Yes, mood. It happens to everybody to compose a wrong number. Well, the finger kinda slipped or the old telephone line did not join right. It happens to me as well.
What kind of voices sound in the membrane! Particularly unpleasant are women voices: for the most part old, tired, sleepy, suspicious, exhausted, timid. You imagine their owners altogether as old women with legs swelled with varicose veins. They sit on their beds, in dirty colored dresses, wrinkled and miserable. A sound from the exterior world is already a threat for them: “Hello!”
“Good afternoon, Igor, please?”
“There is no such person here. Don’t call here anymore.”
Men go to the telephone more rarely. Men voices are gloomy, drunk, menacing, but always depressed, and, of course, sound with suspicion. In Russia everybody suspects everyone. One gets the impression, usually, that the person on the other end of the line was going to kill herself and you are disturbing her from the external world. When it happens to me, in such a way, to hear another’s world, to enter another’s, extremely depressing, fearful existence, then I spend a long time cursing after this. Sometimes I used to live as poorly as the poorest Russia’s pensioner will never dream in the scariest dream, but I never sounded so depressed. Cheer up, for Christ’s sake, I want to tell them. If you are alive – it is already a good thing, a reason to be happy. And if you are healthy as well – throw yourself a party.
The mothers of my guys – members of the party, are not an exception, neither, although there are some perfect mothers and fathers, and in their majority sound sourly and sadly. Each time, having spoke with the parents, I understand why the guys are going into the party. In the party, regardless of the arrests and the threats, reigns a heroic spirit, in the party it is vigorous, brotherly secure and fun. The guys are also escaping the parents, the often-miserable reality that does not answer their exigencies, from the depression of their parents.
I call to the city K. To a boy who had written a letter to the newspaper. In the city K. we do not have a party organization and we would like it to be. We are trying to inspire the boy for the creation of an NBP cell.
“Hello…”
“Good afternoon, please Oleg?”
Silence. Very suspiciously: “And who’s asking him? It’s not from the party?”
“Yes, from the party.”
“Don’t call here anymore. I receive four hundred rubles, we live very poorly. Oleg has just got a job…”
There is fuss in the receiver, rustle, noise, murmurs, maybe.
“That’s why we are fighting against this situation of things, with which You receive four hundred rubles, while the functionaries steal millions of dollars… Please, Oleg,” – I say as softly as I can.
“But what can you do, they will just put you all in jail, you and Oleg…” there is whining in the voice…
“Edouard Veniaminovich, it’s me… I’m sorry, my mother is panicking…” – Oleg finally got hold of the receiver.
Finally, he did not organize us a party cell in the city K. The mother has won over the boy. You can imagine what miserable and depressing life is ahead of him.
Time from time the National-Bolshevik Party participated in some elections. From the confrontation with the living reality, having been (collecting the signatures for the candidacy) in thousands of apartments, the boys came back hurt. Those guys, who collected signatures for the first time were deeply shocked, dismayed by the black reality that they saw in their co-citizens apartments. Here is what wrote Dmitri Bahur in his “Notes of a signatures’ collector”, published in “Limonka” No 79 with the subtitle “There is a general opinion that residents are human. That’s bullshit.”
Here is another hole of a statistical unit of the Moscow population. A door. The last time it was painted even before its creation. But this fact did not prevent the owner, in alcoholic drowsiness, several times breaking off the lock, to crush the doorpost into splinters. Having taken a look at the scratched off walls, I come to the conclusion that the door serves more for camouflage than for the protection of the entrance to the dump. Having joined the two little wires sticking from the wall, I listen the bell’s cracking that had resounded in the emptiness of the apartment. Opening the door, the owner of the house appeared in front of me, although he is not a genie it obviously involved a bottle.
His wife went to a night shift. And this was a pretext. But he does not remember it anymore. On my command, he swiftly brings the passport and puts his signature. The coming of a new person provoked in him an unseen splash of emotions. He suddenly wanted to talk but the unfamiliar tension of vocal cords led to a sudden fall on the floor. It is in this position that I left him.
I cannot get rid of the impression that I roam through a district of asylums and today is the open houses day. Here an alcoholic, having lost touch with the world, sits on the floor and examines his navel. He reacts promptly to simple commands, without asking himself questions about their authorization. And here is another granny, having pissed herself behind the door, announces me that nobody’s home. The door is armored, with a bunch of locks, bolts and little chains. The door was mounted by the grand nephews in the hope that grandma will move to the cemetery. But the grandma doesn’t open the door to anybody and the grandchildren already regret such a hard “little gift’. I enter the apartment of the serial population. Trying to suppress the anguish collectively, they get accounted with the help of two television sets to the lives of other people that have became almost their own. They almost don’t talk with each other, because they watch different serials. She – the “fiction”, he – the “news”. She watches the fate of Huan-Karlos, he – of Chubais. He regards my appearance as the continuation of his favorite, which goes on ORT, under the name of either “I lie” or “We Lie”. Trying to understand where is my camera he gives his signature and impels his wife to leave the action on screen and to sign too. I leave them, certain that they got finally lucky and got on some serial…
Corpses. Moscow is overfilled with living cadavers. They fill its streets. They reside in its multi-apartment vaults.
The resident of this vault made European-style repairs there, installed a double metal door and got himself a dog. Useless to this world he became the servant of a dog. This wretched owner of a passport and a Moscow registration comes out on the street when the dog wants to take a walk, he cooks when the dog wants to eat. I press the doorbell. I don’t hear the bell but by a familiar barking I understand that I was noticed. A few minutes later through the indignant barking the voice of the resident is heard, saddened by the fact that he was distracted from his favorite ad. His words, that he will not sign anything and stop roaming around, have sunk in uninterrupted dog chatter.
It darkens. People open the doors less and less. They fear always more visitors from the exterior world.
Another door. Another button. How insupportably long they decide behind the door what to do: to open or to call “02”. A woman, who approached on the noise of the ring, having doubts about my involvement in the criminal world, asked her husband to open the door. The husband, having heard what I needed left to finish his tasteless supper. The wife stayed to talk. A woman whose body became not interesting to anybody and her knowledge not needed. She and her husband form a typical society cell, that had wasted everything in the world: as the great achievements of their fathers and grandfathers as their own useless savings. So they decided that with signatures they would not be ripped off… I told them to fuck off…