The worst

Train on the road for two weeks, runs through the whole winter snow Russia, from the ocean to the Urals and further to the West. In the car for a long time all the sleep off, got acquainted, long-read all the books, discussed all the rage of the day, played all the games of chess, tired to disgust "goat", even tea does not drink, even beer somehow it seems sour and stands unfinished in dark bottles under the bright paper cups.

And once in the evening in one of the compartments is going male company, and someone offers to each in turn said "the worst case of their lives." Something which, as terrible behind each lot. One burned the plane, the other - in the tank, and the third was almost killed on the torpedoed submarine. One more shot, and he punched through with a light, three days spent under a mountain of dead. At the door coupe is, listening to a middle-aged, small and thin as a teenager, the man in the form of a civil pilot. His hands in the side pockets of his brown leather jacket, he is smoking a thick expensive cigarette, throws it and then one corner of his mouth to the other and clinging to the back of the head jamb door abruptly and throws out nervously at the ceiling a thick stream of blue smoke. He listened, barely looking at the narrator, but the longer you listen, the more worried the more prolonged and deeper ...

Suddenly, his face filled with blood, he makes a few quick, feverish puffs hastily and even frantically stuffed full of cigarette butts in a metal box on the wall and turned to the narrator interrupts:
- St-that! U-Wait! Dr give me! ..
His lips are jumping. His face twitches. He - a stutter, every word of it is pushed out like a cork from a bottle.
- On-most item-trashnoe? - He says, twisting his lips, makes an attempt to portray an ironic smile.
- The worst thing, huh? T-drowned, you say? Mr burned? With m-lay dead? I, too t-t-drowning. I, too, Mr. burned. And the dead in an AB bnimochku lying. And in about a-most item-trashnoe - when I forty-second year of a letter received from Leningrad - from little son ... dd-ten-year "n-n-daddy - says - you have p-pardon of Anyutka ... m-we-last TT-in-a-warriors leather gloves p-Saint-cooked and-a-ate »...

Alexei Panteleyev, "Little Stories", 1962