A distant close friend of mine, Marina Kalinina, a lively Komsomol girl without age, a kind heart, a lifesaver. I met her on a street where a rivulet with the cheerful name Tarakanovka once flowed.
Having gone through various periods of formations and downfalls in our Soviet country, it remained afloat. I got up in the bay of the former design institute, "split" into many different premises, leased for different firms and firms.
She called her firm “Wellness Center” and for years she continued this business, experiencing more adversity than success.
Then, in 1989, she met me at this street Tarakanovka, freed, who had gone through a "small circle" of walking through the agony of different camps and prisons. I stood confused, in slippers, from the colony, in outdated things six years ago, awkward, with a trash can, as if not yet conscious of where I was. Then, in May 1989, she showed genuine kindness and sympathy to me, communicating simply and openly.
This is how she stayed for me. For ten years we have not seen each other, only occasionally calling back. And only in the next century, 13-14 years after the first meeting, it happened to us to meet again.
I hope these conversations were as enjoyable for her as they were for me. One thing clearly worried her, though. She could not in any way process the thought that I, in every next meeting, strikingly, in her opinion, change. She could not believe in sincerity and see the pattern. Being very good about this man, I wrote the following parable for her.
The old gardener could no longer work on his garden and went to live in the city.
He settled in one of the slums of a huge gray city. Once cleaning his old coat, he reached into his pocket and found there old dried grains. Yes, ordinary seeds. Only those seeds were all different, from different plants, and from which – the old man could no longer know.
– Well, I'll plant them in our yard, we'll see what grows.
The old man took these seeds and, on a piece of earth, exposed from the swollen and cracked asphalt, planted them in the soil.
The old man lived in a house that stood face to face to another house. Houses were also crowded on the sides. "Well" – that was the name of these courtyards in that huge, damp city.