... He is sleeping, and he sees that he is at the cottage stop and he needs to cross the canvas on which the train stopped. You need to get up, go through the vestibule, and you will find yourself on the other side. However, he discovers that there is no other door, and that the train starts moving and picks up speed, to jump late, and the train carries him farther and farther. It is in the dream space and little by little it seems to begin to recall what is encountered on the way: this is a tall building, and a flower bed of petunias, and an ominous, dark brick garage. At his gate stands a man waving a Mauser. This Nahum Fearless is watching as the former pre-protector Max Markin, the former head of the department, nicknamed the Death Angel, the right-wing Social Revolutionary Serafim Elk and the female sexota Inga undress before entering the darkness of the garage and disappearing into it. This vision is replaced by others. His mother Larisa Germanovna at the head of the table during a Sunday lunch on the terrace of a rich summer house, and he, Dima, is in the center of attention of guests, before whom his dad praises the work of his son, a born painter.
... And here he is, already in red Odessa. Wrangel is still in the Crimea. Bio-Poles near Kiev. Former junker - artilleryman, Dima works in Izogit, painting posters and slogans. Like other employees, he dines in the dining room on the cards with Inga. A few days ago, they briefly went to the registry office and left as husband and wife.
When they were already finishing dinner, two with a Nagant and a Mauser came up to him from behind and ordered, without turning around, to go out into the street without noise and led him directly along the pavement to a seven-story building, in the courtyard of which there was a dark brick garage. Dima’s thought was beating feverishly. Why did they just take it? What do they know? Yes, he handed over the letter, but he might not have an idea about its content. I did not participate in meetings at the lighthouse, only attended, and then only once. Why didn’t they take Inga?
... In a seven-story building dominated by unnatural silence and deserts. Only on the sixth floor was a convoy with a girl in a gymnasium dress: the first beauty in the city, Vengrzhanovskaya, taken with her brother, a member of the Polish-English conspiracy.
... The investigator said that everyone who was at the lighthouse was already in the basement and forced to sign the finished protocol so as not to lose time. At night, Dima heard constipation rattling and shouting surnames: Prokudin! Von Diderichs! Vengrzhanovskaya! He remembered that they were forced to undress at the garage, not separating men from women ...
Larisa Germanovna, learning about the arrest of her son, rushed to the former Socialist Revolutionary named Serafim Los. Once, together with the current pre-protector, also a former Social Revolutionary, Max Markin fled from exile. Elk, in the name of an old friendship, managed to beg him to "give him the life of this boy." Markin promised and summoned the Angel of Death. “The shot will go to the wall,” he said, “and we will show the junker as being withdrawn to consumption.”
In the morning, Larisa Germanovna found a name in the newspaper on the list of those shot by Dimino. She again ran to Elk, and Dima, meanwhile, entered the apartment where they lived with Inga on the other way. "Who released you?" She asked the returning husband. Markin! She thought so. He is a former Left SR. Contra crawled into the organs! But let's see who is who. Only now Dima understood who was in front of him and why the investigator was so knowledgeable. Inga, meanwhile, went to the most luxurious hotel in the city, where Trotsky’s commissioner Naum Fearless, who had once killed the German ambassador Mirbach, lived in his suite to disrupt the Brest Peace. Then he was a Left Socialist-Revolutionary, now a Trotskyist in love with Lev Davydovich. “Citizen Lazareva! You are arrested, ”he suddenly said, and, not having time to recover from surprise and horror, Inga was in the basement.
Dima, meanwhile, came to his mother's dacha, but found her dead. The doctor called out by the neighbor could no longer help, except by the advice to immediately hide, at least to Romania.
And now he is already an old man. He lies on a straw mattress in the camp infirmary, panting from a cough, with pink foam on his lips. Pictures and visions pass in a dying consciousness. Among them are again a flowerbed, a garage, Naum Fearless, who affirms the world revolution with fire and sword, and four naked people: three men and a woman with slightly short legs and a well developed pelvis ...
It is difficult for a man with a Mauser to imagine himself in the basement of a building on Lubyanka Square crawling on his knees and kissing the boots of the people around him, polished with cream. Nevertheless, he was later taken red-handed when crossing the border with a letter from Trotsky to Radek. He was pushed into the basement, set facing the brick wall. Red dust fell and he disappeared from life.
“Probably you will not flinch, sweeping away a person. Well, martyrs of dogma, you too are victims of the age, ”as the poet said.
