It was a small shop in the Shabolovka area, it was still necessary to walk along some ill-remembered, tedious, dusty courtyards; he was either “Golden Lotus”, or “Third Way”, I do not remember already. Seven clumsy steps down, and you fell into a semi-dark basement, elongated, long, word-but long-distance carriage; with one cloudy little window in the corner. The room was divided into two halves by a self-made counter, on which books were piled. However, the books occupied almost the entire space here - they lay in uneven rows on the shelves, on the window sills, on the floor. It smelled of book dust, dampness, harshly - with Indian incense, printing ink. In the corner, the radio mumbled on, always on the verge of hearing. Behind the counter was usually a monstrous-sized fat woman who always seemed half asleep. As it turned out later, it was a deceptive impression - when one of the visitors tried to sack a book about the astral worlds and their inhabitants, the aunt snatched the book out of his hands with terrifying agility, then to plunge into her usual state again. Sometimes she was replaced by a vigorous peasant who looked like a provincial gym teacher.

Visitors were left to themselves. It was possible to wander along the counter, looking at books painted by ancient symbols and portraits of teachers of various stripes and budgets, weird magazines, eerie talismans, amulets, runes, flyers with invitations to firewalking, levitation and clairvoyance.

Then I wore a-la John Lennon glasses, black ankle-length dresses, baubles and elbow bracelets, dark brown hair to the waist, earrings with pendants and did not yet know that astrology is pseudoscience. Because quite often visited the shop.

Summer, most likely - July, noon; a little stuffy, I remember watering cars driving, and clouds reluctantly gathered on the edge of the sky. I went to the shop to buy the missing volume of "Magical Plants", the book of Agrippa and a collection of works on Rosicrucians, the last time I did not have enough money for them. In the shop was the usual twilight, and after a while and completely dark, - it seems, a thunderstorm began.

The fat woman, groaning, went out for a couple of minutes and returned with a bunch of her own, which she began to light and set in the corners. Catching my surprised look, she growled: "There is no electricity." The book of the Rosicrucians was not found. I quietly whispered a spell to search for the lost thing. It was rapidly turning dark. Taking a candle, I went to a far corner to look for a book there. Then, in the wrong light of a candle, I saw a man standing in a corner with an open book in his hands. It was a graceful young man, about eighteen years old, with a shock of curly honey-colored hair loose on his shoulders. He was dressed in leather pants with lacing, the same jacket, but instead of the T-shirt expected in such cases with some Napalm Death or Anaphema in pathetic poses, there was a white shirt. There was something medieval in the whole look:

Obviously, as usual for all myopic people, I came too close, and he looked up and looked at me intently. He had calm gray eyes, a very pale face, characteristic of people of this suit, a nose with a small crook. The large mouth, as if with pressure, was strange, not very bright, red. “Probably, such people were taken to Hitler Jugend,” I thought.

For a while we silently looked into each other’s eyes. Suddenly the wind breathed through the open door, quickly pounded rain on the iron window-sills, smelling like dust, rain, freshness.

As if by intuition, I lifted the first page of the book, which he held in his hands, and realized that this is the same book about the Rosicrucians.

After some time, she was abruptly gone, and stepped aside, noticing Agrippa Notinnsheim's name glistening with dim gold on a dark blue folio, a few people went into the shop, it was raining, candles were extinguished.

I collected the selected books, paid off and went out, squinting against the sun. Putting a backpack on the ground, I started stuffing my purchases into it, and when I got up to put it on, I saw a young man. He stood leaning against a tree in front of the store entrance, bored, and even somewhat suspended himself, with a haughty glance, glanced at me. “OK,” I thought, “therefore, he is waiting for someone,” and, feeling a pang of disappointment, she was going to turn on Mike Oldfield in the player, when she suddenly heard: “I was waiting for you.” He held out his hand to me, with an agate feather on the ring finger: "Vladimir."

So I met Volodya Hauge.

***

Volodya came from a family of Russified Germans. He taught German at school, at home no one spoke his native language. Names, surnames, facial features and passion for the Gothic style reminded of belonging to a great nation. He really was 18 years old. I was then 24 years old.

We walked a lot, I chose my favorite routes - Gogolevsky Boulevard, Ostozhenka, Prechistenka, Chistye Prudy. We talked about the properties of plants and herbs, about Ivan Kupala, about the Nibelungen ring, and the music of his beloved Wagner, about Germanic myths, about different fortune-telling systems. He was especially interested in Tarot cards and knew how to guess from his hand, often playing, las-kovo grabbed my hand, deftly twisting it palm up, greedily looking at it. I always pulled out my palm. Something stopped me, I didn’t want him to “look” at me. He was silent, grinned.

Somehow, during a particularly long conversation about the solar signs of various nations / it didn’t, of course, without his national solar sign /, I was tired of hearing about the swastikas, solstice and the star of the Mages, stopped to grasp the meaning, and, as often happens, "Disconnected" and smiling, looking at his penetrating thin face, contemplated how he pronounced the words with his un-personally sensual mouth, then suddenly thought - slightly narrowing her gray eyes, sharply, like a bird - looking at me, holding her finger lips and continues:

Then these states began to visit me more and more often - obviously, even then the vulgar "flatness" so characteristic of the esoteric began to bore me, and, to put it bluntly, boredom.

Perhaps because of this, coupled with the hypnosis of his beauty, I did not pay attention to some oddities in the behavior of Vladimir. Now, retrospectively, I remember that when he entered the church, he never approached the altar, but only bought candles and went out. He was not baptized, did not take holy water, and became very tense when I suggested he be baptized. I inexplicably combined then Christianity / baptism, I accepted in 19 / and astrology, not seeing this contradiction.

***

Summer. Gentle violet twilight. Heat from asphalt heated in a day. We wander in them, as if in blue jelly, enchanted, sleepy and blown away by the proximity of each other. He again tells me about something, it seems, a fairy tale about the golden-haired Lorelei. At a certain moment we stop, for a moment we are silent, looking each other in the eyes, by the silent command - we merge into a kiss.

How many times we have kissed: From his lips it smelled like cherries, his mouth was large, tender, almost female, eagerly listening to me. I wanted to kiss him endlessly, and still this smell - I didn’t feel it from anyone anymore: We wandered languid and razomlevshie, with bitten swollen lips, in the lilac summer twilight. We had nowhere to retire. Oh, that housing question!

Often we spent whole evenings on the benches of Gogolevsky Boulevard. I sat down, and he lay on my lap with his head, I read a little book of Shakespeare's sonnets, from time to time I read the lines I liked, Volodya looked thoughtfully into the evening sky, sighed, turned and pressed against my stomach.Then the edge of the sky turned pink, and we embraced, walked to the subway, hushed, listened to the cries of swifts somewhere high, far away :.

It was a sultry July evening. Pretty late, maybe about eleven o'clock. I sat on the first store from the subway on ...