Red Star

Chapter 18

26.05.78, Friday (my 96th day in the USSR)

I was released from the hospital on Friday, may 19. Before that, they twisted and shone under a bunch of devices and took all the tests that could be taken! Every doctor and nurse felt it their duty to Pat me on the head and treat me to something delicious. I smiled at everyone and did not refuse anything delicious. What for? After all, people from the bottom of their hearts. Rumors about the "wounded hero" spread around the hospital immediately, and the visit of the first Secretary of the regional Committee and the Deputy Minister of the interior to the boy's room was, in principle, impossible to hide.

In the hospital, my mother was discharged from the hospital "for child care", although I was already 14 years old, but since I had an operation, it turns out that it is necessary. We played cards, chess, and dominoes with her all day long. Since Wednesday, I was allowed to get up, so there were also walks in the huge hospital Park.

Lech came every day and, if he wasn't working, sat in the ward and walked with us all day. Twice came with fruit Releev, lied, that the fruit from the Motherland, probably bought in the market. However, I could have opened a fruit stall in my ward anyway, because my grandfather and Lech had brought so much stuff. Nor did the hospital food suffer from scarcity or monotony.

According to my memories of my "first childhood", there was no such variety in an ordinary hospital, where I had to be a couple of times. Although the food was decent too. But "sverdlovka" fed its patients tasty, healthy and plentiful!

I recovered very quickly. On the one hand, the care was the best, on the other - the wound, after all, was not heavy, the warm jacket held the blade and it went into me not too deep. And the antibiotics I ate on my own were probably very useful. No complications were observed.

Vladimir Mikhailovich was very happy with the course of treatment and also often "hung out" in my room, because we had fun! Often there were card tournaments on the game of "fool". They played mostly "couple for a couple". And if my mom and a couple Releev-Leh butchered by "nut", I am Lekha, in the end, lost to a pair of Mama-Vladimir M. with a total score of 13 : 22! But he took a revenge from a pair of mom-grandpa 25 : 17. In short, to me personally in the hospital was fun!

My mother also quickly calmed down, because she saw me more than cheerful and constantly heard from Vladimir Mikhailovich assurances that I was quickly recovering and all the tests were "well, just cosmic"!

So at lunchtime on Friday, Vladimir Mikhailovich finally found it possible to send me home. There were no complications, infection was avoided, the stitches were removed on Thursday, and the wound, to be honest, was light, nothing important was touched.

After saying a warm goodbye to the medical staff who came to see me off, we drove home in Lekhin's Moskvich.

I had to spend the weekend at home, and from Monday I was ready to go back to school, finish the school year. Although Vladimir Mikhailovich hinted that he could prescribe me a home regime. But I didn't want to be stuck in four walls at all, and it was wonderful Sunny weather outside and the temperature rose under 20 degrees during the day.

So I insisted on going to school. The doctor did not resist, because he also considered me to be quite healthy. None of the higher-UPS in the hospital visited me again, and I was already planning how to keep them from forgetting about me.

***

It's a bust, I forget...

In school I was equal to the epic heroes of Ancient Greece! About my battle with "Pecuniam", otherwise no one called, knew everything. And much better than me and with such details that I almost "cry" when they "hear". From laughter!

There was the blade that was hidden in the glove, insidiously "Pisey", and my stomach, pierced by the blow of his glove, and the poison that was put into my water, from which I died after the fight. The best Soviet doctors in the world, urgently summoned by Romanov from the Kremlin hospital, then, of course, saved the heroic me.

The enthusiastic delirium of classmates was interrupted only by a call to class!

No one said a word about the maniac. From which I concluded that I should also keep quiet about this.

At the beginning of each lesson, I listened to the next teacher congratulate me on my recovery and "championship", made a proper face and thanked him in return. By the end of classes, when the hype around my person began to slowly subside, in the middle of geography, the clearly excited head teacher, Lilia Olegovna, a tall, fat and very active lady "over thirty", barged into the class and took me with her "to the Director". The class buzzed excitedly at my back. "Lilka" didn't even turn around to make a comment!

In the office of the excited headmistress were five (!) journalists and two comrades "from the regional Committee", as I managed to "bring up to date", while walking down the corridor, out of breath the head teacher. The journalists greeted me and looked at me kindly, but with undisguised curiosity.

The long table in the Director's office was filled with cups of tea, a couple of vases held some cookies, and an open box of chocolates. I was also seated at this table and served tea.

One of the "obkom comrades", the one in the gray suit, first introduced the journalists. As the performance progressed, the headmistress became more and more uneasy, or at least that was what her face expressed.

A personable middle-aged man in a blue suit was his own correspondent for Sovetskaya Rossiya, a young man in a leather jacket and horn-rimmed glasses was a special correspondent for the Leningrad "shift", a red-haired, smiling fat woman in a pink jacket from Pionerskaya Pravda, a young pretty girl in jeans with a stern expression represented Komsomolskaya Pravda, and a tall, thin man with a hoarse voice and a smoky mustache was a correspondent for Leningradskaya Pravda. Large-caliber set of "pravd"! My size... Heh!

Then, already the second "obkom", in a black suit, said the introductory part:

- Comrades, here he is, the same Vitya Seleznev, a seventh-grader of this school, who was not afraid to engage in a fight with an armed criminal. The criminal was detained by the police, who arrived on Viktor's call. Vitya himself was wounded with a knife, but he hid it from everyone and the next day won the city Boxing competition "Golden gloves"... now it's yours-ask questions!

Turning to me, "obkomovets" smiled and looked intently into my eyes. I nodded, clearly no worse than the others.

While the journalists exchange glances to see who will start first, I catch the stunned faces of the Director and the head teacher out of the corner of my eye. Finally, the roles are distributed and the representative of the most solid publication - "Soviet Russia" - starts first. After clearing his throat and straightening the knot of his tie, he began:

"Vitya, please tell me what made you fight an adult and armed criminal?"

Everyone in the office was waiting for my answer with obvious interest.

I scratched my nose thoughtfully and muttered:

"Yes, I don't really know. I also thought about it a lot later. Somehow it just happened.

"Wasn't it scary?" - butted fat from the "Pioneers".

I laughed, under the surprised looks of the correspondents:

- Well, you can't write that I didn't just pee from fear!

- Seleznev! - the head teacher tried to rebuke me.

- Nothing, nothing-stopped her smiling Sobkor "Sovraski", other journalists also smiled, however, and "obkomovtsy" reacted calmly to my speech.

"So if it was so scary, why didn't you back off?" the plump woman climbed in again, undaunted by the stern gaze of the Soviet Russia correspondent.

"Uh," I said, rolling my eyes. To be honest, this meeting with journalists did not come as a surprise to me. I was hoping for something like this. I just thought that they would warn me in advance, start instructing me, it won't happen so soon and not at school, but here everything is so informal, or something... Although, it seems that journalists do not know everything, how not to blurt out too much, however, they will not print too much now, at the wrong time.

"I would have called someone, but there was no one there, so I had to do it myself...

- As we already told you, the criminal attacked the girl, wanted to take possession of the keys to the apartment to Rob her, but then Viktor intervened-a "regional Committee member" in a gray suit entered.

"Was there no need to warn me in advance about this version?" - I was surprised to myself, but outwardly nothing betrayed my surprise.

"So what made you overcome your fear and engage in a deadly and unequal battle?" - again took the reins of the conversation in their hands a writer of "Sourasky".

- So I was taught this everywhere at home, at school, in books, and in pioneers: we must help the weak, we must fight evil, we must always come to the rescue. I don't see how I could have done anything else. That I should have run away? Would you leave a girl without help? I asked him a question.

The reporter gave me a smart look and didn't answer right away. He twirled the gold-plumed pen between his fingers and finally said softly,

" I'm an adult, I'd have a better chance."

- And I'm not an adult yet, but I didn't run away either, - I said in a hollow voice, stubbornly bowed my head and played with my jaw muscles "in public".

Impressed. All further conversation proceeded in the atmosphere of "friendship and mutual understanding". The journalists were already asking questions without any queue, interrupting each other. They were interested in everything: how I study, what I'm interested in, what books I read, why I started Boxing, how I'm going to spend the summer, etc.

When correspondents began to ask about their parents, "obkomovtsy" noticeably strained, but I had the sense to say that my father died in a fighter plane crash, told about my mother and smoothly switched to my grandfather, a veteran of the great Patriotic war. I remembered an incident from his military biography.

My grandfather met the war at the Main naval headquarters of the Navy and from there was sent to the Caspian flotilla, which provided vital oil transportation along the Caspian sea. He served as an Executive officer on an air defense ship.

Once, during another fierce German RAID, communication between the bridge and the engine room was interrupted, and the captain ordered his grandfather to immediately find out the reason. Grandfather went down to the engine room, the connection was quickly restored, and he ran back to the bridge. It should be noted that the battle was actively going on all this time. Grandfather went up to the bridge and saw that the captain was still at his post, standing with his legs wide apart and holding fast to the rail, only... without a head. The line from the Junkers just cut it off.

"I asked him,' what about you? 'and he said,' what about me?' I stood next to him and took care of everything. I remember this very well, especially since my grandfather never told me anything else about the war.

The journalists listened to the story carefully, even stopped writing. They paused to pay tribute to the great past. Then a pretty correspondent of Komsomolskaya Pravda timidly asked her first question:

- Vitya, tell me, do you have any Hobbies other than sports? her face is calm and deliberately strict, probably trying to compensate for her youth, and her blush betrays her excitement.

"Pretty girl", - I thought - " I would have her uh..., but with this I still have eh...".

- There is, Vera. I write poems, mostly songs, and I try to compose music for them myself - when I called her by name, she blushed all over. God, what a time it is now, how we did not appreciate it and incompetently wasted it... what girls - all blushed, from the fact that I remembered her name. And this is a journalist! Opensource projects, eh...

While Vera was silent, her colleagues immediately got in, again excited. Well, of course... Boxer and poems, what is not a reason for surprise! It's already worked for me once, with your brothers... Naturally, among other things, requests to read or sing something immediately followed. Since I hadn't prepared for the meeting at all, I could only remember marsh's words, which I had memorized for the conversation with Lech.

I apologized in advance for the lack of voice and musical accompaniment (I lied about the voice, I'm fine with it!) I began to sing softly, tapping my palms on the edge of the table:

We stand on guard, platoons and by companies,

Immortal as the fire, calm as a granite.

We are the army of the country, we are the army of the people,

The great feat of our history stores!

They stopped writing again and are listening carefully. "Obkomovtsy", hearing such true, in the ideological sense of the word, smile like twin brothers.

And I'm already tapping out the chorus louder and more rhythmically:

Not for nothing in the fate of the red banner!

Not for nothing does the country hope for us, (PA-PA-PA - PA-imitating wind instruments)

We remember the sacred words "Moscow is behind us!" from the

time of Borodin.

I sing the song to the end. As soon as I stop talking, everyone in the office, including both "obkomovtsy", the Director and the head teacher begin to sincerely clap and smile!

For the next fifteen minutes, we play dictation at school, I dictate the words, and the correspondents diligently write them down. I modestly inform you that I would like to see this March performed by the Alexandrov choir, and then even more modestly add :

- during the parade on red square! - everyone laughs, and the "obkom" who in a gray suit says:

- with such a March, it is not shameful to pass through red square.

The reporters nod in agreement.

The March, after the story about the veteran grandfather, sounded very organic, and that's why it was such a success, but then again Vera took a chance with the question:

- Do you have any other songs on any topic? the reporters stared at me again.

"Damn you, you restless fool!" - I swore at the cute guy, mentally of course, and thought about it myself, then, also mentally, I neighed and already aloud, carefully copying the Guba intonation, I sang:

Vera, yesterday we were together,

yesterday we knew

How difficult it would be for us to part with you, Vera

And wait for a new meeting day after day.

Vera, when will I see you again now?

Who knows, maybe it's love?

And I haven't been able to tell you the most important thing yet,

just a few words to You!

The cheerful laughter of others and Verin's spreading blush were the reward for my joke. Actually, there was nothing particularly surprising in a successful joke. A few days ago, I began to form a "folder" in my iPhone with songs that I could "become famous" with, and the Guba thing was melodious, tearful and ideologically neutral. So I not only put it in the "folder", but, of course, listened to it a couple of times, through headphones, and my memory did not fail.

- What was the original name in the song? - having stopped laughing, the moustache from "Leningradskaya Pravda" asked.

"Whatever it is, now this song will always have the name 'Vera' in it," I replied gallantly and pompously, and made a bow to the embarrassed Vera. Well, as I could - sitting down!

Everyone laughed again. I decided to "forge until..." and continued to develop my success:

- And I also have a song for our Leningrad singer Lyudmila Senchina, I think it will be no worse than "Cinderella"!

"Sharks of the feather" immediately wanted to listen to this song, but then I was already adamant, saying that it would be fair if the singer herself heard this song first. Quite unexpectedly, I was supported by "gray Abramovic" and the theme songs closed.

We talked for another half an hour, the journalists wanted to know where I was going to go after school, whether I wanted to become an Olympic champion or a poet and composer, whether I planned to go to the police and catch criminals?

I got off as well as I could: I do sports for myself, no one has sung my songs yet, and I still have three years to study at school. As for the police, I'm thinking about it, because criminals and murderers should not interfere with honest people and generally be. In short, the criminal should be in jail, period!

Soon our meeting came to an end. But my ordeal didn't end there. In the school yard, the correspondents were waiting for the "Rafiq" and the black "Volga", and along with the drivers, a photojournalist was Smoking there. So I had to pose for him for a while with different facial expressions and in different poses! However, "adult I" well understood that the camera needed, so they coped quickly.

We parted very friendly, in fact, as we communicated.

Tram-pam-pam!!! And Verochka gave me her phone number and asked me to " dictate the words of the song, well..."... with my name on it!"

I enthusiastically shouted "assssa" and started dancing lezginka around the school yard, holding a dagger in my teeth. Mentally, of course!

That was the end of it...