here,” Lilya said and made big eyes. “I thought he was at home.” How come I didn't lose him? Take it please. It is for you. I don't feel sorry at all. I'll find as many of them as you want.

I took carnelian. Lilya was watching me.

- Oh! – she suddenly screamed. - Don’t you see that there is a wave pattern on it? There he is, as if coming out of smoke. It will be easier to see now.

She licked the carnelian. It darkened, and indeed, a sea wave pattern appeared on it.

“It’s salty,” said the boy. - I tried.

“I hear the silent sound,” Lilya suddenly said solemnly, made a caesura and laughed, “of divine Hellenic speech...

– Do you want to listen? - I asked, - a story about the secret of the hexameter?

I told Lila about the blind Homer and how he discovered the hexameter. Lilya lay on the sand, resting her chin in her hands, and listened. The boy lay down next to her and also rested his chin on his hands.

He watched Lily and repeated all her movements. She raised her eyebrows - and he raised his eyebrows, she shook her head - and he shook his head, she dangled her heels in the air a little - and he also dangled his heels a little.

Lilya slapped him on the back:

- Stop it, monkey!

- Well, how? I asked her. - Interesting?

- Yes! Aunt Olya is blind. Maybe she, too, like Homer, will hear something that we cannot hear because we are sighted. Can I talk about this at my school in Leningrad during a lesson about Pushkin? He also wrote in hexameter.

- Well, tell me.

“Even if they give me a bad mark, I’ll definitely tell you,” Lilya said with a selfless look.

We returned to Koktebel along steep rocks. Lilya held the boy’s hand tightly, got angry when he stumbled, and in dangerous places she silently extended her hand to me, and I pulled her and the boy up.

A week later I left and almost forgot about Koktebel, Homer and Lilya. But still, fate again brought me together with Homer and with her.

This was three years after what is described above.

Our ship left the concrete forts and houses of Gallipoli, yellowed like burnt paper, on the port side and left the Dardanelles for the Aegean Sea.

The usual idea of ​​the sea has disappeared. We did not go out into the sea, but into purple flames. The steamer even slowed down, as if not daring to disturb this luminous area of ​​the earth. He approached her carefully, arching a long foamy trail behind the stern.

On the left side still stretched the burnt shores of Asia Minor, the barren hills of Homer's fabulous Troy. There, in the bay, like in reddish bowls made of petrified clay, the living azure water swayed and rustled and broke with foam on the low capes.

By evening, the sea became calm, and a slow march along the horizon of the ancient islands began: Imros, Tenedos, Lesbos, Milos.

The islands passed like sea swells. Each island appeared in the fading sky with a gentle rise, a peak and the same gentle fall. It was reminiscent of a titanic stone hexameter that lay on the sea in a continuous stanza - from Hellas to the coast of Asia Minor.

Then the islands came closer. One could already make out grayish-green olive groves and villages in small coastal bays. Above all this rose the steep ore and lilac mountains. At their tops, like smoke from giant censers, clouds smoked, illuminated by the evening sun. They cast a reddish glow on the sea, mountains and people's faces.

The first lighthouse blinked. A breath of wind brought from the islands the smell of lemon and some other smell, bitter and pleasant, like dried chamomile.

At night I went up on deck. The steamer was sailing along the Saronic Gulf. Two piercing lights - green and red - lay on the low horizon of the night. Those were the guiding lights of Piraeus.

I looked to where Athens lay, and felt a chill under my heart: far in the sky, amid the dense darkness of the Attic night, the Acropolis shone, illuminated by the streaming light of searchlights. Its thousand-year-old marbles shone with imperishable, inexplicable beauty.

The steamer was slowly pulled into the roadstead of Piraeus.

In the autumn after this trip, I came to Leningrad for several days and attended Mravinsky’s concert at the Philharmonic.

A thin girl was sitting next to me, and next to her was a blind woman in black glasses.

The girl quickly turned around, narrowed her gray eyes and grabbed my hand.

- No! I even got an A. And, you know, I'm glad you're here.

She introduced me to a blind woman - Aunt Olya, shy and silent, then she said that there was something in the story with the hexameter and Homer that she could not convey, just like poems that you cannot remember in a dream.

I was surprised by this comparison.

We went out, and I accompanied the blind woman and Lilya home. They lived on Tuchkova Embankment. On the way I talked about the Aegean Sea and the islands. Lilya listened to me quietly, but sometimes interrupted and asked the blind woman: “Can you hear, Aunt Olya?” “I hear you, don’t worry,” answered the blind woman. “I can see all this very clearly.”

Near the old dark house we said goodbye.

“Well,” said Lilya, “all we do is say goodbye.” Even funny. Write when you are in Leningrad again, and I will show you one painting in the Hermitage. Nobody notices her. Just a great picture.

They entered the front door. I stood on the embankment for a while. The greenish light of river lanterns fell on black barges moored to wooden pipes. Dry leaves flew past the lanterns.

And I thought that, in the end, it is tiring and sad to meet new people all the time and then lose them for who knows how long - maybe forever.
Yalta, 1957

The apartment greeted him with a draft and the soft smell of wildflowers. He lost the habit of this smell only two years after that incident. My eyes met in horror with the red twenty on the calendar... Time flies so quickly! He has been living alone for exactly two years. Exactly two years ago he lost her... Without taking his shoes off his feet, he ran into the kitchen. Liquor bottles took over the table and sink. The half-eaten breakfast was still standing on the stove, where it had been set to cool and forgotten in a hurry... Bread crumbs littered the floor of the room. She would have argued with him for a long time because of this mess, and would have thrown a tantrum over the shoes that had not been taken off. She would have sulked at him for a whole week and would not have cooked her favorite pancakes for breakfast, thereby showing that she was terribly offended. But she’s not there... Sweeping a couple of bottles off the table, which crashed into thousands of pieces when they met the cold tiles, he fell onto a chair and stared blankly out the window. A cloudy November sky appeared before his eyes. It was going to rain overnight, threatening to last until the morning. One single star peeked out from behind the clouds. Their star...

Volume! Volume! Tom, look what a star! Beautiful, isn't it? - her big brown eyes looked at him and then at the sky for several seconds, beaming with childish intangible joy. A gentle smile formed on his lips. She was all filled with sudden happiness. - Yes. Bright. What if the small, small people living on this star have turned on thousands of spotlights for you right now? And this is why the star is so bright? - Tom asked, burying his face in her soft hair that smelled of wildflowers. - Well, you'll figure it out! - she exclaimed. - No. In fact, there is a sea of ​​snow-white flowers growing there. That’s why the star is so bright,” she smiled again and, turning her head, kissed him on the cheek. From the touch of her warm lips on his skin, somewhere in his stomach a huge, heavy and scalding hot beast awoke, slowly moving into his chest, squeezing his lungs so that it became difficult to breathe in, and even harder to exhale. His lips stretched into a smile, he presses her even tighter to him and suddenly begins to tickle her. She wriggles, moves her legs quickly and quickly and laughs loudly, loudly, loudly...

They are walking along a poorly lit street late at night. In the evening it became sharply cold and, to prevent her from catching a cold, he wrapped her in his jacket. They walk in silence, they don’t need words, at this moment it’s enough just to be nearby... Then the uniform clicking of her heels breaks down, and two young men suddenly appear from around a dark corner. - Isn’t it scary to walk alone in such dark corners so late? – the first one asks sarcastically, approaching the couple with an imposing gait. Angie got scared and grabbed Tom's hand, seeking protection from him. The guy blocked the girl and crossed his arms over his chest. “I have a counter question for you, gentlemen,” Tom retorts rather sharply. The young people looked at each other displeasedly, and the first nodded to his partner. They acted quickly and smoothly; apparently, this was not the first time they had ambushed someone late in the evening. But Tom was not known for his slow reaction and quite quickly hit the first robber in the face with force. The guy could not withstand the blow and fell on the asphalt. The main disadvantage was that there were two attackers, and while Tom was dealing with one, the second impudent man quickly crept up to the girl and was about to steal her purse, when Angie suddenly stepped on his foot with her heel and pressed her elbow firmly on his neck. - I'm daydreaming! This, by the way, is a gift! – the girl exclaimed and proudly raised her nose. - You will answer for this! – one wheezed from the asphalt. “Make sure you don’t answer us for this,” Angie said threateningly. - Well done, dear. “And now I propose to leave them and let them enjoy the fresh evening air,” Tom grinned...

She called him and asked him to carry the bags from the store. He got ready quite quickly and within five minutes was loaded with five bags of food. - And where do you need so much? - he was surprised. - Not for me, honey, but for you. “You eat a week’s supply of food in an hour,” she grinned. “Yeah, and your yoghurts,” he supported. - Exactly! Yoghurts! How could I forget?! Wait here, I’ll be quick,” she turned around and ran across the road to the store... Everything happened too quickly, he didn’t have time to realize it! A small blue foreign car crashes into her at full speed... The grinding of brakes, the dull impact of her body on the asphalt, the screams of people, his own deafening scream... He runs towards her, falls to his knees, calls her, tries to bring her to her senses, but nothing helps... Then everything is as if through thick water: the ambulance, the coffin, the funeral... Everything is blurry and muffled, like an old film stored in the back of my mind... He rose from his chair and went to the window. He was shaking with anger and despair. - Why did you take her?! What she did she do it to you?! – he shouted like crazy. Emotions and nerves were out of control, his vision darkened, his own body turned out to be too heavy, and he fell to his knees with a thud. - For what? She was innocent and blameless. Why are you doing this? – he whispered, hot tears flowing down his cheeks, leaving wet trails on his skin. Suddenly a light breeze blew, and the smell of wildflowers enveloped him, intoxicating his mind. “I’m close,” whispered a gentle voice. He couldn’t understand whether he imagined it or if it really happened, but suddenly it became much easier, his head became clearer, the tension subsided, and peace replaced the raging emotions. “I’ll come back to you,” he whispered, grinning.

* * *
The midday sun stood overhead, smelled thickly of resin, and somewhere high above the ground that had not yet thawed, a lark rang and sang, choking in its own simple song.

Full of a sense of vague danger, Alexey looked around the cutting area. The felling was fresh, not neglected, the needles on the uncut trees had not yet had time to wilt and turn yellow... The loggers might be coming any minute.

Alexei felt like an animal that someone was carefully and incessantly watching him.

A branch cracked. He looked back and saw that several branches lived some kind of special life, not in time with the general movement. And it seemed to Alexei that excited human whispers were coming from there.

"What is this? Beast, man? - thought Alexey, and it seemed to him that someone was speaking Russian in the bushes. This made him feel crazy joy... Without thinking at all about who was there - friend or foe, Alexei let out a triumphant cry, rushed forward with his whole body and immediately fell with a groan as if he had been cut down...
(According to B. Polevoy. 134 words.)
* * *
The modern Russian language is a complex unity of the literary language, dialects, and vernacular.

The Russian literary language, having gone through a long path of development, has become more heterogeneous. Its carriers vary in social status, place of residence, profession, level of education and culture. And the literary language itself was divided into two varieties - book language and colloquial speech.

Book language is the language of scientific works, fiction, business correspondence, newspapers and magazines, television and radio. Colloquial is the language of informal communication. It is considered an independent system within the general system of the literary language. It is spoken at home, on the street, in the family, with friends and acquaintances.

Modern speakers of the Russian literary language speak both of its varieties. And, for example, Russian emigrants who left the country in the first decades of the twentieth century and their descendants practically do not know modern colloquial speech. Even in everyday life they speak the book language of the beginning of the century. This is why their speech may seem somewhat artificial.

* * *
We spent the summer in Serebryany Bor, in an old abandoned house with small staircases, passages, carved wooden ceilings, and corridors that suddenly ended in a blank wall. Everything in this house creaked. Doors in their own way, shutters in their own way. One large room was boarded up tightly. But even there there was a creaking and rustling sound. And suddenly a rhythmic rattling knock began, as if a clock hammer was beating past the bell. Raincoats grew in the attic, foreign books lay with torn pages and no bindings.

The house once belonged to an old gypsy countess. It was mysterious. According to rumors, she walled up the treasure before her death.

Persian lilacs grew thickly around the collapsed arbors. There were statues along the green paths. They were not like the Greek gods.

Such a good life It was only at the beginning of summer, as soon as we moved to Serebryany Bor.

(V. Kaverin, 118 words)

* * *
Poetry is a Greek word, it comes from the verb I create, I create. Poetry is something that is created, or rather, recreated by a person, his thought, feeling, imagination.

The ancient Greeks, as you know, called poetry the art of human speech in general, meaning prose and poetry, theatrical recitation and philosophical argument, judicial speech and congratulations to a friend.

Currently, we call only the art of poetry poetry, but in our minds the idea of ​​poetry as something sublime, beautiful, and unusual is alive. Of course, only those who have the ability to enter the intangible, invisible world (unlike cinema and theater), inaudible (unlike music), and only imaginary can love to read and write poetry.

Suffer, be surprised, rejoice, be indignant about something that does not concern you personally, what may have happened to others, maybe not. Of course, the poetic principle in a person does not get along well with selfishness, vulgarity, and greed. It will either win and drive out evil, or it will leave you unnoticed, but forever. It is not for nothing that evil people, as a rule, do not like poetry.

(According to E. Dryzhakova, 153 words.)

Catherine wanted to build a waterfall on Neglinka, near the Kuznetsky Bridge, and place her statue above it, but nothing came of it.

In winter, there were fierce fist fights on the Neglinka ice. Students of the Greco-Slavic Academy rolled the cartilage of students with lead. In the twelfth year, Napoleonic guards washed their boots in Neglinka. In the twenties of the last century, Neglinka was driven into an underground pipe. And now we are traveling near Neglinka in this shiny carriage.

“And for us,” the girl suddenly said and became embarrassed, “it was very difficult for us because of this Neglinka: there are quicksand here.” Water constantly broke through, the fastenings cracked like matches, the lintels were blown away with one blow. Sometimes we worked waist-deep in water. We were afraid of this Neglinka, but it’s okay, we prevailed.

- You see! – the scientist said reproachfully to the writer. - You see! You are a blind person.

– What should I see? The scientist shrugged:

- Look at her, finally!

The writer looked at the girl. She laughed, and he laughed, and suddenly felt the joy of the rapid progress of the train, the river of lights flowing outside the windows, the roar of the wheels.

They got out on Krymskaya Square. The silver light of the snow stood over the Park of Culture and Recreation. In some places, clear, sharp lights still burned.

The girl ran along the river on skis. The skis rustled and rang on the crust. The girl looked back and waved goodbye.

Watercolor paints

When the word “homeland” was uttered in front of Berg, he grinned. He didn't understand what this meant. The homeland, the land of the fathers, the country where he was born - in the end, does it matter where a person was born? One of his comrades was even born in the ocean on a cargo ship between America and Europe.

– Where is this man’s homeland? – Berg asked himself. – Is the ocean really this monotonous plain of water, black from the wind and oppressing the heart with constant anxiety?

Berg saw the ocean. When he studied painting in Paris, he happened to visit the banks of the English Channel. The ocean was not akin to him.

Land of the fathers! Berg felt no attachment either to his childhood or to the small Jewish town on the Dnieper, where his grandfather went blind while using grit and a shoe awl.

I always remembered my hometown as a faded and poorly painted picture, thickly covered with flies. He was remembered as dust, the sweet stench of garbage dumps, dry poplars, dirty clouds over the outskirts, where soldiers - defenders of the fatherland - were drilled in the barracks.

During the Civil War, Berg did not notice the places where he had to fight. He shrugged his shoulders mockingly when the fighters, with a special light in their eyes, said that they would soon recapture their native lands from the whites and water their horses with water from their native Don.

- Chatter! - said Berg. “People like us do not and cannot have a homeland.”

- Eh, Berg, you crack soul! - the soldiers answered with heavy reproach. “What kind of fighter and creator of new life are you when you don’t love your land, eccentric.” And also an artist.

Maybe that’s why Berg wasn’t good at landscapes. He preferred portraits, genres and, finally, posters. He tried to find the style of his time, but these attempts were full of failures and ambiguities.

The years passed over the Soviet country like a wide wind - wonderful years of work and overcoming. Over the years, we have accumulated experience and traditions. Life was turning, like a prism, with a new facet, and in it, old feelings were refracted freshly and at times not quite understandably for Berg - love, hatred, courage, suffering and, finally, a sense of homeland.

One day in early autumn, Berg received a letter from the artist Yartsev. He called him to come to the Murom forests, where he spent the summer. Berg was friends with Yartsev and, in addition, did not leave Moscow for several years. He went.

At a remote station behind Vladimir, Berg switched to a narrow-gauge train.

August was hot and windless. The train smelled of rye bread. Berg sat on the footboard of the carriage, breathing greedily, and it seemed to him that he was breathing not air, but amazing sunlight.

Grasshoppers screamed in the clearings overgrown with white dried carnations. The stations smelled of unwise wildflowers.

Yartsev lived far from the deserted station, in the forest, on the shore of a deep lake with black water. He rented a hut from a forester.

Berg was driven to the lake by the forester’s son Vanya Zotov, a stooped and shy boy.

The cart knocked on the roots and creaked in the deep sand. Orioles whistled sadly in the copses. A yellow leaf occasionally fell onto the road. Pink clouds stood high in the sky above the tops of the mast pines.

Berg was lying in the cart, and his heart was beating dullly and heavily.

“It must be from the air,” thought Berg.

Lake Berg suddenly saw through the thicket of thinned forests. It lay obliquely, as if rising towards the horizon, and behind it, thickets of golden birch trees were visible through the thin haze. A haze hung over the lake from recent forest fires. Dead leaves floated across the tar-black, transparent water. Berg lived on the lake for about a month. He was not going to work and did not take any oil paints with him. He brought only a small box with a French watercolor by Lefranc, preserved from Parisian times. Berg treasured these paints very much.

For whole days he lay in the clearings and looked at the flowers and herbs with curiosity. He was especially struck by the euonymus - its black berries were hidden in a corolla of carmine petals. Berg collected rosehips and fragrant junipers, long pine needles, aspen leaves, where black and blue spots were scattered across the lemon field, fragile lichens and wilting cloves. He carefully examined the autumn leaves from the inside out, where the yellowness was slightly touched by a light leaden frost.

Olive swimming beetles were running in the lake, fish were playing with dim lightning, and the last lilies lay on the quiet surface of the water, as if on black glass.

On hot days, Berg heard a quiet trembling ringing in the forest. The heat rang, dry grass, beetles and grasshoppers rang. At sunset, flocks of cranes flew over the lake to the south, and Vanya said to Berg every time:

“It seems like the birds are abandoning us, flying to the warm seas.”

For the first time Berg felt a stupid insult - the cranes seemed to him traitors. They abandoned without regret this deserted, forested and solemn region, full of nameless lakes, impassable thickets, dry foliage, the measured hum of pine trees and air smelling of resin and swamp mosses.

- Weirdos! - Berg noted, and the feeling of resentment for the forests becoming empty every day no longer seemed funny and childish to him.

Berg once met Grandma Tatyana in the forest. She trudged in from afar, from Zaborye, to pick mushrooms.

Berg wandered with her through the thicket and listened to Tatyana’s leisurely stories. From her he learned that their region - the wilderness - had been famous since ancient times for its painters. Tatyana told him the names of famous artisans who painted wooden spoons and dishes with gold and cinnabar, but Berg never heard these names and blushed.

Berg spoke little. Occasionally he exchanged a few words with Yartsev. Yartsev spent whole days reading, sitting on the shore of the lake. He didn't want to talk either.

It started raining in September. They rustled in the grass. The air became warmer from them, and the coastal thickets smelled wildly and pungently, like wet animal skin.

At night, the rains slowly rustled through the forests along remote roads leading to no one knows where, along the plank roof of the lodge, and it seemed that they were destined to drizzle all autumn over this forested country.

Yartsev got ready to leave. Berg got angry. How could one leave in the midst of this extraordinary autumn? Berg now felt Yartsev’s desire to leave the same way he once felt the flight of the cranes - it was betrayal. Why? Berg could hardly answer this question. A betrayal of forests, lakes, autumn, and finally, a warm sky drizzling with frequent rain.

“I’ll stay,” Berg said sharply. - You can run, this is your business, but I want to write this fall.

Yartsev left. The next day Berg woke up to the sun. There was no rain. Light shadows of branches trembled on the clean floor, and a quiet blue shone behind the door.

Berg encountered the word “radiance” only in the books of poets; he considered it pompous and devoid of clear meaning. But now he understood how accurately this word conveys that special light that comes from the September sky and sun.