"Watson,_Ian_-_Returning_Home" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watson Ian)

You take a nation without a penny to its name. You take that, and you take a vast country that's been completely cleaned out of people, full of empty cities and factories, airports and harbors.
You put the two things together, and what do you
get?
You get a whole population marching in the only direction possible-to recover the goods they need to carry on.
You get a shivering, starving nation, dressed in dog skins and such, hauling logs north to build rafts and dugouts to cross the Bering Strait and bring back some real ships from the other side-while the first pioneers press on south, by boat or light plane or four-wheel drive, to get to somewhere half-decent and firm up and supply the route for all those who would follow. You get the greatest human migration ever.
And, as with animal migrations, there's an instinctive, almost guided aspect to it-as if our destination has been broadcasting to us. As well as broadcasting to everyone else. To leave it be! So, like superstitious peasants, it seems the Chinese have kept out of the USSR. Vladivostok is even closer to China than Khabarovsk is, but for sure we would find Vladivostok empty, too. I admit that I couldn't be one hundred percent positive of this till we arrived in Khabarovsk. But now-as I said earlier in the hotel I felt as sure as if God had whispered in my heart. This land was reserved for us, the victors, from one shining ocean, the Pacific, to the shining Baltic Sea.
Later, since it was a golden evening and we'd all done as much as we reasonably could, I decreed four hours R and R.
Billy, Hank, and I removed a bottle of Stolichnaya vodka from the hotel kitchen and wandered out to hit the town. Mary declared she was exhausted and could do with an early night, but I think she just said so to give us boys a chance to get roaring drunk.
So we capered up Lenin Avenue to Lenin Square, admiring the silliest things: toy pedal cars on a lane around the weedy flowerbeds, abandoned ice-cream carts, rows of bright red fruit-drink machines with the syrupy goo all dried up in them, and of course a statue of that man with his worker's cloth cap, leaning forward into the future and looking aggressive. Hank climbed up the statue and sat piggy-back on his metal shoulders, urging him on.
We took in another public park, behind the Dynamo Football Stadium, but the mosquitoes drove us
out of there. So we went window-shopping instead which may seem a little weird for three grown men, especially as the goods in the shop windows were few and poor stuff. But, my God, actual shop windows with things in them!
One of the shops was a grocer's. A gastronom. We were getting pretty good at picking out names of streets and buildings in the crazy Russian characters.
"I've never tasted caviar," said Billy.
"So let's find some cans of caviar," I said.
In we went. A mummy, which we took to be a shopgirl's, lay pointing a bare finger bone up at approximately the right shelf. Other mummies, in suits and raggy coats and uniforms, lay piled up against the liquor counter, and behind it; so we avoided that area. Hank scooped up half a dozen little cans, which was all there were.
"Thank you, Miss," Billy giggled nervously; so I handed him the vodka bottle to kill it. As he grabbed it, he hiccupped.
We took the cans off to a restaurant, where there weren't many corpses, and switched on the lighting, which worked, as the phone had worked, though the result was disconcertingly bright. The Russians must have like to chat to one another with searchlights shining on their faces. We sat tipsily contemplating the cans and a hand-scrawled menu, written in pencil.
"Service is sure slow," Hank joked. Producing a hook of a can opener from his Soviet uniform, he tossed this on the tablecloth for us. "I'm going to find something to wash these down." He headed for the kitchen.
Billy picked up the menu while I was working on
the cans. His eyes blinked like an owl's.
"Borsch," he pronounced in a puzzled voice, as if that menu scribbled by a drunken spider was telling him what it said. "Salat eez Krab. We'd better get good at this, eh, Greg? If we're going to be living in Russia for the rest of our lives."
"You know, old buddy, you're right." I nodded. "We aren't going to be able to alter all the signs and notices-"
"And diagrams and lists and warnings and instructions-"
"And et cetera. We aren't going to be able to change them all over into English very quickly. If ever."
Hank returned, triumphantly cradling another bottle with a red skyscraper on the label. Very like a picture of some Nineteen-thirties building in New York, except that the skyscraper was probably some state office block in Moscow, and Moscow still existed.
We caroused awhile till we heard horns hooting along the street. So we piled outside. A victory parade was heading our way. I spotted Dave Weinstock at the wheel of the leading vehicle, thumping on the horn, and glanced at my watch. Obviously Dave was heading back toward the Far East Hotel as per instructions, and he had had the bright idea of rounding up a few extra vehicles as well as sounding a bugle recall on the horns.
There were buses and trucks and a couple of private automobiles, too. I guess their radiators hadn't cracked during the previous winter. Or maybe they had, but since they were being driven only a little
way round town, this wouldn't hurt them. There was quite a bit of fixing up to be done if we were going to own Volgas and Zhigulis, the way we had owned Chevys and Mustangs until last summer.
The parade was as noisy as a Fourth of July celebration.
Hank grinned. "Loud enough to wake the dead, eh?"
This made me frown. I was feeling just a little maudlin now, on account of the drink, in what I felt sure was a very Russian way. But I perked up as soon as we joined the parade, scrambling up onto a truck.
I took the bottle from Hank and waved it grandly.
"Here's a toast, you guys! To prosperity, again!"
"To railroads and liquor!" Billy shouted. "To TV sets and cigarettes. To chairs and sausages. To . . . to . . . cornucopia! To the horn of plenty!"
I didn't know that my friend Billy knew words like cornucopia. It sounded like a Russian word, the way he said it.
"To civilization!"
I caught hold of Billy by the lapels and gripped him tight. The streetlights had come on automatically awhile back, and Billy's big hairy face gleamed with sweat.
"We beat the Commies, Billy. The Commies took away all our property, but we took away their lives! We beat them!"
Then we laughed and wept and hugged one another. I think Major Billy Donaldson even kissed me on both cheeks, but charitably I attributed this to the drink.
Next morning we all assembled outside the hotel. Our numbers had been swollen overnight by the arrival of two hundred souls on the second Ilyushin. (The Ilyushin we'd come in, and a Tupolev, had already flown back north to Magadan.) The pilot of the second Ilyushin, a Captain Tom Quinn, had come into town to see the place and get some sleep. This rather annoyed me, since he should have stayed at the airport, but his sheer boyish exuberance won me over.
"It's like landing on Mars! Yes, sir, on the red planet itself! You know," he confided, "I was a bit nervous, piloting that Commie crate. But it was just as if that old plane flew herself. Cooool." He was wearing some dead Soviet pilot's uniform, with the Order of Soviet Aviation pinned to its breast.
"That's very nice, Captain. Now please get the hell back to the airport, would you?"
Today was railroad day. The Trans-Siberian called us. So we all piled into trucks and buses and headed off up Karl Marx Street toward Khabarovsk's train station.
As we rode, somebody started singing "When the Saints Come Marching In," and everyone joined in. Then, as our convoy was crossing Lenin Square, somehow the song changed itself into "Maryland, My Maryland." Everyone seemed to have forgotten the words and just carried on humming the tune loudly in harmony.
Oh Mary, my Mary! Mary had done wonders with our breakfasts. And the hot coffee . . . I kissed my fingers.
". . . people's flag is deepest red!" I heard a single
voice sing out amidst the humming. I glared at the man, and he shut up.
There were a lot of red flags hanging about. I presumed all that kind of paraphernalia would have to stay around for a while. And this set me to thinking about melting down all the statues of that man into something useful, such as coins, and about how good it would be to have change jingling in my pocket again, even though everything was free for the time being.
"Hey, Hank," I called. "What do you suppose we're going to do about money?"
Hank pulled out a bundle of ruble notes from his pocket. He laughed.