How the novel “Darkness Falls on the Old Steps” works: Oleg Lekmanov tells. Darkness falls on the old steps read online - Alexander Chudakov Darkness falls on the old steps read

Alexander Chudakov

Darkness falls on the old steps

1. Armwrestling in Chebachinsk

Grandfather was very strong. When he, in his faded shirt with the sleeves turned up high, was working in the garden or whittling a handle for a shovel (when resting, he always whittled cuttings; in the corner of the barn there was a supply of them for decades), Anton said to himself something like: “Balls muscles rolled under his skin” (Anton liked to put it bookishly). But even now, when my grandfather was over ninety, when he hardly reached out of bed to take a glass from the bedside table, a round ball rolled familiarly under the rolled up sleeve of his undershirt, and Anton grinned.

Are you laughing? - said the grandfather. -Have I become weak? He became old, but he was young before. Why don’t you tell me, like the hero of your tramp writer: “What, are you dying?” And I would answer: “Yes, I’m dying!”

And before Anton’s eyes that old hand from the past floated up as he unbent nails or roofing iron with his fingers. And even more clearly - this hand is on the edge festive table with a tablecloth and dishes shifted - could it really be more than thirty years ago?

Yes, it was at the wedding of Pereplyotkin’s son, who had just returned from the war. On one side of the table sat the blacksmith Kuzma Pereplyotkin himself, and from him, smiling in embarrassment, but not in surprise, the slaughterhouse fighter Bondarenko, whose hand had just been pinned to the tablecloth by the blacksmith in a competition that is now called arm wrestling, but was not called anything then, walked away from him. There was no need to be surprised: in the town of Chebachinsk there was no person whose hand Perepletkin could not lay. They said that earlier his younger brother, who died in the camps and worked as a hammerman in his forge, could have done the same thing.

Grandfather carefully hung on the back of the chair a black English Boston jacket, left over from a three-piece suit, sewn before the first war, twice faced, but still looking good (it was incomprehensible: even my mother did not exist in the world yet, and grandfather was already sporting this jacket), and rolled up the sleeve of a white cambric shirt, the last of two dozen exported from Vilna in 1915. He firmly placed his elbow on the table, closed his own with his opponent’s palm, and it immediately sank in the blacksmith’s huge, clawed hand.

One hand is black, with ingrained scale, all intertwined not with human, but with some kind of oxen veins (“The veins swelled like ropes on his hands,” Anton thought habitually). The other was twice as thin, white, and only Anton knew that under the skin in the depths the bluish veins were slightly visible, he remembered these hands better than his mother’s. And only Anton knew the iron hardness of this hand, its fingers, without a key unscrewing the nuts from the cart wheels. Only one other person had such strong fingers - my grandfather’s second daughter, Aunt Tanya. Finding herself in exile during the war (as a Czech woman - a member of the family of a traitor to the motherland) in a remote village with three young children, she worked on a farm as a milkmaid. Electric milking was unheard of then, and there were months when she hand-milked twenty cows a day - twice each. Anton’s Moscow friend, a meat and milk specialist, said that these were all fairy tales, this was impossible, but it was true. Aunt Tanya’s fingers were all twisted, but their grip remained steely; when a neighbor, greeting him, jokingly squeezed her hand tightly, she responded by squeezing his hand so hard that it became swollen and hurt for a week.

The guests had already drunk the first few bottles of moonshine, and there was noise.

Come on, proletarian against the intelligentsia!

Is this Pereplyotkin the proletarian?

Perepletkin - Anton knew this - was from a family of exiled kulaks.

Well, Lvovich also found the Soviet intelligentsia.

This is their grandmother from the nobility. And he is one of the priests.

A volunteer judge checked that the elbows were on the same line. Let's start.

The ball from grandfather’s elbow rolled first somewhere deep into his rolled up sleeve, then rolled back a little and stopped. The blacksmith's ropes emerged from under the skin. Grandfather's ball stretched out a little and became like a huge egg (“ostrich egg,” thought the educated boy Anton). The blacksmith's ropes stood out more strongly, and it became clear that they were knotted. The grandfather's hand began to slowly bend towards the table. For those who, like Anton, stood to the right of Pereplyotkin, his hand completely covered his grandfather’s hand.

Kuzma, Kuzma! - they shouted from there.

Delights are premature,” Anton recognized the creaky voice of Professor Resenkampf.

Grandfather's hand stopped bowing. Perepletkin looked surprised. Apparently he pushed hard, because another rope swelled up - on his forehead.

For those who are sensitive to classical literature, we recommend reading the book “Darkness Falls on the Old Steps,” which he wrote famous writer Alexander Chudakov. It is not simple interesting novel, but complete idyll, nostalgia, forgiveness and unconditional love to people. The book is narrated from the perspective of the main character, which gives us the opportunity to experience his entire story for ourselves and get to know all the characters in the work better. This autobiographical book is based on the hero's memories of his childhood and the story of his amazing and unique family.

Alexander Chudakov – Russian writer, literary critic and professor of philological sciences. He began his prose work with the book “Darkness Falls on the Old Steps.” This novel won the Booker Prize.

The events in the novel take place in the city of Chebachinsk in Kazakhstan, where in Soviet times political exiles were sent during the period of Stalinist repression. It is for this reason that in this small provincial town there were a lot of aristocrats and intelligentsia.

The main character of the book “Darkness Falls on the Old Steps” is the scientist Anton Stremoukhov, who in the late 60s came to Chebachinsk to visit his grandfather’s grave. His grandfather was a hereditary priest, and his grandmother was a true aristocrat. Grandfather and grandmother lived a rather harsh life, but despite the exile and hunger they had to face, they were able to raise their children and grandchildren. The city completely immersed Anton in the memories of his past: school, friends and neighbors.

Alexander Chudakov consistently and smoothly tells us fascinating stories. These are life stories in which there is comedy, drama and tragedy, but everything is united by a nostalgic coloring. The author also reveals to us everyday picture pre-war life. The book is full of stories about the Patriotic War and partisan movements. Also in the work we can find a lot of educational information at a time when young Anton receives a lot of information about the world around him from his relatives, acquaintances, scientists and engineers. Anton shares with us the secrets of farming that he has remembered since childhood. At the same time, we can learn a lot of interesting things, for example, how to make hay, grow potatoes, make soap, make a candle, extract sugar from beets and many other useful things. Of course, nowadays all this can be easily purchased in any store, but for that time it was vital knowledge.

The book “Darkness Falls on the Old Steps” is written in the form of a story real person, sitting next to him and remembering his life, so reading the novel is very easy and exciting. The work is historical in nature, therefore main character constantly fades into the background. But this does not spoil the work at all, but on the contrary gives it a special atmosphere, leaving bright impressions.

On our literary website you can download the book “A Darkness Falls on the Old Steps” by Alexander Chudakov for free in formats suitable for different devices - epub, fb2, txt, rtf. Do you like to read books and always keep up with new releases? We have big choice books of various genres: classics, modern fiction, literature on psychology and children's publications. In addition, we offer interesting and educational articles for aspiring writers and all those who want to learn how to write beautifully. Each of our visitors will be able to find something useful and exciting for themselves.

Oleg Lekmanov

Doctor of Philology, professor, teaches at the National Research University Higher School of Economics. Author of books about Mandelstam, Yesenin (together with Mikhail Sverdlov) and Russian Acmeism, one of the compilers full meeting works of Nikolai Oleinikov. Commentator on the works of Kataev, Pasternak, Bunin and Koval.

Alexander Pavlovich Chudakov (1938–2005) graduated from the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University and over time became one of the best humanities scholars of his generation. He wrote several wonderful books, without which it is impossible to imagine philological science, - first of all, a series of books about Chekhov, a collection of articles about the objective world in literature, began to work on a total commentary on “Eugene Onegin”. We also note Chudakov’s memoirs and dialogues with teachers in science: Viktor Vinogradov, Lydia Ginzburg, Mikhail Bakhtin,.

He took up prose quite late. Chudakov's only completed prose work is the novel “Darkness Falls on the Old Steps.” The story of its publication is not without drama: after several refusals, N.B. Ivanov agreed to publish the novel in the magazine “Znamya”. In 2001, “Darkness Falls on the Old Steps” was published in publishing house"Olma-press" was included in the Booker shortlist, but then was left without an award. Justice triumphed in 2011, when the novel received the Booker Booker Prize for best book decades. Today I want to act not in the role of a critic praising the novel (its very choice as a work for analysis speaks volumes about my assessment), but in the role of a philologist, that is, I will try to offer a key to the text that allows us to look at the entire novel as a single whole.

Let this short fragment from a television interview with Alexander Pavlovich serve as the starting point for my reasoning: “We exist in a chaotic and torn world. We must resist this world chaos and absurdity to the best of our ability. Resist and try to bring into the world, if not harmony, then at least clarity, precision and a certain amount of rationalism.” So the author depicts in his novel people trying to contrast chaos and absurdity with order, meaningfulness and structure (a word from the novel itself).

But since the action of the book takes place not in airless space, but in a very specific historical setting (the outskirts of the Soviet empire, the time since the end of the Great Patriotic War to the mid-1980s), then chaos is clearly represented in it by very specific forces. The revolution and everything that followed it brought chaos and absurdity into people's lives. And order, clarity and rationality were the basis of the old, pre-revolutionary life.

At the center of the novel are two heroes. The first is the grandfather, the work begins with his appearance, and ends with the story of how he died. Moreover, a significant motivic echo of the beginning is inserted into the ending of the novel. In the beginning: “But even now, when my grandfather was over ninety, when he hardly reached out of bed to take a glass from the bedside table, a round ball rolled familiarly under the rolled up sleeve of his undershirt, and Anton grinned.” At the end of the novel: “And Anton vividly imagined how a round ball rolled under his rolled up sleeve and cried for the first time.”

It is not without reason that this motif that connects the beginning and ending of the novel turns out to be a motif of power. Grandfather, like a hero (remember the proverb “And there is only one warrior in the field”), consciously contrasts chaos and absurdity Soviet world a reasonable and structured structure of the world of your family. Let us present a large one, but necessary even for summary Our concept is a quote from Chudakov’s novel: “Grandfather knew two worlds. The first is his youth and maturity. It was structured simply and clearly: a person worked, received accordingly for his work and could buy himself a home, an item, food without lists, coupons, cards, or queues. This objective world disappeared, but the grandfather learned to recreate its likeness with knowledge, ingenuity and incredible effort of his own and his family, because no revolution can change the laws of the birth and life of things and plants. But she can remake the intangible human world, and she did it. The system of the pre-established hierarchy of values collapsed, the country with a centuries-old history began to live according to recently invented norms; what was previously called lawlessness became law. But the old world remained in his soul, and the new one did not affect it. Old world felt to him as more real, his grandfather continued his daily dialogue with his spiritual and secular writers, with his seminary mentors, with friends, father, brothers, although he never saw any of them again. The new world was unreal for him - he could not comprehend either with reason or feeling how all this could be born and strengthened so quickly, and he had no doubt: the kingdom of phantoms would disappear overnight, just as it arose, only this hour would not come soon, and they together they wondered whether Anton would live.”

Alexander Chudakov

The second character placed at the center of the novel, although not as prominently as the grandfather, is the narrator himself, Anton Stremoukhov. He received from his grandfather a love of clarity, rationalism and structure; he also struggles with the chaos and absurdity of the surrounding world (not only the Soviet one), but with the same success as his grandfather?

Unfortunately no. He doesn't find common language with most of his classmates and classmates at the university, women leave him because of his almost manic love for the reasonable, rational structure of the world. He cannot convey his “mania for the best object-organization of the world” (quote from the novel) to his own granddaughter (an important negative parallel to Anton’s relationship with his grandfather): “A child of the world of the absurd, she, nevertheless, did not like absurdist poetry, mind you, which went well with with her young, pragmatic mind. But with this same mind somehow strangely coexisted indifference to positive information<…>The world of my childhood was separated from my granddaughter by the same half-century that my grandfathers were from me. And just as his - without radio, electricity, airplanes - was strange and acutely curious to me, so mine - without television and without tape recorders, with gramophones, smoking steam locomotives and bulls - it seemed that at least with its exoticism it should be interesting to her. But she didn’t need him.”

Well, the second part of the novel is written about defeat modern man facing the absurdity and chaos of the modern world? No, because the figure of its author is very important for understanding the meaning of the entire work.

In the novel, Anton sometimes merges with the author to the point of indistinguishability (much has been written about the conspicuous frequent transitions from the first person of the novel to the third and back again). However, in the most important way, the hero and the author are not alike. Anton was unable to fully embody himself in words (just as he was unable to transfer from the history department to the philology department, although he strived for this). His book projects are described in the novel as follows: “This was the fourth in a series of books he had planned for the turn of the century; he said: I am studying the history of Russia before the October Revolution. The first book in the series - his dissertation - was not published; it required alterations and Lenin's assessments. Friends also persuaded me. “What does it cost you? Insert two or three quotes at the beginning of each chapter. Next comes your text! It seemed to Anton that then the text was desecrated, the reader would no longer believe the author. The book didn't work. The second and third books lay in sketches and materials - he already said: half a meter; gradually he grew colder towards them. But for some reason I hoped to publish the fourth book.”

However, Alexander Pavlovich Chudakov, unlike his own hero, his books in Soviet time published That is, with his philological books he was able to really resist chaos, disorganization and absurdity; these books were a wonderful example of clear and structurally constructed texts. But you can also look at the novel “Darkness Falls on the Old Steps” as an attempt to curb the chaos of memories and imagine harmonious and clear pictures from the life of the people and objects that surrounded the author in childhood.

At the same time, the averageness and boring sameness that dominates modern world, Chudakov in his novel contrasts the uniqueness of almost every object he describes. In this regard, he turns out to be a student not of Chekhov, but rather of Gogol, with his love for unusual objects that break out of everyday life (this is how Chudakov talks about the author’s objective world “ Dead souls"in the philological article about him).

And here, at the very end of our conversation, it would be appropriate to comment on the title of the eccentric novel. It is taken from early poem Alexandra Blok:

False day shadows are running.
The bell's call is high and clear.
The church steps are illuminated,
Their stone is alive - and awaits your steps.

You will pass here, touch a cold stone,
Dressed in the terrible holiness of the ages,
And maybe you'll drop a flower of spring
Here, in this darkness, near the strict images.

Indistinct pink shadows grow,
The bell's call is high and clear,
The darkness falls on the old steps...
I am illuminated - I am waiting for your steps.

That is, the stone of the steps of the past, an object dead, abandoned, in oblivion, is waiting for a person to come, and then the sound of echoing steps will be heard, and this stone will come to life. Well, you and I know for sure: if the grandfather in the novel managed to defeat chaos, and Anton lost the fight against him, the author of the novel, Alexander Pavlovich Chudakov, undoubtedly won his battle with absurdity and chaos.

* * *

1. Armwrestling in Chebachinsk

Grandfather was very strong. When he, in his faded shirt with the sleeves turned up high, was working in the garden or whittling a handle for a shovel (while resting, he always whittled cuttings; in the corner of the barn there was a supply of them for decades), Anton said to himself something like: “Balls of muscles rolled under his skin” (Anton liked to put it bookishly). But even now, when my grandfather was over ninety, when he hardly reached out of bed to take a glass from the bedside table, a round ball rolled familiarly under the rolled up sleeve of his undershirt, and Anton grinned.

-Are you laughing? - said the grandfather. – Have I become weak? He became old, but he was young before. Why don’t you tell me, like the hero of your tramp writer: “What, are you dying?” And I would answer: “Yes, I’m dying!”

And before Anton’s eyes that old hand from the past floated up as he unbent nails or roofing iron with his fingers. And even more clearly - this hand is on the edge of the festive table with a tablecloth and dishes pushed together - could it really be more than thirty years ago?

One hand is black, with ingrained scale, all intertwined not with human, but with some kind of oxen (“The veins swelled up like ropes on his hands,” Anton thought habitually). The other was twice as thin, white, and that blueish veins were slightly visible under the skin in the depths, only Anton knew, who remembered these hands better than his mother’s. And only Anton knew the iron hardness of this hand, its fingers, without a key unscrewing the nuts from the cart wheels. Only one other person had such strong fingers – my grandfather’s second daughter, Aunt Tanya. Finding herself in exile during the war (as a Czech woman, a member of the family of a traitor to the motherland) in a remote village with three young children, she worked on a farm as a milkmaid. Electric milking was unheard of at that time, and there were months when she milked twenty cows a day by hand, twice each.

Anton’s Moscow friend, a meat and milk specialist, said that these were all fairy tales, this was impossible, but it was true. Aunt Tanya’s fingers were all twisted, but their grip remained steely; when a neighbor, greeting him, jokingly squeezed her hand tightly, she responded by squeezing his hand so hard that it became swollen and hurt for a week.

The guests had already drunk the first few bottles of moonshine, and there was noise.

- Come on, proletarian against the intelligentsia!

– Is this Pereplyotkin the proletarian?

Pereplyotkin - Anton knew this - was from a family of exiled kulaks.

– Well, Lvovich also found the Soviet intelligentsia.

- This is their grandmother from the nobility. And he is one of the priests.

A volunteer judge checked that the elbows were on the same line. Let's start.

- Kuzma, Kuzma! - they shouted from there.

“Delight is premature,” Anton recognized the creaky voice of Professor Resenkampf.

Grandfather's hand stopped bowing. Perepletkin looked surprised. Apparently he pushed hard, because another rope swelled up - on his forehead.

The grandfather's palm began to slowly rise - again, again, and now both hands stood vertically again, as if these minutes had never happened, this swollen vein on the blacksmith's forehead, this perspiration on the grandfather's forehead.

The hands vibrated subtly, like a double mechanical lever connected to some powerful motor. Here and there. Here - there. A little here again. A little there. And again stillness, and only a barely noticeable vibration.

The double lever suddenly came to life. And he began to bow again. But grandfather’s hand was now on top! However, when it was just a trifle away from the tabletop, the lever suddenly moved back. And froze for a long time in a vertical position.

- Draw, draw! - they shouted first from one and then from the other side of the table. - Draw!

“Grandfather,” Anton said, handing him a glass of water, “and then, at the wedding, after the war, you could have put Pereplyotkin in?”

- Perhaps.

- So what?..

- For what. For him, this is professional pride. Why put a person in an awkward position.

The other day, when my grandfather was in the hospital, before a doctor and a retinue of students visited him, he took off his pectoral cross and hid it in the nightstand. He crossed himself twice and, looking at Anton, smiled faintly. Grandfather's brother, Fr. Pavel said that in his youth he liked to boast about his strength. They are unloading the rye - he will move the worker aside, put his shoulder under a five-pound sack, the other under a second one of the same kind, and walk, without bending, to the barn. No, it was impossible to imagine my grandfather being so boastful.

My grandfather despised any kind of gymnastics, seeing no benefit in it either for himself or for the household; It’s better to split three or four logs in the morning and throw in the manure. My father agreed with him, but summed up the scientific basis: no gymnastics provides such a versatile load as chopping wood - all muscle groups work. Having read a lot of brochures, Anton said: experts believe that with physical labor Not all muscles are occupied, and after any work you need to do more gymnastics. Grandfather and father laughed together: “If only we could put these specialists at the bottom of a trench or on top of a haystack for half a day! Ask Vasily Illarionovich - he lived in the mines for twenty years next to the workers' barracks, everything there is in public - has he seen at least one miner doing exercises after a shift? Vasily Illarionovich has never seen such a miner.

- Grandfather, well, Pereplyotkin is a blacksmith. Where did you get so much strength from?

- You see. I come from a family of priests, hereditary, to Peter the Great, and even further.

- So what?

– And the fact that – as your Darwin would say – is artificial selection.

When admitting to the theological seminary, there was an unspoken rule: the weak and short in stature should not be accepted. The boys were brought by the fathers and the fathers were also looked at. Those who were to bring the word of God to people must be beautiful, tall, strong people. In addition, they often have a bass or baritone voice – this is also an important point. They selected such people. And - a thousand years, since the time of St. Vladimir.

Yes, and oh. Pavel, Archpriest of Gorkovsky cathedral, and another brother of my grandfather, who was a priest in Vilnius, and another brother, a priest in Zvenigorod - they were all tall, strong people. O. Pavel served ten years in the Mordovian camps, worked there in logging, and even now, at ninety years old, was healthy and vigorous. "Pop's bone!" - Anton’s father said, sitting down to smoke, when his grandfather continued to slowly and somehow even silently destroy birch logs with a cleaver. Yes, there was a grandfather stronger than father, and yet my father was not weak - wiry, hardy, one of the peasants who lived on the same farm (in which, however, there was still a remnant of noble blood and a dog's eyebrow), who grew up on Tver rye bread, was inferior to anyone either in mowing or skidding the forest. And for years he was half his age, and then, after the war, my grandfather was over seventy, he was dark brown-haired, and gray hair was just barely visible in his thick hair. And Aunt Tamara, even before her death, at ninety, was like a raven’s wing.

Grandfather was never sick. But two years ago, when youngest daughter, Anton's mother, moved to Moscow, his fingers suddenly began to turn black right leg. My grandmother and older daughters persuaded me to go to the clinic. But in Lately The grandfather listened only to the youngest, she was not there, he did not go to the doctor - at ninety-three it is stupid to go to the doctors, and he stopped showing his leg, saying that everything had passed.

But nothing passed, and when the grandfather finally showed his leg, everyone gasped: the blackness reached the middle of the shin. If they had captured him in time, it would have been possible to limit himself to amputation of the fingers. Now I had to cut off my leg at the knee.

Grandfather did not learn to walk on crutches and ended up lying down; knocked out of the half-century rhythm of all-day work in the garden, in the yard, he became sad and weak, and became nervous. He got angry when grandma brought breakfast to bed and moved, grabbing chairs, to the table. The grandmother, out of forgetfulness, served two felt boots. The grandfather shouted at her - this is how Anton learned that his grandfather could scream. The grandmother timidly stuffed the second felt boot under the bed, but at lunch and dinner it all started again. For some reason, they didn’t immediately realize to remove the second felt boot.

In the last month, the grandfather became completely weak and ordered to write to all the children and grandchildren to come say goodbye and “at the same time resolve some inheritance issues” - this formulation, said granddaughter Ira, who wrote letters under his dictation, was repeated in all the messages.

“Just like in the story of the famous Siberian writer “The Last Date,” she said. The librarian at the district library, Ira, kept an eye on modern literature, but had trouble remembering the names of the authors, complaining: “There are so many of them.”

Anton was amazed when he read in his grandfather’s letter about inheritance issues. What inheritance?

A cabinet with a hundred books? A hundred-year-old, still from Vilnius, sofa, which the grandmother called a chaise longue? True, there was a house. But it was old and shabby. Who needs it?

But Anton was wrong. Of those who lived in Chebachinsk, three claimed the inheritance.

2. Applicants for inheritance

He did not recognize his aunt Tatyana Leonidovna in the old woman who met him on the platform. “The years have left an indelible imprint on her face,” thought Anton.

Among her grandfather's five daughters, Tatyana was considered the most beautiful. She married the railway engineer Tataev, an honest and ardent man, before anyone else. In the middle of the war, he punched the head of the movement in the face. Aunt Tanya never specified why, saying only: “well, it was a scoundrel.”

Tataev was stripped of his armor and sent to the front. He ended up in a searchlight team and one night he mistakenly illuminated his own plane rather than the enemy’s. The Smershevites did not sleep - he was arrested right there, he spent the night in their arrest dugout, and in the morning he was shot, accusing him of deliberate subversive actions against the Red Army. Having first heard this story in the fifth grade, Anton could not understand how it was possible to invent such nonsense, that a man, being in the disposition of our troops, among his own, who would immediately seize him, would do such a stupid thing. But the listeners - two soldiers of the Great Patriotic War - were not at all surprised. It’s true that their remarks were “scheduled?”, “didn’t get to the numbers?” - were even more incomprehensible, but Anton never asked questions and, although no one warned him, he never recounted conversations at home - maybe that’s why they spoke without hesitation in front of him. Or they thought that he still didn’t understand much. And there is only one room.

Soon after Tataev’s execution, his wife and children: Vovka, six years old, Kolka, four, and Katka, two and a half, were sent to a transit prison in the Kazakh city of Akmolinsk; She waited four months for the verdict and was sent to the Smorodinovka state farm in the Akmola region, where they traveled by passing cars, carts, oxen, on foot, splashing in felt boots through the April puddles, there were no other shoes - they were arrested in the winter.

In the village of Smorodinovka, Aunt Tanya got a job as a milkmaid, and it was luck, because every day she brought milk to the children in a heating pad hidden on her stomach. As a ChSIR, she was not entitled to any cards. They settled them in a calf barn, but were promised a dugout - its occupant, a fellow exiled settler, was about to die; Every day they sent Vovka, the door was not locked, he came in and asked: “Auntie, are you not dead yet?” “Not yet,” answered the aunt, “come tomorrow.” When she finally died, they were moved in on the condition that Aunt Tanya would bury the deceased; with the help of two neighbors, she took the body to the cemetery on a handcart. The new nun harnessed herself to the handles, one neighbor pushed the cart, which kept getting stuck in the rich steppe black soil, the other held the body wrapped in burlap, but the cart was small, and it kept rolling into the mud, the bag soon became black and sticky. Behind the hearse, stretched out, she moved funeral procession: Vovka, Kolka, the lagging Katka. However, the happiness was short-lived: Aunt Tanya did not respond to the claims of the farm manager, and she was again evicted from the dugout to the calf barn - however, another, better one: newborn heifers were admitted there. It was possible to live: the room turned out to be large and warm, the cows did not calve every day, there were breaks for two or even three days, and on the seventh of November there was a holiday gift - not a single calving for five whole days, all this time there was no one in the room strangers They lived in the calf barn for two years, until the loving manager was stabbed with a three-pronged pitchfork near a dung heap by a new Chechen milkmaid. The victim, in order not to make a fuss, did not go to the hospital, and the pitchfork was covered in manure; a week later he died from general sepsis - penicillin appeared in these places only in the mid-fifties.

Throughout the war and ten years after, Aunt Tanya worked on the farm, without days off or holidays, it was scary to look at her hands, and she herself became thin to the point of transparency - the light had passed.

In the hungry 1946, my grandmother sent the eldest, Vovka, to Chebachinsk, and he began to live with us. He was silent and never complained about anything. Having once severely cut his finger, he crawled under the table and sat, collecting the dripping blood into a handful; when it was full, he carefully poured the blood into the gap. He was sick a lot, he was given red streptocide, which is why his streak in the snow was scarlet, which I was very jealous of. He was two years older than me, but he only went to the first grade, while I, having entered the second immediately, was already in the third, which Vovka wondered about terribly. Having been taught by his grandfather to read so early that he did not remember himself to be illiterate, he ridiculed his brother, who was a poor reader. But not for long: he learned to read quickly, and by the end of the year he could add and multiply in his head better than me. “Father,” sighed the grandmother. “He did all the calculations without a slide rule.”

There were no notebooks; The teacher told Vovka to buy some book with whiter paper. Grandma bought “A Short Course in the History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks)” - in a store that sold kerosene, decanters and glasses produced by a local glass factory, wooden rakes and stools from a local industrial plant, there was also this book - a whole shelf. The paper in it was the best; Vovka drew his hooks and “letter elements” directly on top of the printed text. Before the text disappeared forever behind the poisonous purple elements, we read it carefully, and then examined each other: “Who had an English uniform?” - “At Kolchak’s.” - “What kind of tobacco?” - “Japanese.” - “Who went into the bushes?” - “Plekhanov.” Vovka titled the second part of this notebook “Rykhmetika” and solved examples there. It began on the famous fourth – philosophical – chapter “ Short course" But the teacher said that it was necessary to have a special notebook for arithmetic - for this, Vovka’s father gave Vovka the brochure “Criticism of the Gotha Program”, but it turned out to be uninteresting, only the preface - by some academician - began well, with poems, however, not written in a column: "A ghost is haunting Europe - the specter of communism."

Vovka studied at our school for only a year. I wrote letters to him in Smorodinovka. Apparently, there was something offensive and boastful in them, because Vovka soon sent me an acrostic letter in response, which deciphered as follows: “Antosha is an English braggart.” The central word was made up of verses: “But you still wonder, You need to imagine less, You talk, although you laugh, Just don’t call me names. And although you learn English, Don’t write this often, But when you get it, Write to me from the heart,” etc.

I was shocked. Vovka, who just a year before my eyes read syllables, now wrote poetry - and even acrostics, the existence of which in nature I did not even suspect! Much later, Vovka’s teacher said that she couldn’t remember another such capable student in thirty years. In his Smorodinovka, Vovka graduated from seven classes and a school for tractor drivers and combine operators. When I arrived based on my grandfather’s letter, he was still living there, with his milkmaid wife and four daughters.

Aunt Tanya moved with the rest of the children to Chebachinsk; their father took them out of Smorodinovka on a truck along with a cow, a real Simmental cow, which could not be abandoned; All the way she mooed and banged her horns on the side. Then he got the middle one, Kolka, into a projectionist school, which was not so easy - after poorly treated otitis in childhood, he turned out to be deaf, but his father’s former student sat on the commission. Having started working as a projectionist, Kolka showed extraordinary resourcefulness: he sold some counterfeit tickets, which were secretly printed for him in a local printing house, and charged patients for sessions in tuberculosis sanatoriums. He turned out to be a first-rate swindler. He was only interested in money. I found a rich bride - the daughter of a famous local speculator, Mani Delets. “He’ll lie down under the blanket,” the young woman complained to her mother-in-law. Honeymoon, – and turns to the wall. I press my breasts and everyone, and put my foot on him, and then I also turn away. So we lie there, ass to ass.” After getting married, I bought myself a motorcycle - my mother-in-law didn’t give me money for a car.

Katya lived with us for the first year, but then we had to refuse her - from the first days she was stealing. She very cleverly stole money, which there was no way to hide from her - she found it in a sewing box, in books, under the radio; I took only a part, but a tangible one. Mom began carrying both her and her father’s salaries in her school bag, where it lay safely in the teacher’s lounge. Having lost this income, Katka began to carry silver tea spoons, stockings, and once stole three-liter jar sunflower oil, for which Tamara, the grandfather’s other daughter, stood in line for half a day. Her mother enrolled her in a medical school, which was also not easy (she was a bad student) - again through a former student. Having become a nurse, she cheated no worse than her brother. She gave some stupid injections, stole medicines from the hospital, arranged fake certificates. Both were greedy, constantly lied, always and everywhere, in big things and in small things. Grandfather said: “They are only half to blame. Honest poverty is always poverty up to certain limits. There was poverty here. Scary - from infancy. Beggars are not moral." Anton believed his grandfather, but did not like Katka and Kolka. When the grandfather died, his younger brother, a priest in Lithuania, in Siauliai, where their father’s estate had once been, sent him for burial a large sum. Kolka met the postwoman and didn’t say anything to anyone. When from Fr. A letter arrived from Vladimir, everything was opened, but Kolka said that he had put the money on the window. Now Aunt Tanya lived with him, in a government-owned apartment next to the cinema. Apparently, Kolka had his eye on the house.

The eldest daughter Tamara, who lived with old people all her life, never married, is a kind, unrequited creature, and had no idea that she could lay claim to something. She lit the stove, cooked, washed, washed the floors, and herded the cow to the herd. The shepherd drove the herd in the evening only to the outskirts, where the cows were sorted by the housewives, and the cows, which were smart, went further on their own. Our Zorka was smart, but sometimes something came over her and she ran across the river to Kamenukha or even further - into the izlogs. The cow had to be found before dark. It happened that Uncle Lenya, grandfather, even mother were looking for her, I tried three times. No one has ever found it. Tamara always found it. This ability of hers seemed supernatural to me. The father explained: Tamara knows that a cow necessary find. And he finds it. It wasn't very clear. She was at work all day long, only on Sundays did her grandmother let her go to church, and sometimes late in the evening she took out a notebook in which she clumsily copied Tolstoy’s children’s stories, texts from any textbook that happened to be on the table, something from a prayer book, most often one evening prayer: “And grant me, Lord, to pass away this dream in peace this night.” The children teased her “Shosha” - I don’t know where that came from - she was offended. I didn’t tease, I gave her notebooks, then brought her blouses from Moscow. But later, when Kolka grabbed her apartment and shoved her into a nursing home in distant Pavlodar, I only sent parcels there occasionally and was still planning to visit - only a three-hour flight from Moscow - but I didn’t visit. Nothing remained of her: neither her notebooks, nor her icons. Just one photo: turning to the camera, she is wringing out the laundry. For fifteen years she did not see a single face of her own, none of us whom she loved so much and to whom she addressed in letters: “Dearest all.”

The third contender was Uncle Lenya, the youngest of his grandfather’s children. Anton recognized him later than his other uncles and aunts - in 1938 he was drafted into the army, then the Finnish war(he got there as a good skier - he was the only one of the entire battalion of Siberians who admitted this), then - domestic, then - Japanese, then with Far East he was transferred to the far west to fight Bendera; from the last military expedition he took out two slogans: “Long live Pan Bender and his wife Paraska” and “Long live the twenty-eighth fate of the Zhovtnevo revolution.” He returned only in '47. They said: Lentya is lucky, he was a signalman, but he wasn’t even wounded; True, I was shell-shocked twice. Aunt Larisa believed that this affected his mental abilities. What she meant was that he enthusiastically played with his young nephews and nieces in sea battle and at cards, he was very upset when he lost, and therefore he often cheated, hiding the cards behind the tops of his tarpaulin boots.

* * *

1. Armwrestling in Chebachinsk

The guests had already drunk the first few bottles of moonshine, and there was noise.

- Come on, proletarian against the intelligentsia!

– Is this Pereplyotkin the proletarian?

Pereplyotkin - Anton knew this - was from a family of exiled kulaks.

– Well, Lvovich also found the Soviet intelligentsia.

- This is their grandmother from the nobility. And he is one of the priests.

A volunteer judge checked that the elbows were on the same line. Let's start.

- Kuzma, Kuzma! - they shouted from there.

“Delight is premature,” Anton recognized the creaky voice of Professor Resenkampf.

Grandfather's hand stopped bowing. Perepletkin looked surprised. Apparently he pushed hard, because another rope swelled up - on his forehead.

- Draw, draw! - they shouted first from one and then from the other side of the table. - Draw!

“Grandfather,” Anton said, handing him a glass of water, “and then, at the wedding, after the war, you could have put Pereplyotkin in?”

- Perhaps.

- So what?..

- For what. For him, this is professional pride. Why put a person in an awkward position.

My grandfather despised any kind of gymnastics, seeing no benefit in it either for himself or for the household; It’s better to split three or four logs in the morning and throw in the manure. My father agreed with him, but summed up the scientific basis: no gymnastics provides such a versatile load as chopping wood - all muscle groups work. Having read a lot of brochures, Anton said: experts believe that during physical labor not all muscles are engaged, and after any work it is necessary to do more gymnastics. Grandfather and father laughed together: “If only we could put these specialists at the bottom of a trench or on top of a haystack for half a day! Ask Vasily Illarionovich - he lived in the mines for twenty years next to the workers' barracks, everything there is in public - has he seen at least one miner doing exercises after a shift? Vasily Illarionovich has never seen such a miner.

- Grandfather, well, Pereplyotkin is a blacksmith. Where did you get so much strength from?

- You see. I come from a family of priests, hereditary, to Peter the Great, and even further.

- So what?

– And the fact that – as your Darwin would say – is artificial selection.

Yes, and oh. Pavel, the archpriest of the Gorky Cathedral, and another brother of my grandfather, who was a priest in Vilnius, and another brother, a priest in Zvenigorod - they were all tall, strong people. O. Pavel served ten years in the Mordovian camps, worked there in logging, and even now, at ninety years old, was healthy and vigorous. "Pop's bone!" - Anton’s father said, sitting down to smoke, when his grandfather continued to slowly and somehow even silently destroy birch logs with a cleaver. Yes, the grandfather was stronger than his father, but his father was not weak - wiry, hardy, from peasants who lived in the same household (in which, however, there was still a remnant of noble blood and a dog's eyebrow), who grew up on Tver rye bread - was not inferior to anyone in mowing or skidding the forest. And for years he was half his age, and then, after the war, my grandfather was over seventy, he was dark brown-haired, and gray hair was just barely visible in his thick hair. And Aunt Tamara, even before her death, at ninety, was like a raven’s wing.

Grandfather was never sick. But two years ago, when his youngest daughter, Anton’s mother, moved to Moscow, his toes on his right foot suddenly began to turn black. My grandmother and older daughters persuaded me to go to the clinic. But lately the grandfather listened only to the youngest, she was not there, he did not go to the doctor - at ninety-three it is stupid to go to the doctors, and he stopped showing his leg, saying that everything had passed.

“Just like in the story of the famous Siberian writer “The Last Date,” she said. A librarian at the district library, Ira followed modern literature, but had trouble remembering the names of authors, complaining: “There are so many of them.”

Anton was amazed when he read in his grandfather’s letter about inheritance issues. What inheritance?

A cabinet with a hundred books? A hundred-year-old, still from Vilnius, sofa, which the grandmother called a chaise longue? True, there was a house. But it was old and shabby. Who needs it?

But Anton was wrong. Of those who lived in Chebachinsk, three claimed the inheritance.