The Black Tulip

I first learned about the black tulip when I watched the film of the same name. Its leads were Alain Delon and the incomparable Virna Lisi, who stayed attractive even in advanced age.

As a kid, I didn't like the film: it felt contrived and false, and the acting of the pretty boy Alain Delon irritated me, but the women I remembered at once and, as it turned out, for good.

And later I had something to compare it with. For instance, "Angélique, Marquise of the Angels", starring Michèle Mercier and Jean Rochefort (nothing of Alain Delon's good looks, but what acting!).

Later, my yard friends and I argued more than once over whether a black tulip really exists or whether it is all the director's invention.

Most leaned toward the view that such a flower does exist after all, although we were more used to yellow tulips and red ones.

Could black tulips really be as gloomy in colour as ink? Though, of course, there is something in that too....

The only place in Kazan where tulips grew in public was Svoboda Square, where the rostrum stood and from which the republic's government greeted the columns of demonstrators on the First of May and the Seventh of November.

To settle our argument fairly, we decided to go to the square and look at the tulips: are there any black ones among them?

There were plenty of tulips: yellow, white, red, but not a single black one! And our faith that black tulips exist was noticeably shaken.

We stood there quite a long time, scanning for the coveted flower with keen eyes, which even put on guard the two militiamen who were keeping their arduous watch by the flowerbeds. Suspecting us of something unlawful, the guardians of order simply chased us off to be on the safe side, saying they would definitely tell our parents if we showed up here again.

To be continued

The black tulip is a mystical flower, which has to do not only with its name but also with its colour.

For me the black tulip always remained a kind of riddle of nature. There are no flowers of black colour. Blooming is always a bright event, like a gift of nature. In flowers you can find any colour of the rainbow. Flowers attract us not only by scent but also by colour; that is precisely their main purpose.

And here suddenly there is blackness. Darkness. Like the Mariana Trench, like the black holes in the boundless Universe.

Where has such a thing ever been seen?

In reality it is not black. Inside it, as if hiding from the sunlight, lies a deep crimson that enriches the bud.

And the Black Tulip is also a book by Alexandre Dumas, and also the An-12 military transport aircraft that carried our Soviet soldiers killed in the Afghan War home from Afghanistan, which A. Rosenbaum sang about so movingly.

"The Black Tulip" is also a satanic sect, an ugly offspring of the 1990s, in which human sacrifices were practised, and about which so much was written in its day.

And "The Black Tulip" is also the deportation of Germans from the Netherlands in 1945.

As well as a great number of monuments erected both in Russia and in the fraternal Slavic republics.

To be continued

Each of us wanted to see a black tulip, or even pick one to give to our ten-year-old girlfriend. For me personally, such a meeting with a black tulip took place many years later.

I remember standing beside it for a long time, studying it from every side. I was not disappointed. There was a lot of black in it, but the colours of the rainbow were there too. And a magic lay hidden in it that draws the eye, one I cannot unravel to this day.

Perhaps it is connected somehow with my half-neglected childhood, like that of many in my time.

Now there are quite a few black tulips in our garden. But every time I involuntarily pause and cast a glance at the buds as I walk past.

In our day there were no black tulips, but there were those of other colours, which we picked, not without risk, on Svoboda Square, right behind the government rostrum.

All these reckless exploits were done in the name of love, to please our little girlfriends and hear their delighted squeals.

And when they staged raids on us at the flowerbeds, we scattered like sparrows. Catching us was not so easy. True, some got caught, but those are separate stories...

My wise and strict mother understood that all these risky pastimes would lead to nothing good. More than once I got the belt. She worried terribly that her two scapegrace sons would end up in "not so remote" places. I took the punishment bravely, without crying out once.

But there were also edifying talks.

They began roughly like this...

"No one in our family has ever sat in prison."

In my mother's opinion, I was supposed to continue the glorious tradition and not stain the family name. "You must study and get good marks, not climb over fences... You've torn your trousers again. And your mother has to mend them! Your grandfather finished something or other, his two brothers were educated too, his sister graduated from the geography faculty. And you can't call your father a fool either..."

"But Ivan Ivanych did sit in prison," I recall my grandfather's elder brother. "Two years!"

A small pause, and then my mother went on confidently:

"Well, back then they locked everybody up! They pinned everything on him!"

My great-uncle was, before the war, the director of the Hotel "Kazan", the most respectable one at the time. Not that it has lost its status even now. They released him right before the war, and after that he fought