The author is Boris Raevsky. A story from the book «In Our Favor»
S. Chekan, Honored Artist of the RSFSR
Actor Yevgeny Pivovarov, standing under the shower, with pleasure threw up one arm, then the other, leaned over, squatted, joyfully, noisily, like a walrus, snorted and loudly patted his chest and sides. Filming went on all day. He barely waited for the moment when he could throw off the robe of the Spanish grandee: a wide cloak, long since lost its color, short, tight-fitting pants that bound him like diapers, a velvet camisole smelling of mothballs. In the dressing room, they assured me that the clothes were clean and disinfected. But Pivovarov was haunted by the feeling that all these rags were dusty, saturated with someone else’s sweat, someone else’s smells.
In a long, six-tiled shower room, several more artists were washing silently. Only a slight ringing and splashing of elastic streams was heard, and occasionally sobbing and rumbling in that e.h.
Turning around, Pivovarov suddenly found that the director Strokov was standing in front of his booth, portly, bearded, looking like a patriarch, with his constant assistant Boris Luminets, whom everyone called Lupitz, because the skin on his small nose was always peeling, like on a potato. The director and assistant silently stared at the washing artist.
Pivovarov felt uncomfortable: a naked person is not very pleased to be the object of study. He even bashfully turned his back on Strokov.
“But it seems nothing…” he said thoughtfully to the assistant, narrowing his eyes.
«Nothing,» Lupitz confirmed, wrinkling up his pink nose as if about to sneeze.
— Will it fit?
“Perhaps…
After exchanging these short, incomprehensible phrases to Pivovarov, they fell silent and continued point-blank, meticulously examining him, like meticulous buyers looking at a cabinet in a furniture store.
«What to them?» Pivovarov was surprised.
The director and his assistant waited until he dried off and got dressed. The three of us went to the dining room. And here, at the table, Strokov offered Pivovarov to play the title role in the new film, which he would soon shoot.
— What is the role? asked Pivovarov casually, trying to hide his joy. He was still relatively young, worked in the theater, and acted in films only in episodes, and such an unexpected, honorable offer flattered him very much.
— Champion of Russia. Wrestler.
— Champion?! — the artist was even more surprised. “But data is needed here … Muscles, a figure …
«Nothing,» Strokov reassured. “Your build is like an Apollo.” You will work your muscles. There is time.
Pivovarov smiled all the way home. No joke, such good luck! The main role!
At home, Pivovarov took off his coat and trousers, went to the mirror, and looked at himself for a long time, meticulously. A tall, slightly weighted thirty-two-year-old man looked at him from the mirror. In his youth, Pivovarov was fond of sports, and traces of this have survived to this day: deployed shoulders, a straight back, good posture. But only traces. Looking in the mirror, he noted sadly: his chest was fat, and his legs too. And even the abdomen is planned. And most importantly, there is no power that always emanates from a champion wrestler, from his convex, powerful chest, short, as if cast, neck, wide sloping shoulders, strong, like columns, legs.
Having waited with difficulty for several days (for solidity, so that the director would not have the impression that he was missing the role without hesitation), Pivovarov announced his consent.
— So that’s great! Strokov approved. Filming will start next year. In the meantime, “train if you want to be a wrestler!” he sang out of tune in bass, slightly altering the words of a popular song. I’ll get a coach.
Three days later, Pivovarov came to the sports hall of the House of Officers. On a thick soft square carpet that looked like a ten-sleeping mattress, two light heavyweight wrestlers puffed. Their huge, massive bodies were shiny, as if greased. One stood on all fours, leaning on his elbows and knees, and from below he watched the slightest movement of the enemy, and he tried to turn him over onto his shoulder blades.
Six more wrestlers were sitting on a low bench, carefully watching the fight.
“I would like Gurgenidze,” Pivovarov muttered in embarrassment, addressing one of the athletes, a hefty guy with a tight red nape and white teeth as big as keys.
— And here. He pointed to a tall man in a blue tracksuit. He had blue-black, short-cropped hair and the same black, quick, lively eyes.
The coach was in the know.
“Ah, fellow artist! he exclaimed, squeezing Pivovarov’s hand in a friendly way. — We need a champion — let’s make a champion! What are you talking about?!
He spoke Russian quite correctly, but with a slight Caucasian accent.
On his instructions, Pivovarov undressed and sat on a bench next to other wrestlers. A new couple was already working on the carpet.
Pivovarov felt uncomfortable. The wrestlers were all young, thick-set guys, first-class. The artist understood: next to their mighty figures, which even now, in winter, keep traces of a tan, he himself, white, as if doused with yogurt, and loose, looks strange, perhaps even ridiculous.
Pivovarov was afraid that the hot, fast coach would now offer him just like that, for a test, to measure his strength with one of the sitting ones. That will be fun for these young, cocky guys, willingly grinning their teeth for any reason.
But the goofy-looking coach turned out to be delicate: he seemed to have forgotten about Pivovarov. The whole lesson did not touch him, allowing him to calm down and take a closer look. And only when the athletes left and the hall was empty, he repeated smiling:
— We need a champion — there will be a champion! What are you talking about?!
He made the artist do some gymnastic exercises, run, jump rope. Briefly outlined the basic rules of wrestling and gave some advice.
The next day, Pivovarov went to a sports shop. I bought dumbbells and a kettlebell. It would be difficult and embarrassing to carry this cargo in a trolley bus. He left the purchases at the saleswoman, went outside, called a taxi. I wanted to take both dumbbells and a weight at once, transfer them to the car, but I hurried, one dumbbell jumped out of my hands, thumped loudly on the floor. Good thing I didn’t hit anyone. Everyone standing in the store looked at Pivovarov at once.
From now on, Pivovarov’s life changed dramatically. Like many artists, he used to get up late, at ten or eleven o’clock. Yes, and then say: until the evening performance is over, while you take off your makeup, change clothes, get home, eat, this and that — you won’t lie down before one in the morning. And sometimes two. But now the coach on the cover of the notebook wrote Pivovarov a hard regimen: “Getting up — 8 hours, exercising — 8-30”.
— And when to sleep? — the artist was confused.
— From twelve to eight, you will lie down all the sides. What are you talking about?!
— What about charging? Necessarily? — Pivovarov was completely despondent. He’s been away from her for a long time.
— Absolutely! No charge — no champion!
There were daily classes in the gym. As a sin, at the very first training session, Pivovarov accidentally scratched his face.
“Skin like a girl,” the trainer said.
“He comes to us, he gets choked, his cheek becomes like a sole,” gu.e. joked one of the wrestlers.
The scratch was trifling, but ugly: it went across the entire cheek and even climbed onto the nose. The wife, seeing her, shrugged her shoulders, but said nothing. And just leaving for work, she quit:
— Powder on a trellis …
Pivovarov’s body ached, as if he had been severely beaten yesterday. My hands ached, and especially my shoulders, my legs ached, so much so that it was impossible to touch the calves, it pricked in the lower back, the neck did not turn, as if it had become stiff.
“This is in the early days. Then it will pass, ”Pivovarov reassured himself, but for some reason his mood did not improve.
Pivovarov’s day was now compressed, as if under pressure. Charging, training on the carpet, crosses. I hardly saw the Pivovarov’s wife. She went to the factory — he was still sleeping. She was returning — her husband was at the play. He came and she was already asleep.
“Everything is not human,” the wife complained. — Others have roles like roles, but here you get exhausted …
Pivovarov himself sometimes regretted taking on this role. Fuss a lot, but will there be any sense ?! How to ensure that the screen turned out to be a real wrestler, and not a miserable fake, which always amuses and annoys meticulous fans?!
Pivovarov tried to go into the dressing room. The head make-up artist, a skinny, round-shouldered old man with shaggy eyebrows, was a passionate movie buff and invented things that outsiders could not even believe. He listened with interest to Pivovarov’s request, but refused to help.
“Cinema, my friend, this is not a theater for you,” he said instructively and sternly. — Here in the theater they can easily make an eighteen-year-old beauty out of an old sandbox, and a toothless witch out of a girl. There it is time to spit. The spectator is far from the stage, neither glued noses, nor pads on the stomach or back are visible to him.
And the number will not work in the cinema! Do not stick the same muscles?! They will take you close-up, and the viewer will immediately see through the fake. And besides, — the old man waved his hand, — during the competition, all these «muscles» will go to hell … Pivovarov practiced throws first with a stuffed animal and only then with a live partner.
The scarecrow was terrible: a canvas bag stuffed with sawdust and sand. Instead of a head — a soccer ball. There are arms, but no legs. It immediately resembled a snowman and a garden scarecrow.
With the scarecrow, everything went smoothly. Half-supples, a throw over the back, and a scarecrow on the shoulder blades. And with the enemy, the tricks “didn’t go”, they turned out uncleanly, with difficulty.
— Dirt! the coach exclaimed reproachfully.
Pivovarov especially got it when they began to work according to the script. The artist read it several times. It was the story of a famous Russian wrestler (the author probably meant Ivan Poddubny, although the champion had a different surname in the script). This wrestler-nugget almost to old age performed in all parts of the world and put all his famous opponents on the shoulder blades. It was all good. Worse, the film showed little of the champion’s personal life, his thoughts and feelings. The viewer saw him mainly on the carpet or near the carpet.
“Nothing,” the director reassured Pivovarov. — This is the first option. The writer is currently working on it.
According to the script, at the beginning of the film, the future champion is thrown with a suples on the carpet by a visiting German guest performer. The scene was very effective. The German was played by the artist Kobzev, an experienced athlete. He was red and covered with thick hair: chest, shoulders, legs, arms and even fingers. With this “characteristic” of his, Kobzev, probably, captivated the director’s heart. Kobzev liked this episode. And almost every day he tried to train him. And when they throw you in a suples and you helplessly fly, turning over in the air and for a moment even losing the idea of where the earth is and where the sky is, the feeling is unpleasant. Pivovarov avoided intensified repeated rehearsals of this technique in every possible way, advised his partner to work with a stuffed animal. But the malicious Kobzev claimed that the effect was not the same with a scarecrow, and again asked to “rehearse” the scene he liked.
The work on the neck was also hard. Gorgsnidze liked to repeat: “For a wrestler, the neck is like a cork circle for a drowning man!”
And Pivovarov was soon convinced: the correct aphorism. A strong neck rescues a wrestler in the most seemingly hopeless situation. They are about to put him on his shoulder blades, but he, dodging like a cat, stands on the bridge. And no matter how the enemy crushes it, the bridge cannot “squeeze”. But in order to stand on the bridge, you need to train daily, “swing” your neck, as the wrestlers say. The job is boring and tedious. And it also happened that the coach would come up when you were standing on the bridge, and sit on your stomach, And sit as if on a bench. And you stand on the bridge, although it seems that now the cervical vertebrae are cracking from the terrible tension.
Tired, completely spinning in a continuous round dance of performances, rehearsals and training, Pivovarov often thought: “No luck! How much energy I spend on this damn fight! And others have the role of a doctor, a saleswoman, a circus owner. No special training. The beauty!»
Often now Pivovarov would go up to the mirror and examine himself.
“The shoulders have become wider,” he noted with pleasure. — Biceps have grown … »
Outwardly, he already looked like a real fighter. And he was very happy when one day in the hall behind him he heard a respectful whisper of a boy from a vocational school:
— Who is this? From Dynamo?
So more than half a year passed imperceptibly. The preparatory period is over. Filming has begun.
In the huge central pavilion of the film studio, from morning till night, hammers were banging, US dollars were shuffling, saws were ringing. The carpenters were building a circus. On the days of filming, the front rows were densely filled with extras: there were old men, and students, and girls, and some intelligent elderly ladies. And in the back rows, which were drowning in smoke (the pyrotechnicians specially fumigated the pavilion with them to create a feeling of “distance”, perspective), in the back rows, painted plywood silhouettes of people were nailed to the benches. It was the crowd.
Now that the shooting began, Pivovarov felt more confident. The hesitation that had haunted him for the past six months — whether he would be able to play a wrestler, a champion — was over. Shooting has begun — you have to work, there is no time to think.
The load was very high. Any, even the most trifling scene on the carpet before shooting was repeated many times, achieving the utmost clarity and expressiveness of every word, every gesture. The wrestlers spent almost whole days, as the athletes say, «in a warm state.» By the end of the day, Pivovarov was completely exhausted.
Hundreds of meters had already been filmed, and Pivovarov, looking through the finished episodes, did not know: was his work successful, did his champion look like a real wrestler?
Everything seemed to be not bad, but still there was no firm confidence in the final success. And only once she suddenly appeared. Pivovarov that day had to fight with the Turk Ali-Huseyn and defeat him. At the rehearsals, they accurately set the course of the fight: grabbing a hand on a key, a swift throw and a touch. All these tricks Pivovarov and Ali-Huseyn (artist Samokhin) repeated dozens of times, and it seemed that the scene was already going like clockwork.
But Pivovarov still felt some kind of dissatisfaction: the struggle was constrained, too tense.
Both the director and Gurgenidze felt this. They filmed this scene three times, and all failed.
— Repeat! — Bass commanded Strokov. — Motor!
— There is a motor!
And the episode began filming for the fourth time. Excited, Pivovarov suddenly seemed to have forgotten all this carefully designed cascade of tricks. He grappled with Ali-Huseyn for real. With an unexpected quick half-supples he threw him over himself, the Turk stood on the bridge, and Pivovarov began to furiously squeeze him. — So-so! — perked up, the director whispered.
The operator did not take his eyes off the peephole.
Pivovarov himself felt that the scene was going on easily, lively, naturally. And when they later looked at the captured footage, it turned out that way.
Anyone who does not know how a film is made cannot be explained by the upsurge, the nervous tension in which all the performers are during the filming period. During these months, everyone, from costume designers and illuminators to the director, screenwriter and director of the picture, lose count of days and hours, like in a war or at the bedside of a seriously ill person.
And Pivovarov, although he was already accustomed to filming, in these weeks and months felt as if his pulse suddenly quickened sharply, and his body, as in space, lost weight.
As always, the scenes were shot interspersed; sometimes from the finale of the film, sometimes from the beginning and middle; everything was confused, besides, some episodes were later rejected, they had to be played again, and the artists gradually lost the feeling — was a lot filmed or not enough? Where is the end?
Only the omniscient director, who never parted with a scruffy, colored pencil-scribbled script, knew this.
Therefore, it seemed unexpected to Pivovarov when one day, unshaven, haggard Lupitz, with his nose peeling, as always, threw on the run that tomorrow or the day after tomorrow the end.
And suddenly everything was broken. There was suddenly silence and calmness. It was almost unbelievable. This feeling is familiar to sailors when a storm of eight is suddenly replaced by complete calm.
Filming is over. True, there was still a lot of work ahead: editing, «noises», music and so on. But Pivovarov was no longer concerned.
He rested for the first two days. He rested primitively, but so far he did not dream of more. He slept a lot, sat in the square, half-closed his eyes, exposing his face to the breeze and the sun, fed the pigeons in the square near the old church.
It was so nice to forget about boring trainings on the carpet, about all sorts of suples, coups and grabs. I even abandoned the exercises in the morning.
In his free time, he and his wife discussed plans for a trip to the Caucasus, developed a hiking trip along the Sukhum Military Highway.
So several days passed. But soon Pivovarov felt empty. Something seemed to be missing.
“Rest, as you know, quickly becomes boring,” he thought, and went to the studio.
There, on one of the cabinets, there was still a sign: “Champion of Russia”. The headquarters of the painting was located here.
Pivovarov hung around in the long corridors of the studio among artists, cameramen, artists, musicians, editors, directors, all this motley, noisy and bright «cinema» fraternity, heard enough of all the latest news and gossip. Everything went on as usual. However, the unusual feeling of emptiness and some stiffness did not disappear.
“What would it be? Pivovarov was worried. “Am I sick?”
He went to the cafeteria. There he met Strokov. The director’s patriarchal beard grew even more magnificent during the filming.
— Well, how? Strokoff exclaimed cheerfully. — Hip throw? Key takeover?
“To the key,” Pivovarov corrected, and suddenly he clearly felt how much he missed the ardent, temperamental Gurgenidze, and the laughter-bearing first-class guys, and the soft wrestling mat.
«I saw your ‘Caucasian man’ yesterday,» continued Strokov. — In accounting. The coach there received money for you. Last time. Yes, you cost us a pretty penny! But amba!
Pivovarov went out into the street. It was a great day sparkling with sunshine. The sky was clear, clear, blue and shone like enamel. In the distance, like a light, gauze backdrop in the theater, the heated air swayed and trembled.
Taking off his hat, the artist walked leisurely along the boulevard. The sand crunched underfoot. The leaves on the trees, washed in the morning rain, were smooth and shiny, as if carved from tin. The wind blew up, and it even seemed to Pivovarov that they thundered.
It was far from home, but Pivovarov did not get on the bus. Too bad the weather is good! He walked, enjoying the warmth and light, and yet he felt: something was missing, something was gnawing at him.
He crossed the square, passed the bridge, then looked at his watch and suddenly, unexpectedly for himself, turned towards the House of Officers. Now it’s just the first-class training.
The room is dark and chilly. On a low, narrow bench sat five athletes in tights and shoes. A couple of heavyweights worked on the carpet. Immediately with a whistle in his mouth and a black, sparkling, as if pomaded, hedgehog of hair stood Gurgenidze.
Pivovarov chuckled. All this vividly reminded him of his first visit here. The stocky, round-shouldered guys sat on the bench in the same way, the heavyweights sniffled on the carpet like asthmatics, and the coach’s hair shone like varnished.
We met Pivovarov cordially. A strong hand clapped heavily on his shoulder. Someone chimed in:
Hello champion!
A guy with teeth as big as keys (his name was Kotya) gu.e.vato said:
— What’s in your pants? How are you standing as a guest?
But Pivovarov did not undress. The studio no longer pays for it. This means that it is somehow inconvenient to exploit Gurgenidze. The coach probably guessed his thoughts.
— The next pair of Limons — Ryumin, get ready for Pivovarov — Myasnikov, — he commanded.
And soon Pivovarov, in his shorts, was already stomping on the carpet, attacking, cunning, defending himself and advancing again.
And when the fight was over, he, standing under the shower, felt: his heart was light and clear again. The painful sensation of connectedness, stiffness, which had fettered them all the last days, flew off the muscles. The body was young again, filled with strength and explosive energy.
«Uh, no,» he thought with a chuckle. “You won’t kick me out of this hall so easily!” Dudki!