Once they were friends, so close that it was impossible to stick a sheet of paper between them, as they say.
They were friends because they lived in the same house, studied at the same school and in the same class, and then worked at the same factory: both tool-makers. And even in love with one girl. Here the girl divorced them.
While each of them nursed a gogol in front of Nastya, she flirted with both. And they almost got into a fight over her. But then they talked like a man and decided that friendship is still more expensive. And each yielded to a friend Nastya. And she took, and she married a completely different person with whom our friends were not familiar and did not even know that Nastya had him.
But after her marriage (she invited them both to the wedding) and they finally parted and even stopped saying hello, although they continued to live in the same house and met at the bus stop every morning, because they went to work at the same factory.
This happens in life when good people, who seem to be connected by a lot, suddenly cease to need each other. And even the warmth in the heart does not remain. And regrets that de, so many years together, and now ...
So what now? Life does not stand still, but swiftly rushes like a river to end in the ocean. Only someone’s river is wide, deep and full of water, while someone’s oozing, like a thin brook, curls in the shade of bushes, whimsically enveloping all obstacles and not entering into a fight with either the right bank or the left. But it still carries its waters, albeit not very clean and warm, all in the same ocean, where it mixes with other streams, turbulent and passionate, frothy and rattling their rivers when they were. And now, in the abyss of the ocean, and you can not tell where is whose water? Who during the river life was shallow, and who simply endowed with the warmth of their water all who turned out to be the will of fate along the banks. Who frantic and noisy, trying to straighten the channel, and who went around every bump, as if ashamed of the fact that he is and the very fact of his existence causes inconvenience to all other living. In a word, rivers curl in different ways, but everyone aspires to the ocean.
So these two people lived. And they lived separately from each other, but about the same. The time came, and both married a year apart. And then both had a son. And they, as expected, were proud of them, they believed that his son was better than that of his neighbor.
And the sons studied together and together then they joined the army.
Both did not return from there either. Because our power, mighty and glorious, then fought somewhere on its outskirts. And the war, as you know, devours not only infants, but also adult young men.
But even the general grief did not bring former friends once. So they suffered and cried one by one. That is, no, of course, both mourned grief with the mothers of their sons, but still - without each other. And that meant that - lonely ...
One of the wife so emerged from grief and could not, yearned for her son, yearned, and so, less than a year after his death, went down after him to the grave.
And the second wife, a year later, left her husband somewhere to work in Europe, and there, over time, her traces were lost.
All. They remained now not only former friends, but also former fathers and husbands, too.
So they continued to live in the former. But still they didn’t greet each other and did not look into each other’s eyes, although by the way their backs were strained and the step was steadier when they met, it was clear that both remembered everything, had not forgotten anything. But there were still more grievances in those memories, and therefore they passed silently past one another ...
... Until one day, already in the evening, somehow in April, when I especially want to live and when you wait for every moment of a miracle, which, if it happens, you won’t even be surprised, the phone rang in the apartment of one. And he immediately grabbed the receiver, as if waiting for a call, sitting next to the device:
- Yes! Hello!! Speak, listen ...
The handset was silent for a long time, and then spoke in the voice of the second, which the first recognized immediately:
- Okay, enough already, Seryoga ... Come to me, we will put up.
But Seryoga was not even surprised, but said only:
- I'm going ...
And he went to Stepan, even forgetting to lock the door to the apartment behind him.
When he ascended to his floor, Stepan stood in the opening of an open door waiting for a friend.
We stood on the threshold, looked at one another. And suddenly, at the same time, they realized: what nonsense had been separating them for so many years, how small, what trifles.
Seryoga entered, immediately went, without invitation, into the kitchen, sat down at the table and again looked at Stepan who had come after him. And I realized how old he is, Seryoga. Because Stepan was already very old.
And they started talking, as if there had not been thirty years of silence, as if they had just parted yesterday, and today they met to finish ...
And they said so under the ticking of the clock, and the vodka that Stepan prudently put on the table at the arrival of a friend, remained unopened.
They spoke, they spoke, and the clock ticked and ticked. They told and told each other everything to themselves. And eagerly listened to each other, listened to how all these years, one lived without the other, but always remembered this other.
When at three o'clock in the morning Seryoga went to his house, Stepan, as when meeting on the threshold, shouted after him:
- Yes! Why did I call you, Seryoga !!. I made a will on you. You bury me humanly. Not long left: the doctors give a maximum of six months, I have cancer ...