I made my way back to our house. I wanted to meet my grandmother first, and that’s why I didn’t go down the street. The old, barkless poles in our and neighboring vegetable gardens were crumbling, and props, twigs, and plank fragments stuck out where the stakes should have been. The vegetable gardens themselves were squeezed by insolent, freely growing boundaries. Our garden, especially from the ridges, was so choked with dull grass that I noticed the beds in it only when, having attached last year’s burrs to my riding breeches, I made my way to the bathhouse from which the roof had fallen, the bathhouse itself no longer smelled of smoke, the door looked like a leaf carbon copies, lying to the side, the current grass stuck between the boards. A small paddock of potatoes and beds, with a densely occupied vegetable garden, hollowed out from the house, there was blackened earth. And these, as if lost, but still freshly darkening beds, rotten hovels in the yard, rubbed by shoes, a low woodpile of firewood under the kitchen window testified that they were living in the house.
For some reason I suddenly felt afraid, some unknown force pinned me to the spot, squeezed my throat, and, with difficulty overcoming myself, I moved into the hut, but I also moved fearfully, on tiptoe.
The door is open. A lost bumblebee buzzed in the entryway, and there was a smell of rotten wood. There was almost no paint left on the door or porch. Only shreds of it glowed in the rubble of the floorboards and on the doorposts, and although I walked carefully, as if I had run too far and was now afraid to disturb the cool peace in the old house, the cracked floorboards still moved and groaned under my boots. And the further I walked, the more desolate, darker it became ahead, the more sagging, the more decrepit the floor, eaten away by mice in the corners, and the more and more perceptible smell of the mold of wood, the moldiness of the underground.
Grandmother was sitting on a bench near the blind kitchen window and winding threads into a ball.
I froze at the door.
A storm has passed over the earth! Millions of human destinies were mixed and entangled, new states disappeared and new states appeared, fascism, which threatened the human race with death, died, and here a wall cabinet made of boards hung and a speckled chintz curtain hung on it; just as the cast iron pots and the blue mug stood on the stove, so they stand; as forks, spoons, and a knife stuck out behind the wall plaque, so they stick out, only there were few forks and spoons, a knife with a broken toe, and there was no smell in the kuti of sauerkraut, cow swill, boiled potatoes, but everything was as it was, even grandmother in her usual place, with the usual thing in hand.
Why are you standing, father, at the threshold? Come, come! I'll cross you, sweetheart. I got shot in the leg... I’ll be scared or happy - and it’ll shoot...
And my grandmother said the usual thing, in a familiar, everyday voice, as if I, in fact, had gone into the forest or ran off to visit my grandfather and then returned, having been a little late.
I thought you wouldn't recognize me.
How can I not find out? What are you, God bless you!
I straightened my tunic, wanted to stretch out and bark what I had thought up in advance: “I wish you good health, Comrade General!”
What kind of a general is this?
The grandmother made an attempt to get up, but she swayed and grabbed the table with her hands. The ball rolled off her lap, and the cat did not jump out from under the bench onto the ball. There was no cat, that's why the corners were eaten.
I’m old, father, completely old... My legs... I picked up the ball and began to wind the thread, slowly approaching my grandmother, not taking my eyes off her.
How small grandma’s hands became! Their skin is yellow and shiny, onion peel. Every bone is visible through the worked skin. And bruises. Layers of bruises, like caked leaves of late autumn. The body, the powerful grandmother’s body, could no longer cope with its work; it did not have enough strength to drown out and dissolve with blood the bruises, even the light ones. Grandma's cheeks sank deeply. All of our cheeks will sag like this in old age. We are all like grandmas, with high cheekbones, and all with prominent bones.
Why are you looking like that? Have you become good? - Grandma tried to smile with worn out, sunken lips.
I threw the ball and grabbed my grandmother's head.
I remained alive, grandma, alive!..
“I prayed, I prayed for you,” my grandmother hurriedly whispered and poked me in the chest like a bird. She kissed where the heart was and kept repeating: “I prayed, I prayed...
That's why I survived.
Did you receive the parcel?
Time has lost its definitions for grandmother. Its boundaries were erased, and what happened a long time ago, it seemed to her, was quite recently; Much of today was forgotten, covered in the fog of fading memory.
In the winter of 1942, I underwent training in a reserve regiment, just before being sent to the front. They fed us very poorly, and didn’t give us any tobacco at all. I tried to smoke with those soldiers who received parcels from home, and the time came when I needed to settle accounts with my comrades.
After much hesitation, I asked in a letter to send me some tobacco.
Pressed by need, Augusta sent a bag of samosad to the reserve regiment. The bag also contained a handful of finely chopped crackers and a glass of pine nuts. This gift - crackers and nuts - was sewn into a bag by the grandmother herself.
Let me take a look at you.
I obediently froze in front of my grandmother. The dent from the Red Star remained on her decrepit cheek and did not go away - it became like a grandmother up to my chest. She stroked and felt me, memory stood thick in her eyes, and grandmother looked somewhere through me and beyond.
How big you have become, big-oh!.. If only the deceased mother could look and admire... - At this point, grandmother, as always, trembled in her voice and looked at me with questioning timidity - am I angry? I didn’t like it before when she started talking about this. I caught it sensitively - I’m not angry, and I also caught it and understood, apparently, the boyish roughness has disappeared and my attitude towards goodness is now completely different. She began to cry not infrequently, but with continuous weak old tears, regretting something and rejoicing at something.
What a life it was! God forbid!.. But God doesn’t clean me up. I'm getting under my feet. But you can’t lie in someone else’s grave. I'll die soon, father, I'll die.
I wanted to protest, to challenge my grandmother, and I was about to move, but she somehow wisely and inoffensively stroked me on the head - and there was no need to say empty, comforting words.
I'm tired, father. All tired. Eighty-six years old... She did the work - just right for another artel. Everything was waiting for you. The anticipation is growing stronger. Now it's time. Now I'll die soon. You, father, come and bury me... Close my little eyes...
Grandmother became weak and could no longer say anything, she just kissed my hands, wet them with her tears, and I did not take my hands away from her.
I also cried silently and enlightenedly.
Soon the grandmother died.
They sent me a telegram to the Urals calling me to the funeral. But I was not released from production. The head of the personnel department of the carriage depot where I worked, having read the telegram, said:
Not allowed. Mother or father is another matter, but grandparents and godfathers...
How could he know that my grandmother was my father and mother - everything that is dear to me in this world! I should have sent that boss to the right place, quit my job, sell my last pair of pants and boots, and rush to my grandmother’s funeral, but I didn’t do that.
I had not yet realized the enormity of the loss that had befallen me. If this happened now, I would crawl from the Urals to Siberia to close my grandmother’s eyes and give her my last bow.
And lives in the heart of wine. Oppressive, quiet, eternal. Guilty before my grandmother, I try to resurrect her in my memory, to find out from people the details of her life. But what interesting details can there be in the life of an old, lonely peasant woman?
I found out when my grandmother became exhausted and could not carry water from the Yenisei, washing her potatoes with dew. She gets up before daylight, pours out a bucket of potatoes onto the wet grass and rolls them with a rake, as if she were trying to wash away the dew from underneath, like an inhabitant of a dry desert, she saved rainwater in an old tub, in a trough and in basins...
Suddenly, very, very recently, quite by accident, I found out that my grandmother not only went to Minusinsk and Krasnoyarsk, but also went to the Kiev Pechersk Lavra for prayer, for some reason calling the holy place the Carpathians.
Aunt Apraksinya Ilyinichna died. During the hot season, she lay in her grandmother’s house, half of which she occupied after her funeral. The deceased woman began to smell, she ought to smoke incense in the hut, but where can you get it today, incense? Nowadays words are incense everywhere and everywhere, so thickly that sometimes the white light cannot be seen, the true truth in the cloud of words cannot be discerned.
Well, I found some incense! Aunt Dunya Fedoranikha, a thrifty old woman, lit a censer on a coal scoop and added fir branches to the incense. The oily smoke smokes and swirls around the hut, it smells of antiquity, it smells of foreignness, it repels all bad odors - you want to smell a long-forgotten, alien smell.
Where did you get it? - I ask Fedoranikha.
And your grandmother, Katerina Petrovna, may God bless her, when she went to the Carpathians to pray, she gave us all incense and gifts. Since then I’ve been taking care of it, there’s just a little left - left for my death...
Dear mom! And I didn’t even know such details in my grandmother’s life, probably back in the old days she made it to Ukraine, with blessings, returned from there, but she was afraid to talk about it in troubled times, that if I blabbed about my grandmother’s prayer, they would trample me out of school, Kolcha Jr. will be discharged from the collective farm...
I want, I still want to know and hear more and more about my grandmother, but the door to the silent kingdom slammed behind her, and there were almost no old people left in the village. I’m trying to tell people about my grandmother, so that they can find her in their grandparents, close and beloved people, and my grandmother’s life would be limitless and eternal, like human kindness itself is eternal - but this work is from the evil one. I don’t have words that could convey all my love for my grandmother, that would justify me to her.
I know grandma would forgive me. She always forgave me everything. But she's not there. And there never will be.
And there is no one to forgive...
Reads in 2 minutes
Very briefly
The narrator promises his old grandmother to be at her funeral, but breaks the promise and regrets it all his life.
Returning from the war, the narrator goes to visit his grandmother. He wants to meet her first, so he makes his way to the house backwards. The narrator notices how dilapidated the house in which he grew up has become. The roof of the bathhouse has caved in, the gardens are overgrown, and there isn’t even a cat in the house, so mice have gnawed through the floor in the corners.
A war swept over the world, new states appeared, millions of people died, but nothing changed in the house, and the grandmother still sits at the window, winding yarn into a ball. She immediately recognizes her grandson, and the narrator notices how the grandmother has aged. Having admired her grandson with the Order of the Red Star on his chest, the old woman says that she is tired after her 86 years and will soon die. She asks her grandson to come and bury her when her time comes.
Soon the grandmother dies, but she is released from the Ural plant only for the funeral of her parents.
I had not yet realized the enormity of the loss that had befallen me. If this happened now, I would crawl from the Urals to Siberia to close my grandmother’s eyes and give her my last bow.
“Opressive, quiet, eternal” guilt settles in the narrator’s heart. He finds out from his fellow villagers the details of her lonely life. The narrator learns that in last years the grandmother became dehydrated, could not carry water from the Yenisei and washed potatoes in the dew; that she went to pray at the Kiev Pechersk Lavra.
The author wants to know as much as possible about the grandmother, “yet the door to the silent kingdom slammed behind her.” In his stories, he tries to tell people about her, so that they remember their grandparents, and so that her life is “limitless and eternal, like human kindness itself is eternal.” “Yes, this work is from the evil one,” - the author does not have words that convey all his love for his grandmother and justify him to her.
Victor Astafiev
FINAL BOW
(A story within stories)
BOOK ONE
A fairy tale far and near
In the outskirts of our village, in the middle of a grassy clearing, a long log building with a lining of boards stood on stilts. It was called a “mangazina”, which was also adjacent to the importation - here the peasants of our village brought artel equipment and seeds, it was called the “community fund”. If a house burns down, even if the whole village burns down, the seeds will be intact and, therefore, people will live, because as long as there are seeds, there is arable land in which you can throw them and grow bread, he is a peasant, a master, and not a beggar.
At a distance from the importation there is a guardhouse. She snuggled under the stone scree, in the wind and eternal shadow. Above the guardhouse, high on the ridge, larch and pine trees grew. Behind her, a key was smoking out of the stones with a blue haze. It spread out along the foot of the ridge, marking itself with thick sedge and meadowsweet flowers in the summer, in winter - as a quiet park under the snow and as a path through the bushes crawling from the ridges.
There were two windows in the guardhouse: one near the door and one on the side towards the village. The window leading to the village was filled with cherry blossoms, stingweed, hops and various other things that had proliferated from the spring. The guardhouse had no roof. Hops swaddled her so that she resembled a one-eyed, shaggy head. An overturned bucket stuck out like a pipe from the hop tree; the door opened immediately onto the street and shook off raindrops, hop cones, bird cherry berries, snow and icicles, depending on the time of year and weather.
Vasya the Pole lived in the guardhouse. He was short, had a limp on one leg, and had glasses. The only person in the village who had glasses. They evoked timid politeness not only among us children, but also among adults.
Vasya lived quietly and peacefully, did not harm anyone, but rarely did anyone come to see him. Only the most desperate children furtively looked into the window of the guardhouse and could not see anyone, but they were still afraid of something and ran away screaming.
At the importation point, the children jostled about from early spring until autumn: they played hide and seek, crawled on their bellies under the log entrance to the importation gate, or were buried under the high floor behind the stilts, and even hid in the bottom of the barrel; they were fighting for money, for chicks. The hem was beaten by punks - with bats filled with lead. When the blows echoed loudly under the arches of the importation, a sparrow commotion flared up inside her.
Here, near the importation station, I was introduced to work - I took turns spinning a winnowing machine with the kids, and here for the first time in my life I heard music - a violin...
Rarely, very rarely indeed, Vasya the Pole played the violin, that mysterious, out-of-this-world person who inevitably comes into the life of every boy, every girl and remains in the memory forever. It seemed that such a mysterious person was supposed to live in a hut on chicken legs, in a rotten place, under a ridge, and so that the fire in it barely glimmered, and so that an owl laughed drunkenly over the chimney at night, and so that the key smoked behind the hut, and so that no one... no one knew what was going on in the hut and what the owner was thinking about.
I remember Vasya once came to his grandmother and asked her something. Grandma sat Vasya down to drink tea, brought some dry herbs and began to brew it in a cast iron pot. She looked pitifully at Vasya and sighed protractedly.
Vasya didn’t drink tea our way, not with a bite and not from a saucer, he drank straight from a glass, put a teaspoon on the saucer and didn’t drop it on the floor. His glasses sparkled menacingly, his cropped head seemed small, the size of a trouser. His black beard was streaked with gray. And it was as if it was all salted, and the coarse salt had dried it out.
Vasya ate shyly, drank only one glass of tea and, no matter how much his grandmother tried to persuade him, he did not eat anything else, ceremoniously bowed out and carried away a clay pot with herbal infusion in one hand, and a bird cherry stick in the other.
Lord, Lord! - Grandmother sighed, closing the door behind Vasya. - Your lot is hard... A person goes blind.
In the evening I heard Vasya's violin.
It was early autumn. The gates of importation are wide open. There was a draft in them, stirring the shavings in the bottoms repaired for grain. The smell of rancid, musty grain pulled into the gate. A flock of children, not taken to the arable land because they were too young, played robber detectives. The game progressed sluggishly and soon died out completely. In the fall, let alone in the spring, it somehow plays poorly. One by one, the children scattered to their homes, and I stretched out on the warm log entrance and began to pull out the grains that had sprouted in the cracks. I waited for the carts to rumble on the ridge so that I could intercept our people from the arable land, ride home, and then, lo and behold, they would let me take my horse to water.
Beyond the Yenisei, beyond the Guard Bull, it became dark. In the creek of the Karaulka River, waking up, a large star blinked once or twice and began to glow. It looked like a burdock cone. Behind the ridges, above the mountain tops, a streak of dawn smoldered stubbornly, not like autumn. But then darkness quickly came over her. The dawn was covered up like a luminous window with shutters. Until morning.
It became quiet and lonely. The guardhouse is not visible. She hid in the shadow of the mountain, merged with the darkness, and only the yellowed leaves shone faintly under the mountain, in a depression washed by a spring. From behind the shadows, bats began to circle, squeak above me, fly into the open gates of the importation, there to catch flies and moths, no less.
I was afraid to breathe loudly, I squeezed myself into a corner of the importation. Along the ridge, above Vasya’s hut, carts rumbled, hooves clattered: people were returning from the fields, from farmsteads, from work, but I still did not dare to peel myself away from the rough logs, and I could not overcome the paralyzing fear that rolled over me. The windows in the village lit up. Smoke from the chimneys reached the Yenisei. In the thickets of the Fokinskaya River, someone was looking for a cow and either called it in a gentle voice, or scolded it with the last words.
In the sky, next to that star that was still shining lonely over the Karaulnaya River, someone threw a piece of the moon, and it, like a bitten half of an apple, did not roll anywhere, barren, orphaned, it became chilly, glassy, and everything around it was glassy. As he fumbled, a shadow fell across the entire clearing, and a shadow, narrow and big-nosed, also fell from me.
Across the Fokino River - just a stone's throw away - the crosses in the cemetery began to turn white, something creaked in the imported goods - the cold crept under the shirt, along the back, under the skin, to the heart. I had already leaned my hands on the logs in order to push off at once, fly all the way to the gate and rattle the latch so that all the dogs in the village would wake up.
But from under the ridge, from the tangles of hops and bird cherry trees, from the deep interior of the earth, music arose and pinned me to the wall.
It became even more terrible: on the left there was a cemetery, in front there was a ridge with a hut, on the right there was a terrible place behind the village, where there were a lot of white bones lying around and where a long time ago, the grandmother said, a man was strangled, behind there was a dark imported plant, behind it there was a village, vegetable gardens covered with thistles, from a distance similar to black clouds of smoke.
Victor Astafiev
FINAL BOW
(A story within stories)
BOOK ONE
A fairy tale far and near
In the outskirts of our village, in the middle of a grassy clearing, a long log building with a lining of boards stood on stilts. It was called a “mangazina”, which was also adjacent to the importation - here the peasants of our village brought artel equipment and seeds, it was called the “community fund”. If a house burns down, even if the whole village burns down, the seeds will be intact and, therefore, people will live, because as long as there are seeds, there is arable land in which you can throw them and grow bread, he is a peasant, a master, and not a beggar.
At a distance from the importation there is a guardhouse. She snuggled under the stone scree, in the wind and eternal shadow. Above the guardhouse, high on the ridge, larch and pine trees grew. Behind her, a key was smoking out of the stones with a blue haze. It spread out along the foot of the ridge, marking itself with thick sedge and meadowsweet flowers in the summer, in winter - as a quiet park under the snow and as a path through the bushes crawling from the ridges.
There were two windows in the guardhouse: one near the door and one on the side towards the village. The window leading to the village was filled with cherry blossoms, stingweed, hops and various other things that had proliferated from the spring. The guardhouse had no roof. Hops swaddled her so that she resembled a one-eyed, shaggy head. An overturned bucket stuck out like a pipe from the hop tree; the door opened immediately onto the street and shook off raindrops, hop cones, bird cherry berries, snow and icicles, depending on the time of year and weather.
Vasya the Pole lived in the guardhouse. He was short, had a limp on one leg, and had glasses. The only person in the village who had glasses. They evoked timid politeness not only among us children, but also among adults.
Vasya lived quietly and peacefully, did not harm anyone, but rarely did anyone come to see him. Only the most desperate children furtively looked into the window of the guardhouse and could not see anyone, but they were still afraid of something and ran away screaming.
At the importation point, the children jostled about from early spring until autumn: they played hide and seek, crawled on their bellies under the log entrance to the importation gate, or were buried under the high floor behind the stilts, and even hid in the bottom of the barrel; they were fighting for money, for chicks. The hem was beaten by punks - with bats filled with lead. When the blows echoed loudly under the arches of the importation, a sparrow commotion flared up inside her.
Here, near the importation station, I was introduced to work - I took turns spinning a winnowing machine with the kids, and here for the first time in my life I heard music - a violin...
Rarely, very rarely indeed, Vasya the Pole played the violin, that mysterious, out-of-this-world person who inevitably comes into the life of every boy, every girl and remains in the memory forever. It seemed that such a mysterious person was supposed to live in a hut on chicken legs, in a rotten place, under a ridge, and so that the fire in it barely glimmered, and so that an owl laughed drunkenly over the chimney at night, and so that the key smoked behind the hut, and so that no one... no one knew what was going on in the hut and what the owner was thinking about.
I remember Vasya once came to his grandmother and asked her something. Grandma sat Vasya down to drink tea, brought some dry herbs and began to brew it in a cast iron pot. She looked pitifully at Vasya and sighed protractedly.
Vasya didn’t drink tea our way, not with a bite and not from a saucer, he drank straight from a glass, put a teaspoon on the saucer and didn’t drop it on the floor. His glasses sparkled menacingly, his cropped head seemed small, the size of a trouser. His black beard was streaked with gray. And it was as if it was all salted, and the coarse salt had dried it out.
Vasya ate shyly, drank only one glass of tea and, no matter how much his grandmother tried to persuade him, he did not eat anything else, ceremoniously bowed out and carried away a clay pot with herbal infusion in one hand, and a bird cherry stick in the other.
Lord, Lord! - Grandmother sighed, closing the door behind Vasya. - Your lot is hard... A person goes blind.
In the evening I heard Vasya's violin.
It was early autumn. The gates of importation are wide open. There was a draft in them, stirring the shavings in the bottoms repaired for grain. The smell of rancid, musty grain pulled into the gate. A flock of children, not taken to the arable land because they were too young, played robber detectives. The game progressed sluggishly and soon died out completely. In the fall, let alone in the spring, it somehow plays poorly. One by one, the children scattered to their homes, and I stretched out on the warm log entrance and began to pull out the grains that had sprouted in the cracks. I waited for the carts to rumble on the ridge so that I could intercept our people from the arable land, ride home, and then, lo and behold, they would let me take my horse to water.
Beyond the Yenisei, beyond the Guard Bull, it became dark. In the creek of the Karaulka River, waking up, a large star blinked once or twice and began to glow. It looked like a burdock cone. Behind the ridges, above the mountain tops, a streak of dawn smoldered stubbornly, not like autumn. But then darkness quickly came over her. The dawn was covered up like a luminous window with shutters. Until morning.
It became quiet and lonely. The guardhouse is not visible. She hid in the shadow of the mountain, merged with the darkness, and only the yellowed leaves shone faintly under the mountain, in a depression washed by a spring. From behind the shadows, bats began to circle, squeak above me, fly into the open gates of the importation, there to catch flies and moths, no less.
I was afraid to breathe loudly, I squeezed myself into a corner of the importation. Along the ridge, above Vasya’s hut, carts rumbled, hooves clattered: people were returning from the fields, from farmsteads, from work, but I still did not dare to peel myself away from the rough logs, and I could not overcome the paralyzing fear that rolled over me. The windows in the village lit up. Smoke from the chimneys reached the Yenisei. In the thickets of the Fokinskaya River, someone was looking for a cow and either called it in a gentle voice, or scolded it with the last words.
In the sky, next to that star that was still shining lonely over the Karaulnaya River, someone threw a piece of the moon, and it, like a bitten half of an apple, did not roll anywhere, barren, orphaned, it became chilly, glassy, and everything around it was glassy. As he fumbled, a shadow fell across the entire clearing, and a shadow, narrow and big-nosed, also fell from me.
Across the Fokino River - just a stone's throw away - the crosses in the cemetery began to turn white, something creaked in the imported goods - the cold crept under the shirt, along the back, under the skin, to the heart. I had already leaned my hands on the logs in order to push off at once, fly all the way to the gate and rattle the latch so that all the dogs in the village would wake up.
But from under the ridge, from the tangles of hops and bird cherry trees, from the deep interior of the earth, music arose and pinned me to the wall.
It became even more terrible: on the left there was a cemetery, in front there was a ridge with a hut, on the right there was a terrible place behind the village, where there were a lot of white bones lying around and where a long time ago, the grandmother said, a man was strangled, behind there was a dark imported plant, behind it there was a village, vegetable gardens covered with thistles, from a distance similar to black clouds of smoke.
A story within stories
Sing, little bird,
Burn, my torch,
Shine, star, over the traveler in the steppe.
Al. Domnin
* BOOK ONE *
A fairy tale far and near
In the outskirts of our village, among a grassy clearing, there stood on stilts
a long log room lined with boards. It was called
"mangazina", which also adjoined the importation - here the peasants of our
villages brought artel equipment and seeds, it was called “common
fund." If the house burns down, even if the whole village burns down, the seeds will be intact and,
this means that people will live, because as long as there are seeds, there is arable land,
which you can leave them and grow bread, he is a peasant, a master, and not
beggar.
At a distance from the importation there is a guardhouse. She snuggled under the stone scree, in
wind and eternal shadow. Above the guardhouse, high on the ridge, larches grew and
pine trees. Behind her, a key was smoking out of the stones with a blue haze. It spread over
at the foot of the ridge, identifying itself with thick sedge and meadowsweet flowers in the summer
time, in winter - a quiet park from under the snow and kurzhak along the crawling from the ridges
bushes.
There were two windows in the guardhouse: one near the door and one on the side towards the village.
The window towards the village is covered with wild cherry trees that have proliferated from the spring,
sting, hops and various fools. The guardhouse had no roof. Hops swaddled
her so that she resembled a one-eyed, shaggy head. Sticking out of the hops
a bucket overturned by a pipe, the door opened immediately onto the street and shook off
raindrops, hop cones, bird cherry berries, snow and icicles depending on
time of year and weather.
Vasya the Pole lived in the guardhouse. He was small in stature, lame on one leg,
and he had glasses. The only person in the village who had glasses. They
evoked fearful politeness not only among us children, but also among adults.
Vasya lived quietly and peacefully, did not harm anyone, but rarely did anyone come to see him.
him. Only the most desperate children sneaked a peek into the window of the guardhouse and
they couldn’t see anyone, but they were still scared of something and ran away screaming
away.
At the delivery station, the children jostled with each other from early spring until autumn: they played
hide and seek, crawled on their bellies under the log entrance to the importation gate or
they were buried under a high floor behind stilts, and also hid in the bottom of the barrel; chopped
in grandma, in chick. The hem was beaten by punks - with bats filled with lead.
When the blows reverberated loudly under the arches of importation, a fire flared up inside it.
sparrow commotion.
Here, near the importation station, I was introduced to work - I took turns with
children, a winnowing fan, and here for the first time in my life I heard music -
violin.