About the book: 2019 / Dad died because there was nothing to love him for. He stopped rebelling and resisting. It went out like a candle flame knocked down by the wind. Dad was saved from life by the month of May. Cancer is a diagnosis that often hides the real cause of death. In the cruel essence, we have all suffered. Mom began to take better care of herself and dress well. I hid my thoughts and feelings from her. And I understood the following: it is almost impossible to meet a man like dad again in my life. There are no such things. A rare or unique combination of nobility, intelligence, and external attractiveness. And all this masks the entrance to a real abyss of suffering, desperate search for an ideal and sleepless despair. That is, God forbid you meet her: you will immediately disappear. Mom was so lucky for only one reason: she used to be incredibly pretty. She is still considered beautiful, but in our relationship I am increasingly overcoming the feeling of rejection, sometimes disgust. Deprived of the aura of my father’s admiration, my mother became herself - an ordinary aunt with a good face and a normal figure. It’s strange: after my father’s death, I didn’t find any intelligence, kindness, or charm in her at all. Perhaps poor dad also drowned out such disappointment with alcohol. Such a destruction of invented perfection. And when my mother brought a new husband, everything generally fell into place. Primitive is attracted to primitive. Nikolai, the stepfather, turned out to be a formally prominent man: tall, with broad shoulders, with a stamp of solidity and contentment on his well-fed face. But from the very beginning I was ashamed to look at him and hear his rantings. Only a nonentity can talk like that and look like that. And my mother suited him as part of the decor in our very changed apartment. They were two originally connected details in the interior of the world. Everything real, stormy, passionate and beautiful was taken away from our lives by the month of May…