Her name was ... However, everything had its time ... She was a student of the geological department and went to the nurses out of necessity. Then they did not ask for a diploma, but put before the fact: here is a half-centner of decaying flesh, and if you have the strength to mess with IT, then you are welcome. She turned out to be strong and began to work. She was scared, but then everyone was scared, and even the head physician emerged from a drunken stupor only to be frightened and in a fright do good deeds - to save someone’s life or alleviate suffering. Being tied up with general fear, she first got worn out, and then completely stopped experiencing anything other than healthy fatigue at the end of the day, when her hands refused to be bandaged and her legs to do the wretched routes: bunk - bunk - bunk - bunk - bunk. She was not surprised when the dying captain of T-sky called her. She walked toward him with a familiar gait to the limit of her wrapped sister. She no longer felt sorry for anyone and was only concerned about one thing - to be in time. She was needed too much to think about herself, her name, what she was and how she looked. And meanwhile she looked lovely. As luck would have it, neither the sufferings of others, nor the general pain that filled the huge country then became a shadow on her face. Aperekor everything, she was more rosy than before, and her eyes shone with completely obscene brilliance, akin to a semiprecious stone just mined. Khalatik clung to her wax figure, caressing her so that the gray-haired infantrymen showed up nicotine teeth in a smile: Ay, girl! With such and die is not scary! The captain was lying by the window, amid a soaped spring cherry and the miraculously surviving village. He was dying. He walked away like a man, moaning only to avoid foul language, lay for days on end, facing the wall. The bullet hit him in the spine, he could only move his hands, and he did it all the time to prove to the whole world that he could, that he was alive, that the conservatory still stood on the Great Ikitsky, free of bombings and open to music. He played a major arpeggio. Sometimes she heard them, and the Other Life, which everyone in the hospital dreamed of, broke into the open window by a spring draft ... The bandages, printed with blood and pus, were documents of death. They triumphed here, in the foul-smelling hell, among moans and confessions. She kept her hellish bookkeeping, buried yesterday's wounded, cried over them with dry eyes. And yet ... She gave herself to everyone who still had the strength to accept her. When evening came, and in the hospital the twilight spread in lilac blotches, she walked along her hands. She approached the old men and gave them herself. She took their knotty peasant hands with dirty, broken nails, opening all the doors in front of them. She caressed the young soldiers, and if someone had enough strength for love, she gave her without a trace, as she did not give to that half-forgotten, erased in memory ... in funny round glasses ... he died in the 1st Ukrainian , mom wrote about it ... Now we can say what her name was ... She had many names. Masha. Nastya. Ksyusha Dasha. Natalia Sergeevna. She responded to everyone, recognizing all of herself in a hoarse message without error. The captain called her Kate. He had a card on his bedside table. A girl from the Moscow suburbs, sassy, ​​with a stubbornly upturned nose, she helped her as she could, silently, passionately, ineptly. Repulsed by hooligans from Marina Grove, she kissed bruises and bumps, lamenting over them in a strange-romantic manner of old books. She also kissed - not bruises - a terrible wound that broke on his skin, like a return ticket to another life. She cried over this torn ticket. She sat on the tracks in the place where they ended, and offered her thin wings to move on. On these two days, those who were lucky enough to stay on their feet knew where love lived. They came to the captain, to the sad tavern of Billy Bones. She waited for them there in the twilight, and each brought the White Mark of Life, according to which the captain got another five minutes.She screamed, but the wounded screamed louder. A little girl on a deflated ball, what could she do for them? ... She was too small to pay for such pain, for such suffering. The captain smiled. He knew that by releasing the next Brother, she would stick to his arm. And the hand playing the A major arpeggio will come in the purest C sharp major of its little finger. He gave his hand for a kiss, imperiously and confidently as the Master, and mockingly winked at the one who was standing at the head of the bed and in her icy beauty drowned the very idea of ​​tenderness. He tried not to cry. She tried not to notice his tears. And the sooty Cupid with the shot Schmeisser was hiding in the backyard by a miraculously surviving peasant estate ... © Mr. Kiss, One Hundred Splinters of One Sense, 1998–1999