Grandmother's рerception ...

My perception of “grandmothers” has long been unicellular. At its best, grandmother is Arina Rodionovna, a warm stove, next to which it’s cozy to fall asleep in a cold. The diminutive suffix did its job - formatted perception. In addition to warmth and comfort, it can also be useful in the household: out, the classic even drank with her.
I saw the dark side of grandmothers through the collective image of Baba Yaga. Indeed, by old age, some women make themselves sharp faces that can be cut at first sight. There is no cosiness in them - the windows are wide open, and some kind of internal homelessness is visible from everywhere.

Once I was visiting a childhood friend. I was then twenty years old, I graduated from college. We remembered our happy Soviet famine, looking at old photographs. I noticed a rare album with a satellite on the cover, lying in the back of the box.

“Oh, this is my grandmother, nothing interesting,” commented a friend.

I still asked permission to look.

“Grandma, can Oleg see your album?” Shouted a friend.

“Yes, of course!” Flew back from the next room through the corridor. Grandmother lived in the same apartment with her friend’s parents and himself.

I opened the album on the first page and started flipping through. Nothing outstanding, the usual yellow leaves of someone's fate, like in any park in the fall, like in any life in old age. Pictures of children, women, men, black and white sky, gray sun, frozen forever in the sea, proud buildings, from which now you can not find a brick.

But in the middle of the album I lingered. I was hooked by several similar photos of some girl. It was a full-fledged photo shoot, as we would say now, such a retro instagram. The girl posed in the interior. In the background, the old tube radio, the paintings on the walls, the window with curtains flickered. The pictures were very high quality, even professional, as if from the cover of a magazine.

Perhaps this impression arose from the fact that the girl in the photo was divinely good. I was even somehow shy of her beauty. It seemed to me that if I look a little longer, then I risk falling in love with her (then I was not married, then I could still). The girl on the yellowed cards smiled so that black and white photographs for a moment become color. She smiled before catching her throat, to butterflies in my stomach.

I hastened to turn the page. Then there were some more pictures, more and more modern, and at the end of the album, on the last pages, I could easily recognize my friend’s grandmother - at the cottage, on the bench, at the table.

I closed the album and returned it to a friend.

“Interesting,” I muttered out of politeness, “the girl is there alone in the photo, it’s really nothing. Is your relative? "

“Ah,” said a comrade, immediately realizing what I was talking about, “yeah, a relative. My grandmother. ”

I sat in silence for several seconds until my kettle began to boil.

I took the album from a friend back, literally pulled it out of my hands. Opened in the middle of the page with photos of the girl. I flipped to the end on the page with photos of my grandmother. Then he rewound it. Then fast forward. I did this simple cartoon trick a couple more times.

“Is this the same grandmother as in the last photos?” I asked one of my signature idiotic questions.

“The same, the same,” the friend replied with intonation, “and you will be treated.”

I was holding a stunned album in my hands, and a template torn in half sparkled inside me.

At that moment, a shuffle rang out in the corridor, and grandmother entered our room. She brought us gingerbread tea on a tray.

“Oh, granny, it wasn’t worth it,” a friend told her.

The old lady put down the tray and straightened up. She did not leave immediately, apparently, she needed to catch her breath. She was already a little over eighty. She heard perfectly, but her legs listened poorly, no matter how much the brain tried to shout to them. An elderly woman was looking straight at me. I felt awkward. I picked up the album, open on her girl’s pictures, and uttered the second idiotic phrase of the day:

“And this is you!”

She clasped her hands as if she had seen a ghost.

And smiled. The same smile from the old photo.

And at that moment, someone launched a modern Hollywood blockbuster with special effects.

The grandmother on my eyes began to crumble into pixels. A bunch of gray hair tore the gum and scattered into thousands of black snakes. The wrinkles instantly smoothed out, as if they had run an iron of time on her face. His eyes flashed, as if they were rubbed off by dust.

A smile does not age. Before me stood a stunning beauty, a girl from a yellowed picture. Butterflies flew around the room around us, fluttering out of my stomach.

How often our grandmothers for us is just the last page of the photo album. How recklessly we forget to turn it over to see the miracle of old man's youth. How difficult it is for us to believe that Aivazovsky is hiding under Polenov, that nine-point passions could also rage in a quiet pond.

What a pity that our old people leave us unsolved and unsolved, like an old photo album.

© Oleg Batluk