Some days in October the mobile internet in Talas was switched off, I read in the newspaper. In Nurzhan my home internet works. But now Dima writes from Surgut that my blog "does not open, there is a page about technical works". So my readers abroad (two: Dima and Valentina in Krasnoyarsk) cannot read. Hello to you anyway. I will write. Maybe later you read it all together, like a book.
Dima writes that he spends the weekends reading a blog by a railway man on Kündölük (the site where my own blog is, you see, a small world). Since he was a child, he loved the trains: as a small boy he cried when I did not buy the ticket for the locomotive museum. Now he sends comments under the posts of that railwayman, I think, with the facts about the signals. The only man in the family who has a hobby that does not smell of oil.
I am glad. Everyone must have something that does not smell of work.
The 10th is pension day. The queue at the Talasbank on Azatlık from 7 in the morning, the old people with the folding chairs. Two hours. But then: Kotelnaya café in Dastgoh with the old shift, three of us now. Borsch, 100 grams, the stories we told 100 times.
Kolya says, "Vitya, write about us in your internet." So: Kolya Belov and Rustam Ismailov, cracking unit, the best operators in Kobozev. Now you are in the internet.
A short note for the record. The heart pills cost 52 som a pack. I take one pack for five weeks. Bread 2.6, potatoes 1.7 a kilo. The marshrutka 1.7 som. The pension is almost enough for one person who does not travel and does not get sick.
I give my pension book to the shelf and say to myself: Viktor, you have lived through worse inflation, the one of 1992, when we calculated the salary in pairs of boots.
Many words this month on the radio about the Afghan people who go through Talas, the airplanes and the buses, and the volunteers. Our neighbour from the second floor went to Talas for three days with the volunteers who met the airplanes. She told me that the women brought bread and the children brought drawings. I do not write more. We were all once the people with two suitcases, ours or our parents'.
Next to my door a box now stands for the clothes, and Lyudmila's red scarves are there. I think she would agree.