This book came out of my novel "Lyubozhid" like Eve from Adam's rib. But as the presence of Adam's flesh in Eve - kidneys, liver and some other domestic organs - does not prevent the Eves of the whole world from rightly considering themselves completely original creatures, so the "Russian Diva", I dare to assure the reader, already after the fifth or sixth chapter separated from "Lyubozhid" and galloped into its own plot so rapidly that in the end, at the end, even I, the author, threw up my hands in amazement.
However, this preface is not written for advertising purposes, but simply to inform the reader: yes, out of a dozen characters that inhabit the novel-essay "Lyubozhid", I took three, tied them with an intimate secret and released them into a separate novel. What came of it is for the reader to judge. Moreover, those who have not read "Lyubozhid" do not need this preface at all, unless, after reading "Diva", someone wants to know where it came from. And for those who are familiar with "Lyubozhid", I hope it still makes sense to overcome a few familiar pages in order to sail away with familiar characters on an unfamiliar voyage.
With all my authorial modesty, I know one thing for sure: just as women are an incomparably better creation of the Lord than men (it’s not for nothing that they were created after us!), So the “Russian Diva” is much better than the flesh from which she was born. Amen.
I dedicate to Julia, my beloved wife
Sexual polarity is the basic law of life and, perhaps, the foundation of the world. The ancients understood this better, but we are disgustingly powerless and degenerate more and more.
Nikolay Berdyaev. The Metaphysics of Sex and Love, 1907
Note that I do not mean to say that being a Jew is such a stroke of luck. After all, Jews have problems too.
Roman Gary
Summer 1961, USSR
Pioneer camp "Sputnik"
Do you know what it's like to be a Russian woman? I mean - what is it like to be a real Russian woman?
He looked around at the faces of the girls around him. Thirty young Komsomol women - the entire sixth detachment of the Sputnik summer pioneer camp - fell silent and looked at him with expectant interest. The glare of the evening fire illuminated their scarlet pioneer ties, blue T-shirts, tight elastic breasts, and short shorts, specially washed white to set off the chocolate tan of their legs, strengthened over the summer from volleyball, swimming and camping trips. Further, behind them, in the darkness of the night, more guessed than visible, were a wide river, beacons of buoys and rafts of timber rafts quietly floating along the river rapids.
And who is she - a real Russian woman? he asked without raising his voice. - Anna Karenina cheating on her husband? Or Natasha Rostova, who gives birth to a child every year? Or the courtesan Nastasya Filippovna from Dostoyevsky's The Idiot? Or the miserable prostitute Sonechka Marmeladova from the novel "Crime and Punishment"? Don't laugh, this is an interesting question! Look: the French inspired the world that French women are the most sophisticated fashionistas. Right? Spaniards - that the Spanish woman is the most ardent and sensual, right? We know about English women that they are cold and stiff. About Jews and Japanese women - that they are the best mothers. And what about the Russians? You are future Russian women. Yes, yes, there is nothing to giggle, you should be Russian women, but who else? But what do you know about yourself?
He broke a dry spruce branch with his knee and stirred the charred firewood with it. The fire flared greedily on the spruce needles, and he looked again at his listeners. He was not much older than they were, six or seven years old, and the daily war for their attention had worn him out. Their thoughts are always wandering somewhere away from the conversation, there is always some kind of grin and challenge in their eyes, as if these pigals know a secret that is not known to him, twenty years old. But now, it seems, he hit them to the quick. Still would! At this age, of course, they are interested in everything that is somehow connected with the word "woman". But he won't rush...
“He will stop a galloping horse, he will enter a burning hut,” he quoted the Russian poet. - Here is the definition given to a Russian woman in literature. Russian writers, even the greatest ones, even Tolstoy, have added nothing to these two lines. So is this really your main quality - to be such Hercules in skirts? Or firefighters? BUT?
He waited out their laughter and continued:
No, I think there must be something else, because of which the monarchs of Europe once fell in love with Russian women and, neglecting their princesses, erected Russians girls to the English, French, British and Norwegian thrones. But what? The beauty? Here I am looking at you. Of course, you are all beautiful and all beauties. Quiet, don't laugh. But are you much more beautiful than French women or, say, Italian women? Well, honestly - more beautiful? Here I don't know. And then I turn to history. I want to find the answer in ancient times: what distinguished Russian women from all others? And suddenly ... suddenly I find out that no Russians have existed for a long time. There are no Russians for almost a thousand years! Yes, yes, we live in Russia, and the whole world calls us Russians, but ... the facts are a stubborn thing - we only have a name from Russians. All historians - both Russian and Western - lost traces of the Rus in the tenth century. Russ, real Russ - a huge tribe, an entire ethnic group that swept across Europe in the first millennium - disappeared! They disappeared in the darkness of centuries, leaving behind the Scythian tribes only their name and later the dynasty of the kings of Rurik. And that's all. No language, no culture, no writing, no legends. Only names: Oleg, Olga, Igor. Yes, the names of the rivers: Dnieper, Dniester. However, even these names sound more German than Russian, right? But how is it? How could a whole nation disappear without a trace? And why? And disappeared?
He stood up impulsively. The flames of the fire cast a large broken shadow from his thin figure onto the awnings of tourist tents whitening in the night. His face, narrow and illuminated from below by crimson highlights, suddenly acquired some kind of Mephistopheles and at the same time inspired expression, dark eyes lit up with an inner light, and the wide wings of a large nose trembled predatory at an unexpectedly close splash of river fish, as if it were splashing in river water. the same mystery he was looking for.
Look around! he suddenly ordered, tracing a wide semicircle in the dark with his burnt spruce stick, and at this sharp gesture the coal-red end of the stick flared up like a fiery spear. - Twenty centuries ago there was the same darkness, the same forests and the same mosquitoes. Small tribes lived along the banks of these rivers - some kind of Ugrians, Burtases, Guzes. They were engaged in fishing, hunting and collecting honey in the forests. But in the fifth - seventh centuries, the devil knows where - from the north, from the Baltic states - hordes of warlike rugs poured in here. They were bandits, conquerors. They did not produce anything, but were engaged only in robberies and lived off looting. In the ninth century, they conquered the Slavic capital Kyiv and since then they began to rule and push around everyone who was around - glades, drevlyans, northerners. They robbed them, took heavy tributes from them and sold them into slavery in Byzantium, in Greece, in Khazaria. They were rude, cruel, merciless in battles and treacherous in everyday life, and they left all their property, acquired by robbery, as an inheritance to their daughters. And they bequeathed to their sons only weapons, saying: “I got my fortune with this sword, take it and go further than me!” In other words, it was an ethnic group of bandits. But!..
He raised a burning spruce stick, like a saber or like a rod. He had been walking along the dark shore for a long time, inspired by the attention of his listeners and those mirages of the past that he saw in the darkness of this summer night.
In Moscow, Rubinchik did not start novels. And not only because he valued his reputation as a well-known journalist and employee of Rabochaya Gazeta, where he published under the pseudonym Iosif Rubin, but also because in Moscow he had neither time nor desire for these novels. A thin thirty-seven-year-old Jew with a provincial orphanage upbringing and metropolitan ambition, in Moscow he devoted himself entirely to everyday editorial fever, two small children, a wife and a bitchy life that eats up all leisure time, scandalous lines for groceries, shoes, clothes, medicines for children and everything else, without which the everyday existence of man is impossible. Wrapped up in this tights, Rubinchik did not have even a minute in Moscow to look around him and see someone's woman's face, an alluring neckline of a dress, or even a quiet dance of snowflakes under street lamps.
But as soon as he went on a business trip, as soon as he threw off the hassle of Moscow worries, some kind of mystical, predatory and cheerful excitement of a hunter woke up in him. But not for any game, no. Rubinchik did not have that omnivorousness that is characteristic of almost all husbands who have escaped from the bed, even if they are beloved, but already such a habitually familiar wife. And in general, it was not a sexual hunger. It was about something else, to which Rubinchik himself could not give a name, and did not look for it. But at the moment when he got into an editorial car or an Aeroflot bus to go to the airport, and from there fly to the Siberian oil developments, the Ural mines or the Altai lumberjacks, a powerful release of adrenaline into the blood in some strange way regrouped those who had settled down on the Moscow orbits the atoms and electrons of his body, jacked them up, split new kilowatts of energy in them, straightened Rubinchik's shoulders, changed the position of his head, added looseness and wit, and filled his gaze with self-confident audacity.
And from that moment the hunt began.
So a secret drug addict, almost not realizing his actions, goes in search of a drug. So the maniac-killer goes on a night hunt for his next victim. Thus a poet of genius unconsciously searches for a single word that will make his verse soar above the sea of contemptible prose.
A huge country—the entire Soviet empire at the height of its power— lay before him, stretching freely from the Baltic to the Pacific, and he could hardly contain his excitement, like an alien landing on a new planet or like a horseman from the horde of Genghis Khan before the invasion of Siberia. A lot of events took place in this country - it discovered gas in the Arctic, caught foreign spies, prepared for the Olympics, laid canals in the Caspian deserts, pursued dissidents, built hydroelectric stations, sent rockets into space, listened to Voice of America and Svoboda, and Rubinchik with professional greed he absorbed, absorbed and entered into his notebooks everything that he heard and saw around. This was his country, and it belonged to him all - from Moldova and Estonia to Turkmenistan and Chukotka, and with all his little Jewish heart he loved its vastness, diversity and power. However, he never considered himself a Jew in the full sense of the word - he was an atheist, did not know the Jewish language, shortened his last name to its Russian sound, drank vodka no worse than any Russian, and, most importantly, he loved Russian women. Oh yeah! Every time, somewhere in the Siberian, Vyatka or Murmansk wilderness, his searching eye finally stumbled upon the one that made his hunting heart freeze, he discovered that this new one, too, is related to all his previous finds with one indispensable quality: it is always there were Russian women, with an elongated figure, secretly sad gray or green eyes and that elongated face, high brow ridges and thin transparent skin, which can be seen in the paintings of Rokotov, Levitsky and Borovikovsky.
Of course, Rubinchik almost never found a copy of Princess Struyskaya or Lopukhina, although these portraits do not accurately convey the image that, for some inexplicable reason, lived in his subconscious. But if we combine the face of the iconic Mother of God of Vladimir with the eyes of some ancient Russian or Norwegian warrior-princess, or at least with severe sacrifice in the eyes of Petrov-Vodkin's female portraits, then perhaps it will be close to the ideal that Rubinchik was obsessive to have. and almost manic lust.
Such female types can still be found in the deep Russian provinces - although less and less often. Cosmetics, fashion in clothes and hairstyles, incest that swept through the Russian breed with the waves of the Tatar-Mongol yoke, Turkish captivity, Polish and French invasions, the debauchery of their own boyars, German occupation, KGB dispossession, sub-Soviet migration and mass alcoholism - all this muddied, spoiled and dissolved the Nordic beauty of Russian women, but originally softened in Polovtsian blood, which a few centuries ago so captivated European monarchs that they led Russian brides to wedding altars and sat next to them on thrones in England, Norway, France, Hungary - yes all over Europe!
Now, in our time, the standard of Russian beauty has shifted to copying Western film beauties in Russian manners, and only very rarely, by chance, like a winning combination of numbers in a lottery ticket, fate suddenly brings together in one maternal womb the old and lost for centuries truly Russian set of chromosomes. And then, somewhere in the provincial wilderness of Siberia, the Urals or Karelia, quietly, in an ordinary family, grows, without knowing it, a young copy of the epic Yaroslavna, the fabulous Vasilisa the Beautiful or the Scythian princess Olga. For reasons unknown to herself and strange to those around her, she eschews ghoul friends, factory dances with the obligatory groping of fixed peers on the chest and other intimate places, early defloration in the bushes of the district park of culture, and the fashionable predilection of fifteen-year-olds for wine, cigarettes and shabby conversation. By the age of sixteen, she was already hopelessly “behind” her friends, she moved away from them into solitary and disturbing daydreaming for her parents, reading books, knitting and studying at some technical school, and at twenty-two she, like an old maid, was almost forcibly get married. And, never distinguished from other commoners, this secret flower of the Russian race quickly fades as the wife of some ensign in a remote military town, grows rude with her drunken husband among children, dirty linen and the bitchiness of the factory Khrushchev, or languishes on its own from an obscure and unrealized of its intended purpose - languishes to hopeless Russian melancholy, the panel of the Kursk railway station and the women's prison.
But it was enough for Rubinchik to single out and identify among the thousands of female faces that he met on his journalistic routes the one in which the primordial, primordial Russianness had not yet been shaded by provincial life, defiled by village whoredom or muzzled by her alcoholic husband. And when it happened, when he - finally! - stumbled upon what he called to himself "icon diva", everything froze in him - the pulse of thought, breathing. It didn't last long, a fraction of a second, but he felt it deeply and powerfully, like a heart attack. And then the heart would catch on and throw such a quantity of hot blood through the weakened veins that the desire to have this ancient Russian beauty permeated Rubinchik not only his stomach, groin and legs, but even the hair on his chest. Everything in him was merry, heaved up, stood up, like a Mongol rider in stirrups and like wool on an animal that has seen prey.
It is amazing that these chosen ones of his never resisted him and did not even demand preliminary flirting, prolonged seduction, or at least dinner in a restaurant in the manner of Moscow women. Something different, some unknown and untranslatable way of communication arose between Rubinchik and such an "icon diva", arose immediately, at that first moment when their eyes met. Rubinchik once experienced the same feeling of instant non-verbal communication in the taiga when he accidentally met a young deer who turned her head towards him on the taiga path. They both froze - both Rubinchik and the big one. Five meters separated them from each other, exactly five meters, no more, and they looked into each other's eyes - point-blank and with calm attention. Rubinchik clearly, through and through, to the back of his head, felt how the important woman, peering at him, comprehended him with her huge dark eyes, moist as a fresh chestnut. He gathered all his will to also penetrate the eyes and soul of this graceful and gentle beast, frozen on high and thin legs. And it seemed to him that - yes, there is contact! There, behind the moist cornea of those plum-like eyes, he suddenly felt something wide, dark, warm and thick, like blood, which is only waiting for his sign to let him in even deeper or simply to follow him along the taiga path. It seemed that if he made the right gesture or sign, the lady would step towards him, gently and trustingly press her lips on his neck and become a submissive slave, bride, forest mistress.
But there, in the taiga, he did not know the secret sign, which the taiga beauty had been waiting for from him so patiently and for a long time - maybe as much as five minutes. And he sighed in annoyance, made some small movement with either his hand or his Adam's apple, and at the same moment the big lady dived into the fir thicket, rapidly moving her thin legs of the forest ballerina in half-flight and contemptuously lifting her short, elastic tail over her bouncing white ass . Left alone on the path, Rubinchik felt like an uncouth dork at the ball of life, rejected by a taiga aristocrat for not knowing the forest mazurka.
However, here, among the people, Rubinchik did not need any secret codes, or magical gestures, or words. Just as with a single glance he saw the Russian diva in the terrible cocoon of her quilted jacket and ridiculous provincial dress, in thick knitted tights and rubber boots, so this diva herself, at first glance, recognized him as some other, until now even to herself unknown instinct and some other, genetic memory. And a wide, spacious depth, thick and warm, like blood, opened before Rubinchik in her eyes.
Of course, he got acquainted with the girl, spoke some ordinary words, but he clearly saw that she only listens to his voice and, along with this voice, absorbs him into herself, drinks him like a drug ...
Rubinchik could never explain this effect to himself. That is, why he was attracted to Russian women - you can find a thousand reasons for this: from education in Russian culture to the complex of a small and infringed Jew in a sea of Slavic and state anti-Semitism. But what did they - the old Russian princesses, the Polovtsian princesses, the Don Yaroslavl and Onega Vasilises - see in him, a short, thin Jew with coarse black hair, a large Jewish nose, small brown eyes and thick hair that sticks out of the open collar of his shirt? Why, after a few insignificant words of acquaintance, they dutifully, like bewitched ladies, came to his hotel room themselves - openly! in front of your entire city or village! - and not even seeing the eyes the hotel administrators look at them with.
Rubinchik never understood this, and every time it happened, he was sure that this time he must have made a mistake and picked up a simple provincial slut.
But when the next “princess” went to the shower on his orders and returned from there barefoot, with goosebumps on her bare legs and wrapped from chest to pubis in a shabby hotel towel (with the obligatory purple stamp “Goskommunkhoz” so that hotel guests would not push this towel) , Rubinchik immediately saw that it did not smell not only of whoredom, but in general of some kind of sexual experience. In her gait, figure, outstretched neck and in her eyes there was something fascinated, frightened and mystically submissive to his will, word, gesture and thought. And most importantly - his lust. And slowly taking away this hotel towel covering her thin white body, breasts and tiny pale nipples, Rubinchik already saw that - yes, he was not mistaken this time too, she is a virgin.
He corrupted them, of course. But only if we understand seduction as defloration and nothing but this purely medical act. Because in all other meanings of this word - to deprive women of honor, to lead astray - then what the hell is seduction here! He did not fuck them or break a hymen, but led them along a narrow bridge from girlhood to femininity - he led them with almost paternal care, patience and tenderness, and then attached them to the true and high female honor of being in bed not a log split in two, but a Priestess .
Thus, in the fog of the night, an experienced buoy keeper first finds the dark buoy of a lighthouse by intuition alone, then disassembles the lantern by touch, adds oil, refills the wick, finally lights the fire - and suddenly the light of this lighthouse blinds his own eyes.
The light of true femininity, which Rubinchik lit on such a night somewhere in Izhevsk, Vologda, Igarka or Kokchetav, was like the return to life of an old icon, when, after careful and quivering clearing, living and magical eyes suddenly flare up on you from the depths of centuries.
This moment Rubinchik prepared especially carefully and even ceremonially. In a country where, despite mass whoring, sex education was provided only to dark porches, obscene anecdotes and wall paintings in public toilets, where there was not a single book on the topic “HOW IT IS DONE” and where even the word “gynecologist” is embarrassed to say aloud , - in this country, millions of young women know about sex no more than pets. Lie on your back, spread your legs and give in - that's all that they teach their brides and that ninety percent of Russian men demand from their wives. Is it necessary to be surprised at the mass frigidity of Russian women?
In the black sea of sexual ignorance, Rubinchik lit the bright lamps of sensuality and was the first to enjoy their quivering flame.
- Now, dear! Don't rush and don't be afraid! Forget everything that your friends told you about this, and forget all the dirty words that they write about it in the entrances. We will do it in a completely different way. So that you remember this all your life, as the most holy day of your life, as a Christmas holiday. Have some wine. Like this. And another sip. And further. Now give me your lips. No not like this. Forget about me and listen only to yourself...
Hell, they didn't even know how to kiss properly! Their nipples did not know how to respond to the touch of male lips, their hands were afraid to go down to the male groin, their legs cramped with prejudice, and even when they made an effort of will and opened their legs in that pose of readiness, which was repeatedly seen in obscene drawings in school toilets , - even then their body was not yet a bed of passion, or even desire, but only a bed of fear.
But Rubinchik was a poet of intercourse, patient and virtuoso.
- Wait! What's with the legs? Do you see this night outside the window? These are not stars, no. This is the sieve of eternity. Seventeen years of your life have flown through this sieve forever. They are not here. They melted into space. What is left of them in you? Nothing. Because you haven't lived yet. You breathed yes. You ate, drank, learned something. Su-s-stvo-va-la. But only. And now you're starting to live. After this night, none of your nights will flow away from you anywhere. They will be all yours. You hear - your body is filled with solar power. From each touch to you with this key of life, everything in you comes to life - both your back ... and your stomach ... Look at him. Do not be shy. Take it in hand. Just don't squeeze so hard. More tender. Do you know why the domes of all churches and mosques are of this shape? Because this is the pinnacle of divine harmony! Now put it on your chest - yourself. Yes, honey, yes. You feel? Your nipple grows towards him...
He didn't go lower. Even when her back was already arching towards him, and her stomach began to throb with the first tides of desire, and her breathing became heavy, and her lips opened, he was in no hurry. On the contrary, he took his key of life from her body and carried it to her lips. It was one of the most critical moments of the operation. Brought up in Soviet ignorant and squeamish puritanism, all one hundred percent of young Russian women consider the male genital organ to be as dirty as their public toilets. To touch it, and even more so to take it with their lips, seems to them an unthinkable humiliation. After all, there is no worse insult in Russia than to say about a woman: “I had her in my mouth!” And the Russian man feels the same contemptuous aversion to the female vagina. “Even if someday,” thought Rubinchik, “in the twenty-third century, erotic films will be made in Russia, it is impossible to imagine that in such a film a Russian man kissed a woman between her legs ...”
But Rubinchik easily broke this wild Russian prejudice. He raised his proud key of life, tense and entwined with swollen veins, over the chest of his concubine to her chin and lips - slowly and solemnly, like a prize, like a divine rod ...
Most of the time, she closed her eyes in horror.
He didn't insist, no. He took her face with both hands and spoke softly and tenderly:
- Look at me!
She opened her eyes. And they always had the same thing - humility and readiness to let him into the warm depths of their soul and body, and a secret horror before this happens. No, and something else - something more ancient, some other, mystical horror of a forced and enchanted victim ...
But Rubinchik had no time, and he did not try to unravel the mystery of this fear. But he gave this diva the opportunity to look into his soul.
"It's not embarrassing, honey! Look into my eyes! There is nothing to be ashamed of in our body. Not in yours, not in mine. Everything is made by God from one blood and one flesh. And everything tastes equally great. Look…
And he began to kiss her body from top to bottom, slowly lowering his lips and tongue over her chest and stomach, lower and lower, to the thin curls of her pubic hair. And then he spread her knees with a soft but powerful movement of his palms. Here, in this hollow, was the main trap of his life, here, under the fluff of these silken thickets, hid that magic magnet, whose unearthly power Rubinchik experienced only once, a long time ago, on the banks of the ancient Itil, but which since then imperiously pulls him out from Moscow and drags through the Russian mud and snow, through the taiga and tundra in search of another Russian diva.
Cautiously, like a miner or a tigrolov, Rubinchik brought his face closer to this small tender grove and parted its tangled vines with his chin.
The dry, closed and still dormant lips of an innocent girlish bud appeared before his inquisitive gaze, and there seemed to be no mysticism in these pale pink doors, just as there is no mysticism in a simple pearl shell.
But Rubinchik could not deceive these tricks of nature. Not breathing, fearing and at the same time longing for this dangerous miracle, he first with his lips and then with his tongue touched these pale pink flaps.
This one touch caused girlish shock. Not sexual, no - cultural. Trying to save Rubinchik from unnecessary, as they considered, humiliation, they always at that moment grabbed his head with their hands and tried to push it away, take it out of their own loins. But Rubinchik intercepted their hands with his own and squeezed them with all his might, forbidding them any movement.
Of course, he knew that they would give him without it.
He could at any moment break their legs with his elbows and enter their body, with one blow breaking through the dryness of their virgin lips, the convulsively compressed muscles of the mouth and the thin film inside. As a matter of fact, due to their ignorance, they did not expect anything else from him, although this is exactly what they could get in any gateway without any Rubinchik.
But this was not his mission and the magic of this night!
Teacher, Enlightener, Mentor and First Man - even these simple titles filled his sexual desire with another quality, another facet of sophistication. And besides that…yes, besides that, he was expecting something else from this night – incredible, extraordinary, almost satanic, which he had only experienced there, on the banks of the Itil…
Squeezing the wrists of thin girlish hands with his hands, he continued gently, in one touch, kissing the still dry and dormant lips of the girlish bud. This bud always reminded him of an oversleeping child wrapped in a warm flannelette blanket, which Rubinchik had to unfold with his tongue and lips. And he began this process with the same glee with which his three-year-old son unwrapped the wrapper of a chocolate candy. Sharpening his tongue, he slowly, as in a rapid move, parted these reviving petals. He knew that in her subconscious, this small bud began to grow, hypertrophy, grow to gigantic proportions. In terms of the strength of lust, it was incomparable to any of her previous girlish longings or the unconscious urges of her young body to masturbate. Now, in her overheated brain, her little lagoon was turning into a separate body, into a greedy beast and into one giant mouth, hungry for new touches, kisses, caresses, saliva. So the desert, drying up from many years of drought, writhing with thirst and impatiently opens its parched pores to the very first clouds that float towards it from the horizon.
But the miracle that Rubinchik was waiting for and that he wanted to nurture, like an experienced gardener nurtures a rare exotic flower, this miracle could not be hurried or overheated by his caress. No, now it was necessary to give this miracle the opportunity to germinate on its own, like a grain awakened from a spring rain. And at that moment, when Rubinchik's tongue and lips began to feel the moistening of her lower lips and groped for a tiny knot-pearl at the top of their folds, Rubinchik stopped himself. By his example, he broke the first barrier - the attitude towards the sexual organ as something dirty and shameful, which is unthinkable to touch with lips, and now he again raised his key of life to the face of the young diva. And there was no occasion yet that this time she rejected him, closed her lips or turned away. On the contrary, impetuously seizing him with her hands and lips, like a pioneer bugle, she showed Rubinchik that the lesson had been learned, that one could go further, further...
However, even here he did not give free rein to girlish amateur performances. He took his magic key of life from her lips and ordered in a harsh tone of lord and master:
- Without teeth! Softer and deeper!
Yes, now he did not choose expressions and did not pay attention to the frightened eyes, burning in the darkness, like those of a small animal. She must learn the terminology along with the process.
– Just slowly, slowly! And play with your tongue! Play like a flute! That's it, yes!
He knew that in her subconscious her lower and upper lips had already united into a single monster capable of absorbing his entire body and soul, but even further, on the periphery of her consciousness, the last impatient thought still beats, dying from horror and glee: “Well when? When? I will do everything that you order, only you quickly do that, the main thing! And it was not even a thought in them, but the essence and main task of their stay on earth: to become a woman. It is written in their genetic code, in the subcortex of their brain and in every cell of their body. The gifts of the Lord are irrevocable!
However, Rubinchik delayed this main moment. This pull cost him his health, as he had to tame the pressure raging in his genitals by an effort of will. But he went to this torture consciously, as a sacrifice for the sake of a lofty goal. He ordered himself to switch off, endure, wait! Her consciousness is already crumpled by the thirst for intercourse, and she has already surrendered to this stream, opened up to him and swam in it, and lust twists her, and she gets high from everything - from the taste of his flesh, because - finally, after so many years of waiting! - holds in his hands this living and hot key of life, and even from the one that breathes its smell! Now, even without seeing her in the dark, Rubinchik felt that her tongue and lips were fulfilling his order not out of fear, not out of compulsion, but - with jubilation! So a young musician, who involuntarily, under the compulsion of his parents, learned the first melody, suddenly begins to experience pleasure from his playing - rejoicing and proud, he plays it again and again, louder, faster, more artistic, highlighting nuances, transitions, coloring in timbre and no longer wanting to release this magic flute from his mouth.
It was this enthusiastic fluency of the tongue and lips of the new student, her greedy, choking rapture from the absorption of his flesh, that told Rubinchik that everything, it happened, sensuality woke up in this vessel, the Woman was born in an awkward child, the female came to life in a virgin body, the fire kindled in icon lamp.
And now - to business!
He plunged his hand into the furry edge of her pubis and began to prepare a foothold. Slowly, even more slowly, with only two fingers... And when her legs were already on their own, in a wild urge, they rested their feet on the mattress and arched her body towards his fingers, and her mouth, and lips, and tongue were no longer just licked and sucked, but devoured him, choking on his own saliva - at that moment Rubinchik, already captured by the flow of lust, forced himself to reach out to the night lamp and turn on the light.
No, she did not react to it, she did not even see this light. Because she no longer lived in the world of external consciousness, but, like a sea jellyfish, only inside herself - with her sensuality and her thirst for intercourse.
However, Rubinchik knew no mercy. He returned his student to the real world, taking his proud key of life from her lips, and brought a new glass of wine to them. She opened her eyes, and wild, crazy, seeing nothing pupils rolled out to him from under the superciliary arches, rolled out as if from another world and looked at him with a question, a prayer and impatience.
Now you will become a woman. Now, he reassured. “I just want you to see it with your own eyes. Have some wine...
Her body was still pulsing down below, but she obediently took one or two convulsive gulps, and then leaned her head back on the pillow, ready for anything and even, probably, annoyed at him for not doing it already - while she was there, but another trait, beyond consciousness.
Rubinchik, however, did not regret such a missed opportunity. A woman in bed, like good prose, requires slowness. And it is in sex that a man approaches true creativity - the creation of Life. God, creating earthly life, certainly experienced an orgasm, because there is no other way to explain the origin of this highest pleasure in the world.
Rubinchik removed the pillow from under his student's head, placed it under her buttocks, and began to lick her ears with his tongue. This immediately returned her and himself to the former abyss of lust, to the very cycle of sensuality.
And then he raised his spear dark from stagnant blood and strained to trembling over her open and hot loins and slowly, again slowly, in tiny steps, began to plunge its hot tip into a tight, wet, pink crevice, with each step, pushing everything apart and pushing it gently muscular mouth - until it ran into a vague, blind barrier.
It was a holy and sweet moment to his soul.
Now he drew his spear to its full length, did push-ups on his hands and looked at the body stretched out under him.
So the rider rises in the stirrups in order to put all his weight and all the power of the swing into the blow of the spear.
An endless white river of female flesh flowed beneath him on the creaky hotel bed. Two Scythian mounds rose on this river chest with dark beacons of pointed nipples. Two open arms flew off in powerless streams. The long Polovtsian neck stretched to the chin of the thrown back head. And behind her, farther, a limp waterfall of thick blond thin hair fell from the bed.
Rubinchik looked at this body with tenderness, tenderness, love. Here was his homeland, his Russia. Thirty years ago, she beat him, the boy, until he bled, called him a "Jew", threw him to the ground, wringed his hands, smeared his lips with lard and forced him to eat this lard along with earth and dust. Twenty years ago, she cut him off at the entrance exams at Moscow, Leningrad and other universities only because the fifth column of his passport contained the short word "Jew", and shook him around the soldiers' barracks and workers' hostels. But he broke through! And now she, this same Russia, belonged to him all - with all her flesh, rivers, forests and birds singing in her foggy gardens. And - with its elastic neck, darkened nipples of a white chest, a quivering cavity of the abdomen, trusting open arms of the loins.
He loved her at that moment. He loved this Russian land as fully and tenderly as no other Russian, as only a person who miraculously swam to the shore from sea storms can love the land, or as a child who survived beatings in the house of an evil stepmother loves his home ...
He took a deep breath and without excessive harshness, but powerfully and decisively entered her native and beautiful body.
The warmth of her blood, a quiet moan, tears of pain and high, the first inexpressible languor from absorbing his key of life and squeezing it with virgin muscles, and almost immediately, in a minute, the frantic convulsions of her body filled him with joy. Finally, her body waited for the main thing for which it grew and matured all the years of its young life! It waited for intercourse with the polar flesh and there, inside, in its depths, it saluted this intercourse with geysers of tenderness and moisture collected over the entire previous life.
The feeling of these hot and stormy fountains pinched Rubinchik's soul with divine, unearthly pleasure. Thin hands hugged his neck and squeezed convulsively and gratefully, not allowing him to move; her lips dug into his lips until they hurt; her legs were locked around his legs; and her trembling pubis followed him, not allowing him to take himself out of her depths even for a micron.
So a trap clamps a living prey, so a scabbard wraps around a deadly-life-giving blade.
At that moment Rubinchik always envied them. What cosmic showers shake their flesh! What lightning strikes! What abysses they fall into at the moment of orgasm! He saw and understood that not a single man, even the most voluptuous, can experience even a tenth of those divine torments of pleasure that come to women at such moments. But he felt proud and joyful to be the courier, the purveyor of this gift of God, which he now held in a female body on a spear of his flesh. God sent them wild labor pains, unknown to men, and God - through him, Rubinchik! - rewarded them for these torments with such a power of pleasure that it is not given to experience males. Rubinchik felt the pleasure of giving pleasure, he felt at that time acting. - Acting - Almighty God and tried to extend his stay in this role for as long as he could. Orphaned in the bombings of 1941, when he was only three or four months old, he saw death throughout the war - on trains, in starving orphanages, on burning Volga barges with children and screaming educators. And this made death for him not a distant and abstract future, but as real, every minute possibility as bed pleasure. They - death and pleasure - approached each other in his mind, almost closed - it was not for nothing that at the moment of orgasm all living things, from a person to a forest animal, experience a strange, exciting, dizzying closeness of death. “This joy-Death,” Rubinchik thought, “only God can give, but a man can bring a woman close to this fatal and delightful abyss of ecstasy.” And he put all his strength and talent into this art. For the sake of prolonging his role as a messenger of God, for the sake of keeping the intensity of lust, he managed, even in the most holy and sweet moments of the first entry, not to lose his head and not run out, but to extract his tool from the castle of female flesh - to extract it by a micron.
Extract and return...
Log out and log in...
First, a little...
And then a little more...
And then - even wider, more powerful ...
Amble…
And finally jump! To wheeze! Until the scream!
The springs of the bed clattered like hooves!
The white body of the Polovtsian slave howled like a wolf - but not from pain, no!
She no longer felt pain, because the flame of her desire worked like an anesthetic, like a laughing gas.
In the living synchrophasotron of her pulsating body, their Russian-Jewish erotic polarity discharged with violent streams of sexual energy and watered them both with new yearning and such a wild thirst for new intercourse, which is unknown to men and women of the same nationality.
Rubinchik twisted the body of his Russian captive into a ring and a spiral, he broke her legs to a twine - she trusted him in everything, obeyed every order and was already the student who herself stretches her hand to be called to the blackboard. Beast with ecstasy, she seized the initiative, accelerated the rhythm to a gallop, thrashed her head from side to side, whipped the air with her mane of hair, grabbed the headboard with her hands, gnashed her teeth, shed tears of delight, erupted with hot and sticky fireworks, fell down like a dead woman, and again soared in an arch, and her mouth found and sucked on his fingers, grabbing them with sharp animal bites, and her legs flew up to his buttocks, back, shoulders. Something, some subconscious instinct, some intuitive biological manometer, told her that only with him - a Jew! a Jew! - such a complete, such an almost hostile sexual polarity is possible, in which the collisions of opposite polarity flows of their sexual energy reach the power of nuclear explosions. And she gave herself to these discharges with all her flesh and blood, and her body, with its own carnal memory, remembered every moment of this pleasure.
After each of her orgasms, when she, dying, fell and died down on his chest, Rubinchik felt like Paganini or Richter, who had just brilliantly played the most complicated symphony. In the Siberian night silence, he even heard the soundless applause of Orthodox and Jewish angels and the cries of "encore!" And he did not be mean and did not force himself to beg for a long time, but, quietly moving his loins and wondering himself where new forces came from, unknown during his communication with a Jewish wife, he played an encore - first in a minor key, but after a minute moving on to powerful major chords and to a real crescendo.
Later, before releasing himself, Rubinchik, controlling the situation with the last of his strength, again did push-ups on his hairy arms and looked at the newborn Russian Woman with a gentle smile. He was proud of himself. The fire of sensuality was already blazing in this fireplace at full power and itself, without his help, was already throwing out hot prominences of passion. Unable to reach Rubinchik's lips, she licked the hair on his chest with her tongue, bit his shoulders with her teeth, and dug her nails into his back and head.
He looked at her and knew that now she would do everything he commanded, and would carry out his orders not out of mystical fascination, as at the beginning, but with the glee of a newly converted servant of God. Yes, lying under him on her back, on her side, on her stomach, on her elbows and knees, or flying over him like a Scythian Amazon, she, this Russian diva, will always see God in him. In it, in Rubinchik. And by morning, when she will run out, as it will seem to her, with absolutely all the juices of her body and when her body will become transparent, weightless and falling in a free fall, as in space, - at this time, with the dawn coolness, creeping into the enlightened window, even in the most secret corners of her consciousness she will pray for him and indulge in his image in herself, as in the twelfth century women worshiped the sensual-erotic cult of Christ.
In the light of the lilac Russian dawn, he lifted her amazingly light head on his knees and stroked, stroked, stroked her thin blond hair. And she, powerless, silent and light, like an angel, quietly, without opening her Polovtsian eyes, began to lick his fallen flesh, flying off into sleep, into oblivion, into childhood, into infancy, where she picked up with the same well-fed lips, before fall asleep, the last drops of milk from his mother's nipple.
But even while stroking and lovingly nursing this new Russian diva, Rubinchik already knew that that mystical, magical, satanic miracle, in search of which he wandered around on business trips around this gigantic country, this miracle did not happen here either. Returning from a business trip to Moscow, to the editorial office of Rabochaya Gazeta, in his office, which he shared with three other correspondents, he approached a huge wall map of the Soviet Union, found on this map the place where he had just lit another beacon of femininity, and inserted to this point a new red checkbox. During the ten years of his work as a traveling correspondent for Rabochaya Gazeta, there were already more than a hundred such flags on this map, but the strange miracle that he experienced only once, in his youth, in the Sputnik pioneer camp, this miracle did not exist anywhere. And that means that in two or three weeks he will again take off on the road. That's just - where?
He did not know, however, that recently in a completely different office - with a window on Dzerzhinsky Square - someone on the same map also marks the routes of his trips and the "lighthouses" he lit in Russia.
This man was Oleg Dmitrievich Barsky, a KGB colonel.
I dedicate to Julia, my beloved wife
Sexual polarity is the basic law of life and, perhaps, the foundation of the world. The ancients understood this better, but we are disgustingly powerless and degenerate more and more.
Nikolay Berdyaev. The Metaphysics of Sex and Love, 1907
Note that I do not mean to say that being a Jew is such a stroke of luck. After all, Jews have problems too.
Roman Gary
From the author
This book came out of my novel "Lyubozhid" like Eve from Adam's rib. But as the presence of Adam's flesh in Eve - kidneys, liver and some other domestic organs - does not prevent the Eves of the whole world from rightly considering themselves completely original creatures, so the "Russian Diva", I dare to assure the reader, already after the fifth or sixth chapter separated from "Lyubozhid" and galloped into its own plot so rapidly that in the end, at the end, even I, the author, threw up my hands in amazement.
However, this preface is not written for advertising purposes, but simply to inform the reader: yes, out of a dozen characters that inhabit the novel-essay "Lyubozhid", I took three, tied them with an intimate secret and released them into a separate novel. What came of it is for the reader to judge. Moreover, those who have not read "Lyubozhid" do not need this preface at all, unless, after reading "Diva", someone wants to know where it came from. And for those who are familiar with "Lyubozhid", I hope it still makes sense to overcome a few familiar pages in order to sail away with familiar characters on an unfamiliar voyage.
With all my authorial modesty, I know one thing for sure: just as women are an incomparably better creation of the Lord than men (it’s not for nothing that they were created after us!), So the “Russian Diva” is much better than the flesh from which she was born. Amen.
Prologue
Summer 1961, USSR
Pioneer camp "Sputnik"
– Do you know what it means to be a Russian woman? I mean - what is it like to be a real Russian woman?
He looked around at the faces of the girls around him. Thirty young Komsomol women - the entire sixth detachment of the Sputnik summer pioneer camp - fell silent and looked at him with expectant interest. The glare of the evening fire illuminated their scarlet pioneer ties, blue T-shirts, tight elastic breasts, and short shorts, specially washed white to set off the chocolate tan of their legs, strengthened over the summer from volleyball, swimming and camping trips. Further, behind them, in the darkness of the night, more guessed than visible, were a wide river, beacons of buoys and rafts of timber rafts quietly floating along the river rapids.
- And who is she - a real Russian woman? he asked without raising his voice. - Anna Karenina cheating on her husband? Or Natasha Rostova, who gives birth to a child every year? Or the courtesan Nastasya Filippovna from Dostoyevsky's The Idiot? Or the miserable prostitute Sonechka Marmeladova from the novel "Crime and Punishment"? Don't laugh, this is an interesting question! Look: the French inspired the world that French women are the most sophisticated fashionistas.
Right? Spaniards - that the Spanish woman is the most ardent and sensual, right? We know about English women that they are cold and stiff. About Jews and Japanese women - that they are the best mothers. And what about the Russians? You are future Russian women. Yes, yes, there is nothing to giggle, you should be Russian women, but who else? But what do you know about yourself?
He broke a dry spruce branch with his knee and stirred the charred firewood with it. The fire flared greedily on the spruce needles, and he looked again at his listeners. He was not much older than them, six or seven years old, and the daily war for their attention had worn him out. Their thoughts are always wandering somewhere away from the conversation, there is always some kind of grin and challenge in their eyes, as if these pigals know a secret that is not known to him, twenty years old. But now, it seems, he hit them to the quick. Still would! At this age, of course, they are interested in everything that is somehow connected with the word "woman". But he won't rush...
“He will stop a galloping horse, he will enter a burning hut,” he quoted a Russian poet. - Here is the definition that is given to a Russian woman in literature. Russian writers, even the greatest ones, even Tolstoy, have added nothing to these two lines. So is this really your main quality - to be a kind of Hercules in skirts? Or firefighters? BUT?
He waited out their laughter and continued:
- No, I think there must be something else, because of which the monarchs of Europe once fell in love with Russian women and, neglecting their princesses, erected Russians girls to the English, French, British and Norwegian thrones. But what? The beauty? Here I am looking at you. Of course, you are all beautiful and all beauties. Quiet, don't laugh. But are you much more beautiful than French women or, say, Italian women? Well, honestly - more beautiful? Here I don't know. And then I turn to history. I want to find the answer in ancient times: what distinguished Russian women from all others? And suddenly ... suddenly I find out that no Russians have existed for a long time. There are no Russians for almost a thousand years! Yes, yes, we live in Russia, and the whole world calls us Russians, but ... the facts are a stubborn thing - we only have a name from Russians. All historians - both Russian and Western - lost traces of the Rus in the tenth century. Russ, real Russ - a huge tribe, an entire ethnic group that swept across Europe in the first millennium - disappeared! They disappeared in the darkness of centuries, leaving behind the Scythian tribes only their name and later the dynasty of the kings of Rurik. And that's all. No language, no culture, no writing, no legends. Only names: Oleg, Olga, Igor. Yes, the names of the rivers: Dnieper, Dniester. However, even these names sound more German than Russian, right? But how is it? How could a whole nation disappear without a trace? And why? And disappeared?
He stood up impulsively. The flames of the fire cast a large broken shadow from his thin figure onto the awnings of tourist tents whitening in the night. His face, narrow and illuminated from below by crimson highlights, suddenly acquired some kind of Mephistopheles and at the same time inspired expression, dark eyes lit up with an inner light, and the wide wings of a large nose trembled predatory at an unexpectedly close splash of river fish, as if it were splashing in river water. the same mystery he was looking for.
– Look around! he suddenly ordered, tracing a wide semicircle in the darkness with his burnt spruce stick, and at this sharp gesture the coal-red end of the stick flared up like a fiery spear. “Twenty centuries ago there was the same darkness here, the same forests and the same mosquitoes. Small tribes lived along the banks of these rivers - some kind of Ugrians, Burtases, Guzes. They were engaged in fishing, hunting and collecting honey in the forests. But in the fifth - seventh centuries, the devil knows where - from the north, from the Baltic states - hordes of warlike rugs poured in here. They were bandits, conquerors. They did not produce anything, but were engaged only in robberies and lived off looting. In the ninth century, they conquered the Slavic capital of Kyiv and since then they began to rule and push around everyone who was around - glades, drevlyans, northerners. They robbed them, took heavy tributes from them and sold them into slavery in Byzantium, in Greece, in Khazaria. They were rude, cruel, merciless in battles and treacherous in everyday life, and they left all their property, acquired by robbery, as an inheritance to their daughters. And they bequeathed to their sons only weapons, saying: “I got my fortune with this sword, take it and go further than me!” In other words, it was an ethnic group of bandits. But!..
He raised a burning spruce stick, like a saber or like a rod. He had been walking along the dark shore for a long time, inspired by the attention of his listeners and those mirages of the past that he saw in the darkness of this summer night.
But they were beautiful! he announced. - This cannot be taken away - the Rugs, who in these places began to be called "Rus", were very beautiful. As the Iranian ambassador Ahmed ibn Fadlan wrote to his master in 922: “I saw the Rus. I saw the Rus when they arrived on their trading business and settled down near the Itil River. I have not seen people with more perfect bodies than theirs. They are like palm trees, blond, beautiful in face and white in body. They do not wear jackets or caftans, but their man wears a kitty, with which he covers one side, with one of his arms coming out of it. And each of them has an ax, a sword and a knife, and he never partes with all this. And in others, from the nails to the neck, the whole body is painted with the image of trees, birds, gods, and the like. As for their women, they are all beautiful, their bodies are white as ivory, and on each of their breasts is attached a box in the form of a circle of iron, or silver, or copper, or gold, or wood, according to the wealth of their husbands. They have been wearing these boxes since childhood to keep their breasts from getting too big. On their necks they have a monist of gold and silver, and a knife falling between their breasts, and green ceramic beads are considered the most magnificent decoration among the Rus. For each such bead, they are ready to give the skin of a sable.
They come from their own country and moor their ships on the Itil - which is a big river - and build big wooden houses on its banks. And ten or twenty of them gather in one such house, each has his own bench on which he sits, and beautiful girls for merchants sit with him ... If the head of the family dies, then his relatives say to his girls: “Which of you will die with him?" One of them, who loved him more than the others, says: "I am." Then they collect what he possessed and divide it into three parts, and one third is for his family, the second is to tailor clothes for her, and the third is to prepare nabidz for her, which they all drink for ten days, while they cut and sew clothes for the dead. For these ten days, they put the deceased in the grave, and they themselves drink, combine with women and play the saz. And the girl who burns herself with her master drinks and makes merry during these ten days, decorates herself with various outfits and ornaments, and thus, dressed up, gives herself to people.
“I wanted all the time,” wrote Ibn Fadlan, “to get acquainted with this custom, until the news of the death of one outstanding husband from among them reached me. When the day came on which they were supposed to burn him and the girl, I arrived at the river on which his ship was located - and now this ship was already pulled ashore, on a wooden structure like large platforms. In the middle of this ship they placed a hut made of wood and covered this hut with various kinds of kumach. Then they brought a bench, covered it with quilted mattresses and Byzantine brocade, and pillows - Byzantine brocade. And an old woman came, who is called the Angel of Death, it is she who directs the sheathing of the dead, and she kills the girls. And I saw that she was an old heroic woman, hefty, gloomy.
When they arrived at the grave, they removed the earth and took out the deceased in the veil in which he died. Before that, they placed with him in the grave a nabizh, some kind of fruit, and a lute. Now they've taken it all out. And I saw that the deceased had turned black from the cold of this country, but nothing else had changed in him, except for his color. Then they put on him trousers, leggings, boots, a jacket, a brocade caftan with gold buttons, put a brocade hat on his sable head, and carried him to the ship, on a quilted mattress, propped him up with pillows and brought nabis, fruits, flowers and aromatic plants, and put this along with it. And they brought bread, meat, and onions, and left it beside him. Then they brought his weapon and laid it next to him. Then they took two horses, cut them with swords and threw their meat into the ship.
Many men and women gathered, playing the saz, and each of the relatives of the deceased puts up a hut, and the girl who wanted to be burned with her master, dressed up, goes to the huts of the relatives of the deceased, enters each of the huts, and the owner of the hut is combined with her and says to her in a loud voice: “Tell your master: ‘Really, I did this out of love and friendship for you.’” And in this way she goes through all the huts ...
When the time came for the sun to descend, she put her feet on the palms of her husbands, rose and uttered some words in her own language, after which she was lowered. Then they lifted her a second time and a third time, and I asked the interpreter about these actions, and he said: “She said the first time she was lifted:“ Here I see my father and my mother, ”and said the second times: “Here are all my dead relatives sitting,” and she said for the third time: “Here I see my master sitting in the garden, and the garden is beautiful, green, and now he is calling me, so take me to him!” »
And so they came with her to the ship. And she took off the two bracelets that were on her, and gave them to that old woman, called the Angel of Death, who would kill her. After that, all the men make their hands a paved path for the girl, so that the girl, standing on the palm of their hands, goes to the ship. But they had not yet taken her into the hut of her dead master. The men came, carrying with them shields and sticks, and they gave her a goblet with nabidh. She sang over it and drank it. And the translator told me that she said goodbye to her friends. Then another goblet was served to her, and the old woman, having a huge dagger with a wide blade, entered the hut with her, and then six husbands from her husband's relatives entered the hut and all of them combined with the girl in the presence of her deceased master until then until she became joyful and light, like an angel. Then, as soon as they had finished exercising their rights of love, they laid her down next to her master. Two grabbed both her legs, two grabbed both her hands, and the old woman, called the Angel of Death, put a rope around her neck and stuck a dagger between her ribs. And the men began to beat with sticks on their shields so that the sound of her death cry was not heard ...
When she died, the closest relative of the deceased, while still naked, took a stick and lit it by the fire and went to light the wood piled under the ship.
And the fire took fire for the firewood, then for the ship, then for the hut, and the husband, and the girl, and for everything that is in it. Then the wind blew, great, terrifying, and the flame of fire increased, and its blaze flared up. Less than an hour passed, as the ship, and the firewood, and the girl, and her master turned into ashes, then into the smallest ashes.
Then they built something like a round hill in the place of this burnt ship and erected a large tree in the middle of it, wrote on it the name of this husband and the name of the king of the Rus and left.
- So Ibn Fadlan wrote about the Rus, whom he saw with his own eyes here, on the banks of this river. Yes, it was right here - the Russians were sitting here with their goods and young beauties, slender as palm trees, and with a beautiful face and body. And here Russian girls went into the fire for their lover or husband. And it was only a thousand and forty-three years ago. But then, in some seventy or eighty years, all the Russian men died in unsuccessful campaigns against Byzantium, Persia and Bulgaria. And what happened to their beautiful women is not written anywhere, but most likely they became the wives of the Slavs, Polyans and Drevlyans, who adopted their name because they wanted to be as formidable and beautiful as their former masters. But did they? Ask yourself at night alone with yourself: can you go into the fire for your beloved? To drink a cup of nabis before death, to sing a farewell song to your friends, and to board your husband's burning boat? Ask yourself and then you will know if Russian women survived in Russia. Thank you for your attention. And now - all in tents, sleep!
He waited out their screeching and shouting: “More! Say something else! Please!" - then he scattered the ashen coals of the burnt out fire and said softly:
- All! That's all for today. Hang up.
They surrounded him, jumping and squealing:
- Not! You know more! Oh please! Tell!
He looked up at them, and they fell silent, waiting for the story to continue. And he said:
“Maybe I know a hundred more interesting stories. But if you ever want to hear them, you will immediately go to sleep. I count to three. Once…
They ran away to their tents. Screeching and laughter and the flash of tanned ankles in the night… He chuckled wearily as he looked after them. And then he turned to the river.
In the distance, in the darkness, floated away from him and melted in the black canopy of the night the last flame of the raftsmen's fire. But from above, from the north, he suddenly heard some sounds - either the movement of a new timber rafting along the river, or the soft splashes of oars. He stepped towards the water, peering into the darkness of the moonless night. An armada of dark silhouettes appeared on the river rapids, but from a distance and through the darkness of a moonless night, he could not understand that these were rafts? boats? or the boats of the ancient Rus, sailing for new prey? ..
Part I
double hunt
1
In Moscow, Rubinchik did not start novels. And not only because he valued his reputation as a well-known journalist and employee of Rabochaya Gazeta, where he published under the pseudonym Iosif Rubin, but also because in Moscow he had neither time nor desire for these novels. A thin thirty-seven-year-old Jew with a provincial orphanage upbringing and metropolitan ambition, in Moscow he devoted himself entirely to everyday editorial fever, two small children, a wife and a bitchy life that eats up all leisure time, scandalous lines for groceries, shoes, clothes, medicines for children and everything else, without which the everyday existence of man is impossible. Wrapped up in this tights, Rubinchik did not have even a minute in Moscow to look around him and see someone's woman's face, an alluring neckline of a dress, or even a quiet dance of snowflakes under street lamps.
But as soon as he went on a business trip, as soon as he threw off the hassle of Moscow worries, some kind of mystical, predatory and cheerful excitement of a hunter woke up in him. But not for any game, no. Rubinchik did not have that omnivorousness that is characteristic of almost all husbands who have escaped from the bed, even if they are beloved, but already such a habitually familiar wife. And in general, it was not a sexual hunger. It was about something else, to which Rubinchik himself could not give a name, and did not look for it. But at the moment when he got into an editorial car or an Aeroflot bus to go to the airport, and from there fly to the Siberian oil developments, the Ural mines or the Altai lumberjacks, a powerful release of adrenaline into the blood in some strange way regrouped those who had settled down on the Moscow orbits the atoms and electrons of his body, jacked them up, split new kilowatts of energy in them, straightened Rubinchik's shoulders, changed the position of his head, added looseness and wit, and filled his gaze with self-confident audacity.
And from that moment the hunt began.
So a secret drug addict, almost not realizing his actions, goes in search of a drug. So the maniac-killer goes on a night hunt for his next victim. Thus a poet of genius unconsciously searches for a single word that will make his verse soar above the sea of contemptible prose.
A huge country—the entire Soviet empire at the height of its power— lay before him, stretching freely from the Baltic to the Pacific, and he could hardly contain his excitement, like an alien landing on a new planet or like a horseman from the horde of Genghis Khan before the invasion of Siberia. A lot of events took place in this country - it discovered gas in the Arctic, caught foreign spies, prepared for the Olympics, laid canals in the Caspian deserts, pursued dissidents, built hydroelectric stations, sent rockets into space, listened to Voice of America and Svoboda, and Rubinchik with professional greed he absorbed, absorbed and entered into his notebooks everything that he heard and saw around. This was his country, and it belonged to him all - from Moldova and Estonia to Turkmenistan and Chukotka, and with all his little Jewish heart he loved its vastness, diversity and power. However, he never considered himself a Jew in the full sense of the word - he was an atheist, did not know the Jewish language, shortened his last name to its Russian sound, drank vodka as well as any Russian, and, most importantly, he loved Russians women. Oh yeah! Every time, somewhere in the Siberian, Vyatka or Murmansk wilderness, his searching eye finally stumbled upon the one that made his hunting heart freeze, he discovered that this new one, too, is related to all his previous finds with one indispensable quality: it is always were Russians women, with an elongated figure, secretly sad gray or green eyes and that elongated face, high brow ridges and thin transparent skin, which can be seen in the paintings of Rokotov, Levitsky and Borovikovsky.
Of course, Rubinchik almost never found a copy of Princess Struyskaya or Lopukhina, although these portraits do not accurately convey the image that, for some inexplicable reason, lived in his subconscious. But if you combine the face of the iconic Our Lady of Vladimir with the eyes of some ancient Russian or Norwegian warrior princess, or at least with severe sacrifice in the eyes of female portraits of Petrov-Vodkin, then maybe it will be close to that ideal, have which was for Rubinchik an obsessive and almost manic lust.
Such female types can still be found in the deep Russian provinces - although less and less often. Cosmetics, fashion in clothes and hairstyles, incest that swept through the Russian breed with the waves of the Tatar-Mongol yoke, Turkish captivity, Polish and French invasions, the debauchery of their own boyars, German occupation, KGB dispossession, sub-Soviet migration and mass alcoholism - all this muddied, spoiled and dissolved the Nordic beauty of Russian women, but originally softened in Polovtsian blood, which a few centuries ago so captivated European monarchs that they led Russian brides to wedding altars and sat next to them on thrones in England, Norway, France, Hungary - yes all over Europe!
Eduard Topol
This book came out of my novel "Lyubozhid" like Eve from Adam's rib. But as the presence of Adam's flesh in Eve - kidneys, liver and some other domestic organs - does not prevent the Eves of the whole world from rightly considering themselves completely original creatures, so the "Russian Diva", I dare to assure the reader, already after the fifth or sixth chapter separated from "Lyubozhid" and galloped into its own plot so rapidly that in the end, at the end, even I, the author, threw up my hands in amazement.
However, this preface is not written for advertising purposes, but simply to inform the reader: yes, out of a dozen characters that inhabit the novel-essay "Lyubozhid", I took three, tied them with an intimate secret and released them into a separate novel. What came of it is for the reader to judge. Moreover, those who have not read "Lyubozhid" do not need this preface at all, unless, after reading "Diva", someone wants to know where it came from. And for those who are familiar with "Lyubozhid", I hope it still makes sense to overcome a few familiar pages in order to sail away with familiar characters on an unfamiliar voyage.
With all my authorial modesty, I know one thing for sure: just as women are an incomparably better creation of the Lord than men (it’s not for nothing that they were created after us!), So the “Russian Diva” is much better than the flesh from which she was born. Amen.
I dedicate to Julia, my beloved wife
Sexual polarity is the basic law of life and, perhaps, the foundation of the world. The ancients understood this better, but we are disgustingly powerless and degenerate more and more.
Nikolay Berdyaev. The Metaphysics of Sex and Love, 1907
Note that I do not mean to say that being a Jew is such a stroke of luck. After all, Jews have problems too.
Roman Gary
Summer 1961, USSR Sputnik Pioneer Camp
Do you know what it's like to be a Russian woman? I mean - what is it like to be a real Russian woman?
He looked around at the faces of the girls around him. Thirty young Komsomol women - the entire sixth detachment of the Sputnik summer pioneer camp - fell silent and looked at him with expectant interest. The glare of the evening fire illuminated their scarlet pioneer ties, blue T-shirts, tight elastic breasts, and short shorts, specially washed white to set off the chocolate tan of their legs, strengthened over the summer from volleyball, swimming and camping trips. Further, behind them, in the darkness of the night, more guessed than visible, were a wide river, beacons of buoys and rafts of timber rafts quietly floating along the river rapids.
And who is she - a real Russian woman? he asked without raising his voice. - Anna Karenina cheating on her husband? Or Natasha Rostova, who gives birth to a child every year? Or the courtesan Nastasya Filippovna from Dostoyevsky's The Idiot? Or the miserable prostitute Sonechka Marmeladova from the novel "Crime and Punishment"? Don't laugh, this is an interesting question! Look: the French inspired the world that French women are the most sophisticated fashionistas. Right? Spaniards - that the Spanish woman is the most ardent and sensual, right? We know about English women that they are cold and stiff. About Jews and Japanese women - that they are the best mothers. And what about the Russians? You are future Russian women. Yes, yes, there is nothing to giggle, you should be Russian women, but who else? But what do you know about yourself?
He broke a dry spruce branch with his knee and stirred the charred firewood with it. The fire flared greedily on the spruce needles, and he looked again at his listeners. He was not much older than they were, six or seven years old, and the daily war for their attention had worn him out. Their thoughts are always wandering somewhere away from the conversation, there is always some kind of grin and challenge in their eyes, as if these pigals know a secret that is not known to him, twenty years old. But now, it seems, he hit them to the quick. Still would! At this age, of course, they are interested in everything that is somehow connected with the word "woman". But he won't rush...
“He will stop a galloping horse, he will enter a burning hut,” he quoted the Russian poet. - Here is the definition given to a Russian woman in literature. Russian writers, even the greatest ones, even Tolstoy, have added nothing to these two lines. So is this really your main quality - to be such Hercules in skirts? Or firefighters? BUT?
He waited out their laughter and continued:
No, I think there must be something else, because of which the monarchs of Europe once fell in love with Russian women and, neglecting their princesses, erected Russians girls to the English, French, British and Norwegian thrones. But what? The beauty? Here I am looking at you. Of course, you are all beautiful and all beauties. Quiet, don't laugh. But are you much more beautiful than French women or, say, Italian women? Well, honestly - more beautiful? Here I don't know. And then I turn to history. I want to find the answer in ancient times: what distinguished Russian women from all others? And suddenly ... suddenly I find out that no Russians have existed for a long time. There are no Russians for almost a thousand years! Yes, yes, we live in Russia, and the whole world calls us Russians, but ... the facts are a stubborn thing - we only have a name from Russians. All historians - both Russian and Western - lost traces of the Rus in the tenth century. Russ, real Russ - a huge tribe, an entire ethnic group that swept across Europe in the first millennium - disappeared! They disappeared in the darkness of centuries, leaving behind the Scythian tribes only their name and later the dynasty of the kings of Rurik. And that's all. No language, no culture, no writing, no legends. Only names: Oleg, Olga, Igor. Yes, the names of the rivers: Dnieper, Dniester. However, even these names sound more German than Russian, right? But how is it? How could a whole nation disappear without a trace? And why? And disappeared?
He stood up impulsively. The flames of the fire cast a large broken shadow from his thin figure onto the awnings of tourist tents whitening in the night. His face, narrow and illuminated from below by crimson highlights, suddenly acquired some kind of Mephistopheles and at the same time inspired expression, dark eyes lit up with an inner light, and the wide wings of a large nose trembled predatory at an unexpectedly close splash of river fish, as if it were splashing in river water. the same mystery he was looking for.
Look around! he suddenly ordered, tracing a wide semicircle in the dark with his burnt spruce stick, and at this sharp gesture the coal-red end of the stick flared up like a fiery spear. - Twenty centuries ago there was the same darkness, the same forests and the same mosquitoes. Small tribes lived along the banks of these rivers - some kind of Ugrians, Burtases, Guzes. They were engaged in fishing, hunting and collecting honey in the forests. But in the fifth - seventh centuries, the devil knows where - from the north, from the Baltic states - hordes of warlike rugs poured in here. They were bandits, conquerors. They did not produce anything, but were engaged only in robberies and lived off looting. In the ninth century, they conquered the Slavic capital Kyiv and since then they began to rule and push around everyone who was around - glades, drevlyans, northerners. They robbed them, took heavy tributes from them and sold them into slavery in Byzantium, in Greece, in Khazaria. They were rude, cruel, merciless in battles and treacherous in everyday life, and they left all their property, acquired by robbery, as an inheritance to their daughters. And they bequeathed to their sons only weapons, saying: “I got my fortune with this sword, take it and go further than me!” In other words, it was an ethnic group of bandits. But!..
Eduard Topol
This book came out of my novel "Lyubozhid" like Eve from Adam's rib. But as the presence of Adam's flesh in Eve - kidneys, liver and some other domestic organs - does not prevent the Eves of the whole world from rightly considering themselves completely original creatures, so the "Russian Diva", I dare to assure the reader, already after the fifth or sixth chapter separated from "Lyubozhid" and galloped into its own plot so rapidly that in the end, at the end, even I, the author, threw up my hands in amazement.
However, this preface is not written for advertising purposes, but simply to inform the reader: yes, out of a dozen characters that inhabit the novel-essay "Lyubozhid", I took three, tied them with an intimate secret and released them into a separate novel. What came of it is for the reader to judge. Moreover, those who have not read "Lyubozhid" do not need this preface at all, unless, after reading "Diva", someone wants to know where it came from. And for those who are familiar with "Lyubozhid", I hope it still makes sense to overcome a few familiar pages in order to sail away with familiar characters on an unfamiliar voyage.
With all my authorial modesty, I know one thing for sure: just as women are an incomparably better creation of the Lord than men (it’s not for nothing that they were created after us!), So the “Russian Diva” is much better than the flesh from which she was born. Amen.
I dedicate to Julia, my beloved wife
Sexual polarity is the basic law of life and, perhaps, the foundation of the world. The ancients understood this better, but we are disgustingly powerless and degenerate more and more.
Nikolay Berdyaev. The Metaphysics of Sex and Love, 1907
Note that I do not mean to say that being a Jew is such a stroke of luck. After all, Jews have problems too.
Roman Gary
Summer 1961, USSR Sputnik Pioneer Camp
Do you know what it's like to be a Russian woman? I mean - what is it like to be a real Russian woman?
He looked around at the faces of the girls around him. Thirty young Komsomol women - the entire sixth detachment of the Sputnik summer pioneer camp - fell silent and looked at him with expectant interest. The glare of the evening fire illuminated their scarlet pioneer ties, blue T-shirts, tight elastic breasts, and short shorts, specially washed white to set off the chocolate tan of their legs, strengthened over the summer from volleyball, swimming and camping trips. Further, behind them, in the darkness of the night, more guessed than visible, were a wide river, beacons of buoys and rafts of timber rafts quietly floating along the river rapids.
And who is she - a real Russian woman? he asked without raising his voice. - Anna Karenina cheating on her husband? Or Natasha Rostova, who gives birth to a child every year? Or the courtesan Nastasya Filippovna from Dostoyevsky's The Idiot? Or the miserable prostitute Sonechka Marmeladova from the novel "Crime and Punishment"? Don't laugh, this is an interesting question! Look: the French inspired the world that French women are the most sophisticated fashionistas. Right? Spaniards - that the Spanish woman is the most ardent and sensual, right? We know about English women that they are cold and stiff. About Jews and Japanese women - that they are the best mothers. And what about the Russians? You are future Russian women. Yes, yes, there is nothing to giggle, you should be Russian women, but who else? But what do you know about yourself?
He broke a dry spruce branch with his knee and stirred the charred firewood with it. The fire flared greedily on the spruce needles, and he looked again at his listeners. He was not much older than they were, six or seven years old, and the daily war for their attention had worn him out. Their thoughts are always wandering somewhere away from the conversation, there is always some kind of grin and challenge in their eyes, as if these pigals know a secret that is not known to him, twenty years old. But now, it seems, he hit them to the quick. Still would! At this age, of course, they are interested in everything that is somehow connected with the word "woman". But he won't rush...