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MAY 9. I'VE ASKED TO BORROW A TV from a neighbor. He put on an understanding face, but thankfully we managed the exchange without any questions. A week ago my mother-in-law came to pick up her things. And now the whole building knows that my wife has left me.
Running into me on the staircase, all women, including the four-year-old Marusya, whom I used to count among my friends, maintain a meaningful silence and turn away, and all men - as if on cue - don that understanding expression.
But I needed a TV not because I was dying of melancholy, as my neighbor had, of course, assumed. Even though I am truly dying. Still, the last thing I'd look to for a cure would be television.
It's just that May 9 is the only day of the year when I watch TV. Films about war. They don't let me delude myself. Don't let me mistake everything we usually occupy ourselves with for real life.
The point isn't war. I'm a normal person, and mass killings elicit no delight from me. I use these movies, no matter what they are - naïve, pretentious, sentimental, propagandistic - to quench my thirst for the real. Everything in them is serious. "For reals," as Marusya would say.
Also, war movies always leave me ashamed. In front of these kids (younger than me) who went to their deaths with no faith in their future lives, with only the hope that their grandchildren would be happy, I'm ashamed of the unhappiness I feel because of things that are, in essence, unimportant.
After I finished watching Ascent I couldn't take any more and walked down to the store. Even though I'd promised myself not to drink at the very least, for now - I came back with two bottles under my arm. A neighbor, who was smoking on the stoop, followed me with an understanding gaze.
But during the whole evening I only thought about her once. Remembered her screaming: "If you like all this war crap, you should enlist!" She thought I was nostalgic for gunfire, trench fleas, and hand-to-hand combat.
Drank, watched A Ballad about a Soldier, thought about my grandfather, who was declared missing near Smolensk. I only...