- Oh, what are you doing here, finally? - Mom couldn't help it, and her voice trembled.
- Dad, Mom doesn't want to see other people. Don't bother. I don't really want to either. You swim yourself. Meet, talk. Nobody is holding you back.
- I don't hold anybody myself.
- What do you mean? - My mother cut off the thread with her teeth, put a needle in the coil and straightened the skirt, and the skirt almost flew away in the wind.
- Ay, leave it alone! - Dad waved his hand again. - Not to talk.
I thought I was tired of both of you, and I went back to the drifter's nose. Not far away were the whales, but nobody paid any attention to them. I looked back at the village of Nikolskoye: it was rippling in the eyes of the bright colors of the walls and roofs, designed to fight against human despondency in the colorless north.
With the neighbor Zoika we somehow came across an article on the Internet about people who cut the body to heal the soul. They use such violence against themselves as an attempt to reduce emotional tension. This is an important choice for them. A couple of times I noticed abrasions from my mother's fingernails on the palms of my mother's hands. Deep scars. No, of course it's not a blade job, it's not even an attempt to cut yourself. It's more of a spasm. It seems to me that all my mother's tears have turned into these scars on my palms. Clenching her fists, she was letting go of the accumulated pain. She'd let her go, putting her under her skin, back into herself.
Tamarin's gift drew her mother's extinct soul because in this book, she was promised again, just as her father once did to bring her mother to Bering Island. Mom didn't see any miracles, and Dad witnessed the miracle and promised to show it to Mom. I don't even know what's changed in Mom since then: she always wanted to be deceived, wanted to be deceived as soon as possible so she wouldn't have to wait for anything else.
- Masha, have you heard of the commander's sea cow? - My father called me out.
- Well, she is in our museum, we went to see her bones with the class.
- A sea-suffering woman..." Daddy said with sympathy in his voice. - She only stayed here, on the Commanders. And the people settled the islands, so her kind and exterminated, the bastards. But nothing goes without a trace. Our cow was gone, there was no one to eat sea cabbage. So the cabbage has grown, and in the thick thickets of many birds it became difficult to catch fish. And several species of birds died out just behind the sea cow. It was a terrible thing. And you know, they say that when the last female was killed, the male cow did not leave the dead girlfriend. He didn't even try to escape. He just stayed there by the waves and grieved. But not for long: he was killed next. Here she is, devotion, - Dad rubbed the back of his head, smiling with an empty smile. - I think I am that male sea cow: I leaned over my dead girlfriend and am not sailing anywhere. Why? And the hell knows me. I can still be saved and live a long life. But what about it? My friend is being eaten by flies, and there will be no more continuation for my family. And I'm no longer anyone's," Dad concluded, and finally sang loudly and longingly. The wind jammed his voice, but his father resisted the power of nature:
He wore it carefully near the shore.
the seagulls are a foamy wave.
Bering Island, Bering Island...
Nikolsky's got the silence.
Daddy took out a mint tutu from his pocket, pulled a cigarette out of it and covered it with a strong wind and just lit it, lighting it up. Then he exhaled and took a long breath, staring at the horizon line, as if it was a chip in tile tiles.
- You know, I thought all my student time that Valerka was a fool. Shy, hesitant fool. That even a friend wouldn't open up to the end. And one day I saw them together on the shore. They were like that, holding hands, she shook her head, he looked at her in her hands, then on her stomach, persistently pulled and almost cried. The man almost cries. And she got the courage, suddenly she pulled her hands off, slipped away and left. As I remember now, he stayed standing, and she got back into the dormitory and sobbing on the way. Dad threw an unsmoked cigarette overboard and stared at the chip again.
I looked at Mom, she looked at Dad's back of the head, and he wouldn't turn for a long time, waving his shoulders and pulling his head into them.
- I had never seen a woman cry like that in my life again. Though I saw them crying. But in such a way... So that there would be enough for the rest of my life. I didn't, by golly.
The old, hastily sewn skirt was ripped off my mother's knees with a sharp gust of wind and thrown out on restless waves. Mom, tirelessly twisting and twisting the curl of the curl that fell out of the collected tail, imprinted a frozen look at the shapeless fabric overboard, until the skirt was carried away in the fog. The next morning, there, in the kitchen, on my mother's birthday, no one else mentioned aloud about my father's old friend. And the photo album my mother then lost in her hands and flipped through the pages so quickly that all the faces and objects were blurred in one porridge. And then she put the bottle caps on the table and patted me on the shoulder.