Horrible overload.
Kid...
leave us for a minute.
Why aren't you saving yourself?
Foolish. That's harlem's style.
What will be with us, Vovochka?
God, what can i do? Consider it yourself:
they're dreadful people, dreadful and merciless.
They eat two-inch screws and not a single teeth cracks.
And what should i do? Like Tolik put with a tool on everything?
I knew for sure that perestroika would tread out everybody.
They have changed so many envoys.
I had such hope in Schewardnadze...
Hallo, Lizenka? That's me, Vovik.
Why am i breathing so [heavily]?
Why, why? It's a dog's life, Liza. Dog's life, Lizenka.
No, no, i didn't manage to go to the market.
Bananas?
Are we gonna eat bananas?
Yes, i bought. Two kilogramms.
Kisses.
There now, i understand everything...but can do nothing.
Sardanapal, you arrogant asian,
why did my wardrobe serve you as living place?
We're walking through the streets and whistling
calling everybody to distand paradise garden.
Their specific minds have gone stale
during process of consuming products
What do they care that your cousin conductor
is prince royal of Ufa and Kostroma.
Have we gotten on your nerves much?
No.
It's bad to be alone.
Yes. Do you want me to show you a trick?
OK.
That's all?
What will you do next?
I want to go to Leningrad. There's a military school.
Are you in your own mind? Why the hell do you need this dirty business?
Look, people want to get out of there, sign themselves
in mental hospitals and so on.
But you want to put on bearing-rein for your whole life.
Mother wanted so.
What did mother want? That you spent best years of you live
with empty head on the field?
Always ready to execute every order of every authority?
Mother wanted me to become and officer in the honour of grandfather.
He was engineer-admiral.
You said he was a white guard? Or perhaps in honour of
white guards she wanted to hand you over to soviet army?
Her brother was a white guard. Now he lives in France. He writes such letters
for forty years already, scarry to read them. Huge anti-sovietism.
He stayed in the free Europe while kids were still little, but my mother was brough up by his younger brother.
He is something like second grandfather to me.
Yes, you're classical grandson of no one.
Anyway, do as you know.
Mother said that he was the only honest man she saw in her whole life.
He worked in system of communications. Before war he wrote a letter
to Stalin that there's completely no communicatins between ground and military planes.
There's such backwardness, Hitler has radio, but we wave hands:
One hand's wave - attack from the left, two hand's waves - attack from the right.
Stalin talked with necessary people and they decided to put grandfather
in jail for insubordination or for espionage.
They took him directly out of work, in full uniform
with orders. Investigator was young kid (mother told me
but grandfather told her) in the beginning of conversation
knocked out all his teeth with a chair but he nevertheless
adressed him with "You" during whole interrogation.
Then the war started. In three months time it became clear to Stalin
that grandfather was right. He was brought directly from penalty camp to Kremlin.
How much time do you need, Stalin asks, to set right air communications?
Gradfather answers: I don't know for sure...i can't tell exactly.
I have to wash myself at first, sleep, then put teeth in...but i think
half a year should be enough.
And did he set it right?
He did.
You can kill me, but i don't understand.
What?
Why didn't he then choke that son-of-a-bitch Stalin? They were eyeball to eyeball.
Why did he again work for him?
I, too, asked mother that. She said he told he hadn't worked for him.
I, grandfather says, am I, but WE are WE.
My father, too, told one silly story. He was brough to Red Square at night
when he was a little kid
and there was some window in Kremlin with light on.
There, he is told, Stalin is