Eug. Yevtushenko. Bezvozrastny age
Posted 18-07-2012 at 10:56 by Вадим Алексеев
One day I fell in love with the portrait.
It is difficult to believe this, but it was not my own.
It was a photograph of a woman twenty years, taken sixty years ago.
It looks like Anna Karenina, Scarlett O'Hara Madame Bovary, and at the same time.
Her eyes were full of expectation of something, but what exactly - she herself seems vaguely represented.
She was the face of a woman who still does not like, but is ready to fall in love.
Perhaps she imagined that this "someone" is about to appear from behind a corner.
However, if you look into the Her eyes, deep inside the golden sparks advance lover expectations you may have noticed the sad blue glow is a dying flame, which is so afraid to die, leaving behind only ash is gradually cooling off.
But even predranennaya bitter misgivings, this woman has not lost the courage to believe that youth and love are immortal, in spite of so many of their murderers, one of them - death.
- This is your daughter? - Unable to tear look of the portrait, I asked an octogenarian American, in whose house was completely by accident on the way to Florida.
- I have no daughter. This is me ... she - she said simply, without sighs. - Why you have been looking at this portrait?
- I may have never seen such a beautiful person - I said, quite sincerely.
She took off her portrait from the wall and gave it to me.
This portrait of a couple of years he lived on the wall of my home in Oklahoma, as the image of my unfulfilled love, as a symbol of purity, which can not stick any dirt. When I realized that the eighty-year-old - this is it for the first time I have not found anything in common between her and the young woman. But after a hour and a half, more or less superficial conversation over a cup of tea is a youthful face began to appear little by little through the wrinkles. It was like a restoration of the church when the alien through the bedding colors, scribbled "brush sleepy" artist-barbarian, slowly begin to exude traits of the original masterpiece.
I met this woman in two years when she came to stay with his son archaeologist, to Oklahoma, where I taught, and now she behaved with me very differently, because now I belonged to precious to her tiny circle of people who remembered how beautiful she was, and her knowledge about my knowledge of her beauty making it closer and closer to her own portrait.
One day a young cynic sarcastically described to me a golden wedding, where two have lived together for fifty years, kissed and hugged, looked at each other eyes full of happy tears.
- cheap vaudeville - a young cynic muttered derisively.
unfortunate people. I think that cynicism - it is a secret form of envy.
That's why cynics always try izdevnutsya over those who have the dignity not to join them to you like this clan. That's why they can see in the so-called "old people" only old people, not being able to see the young faces, wrinkles shy protected from ridicule. Cynics can not imagine that these two, when they look at the golden wedding in each other's eyes, they see no wrinkles, no gray hair, and your favorite person, untouched by age.
These people - and there are the most expensive heirlooms, saved in the depths of hell relentlessly aging. This is the charm bezvozrastnogo age.
Once, when I was still young, I went with my girlfriend late at night, under a soft, large Moscow snowfall. Suddenly, for myself, I stood and pulled her friend's hand, and we clung to the wall, trying to merge with it. The drifts, filled up the sidewalk, moving two smoky figures, wrapped in a white mist. It was Pasternak and his love
Olga and Winski. Pasternak was a child laughing stselovyvaya snowflakes from her cheeks, eyelashes. At this point I'm stunned to realize that he was well over sixty, and I whispered to her friend of his recently written lines devoted Ivinskaya:
You just discard a dress,
As Grove clears leaves,
When you fall into the arms in a silk robe with a brush.
- and when you will be as old as Pasternak, you can love me the same way ? - I asked my friend.
- Of course! - Without a doubt I cried.
We are not married, and eventually broke up.
But I lied to her then.
I still love it, as I love all those whom I loved once.
Maybe it will not let me feel old. Fortunately, I never knew what this famous "love-hate." With horror I see around me ex-lovers in each other people who have poured mud at each other. These ex-couples do not realize that they steal it from themselves a great chance to bezvozrastnogo age.
Like all of us, I'm a very good guide to all the other - but not himself.
Some are not the most intelligent people to whom I refer as well as himself, the fear of old age, even stronger than the fear of death.
In my early youth I have tried hard to look older than himself and shamelessly lied inventing non-existent experience in love, ingeniously depicting on his face, untouched by a razor, no kisses, satiety.
In the postwar golodnovatoy and poorly dressed Moscow among naive students were quite fashionable to boast of sexual sophistication.
A fifteen-year-girl - I am sure that the innocent - traded kisses for a ruble apiece, and for three rubles left in adolescents on the breast crimson and blue passionately that we wear proudly as the order of love. One day, naked from the waist up, I washed in our communal kitchen, forgetting that my chest was the whole show. All our neighbors have forgotten your shipyashie pans and stared at me. My mother saw this on my chest Papuan tattoos made girlish lips, trying to be demonically impassioned, took a wet rag and dirty on the merits of the cross over me, it more than once. Then I did not know English sayings of the wise: "Young people think old people - fools. But older people know that they are not fools, and young people ».
When I was thirty years, the first time I proudly revealed the secret of my age, no longer pretending to be older. But my pride was short, despite the fact that all my life I tried to celebrate all the world, trying to find any reasons to peers - especially birthdays - mine and others.
I hate standing gatherings like at a flea market business cards.
I like many peers with strong chairs, a long metaphorical toast, where the biblical wisdom mixed with grandiloquent richness of expression of some marginal beer. I love it when many of the tables are joined into one, and their legs from the medieval podgibayutsya of snacks when you do not have to wait humbly, that the waiter in white gloves kindly notice your empty glass and fill it out haughtily charity. I love this landscape a feast, when all the bottles on the table, trembling, yearn for that moment when your hand is finally embrace their crystal waist. Although this Rabelaisian landscape is more than I can replace the simple Russian gatherings anywhere in the kitchenette, with anchovies, black nyashechkoy and vodka - if only in good company.
I do not understand how such a rablezianets as I could get permission to teach in the U.S., based Puritans, although they could not imagine the antics of some of their descendants.
So, my thirtieth birthday I celebrated with a childish boasting. My fortieth - with relative optimism. But as it happened, I turned sixty, - I have not figured out, and still can not understand logically and physiologically.
I did not hide my age, but I started to try to hold back it. Me and my age started to live like Siamese twins, trying to ignore each other, but my age at times tactless reminder of his.
Once on the Siberian market, I and my wife Maria, which is slightly younger than me, and how many years - it's our family secret, chose a watermelon. When we chose it, I started to bargain, because without this market - no market. But the stubborn oriental man said with a sweet ehidtsey:
- How can you negotiate in the presence of such a charming daughter! ..
Thank God, Mary was found.
- You are mistaken, - she said. - This is my adopted son.
Not so long ago, I rode standing in the crowded subway car on the line F in New York, while on the line segment, it was already quite a relative in New York. The car was stuffed all of humanity - the Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Africans, Italians, Greeks, Poles, Latinos, and even some of the creatures from the Red Book - Anglo-Saxon origin. Among the readers of tabloids suddenly - especially in the interval between the metro stations and in-odhaven Jamaica - I saw sitting a girl who read a little-known French writer in the United States, in which I have just recently, but forever in love - Romain Gary. He wrote about aging, but also young women inside, perhaps, as no one before him. I almost do not remember him from memory entire chunks:
«When I gave Mademoiselle Cora bouquet of flowers, she immediately plunged her smiling face in the me-nots, and at this point, because it is very thin, fragile waist, saving feminine figure, and because her face was covered with flowers, whose scent is inhaled, it looked like a girl irresistible. But when she lifted her face, it was easy to see how life is ruthlessly drove through it. I immediately took her hand, trying to help her feel that cross age does not matter. I do not care for age - sixty-three or sixty-five, - because it does not matter how old Royal Bengal tigers and beautiful in its enormity whales. We know only one of them - these wondrous creation is in danger, that in relation to them, there are discrimination and predatory destruction. Similarly, there is discrimination with respect to age. In this sense, I am ready to defend all life, without any exception, including tech. anyone who dares to call the "old", thereby destroying them.
It was written by Romain Gary, and perhaps the girl sitting opposite me on the subway, reading these lines.
< br /> She was crying. But she was not ashamed of their own tears. No one laughed at her, one ironically did not comment on its neighbor, tears in his ear. Perhaps some of the passengers looked at her with some envy, because all people want to cry sometimes, but only few have the courage for this. Especially when others weep. Especially in the subway. Especially on this line segment F in New York.
Overcoming daunting set of family rights and husband of almost flawless, I took a step toward the girl.
At this point, the car jolted and I almost fell on her, she apparently regarded as a weak old man, who can not stand on its own feet. She stood up and politely invited me to his place. It was the worst disaster in my life.
And when I found one book of the seventeenth century - I do not remember whose - a sad joke: "At fifty you start to get tired of death around the world, and when you are sixty , the world is dead tired of you, "I'm depressed.
Fortunately, I soon stumbled upon the saving words of Oscar Wilde, restored my peace of mind:
« The tragedy of old age in the that it does not exist ».
I looked around and suddenly I saw a shy old mystery.
It is that" there is no age ».
Some people, violent young eyes look like old men, in fact, can not love less, sometimes more than the young - but they hide it, for fear of being ridiculous.
There is a nostalgia for old people for the young.
But you can not interpret it only as lolitizm or kerubinizm.
This is a primitive and even insulting.
A semi-womanizer told me, " If you are a true gentleman, marry only girls who half younger than you, because it is very cruel - to see how our favorite age. " But what do you do when you love a young girl her age or even older? Do not marry her just because she is old before you do?
When elderly people are in love, love makes them young again.
My Uncle Andrew, the great Siberian driver, once said to me:
- Up to forty we are going to the fair, nephew, and after forty - from the fair.
He himself was then a little over fifty.
I asked him:
- Well, how are you feeling?
He grinned:
- And so, nephew that one my leg still rushing to the fair and the other - has returned from the fair.
I wanted to know:
- Well, and the result?
He shrugged his shoulders.
- And such a result, the nephew, the pain in a certain place ... Still think that the fair is not somewhere where we were going, and within us.
depends on us, what to choose - a life-or life-funeral feast.
Link to original
It is difficult to believe this, but it was not my own.
It was a photograph of a woman twenty years, taken sixty years ago.
It looks like Anna Karenina, Scarlett O'Hara Madame Bovary, and at the same time.
Her eyes were full of expectation of something, but what exactly - she herself seems vaguely represented.
She was the face of a woman who still does not like, but is ready to fall in love.
Perhaps she imagined that this "someone" is about to appear from behind a corner.
However, if you look into the Her eyes, deep inside the golden sparks advance lover expectations you may have noticed the sad blue glow is a dying flame, which is so afraid to die, leaving behind only ash is gradually cooling off.
But even predranennaya bitter misgivings, this woman has not lost the courage to believe that youth and love are immortal, in spite of so many of their murderers, one of them - death.
- This is your daughter? - Unable to tear look of the portrait, I asked an octogenarian American, in whose house was completely by accident on the way to Florida.
- I have no daughter. This is me ... she - she said simply, without sighs. - Why you have been looking at this portrait?
- I may have never seen such a beautiful person - I said, quite sincerely.
She took off her portrait from the wall and gave it to me.
This portrait of a couple of years he lived on the wall of my home in Oklahoma, as the image of my unfulfilled love, as a symbol of purity, which can not stick any dirt. When I realized that the eighty-year-old - this is it for the first time I have not found anything in common between her and the young woman. But after a hour and a half, more or less superficial conversation over a cup of tea is a youthful face began to appear little by little through the wrinkles. It was like a restoration of the church when the alien through the bedding colors, scribbled "brush sleepy" artist-barbarian, slowly begin to exude traits of the original masterpiece.
I met this woman in two years when she came to stay with his son archaeologist, to Oklahoma, where I taught, and now she behaved with me very differently, because now I belonged to precious to her tiny circle of people who remembered how beautiful she was, and her knowledge about my knowledge of her beauty making it closer and closer to her own portrait.
One day a young cynic sarcastically described to me a golden wedding, where two have lived together for fifty years, kissed and hugged, looked at each other eyes full of happy tears.
- cheap vaudeville - a young cynic muttered derisively.
unfortunate people. I think that cynicism - it is a secret form of envy.
That's why cynics always try izdevnutsya over those who have the dignity not to join them to you like this clan. That's why they can see in the so-called "old people" only old people, not being able to see the young faces, wrinkles shy protected from ridicule. Cynics can not imagine that these two, when they look at the golden wedding in each other's eyes, they see no wrinkles, no gray hair, and your favorite person, untouched by age.
These people - and there are the most expensive heirlooms, saved in the depths of hell relentlessly aging. This is the charm bezvozrastnogo age.
Once, when I was still young, I went with my girlfriend late at night, under a soft, large Moscow snowfall. Suddenly, for myself, I stood and pulled her friend's hand, and we clung to the wall, trying to merge with it. The drifts, filled up the sidewalk, moving two smoky figures, wrapped in a white mist. It was Pasternak and his love
Olga and Winski. Pasternak was a child laughing stselovyvaya snowflakes from her cheeks, eyelashes. At this point I'm stunned to realize that he was well over sixty, and I whispered to her friend of his recently written lines devoted Ivinskaya:
You just discard a dress,
As Grove clears leaves,
When you fall into the arms in a silk robe with a brush.
- and when you will be as old as Pasternak, you can love me the same way ? - I asked my friend.
- Of course! - Without a doubt I cried.
We are not married, and eventually broke up.
But I lied to her then.
I still love it, as I love all those whom I loved once.
Maybe it will not let me feel old. Fortunately, I never knew what this famous "love-hate." With horror I see around me ex-lovers in each other people who have poured mud at each other. These ex-couples do not realize that they steal it from themselves a great chance to bezvozrastnogo age.
Like all of us, I'm a very good guide to all the other - but not himself.
Some are not the most intelligent people to whom I refer as well as himself, the fear of old age, even stronger than the fear of death.
In my early youth I have tried hard to look older than himself and shamelessly lied inventing non-existent experience in love, ingeniously depicting on his face, untouched by a razor, no kisses, satiety.
In the postwar golodnovatoy and poorly dressed Moscow among naive students were quite fashionable to boast of sexual sophistication.
A fifteen-year-girl - I am sure that the innocent - traded kisses for a ruble apiece, and for three rubles left in adolescents on the breast crimson and blue passionately that we wear proudly as the order of love. One day, naked from the waist up, I washed in our communal kitchen, forgetting that my chest was the whole show. All our neighbors have forgotten your shipyashie pans and stared at me. My mother saw this on my chest Papuan tattoos made girlish lips, trying to be demonically impassioned, took a wet rag and dirty on the merits of the cross over me, it more than once. Then I did not know English sayings of the wise: "Young people think old people - fools. But older people know that they are not fools, and young people ».
When I was thirty years, the first time I proudly revealed the secret of my age, no longer pretending to be older. But my pride was short, despite the fact that all my life I tried to celebrate all the world, trying to find any reasons to peers - especially birthdays - mine and others.
I hate standing gatherings like at a flea market business cards.
I like many peers with strong chairs, a long metaphorical toast, where the biblical wisdom mixed with grandiloquent richness of expression of some marginal beer. I love it when many of the tables are joined into one, and their legs from the medieval podgibayutsya of snacks when you do not have to wait humbly, that the waiter in white gloves kindly notice your empty glass and fill it out haughtily charity. I love this landscape a feast, when all the bottles on the table, trembling, yearn for that moment when your hand is finally embrace their crystal waist. Although this Rabelaisian landscape is more than I can replace the simple Russian gatherings anywhere in the kitchenette, with anchovies, black nyashechkoy and vodka - if only in good company.
I do not understand how such a rablezianets as I could get permission to teach in the U.S., based Puritans, although they could not imagine the antics of some of their descendants.
So, my thirtieth birthday I celebrated with a childish boasting. My fortieth - with relative optimism. But as it happened, I turned sixty, - I have not figured out, and still can not understand logically and physiologically.
I did not hide my age, but I started to try to hold back it. Me and my age started to live like Siamese twins, trying to ignore each other, but my age at times tactless reminder of his.
Once on the Siberian market, I and my wife Maria, which is slightly younger than me, and how many years - it's our family secret, chose a watermelon. When we chose it, I started to bargain, because without this market - no market. But the stubborn oriental man said with a sweet ehidtsey:
- How can you negotiate in the presence of such a charming daughter! ..
Thank God, Mary was found.
- You are mistaken, - she said. - This is my adopted son.
Not so long ago, I rode standing in the crowded subway car on the line F in New York, while on the line segment, it was already quite a relative in New York. The car was stuffed all of humanity - the Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Africans, Italians, Greeks, Poles, Latinos, and even some of the creatures from the Red Book - Anglo-Saxon origin. Among the readers of tabloids suddenly - especially in the interval between the metro stations and in-odhaven Jamaica - I saw sitting a girl who read a little-known French writer in the United States, in which I have just recently, but forever in love - Romain Gary. He wrote about aging, but also young women inside, perhaps, as no one before him. I almost do not remember him from memory entire chunks:
«When I gave Mademoiselle Cora bouquet of flowers, she immediately plunged her smiling face in the me-nots, and at this point, because it is very thin, fragile waist, saving feminine figure, and because her face was covered with flowers, whose scent is inhaled, it looked like a girl irresistible. But when she lifted her face, it was easy to see how life is ruthlessly drove through it. I immediately took her hand, trying to help her feel that cross age does not matter. I do not care for age - sixty-three or sixty-five, - because it does not matter how old Royal Bengal tigers and beautiful in its enormity whales. We know only one of them - these wondrous creation is in danger, that in relation to them, there are discrimination and predatory destruction. Similarly, there is discrimination with respect to age. In this sense, I am ready to defend all life, without any exception, including tech. anyone who dares to call the "old", thereby destroying them.
It was written by Romain Gary, and perhaps the girl sitting opposite me on the subway, reading these lines.
< br /> She was crying. But she was not ashamed of their own tears. No one laughed at her, one ironically did not comment on its neighbor, tears in his ear. Perhaps some of the passengers looked at her with some envy, because all people want to cry sometimes, but only few have the courage for this. Especially when others weep. Especially in the subway. Especially on this line segment F in New York.
Overcoming daunting set of family rights and husband of almost flawless, I took a step toward the girl.
At this point, the car jolted and I almost fell on her, she apparently regarded as a weak old man, who can not stand on its own feet. She stood up and politely invited me to his place. It was the worst disaster in my life.
And when I found one book of the seventeenth century - I do not remember whose - a sad joke: "At fifty you start to get tired of death around the world, and when you are sixty , the world is dead tired of you, "I'm depressed.
Fortunately, I soon stumbled upon the saving words of Oscar Wilde, restored my peace of mind:
« The tragedy of old age in the that it does not exist ».
I looked around and suddenly I saw a shy old mystery.
It is that" there is no age ».
Some people, violent young eyes look like old men, in fact, can not love less, sometimes more than the young - but they hide it, for fear of being ridiculous.
There is a nostalgia for old people for the young.
But you can not interpret it only as lolitizm or kerubinizm.
This is a primitive and even insulting.
A semi-womanizer told me, " If you are a true gentleman, marry only girls who half younger than you, because it is very cruel - to see how our favorite age. " But what do you do when you love a young girl her age or even older? Do not marry her just because she is old before you do?
When elderly people are in love, love makes them young again.
My Uncle Andrew, the great Siberian driver, once said to me:
- Up to forty we are going to the fair, nephew, and after forty - from the fair.
He himself was then a little over fifty.
I asked him:
- Well, how are you feeling?
He grinned:
- And so, nephew that one my leg still rushing to the fair and the other - has returned from the fair.
I wanted to know:
- Well, and the result?
He shrugged his shoulders.
- And such a result, the nephew, the pain in a certain place ... Still think that the fair is not somewhere where we were going, and within us.
depends on us, what to choose - a life-or life-funeral feast.
Link to original
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