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Prologue

“... No, you know, I did not immediately understand that she was not herself. Such a pleasant old lady ... Or rather, not old, that it's me! The years, of course, were visible: the face in wrinkles and all that. But her figure is in a light cloak, so young, so tight at the waist, and this gray-haired hedgehog on the back of the head of a teenage boy ... And eyes: old people don’t have such eyes. There is something tortoise-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 as a child.

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

And she greeted me, you know, in such a way that it was obvious: she came in not just to stare and does not throw words into the wind. Well, Gena and I, as usual, can we help, madam?

And she suddenly told us in Russian: “You can do it, boys. I am looking for, - he says, - a gift for his granddaughter. She was eighteen, she entered the university, the department of archeology. Will deal with the Roman army, its war chariots. So, in honor of this event, I intend to give my Vladka an inexpensive elegant 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 managed to chat a lot. Or rather, the conversation was so spinning that it was Gena and I who told her how we decided to open a business in Prague and about all the difficulties and troubles with local laws.

Yes, that's strange: now I understand how deftly she conducted the conversation; Gena and I spilled like nightingales (a very, very cordial lady), and 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 grenades are small, but lovely in shape, curved drops are woven into a double whimsical chain. A special, touching bracelet for a thin girlish wrist. I advised! And we tried to pack it stylishly. We have VIP bags: cherry velvet with gold embossing on the neck, such a pink wreath, laces are also gilded. 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. After all, we are also not the first year in business, we understand something in people. A scent is developed - what is worth 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 start to the day. There are such people, with a light hand: they will come in, buy shabby earrings for fifty euros, and after them moneybags will tumble down! So it was here: an hour and a half passed, and we managed to sell goods to an elderly Japanese couple for three pieces of euros, and behind them three young German women bought a ring - the same, can you imagine that?

As soon as the Germans came out, the door opens, and ...

No, first her silver hedgehog swam past the window.

We have a window, it's a showcase - half the battle.

We rented this place because of him. An expensive room, they could save half, but from behind the window - as I saw it, I say: 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, but what product do we have? After all, we have garnet, a noble stone, warm, responsive to light. And I, as I saw this stained-glass window and imagined the shelves under it - how our grenades will sparkle to him in rhyme, illuminated by light bulbs ... What is the main thing in jewelry? A feast for the eyes. And he was right: people always stop in front of our shop window! And if they don’t stop, they will slow down - they say, we should come in. And often come back. And if a person has already entered, and if this person is a woman ...

So what am I talking about: we have a counter with a cash register, you see, it is turned so that the showcase in the window and those who pass outside the window, as on stage, were visible. Well, here it is: it means that 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 in any way, what are you - can you confuse such a thing? It was the glamor of a recurring dream.

She greeted us as if seeing us for the first time, and from the doorway: “My granddaughter turned eighteen years old, and she 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're dumbfounded, to be honest. If there was even a hint of madness in her, it’s not so: black eyes look friendly, lips in a half smile ... An absolutely normal calm face. Well, Gena woke up first, we must give him his due. Gena's mother is a psychiatrist with great experience.

“Madame,” says Gena, “it seems to me that you should look into your purse, and much will become clear to you. It seems to me that you have already bought a gift for your granddaughter and it lies in such an elegant cherry bag.

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

And she puts her handbag on the window ... damn, I have this one in front of my eyes vintage handbag: black, silk, with a fastener in the form of a lion's muzzle. And there is no bag in it, even if you crack!

Well, what thoughts could we have? Yes, none. Our roofs are gone. And literally in a second it rumbled and blazed!

…Sorry? No, then this began - both on the street and around ... And to the hotel - after all, the car with this Iranian tourist exploded there, huh? - came in large numbers to hell with the police and the ambulance. No, we didn't even notice where our client went. She probably got scared and ran away ... What? Oh yes! Here Gena prompts, and thanks to him, I completely forgot, but it will suddenly 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 myself was surprised: what does the canary in the jewelry store have to do with it? It's not some kind of caravanserai. And she says: “In the East, in many shops they hang a cage with a canary. And so that she sings more cheerfully, they remove her eyes with the tip of a red-hot wire.

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

The young man, who was telling this strange story to an elderly gentleman who had entered their shop about ten minutes ago, was hanging at the windows and suddenly unfolding a most serious service certificate, which was impossible to ignore, fell silent for a moment, shrugged his shoulders and looked out the window. There, in the rain, the flounces of the tiled skirts on the Prague roofs shone like a carmine cascade, a broad, squat house stared out into the street with two blue windows of the attic, and above it an old chestnut tree spread out its powerful crown, blooming with many creamy pyramids, so that it seemed that the whole tree was dotted with ice cream from the nearest cart.

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

... which the old lady appreciated so much: this detached calmness, and spring rain, and flowering chestnuts on the Vltava.

Fear was not part of the palette of her emotional experiences.

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 off and blazed with fire, the old lady simply slipped out, turned into the nearest alley, leaving a numb square behind her, and at a walking pace, past the police cars and ambulances that were screaming their way to the hotel through a dense traffic jam, passed five blocks and entered the lobby of a more than modest three-star hotel, where a room had already been booked in the name of Ariadna Arnoldovna von (!) Schneller.

In the shabby lobby of this boarding house rather than a hotel, they nevertheless tried to acquaint guests with the cultural life of Prague: a glossy concert poster hung on the wall near the elevator: a certain Leon Etinger, kontratenor(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). Location: St. Mikulas Cathedral in Mala Strana. The concert starts at 20.00.

Having filled out the card in detail, having written out with special care a middle name that no one needed here, the old lady received from the porter a solid key with a copper key ring on a chain and went up to the third floor.

Her room, number 312, was very convenient, just opposite the elevator. But, finding herself in front of the door to her room, Ariadna Arnoldovna for some reason did not open it, but, turning left and reaching room 303 (where a certain Demetros Papakonstantinou, a smiling businessman from Cyprus, had been living for two days), she took out a completely different key and, easily turning it in the lock, she entered and closed the door on the chain. Throwing off her cloak, she retired to the bathroom, where every object seemed to be perfectly familiar to her, and, first of all, wetting a terry towel with hot water, she ran it with force along the right side of her face, pulling off a flabby bag under her eye and a whole scattering of small and large wrinkles. . A large oval mirror above the washstand showed 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 removed the gray scalp from an absolutely naked skull - a wonderful shape, by the way - and at once transformed into an Egyptian priest from an amateur production of students of the Odessa gymnasium.

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

“And not bad ... this hedgehog, and the old woman is crazy. Good luck, the young lady would have liked it. And fagots are funny. Until eight there is still a lot of time, but - to sing ... ”- I thought ...

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

And he thought in an unimaginable mixture of languages, but he mentally uttered the words "Hochma", "Hedgehog" and "Young lady" in Russian.

In this language, he spoke with his eccentric, brainless and very beloved mother. That's just her name was Vladka.

However, that's the whole story...

Trapper

1

... And in a different way he was not called in the family. And because for many years he supplied animals to the Tashkent and Alma-Ata zoos, and because this nickname went so well with his whole wiry and agile appearance.

The trace of a camel's hoof was imprinted on his chest with a baked gingerbread, his entire back was slashed with the claws of a snow leopard, and how many times snakes bit him - it was completely without counting ... But he remained a powerful and healthy man even at seventy, when unexpectedly for his relatives suddenly put himself to die, for which he left the house the way animals go to die - alone.

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

And one more thing: when he died (starved himself to death), my 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, the youngest, so they were separated by 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, but now you can’t even ask anyone what insatiable wind drove their dad across the Russian Empire? But it drove, both in the tail and in the mane. And if we are talking about the tail and the mane: only after the collapse of the Soviet state did the grandmother dare to expose a piece of the “terrible” family secret: the great-grandfather, it turns out, had his own stud farm, and that’s exactly what is in Kharkov. “How the horses went 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 is clear where Zverolov's passion for hippodromes comes from! Ilya once exclaimed. But the grandmother glanced with her famous "Ivan-terrible" look, and he shut up so as not to upset the old woman: she was already the keeper of family honor.

It is quite possible that the rampant great-grandfather's wagon shook through the cities and towns in pursuit of the inexorable run of vagrant blood: his most distant known ancestor was a gypsy with the triple surname Prokhorov-Maryin-Seregin - apparently, it seemed to him that double was not enough. And Kablukov ... but God knows where she came from, this simple surname (also disgraced by the fact that one of the two Alma-Ata psychiatric hospitals, the one on the street of the same name, endowed this surname with a common chuckle: “Are you from Kablukov?” ).

Perhaps the same ancestor otkabluchival and vykabluchival guitar so that heels flew from the heels?

In the family, in any case, there were scraps of unknown, and even simply obscene songs, and all of them purred, from young to old, with a characteristic anguish, without going too far into the meaning:

gypsy gypsy says:
"I've had it for a long time...
Eh, dy - there is a bottle on the table!
Let's drink, honey!"

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

Sta-a-can-chi-ki gra-ane-ny-ia
Upa-a-ali so-o table ...

This Zverolov himself liked to sing under his breath when he was cleaning canary cages:

Upa-ali and raz-bi-li-sya -
My life has been shattered...

Canaries were his passion.

At the four corners of the dining room, cages were piled from floor to ceiling.

His friend worked at the zoo, the master is amazing. Each cell is a small openwork house, and each one is unique: one is like a carved box, the other is exactly like a Chinese pagoda, the third is a cathedral with twisted turrets. And inside the whole setting, a caring, painstaking household for the singing residents: a "kupalka" - a goal, like a football one, with a plexiglass bottom, and a drinking bowl - a complexly arranged thing where water came from a reservoir; I had to change it every morning.

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

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

And a skullcap! He wore them all his life: tetrahedral Chust "duppi" - hard boxes, with calampir 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 a lot of women around him.

He spoke Uzbek and Kazakh fluently; if he undertook to cook pilaf, there was nothing to breathe from the child, and the carrot stuck to the ceiling, but it turned out delicious.

He drank tea only from a samovar and at least seven enameled mugs a night - he did not recognize cups. If he was in a good mood, he joked a lot, laughed thunderously and boisterously, with funny sobs and a canary fistula on high notes; forever poured some unknown jokes to anyone: “The village of Yushta! Here is the wilderness!” - and at every opportunity, like a magician, he would extract from his memory a suitable piece of a poem, ingeniously changing the rhyme along the way, if suddenly the word is forgotten or does not lie in meaning.

Ilyusha climbed Zverolov like a tree.

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

In general, there was a time when he thought a lot about the Trapper, digging up some memories confused by the ingenuous childhood memory. For example, how he wove baskets for canary nests from barbecue sticks.

They collected sticks together in the grass near the neighboring barbecue, then washed them for a long time under a pump in the yard, scraping off the hardened wax of old fat. After that, the Zverolov's giant fingers started an intricate dance, weaving deep baskets.

- Are the nests such - like a box? Ilyusha asked, carefully following the deft thumb that effortlessly bent the aluminum spear and easily threaded it under the already woven frame.

“Otherwise the testicles will fall out,” Trapper explained seriously; always explained in detail - what, how and why he does it.

Pieces of camel hair were wound onto the finished frame (“so that the boys would not freeze”) - and if there was no wool, a yellow lumpy batting was picked out from an old, wartime padded jacket. Well, strips of colored matter were knitted on top of everything - here already the grandmother took out rags from her cherished tailor's bag with a generous hand. And the nests came out festive - chintz, satin, silk - very colorful. And then, said Zverolov, bird care. And the birds "brought comfort": they covered the 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…” Zverolov sighed tenderly.

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

But he was allowed to feed the grown chicks. The trapper kneaded the egg yolk, mixed it with a drop of water, pried the gruel with a match and with a precise movement pushed it right into the chick's gaping beak. For some reason, all the chicks strove to swim in drinking bowls, and Zverolov explained to Ilyusha how they should be taught, where to drink from, and where to swim. He liked to swing in the palms; showed - how to take, so that, God forbid, do not hurt the bird.

But all these nursery worries faded 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 plugged her ears and always exclaimed the same thing: "Jericho's trumpet!" - for which she immediately received in response: “Valaam’s donkey!”) - released all the canaries from the cages to fly. And the air became jungle: dense, iridescent, yellow-green, fan ... and a little dangerous; and Zverolov stood in the middle of the room - tall, straight Colossus of Rhodes (this is again a grandmother) - and in a gentle, grumbling bass with a sudden fistula squeak, he carried on conversations with the birds: he clicked his tongue, clicked, his lips got up so that Ilyusha laughed like crazy.

And there was another morning number: the Trapper funny watered the birds from his mouth: he took water into his mouth, began to “buzz and bawl” in order to attract them. And they flocked to his lips and drank, throwing their heads back like babies. So in spring the birds flock to a mighty tree with a birdhouse nailed high. Yes, and he himself, with his head thrown back, became like a giant chick of some pterodactyl.

Grandmother did not like this, she was angry and repeated that birds are carriers of dangerous diseases. And he just laughed.

All the birds sang.

Ilyusha distinguished them by their voices, he liked to watch how the neck of the canary trembled at especially loud trills. Sometimes the Trapper allowed you to put your finger on the singing throat - to listen with your finger to the pulsating scattering. And he taught them to sing. He had two ways: 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: slaty black, with a dagger sparkle running in a circle, with pink and yellow cores, where small letters indicated which birds sang: tits, warblers, blackbirds.

- What does the valuable song of a noble singer consist of? asked the Trapper. He paused for a moment, then carefully placed the record on the record player and carefully let the needle into its enchanted whirl. From the distant silence of the blue hills, bird voices were born and floated in sonorous streams, rattling on the pebbles, scratching out, calling out and fractionally silvery swarming in the air.

Ilyusha knew the knees of the song of the Russian canary; already knew how to distinguish “light oatmeal” from “mountainous”, “elevating” - when, starting to sing in a low register, gradually, as if rising uphill, the singer pulls the song up, to transcendent trills with a fading sweetness of sound (and you are afraid, it won’t cut off li) and holds the quivering “i-i-i-i” for a long time, translating it either to “u-u-u-u”, then to “u-u-u-u”, and after a short breath, exhales full and round sound ("Knorr let go!" - Zverolov noticed in a whisper) - and ends with low, gently interrogative whistles.

The ebullient, inescapably musical Odessa family and the Alma-Ata family of secretive, silent wanderers ... For a century they have been connected only by a thin thread of the bird family - the brilliant maestro kenary Zheltukhin and his descendants.

At the end of the 20th century, the chaotic history settles into bitter and sweet memories, and new people are born, including the “last time Etinger”, who is destined for an amazing, and at times suspicious fate.

"Zheltukhin" is the first book in Dina Rubina's "Russian Canary" trilogy, a colorful, stormy and many-sided family saga...

Dina Rubina

Russian canary. Zheltukhin

All rights reserved. No part of the electronic version of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, including posting on the Internet and corporate networks, for private and public use, without the written permission of the copyright owner.

* * *

Prologue

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

And she greeted me, you know, in such a way that it was obvious: she came in not just to stare and does not throw words into the wind. Well, Gena and I, as usual, can we help, madam?

As soon as the Germans came out, the door opens, and ...

No, first her silver hedgehog swam past the window.

We have a window, it's a showcase - half the battle. We rented this place because of him. An expensive room, they could save half, but from behind the window - as I saw it, I say: 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, but what product do we have? After all, we have garnet, a noble stone, warm, responsive to light. And I, as I saw this stained-glass window and imagined the shelves under it - how our grenades will sparkle to him in rhyme, illuminated by light bulbs ... What is the main thing in jewelry? A feast for the eyes. And he was right: people always stop in front of our shop window! And if they don’t stop, they will slow down - they say, we should come in. And often come back. And if a person has already entered, and if this person is a woman ...

The first book hope that a very good trilogy!
In search of new interesting books (I wanted something a little detective, but just a little bit) I came across this book.
The fact that it was written by a female author did not bother me, because. if the author writes really well (preferably in a third person), then I don’t think that it is necessary to do something about men and women. Therefore, I enjoyed reading such authors as Ursula Le Guin, Maria Semyonova and Andre Norton. Now among them, most likely, there will be Dean Rubin - I will read a couple more of her books. As one writer said in an interview:
"... I enjoyed reading some books written by women...", "... Therefore, if the author is unverified, I look not at the floor, but at the first "two pages". It is enough to evaluate the style, literacy, and form of presentation of the material and make a decision: to read or not to read..." (Artyom Kamenisty).
Guided by similar ideas, I “leafed through” an excerpt of the book available on the Internet. Realizing that the writing language is good, I bought this book.

Now for the book itself.
As I said earlier, the writing style is excellent, as I read it, I liked it more and more. Very easy to read and interesting! Further, intrigues, spies, secrets appear in the book - in general, everything I like :-) I hope there will be even more of them in the next book of the trilogy! We should also note the musical line in the work. She is depicted in a hateful way, but at the same time very bright. A huge number of storylines can, of course, alert at the beginning, but they do not develop very quickly and therefore gradually add up a complete picture of what is happening on the entire scale of action. Quite a lot has been written about each character, so the author managed to reveal the characters perfectly. The descriptions are also very beautiful and voluminous, as if this very city and place is in front of you. So realistic and beautiful that you want to visit There, for example, in Odessa. A similar impression was made on me by Robert Asprin's Dragon Games, where she wrote with incredible love for the descriptions of the surrounding places about the city he fell in love with. But there was New Orleans (even before the events that happened to it), and in this work the places are somehow closer, more familiar. And it seems that Odessa is as close as, say, Alma-Ata, no matter how far they are, no matter how different they may seem, but there is something in them that is so ... familiar, or what?
What surprised me a little was the unusual description of the protagonist, about which we learn, as it were, from others, and he himself appears briefly, briefly. Very unique and interesting!

(About the plot: for those who have not read, it is better to skip this paragraph)
Several families, different cities, customs, manners and traditions. Completely unfamiliar people and their families are united only by the kenar and his descendants. A small songbird Zheltukhin, which creates that musical atmosphere! Yes, yes, it is she, and not a musical Odessa family or a young man with a contrasoprano voice, it is the canary that creates to the greatest extent a certain musical rhythm of the work. It is in honor of this bird that the book is named, the continuation of which, I hope, will soon be!

I will definitely read the sequel as two books! Excellent, I think there will be a trilogy ... I hope that the continuation "does not let us down" and will be just as interesting!
After reading, I could not resist and looked on the Internet for the history of writing the book. It turns out that the author very carefully studies what he writes about - a rather rare phenomenon in modern literature. She is interested in those events, phenomena and everything that is possible, which she tells the reader about. This was said on one site, sort of like an interview with a writer - I hope it's true.

* * *

Prologue

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

And she greeted me, you know, in such a way that it was obvious: she came in not just to stare and does not throw words into the wind. Well, Gena and I, as usual, can we help, madam?

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

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