The Most Russian Person

The company is amused by ringing voices of six grandchildren and now great-grandchildren.

“And we are getting old,” Ivan Nikiforovich grieves, stretching his legs. “They hurt, probably, to bad weather.”

“Well, so, have you finished your interview with me?” he turns to me, squinting slyly. “I'm tired, do not blame me, my friend. Old age, nevertheless,” he says in a cheerful voice, but sadness flashes in his eyes, It is quite understandable and explainable.

I felt sorry that our evenings with him were over, although I know that I can come to his house any time.

“No, let me ask you one more question. Is it true that Kurchatov did not like smokers?”

“Ha, ha, ha!” roars Medyanik, laughing at me. And he immediately interjects a familiar Kurchatov phrase: “It strongly smells with violation of the regime.”

“And another question, Ivan Nikiforovich. Recently, the life of the hero of my story, Vyacheslav Yevgenyevich Vasadze Game to an end. May he rest in peace. It turns out that he drove your car on a trip in Georgia.”

“Yes, there was such a thing. Slavik was a good man, reliable. I had known him as a boy. Here it is. He insisted once on a trip to Georgia. Moreover, I allowed him to use my company car. I always treated him in a fatherly way, I wanted to help a guy with something, and then a trip to the Black Sea coast turned up. I took him with me and gave him an extra week to search for relatives.”

I will allow myself another passage from my story about Vasadze.

“Today Vyacheslav Yevgenyevich Vasadze is over sixty. But when he was young, he passionately wanted to learn something about his father, to find relatives, to find his father’s colleagues, to hear first-hand how his father fought, how and where he died. Having taken a vacation, he went to Georgia. The first on the way were the villages where the whole Vasadze clans lived. But no one knew about his father. Addresses in the villages of Nakalakevi and Ben also did not give results: they did not find any relatives of the father or the mother. They sympathized with him, expressed readiness to help in the search. The vacation was already coming to an end, it was time to go back home, and Slavik was keenly aware that he was losing his father for the second time, he was also missing in peace life. When he was almost desperate, someone advised him, “You know, the actor Akakiy Vasadze lives in Tbilisi, go to him, maybe he will help somehow. He is known man, no one will refuse him.”

Slavik hesitated. More than twenty years had passed after the war, there is little hope of finding his father’s colleagues, and he was ashamed to disturb a famous person. A sense of delicacy, or perhaps innate tact, stopped him. And yet he decided to use any chance. He arrived in Tbilisi, found out the artist's phone number, contacted him and asked for a meeting. With a feeling of anxiety, he crossed the threshold of the house of an outstanding actor and director, an idol of his father's generation. What did Slavik know about him? Nothing. Neither that Vasadze was a professor at the Tbilisi Theatrical Institute, nor that he had the title of People’s Artist of the Soviet Union and, as an actor was busy in all theater productions, starred in films, that he was three times winner of the Stalin Awards. He did not know anything of this and could not know because his work was too far from art. He simply saw a handsome, great man, who at that time was already under seventy. He caught the look of his attentive and sympathetic eyes as he told the sad story of the search for the father.

“No, sonny,” the actor Vasadze answered him, “I did not know your father. We are not relatives, just namesakes. In Georgia many carry names of Vasadze. And the fact that you are looking for people who knew your father-soldier is worthy of respect. A person should know where his kin had come to the world…”

His words, convincing and simple, were taken for the soul, reached the heart. And let the wine be left in the glasses and firmly brewed tea in the glasses, and ripe grapes, peaches, pomegranates, apples lay intact in the vases. Slavik simply did not notice this magnificent still life. With all his heart he regretted that the thread of his hope to find at least some trace of his father broke in Akakiy Vasadze's house.

“I’ll tell you what,” Akakiy Alekseevich continued with a sigh, “grief and joy are always together just like love and separation. “So as respect and hatred, evil and good… Recently, I lost my adopted son. I accept God's wrath with humility, he punished me for my sins. But how unbearably hard it is when children die earlier than their parents. I am left alone in the whole world. Over the years a person gains knowledge, but energy decreases. You have lost your father, and if it is a consolation, I suggest you stay in my house. Be my son. I’m ready to share everything in the house: books, a collection of rare paintings, a grand piano…”