Summary of the Lines of Fate, or Milashevich’s Chest
M. Kharitonov
Lines of Fate, or Milashevich’s Chest,
Anton Andreevich Lizavin, philologist, Ph. D. thesis wrote about his countrymen – writers of the 1920s. In the course of these studies, he was carried away by the work of the unknown, but very original writer Simeon Milashevich.
One of the strangest stories of the latter was called “Revelation.” Its meaning is as follows: in the house of the narrator a former university classmate (thin face with a nervous cut of the nostrils, aroused eye shine) appears on the way… When the guest has a chest in size with a case from the sewing machine “Singer”. It is gradually revealed that all three – Milashevich married – are connected by a long history. Once a visiting student knocked a young girl to flee from her parents’ home to Moscow, but disappeared (most likely, through illegal activities), instructing the fugitive to take care of a friend. And now he again met
Here, as always, Milasevic does not really have a plot, but a “prick of a mixed feeling” – dry twilight, light of a kerosene lamp, – a shaky air of narration. The apology of the wretched, inert and yet cute vegetation as opposed to the desire to change and improve life, even if something has been destroyed.
His eyes shine, he is ill, and the chest is waiting somewhere, and the owner himself is called to deliver it. It seems that the return of it was very protracted. It turns out that in the life of the author himself, Milashevich (the story is clearly autobiographical), there was an arrest, the cause of which was not the suitcase, not the chest stuffed with illegal illegalities, and for the arrest – deportation.
However, there is almost no information about Milashevich. His wife knows only the name. In the stories of her husband Alexandra Flegontovna’s presence is felt through the embroidered napkins, back pads, Maslenitsa pancakes and other pleasures of the provincial way of life. Apparently, at about that time, the
Where more clearly appears in his prose (under different names) is a heavy athlete with a curly beard: the socialist landowner Ganshin. Milashevich lived in his estate for a long time: he was busy in the greenhouse, inventing candy wrappers and candy wrappers for the Ganshin caramel factory.
When the thesis was almost ready, Lizavina managed to find in the archive a box containing Milashevich’s papers, or rather, papers. For the records, the reverse side of those same candy wrappers was used (in view of the deficit of paper in revolutionary time). And now the scuffling with candy wrappers began to displace Lizavin’s other scientific studies, and it began to seem to him that the course of this work and the circumstances of his life were not accidentally related. At first incomprehensible and abrupt, the recordings were once composed under his hands in an unintentional connection, as if lines of fate were lined up in the force field of time.
It turned out in the chest and a letter from an unknown person, from whose contents it was read out what he wrote to a woman with whom they had been bound by complicated love relationships twenty years ago. Then, with another woman, this person found himself in exile, where they had a boy, a son, sent for a time to Russia, to the parents of his wife.
In search of new materials Lizavin with Maxim Sivers, an unexpected Moscow guest, went to see his former classmate and saw his wife, the nervous, vulnerable beauty Zoya. Then he accidentally picked her up at the station (something, apparently, embarrassed her peace Siiver), left her husband in the unknown, settled behind the wall of an old woman-neighbor. Then everything happened to them without their participation, time was flowing with lunar juice, gratitude and ecstasy… Well, now mother will wait for her grandchildren, thought Lizavin. But nothing had time to tell Zoe: the old woman had died, and the beloved disappeared while he was busy about the funeral.
I came to Moscow, and there Sivers’ wife gave me to read Maxim’s diary (my husband served time as a prisoner of conscience). In the diary was about his father (the Socialist-Revolutionary past, emigration, a thin face with a nervous cut of the nostrils, the son from the first wife, not Maxim, sent to Russia), Zoya and about him, Lizavina, – what exactly could he save Zoya.
Incidentally, a new one was being revealed about Milashevich. Returning after his expulsion to Stolbenets, he saw his wife years later, who came from exile through Petrograd as an authorized new power. Was he going to see him? Because her parents lived her boy, son. But stayed with him, losing both his voice and his ability to move – economic feats were the husband’s imagination. The feeling grew that a heap of candy wrappers was an implicit, self-expanding book, the world that Milashevich was creating, so that by keeping the moments withdrawn from time he could make the passing one imperishable. Just as he kept his favorite, such a vulnerable woman next to him.
With Zoya Lizavin met unexpectedly: he went to the hospital, and she was a nurse there. And again I did not have time to say the main thing, how she disappeared. A sense of error, inaccuracy, or guilt arose. Here he found, managed to hold. And he, Lizavin, had Lusya. There is no love, but there is pity, and the tenderness, and wisdom of the blind body, and the cleverness of the poor mind. And inside her already eyeless little fish stretches into the darkness with small searching lips.
The radio broadcast: Maxim Siver. He’s done. Now there is no one else to hope for, and maybe it’s not too late to find. Maybe only this sense of connection is called fate. You are free to accept it or not, but somebody is waiting for you anyway. Only you.
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