Two stories that, without any decisions from the higher courts, have codified me for the rest of my life: return what belongs to someone else, even if you don’t know who it belongs to. Or suffer with it for the rest of your life.
There was an international book fair in Minsk, Evgeniy Vodolazkin and I spoke about their novel Brisbane. At the beginning there was a significant episode: a woman with a laurel came up to the writer and asked him to sign the book for her mother, who was very ill, but they believed that after a mental and prayerful autograph on a book about a saint who performed miracles, everything would get better.
And within the genre. There was a conversation between a charming intellectual and a wonderful audience of fans. But the unexpected happened: in the next booth a presentation of songs based on poems by modern poets began. We were drowned by the cannonade of the soundtrack.
What… give up and leave? There’s no point in talking. I can’t hear anything.
I still admire Evgeniy Germanovich: he suddenly starts quietly singing “Kupalenka” in Belarusian. I haven’t seen many miracles in the world, but then a miracle happened. Random people, but as if the famous Belarusian Tikotsky choir had sung, began to sing quietly but powerfully, people began to flock to us from all the stands. We have become a force. That video is still circulating on social networks.
Then there was a good dialogue between good people. I don’t remember, in response to which question, Evgeniy Germanovich suddenly told how he once came from St. Petersburg to Moscow, to a press conference at TASS, then went out onto Tverskoy Boulevard and saw a dollar bill in the snow. Since then, he jokes, when he comes to Moscow, he looks at the snowdrifts: what if?…
And suddenly a reader appears, delicately in disagreement: “But I never want to find money!” The whole town turns to her inquisitively: “Because I always imagine the pain of those who lost them.”
Nothing else happened to me that day.
I will always remember the episode that rhymes with now. A sunny day on the banks of the Neman River, native to Belarus: with a Moscow family on vacation, with their parents still alive, happiness in the air, wandering through a meadow with daisies: girl, daughter, mother… And I find three Soviet rubles. Folded into a small square.
I still think he was a shepherd who looked after the village cows (they paid up to three rubles a day!!!) and accidentally lost them in a fragrant meadow where honey plants resounded…
Can you imagine their pain?
How many years have passed, but how I would like to return those three rubles and be happy about it.
