Marilyn Monroe’s Russian Resurrection. Dmitrii TaganovЧитать онлайн книгу.
was sent to boarding school, and Masha was taken to her relatives living in the district center, having there a good high school. They saw each other and played together every summer, but real love came to Ivan Rebrov only at eighteen.
He worked then again in the woods, but with another team. He worked hard, sawing the timber and hauling it by the trucks. They paid better there and more regularly after that grim incident. Rebrov did not drink much and saved all the money: he wanted to repair his house and add one more room, good enough to bring his wife into. They both were waiting for spring to marry, when Masha will be eighteen, too.
Rebrov worked all that winter on distant allotments. Almost every week someone of their team went back home for a short stay to one of the neighboring villages, and Rebrov exchanged with his Masha gentle and loving letters. Rebrov never went home himself and didn’t see her several months: he wanted to test their love, because he had to go to the Army soon. He tested their love all right, though it didn’t endure their winter parting. By the end of the winter fewer letters reached the snowbound woods, and they became kind of formal and dry, and by the early spring they stopped coming. In April one fellow that came from the neighboring village frankly revealed to it to Rebrov, “She’s having a good time, your Masha.”
Rebrov went home only on First of May holidays. That was both official and folk festivities stretching often well up to Ninth of May, the Victory day. He sailed to her village by roiki with his little brother, but he didn’t go to her house but stayed by the store with a bunch of his old half-drunk friends. He drank half a glass of vodka, then some more, but his soul was trembling. Then he suddenly saw her. She walked down the village main street, closely arm in arm with some guy. Rebrov’s friends, who knew about his love, stopped talking at once, and the dead silence fell on store’s porch. She saw Rebrov, too. As if trying to hide her boy from Rebrov she fussily turned, but then stepped forward, with a back to her boy, breasts to Rebrov, with worried and scared eyes, as a bird protecting her nestling.
Rebrov stepped forward. He just wanted to say “Hi!” to congratulate her with a May’s Day, and maybe to have some talk. But she warily backed from him, bumping at her boy. Rebrov, taken aback, stopped. Something flashed in his affected by vodka mind. And getting his knife out of pocket, he walked to them. Deeply insulted, with everybody around watching, Rebrov felt he should kill this guy now, because nothing else could lift his months-old pain, whatever happens with him afterwards.
Unexpectedly she flung herself at him, threw her arms around his neck, kissing his face and pushing him back. Rebrov couldn’t even to move away his knife in time and it stuck between them with its blade between their stomachs. She was kissing his face all over, pushing back, step by step, away from her boy. Rebrov felt his knife cuts her, but she did not stop kissing, silently pushing him further back from her boy. Finally, he threw out his hand with the knife sideways and cast a quick look at it. The blade was glittering red. With his other hand Rebrov gently pushed her back, just to take a look at her. Down her waist over her festive dress ran a bloody stain.
Something that was painfully strained for months suddenly snapped and broke in him. He reached out his hand down to her bloody stain, but she at once threw herself back from his hand, and Rebrov saw closely her eyes. There was nothing in it but unconcealed stony fear. Rebrov let down the knife from his hand and it fell on the ground. Then he closed his face with both hands, turned and slowly walked away. Feet brought him down to the lake and he got into his boat. Something hard and tight suddenly squeezed his neck and a lump rose in his throat. He clamped both his hands to the eyes and his body violently shook all over. Soon his little brother came running after him. Rebrov leaned overboard, drew a handful of cold water and splashed it on his face.
At home Rebrov packed his sporting bag, tried to wake up his drunken father, but then hugged his brother and went in the light spring night to the railway station some fifteen miles away. Passenger train stopped there once a day. On even days of a month the train went to Sankt-Petersburg, and on the odd days to Moscow. If it would have had happened to be an even day the train would have taken Rebrov to Petersburg, where his uncle lived, a non-drinking cheery fellow. Every time he came for vacation, to see his sister when she was alive, he always lured Rebrov to come and work with him at metal works. However, early morning of that day in May happened to be odd. Rebrov went to Moscow, became there firstly a burglar, and then a professional killer. He never came back to his village.
4. Lunch with a Banker
Levko has chosen Chinese cuisine for lunch with his partner. First dish was to be a swallow's nest, that’s a soup cooked of small fishes caught and brought by swallows to build their nests, glued together with something tasty. Second dish was simpler, the duck a la Peking with bamboo shoots. Levko hired his first private cook in the nineties when he founded his first bank. It was vitally sensible: in those wild years the less the banker showed up in crowded places, the longer he was expected to live. He named his first bank as a born gambler and reckless card player: Bid Credit. This bank, with the doors from a dirty backyard, did not deal in loans, but mostly had laundered criminal money. If Levko ever gave any loans then, that was to the traders who brought to the country second-hand clothes or long overdue sausages and canned food bought cheaply from Europe’s shops. That was quick and profitable turnover for his bank. But the main business of his bank was laundering criminal rubles and moving it abroad turned into hard foreign currency, minus, of course, a fat percent for his bank’s risk and trouble. Also, his bank transferred rubles from its accounts into paper cash keeping no record and trail, if the owners needed it for some shady and murky deals. That was even more illegal. Though, the problems were only with the suitcases to carry to and fro billions of those inflated and weak rubles, called then "wooden".
Levko also stuffed his pockets with easy money when privatization was undertaken by current government. Issued privatization vouchers, a silly idea in the falling apart country, meant to justly divide all of the state’s riches among two hundred million people. But currently those pieces of paper had meant or cost almost nothing in those hungry years and were sold by most people just for dinner. Thus almost all riches of the great country were seized and divided between a hundred fat corrupt cats; two hundred million people got nothing. Levko’s bank very actively bought and sold those notes of country’s potential wealth, getting huge and quite legal profits.
Confused by privatization and shock therapy applied by vigorous but entirely ignorant government, millions of Russians took their scarce “wooden” rubles, fast depreciating with inflation, to newly sprung unknown banks such as Levko’s Bid Credit. Advertizing in the newspapers, Levko boldly promised everyone a hundred percent gain, but by the end of year the ruble lost thousand percent of its value, leaving him profits he could never dream of.
Those were golden years for such operators as Levko, and no wonder it so foolishly ended in ninety eighth with a crash. Country finance could no long endure economy “a la Levko” and had burst as a bubble; vigorous but ignorant “vouchers-managers” drove the country to default. Bid Credit went bankrupt in concert with his country’s government. Levko then reasoned that if even his State does not pay its debts, he won’t do that even more so. His own money was transferred in advance to off-shores, because he felt long before that something wrong was going on: the state government, as a loser gambler in tatters, was borrowing money by growing every week three-digit percentages.
Bid Credit vanished. They simply removed the sign and locked all the doors. But still there were dozens of those who owed money to the bank, and a lot of money. To lose it seemed to Levko ridiculous. Though the debtors were shrewd enough and also hid their money wherever they could, though to sue them in a civilized way and get then just pennies was stupid: those pennies would immediately be claimed by bank’s creditors. So it was the best to go bankrupt and approach the bandits. That’s when the banker Levko met the killer Rebrov.
Levko always lunched at his spacious office, because he did not like being away from his computers even for an hour. Everywhere one could throw a glance, on the tables and on the walls, flickered and silently stirred charts and tables on computer monitors. The world stock exchanges directly reported to Levko the current results of his risky financial speculations. He was an innate gambler. As a youngster he had begun playing cards for living on golden beaches of Sochi. At nights, in stuffy and smoke-filled hotel rooms