by Alexander Rokhlin
| Lyrical. |
The workers' town is grimy, smoky, smoke-filled, with the sun shining through the dust, scattered chaotically in all directions across the steppe. From the very beginning, no one thought of doing urban development here: streets, blocks, the magistrate and the market... Khuzovka did not worry about the harmony of its architectural forms. The shaft of the mine and the waste heap are the defining points.
The genius loci, to which those same streets, quarters, magistrate and market were crowded, stuck to each other and grew in different directions. It could not become, like Moscow, radial-ring or, like St. Petersburg, square-angular. Donetsk is defiantly irregular, woven from knots - paths and stitches between mines and settlements.
Sit and knit: cast on loops, spin around waste heaps, dive into beams, hang necklaces of stakes.
But most of all it resembles... an apiary city. Where in a blooming garden, among apricot, cherry, sour cherry and mulberry trees, under an unbearably generous sun, with a high and shamelessly blue sky, stand in the most whimsical order hives - mines. Mining bees are busy day and night in the hives with the non-stop work of life: they smoke, hum, dig, build, destroy, plug, bring and carry away. Because a golden coal is also black honey.
A long beginning, and a simple story. But personally very dear to me. And the context is fundamentally important.
If you treat bees politely and attentively, life at the apiary has all the properties of paradise. And if, like me, you casually hitch a ride to one flighty gray-eyed bee in a skirt, promise her a field of daisies, then you will receive a free and eternal ticket to enter the apiary with all the honey preferences in the form of lard, fish, yellow cherries, 12 stakes for personal use and the smell of a beetle as pheromones that do not allow you to come to your senses.
So I lived for twenty years straight, receiving handfuls of happiness from the city at any time of the year. Until the war came.
And the honey ran out.
In March 2014, I found myself on the bank of the river that flows around Staromikhailovka from the north. On the left is the Kirovsky district, right on the horizon are the Chelyuskintsev and Petrovka mines, on the right is Krasnogorovka.
In Kyiv, the Maidan had already won. The country had a new government. The new one was already clicking its teeth, demanding, to put it mildly, attention. In Donetsk, all the streets seemed electrified, waiting to see what the Kyiv events would mean for the East. But here, on the shore of the pond with bare apricot plantations behind it, it was still completely quiet.
That's the thing, this silence tasted different, not like usual. Uncomfortable, tasteless, prickly silence. As if a person you're used to communicating warmly with suddenly stopped talking without explanation. You're left wondering: what happened? What's wrong with you or him?
Then what began began. In no nightmare could I have imagined that my pond and that "bank" near Staromikhailovka, where I last watched a film about spring in the Donetsk steppe, would become a front line and a deadly dangerous place. And the earth already then, in March 2014, felt what awaited it.
Seven hundred kilometers to the west, the square above the Dnieper shook, blood was spilled, and here, either through the air or underground, a wave came and covered. Open the gates, Donbass: now we will pour grief and misfortune on you in full measure, shaken up, pressed.
But I didn't understand. I got used to treating everything like Winnie the Pooh, whom all the bees love and give him their honey for free.
Arriving during the war, I recognized and did not recognize my Khuzovka. The streets were the same, the people were the same, the mines were the same, the buzzing machine was the same, but there was no honey. The city had stopped sharing its warmth, joy, heavenly and delicious life with me as before. The city had withdrawn into itself, behind its inner walls. It was besieged, it had no time to lavish honeyed tenderness.
It remains the same today. A city that does not live in its full width, depth and height, but only in small dashes.
And suddenly, unexpectedly, I found out where Khuzovka keeps her precious residual honey. And I tasted it...
Now, finally, the story itself. My wife had only one relative left in the city, an 87-year-old aunt. The aunt needed to pay her apartment bill. She was used to doing this only through a face-to-face meeting with the cashier at the window. The aunt did not accept any "innovations" in the form of payment by phone, QR code, or through a personal account. Only through a live teller at the window! And so that a receipt with a stamp on payment was immediately issued in person.
At the department, my aunt and I trotted to the machine that issued a ticket for the electronic queue. Our number was 70. And everything would have been fine, if I hadn’t noticed the helpful electronic note at the bottom of the ticket in small handwriting: “There are 32 clients in front of you.”
That's when I felt sick. I hadn't expected such a trick at all. The bank branch's operations room was quite crowded, but not exactly overcrowded. There were even some free chairs. Two female employees were handling the actual banking operations at separate tables. And there was only one window for utility bills. That's where all 32 of us plus one client were standing.
Here I began to guess that I had unexpectedly gone back in time, about forty years, to the lean, lean post-Soviet times, when I last physically stood in a real queue with some papers. I had nowhere to go, I couldn’t leave my aunt, offers for instant payment via phone were not accepted, we couldn’t come another day.
A vicious circle.
There was only one salvation - in humbly accepting the situation. I humbly sat down on a chair in the corner and humbly immersed myself in reading The Brothers Karamazov, agreeing to sit there until the second coming or until my aunt's patience ran out. Which would happen first?
The line behaved very decently. No one was arguing, complaining, seething, trying to push their way to the front. It was all ordinary, run-of-the-mill. The faces of the visitors matched the occasion - they were as dull as Lenten pancakes.
Almost two hours passed like this. I did not get out of Skotoprigonyevsk Fyodor Mikhailovich, until suddenly I heard a stir in the hall, similar to the beginning of a scandal. The beginning was connected with the appearance of a very old granny. However, she came here on her own two feet - and alone. The granny loudly addressed the queue with a question: how should she understand what was happening? And why was it necessary to complicate the process so much, when previously there was only one account book, etc., etc.
She spoke excessively loudly, was obviously hard of hearing and, what was most surprising, unusually expressively, using old participial and adverbial participial phrases. It was as if a very old fairy, responsible for the Russian language textbook for princes of the blood, had come to the bank.
The queue tried to explain something to the fairy, including about the electronic queue. She listened without interrupting, but apparently did not find satisfaction in the answer. This went on for some time, dying down and emerging again. Now one, now another voice from the queue tried to tell the woman that her electronic number would be announced by an electronic announcer.
And suddenly I saw her heading straight into the lion's mouth - to the tables behind the partition, where two "free" bank employees were sitting. From our, the client's side, they looked, of course, like blatant slackers. When a line of forty people is banging on one window, and next to it two ladies in suits are chilling at their computers, you can't help but feel a sense of oppressed justice. But someone has to do the banking, and not pay for gas and electricity!
This granny was so decrepit that she moved at the speed of a snail or a toy wooden boat. Here she crossed the invisible border between the worlds: the operating room with us, the "housing and communal services worms", and the "office" of two employees, where the real, high banking life was going on: accounts, cards, deposits, loans and interest.
- I ask you to forgive me in advance! - the grandma-boat said loudly out loud, and I shuddered. - I'm going on 97 and my hearing is failing. But I have a question to which I haven't received a clear answer. I need to pay the rent for September, but with the amount of paperwork from you, I'm completely losing my head.
I closed my eyes. Firstly, I hadn't heard such Russian spoken in years. Secondly, I couldn't see the snail granny's face. But I could see the faces of the two female employees whose space the snail granny had dared to cross. These faces didn't bode well. The entire room froze, not doubting that something was about to happen.
— Woman! Take your seat. Take a paper ticket and wait your turn. According to all calculations, one window is working. Yes, only one window!
But suddenly this did not happen. One of the employees, younger, in a black jacket that did not fit over her huge chest, with a pink and round face, with traces of an unsuccessful curl in her black hair, looked at the granny and suddenly said:
- Please sit down.
The elderly fairy perched on the edge of the chair.
"It's a very inconvenient system. And who invented it? Before, I had a single book for payment, and now I have a lot of separate sheets of paper coming by mail," she said. "I find it difficult to explain to you...
"Do you have your passport with you?" asked the young employee with the unfortunate perm.
— A passport, of course. I was born on June 14, 1927. My address: Ilyicha Avenue, Building 4. You know, I remember the occupation of our Donetsk. And now I am living through the second war, — for some reason the woman gave out all the defining events of her life.
“My God!” I thought and stood up from my chair, as if trying to express respect for this enormous life lived, its fragility and the glassiness of its current situation and, undoubtedly, the preserved sense of human dignity.
The young clerk performed some operations on the computer and said:
- That's it. Your bills are paid.
- What? - the old fairy was amazed. - Paid? And the money?
- I wrote them off from your card.
- Cards? It's so simple, - the fairy began to rise slowly from her chair, like a small flag on a toy mast with a sail. - How nice it would be in the future... Thank you, dear girl, - she said, made a small bow and set off on a return snail swim to Ilyich Avenue.
“You are my dear…” I thought with bitter tenderness and gratitude specifically to the employee girl, as if she had done all this for me personally: she did not drive away the fairy, but went against the instructions, made an instant decision not to push away the old man, but to accept and do such an important, penny-worth deed for her.
But that wasn't all. A few minutes later it was my aunt's and my turn to go to the treasured window. A pretty woman in a white sweater sat behind it.
"Where is your EIRC code?" she asked. "I can't make a payment without the code."
“What other code?” I asked, growing cold inside.
— There should be a code on the previous paid receipts, but there isn’t one here.
“I didn’t take the old receipts,” said the aunt in a low voice.
And things started to smell bad: two hours of sitting in line ended in vain. But for some reason I was ready to accept defeat with a light heart. There are no two miracles in a row. And I had just been shown a real miracle with another person. So there would still be time with me, another time.
No way! The woman in the window looked at the aunt with tired eyes and did not give us back our useless receipts, but began to look for the ill-fated EIRC code on her phone, on the Internet - by her residential address.
“This can’t be!” I thought.
It happens, the cashier's tired eyes said. Two hours of my waiting and another six hours of her working time were spent searching for data, forgotten, missing, undelivered codes, addresses, bills and other nonsense from aunties, grandmothers and Donetsk fairies who bring their receipts and kopecks to the bank branch on Gorky Street, between Chelyuskintsev and Postysheva.
And at that moment I suddenly realized that with this whole story, in the most inappropriate and inconvenient place for miracles, besieged Donetsk shared with me, as before, its fabulous wealth. That same warmth, generosity, heat of the heart, coal like honey, breadth and depth of the soul like the entire Donetsk steppe, with which I fell in love once, thirty years ago. And I can’t stop loving it.