Marguerite Duras

"Lover"

The female narrator recounts her youth in Saigon. The main events relate to the period from 1932 to 1934.

A French girl of fifteen and a half lives in a state boarding school in Saigon, and studies at a French lyceum. Her mother wants her daughter to get a secondary education and become a mathematics teacher at a lyceum. The girl has two brothers, one is two years older than her - this is the "younger" brother, and the other, the "older", is three. She, without knowing why, madly loves her younger brother. The older one is considered a disaster for the whole family, although the mother does not have a soul in him and loves, perhaps even more than the other two children. He steals money from relatives, from servants, impudent, cruel. There is something sadistic about him: he rejoices when his mother beats his sister, beats his younger brother with wild fury for any reason. The girl's father serves in Indochina, but falls ill early and dies. The mother carries all the hardships of life and the upbringing of three children.

After the lyceum, the girl is transported by ferry to Saigon, where her boarding house is located. For her, this is a whole journey, especially when she travels by bus. She returns from the holidays from Schadek, where her mother works as the director of the girls' school. Her mother sees her off, entrusting her to the care of the bus driver. As the bus enters the ferry crossing one of the branches of the Mekong from Shadek to Vinh Long, she gets off the bus, leaning against the parapet. She wears a worn silk dress girded with a leather belt, high-heeled gold brocade shoes, and a soft, flat-brimmed men's felt hat with a wide black band. It is the hat that gives the whole image of the girl a clear ambiguity. She has long copper-red heavy curly hair, she is fifteen and a half years old, but she is already wearing makeup. Foundation, powder, dark cherry lipstick.

On the ferry next to the bus is a large black limousine. In the limousine there is a chauffeur in a white livery and an elegant man, Chinese, but dressed in a European way - in a light, light suit, such as bankers in Saigon wear. He keeps looking at the girl, as many look at her. A Chinese man approaches her, speaks to her, offers to take her to the boarding house in his limousine. The girl agrees. From now on, she will never ride the local bus again. She is no longer a child and understands something. She understands that she is ugly, although, if she wants, she can seem like that, she feels that it is not beauty and outfits that make a woman desirable. A woman either has sex appeal or she doesn't. This is immediately visible.

In the car, they talk about the girl's mother, whom her companion knows. The girl loves her mother very much, but she does not understand much about her. Her commitment to rags, old dresses, shoes, her bouts of fatigue and despair are incomprehensible. Mother is constantly trying to get out of poverty. That is probably why she allows the girl to walk around dressed as a little prostitute. The girl is already well versed in everything, knows how to use the attention given to her. She knows that it will help to get money. When a girl wants money, her mother will not interfere with her.

Already in adulthood, the narrator talks about her childhood, about how all the children loved their mother, but also how they hated her. The history of their family is a history of love and hate, and she cannot understand the truth in it, even from the height of her age.

Even before the man speaks to the girl, she sees that he is scared, and from the first minute she understands that he is entirely in her power. And she also understands that today is the time to do what she must do. And neither her mother nor her brothers should know about it. The slamming car door cut her off from her family once and for all.

One day, shortly after their first meeting, he picks her up at the boarding house, and they go to Sholon, the Chinese capital of Indochina. They enter his bachelor apartment, and the girl feels that she is exactly where she should be. He confesses to her that he loves her like crazy. She replies that it would be better if he did not love her, and asks to behave with her in the same way as he behaves with other women. She sees how much pain her words cause him.

He has amazingly soft skin. And the body is thin, devoid of muscles, so fragile, as if suffering. He moans, sobs. Choking on his unbearable love. And gives her a boundless, incomparable sea of ​​​​pleasure.

He asks why she came. She says it was necessary. They are talking for the first time. She tells him about her family, that they have no money. She wants him along with his money. He wants to take her away, to go somewhere together. She cannot leave her mother yet, otherwise she will die of grief. He promises to give her money. Evening comes. He says that the girl will remember this day for the rest of her life, the memory will not fade away, and when she completely forgets him, she will even forget his face, even his name.

They go outside. The girl feels that she has grown old. They go to one of the big Chinese restaurants, but no matter what they talk about, the conversation never turns to themselves. This continues for the whole year and a half of their daily meetings. His father, the richest Chinese in Cholon, would never agree to his son marrying this little white prostitute from Jadek. He never dares to go against the will of his father.

The girl introduces her lover to her family. Meetings always begin with luxurious dinners, during which the brothers overeat terribly, and the owner himself is ignored, not uttering a single word about him.

He takes her to the boarding house at night in a black limousine. Sometimes she does not come to sleep at all. Mothers are informed. The mother comes to the headmistress of the boarding house and asks to give the girl freedom in the evenings. Soon, a very expensive diamond ring appears on the girl’s ring finger, and the guards, although they suspect that the girl is not engaged at all, completely stop making comments to her.

One day, a lover leaves for his ill father. He recovers and thus deprives him of his last hope of ever marrying a white girl. The father prefers to see his son dead. The best way out is her departure, separation from her, in the depths of his soul he understands that she will never be faithful to anyone. Her face speaks for itself. Sooner or later they will still have to part.

Soon the girl, along with her family, sails on a ship to France. She stands and looks at him and his car on the shore. She is in pain, she wants to cry, but she cannot show her family that she loves the Chinese.

Arriving in France, the mother buys a house and a piece of forest. Big brother loses it all overnight. During the war, he robs his sister, as he always robbed his relatives, takes her last meal and all the money from her. He dies on a gloomy, overcast day. The younger brother died even earlier, in 1942, from bronchopneumonia in Saigon, during the Japanese occupation.

The girl does not know when her lover, obeying the will of his father, married a Chinese girl. Years passed, the war ended, the girl gave birth to children, got divorced, wrote books, and now, many years later, he comes with his wife to Paris and calls her. His voice is trembling. He knows that she writes books, her mother, whom he met in Saigon, told him about this. And then he says the main thing: he still loves her, as before, and will love only her alone until his death.

The youth of the woman - the storyteller passed in Saigon. She, a 15-year-old French girl, lives in a boarding school and studies at the French Lyceum, because her mother wants her daughter to become a mathematics teacher at the Lyceum. The girl has two older brothers, of which the younger one she really likes. She considers the other the misfortune of the family, because he steals and looks like a sadist. But the mother loves the eldest most of all children. The father served in Indochina, died, and now the mother has to raise her sons and daughter herself.

On her way back from the holidays, she is on her way to the boarding house by bus and notices a black limousine on the ferry carrying an elegant Chinese man. At first he looked at her, then he approached the girl, spoke to her and offered to take her to the boarding house by car. She agreed. Although she is fifteen and a half, she understands how beautiful and desirable for a man can be.

On the way to the boarding house, they talk about the girl's mother. The gentleman appears to know her. The mother's attempts to get out of poverty annoy the heroine. Apparently that is why the mother allows the girl to dress as if she were a prostitute. The girl understands that such free behavior can help in making money.

Having already matured, the narrator recalls her feelings for her mother and wonders how she could both love her mother and hate at the same time.

Then, at the age of fifteen, she understood that a man would obey her, because she had a huge power over him - sexuality. One day, a man picked up the girl at a boarding house and took her to Sholon, the capital of Indochina. There, in a bachelor apartment, a girl spends time with a man in passion and intimacy. He gives her pleasure, and then they say. The girl talks about her family and that they have no money. He asks her to agree to leave with him, but the girl is afraid that leaving her mother will hurt her. He promises to give money.

So they meet for a year and a half. They sleep, talk, but never about themselves. He knows that his father (the richest Chinese in Cholon) will not allow his son to marry a little white prostitute from Jadek. Yes, he would not dare to go against the will of his father. The girl introduces her lover to her mother and brothers. After a hearty sumptuous dinner, he always takes her to the boarding house, and sometimes she does not spend the night in the boarding house. Mother is not against her free life.

The guards, seeing the expensive ring on the girl's finger, stop making comments. The lover's father is against their union. He thinks the relationship should end. The man himself understands that this girl will never be faithful to anyone and someday they will part.

The girl and her family sail to France. In France, a mother bought a house and a plot of woods, and the eldest son lost it all overnight. During the war, he steals money and food from his sister. He died on a gloomy day. The second brother died even earlier.

The lover, obeying his father, married a Chinese woman. Years passed. War is over. The girl's life flowed in its own way: children, marriages, divorces, writing books. Many years later, a Chinese man comes to Paris with his wife and calls her. He learned about his beloved from her mother. Now he has come to say that he loves her and will love her alone until the day he dies.

Marguerite Duras

Lover

Bruno Nuittenu

Once - I was already in years - a man approached me in the lobby of some institution. He introduced himself and said, “You don't remember me, but I've known you all my life. They say you were beautiful in your youth, but for me you are more beautiful now than then, I liked your face of a young girl less than now - a devastated face.

I often remember this image - I still see it alone and have never told anyone about it. So he stands before me, silent, bewitching. I love this image of mine more than anyone else, I admire it.

How quickly everything in my life became too late. At eighteen, it was already too late. From eighteen to twenty-five, something incomprehensible was happening to my face. I was old at eighteen. I don’t know, maybe it’s like that with everyone, I never asked. It seems that someone told me that time happens to suddenly strike people in the youngest, most festive years of life. I aged suddenly, rudely. Time subjugated my features one by one, I saw how they change, how the eyes become larger, the look is sadder, the mouth is more determined, the forehead is crossed by deep wrinkles. I can’t say that it scared me, on the contrary, I watched my face grow old, as if reading a fascinating book. I knew, I always knew, that one day aging would slow down and normal things would resume. Friends who saw me at the age of seventeen during my trip to France were amazed when they met again two years later, when I was nineteen. This is my new face. It became my face. Of course, it is still older, but much less than one might expect. My face is deeply lined, my skin is dry and chapped. It is not flabby, as some thin-featured faces are, but the rock of which it is composed has crumbled. I have a broken face.

In the meantime, I'm fifteen and a half years old.

I'm taking a ferry across the Mekong.

This image remains in front of my eyes all the time while the ferry crosses the river.

I am fifteen and a half years old, and I live in a land where there are no seasons, where it is always summer - hot, viscous, monotonous: I live in a warm land, where there is no spring, no renewal.

I'm in a government boarding house in Saigon. In the boarding house I only eat and sleep, and I study at the French Lyceum. My mother, a teacher, wants her daughter to get a secondary education. You need a high school education, baby. But what was good for her is no longer enough for her daughter. First, secondary education, and then a competition for the position of a mathematics teacher in a lyceum. Always the same song since I went to school. I never imagined that I would be able to avoid mathematics, I was happy - let my mother at least hope for something. I saw her day by day arranging the future of her children and her own. However, the day came when she could no longer make grandiose plans for her sons, and then other projects appeared, she invented new options, but they all met the same goal - to fill, secure our future. I remember she was talking about accounting courses for her younger brother. And about the Universal School - every year, since childhood. Gotta make up for lost time, my mother said. This went on for three days, no more. Not more. Then we moved, and the talk about the Universal School stopped. In a new place, everything started all over again. Mother lasted ten years. Nothing could break her. The younger brother became a humble accountant in Saigon. There was no Violet school in the colonies, so the older brother had to go to France. He lived there for several years, allegedly attending Viole's school. But I didn't really study. I think my mother knew about it - you can't fool her. But she had no other choice - it was necessary at all costs to excommunicate this son from two other children. For several years he fell out of the family circle. And his mother bought the concession in his absence. A terrible idea, but for us, the two remaining children, the only thing that could cause more horror, probably, is the killer, the killer of children, the bandit from the highway, who lies in wait for the victim in the night, forever looming under the windows.

I was often told: you grew up under too hot a sun, that's the whole point. But I didn't believe. They also said that children growing up in poverty begin to think early. No, and that's not entirely true. I saw in the colonies children swollen from hunger, like little old men, but we - no, we did not starve, we were - white children; we were tormented by shame, for sometimes we had to sell furniture, but we did not starve; we had a boy-servant, and we ate - yes, I must admit, sometimes we ate all sorts of filth, tough, tasteless meat of birds or even caimans, but it was prepared by a boy, and sometimes we refused to eat, we could afford such a luxury - to refuse food. No, when I was eighteen, something happened and my face changed dramatically. Must be at night. I was afraid of myself, of God. During the day I was not so afraid, and death did not seem so terrifying to me. But even during the day the thought of death did not leave me. I wanted to kill, to kill my older brother, yes, I wanted to kill him, to defeat him once in a lifetime and then watch him die. I had to take away the object of her love from my mother, punish her for loving him so passionately and in vain, and most importantly, I had to save my younger brother, my baby, save him from the oppression of someone else's life, the too lively life of my elder, not allowing the younger one to live, to save him from the darkness that obscured his light, to transgress the law proclaimed by the elder brother and embodied in him, the brutal law embodied in man, turning every moment of the younger’s existence into sheer horror, into a horror of life, And then one day the horror reached heart and killed the boy.

The female narrator recounts her youth in Saigon. The main events relate to the period from 1932 to 1934.

A French girl of fifteen and a half lives in a state boarding school in Saigon, and studies at a French lyceum. Her mother wants her daughter to get a secondary education and become a mathematics teacher at a lyceum. The girl has two brothers, one is two years older than her - this is the "younger" brother, and the other, the "older", is three. She, without knowing why, madly loves her younger brother. The older one is considered a disaster for the whole family, although the mother does not have a soul in him and loves, perhaps even more than the other two children. He steals money from relatives, from servants, impudent, cruel. There is something sadistic about him: he rejoices when his mother beats his sister, beats his younger brother with wild fury for any reason. The girl's father serves in Indochina, but falls ill early and dies. The mother carries all the hardships of life and the upbringing of three children.

After the lyceum, the girl is transported by ferry to Saigon, where her boarding house is located. For her, this is a whole journey, especially when she travels by bus. She returns from the holidays from Schadek, where her mother works as the director of the girls' school. Her mother sees her off, entrusting her to the care of the bus driver. As the bus enters the ferry crossing one of the branches of the Mekong from Shadek to Vinh Long, she gets off the bus, leaning against the parapet. She wears a worn silk dress girded with a leather belt, high-heeled gold brocade shoes, and a soft, flat-brimmed men's felt hat with a wide black band. It is the hat that gives the whole image of the girl a clear ambiguity. She has long copper-red heavy curly hair, she is fifteen and a half years old, but she is already wearing makeup. Foundation, powder, dark cherry lipstick.

On the ferry next to the bus is a large black limousine. In the limousine there is a chauffeur in a white livery and an elegant man, Chinese, but dressed in a European way - in a light, light-colored suit, which bankers wear in Saigon. He keeps looking at the girl, as many look at her. A Chinese man approaches her, speaks to her, offers to take her to the boarding house in his limousine. The girl agrees. From now on, she will never ride the local bus again. She is no longer a child and understands something. She understands that she is ugly, although, if she wants, she can seem like that, she feels that it is not beauty and outfits that make a woman desirable. A woman either has sex appeal or she doesn't. This is immediately visible.

In the car, they talk about the girl's mother, whom her companion knows. The girl loves her mother very much, but she does not understand much about her. Her commitment to rags, old dresses, shoes, her bouts of fatigue and despair are incomprehensible. Mother is constantly trying to get out of poverty. That is probably why she allows the girl to walk around dressed as a little prostitute. The girl is already well versed in everything, knows how to use the attention given to her. She knows - it will help to get money. When a girl wants money, her mother will not interfere with her.

Already in adulthood, the narrator talks about her childhood, about how all the children loved their mother, but also how they hated her. The history of their family is a story of love and hate, and she cannot understand the truth in it, even from the height of her age.

Even before the man speaks to the girl, she sees that he is scared, and from the first minute she understands that he is entirely in her power. And she also understands that today is the time to do what she must do. And neither her mother nor her brothers should know about it. The slamming car door cut her off from her family once and for all.

One day, shortly after their first meeting, he picks her up at the boarding house, and they go to Sholon, the Chinese capital of Indochina. They enter his bachelor apartment, and the girl feels that she is exactly where she should be. He confesses to her that he loves her like crazy. She replies that it would be better if he did not love her, and asks to behave with her in the same way as he behaves with other women. She sees how much pain her words cause him.

He has amazingly soft skin. And the body is thin, devoid of muscles, so fragile, as if suffering. He moans, sobs. Choking on his unbearable love. And gives her a boundless, incomparable sea of ​​​​pleasure.

He asks why she came. She says it was necessary. They are talking for the first time. She tells him about her family, that they have no money. She wants him along with his money. He wants to take her away, to go somewhere together. She cannot leave her mother yet, otherwise she will die of grief. He promises to give her money. Evening comes. He says that the girl will remember this day for the rest of her life, the memory will not fade away, and when she completely forgets him, she will even forget his face, even his name.

They go outside. The girl feels that she has grown old. They go to one of the big Chinese restaurants, but no matter what they talk about, the conversation never turns to themselves. This continues for the whole year and a half of their daily meetings. His father, the richest Chinese in Cholon, would never agree to his son marrying this little white prostitute from Jadek. He never dares to go against the will of his father.

The girl introduces her lover to her family. Meetings always begin with luxurious dinners, during which the brothers overeat terribly, and the owner himself is ignored, not uttering a single word about him.

He takes her to the boarding house at night in a black limousine. Sometimes she does not come to sleep at all. Mothers are informed. The mother comes to the headmistress of the boarding house and asks to give the girl freedom in the evenings. Soon, a very expensive diamond ring appears on the girl’s ring finger, and the guards, although they suspect that the girl is not engaged at all, completely stop making comments to her.

One day, a lover leaves for his ill father. He recovers and thus deprives him of his last hope of ever marrying a white girl. The father prefers to see his son dead. The best way out is her departure, separation from her, in the depths of his soul he understands that she will never be faithful to anyone. Her face speaks for itself. Sooner or later they will still have to part.

Soon the girl, along with her family, sails on a ship to France. She stands and looks at him and his car on the shore. She is in pain, she wants to cry, but she cannot show her family that she loves the Chinese.

Arriving in France, the mother buys a house and a piece of forest. Big brother loses it all overnight. During the war, he robs his sister, as he always robbed his relatives, takes her last meal and all the money from her. He dies on a gloomy, overcast day. The younger brother died even earlier, in 1942, from bronchopneumonia in Saigon, during the Japanese occupation.

The girl does not know when her lover, obeying the will of his father, married a Chinese girl. Years passed, the war ended, the girl gave birth to children, got divorced, wrote books, and now, many years later, he comes with his wife to Paris and calls her. His voice is trembling. He knows that she writes books, her mother, whom he met in Saigon, told him about this. And then he says the main thing: he still loves her, as before, and will love only her alone until his death.

retold

Marguerite Duras wrote 34 novels, slightly fewer plays, and directed more than 20 films. The first great literary success came to her in 1950 with the publication of the novel "The Dam Against the Pacific Ocean", the first success in the cinema - with the advent of the film "Hiroshima, my love" by Alain Resnais based on her script, but she became a really famous writer thanks to novel "The Lover". Prostokniga will tell you more about this landmark work, for which she was awarded the Prix Goncourt.

The building material for creativity was her own life: childhood in Indochina, participation in the Resistance Movement during the Second World War and in the Communist Party after it, relationships with her husband and lovers. In many works, she plays with recurring, obsessive images from her past in different variations, without revealing the secrets of their origin. But in the novel "" Duras finally showed their biographical context, lifting the curtain that hid the events of her youth. Thus, The Lover became a kind of key to understanding her other texts.

In this autobiographical novel, there is nothing like diary notes and documentary notes, in which the whole life lived is collected piece by piece. Duras discards as unnecessary details, everyday nuances, excursions into history and prescribes events only with a dotted line, flaunting deep experiences, exposing the main nerve of sensory experience. The writer even sacrifices the objective truth to the main theme. The result is a romanticized autobiography in which reality is intertwined with fiction and fantasy. As Laure Adler remarked, "Duras has gotten her hands on fake confessions, sometimes she loses the ability to distinguish the real event from her thoughts about it and from how she herself wrote this event."

The plot of the novel. The main character, 15-year-old Marguerite Duras, is on her way back to a girls' boarding school and meets a young Vietnamese man on a ferry. Their flirting develops into a long-term love affair. Marguerite tries to convince herself that they are connected only by lust, and not real feelings, because their relationship cannot have a future, since her lover is already engaged. And standing on the deck of a ship bound for France, the heroine realizes how much she was mistaken.

It is not known for certain whether she actually had a lover in Indochina, but his image became one of the main motives for all her work. When Duras writes about the brothers: the older one is a bastard and a drug addict, and the younger one is a sensitive and vulnerable boy, who, with her light suggestion, are very reminiscent of her husband Robert Antelma and lover Dionysus Mascolo, she creates two archetypes of men, between whom she has rushed all her life, like between two fires.

In "The Lover", as in all author's works, in the center of the plot is a woman in captivity of passions. The rest are metaphors expressing her state of mind. At the heart of Marguerite's passion is the thirst for knowledge of the new and the forbidden. At the heart of thirst is a rebellion against morality and mores. Therefore, the heroine is not ashamed of the fact that at her fifteen years old, in a small stuffy room, she makes love with an adult man for hours on end. “It was as if a vice had nested in me - I knew - but surprisingly early. Carnal desire nested in me in the same way, ”she writes.

Bruno Nuittenu

Once - I was already in years - a man approached me in the lobby of some institution. He introduced himself and said, “You don't remember me, but I've known you all my life. They say you were beautiful in your youth, but for me you are more beautiful now than then, I liked your face of a young girl less than now - a devastated face.

I often remember this image - I still see it alone and have never told anyone about it. So he stands before me, silent, bewitching. I love this image of mine more than anyone else, I admire it.

How quickly everything in my life became too late. At eighteen, it was already too late. From eighteen to twenty-five, something incomprehensible was happening to my face. I was old at eighteen. I don’t know, maybe it’s like that with everyone, I never asked. It seems that someone told me that time happens to suddenly strike people in the youngest, most festive years of life. I aged suddenly, rudely. Time subjugated my features one by one, I saw how they change, how the eyes become larger, the look is sadder, the mouth is more determined, the forehead is crossed by deep wrinkles. I can’t say that it scared me, on the contrary, I watched my face grow old, as if reading a fascinating book. I knew, I always knew, that one day aging would slow down and normal things would resume. Friends who saw me at the age of seventeen during my trip to France were amazed when they met again two years later, when I was nineteen. This is my new face. It became my face. Of course, it is still older, but much less than one might expect. My face is deeply lined, my skin is dry and chapped. It is not flabby, as some thin-featured faces are, but the rock of which it is composed has crumbled. I have a broken face.

In the meantime, I'm fifteen and a half years old.

I'm taking a ferry across the Mekong.

This image remains in front of my eyes all the time while the ferry crosses the river.

I am fifteen and a half years old, and I live in a land where there are no seasons, where it is always summer - hot, viscous, monotonous: I live in a warm land, where there is no spring, no renewal.

I'm in a government boarding house in Saigon. In the boarding house I only eat and sleep, and I study at the French Lyceum. My mother, a teacher, wants her daughter to get a secondary education. You need a high school education, baby. But what was good for her is no longer enough for her daughter. First, secondary education, and then a competition for the position of a mathematics teacher in a lyceum. Always the same song since I went to school. I never imagined that I would be able to avoid mathematics, I was happy - let my mother at least hope for something. I saw her day by day arranging the future of her children and her own. However, the day came when she could no longer make grandiose plans for her sons, and then other projects appeared, she invented new options, but they all met the same goal - to fill, secure our future. I remember she was talking about accounting courses for her younger brother. And about the Universal School - every year, since childhood. Gotta make up for lost time, my mother said. This went on for three days, no more. Not more. Then we moved, and the talk about the Universal School stopped. In a new place, everything started all over again. Mother lasted ten years. Nothing could break her. The younger brother became a humble accountant in Saigon. There was no Violet school in the colonies, so the older brother had to go to France. He lived there for several years, allegedly attending Viole's school. But I didn't really study. I think my mother knew about it - you can't fool her. But she had no other choice - it was necessary at all costs to excommunicate this son from two other children. For several years he fell out of the family circle. And his mother bought the concession in his absence. A terrible idea, but for us, the two remaining children, the only thing that could cause more horror, probably, is the killer, the killer of children, the bandit from the highway, who lies in wait for the victim in the night, forever looming under the windows.

I was often told: you grew up under too hot a sun, that's the whole point. But I didn't believe. They also said that children growing up in poverty begin to think early. No, and that's not entirely true. I saw in the colonies children swollen from hunger, like little old men, but we - no, we did not starve, we were - white children; we were tormented by shame, for sometimes we had to sell furniture, but we did not starve; we had a boy-servant, and we ate - yes, I must admit, sometimes we ate all sorts of filth, tough, tasteless meat of birds or even caimans, but it was prepared by a boy, and sometimes we refused to eat, we could afford such a luxury - to refuse food. No, when I was eighteen, something happened and my face changed dramatically. Must be at night. I was afraid of myself, of God. During the day I was not so afraid, and death did not seem so terrifying to me. But even during the day the thought of death did not leave me. I wanted to kill, to kill my older brother, yes, I wanted to kill him, to defeat him once in a lifetime and then watch him die. I had to take away the object of her love from my mother, punish her for loving him so passionately and in vain, and most importantly, I had to save my younger brother, my baby, save him from the oppression of someone else's life, the too lively life of my elder, not allowing the younger one to live, to save him from the darkness that obscured his light, to transgress the law proclaimed by the elder brother and embodied in him, the brutal law embodied in man, turning every moment of the younger’s existence into sheer horror, into a horror of life, And then one day the horror reached heart and killed the boy.

I used to write a lot about my family before, but then both my mother and brothers were still alive, and I could only circle around the bush without getting to the point.

There is no history of my life. It doesn't exist. There has never been a starting point. There is no life path, a clearly drawn line. Only vast spaces, and I want everyone to believe that there is someone there, but this is not true, there is no one there. I have already described in more or less detail the history of my youth, or rather, a negligible part of it, but one can guess something from it - I mean crossing the river by ferry. What I am doing now is both similar to the former and unlike. Previously, I spoke only about the bright, or rather, illuminated periods of my youth. Now I'm talking about what remained in the shadows, about hidden in the same youth, I reveal to you things, feelings, events that I previously kept silent about. When I began to write, my environment willy-nilly forced modesty on me. The people around me considered writing a moral occupation. Now it often seems to me that writing is pointless at all. Sometimes I clearly understand: yes, writing is pointless, unless you want to amuse your vanity or just go with the flow. Yes, probably, and for the sake of what I will not pick up a name, perhaps I want to publicize my own life.

But more often I don’t think about the reason, I see a space open on all four sides, without any walls, and what I write can’t be hidden, hidden anyway, and when they read what I wrote, all the inappropriateness of the text, even obscenity, will be exposed but I don't think any further.

Now I see: in my youth, at eighteen, even at fifteen, my face already promised to become what it became in my mature years, when I drank a lot. Alcohol did something to me that the Lord God did not, and then killed me, or rather, slowly killed me. But my face was old even before I started drinking. Alcohol only reinforced these traits. It was as if a vice had nested in me - I knew - but surprisingly early. The desire of the flesh also nestled in me. At the age of fifteen, sensuality was written on my face, although I did not yet know the pleasures of the flesh. This facial expression could not be hidden from anyone. Even his mother must have noticed him. And the brothers saw. That's how it all started for me, it started with a face - too bright, tired, with sunken eyes, and the face was formed prematurely, to knowledge.