What does it take to make an ordinary life story funny, lively, memorable? Observation, attention to detail? The answer is known to the writer Leonid Kostyukov.
When you can’t agree
One young married couple was hitchhiking or even walking in Turkey. In anticipation of the overnight stay, they simply knocked on the houses – and they were excellently received, fed, watered and admonished. And for a better understanding, the young spouses carried a Russian-Turkish dictionary with them.
And then one day they wandered into the mountains, it got dark, they knocked on some door. Unsmiling people let them in, treated them somehow. In the morning, the couple said goodbye to the owners and intends to move further into the mountains. And here, to the extent of communication possibilities, such a dialogue takes place.
– You can’t go there. There are Kurds.
– So what? We’ll come to an agreement somehow.
“You can’t negotiate with them. These are animals.
– Well, at least we’ll give you money.
They won’t take the money. These are animals.
This detail makes the spouses alert and get into the dictionary. It turns out that the Kurds are wolves.
– Thank you! And we thought that the Kurds are such a people.
– Not. Those are Kurds. We are Kurds, and they are Kurds.
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This is most likely not the issue.
My friend Jan Shenkman ordered an article for me in the Ogonyok magazine. Something else about the disastrous situation with the Russian language in Pandan to a similar article by some (I don’t remember already) prominent philologist or linguist. Wrote, gave, forgot. After some time, in a telephone conversation with Jan on another topic, I remember and wonder what and how.
“No way,” Yang replies. – My boss Arkhangelsky ruined the whole idea.
– A! I take it with gusto. And I think I know why! Arkhangelsky and I are in Rostov-on-Don…
And I talk about our spat at the round table, the subsequent reconciliation at dinner – but, obviously, incomplete; sediment remains. In general, everything is as it is, with subtle nuances.
“You know,” Yang says, having delicately listened to everything to the end, “I don’t think that’s really the point. Let’s start with the fact that this is not the same Arkhangelsk …
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Variability
A long time ago, at the turn of the century, it fell to me to be on the jury of an online literary competition. There were over 30 nominations, and, as you understand, there were much more texts. And one of my comrades, Ilyusha, pumped them to me from the Internet on floppy disks, and I regularly went to him for them. We drank tea, talked, and sometimes the owner’s younger sister Anya, a sweet and well-mannered girl, joined us. An easy friendly relationship was established between us, which, in my opinion, was quite enough to say hello and exchange a couple of phrases when we met somewhere at a literary evening. But here’s the bad luck – it’s not that it didn’t work out at all, but it worked out every other time. Either Anya smiles and seems to be glad to see me, then she looks at me as if I were a stranger. In complete bewilderment, I turned to Ilyusha for clarification and support. He answered a little unexpectedly:
“I can explain it to you, but I can’t help you. The fact is that there is my sister Anya, and there is a girl Dasha from Sakhalin, and also in a literary get-together, and it is almost impossible to distinguish between them. Well, if you put it next to me, then Dasha is a little higher. So – Anya greets you, but Dasha does not.
So I remained in conscious ignorance until Dasha came to study at the university where I then taught. Now, for the most part, I distinguished Anya and Dasha from a logical point of view, since I roughly understood where Dasha should be. And if he did not distinguish, then it does not matter: both girls greeted me excellently.