When Ivan woke up, he couldn't figure out where he was at first. It's too fresh, the breeze is blowing, but it's not cold. The sound of passing cars reached my ears, I could smell exhaust fumes in my nose, and my back was slightly aching from an excessively hard and uncomfortable surface.
Opening his eyes, Vanya was more stunned than ever. First of all, he noted that he was sleeping outside! It was some kind of park. It seemed to him that he had already seen this park, but it was clearly not located in Chelyabinsk. Secondly, he was wearing an old-fashioned army uniform, even that old spotted green of those times when he happened to pay his debt to the motherland.
The last time such an adventure happened to Vanya was thirty-five years ago, when, after demobilization, he was traveling from a military unit located in Volgograd, where he served, to a village near Chelyabinsk. Then he went on a spree, which caused him to miss the train. The adventure was so vivid that it was remembered for a lifetime. He remembered that he was going to sleep at the train station, but some homeless man got to him there, offering to eat and drink together. Naturally, at the expense of the soldier. Vanya had money, even if it was not a cosmic sum, but he managed to save up something. But he didn't dare flash cash in front of a muddy tramp. I took some change out of my pocket and bought a sausage in dough, which I shared in half with the homeless man.
Then Ivan did not know how to abruptly dismiss people. That's understandable, he was only twenty years old. A young naive guy who hadn't really seen life. At that time, he had spent almost a third of his life in an orphanage, had lived in a remote village with foster parents for another twelve years, and had served in an auto company in a closed men's group for two years. It's not that he was lucky to get a job, he's just one of the few guys who agreed to study at DOSAAF. He has never regretted this in his life, because he gained experience in driving and repairing cars in the army and was discharged with a driver's license to drive cars and trucks.
It was then that he spent the night on a bench in the park for the first and last time. He wanted to get rid of the homeless man as soon as possible, but he followed him and did not lag behind. Vanya later recalled with a smile how at some point he allegedly went off to relieve himself, and when he disappeared from the eyes of the murky type, he quickly ran away. But after that, he had no desire to return to the train station ahead of time. His train wasn't due to leave until three o'clock in the afternoon. The guy did not want to spend money on a hotel, he thought to save money for something more useful. So he went to sleep right on a bench in the nearest park right in the center of the city. That night, he was also approached by patrolling policemen, with whom a rather unpleasant dialogue took place, which almost ended with a trip to the bullpen (pre-trial detention cell). But it worked out. The guards got into the soldier's position, they had recently been like that, so they left him alone.
What made this day even more memorable was its irony. That morning, when he woke up on the bench, it was his birthday - the third of June of the two thousandth year - then he turned exactly twenty years old. It's hard to forget such a birthday.
And now it's all happening all over again.
Another fact that threw Ivan into a stupor was his thinness. It wasn't that he was completely out of control, but since he was thirty, his figure had swollen with fat and was quite dense. Now he was thin and muscular, as in his youth, and he felt as if he had been reborn instead of spending the night on a wooden bench. At the age of fifty-five, it would have been difficult to get up after that, if it had happened at all because of a jammed back.
After carefully examining his wardrobe, Vanya fell into a stupor: it was his military uniform! His fucking demob outfit! He remembered how he spent half a year on embroidery, braiding aiguillettes, as if he had served in the sewing troops instead of in the auto corps. Then it seemed to him that he looked dapper - a kind of macho Russian spill, at whose feet all the girls would fall. But nothing like that. As he got older, he realized how stupid it looked from the outside. An ordinary military uniform is better than a clown covered with ropes.
He found money, a military ID, and an old-style driver's license in his pocket. A very old sample! The large laminated document was the size of a pair of bank cards. It's inconvenient to carry one in your wallet, as are the old vehicle registration certificates (CTC), which had a similar format. For driving chastity, I had to buy a separate leather case, similar to a passport cover. And when the insurance went out, before they were transferred to a purely electronic form, then diagnostic cards, documents for additional equipment, and so on were added. Wow, then I had to carry a thick stack of papers with me so as not to run into a fine... Such rights were revoked back in the eighteenth year. Perhaps this happened earlier, it's just that when Vanya once again changed his rights to new ones, just in the eighteenth year, documents of this type were no longer issued. And the modern driver's license he received in the twenty-eighth year, the one with computer chips and biometric data, was nowhere near. There's a bunch of holograms, shields, and watermarks. In the light, they "blink" like a peacock spreading its tail in front of a female.
Surprisingly, the documents were his. Both the military record and the rights contained old photographs of him taken at the age of eighteen. First name, last name, patronymic - all honor by honor: Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov. And his date of birth.
The name, of course, is from the category of "take any sample and you don't have to fill anything out." And all because the imagination of the shelter workers is not very smooth. That's how they named the foundling child. And the foster parents did not give their last name because of their ineradicable laziness. They were elderly people of the old school, and they did not give themselves or their children any indulgences in their work. But when it came to bumping into a bureaucratic machine, they gave up. It's necessary to go to the city, again to make out some paperwork, and this is after running through the authorities to arrange the adoption.
The adoptive parents were the Mikheevs. Vanya's father was fifty-five at the time of adoption, and her mother was fifty-three. They could not have children of their own due to health problems, but they wanted to. For a long time they did not dare to take on the upbringing of someone else's child, but in their old age they were able to. Then they got a taste.
Three years after the adoption of six-year-old Vanya, Mikhail and Irina Mikheev adopted a seven-year-old girl. The orphanage staff could not mock her name, because Olga Sergeevna Kalinina went to an orphanage from a family of alcoholics, but she did not stay there for long, having come into the care of the Mikheevs.
Vanya was terribly offended by his foster parents at that time. For three years, he got used to being one child in the family. He didn't want to share his parents with anyone else. Olga initially behaved modestly and shyly, but quickly got used to it, and quarrels began between her stepbrother and sister.
That's how both of them, who visited the orphanage, never wanted to go back there. Even though they were children, they understood that foster parents should not be upset. Therefore, all their conflicts took place on the sly, so that Papa Misha and Mama Ira would not find out. Best friends were in plain sight, and when they were alone, they fought like a cat with a dog.
When Vanya was fifteen years old, Misha's dad died. And in ninety-nine, Ira's mother left after him. At that time, Vanya was serving in the army. When this most unpleasant news came, he was given a long vacation so that he could attend to the funeral. But this vacation did not count towards the service, which is why he was the last one to leave the unit, and even so late, right on the first of June.
Olga, who lost both guardians, was returned to the orphanage. Although she was already a hefty seventeen-year-old bully. Perhaps if she had studied at an institute or at least a technical college and lived in a dormitory, this would not have happened. But it so happened that she spent four months before coming of age in not the best conditions of a Russian orphanage in Chelyabinsk.
In theory, orphans should be given housing. But both Ivan and Olga flew with the apartment like plywood over Paris. Legislation in this area is quite tricky. It turned out that both had guardians who had their own house. Both orphans are registered in this house and have a share. So it's like they're not supposed to have a place to live. And the fact that the house is in a remote village doesn't bother anyone.
Even the best psychologist can't tell you exactly what's going on in people's heads. Perhaps Olga was making something up for herself, but in the end she blamed all her troubles on her brother, who had just returned from the army. By this time, she had already been living in a foster parents' home for six months. Ivan got verbal slops for not adopting her, but returning to "his army" as if he could have done otherwise. And for the fact that he, such an impudent man, owns as much as half of the house, which Olga needs to sell blood from her nose in order to go live in the city.
In general, on the day of arrival, the stepbrothers quarreled for life. Vanya then agreed to sell the house and split the money, but they managed to get out such crumbs that they couldn't buy anything useful with them. Both were left without a roof over their heads.
Olga immediately left to conquer the capital and seemed to have settled down quite well, marrying a guy with an apartment somewhere in the suburbs.
Vanya went to Chelyabinsk. The money he earned from the house was enough for him to rent an apartment and buy clothes. But there was no way to live anymore. He had to look for a job urgently.
Having only military service experience, he did not know where to get a job. As a result, he went to the nearest car repair shop, where he was welcomed with open arms. Since then, he has connected his life with car repairs.
Five years after his military service, he married a girl he had known since childhood. Their re-acquaintance happened by chance. When Vanya was injured and went to the clinic to see a surgeon, he found himself at a doctor's appointment with a familiar face. Saule Ledge is a Russian Kazakh girl. He lived with her on the next street, went to the same school in the same class, but was never interested in her as a girl. She was an excellent student and a crammer at school, and Ivan was a bully and a C student. Two such different people couldn't find a common language. Then! Now they had a lot in common: both were single, fellow countrymen, and.. Somehow it so happened that a friendly meeting after work ended with a wedding and five children.
Until the age of thirty, Vanya worked for his uncles in various services. In the tenth year, the father - at that time of three children - realized that working for his uncle would not feed his family. And he opened his own small car repair shop. At first, he unwound, paid off loans, and then the service began to make a good profit. So the Ivanovs decided to have two more children. The orphan dreamed of a big family. And it was customary for Kazakhs to do so.
The business brought a good income. It was enough to build a good cottage and buy a good foreign car. But suddenly the year two thousand and twenty came. And in March, all small business owners sucked on rotten tuna.
Ivanov did not have a financial cushion, yet the only small service and a large family are not the conditions that allow you to make large savings. He had to sell the service with all the equipment and think about how to feed his family.
There was nowhere else to go, and Vanya went into overbooking. He didn't want to remember that time, because he had deceived many people back then. He was one of those tough dealers who buy broken car junk, quickly and cheaply make it marketable and sell it for a lot of money.
He was engaged in this business for several years, and then either his conscience woke up, or his nerves couldn't stand it, but he decided to move away from it. I built a large garage in the courtyard and started doing body repairs. It brought in less money than car service and resale fraud, but it was quieter. Of course, sometimes there were such clients that it was difficult to talk about peace of mind. But this is the case at any car service station. There are often comrades with a fee who, for five kopecks, want to be made into a million and given a lifetime guarantee. And if anything goes wrong, then a dick on the table and into the or. But you can't drink away the experience. Ivan learned to identify such clients right away and immediately rejected them. It's easy to scare them off: you put up a normal price tag, like an official dealer's, which seems like a cosmic sum to them. After that, they run so that their heels sparkle.
Experience was slowly gained, and the workshop grew. Sometimes Ivanov bought broken cars, which he restored in his spare time. And he did it not as he did during his career as an outbidder, but qualitatively, as for himself. Basically, he did it for himself. I rode these cars for a while, after which I sold them, of course, for more. So he often changed cars and did not stay out of pocket. Almost any car he had was a plus.
But working with a slipway does not forgive mistakes. Safety regulations are written in human blood. Fifty-five years is a long time. Repairs were becoming increasingly difficult for Vanya. Pulling the muzzle of an old Tesla, he lost his caution and stood where it is strictly forbidden to stand. The clamp came loose from the spar. A ten-ton tension chain flew straight into a bad head like a bullet.
It was this moment that flashed through Vanya's mind, which caused him to have a phantom migraine. Rubbing his forehead, he whispered:
- Come on! What is it, I'm dead?! No, is he really dead?!!!
He was much more shocked than he had been when he woke up. To realize that you're dead, but still alive, young, and presumably in the past is stressful. It won't take long to go crazy. But it's hard to go crazy for someone who was the father of five children and whose wife worked in medicine, had a great sense of humor and a high degree of cynicism. If you live in such an environment for twenty years, you will either run away shouting 'save me, help me', or the hardening will become such that you will not break through with a clamp that has fallen off the slipway.
A materialist to the core and an atheist, such as Ivanov, needed confirmation of the reality of what was happening. He couldn't believe that this was really happening to him.
He pinched himself first. The pain was very real. Nevertheless, he did not dismiss the possibility that he was currently in a hospital room and was seeing glitches.
It is worth noting that the hallucinations were too vivid and realistic. The wind blew against my skin. The hot June Volgograd sun licked the exposed skin with its rays. The smell of fresh foliage was mixed with the aromas of exhaust fumes. People were making noise in the distance, and cars were rumbling with engines. The foliage had a rich green color and was covered with dust in the upper part.
There were few passersby strolling through the park at such an early hour. His clothes smelled of heavy sweat.
Such feelings are difficult to fake. Even the most expensive virtual reality capsule, which has recently appeared on sale to order, is unable to fake all the sensations.
- We need more evidence! Ivanov muttered, resolutely getting up from the bench.
Picking up a black sports bag with things that he used as a pillow, the guy directed his steps towards the market.
During his two years of service in Volgograd, he was barely familiar with this city. You don't see much on rare leave days. But he and his army comrades walked the length and breadth of the city center. Of course, a lot had been forgotten over the years, but as soon as I left the park, my memory kept throwing up familiar landmarks. For example, if you turn right behind the nearest Stalin five-story building and go down to the Volga, cross the road and turn left, then you can go to the market. Probably...
Walking unsteadily through the city, which he had not visited for thirty-five years, Ivan Ivanovich nevertheless reached the central market. There was a Soyuzpechat kiosk at the bus stop, which by the thirties of the twenty-first century were nowhere left in the country. Back in the 1980s, the Internet began to actively displace printed products. After the twenty-seventh year, the governments of all countries turned to the environment. Even in Russia, waste recycling plants began to be actively introduced, and paper was abandoned. Moreover, each person had a tablet, smartphone, computer. Any information could be obtained from the network. But the press has become completely corrupt.
Previously, newspapers paid off with sales of copies of products. It's not like that in the future. Few people will want to visit paid websites of news agencies. Therefore, articles in the press were easily bought. And advertising is everywhere and everywhere. Information resource sites are full of advertisements. If you can buy a subscription on other sites like a well-known video hosting service or an online movie theater so that you don't see ads, this won't work with the press. They live by selling articles and advertising. Bloggers have become relatively honest journalists, but even there, no video is complete without advertising. Product placement at every step. And you have to put up with this, because it is clear that an independent journalist must earn something in order to have an interest in his work.
And here's the good old magazine stand. Ivanov looked at him with nostalgia. He inhaled the scents of the fresh press with indescribable pleasure. Looking at the bright covers of glossy magazines and newspapers, he couldn't remember the last time he had held a press in his hands, except for the advertising spam that couriers shove into mailboxes and residents immediately throw into the trash. Advertisers were somehow in no hurry to save nature.
- Soldier, are you going to stand for a long time?
Vanya turned around at the hoarse male voice. When he found an impatient man in his forties nervously adjusting his glasses, he smiled disarmingly.
- Excuse me, I'm here now, - leaning over the window, he said to the plump elderly saleswoman: - Give me, please, all the latest newspaper ads.
- There are 'Dominoes' and 'Everything is for you." Today's ones. Will you take it?
- yes. Is there anything else?
- There is, - the double chin of the saleswoman rushed to the sagging chest. - "Work for you" and the magazine "Auto Sale".
- Except for 'Work', give me everything.
Hastily paying off so as not to delay the queue, Ivanov scooped up the press and retreated from the kiosk in the direction of shawarma. Delicious aromas of fried meat emanated from there, to which the stomach reacted with a rumbling roulades.
With a cup of hot instant coffee, a huge shawarma and a press under his arm, Vanya crossed the road and settled into a park alley that is located in the middle of the road and stretches through the entire city center.
Taking an empty bench, he took a bite of the shawarma and eagerly found the small numbers in the corner of the newspaper 'Everything is for you." Today's date was '2.06.2000 year'. On the Domino It was the same number. But the magazine is outdated for a couple of days. Judging by the last page, it was released once a week.
- Yogurt on the lips! They've arrived! - He breathed out. "So I'm in the past after all?"
Vanya loved to read. He became intimately acquainted with books at the age of fourteen. At that time, he had access only to the school library and the home collections of books by friends and acquaintances. At that time, it was normal to borrow a book from someone.
Like many boys, Vanya was attracted to adventures and detective stories.
After the army, he became familiar with science fiction and fantasy, but since books were expensive, he could very rarely afford to buy them. There was no time to go to libraries.
With the advent of the Internet, he was once again able to immerse himself in the fascinating world of book universes, which brought joy and allowed him to escape from reality. First there was the time of piracy: books, movies, music - all this could be easily found and downloaded from torrent sites. In those days, he was firmly convinced that paying for something that could be downloaded for free was utter stupidity.
Then Ivanov became a wealthy man and could already afford to buy everything he wanted: subscriptions to online services, books. He sent donations to his favorite authors and bloggers, who replaced television. Of course, not to the detriment of the family budget. But being paid for his hard work, he now understood writers perfectly. They also need an incentive, because creating a book universe and breathing life into the characters is not an easy task that requires a lot of time and effort. It is difficult to count how many good authors disappeared during the times of total piracy for a trivial reason: they stupidly wanted to eat, drink, and pay for utilities. When you work, and for that you get a fig with the universally banned poisonous palm oil, what kind of creativity? Why not try on white sneakers with hunger!
Or has palm oil not been banned yet?
This question made Ivanov frown. He didn't want to get hurt by buying inedible products. He recalled with horror the period when store shelves were filled with palm oil products. The genocide auction reached a particularly wide scale in the twenties. Then you could come to the store and find only one out of a hundred products that did not contain this product of the African industry. And even the law obliging sellers to indicate on the price tag that the product contains palm oil has not always helped. People bought this stuff, got poisoned, but they went back to the store and took the same thing because it was cheap. But the worst of all are fakes, which indicate one composition, but in fact - poison. It was only in the early thirties, when the scale of the tragedy became visible, that the World Health Organization (WHO) banned this poison.
Yes, Ivanov loved books. At one time, he read a lot about people going anywhere: to parallel worlds, to outer space, to alternative universes, including the past. He even used to dream of such a thing, put himself in the place of the heroes of the works, but never expected that one day he would be in the place of one of them. It was, to put it mildly, unexpected.