Читать книгу Manchester Diary - Ариель Давидович Абарбанель - Страница 5

– Seryozha Kunder called you.

– Yes mom. For a long time nothing was heard about him. What did he want?

– He said that he was discharged from a psychiatric hospital, where he was under examination and treatment. There he was diagnosed with Schizophrenia and was given the second group of disability.

Now he won’t have to work, as he had once dreamed of as a child, Levy thought sadly.

“What did he want, mom?”

– Nothing. Just wondered where you are and how you are doing.

– We must go to him.

– Is it necessary?

Mom always protected Levy from unfavorable, as it seemed to her, acquaintances. Absolutely right. But she still failed to save everyone. Of the entire class of that ill-fated school number two hundred sixty-eight, Serezha was probably the best candidate for a friend, but only against the background of the students of this school. He did not want to study and do any kind of work. In a three-room apartment, his grandmother, mother and brother lived with him. My brother toiled for a long time in search of work, but then he nevertheless got a job as a collector on the Railway. He married, gave birth to a girl and died, at an early age for this common stomach disease. Sergei was left alone with his mother and grandmother. He brought rare records from the black market, put them on his gramophone, and at full volume with an open window he listened for days on end to the “space music” of various foreign artists. Levy occasionally came to him, called to walk around the city:

– Come, Seryoga, why sit at home? Look, the weather is so wonderful in the courtyard!

At first Sergey was going to take a walk, put on his sneakers, but at the last moment he changed his mind:

– You know, come on another time? Now I listen to music a little better.

They had not seen each other for a very long time, and now, now this is a bleak message. Levy came to his mother from abroad, where he had been for many years. Not much joyful happened during this time in St. Petersburg, in “their” area – mostly disappointing and sad things. And not only in the Kunder’s family.

Nevertheless, you need to visit a guy without saying aloud so as not to upset your mother, Levy thought.

The top floor of the deaf Petersburg front door of a gray well-house. The bell at the red-painted door:

– Who's there?

– Hello!

Further beyond the door you hear animation and a smoky voice unmistakably names the exact Levi’s data, up to the home address and phone. Then the door swings open and Seryozha, easily recognizable, invites Levi inside with his tongue twister:

– How glad I am! How glad i am! Come in, come in! Do you want to smoke a cigarette or listen to music, for example, “Electric Light Orchestra” or “Prompter's Box”?

On the table in the middle of the room rises a mountain of packs of cheap cigarettes – Baltic, Prima. The room is covered with smoke. Seryozha has almost no teeth left, he smokes a cigarette one after another. Hair covered with smoked yellow gray hair, earthy skin color, puffy face.

Leo doesn’t understand anything in such music, and answers:

– No, thank you.

– Do you want to take a plate for memory?

Levy nods his head.

“Can I do something for you?” Here I have some tidy, still solid things, can they come in handy?

Sergei willingly picks up the bag. Thanks indifferently. In the room to the noise of the conversation of old friends enter the aged mother of Sergei. She still remembers and immediately recognizes Levy.

“Would you like to buy us some vegetables?”

Levy does not refuse, and with a carefully given out list and hunt, she goes first to the pharmacy and then to the food store. When he returns with purchases, Seryozha's mother asks him to repeat this procurement trip again. Levy does not refuse again and soon returns again loaded with packets. On the third attempt of an older but more energetic mother of a friend to send Levy to the next shopping trip, Levy addresses both of them:

– My dear! I am very glad that we saw each other, that I could at least help you a little. I apologize, urgent business is waiting for me and people to whom I can also be, maybe, a little useful.

The tacit consent, painted with slight disappointment, spreads over the hallway – the visit is over.

Seryozha, closing the opening speech for Levi, escorts him with his machine-gun speech line:

– Come again! Be sure to come in! We’ll listen to the music, or we’ll take a walk somewhere and walk around the city.

– Of course! I'll definitely come! – Levy sends her words already from the bottom of the stairs, standing in front of the barred elevator car. The old box on iron cables lazily and creakily lowers it down to the first floor, which pours Levi with the musty smell of the old building, the smells of cheap cooked food, escaping from several apartments at once and mixing with each other on the ground floor. Levy tries to hold his breath and goes towards the light and a clean stream of air, seeping through the ajar front door. He jerks it open, and is surrounded by the walls of a stone gray well. A hole gapes from above, from which the same gray as the walls of houses looks, the sky, from the torn slits of which golden azure flows, which is like a precious the hiding place is hidden behind the clouds. Levi inhales deeply and lightly this fresh, fertile air of the street:

– Glory to Gd! The important visit of the day is over! Keeps them all Gd!