Victor Astafiev's last bow (a story within stories). Victor Astafiev - Last bow (a story in stories) A mysterious Pole lived in a guardhouse: Vasya
In the outskirts of our village, in the middle of a grassy clearing, a long log building with a lining of boards stood on stilts. It was called a “mangazina”, which was also adjacent to the importation - here the peasants of our village brought artillery equipment and seeds, it was called the “community fund”. If a house burns down, even if the whole village burns down, the seeds will be intact and, therefore, people will live, because as long as there are seeds, there is arable land in which you can throw them and grow bread, he is a peasant, a master, and not a beggar.
At a distance from the importation there is a guardhouse. She snuggled under the stone scree, in the wind and eternal shadow. Above the guardhouse, high on the ridge, larches and pines grew. Behind her, a key was smoking out of the stones with a blue haze. It spread along the foot of the ridge, marking itself with thick sedge and meadowsweet flowers in the summer, in winter as a quiet park under the snow and a ridge over the bushes crawling from the ridges.
There were two windows in the guardhouse: one near the door and one on the side towards the village. The window leading to the village was filled with cherry blossoms, stingweed, hops and various other things that had proliferated from the spring. The guardhouse had no roof. Hops swaddled her so that she resembled a one-eyed, shaggy head. An overturned bucket stuck out like a pipe from the hop tree; the door opened immediately onto the street and shook off raindrops, hop cones, bird cherry berries, snow and icicles, depending on the time of year and weather.
Vasya the Pole lived in the guardhouse. He was short, had a limp on one leg, and had glasses. The only person in the village who had glasses. They evoked timid politeness not only among us children, but also among adults.
Vasya lived quietly and peacefully, did not harm anyone, but rarely did anyone come to see him. Only the most desperate children furtively looked into the window of the guardhouse and could not see anyone, but they were still afraid of something and ran away screaming.
At the importation point, the children jostled about from early spring until autumn: they played hide and seek, crawled on their bellies under the log entrance to the importation gate, or were buried under the high floor behind the stilts, and even hid in the bottom of the barrel; they were fighting for money, for chicks. The hem was beaten by punks - with bats filled with lead. When the blows echoed loudly under the arches of the importation, a sparrow commotion flared up inside her.
Here, near the importation station, I was introduced to work - I took turns spinning a winnowing machine with the children, and here for the first time in my life I heard music - a violin...
Rarely, very rarely indeed, Vasya the Pole played the violin, that mysterious, out-of-this-world person who inevitably comes into the life of every boy, every girl and remains in the memory forever. It seemed that such a mysterious person was supposed to live in a hut on chicken legs, in a rotten place, under a ridge, and so that the fire in it barely glimmered, and so that an owl laughed drunkenly over the chimney at night, and so that the key smoked behind the hut. and so that no one knows what is going on in the hut and what the owner is thinking about.
I remember Vasya once came to his grandmother and asked her something. Grandma sat Vasya down to drink tea, brought some dry herbs and began to brew it in a cast iron pot. She looked pitifully at Vasya and sighed protractedly.
Vasya didn’t drink tea our way, not with a bite and not from a saucer, he drank straight from a glass, put a teaspoon on the saucer and didn’t drop it on the floor. His glasses sparkled menacingly, his cropped head seemed small, the size of a trouser. His black beard was streaked with gray. And it was as if it was all salted, and the coarse salt had dried it out.
Vasya ate shyly, drank only one glass of tea and, no matter how much his grandmother tried to persuade him, he did not eat anything else, ceremoniously bowed out and carried away a clay pot with herbal infusion in one hand, and a bird cherry stick in the other.
- Lord, Lord! - Grandma sighed, closing the door behind Vasya. “Your lot is hard... A person goes blind.”
In the evening I heard Vasya's violin.
It was early autumn. The delivery gates are wide open. There was a draft in them, stirring the shavings in the bottoms repaired for grain. The smell of rancid, musty grain pulled into the gate. A flock of children, not taken to the arable land because they were too young, played robber detectives. The game progressed sluggishly and soon died out completely. In the fall, let alone in the spring, it somehow plays poorly. One by one, the children scattered to their homes, and I stretched out on the warm log entrance and began to pull out the grains that had sprouted in the cracks. I waited for the carts to rumble on the ridge so that I could intercept our people from the arable land, ride home, and then, lo and behold, they would let me take my horse to water.
Beyond the Yenisei, beyond the Guard Bull, it became dark. In the creek of the Karaulka River, waking up, a large star blinked once or twice and began to glow. It looked like a burdock cone. Behind the ridges, above the mountain tops, a streak of dawn smoldered stubbornly, not like autumn. But then darkness quickly came over her. The dawn was covered up like a luminous window with shutters. Until the morning.
It became quiet and lonely. The guardhouse is not visible. She hid in the shadow of the mountain, merged with the darkness, and only the yellowed leaves shone faintly under the mountain, in a depression washed by a spring. From behind the shadows, bats began to circle, squeak above me, fly into the open gates of the importation, there to catch flies and moths, no less.
I was afraid to breathe loudly, I squeezed myself into a corner of the importation. Along the ridge, above Vasya’s hut, carts rumbled, hooves clattered: people were returning from the fields, from farmsteads, from work, but I still did not dare to peel myself away from the rough logs, and I could not overcome the paralyzing fear that rolled over me. The windows in the village lit up. Smoke from the chimneys reached the Yenisei. In the thickets of the Fokinskaya River, someone was looking for a cow and either called it in a gentle voice, or scolded it with the last words.
In the sky, next to that star that was still shining lonely over the Karaulnaya River, someone threw a piece of the moon, and it, like a bitten half of an apple, did not roll anywhere, barren, orphaned, it became chilly, glassy, and everything around it was glassy. As he fumbled, a shadow fell across the entire clearing, and a shadow, narrow and big-nosed, also fell from me.
Across the Fokinskaya River - just a stone's throw away - the crosses in the cemetery began to turn white, something creaked in the imported goods - the cold crept under the shirt, along the back, under the skin. to the heart. I had already leaned my hands on the logs in order to push off at once, fly all the way to the gate and rattle the latch so that all the dogs in the village would wake up.
But from under the ridge, from the tangles of hops and bird cherry trees, from the deep interior of the earth, music arose and pinned me to the wall.
It became even more terrible: on the left there was a cemetery, in front there was a ridge with a hut, on the right there was a terrible place behind the village, where there were a lot of white bones lying around and where a long time ago, the grandmother said, a man was strangled, behind there was a dark imported plant, behind it there was a village, vegetable gardens covered with thistles, from a distance similar to black clouds of smoke.
I’m alone, alone, there’s such horror all around, and there’s also music – a violin. A very, very lonely violin. And she doesn’t threaten at all. Complains. And there's nothing creepy at all. And there is nothing to be afraid of. Fool, fool! Is it possible to be afraid of music? Fool, fool, I never listened alone, so...
The music flows quieter, more transparent, I hear, and my heart lets go. And this is not music, but a spring flowing from under the mountain. Someone put his lips to the water, drinks, drinks and cannot get drunk - his mouth and inside are so dry.
For some reason I see the Yenisei, quiet in the night, with a raft with a light on it. An unknown man shouts from the raft: “Which village?” - For what? Where is he going? And you can see the convoy on the Yenisei, long and creaking. He also goes somewhere. Dogs are running along the side of the convoy. The horses walk slowly, drowsily. And you can still see a crowd on the bank of the Yenisei, something wet, washed away with mud, village people all along the bank, a grandmother tearing out the hair on her head.
This music speaks about sad things, about illness, it speaks about mine, how I was sick with malaria the whole summer, how scared I was when I stopped hearing and thought that I would forever be deaf, like Alyosha, my cousin, and how she appeared to me in In a feverish dream, my mother put a cold hand with blue nails to her forehead. I screamed and did not hear myself scream.
Beauty has the ability to please the eye. The most ordinary things can evoke admiration due to their beauty. We encounter them every day, as they are around us. Beauty is all that beauty that surrounds a person and lives inside him. We are now talking about nature, music, animals and people. Everything conceals external and internal beauty. You just need to have the ability to see and understand it.
V. Astafiev wrote in his work about a lonely violin singing, which suddenly managed to open up the beauty of the world to the main character, teaching him to see and understand the beautiful. It taught the boy not to be afraid of the world, but to see the good in it.
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The character managed to feel in the music the consonance with his own emotional experiences, his own orphan’s grief, and at the same time, faith in the best. The child was seriously ill, but managed to recover - something similar also seemed to him in the singing of a sad violin. Astafiev wrote: “There was no…evil around,” since the hero’s heart at that moment was filled with goodness.
We see the world both with ordinary eyes and with the eyes of the soul. If the soul is filled with anger and ugliness, then the world seems just as disgusting. If a person is endowed with a pure and bright soul, then he sees only beauty around him. We've all met people who see the good in everything. But there are also many people who are constantly dissatisfied with everything. E. Porter’s book “Pollyanna” is dedicated to this very topic: life can become more joyful, the sun brighter and the world even more beautiful if you strive to find joy and beauty around you, rather than ugliness and sorrow.
Updated: 2017-02-15
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A fairy tale far and near
In the outskirts of our village, in the middle of a grassy clearing, a long log building with a lining of boards stood on stilts. It was called a “mangazina”, which was also adjacent to the importation - here the peasants of our village brought artel equipment and seeds, it was called the “community fund”. If a house burns down, even if the whole village burns down, the seeds will be intact and, therefore, people will live, because as long as there are seeds, there is arable land in which you can throw them and grow bread, he is a peasant, a master, and not a beggar.
At a distance from the importation there is a guardhouse. She snuggled under the stone scree, in the wind and eternal shadow. Above the guardhouse, high on the ridge, larches and pines grew. Behind her, a key was smoking out of the stones with a blue haze. It spread out along the foot of the ridge, marking itself with thick sedge and meadowsweet flowers in the summer, in winter - as a quiet park under the snow and as a path through the bushes crawling from the ridges.
There were two windows in the guardhouse: one near the door and one on the side towards the village. The window leading to the village was filled with cherry blossoms, stingweed, hops and various other things that had proliferated from the spring. The guardhouse had no roof. Hops swaddled her so that she resembled a one-eyed, shaggy head. An overturned bucket stuck out like a pipe from the hop tree; the door opened immediately onto the street and shook off raindrops, hop cones, bird cherry berries, snow and icicles, depending on the time of year and weather.
Vasya the Pole lived in the guardhouse. He was short, had a limp on one leg, and had glasses. The only person in the village who had glasses. They evoked timid politeness not only among us children, but also among adults.
Vasya lived quietly and peacefully, did not harm anyone, but rarely did anyone come to see him. Only the most desperate children furtively looked into the window of the guardhouse and could not see anyone, but they were still afraid of something and ran away screaming.
At the importation point, the children jostled about from early spring until autumn: they played hide and seek, crawled on their bellies under the log entrance to the importation gate, or were buried under the high floor behind the stilts, and even hid in the bottom of the barrel; they were fighting for money, for chicks. The hem was beaten by punks - with bats filled with lead. When the blows echoed loudly under the arches of the importation, a sparrow commotion flared up inside her.
Here, near the importation station, I was introduced to work - I took turns spinning a winnowing machine with the kids, and here for the first time in my life I heard music - a violin...
Rarely, very rarely indeed, Vasya the Pole played the violin, that mysterious, out-of-this-world person who inevitably comes into the life of every boy, every girl and remains in the memory forever. It seemed that such a mysterious person was supposed to live in a hut on chicken legs, in a rotten place, under a ridge, and so that the fire in it barely glimmered, and so that an owl laughed drunkenly over the chimney at night, and so that the key smoked behind the hut, and so that no one... no one knew what was going on in the hut and what the owner was thinking about.
I remember Vasya once came to his grandmother and asked her something. Grandma sat Vasya down to drink tea, brought some dry herbs and began to brew it in a cast iron pot. She looked pitifully at Vasya and sighed protractedly.
Vasya didn’t drink tea our way, not with a bite and not from a saucer, he drank straight from a glass, put a teaspoon on the saucer and didn’t drop it on the floor. His glasses sparkled menacingly, his cropped head seemed small, the size of a trouser. His black beard was streaked with gray. And it was as if it was all salted, and the coarse salt had dried it out.
Vasya ate shyly, drank only one glass of tea and, no matter how much his grandmother tried to persuade him, he did not eat anything else, ceremoniously bowed out and carried away a clay pot with herbal infusion in one hand, and a bird cherry stick in the other.
Lord, Lord! - Grandmother sighed, closing the door behind Vasya. - Your lot is hard... A person goes blind.
In the evening I heard Vasya's violin.
It was early autumn. The gates of importation are wide open. There was a draft in them, stirring the shavings in the bottoms repaired for grain. The smell of rancid, musty grain pulled into the gate. A flock of children, not taken to the arable land because they were too young, played robber detectives. The game progressed sluggishly and soon died out completely. In the fall, let alone in the spring, it somehow plays poorly. One by one, the children scattered to their homes, and I stretched out on the warm log entrance and began to pull out the grains that had sprouted in the cracks. I waited for the carts to rumble on the ridge so that I could intercept our people from the arable land, ride home, and then, lo and behold, they would let me take my horse to water.
Beyond the Yenisei, beyond the Guard Bull, it became dark. In the creek of the Karaulka River, waking up, a large star blinked once or twice and began to glow. It looked like a burdock cone. Behind the ridges, above the mountain tops, a streak of dawn smoldered stubbornly, not like autumn. But then darkness quickly came over her. The dawn was covered up like a luminous window with shutters. Until the morning.
It became quiet and lonely. The guardhouse is not visible. She hid in the shadow of the mountain, merged with the darkness, and only the yellowed leaves shone faintly under the mountain, in a depression washed by a spring. From behind the shadows, bats began to circle, squeak above me, fly into the open gates of the importation, there to catch flies and moths, no less.
I was afraid to breathe loudly, I squeezed myself into a corner of the importation. Along the ridge, above Vasya’s hut, carts rumbled, hooves clattered: people were returning from the fields, from farmsteads, from work, but I still did not dare to peel myself away from the rough logs, and I could not overcome the paralyzing fear that rolled over me. The windows in the village lit up. Smoke from the chimneys reached the Yenisei. In the thickets of the Fokinskaya River, someone was looking for a cow and either called it in a gentle voice, or scolded it with the last words.
In the sky, next to that star that was still shining lonely over the Karaulnaya River, someone threw a piece of the moon, and it, like a bitten half of an apple, did not roll anywhere, barren, orphaned, it became chilly, glassy, and everything around it was glassy. As he fumbled, a shadow fell across the entire clearing, and a shadow, narrow and big-nosed, also fell from me.
Across the Fokino River - just a stone's throw away - the crosses in the cemetery began to turn white, something creaked in the imported goods - the cold crept under the shirt, along the back, under the skin, to the heart. I had already leaned my hands on the logs in order to push off at once, fly all the way to the gate and rattle the latch so that all the dogs in the village would wake up.
But from under the ridge, from the tangles of hops and bird cherry trees, from the deep interior of the earth, music arose and pinned me to the wall.
1(1) In the outskirts of our village there was a long room made of boards on stilts. (2) For the first time in my life I heard music here - violin. (3) Vasya the Pole played it. (4) What did the music tell me? (5) About something very big, (6) What was she complaining about, who was she angry with? (7) I feel anxious and bitter, (8) I want to cry, because I feel sorry for myself, I feel sorry for those who sleep soundly in the cemetery!
(9) Vasya, without ceasing to play, said: “(10) This music was written by a man who was deprived of the most precious thing. (11) If a person has no mother, no father, no homeland, he is not yet an orphan. (12) Everything passes: love, regret about it, the bitterness of loss, even the pain from wounds - but the longing for the homeland never goes away and does not go away. (13) This music was written by my fellow countryman Oginsky. (14) I wrote at the border, saying goodbye to my homeland. (15) He sent her his last greetings. (16) The composer has long been gone from the world, but his pain, his melancholy, his love for his native land, which no one can take away, is still alive.”
(17) “Thank you, uncle,” I whispered. (18) “What, boy?” -(19) “The only thing is that I’m not an orphan.” (20) With ecstatic tears I thanked Vasya, this night world, the sleeping village, and also the sleeping forest behind it. (21) At those moments there was no evil for me. (22) The world was kind and lonely just like me. (23) Music sounded within me about the ineradicable love for the homeland. (24) And the Yenisei, which does not sleep even at night, the silent village behind me, the grasshopper working with its last strength against the autumn in the nettles, it seems to be the only one in the whole world, the grass cast as if from metal - this was my homeland.
(25)...Many years have passed. (26) And then one day at the end of the war I stood near the cannons in a destroyed Polish city. (27) There was a smell of burning and dust all around. (28)1 suddenly, in the house across the street from me, the sounds of an organ were heard. (29) This music stirred up the memories. (30) Once I wanted to die from incomprehensible sadness and delight after I listened to Oginsky’s polonaise, (31) But now the same music that I listened to in childhood was refracted in me and petrified, especially that part of it, from which I once cried. (32) The music, just like on that distant night, grabbed the throat, but did not squeeze out tears, did not sprout pity. (33) She called somewhere, forced them to do something so that these fires would go out, so that people would not huddle in burning ruins, so that the sky would not throw up explosions. (34) Music ruled over the city, numb with grief, the same music that, like the sigh of his land, was kept in the heart of a man who had never seen his homeland and had been yearning for it all his life. (According to V. Astafiev)
Why does a person feel love for his homeland forever? It is the problem of homesickness that he addresses in his text. V. Astafiev.
This moral problem is one of those that is relevant today. A person cannot live outside his homeland. Remembering his childhood, the author talks about a person he knows who “lost what was most dear to him” and dedicated his music to his native land. V. Astafiev convinces that if a person has no mother, no father, but has a homeland, he is not yet an orphan.
One cannot but agree with the author that truly noble people can be called those who, despite life’s adversities, maintain an invisible connection with their small homeland and a respectful attitude towards their past. For example, when the Nazis, having occupied France, invited General Denikin, who fought against the Red Army during the Civil War, to cooperate with them against Soviet power, he refused, because his homeland was more valuable to him than political differences.
The author’s correctness is also confirmed by the experience of fiction. The small homeland is the cradle of childhood, the place where a person is formed as an individual, where the foundations of moral education are laid. And if he remembers this, then neither time, nor fashion, nor the people around him will change him. Thus, Tatyana Larina, the heroine of the novel “Eugene Onegin” in verse by A.S. Pushkin, after marriage becomes a brilliant society lady, but behind external changes she is easily recognizable as the former provincial young lady who is ready to give everything “for a shelf of books, for a lovely garden.” "
So, a person experiences love for his homeland forever if he maintains his blood connection with his home, with his childhood. Tanya D., 11th grade
Composition
“The music grabbed you by the throat, but did not squeeze out tears, did not sprout pity.” In the proposed text V. Astafiev makes us think about the problem of the impact of art on humans.
The problem raised by the author remains relevant at all times and concerns people of different ages and professions. It is one of the “eternal” ones, because the desire to create is characteristic of every person. The author, telling his story, explains what music means to him. But also tries to convey to readers the importance of music for everyone. Convinces that music is like a key that unlocks tender or sad memories in people.
I completely agree with the author's opinion. Of course, art influences a person: it inspires him, reveals hidden feelings in him. An example of the influence of art on a person is the work of A.I. Kuprin “Garnet Bracelet”. For Princess Vera, the main character, music becomes a consolation after the death of Zheltkov, reveals the sensuality of her soul, and transforms the heroine internally.
On the other hand, in A. Conan Doyle’s novel “Sherlock Holmes,” the main character always picked up the violin in order to concentrate. The music flowing from under the bow helped him make the right decision and reveal the secret.
So, to paraphrase V. Astafiev (“Music reigned in the heart of man”), we can say that music living in the hearts is capable of working miracles with a person. Anya K., 11th grade
What role does true art play?in a person's life? Whichcan have an impactmusic per person? Exactly the problem the impact of music on the human soulraises in his text V.P.Astafiev.
Author explains the problem with an exampletwo incidents from the life of the narrator who recalls feelings,awakened in his soul under the influence of music. The writer talks abouta boy who heard music for the first time and experienced feelings of pity for himself and other people, longing for his homeland.
Pondering the problemthe influence of music on a person, V.P. Astafiev compares the feelings experienced by the hero in childhood with the feelings during the war, when the narrator hears the same music.The author draws attention to the fact thatwhat is music nowhas a different effectat the listener: “she called somewhere,” “forced her to do something...”
Victor Astafiev
FINAL BOW
(A story within stories)
BOOK ONE
A fairy tale far and near
In the outskirts of our village, in the middle of a grassy clearing, a long log building with a lining of boards stood on stilts. It was called a “mangazina”, which was also adjacent to the importation - here the peasants of our village brought artel equipment and seeds, it was called the “community fund”. If a house burns down, even if the whole village burns down, the seeds will be intact and, therefore, people will live, because as long as there are seeds, there is arable land in which you can throw them and grow bread, he is a peasant, a master, and not a beggar.
At a distance from the importation there is a guardhouse. She snuggled under the stone scree, in the wind and eternal shadow. Above the guardhouse, high on the ridge, larches and pines grew. Behind her, a key was smoking out of the stones with a blue haze. It spread out along the foot of the ridge, marking itself with thick sedge and meadowsweet flowers in the summer, in winter - as a quiet park under the snow and as a path through the bushes crawling from the ridges.
There were two windows in the guardhouse: one near the door and one on the side towards the village. The window leading to the village was filled with cherry blossoms, stingweed, hops and various other things that had proliferated from the spring. The guardhouse had no roof. Hops swaddled her so that she resembled a one-eyed, shaggy head. An overturned bucket stuck out like a pipe from the hop tree; the door opened immediately onto the street and shook off raindrops, hop cones, bird cherry berries, snow and icicles, depending on the time of year and weather.
Vasya the Pole lived in the guardhouse. He was short, had a limp on one leg, and had glasses. The only person in the village who had glasses. They evoked timid politeness not only among us children, but also among adults.
Vasya lived quietly and peacefully, did not harm anyone, but rarely did anyone come to see him. Only the most desperate children furtively looked into the window of the guardhouse and could not see anyone, but they were still afraid of something and ran away screaming.
At the importation point, the children jostled about from early spring until autumn: they played hide and seek, crawled on their bellies under the log entrance to the importation gate, or were buried under the high floor behind the stilts, and even hid in the bottom of the barrel; they were fighting for money, for chicks. The hem was beaten by punks - with bats filled with lead. When the blows echoed loudly under the arches of the importation, a sparrow commotion flared up inside her.
Here, near the importation station, I was introduced to work - I took turns spinning a winnowing machine with the kids, and here for the first time in my life I heard music - a violin...
Rarely, very rarely indeed, Vasya the Pole played the violin, that mysterious, out-of-this-world person who inevitably comes into the life of every boy, every girl and remains in the memory forever. It seemed that such a mysterious person was supposed to live in a hut on chicken legs, in a rotten place, under a ridge, and so that the fire in it barely glimmered, and so that an owl laughed drunkenly over the chimney at night, and so that the key smoked behind the hut, and so that no one... no one knew what was going on in the hut and what the owner was thinking about.
I remember Vasya once came to his grandmother and asked her something. Grandma sat Vasya down to drink tea, brought some dry herbs and began to brew it in a cast iron pot. She looked pitifully at Vasya and sighed protractedly.
Vasya didn’t drink tea our way, not with a bite and not from a saucer, he drank straight from a glass, put a teaspoon on the saucer and didn’t drop it on the floor. His glasses sparkled menacingly, his cropped head seemed small, the size of a trouser. His black beard was streaked with gray. And it was as if it was all salted, and the coarse salt had dried it out.
Vasya ate shyly, drank only one glass of tea and, no matter how much his grandmother tried to persuade him, he did not eat anything else, ceremoniously bowed out and carried away a clay pot with herbal infusion in one hand, and a bird cherry stick in the other.
Lord, Lord! - Grandmother sighed, closing the door behind Vasya. - Your lot is hard... A person goes blind.
In the evening I heard Vasya's violin.
It was early autumn. The gates of importation are wide open. There was a draft in them, stirring the shavings in the bottoms repaired for grain. The smell of rancid, musty grain pulled into the gate. A flock of children, not taken to the arable land because they were too young, played robber detectives. The game progressed sluggishly and soon died out completely. In the fall, let alone in the spring, it somehow plays poorly. One by one, the children scattered to their homes, and I stretched out on the warm log entrance and began to pull out the grains that had sprouted in the cracks. I waited for the carts to rumble on the ridge so that I could intercept our people from the arable land, ride home, and then, lo and behold, they would let me take my horse to water.
Beyond the Yenisei, beyond the Guard Bull, it became dark. In the creek of the Karaulka River, waking up, a large star blinked once or twice and began to glow. It looked like a burdock cone. Behind the ridges, above the mountain tops, a streak of dawn smoldered stubbornly, not like autumn. But then darkness quickly came over her. The dawn was covered up like a luminous window with shutters. Until the morning.
It became quiet and lonely. The guardhouse is not visible. She hid in the shadow of the mountain, merged with the darkness, and only the yellowed leaves shone faintly under the mountain, in a depression washed by a spring. From behind the shadows, bats began to circle, squeak above me, fly into the open gates of the importation, there to catch flies and moths, no less.
I was afraid to breathe loudly, I squeezed myself into a corner of the importation. Along the ridge, above Vasya’s hut, carts rumbled, hooves clattered: people were returning from the fields, from farmsteads, from work, but I still did not dare to peel myself away from the rough logs, and I could not overcome the paralyzing fear that rolled over me. The windows in the village lit up. Smoke from the chimneys reached the Yenisei. In the thickets of the Fokinskaya River, someone was looking for a cow and either called it in a gentle voice, or scolded it with the last words.
In the sky, next to that star that was still shining lonely over the Karaulnaya River, someone threw a piece of the moon, and it, like a bitten half of an apple, did not roll anywhere, barren, orphaned, it became chilly, glassy, and everything around it was glassy. As he fumbled, a shadow fell across the entire clearing, and a shadow, narrow and big-nosed, also fell from me.
Across the Fokino River - just a stone's throw away - the crosses in the cemetery began to turn white, something creaked in the imported goods - the cold crept under the shirt, along the back, under the skin, to the heart. I had already leaned my hands on the logs in order to push off at once, fly all the way to the gate and rattle the latch so that all the dogs in the village would wake up.
But from under the ridge, from the tangles of hops and bird cherry trees, from the deep interior of the earth, music arose and pinned me to the wall.
It became even more terrible: on the left there was a cemetery, in front there was a ridge with a hut, on the right there was a terrible place behind the village, where there were a lot of white bones lying around and where a long time ago, the grandmother said, a man was strangled, behind there was a dark imported plant, behind it there was a village, vegetable gardens covered with thistles, from a distance similar to black clouds of smoke.
