Читать книгу The Most Russian Person - Vladimir Shatakishvili - Страница 18

The reader's question is quite natural: how will the author justify these famous Lermontov lines in connection with the fate of his hero?

The answer is not difficult. We can recall the list of Ivan Nikiforovich, given at the beginning of the narration: each scientist’s name written by him is a star in the “atomic calendar" of science – I. V. Kurchatov, A. I. Alikhanov, N. A. Dollezhal, A. D. Sakharov, Y. B. Hariton, L. P. Alexandrov, space expert S. P. Korolev, in the management and construction of the nuclear site E. P. Slavsky, B. G. Muzrukov.

Thisallegory easilyappliesto theaward “iconostasis” of our great contemporaries: Golden Stars of Heroes seem to make the quiet chiming of orders and medals recalling the glorious achievements of national science.

And, finally, I confess the well-known Lermontov stanza was chosen by me almost as a true documentary, it was in Pyatigorsk that this poetry of tremendous power was composed by the poet. Aren’t his lines linked with the Mashuk mountain, which paths Lermontov walked along?

The team of the motor depot, led by Medyanik, was transferred to the construction of a huge television tower on top of Mashuk, it was the construction of the first television center in the region of Pyatigorsk. The height of the tower, or, as the communicators say, the repeater, was so huge that the top of it literally caught the clouds. More over, it went off scale for the height of 1160 meters!

And at night in clear weather, when the stars shine in the sky, one hears how a star speaks to a star.

The sixties in the life of Medyanik were not quit easy. His health started to shake. Heartbreaks began and one hospital was changed for another. And then a huge grief sorrow happened to the family – the wife Lyubov Alekseevna died in a car-crash.

It was necessary to survive, it was necessary to survive the disaster and it was necessary to work!

And then came humiliating and false denunciation. Ivan Nikiforovich refused point blank to return to the Lermontov car fleet. Friends came to help. He had a lot of them, both in the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, where Efim Slavsky worked, and at “Mayak”. Pyotr Ivanovich Butenko offered him a place as the chief of the detachment in the Kislovodsk car fleet, and at the same time he could undergo treatment at a cardiology clinic. The radiation let know. He was treated also with folk remedies, in particular honey. During vacation he even went with beekeepers to Elbrus.

But without a well-organized life, without a female care for children who were not yet fully grown up, it was difficult. So Vera Nikolaevna became his second wife. Their acquaintance was blessed by “Mayak”.

How much inner tact, cordial motherly tenderness she had displaid! She managed to turn the house into a real family hearth. By the way, she was like that until the end of life. The favourite of the family Lida (Lyalya) married and left for Poland to her husband’s homeland. She was a chemist by profession.

He did not notice how his own children became grandparents.

His son, Yevgeniy, has long been called Yevgeniy Ivanovich, an extremely busy man, he is the designer of submarines.

And Mikhail, Vera Nikolaevna’s son from her first marriage, has become an honored irrigator of Russia, and works in Sevkavgiprovkhoz.

Whenever the family gathered together, the holiday would come in the house of Ivan Nikiforovich.

The company is amused by ringing voices of six grandchildren and now great-grandchildren.

“And we are getting old,” Ivan Nikiforovich grieves, stretching his legs. “They hurt, probably, to bad weather.”

“Well, so, have you finished your interview with me?” he turns to me, squinting slyly. “I'm tired, do not blame me, my friend. Old age, nevertheless,” he says in a cheerful voice, but sadness flashes in his eyes, It is quite understandable and explainable.

I felt sorry that our evenings with him were over, although I know that I can come to his house any time.

“No, let me ask you one more question. Is it true that Kurchatov did not like smokers?”

“Ha, ha, ha!” roars Medyanik, laughing at me. And he immediately interjects a familiar Kurchatov phrase: “It strongly smells with violation of the regime.”

“And another question, Ivan Nikiforovich. Recently, the life of the hero of my story, Vyacheslav Yevgenyevich Vasadze Game to an end. May he rest in peace. It turns out that he drove your car on a trip in Georgia.”

“Yes, there was such a thing. Slavik was a good man, reliable. I had known him as a boy. Here it is. He insisted once on a trip to Georgia. Moreover, I allowed him to use my company car. I always treated him in a fatherly way, I wanted to help a guy with something, and then a trip to the Black Sea coast turned up. I took him with me and gave him an extra week to search for relatives.”

I will allow myself another passage from my story about Vasadze.

“Today Vyacheslav Yevgenyevich Vasadze is over sixty. But when he was young, he passionately wanted to learn something about his father, to find relatives, to find his father’s colleagues, to hear first-hand how his father fought, how and where he died. Having taken a vacation, he went to Georgia. The first on the way were the villages where the whole Vasadze clans lived. But no one knew about his father. Addresses in the villages of Nakalakevi and Ben also did not give results: they did not find any relatives of the father or the mother. They sympathized with him, expressed readiness to help in the search. The vacation was already coming to an end, it was time to go back home, and Slavik was keenly aware that he was losing his father for the second time, he was also missing in peace life. When he was almost desperate, someone advised him, “You know, the actor Akakiy Vasadze lives in Tbilisi, go to him, maybe he will help somehow. He is known man, no one will refuse him.”

Slavik hesitated. More than twenty years had passed after the war, there is little hope of finding his father’s colleagues, and he was ashamed to disturb a famous person. A sense of delicacy, or perhaps innate tact, stopped him. And yet he decided to use any chance. He arrived in Tbilisi, found out the artist's phone number, contacted him and asked for a meeting. With a feeling of anxiety, he crossed the threshold of the house of an outstanding actor and director, an idol of his father's generation. What did Slavik know about him? Nothing. Neither that Vasadze was a professor at the Tbilisi Theatrical Institute, nor that he had the title of People’s Artist of the Soviet Union and, as an actor was busy in all theater productions, starred in films, that he was three times winner of the Stalin Awards. He did not know anything of this and could not know because his work was too far from art. He simply saw a handsome, great man, who at that time was already under seventy. He caught the look of his attentive and sympathetic eyes as he told the sad story of the search for the father.

“No, sonny,” the actor Vasadze answered him, “I did not know your father. We are not relatives, just namesakes. In Georgia many carry names of Vasadze. And the fact that you are looking for people who knew your father-soldier is worthy of respect. A person should know where his kin had come to the world…”

His words, convincing and simple, were taken for the soul, reached the heart. And let the wine be left in the glasses and firmly brewed tea in the glasses, and ripe grapes, peaches, pomegranates, apples lay intact in the vases. Slavik simply did not notice this magnificent still life. With all his heart he regretted that the thread of his hope to find at least some trace of his father broke in Akakiy Vasadze's house.

“I’ll tell you what,” Akakiy Alekseevich continued with a sigh, “grief and joy are always together just like love and separation. “So as respect and hatred, evil and good… Recently, I lost my adopted son. I accept God's wrath with humility, he punished me for my sins. But how unbearably hard it is when children die earlier than their parents. I am left alone in the whole world. Over the years a person gains knowledge, but energy decreases. You have lost your father, and if it is a consolation, I suggest you stay in my house. Be my son. I’m ready to share everything in the house: books, a collection of rare paintings, a grand piano…”