Monk in new pants plan. Monk in new pants

- Well, what are you, what are you! Grandfather reassured me, wiping the tears from my face with his big hard hand. - Why are you lying there hungry? Ask for forgiveness ... Go, go, - grandfather gently pushed me in the back.

Holding my pants with one hand, I pressed the other to my eyes, stepped into the hut and started:

“I am more… I am more… I am more…” And he could not say anything further.

- All right, wash yourself and sit down to crack! - still irreconcilable, but already without a thunderstorm, without thunders, grandmother said.

I humbly washed myself. For a long time and very carefully he wiped himself with a towel, now and then shuddering from the sobs that had not yet passed, and sat down at the table. Grandfather was busy in the kitchen, winding the reins on his hand, doing something else. Feeling his invisible and reliable support, I took the kraukha from the table and began to eat dry food. Grandmother poured milk into the glass in one fell swoop and placed the bowl in front of me with a thud.

- Look, what a meek little one! Look how quiet! And he won't ask for milk!

Grandfather winked at me: be patient. Even without him I knew: God forbid now to argue with my grandmother or do something wrong, not at her discretion. She must discharge, she must express everything that she has accumulated, she must take her soul away.

For a long time my grandmother rebuked me and shamed me. Once again I roared remorsefully. She yelled at me again.

But Grandma spoke up. Grandfather has gone away. I sat, smoothed out the patch on my pants, pulled the threads out of it. And when he raised his head, he saw in front of him ...

I closed my eyes and opened my eyes again. He closed his eyes again, opened them again. A white horse with a pink mane rode on pink hooves on the scraped kitchen table, as if on a huge land with arable land, meadows and roads.

Take it, take it, what are you watching? You look, but even when you deceive your grandmother ...

How many years have passed since then! How many events have passed! And I still can’t forget my grandmother’s gingerbread - that marvelous horse with a pink mane.

Monk in new pants

I was ordered to sort out the potatoes. Grandmother determined the norm, or harnessed, as she called it. This harness is marked by two rutabaga, lying on either side of the oblong barrel, and to these rutabaga is the same as to the other bank of the Yenisei. When I get to the swede, God only knows. Maybe I won't even be alive by then!

In the basement there is an earthy, grave silence, mold on the walls, sugary curd on the ceiling. It makes you want to take it on your tongue. From time to time, for no reason, it crumbles from above, falls behind the collar and melts. Not good either. In the pit itself, where there are barrels of vegetables and tubs of cabbage, cucumbers and saffron mushrooms, the jacket hangs on the threads of the cobweb, and when I look up, it seems to me that I am in a fairy-tale kingdom, and when I look down, my heart bleeds and a great, great longing takes me.

There are potatoes all around here. And you need to sort them out, potatoes. The rotten one is supposed to be thrown into a wicker box, the large one into sacks, and the smaller one is thrown into the corner of this huge, like a yard, bin in which I sit, maybe all day, and my grandmother forgot about me, or maybe I’ve been sitting for a whole month and I’ll die soon, and then everyone will know how to leave a child here alone, and even an orphan to the same.

Of course, I am no longer a child and I work not in vain. The larger potatoes are taken for sale in the city, and my grandmother promised to buy textiles with the proceeds and sew me new pants with a pocket.

I see myself clearly in these pants, elegant, handsome. My hand is in my pocket, and I walk around the village and do not take my hand out, and if something needs to be put in - a bat or money, I only put it in my pocket, and nothing of value will fall out of my pocket and will not be lost.

Pants with a pocket, and even new ones, I never had. I'm getting everything old. The bag will be dyed and re-sewn, a woman's skirt that came out of socks, or something else. Once they even used a half-shawl. They dyed it and sewed it, and then it shed, and the cells became visible. All the Levontiev guys laughed at me. What, give them a scoff!

I wonder what they will be, pants, blue or black? And what kind of pocket will they have - external or internal? Outdoor, of course. Grandma will be messing with the inside! She has no time for everything. Family must be bypassed. Point out to everyone. General!

So I rushed off somewhere again, and I sit here and work!

At first I was afraid in this deep and silent basement. It always seemed to me that someone was hiding in the gloomy rotten corners, and I was afraid to move and was afraid to cough. And then I took a small lamp without glass, left by my grandmother, and shone it in the corners. There was nothing there but a greenish-white mold that had covered the logs in patches, and earth dug up by mice, and rutabaga, which from a distance seemed to me like severed human heads. I shook one swede on a sweaty wooden log house with veins of jacket in the grooves, and the log house answered in a guttural voice: "U-u-u-a-ah!"

– Aha! - I said. - That's it, brother! It doesn't hurt me!

I also took small beets, carrots with me and from time to time threw them into a corner, into the walls and scared away everyone who could be there from evil spirits, from brownies and other shantrapa.

The word "shantrapa" is imported in our village, and I don't know what it means. But I like it. "Shantrap! Shantrapa!" All bad words, according to my grandmother, were dragged into our village by the Betekhtins, and without them, we would not even know how to swear.

I have already eaten three carrots; rubbed them on the shank of a wire rod and ate it. Then he put his hand under the wooden mugs, scraped out a handful of cold, springy cabbage, and ate it too. Then he caught the cucumber and ate it too. And he also ate mushrooms from a tub as low as a tub. Now my stomach is growling and tossing and turning. These are carrots, cucumber, cabbage and mushrooms quarreling among themselves. They are cramped in one belly.

If only the stomach would relax or the legs would hurt. I straighten my legs, I hear crunches and clicks in my knees, but nothing hurts.

Pretend to?

What about pants? Who will buy me pants and for what? Pants with a pocket, new and already without straps and maybe even with a strap!

My hands begin to scatter potatoes quickly, quickly: large ones into a gapingly open bag; small - in a corner; rotten - in a box. Fuck-bang! Tarabakh!

- Spin, spin, spin! - I encourage myself and yell at the whole basement:

The girl was judged alone
She was a child of the year-a-a-mi-i-i ...

This song is new, foreign. She, by all accounts, was also dragged into the village by the Betekhtins. I remembered only these words from her, and I liked them very much. I know how a girl is judged. In the summer, grandmother and other old women will come out to the mound in the evening, and now they are judging, now they are judging: and uncle Levonti, and aunt Vasya, and Avdotya’s maiden - cheerful Agashka!

But I don’t understand why Grandma and all the old women shake their heads, spit and blow their noses?

- Spin, spin, spin!

The girl was judged alone
She was a child of the year-and-ami-and-and-and ...

The potato scatters in different directions, and bounces. One rotten one got into a good potato. Remove her! You can't fool a buyer. He cheated with strawberries - what good happened? Shame and shame all the way. And now a rotten potato comes across - he, the buyer, will spit! If he doesn’t take potatoes, it means that you won’t get any money or goods, which means you won’t get pants! Who am I without pants? Without pants, I'm a scammer! Go without pants, so, just like the Levontievsky guys, everyone strives to slap on his bare bottom, that’s his purpose: if you’re naked, you won’t be able to resist, you’ll slap.

But I'm not afraid of anything, no chantrap!
Chantrap-a-a, shan-tra-pa-a-a-a...

I sing, I open the sash and look at the steps from the basement. There are twenty eight of them. I already counted a long time ago. My grandmother taught me to count to a hundred, and I counted everything that could be counted. The top door to the basement is slightly ajar. It was my grandmother who opened it so that it would not be so terrible for me here. Still a good person my grandmother! General, of course, but since she was born like that, you can’t change it.

Above the door, to which a tunnel, white from the jacket, hung with threads of white fringe, leads, I notice an icicle. A tiny icicle, the size of a mouse's tail, but in my heart something immediately stirred like a soft kitten.

Spring is coming soon. It will be warm. The first of May will be! Everyone will celebrate, walk, sing songs. And I will be eight years old, and everyone will stroke my head, pity me, treat me with sweets. And my grandmother will definitely sew my pants by May Day.

- Drunk! I confirm. - In a trolley ... They judged the girl alone-oo-oo-oo ...

- My mothers! And he cleaned himself up like a pig! Grandmother squeezes my nose into her apron, rubs her cheeks. - Get enough soap for you. - And pushes in the back: - Go to dinner. Grandpa is waiting.

Monk in new pants

I was ordered to sort out the potatoes. Grandmother determined the norm, or harnessed, as she called the task. This harness is marked by two rutabaga, lying on either side of the oblong barrel, and to those rutabaga is the same as to the other bank of the Yenisei. When I get to the swede, God only knows. Maybe I won't even be alive by then!

In the basement there is an earthy, grave silence, mold on the walls, sugary curd on the ceiling. It makes you want to take it on your tongue. From time to time, for no reason, it crumbles from above, gets behind the collar, sticks to the body and melts. Not good either. In the pit itself, where there are barrels of vegetables and tubs of cabbage, cucumbers and saffron mushrooms, the jacket hangs on threads of cobwebs, and when I look up, it seems to me that I am in a fairy-tale kingdom, in a distant state, and when I look down, my heart mine bleeds and takes me great, great longing.

There are potatoes all around. And you need to sort them out, potatoes. The rotten one is supposed to be thrown into a wicker box, the large one - into bags, the smaller one - thrown into the corner of this huge, like a yard, bin in which I sit, maybe for a whole month and die soon, and then everyone will know how to leave a child here alone , and even an orphan to the same.

Of course, I am no longer a child and I work not in vain. Larger potatoes are selected for sale in the city. Grandmother promised to buy textiles with the proceeds and sew me new pants with a pocket.

I see myself clearly in these pants, elegant, handsome. My hand is in my pocket, and I walk around the village and do not take out my hand, if necessary, put it in - a bat or money - I only put it in my pocket, no value will fall out of my pocket and will not be lost.

Pants with a pocket, and even new ones, I never had. I'm getting all the old stuff. The bag will be dyed and re-sewn, a woman's skirt that has come out of socks, or something else. Once they even used a half-shawl. They dyed it and sewed it, then it shed and the cells became visible. All the Levontiev guys laughed at me. What, give them a scoff!

I wonder what they will be, pants, blue or black? And what kind of pocket will they have - external or internal? Outdoor, of course. Grandmother will rush about with the inside! She has no time for everything. Family must be bypassed. Point out to everyone. General!

So I rushed off somewhere again, and I sit here, work. At first I was scared in this deep and silent basement. It all seemed as if someone was hiding in the gloomy rotten corners, and I was afraid to move and was afraid to cough. Then he grew bolder, took a small lamp without glass, left by his grandmother, and shone in the corners. There was nothing there but a greenish-white mold that had covered the logs in patches, and earth dug up by mice, and rutabaga, which from a distance seemed to me like severed human heads. I fucked one swede on a sweaty wooden log house with veins of jacket in the grooves, and the log house answered in a guttural voice: "U-u-a-ah!"

Aha! -- I said. - That's it, brother! It doesn't hurt me!

I also took with me small beets, carrots and from time to time threw them into a corner, into the walls and scared away everyone who could be there from evil spirits, from brownies and other shantrapa.

The word "shantrapa" is imported in our village, and I don't know what it means. But I like it. "Shantrap! Shantrapa!" All bad words, according to my grandmother, were dragged into our village by the Verekhtins, and if we didn’t have them, we wouldn’t even know how to swear.

I had already eaten three carrots, rubbed them on a rolled shank and ate. Then he put his hands under the wooden mugs, scraped out a handful of cold, resilient cabbage, and ate it too. Then he caught the cucumber and ate it too. And he also ate mushrooms from a tub as low as a tub. Now my stomach is growling and tossing and turning. These are carrots, cucumber, cabbage and mushrooms quarreling among themselves. It’s crowded in one belly, I eat, we don’t see grief, even if my stomach relaxes. The hole in the mouth is drilled through and through, there is nowhere and nothing to hurt. Maybe it will cramp your legs? I straightened my leg, crunches in it, clicks, but nothing hurts. After all, when it is not necessary, they hurt so much. Pretend, right? What about pants? Who will buy me pants and for what? Pants with a pocket, new and already without straps, and even with a strap!

My hands begin to scatter potatoes quickly, quickly: large ones into a gapingly open bag, small ones into a corner, rotten ones into a box. Fuck-bang! Tarabakh!

Spin, spin, spin! - I cheer myself up, and since only the pop and the rooster sing without eating, and I got drunk, I was drawn to the song.

The girl was judged alone

She was a child of years-ami-and-and-and ...

I yelled with a shake. This song is new, foreign.

She, in all respects, was also brought to the village by the Verekhtins. I remembered only these words from her, and I liked them very much. Well, after we had a new daughter-in-law - Nyura, a daring songwriter, I pricked up my ear, in my grandmother's way - naustaurized, and memorized the whole city song. Further there in the song it is said what the girl was judged for. She loved the man. Mushshin, hoping that he was a good man, but he turned out to be a traitor. Well, she endured, endured the maiden's betrayal, took a sharp knife from the window, "and smacked his white chest."

How much can you endure, really?!

Grandmother, listening to me, raised her apron to her eyes:

Passions, what passions! Where are we, Vitka, going?

I explained to my grandmother that a song is a song and we are not going anywhere.

No-at, boy, we're going to the edge, that's what. Since a woman with a knife on a peasant, that's all, that's a complete revolution, the last, therefore, the limit has come. It remains only to pray for salvation. Here I myself have a trait of the most self-possessed, and we will quarrel when, but with an ax, with a knife against my husband? .. Yes, God save us and have mercy. Not-at, dear comrades, I will ruin the way, violation of the order specified by God.

In our village, not only the girl is judged. And the girls get to be healthy! In the summer, grandmother and other old women will come out onto the mound, and now they are judging, now they are judging: Uncle Levonti, and Aunt Vasenya, and Avdotya, the maiden Agashka, who brought a gift to dear mother in a hem!

But I won’t understand: why do old women shake their heads, spit and blow their noses? A gift - is it bad? Gift is good! My grandmother will bring me a present. Trousers!

Spin, spin, spin!

The girl was judged alone

She was a child of the year-and-ami-and-and-and ...

The potato scatters in different directions, and bounces, everything goes as it should, according to grandmother's saying again: "Whoever eats quickly, he works quickly!" Wow, fast! One rotten one got into a good potato. Remove her! You can't fool a buyer. He cheated with strawberries - what good happened? Shame and shame! If you get a rotten potato, he, the buyer, will spit. If he doesn’t take potatoes, then you won’t get any money, goods, and pants. Who am I without pants? Without pants, I'm a scammer. Go without pants, it's all the same as everyone strives to slap the Levontiev guys on their bare bottoms - that's his purpose, if you're naked - you can't resist, you'll slap.

Shan-tra-pa-a, shan-tra-apa-a-a-a...

I open the door and look down at the basement steps. There are twenty eight of them. I already counted a long time ago. My grandmother taught me to count to a hundred, and I counted everything that could be counted. The top door to the basement is slightly ajar, so that I would not be so afraid here. Still a good person - a grandmother! General, of course, but since she was born like that, you can’t change it.

Above the door, to which a tunnel, white from jacket, hung with threads of fringe, leads, I notice an icicle. A tiny icicle, the size of a mouse's tail, but something immediately shook in my heart, a soft kitten stirred.

Spring is coming soon. It will be warm. The first of May will be! Everyone will celebrate, walk, sing songs. And I will be eight years old, they will stroke my head, pity me, treat me with sweets. And my grandmother will sew my pants for May Day. It will break into a cake, but it will sew - such a person she is!

Shantrapa-ah, shantrapa-ah-ah! ..

They will sew pants with a pocket on the First of May! ..

Try to catch me then!

Fathers, rutabaga - there they are! I overcame the harness. Once or twice, however, I moved the rutabaga closer to me and thus shortened the distance measured by my grandmother. But where they used to lie, these rutabaga, I, of course, do not remember, and do not want to remember. Yes, if it comes to that, I can take away the rutabaga altogether, throw them out and sort through all the potatoes, and beets, and carrots - I don’t care about anything!

The girl was judged alone...

Well, how are you here, a miracle on a silver platter?

I shuddered and dropped the potatoes from my hands. Grandma came. Came old!

Nothing-oh! Be healthy, worker. I can turn over the whole vegetable - potatoes, carrots, beets - I can do everything!

You, father, be quiet on the turns! Eck is getting you!

Let it bring!

Are you drunk on some rotten spirit?!

Drunk! I confirm. - In a trolley ... They judged the girl alone ...

My mothers! And he cleaned himself up like a pig! Grandmother squeezed my nose into her apron and rubbed her cheeks. - Get enough soap for you! - And pushed in the back: - Go to dinner. Eat cabbage soup with your grandfather, your neck will be white, your head will be curly! ..

Still just lunch?

I suppose it seemed to you that you worked here for a week?

Aha!

I jumped up the steps. My joints clicked, my legs crunched, and fresh cold air floated towards me, so sweet after the rotten, stagnant basement spirit.

That's a scammer! - heard downstairs in the basement. -- That's a rogue! And who did he go to? We don't have anything like that in our family... - Grandmother discovered the moved rutabagas.

I accelerated and emerged from the basement into the fresh air, onto a clear, bright day, and somehow distinctly noticed that everything in the yard was filled with a premonition of spring. It is in the sky, which has become more spacious, higher, doves in divorces, it is also on the sweaty roof boards from the edge where the sun is, it is in the chirping of sparrows, grabbing hand to hand in the middle of the yard, and in that still thin haze that arose over the distant passes and began to descend the slopes to the village, enveloping the blue slumber of forests, ravines, mouths of rivers. Soon, very soon, the mountain rivers will swell with a greenish-yellow icing, which, with sonorous matinees, will become loose and sweet-looking crust, like that crust of sugar, and Easter cakes will soon begin to bake, reddened along the rivers will turn purple, shine, willows will be covered with a bump, the children will break willows to parental day, others will fall into the river, swell up, then the ice will corrode on the rivers, it will remain only on the Yenisei, between the wide banks, and, thrown by everyone, the winter road, sadly dropping thawing milestones, will dutifully wait for it to be broken into pieces and carried away. But even before the ice breaks, snowdrops will appear on the ridges, grass will sprinkle on the warm slopes and the First of May will come. We often have ice drifts together, and the First of May, and on the First of May ...

No, it's better not to poison the soul and not think about what will happen on the First of May!

Matter, or manufactory, the so-called clothing product, my grandmother bought, even when she went to the city on a sledge track with a tradeswoman. The material was blue in color, ribbed, rustled and crackled well, if you ran a finger over it. It was called Treco. No matter how much I lived in the world later, no matter how many pants I wore out, I never met matter with such a name. Obviously, it was the tights. But this is just my guess, nothing more. There was a lot in childhood that did not meet again later and did not happen again, unfortunately.

A piece of manufactory lay in the depths of the chest, at the very bottom, lay under the low-value junk, as if accidentally thrown over it - under balls of rags that are prepared for weaving rugs, under dresses that came out of socks, shreds, stockings, boxes with "clothes". A dashing person will get to the chest, look into it, spit out of annoyance and leave. What did he break? Hope to live? There are no valuables in the house and in the chest!

What a smart grandma! And if only she was so cunning. All women are on their minds. A suspicious guest appears in the house, or "himself", that is, the owner, drinks himself to the point that the pectoral cross is ready to drink away, then in a secret bundle, secret passages and passages is transported to neighbors, to all sorts of reliable people - a piece of cloth stored from the war ; sewing machine; silver - two or three spoons and forks, inherited from someone, or exchanged with exiles for bread and milk; "gold" - a pectoral cross with a Catholic thread in three colors, probably from the stages, from the Poles still, somehow got to our village; a hairpin of noble, maybe "Pitinbur" origin; cover from a powder box or a snuffbox; a dull copper button, which someone has turned instead of a gold one, for a gold one and descending; chrome boots and boots purchased on the "fish", which means that the owner once went to the northern Putins, for wild "money", bought good things, and it is stored until the holidays and until the children's weddings, until "going out to the public", but that's a dashing moment has come - save whoever can, and save what you can.

The miner himself, with eyes whitened from moonshine and a wild face covered in moss, runs around the yard with an ax, trying to chop everything into chips, grabs a shotgun - therefore, don’t forget, woman, and take away the bandolier, bury hunting supplies in a safe place .. .

In "reliable hands", often in grandmothers, "good" dragged, and not only from the house of Uncle Levontiy women found shelter here. They stomped in the distance, whispering in the corners: “Look, godfather, don’t make money on our mountain ...” - “What are you, what are you? go, not to the Boltukhins, not to Vershkov?

The whole evening, when it is night, back and forth, back and forth, boys roam from someone else's farmstead. A mournful mother with a black eye, a split lip, covering small children with a shawl, presses them to her body in a strange house, on strangers, waiting for positive news.

The boy will appear from reconnaissance - head down: "Ishsho did not sleep. He destroys the benches. He was angry that there were no cartridges, he broke Berdan on the stove ..." - "And when will he choke? When will he flood his shameless balls? Winter is on the nose, firewood not a log, hay is not taken out, Berdanka will decide, what will she go to the taiga with what to whiten? Don't mess around, you'll get wet. Why are we listening to the parent's word? His eyebrows are like falcons, his forelock is fire, his voice is heard beyond the river. "You're growing like a papa, you're growing into your golden papa! Just a little - 'don't touch your father!'. So don't touch it! Here we are wandering around in strange corners, we don't let good people sleep. Oh-ho-ho-ho-nush "Yes, you are my unfortunate children, but you grow up without a father under your father. He drowned five times - he didn’t drown, he burned in a forest fire - he didn’t burn out, he fornicated in the taiga - he didn’t get lost ... Damn it , neither the forest, nor the water, nor the earth accept it. He would have left, but it would have been better for us without him, the villain, it would have been ... Orphans would have grown, but on the other hand, in a calm, hungry, but not cold ... "

Of the girls, one of the mothers will howl, you see, and all the children in a voice.

“Yes, it will be for you, it will be. Someday it will calm down, not an iron woman, not a stone ..” - the grandmother reassures the unfortunate guests.

"Scout" again cap in an armful and in the search. Five times, ten times a night, he runs away until he comes with the good news: "That's it! He fell down in the middle of the hut ..."

And the usual, habitual prayer: "Glory to Thee, Lord! Glory to Thee... Forgive us, Grandma Katerina, we'll get bored..." - "What's the matter? I'll set up a dressing room with a dressing room.

And steam! A trembling little man, overgrown with hair, will stand in front of her and catch his pants, falling from the front, to the back during the drinking of the grown belly.

Duck what to do something, grandmother Katerina? She won’t let her go home, die, she says, get lost, drunkard! You talk to her...

About what?

Well, about that. The request, they say, asks for more, so it will not happen again.

What won't happen again? You speak, speak. Look, he has no words. Yesterday he was so eloquent and brave! On his woman, God-given woman, with an ax and a gun. Warrior! Rebel!..

Well, fool, duck what? Drunk fool.

And there is no demand from a drunk?

What's the demand?

Why didn't you hit your head against the wall? Why didn't you aim the gun at yourself, at the woman? Why? Speak!

0-oh, grandmother Katerina! Yes, shtob I allowed such a disgrace once again! Yes, you distort me, distort the reptile is like that! ..

Grandmother "goes to the chest" - a triumph of the soul and a holiday. For some reason, she opened it, whispers to herself, looking around, closing the door more tightly, lays out the goods upstairs, my manufactory, intended for pants, completely separated from all good things, put aside a piece of an old, such an old chintz that my grandmother looks at the light , tries with a tooth, well, and on the little things, a casket, tea jars clanging with something, festive forks and spoons tied in rags, church books and something hidden from the church - grandmother believes that the church is not permanently closed and will continue to serve in it.

With granny's supplies, the family lives. Everything is like good people. And something is saved for a rainy day, you can calmly look into the future, and die, so there is something to dress up and remember.

A latch clanged in the yard. Grandma was worried. I guessed from the steps - a stranger, and once and again she stuffed all the good stuff, covered him with junk and various obscenities, thought to turn the key, but did not. And the grandmother put on a look of misery, almost mourning - falling on both legs, groaning, she wandered towards the guest or some other person blown by the wind. And that man had no choice but to think: poor, sick and wretched people live here, for whom only one salvation remains - to go through the world.

Whenever Grandma opened the chest and there was a musical chime, I was right there. I stood at the curb on the threshold of the upper room and looked into the chest. Grandmother was looking for the thing she needed in a huge chest, like a barge, and did not notice me at all. I moved, drummed my fingers on the joint - she did not notice. I coughed, at first once - she did not notice. I coughed many times, as if my whole chest caught a cold, - she still did not notice. Then I moved closer to the chest and began to turn the huge iron key. Grandmother silently slapped my hand - and still did not notice me ... Then I began to stroke the blue manufactory - treco with my fingers. Here the grandmother could not stand it and, looking at important, handsome generals with beards and mustaches, with which the lid of the chest was pasted over from the inside, she asked them:

What should I do with this child? The generals didn't answer. I ironed the manufactory. Grandmother threw back my hand on the pretext that it might be unwashed and dirty the track. - It sees, this is a child, - I spin like a squirrel in a wheel! It is known - I will sew pants for the name day, be they cursed! So it’s not there, stain it, it climbs, it climbs! .. - Grandmother grabbed me by the ear and took me away from the chest. I leaned my forehead against the wall, and I must have looked so unhappy that after a while there was a louder, more musical sound of the castle, and everything in me froze with blissful forebodings. With a small key, my grandmother opened a Chinese box made of tin, like a house without windows. All sorts of otherworldly trees, birds and ruddy Chinese women in new blue pants are painted on the house, only not from the track, but from some other material, which I also liked, but much less than my manufactory.

I was waiting. And not in vain. The fact is that the most valuable grandmother's valuables are stored in the Chinese box, including lollipops, which were called monpensier in the store, and in our country it is simpler - lampasie or lampaseyki. There is nothing sweeter and more beautiful than lanterns in the world! We stuck them on Easter cakes, and on sweet pies, and just like that they sucked these sweetest lamps, from whom, of course, they were kept.

Grandma has everything! And everything is securely covered. Shisha two you will find! The soft, gentle music was playing again. The box is closed. Maybe grandma changed her mind? I began to sniff louder and thought about letting my voice go. But here it was:

Come on, your cursed soul! - And in my hand, which had long been lowered expectantly, my grandmother thrust rough little lamps. My mouth was filled with lingering saliva, but I swallowed it and pushed my grandmother's hand away.

He-e-e...

What about you? Belt?

Pants-s-s...

Grandmother slapped her thighs contritely and turned not to the generals, but to my back:

Why is he, a blood-drinker, not understanding words? I interpret it in Russian - I'll sew it! And he's here! Urosit! A? Would you like some candy or lock up?

Eat yourself!

Herself? - Grandmother for a while loses the gift of speech, does not find words. -- Herself? I'll give you, myself! I'll show you - myself!

A turning point. Now you need to give a voice, otherwise it will hit, and I led from the bottom up:

Uh-uh-uh...

Shout at me, shout at me! - my grandmother exploded, but I blocked her with my roar, and she gradually gave in, began to cajole me. - I'll sew, soon I'll sew, father, don't cry. Here's some candy, think about it. Sweet little lamps. Soon, soon you will start walking around in new trousers, smart, but handsome, and handsome ...

Speaking unctuously, in a church way, my grandmother finally broke down my resistance, stuck lamps into my palm, five pieces - it would not be miscalculated! She wiped my nose and cheeks with an apron and escorted me out of the room, comforted and contented.

My hopes did not come true. By the birthday, by the First of May, the pants were not sewn. At the very height of the steppe, my grandmother took to her bed. She always bore any minor pain on her legs, and if she fell down, then for a long time.

She was moved to the upper room, on a clean, soft bed, the rugs were removed from the floor, the window was curtained, the iconostasis lamp was lit, and in the upper room it became like in someone else's house - it was dark, cool, it smelled of oil, a hospital, people walked around the hut on tiptoe and talking in whispers. In these days of my grandmother's illness, I discovered how many relatives my grandmother has and how many people, and not relatives, also come to pity her and sympathize with her. And only now, albeit vaguely, I felt that my grandmother, who always seemed to me an ordinary grandmother, was a very respected person in the village, but I didn’t listen to her, quarreled with her, and a belated feeling of repentance sorted me out.

Grandmother breathed loudly, hoarsely, half-sitting in pillows, and kept asking:

Submissive... have they fed the child?

The old women, daughters, nieces and various other people who were in charge of the house reassured her, fed, they say, your beloved child is drunk, there is no need to worry about anything and, as proof, they brought me to the bed, showed my grandmother. She with difficulty separated her hand from the bed, touched my head and said pitifully:

When your grandmother dies, what are you going to do? With whom to live? With whom to sin? Oh Lord, Lord! - She squinted her eyes at the lamp: - Give me strength for the sake of the miserable orphan. Guska! she called to Aunt Augusta. "You'll milk the cow, and udder it with warm water... She's... spoiled with me... Otherwise, don't tell you..."

And again the grandmother was reassured, demanded that she talk less and not worry, but she still talked all the time, worried, worried, because she didn’t know how to live otherwise.

When the holiday came, my grandmother began to worry about my pants. I consoled her myself, talked to her about her illness, tried not to mention her pants. Grandmother had recovered a little by this time, and one could talk with her as much as she liked.

What kind of disease do you have, grandmother? - as if for the first time I was curious, sitting next to her on the bed. Thin, bony, with rags in split braids, with an old damper hanging under a white shirt, the grandmother slowly, counting on a long conversation, began to tell about herself:

I have been planted, father, worked out. All planted. From an early age in work, in work everything. I had a family with my aunt and my mother and raised my tithes ... It's easy to just say. What about growing?!

But she spoke about the pitiful only at first, as if for a sing-along, then she talked about various cases from her great life. It turned out according to her stories that there were much more joys in her life than hardships. She did not forget about them and knew how to notice them in her simple and difficult life. Children were born - joy. Children got sick, but she saved them with herbs and roots, and not one died - also a joy. A new thing for yourself or your children is a joy. A good harvest for bread is joy. Fishing was lucrative - a joy. Once she put her hand out on the arable land, she herself set it right, she was just suffering, they were harvesting bread, with one hand she stinged and did not become a kosorochka - is this not joy?

I looked at my grandmother, marveled at the fact that she also had an aunt and a mother, looked at her big, working hands in the veins, at her wrinkled face, with an echo of the former blush, at her greenish eyes, darkening from the bottom, at these pigtails of her , sticking out, like a girl’s, in different directions, - and such a wave of love for my family and a close person to a groan rolled over me that I poked my face into her loose chest and buried my nose in a warm, grandmother-smelling shirt. In this impulse, I was grateful to her for the fact that she remained alive, that we both exist in the world and that everything around us is alive and kind.

You see, I didn’t sew your trousers for the holiday, - my grandmother stroked my head and repented. - Reassured and did not sew ...

You will sew more, where to rush something?

God bless you get up...

And she kept her word. As soon as I started walking, I immediately took up cutting my pants. She was still weak, walked from bed to table, holding on to the wall, measured me with a tape with numbers, sitting on a stool. She staggered, and she put her hand to her head:

Oh my god, what is wrong with me? Clean out of the blue!

But all the same, she measured well, drew on matter with chalk, tried on me a cut piece of the track, gave me a couple of times so that I wouldn’t spin too much, which made me more cheerful, because this is the first sign of my grandmother’s return to her former life, full of her convalescence.

Grandmother cut pants for almost a whole day, and began to sew them the next day. Needless to say, how badly I slept the night and rose before the light. Groaning and swearing, the grandmother also got up and began to fuss in the kitchen. She stopped every now and then, as if listening to herself, but from that day on she did not lie down in the upper room anymore, she moved to her camp bed, closer to the kitchen and to the Russian stove.

In the afternoon, my grandmother and I picked up the sewing machine from the floor and set it on the table. The machine was old, with flowers worked on the body. Only individual whorls stood out from the flowers, resembling rattlesnakes of fire. Grandmother called the typewriter "Signer", assured that there was no price for it, and every time she told the curious in detail, with pleasure, that her mother, God rest her soul, similarly exchanged this typewriter with exiles at the city pier for a year-old heifer, three bags of flour and a dash of ghee. That Krinka, almost completely intact, was never returned by the exiles. Well, what a demand from them - the exiles are the exiles - barnacles and black-footed, and even some kind of warlocks before the coup brought down the shaft.

The machine "Signer" chirps. Grandma turns the handle. He turns it carefully, as if gathering courage, contemplates further actions, suddenly accelerates the wheel and releases it, the handle is not visible - it turns like that. It seems to me that now the machine will sew all the pants in an instant. But the grandmother will put her hand on the shiny wheel, calm down the machine, tame its chatter, when the machine stops, she will put the fabric on her chest, carefully look - does the needle go through the fabric, is it a crooked seam.

Grandma talked to me about good things, about pants:

A commissar can't be without pants, she reasoned, biting the thread and looking at the light in the sewing. - A small commissary with a button and a shoulder strap. Hang up the revolver - and you will be a uniformed commissar Vershkov, or maybe Shshetinkin himself! ..

On that day, I did not leave my grandmother's, because I had to try on pants. With each entry, the pants took on more and more foundations and looked to me so that I could neither speak nor laugh with delight. To the grandmother’s questions: is it not pressing here, is it not squeezing here, he shook his head and uttered strangledly:

N-no-ee!

You just do not lie, then it will be too late to correct.

It's true, it's true, - I confirmed as soon as possible, so that only my grandmother would not start smacking her pants, she would not put off work.

Grandmother was especially concentrated and intent when it came to a hole - she was always embarrassed by some kind of wedge. If it, this wedge, is put incorrectly, the pants will get wet before the deadline, and the "cockerel" will begin to look out into the street. I did not want this to happen, and patiently endured fitting after fitting. Grandmother very carefully felt in the area of ​​\u200b\u200bthe "cockerel", and I was so tickled that I looked up with a squeal. Grandma gave me the scruff of the neck.

So without lunch we worked with her until dusk - it was I who begged my grandmother not to be interrupted because of such a trifle as food. When the sun went beyond the river and touched the upper ridges, the grandmother hurried - they were about to bring in the cows, but she kept digging, and in an instant finished the work. She fitted a flap pocket over her pants, and although I would have liked an inner pocket, I did not dare to object. So the last touches were put on by the grandmother with a typewriter, she pulled out the thread, folded her pants, stroked her stomach with her hand.

Well, thank God. Buttons after I will repulse from something and sew.

At this time, the boats rattled in the street, the cows demanding and satiety blissed out. Grandmother threw her pants on the typewriter, took off and rushed off, punishing me on the go so that I would not think of turning the typewriter, would not touch anything, would not harm.

I've been patient. And by that time I had no strength left in me. The lamps were already lit all over the village and people were having dinner, and I was still sitting near the Signer typewriter, from which my blue trousers hung down. I sat without lunch, without dinner and wanted to sleep.

How my grandmother dragged me into bed, exhausted and tired, I don’t remember, but I will never forget that happy morning on which I woke up with a feeling of festive joy. On the back of the bed, neatly folded, hung new blue trousers, on them was a washed white striped shirt, next to the bed the smell of burnt birch was spread by the boots mended by the shoemaker Zherebtsov, smeared with tar, with yellow, completely new vamps.

Immediately, my grandmother came from somewhere and began to dress me like a little one. I limply obeyed her, and laughed uncontrollably, and talked about something, and asked something, and interrupted myself.

Well, - said my grandmother, when I appeared before her in all my glory, in all the parade. Her voice trembled, her lips turned to one side, and she took hold of the handkerchief: “I wish your mother could see, dead woman ...

I frowned.

Grandmother stopped lamenting, pressed me to her and crossed me.

Eat and go to your grandfather's house.

One, grandma?

Of course, one. You are so big! Man!

Oh, baby! - From the fullness of feelings, I hugged her by the neck and butted her head.

All right, all right, - my grandmother gently pushed me away. “Look, Lisa Patrikeevna, if only he were always so affectionate and kind...”

Discharged to smithereens, with a bundle in which there were fresh clothes for grandfather, I left the yard when the sun was already high and the whole village was living its ordinary, slow life. First of all, I turned to the neighbors and plunged the Levontiev family into such confusion with my appearance that an unprecedented silence suddenly set in the sodomite hut, and it became, this house, unlike itself. Aunt Vasenya threw up her hands and dropped her stick. This stick hit one of the small ones on the head. He sang with a healthy bass. Aunt Vasenya picked up the victim in her arms, muttered, but she herself did not take her eyes off me.

Tanka was next to me, all the guys surrounded me, felt the fabric, admired. Tanya reached into my pocket, found a clean handkerchief there, and fell silent in shock. Only her eyes expressed all the feelings, and from them I could guess how handsome I was now, how she admired me, and to what unattainable height I had ascended.

They squeezed me, slowed me down, and I had to break free and make sure that they didn’t get dirty, didn’t crush anything and didn’t eat it under the guise of a shanga - a treat for grandfather. Here after all only yawn.

In a word, I hurried to say goodbye, referring to the fact that I was in a hurry, and asked if there was something to convey to Sanka. Sanka Levontievsky was at our zaimka - he helped grandfather in arable affairs. For the summer, the Levontievsky children were shoved around people, and they fed there, grew up and worked. Grandfather took Sanka with him for two summers. My grandmother, Katerina Petrovna, predicted that this convict would drive the old man crazy, there would be no way out of him, there would be a complete collapse in work, then she was surprised how grandfather and Sanka got along and were pleased with each other.

Aunt Vasenya said that there was nothing to convey to Sanka, except for an order to obey grandfather Ilya and not drown in Man if he decided to swim.

To my chagrin, at this noon hour the people on the street were rare, the village people had not yet finished the spring suffering. The peasants all left for Many - to hunt marals - their antlers are now in valuable pores, and haymaking was already approaching, and everyone was busy with work. But all the same, in some places children played, women went to the consumer room and, of course, paid attention to me, sometimes quite intently. Here, Aunt Avdotya, grandmother's sister-in-law, rushes to meet. I'm going whistling. I’m walking past, I don’t notice Aunt Avdotya. She turned to the side, and I saw her astonishment, I saw how she threw up her hands, I heard words that are better than any music.

I'm sick of it! Isn't that Vitka Katerinin?

"Of course I am! Of course I am!" I wanted to give me some advice to Aunt Avdotya, but I restrained my impulse and only slowed down my steps. Aunt Avdotya hit herself on her skirt, overtook me in three leaps, began to feel, stroke and say all sorts of good words. Windows opened in the houses, women and old women looked out, everyone praised me, everyone talked about my grandmother and about our laudatory things, so, they say, a guy grows up without a mother, and his grandmother drives in such a way that, God forbid, other parents lead their children, and so that the grandmother I revered, obeyed, and if I grew up, I would never forget her kindness.

Our village is big, long. I got tired, tired, while I walked it from end to end and took upon myself all the tribute of admiration for me and my outfit, and also for the fact that I myself go to my grandfather's house. I was already covered in sweat when I went out of the village.

He ran to the river, drank from the palms of the icy Yenisei water. From the joy that seethed in me, I threw a stone into the water, then another, I was carried away by this occupation, but in time I remembered where I was going, why and in what form. Yes, and the path is not close - five miles! I walked, even ran at first, but you have to look under your feet so as not to knock down the yellow vamps on the roots. He switched to a measured step, unfussy, peasant, which grandfather always walked.

A large forest began from the place. Blooming boyars, succulent pines, birches, the share of which fell to grow in the neighborhood of the village and therefore broken off during the winter into bare trees, were left behind. An even aspen forest with full, slightly brownish leaves climbed densely up the slope. A road with washed stonework wound up. Gray large slabs, scratched by horseshoes, were turned out by spring streams. To the left of the road there was a dark ravine, in which a spruce forest stood densely, in the midst of which a stream, falling asleep until autumn, muffled with a muffled noise. In the spruce forest hazel grouse whistled, in vain calling the females. Those have already sat on the eggs and did not respond to the cavaliers-cockerels. The old capercaillie had just fussed on the road, clapped and with difficulty took off. He began to molt, but then he crawled out onto the road - to peck pebbles, to knock out lice and fleas from himself with warm dust. Bath to him here! If he sat quietly in a thicket, in the light he would be devoured, an old fool, by a lynx, and the fox would not choke.

I lost my breath - the capercaillie thumped its wings loudly. But there is no great fear, because it is sunny all around, it is light, and everything in the forest is busy with its own business. Yes, and I knew this road well - many times I traveled along it on horseback and in a cart with my grandfather, with my grandmother, with Kolcha Jr. and with various other people.

And yet I saw and heard as if anew, probably because for the first time I traveled alone to the zaimka through the mountains and taiga. Farther uphill the forest was less frequent, thicker, the larches towered over the entire taiga and seemed to touch the clouds. I remembered how, on this long and slow climb, Kolcha Jr. always sang the same song, the horse slowed down its steps, carefully put its hooves so as not to interfere with the man's singing. And our horse itself - the Hawk - at the end of the mountain, stuck in a song at the top, let his "and-ho-ho-oh-oh-oh" through the mountains and passes, but then embarrassedly made a go-ahead with his tail, they say, I know, that I’m not very good with songs, but I couldn’t stand it, everything is very nice here and you are pleasant riders - don’t whip me, sing songs.

I also sang Kolchi Jr.'s song about a natural plowman, rolled like a ball along the ravine, bounced on stones and screes, my voice, repeating funny: "Ha-hal!" So, with a song, I overcame the mountain. It got brighter. The sun kept rising and rising. The forest was thinning, and there were more stones on the road, they were larger, and therefore the whole road meandered around the cobbles. The grass in the forest became thinner, but there were more flowers, and when I went out to the outskirts of the forest, the whole edge of the forest burned with fire, overwhelmed with fires.

Above, over the mountains, our village fields began. At first they were reddish-black, only in some places the seedlings of potatoes gleamed mouse-like on them, and the plowed stone pebble gleamed in the sun. But farther on, everything was flooded with multi-colored wavy greens of thickening bread, and only the borders left by people who did not know how to break the earth separated the fields from each other, and, like the banks of rivers, did not allow them to merge together, become a sea.

The road here is covered with grass - goose foot, blooming quite unoppressedly, although people traveled and walked along it. The plantain was gaining strength to light his gray candle, every byle turned green here, stretched, weaved along the furrows from the wheels, along the hoof pits, not suffocating with road dust. By the side of the road, in chishchenkas, where stones from the fields were dumped, a ditch and cut down bushes, everything grew at random, large, violently. Kupyrs and carrots tried to follow the tune, the frying here, in the sun, was already littering in the wind with the fading of petals, the watersheds-bells hung in the air in anticipation of the summer, disastrous heat for them. In place of these flowers, grasshoppers took up from the thicket, and the beautiful day was already in oblong buds, covered with wool, as if with hoarfrost, waiting in the wings to hang yellow gramophones on the outskirts of the fields.

Here is the Korolev log. There was a dirty puddle in it. I set out to rush along it so that it splashed in all directions, but immediately came to my senses, took off my boots, rolled up my trousers and carefully walked over a lazy, pacified sedge pothole, crushed by the hooves of cattle, painted with the paws of birds, the paws of animals.

I flew out of the log at a trot, and while I was putting on my shoes, I kept looking at the field that opened up in front of me, and tried to remember where else I had seen him? A field that goes straight to the horizon, and in the middle of the field there are lonely large trees. Right in the field, into the grain, the road dives, quickly drying up in it, and above the road it flies to itself, the swallow chirps ...

Ah, I remembered! I saw the same field, only with yellow bread, in a picture in the house of a school teacher, to whom my grandmother took me to sign up for the winter to study. I stared at that picture, stared straight at it with my eyes, and the teacher asked: "Do you like it?" I shook my head, and the teacher said that the famous Russian artist Shishkin painted it, and I thought that he, gosh, ate a lot of cedar cones. But he could not speak because of miracles - the arable land, the earth, is similar to ours, here it is, in a frame, but how alive!

I stopped under the thickest larch and raised my head. It seemed to me that a tree, on which greenish needles were thick, where sparsely wobbled, floated across the sky, and the falcon, attached to the top of the tree, between black, as if charred, last year's cones, dozed, lulled by this slow and calm swimming. There was a hawk's nest on the tree, twisted in a fork between a thick bough and a trunk. Sanka somehow climbed to ruin the nest, climbed up to it, was about to throw out the wide-eyed hawks, but then the hawk screamed, how she began to flap her wings, peck the villain with her beak, tear with her claws - Sanka could not resist, let go. There would be a destroyer karachun, but he put on a shirt on a bough, and okay, the seams of a canvas shirt turned out to be strong. The men took Sanka down from the tree, kicking him, of course. Since then, Sanka has red eyes, they say, the blood has poured.

The tree is the whole world! There are holes in its trunk, hollowed out by woodpeckers, in each hole someone lives, tracks: either a beetle, or a bird, or a lizard, and above - and bats. Nests are hidden in the grass, in the plexus of roots. Mouse, gopher minks go under a tree. The anthill is attached to the trunk. There is a prickly thorn here, a frozen Christmas tree, there is a round green clearing near the larch. It can be seen from the bare, scraped off roots, how they wanted to bring the clearing down, to patch it up, but the roots of the tree resisted the plow, did not give the clearing to be torn to pieces. The larch itself is hollow inside. Someone long ago lit a fire under the sky, and the barrel burned out. If the tree hadn’t been so big, it would have died long ago, but this one still lived, it was difficult, with maeta, but it lived, extracting food from the ground with plowed roots, and at the same time it still gave shelter to ants, mice, birds, beetles, broomsticks and all other living creatures .

I climbed into the coal inside of a larch, sat down on a mushroom-lip, hard as a stone, sticking out of a rotten trunk. It hums in the tree, creaks. It seems to me - it complains to me with a wooden, endlessly long cry, going along the roots from the earth. I climbed out of the black hollow and touched the trunk of a tree covered with siliceous bark, sulfur influxes, scars and cuts, healed and not healed, those that a damaged tree no longer has the strength and juices to heal.

"Oh, soot! What a mess!" But the cinder has weathered, and the hollow does not get dirty, just on one elbow and on the trouser leg it is stained with black. I spat on my palm, wiped the stain off my pants, and slowly walked towards the road.

For a long time, a wooden groan sounded in me, audible only in the hollow of the larch. Now I know that the tree also knows how to moan and cry in an internal, inconsolable voice.

It is not far from the burnt larch to the descent to the mouth of the Mana. I gave a step, and now the road went down a slope between two mountains. But I turned off the road and carefully began to make my way to the steep cut of the mountain, which descended in a stony corner into the Yenisei and a ribbed slope to the Man. From this steep slope you can see our arable land, our zaimka. For a long time I was going to look at all this from a height, but it didn’t work out, because I traveled with other people, and they were in a hurry to work, then home from work. On the mane of Manskaya Mountain, the pine forest was undersized, with paws twisted by the wind. As if the hands of old people, these paws were in bumps and fragile joints. Boyarka here grew fiercely sharp. And all the bushes were dry, ruffy and hooky. But here there were even birch forests, pure aspen forests, thin, racing to grow after the fire, which was still reminiscent of black deadwood and eversion. Peña and fallen trees were swept over with shoots of sweet, pouring strawberries into the pour; the bramble turned white and filled with juice, small-leaved, strong lingonberries crunched under the pines, and chamomile plaid along the slope - his favorite place here - lilac, yellow, almost purple, in some places white, with a whole broom, as if splashed in a scree of sour cream. Grandmother does not bypass this spill of chamomile, she always picks up a “blinker” for medicine. I plaited the flowers to the very root, picked up so many of them that they barely fit in the pregnancy, and here I go, and the smell around me, as if in a pharmacy or in a pantry, where my grandmother dries herbs, it is dusty and smells like chamomile. especially yellow, just look, you will sneeze, as if from a fierce grandfather's squashing.

Above the cliff, where there were no trees, only thorn, meadowsweet, acacia, thorns and broods of mountain turnip stained the stones. I stopped and stood until my legs got tired, then sat down, forgetting that there were snakes here - I was afraid of snakes more than anything in the world. For a while I did not breathe at all, I just looked and looked, my heart beat loudly and often in my chest.

For the first time I saw from above the confluence of two large rivers - the Mana and the Yenisei. They hurried towards each other for a long, long time, and when they meet, they flow separately, pretending that they are not interested in one another. Mana is faster than the Yenisei and lighter, although the Yenisei is also bright. A whitish seam, like a breakwater, spreading wider and wider, defines the boundary of two waters. Yenisei splashes, pushes Mana to the side, flirts and imperceptibly presses her into the corner of the Mansky bull, the way our village boys press the girls to the fence when they are playing. Mana boils, splashes on the rock, roars, but it's too late - the bull is sheer and tall, the Yenisei is assertive - you can't get carried away with it.

Another river has been conquered. Groaning full under the bull, the Yenisei runs to the sea-ocean, rebellious, indomitable, sweeping away everything in its path. And what is Mana to him! He will also pick up not such rivers and rush off with him to the icy, midnight lands, where fate will bring me later, and then I will have a chance to see my native river, completely different, overflowing floodplain, tired of a long journey. In the meantime, I look and look at the rivers, at the mountains, at the forests. The arrow at the junction of Mana with the Yenisei is rocky and steep. The root water has not subsided yet. The twine of the crumbly bank is still flooded. The rocks on the other side stand in the water, where the rock begins, where its reflection is - you can't make out from here. Stripes under the rocks. It pulls, twists the water with slings of spinning stones.

But on the other hand, there is so much space above, above the Mana River. There is a stone crown on the arrow, the remnants pile up scattered, even further - the order begins: falling, the mountains go up in waves from the mess of gorges, noisy rivers, springs. There, above - the stopped waves of the taiga, slightly enlightened on the manes, secretly thick in the hollows. On the humpiest splash of the taiga, a white cliff sparkles like a lost sail. Mysteriously, inaccessibly, the distant passes turn blue, about which it is terrible to even think. Between them winds, roars and thunders on the rapids of the Mana River - a nurse-drinker: our arable land is here, reliable fishing is also on this river. There are a lot of animals, game, fish on Mana. There are many rapids, dews, mountains, rivers with enticing names: Karakush, Nagalka, Run, Mile, Kandynka, Tykhty. Negnet. And how wisely the wild river acted: in front of the mouth it took it and fell abruptly to the left, to a rocky arrow, and left a gentle angle of alluvial land. Here are arable lands, huts, lodges on the banks of the Mana, fields here. They rest against the mountains with the most distant fragments, borders and chischenki. Below me, the Manskaya River, would evenly outline the border of what is permitted and the mountain does not let through itself. Further from the castles, there, to the bend of Mana, behind which the cliff turns white, it is already hilly, there is a forest, taiga, many large birches grow in the open. People are crowding this forest, cutting down summer shoots, leaving only those trees that they cannot cope with. Every year, first on one hillock, then on the other, the villagers throw out our green patches of peasant arable land, they pushed the taiga to the Straw reach.

Persistent people worked on this earth!

I looked for our zaimku. Finding her is easy. She is distant. Each zaimka is a repetition of that yard, that house that the owner maintains in the village. The house was cut down in the same way, the yard was fenced off in the same way, the same shed, the same canopy, even the architraves on the house are the same, but everything: the house, the yard, the windows, and the stove inside are smaller. And yet there are no winter flocks, barns and baths in the yard, but there is one wide summer paddock, covered with brushwood, with straw over brushwood.

Behind our lodge, a path snakes along a stone bullock, always wet with mold. A key drills out of a goby into a slot, a crooked larch without a top and two alders grow above the key. The roots of the trees were pinched by the goby, and they grow crooked, with a leaf on one side. Smoke rises above our place. Grandpa and Sanka are cooking something. I wanted to eat at the same time. But I can't get away, I can't tear my eyes away from the two rivers, from these mountains that shimmer in the distance, I still can't comprehend with my childish mind the immensity of the world.

I shook myself, shrugged my shoulders, yelled louder to scare away the astringent, incomprehensible fear that had fallen on me, almost rolled head over heels down the mountain, gray flagstone, crumb, flowed behind me with an avalanche clang. Outrunning the stream, round boulders jumped ahead, which, together with a lot, sank into the Manskaya River.

The windy daisies floated, the bundle with the dishcloths floated, playfulness attacked me - I ran along the cold river with laughter, caught the bundle, flowers and suddenly stopped.

Boots!

I was still standing and watching how the river ran above my boots, how the river swirled, how yellow-red boots flickered in the water like living fish.

"Clutzer! Stupid! Spoiled his boots! Soaked his pants! New pants!"

I wandered ashore, took off my shoes, poured water out of my boots, smoothed my trousers with my hands and waited for my outfit to dry and regain its festive gloss.

Long, tiring was the way from the village. Instantly and completely imperceptibly, I fell asleep to the sound of the Manskaya River. I must have slept very little, because when I woke up my boots were still damp, but the vamps had become yellower and prettier - the tar had been washed off them. Pants dried in the sun. They wrinkled, lost force. I spat on my palms, smoothed my trousers, put them on, smoothed them again, put on my shoes, ran along the road easily and quickly, so that the dust exploded after me.

Grandfather was not in the hut, Sanka was not there either. Something tapped behind the hut in the yard. I put the bundle and flowers on the table, went to the yard. Grandfather knelt under a wooden visor and chopped tobacco in a papukha trough. An old shirt, patched at the elbows, was let out of his trousers, quivering on his back. Grandpa's neck is tarred by the sun. Her hair, greyish with age, hung in brown cracks around her neck. On the porches, large shoulder blades, like those of a horse, protruded from the shirt.

I smoothed my hair to one side with my hand, pulled up the silk tassel belt on my stomach and called out in a hoarse voice;

Grandfather!

Grandfather stopped baling, put down the ax, turned around, looked at me for a while, kneeling, then got up, wiped his hands on the hem of his shirt, pressed me to him. With a hand sticky from leaf tobacco, he ran it over my head. He was tall, not stooped yet, and my face reached only to his stomach, to his shirt, so saturated with tobacco that it was difficult to breathe, itching in his nose and I wanted to sneeze. But I did not move, did not sneeze, quieted down, like a kitten under the palm of my hand.

Sanka arrived on horseback, tanned, trimmed by grandfather, in darned trousers and a shirt, as I guessed from the sweeping stitch - also mended by grandfather. Sanka is Sanka! He just drove the horse, he didn’t even say hello, but he already dumbfounded me:

Monk in new pants! - He also wanted to add something, but he held his tongue, grandfather was ashamed. But he will say maliciously, then he will say when his grandfather is gone. It's enviable because Sanka himself never sewed new trousers, and boots, and even with new vamps, never even dreamed of him.

Turns out I was in time for dinner. They ate drachena - crumpled potatoes baked with milk and butter, ate kharyuz and fried paths - Sanka pulled in the evening, then they drank tea brewed with a typical root, with grandmother's soaked dish-cloths.

Did you swim on shangs? Sanka asked curiously.

Grandpa didn't ask anything.

Swimming! - I sent Sanka away.

After dinner, I went down to the little key, washed the dishes and brought water along the way. I put chamomiles in an old pot with a broken edge, they were already wilted, but soon rose, curled up with dense greenery, littered the table with yellow dust and petals.

Whoa! What a straight girl! Sanka began to taunt again. But the grandfather, who was going to rest on the stove after dinner, cut him off:

Don't hit the guy. Since he has a soul for a flower, it means that such is his soul. This means that he has his own meaning in this, his own meaning, incomprehensible to us. Here.

The gadfly subsides, let's chase. Boots and pants.

We went out into the yard, and I asked:

Why is grandfather so talkative today?

I don't know, Sanka shrugged. - I must have been delighted with such an overdressed grandson. - Sanka picked his teeth with his fingernail and, looking at me with red eyes, asked: - What are we going to do, monk in new trousers?

You tease me - I'll leave.

Okay, okay, touchy what! Make-believe, indeed.

We ran into the field. Sanka showed me where he harrowed, said that grandfather Ilya taught him to plow, and also added that he would leave school, as soon as he became more adept at plowing, he would start earning money, buy himself trousers not track, but cloth - and quit.

These words finally convinced me - Sanka got stuck. But what would follow next - he did not guess, because the simpleton was and remained.

Behind a strip of densely growing oats, near the road was an oblong bog. There was almost no water left in it. Along the edges, smooth and black, like pitch, mud was covered with a web of cracks. In the middle, near a puddle the size of a palm, a large frog sat in mournful silence and thought where to go now. In the Mana and the Manskaya River, the water is fast - it will tip you upside down and carry you away. There is a swamp, but it is far away - you will be lost until you jump. The frog suddenly jumped to the side, flopped at my feet - it was Sanka who rushed along the bog, and so briskly that I didn’t even have time to gasp. He sat down on the other side of the bog and wiped his feet on the burdock.

And you are weak!

me? Weak-oh? - I fumbled, but immediately remembered that I had fallen for Sanka's hook more than once, and I can’t count how many troubles, troubles with all sorts of consequences through this. "Nah, brother, I'm not so small that you fooled me like before!"

Just tear the flowers! - Sanka itched.

"Flowers! So what! What's wrong with that? Grandfather used to say something like ..." But then I remembered how people in the village are contemptuous of people who pick flowers and do all this nonsense. In the village of hunters-St. John's wolves, it's an abyss. On the arable land, old men, women and children are managed. All the peasants in Mana shoot and fish with guns, they also get pine nuts, they sell booty in the city. Flowers as a gift for wives are brought from the market, flowers made of shavings, blue, red, white - rustle. Baza flowers are respectfully placed on the corners and attached to the icons. And in order to pick fryers, old oaks or saranok, the peasants never do this, and they teach their children from childhood to tease and despise people like Vasya the Pole, the shoemaker Zherebtsov, the stove-maker Makhuntsov and all sorts of other self-propelled guns, greedy for entertainment, but unsuitable for hunting.

And Sanka is there too! He won't be doing flowers. He is already a plowman, a sower, a worker! And so am I! A jerk, you mean? Smudge? So I fired myself up, got so angry that with a brave boom I rushed across the bog.

In the middle of the pit, where the thoughtful frog was sitting, I immediately, with distinct clarity, realized that I was again on the hook. I also tried to twitch once or twice, but I saw Sanka's wide-legged footprints from a puddle to the side - a shiver went through me. Eating with a glance Sanka's rounded mug with those red eyes, like those of a drunkard, he said:

Gad!

He said and stopped fighting.

Sanka raged above me. He ran around the hollow, jumped, stood on his hands:

Ahh, got stuck! A-ha-ha-ha, boasted! A-ha-ha-ah, a monk in new pants! Pants, ha ha ha! Boots ho ho ho!

I clenched my fists and bit my lips to keep from crying. I knew that Sanka was just waiting for me to fall apart, burst into tears, and he would completely tear me to pieces, helpless, trapped. Feet are cold. I was sucked in further and further, but I did not ask Sanka to pull me out, and did not cry. Sanka was still mocking me, but soon this occupation bored him, he was satisfied with pleasure.

Say: "Dear, pretty Sanechka, help me for Christ's sake!" I might take you out!

No!

Oh no?! Sit down tomorrow.

I gritted my teeth and looked around for a stone or block of wood. There was nothing. The frog again crawled out of the grass and looked at me with annoyance, they say, they recaptured the last refuge, the wicked ones.

Get out of my sight! Go away, bastard, better! Get away! I shouted and began throwing handfuls of mud at Sanka.

Sanka left. I wiped my hands on my shirt. Above the hollow, on the border, henbane leaves stirred - Sanka hid in them. From the pit, I can only see this henbane, the top of this burdock, and even part of the road is visible, the one that rises to Manskaya Mountain. Until quite recently, I was happy along this road, admiring the countryside and I didn’t know any hollow, I didn’t know any grief. And now I'm stuck in the mud and waiting. What am I waiting for?

Sanka climbed out of the weeds, apparently, the wasps kicked him out, maybe he didn’t have enough patience. Eats some grass. A bunch, it must be. He's always chewing on something - a pot-bellied stomach!

So are we going to sit?

No, I'm about to fall. Legs are already tired.

Sanka stopped chewing on the bundle, carelessness flew off his face, he must be beginning to understand what the matter was heading towards.

But you, motherfucker! he yelled, pulling down his pants. - Just drop it!

I try to stay on my feet, but they are so hurt below the knees that I can hardly feel them. I'm shaking all over from the cold, shaking from fatigue.

Headless bastard! - climbed into the mud and cursed Sanka. - How much I inflated him, he still inflates! - Sanka tried to get close to me from one side, from the other side - it didn’t work. Viscous. Finally, he approached and yelled: "Give me your hand!" Let's! I'll leave! I'm really leaving. You'll disappear here with your new pants! ..

I didn't give him a hand. He grabbed me by the scruff of the neck, pulled, but the stake itself went into the liquid depth of the pit. He abandoned me, rushed to the shore, with difficulty freeing his legs. His tracks were immediately covered with black liquid, bubbles appeared in the tracks, bursting with a spike and gurgling.

Sanka on the beach. He looked at me frightened, silently, trying to figure something out. I looked past him. My legs were completely breaking down, the dirt seemed to me already a soft bed. I wanted to dive into it. But I'm still alive to the waist and think a little - I'll go down and easily choke.

Hey, you, why are you silent?

I did not answer anything to the destroyer Sanka.

Go for grandpa, you bastard! I'm going to fall right now.

Sanka whined, cursed like a drunken man, obscenely, and rushed to pull me out of the mud. He almost pulled off my shirt, began to pull on my arm so that I roared in pain and began to poke Sanka in the face with his fist, once or twice got it. I was not sucked further, I must have reached solid ground with my feet, maybe even frozen ground. Sanya had neither the strength nor the wit to pull me out. He was completely confused and did not know what to do, how to be.

Go for grandpa, bastard!

Chattering his teeth, Sanka pulled his pants right over his dirty feet.

Baby, don't fall! - At first he whispered, then Sanka shouted in a voice that was not his own and rushed to the lodge. - Don’t pa-a-da-a-ay, dear ... Don’t pa-a-ad-ay! ..

His words came out with a bark, with a bark. Sanka roared with fright. "So you, the snake, and it is necessary!"

Anger made me stronger. I raised my head and saw: two men were descending from the Manskaya Mountain. Someone leads someone by the hand. So they disappeared behind the willow trees, in the Manskaya River. Drink, must be, or wash. Such a river - murmuring, fast. No one can get past her.

Or maybe take a rest? Then it's a lost cause.

But a head in a white scarf appeared from behind the hillock, even at first only a white scarf, then a forehead, then a face, then another person became visible - this is a girl. Who is going? Who? Yes, you go quickly! Rearrange legs exactly inanimate!

I didn't take my eyes off the two people walking slowly down the road. Whether it was by her walk, by her handkerchief, or by the gesture of the hand pointing the girl straight at me, most likely in the field behind the bochazhina, I recognized my grandmother.

Ba-a-bonka! Mi-ilenka-ah! .. Oh, ba-bonka-ah! I roared and fell into the dirt. In front of me were the slopes of this damned pit washed out by water. Even the henbane is not visible, even the frog has jumped off somewhere.

Ba-a-aba-a-a! Ba-a-bonka-a-a! I'm drowning! Oh, I'm drowning!

I'm sick of it, sick of it! Oh, my heart felt how did you, asp, get carried there? I heard my grandmother cry above me. - Oh, it was not in vain that you sucked in the pit of your stomach! .. But who advised you? Oh, hurry up!

And still the words reached me, thoughtfully and condemningly said by the Levontiev Tanka:

Ush, didn’t the leshaki zatashshly you there ?!

A board slapped, another one, I felt like they picked me up and, like a rusty nail from a log, they slowly pulled, I heard how my boots were taken off, I wanted to shout, but I didn’t have time. Grandfather pulled me out of his boots, out of the mud. Stretching his legs with difficulty, he backed toward the shore.

Shoes something! Boots! - Grandmother pointed to the pit, where the stirred-up mud was swaying, all in bubbles and moldy greenery. Waving his hand hopelessly, the grandfather climbed to the boundary and began to wipe his feet with mugs. Grandmother, with trembling hands, was picking handfuls of dirt from my new pants and triumphantly, as if proving to someone, spoke out:

No, no, you can't deceive my heart! Toko this bloodsucker is beyond the threshold, it ached, it ached. And you, old man, where did you look? Where have you been? What if the baby died?

Didn't die...

I lay with my nose buried in the grass, and wept from self-pity, from resentment. Grandmother began to rub my legs with her palms. Tanya rummaged through my nose with a shovel, swore at each other with her grandmother:

Oh, convict Shanka! I’ll tell my tyatka vsho-o rashkazhu, - and shook her finger into the distance: - Tyatka, shur-shur-shur! - Do you understand what Tanya has? It rustles like a wasp in honey.

I looked where she was threatening, and noticed the swirling dust in the distance. Sanka scratched his shoulder blades from the lodge to the river in order to hide in the shelters until better times. Now he will truly live like a fugitive forest robber.

The fourth day I lie on the stove. My feet are wrapped in an old blanket. Grandmother rubbed them three times a day with an infusion of anemone, ant oil and something else that was pungent and smelly, and gave me chamomile and St. John's wort to drink. My legs burned and stinged so much that it was time to howl, but my grandmother assured me that this is how it should be, which means that my legs are cured, since they feel burning and pain, and talked about how and whom she had cured in her time and what She was thanked for this.

Grandma couldn't catch Sanka. As I guessed, grandfather took Sanka out from under the intended retribution. He either dressed up Sanka at night - to graze cattle, then he sent him to the forest with a backlog. Grandmother was forced to vilify grandfather and me, but we are accustomed to this, grandfather only groaned and smoked his cigarette even more, I giggled into the pillow and winked at grandfather.

My grandmother washed my pants, the boots remained in the bochazhina. Pity the boots. Pants are also not what they were. The material does not shine, the blue has faded, the pants faded at once, withered, like flowers plucked from the ground. "Oh, Sanka, Sanka!" - I sighed - I felt sorry for Sanka.

Again rematizny pester? Grandmother got up on the step of the stove, hearing my groaning.

It's hot here.

Heat doesn't break bones. The fool went to bed - three boils on his side. Be patient. And then you will cut your legs - and she herself to the window, Put her hand, looks out. “Where did he send this villain to?” Look, good people! She said to herself: neither from the stone of the fruit, nor from the rogue of goodness! He is on me with an alliance! .. He himself gives a milestone to the robber, they will save me from me.

Here - trouble for trouble - grandfather missed the chicken. This motley hen has been striving to produce chickens for three summers now. But the grandmother believed that there were more suitable chickens for this business, bathed the pied in cold water, whipped her with a broom, forcing her to lay eggs. Corydalis, on the other hand, showed downright soldierly stamina: somewhere quietly she laid eggs and, not looking at her grandmother's ban, she buried herself and hatched offspring.

In the evening it lit up in the window, flashed, crackled - it was behind the key, on the bank of the river, a hut made by hunters in the spring was plastered. Our Corydalis fluttered out of the hut with a cluck, without touching the ground, flew up to the hut, all disheveled, clucking, twitching its damaged goiter and head.

An inquiry began, and it turned out: Sanka took tobacco from his grandfather's trough, smoked in a hut and lit a spark.

He'll burn down the loan, he won't blink! Grandmother roared, but her noise was somehow unthreatening, at the end, her heart must have softened because of the chicken, maybe it boiled over with anger inside her. In a word, she told her grandfather that Sanka would not hide anymore, would spend the night at home, and rushed off to the village - she had a lot of things to do there.

Of course, she is always up to her neck in business, but her main concern is that without her in the village, as without a commander in a war, there is confusion, confusion, confusion, everything has gone astray, and it is necessary to direct the system and discipline as soon as possible.

Whether from the silence, or from the fact that my grandmother had made peace with Sanka, I fell asleep and woke up at sunset, all light and relieved, fell down from the stove and almost screamed. In that same jar with a broken edge, a huge bouquet of scarlet mountain shads with curled petals blazed.

Summer! The full summer has come!

Sanka stood at the lintel, circling on the floor with saliva into a hole between his teeth. He chewed sulfur, and he accumulated a lot of saliva.

Bite off sulfur?

Take a bite.

Sanka bit off a piece of larch sulfur. I also began to chew it with a snap.

The larch from the rafting washed ashore, and I dug up. - Sanka zirknul saliva from the stove and right up to the window. I also circled, but it hit me on the chest.

Do your legs hurt?

Quite a bit. I'll run tomorrow.

Kharyuz began to take well on the cobweb and on the cockroach. Soon he will go to the mare.

Take me?

So Katerina Petrovna let you go!

She's not there!

Come on!

I will ask.

Well, if you ask for leave ... - Sanka turned to the courtyard, even sniffed the air, then crawled up to my ear:

Will you smoke? Here! I shaved off my grandfather. He showed a handful of tobacco, a piece of paper, and a piece of a matchbox. -- Smoke the world! Did you hear how I said salash yesterday? The chicken flew like a tumbler! Scream! Katerina Petrovna is baptized: "God save! Christ save!" Scream!

Oh, Sanka, Sanya! Forgiving him everything, I repeated my grandmother's words. - Do not take off your daring head! ..

Nishta-aak! - Sanka dismissed with relief and pulled a splinter out of his heel. A drop of blood rolled out like a cranberry. Sanka spat on his palm and rubbed his heel.

I looked at the gently crimson rings of locusts, at their stamens like hammers protruding from the flowers, I listened to how busy swallows were fussing in the attic, slandering among themselves. One swallow is dissatisfied with something, she talks, she talks and screams, as if Aunt Avdotya at her girls when they come home from a walk, or at her husband - Terenty, when he comes back from swimming.

In the yard, grandfather was poking his ax and coughing. Behind the palisade of the front garden, a blue flap of the river is visible. I put on my now habitual pants, in which you can sit anywhere and on anything.

Where are you going? Sanka shook his finger. - It is impossible Grandmother Katerina did not order!

I didn't answer him, I went up to the table and touched the red-hot, but not burning hand saranok with my hand.

Look, grandma will scold. Look, got up! Brave! muttered Sanka, distracting me, talking with his teeth. - Then you will start to sing and breathe ...

What a kind grandfather, he got me a locust, - I helped Sanka get out of a difficult situation. Little by little, little by little, he leaned out of the hut, pleased with this outcome. I slowly made my way outside, into the sun. My head was spinning, my legs were still trembling and clicking. Grandfather under a canopy, laying aside the ax with which he hewed the body, looked at me as soon as he could look - everything is so clear with his eyes. Sanka was cleaning our Hawk with a scraper, and he, you see, was ticklish, and he was trembling with his skin, jerking his leg.

N-n-but-oh, you dance with me! shouted Sanka at the gelding. And why shout at the horse, which is not more enduring and patient in the village, which even the grandmother indulges, sometimes with crusty bread, and says with a sneer that our horse lived with seven priests, seven years old, and he was all seven years old .. .

Old, old Hawk! So what? And the grandfather is old, but there is no better person in the world. The price is not for years, but for business ...

How warm it is around, green, noisy, fun! Swifts are circling over the river, falling to meet their shadow on the water. The plates are chirping, the wasps are buzzing, the logs are racing through the water. Soon it will be possible to swim - Lydia the bathers will come. Maybe I'll be allowed to swim. The fever did not return, as soon as it covers the head and the legs ache in the joints. Well, if they don’t allow it, then I’m slowly bathing myself. With Sanka I wind up on the river and bathe.

Sanka and I, holding on to the back on both sides, led the Hawk to the river. He descended the stony bullock, cautiously spreading his front legs with a bench, slowing himself down with worn, nailed hooves. He wandered into the water, stopped, touched the reflection in the water with his flabby lips, as if kissing the same old piebald horse.

We splashed water on him. The horse twitched his skin on his back and, loudly thumping his hooves on the stones, daringly shaking his bearded head, wandered deeper, we groaned behind him, holding on to the mane and tail, dragged along. The hawk wandered out onto a pebbly headland, stopped up to its belly in the water and surrendered to the will of the current.

We scratched our bent back, neck, and chest covered with labor blisters. The hawk quivered his skin in joyful languor, stepped over his feet and even tried to play, grabbed us by the collars with his pendulous lip.

N-don't mess around! we shouted loudly. But the Hawk did not obey, and we did not expect him to obey, we yelled just like that, out of habit, at the horse.

They tried to sit on the horse's back to peck flies swarming on the worn horse skin or to grab a bloodsucker horsefly that had soldered to the horse's rump.

On the bullock stood the grandfather in a loose shirt, barefoot. The breeze ruffled his hair, stirred his beard, rinsed his unbuttoned shirt on his bulging, forked chest. And the grandfather of the Russian hero reminded me during the campaign, which took a break - the hero stopped to look around his native land, breathe in its healing air.

Well, how! The hawk is bathing. Grandfather stands on a stone bullock, forgotten, summer in the noise, bustle, in boring chores rolled up. Every pichuga, every midge, flea, ant is busy with work; Berries are about to go, mushrooms. The cucumbers will soon fill up, the potatoes will begin to dig up, there another garden will ripen on the table, there the bread will rustle with a ripe ear - the harvest will do. You can live in this world! And the jester with him, with his pants and boots too. I'll still live. I will earn.

The story is written on behalf of the boy Vitya. He was told to sort out the potatoes. Grandmother measured out a “lesson” for him with two rutabaga, and he sits all morning in a cold, frosty cellar. The only thing preventing the boy from escaping is the dream of new pants with a pocket, which grandmother Katerina promised to sew by the first of May - Vitya's eighth birthday.

I see myself clearly in these pants, elegant, handsome. My hand is in my pocket, and I walk around the village without taking my hand out.

Vitya never had new pants. Until now, his clothes were altered from obsolete things. Having moved the rutabaga closer a couple of times, Vitya overcomes the “lesson” just in time for dinner. Grandmother notices the deception when the boy is already jumping out of the cellar.

Grandmother bought fabric for pants a long time ago. It was kept in the depths of her chest. Vitya, however, doubted that the grandmother would have time to sew pants: she is always busy. In their village, she is like a general, everyone respects grandmother Katerina and runs to her for help. When a man gets drunk and starts to run amok, all family valuables are stored in the grandmother's chest, and the drunkard's family is saved in her house.

When the grandmother opens the cherished chest, Vitka always turns out to be nearby and strokes the fabric with dirty fingers. Neither punishment nor treats help - the boy roars and demands pants.

My hopes did not come true. By the birthday, by the First of May, the pants were not sewn. At the very height of the steppe, my grandmother took to her bed.

She is placed in the upper room on a high bed, and from there the grandmother commands numerous assistants. Grandmother is worried - she didn’t sew pants for her grandson - and Vitka tries to distract her with conversations, asking what kind of illness she has. Grandmother says that this illness is from hard work, but even in her hard life she finds more joys than sorrows.

Grandma started sewing pants as soon as she recovered a little. Vitya does not leave her all day, and gets so tired from endless fittings that he falls asleep without dinner. When he wakes up in the morning, he finds new blue pants, a white shirt and mended boots by his bed. Grandmother releases Vitya alone to his grandfather's house.

Discharged to smithereens, with a bundle in which there were fresh clothes for my grandfather, I left the yard when the sun was already high and the whole village was living its ordinary, slow life.

After listening to admiring sighs, the boy goes to his grandfather.

The path to the zaimka is not close, through the taiga. Vitya is not naughty, he walks sedately, so as not to get his pants dirty and not to bring down the new toes on his boots. On the way, he stops on a rock that marks the confluence of two mighty rivers - the Mana and the Yenisei - for a long time he admires the taiga distances and manages to soak his precious pants in the river. While the pants and boots are drying, Vitya sleeps. The dream does not last long, and now the boy is already at the lodge.

Together with his grandfather, the neighbor Sanka lives in the zaimka, he learns to plow. He enviously examines Vitka, calls him "a monk in new pants." Vitka understands - this is out of envy, but still falls for Sanka's trick. He chooses the pit with viscous mud left after the river filling, very briskly runs across it and begins to incite Vitka to the same feat. The boy can't stand Sanka's bullying, runs into the pit and gets bogged down. Cold mud squeezes his arthritic legs. Sanka tries to pull him out, but he doesn't have enough strength. You have to run after your grandfather. And then grandmother Katerina appears at the pit. She felt that there was trouble with her grandson and hurried to the property.

For four days Vitya lay on the stove with an attack of arthritis.

Grandma couldn't catch Sanka. As I guessed, grandfather took Sanka out from under the intended retribution.

Sanka is forgiven when he accidentally sets fire to his shelter - an old hunting hut by the river. The boots sank in the mud, and the grandmother washed the trousers, and they faded, lost their shine. But all summer ahead. “And the jester with them, with pants and boots, too,” thinks Vitka. - "I'll make some more. I will earn.

Very briefly The boy dreams of new pants. Having received a new thing, he spoils it very quickly and realizes that happiness is not in his pants.

The story is written on behalf of the boy Vitya. He was told to sort out the potatoes. Grandmother measured out a “lesson” for him with two rutabaga, and he sits all morning in a cold, frosty cellar. The only thing preventing the boy from escaping is the dream of new pants with a pocket, which grandmother Katerina promised to sew by the first of May - Vitya's eighth birthday.

I see myself clearly in these pants, elegant, handsome. My hand is in my pocket, and I walk around the village without taking my hand out.

Vitya never had new pants. Until now, his clothes were altered from obsolete things. Having moved the rutabaga closer a couple of times, Vitya overcomes the “lesson” just in time for dinner. Grandmother notices the deception when the boy is already jumping out of the cellar.

Grandmother bought fabric for pants a long time ago. It was kept in the depths of her chest. Vitya, however, doubted that the grandmother would have time to sew pants: she is always busy. In their village, she is like a general, everyone respects grandmother Katerina and runs to her for help. When a man gets drunk and starts to run amok, all family valuables are stored in the grandmother's chest, and the drunkard's family is saved in her house.

When the grandmother opens the cherished chest, Vitka always turns out to be nearby and strokes the fabric with dirty fingers. Neither punishment nor treats help - the boy roars and demands pants.

My hopes did not come true. By the birthday, by the First of May, the pants were not sewn. At the very height of the steppe, my grandmother took to her bed.

She is placed in the upper room on a high bed, and from there the grandmother commands numerous assistants. Grandmother is worried - she didn’t sew pants for her grandson - and Vitka tries to distract her with conversations, asking what kind of illness she has. Grandmother says that this illness is from hard work, but even in her hard life she finds more joys than sorrows.

Grandma started sewing pants as soon as she recovered a little. Vitya does not leave her all day, and gets so tired from endless fittings that he falls asleep without dinner. When he wakes up in the morning, he finds new blue pants, a white shirt and mended boots by his bed. Grandmother releases Vitya alone to his grandfather's house.

Discharged to smithereens, with a bundle in which there were fresh clothes for my grandfather, I left the yard when the sun was already high and the whole village was living its ordinary, slow life.

After listening to admiring sighs, the boy goes to his grandfather.

The path to the zaimka is not close, through the taiga. Vitya is not naughty, he walks sedately, so as not to get his pants dirty and not to bring down the new toes on his boots. On the way, he stops on a rock that marks the confluence of two mighty rivers - the Mana and the Yenisei - for a long time he admires the taiga distances and manages to soak his precious trousers in the river. While the pants and boots are drying, Vitya sleeps. The dream does not last long, and now the boy is already at the lodge.

Together with his grandfather, the neighbor Sanka lives in the zaimka, he learns to plow. He enviously examines Vitka, calls him "a monk in new pants." Vitka understands - this is out of envy, but still falls for Sanka's trick. He chooses the pit with viscous mud left after the river filling, very briskly runs across it and begins to incite Vitka to the same feat. The boy can't stand Sanka's bullying, runs into the pit and gets bogged down. Cold mud squeezes his arthritic legs. Sanka tries to pull him out, but he doesn't have enough strength. You have to run after your grandfather. And then grandmother Katerina appears at the pit. She felt that there was trouble with her grandson and hurried to the property.

For four days Vitya lay on the stove with an attack of arthritis.

Grandma couldn't catch Sanka. As I guessed, grandfather took Sanka out from under the intended retribution.

Sanka is forgiven when he accidentally sets fire to his shelter - an old hunting hut by the river. The boots sank in the mud, and the grandmother washed the trousers, and they faded, lost their shine. But all summer ahead. “And the jester with them, with pants and boots, too,” thinks Vitka. - "I'll make some more. I will earn.

I was ordered to sort out the potatoes. Grandmother determined the norm, or harnessed, as she called it. This harness is marked by two rutabaga, lying on either side of the oblong barrel, and to these rutabaga is the same as to the other bank of the Yenisei. When I get to the swede, God only knows. Maybe I won't even be alive by then!

In the basement there is an earthy, grave silence, mold on the walls, sugary curd on the ceiling. It makes you want to take it on your tongue. From time to time, for no reason, it crumbles from above, falls behind the collar and melts. Not good either. In the pit itself, where there are barrels of vegetables and tubs of cabbage, cucumbers and saffron mushrooms, the jacket hangs on the threads of the cobweb, and when I look up, it seems to me that I am in a fairy-tale kingdom, and when I look down, my heart bleeds and a great, great longing takes me.

There are potatoes all around here. And you need to sort them out, potatoes. The rotten one is supposed to be thrown into a wicker box, the large one into sacks, and the smaller one is thrown into the corner of this huge, like a yard, bin in which I sit, maybe all day, and my grandmother forgot about me, or maybe I’ve been sitting for a whole month and I’ll die soon, and then everyone will know how to leave a child here alone, and even an orphan to the same.

Of course, I am no longer a child and I work not in vain. The larger potatoes are taken for sale in the city, and my grandmother promised to buy textiles with the proceeds and sew me new pants with a pocket.

I see myself clearly in these pants, elegant, handsome. My hand is in my pocket, and I walk around the village and do not take my hand out, and if something needs to be put in - a bat or money, I only put it in my pocket, and nothing of value will fall out of my pocket and will not be lost.

Pants with a pocket, and even new ones, I never had. I'm getting everything old. The bag will be dyed and re-sewn, a woman's skirt that came out of socks, or something else. Once they even used a half-shawl. They dyed it and sewed it, and then it shed, and the cells became visible. All the Levontiev guys laughed at me. What, give them a scoff!

I wonder what they will be, pants, blue or black? And what kind of pocket will they have - external or internal? Outdoor, of course. Grandma will be messing with the inside! She has no time for everything. Family must be bypassed. Point out to everyone. General!

So I rushed off somewhere again, and I sit here and work!

At first I was afraid in this deep and silent basement. It always seemed to me that someone was hiding in the gloomy rotten corners, and I was afraid to move and was afraid to cough. And then I took a small lamp without glass, left by my grandmother, and shone it in the corners. There was nothing there but a greenish-white mold that had covered the logs in patches, and earth dug up by mice, and rutabaga, which from a distance seemed to me like severed human heads. I shook one swede on a sweaty wooden log house with veins of jacket in the grooves, and the log house answered in a guttural voice: “U-u-u-a-ah!”

– Aha! - I said. - That's it, brother! It doesn't hurt me!

I also took small beets, carrots with me and from time to time threw them into a corner, into the walls and scared away everyone who could be there from evil spirits, from brownies and other shantrapa.

The word "shantrapa" is imported in our village, and I don't know what it means. But I like it. "Shantrap! Chantrap!" All bad words, according to my grandmother, were dragged into our village by the Betekhtins, and without them, we would not even know how to swear.

I have already eaten three carrots; rubbed them on the shank of a wire rod and ate it. Then he launched under wooden mugs? hand, scraped off a handful of cold, springy cabbage, and ate it too. Then he caught the cucumber and ate it too. And he also ate mushrooms from a tub as low as a tub. Now my stomach is growling and tossing and turning. These are carrots, cucumber, cabbage and mushrooms quarreling among themselves. They are cramped in one belly.

If only the stomach would relax or the legs would hurt. I straighten my legs, I hear crunches and clicks in my knees, but nothing hurts.

Pretend to?

What about pants? Who will buy me pants and for what? Pants with a pocket, new and already without straps and maybe even with a strap!

My hands begin to scatter potatoes quickly, quickly: large ones into a gapingly open bag; small - in a corner; rotten - in a box. Fuck-bang! Tarabakh!

- Spin, spin, spin! - I encourage myself and yell at the whole basement:

The girl was judged alone

She was a child of the year-a-a-mi-i-i ...

This song is new, foreign. She, by all accounts, was also dragged into the village by the Betekhtins. I remembered only these words from her, and I liked them very much. I know how a girl is judged. In the summer, grandmother and other old women will come out to the mound in the evening, and now they are judging, now they are judging: and uncle Levonti, and aunt Vasya, and Avdotya’s maiden - cheerful Agashka!

But I don’t understand why Grandma and all the old women shake their heads, spit and blow their noses?

- Spin, spin, spin!

The girl was judged alone

She was a child of the year-and-ami-and-and-and ...

The potato scatters in different directions, and bounces. One rotten one got into a good potato. Remove her! You can't fool a buyer. He cheated with strawberries - what good happened? Shame and shame all the way. And now a rotten potato comes across - he, the buyer, will spit! If he doesn’t take potatoes, it means that you won’t get any money or goods, which means you won’t get pants! Who am I without pants? Without pants, I'm a scammer! Go without pants, so, just like the Levontievsky guys, everyone strives to slap on his bare bottom, that’s his purpose: if you’re naked, you won’t be able to resist, you’ll slap.

But I'm not afraid of anything, no chantrap!

Chantrap-a-a, shan-tra-pa-a-a-a...

I sing, I open the sash and look at the steps from the basement. There are twenty eight of them. I already counted a long time ago. My grandmother taught me to count to a hundred, and I counted everything that could be counted. The top door to the basement is slightly ajar. It was my grandmother who opened it so that it would not be so terrible for me here. Still a good person my grandmother! General, of course, but since she was born like that, you can’t change it.

Above the door, to which a tunnel, white from the jacket, hung with threads of white fringe, leads, I notice an icicle. A tiny icicle, the size of a mouse's tail, but in my heart something immediately stirred like a soft kitten.

Spring is coming soon. It will be warm. The first of May will be! Everyone will celebrate, walk, sing songs. And I will be eight years old, and everyone will stroke my head, pity me, treat me with sweets. And my grandmother will definitely sew my pants by May Day.

Chantrapa-ah, chantra-pa-ah-ah-ah!

They will sew pants with a pocket for me on the First of May!

Try to catch me then!

Fathers, rutabagas, here they are! I did it! True, once or twice I moved the rutabaga closer to me and in this way shortened the distance measured by my grandmother. But where they used to lie, these rutabaga, I, of course, do not remember and do not want to remember. Yes, if it comes to that, I can take the rutabaga altogether, throw them out and sort through all the potatoes, and beets, and carrots, and I don’t care about anything!

The girl was judged alone...

- Well, how are you, worker?

I already shuddered and dropped the potatoes from my hands. Grandma came. Came old!

- Nothing-oh-oh! Be healthy worker! I can do all the vegetables! Potatoes, carrots, beets - I can do anything!

- You, father, be quiet at the corners! Eck is getting you!

- Let it bring!

- Yes, you, in any way, got drunk from a rotten spirit?

- Drunk! I confirm. - In a trolley ... They judged the girl alone-oo-oo-oo ...

- My mothers! And he cleaned himself up like a pig! Grandmother squeezes my nose into her apron, rubs her cheeks. - Get enough soap for you. - And pushes in the back: - Go to dinner. Grandpa is waiting.

“Is it just dinner yet?”

- I suppose it seemed to you - you worked here for three days?

I jump up the stairs. I hear my joints snapping and I feel fresh, chilly air floating towards me, so sweet after the rotten, stagnant basement spirit.

I speed up and emerge from the basement into a bright day, into clean air, and somehow and clearly notice that everything in the yard is filled with a premonition of spring. It is in the sky, which has become more spacious, higher and doves in divorces, it is also on the sweaty roof boards from the edge where the sun is, it is in the chirping of sparrows, grabbing hand to hand in the middle of the yard, and in that still thin haze that arose over the distant ridges and began to descend, enveloping the forests, ravines and meadows at the mouth of the rivers with a gloomy slumber. And soon, these rivers will flare up with greenish-yellow ice, flood the banks with red, currants and willows, and then ice will melt on the rivers, eat snow on the ridges, there will be grass, snowdrops, the First of May will come, and on the First of May ...

No, it's better not to think about what will happen on the First of May!

Matter, or manufactory, as our garments are called, my grandmother bought, even when she went to the city on a sleigh path with potatoes. The material was blue in color, ribbed, and rustled and crackled well if you ran your finger over it. It was called Treco. No matter how much I lived in the world later, no matter how many pants I wore out, however, I did not meet matter with such a name. Obviously, it was a tights. But this is just my guess, nothing more. There was a lot in my childhood that I didn’t meet again later and didn’t repeat, unfortunately.

A piece of manufactory lay at the very top in a chest, and whenever my grandmother opened this chest and there was a musical ringing, I was right there. I stood on the threshold of the upper room and looked into the chest. Grandmother was looking for the thing she needed in a chest as huge as a barge and did not notice me at all. I moved, drummed my finger on the joint - she did not notice. I coughed at first once - she did not notice. I coughed many times, as if my whole chest caught a cold, - she still did not notice. Then I moved closer to the chest and began to turn the huge iron key. Grandmother silently slapped my hand - and still did not notice me. Then I began to stroke the blue manufactory - treko with my fingers. Here the grandmother could not stand it and, looking at the important, handsome generals with beards and mustaches, with which the lid of the chest was pasted over from the inside, she asked them:

What should I do with this child? (The generals did not answer. I stroked the manufactory.) - Grandmother threw back my hand under the pretense that it might turn out to be unwashed and stain the track, and continued: - It sees, this child - I'm spinning like a squirrel in a wheel! It knows - I'll sew pants for the name day, be they cursed! So no, it climbs and climbs like that! ..

With the last words, my grandmother grabbed me by the forelock or by the ear and took me away from the chest. I leaned my forehead against the wall. And I must have looked so sad that after a while the sound of the lock sounded thinner, more musical, and everything in me froze from blissful forebodings.

Grandmother used a little key to open a Chinese box made of tin, like a house without windows. All sorts of otherworldly trees, birds and ruddy Chinese women in new blue trousers are painted on this house, only not from a track, but from some other material, which I also liked, but liked much less than my manufactory.

I'm waiting. And not in vain. The fact is that the most valuable grandmother's valuables are stored in a Chinese box, including lollipops, which are called monpensier in the store, and in our country it is simpler - lampasier or lampaseyki. There is nothing sweeter and more beautiful than lanterns in the world! We stick them on Easter cakes, and on sweet pies, and they just suck on these sweetest lamps, whoever has them, of course.

Grandma has! For guests. I again hear thin and gentle music. The box is closed. Maybe grandma changed her mind?

I begin to sniff louder and think: maybe I shouldn’t let my voice go. But then grandmother's dissatisfied words are heard:

- Oh, your damned soul! - And in my hand, which has long been lowered expectantly, my grandmother puts rough lamps.

My mouth is full of lingering saliva, but I swallow it and push my grandmother's hand away:

- No-ee...

- And what do you want? Belt?

- Pants-s-s ...

I hear how my grandmother slaps her thighs in contrition and turns not to the generals, but to my back:

“What is it, the blood-drinker, that he doesn’t understand words?” I interpret it in Russian - I'll sew it! And he's here! And he will urinate! A? Would you like candy or lock up?

- Eat yourself!

- Herself?! - Grandmother goes dumb for a while: apparently, she does not find words. - Herself?! I'll give you - myself! I'll show you - myself!

Now is the turning point. Now you need to give a voice, otherwise it will hit, and I lead from the bottom up:

- Uh-uh...

- Shout at me, shout at me! - Grandma screams, but I block it with my roar.

She gradually gives up, begins to cajole me:

- Well, I’ll sew it, I’ll sew it soon!

Sweet little lamps. Soon, soon you will be walking around in new trousers, smart, but handsome, and handsome ...

While slandering, my grandmother finally breaks my resistance, sticks lamps into my palm - about five, it won’t be miscalculated! - He wipes my nose and cheeks with his apron and escorts me out of the room, comforted and satisfied.

… My hopes did not come true. By the birthday, by the First of May, the pants were not sewn. At the very height of the steppe, my grandmother took to her bed. She always bore any minor pain on her legs, and if she fell down, then for a long time and seriously.

She was moved to the upper room, on a clean, soft bed, the rugs were removed from the floor, the window was curtained, and in the upper room it became like in a strange house - it was semi-dark, cool, it smelled of a hospital there, and people walked on tiptoe and talked in a whisper. During these days of my grandmother's illness, I discovered how many relatives my grandmother has and how many people, and not relatives, also come to pity her and sympathize with her. And perhaps only now I, albeit vaguely, felt that my grandmother, who always seemed to me an ordinary grandmother, was a very respected person in the village, but I didn’t obey her, quarreled with her, and a belated feeling of repentance sorted me out.

Grandmother breathed loudly and hoarsely, half-sitting in the pillows, and kept asking:

- Pokor ... did they feed the child? There is a simple kalachi ... kalachi ... everything is in the pantry ... in a chest.

Old women, daughters, nieces and various other people who were in charge of the house reassured her: fed, they say, your child is drunk and there is no need to worry, and, as proof, they brought me to the bed and showed my grandmother. She with difficulty separated her hand from the bed, touched my head and said pitifully:

- Grandma dies, what will you do? With whom to live? With whom to sin? Oh Lord, Lord! .. Give me strength for the sake of the miserable orphan ... Gusk! she called Aunt Augusta. - You will milk the cow, so you will udder with warm water ... She ... spoiled with me ... Otherwise, don’t tell you ...

And again the grandmother was reassured and demanded that she talk less and not worry. But she still talked all the time, worried and agitated, because otherwise, apparently, she did not know how to live.

When the holiday came, my grandmother began to worry about my pants. I consoled her myself, talked to her about her illness, but tried not to mention her pants. Grandmother had recovered a little by this time, and one could talk with her as much as one wanted.

- What kind of disease do you have, grandmother? - as if for the first time I was curious, sitting next to her on the bed.

She, thin, bony, with rags in split braids, with an old extinguisher hanging under a white shirt, slowly, counting on a long conversation, began to tell about herself:

- I've been planted, father, worked out. All planted. From an early age in work, everything is in work. I was the seventh with my father and mother, and I raised my tithes ... It's easy to just say. What about growing?!

But she spoke about the pitiful only at first, as if for a sing-along, and then she talked about various cases from her big life. It turned out from her stories that there were more joys in her life than hardships. She did not forget about them and knew how to notice them in her simple and difficult life. Children were born - joy. The children were sick, but she saved them with herbs and roots, and not a single one died - also a joy. A new thing for yourself or children is a joy. A good harvest for bread is joy. Fishing was lucrative - a joy. Once she put her hand out on arable land, and she herself set it right. There was just suffering, the bread was being removed, with one hand she stinged and did not become a kosorochka - is this not joy?

I looked at my grandmother, marveled at the fact that she also had a father and mother, looked at her big, working hands in the veins, at her wrinkled face, with an echo of the former blush, at her eyes, greenish, like water in an autumn pond, at these pigtails of her, sticking out, like a girl’s, in different directions - and such a wave of love for my family and such a close person to a groan rolled over me that I poked my face into her loose chest and buried my nose in a warm, grandmother-smelling shirt. In this impulse, I was grateful to her for the fact that she remained alive.

“You see, I didn’t sew your pants for the holiday,” my grandmother stroked my head and repented. - Reassured and did not sew.

- You'll sew more, there's nowhere to hurry.

- Yes, God forbid to rise ...

And she kept her word. I just started walking and immediately started cutting my pants. She was still weak, walked from bed to table, holding on to the wall, measured me with a tape with numbers, sitting on a stool. She staggered, and she put her hand to her head:

“Oh my God, what is wrong with me?” Clean out of the blue!

But all the same, she measured well, drew on the fabric with chalk, figured it out for me, gave it a couple of times so that the excess would not spin, which made me merry. After all, this is a sure sign of the grandmother's return to real life and her complete recovery!

Grandmother cut pants for almost a whole day, and began to sew them the next day.

Needless to say, how badly I slept at night. I got up before daylight, and my grandmother, groaning and swearing, also got up and began to fuss in the kitchen. She stopped every now and then, as if listening to herself, but from that day on she did not lie down in the upper room anymore, but moved to her camp bed, closer to the kitchen and to the Russian stove.

In the afternoon, my grandmother and I picked up the sewing machine from the floor and set it on the table. The machine was old, with worked flowers on the body. They stood out in separate curls and resembled rattlesnakes of fire. Grandmother called the typewriter “Signer” and assured that there was no price for it, and every time she told the curious in detail, with pleasure, that her mother, God rest her soul, similarly exchanged this typewriter with exiles at the city pier for a year-old heifer, three bags of flour and a dash of melted butter. This Krinka, almost completely intact, was never returned by the exiles. Well, what a demand from them - exiles, after all!

The Signer machine chirps. Grandma turns the handle. He turns it carefully, as if gathering courage, contemplating further actions, and suddenly he accelerates the wheel and releases it, the handle is not visible, it is spinning. And it seems to me - now the machine will sew all the pants. But grandmother will put her hand on the shiny wheel and calm down the machine, tame it; and when the machine stops, he bites the thread with his tooth, puts the fabric on his chest and carefully looks to see if the needle is piercing the fabric, whether the seam is crooked.

That day I did not leave my grandmother's, because I had to try on pants. With each entry, the pants gained more and more foundation and I liked it so much that I could neither speak nor laugh with delight, and when my grandmother asked whether it was pressing here and whether it was pressing here, I shook my head and uttered in a strangled voice:

- N-no-ee!

“Just don’t lie to me, then it will be too late to correct me,” my grandmother instructed me.

“It’s true, it’s true,” I confirmed as soon as possible, so that only my grandmother would not start smacking her pants and put off work.

Grandmother was especially concentrated and intent when it came to a hole - she was always embarrassed by some kind of wedge. If it, this wedge, is inserted incorrectly, the pants will get wet before the deadline. I did not want this to happen, and patiently endured fitting after fitting.

So, without lunch, we worked with her until dusk - it was I who begged my grandmother not to be interrupted because of such a trifle as food.

When the sun went behind the cattle and touched the upper ridges, the grandmother hurried - they say, they will bring the cows, and she still digs - and instantly finished the work. She fitted a flap pocket over her trousers, and although I would have preferred an inner pocket, I did not dare to object. So the last touches were put on by the grandmother with a typewriter, once again she threw her pants over her chest, pulled out the thread, folded them, stroked them on her stomach with her hand:

- Well, thank God. Buttons after I repulse from something and sew.

At this time, the boats rattled in the street, the cows demanding and satiety blissed out. Grandmother threw her pants on the typewriter, took off and rushed off, punishing me on the go so that I would not think of turning the typewriter and would not touch anything.

I've been patient. And by that time, I had no strength left in me. The lamps were already lit all over the village and people were having dinner, and I was still sitting near the Signer typewriter, from which my blue trousers hung down. I sat without lunch, without dinner and wanted to sleep. And the grandmother did not go and did not go.

How my grandmother dragged me into bed, exhausted and wrinkled, I don’t remember, but I will never forget that happy morning on which I woke up with a feeling of festive joy.

On the back of the bed, neatly folded, hung new blue trousers, on them was a washed white striped shirt, and next to the bed the smell of burnt birch was spread by my boots mended by the shoemaker Zherebtsov, smeared with tar, with yellow, completely new vamps.

Immediately, my grandmother came from somewhere, began to dress me like a little one, and I limply obeyed her, and laughed uncontrollably, and talked about something, and asked something, and interrupted myself.

- Well, - said my grandmother, when I stood before her in all my glory, in all the parade. Her voice trembled, her lips turned to one side, and she took hold of the handkerchief. - If only your mother could see, the deceased ...

I frowned. Grandmother stopped lamenting, pressed me to her and crossed me:

- Eat and go to the grandfather's zaimku.

One, grandma?

- Of course, one. You are so big! Man!

- Oh, baby! - From the fullness of feelings, I hugged her by the neck and butted her head.

“All right, all right,” my grandmother gently pushed me away. “Look, Lisa Patrikeevna, he would always be so affectionate and good ...

Discharged to smithereens, with a bundle in which there were fresh clothes for my grandfather, I left the yard when the sun was already high and the whole village was living its ordinary, slow life. First of all, I turned to the neighbors and plunged the Levontiev family into such confusion with my appearance that an unprecedented silence suddenly set in the sodomite hut, and it became, this house, not like itself. Aunt Vasenya threw up her hands and dropped her stick. This stick hit one of the small ones on the head. He sang with a healthy bass. Aunt Vasenya picked up the victim in her arms, muttered, but she herself did not take her eyes off me.

Tanka turned out to be next to me, all the guys surrounded me, felt the fabric and admired, and Tanka reached into her pocket, found a clean handkerchief there and fell silent in shock. Only her eyes expressed all the feelings, and from them I could guess how beautiful I was now, how she admired me, and to what unattainable height I had ascended.

They squeezed me, slowed me down, and I had to break free and make sure that they didn’t get me dirty, didn’t crush anything and didn’t eat it under the noise of shanga - a present for grandfather. Here after all only yawn!

In a word, I hurried to say goodbye, referring to the fact that I was in a hurry, and asked if there was something to convey to Sanka. Sanka Levontievsky was at our lodge - he helped grandfather. For the summer, the Levontievsky children were shoved around people, and they fed there, grew up and worked. Grandfather took Sanka with him for two summers. My grandmother at first predicted that this convict would drive the old man crazy and there would be no way out of him, and then she was surprised how grandfather and Sanka got along and were pleased with each other.

Aunt Vasenya said that there was nothing to convey to Sanka, except for an order to obey grandfather Ilya and not drown in Man if he decided to swim.

To my chagrin, there were very few people on the street at this pre-noon hour - the village people had not yet finished the spring suffering. The peasants had all gone to Mana to hunt for deer - their antlers are now in valuable pores, and haymaking was already approaching, and everyone was busy with work. But all the same, in some places children played, women went to the consumer house and, of course, paid attention to me, sometimes quite intently. Here, Aunt Avdotya, grandmother's sister-in-law, scurries to meet. I'm going to whistle. I’m walking past, I don’t notice Aunt Avdotya. She turns aside, and I see amazement, I see how she throws up her hands, and I hear words that are better than any music:

- I'm sick of it! Isn't that Vitka Katerinin?

"Of course it's me! Of course it's me!" - I want to instruct my aunt Avdotya, but I restrain my impulse and only slow down my steps. Then Aunt Avdotya beats herself on her skirt, overtakes me in three jumps, begins to feel, stroke and say all sorts of good words. Windows open in the houses, village women and old women look out, and everyone praises me and says laudatory things about my grandmother and all of our people: here, they say, a guy grows up without a mother, and his grandmother drives so that God forbid other parents lead their children, and so that I would honor my grandmother for this, would obey, and when I grow up, I would not forget her kindness.

Our village is big, long. I got tired, tired, while I walked it from end to end and took upon myself all the tribute of admiration for me and my outfit, and also for the fact that I myself go to my grandfather's house. I was all sweaty when I left the village.

He ran to the river, drank from the palms of the icy Yenisei water. From the joy that seethed in me, he threw a stone into the water, then another, he was already carried away by this occupation, but in time he remembered where I was going, why and in what form. And the path is not close - five miles. I walked, even ran at first, but you have to look under your feet so as not to knock down the yellow vamps on the roots. He switched to a measured step, unfussy, peasant, as grandfather always walks.

A large forest began from the place. Blooming boyar trees, succulent pines, birches, the share of which fell to grow in the neighborhood of the village and therefore broken off in winter into barren trees, were already left behind.

An even aspen forest with full, slightly brownish leaves climbed densely up the slope. A road with washed stonework wound up. Gray large slabs, scratched by horseshoes, were turned out by spring streams. To the left of the road there was a ravine, and in it a spruce forest darkened, and in the thick of it, a stream, falling asleep for the summer, murmured muffledly. In the spruce forest hazel grouse whistled, in vain calling the females. Those have already sat on the eggs and did not respond to the cavaliers-cockerels. The old capercaillie had just fussed on the road, clapped and with difficulty took off. He has already begun to molt, but he crawled out onto the road to peck pebbles and knock out lice and fleas from himself with warm dust. Bath to him here! I would sit quietly in the thicket, otherwise the lynx would devour him, the old fool, in the light.

I lost my breath - the capercaillie was thumping its wings painfully. But there is no great fear, because it is sunny all around, it is light and everything in the forest is busy with its own business. Yes, and I knew this way well. Many times I rode it on horseback and in a cart, with my grandfather and grandmother, and with Kolcha Jr., and with various other people.

And yet, I saw and heard everything as if anew, probably because for the first time I traveled alone to the zaimka through the mountains and taiga. Farther uphill the forest was less frequent and thicker. The larches towered over the entire taiga and seemed to touch the clouds floating above the mountains.

I remembered how, on this long and slow climb, Kolcha Jr. always sang the same song, and the horse slowed down its steps and, as it were, cautiously placed its hooves so as not to interfere with the man's singing. And our horse itself was already there, at the end of the mountain, suddenly jumped into the song, let out its “i-ho-ho-oh-oh-oh” through all the mountains and passes, but then embarrassedly made a go-ahead with its tail: they say, I know that I’m not very good with songs, but I couldn’t stand it, everything here is very nice and you are pleasant riders - don’t whip me and sing songs.

I sing Kolchi Jr.'s song about a natural plowman and hear how my voice rolls and bounces between the stone scree along the ravine, repeating funny: “Hahal!”

So, with a song, I overcame the mountain. It got brighter. The sun kept rising and rising. The forest was thinning, and there were more stones on the road, and they were larger, and therefore the whole road meandered around the cobbles. The grass in the forest became rarer, but there were more flowers, and when I went to the outskirts of the forest, the whole edge of the forest was burning like a fire, overwhelmed with fires.

Above, over the mountains, our village fields began. At first they were reddish-black, and only in some places the seedlings of potatoes gleamed mouse-like on them and plowed stone gleamed in the sun. But farther on, everything was flooded with the same-colored wavy green of thickening crops, and only the boundaries, the wide Siberian boundaries, left by people who do not know how to break the earth, separated the fields from each other and, like the banks of rivers, did not allow them to merge together and become a sea.

The road here was covered with grass - a goose foot, blooming quite unoppressedly, although people traveled and walked along it. The plantain was gaining strength to light his little gray candle, and all the grass here turned green and rejoiced, not suffocating with road dust. By the side of the road, in chishenkas, where stones were dumped from the fields, a ditch and cut down bushes, everything grew at random, grew large, and raged furiously. Bunches of kupyrs and carrots were trying to follow the tune, and frying here in the sun was already littering the wind with sparks of petals, catchment bells hung overhead in anticipation of the summer, disastrous heat for them. In place of these flowers, grasshoppers took up from the boundary thicket, stood already in oblong buds, covered with wool, like hoarfrost, and waited in the wings to hang red, purple and motley earrings on the outskirts of the fields.

Here is the Korolev log. There was still a dirty puddle in it, and I wanted to rush through it so that it splashed in different directions, but immediately came to my senses, took off my boots, rolled up my trousers and carefully walked over a lazy, pacified by sedge pothole, stained with hooves of cattle and paws of birds.

I flew out of the log at a trot and, while putting on my shoes, kept looking at the field that opened before me, and tried to remember where else I had seen him. A field that goes straight to the horizon, and in the middle of the field there are lonely large trees. Right in the field, into the grain, the road dives, quickly dries up in it, and a swallow flies over the road and chirps ...

Ah, I remembered! I saw the same field, only with yellow bread, in the picture of a school teacher, to whom my grandmother took me to sign up for the winter to study. I was still looking at this picture very much, and the teacher asked: “Do you like it?” I shook my head, and the teacher said that the famous Russian artist Shishkin painted it, and I thought that he, gosh, ate a lot of cedar cones.

I went up to one of the thickest larch trees and lifted my head. It seemed to me that a tree, on which greenish needles were thick, where sparsely wobbled, floated across the sky, and the falcon, nestled on top of the tree between black, as if burned, last year's cones, dozed, lulled by this slow and calm swimming. There was a nest on a tree, twisted in a fork between a thick bough and a trunk. Once Sanka wanted to destroy this nest, he climbed up to it, he was about to throw out the wide-eyed hawks, but then the hawk screamed, how it swooped in, how it began to flap Sanka with its wings, peck with its beak, tear with its claws - Sanka could not resist, let go. If Sanka were a karachun, but he put on a shirt on a bough, and okay, the seams of the canvas shirt turned out to be strong, they kept him. The men took off Sanka, slapped him, of course, and that's why Sanka's eyes are red now: they say, the blood has poured. The tree is the whole world! There are holes in its trunk, hollowed out by woodpeckers, and in each hole someone lives and tricks - some kind of beetle, then a bird, then a lizard. Nests are hidden in the grass and in the plexus of roots. Mouse and gopher minks go under the tree. The anthill is attached to the trunk. There is a prickly thorn here, there is a frozen Christmas tree, and there is a round green clearing near the larch. It can be seen from the bare, scraped off roots, how they wanted to bring the clearing down, patch it up, but the roots of the tree resisted the plow, did not give the clearing to be torn to pieces. The larch itself is hollow inside. Someone lit a fire under it a long time ago, and the barrel burned out. If the tree weren’t so big, it would have died long ago, but it still lives, it’s hard, with maeta, but it lives, gets food from the ground with plowed roots and also gives shelter to ants, mice and birds, beetles, broomsticks and all other living creatures.

I climb into the coal inside of a larch, sit down on a mushroom-lip, hard as a stone, sticking out of a rotten trunk. In the tree, it hums and creaks. It seems - it complains to me with a wooden, endlessly long cry, going along the roots from the earth. I got out of the black hollow and touched the trunk of a tree covered with flinty bark, sulfur influxes, scars and cuts, healed and not healed, those that a damaged tree no longer has the strength and juices to heal.

"Oh, soot! Well, a mess!” But the cinder has weathered, and the hollow does not get dirty. Slightly only on one elbow and on the trouser leg is stained with black. I spat on my palm, wiped the stain off my pants and slowly walked towards the road.

For a long time, a wooden groan sounded in me, audible only in the hollow of a larch. Now I know: a tree can also moan and cry in an inner, inconsolable voice.

It is not far from this larch to the descent to the mouth of the Mana. I gave a step, and now the road went down a slope between two mountains. But I turned off the road and cautiously began to make my way to the steep cut of the mountain, descending in a stony corner into the Yenisei and Manu.

From this steep slope you can see our arable land, our zaimka. For a long time I was going to look at all this from the mountain, but it didn’t work out, because I traveled with other people and they were in a hurry to work, then home from work.

Here, on the mane of the Manskaya Mountain, the pine forest was undersized, with paws twisted by the wind. Like the hands of old people, these paws were covered with bumps and fragile joints. Boyarka here grew fiercely sharp. And all the bushes were dry, ruffy and hooky. But here there were even birch and aspen forests, clean, thin, racing to grow after the fire, which was still reminiscent of black deadwood and eversion. Strawberries with green pimples clung to the stumps and fallen trees, into the pouring of going berries, stone berries, cutting grass and flowers. In one place I stumbled upon a thicket of dark green old oaks, I covered them with my beret and now I’m going and I hear how they smell of the taiga, and even a cave, and even hay, and a wormwood seed, and it smells like fairy tales, those fairy tales that I am different since the grandmother says, if she is in a good mood and she will find time.

Over the cliff, where there were no trees at all, but only thorns grew, red moss and broods of mountain turnips stained the stones, I stopped and stood until my legs got tired, then sat down, forgetting that snakes were found here, and I was afraid of snakes more than anything in the world. For some time I didn’t breathe at all, didn’t even blink, just looked and looked, and my heart beat loudly and often in my chest.

For the first time I saw from above the confluence of two large rivers - the Mana and the Yenisei. They hurried towards each other for a long, long time, and when they meet, they flow separately and pretend that they are not interested in one another. Mana is faster than the Yenisei and lighter, although the Yenisei is also bright. A whitish seam, like a breakwater, spreading wider and wider, defines the boundary of two waters.

Yenisei splashes, pushes Mana in the side - it seems to flirt, and suddenly presses her into the corner of the Mansky bull. Mana boils, splashes onto the rock, roars, but it's too late - the bull is steep and tall. The Yenisei is assertive and strong - you can’t shy away from it.

Another river has been conquered. Growing full under the bull, the Yenisei runs to the icy sea-ocean, rebellious, indomitable, sweeping everything in its path. And what is Mana to him? He will also pick up not such rivers and rush off with him to the icy, midnight lands, where fate will bring me later, and I will have a chance to see my native river, completely different, overflowing floodplain, tired of a long journey.

In the meantime, I look and look at the rivers, the mountains, the forests. The arrow at the junction of Mana with the Yenisei is rocky and steep. The root water has not yet subsided, and the string of the crumbly bank is still flooded. The rocks on the other side are in the water, and where the rock begins, and where its reflection is, you can’t make out from here. Stripes under the rocks. It pulls, twists the water with slings of spinning stones.

But how much space is above, above the Mana River! On the arrow there is a stone crown, then the remnants pile up scattered, and even further the order begins. Rocky, waves go up the mountains from the muddle of gorges, noisy rivers and springs. There, above, the stopped waves of the taiga, slightly enlightened on the manes, secretly thick in the hollows. On the humpiest splash of the taiga, a white cliff sparkles like a lost sail.

Mysteriously, inaccessibly, the distant passes turn blue, about which it is eerie to even think. Between them, the Mana River winds, roars and rattles on the rapids and on the shivers.

Mana! We talk about her constantly. She is the breadwinner: our arable land is here and reliable fishing is also on this river. There are a lot of animals, game, fish on Mana! There are many rapids, dewlands, mountains, rivers with enticing names: Karakush, Nagalka, Run, Mile, Kandynka, Tykhty, Negnet.

And how wisely the wild river Mana acted! In front of the mouth, she took it and fell abruptly to the left, to a rocky arrow. Here, below me, I left a gentle corner of alluvial land. In this corner of arable land. The houses are on the banks of the Mana, and the fields are here. They rest against the mountains from behind and on the right, where I am standing, also against the mountains, or rather, the Manskaya River, which would evenly outline the border of what is permitted and does not let the mountain through itself, but also the fields. Further on the castle, there, to the bend of Mana, behind which the cliff turns white, it is already hilly, there the forest grows and there are many large birches in the free space. People are crowding this forest, cutting down summer shoots, leaving only those trees that they cannot cope with. Every year, first on one hillock, then on another hillock, the villagers throw out our green cloths of peasant arable land.

Persistent people work on this earth!

I look for our zaimku. It's not hard to find her. She is distant. Each zaimka is a repetition of that house, that yard that the owner maintains in the village. The house was cut down in the same way, the courtyard was blocked in the same way, the same shed, the same canopy, even the architraves on the house are the same, but everything - the house, the yard, the windows, and the stove inside - are smaller. And yet there are no winter flocks, barns and bathhouses in the yard, but there is one wide summer paddock covered with brushwood, and over brushwood with straw.

Behind our lodge, the path snakes along a stony bullock, always wet with mold, covered with moss. A key drills out of a goby into a slot, and a crooked larch without a top and two alders grow above the key. The roots of the trees were pinched by the goby, and they grow crooked, with a leaf on one side. Smoke rises above our place. Grandpa and Sanka are cooking something. I wanted to eat at the same time.

But I can’t leave, I can’t tear my eyes away from the two rivers, from these mountains that shimmer in the distance, I still can’t comprehend with my mind the immensity of the world.

No later than in winter my father will return from lands not so remote as they say now, and he will take me up this Mane River, to those tempting distances, with his new family, and I will grab such dashing there, I will sip so much murtsovka, this savory, debilitating food that I will never forget either Manu or the time I lived with my grandparents.

But I still don’t know any of this, while I’m free and joyful, like a sparrow that has successfully overwintered. And that is why I suddenly yell at the world, this land, the Mane River, the Yenisei. What the hell, I don't understand. Then I roll down the mountain almost head over heels, and a stream of gray stone flagstone flows behind me with an landslide clang. Overtaking the stream, round boulders jump up and, together with me, hoot into the frightenedly running Manskaya River.

The beret of the windy old oaks floated, the bundle with the dishcloths floated, but playfulness attacked me - I run along the cold river with laughter, I catch the bundle, I catch flowers and suddenly I stop:

- Boots something!

I’m still standing and watching how the river runs and swirls above my boots, and how exactly live fish flicker in the water, yellow-red vamps on my boots.

"Clutch! Idiot! Wet your pants! Soaked boots! New pants!..”

I wandered ashore, took off my shoes, poured water out of my boots, smoothed my trousers with my hands and waited for my clothes, my outfit, to dry.

Long, tiring was the way from the village. Instantly and completely imperceptibly, I fell asleep to the sound of the Manskaya River. He must have slept quite a bit, because when he woke up, it was still damp in his boots, but the vamps became yellower and more beautiful - the tar was washed off them. Pants dried in the sun. They shriveled and lost force. But I spat on my hands, smoothed my pants, put it on, smoothed it again, put on my shoes and ran along the road easily and quickly, so that the dust exploded after me.

Grandfather was not in the hut, and Sanka was not there either. Something tapped behind the hut in the yard. I put the bundle and flowers on the table and went to the yard.

Grandfather knelt under a wooden visor and chopped tobacco in a papukha trough. An old shirt, patched at the elbows, was let loose from his trousers and quivered on his back. Grandpa's neck is tarred by the sun, it's not exactly a neck, but dried clay in cracks. Her hair, grayish from old age, hung in dangles on a brown neck, and on the porches her shirt protruded large, like a horse's, shoulder blades.

I smoothed my hair to one side with my hand, pulled up a silk belt with tassels and called out in a hoarse voice:

Grandfather stopped baling, put down the ax, turned around, looked at me for a while, kneeling, and then got up, wiped his hands on the hem of his shirt, pressed me to him. With a hand sticky from leaf tobacco, he ran it over my head. He was tall, not yet stooped, and my face reached only to his stomach, to his shirt, so saturated with tobacco that it was difficult to breathe, itching in his nose and I wanted to sneeze. Like a kitten, grandfather stroked me, and I did not move.

Sanka arrived on horseback, tanned, trimmed by grandfather, in darned trousers and a shirt, as I guessed from the sweeping stitch, also mended by grandfather.

Sanka is Sanka. He just drove the horse, didn’t say “hello” yet, and even dumbfounded me with malice:

“A monk in new pants!”

He also wanted to add something, but he held his tongue, grandfather was ashamed. But he will say. Then he will say when grandfather is gone. Enviable because Sanka himself never sewed new pants, and boots, and even with such vamps, he never dreamed of.

Turns out I was in time for dinner. They ate drochena - crumpled potatoes baked with milk and butter, ate kharyuz and fried paths - Sanka pulled in the evening. And then they drank tea with my grandmother's soaked dishcloths.

- Did you swim on shangs? Sanka asked curiously.

Grandfather did not ask anything, and therefore I said to Sanka:

- He swam!

After dinner, I went down to the spring, washed the dishes and brought water along the way. I put the old oaks in an old jug with a broken edge, and they, having already drooped, soon rose, curled up with dense greenery. The yellow flowers of the old oaks, littering with pollen, sparkled with solar glare.

- Hey! What a straight girl! - Sanka began to be sarcastic again.

But the grandfather, who was going to rest on the stove after dinner, cut him off:

- Don't hit the guy! Since his soul lies with a flower, it means that such is his soul. This means that he has his own meaning in this, his own meaning, which we do not understand. Here.

The grandfather expressed the entire weekly norm of words and turned away, and Sanka fell silent immediately. That's it, brother! It’s not for you to gossip with Aunt Vasenya or with my grandmother. Grandfather said - and the point!

- The gadfly subsides, let's chase. Boots and pants symy then.

We went out into the yard, and I asked Sanka:

- Why is your grandfather so talkative today?

I don't know, Sanka shrugged. - I must have been delighted with such an overdressed grandson. - Sanka dug his fingernail in his teeth and, looking at me with red eyes, asked: - What are we going to do, monk in new trousers?

- You tease me - I'll leave.

- All right, all right, touchy! Make-believe, indeed.

We ran into the field, and Sanka showed me where he harrowed, and said that grandfather Ilya had already taught him to plow, and also added that he would leave school completely and, as he became more adept at plowing, would start earning money and buy himself non-track pants, and cloth.

These words finally convinced me - Sanka got stuck. But what would follow next, I did not guess, because there was a simpleton, and a simpleton remained.

Behind a strip of densely growing oats, there was an oblong bog near the road. There was almost no water left in it.

Along the edges, smooth and black as pitch, mud was covered with a web of cracks, and in the middle, near a puddle the size of a palm, a large frog sat in mournful silence and thought where to go now. In Mana and in the Manskaya River, the water is fast - it will tip you upside down and carry you away. There is a swamp, but it is far away - you will disappear until you jump.

The frog suddenly jumped to the side and plopped down at my feet. It was Sanka who rushed along the bochazhina, and so briskly that I didn’t even have time to gasp. He sat down on the other side of the bog and wiped his feet on the burdock.

- And you are weak!

- Me? Weak-o? I fumbled, but immediately remembered that I had run into Sanka more than once, and I can’t count how many troubles and troubles I had through this, with all sorts of consequences. “No, brother, I’m not so small that you fool me like before!”

- Just pick the flowers! - Sanka itched.

"Flowers! So what? Is that bad? There grandfather said something like ... "

But then I remembered how in the countryside they are contemptuous of people who pick flowers and engage in all sorts of such nonsense. An abyss appeared in the village of St. John's hunters. On the arable land, old men, women and children are managed. And the men in Mana are all shooting with guns, and fishing, and even getting pine nuts - they sell booty in the city. Flowers from the market are brought as a gift to wives. From shavings, flowers - blue, red, white - rustle. Bazaar flowers are respectfully placed on the corners and attached to the icons of the gods. And in order to pick fryers, starodubs or saranok, the peasants never do this, and from childhood they teach their children to call people like Vasya the Pole, the shoemaker Zherebtsov, the stove-maker Makhuntsov and all sorts of other self-propelled vehicles and stray people who are greedy for entertainment, but unsuitable for hunting.

Here is Sanka! He won't be doing flowers. He is already a plowman, a sower, a worker! And so am I! A jerk, you mean? Smudge?

So I inflamed myself, got so angry that with a brave boom I rushed across the hollow. In the middle of the pit, where the pensive frog was sitting, I immediately, with distinct clarity, realized that I was again on the hook. I also tried to twitch once, twice, but I saw Sanka's wide-legged traces from the puddle completely to the side - a shiver went through me.

Eating with a glance Sanka's round face with those red, like a drunkard's eyes, I said:

He said and stopped fighting.

Sanka raged above me. He ran around the hollow, jumped, stood on his hands:

- Aaaaa, got in! Aha-ah-ah-ah, got it! Aha-ah, a monk in new pants! Pants, ha ha ha! Boots, ho-ho-ho!

I clenched my fists and bit my lips to keep from crying. I knew that Sanka was only waiting for me to unstuck, burst into tears, and he would completely tear me to pieces, helpless, trapped.

- Say: "Dear, pretty Sanechka, help me for the sake of Christ!" - I might take you out! Sanka suggested.

- Oh no? Sit until tomorrow.

I clenched my teeth and looked for a stone or some kind of chock. There was nothing. The frog again crawled out of the grass and looked at me with annoyance: they say, the last refuge has been recaptured, you wicked ones!

- Get out of my sight! Go away, bastard, better! Get away! Get away! Get away! I shouted and started throwing handfuls of mud at Sanka.

Sanka left. I wiped my hands on my shirt. Henbane leaves stirred above the bochazhina on the border - Sanka hid in them. From the pit, I can only see this henbane, the top of this burdock, and even part of the road is visible, the one that rises to Manskaya Mountain. Until quite recently, I was happy along this road, admiring the terrain, and I didn’t know any hollow, and I didn’t know any grief. And now I'm stuck in the mud and waiting. What am I waiting for?

Sanka got out of the weeds: apparently, the wasps kicked him out, or maybe he didn’t have enough patience. Eats some grass. A bunch, it must be. He is always chewing on something - a pot-bellied stomach!

- Are we going to sit?

No, I'm about to fall. Legs are already tired.

Sanka stopped chewing on the bundle, carelessness flew off his face: he must be beginning to understand what the matter was heading towards.

- But, you, bastard! he yells at me and quickly pulls off his pants. - Just fall!

I try to stay on my feet, but they are so hurt below the knees that I can hardly feel them. I'm shaking from the cold and shaking from fatigue.

- Headless nag! - crawls into the mud and swears Sanka. - How much I blew it! As soon as he didn’t inflate, he still inflates!

Sanka tries to get close to me from one side, but from the other side - it doesn't work. Viscous. Finally approached, yelled:

- Give your hand! .. Come on! I'll leave! I'm really leaving. You will disappear here with your new pants! ..

I didn't give him a hand. He grabbed me by the collar, pulled, but he, like a stake in soft earth, went into the depths of the pit. He abandoned me, rushed to the shore, with difficulty freeing his legs. His tracks were quickly covered with black goo, bubbles appeared in the tracks, but immediately burst with a thorn and gurgling.

Sanka on the beach. He looks at me, frightened silent. And I look past him. My legs are completely breaking down, the dirt seems to me like a soft bed. I want to dive into it. But I'm still alive to the waist and can think a little - if I fall, I can choke.

- Hey, you, why are you silent? Sanka asks in a whisper.

I don't answer him.

- Hey, dunk! Have you lost your tongue?

“Go get Grandpa, you bastard!” I bite through my teeth. - I'm going to fall now.

Sanka howled, swore like a drunken man, and rushed to pull me out of the mud. He almost pulled off my shirt, started tugging at my arm so that I roared in pain. I was not sucked further. I must have reached hard, rocky ground with my feet, or maybe even frozen ground. Sanya had neither the strength nor the wit to pull me out. He was completely confused and did not know what to do, how to be.

- Go for your grandfather, you bastard!

Sanka, chattering his teeth, put on his pants right on his dirty feet.

- Honey, don't fall! - he shouted in a voice that was not his own and rushed to the castle. - Do not pa-da-a-ay, dear ... Do not pa-da-a-ay! ..

His words came out with a bark, with a sort of barking. It can be seen that Sanka roared from fright. It serves him right! Anger seemed to increase my strength. I raised my head and saw: two people were descending from Manskaya Mountain. Someone is holding someone's hand. Here they disappeared behind the willow trees, in the river. Drink, must be, or wash. There is always all wash in the heat. Such a river - murmuring, fast. No one can get past her.

Or maybe take a rest? Then it's a lost cause. But a head in a white scarf appears from behind a hillock, even at first only a white scarf, and then a forehead, and then a face, and then another person becomes visible - this is a girl. Who is this coming? Who? Yes, you go quickly! ..

I can't take my eyes off the two people walking down the road, exhausted. Whether by her walk, by her handkerchief, or by the gesture of the hand pointing the girl directly at me, but most likely in the field behind the bochazhina, I recognized my grandmother.

- Ba-bonka! Sweetie-ah-ah!.. Oh, baby-ah-ah! I roared, fell into the mud and saw nothing more.

In front of me were the slopes of this damned pit washed out by water. Even the henbane is not visible, even the frog has jumped off somewhere.

- Ba-a-a-ba-a-a! Ba-bonka-ah! Oh, I'm drowning!..

- I'm sick of it, sick of it! Oh, my heart felt! How did you get there, aspid? I heard my grandmother cry above me. - Oh, it was not in vain that you sucked in the pit of your stomach! .. Who told you that? Oh, hurry up!

And still the words reached me, thoughtfully and condemningly spoken by the voice of Tanka Levontievskaya:

“Isn’t it the woodsmen who drove you there?! A board slapped, another, and I felt myself being picked up and, like a rusty nail from a log, slowly pulled. I heard how my boots were taken off, I wanted to shout about this grandmother, but I did not have time. Grandfather pulled me out of his boots, out of the mud. Stretching his legs with difficulty, he backed toward the shore.

- Shoes something! Boots! - Grandma pointed to the pit, where the stirred up mud was swaying, all in bubbles and moldy greenery.

The grandfather waved his hand hopelessly, climbed to the boundary and began to wipe his feet with mugs. And my grandmother, with trembling hands, was picking handfuls of dirt from my new trousers and triumphantly, as if proving to someone, shouted:

- No, no, you can’t deceive my heart! Toko this blood-drinker is beyond the threshold, but I already ached, it ached ... And you, old one, where did you look? Where have you been? What if the child died?

- Didn't die...

I lay with my nose buried in the grass, and wept from self-pity, from resentment. Grandmother undertook to rub my legs with her palms, and Tanya rummaged through my nose with a shovel, swearing at each other with her grandmother:

- Oh, convict Shanka! I’ll tell Levonti’s folder everything! .. - and shook her finger into the distance.

I looked where she was threatening, and noticed the dust already swirling near the lodge. Sanka scratched with all his shoulder blades to the castle, to the river, in order to hide somewhere until better times.

... The fourth day I lie on the stove. My feet are wrapped in an old blanket. Grandmother rubbed them three times a night with infusion of anemone, ant oil, and something else that was stinky and stinky. Now my legs burned and tingled so that it was time to howl, but my grandmother assured me that this was how it should be, which means that my legs are cured, since they feel burning and pain, and she talked about how and whom she cured in her time and what thanks she had for that.

Grandma couldn't catch Sanka. As I guessed, the grandfather takes Sanka out from under the retribution planned by the grandmother. He either dressed up Sanka at night to graze cattle, then he sent him to the forest with some kind of backlog. Grandmother had to scold grandfather and me, but we are accustomed to this, and grandfather only groaned and smoked his cigarette even more, and I giggled into the pillow and winked at grandfather.

My grandmother washed my pants, but my boots remained in the bochazhina. Pity the boots. Pants are also not the same as they were. The material does not shine, the blue has faded, the trousers have faded at once, withered, like the flowers of an old oak tree in a pot. "Oh, Sanka, Sanka!" I sighed. But for some reason, I already felt sorry for Sanka.

- Again rematizny pesters? - my grandmother rose to the step of the stove, hearing my sigh.

- It's hot in here.

“Heat doesn’t break bones. Be patient. And then you'll be discouraged. - And she put her hand to the window, looks out: - And where did he send this adversary to? Look, you are my mother, they are coming at me in alliance! Well, wait, wait, wait!

And then grandfather missed the chicken. This motley hen has been striving for three summers to produce chickens. But the grandmother believed that there were more suitable chickens for this business, bathed the pied in cold water, whipped her with a broom and forced her to lay eggs. Corydalis, however, showed stubborn independence, somewhere quietly laid eggs and, not looking at her grandmother's ban, buried herself and hatched offspring.

Grandmother is looking for Sanka, looking for a chicken and will not find it in any way, but she is no longer interested in scolding me and my grandfather.

In the evening it suddenly lit up in the window, flashed, crackled - it was behind the key, on the river bank, a hut made by hunters in the spring broke out. Our Corydalis fluttered out of the hut with a panicked cackling and, without touching the ground, flew up to the hut, all disheveled, clucking.

An inquiry began, and it soon became clear that Sanka had taken tobacco from his grandfather's trough, smoked in a hut and lit a spark.

“He’ll burn down the castle, he won’t blink,” the grandmother rustled, but her noise was somehow not very strict, menacing - she must have softened because of the chicken.

Today she told her grandfather that Sanka would not hide anymore, would spend the night at home. After dinner, my grandmother went to the village. Cases, she says, she has accumulated a lot there. But she says it like that, to avert her eyes. Of course, she always has enough things to do, but the main thing is that she cannot do without people. Without her in the village, as without a commander in a war, confusion and lack of discipline.

Whether because of the silence, or because my grandmother had made peace with Sanka, I fell asleep and woke up at sunset, all bright and relieved. He fell off the stove and almost screamed. In that same jar with a broken edge, a huge bouquet of scarlet shads with curled petals blazed.

Summer! The full summer has come!

Sanka stood at the lintel, looked at me, spitting at the floor with saliva through a hole between his teeth. He chewed sulfur, and he accumulated a lot of saliva.

- Bite off sulfur?

- Take a bite.

Sanka bit off a piece of brown sulfur. I also began to chew it with a slit.

- Good sulfur! The larch from the rafting was washed ashore, and I dug it up. - Sanka spluttered from the stove and right up to the window. I snorted too, but it hit me on the chest.

- Do your feet hurt?

- Nope. Quite a bit. I'll run tomorrow.

- Kharyuz began to take well on the cobwebs and on the cockroach too. Soon he will go to the mare.

- Take me?

- That's how Katerina Petrovna let you go!

- She's not there!

- Come on!

- I'll ask.

- Well, if you ask, it's another matter. - Sanka turned back, exactly sniffed, then crawled up to my ear: - Will you smoke? Here! I stole yours from my grandfather. - He shows a handful of tobacco, a piece of paper and a piece of a matchbox. - Smoke the world. Heard, no, how I set fire to the hut yesterday? The chicken flew like a tumbler! Scream! Katerina Petrovna is baptized: “Lord, save me! Christ, save!..” Scream!

“Oh, Sanka, Sanka,” forgiving him everything, I repeated my grandmother’s words. - Do not take off your desperate head! ..

- Nishtya-ak! - Sanka dismissed with relief and pulled a splinter out of his heel. A drop of blood rolled out from the cranberries. Sanka spat on his palm and rubbed his heel.

I looked at the gently crimson rings of locusts, at their stamens like hammers protruding from the flowers, I listened to how busy swallows were fussing in the attic, slandering among themselves. One swallow is dissatisfied with something - she talks and talks and screams, like Aunt Avdotya at her girls when they come home from a walk.

In the yard, grandfather pokes his ax and coughs. Behind the palisade of the front garden, a blue flap of the river is visible. I put on my now habitual pants, in which you can sit anywhere and on anything.

- Where are you going? - Sanka severely shook his finger. - It is forbidden! Grandma Katerina did not order!

I did not answer him, but went up to the table, touched the red-hot, but not burning the hand saranok with my hand.

- Look, grandma will scold. Look up! Brave! Sanka muttered. Sanka distracts me, his teeth are talking. “Then you’ll get sick again…

“What a kind grandfather, I got a locust,” I helped Sanka get out of a difficult situation. Little by little, little by little, he leaned out of the hut, pleased with this outcome.

I slowly made my way outside, into the sun. My head was spinning. My legs were still trembling and clicking. Grandfather under a canopy put down the ax with which he hewed the body. He looked at me, as always, in his own way: softly, affectionately. Sanka was cleaning our Hawk with a scraper, and he, you see, was ticklish, and he was trembling with his skin, jerking his leg.

- N-but-oh, you dance with me! Sanka shouted at the gelding and winked at me patronizingly.

How warm it is around, green, noisy and fun! Swifts are circling over the river, falling to meet their shadow on the water. The plates are chirping, the wasps are buzzing, the logs are racing through the water. Soon it will be possible to swim - Lydia the swimmers will come. Maybe they'll let me swim too, the fever hasn't come back, it's just a little dizzy and my legs hurt a little. Well, if they don't let me, I'm slowly taking a bath. With Sanka I wind up on the river and bathe.

Sanka and I led the Hawk to the river. He descended the stony bullock, cautiously spreading his front legs with a bench and slowing himself down with worn, nailed hooves. And he himself wandered into the water, stopped, touched the reflection in the water with his flabby lips, as if kissing the same old, piebald horse, and shook himself off.

We splashed water on him, scraped bare-bones his bent back and scruff, covered with labor blisters. The hawk quivered its skin in joyful languor and stepped over its feet. In the water flocks of minnows scurried about, gathered for the murk.

On the bullock stood grandfather in his loose shirt, barefoot, and the breeze ruffled his hair, stirred his beard and rinsed his unbuttoned shirt on his convex, forked chest. And he was reminiscent of the grandfather of the Russian hero, who took a break during the campaign - he stopped to look at his native land, to breathe in its healing air. Well, how! The hawk is bathing. Grandfather stands on a stone bullock, forgotten, summer in the noise, bustle and boring chores rolled up. Every pichuga, every midge, flea and ant is busy with work. The berries are about to go, then the mushrooms, then the potatoes will ripen, bread, the vegetable garden will trample any of the ridges - you can live in this world! And the jester with them, with pants, and with boots too! I'll live more. I will earn.