© Aegitas publishing house, 2021
St. Petersburg stories
There are different ways people call Saint Petersburg: Peter, the Capital of Culture, and Leningrad as in the old times… It used to be called Chertograd and Northern Palmyra. Recently a meme has appeared – Dissectiongrad. It happened due to the fact that there one professor dismembered a student he lived with. He swam along the Neva with her cut off hand in his hand. As we say, hand in hand. There is not only this professor, there have been many similar cases lately. But our story is not about this at all, especially the Petersburgers themselves do not like it too much when their hometown is so demonized. But they make fun of the visitors, and they don't even mind scaring them or puzzling them with some piquant story. Svetlana, the Moscow friend, came to visit the Mistress of depilation SugarNadya. She came to the cultural capital partly on business, for example, to some kind of training seminar, partly just took the opportunity to relax and replenish her cultural baggage in other words. She visited the Hermitage, the Russian Museum, visited Peterhof Palace, and went to the Mariinsky Theatre, where she listened to Borodin's opera "Knyaz Igor". The opera made an incredible impression on Sveta, and now she kept singing: "Oh, give me, give me freedom, I will be able to atone for my shame!"
– And what kind of freedom do you want, mischievous girl? – Nadya asked her friend. – Do you want adventures, or what? Keep nose to the ground, you know, this is not Moscow…
– What’s wrong? – Svetlana casually waved her hand, draining the second glass of tan. She was being treated with this magic drink after yesterday's end-of-seminar party. – You mean that I could die of boredom in this Hermitage?
– What's wrong with the Hermitage? – Nadya shrugged. – It's very interesting there. For example, there is such a mummy in the basement, well, on the ground floor… But that's not what I meant.
– And then what?
– There’re purely St. Petersburg stories…
– Are they creepy? – Svetlana's eyes lit up with feverish fire.
– Yeah! SugarNadya nodded. – St. Petersburg’s terrible ones.
– No, – Sveta sighed regretfully, – this has not happened to me for the whole week. Can you tell? Well, so I’ll have something to tell my friends later in Moscow. I think telling about Knyaz Igor and the Hermitage’s queue are not interesting things.
Nadezhda paused, thinking.
– Come on, tell me! To take my breath away! – Svetlana did not calm down.
– To let the hang-over go? – the Mistress asked.
– Yeah.
– Well, listen to me. There is a legend in St. Petersburg…
– No, you tell me not a legend, but a truth! – Svetlana poured herself a third glass of her terrible sour stuff.
– Don't interrupt, – the Mistress said sternly. – Every legend is a truth in St.Petersburg. This is a scientific fact, by the way. So, there is a legend that if you walk at certain hours along the Nevsky Prospect in St. Petersburg – back and forth, back and forth, you will definitely meet…
– Serial maniac!
– Something like that. But not only that. You will definitely meet various interesting legendary personalities, truly speaking, real St. Petersburg characters.
– For example?
– For example, there is a professor at one of the most prestigious St. Petersburg universities, who acted in porn in his youth, and now teaches, and in academic community has clout… But this is not the main thing. It is interesting that he goes out onto the Nevsky Prospect in women's clothing and walks in this way, looking at the passersby in the evenings, at dusk…
– Is that all? – Svetlana stretched out in disappointment.
– No, he chooses one of the newcomers among the crowd and offers to tell them fortunes for the future. He predicts fate.
– Wow! Have you seen him? Did he predict it for you?
– I have, and even met him. But he predicted fate not for me, but for one young man. I saw how it was. Listen!
The evening after a hot day did not bring any coolness. The stuffy air, saturated with exhaust gases, the smell of gasoline and all sorts of poisonous fumes from the big city, flowed between the houses and seemed to thicken with dusk. At the corner of the Nevsky Prospect and the Fontanka River, a slouching young man stood in a large, baggy jacket, as if it isn’t his one, and with tousled hair. He was looking at the phone screen, apparently reading SMS, and not believing what he was reading, because he looked completely lost and dumbfounded at the same time. Suddenly he swung and threw the phone into the aqueduct. The phone gurgled, and the young man was standing and watching the circles dispersing on the smooth surface of the water. He looked so miserable, so unhappy that I wanted to go up to him and say something kind.
– Yeah, come up… What if he is some kind of maniac, snatches an ax from under his special large jacket…
– Why are you harping on: a maniac, a maniac… There are not only maniacs, but also a lot of ordinary people in St. Petersburg. We also have composers, writers and poets living here. Dostoevsky lived there, Alexander Blok…
– Yeah, “night, street, lamp, pharmacy, not a single normal person around.” It seems that your Blok wrote it.
– But it seems to me that he wrote in a different way. Okay, in short, I approached to the young man, I was about to open my mouth to say something kind, and suddenly the weird lady from the avenue got in front of me, she took him on the arm and said: “Young man, good evening! What are you doing here? Are you thinking of drowning yourself? Admit it, drown yourself, right? You just don't know how to start such an important matter, right?” I was taken aback, I stood looking at this lady and realized that something was wrong with her, but I just couldn't figure out what it was. The young man also looks at her with his mouth open.
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