Hell of an honor

  

Hell of an honor

Excerpt from the novel “God Steals Unnoticed”

 

 

To the 85th anniversary of the birth of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya

 

 

Our benches stand in hell, opposite a miserable sky, full of unbearable people, disgusting sycophants, gathered in circles that we usually do not attend; vulgar, miserable, petty, low, vile, they sing flattering carols in falsetto.

In hell both lofty poetry and words full of primordial power can be heard. In order not to fall into doubt, not to succumb to weakness, we must believe in hell, but this should also force us to make a firm decision: not to retreat, not to humiliate ourselves, to faithfully follow the dictates of our noble heart and not to enter into an agreement with a ruthless tyrant.

“Hello, dear comrade Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya! Please make sure that Nadya does not marry Igor Petrovich, he is disgusting. Nadya is only five years older than me, and she thinks that she is the smartest, she imagined. And I give an honest pioneer, that if you help me, I will embroider your portrait for the red corner, I swear to my mother. And that in mathematics I said a hooligan word, I didn’t know that it was hooligan, it was Lalka and Tanya who talked me into it.

 And that Tanya and I were looking at her brother Mitya’s pussy, I didn’t want to look at it, she came up with it. Aleftina Lachina, 7B.” Nadya did marry Igor even after the January events  1  I went with him to Gorky, and it served me right, why I let my friends persuade me and smoked half a cigarette with them in the school toilet. Even the day before, I couldn’t think that this would happen, the day when I placed a letter at the foot of the monument to the twenty-six Baku commissars. 

I couldn’t think of a better place, it was far from the monument to Zoya, although the commissars were also far from her, everyone was far from her, I knew this for sure in those thirteen years, and in the previous twelve I already knew it, and at eleven I knew it too . 

Let a sophisticated historian explain why in the Union, where it was difficult to surprise with heroism, Zoya was somehow special, and at the same time let him explain why she was special to me, because it’s me, I’m the best in the whole country (and therefore in the world) knew everything that happened, starting from October 26, 1941, when she, yesterday’s schoolgirl, future writer and philologist (which forever remained the future), appeared at the city committee and demanded to be included in the saboteur detachment, but they didn’t want to take her, “too fragile and beautiful for a saboteur,” the NKVD officer wrote down, but she insisted, and they took her, and from the Colosseum cinema, together with others in a covered truck, she went to military unit No. 9903. 

Because the cinema was the Colosseum, in my childhood imagination it was Roman, where giant cats were tearing up the comrades-in-arms of Spartacus, about whom I had read then in some Italian novel; Only in the Colosseum, full of the hot breath of African cats and the smell of gladiator blood, could my heroine come to her death. 

For some reason, it seemed to me that it was death, that everything was known in advance and unshakable, and the red flag over the Reichstag in 1945, and that Zoya went to great lengths to become a legend, because she deserved it, otherwise it would be couldn't. I would be offended by the thought that she could have stayed alive and just been a good person, she deserved better. And more happened. I remembered it by heart: Zoya received the task of setting fire to the village of Petrishchevo, where the Germans were stationed, and she managed to burn down three houses and escape from pursuit, but as a conscientious person she decided to complete the task to the end and, after waiting out the turmoil in the forest, she returned, although the danger had doubled, and was captured. 

There was probably something unconsciously cruel in my attitude towards the captive, I didn’t feel sorry for her, I didn’t dare to feel sorry for her, she was above that, you could feel sorry for a simple person, but here is a saint, a hero who could not die immediately and painlessly, she deserved more, and more came in full. They beat her and asked what was going on in Moscow, and whether it was true that Stalin had fled, and she answered: “Stalin is on duty,” but she didn’t say anything else, about her comrades in arms and so on, she didn’t even say her real name, she was tortured, they took her around in the cold in underwear and barefoot, achieved nothing and hanged her, but on the scaffold she turned to the people (then there were people, not a crowd), while the Germans stood in a circle, photographed her, and said that there was nothing to be afraid of the Germans, they They themselves are afraid of us, and that we will win, and she kept saying, then the box was knocked out from under her feet,she grabbed the rope, but they hit her hand, and she hung, and throughout December 1941 she swung in a noose, showered with snow, then a group of drunken fascists on the night of New Year tore off her clothes, cut her up and stabbed her with daggers and cut off her breasts, New Year's Eve, the villagers buried her, and then our people came, dug up her body, and her face turned out to be calm, as if sleeping, like Lermontov’s Tamara in a coffin (and the thirteenth stanza of “The Demon” for me was always about Zoya), and she became a legend, although I thought that she was born a legend, born to become one, to make a fairy tale come true, and I was dying of envy, white, snow-white, white-foamed envy, that there was no war, everything was fine and no one would subject me to torture and execution, because I too I can be a person, damn this is a bright future, where there is no way to become Kosmodemyanskaya, and even when I was accepted into the pioneers and we went to take pictures at the eternal flame of the twenty-six commissars, it seems I was already thinking about it. I was also terribly irritated by my own cheeks, their major bulges; they were (and remain) somehow not romantically cheerful. 

Although the main thing is that she was not fat, she would not have dared, she immediately lost weight: it was not fitting for a hero, a martyr to be fat. To the martyr. Now it is clear what was holy - martyrdom. How I despised all these ancient and medieval martyrs for the faith, from classical painting and grandfather’s books, printed with the letter “yat”. Having suffered for the allotted time, they received a ticket to heaven and left there without delay.

 Several hours of torture for eternal bliss is magnificent courage, it shakes the hearts of millions. I am a heartless person. At the place of execution, well-fed, pink-bottomed angels with wreaths of roses flew up to them, apparently in case the passion-bearer lost heart.

 More serious interferences in the course of events also occurred: severed heads grew back to the body, instruments of torture, defying the laws of physics, broke in the hands of the executioners. I also remember a certain Saint Inessa, from an album of Spanish paintings: she was undressed in public, but her hair miraculously grew back to her toes and covered interesting places, and onlookers broke off. A good topic for an advertising phrase: “Ascetics of the faith are not in danger of baldness.” My great martyr was not lured with a ticket to heaven, a priestly angel did not fly up with a bouquet, the gallows did not collapse and the rope did not break. Everything is according to the laws of physics, as taught in school. Frankly. When they stripped me for the flogging, the hair did not grow back. And the cut off breast did not come back. But the main thing is that there is no paradise, no crap - I would be sick if Zoya was fearless from waiting for heaven, smelling flowers from her angelic fleshy hands. There are no miracles, there is no immortality - I firmly believed in this, and therefore I wrote her a letter to heaven asking her not to let Nadya marry Igor, and Zoya would have done this if I had not smoked half a cigarette the next day. She is a real heroine, she did not need immortality, which does not exist, therefore she is immortal and can work miracles. There was iron childish logic, which my grown-upMy crusted mind is unable to comprehend, maybe I will still grow into it. Even at the age of fourteen I understood all this. And when I was fifteen, people howled around about the afterlife and the new martyred priests killed by the security officers in the twenties. I don’t know a damn thing about history, maybe someone was really killed there for nothing, but I was disgusted by the fact that these murdered people were now smelling the flowers of paradise. This was some kind of vague thorn in me - these are unimportant saints, I know higher ones, but now for some reason it is customary to praise these over there. Is there something wrong. And one more thing: after all, Zoya’s grandfather, a priest, rector of the temple, was executed in the twenties for fighting Soviet power, and every second in her family was a priest, and she thought that because of this they would not take her as a saboteur, they would not trust her, and she went through the offices, and achieved being sent to the front to fight for the Soviet country. 

How can we respect people like her grandfather, because they were opponents of the system that gave birth to Zoya, Vera Voloshina and Masha Golovotyukova. It was also not clear why they began to scold Pavlik Morozov, because Zoya was the same Pavlik in relation to her relatives, she included Pavlik entirely, I then already began to understand: she included all the best people of the Union, all their virtues, each of they are only a particle of it, and therefore here, in my country, it was special; but everything that was said now about history essentially went against it, and not understanding a damn thing about anything, I only saw that something bad, nasty was happening.

 And then, that is, around the same time, when American films were still a novelty, somewhere at a party they showed a film about Christ, creepy in the meticulousness with which his dying torments were presented. The director was a Hollywood Jew, apparently that’s why the Roman soldiers looked like SS men, the director presented them as German mercenaries, they cackled and exchanged words reminiscent of modern German. But not only this was from the story with Zoya, here almost all the details coincided literally, take eyewitnesses of Zoya’s interrogations and the biblical tradition: Jesus asks for a drink, and a sponge soaked in vinegar is brought to his mouth, and here it is: “She asked my husband for a drink. We asked: “Can I?” They said: “No,” and one of them, instead of water, raised a burning kerosene lamp without glass to his chin.”and achieved being sent to the front to fight for the Soviet country. 

How can we respect people like her grandfather, because they were opponents of the system that gave birth to Zoya, Vera Voloshina and Masha Golovotyukova. It was also not clear why they began to scold Pavlik Morozov, because Zoya was the same Pavlik in relation to her relatives, she included Pavlik entirely, I then already began to understand: she included all the best people of the Union, all their virtues, each of they are only a particle of it, and therefore here, in my country, it was special; but everything that was said now about history essentially went against it, and not understanding a damn thing about anything, I only saw that something bad, nasty was happening.

 And then, that is, around the same time, when American films were still a novelty, somewhere at a party they showed a film about Christ, creepy in the meticulousness with which his dying torments were presented. The director was a Hollywood Jew, apparently that’s why the Roman soldiers looked like SS men, the director presented them as German mercenaries, they cackled and exchanged words reminiscent of modern German. But not only this was from the story with Zoya, here almost all the details coincided literally, take eyewitnesses of Zoya’s interrogations and the biblical tradition: Jesus asks for a drink, and a sponge soaked in vinegar is brought to his mouth, and here it is: “She asked my husband for a drink. We asked: “Can I?” They said: “No,” and one of them, instead of water, raised a burning kerosene lamp without glass to his chin.”and achieved being sent to the front to fight for the Soviet country. 

How can we respect people like her grandfather, because they were opponents of the system that gave birth to Zoya, Vera Voloshina and Masha Golovotyukova. It was also not clear why they began to scold Pavlik Morozov, because Zoya was the same Pavlik in relation to her relatives, she included Pavlik entirely, I then already began to understand: she included all the best people of the Union, all their virtues, each of they are only a particle of it, and therefore here, in my country, it was special; but everything that was said now about history essentially went against it, and not understanding a damn thing about anything, I only saw that something bad, nasty was happening. 

And then, that is, around the same time, when American films were still a novelty, somewhere at a party they showed a film about Christ, creepy in the meticulousness with which his dying torments were presented. The director was a Hollywood Jew, apparently that’s why the Roman soldiers looked like SS men, the director presented them as German mercenaries, they cackled and exchanged words reminiscent of modern German.

 But not only this was from the story with Zoya, here almost all the details coincided literally, take eyewitnesses of Zoya’s interrogations and the biblical tradition: Jesus asks for a drink, and a sponge soaked in vinegar is brought to his mouth, and here it is: “She asked my husband for a drink. We asked: “Can I?” They said: “No,” and one of them, instead of water, raised a burning kerosene lamp without glass to his chin.” 2   or this legendary Roman centurion, who took pity on Christ, so it was: “... they assigned someone else to her. He was more conscientious and took the pillow and blanket from me and put her to bed. 

After lying down for a while, she asked him to untie her hands in German, and he untied her hands,” the whole film was based on the events of November 28-29, 1941, and even those details that are not in the Bible, the director somehow guessed, his German-speaking legionnaires constantly laughed during the execution, and so it was: “And those who flogged laughed during the flogging,” and again: “The Germans came running, about a hundred and fifty, looked and laughed,” “...and again hundreds of Germans came (this It was in the morning, at eight o'clock). They laughed. She was silent, looked at them,” and for some reason all this was shown about Jesus, whose existence is not confirmed by any independent source, and everyone believed in it and called him God, and if so, then the day of torment was a short moment in his eternal divine invulnerability, and apparently for this everyone who watched the film pitied him terribly, and no one wanted to remember that all this was not two thousand, but fifty years ago, not with a thirty-three-year-old man, but an eighteen-year-old girl, and she did not cry in the Garden of Gethsemane, I didn’t scream at the front, saying why did you leave me, but said that we would win. 

All subsequent religious propaganda died out for me at once - all these legends about Christian and Muslim fighters and martyrs for the faith turned out to be a weak shadow of Soviet history, some kind of unsuccessful alteration of the biographies of Soviet saints, and whoever really wanted a crucified one, I reminded Sergeant Yuri Smirnov  3  , but the believers didn't like it. Although Russian history was often recalled: every month they scolded Stalin more and more often, and I didn’t understand a damn thing about modern history, who was lying and who wasn’t, I only remembered that the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, up to his neck in business, personally took up Zoya’s case and ordered the capture and execute the officers of the regiment that killed her, and they were caught and hanged, and it was hard to listen to the eloquent and important guys who smoothly proved that he was evil, but I, although reluctantly, believed them - the guys spoke very smoothly and smartly, only one the detail struck me - I remember it firmly.

 Journalists laughed that Stalin wore warm thick socks in any weather, because he had to freeze as a child. The Nazis drove Zoya barefoot through the snow, and if she had survived, she would probably have wrapped her feet in any weather. That means they would laugh at her too. That is, the idea that Zoya could be ridiculed could not have entered my sixteen-year-old head at all, but according to the logic of the greyhound writers, it turned out that way. The entire subsequent anti-Stalin campaign died for me overnight. I was reluctant to read and watch all these articles and programs; one thing was clear - some kind of bastard had come to power. Which is funny when people get cold feet. And then, when I was seventeen, the smooth guy writer Zhopis appeared in the newspaper Argumenty i Fakty, that is, Zhovpis or Zhovpus, but I remember him as Zhopis 4 . And he said that there were no Germans at all in the village of Petrishchevo. Then in the same newspaper, a well-fed doctor of medical sciences said that Zoya was schizophrenic, that is, that she was suspected of schizophrenia, and it turned out that she was crazy, Zoya, who knew Russian classical literature by heart and Goethe in the original, recited the latter at the level of a professional reader , who at the age of seventeen amazed A. Gaidar with her intelligence, was crazy, and everyone understood that way, because people who had already become a crowd, people, were accustomed to understand everything only in a vile or obscene sense, and almost no one was interested in what exactly schizophrenia They suspected, but it turned out that she was not there, but that there was overwork from intensive study and binge reading, that the Germans were in Petrishchevo and you can ask eyewitnesses from local residents about this - nothing could be explained, it was Zoya on the scaffold who was addressing the people, the people, and I argued with the cattle, the people, then I limited myself to the intellectuals, but it turned out that the intelligentsia, Russian and Azerbaijani, became the cattle first and most willingly of all. It was all this, that there was an unexpected, sickening amount of scum, that somehow slowed me down, temporarily dulled the sensations. And you also had to eat, in democracy, eating became a problem for many, and I now think that it is difficult for a hungry person to maintain ideals, but it became difficult for those who had them to eat, and the money went precisely to those who did not have ideals anyway, which is probably why the latter are so it disappeared quickly, and I’m thinking: maybe it was intended that way, I don’t know, I never understood politics. And everything broke down and died - romance, faith in the best - when, immediately after the collapse of the Union, I learned about books where they laughed at the heroes, and at Zoya too. No meanness was surprising anymore: anything can happen in life, there are no rules or justice. 

Everyone understood this in their own way in the 90s, and so did I, and I wasn’t surprised by anything else. There wasn’t even any indignation left, and why it wasn’t left became clear a few years later, when I came across a quote from Machiavelli, they say, if a ruler wants to do something mean and so that the people don’t get indignant, do the mean thing immeasurably, then there won’t even be any strength for indignation, and then do whatever you want, people will take everything for granted - well, that’s what they did. Everything in me temporarily died down, that is, I used to think that childhood had died in me, but it turned out that it had died down, as if in a half-asleep I perceived crumbs of information about the saint of my childhood.

 I once found out that thousands of children wrote letters with requests to Zoya and many took them to her monument, then I was overwhelmed with pride for her: she was not the only miracle worker for me. There was also a painful blow (although everything died down, but the pain was dull), an article caught my eye about some top model, originally from Osino-Gai, Zoya’s small homeland, who sometimes came to visit her fellow countrymen from abroad, and students of the same schools, where they wrote letters to Zoya, now wrote to the long-legged millionaire scammer, and enthusiastically greeted her on the threshold of the school at the bust of the heroine; I also found out details about the past that were not disclosed in the Union, and I’m gladthat I didn’t know this in childhood, it wouldn’t have fit into my head, now anything fits into my head - that Zoya was beaten not only by the Germans, but also by some of their own, the women whose houses she burned, burned, in order to drive out those who were holed up enemies and defeat them, but they thought only about themselves and, together with the fascists, beat her. For some reason, it was then that I again remembered the films (now I already knew several of them) about Christ, about these passions of his, I again remembered all the poignancy of these coincidences, now doubly poignant for me because ancient myths became even more popular, and the living legend was remembered and knew less and less. And then everything exploded. Everything died down at once. I came across a TV show by chance at dinner, and it turned out to be normal, I didn’t have to switch, I miraculously ran into it, the chances were no greater than encountering a rude word in Soviet literature; I got this chance. Documentary film about Zoya. I knew all the facts by heart; at the age of eleven I knew them by heart. But they got there differently. When the villagers dug a hole in the frozen ground and buried the hanged woman, and no one in the country knew about her yet, military correspondent Pyotr Lidov heard the story of an old peasant man near Moscow, Tarasov, saying that in Petrishchevo the Nazis executed a young girl “they hang her, but she speaks a speech” , and Lidov couldn’t believe his ears: “how ... speech?”, “And so,” muttered the old man, “they’re already hanging, but she keeps talking and talking.” And Lidov was shocked by this story, and he decided to find out everything, and he found out, and Zoya became a legend. It was only then that I somehow suddenly realized that Zoya didn’t even know that she would become a legend, a saint for millions, she thought: they’ll kill her and that’s it, but it could have happened, you never know the nameless heroes, and this didn’t shake her determination at all, and every minute in captivity she behaved as if millions were already looking at her, and this is her holiness, and I’m rubbish - all the last years I thought that the time was not right, the time of heroes had passed, I need to think about what to eat, and I’m already good because I keep her image in my mind, and her situation was no better, she was just Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, and I have no excuses. And for the first time, in the twenty-sixth year of my life, I realized that she was a human being, she blew her nose and itched like me, and probably wanted to live and not be a posthumous hero, but I kept her in the goddesses and didn’t even feel sorry for her, and for the first time , in the twenty-sixth year of my life, at the end of the program, I cried about Zoya, because now I wanted her not to die. At that very moment I realized that she would now be higher for me than in childhood, because she was not born a legend, she blew her nose and itched, but she took it and became a legend, a fairy tale, she became my goddess. And I also saw footage of students from her school running past her bust towards the slutty model, and it really dawned on me that Zoya was not for everyone, although she thought that she was for everyone, she was for a few, and I might not get into their number. But it still made me feel better that I had changed my mind about it all. Because all the doubts of recent years have decayed and crumbled: Zoya alone is enough to be for the Soviet Union.Dostoevsky wrote somewhere that if Christ were on one side, and the truth was on the other, he would follow Christ. Even between the truth and Zoya, I would choose Zoya. And having seen enough and listened to religious people, I now know what hell is: it is where there is no crap, false righteous people who accepted torment for the sake of heavenly grub; and only holy atheists will meet me there, well, yes, they will, they won’t take me anywhere else, and having passed through the ranks with Zina Portnova, Yuri Smirnov, Imant Sudmalis and Tatyana Solomakha 5  , I will appear before Zoya, the mistress of heroes, she will shower me with contempt as the worst, and will punish me to stand somewhere in the back. It's okay, it's not a joke. The main thing is no bullshit.