The role of the girl was decided to give my brother Zhenya, who just turned 14 years old, so his voice was not yet mutated and was surprisingly similar to the girl's. As soon as the erotic sound appeared in the tape recording, with the enchanting hoarse of a pretty roaming girl, Zhenya's voice, Vitaly Fefelov and I could not help smiling. Vitaly Fefelov is a sound engineer for the DK "Motorostroitelei", in which I played then in a local rock band. He kindly agreed to my request to help record all the soundtracks for the rock opera, and at the same time brilliantly played the role of director of the Magic Theater. All theatrical scenes we recorded in my pantry to achieve a "flat", natural sound and get rid of the absolutely unnecessary reverberation effect in our case. Only now I understood and appreciated the whole complexity of the work of actors working in radio performances - try it with a voice, only with its intonations and nothing more, to convey the whole gamut of human experiences!
Finally, "Steppe Wolf" was recorded, but clearly there was not enough audience that could appreciate this "epoch-making" work. Fefelov, a radio electronic engineer from God, suggested using the latest achievements of scientific and technological progress. To do this, he brought to my house a powerful 100-watt amplifier, which we connected to the radio in my apartment. The recorder was connected to the amplifier and at 21.00 (when the majority of people are already at home) the rock opera "Steppe Wolf" was aired. The amplifier at the time of the broadcast completely cut off local radio broadcasting in the region of approximately two quarters (and this, then, and now it was a legal matter), and people were simply forced to listen to our existential, "beyond meaning" for human understanding, musical and literary composition. It is a pity that we could not "enjoy" their reaction, and without this, of course, there was no complete satisfaction from what was done.
Unfortunately, my personal copy of Steppen Wolf was lost somewhere irretrievably - from all this titanic work I had only one left, though the central theme of Harry Haller himself, written specifically for the clarinet (see phonogram 1). But I know for a fact that the original of this "imperishable" rock opera still remains with Vitaliy Fefelov, who still carefully keeps it in memory of our joint Creativity.
On July 1, 1982, with great "enthusiasm" I went to my first student construction team "Rusichi" of the Faculty of Law of the ASU (then there will be two more). We were 30 guys from different courses and only 5 girls - a cook. So, apparently, a big "gender" show was expected, especially when we learned that the place of deployment of the construction team is a huge Altai field 30 km from the village of Shelabolich in the Pavlovsky district. We were "bought" from the faculty by the famous in the Altai Territory director of the state farm "mirror carp" Hero of Socialist Labor Sapunov, whom we, for his too boring character, immediately dubbed "a precursor".
When we arrived at the site of the construction squad, I was simply shocked by the majestic panorama that opened to us such a familiar and, it turns out, completely unfamiliar nature of the Altai. What a beautiful, after all, this "small" my Motherland! In front of me was a magnificent emerald field, as in Alexander Volkov's fairy tale "The Wizard of the Emerald City". Solar spots from the burning July sun lifted from the magical field of a jet of hot, hot-white air, in the haze of which the silhouettes of distant skeletons, disorderly scattered across the field, and our two construction wagons, wretched on the edge of a birch grove, wavered. All the space around the trailers, even on those rare black and white photographs that remained of this construction team, is flooded with some fantastically unreal, dazzling white sun.
Next to our trailers was a large van on wheels, in which there were drivers of scrapers and graders (road construction machinery) who came here to the "red-hot" of Talmenka. Together with them we had to build a new pond for the "mirror carp".
The first night in building trailers for all passed just a nightmare. For a day, the heated, sheeted iron car was transformed into a sauna that it was impossible to sleep until 3 am. Then, at last, somehow falling asleep in the morning, an hour later you were already waking up from the wild cold - it turns out that these thin, plywood walls of the trailer could not keep the heat and were completely defenseless before the icy Altai morning.
The morning of the next day was immediately clouded by a sad incident in which we all saw a bad sign and an omen. When I got out of the car, I saw that some very bad movement was taking place near the van of the workers from Talmenki: the workers were running, excitedly waving their arms and shouting something, while on the ground at that time lay absolutely indifferent to
