- I personally feel sick from the left discourse. Moreover, notice, all these leftists are perfectly inscribed into the capitalist system. To talk about Marx, of course, is better in sables ...
We walked on the grass and dragged the bags from the store. We had arrived to the village a few days before and couldn’t help enjoying the village life. Bird cherry was blooming and the horizon was going pink.
- ...but as soon as it comes to...
The overgrown rosehip bushes suddenly stirred, the rustle of last year's sedge was heard, and a huge turtle crawled out from there.
We were even scared. What?!! Turtle? Look ... really a turtle!!! And a huge one. How did this turtle get here? The reptile of impressive size, fingering its scaly legs, climbed the path. The carapace was the size of a basin, turned upside down and split apart - in the middle was a crack. In fact, it seemed more like wood rather than bone, and sawn with a good carver: identical fragments in the middle resembled wood cuts, and below were folds. The legs were like the tops of a huge yellow asparagus.
The turtle stopped. It stretched out its wrinkled neck, which appeared to be unexpectedly long, in the direction of the red sign on the plastic bag - “Magnet”. Its gaze seemed meaningful, at least unambiguous.
“Maybe it wants to eat? - asked Nastya - let's feed it?” - and threw half a loaf on the grass.
- What a hungry look! As if it hasn’t eaten since spring.
- Or maybe it hasn’t eaten? Maybe a ... - I answered and stopped short, imagining how the turtle sleeps like a bear in a den.
Turtles seem to eat much faster than crawl. After half a loaf, it again craned its neck. We gave it the rest of the loaf.
Let's get its some milk - says Nastya. "Well, not beer, at least... I said,  already looking for an empty bottle of Zhigulevskoe beer that was lying in the grass. We cut it in half with a nail, which we found in the bushes, and poured milk into it.
"Won’t it cut itself? Nastya asked solicitously, and the milk with the inscription “Zhigulevskoe. The bar beer" was rapidly decreasing. I didn't have to think about it for long, because the turtle started making sounds. To our shame, we were not sufficiently aware of the structure of reptiles and their habits, that is, we could not say for sure whether they had any speech activity. Convulsively turning over in my head information about them, my memory gave out only a character from Pinocchio and anecdotes about their slowness. And in folk wisdom, turtles were not widely reflected, perhaps because this is not the most prominent representative of the local fauna. And at the same time, hissing, gurgling, croaking and sneezing came from this particular individual.
“Oh, bunny,” Nastya said, stroking the tortoise’s shell, “do you want yogurt?” And the can of Miracle Yogurt was also instantly destroyed.
This unimaginable phenomenon made us forget where we were going. And we went to Ira. Taking advantage of the lack of people on the beach, since in May they do not swim here, Ira was sunbathing naked somewhere nearby. We went there, at a snail's pace, because the reptile crawled behind us, that is, I suspect, was after our packages. Opening her mouth at our appearance, Ira began to frantically run her hand over her clothes lying on the sand. A handkerchief fell under her hand and she fixed it on her. The turtle crawled to Ira and began to make louder sounds, already clearly reminiscent of a groan:
- Oh oooh ohhh oh oh! Oh! oooh !!!
Nastya and I rolled with a laugh: “Seems it likes you.”
- I wonder if this is a boy or a girl? - asked Nastya. To which Ira immediately replied: “Stallion, can’t you see? “
The turtle, meanwhile, continued its linguistic exercises and rolling its eyes, craning its neck, straining all its forces, it quite distinctly pronounced the word “discourse”.
All summer the turtle lived in our yard. Of course, we wrote letters to every conceivable authority. But no one from the press even reacted - you never know how many the fuck-heads are writing to them constantly, and from the scientists only the employees of the Terrarium responded, but the fact that they are ready to receive the turtle only in the third quarter of the year, when The issue of financing and transportation of reptiles was agreed. So it, that is, he (looking in Google, we found out that this is a male spur-shaped tortoise aged 17-19 years) settled with us. He loved to sleep under the canopy of the house, which is called “Seni” in Russian, that’s why he received the name Senya.
Senya developed rapidly, both physically and mentally. He showed remarkable linguistic abilities, after a month he was already expressing himself normally, with almost no accent, and after a while he was already participating in our discussions, which we liked to arrange under the stars. I don’t know how the brain of these creatures works, but Semyon seemed to quite reasonably talk about many phenomena. It is incomprehensible to the mind how quickly he picked up everything. We barely controlled our laughter when Senya began to talk about art, while he didn’t see any artworks in his eyes.
At the end of July, the words “narrative”, “ontology”, “structuralism”, “postmodernism” and “anthropocene” appeared in his vocabulary.
Senya's brain was unique, but anomalies happen – as someone has two heads, and other has a tail, and here is super-active mental activity. Or maybe he was born near Chernobyl? Senya did not remember his past. Or didn’t want to talk.
For a long time we refused to believe it, but Senya was definitely in love with Ira. They somehow immediately found a common language and became inseparable. As soon as Ira showed herself in the yard, Senya started to scratch under the floor: he tagged along behind her.
This summer, Ira worked on her project: sculpting something from clay, filming a video. Senya was her permanent assistant, almost a co-author. They discussed the details, they came up with something. Senya drove her buckets of sand, a tripod, equipment, slowly, of course, but as they say, "the service of the muses does not endure fuss".
 Once, Nastya and I were returning from night swimming and, deciding to cut the path, went through the field. We saw Ira and Senya in the moonlight. These two silhouettes still stand in my eyes ... Ira sits on the grass with her long blond hair, and Senya is at her feet, and laid his paws on her knees.
“What a nice couple,” Nastya and I unanimously decided. 
Thus, Senya, thanks to Ira, became interested in modern art. He even once said that he wanted to apply his portfolio to the Rodchenko Art School. And from this, as you know, do not expect good ...
In late summer, he began to show signs of depression. He complained more and more about congruent dissonance and gradually became addicted to alcohol. Of course, we ourselves are to blame, because at the beginning, when Senya asked for a beer, we poured him a little bit. Just for fun. And then, somehow imperceptibly, of course, putting a bottle of wine on the table, we took out a special glass for Senya - such a transparent saucer from Ikea. No, he didn’t get much drunk, but he was more and more not sober, and then, as the evening came, he urged someone to run to the store.
Drunk Senya, if a little more drops fell in his saucer, became completely unbearable. Firstly, he chatted incessantly, preventing anyone from inserting a word. And then he began to get Ira. Not even get her, but cheeky pester. Or, to put it bluntly, to harass. At least Ira had no trouble escaping. And in the mornings, she was angry in the kitchen: “I'll make soup out of him someday.”
When we tried to reason with him, to stop him, he gave out some kind of quote from Heidegger, such as “in danger - salvation” or something like that. It amused us ...
The drunken Senya's constant theme was accusations of fascism.
“I know you put me below you because I’m not like you.” Yes, I do not look like you. Yes, I have a different exterior! I have a shell, but in general, furs stripped from animals - someone else's skin, wear it on you! So what about the fact that I have four legs? I've seen, some, we will not point a finger, also on all fours crawled after one’s birthday party. And I walk slowly, so everyone has a different temperament. A? What else do you start about the circulatory system or the gastrointestinal tract, yes? You are materialists, here you are. No, you are worse, you are fascists! .. And the turtle is also a man! etc.
Then he began to swear and ended up with some incoherent tirades about the antagonism of postmodern irony, along with religious fundamentalism and the anthropological transformation of culture and its explicit specification of conceptualization ...
In short, we seriously worried about Senya's health. We are losing him. Who will treat him, if that? And if binges begin? It seems that the issue of alcohol dependence of reptiles has not yet been investigated. And it is unlikely that the full-time unit of the narcologist can be found in the Crimean Terrarium, or will they have to wait for the next quarter to settle this question. And the summer is over, we have to go to Moscow.
Oh, how Senya wanted to come with us! Maybe he started drinking because he understood that he would soon have to part with his beloved. Of course, we discussed this among ourselves. But first, where do we put him? How will he live in an apartment?  In the bathroom? And none of the Moscow scientists showed interest in him, most likely considering our letters a stupid joke.
“Well, how can we take you away, Senichka?” After all, we have a national treasure, a media figure almost ... you already do not belong to yourself.
- Please take me, I'll lay off the booze, I'll go to work ...
 Well, and then, frankly, he already got us so much with his antics that we just waited for us to get rid of him.
And this hour has come. Unfortunately, it turned out that we were leaving a few days earlier than the car from the terrarium was supposed to arrive. We boarded up windows in the morning, removed the all summer belongings from outside, and the yard instantly became uninhabited, dreary. Yellow birch leaves were already flying on the crumpled grass. The sun was barely breaking through the clouds. We loaded all the luggage into the car, ate together for the last time outside. Senya asked for vodka, but we did not give him. Perhaps it was cruel, because it was many times harder for him than for us. We left only food. Not even for a few days, but probably for a couple of weeks with a margin (when I came back for a few days in November, I saw that he did not even touch the food).
We sat down for a moment before we a long journey We told Senya all kinds of comforts that summer would come, we would get together again and be fine, we would argue again about the art of the night away. But, of course, neither Senya, nor ourselves, believed in this. That's why he was especially slow, stretching every moment crawling us to see us off to the car. While we were packing our backpacks in the trunk, he buried his head in Ira’s leg and stood there all this time without moving. When Ira finally got behind the wheel, her pant leg was wet. We slammed the doors. Senya hid his head...
Two years had passed. Since then, we had not communicated with Senya. Well, somehow it happened. Yes, and it was a shame let's face the fact, because our departure was like a betrayal.
Someone heard on TV about a talking turtle, but compared to other news  being broadcast, that story seemed no less plausible to everyone.
One evening, Nastya called me.

- Guess who I just talked to! Manya Kogot’! Yes, from Berlin, she called me herself.
- Ha-ha! Did she invite you to Documenta? 
 - No! Look, she says, do you know, Nastya, such a curator Semyon Turtullian? I say, l think, I don’t ... And she: “How come?! In our professional community everyone is talking about him, but again you don’t know anything! He finally updated the so-called left post-Soviet discourse, which had compromised itself. It is very strange that no one has ever seen him in person. But you should know, he wrote that you met, he is from somewhere in the province...”
"Well?" Nastya asked me ... Think! Concentrate! Turtullian.
– ...Come on...?!
- Yes! Exactly! And she begged me, like literally begged to find him and help arrange a on-line conference with him...
– Where are we going to find him now?"

Translated by Dmitry Gugin, John Duncan