Women voted. Children screamed. The wounded were moaning.
For several months now Masha Semenova has been watching how hard Russians have been exterminating Chechens and vice versa. At the end of the twentieth century, the war in the Caucasus was not as romantic as in the works of Pushkin and Tolstoy.
Women voted. Children shouted. The wounded were moaning. There was a murmur of a bulldozer that was burying another hastily dug mass grave... And now, sitting right on the bare ground in the suburbs of Grozny, Masha was staring at a bank card made of colored plastic - the only thing left of Roma Ivanov, not counting his pocket player.
It was not difficult for Masha to comment on or interpret what was going on - that was her profession. But here is an elementary, human understanding...
No, she could not understand this madness in any way, although from the very first day of the conflict she was here as a reporter for Russian television. It is only in the textbooks of the political economy that it is written that wars are waged to warm hands on a bloody bath. This is all nonsense. The wind blows because the trees are swaying. And Masha climbed up here just to find the real reasons for the massacre.
Every day she appeared in front of the camera against the background of the ruins. She had to tell the story of the hearths that had been wiped off the face of the earth. Show the foggy kids with their eyes wide open and the old men pinned down, looking for the remains of a house scarf among the ruins.
Feminine and, in essence, not a heroic warehouse Roma Ivanov, a sound engineer, who served the exits from the war zone, just showed Masha a new credit card with his more than modest foreign currency deposit in a monumental commercial bank. The case is fashionable and ostensibly promising. Together with the card, he put Masha in his hands a colorful advertising prospectus, in which all the benefits of the new banking enterprise were signed, and avidly listened to how it aloud recites the text and calmly lists all the nuances of the wonderful document on the items. He asked to read louder in his pocket player headphones. As louder as possible. It seemed to him that Masha's voice drowned out the terrible music of death.
They were sitting in a dusty hollow, and over their heads, a thick crossfire of machine guns and large-caliber machine guns rang. When Masha moved on to the points directly related to the foreign exchange earnings on deposit, she looked up to Roma Ivanov for a second. "Monthly interest on the deposit is..." She didn't even have time to say those words when she saw that her sound engineer was in trouble. The same thing that once happened to Baron Munchausen's horse, which was divided into two separate halves by the nucleus. The difference was that in this case, it was a shot from the under-barrel grenade launcher, and parts of the sound engineer did not start to travel on their own on the battlefield.
To be more precise, they showed no signs of life at all, and there was no need to stitch them together with willow branches... Bloody bruises splashed around the ground and a new khaki jacket in which Masha was wearing. It seemed to Masha that everything that had happened had nothing to do with her.
- The monthly deposit percentage is... - she repeated in the heat over and over again, without specifically addressing anyone, until someone grabbed her into a bunch like a sheaf.
This, someone, was in uniform. He dragged her away from Roma. Masha felt herself and found that from ears to knees she was splattered by Roma Ivanov. The man in military uniform gradually gained contrast. A familiar colonel held Masha firmly and stroked his head like a little girl. She hid her face on his chest and couldn't think about anything at all for a while. Then, in front of her mental eye flashed picture of evening television news: she, Masha, on the air - from head to toe splashed by Roma Ivanov.
"Look at this, the people are Orthodox and faithful, what you did to my sound engineer! You, people, are kind people, to whom you report more cooler and more bloody, and it is desirable, of course, in a live broadcast!... Have you ever thought, admit it, for a moment, why are you so insensitive to the war?
The rum is gone. There is more than a plastic credit card and the player left to go with it. Such cases, Roma. Masha suddenly imagined how the text of his last will could sound.
"I, Roma Ivanov, hereby certify and bequeath my credit card and my headphone player, which, by the way, continued to work when I was no longer able to listen to it, to my colleague and friend Masha Semenova. I'm like this - and that's who died suddenly in the hellish suburbs, and whose deposit with a monthly interest rate... etc., etc.
In short, normal, permanent madness.
A few hours later, an ordinary group of journalists gathered in an officer's canteen in the basements of a former vegetable base to drink to death at a friendly table. The colonel was still there. Masha met him by chance at the beginning of the war. His name was Alexander Vovk, and his hand slightly hugged Masha by the shoulders. However, she barely noticed this touch.
"The wolf..." she said in her mind.
Somewhere inside of her, Masha felt acute pain, yet unable to determine her exact location. Several voices were heard around her at once. They came to her as if from afar.
- Just think - Romka! What a horror, a? In half! It's a stray shot from the barrel - and there's no more Romka... - someone said, snapping his fingers.
As if agreeing with what he had said, the colonel hugged Masha a little harder.
Much later, gnawing at his fingernail and staring at the peeled ceiling, lit by a weakly strong light bulb, Masha remembered her long and only session with one magician and prophet. In those ancient times, magicians and fortune-tellers had not yet multiplied and were in great short supply. It was possible to get to them only on the big blaze to receive them.
The magician and the fortuneteller (let's not call his name after him) began to tell Masha the story of the faithful gray wolf, who carried a beautiful princess on his back through the dense forests, and Masha, sitting on a comfortable magical couch suddenly trivial, the woman-girl roared
And she roared at least half an hour out of her 40 minutes.
- What do you actually want from life? - The magician asked her directly.
- I want to be happy! - She answered ingeniously and lowered her eyes.
This did not confuse the specialist for a moment. When he leaned closer, he said something mysterious:
- Well, of course, I can't guarantee you global happiness, but if you can see the wolf in a person, then you're guaranteed pure female happiness.
He didn't even try to bother her.