Nothing was heard about Olga. And her stepbrother wasn't interested in her fate. Ivan's resentment of his sister, which he had carried over from the future, turned out to be too strong, and therefore he was not interested in her fate. Besides, he had enough to do not to think about abstract matters. He set a goal for himself and tried to achieve it with hard work from morning to night and almost seven days a week.
In September, he changed the format of his business, which was facilitated by his local popularity. At first, the neighbors in the garages became aware that Vanya was repairing and painting cars. He had been approached several times before with a request to paint a car, but he refused, and now he decided to try.
I tried it once, then again and again. Word of mouth spread rumors about a garage foreman who charges inexpensively for his services and does his job efficiently.
As a result, by October, Ivan had completely switched to the format of minor body repairs and painting. He worked informally, did not pay taxes, but it is not so easy for the tax service to find a garage foreman who does not want to register his activities officially.
Painting a car has always been expensive. It is very difficult to find a person who will do the work just below the market price, but quickly and efficiently. Therefore, it is no wonder that Ivanov's business turned out to be very successful. There was no shortage of customers. And to keep it that way, he posted ads in newspapers on a regular basis.
Overall, profits remained at about the same level as in the bucket business. Sometimes more, sometimes as much. There were pros and cons. The advantage is that you don't have to drive around the city in search of cars for restoration and their subsequent resale. The disadvantage is a more rigid schedule and dependence on the flow of customers.
Everything was going great until the beginning of April. The day started badly in the morning. The sky was covered with leaden clouds, a nasty icy rain was drizzling, and because of the fog, visibility was reduced to fifty meters.
When Ivanov drove his four-wheeler up to the garage, he found a Mercedes SUV parked there.
Such a neighborhood aroused suspicion. Mercedes has nothing to do in the most ordinary garage cooperative. Moreover, there is nothing for such a car to do near his garage. If this is a customer, then he is clearly in the wrong place, because garage painting does not correlate well with an expensive car.
As soon as he got out of the car, two strong guys left the interior of the Mercedes. Leather jackets were draped over their broad shoulders. Their heads were cropped short. You look at those faces, and immediately there are associations with bandits from the nineties.
"Kid," one of them said to him, "is this your garage?"
Ivan didn't want these people to admit to owning garages.
- no. I'm looking for a body builder. They told me it was here somewhere. Do you happen to know? Otherwise, I need to touch up the wing.
"Here, here," the big man nodded, losing interest in Ivanov. "Only he's not working today." Come back tomorrow.
- Yeah, thanks...
Trying to hide the trembling in his knees, Vanya slowly walked to his car. In order not to betray his excitement, he did everything slowly: smoothly inserted the key into the ignition lock, turned it and waited for the Zhiguli engine to purr.
After backing up, he drove in the opposite direction and parked near the checkpoint. Entering the gatehouse, he nodded to the watchman. A young guy was on duty today. Memory brought up his name.
- Ilya, good afternoon. Can you tell me what kind of comrades came in the Gelentwagen?
- So you know better! Ilya declared, looking at his interlocutor with perplexity. - They came to me, asked who was doing repairs in our garages. I've told you about you.
"The whole Mercedes?" Body repair in garages? Ilya, don't you think this is illogical?
"I don't know, I don't care," he shrugged.
"What else did they ask?"
- They asked how often cars come to you, how much you charge for repairs. I roughly answered. And what?
Ivanov frowned. He had a growing suspicion that these were not clients. Either law enforcement officers or racketeers may be interested in such things. Those bulls don't look like the first ones, so they're bandits.
- Listen, Ilya. These are not clients. Bandits are like yogurt on the lips! Anyway, you haven't seen me today, you don't know anything about me, and when I show up, you don't know. Understood?
- Are you afraid that they will put you on the meter? The watchman grinned.
- Only idiots or people with a lot of money and a staff of personal guards are not afraid of bandits. And that's not a fact. And I'm an ordinary person. My health is precious to me. You probably don't want to get in trouble either. So please, if these bulls come at you, pretend to be a rag. I'm not me, I don't know anything, I've said everything I knew. Ok?
"Got it," Ilya removed the grin from his face. "I didn't see or hear you."
Ivan disconnected the phone and hurried away from the garages. He was not a believer, but like anyone over the age of thirty, even if he was biologically twenty-two years old, he was full of prejudice. He took the appearance of a couple of muggers on the threshold of his workshop as a sign from above.
When he stopped pounding, he thought:
'Well, it's sad, but you can't earn all the money. But I didn't want to do any repairs. People's rumor is not only useful for advertising, but it can also bring trouble."
He managed to save up eight thousand dollars. This money should be enough to build a house. So Vanya resolutely turned off the phone and started packing.
Having soberly reasoned that the bandits would not spend the night near the garage, he returned to the garage late at night for a trailer and tools. At the same time, he arranged a meeting with the last customer, whose car was unfinished. He returned the money to the client, saying that his compressor had broken down.
It took half the night to load the most valuable items. Only later in the morning did Vanya leave the garage, immediately going to Badgers.
He spent the night in the village, left his belongings, and then returned to the city, where he put up a garage for sale at the lowest market price and began looking for tenants for an apartment.
The sale of the garage was complicated by the fact that the bandits came to GSK daily for three more days in a row, as if for work. On the fourth day, they did not arrive. Only then did we manage to start driving customers to the garage. As a result, he left a couple of days later for only a thousand bucks, which is at least twice the market price. But Vanya believed that security was more expensive than money. The garage has paid for itself.
After renting out the main apartment, Ivanov returned to Badgers with a full trunk and a trailer full of his belongings from the garage and apartment.
This time, his stay in his native village was not marred by troubles. All the time, he regularly made all the necessary payments, entering the minimum figures in the expense on the meters. During the gas connection, he managed to break through the installation of a gas meter, which fully paid for itself in a couple of years.
With a meter, you only need to pay for the spent gas. If you don't have one, the Regional Gas doesn't care if you live in the house or not - be kind enough to pay the rates they set.
When you have a roof over your head, you can safely engage in construction.
In an alternative future, Vanya, when he had the money, built himself a three-story cottage. On the one hand, it was convenient: each child had his own bedroom, and there were enough bathrooms for everyone. But a big house has many undeniable disadvantages. For example, cleaning there is comparable to the full-fledged work of a cleaner. It is expensive to heat a large building, especially if the house is not insulated and built of brick. Running from floor to floor is fun only for children. The older you get, the harder it gets to climb stairs. There are thoughts that it would be nice to have a one-story warm house.
Since Vanya was building the cottage for the first time, he focused more on pomp and prestige than on the convenience of living. He did not take into account the main aspects for suburban housing.
There should be several storage facilities in a private house. One storage room for supplies like detergents, mops, dustpans, brooms, vacuum cleaners, and the like. There must be a pantry for groceries. In the Ivanovs' cottage, numerous purchases from stores were stored anywhere, crammed into different corners, cupboards, bookcases. It's very inconvenient when you have to look for something you need. When living in an apartment, you can stop by the store on the way and buy a small bag of groceries. For residents of a private house and the father of a large family, it is more convenient to go to a hypermarket once a week and pack a full trunk in reserve. For the village, it is better to go to the regional center once a month and buy everything possible for the future. That's why a villager's pantry should be very spacious.
In addition, it is desirable to have a separate boiler room. It can be combined with a laundry room. Usually in private homes, the boiler is installed in the kitchen, but it often gets in the way there. A gas wall-mounted boiler is still a good idea, although the whole view spoils a lot of pipes. But if you put a floor-standing boiler, a storage boiler-water heater for hot water supply, add a boiler from the well and add a bunch of pipes and pumps to all this, you get a decent pile.
It's also a good idea to have a basement or cellar at home for storing twists and vegetables. Do not confuse this room with a food pantry. The basement is rarely climbed, so it can be made difficult to access. And the owners look into the pantry several times a day.
An important point is the availability of several bathrooms. When the family is small, for example, of three people, one toilet is enough. But even in this case, it is advisable to make it separate. But when there are four or more members in a family, it is difficult to live without two toilets. You can have one bathroom or shower, and there should be several toilets and sinks.
Following these rules, born with life experience, Ivanov created the project of the house of his dreams. It had everything he wanted: a cellar, one floor, one bathroom, but two toilets, two storerooms, a boiler room with space for a washing machine, as well as a large kitchen-dining room - the place where the whole family often spends the most time after their room with a computer. There will be only two rooms, but Ivan has provided for the possibility of expanding the house in the future.
It was going to be built on the principle of "cheap, reliable and using low-skilled labor." And in the village there is only such a thing. Two thousand and two years ago, there was widespread unemployment in the villages with the accompanying problem of drunkenness. To prevent drunken collective farmers from ruining the house, its construction should be as simple as possible.
Ivan decided to use expanded clay blocks as a wall material. It's easy and fast to build from them. They are durable. Their only drawback is that they don't keep much heat.
To mitigate this problem, it was decided to insulate the walls. But modern insulation materials for the future are too expensive now. This problem was solved by pouring an arbolite belt outside the house.
Arbolite is an undeservedly forgotten Soviet material that retains heat well. This is concrete with sawdust, in which lime is added to protect against mold formation, and to prevent rodents from getting there. The formwork is made outside the house, concrete with sawdust is mixed and poured. To keep it better, pieces of reinforcement are periodically inserted into the masonry during the construction of the walls. In this case, the structure turns out to be reliable and warm, and it is built quickly by drunks. What the doctor ordered.
The concrete mixer was found by an ad in Chelyabinsk. It's big and used, but it's very cheap. Judging by the price and the seller, it was most likely that the builders had stolen it from the construction site, but Ivanov didn't care. The main thing is that it's working.
Having learned from bitter experience, he bought building materials immediately en masse and with a reserve. This allows you to get a small discount and protects you from the inevitable price increase. The only problem was with cement: you couldn't buy it in stock. But it is always available in the district center. Nothing prevents you from going to get cement with a trailer at any time.
Sawdust was the cheapest. They were found at a nearby sawmill. They cost the price of shipping and a case of vodka for the employees of the sawmill.
All the building materials were delivered within a week, and construction began to boil.
An excavator operator from a neighboring village dug a hole for a ribbon foundation and a cellar in a day.
Three weeks later, the foundation was ready. More precisely, he was ready earlier, because Ivanov caught up with a crowd of men to fill it. The concrete should have been allowed to strengthen for at least two weeks. And when the deadlines were met, the construction of the walls began.
Despite the large number of people who wanted to earn money, no more than three or four people a day were present at the construction site. The staff turnover, if you can call it that, was catastrophic. The village men demanded payment for a day's work. After receiving the money, they disappeared for a long time, drinking it. Sometimes Vanya had to work alone, but the walls of expanded clay blocks grew before our eyes.
It was more difficult to fill the armopoyas, which should have been done every five rows of blocks. It is even harder to lay window lintels. There's nothing to do there alone, you'll just tear your navel.
Despite minor troubles, the house, with the exception of interior decoration, was fully erected by the end of the summer. Inside there are plastered walls made of blocks. There's an arbolite outside. Windows and doors had to be ordered from a carpenter. Plastic costs a lot of money, while wooden ones are budget-friendly, although they do not provide as much comfort as good double-glazed windows. It turned out to be cheaper to order doors from a carpenter than to buy them at a hardware store.
Ivan had enough money to live from renting apartments. He spent only four thousand dollars on the construction. Very budget-friendly for a house of seventy square meters. But there was finishing work ahead, which is usually very expensive.
Vanya did all the other work himself. I assembled the heating system, installed a gas boiler, and painted the walls. No wallpaper or other frills - ordinary water-dispersion paint on plaster looks good, is inexpensive, is applied quickly and, unlike whitewash, does not get dirty.
He had to pay professionals four times. The first time when decorating a house. The second time was for gas workers to connect gas from a pipe in an old house. The third time was for an artesian well, the water from which he brought into the house himself. For the fourth time, he paid for a triple septic tank with ten cubic meters, which, in theory, would not have to be pumped out for the next ten years.
After wiring the electrics and installing plumbing, which were completed at the end of October, it was possible to move into the house, but Vanya had nothing to live on. The budget, which seemed limitless, showed the bottom.
For a long, long time, Ivanov was in business all the time. He worked like a complete workaholic. Vanya pushed away thoughts about his strange journey into the past. And that's it: the house is finished, the money is gone, there is no work and nothing to occupy yourself with. This was the decisive factor in the apathy that came over him.
All this time, Vanya unconsciously tried not to think about the unnaturalness and strangeness of what was happening. History repeated itself, but his life was different. It was like a virtual Carpet Dealer game from an old, but not yet existing, Rick and Morty cartoon. In The Carpet Merchant, you can live the whole life of a hero in an instant, who began his journey with the carpet trade. The player could radically change the fate of the hero, living his life for him. The game ended with the death of the hero. Exiting the game, the player felt as if he had really lived a lifetime.
Vanya thought about it: Isn't he the hero of such a game? What if some powerful aliens are playing him like a virtual character, emulating the surrounding reality? For the game characters, their world seems real. They can't even imagine that they are in the game. So why not, if there is a fact: he lived a whole life, but returned to his past...
Ivan also thought that it might be the devil's game. He recalled one movie in which Satan brought a man back to the past, allowing him to live his life differently. As payment for this, he took the unborn child of a hero from an alternate universe. Perhaps some demon took Ivanov's unborn children as payment for Vanya to live again? But he remembered perfectly well that he had not made any deals with higher powers. And he never believed in these powers, being an inveterate materialist.
More than two years have passed since he woke up in the park young and healthy. He plunged into his work due to circumstances. I forced myself to do it so that I wouldn't go crazy. And here's a finita la comedy. He completed all the planned tasks.
That day, he couldn't help himself and got drunk. One of them, like an alcoholic, sat down in the kitchen of an old house and ordered a bottle of vodka.
He was drinking, and tears were running down his cheeks. Suddenly, memories of family, wife, and children came out. He had not seen them for more than two years and would never see them again. Are they gone or won't they be? He couldn't decide how to think about it. On the one hand, they disappeared, but he remained. On the other hand, now in the past, which is the present, they did not exist. But he, Vanya, changed the future with his actions. His children may not be here.
He missed his family a lot. But at the same time, he understood that you can't step into the same river twice. That's how you can get to know the same girl again, who was once his Saule? Even if she makes contact, it will be incredibly difficult to establish communication with her. Vanya is no longer the same young and perky guy who can charm a doctor of his age. He felt like an old fart trapped in a young body. He had forgotten how to meet girls. Despite the needs of a young body, Vanya simply did not want to waste time on all sorts of curtsies with dates, acquaintances, lapping. He wanted to return to his home, find his beloved Saule in the kitchen, gently hug her and not let her go anywhere. Listen to her grumble, enjoy the taste of homemade beshbarmak and real pilaf.
At the memory of the food that his wife cooked, Vanya began to salivate profusely. He could almost smell the aroma of fried onions and mutton.
He remembered the taste of cooking, but he could no longer remember how he had charmed Saule. There are some fragments in my memory that have been distorted by time. The most memorable trips to the cinema and cafes, trips to the seaside with the whole family.
Children... He won't see them again. To see your children, you'll have to go through becoming a parent all over again, from conception to parenting. No matter how hard he tries, he won't be able to guess exactly the dates as in his previous life. If he sets such a goal for himself, it will not be a life, but a re-living. You'll have to walk around with a stopwatch, thinking something like, 'Now we have to conceive Misha. We need to do it like last time on the washing machine, so that Masha won't be born instead of Misha.'
"Nonsense! A thought raced through Ivan's head. - It all sounds like the ravings of a madman! Who! For what? Why me?'
He had such pain in his soul that alcohol could not drown it out. Looking for a way to get rid of the mental burden, a thought rushed into the drunken brain:
'I need a woman! A whore is better. To come off with her properly, so that the sadness goes away."
It's not so easy to find a whore in a small village. There are plenty of girls of easy virtue here, but they are married, although they do not deny themselves the pleasure of going to the left. But then the whole village will talk about it. This will lead to problems, at least a disagreement with her cuckold husband.
The only one who came to mind from the drunken bench was Svetka from the next street. She was a year older than Vanya, back in the days before the secondary school in Badgers was closed.
Alcohol is a scourge for Russian villages. He captures the minds of young people, drags them into the abyss of drunkenness. Mostly, only the weak-willed people who are used to going with the flow remain in the villages of the young. Young people tend to move to the city and stay there. It doesn't matter where: to the capital, to St. Petersburg, Cheboksary or Volgograd. The city seems to them to be filled with opportunities, and the village is a gutter in which they rot alive.
Of course, this is not the case. A well-armed and non-drinking person realizes himself in the village, providing a decent income.
Sveta was just from the category of weak-willed personalities. She gave herself completely to the current, occasionally floundering there. Two or three times a year she went to work in the capital. He works for a month, then returns to the village and drinks a lot of money by local standards. When the money ran out, she repeated the tour. And so her whole life flew by from the day she graduated from high school. No ambition, no desire to live like a white man, no concern for family.
Vanya remembered that in a previous life, Svetka got drunk and passed away five years before him. She had an adult son who she didn't need. The kid grew up without upbringing with a constantly drunk mother, like a weed in the garden. When he turned eleven, a strict lady came to the house. But she did not bring a letter from Hogwarts, but a court order on the deprivation of parental rights. The boy repeated the fate of Ivanov's stepsister: he was sent to an orphanage, where he grew up. But he was more fortunate. Svetka eventually drank down the house, and the state allocated an apartment to her son. As a result, he stayed in the city and even started his own furniture manufacturing business.
But now... There was still plenty of light. Alcohol had already caused irreparable damage to her beauty, but youth tried to give the hostess a chance. At twenty-three, she still looked good. And most importantly, Vanya knows for sure that she is a whore, unable to keep her legs together. And judging by the fact that even in the twenties there were no rumors about mass cases of sexually transmitted diseases in the village, in this regard it should be clean.