Russian canary. Zheltukhin Russian Canary

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Russian canary. Zheltukhin Russian Canary

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“...No, you know, I didn’t immediately realize that she was not herself. Such a nice old lady... Or rather, not old, that it’s me! The years, of course, were visible: the face was wrinkled and all that. But her figure is in a light raincoat, cinched at the waist like a youth, and that gray hedgehog on the back of a teenage boy’s head... And her eyes: old people don’t have eyes like that. There is something turtle-like in the eyes of old people: slow blinking, dull corneas. And she had sharp black eyes, and they held you at gunpoint so demandingly and mockingly... I imagined Miss Marple like that as a child.

In short, she came in and said hello...

And she said hello, you know, in such a way that it was clear: she didn’t just come in to gawk and didn’t waste words. Well, Gena and I, as usual, can we help with anything, madam?

And she suddenly said to us in Russian: “You really can, boys. “I’m looking,” he says, “for a gift for my granddaughter.” She turned eighteen and entered the university, the department of archeology. He will deal with the Roman army and its war chariots. So, in honor of this event, I intend to give my Vladka an inexpensive, elegant piece of jewelry.”

Yes, I remember exactly: she said “Vladka”. You see, while we were choosing and sorting out pendants, earrings and bracelets together - and we liked the old lady so much, we wanted her to be satisfied - we had time to chat a lot. Or rather, the conversation turned in such a way that it was Gena and I telling her how we decided to open a business in Prague and about all the difficulties and problems with local laws.

Yes, it’s strange: now I understand how cleverly she conducted the conversation; Gena and I were like nightingales (a very, very warm-hearted lady), but about her, except for this granddaughter on a Roman chariot... no, I don’t remember anything else.

Well, in the end I chose a bracelet - a beautiful design, unusual: the garnets are small, but beautifully shaped, curved drops are woven into a double whimsical chain. A special, touching bracelet for a thin girl’s wrist. I advised! And we tried to pack it stylishly. We have VIP bags: cherry velvet with gold embossing on the neck, a pink wreath, and gilded laces. We keep them for especially expensive purchases. This one was not the most expensive, but Gena winked at me - do it...

Yes, I paid in cash. This was also surprising: usually such exquisite old ladies have exquisite gold cards. But we, in essence, do not care how the client pays. We are also not the first year in business, we understand something about people. A sense of smell is developed – what is and what is not worth asking a person.

In short, she said goodbye, and we were left with the feeling of a pleasant meeting and a successful day. There are such people with a light hand: they will come in, buy cheap earrings for fifty euros, and after that the moneybags will go down like that! So it is here: an hour and a half passed, and we managed to sell three euros worth of goods to an elderly Japanese couple, and after them three young German women bought a ring each - identical, can you imagine that?

The German girls just came out, the door opens, and...

No, first her silver hedgehog swam behind the display case.

We have a window, which is also a showcase – half the battle is luck. We rented this room because of him. It’s not a cheap space, we could have saved it by half, but because of the window – as I saw it, I said: Gena, this is where we start. You can see for yourself: a huge window in the Art Nouveau style, an arch, stained glass windows in frequent bindings... Please note: the main color is scarlet, crimson, what kind of product do we have? We have garnet, a noble stone, warm, responsive to light. And I, when I saw this stained glass window and imagined the shelves under it - how our garnets would sparkle in rhyme with it, illuminated by light bulbs... What is the main thing in jewelry? A feast for the eyes. And I turned out to be right: people definitely stop in front of our window! If they don’t stop, they’ll slow down, saying they should come in. And they often stop by on the way back. And if a person has already come in, and if this person is a woman...

So what am I talking about: we have a counter with a cash register, you see, turned out so that the display case in the window and those who pass outside the window are visible as on the stage. Well, here it is: it means her silver hedgehog swam by, and before I had time to think that the old lady was returning to her hotel, the door opened and she entered. No, I couldn’t confuse it in any way, what, can you really confuse something like that? It was the delusion of a recurring dream.

She greeted us as if she was seeing us for the first time, and from the doorway: “My granddaughter is eighteen years old, and she has also entered the university...” - in short, all this canoe with archeology, the Roman army and the Roman chariot... gives out as if nothing had happened .

We were speechless, to be honest. If there were even a hint of madness in her, then no: black eyes look friendly, lips in a half-smile... An absolutely normal, calm face. Well, Gena was the first to wake up, we must give him his due. Gena’s mother is a psychiatrist with extensive experience.

“Madam,” says Gena, “I think you should look in your purse, and a lot will become clear to you. It seems to me that you have already bought a gift for your granddaughter and it is in such an elegant cherry bag.”

“Is that so? – she answers in surprise. “Are you, young man, an illusionist?”

And he puts a handbag on the display window... damn, I have this one in front of my eyes vintage handbag: black, silk, with a clasp in the shape of a lion's face. And there is no bag in it, even if you crack it!

Well, what thoughts could we have? Yes, none. We've gone completely crazy. And literally a second later it thundered and blazed!

…Sorry? No, then this started happening - both on the street and around... And to the hotel - that’s where the car with this Iranian tourist exploded, huh? - the police and ambulance came in droves to hell. No, we didn’t even notice where our client went. She probably got scared and ran away... What? Oh yes! Gena gave me a hint, and thanks to him, I completely forgot, but it might come in handy for you. At the very beginning of our acquaintance, the old lady advised us to get a canary to revive the business. As you said? Yes, I was surprised myself: what does a canary in a jewelry store have to do with it? This is not some kind of caravanserai. And she says: “In the East, in many shops they hang a cage with a canary. And to make her sing more cheerfully, they remove her eyes with the tip of a hot wire.”

Wow - a remark from a sophisticated lady? I even closed my eyes: I imagined the suffering of the poor bird! And our “Miss Marple” laughed so easily..."

The young man, who was telling this strange story to an elderly gentleman who had entered their store about ten minutes ago, stood near the windows and suddenly unfolded a very serious official ID, which was impossible to ignore, fell silent for a minute, shrugged his shoulders and looked out the window. There, the flounces of tiled skirts on the Prague roofs glittered like a carmine cascade in the rain, a side-squat house stared out onto the street with two blue attic windows, and above it stretched the powerful crown of an old chestnut tree, blooming in many creamy pyramids, so that it seemed as if the whole tree was strewn with ice cream from the nearest cart.

Further on stretched the park on Kampa - and the proximity of the river, the whistles of steamboats, the smell of grass growing between the paving stones, as well as friendly dogs of various sizes, let off their leashes by their owners, imparted to the entire area that lazy, truly Prague charm...

...which the old lady valued so much: this detached calm, and the spring rain, and the blooming chestnuts on the Vltava.

Dina Rubina

Russian canary. Zheltukhin

* * *

In short, she came in and said hello...

And she said hello, you know, in such a way that it was clear: she didn’t just come in to gawk and didn’t waste words. Well, Gena and I, as usual, can we help with anything, madam?

The German girls just came out, the door opens, and...

No, first her silver hedgehog swam behind the display case.

“Is that so? – she answers in surprise. “Are you, young man, an illusionist?”

Well, what thoughts could we have? Yes, none. We've gone completely crazy. And literally a second later it thundered and blazed!

Wow - a remark from a sophisticated lady? I even closed my eyes: I imagined the suffering of the poor bird! And our “Miss Marple” laughed so easily..."

...which the old lady valued so much: this detached calm, and the spring rain, and the blooming chestnuts on the Vltava.

Fear was not part of her emotional range.

When at the door of the hotel (which she had been watching for the last ten minutes from the window of such a conveniently located jewelry store) an inconspicuous Renault jerked and puffed fire, the old lady simply slipped out, turned into the nearest alley, leaving behind her a numb square, and at a walking pace, past the police cars and ambulances that, screaming, were rushing towards the hotel through a dense traffic jam on the road, walked five blocks and entered the lobby of a more than modest three-star hotel, where a room had already been reserved in the name of Ariadna Arnoldovna von (!) Schneller.

In the shabby lobby of this boarding house rather than a hotel, they nevertheless tried to introduce guests to the cultural life of Prague: on the wall near the elevator hung a glossy poster for a concert: a certain Leon Etinger, contratenor(white-toothed smile, cherry butterfly), performed today with the philharmonic orchestra several numbers from the opera “La clemenza di Scipione” by Johann Christian Bach (1735–1782). Place: St. Nicholas Cathedral in Mala Strana. The concert starts at 20.00.

Having filled out the card in detail, and with special care writing down the middle name that no one here needed, the old lady received from the receptionist a good-quality key with a copper keychain on a chain and went up to the third floor.

Dina Rubina came to Russia to present the first two books of her “Russian Canary” trilogy - a family saga, a spy novel, a book about love. Dina Rubina herself defines the new work as “a strange novel.”

-What is “strange” about your new novel?

In the unusual behavior of third-rate heroes. Here is the mother of my hero - Vladka. She should have quietly faded from the pages, just like his grandmother Irusya. But Vladka turned out to be so indefatigable that even in the third volume she will be quite bothered. These very tertiary heroes turned out to be so viable and greedy for life that I had to allocate this very living space for them. Even so - they won him away from me, the romance swelled. This is a double family saga. Everyone there has their own pain that must be expressed and experienced.

- How did the idea for “Russian Canary” come about?

The idea of any work is a mysterious thing. The writer, in principle, is concerned about several topics in his life, and which form he will choose to once again talk about what is tormenting him is a question of Providence: what will fly into the writer’s ear and why is it suddenly on his desk among many books there will be a brochure on raising canaries. “Who do you have to be to give me such a brochure,” I thought and decided that this man was completely crazy. And the donator turned out to be Roman Nikolaevich Skibnevsky, the president of the Brown Canary Support Fund, a wonderful and delightful person, whom I later searched for all day via the Internet. And I realized what wealth was in front of me, what a world of passions was opening up to me. Why did fate force me to simply open this brochure? When I read the title “Russian Canary”, I realized that this was the title of a novel. Any topic like this is the focus of passion, and in general I love passionate people, who look closely at life, who know how to bite into the very flesh of this or that matter, this or that topic. I adore professionals in their field, whether it’s a plumber, a hairdresser or a dressmaker, it doesn’t matter. I revere professionals and hate, I cannot forgive, mediocrity in this life, although I understand perfectly well that not all people are talented. This is my personal flaw.

Two years ago I tried to talk to you “for Odessa”; honestly, it was strange to me that Odessa had not appeared in your books by that time. But now, having read the first two volumes of “The Russian Canary,” I understand that we can now speak freely “for Odessa.” Close your eyes and walk along your favorite streets - from Pushkinskaya to Staroportofrankovskaya. How do you “enter cities”? I haven’t been to Lvov, for example, but thanks to you I know what “gate” is. And you conveyed the feeling - personally, my feeling of the morning Leningrad tram in winter - in “The White Dove of Cordoba” - absolutely accurately.

I only enter cities from the back porch. And Odessa, like St. Petersburg, is a very dangerous space: such wonderful pages of Russian prose have been written about these cities. Therefore, one must “enter” Odessa only through people, their destinies, their apartments, streets, alleys and courtyards... through details that grow in memory into a powerful symbol. This is all done through specific people. How? This is my secret. It is very difficult to talk to a person - after all, people almost always speak in ready-made formulas; you rarely meet a Chrysostom who can spend hours, for example, talking about a birdcage that his grandfather knitted from wire. This is my search for people who can help me pull out some stories, non-standard details. These are my secrets - to ask so that a person suddenly remembers, and then, like a catechumen, after the publication of the book, he writes and writes to me, because he cannot stop and is grateful that some floodgates, some veins have opened and childhood poured out from there.

- And yet, why did the choice finally fall on Odessa this time?

I was very afraid, but I needed this key of living speech, this South. In the novel, on the one hand, there is Alma-Ata, where there is a very closed family, very strange, closed. On the other hand, everything had to sparkle and sparkle, splashing out with screams, noise, music: cello, clarinet, revolution, the song of two tenors over the sea. There must be space, there must be sea. I didn’t come to Odessa right away, I was groping for the city - Kharkov? there is no sea there. Kherson? there is plenty of south there, but I needed a theater - a big, famous one. Let Chaliapin just stand in a framed photo on the cabinet piano together with Big Etinger. Chaliapin is legendary. I needed a legend in this novel. And Odessa is a legend. By the way, I haven’t been there for thirteen years; perhaps I’ll visit in the fall. But, I hope, by the fall the third volume of “Russian Canary” - “The Prodigal Son” - will already be written. And when the book is written, I am no longer interested in any canaries, just as I am no longer interested in dolls now - when “Parsley Syndrome” was created, on which a film is now being made.

- Tell us about the filming, you even visited one of the filming days - in Peterhof.

The film is being filmed in different suburbs of St. Petersburg. The director is Lena Khazanova, who lives in Geneva, who shot her first film, “The Oligarch's Translator,” in Russia and on Russian material, then Lena created one of the best Swiss TV series. And I really hope that she will cope with this very complex material of mine. And I really, really hope for the brilliant actors I love - Evgeny Mironov and Chulpan Khamatova. It seems to me that this choice is a very accurate fit into the image. The same “dance with a doll” - the iconic dance in “Parsley Syndrome” - is staged in the film by European-scale choreographer Radu Poklitaru, creator of the Kyiv-Modern Ballet, one of the authors of the opening ceremony of the Olympics in Sochi. And he put on an amazing dance, Chulpan is simply divine in her fiery wig. The film script was written by Alena Alova. You understand that the author of the novel and the author of the screenplay are people, say, of “opposite interests”: the author of the screenplay has nothing left to do but cut and write his own line... A screenplay is a completely different genre.

-Are you afraid?

Afraid. For me it is a terrible disappointment that there is no Prague, no Lvov. There the story turns out to be somewhat different - not in the text, but in the atmosphere. And yet, I hope. After all, St. Petersburg is a great city and it was not only my romance that warmed me. I hope for brilliant actors, talented directors and cameramen. And music - the question of who will write the music for the film, which will be full-length, is now being decided. Filming is expected to wrap up by May. And a film is being created, as far as I know, for the Cannes Film Festival.

For many years you have been meeting with your readers in different countries - both the former USSR and distant, as we usually say, abroad. That's how you feel - are readers changing? Based on their questions, remarks, notes, reactions to what they read - what is happening?

In fact, nothing happens to a person - his core. He still longs for happiness, he wants to read about human passions, because he either suppressed them in himself or lives by them. Man is always love, hatred, long-suffering. But what really changes a person terribly now, I don’t know what else will happen to children, is the Internet, these are social networks. This is a spreading through some millions of different communications, a constant desire to get away from oneself, not to allow oneself to be alone with oneself and look into oneself, the inability to occupy oneself. And in this new novel I needed to win over this reader, to force: “Sit down and read.” Because the modern person gives up everything and sits with this iPad, iPhone, Aishmon and cannot tear himself away from this screen, going into the bad infinity of bad talk, completely empty.

A person on the Internet is relieved, freed from talking with himself and with his interlocutor, but at the same time not free from his complexes or from the greedy search for passions.

- And yet, at meetings with you, readers ask eternal questions?

Undoubtedly.

Galina Artemenko

* * *

Prologue

In short, she came in and said hello...

And she said hello, you know, in such a way that it was clear: she didn’t just come in to gawk and didn’t waste words. Well, Gena and I, as usual, can we help with anything, madam?

In short, she said goodbye, and we were left with the feeling of a pleasant meeting and a successful day.

There are such people with a light hand: they will come in, buy cheap earrings for fifty euros, and after that the moneybags will go down like that! So it is here: an hour and a half passed, and we managed to sell three euros worth of goods to an elderly Japanese couple, and after them three young German women bought a ring each - identical, can you imagine that?

The German girls just came out, the door opens, and...

No, first her silver hedgehog swam behind the display case.

“Is that so? – she answers in surprise. “Are you, young man, an illusionist?”

Well, what thoughts could we have? Yes, none. We've gone completely crazy. And literally a second later it thundered and blazed!

Wow - a remark from a sophisticated lady? I even closed my eyes: I imagined the suffering of the poor bird! And our “Miss Marple” laughed so easily..."

...which the old lady valued so much: this detached calm, and the spring rain, and the blooming chestnuts on the Vltava.

Fear was not part of her emotional range.

Her room at number 312 was located very conveniently - just opposite the elevator. But, finding herself in front of the door to her room, for some reason Ariadna Arnoldovna did not unlock it, but, turning left and reaching room 303 (where a certain Demetros Papakonstantinou, a smiling businessman from Cyprus, had been living for two days), took out a completely different key and, Having easily turned it in the lock, she entered and closed the door with a chain. Throwing off her cloak, she retired to the bathroom, where every item seemed to be very familiar to her, and, first of all, wetting a terry towel with hot water, she ran it forcefully along the right side of her face, pulling off a flabby bag under her eye and a whole scattering of small and large wrinkles . The large oval mirror above the washbasin revealed a mad harlequin with the mournful half of an old woman's mask.

Then, prying a transparent adhesive strip above her forehead with her fingernail, the old lady pulled the gray scalp off her completely bare skull - a remarkable shape, by the way - and at once transformed into an Egyptian priest from an amateur production by students of the Odessa gymnasium.

The left side of the wrinkled face slid down, like the right, under the pressure of hot water, as a result of which it was discovered that Ariadna Arnoldovna von (!) Schneller would do well to shave.

“It’s not bad... this hedgehog, and the crazy old woman. Good joke, the young lady would have liked it. And fagots are funny. There’s still a lot of time until eight, but let’s sing…” I thought...

...thought, studying himself in the mirror, a young man of the most indeterminate age - due to his slight build -: nineteen? twenty seven? thirty five? Young men as lithe as eels usually performed female roles in medieval traveling troupes. Perhaps that is why he was often invited to sing female parts in opera productions; he was extremely natural in them. In general, music critics certainly noted in their reviews his plasticity and artistry - rather rare qualities in opera singers.

And he thought in an unimaginable mixture of languages, but mentally pronounced the words “hokhma”, “hedgehog” and “young lady” in Russian.

In this language he spoke with his eccentric, brainless and very beloved mother. It was her name that was Vladka.

However, this is a whole story...

Trapper

1

...And the family didn’t call him anything else. And because for many years he supplied animals to the Tashkent and Alma-Ata zoos, and because this nickname suited his whole wiry, hunting appearance.

On his chest there was a trace of a camel's hoof imprinted with baked gingerbread, his whole back was striped by the claws of a snow leopard, and the number of times he was bitten by snakes was almost uncountable... But he remained a powerful and healthy man even at seventy, when unexpectedly for his family suddenly he decided to die, for which he left home the way animals go to die - alone.

Eight-year-old Ilyusha remembered this scene, and subsequently, cleared by memory of the confusion of exclamations and confusion of gestures, it acquired the laconicism of a quickly completed picture: The trapper simply changed his slippers for shoes and went to the door. The grandmother rushed after him, leaned her back against the door and shouted: “Over my corpse!” He pushed it aside and left silently.

And one more thing: when he died (he starved himself to death), his grandmother told everyone how light his head was after death, adding: “This is because he himself wanted to die - and he died and did not suffer.”

Ilyusha was afraid of this detail all his life.

* * *

Actually, his name was Nikolai Konstantinovich Kablukov, and he was born in 1896 in Kharkov. Grandmother’s brothers and sisters (almost ten people, and Nikolai was the eldest, and she, Zinaida, was the youngest, so they were separated by about nineteen years, but mentally and by fate he remained with her all his life nearest) – all were born in different cities. It’s hard to understand, and now you can’t ask anyone, what insatiable wind drove their dad across the Russian Empire? But it drove me, both in the tail and in the mane. And if we’re talking about the tail and the mane: only after the collapse of the Soviet state did my grandmother dare to reveal a piece of the “terrible” family secret: my great-grandfather, it turns out, had his own stud farm, and it was in Kharkov. “How the horses came to him! - she said. “They just raised their heads and walked.”

At these words, each time she raised her head and - tall, stately even in old age, took a wide step, smoothly moving her hand; in this movement of hers there seemed to be a bit of horse grace.

– Now it’s clear where Trapper’s passion for hippodromes comes from! – Ilya once exclaimed to this. But the grandmother looked with her famous “Ivano-threatening” gaze, and he shut up, so as not to upset the old woman: there she was, the keeper of family honor.

It is quite possible that his great-grandfather’s cart jolted through the cities and villages, racing with the inexorable rush of vagabond blood: his most distant known ancestor was a gypsy with the triple surname Prokhorov-Maryin-Seregin - apparently, double was not enough for him. And Kablukov... God knows where it came from, this surname is no wonder (it’s also disgraced because one of the two Alma-Ata psychiatric hospitals, the one on the street of the same name, gave this surname a common noun laugh: “Are you from Kablukov?” ).

Perhaps the same ancestor hewed and hewed to the guitar so that the heels of his heels flew off?

In the family, in any case, there were scraps of little-known and simply indecent songs, and everyone, young and old, hummed them, with a characteristic strain, without going too deeply into the meaning:

Gypsy to Gypsy says:
“I’ve had it for a long time...
Eh, yay - there’s a bottle on the table!
Let's have a drink, honey!

There was something more decent, although on the same table topic:

Sta-a-kan-chi-ki gra-ane-ny-iya
Fell off the table...

The Trapper himself liked to sing this under his breath when he cleaned the canary cages:

Fell and crashed -
My life was shattered...

Canaries were his passion.

Cages were piled from floor to ceiling at the four corners of the dining room.

A friend of his worked at the zoo, he was an amazing master. Each cell is a small openwork house, and each one is different: one is like a carved box, the other is exactly a Chinese pagoda, the third is a cathedral with twisted turrets. And inside there is all the furniture, a careful, painstaking management for the singing residents: a “bathing room” - a goal, like a football goal, with a bottom made of plexiglass, and a drinking bowl - a complex thing, into which water came from a reservoir; it had to be changed every morning.

But the main thing is the feeder: a wooden box into which millet and millet were poured. The food was stored in a chintz bag, tied at the neck with silver braid from a New Year's gift from Ilyusha's early childhood. The bag is green, with orange flowers, and a scoop is tied to it, too - baby babble... ...nonsense, why do I remember this?

And I clearly, very clearly remember the browed, nosed face of the Trapper, shaded by the thin bars of the birdcage. Deep-set black eyes with an expression of demanding admiration and in each - the yellow light of a galloping canary.

And a skullcap! He wore them all his life: tetrahedral Chust “duppies” - solid boxes with kalampir peppers quilted with white thread, Samarkand “piltaduzi”, Bukhara gold-embroidered ones... A variety of skullcaps, lovingly embroidered by a woman’s hand. There were always many women hovering around him.

He spoke fluent Uzbek and Kazakh; if you started cooking pilaf, you couldn’t breathe from the child, and the carrots stuck to the ceiling, but it turned out delicious.

He drank tea only from a samovar and at least seven enamel mugs per evening - he did not recognize cups. If he was in a good mood, he joked a lot, laughed loudly and loudly, with funny sobs and a canary fistula on high notes; always sprinkled with some unknown jokes: “The village of Yushta! This is the wilderness!” - and at every opportunity, like a magician, he extracted from memory a suitable fragment of a poem, inventively changing the rhyme along the way, if suddenly the word was forgotten or did not make sense.

Ilyusha climbed the Trapper like a tree.

Much later, having learned something more about him, Ilya recalled individual gestures, glances and words, belatedly endowing his personality with passions that were not trampled, smoldering even in later years.

In general, there was a time when he thought a lot about the Trapper, unearthing some memories confused by his simple-minded childhood memory. For example, how he wove baskets for canary nests from kebab sticks.

Together they collected the sticks in the grass near the neighboring kebab shop, then washed them for a long time under the pump in the yard, scraping off the hardened wax of old fat. After which the giant fingers of the Trapper began an intricate dance, weaving deep baskets.

– Are nests really like a box? - asked Ilyusha, carefully watching his dexterous thumb, which effortlessly bent the aluminum spear and easily threaded it under the already woven frame.

“Otherwise the testicles will fall out,” the Trapper explained seriously; He always explained in detail what he was doing, how and why.

Pieces of camel wool were wound onto the finished frame (“so that the kids wouldn’t freeze”) - and if there was no wool, yellow, lumpy batting was picked out from an old, wartime quilted jacket. Well, strips of colored fabric were knitted on top of everything - here the grandmother, with a generous hand, took out scraps from her treasured tailor's bundle. And the nests came out festive - calico, satin, silk - very colorful. And then, said the Trapper, the birds care. And the birds “created comfort”: they lined their nests with feathers, pieces of paper, looked for balls of grandmother’s “gypsy” hair, combed out in the morning and accidentally rolled under a chair...

“The poetry of family life...” sighed the Trapper with emotion.

The testicles turned out very cute, bluish-pockmarked; they could be examined only if the female got out of the nest, but it was forbidden to touch them. But the chicks hatched scary, similar to Kashchei the Immortal: bluish, bald, with huge beaks and watery bulging eyes. Soon they were covered with fluff, but they remained scary for a long time: newborn dragons. Sometimes they fell out of the nests: “This inexperienced female, you see, drops them herself,” - and sometimes one of them died, and Ilyusha, noticing the stiff corpse on the floor of the cage, turned away and closed his eyes so as not to see the whitish film on his rolling eyes.

But he was allowed to feed the grown chicks. The trapper kneaded the egg yolk, mixed it with a drop of water, picked up the pulp with a match and with a precise movement pushed it straight into the chick's gaping beak. For some reason, all the chicks strove to bathe in the drinking bowls, and the Trapper explained to Ilyusha how they should be taught, where to drink from, and where to swim. He loved to rock in his palms; showed how to take it so that, God forbid, you don’t hurt the bird.

But all these nursery worries paled before the magical morning moment, when the Trapper - already awake, cheerful, early trumpet (he blew his nose into a large checkered handkerchief so that the grandmother covered her ears and always exclaimed the same thing: “The trumpet of Jericho!” - for which she immediately received in response: “Valaam’s donkey!”) - he released all the canaries from their cages to fly. And the air became jungle: dense, iridescent, yellow-green, fan-shaped... and a little dangerous; and the Trapper stood in the middle of the room - tall, like the Colossus of Rhodes (it’s grandma again) - and in a gentle, coarsening bass with a sudden fistula squeak, he talked with the birds: he clicked his tongue, clicked, did such things with his lips that Ilyusha laughed like crazy.

And there was another morning number: The trapper funny fed the birds from his mouth: he filled his mouth with water, began to “walk and gurgle” in order to attract them. And they flew to his lips and drank, throwing their heads back like infants. So in the spring, birds flock to a mighty tree with a birdhouse nailed high. And he himself, with his head thrown back, looked like a giant chick of some pterodactyl.

Grandma didn’t like this, she got angry and repeated that birds are carriers of dangerous diseases. And he just laughed.

All the birds were singing.

Ilyusha distinguished them by their voices, loved to watch how the canary’s neck trembled during especially loud trills. Sometimes the Trapper allowed me to put my finger on the singing throat - to listen to the pulsating placer with my finger. And he taught them to sing himself. He had two methods: his own loud singing of Russian romances (the birds picked up the melody and sang along) - and records with the voices of birds. There were four records: slate-black, with a dagger-like light running in a circle, with pink and yellow cores, where in small letters it was indicated which birds were singing: tits, warblers, blackbirds.

– What does a noble singer’s valuable song consist of? - asked the Trapper. He paused for a moment, then carefully placed the record on the turntable and carefully let the needle spin in its enchanted circle. From the distant silence of the blue hills, bird voices were born and floated in ringing streams, chattering over pebbles, striking out, calling out, and scattering silvery sounds in the air.

The book that broke all sales records in 2014! The first book of Dina Rubina’s colorful, stormy and multifaceted family saga “Russian Canary”, brilliantly performed by the author. The release of each new book by Dina Rubina is an event that attracts the attention of millions of readers. The Russian Canary trilogy is a family saga, a detective story, and a love-psychological drama. An ebullient, inescapably musical Odessa family and an Almaty family of secretive, silent wanderers... For a century, they have been connected only by a thin thread of the avian family - the brilliant maestro canary Zheltukhin and his descendants. At the end of the 20th century, a chaotic history is settled with bitter and sweet memories, and new people are born, including “the last in time, Etinger,” who is destined for an amazing, and at times suspicious, fate... “Zheltukhin” is the first book in Dina Rubina’s “Russian” trilogy. canary". Recorded by the Vimbo production center Performer: Dina Rubina Illustration: Yulia Stotskaya Producers: Vadim Bukh, Mikhail Litvakov © Dina Rubina ©&? Vimbo LLC, Moscow, Russia, 2014

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