One spring I was sitting in Mariinsky Park and reading Stevenson's Treasure Island. Sister Galya sat next to her and also read. Her summer hat with green ribbons lay on the bench. The wind stirred the ribbons, Galya was short-sighted, very trusting, and it was almost impossible to get her out of her good-natured state.

In the morning it rained, but now the clear sky of spring shone above us. Only belated raindrops flew from the lilac.

A girl with bows in her hair stopped in front of us and began to jump over the rope. She prevented me from reading. I shook the lilacs. Little rain fell noisily on the girl and Galya. The girl stuck out her tongue at me and ran away, while Galya shook the raindrops off the book and continued reading.

And at that moment I saw a man who poisoned me for a long time with dreams of my unrealizable future.

A tall midshipman with a tanned calm face walked easily along the alley. A straight black broadsword hung from his lacquered belt. Black ribbons with bronze anchors fluttered in the gentle wind. He was all in black. Only the bright gold of the stripes set off its austere form.

In land Kiev, where we almost did not see the sailors, it was an alien from the distant legendary world of winged ships, the frigate "Pallada", from the world of all oceans, seas, all port cities, all winds and all the charms that were associated with the picturesque labor of sailors ... The old sword with a black hilt seemed to have appeared in the Mariinsky Park from the pages of Stevenson.

The midshipman walked past, crunching on the sand. I got up and followed him. Galya, due to myopia, did not notice my disappearance.

All my dream of the sea was embodied in this man. I often imagined the seas, foggy and golden from the evening calm, distant voyages, when the whole world is replaced, like a fast kaleidoscope, behind the windows of the window. My God, if someone would have guessed to give me at least a piece of petrified rust, beaten off from an old anchor! I would keep it like a jewel.

The midshipman looked around. On the black ribbon of his peakless cap, I read the mysterious word: "Azimuth". Later I learned that this was the name of the training ship of the Baltic Fleet.

I followed him along Elizavetinskaya Street, then along Institutskaya and Nikolaevskaya. The midshipman saluted the infantry officers gracefully and casually. I was ashamed in front of him for these baggy Kiev soldiers.

Several times the midshipman looked around, and at the corner of Meringovskaya he stopped and called me over.

Boy, ”he asked mockingly,“ why did you follow me in tow?

I blushed and said nothing.

Everything is clear: he dreams of being a sailor, - the midshipman guessed, speaking for some reason about me in the third person.

We will reach Khreshchatyk.

We walked side by side. I was afraid to look up and saw only the sturdy boots of the midshipman, polished to an incredible shine.

On Khreshchatyk, the midshipman came with me to the Semadeni coffee shop, ordered two servings of pistachio ice cream and two glasses of water. We were served ice cream on a small three-legged marble table. It was very cold and was covered with numbers: stock dealers gathered at Semadeni's and counted their profits and losses on the tables.

We ate our ice cream in silence. The midshipman took from his wallet a photograph of a magnificent corvette with sail rig and wide pipe and handed it to me.

Take it as a keepsake. This is my ship. I went to Liverpool on it.

He shook my hand tightly and left. I sat a little longer until sweaty neighbors in a boater began to look back at me. Then I awkwardly went out and ran to the Mariinsky Park. The bench was empty. Galya left. I guessed that the midshipman took pity on me, and for the first time I learned that pity leaves a bitter residue in my soul.

After this meeting, the desire to become a sailor tormented me for many years. I was torn to the sea. The first time I saw him briefly was in Novorossiysk, where I went for a few days with my father. But that was not enough.

For hours I sat over the atlas, looked at the coasts of the oceans, looked for unknown seaside towns, capes, islands, river mouths.

I came up with a difficult game. I have compiled a long list of steamers with sonorous names: Polar Star, Walter Scott, Khingan, Sirius. This list swelled every day. I was the owner of the largest fleet in the world.

Of course, I was sitting in my shipping office, in the smoke of cigars, among colorful posters and timetables. Naturally, wide windows overlooked the embankment. The yellow masts of the steamers protruded near the windows, and good-natured elms rustled outside the walls. Steamer smoke flew into the windows cheekily, mixing with the smell of rotten brine and new, cheerful matting.

I came up with a list of amazing voyages for my steamboats. There was no most forgotten corner of the earth, wherever they went. They even visited the island of Tristan da Cunho.

I took off steamers from one voyage and sent them on to another. I followed the sailing of my ships and knew exactly where the Admiral Istomin was today and where the Flying Dutchman was: Istomin was loading bananas in Singapore, and the Flying Dutchman was unloading flour in the Faroe Islands.

It took me a lot of knowledge to run such a vast shipping company. I read guides, ship directories and everything that had even a remote touch to the sea.

Then for the first time I heard the word "meningitis" from my mother.

He'll get to God knows what with his games, - said my mother one day. - No matter how it all ends with meningitis.

I have heard that meningitis is a disease of boys who learn to read too early. So I just grinned at my mother's fears.

It all ended with the fact that the parents decided to go with the whole family for the summer to the sea.

Now I guess that my mother hoped to cure me by this trip from my excessive passion for the sea. She thought that I would be, as always, disappointed by the direct encounter with what I so passionately aspired in my dreams. And she was right, but only partially.

Once my mother solemnly announced that the other day we are leaving for the whole summer to the Black Sea, to the small town of Gelendzhik, near Novorossiysk.

Perhaps it was impossible to choose a better place than Gelendzhik in order to disappoint me in my passion for the sea and the south.

Gelendzhik was then a very dusty and hot town without any vegetation. All the greenery for many kilometers around was destroyed by the fierce Novorossiysk winds - the northeast. Only the thorny bushes of the grip-tree and the stunted acacia with yellow dry flowers grew in the front gardens. From high mountains felt the heat. At the end of the bay a cement plant was smoking.

But Gelendzhik Bay was very nice. In its transparent and warm water, large jellyfish floated like pink and blue flowers. Spotted flounders and goggle-eyed gobies lay on the sandy bottom. The surf washed ashore red algae, rotten fish-net floats, and pieces of dark green bottles rolled by the waves.

The sea after Gelendzhik has not lost its charm for me. It only became simpler and thus more beautiful than in my elegant dreams.

In Gelendzhik, I made friends with an elderly boatman Anastas. He was Greek, originally from the city of Volo. He had a new sailboat, white with a red keel and gratings washed to gray.

Anastas rode summer residents on a boat. He was famous for his dexterity and composure, and my mother sometimes let me go alone with Anastas.

Once Anastas came out with me from the bay to the open sea. I will never forget the horror and delight that I experienced when the sail, inflating, heeled the boat so low that the water rushed at side level. The noisy huge shafts rolled towards them, shining through with greenery and splashing salty dust on their face.

I grabbed the shrouds, I wanted to go back to the shore, but Anastas, gripping the pipe with his teeth, purred something, and then asked:

How much did your mom give for these dudes? Ay, good guys!

He nodded at my soft Caucasian shoes - chuvyaki. My legs were trembling. I didn't answer. Anastas yawned and said:

Nothing! Small shower, warm shower. You will dine with appetite. You will not have to ask - eat for papa-mama!

He turned the boat casually and confidently. She scooped up water, and we rushed into the bay, diving and jumping out onto the crests of the waves. They went out from under the stern with a menacing noise. My heart sank and sank.

Suddenly, Anastas began to sing. I stopped trembling and listened to this song in bewilderment:

From Batum to Sukhum - Ai-wai-wai!

From Sukhum to Batum - Ai-wai-wai!

A boy was running, dragging a box - Ai-wai-wai!

The boy fell, broke the box - Ai-wai-wai!

To this song we lowered the sail and, with acceleration, quickly approached the pier, where the pale mother was waiting. Anastas picked me up in his arms, put me on the pier and said:

Now you have it salty, madam. Already has a habit to the sea.

Once my father hired a ruler, and we drove from Gelendzhik to the Mikhailovsky Pass.

At first, the gravel road ran along the slope of bare and dusty mountains. We passed bridges over ravines where there was not a drop of water. The same clouds of gray dry cotton wool lay on the mountains all day, clinging to the peaks.

I was thirsty. The red-haired Cossack cabman turned around and told me to wait until the pass - there I would drink delicious and cold water. But I didn’t believe the cab. The dryness of the mountains and the lack of water frightened me. I looked longingly at the dark and fresh strip of the sea. You couldn't drink from it, but at least you could bathe in its cool water.

The road climbed higher and higher. Suddenly, freshness came to our face.

The very pass! - said the driver, stopped the horses, got down and put iron brakes under the wheels.

From the ridge of the mountain, we saw huge and dense forests. They stretched in waves over the mountains to the horizon. In some places, red granite cliffs protruded from the greenery, and in the distance I saw a peak burning with ice and snow.

The Nord-Ost does not reach here, ”said the cab. - Here is paradise!

The ruler began to descend. Immediately a thick shadow covered us. In the impassable thicket of trees we heard the murmur of water, the whistle of birds and the rustle of foliage agitated by the midday wind.

The lower we went, the thicker the forest became and the more shady the road became. A transparent stream was already running along its side. He washed multi-colored stones, touched with his jet lilac flowers and made them bow and tremble, but could not tear them off the stony ground and carry them down into the gorge.

Mom took water from the stream into a mug and gave me a drink. The water was so cold that the mug was immediately covered with sweat.

It smells like ozone, - said the father.

I took a deep breath. I didn’t know what smelled around, but it seemed to me that I was overwhelmed with a heap of branches soaked in fragrant rain.

The vines clung to our heads. And here and there, on the slopes of the road, a shaggy flower protruded from under the stone and looked with curiosity at our ruler and at the gray horses, which raised their heads and performed solemnly, as in a parade, so as not to break off at a gallop and not to roll out the ruler.

There is a lizard! - said my mother. Where?

Over there. Do you see the hazel? And to the left is a red stone in the grass. See above. Do you see the yellow corolla? This is an azalea. Slightly to the right of the azalea, on a felled beech, near the very root. There, you see, such a shaggy red root in dry earth and some tiny blue flowers? So next to him.

I saw a lizard. But while I found her, I made a wonderful journey through hazel, red stone, azalea flower and fallen beech.

"So this is what it is, the Caucasus!" - I thought.

Here is paradise! repeated the cab, turning off the highway onto a narrow grassy clearing in the forest. - Now we will unharness the horses, we will swim.

We drove into such a thicket and the branches hit us in the face so hard that we had to stop the horses, get off the line and continue on foot. The ruler followed us slowly.

We went out into a clearing in a green gorge. Crowds of tall dandelions stood in the lush grass like white islands. Under thick beech trees we saw an old empty barn. He stood on the banks of a noisy mountain stream. She tightly poured clear water over the stones, hissed and dragged many air bubbles along with the water.

While the cabman unharnessed and went with his father to fetch firewood, we washed ourselves in the river. Our faces burned with heat after washing.

We wanted to immediately go up the river, but my mother spread a tablecloth on the grass, took out provisions and said that until we had eaten, she would not let us go anywhere.

I gagged and ate sandwiches with ham and cold rice porridge with raisins, but it turned out that I was in no hurry - the stubborn copper kettle did not want to boil over the fire. It must be because the water from the stream was completely icy.

Then the kettle boiled so unexpectedly and violently that it filled the fire. We drank some strong tea and began to rush my father to go into the forest. The driver said that we must be on our guard, because there are many wild boars in the forest. He explained to us that if we see small holes dug in the ground, then these are the places where boars sleep at night.

Mom was worried - she could not walk with us, she had shortness of breath - but the cabman calmed her, noticing that the boar had to be deliberately teased so that it rushed at the man.

We went up the river. We pushed our way through the thicket, stopped every minute and called to each other to show the granite pools, gouged by the river, - trout swept through them with blue sparks, - huge green beetles with long whiskers, foamy grumbling waterfalls, horsetails taller than our height, thickets of forest anemones and meadows with peonies.

Borya came across a small dusty pit that looked like a baby bath. We walked around it carefully. Obviously, this was the place where the wild boar spent the night.

The father went ahead. He started calling us. We made our way to him through the buckthorn, bypassing the huge mossy boulders.

My father was standing near a strange building overgrown with blackberries. Four smoothly hewn gigantic stones were covered, like a roof, with the fifth hewn stone. It turned out to be a stone house. A hole was punched in one of the side stones, but it was so small that even I could not get through it. There were several such stone buildings around.

They are dolmens, ”said the father. - Ancient burial grounds of the Scythians. Or maybe these are not burial grounds at all. Until now, scientists cannot find out who, why and how built these dolmens.

I was sure that dolmens are the dwellings of long-extinct dwarf people. But I did not tell my father about this, since Borya was with us: he would have made fun of me.

We returned to Gelendzhik completely burnt by the sun, drunk with fatigue and forest air. I fell asleep and through my sleep I felt a breath of heat on me, and heard the distant murmur of the sea.

Since then, in my imagination, I have become the owner of another magnificent country - the Caucasus. Began a passion for Lermontov, abreks, Shamil. Mom was alarmed again.

Now, in adulthood, I remember with gratitude my childhood hobbies. They taught me a lot.

But I was not at all like noisy and carried away boys choking with saliva from excitement, giving no one rest. On the contrary, I was very shy and didn't bother anyone with my hobbies.

But, on the other hand, the writer's ability to talk about himself is limited. He is associated with many difficulties, first of all - the awkwardness of evaluating his own books.

Therefore, I will express only some considerations regarding my work and briefly convey my biography. It makes no sense to tell it in detail. My whole life, from early childhood to the early thirties, is described in six books of the autobiographical Story of Life, which is included in this collection. I continue to work on "The Story of Life" even now.

I was born in Moscow on May 31, 1892 in Granatny Lane, in the family of a railway statistician.

My father comes from the Zaporozhye Cossacks who, after the defeat of the Sich, moved to the banks of the Ros River, near the White Church. There lived my grandfather - a former Nikolaev soldier - and a Turkish grandmother.

Despite the profession of statistics, which requires a sober view of things, his father was an incorrigible dreamer and a Protestant. Because of these qualities, he did not sit for a long time in one place. After Moscow he served in Vilna, Pskov and, finally, settled, more or less firmly, in Kiev.

My mother, the daughter of a sugar factory employee, was a domineering and harsh woman.

Our family was large and varied, prone to art. The family sang a lot, played the piano, argued, reverently loved the theater.

I studied at the 1st Kiev classical gymnasium.

When I was in the sixth grade, our family broke up. From then on, I myself had to earn my living and teaching. I was interrupted by rather hard work - the so-called tutoring.

In the last grade of the gymnasium I wrote my first story and published it in the Kiev literary magazine Ogni. This was, as far as I remember, in 1911.

After graduating from high school, I spent two years at Kiev University, and then transferred to Moscow University and moved to Moscow.

At the beginning of the World War I worked as a counselor and conductor on a Moscow tram, then as an orderly on the rear and field ambulance trains.

In the fall of 1915, I switched from the train to a field sanitary detachment and went with it a long retreat from Lublin in Poland to the town of Nesvizh in Belarus.

In the detachment, from a piece of newspaper I came across, I learned that both my brothers were killed on different fronts on the same day. I returned to my mother - at that time she lived in Moscow, but could not sit still for a long time and again began my wandering life: I left for Yekaterinoslav and worked there at the metallurgical plant of the Bryansk society, then moved to Yuzovka at the Novorossiysk plant, and from there to Taganrog to the Nev Wilde boiler plant. In the fall of 1916, he left the boiler plant for a fishing artel on the Sea of ​​Azov.

In my free time, I started writing my first novel in Taganrog, Romantics.

Then he moved to Moscow, where the February Revolution caught me, and started working as a journalist.

My becoming a person and a writer took place under Soviet rule and determined my entire future life path.

In Moscow, I survived the October Revolution, witnessed many events of 1917-1919, heard Lenin several times and lived the busy life of newspaper editors.

But soon I was "whirled". I went to my mother (she moved to Ukraine again), survived several coups in Kiev, left Kiev for Odessa. There I first found myself among young writers - Ilf, Babel, Bagritsky, Shengeli, Lev Slavin.

But the "muse of distant wanderings" haunted me, and after spending two years in Odessa, I moved to Sukhum, then to Batum and Tiflis. From Tiflis I traveled to Armenia and even ended up in Northern Persia.

In 1923 he returned to Moscow, where he worked for several years as the editor of ROSTA. At that time I had already started to publish.

My first "real" book was a collection of stories "Oncoming Ships" (1928).

In the summer of 1932, I started working on the book "Kara-Bugaz". The history of writing "Kara-Bugaz" and some other books is described in some detail in the story " Golden Rose". Therefore, I will not dwell on this here.

After the publication of "Kara-Bugaz" I left the service, and since then writing has become my only, all-consuming, sometimes painful, but always beloved work.

I still traveled a lot, even more than before. Over the years of my life as a writer, I was on the Kola Peninsula, lived in Meshchera, traveled to the Caucasus and Ukraine, the Volga, Kama, Don, Dnieper, Oka and Desna, Ladoga and Onega lakes, was in Central Asia, in the Crimea, in Altai, in Siberia, in our wonderful north-west - in Pskov, Novgorod, Vitebsk, in Pushkin Mikhailovsky.

During the Great Patriotic War I worked as a war correspondent on the Southern Front and also traveled to many places. After the end of the war, I traveled a lot again. During the 50s and early 60s, I visited Czechoslovakia, lived in Bulgaria in the absolutely fabulous fishing towns of Nessebar (Messemeria) and Sozopol, traveled around Poland from Krakow to Gdansk, sailed around Europe, visited Istanbul, Athens, Rotterdam, Stockholm, Italy (Rome, Turin, Milan, Naples, Italian Alps), saw France, in particular Provence, England, where he was in Oxford and Shakespeare's Stradford. In 1965, because of my persistent asthma, I lived for quite a long time on the island of Capri - a huge rock, completely overgrown with fragrant herbs, resinous Mediterranean pine - pine and waterfalls (or rather, color falls) of scarlet tropical bougainvillea - on Capri, immersed in a warm and transparent the water of the Mediterranean Sea.

Impressions from these numerous trips, from meetings with the most different and - in each individual case - interesting people in their own way formed the basis of many of my stories and travel essays ("Picturesque Bulgaria", "Amphora", "The third meeting", "The crowd on embankment "," Italian meetings "," Fleeting Paris "," Lights of the English Channel, "etc.), which the reader will also find in this Collected Works.

I have written a lot in my life, but the feeling that I still have a lot to do and that the writer learns to deeply comprehend certain aspects and phenomena of life and talk about them only in adulthood does not leave me.

In my youth, I experienced a fascination with exotic things.

The desire for the extraordinary has haunted me since childhood.

In a boring Kiev apartment where this childhood passed, an extraordinary wind constantly rustled around me. I summoned him with the power of my own boyish imagination.

This wind brought the smell of yew forests, the foam of the Atlantic surf, the rolling of a tropical storm, the ringing of an aeolian harp.

But the colorful world of exoticism existed only in my imagination. I have never seen any dark yew forests (with the exception of a few yew trees in the Nikitsky Botanical Garden), nor the Atlantic Ocean, nor the tropics, and I have never heard the aeolian harp. I didn't even know what she looked like. Much later, from the notes of the traveler Miklouho-Maclay, I learned about this. Maclay built an eolian harp from bamboo trunks near his hut in New Guinea. The wind howled fiercely in the hollow trunks of the bamboo, frightened off the superstitious natives, and they did not interfere with Maclay's work.

Geography was my favorite science at the gymnasium. She dispassionately confirmed that there are extraordinary countries on earth. I knew that then our meager and unsettled life would not give me the opportunity to see them. My dream was clearly a pipe dream. But from this she did not die.

One spring I was sitting in Mariinsky Park and reading Stevenson's Treasure Island. Sister Galya sat next to her and also read. Her summer hat with green ribbons lay on the bench. The wind stirred the ribbons, Galya was short-sighted, very trusting, and it was almost impossible to get her out of her good-natured state. It had rained in the morning, but now the clear sky of spring shone above us. Only belated raindrops flew from the lilac. A girl with bows in her hair stopped opposite us and began to jump over the string. She prevented me from reading. I shook the lilacs. Little rain fell noisily on the girl and Galya. The girl stuck out her tongue at me and ran away, while Galya shook the raindrops off the book and continued reading. And at that moment I saw a man who poisoned me for a long time with dreams of my unrealizable future. A tall midshipman with a calm tanned face walked lightly along the alley. A straight black broadsword hung from his lacquered belt. Black ribbons with bronze anchors fluttered in the gentle wind. He was all in black. Only the bright gold of the stripes set off its austere form. In overland Kiev, where we almost did not see sailors, it was an alien from the distant legendary world of winged ships, the frigate \ "Pallas \", from the world of all oceans, seas, all port cities, all winds and all the charms that were associated with the picturesque labor of seafarers. The old sword with a black hilt seemed to have appeared in the Mariinsky Park from the pages of Stevenson. The midshipman walked past, crunching on the sand. I got up and followed him. Galya, due to myopia, did not notice my disappearance. All my dream of the sea was embodied in this man. I often imagined the seas, foggy and golden from the evening calm, distant voyages, when the whole world is replaced, like a fast kaleidoscope, behind the windows. My God, if someone would have guessed to give me at least a piece of petrified rust, beaten off from an old anchor! I would keep it like a jewel. The midshipman looked around. On the black ribbon of his peakless cap, I read the mysterious word: \ "Azimuth \". Later I learned that this was the name of the training ship of the Baltic Fleet. I followed him along Elizavetinskaya Street, then along Institutskaya and Nikolaevskaya. The midshipman saluted the infantry officers gracefully and casually. I was ashamed in front of him for these baggy Kiev soldiers. Several times the midshipman looked around, and at the corner of Meringovskaya he stopped and called me over. “Boy,” he asked mockingly, “why did you follow me in tow? I blushed and said nothing. - Everything is clear: he dreams of being a sailor, - the midshipman guessed, speaking for some reason about me in the third person. “I'm short-sighted,” I replied in a low voice. The midshipman put a thin hand on my shoulder. - Let's get to Khreshchatyk. We walked side by side. I was afraid to look up and saw only the sturdy boots of the midshipman, polished to an incredible shine. On Khreshchatyk, the midshipman came with me to the Semadeni coffee shop, ordered two servings of pistachio ice cream and two glasses of water. We were served ice cream on a small three-legged marble table. It was very cold and was covered with numbers: stock dealers gathered at Semadeni's and counted their profits and losses on the tables. We ate our ice cream in silence. The midshipman took from his wallet a photograph of a magnificent corvette with sail rig and wide pipe and handed it to me. - Take it as a keepsake. This is my ship. I went to Liverpool on it. He shook my hand tightly and left. I sat a little longer until sweaty neighbors in a boater began to look back at me (1). Then I awkwardly went out and ran to the Mariinsky Park. The bench was empty. Galya left. I guessed that the midshipman took pity on me, and for the first time I learned that pity leaves a bitter residue in my soul. After this meeting, the desire to become a sailor tormented me for many years. I was torn to the sea. The first time I saw him briefly was in Novorossiysk, where I went for a few days with my father. But that was not enough. For hours I sat over the atlas, looked at the coasts of the oceans, looked for unknown seaside towns, capes, islands, river mouths. I came up with a difficult game. I have compiled a long list of steamers with sonorous names: \ "Polar Star \", \ "Walter Scott \", \ "Khingan \", \ "Sirius \". This list swelled every day. I was the owner of the largest fleet in the world. Of course, I was sitting in my shipping office, in the smoke of cigars, among colorful posters and schedules. Naturally, wide windows overlooked the embankment. The yellow masts of the steamers protruded near the windows, and good-natured elms rustled outside the walls. Steamer smoke flew into the windows cheekily, mingling with the smell of rotten brine and new, cheerful matting. I came up with a list of amazing voyages for my steamboats. There was no most forgotten corner of the earth, wherever they went. They even visited the island of Tristan da Cunho. I took off steamers from one voyage and sent them on to another. I followed the sailing of my ships and knew exactly where today \ "Admiral Istomin \", and where \ "The Flying Dutchman \": \ "Istomin \" loads bananas in Singapore, and \ "The Flying Dutchman \" unloads flour in the Faroe Islands ... It took me a lot of knowledge to run such a vast shipping company. I read guides, ship directories and everything that had even a remote touch to the sea. Then for the first time I heard the word \ "meningitis \" from my mother. “He’s going to get to God knows what with his games,” Mom once said. - No matter how it all ends with meningitis. I have heard that meningitis is a disease of boys who learn to read too early. So I just grinned at my mother's fears. It all ended with the fact that the parents decided to go with the whole family for the summer to the sea. Now I guess that my mother hoped to cure me by this trip from my excessive passion for the sea. She thought that I would be, as always, disappointed by the direct encounter with what I so passionately aspired in my dreams. And she was right, but only partially. Once my mother solemnly announced that the other day we are leaving for the whole summer to the Black Sea, to the small town of Gelendzhik, near Novorossiysk. Perhaps it was impossible to choose a better place than Gelendzhik in order to disappoint me in my passion for the sea and the south. Gelendzhik was then a very dusty and hot town without any vegetation. All the greenery for many kilometers around was destroyed by the fierce Novorossiysk winds - the Nordosts. Only the thorny bushes of the grip-tree and the stunted acacia with yellow dry flowers grew in the front gardens. Heat was drawn from the high mountains. At the end of the bay a cement plant was smoking. But Gelendzhik Bay was very nice. In its transparent and warm water, large jellyfish floated like pink and blue flowers. Spotted flounders and goggle-eyed gobies lay on the sandy bottom. The surf washed ashore red algae, rotten bulberk floats from fishing nets and pieces of dark green bottles rolled by the waves. The sea after Gelendzhik has not lost its charm for me. It only became simpler and thus more beautiful than in my elegant dreams. In Gelendzhik, I made friends with an elderly boatman Anastas. He was Greek, originally from the city of Volo. He had a new sailboat, white with a red keel and gratings washed to gray. Anastas rode summer residents on a boat. He was famous for his dexterity and composure, and my mother sometimes let me go alone with Anastas. Once Anastas came out with me from the bay to the open sea. I will never forget the horror and delight that I experienced when the sail, inflating, heeled the boat so low that the water rushed at side level. Rustling huge shafts rolled towards them, shining through with greenery and splashing salty dust on their face. I grabbed the shrouds (2), I wanted to go back to the shore, but Anastas, gripping the pipe with his teeth, purred something, and then asked: - How much did your mother give for these chuvyi? Ay, good guys! He nodded at my soft Caucasian shoes - chuvyaki. My legs were trembling. I didn't answer. Anastas yawned and said: - Nothing! Small shower, warm shower. You will dine with appetite. You will not have to ask - eat for papa-mama! He turned the boat casually and confidently. She scooped up water, and we rushed into the bay, diving and jumping out onto the crests of the waves. They went out from under the stern with a menacing noise. My heart sank and sank. Suddenly, Anastas began to sing. I stopped trembling and listened with bewilderment to this song: From Batum to Sukhum - Ai-wai-wai! From Sukhum to Batum - Ai-wai-wai! A boy was running, dragging a box - Ai-wai-wai! The boy fell, broke the box - Ai-wai-wai! To this song we lowered the sail and, with acceleration, quickly approached the pier, where the pale mother was waiting. Anastas picked me up in his arms, put me on the pier and said: - Now you have it salty, madam. Already has a habit to the sea. Once my father hired a ruler, and we drove from Gelendzhik to the Mikhailovsky Pass. At first, the gravel road ran along the slope of the bare and dusty mountains. We passed bridges over ravines where there was not a drop of water. The same clouds of gray dry cotton wool lay on the mountains all day, clinging to the peaks. I was thirsty. The red-haired Cossack cabman turned around and told me to wait until the pass - there I would drink delicious and cold water. But I didn’t believe the cab. The dryness of the mountains and the lack of water frightened me. I gazed longingly at the dark and fresh strip of the sea. You couldn't drink from it, but at least you could bathe in its cool water. The road climbed higher and higher. Suddenly, freshness came to our face. - The most pass! - said the driver, stopped the horses, got down and put iron brakes under the wheels. From the ridge of the mountain, we saw huge and dense forests. They stretched in waves over the mountains to the horizon. In some places, red granite cliffs protruded from the greenery, and in the distance I saw a peak burning with ice and snow. “The Nord-Ost doesn't reach here,” said the cab. - Here is paradise! The ruler began to descend. - Here is paradise! The ruler began to descend. Immediately a thick shadow covered us. In the impassable thicket of trees we heard the murmur of water, the whistle of birds and the rustle of foliage agitated by the midday wind. The lower we went, the thicker the forest became and the more shady the road became. A transparent stream was already running along its side. He washed the multi-colored stones, touched the lilac flowers with his jet and made them bow and tremble, but he could not tear them off the stony ground and carry them down into the gorge. Mom took water from the stream into a mug and gave me a drink. The water was so cold that the mug was immediately covered with sweat. “It smells like ozone,” said my father. I took a deep breath. I didn’t know what smelled around, but in May it seemed that I was covered with a heap of branches soaked in fragrant rain. The vines clung to our heads. And here and there, on the slopes of the road, a shaggy flower protruded from under the stone and looked with curiosity at our ruler and at the gray horses, which raised their heads and performed solemnly, as in a parade, so as not to break off at a gallop and not to roll out the ruler. - There is a lizard! - said my mother. Where? - Over there. Do you see the hazel? And to the left is a red stone in the grass. See above. Do you see the yellow corolla? This is an azalea. Slightly to the right of the azalea, on a felled beech, near the very root. There, you see, such a shaggy red root in dry earth and some tiny blue flowers? So next to him. I saw a lizard. But while I found it, I made a wonderful journey through hazel, red stone, azalea flower and fallen beech. \ "So this is what it is, the Caucasus! \" - I thought. - Here is paradise! repeated the cab, turning off the highway onto a narrow grassy clearing in the forest. - Now we will unharness our horses, we will swim. We drove into such a thicket and the branches hit us in the face so hard that we had to stop the horses, get off the line and continue on foot. The ruler followed us slowly. We went out into a clearing in a green gorge. Crowds of tall dandelions stood in the lush grass like white islands. Under thick beech trees we saw an old empty barn. He stood on the banks of a noisy mountain stream. She tightly poured clear water over the stones, hissed and dragged many air bubbles along with the water. While the cabman unharnessed and went with his father to fetch firewood, we washed ourselves in the river. Our faces burned with heat after washing. We wanted to immediately go up the river, but my mother spread a tablecloth on the grass, took out provisions and said that until we had eaten, she would not let us go anywhere. I gagged and ate sandwiches with ham and cold rice porridge with raisins, but it turned out that I was in no hurry - the stubborn copper kettle did not want to boil over the fire. It must be because the water from the stream was completely icy. Then the kettle boiled so suddenly and violently that it filled the fire. We drank some strong tea and began to rush my father to go into the forest. The driver said that we must be on our guard, because there are many wild boars in the forest. He explained to us that if we see small holes dug in the ground, then these are the places where boars sleep at night. Mom was worried - she could not walk with us, she had shortness of breath - but the cabby calmed her down, noting that the boar had to be deliberately teased so that it rushed at the man. We went up the river. We pushed our way through the thicket, stopped every minute and called to each other to show the granite pools, gouged by the river - trout rushed through them with blue sparks, - huge green beetles with long whiskers, foamy grumbling waterfalls, horsetails taller than our height, thickets of forest anemones and meadows with peonies. Borya came across a small dusty pit that looked like a baby bath. We walked around it carefully. Obviously, this was the place where the wild boar spent the night. The father went ahead. He started calling us. We made our way to him through the buckthorn, bypassing the huge mossy boulders. My father was standing near a strange building overgrown with blackberries. Four smoothly hewn gigantic stones were covered, like a roof, with the fifth hewn stone. It turned out to be a stone house. A hole was punched in one of the side stones, but it was so small that even I could not get through it. There were several such stone buildings around. “They are dolmens,” said the father. - Ancient burial grounds of the Scythians. Or maybe these are not burial grounds at all. Until now, scientists cannot find out who, why and how built these dolmens. I was sure that dolmens are the dwellings of long-extinct dwarf people. But I did not tell my father about this, since Borya was with us: he would have made fun of me. We returned to Gelendzhik completely burnt by the sun, drunk with fatigue and forest air. I fell asleep and through my sleep I felt a breath of heat and heard the distant murmur of the sea. Since then, in my imagination, I have become the owner of another magnificent country - the Caucasus. Began a passion for Lermontov, abreks, Shamil. Mom was alarmed again. Now, in adulthood, I remember with gratitude my childhood hobbies. They taught me a lot. But I was not at all like noisy and carried away boys choking with saliva from excitement, giving no one rest. On the contrary, I was very shy and didn't bother anyone with my hobbies. (1) Boater - a type of headdress. (2) Shrouds are a flexible part of the rigging of a sailing vessel. Mom was worried - she could not walk with us, she had shortness of breath - but the cabby calmed her down, noting that the boar had to be deliberately teased so that it rushed at the man. We went up the river. We pushed our way through the thicket, stopped every minute and called to each other to show the granite pools, gouged by the river - trout rushed through them with blue sparks, - huge green beetles with long whiskers, foamy grumbling waterfalls, horsetails taller than our height, thickets of forest anemones and meadows with peonies. Borya came across a small dusty pit that looked like a baby bath. We walked around it carefully. Obviously, this was the place where the wild boar spent the night. The father went ahead. He started calling us. We made our way to him through the buckthorn, bypassing the huge mossy boulders. My father was standing near a strange building overgrown with blackberries. Four smoothly hewn gigantic stones were covered, like a roof, with the fifth hewn stone. It turned out to be a stone house. A hole was punched in one of the side stones, but it was so small that even I could not get through it. There were several such stone buildings around. “They are dolmens,” said the father. - Ancient burial grounds of the Scythians. Or maybe these are not burial grounds at all. Until now, scientists cannot find out who, why and how built these dolmens. I was sure that dolmens are the dwellings of long-extinct dwarf people. But I did not tell my father about this, since Borya was with us: he would have made fun of me. We returned to Gelendzhik completely burnt by the sun, drunk with fatigue and forest air. I fell asleep and through my sleep I felt a breath of heat and heard the distant murmur of the sea. Since then, in my imagination, I have become the owner of another magnificent country - the Caucasus. Began a passion for Lermontov, abreks, Shamil. Mom was alarmed again. Now, in adulthood, I remember with gratitude my childhood hobbies. They taught me a lot. But I was not at all like noisy and carried away boys choking with saliva from excitement, giving no one rest. On the contrary, I was very shy and didn't bother anyone with my hobbies. (1) Boater - a type of headdress. (2) Shrouds are a flexible part of the rigging of a sailing vessel.

Konstantin Georgievich Paustovsky

Father's death

I was a high school student in the last grade of a Kiev gymnasium, when a telegram arrived that my father was dying in the Gorodishche estate, near Bila Tserkva.

The next day I arrived at Belaya Tserkov and stayed with my father's old friend, the head of the post office, Feoktistov. He was a long-bearded, myopic old man with thick glasses and a worn post office jacket with crossed brass horns and zippers on his buttonholes.

March ended. It was drizzling rain. Naked poplars stood in the fog.

Feoktistov told me that at night the ice went down on the stormy river Ros. The estate where my father was dying stood on an island in the middle of this river, twenty miles from Bila Tserkva. A stone dam - rowing - led to the estate across the river.

Hollow water now goes through rowing in a rampart, and no one, of course, will agree to take me to the island, not even the most desperate balagula - a cab.

Feoktistov wondered for a long time who of the Belaya Tserkov cabs was the most desperate. In the dim living room, Feoktistov's daughter, a schoolgirl, Zina, diligently played the piano. The ficus leaves trembled from the music. I looked at the pale, squeezed lemon slice on a saucer and said nothing.

“Well, let’s call Bregman, an inveterate old man,” Feoktistov finally decided. - Him himself the devil is not a brother.

Soon the cabman Bregman, "the most inveterate old man" in Belaya Tserkov, entered Feoktistov's office, littered with volumes of Niva in embossed gold bindings. He was a stout dwarf Jew with a sparse beard and blue cat's eyes. His weathered cheeks were red like heavenly apples. He twirled a small whip in his hand and listened derisively to Feoktistov.

- Oh, misfortune! He said finally in falsetto. - Oh, trouble, Pan Feoktistov! My Fighton is easy and my horses are weak. Gypsy horses! They will not drag us through rowing. The horses, the Fighton, the young man and the old joker will drown themselves. And no one will even publish about this death in Kievskaya Mysl. This is what is unbearable to me, Pan Feoktistov. And, of course, you can go. Why not go? You yourself know that the life of a balagula is worth only three karbovanets - I will not swear that it is five or, let's say, ten.

“Thank you, Bregman,” said Feoktistov. “I knew you would agree. You are the bravest person in the White Church. For this I will write you "Niva" by the end of the year.

“Well, if I’m so brave,” Bregman squeaked, grinning, “then you better write out“ Russian invalid ”for me. There I, at least, read about the cantonists and the cavaliers of St. George. The horses will be at the porch in an hour, sir.

Bregman left.

In the telegram I received in Kiev, there was a strange phrase: "Bring a priest or priest from Belaya Tserkov - it doesn't matter who, as long as you agree to go."

I knew my father, and therefore this phrase worried and embarrassed me. The father was an atheist. He had eternal clashes over the mockery of priests and priests with my grandmother, a Polish woman, fanatical, like almost all Polish women.

I guessed that my father's sister, Theodosia Maksimovna, or, as everyone called her, Aunt Dozya, insisted on the priest's arrival.

She denied all church rites, except for the remission of sins. The Bible was replaced by Shevchenko's "Kobzar" hidden in a bound chest, just as yellow and waxed as the Bible. Aunt Dozya took him out from time to time at night, read Katerina by candlelight, and every minute wiped her eyes with a dark handkerchief.

She mourned the fate of Katherine, similar to her own. In the damp levada grove behind the hut, the grave of her son, the "little boy," who had died many years ago, when Aunt Dozya was still very young, was green. This lad was, as they said at the time, her "illegitimate" son.

A loved one deceived Aunt Dozu. He abandoned her, but she was faithful to him to death and kept waiting for him to return to her, for some reason certainly sick, beggar, offended by life, and she, having scolded him properly, would finally shelter and warm him up.

None of the priests agreed to go to the Gorodishche, excused from illness and deeds. Only the young priest agreed. He warned me that we would go to the church for the holy gifts for communion with the dying and that we should not talk to the person who was carrying the holy gifts.

The priest was wearing a long black coat with a velvet collar and a strange, also black, round hat.

It was gloomy and cold in the church. Having dropped down, very red paper roses hung at the foot of the crucifix. Without candles, without the ringing of bells, without the rumble of organ, the church resembled a theater backstage in dull daylight.

At first we drove in silence. Only Bregman smacked and prodded the bony bay horses. He shouted at them, as all the jokes shout: not "but", but "vie!" The rain was rustling in the low gardens. The priest was holding a monstrance wrapped in black twill. My gray gymnasium overcoat got wet and blackened.

In the smoke of the rain, it seemed - to the very sky, the famous Alexandrian gardens of Countess Branitskaya rose. These were vast gardens, equal in size, as Feoktistov told me, to Versailles. Snow melted in them, covering the trees with cold steam. Bregman turned around and said that there were wild deer in these gardens.

“Mickiewicz was very fond of these gardens,” I said to the priest, forgetting that he should be silent all the way.

I wanted to say something nice to him in gratitude for agreeing to this difficult and dangerous journey. The priest smiled back.

There was rainwater in the muddy fields. It reflected flying jackdaws. I raised the collar of my greatcoat and thought about my father, about how little I knew him. He was a statistician and served almost his entire life on various railways - Moscow-Brest, Petersburg-Warsaw, Kharkov-Sevastopol and Southwest.

We often moved from city to city - from Moscow to Pskov, then to Vilno, then to Kiev. Everywhere the father did not get along with the authorities. He was a very proud, ardent and kind person.

A year ago, my father left Kiev and entered the Bryansk plant in the Oryol province as a statistician. Having served for a short time, my father unexpectedly, for no apparent reason, left the service and went to the old grandfather's estate Gorodishche. His brother Ilko, a village teacher, and his aunt Dozya lived there.

The inexplicable act of my father embarrassed all my relatives, but most of all my mother. She lived at that time with my older brother in Moscow.

A month after his arrival at the Settlement, my father fell ill and now he is dying.

The road went down the ravine. At the end of it, an insistent sound of water was heard. Bregman fidgeted on the box.

The rowing opened suddenly around the bend. The priest stood up and grabbed Bregman by the faded red sash.

The water rushed easily, sandwiched by the granite rocks. At this point, the Ros river broke through, raging, through the Avratynsk mountains. The water flowed through the stone dam as a transparent rampart, fell down with a crash and drizzled with cold dust.

Across the river, on the other side of the rowing, huge poplars seemed to fly up into the sky and a small house gleamed white. I recognized the manor house on the island where I lived in my early childhood - its levada and wattle fence, the rocker arms of the crane wells and the rocks near the coast. They cut the river water into separate mighty streams. From these rocks, my father and I used to catch mustachioed minnows.

Bregman stopped the horses near rowing, got down, straightened the harness with his whip, looked at his carriage incredulously, and shook his head. Then for the first time the priest broke his vow of silence.

- Uh! Bregman replied. - How do I know how? Sit quietly. Because the horses are already shaking.

Bay horses, snoring up their muzzles, entered the rushing water. She roared and knocked the light carriage to the unfenced edge of the rowing. The carriage went sideways, obliquely, gnashing with iron tires. The horses trembled, rested, almost lay down on the water so that she would not knock them off their feet. Bregman whipped the whip over his head.

In the middle of the row, where the water was going strongest and even rattling, the horses stopped. Foamy waterfalls beat about their slender legs. Bregman screamed in a crying voice and began to whip the horses mercilessly. They backed away and pushed the carriage to the very edge of the rowing.

Then I saw Uncle Ilko. He rode a gray horse from the estate to the rowing. He was shouting something and waving a bundle of thin rope over his head.

He rode in and threw the rope to Bregman. Bregman hastily tied him up somewhere under the trestle, and three horses - two bay and a gray one - finally dragged the carriage to the island.

The priest made the sign of the cross with a wide Catholic cross. Bregman winked at Uncle Ilko and said that for a long time people would remember such a joke as old Bregman, and I asked him how his father was.

“Still alive,” Ilko answered and kissed me, scratching me with his beard. - He's waiting. And where is mom - Maria Grigorievna?

- I sent her a telegram to Moscow. He must be arriving tomorrow.

Uncle Ilko looked at the river.

“Arriving,” he said. - Bad, my dear Kostik. Well, maybe it will. Let's go!

On the porch we were met by Aunt Dozya, all in black, with dry, tear-stained eyes.

The stuffy rooms smelled of mint. I did not immediately recognize my father in a yellow old man overgrown with gray stubble. Father was only fifty years old. I always remembered him a little stooped, but slender, graceful, dark-haired, with his unusual sad smile and gray attentive eyes.

Now he was sitting in a chair, breathing hard, staring at me, and a tear fell down his dry cheek. She got stuck in her beard and Aunt Dozia wiped her off with a clean handkerchief.

The father could not speak. He was dying of throat cancer.

I sat with my father all night. Everyone was asleep. The rain is over. The stars shone sullenly outside the windows. The river was louder and louder. The water rose quickly. Bregman and the priest could not get back and got stuck on the island.

In the middle of the night, my father stirred, opened his eyes. I leaned over to him. He tried to hug me by the neck, but he could not and said in a hissing whisper:

- I'm afraid ... will ruin you ... spinelessness.

“No,” I said quietly. - It will not happen.

“You’ll see Mom,” his father whispered. - I am guilty before her ... Let her forgive ...

He paused and squeezed my hand weakly.

I did not understand his words then, and only much later, after many years, their bitter meaning became clear to me. It was also much later that I realized that my father was essentially not a statistician at all, but a poet.

At dawn he died, but I did not immediately guess about it. It seemed to me that he fell asleep calmly.

Our old grandfather Nechipor lived on the island. He was called to read the psalter over his father.

Nechipor often interrupted his reading in order to go out into the passage to smoke makhorka. There he whispered to me uncomplicated stories that shook his imagination: about a bottle of wine he had drunk last summer in Belaya Tserkov, about what he saw Skobelev himself so close near Plevna, "like a wattle fence," and about an amazing American winnower, operating from a lightning rod. Grandfather Nechipor was, as they said on the island, an "easy man" - a liar and a chatterbox.

He read the psalter all day and all the following night, pinching off the carbon from the candle with black nails, fell asleep standing, snored and, waking up, again muttered indistinct prayers.

At night, on the other side of the river, someone started waving a lantern and shouting longly. I went ashore with Uncle Ilko. The river roared. The water flowed through the rowing in a cold waterfall. The night was late, deaf, not a single star was overhead. The wild freshness of the spill, thawed earth blew into my face. And all the time someone was waving a lantern on the other side and shouting, but the words behind the noise of the river could not be made out.

“It must be Mom,” I said to Uncle Ilko.

But he didn’t answer me.

“Let's go,” he said after a pause. - It's cold on the shore. Catch a cold.

I didn't want to go into the house. Uncle Ilko was silent a little longer and left, while I stood and looked at the distant lantern. The wind blew more and more, shook the poplars, carried from somewhere the sweetish smoke of straw.

Father was buried in the morning. Nechipor and Uncle Ilko dug a grave in a grove at the edge of the ravine. From there, the forests beyond the Ros and the whitish March sky were far visible.

The coffin was carried out of the house on wide embroidered towels. The priest walked ahead. He looked straight ahead with calm gray eyes and spoke Latin prayers in an undertone.

When the coffin was carried out onto the porch, I saw on the other side of the river an old carriage, horses unharnessed and tied to it, and a little woman in black — my mother. She stood motionless on the shore. From there she saw how they carried her father out. Then she knelt down and dropped her head on the sand.

A tall, skinny cabman came up to her, bent over her and said something, but she still lay motionless.

Then she jumped up and ran along the coast to rowing. The cabman grabbed her. She sank to the ground powerlessly and covered her face with her hands.

Father was carried along the road to the grove. At the turn, I looked around. The mother sat still, covering her face with her hands.

All were silent. Only Bregman patted the boot with his whip.

Near the grave the priest raised grey eyes to the cold sky and distinctly and slowly said in Latin:

- Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis!

"Lord, grant them eternal peace and eternal light!"

The priest fell silent and listened. The river was rustling, and overhead, in the branches of old elms, tits were whistling. The priest sighed and spoke again of the eternal longing for happiness and the valley of tears. These words suited my father's life surprisingly. My heart sank from them. Then I often experienced this oppression of the heart, faced with the thirst for happiness and with the imperfection of human relationships.

The river rustled, birds whistled cautiously, and the coffin, showering the damp earth and rustling, slowly descended on towels into the grave.

I was then seventeen years old.

My grandfather Maxim Grigorievich

After my father's funeral, I lived for several more days in Gorodishche.

Only on the third day, when the water melted, the mother was able to move over the dam.

Mother grew haggard, turned black, but did not cry any more, only sat for hours on her father's grave.

There were no fresh flowers yet, and the grave was removed with paper peonies. They were made by girls from a neighboring village. They loved to weave these peonies into their braids along with silk multi-colored ribbons.

Aunt Dozya tried to comfort me and entertain me. She pulled out from the closet - the chambers - a chest full of antiques. Its lid opened with a loud clang.

In the chest I found a yellowed hetman letter written in Latin - "universal", a copper seal with a coat of arms, St. George Medal for the Turkish War, "Dream Interpretation", several stoned pipes and black lace of the finest workmanship.

"Universal" and the press remained in our family from Hetman Sagaidachny, our distant ancestor. My father laughed at his "hetman origin" and liked to say that our grandfathers and great-grandfathers plowed the land and were the most ordinary patient grain growers, although they were considered the descendants of the Zaporozhye Cossacks.

When the Zaporozhye Sich was dispersed under Catherine II, some of the Cossacks settled along the banks of the Ros River, near the White Church. The Cossacks sat down reluctantly on the ground. Their violent past boiled in blood for a long time. Even I, who was born at the end of the nineteenth century, heard from old people stories about bloody slaughter with the Poles, campaigns “to the Turetchina”, about the Uman massacre and the Chigirin hetmans.

Having heard these stories, I played with the brothers in the Zaporozhye battles. We played in the ravine behind the estate, where a thistle - a budyak - grew densely near the fence. Its red flowers and thorny leaves gave off a sweet smell in the heat. The clouds stopped in the sky above the ravine - lazy and lush, real Ukrainian clouds. And such is the strength of childhood impressions that since then all the battles with the Poles and Turks have been associated in my imagination with a wild field, overgrown with thistles, with its dusty dope. And the very flowers of the thistle looked like clots of Cossack blood.

Over the years, the Zaporozhye exuberance has faded. At the time of my childhood, it only manifested itself in long-term and ruinous litigation with Countess Branitskaya over every piece of land, in stubborn poaching and Cossack songs - dumka. My grandfather Maxim Grigorievich sang them to us, to his grandchildren.

Small, gray-haired, with colorless kind eyes, he lived all summer in an apiary behind a Levada - he sat there from the angry character of my grandmother, a Turkish woman.

In ancient times, the grandfather was a Chumak. He went on oxen to Perekop and Armyansk for salt and dried fish. For the first time I heard from him that somewhere beyond the blue and golden steppes of Katerinoslav and Kherson regions lies the Crimean land of paradise.

Before his grandfather became a Chumak, he served in the Nikolaev army, was in the Turkish war, was captured and brought from captivity, from the city of Kazanlak in Thrace, his wife, a beautiful Turkish woman. Her name was Fatma. Marrying her grandfather, she adopted Christianity and a new name - Honorata.

We were no less afraid of our Turkish grandmother than our grandfather, and we tried not to catch her eye.

Grandfather, sitting near the hut, among the yellow pumpkin flowers, hummed Cossack dumki and Chumak songs in a rattling tenor voice, or told all sorts of stories.

I loved Chumak songs for their melancholy. Such songs could be sung for hours under the creak of wheels, lying on the cart and looking at the sky. Cossack songs have always evoked incomprehensible sadness. They seemed to me now the cry of slaves, chained in Turkish chains - kaidans, now a broad marching song to the sound of horse hooves.

What did not my grandfather sing! Most often he sang our favorite song:

Cossacks whistled

Hiking from midnight.

Marusenka cried

Their eyes are clear.

And of the grandfather's stories, we liked the story of the lyre player Ostap the most.

I don't know if you've ever seen the Ukrainian lyre. Now, it must be found only in the museum. But in those days, not only in bazaars in small towns, but also on the streets of Kiev itself, blind lyre players were often met.

They walked holding on to the shoulder of a small, barefoot guide in a tailored shirt. In a canvas bag behind them were hidden bread, onions, salt in a clean cloth, and a lyre hung on their chests. It resembled a violin, but a handle and a wooden rod with a wheel were attached to it.

The lyre player twirled the handle, the wheel spun, rubbed against the strings, and they hummed in different modes, as if the kind tame bumblebees were humming around the lyre player, accompanying him.

Lyrniks almost never sang. They spoke in a melodious recitative their thoughts, "psalms" and songs. Then they fell silent, listened for a long time as the lyre hums and dies down, and, looking in front of them with blind eyes, begged for alms.

They asked her in a completely different way from ordinary beggars. I remember one lyre player in the city of Cherkassy. "Throw a penny," he said, "to the blind and to the lad, because without that lad, the blind man will get lost and will not find his way to God's paradise after his death."

I don’t remember a single bazaar where there was no lyre player. He was leaning against a dusty poplar tree. Pitying women crowded around him and sighed, and threw green copper coins into a wooden bowl.

The idea of ​​lyre players forever linked me with the memory of Ukrainian bazaars - early bazaars, when the dew still glistens on the grass, cold shadows lie across the dusty roads and bluish smoke streams over the land already lit by the sun.

Misted jugs - glechiks - with ice-cold milk, wet marigolds in buckets of water, buckwheat honey in makotra, hot cheesecakes with raisins, sieves with cherries, the smell of ramming, lazy church bells, swift altercations of babies - "pokotukh", lace umbrellas of young provincial and the sudden thunder of a copper cauldron - it was dragged on the shoulders of some wild-eyed Romanian. All the "guys" considered it their duty to knock on the boiler with a whip, to try whether Romanian copper is good.

I knew the history of lyre poet Ostap almost by heart.

- It happened in the village of Zamoshie, near the city of Vasilkov, - said the grandfather. - Ostap was a farrier in that village. His smithy stood on the outskirts under the black willows, over the river itself. Ostap did not know failure - he forged horses, nails, forged axles for the Chumak carts.

One summer evening, Ostap was fanning the coals in the smithy, and at that hour a thunderstorm passed in the yard, scattered leaves over the puddles, knocked down rotten willow. Ostap fanned the coals and suddenly hears hot horses stamping their feet, stopping near the smithy. And someone's voice - female, young - is calling the farrier.

Ostap came out and froze: at the very doors of the smithy a black horse was dancing, and on it was a woman of heavenly beauty, in a long velvet dress, with a whip and a veil. Her eyes laugh from under the veil. And the teeth are laughing. And the velvet on the dress is soft, blue and drops glisten on it - after the rain, they fall from the black willows onto that woman. And next to her on the other horse is a young officer. At that time, a regiment of lancers was stationed in Vasilkovo.

“Forge, my dear,” says the woman, “give me a horse, I lost my horseshoe. A very slippery road after a thunderstorm. "

The woman got off the saddle, sat on the block, and Ostap began to forge the horse. She forges and keeps looking at the woman, but she suddenly became so vague, threw back her veil and also looked at Ostap.

“I haven’t met you until now,” Ostap tells her. "Are you not one of ours, ma'am, places?"

“I'm from St. Petersburg,” the woman replies. "You forge very well."

“What horseshoes! - says Ostap quietly to her. - It's an empty matter! For you I can forge such a thing out of iron that no queen in the world has it ”.

"What kind of thing is this?" The woman asks.

"What do you want. For example, I can forge the thinnest rose with leaves and thorns. "

"Good! - the woman answers just as quietly. - Thank you, forge. I'll come for her in a week. "

Ostap helped her into the saddle. She gave him a gloved hand to lean on, and Ostap could not resist - he clung hotly to that hand. But before she could pull her hand back, the officer hit Ostap with a whip across his face and shouted: "Know your place, man!"

The horses soared and galloped. Ostap grabbed a hammer to throw at the officer. But I didn’t. He sees nothing around, blood pours down his face. The officer injured one eye.

However, Ostap got over it, worked for six days and forged a rose. Various people watched it, said that there was no such work, it must have been, even in Italian soil.

And on the seventh day at night, someone quietly drove up to the forge, dismounted from the horse, tied it to a spindle.

Ostap was afraid to go out, to show his face - he closed his eyes with his hands and waited.

And he hears light steps and breathing, and someone's warm arms embrace him, and her only tear falls on his shoulder.

“I know, I know everything,” the woman says. - My heart ached during these days. Sorry, Ostap. Because of me, your great misfortune has happened. I drove him, my fiance, and now I am leaving for Petersburg. "

"Why?" - asks Ostap quietly.

“My dear, my heart,” says the woman, “people won't give us happiness anyway.”

“Your will,” Ostap replies. - I am a simple man, forge. It’s a joy for me to think of you ”.

The woman took the rose, kissed Ostap and left at a walking pace. And Ostap went out on the threshold, looked after her, listened. The woman stopped the horse twice. I wanted to return twice. But she didn’t come back. The stars played over the ravines, fell into the steppe, as if the sky itself was crying over their love. That's it, lad!

At this point, the grandfather always fell silent. I sat, afraid to move. Then I asked in a whisper:

- So they never saw each other again?

- No, - answered the grandfather. - That's right, we haven't seen each other. Ostap began to go blind. Then he thought of going to Petersburg to see that woman, while he was not completely blind. He reached the imperial capital and learned that she was dead, - maybe she could not stand the separation. Ostap found her grave in the cemetery made of white marble-stone, looked, and his heart snapped - his iron rose lay on the stone. That woman bequeathed to put a rose on her grave. Forever. And Ostap began to play lyre and, damn it, he died on the road or at the market under a wagon. Amen!

The shaggy dog ​​Ryabchik with burrs on his face yawned loudly, listening to his grandfather's story. I pushed him in the side with indignation, and Grouse did not take offense at all and climbed to caress me, sticking out his hot tongue.

Fragments of teeth stuck out in Grouse's mouth. Last fall, when we were leaving Gorodishche, he grabbed a wheel - he wanted to stop the carriage - and broke his teeth.

Ah, grandfather Maxim Grigorievich! To him, I owe some of my excessive impressionability and romanticism. They turned my youth into a series of encounters with reality. I suffered from this, but nevertheless I knew that my grandfather was right and that a life created out of sobriety and prudence may be good, but painful for me and fruitless. "For every person," as my grandfather used to say, "there is a different presentation."

Maybe that's why the grandfather did not get along with the grandmother. Rather, he was hiding from her. Her Turkish blood did not give her any attractive features other than a beautiful but formidable appearance.

The grandmother was despotic, picky. She smoked at least a pound of the strongest black tobacco a day. She smoked it in short hot pipes. She was in charge of the household. Her black eye noticed the slightest disorder in the house.

On holidays, she put on a satin dress trimmed with black lace, left the house, sat on the embankment, smoked her pipe and looked at the fast river Ros. From time to time she laughed loudly at her thoughts, but no one dared to ask her why she was laughing.

The only thing that made me and my grandmother a little bit reconciled was the solid pink bar that looked like soap. It was hidden in her dresser. She took it out from time to time and proudly gave us a sniff. The bar gave off the subtlest scent of roses.

My father told me that the valley around Kazanlak - my grandmother's hometown - is called the Valley of Roses, that rose oil is mined there and a wonderful bar is some kind of composition soaked in this oil.

Valley of roses! These very words worried me. I did not understand how a person with such a harsh soul as my grandmother could appear in such poetic places.

Carp

Now, having lingered in Gorodische after my father's death, I remembered my early childhood, the time when we, cheerful and happy, came here for the summer from Kiev. Then the father and mother were still young and the grandfather and the Turkish grandmother had not yet died. Then I was still a very young boy and invented all sorts of fables.

The train from Kiev came to Bila Tserkva in the evening. Father immediately hired loud cabbies on the station square.

We got to Gorodishche at night. Through the slumber, I heard the annoying rattling of a spring, then the sound of water near the mill, the barking of dogs. Horses snorted and fences creaked. The night shone with unfading stars. From the damp darkness, weeds were drawn.

Aunt Dozya carried me, sleepy, into a warm hut, covered with multi-colored rugs. The hut smelled of baked milk. I opened my eyes for a moment and saw near my face the magnificent embroidery on the snow-white sleeves of my aunt.

In the morning I woke up from the hot sun hitting the white walls. Red and yellow mallow nuns swayed outside the open window. Together with them a nasturtium flower peeped into the room; a furry bee was sitting in it. I froze and watched her angrily back away and get out of the tight flower. Light streams ran endlessly along the ceiling, light waves - reflections of the river. The river was noisy right there, nearby.

Then I heard the mocking uncle Ilko say to someone:

- Well, of course, the sun didn’t have time to warm up, but the procession had already appeared! Dozing, put cherries and pies on the table!

I jumped up, ran barefoot to the window and saw: from the other bank along the rowing, tapping with gnarled staffs, old men in large straw hats - shaved - were slowly approaching the estate. Medals clanged and glittered on their brown scrolls.

They were coming to greet us and congratulate on a safe arrival the venerable grandfathers from the neighboring village of Pilipchi. Ahead walked the chipped head Trofim with a brass plaque around his neck.

A bustle began in the hut. Aunt Dozya waved a tablecloth over the table. The wind blew across the room. Mom hastily put pies on the dish, cut the sausage. Father uncorked bottles with homemade cherries, and Uncle Ilko arranged faceted cups.

Then Aunt Dozya and Mom ran away to change clothes, and Father and Uncle Ilko went out onto the porch to meet the old people who were approaching solemnly and inevitably, like fate.

The old men finally approached, silently kissed their father and uncle, sat down on the heap, everyone sighed at once, and then the headman Trofim, after clearing his throat, uttered his famous phrase:

- I have the honor to humbly congratulate you, Georgy Maksimovich, on your arrival before us, in our quiet area.

- Thanks! - said the father.

- Yes! - all the old men answered at once and sighed with relief. - It is so, of course ...

- Yes! - repeated Trofim and glanced through the window at the table, where the bottles were gleaming.

- Here it is, then, how it is composed, - said the old Nikolayev soldier with a bumpy nose.

- It's clear! - entered into the conversation a small and very curious old man Nedolya, the father of twelve daughters.

From old age he forgot their names and could count no more than five on his fingers: Ganna, Parasya, Gorpyna, Olesya, Frosya ... Then the old man got lost and started counting all over again.

- So! - said the old people and fell silent for a long time.

At this time, grandfather Maxim Grigorievich was leaving the house. The old men stood up, bowed low to him. Grandfather bowed to them in response, and the old people, sighing noisily, again sat down on the heap, quacked, were silent and looked at the ground. Finally, by some subtle signs, Uncle Ilko guessed that everything in the hut was ready for refreshments, and said:

- Well, thank you for the conversation, kind people... Please now take a bite of what God sent.

In the hut of the old people, my mother met in the summer fancy dress... The old men kissed her hand, and she kissed their brown hands in return - that was the custom. Aunt Dozya, in a blue dress and shawl with crimson roses, ruddy, beautiful, early gray, bowed to the old men in the belt.

After the first glass of sticky cherry, Nedolya, tormented by curiosity, began to question. All the things we brought from Kiev caused him bewilderment, and he, pointing to them, asked:

- Well, what is it for and what is the use of literature in it?

His father explained to him that this was a brass iron, and this was an ice cream maker, and there was a folding mirror on the dresser. Nedolya twisted his head with admiration:

- On your own money!

- It is so, of course! - agreed the old people, drinking.

Summer in the Settlement came into its own - hot summer with its terrible thunderstorms, the noise of trees, cool streams of river water, fishing, thickets of blackberries, with its sweet sensation of carefree and varied days.

The island on which the grandfather's hut stood was, of course, the most mysterious place in the world.

Behind the house were two huge deep ponds. It was always gloomy there with old willows and dark water.

Beyond the ponds, up the slope, rose a grove with impassable hazel trees. Behind the grove, glades began, overgrown with flowers up to the waist and so fragrant that on a sultry day they made your head feel sick.

Behind the glades in the apiary, a faint smoke was smoking around the grandfather's hut. And behind the grandfather's hut were unknown lands - red granite rocks covered with creeping bushes and dry strawberries.

In the depressions of these rocks, there were small lakes of rainwater. Wagtails, shaking their variegated tails, drank warm water from these lakes. Clumsy and impudent bumblebees, having fallen on a grand scale into the lakes, whirled and hummed, crying in vain for help.

The cliffs ended in a sheer wall into the Ros River. We were forbidden to go there. But from time to time we crawled to the edge of the rocks and looked down. In a tight transparent stream, dizzy, Ros was rushing below. Under the water, against the current, narrow fish walked slowly, shuddering.

On the other side, the reserved forest of Countess Branitskaya rose up the slope. The sun could not break through the powerful greenery of this forest. Only from time to time a lone beam cut obliquely through the thicket and revealed before us the tremendous power of vegetation. Little birds flew into this beam like sparkling dust particles. They chased each other with a squeak and dived into the foliage, as if into green water.

But my favorite place was the ponds.

Every morning my father went there to fish. He took me with him.

We left the house very early and walked carefully on the heavy wet grass. Among the dark, still nocturnal foliage, the willow branches, illuminated by the first sun, shone in quiet golden spots among the dark foliage. Crucian carp splashed in the deep water. Thickets of water lilies, pondweed, arrowhead and water buckwheat hung, it seemed, over a black abyss.

Mysterious world water and plants opened up before me. The charm of this world was so great that I could sit on the bank of the pond from sunrise to sunset.

The father silently cast his fishing rods and lit a cigarette. Tobacco smoke floated above the water and got entangled among the coastal branches.

I took water from a pond into a bucket, threw grass into this water and waited. The red floats stood motionless in the water. Then one of them began to shudder, made light circles, suddenly dived or swam quickly to the side. Father hooked, the line pulled, the walnut rod bent into an arc, and in the fog over the pond gurgling, splashing, fussing began. Water scattered, shaking water lilies, water beetles hurried away in all directions, and, finally, a beating golden shine appeared in the mysterious depths. It was impossible to make out what it was until the father dragged the heavy crucian carp onto the crumpled grass. He lay on his side, puffing and wiggling his fins. From its scales came the amazing smell of the underwater kingdom.

I put the crucian carp in the bucket. He was tossing and turning there among the grass, unexpectedly hitting his tail and splashing me. I licked the spray from my lips, and I really wanted to get drunk from the bucket, but my father would not allow it.

It seemed to me that the water in a bucket with crucian carp and grass should be as fragrant and tasty as the water of thunderstorms. We, boys, eagerly drank it and believed that from this a person would live up to one hundred and twenty years. So, at least, Nechipor assured.

Pleurisy

Thunderstorms were frequent in the Settlement. They began on Ivan Kupala and lasted all July, surrounded the island with multicolored masses of clouds, shone and thundered, shaking our house, and frightened Aunt Dozyu to fainting.

The memory of my first childhood love is associated with these thunderstorms. I was nine years old then.

On the day of Ivan Kupala, girls from Pilipcha came in an elegant flock to our island to send wreaths along the river. They made wreaths of wildflowers. Inside each wreath, they inserted a splinter cross and glued a wax stub to it. At dusk, the girls lit cinders and threw wreaths along the river.

The girls wondered whose candle would float on, that girl would be the happiest of all. But the happiest were those whose wreath fell into the whirlpool and slowly circled over the whirlpool. The pool was under the steep. There was always a calm, candles burned on such wreaths very brightly, and even from the shore one could hear their wicks crackling.

Both adults and we, children, loved these wreaths for Ivan Kupala very much. One Nechipor grunted dismissively and said:

- Stupidity! Dumb in those wreaths with a walkie-talkie!

Hannah, my second cousin, came with the girls. She was sixteen years old. She weaved orange and black ribbons into her lush reddish braids. A dull coral monisto hung around her neck. Hanna's eyes were greenish, shiny. Every time Hanna smiled, she lowered her eyes and raised them not soon, as if it was hard for her to raise them. A hot blush never left her cheeks.

I heard Dozia's mother and aunt feel sorry for Ganna for something. I wanted to know what they were saying, but they always fell silent as soon as I approached.

On Ivan Kupala, they let me go with Ganna to the river to the girls. On the way, Ganna asked:

- What will you be, Kostik, when you grow up big?

“A sailor,” I replied.

“Don't,” said Ganna. - Sailors are drowning in the abyss. Let somebody cry for you with clear eyes.

I ignored Hanna's words. I held her hot swarthy hand and talked about my first trip to the sea.

In early spring, my father went on a business trip to Novorossiysk for three days and took me with him. The sea appeared in the distance like a blue wall. For a long time I could not understand what it is. Then I saw a green bay, a lighthouse, heard the sound of waves at the pier, and the sea entered me, as a magnificent, but not very clear dream enters into my memory.

On the roadstead stood black battleships with yellow trumpets - "The Twelve Apostles" and "Three Saints". My father and I went to these ships. I was struck by the tanned officers in white uniforms with gold dirks, the oily warmth of the engine rooms. But my father surprised me most of all. I've never seen him like this. He laughed, joked, spoke animatedly with the officers. We even went into the cabin of a ship mechanic. His father drank cognac with him and smoked Turkish cigarettes made of pink paper with golden Arabic letters.

Ganna listened with downcast eyes. For some reason I felt sorry for her, and I said that when I became a sailor, I would certainly take her to my ship.

- Who will you take me? Ganna asked. - A doorknob? Or a laundress?

- No! I replied, flashing with boyish enthusiasm. - You will be my wife.

Hanna stopped and gazed sternly into my eyes.

- Swear! She whispered. - Swear by your mother's heart!

- I swear! - I answered without hesitation.

Hanna smiled, her pupils turning green like sea water, and she kissed me hard in the eyes. I felt the heat of her red lips. We were silent the rest of the way to the river.

Hanna's candle went out first. A smoky cloud rose from behind the forest of Countess Branicka. But we, carried away by the wreaths, did not notice it until the wind blew, and the first lightning whistled, bending down to the ground, and the first lightning burst out with a blinding thunder.

The girls rushed under the trees with a squeal. Ganna tore off the handkerchief from my shoulders, tied it around me, grabbed my hand, and we ran.

She dragged me, the downpour overtook us, and I knew that we would not have time to reach the house anyway.

The downpour caught up with us not far from the grandfather's hut. We ran to the hut soaked through and through. Grandfather was not at the apiary.

We sat in a hut, huddled together. Ganna rubbed my hands. She smelled of wet calico. She kept asking fearfully:

- Are you cold? Oh, if you get sick, what will I do then!

I was trembling. I was really very cold. Fear, despair, love replaced in Ganna's eyes.

Then she clutched at her throat and coughed. I saw how a vein beat on her delicate and clean neck. I hugged Ganna and pressed my head to her wet shoulder. I wanted to have such a young and kind mother.

- What you? - Ganna asked in confusion, not stopping to cough, and stroked my head. - What you? Do not be afraid ... We will not be killed by thunder. I'm with you. Do not be afraid.

Then she slightly pushed me away, pressed the sleeve of her shirt, embroidered with red oak leaves, to her mouth, and next to them a small bloody spot spread on the canvas, similar to an embroidered oak leaf.

- I don’t need your oath! - whispered Ganna, looked at me guiltily from under her brows and grinned: - I was joking.

Thunder was already thundering beyond the edge of the vast land. The downpour has passed. Only frequent drops rustled through the trees.

At night I started having a fever. A day later, the young doctor Napelbaum came from Bila Tserkva on a bicycle, examined me and found that I had pleurisy.

From us, Napelbaum went to Pilipchu to see Hanna, returned and said in the next room to my mother in a low voice:

- She, Maria Grigorievna, has transient consumption. She won't live to see spring.

I burst into tears, called my mother, hugged her and noticed that my mother had the same delicate vein around her neck as Hanna's. Then I cried harder and for a long time could not stop, and my mother stroked my head and said:

- What you? I'm with you. Do not be afraid.

I recovered, and Ganna died in the winter, in February.

The next summer, I went with my mother to her grave and put chamomile flowers tied with a black ribbon on a small green mound. Such flowers were woven by Ganna into her braids. And for some reason I was embarrassed that my mother was standing next to me with a red umbrella from the sun and that I had not come to Hanna alone.

Trip to Czestochowa

In Cherkassy, ​​on the Dnieper, my other grandmother lived - Vikentiya Ivanovna, a tall old woman, a Polish woman.

She had many daughters, my aunts. One of these aunts, Evfrosinia Grigorievna, was the head of the women's gymnasium in Cherkassy. Grandmother lived with this aunt in a large wooden house.

Vikentiya Ivanovna always wore mourning and a black headdress. She first put on mourning after the defeat of the Polish uprising in 1863 and has never taken it off since.

We were sure that during the uprising at my grandmother's house, they killed the groom - some proud Polish rebel, completely unlike my grandmother's gloomy husband, and my grandfather - a former notary in the city of Cherkassy.

I don't remember my grandfather well. He lived on a small mezzanine and rarely went down from there. His grandmother settled him separately from everyone because of the unbearable passion of his grandfather for smoking.

From time to time we made our way to his room, bitter and cloudy with smoke. On the table were tobacco poured in mountains, poured out of boxes. Grandfather, sitting in an armchair, stuffed cigarette after cigarette with trembling sinewy hands.

He did not speak to us, only ruffled the hair on the back of our heads with a heavy hand and presented us with lilac glossy paper from tobacco boxes.

We often came from Kiev to stay with Vikentia Ivanovna. She had a firm order. Every spring during Great Lent, she went on pilgrimage to the Catholic holy places in Warsaw, Vilna or Czestochowa.

But sometimes it occurred to her to visit Orthodox shrines, and she left for the Trinity-Sergius Lavra or Pochaev.

All her daughters and sons laughed at this and said that if it went on like this, Vikentia Ivanovna would begin to visit the famous Jewish tzaddiks and end her days with a pilgrimage to Mecca to the tomb of Mohammed.

The biggest clash between my grandmother and my father happened when my grandmother took advantage of my father's departure to Vienna for a statisticians' congress and took me with her on one of her religious trips. I was happy with this and did not understand my father's indignation. I was then eight years old.

I remember the transparent Vilna spring and the Chapel of Ostraya Brama, where my grandmother went to communion.

The whole city was in the greenish and golden sheen of the first leaves. At noon, a cannon from the times of Napoleon fired on the Castle Hill.

The grandmother was a very well-read woman. She explained everything to me endlessly.

Religiosity surprisingly coexisted in her with cutting edge ideas... She was fond of Herzen and at the same time Heinrich Sienkiewicz. Portraits of Pushkin and Mickiewicz always hung in her room next to the icon of the Czestochowa Mother of God. During the 1905 revolution, she hid revolutionary students and Jews during the pogroms.

From Vilna we went to Warsaw. I remember only the monument to Copernicus and Kavarni, where my grandmother treated me to “prshevruzona kava” - “inverted coffee”: it had more milk than coffee. She also treated me to pastries - meringues, which melted in my mouth with a buttery cold sweetness. We were served by nimble girls in corrugated aprons.

From Warsaw we went to Czestochowa, to the famous Catholic monastery of Jasna Góra, where the "miraculous" icon of the Mother of God was kept.

For the first time, I then encountered religious fanaticism. He shocked me and scared me. Since then, the fear of fanaticism and disgust for it entered my mind. For a long time I could not get rid of this fear.

The train arrived in Czestochowa early in the morning. It was far from the station to the monastery, which stood on a high green hill.

The pilgrims got out of the carriage - Polish peasants and peasant women. Among them were city dwellers in dusty bowlers. An obese old priest and clergy boys in lace robes were waiting for the pilgrims at the station.

Right there, near the station, a procession of pilgrims lined up on the dusty road. The priest blessed her and muttered a prayer into his nose. The crowd fell to their knees and crawled towards the monastery, chanting psalms.

The crowd crawled on their knees all the way to the monastery cathedral. Ahead crawled a gray-haired woman with a white, frenzied face. She was holding a black wooden crucifix in her hands.

The priest walked slowly and indifferently in front of this crowd. It was hot, dusty, and sweat was rolling down their faces. People breathed hoarsely, angrily glancing back at the laggards.

I grabbed my grandmother by the arm.

- Why is that? I asked in a whisper.

“Don't be afraid,” my grandmother answered in Polish. “They are sinners. They want to beg forgiveness from the Pan God.

“Let's get out of here,” I said to my grandmother.

But she pretended not to hear my words.

The Czestochowa Monastery turned out to be a medieval castle. Rusty Swedish cannonballs stuck in its walls. Rotting in the moats green water... Thick trees rustled on the ramparts.

Drawbridges on iron chains were lowered. We drove in a cab-carriage across such a bridge into the confusion of monastery courtyards, passages, nooks and crannies and arcades.

A monk attendant, belted with a rope, led us to the monastery hotel. We were assigned a cold vaulted room. An unchanging crucifix hung on the wall. On the brass feet of Christ pierced with nails, someone hung a wreath of paper flowers.

The monk asked the grandmother if she was suffering from diseases requiring healing. The grandmother was very suspicious and immediately complained of pain in her heart. The monk took from the pocket of his brown robe a handful of small hearts, hands, heads, and even toy babies made of silver, and poured them in a heap on the table.

“There are hearts,” he said, “for five rubles, for ten and for twenty. They are already sanctified. It remains only to hang them with prayer on the icon of the mother of God.

My grandmother bought a small plump heart for ten rubles.

My grandmother said that at night we would go to the church for a solemn service, gave me tea with stale Warsaw rolls and lay down to rest. She fell asleep. I looked out the low window. A monk in a shiny, burnt-out cassock passed by. Then two Polish peasants sat down in the shade by the wall, took out gray bread and garlic from the bundles, and began to eat. They had blue eyes and strong teeth.

I got bored and cautiously walked out into the street. My grandmother told me not to speak Russian in the monastery. This made me scared. I knew only a few words in Polish.

I got lost, got into a narrow passage between the walls. It was paved with cracked slabs. Plantain blossomed in the cracks. Cast iron lanterns were screwed to the walls. They must have not been lit for a long time - in one of the lanterns I saw a bird's nest.

A narrow gate in the wall was ajar. I looked into it. An apple orchard, covered in sunspots, sloped down the hillside. I entered cautiously. The garden faded. Yellowed petals often fell. Liquid, but melodic ringing came from the church bell tower.

A young Polish peasant woman was sitting on the grass under an old apple tree, breastfeeding a child. The child winced and wheezed. Next to the woman stood a pale, swollen peasant boy in a new felt hat. A blue satin ribbon was sewn onto the hat, and a peacock feather was tucked behind it. The guy looked at his feet with round eyes and did not move.

A short, bald monk with a pruning shears in hand sat on a tree stump opposite a woman. He looked at me carefully and said:

- Hex benji praised by Jesus Christus!

- Forever! - I answered the way my grandmother taught me.

My heart stopped with fear.

The monk turned away and again began to listen to the woman. Strands of white hair fell over her face. She pushed them aside with a gentle hand and said plaintively:

- As the son went the fifth month, Mikhas shot a stork. He brought it to our shack. I cried and said: “What have you done, you fool! You know that for every stork killed, God takes away one child from people. Why did you shoot him, Mikhas? "

The guy in the felt hat was still staring at the ground with indifference.

“And from that day on,” the peasant woman continued, “our son turned blue and the disease began to choke him by the throat. Will the womb of God help him?

The monk evasively looked to the side and did not answer.

- Oh, tensknot! - said the woman and began to scratch her throat with her hand. - Oh, tensknot! She screamed and hugged the baby to her breast.

The child goggled and wheezed.

I remembered the toy silver babies that the minister in the monastery hotel showed to my grandmother. I felt sorry for this woman. I wanted to tell her to buy such a baby for twenty rubles and hang him up from the Czestochowa icon. But I didn't have enough Polish words to give such difficult advice. Besides, I was afraid of the gardener monk. I left the garden.

When I returned, my grandmother was still asleep. I lay down, without undressing, on a hard bed and immediately fell asleep.

Grandma woke me up in the middle of the night. I washed myself with cold water in a large faience basin. I was trembling with excitement. Handlamps floated past the windows, the shuffling of feet was heard, bells were ringing back.

“Today,” said the grandmother, “the cardinal, the papal nuncio, will serve.

With difficulty we got to the church in the dark.

- Hold on to me! - said the grandmother in the unlit vestibule.

We groped our way into the church. I didn't see anything. There was not a single candle, not a glimpse of light in the stifling darkness, fettered by high church walls and filled with the breath of hundreds of people. This vast darkness smelled sweetly of flowers.

I felt a worn cast-iron floor under my foot, took a step and immediately bumped into something.

- Stay calm! - said the grandmother in a whisper. - People lie on the floor with a cross. You will step on them.

Suddenly, in this heavy gloom, the sobbing thunder of the organ resounded, shaking the walls. At the same moment, hundreds of candles flashed. I screamed, blinded and frightened.

The large golden curtain covering the icon of the Mother of God of Czestochowa began to slowly move apart. Six old priests in lace vestments were kneeling in front of the icon, with their backs to the crowd. Their hands were raised to the sky. Only a thin cardinal in a purple cassock with a wide purple sash that tied his slender waist, stood at full height - also with his back to the worshipers - as if listening to the fading storm of the organ and the sobbing of the crowd.

I have never seen such a theatrical and incomprehensible spectacle.

After the night service, my grandmother and I walked into a long vaulted corridor. It was getting light. The worshipers were kneeling under the walls. Grandmother knelt down too and made me go down too. I was afraid to ask her what these crazy-eyed people were waiting for.

A cardinal appeared at the end of the corridor. He walked easily and swiftly. His purple cassock fluttered and brushed the worshipers in the face. They caught the edge of the cassock and kissed it passionately and humiliatingly.

“Kiss the cassock,” my grandmother told me in a quick whisper.

But I didn’t obey. I turned pale with resentment and looked directly into the face of the cardinal. I must have had tears in my eyes. He stopped, put a dry little hand on my head for a moment and said in Polish:

- Tears of a child - best prayer lord.

I looked at him. His sharp face was tightened with brown skin. It was as if a dim glow illuminated this face. Black narrowed eyes looked at me expectantly.

I was stubbornly silent.

The cardinal turned sharply away and, just as easily, picking up the wind, went on.

Grandma grabbed my arm so hard that I almost screamed in pain and led me out of the corridor.

- All in the father! - she said when we went out into the yard. - All in the father! Mother of God of Czestochowa! What will happen to you in life ?!

Pink oleanders

On a gallery in my grandmother's house in Cherkassy, ​​oleanders stood in green tubs. They bloomed pink flowers... I really liked the grayish leaves of oleanders and their pale flowers. For some reason, they were connected with the idea of ​​the sea - distant, warm, washing the countries blooming with oleanders.

My grandmother grew flowers well. In winter, fuchsias always bloomed in her room. In summer, in the garden, overgrown with burdock near the fences, so many flowers were blooming that the garden seemed to be a continuous bouquet. The scent of flowers even penetrated my grandfather's mezzanine and displaced tobacco fumes from there. Grandpa slammed the windows angrily. He said that this smell gave him chronic asthma.

Flowers seemed to me then as living creatures. Reseda was a poor girl in a gray darned dress. Only an amazing smell betrayed her fabulous origin. Yellow tea roses seemed like young beauties who had lost their blush from the abuse of tea.

The pansies flowerbed was like a masquerade. These were not flowers, but cheerful and sly gypsies in black velvet masks, motley dancers - now blue, now purple, now yellow.

I didn't like daisies. Their boring pink dresses reminded the girls of their grandmother's neighbor, Zimmer's teacher. The girls were eyeless and blond. At each meeting, they did knixen, holding muslin skirts.

The most interesting flower was, of course, the purslane - creeping, glowing with all the pure colors. Instead of leaves, the purslane had soft and juicy needles sticking out. As soon as they were pressed a little, green juice splashed in the face.

Grandma's garden and all these flowers with extraordinary power acted on my imagination. It must have been in this garden that my addiction to travel was born. As a child, I imagined a distant country where I would certainly go, like a hilly plain, overgrown to the horizon with grass and flowers. Villages and cities were drowning in them. When high-speed trains crossed this plain, pollen adhered to the walls of the carriages in a thick layer.

I told my brothers, sister and mother about this, but no one wanted to understand me. In response, for the first time I heard from my elder brother the contemptuous nickname "Fantazer".

Perhaps one aunt Nadya, the youngest of my grandmother's daughters, understood me.

She was then twenty-three years old. She studied singing at the Moscow Conservatory. She had a wonderful contralto.

Aunt Nadya came to Cherkassy for Easter and in the summer to see her grandmother. Immediately in a quiet spacious house it became noisy and cramped. She played with us and ran with laughter across the waxed floors - slender, slender, with disheveled blond hair and a slightly parted fresh mouth.

Grains of gold always sparkled in her gray eyes. These eyes laughed in response to everything: to any joke, funny word, even in response to the squeamish face of Anton's cat, who is dissatisfied with our fun.

- For Nadia, everything is tryn-grass! - said my mother with mild condemnation.

Aunt Nadia's carelessness has become a proverb in our family. She often lost gloves, powder, money, but she was never upset about this.

On the day of her arrival, we lifted the lid of the piano, and it stood open until Aunt Nadya returned to her cheerful and hospitable Moscow.

Piles of music lay on the chairs. The candles were smoking. The piano rumbled, and I sometimes woke up at night from a chesty and gentle voice singing to the barcarole:

Swim my gondola

Illuminated by the moon

Give out, barcarole,

Above the sleepy wave.

And in the morning I was awakened by insinuating singing, almost a whisper, near my ear and Aunt Nadia's hair tickling my cheeks. “Get up quickly,” she sang. Robins have been ringing for a long time, and roses have opened up for you! "

I opened my eyes, she kissed me, immediately disappeared, and a minute later I heard her already circling the hall in a fast waltz with her brother - cadet Uncle Kolya. He also sometimes came to his grandmother for Easter from St. Petersburg.

I jumped up, anticipating a stormy, cheerful, unexpected day.

When Aunt Nadya sang, even grandfather would open wide the door to the stairs from the mezzanine and then say to grandmother:

- Where did Nadia get this gypsy blood from?

The grandmother assured that Nadya's blood was not Gypsy, but Polish. Referring to literary examples and the history of the Commonwealth, she argued that among the Poles there were often such irresistibly cheerful, eccentric and careless women.

- That's it! - answered the grandfather sarcastically and tightly closed the door behind him. - That's it! He repeated loudly behind a closed door, sitting down to stuff cigarettes.

Once, I remember, it was late Easter. Gardens have already blossomed in Cherkassy. We arrived from Kiev by steamer. Then Aunt Nadya came from Moscow.

I loved Easter, but I was afraid of the days before Easter, because I was forced to grind almonds for hours or beat egg whites with a spoon. I got tired of it and even cried on the sly.

In addition, before Easter, a mess began in my grandmother's house. Women in tucked-up skirts washed ficuses, rhododendrons, windows and floors, knocked out carpets and furniture, and cleaned copper handles on doors and windows. We were always driven from room to room.

After the harvest, a sacred ceremony took place - grandmother made dough for Easter cakes, or, as they were called in our family, for “satin women”. The tub with yellow bubble dough was wrapped in cotton blankets, and until the dough rose, it was impossible to run around the rooms, slam doors and talk loudly. When a cab was driving along the street, my grandmother was very frightened: the dough could "sit down" from the slightest shake, and then goodbye to the tall, spongy cakes, smelling of saffron and covered with sugar glaze!

In addition to Easter cakes, my grandmother baked many different "mazurkas" - dry cakes with raisins and almonds. When the baking trays with hot mazurkas were taken out of the stove, the house was filled with such smells that even grandfather became nervous in his mezzanine. He opened the door and looked down into the living room, where a long marble table was already covered with heavy tablecloths.

On Holy Saturday, cool cleanliness and silence finally reigned in the house. In the morning we were given a glass of liquid tea with breadcrumbs, and then the whole day before breaking the fast after Matins we did not eat anything. We liked this slight hunger. The day seemed very long, my head rang a little, and my grandmother's demand to talk less set us up in a solemn mood.

At midnight we went to matins. They dressed me in long sailor trousers, a sailor jacket with gold buttons, and painfully brushed my hair. I looked at myself in the mirror, saw a terribly agitated ruddy boy and was very pleased.

Aunt Evfrosinia Grigorievna came out of her rooms. She alone did not take part in the holiday preparations. She was always sick, rarely spoke and only smiled affectionately in response to our cheerful chatter.

She came out in a deep blue dress, with a gold watch chain around her neck and a beautiful bow pinned to her shoulder. Mom explained to me that this bow is called a "cipher", that this is an award for an exemplary graduation from the institute where Aunt Evfrosinia Grigorievna once studied.

Mom was wearing her gray festive dress, and father was wearing a black suit with a white waistcoat.

Then grandmother appeared - solemn and beautiful, all in black silk, with an artificial heliotrope flower pinned to her bodice. Her gray, sleek hair was visible from under a lace headdress. Her dress rustled, and she moved easily - grandmother was getting younger that night.

She lit the lamps, then pulled on black lace gloves, and her father handed her a mantilla with wide ties of ribbons.

- You, of course, will not go to matins? - kindly, but coldly asked his grandmother.

- No, Vikentia Ivanovna, - answered the father, smiling. - I'll lie down a little. I will be woken up when you return from church.

- Oh, - said the grandmother and shrugged her shoulders, straightening her cloak. - I only hope that God is tired of your jokes and he waved his hand at you.

“I, too, count on it,” my father replied politely.

Grandmother went up to the mezzanine for a minute to say goodbye to grandfather. When she walked down from her grandfather, Aunt Nadya entered the hall. She was always late.

She did not enter - she flew in like a slender sparkling bird, in a white dress of light silk with a trench and puffs. She was breathing heavily, and a yellow rose fluttered on her chest.

It seemed that all the light, all the joy of the world shone in her darkened eyes.

Grandmother stopped on the stairs and brought the handkerchief to her eyes. She could not hold back tears at the sight of the beauty of her youngest daughter. Each time, the grandmother, obviously, thought about the fate of Aunt Nadia, about what would happen to her in this harsh life, and these thoughts involuntarily made the grandmother cry.

This time, when we returned from church, my father was awake. He opened wide the windows from the living room to the garden. It was very warm.

We sat down at the table to break our fast. The night stood next to us. The stars twinkled right into my eyes. The squeak of a sleepless bird came from the garden. Everyone spoke little and listened to the ringing of the bells that appeared and then died down in the darkness.

Aunt Nadya sat pale and tired. I noticed how my father gave her in the hall when he helped to take off the cape, a blue telegram.

Aunt Nadya flushed and crumpled up the telegram.

After breaking the fast I was immediately sent to bed. I woke up late, when the cups were jingling in the dining room and the adults were already drinking coffee.

At dinner, Aunt Nadya said that she had received a telegram from the neighboring town of Smela from her friend Liza Yavorskaya. Liza invites Aunt Nadya to come and stay for a day at her estate near Smela.

“I want to go tomorrow,” said Aunt Nadya, glanced at her grandmother and added: “And I'll take Kostik with me.

I blushed with happiness.

- God be with you, - answered the grandmother, - go, but look not to catch a cold.

“They will send horses for us,” said Aunt Nadya.

It was an hour's train ride from Cherkassy to Smela. At the station in Smela we were met by Liza Yavorskaya, a fat and funny girl. In a steam-powered carriage, we drove through a clean and beautiful town. Under the green cliffs, the Tyasmin River flooded with quiet pools. Only in the middle of the whirlpools its slow current glittered silver. It was hot. Dragonflies were flying over the river.

When we drove into a deserted park outside the city, Liza Yavorskaya said that Pushkin loved to walk here. I could not believe that Pushkin had been to these places and that I was where he had been. At that time Pushkin seemed to me a legendary creature. His brilliant life, of course, should have passed away from these Ukrainian provinces.

“Near Kamenka, the former Raevsky estate,” said Liza Yavorskaya. - He stayed with them for a long time and wrote wonderful poems here.

- What kind? - asked Aunt Nadya.

Play Adele

Do not know sorrow;

Kharita, Lel

You were crowned

And the cradle

They rocked yours ...

I didn’t know what “Kharita” and “Lel” meant, but the melodious power of these poems, the high park, centenary lime trees and the sky, where the clouds were floating, - all this tuned me into a fabulous mood. The whole day remained in my memory as a holiday of a quiet and deserted spring.

Liza Yavorskaya stopped the carriage in a wide alley. We got out and walked to the house along the side path among the dense rose hips.

Suddenly, a tanned, bearded man without a hat emerged from around the bend in the path. The hunting shotgun slung over his shoulder. In his hand he carried two dead ducks. His jacket was unbuttoned. There was a strong brown neck.

Aunt Nadya stopped, and I noticed how much she turned pale.

The tanned man broke a large branch of rose hips with buds, scratched his hands with blood and gave this branch to Aunt Nadya. She carefully took the prickly rose, held out her hand to the bearded, and he kissed her.

“Your hair smells like gunpowder,” said Aunt Nadia. - And the hands are scratched. It is necessary to remove the thorns.

- Empty! - he said and smiled.

He had straight teeth. Now, close up, I saw that he was still quite an old man.

We went to the house. The bearded man spoke very strangely, about everything at once - that he had arrived from Moscow two days ago, that it was wonderful here, that the day after tomorrow he had to take his paintings to an exhibition in Venice, that he was bewitched by a gypsy woman - a model for the artist Vrubel - and that he was a man is lost and only the voice of Aunt Nadia can save him.

Aunt Nadya smiled. I looked at him. I liked him very much. I guessed it was an artist. He really smelled of gunpowder. His hands were covered with sticky pine resin. From the black duck beaks, occasionally bright blood dripped onto the path.

In the artist's thick hair, a cobweb got tangled, needles and even a dry twig got stuck. Aunt Nadya took him by the elbow, stopped him and took out this twig.

- Incorrigible! - she said. “Quite a boy,” she added, and smiled sadly.

“That's why I love you,” Aunt Nadya said quietly.

The artist suddenly removed the gun from his shoulder and fired both barrels into the air. A jet of blue powder smoke escaped. The dogs barked and rushed towards us. Somewhere a frightened chicken cackled and cackled.

- Salute to life! - said the artist. “It's damn wonderful to live!

We approached the house, surrounded by agitated barking dogs.

The house was white, with pillars and striped curtains on the windows. A small elderly woman in a lavender dress, with a lorgnette, all in gray curls, came out to us - the mother of Liza Yavorskaya. She squinted and for a long time, squeezing her hands, admired the beauty of Aunt Nadia.

The wind blew in the cool rooms, pulled the curtains tight, and threw the newspapers Russkoe Slovo and Kievskaya Mysl from the table. Dogs wandered everywhere, sniffing. Hearing any suspicious sounds from the park, they immediately broke off and with loud barks, bumping into each other, rushed out of the rooms.

Spots of sunshine ran from the wind through the rooms, sorting through all sorts of things - vases, copper wheels on the legs of a piano, golden frames, Aunt Nadia's straw hat thrown on the table and blue barrels of a gun: the bearded one put it on the windowsill.

We drank thick coffee in the dining room. The artist told me how he was fishing in Paris right from the embankment opposite the Cathedral of Our Lady. Aunt Nadya looked at him and smiled affectionately. And Lisa's mother kept repeating:

- Ah, Sasha! When will you be an adult! It's finally time!

After coffee, the artist took Aunt Nadia and me by the arms and led me to his room. There were brushes, crushed tubes of paint, and a mess. He began hastily to collect the scattered shirts, boots, pieces of canvas, stuffed it all under the ottoman, then filled his pipe with oily tobacco from a blue tin, lit a cigarette and ordered Aunt Nadia and me to sit on the windowsill.

We sat down. The sun strongly warmed our backs. The artist approached the painting, which was hanging on the wall and covered with a canvas, and took off the canvas.

The painting depicted Aunt Nadia. Then I still did not understand anything about painting. I heard my father arguing with Uncle Kolya about Vereshchagin and Vrubel. But I didn't know a single good picture. Those that hung from my grandmother depicted sullen landscapes with boring trees and deer by the stream or brown ducks hanging upside down.

When the artist opened the portrait, I involuntarily laughed with joy. The portrait was inseparable from the shining spring beauty of Aunt Nadia, from the sun that poured into the old park in golden waterfalls, from the wind blowing through the rooms and the greenish reflection of the leaves.

Aunt Nadya looked at the portrait for a long time, then slightly ruffled the artist's hair and quickly left the room without saying a word.

- Well, thank God! - the artist sighed. - So, you can take this canvas to the exhibition in Venice.

In the afternoon we went boating on Tyasminu. The shadows from the park lay like a jagged green wall on the water. In the depths, round leaves of water lilies could be seen, which had not yet managed to reach the surface of the water.

In the evening before leaving, Aunt Nadya sang in the low hall. The artist accompanied her and was confused by the fact that his fingers, smeared with resin, stuck to the keys.

First meetings, last meetings

And then we again rode in a steam-horse carriage to Smela. The artist and Liza accompanied us. Horses thumped their hooves on the hard road. The river smelled damp, frogs croaked. A star burned high in the sky.

At the station, Liza took me to a buffet to buy ice cream, while Aunt Nadya and the artist remained on a bench in the station's front garden. There was, of course, no ice cream in the buffet, and when we returned, Aunt Nadya and the artist were still sitting, lost in thought, on the bench.

Soon, Aunt Nadya left for Moscow, and I never saw her again. The next year, she rode a troika to Petrovsky Park in a troika, sang in the cold, she developed pneumonia, and died just before Easter. Her grandmother, mother and even her father went to her funeral.

I was very homesick then. And to this day I cannot forget Aunt Nadia. She has always remained for me the embodiment of all the charm of girlhood, cordiality and happiness.

Elderberry balls

White soft balls were rolling in the box. I threw such a ball into a bowl of water. The ball began to swell, then it opened and turned into a black elephant with red eyes, then into an orange dragon or a rose flower with green leaves.

These fabulous Chinese elderberry balls were brought to me from Beijing by my uncle and Godfather Joseph Grigorievich, or simply Uncle Yuzya.

- A pure adventurer! - my father spoke about him, but not with condemnation, but even with some envy.

He envied Uncle Hughes because he traveled all over Africa, Asia and Europe, but not at all as a well-behaved tourist, but as a conqueror - with noise, bangs, daring antics and an ineradicable desire to start all sorts of incredible business in any corner of the world: in Shanghai and Addis -Ababa, in Harbin and Mashhad.

All these cases ended in failure.

- I would get to the Klondike, - used to say Uncle Yuzya. - I would show them to the Americans!

What exactly he was going to show the Klondike inveterate gold diggers remained unknown. But it was quite clear that he would really show them something that would make his fame thunder throughout the Yukon and Alaska.

Perhaps he was born to become a famous explorer and traveler, equal to Nikolai Przewalski or Livingston. But life in Russia at that time and at that time - my father called it timelessness - distorted Uncle Yuzyu. His noble wanderlust spilled over into a disorderly and fruitless wandering. But I still owe Uncle Hughes that the land after his stories began to seem mortally interesting to me, and I kept this feeling for the rest of my life.

Grandmother Vikentiya Ivanovna considered Uncle Yuzya "God's punishment", a black sheep in our family. When she was angry with me for my pranks and disobedience, she said:

- Make sure that the second uncle Yuzia does not come out of you!

Poor grandmother! Unbeknownst to her, this uncle's life seemed to me absolutely magnificent. I only dreamed of being "the second uncle Yuzei".

Uncle Yuzia always appeared at our place in Kiev or at his grandmother's in Cherkassy, ​​suddenly and just as suddenly disappeared, so that in a year and a half he would ring the doorbell again and fill the apartment with a hoarse voice, coughing, vows and infectious laughter. And each time, after Uncle Yuzia, the cabman dragged heavy suitcases with all sorts of rarities across the floor.

Uncle Yuzia was a tall, bearded man with a sagging nose, with iron fingers - he used them to bend silver rubles - with suspiciously calm eyes, in the depths of which cunning never disappeared.

He, as his father said, “was not afraid of God, the devil, or death,” but he was pitifully lost and softened from women's tears and children's whims.

The first time I saw him was after the Boer War.

Uncle Yuzia volunteered for the Boers. This act - heroic and selfless - greatly elevated him in the eyes of his relatives.

We children were shocked by this war. We pitied the Boers who fought for their independence, and we hated the British. We knew in every detail every battle that took place on the other side of the earth - the siege of Ladysmith, the battle of Bloomfontein and the storming of Mount Mayuba. The most popular people among us were the Boer generals Devette, Joubert and Botha. We despised the haughty Lord Kitchener and mocked the fact that English soldiers were fighting in red uniforms. We read the book "Peter Maritz, Young Boer from the Transvaal".

But not only us - the entire cultural world with bated breath followed the tragedy that unfolded in the steppes between Vaal and the Orange River, the unequal battle of a small people with a mighty world power. Even the Kiev organ-grinders, who until then had only played "Separation", began to play new song: "Transvaal, Transvaal, my country, you are all on fire." For this we gave them the nickels hidden in the ice cream.

For boys like me, the Boer War was a wreck of childish exoticism. Africa turned out to be completely different from what we imagined it to be from the novels from "Around the World" or from the house of the engineer Gorodetsky on Bankovskaya Street in Kiev.

The walls of this gray castle-like house were embedded with sculptures of rhinos, giraffes, lions, crocodiles, antelopes and other animals that inhabited Africa. Concrete elephant trunks hung over the sidewalks and replaced drainpipes. Water dripped from the mouths of the rhinos. Gray stone boas raised their heads from dark niches.

The owner of this house, engineer Gorodetsky, was a passionate hunter. He even went hunting in Africa. In memory of these hunts, he decorated his house with stone figures of animals. The adults said that Gorodets was an eccentric, but we boys loved this strange house. He helped our dreams of Africa.

But now, although we were boys, we understood that suffering and the struggle for human rights had invaded the vast black continent, where until then, according to our concepts, only wise elephants trumpeted, tropical forests breathed miasma, and hippos snuffled in greasy mud great unexplored rivers. Until then, Africa existed as a land of travelers, various Stanleys and Livingstones.

I, like the other boys, felt sorry to part with that Africa where we wandered in dreams - to part with lion hunts, sunrises in the sands of the Sahara, rafts in the Niger, whistling arrows, furious din of monkeys and the darkness of impenetrable forests. There, dangers awaited us at every step. Mentally, we have already many times died from fever or from wounds behind the log walls of the fort, listening to the buzzing of a lonely bullet, inhaling the smell of wet poisonous grass, looking with inflamed eyes into the black velvet sky, where the Southern Cross was burning down.

How many times have I died like that, regretting my young and short life, that mysterious Africa has not been covered by me from Algeria to the Cape? Good Hope and from Congo to Zanzibar!

Still, this idea of ​​Africa could not be completely ejected from memory. It turned out to be tenacious. Therefore, it is difficult to convey that stupefaction, that dumb delight that I experienced when a bearded man, burned by the African sun, in a wide-brimmed Boer hat, in a shirt with an open neck, with a bandolier on his belt, appeared in our boring apartment in Kiev - Uncle Yuzya.

I followed him, I looked into his eyes. I could not believe that these eyes had seen the Orange River, the Zulu kraals, British cavalry and the storms of the Pacific Ocean.

At that time, the President of the Transvaal, an old and overweight Kruger, came to Russia to ask for help from the Boers. Uncle Yuzia came with him. He stayed in Kiev for only one day and left for Petersburg after Kruger.

Uncle Yuzia was sure that Russia would help the Boers. But from St. Petersburg, he wrote to his father: “Higher state considerations forced the Russian government to do mean things - we will not help the Boers. It means that everything is over, and I am leaving again to my place in the Far East. "

My grandfather - my mother's father - was not a rich man. He would not have had enough funds to educate numerous children - five girls and three sons, if he had not sent all his sons to the Kiev Cadet Corps. Training in the corps was free.

Uncle Yuzia studied with his brothers in this building. Four years passed safely, but in the fifth year, Uncle Yuzia was transferred from Kiev to the penalty, "convict", building in the city of Volsk, on the Volga. The cadets were exiled to Volsk for "grave crimes." Uncle Yuzia committed such a crime.

The kitchen in the Kiev building was located in the basement. For one of the holidays, a lot of buns were baked in the kitchen. They were cooling down on the long kitchen table. Uncle Yuzia took out a pole, tied a nail to it, with the help of this device hauled several dozen ruddy buns through the open kitchen window and made a magnificent feast in his class.

Uncle Yuzia spent two years in Volsk. In the third year he was expelled from the corps and demoted to a soldier for hitting an officer: the officer stopped him in the street and rudely scolded him for a minor disorder in his clothes.

They put on a soldier's greatcoat, gave him a rifle and sent him on foot from Wolsk to the city of Kutno, near Warsaw, to an artillery unit.

In winter he passed the country from east to west, appearing to the chiefs of the garrisons, begging for bread in the villages, spending the night wherever he could.

He left Volsk as a hot-tempered boy, and came to Kutno as an embittered soldier.

In Kutno, he rose to the first officer's rank. He was promoted to ensign.

On military service Uncle Hughes was unlucky in the most fatal way. From artillery he was transferred to the infantry. Uncle Yuzi's regiment was summoned to Moscow to carry security during the coronation of Nicholas II. Uncle Yuzi's company guarded the Kremlin embankment.

Early in the morning on the day of the coronation, my uncle saw his soldiers rushing to the bank of the river and a brutal battle began there. Holding his sword, my uncle ran to the soldiers.

He saw a terrible creature with a copper head entangled with wires lying in the mud on the shore. The creature was knocked down by the soldiers, leaned on it, and it clumsily kicked off from them with huge leaden boots. One of the soldiers clamped a rubber ribbed tube near the copper head of this creature, and it, wheezing, ceased to resist. My uncle saw that it was a diver, shouted at the soldiers, quickly unscrewed the copper helmet, but the diver was already dead.

Uncle and the soldier were not warned that this morning divers from Kronstadt were examining the bottom of the Moskva River, looking for hellish machines.

After this incident, Uncle Yuzia was dismissed from the army. He left for Central Asia and served for some time as the chief of camel caravans that went from Uralsk to Khiva and Bukhara. At that time, Central Asia was not yet connected with Russia by rail, all goods were reloaded in Uralsk on camels and went further by caravan route.

During these caravan travels, Uncle Yuzia became friends with the explorers of Central Asia, the brothers Grum-Grzhimailo, and hunted tigers with them. He sent a tiger skin as a gift to his grandmother with such a fierce expression on the face of a killed tiger that grandmother immediately hid this skin in the basement, having previously sprinkled it with mothballs.

Uncle Yuzia loved to tell how he killed jackals on the spot with one sneeze. On bivouacs in the desert, my uncle would lie down, put a bag of groceries under his head and pretend to be asleep. The jackals crawled with their tails between their legs. When the most insolent of them began to carefully pull the bag out from under his uncle's head with his teeth, the uncle sneezed deafeningly, and the cowardly jackal, without even screaming, immediately died of a heart attack on the spot.

We believed this because we knew very well how Uncle Yuzia sneezed in the morning, preparing for a new day. In response to this sneeze, glass in the windows clinked and the cat, maddened, rushed around the room in search of salvation.

Uncle Yuzy's stories were more interesting for us than the adventures of Baron Munchausen. Munchausen had to be imagined, and Uncle Yuzia was there - alive, drowning in clouds of tobacco smoke, shaking the sofa with his laughter.

Then an unclear streak came in the life of Uncle Yuzi. He wandered around Europe, played, they say, at roulette in Monte Carlo, found himself in Abyssinia and returned from there with a huge golden order, granted to him for something by the Negus Menelik. The order looked like a janitor's badge.

Uncle Yuzia did not find a place for himself in life until his gaze turned to the foggy Far East, to Manchuria and the Ussuri region. This country seemed to exist on purpose for people like my uncle. It was possible to live there widely, noisily, not obeying any "stupid laws" - with all the strength of his unbridled character and his enterprise.

This was Russian Alaska - uninhabited, rich and dangerous. There was no better place in the world for Uncle Yuzi. Cupid, taiga, gold, Pacific Ocean, Korea, and further - Kamchatka, Japan, Polynesia. The vast, unexplored world roared like a surf off the shores of the Far East and disturbed the imagination.

Uncle Yuzia, taking with him a young ascetic wife - since no one except the ascetic, in my mother's opinion, could be the wife of such terrible person like Uncle Yuzya, he left for the Far East.

There he took part in the defense of Harbin during the Chinese uprising, in skirmishes with the Hunghuz, in the construction of the Sino-Eastern Railway. He interrupted this occupation only to go to the Transvaal.

After the Boer War, he returned to the Far East, but not to Manchuria, but to Port Arthur. There he worked as an agent for the Volunteer Fleet. Uncle Yuzia wrote that he fell in love with the steamship business and regrets that he did not become a sailor in his youth.

By that time, his wife had died. In the arms of Uncle Yuzi, two girls remained, his daughters. He raised them touchingly and clumsily together with an old Chinese servant, whom he called Pew-tea himself. Uncle Yuzia loved this loyal Chinese man, perhaps, no less than his daughters. In general, he was very fond of the Chinese and said that they were a magnificent, kind and wise people and their only drawback was the fear of rain.

During Japanese war Uncle Yuzia was drafted, like an old officer, into the army. He sent his daughters along with Sam Pu-tea to Harbin.

After the war, he came to Kiev to visit his relatives. It was last time when I saw him.

He was already gray-haired, calm, but frantic cheerful sparks, although occasionally, still crossed in his eyes.

He told us about Beijing, the gardens of the Chinese emperors, Shanghai and the Yellow River.

After these stories, China seemed to me a country where there is always a warm and clear evening. Perhaps this impression was explained by the fact that Uncle Yuzia was no longer inventing anything, did not roll his eyes and did not laugh, but spoke in a tired voice, continually shaking the ashes from his cigarette.

This was in 1905. Uncle Yuzia did not know much about politics. He considered himself an old soldier and really was one - honest, faithful to the oath. When my father started his harsh and dangerous speeches, Uncle Yuzia kept silent, went into the garden, sat on a bench and smoked there alone. He considered his father "to the left of the left."

In the fall of the fifth year, a sapper battalion and a pontoon company revolted in Kiev. Sappers fought through the city, fighting off the Cossack hundreds that were pressing on them.

The sappers were joined by the workers of the Yuzhno-Russian Machine-Building Plant. Many children were running ahead of the rebels. At the Galician bazaar, the Azov sapper regiment opened fire on the rebels. Many children and workers were killed with volleys. The sappers could not answer the fire, since there were crowds of residents between them and the Azov people. On that day, Uncle Yuzia, upon learning about the events, was very nervous, smoked endlessly, wandering around the garden, and scolded in an undertone.

- Azovtsy, - he muttered. - Fools. A shame! And those are also good, sappers - not arrows, but chickens!

Then he imperceptibly disappeared from the house and did not return by evening. He did not return either at night or the next day. He never came back. Only six months later did his daughter receive a letter from Harbin. She reported that Uncle Yuzia settled in Japan and asked him to forgive him for his sudden disappearance.

Much later, we learned that Uncle Yuzia made his way to the sappers, saw the killed children, flew into a rage, together with the leader of the uprising, Lieutenant Zhadanovsky, gathered some of the sappers and opened such fire on the government troops with them that they were forced to withdraw. Uncle Hughes naturally had to flee. He left for Japan, where he soon died in the city of Kobe from cardiac asthma and a terrible disease - nostalgia - homesickness.

Before his death, this huge and frantic man cried at the slightest reminder of Russia. And in the last, seemingly playful letter, he asked to send him the most precious gift for him in an envelope - a dried leaf of Kiev chestnut.

Svyatoslavskaya street

Trips to Cherkassy and Gorodische were holidays in my childhood, and everyday life began in Kiev, on Svyatoslavskaya Street, where long winters passed in a gloomy and uncomfortable apartment.

Svyatoslavskaya street, built up with boring tenement houses made of yellow Kiev brick, with the same brick and sidewalks, rested against a huge wasteland, indented by ravines. There were several such vacant lots in the middle of the city. They were called "yars".

All day long, past our house, carts of kalamashki with clay were drawn to the Svyatoslavsky Yar. Kalamashki in Kiev were called carts for transporting earth. Kalamashniki filled the ravines into the hole and leveled it for the construction of new houses.

The earth spilled out of the kalamashki, it was always dirty on the pavement, and therefore I did not like Svyatoslavskaya Street.

We were strictly forbidden to go to the yar. It was scary place, a shelter for thieves and beggars. But nevertheless, we, boys, sometimes gathered in detachments and went to the yar. We took a police whistle with us, just in case. He seemed to us as sure weapon as a revolver.

At first, we looked with apprehension from above into the ravines. Broken glass glittered there, there were rusty basins, and dogs were rummaging through the rubbish. They paid no attention to us.

Then we got so bold that we began to descend into the ravines, from where a cheesy yellow smoke was blowing. This haze came from dugouts and shacks. The shacks were sculpted from just about anything - broken plywood, old tin, broken boxes, seats from Viennese chairs, mattresses with springs sticking out of them. Dirty bags hung instead of doors.

By the hearths sat simple-haired women in rags. They called us "barchuk" or asked "for a monopole". Only one of them - a gray-haired shaggy old woman with a lion's face - smiled at us with a single tooth.

It was a well-known Italian beggar woman in Kiev. She walked around the courtyards and played the harmonica. For a special fee, she played the Marseillaise. In these cases, one of the boys was sent to the gate to warn if a police officer appeared.

The beggar not only played the Marseillaise on the harmonica - she shouted it in a raging, hoarse voice. The Marseillaise in her performance sounded like an angry appeal, like a curse on the inhabitants of the Svyatoslav Yar.

We recognized old acquaintances among the inhabitants of these shacks. Here is Yashka Paduchiy - a beggar with white vodka eyes. He constantly sat on the porch of the Vladimir Cathedral and shouted the same phrase: "Merciful gentlemen, pay attention to my wickedness, sheep!"

In the ravine Yashka Paduchiy was not at all as nasal and quiet as on the porch. He drank a quarter of vodka in one go, beat himself on the chest with a flourish and cried out with a tear: "Come to me, all suffering and burdened, and I will rest you!"

Here is a bald old man selling toothpicks on Fundukleevskaya Street near the François cafe, and next to him is an organ-grinder with a parrot.

Earthen hearths with leaky samovar pipes were smoking near the shacks.

More than any other I liked the organ-grinder's shack. During the day, the organ-grinder was never there - he walked around the courtyards. A barefoot girl with an earthy face and beautiful gloomy eyes was sitting on the ground near the shack. She was peeling potatoes. One leg was wrapped in rags.

It was the daughter of an organ grinder, a gymnast, a "man without bones." She used to go with her father around the yards, lay out the rug and show on it - thin, in blue tights - various acrobatic tricks. Now she injured her legs and could not "work".

Sometimes she read all the same book with the cover torn off. From the pictures I guessed that they were "The Three Musketeers" by Dumas.

The girl shouted at us with displeasure:

- What are you walking around here! Didn't you see how people live?

But then she got used to us and stopped screaming. Her father, a short, gray-haired organ-grinder, found us in the hole, said:

- Let them see how our society is toiling. Maybe it will be useful for them when they are students.

At first we went to the yar with a whole gang. Then I got used to the inhabitants of the ravine and began to go there alone.

I hid it from my mother for a long time, but the organ-grinder's daughter betrayed me. I brought her Uncle Tom's Cabin to read, but I fell ill and did not come for a book for a long time. She became worried and herself brought the book to our apartment. Mom opened the door for her, and everything was revealed. I understood this by the pursed lips of my mother and by her icy silence.

In the evening, a conversation took place between my mother and father in the dining room about my behavior. I heard him from outside the door. Mom was worried and angry, but my father said that there was nothing terrible, that it was difficult to spoil me and that he preferred that I be friends with these disadvantaged people, and not with the sons of Kiev merchants and officials. Mom objected that at my age I should be protected from difficult everyday impressions.

- Understand, - said the father, - that these people respond to human relations with such devotion that you will not find in our circle. What does this have to do with difficult everyday impressions?

Mom was silent and answered:

- Yes, maybe you are right ...

When I recovered, she brought me Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper and said:

“Here… take this yourself… to the organ-grinder's daughter. I don’t know her name.

“Liza,” I answered timidly.

- Well, take this book to Lisa. For a present.

Since then, no one in the house has resented my visits to the Svyatoslav Yar anymore. Now I didn't have to secretly carry sugar from the buffet for my new friends or Chinese nuts for the blind parrot Mitka. I openly asked my mother for all this. She never refused me.

I was grateful to my mother for this, and in my heart it was as easy as a boy with a clear conscience can have.

One early autumn an ​​organ-grinder came to our yard without a parrot. He indifferently twisted the handle of the organ. She whistled a polka "Come on, let's go, dear angel, let's go dance with me." The organ-grinder scanned the balconies and open windows, waiting for a copper coin, wrapped in paper, to finally fly into the courtyard.

I ran out to the organ grinder. He told me, without ceasing to twirl the organ:

- Mitka has an ailment. Sits like a hedgehog. I threw your nuts even then. Looks like he's dying.

The organ-grinder took off his dusty black hat and wiped his face with it.

- Lost existence! - he said. - One organ, without Mitka, let alone bread - you can't earn money for vodka. Who is to draw out "happiness" now?

A parrot for five kopecks pulled out green, blue and red tickets with predictions printed on them. For some reason, these tickets were called "happiness." They were rolled into tubes and packed like cigarettes in a cartridge case. Before pulling out the ticket, Mitka walked for a long time on the perch and shouted in displeasure.

The predictions were written in a very dark language.

“You were born under the sign of Mercury, and your stone is an emerald, otherwise emerald, which means reluctance and the final finding of the worldly order in years whitened with gray hair. Be afraid of blondes and blondes and prefer not to go out on the day of the beheading of John the Baptist. "

Sometimes the tickets contained short and ominous phrases: "Tomorrow evening" or "If you want to stay alive, never look back."

A day later, Mitka died, I buried him in a hole in cardboard box from the shoes. The organ-grinder got drunk and disappeared.

I told my mother about the death of the parrot. My lips were trembling, but I held back.

“Get dressed,” Mom said sternly. - Let's go to Burmistrov.

Burmistrov was an old man with a green beard with age. He kept a dark and cramped store in Bessarabka. There, this deaf man, who looked like a dwarf, traded in magnificent things - fishing rods, colorful floats, aquariums, goldfish, birds, ant eggs and even decals.

Mom bought an elderly green parrot with a tin ring on its leg from Burmistrov. We borrowed a cage from Burmistrov. I carried a parrot in it. On the way, he contrived and bit my finger to the very bone. We went to the pharmacy. They bandaged my finger, but I was so agitated that I hardly felt any pain.

I really wanted to take the parrot to the organ-grinder as soon as possible, but my mother said:

- I'll go with you. I have to see it myself.

She went to her room to change. I was ashamed that my mother was changing her clothes to go to the poor, ragged people, but I did not dare to tell her anything.

After a few minutes she left. She was wearing an old dress, darned at the elbows. She threw a handkerchief over her head. This time she didn't even pull on her elegant kid gloves. And she wore shoes with worn out heels.

I looked at her with gratitude, and we went.

Mom bravely descended into the ravine, walked past the disheveled women, numb with amazement, and never even lifted her skirt so as not to stain it on the heaps of rubbish and ash.

Liza, seeing us with a parrot, flushed, her gray face was covered with a hot blush, and she suddenly made a curtsy to her mother. The organ-grinder was not at home - he was still pouring his grief with his friends on Demievka.

Liza took the parrot and, blushing more and more, repeated the same words:

- Well, why are you! Why are you doing this!

- It will be possible to learn to pull out "happiness"? Mom asked.

- Yes, in two days! - Liza answered happily. - But why are you! God! What for? It costs so much money!

At home, the father, upon learning of this incident, grinned and said:

- Ladies' philanthropy! Sentimental education!

- Oh, my God! My mother exclaimed in annoyance. “I don’t know why you definitely want to contradict yourself. You have an amazing character. If you were me, you would do the same.

- No, - said the father, - I would have done more.

- Let's see!

I had no idea that my father was saying all this on purpose to tease my mother.

The day after this skirmish, my mother sent Lisa to the Svyatoslavsky Yar black dress my sister and her brown shoes.

But my father did not remain in debt to my mother. He waited until the organ-grinder came to our yard with a new parrot.

A red scarf was tied around the organ-grinder's neck. His nose shone triumphantly with vodka. In honor of my mother, the organ-grinder played everything that his organ-grinder could whistle: the Homesickness march, the Danube Waves waltz, the Separation polka and the song Eh, the box is full.

The parrot was drawing out "happiness" again. Coppers in pieces of paper poured generously from the windows. The organ-grinder deftly caught some of them with his hat.

Then he threw the hurdy-gurdy on his back and, as always, bending over strongly, went not to the street, but up the front staircase and rang at our door.

Taking off his hat and holding it in his outstretched hand so that the hat touched the floor, he thanked his mother and kissed her hand. The father went out and invited the organ grinder to his office. The organ-grinder leaned the organ-grinder against the wall in the hallway and, walking cautiously, followed his father.

The father treated the organ-grinder to cognac, said that he knew what a difficult and unfaithful life he had, and offered him a job as a traveling guard on the South-Western Road. There will be a small house, a vegetable garden.

“Don't blame me, Georgy Maksimovich,” the organ-grinder answered quietly and blushed. - I'll light up a fireman. Apparently, I’ve been in trouble with the barrel organ.

He left. Mom could not hide her triumph, although she was silent.

A few days later, the police unexpectedly evicted all of its inhabitants from the Svyatoslavsky Yar. The organ-grinder and Liza disappeared - apparently, they migrated to another city.

But before that I managed to once again visit the hole. The organ-grinder invited me to "chill".

On an overturned drawer was a plate of baked tomatoes and black bread, a bottle of cherry liqueur, and dirty candy — thick pink and white striped sugar sticks.

Lisa was in a new dress, with tightly braided braids. She resentfully made sure that I ate, "like my mother." The parrot slept, covering his eyes with a leather film. The hurdy-gurdy would occasionally emit a melodious sigh by itself. The organ-grinder explained that it was stagnant air coming out of some pipes.

It was already September. Dusk was approaching. Those who have not seen the Kiev autumn will never understand the delicate charm of these watches.

The first star lights up above. The lush autumn gardens are silently waiting for the night, knowing that the stars will surely fall to the ground and the gardens will catch these stars, like in a hammock, in the thick of their foliage and lower them to the ground so carefully that no one in the city will even wake up and know about it.

Lisa walked me home, gave me a pink sticky candy goodbye, and quickly ran down the stairs. And for a long time I did not dare to call, fearing that I would be hit for a late return.

Winter shows

Father gave me Halifax skates for Christmas.

Boys of today would laugh for a long time when they saw these skates. But then there were no better skates in the world than skates from the city of Halifax.

Where is this city? I asked everyone. Where is this old city of Halifax, covered with snow? There all the boys run on such skates. Where is this winter country inhabited by retired sailors and nimble schoolchildren? Nobody could answer me.

The elder brother Borya assumed that Halifax was not a city at all, but the surname of the inventor of skates. My father said that it seems that Halifax is, however, a town on the island of New Foundland off the northern coast of America and is famous not only for ice skates, but also for diving dogs.

The skates were on my table. I looked at them and thought about the city of Halifax. Having received the skates, I immediately invented this city and already saw it so clearly that I could draw a detailed plan of its streets and squares.

I could sit for a long time at the table over the problem book of Malinin and Burenin - I was preparing this winter for the high school exams - and think about Halifax.

This property of mine scared my mother. She was afraid of my "fantasies" and said that boys like me would face poverty and death under the fence.

This gloomy prediction "you will die under the fence" was very common at the time. For some reason, death under the fence was considered especially shameful.

I have heard this prediction often. But much more often my mother said that I had "dislocated brains and everything is not like that of people," and was afraid that I would become a loser.

Father was very angry when he heard this and said to mother:

- Let him be a loser, a beggar, a vagabond, anyone, but not a damned Kiev man in the street!

In the end, I myself began to be afraid and ashamed of my imagination. It seemed to me that I was doing nonsense, while everyone around me was busy with serious business: my brothers and sister go to the gymnasium, cram lessons, my father works in the administration of the South-Western Railways, my mother sews and orders around the house. I am the only one living in a world cut off from common interests and wasting my time.

“You’d better go to the rink than it’s pointless to sit and invent something,” my mother said. - What a boy! What are you like!

I went to the rink. The winter days were short. Twilight caught me at the rink. The military band came. Multi-colored light bulbs were lit. High school students in fur coats rolled in a circle, swaying and hiding their hands in small muffs. High school students rode backwards or with a "pistol" - squatting on one leg and putting the other far out. It was considered the highest chic. I envied them.

I returned home flushed and tired. But anxiety did not leave my heart. Because even after skating, I felt the same dangerous tendency towards inventions.

At the rink, I often met my sister's friend Gali - Katyusha Vesnitskaya, a high school student at the Fundukleevskaya women's gymnasium. She also skated on Halifax skates, but made of black blued steel.

My elder brother Borya, a student of a real school and a connoisseur of mathematics, looked after Katyusha. He danced a waltz with her on skates.

Skaters cleared a wide circle on the ice. Street boys, diving underfoot on homemade skates, were given cuffs to calm down, and a sliding and slow dance began.

Even the bandmaster of the military band, the red-haired Czech Kovarzhik, turned to face the rink to see this dance. On the red face of the Kapellmeister (we called him "Kapeldudkin") a sweet smile wandered.

Vesnitskaya's long braids flew to the beat of the waltz. They interfered with her, and she, without ceasing to dance, threw them to her chest. She haughtily looked out from under half-closed eyelids at the admiring spectators.

I watched Boreas with malice. He danced worse than Katyusha. Sometimes he even slipped on his vaunted Yacht Club skates.

Could I have thought then at the skating rink that Vesnitskaya's life would be much more unexpected than all my fantasies.

One of the sons of the Siamese king Chakrabon was brought up in the Corps of Pages in St. Petersburg. During his return to his homeland, the prince fell ill on the road near Kiev with pneumonia. The journey was interrupted. The prince was brought to Kiev, placed in the royal palace and surrounded by the care of Kiev doctors.

The prince has recovered. But before continuing his journey to Siam, he needed to rest and recover. The prince lived in Kiev for two months. He was bored. They tried to entertain him - they took him to balls in the Merchant Assembly, to the Allegri lotteries, to the circus and theaters.

At one ball the yellow-faced prince saw Vesnitskaya. She danced a waltz, just like on a skating rink, throwing her braids over her chest and haughtily looking out from under half-closed eyelids with blue eyes. The prince was fascinated. Small, slanting, with shiny, like wax, hair, he fell in love with Katyusha. He left for Siam, but soon returned to Kiev incognito and invited Katyusha to become his wife. She agreed.

Confusion gripped the Kiev school girls. All unanimously said that in her place they would never have been able to marry an Asian, even the son of the king.

Katyusha left for Siam. The Siamese king soon died of some kind of tropical disease. Following him, the first crown prince died of the same disease.

Katyusha's husband was the second son of the king. He had very little hope for the Siamese throne. But after the death of his brother, he was the only heir and suddenly became king. So the cheerful Kiev schoolgirl Vesnitskaya became the Siamese queen.

The courtiers hated the foreign queen. Its existence violated the traditions of the Siamese court.

Electric lighting was installed in Bangkok at the request of Katyusha. This filled the cup with the hatred of the courtiers. They decided to poison the queen, who trampled on the ancient habits of the people. They began to gradually pour glass from broken electric bulbs into the queen's food. Six months later, she died of bleeding in the intestines. The king erected a monument on her grave. A tall elephant of black marble with a golden crown on its head stood with its trunk lowered sadly in the thick grass that reached to its knees. Under this grass lay Katyusha Vesnitskaya - the young queen of Siam.

Since then, every time I went to the skating rink, I remembered Katyusha and the bandmaster who played the Waltz "The Enduring Summer", and how she brushed the snow off her forehead and eyebrows with a mitten, and her blue steel skates - skates from the city of Halifax. It was inhabited by simple-minded retired sailors. I would like to tell these old people the story of Vesnitskaya. At first they would open their mouths in amazement, then they would turn red with anger at the courtiers and would shake their heads for a long time, lamenting the vicissitudes of human fate.

In winter I was taken to theaters.

The first play I saw was The Storming of Ishmael. I didn't like her, because I noticed a man in the wings with glasses and frayed velvet trousers. He stood next to Suvorov, then strongly pushed Suvorov in the back, he jumped out onto the stage and crowed like a rooster.

But the second play, "The Dreaming Princess" by Rostand, stunned me. There was everything to shake my imagination: the deck of a ship, huge sails, troubadours, knights, princess.

I fell in love with the dramatic Solovtsov Theater, its blue velvet upholstery and small boxes. After the performance I could not be taken away from the theater by any force until the lights were turned off. The darkness of the theater hall, the smell of perfume and orange peels - all this seemed so tempting to me that I dreamed of hiding under an armchair and spending the whole night in an empty theater.

As a child, I could not separate the theatrical spectacle from reality and was really tormented and even sick after each performance.

My passion for reading intensified after the theater. As soon as I saw at least "Madame San-Zhen", and I began to eagerly re-read all the books about Napoleon. The epochs and people seen in the theater came to life in a miraculous way and were filled with extraordinary interest and charm.

I fell in love not only with the performances themselves. I liked theatrical corridors with mirrors in dull gold frames, dark hangers that smelled of fur from fur coats, mother-of-pearl binoculars, the pounding of stagnant horses at the theater entrance. During intermissions, I ran to the end of the corridor and looked out through the window. There was pitch darkness. Only the snow was white on the trees. I quickly turned around and saw the light of the elegant hall, the chandeliers, the shine of women's hair, bracelets, earrings and a velvet theater curtain. During intermissions, the curtain was swaying with a warm wind. I repeated this lesson several times - I looked out the window, then at the hall - and I really liked it.

I didn't like opera. Obviously because the first opera I was shown was Rubinstein's The Demon. A fat actor with a cheeky and flippant face sang the Demon lazily and somehow waddlingly. He played almost without makeup. It was funny that on this respectable man with a belly they put on a long black shirt made of muslin, trimmed with sequins, and tied wings to his back. The actor lisped hard, and when he sang "Damn world, despicable world", I could not help laughing. Mom was outraged and stopped taking me to the opera.

Every winter, Aunt Dozya came to us from the Gorodishche. Mom loved to take her to the theater.

Before that, Aunt Dozya had not slept well the night. A few hours before the performance, she already put on a wide, rustling dress made of brown satin, woven with yellow flowers and leaves, threw a brown shawl around her neck, clutched a lace handkerchief in her hand and then, ten years younger and a little frightened, rode in a cab with her mother to the theater ... Aunt Dozya tied her head, like all Ukrainian women, with a black scarf with small roses.

In the theater, everyone looked at Aunt Dozyu, but she was so carried away by the performance that she did not pay attention to anyone.

They took her mainly to Ukrainian plays - "Natalka Poltavka", "Zaporozhets beyond the Danube" and "Shelmenko-Batman". Once in the middle of the action, Aunt Dozya jumped up and shouted in Ukrainian to the theatrical villain:

- What are you doing, you bastard, your shameless eyes!

The audience laughed wildly. They gave a curtain. Aunt Dozya cried the next day with shame, asked her father for forgiveness, and we did not know how to calm her down.

Aunt Dosei and I went to the cinema for the first time. Then the cinema was called "illusion" or "cinematography of Lumiere".

The first session was arranged in Opera house... Father was in awe of the illusion and hailed it as one of the great innovations of the twentieth century.

A gray wet canvas was pulled on the stage. Then the chandeliers were extinguished. An ominous greenish light flickered across the canvas and black spots ran. A smoky ray of light streamed directly over our heads. It hissed terribly, as if a whole boar was being fried behind us. Aunt Dozia asked her mother:

“Why is he grumbled like that, this illusion? We will not burn from him, as in a hen house?

After a long blinking, an inscription appeared on the canvas: “Eruption on the island of Martinique. Specific picture ".

The screen shook, and a fire-breathing mountain appeared on it, as if through a shower of dust. Burning lava poured from its depths. Auditorium made a noise, shocked by this sight.

After the view, they showed a comic picture of the life of a French barracks. The drummer beat the drum, the soldiers woke up, jumped up, pulled on their trousers. A large rat was falling out of the trouser leg of one soldier. She ran through the barracks, and the soldiers, horrified, goggling incredibly, climbed on the bunks, on the doors and windows. This was the end of the picture.

- Balagan! - said my mother. - The only difference is that the booths at the Contract Fair are much more interesting.

Father noticed that in the same way short-sighted people laughed at Stephenson's steam locomotive, and Aunt Dozya, trying to reconcile father and mother, said:

- God bless him, with an illusion! This is not our feminine mind business.

The booths at the Contract Fair were really interesting. We loved this fair and looked forward to the whole winter when it opens.

It was opened at the end of winter in the old Contract House in Podol and in the wooden tents around this house.

Usually, on the day of its opening, there was a thaw. The pungent smells of fairground merchandise could be heard from afar. It smelled of new barrels, leather, gingerbread and calico.

I liked the carousels, toys and freak show at the fair.

Oily lumps of white and chocolate halva crunched under the sellers' knives. Transparent pink and lemon Turkish delight sealed his mouth. Pyramids of candied pears, plums and cherries - the products of the famous Kiev confectioner Balabukha - were piled on huge clay dishes.

On the matting spread in the mud stood in rows roughly carved out of wood and painted with sticky paint soldiers - Cossacks in hats and wide trousers with crimson stripes, drummers with brutally bulging eyes and trumpeters with lush tassels on trumpets. Clay whistles were piled up in heaps.

Cheerful old men jostled in the crowd, snatching "mother-in-law's tongues" and "sea inhabitant". It was a tempting toy. In a narrow glass jar, a black furry devil dived and turned over in the water.

A multitude of sounds deafened us - the shouts of the sellers, the clang of forged drogs, the Lenten bells from the Brotherhood Monastery, the squeak of rubber devils, the whistle of whistles and the screams of boys on the merry-go-round.

For a surcharge, the merry-go-round was spun so quickly that everything turned into a motley mixture of grinning horse muzzles made of papier-mâché, ties, boots, swollen skirts, multi-colored garters, lace, shawls. Sometimes glass beads from someone torn apart by the swift rotation of a monist flew into the audience's face like bullets.

I was afraid of the panopticon, especially the wax figures. The murdered French President Carnot lay smiling on the floor in a dress coat with a star. Unnaturally thick blood, like red Vaseline, ran down his plastron. Carnot seemed pleased that he had died so spectacularly.

The wax queen Cleopatra clutched a black snake to her firm greenish chest.

A mermaid with purple eyes lay in a zinc bath. A dim light bulb was reflected in the muddy scales of the mermaid. The bath water was cloudy.

A boa constrictor slept among the wadded blankets in an open chest covered with wire mesh. He occasionally flexed his muscles, and the audience shied away.

A stuffed gorilla, surrounded by foliage of dyed shavings, carried an insensitive girl with loose golden hair into the thicket.

Anyone could shoot this gorilla from a Monte Cristo for three kopecks and save the girl. If it fell into a circle on the monkey's chest, she dropped the rag girl on the floor. Dust rose thickly from the girl.

After that, the gorilla was pulled for a minute with a cotton curtain, and then she again appeared, still fiercely dragging the girl into the same faded forest thickets.

We also loved the Contract Fair for the fact that it foreshadowed a close Easter, a trip to my grandmother in Cherkassy, ​​and then - always beautiful and extraordinary Kiev our spring.

Midshipman

Spring in Kiev began with the flooding of the Dnieper. One had only to leave the city on the Vladimirskaya Gorka, and immediately the bluish sea swung open before our eyes.

But, apart from the flood of the Dnieper, another flood began in Kiev - sunshine, freshness, warm and fragrant wind.

Sticky pyramidal poplars were blooming on Bibikovsky Boulevard. They filled the surrounding streets with the smell of incense. The chestnuts threw out the first leaves - transparent, crumpled, covered with reddish down.

When yellow and pink candles were blooming on the chestnuts, spring was at its height. From the centuries-old gardens, waves of coolness, the damp breath of young grass, the noise of recently blossoming leaves poured into the streets.

Caterpillars crawled along the sidewalks even on Khreshchatyk. The wind blew dried petals into heaps. May beetles and butterflies flew into tram cars. Nightingales sang in the front gardens at night. Poplar fluff, like the foam of the Black Sea, rolled in the surf on the panel. Dandelions were turning yellow along the edges of the pavements.

Striped sun awnings were pulled over the wide open windows of the confectionery and coffee shops. Lilacs, splashed with water, stood on the restaurant tables. Young women from Kiev were looking for flowers of five petals in the bunches of lilacs. Their faces, under their summer straw hats, took on a yellowish matte color.

It was time for the Kiev gardens. In the spring I spent all day in the gardens. I played there, taught lessons, read. I only came home to have dinner and spend the night.

I knew every corner of the huge Botanical Garden with its ravines, pond and dense shade of centenary linden alleys.

But most of all I loved the Mariinsky Park in Lipki near the palace. He hung over the Dnieper. Walls of lilac and white lilacs three human heights tinkled and swayed from the multitude of bees. Fountains gushed among the lawns.

A wide belt of gardens stretched over the red clay cliffs of the Dnieper - Mariinsky and Palace parks, Tsarsky and Kupechesky gardens. From the Merchant Garden there was a glorious view of the Podol. The people of Kiev were very proud of this view. I played in the Merchant Garden all summer Symphony Orchestra... Nothing prevented me from listening to music, except for the drawn-out steamer whistles coming from the Dnieper.

The last garden on the Dnieper bank was Vladimirskaya Gorka. There was a monument to Prince Vladimir with a large bronze cross in his hand. Electric bulbs were screwed into the cross. In the evenings they were lit, and a fiery cross hung high in the sky above the Kiev steep slopes.

The city was so good in the spring that I did not understand my mother's addiction to the obligatory Sunday trips to summer cottages - Boyarka, Pushcha Voditsa or Darnitsa. I was bored among the monotonous summer cottages of the Voditsa Pushcha, indifferently looked in the boyar forest at the stunted alley of the poet Nadson and did not like Darnitsa for the trampled earth near the pine trees and loose sand mixed with cigarette butts.

One spring I was sitting in Mariinsky Park and reading Stevenson's Treasure Island. Sister Galya sat next to her and also read. Her summer hat with green ribbons lay on the bench. The wind stirred the ribbons.

Galya was short-sighted, very trusting, and it was almost impossible to get her out of her good-natured state.

It had rained in the morning, but now the clear sky of spring shone above us. Only belated raindrops flew from the lilac.

A girl with bows in her hair stopped opposite us and began to jump over the string. She prevented me from reading. I shook the lilacs. Little rain fell noisily on the girl and Galya. The girl stuck out her tongue at me and ran away, while Galya shook the raindrops off the book and continued reading.

And at that moment I saw a man who poisoned me for a long time with dreams of my unrealizable future.

A tall midshipman with a calm tanned face walked lightly along the alley. A straight black broadsword hung from his lacquered belt. Black ribbons with bronze anchors fluttered in the gentle wind. He was all in black. Only the bright gold of the stripes set off its austere form.

In land Kiev, where we almost did not see the sailors, it was an alien from the distant legendary world of winged ships, the frigate "Pallada", from the world of all oceans, seas, all port cities, all winds and all the charms that were associated with the picturesque labor of sailors ... The old sword with a black hilt seemed to have appeared in Mariinsky Park right from the pages of Stevenson.

The midshipman walked past, crunching on the sand. I got up and followed him. Galya, due to myopia, did not notice my disappearance.

All my dream of the sea was embodied in this man. I often imagined the seas, foggy and golden from the evening calm, distant voyages, when the whole world is replaced, like a fast kaleidoscope, behind the windows. My God, if someone would have guessed to give me at least a piece of petrified rust, beaten off from an old anchor! I would keep it like a jewel.

The midshipman looked around. On the black ribbon of his peakless cap, I read the mysterious word: "Azimuth." Later I learned that this was the name of the training ship of the Baltic Fleet.

I followed him along Elizavetinskaya Street, then along Institutskaya and Nikolaevskaya. The midshipman saluted the infantry officers gracefully and casually. I was ashamed in front of him for these baggy Kiev soldiers.

Several times the midshipman looked around, and at the corner of Meringovskaya he stopped and called me over.

“Boy,” he asked mockingly, “why are you dragging me in tow?

I blushed and said nothing.

- Everything is clear: he dreams of being a sailor, - the midshipman guessed, speaking for some reason about me in the third person.

The midshipman put a thin hand on my shoulder.

- Let's get to Khreshchatyk.

We walked side by side. I was afraid to look up and saw only the sturdy boots of the midshipman, polished to an incredible shine.

On Khreshchatyk, the midshipman came with me to the Semadeni coffee shop, ordered two servings of pistachio ice cream and two glasses of water. We were served ice cream on a small three-legged marble table. It was very cold and was covered with numbers: stock dealers gathered at Semadeni's and counted their profits and losses on the tables.

We ate our ice cream in silence. The midshipman took from his wallet a photograph of a magnificent corvette with sailing equipment and a wide pipe and handed me:

- Take it as a keepsake. This is my ship. I went to Liverpool on it.

He shook my hand tightly and left. I sat a little longer until sweaty neighbors in a boater began to look back at me. Then I awkwardly went out and ran to the Mariinsky Park. The bench was empty. Galya left. I guessed that the midshipman took pity on me, and for the first time I learned that pity leaves a bitter residue in my soul.

After this meeting, the desire to become a sailor tormented me for many years. I was torn to the sea. The first time I saw him briefly was in Novorossiysk, where I went for a few days with my father. But this was, of course, not enough.

For hours I sat over the Atlas, looked at the coasts of the oceans, looked for unknown seaside towns, capes, islands, river mouths.

I came up with a difficult game. I have compiled a long list of steamers with sonorous names: Polar Star, Walter Scott, Khingan, Sirius. This list swelled every day. I was the owner of the largest fleet in the world.

Of course, I was sitting in my shipping office, in the smoke of cigars, among colorful posters and schedules. Naturally, wide windows overlooked the embankment. The yellow masts of the steamers protruded near the windows, and good-natured elms rustled outside the walls. Steamer smoke flew into the windows cheekily, mingling with the smell of rotten brine and new, cheerful matting.

I have come up with a list of the most amazing voyages for my steamers. There was no most forgotten corner of the earth, wherever they went. They even visited the island of Tristan d'Acunyou.

I took off steamers from one voyage and sent on another. I followed the sailing of my ships and knew exactly where the Admiral Istomin was today and where the Flying Dutchman was: Istomin was loading bananas in Singapore, and the Flying Dutchman was unloading flour in the Farrere Islands.

It took me a lot of knowledge to run such a vast shipping company. I read guides, ship directories and everything that had even a remote touch to the sea.

Then for the first time I heard the word "meningitis" from my mother.

“He’s going to get to God knows what with his games,” Mom once said. - No matter how it all ends with meningitis.

I have heard that meningitis is a disease of boys who learn to read too early. So I just grinned at my mother's fears.

It all ended with the fact that the parents decided to go with the whole family for the summer to the sea.

Now I guess that my mother hoped to cure me by this trip from my excessive passion for the sea. She thought that I would be, as is usually the case, frustrated by the direct encounter with what I so passionately longed for in my dreams. And she was right, but only partially.

What paradise looks like

Once my mother solemnly announced that the other day we are leaving for the whole summer to the Black Sea, to the small town of Gelendzhik, near Novorossiysk.

Perhaps it was impossible to choose a better place than Gelendzhik in order to disappoint me in my passion for the sea and the south.

Gelendzhik was then a very dusty and hot town without any vegetation. All the greenery for many kilometers around was destroyed by the fierce Novorossiysk winds - the northeast. Only the thorny bushes of the grip-tree and the stunted acacia with yellow dry flowers grew in the front gardens. Heat was drawn from the high mountains. At the end of the bay a cement plant was smoking.

But Gelendzhik Bay was very nice. In its clear and warm water, large jellyfish floated like pink and blue flowers. Spotted flounders and goggle-eyed gobies lay on the sandy bottom. The surf washed ashore red algae, rotten bulberk floats from fishing nets and pieces of dark green bottles rolled by the waves.

The sea after Gelendzhik has not lost its charm for me. It only became simpler and thus more beautiful than in my elegant dreams.

In Gelendzhik, I made friends with an elderly boatman Anastas. He was Greek, originally from the city of Volo. He had a new sailboat, white with a red keel and gratings washed to gray.

Anastas rode summer residents on a boat. He was famous for his dexterity and composure, and my mother sometimes let me go alone with Anastas.

Once Anastas came out with me from the bay to the open sea. I will never forget the horror and delight that I experienced when the sail, inflating, heeled the boat so low that the water rushed at side level. Rustling huge shafts rolled towards them, shining through with greenery and splashing salty dust on their face.

End of introductory snippet.

Konstantin Gelrgievich Paustovsky

"The Story of Life"

One spring I was sitting in Mariinsky Park and reading Stevenson's Treasure Island. Sister Galya sat next to her and also read. Her summer hat with green ribbons lay on the bench. The wind stirred the ribbons, Galya was short-sighted, very trusting, and it was almost impossible to get her out of her good-natured state.

In the morning it rained, but now the clear sky of spring shone above us. Only belated raindrops flew from the lilac.

A girl with bows in her hair stopped in front of us and began to jump over the rope. She prevented me from reading. I shook the lilacs. Little rain fell noisily on the girl and Galya. The girl stuck out her tongue at me and ran away, while Galya shook the raindrops off the book and continued reading.

And at that moment I saw a man who poisoned me for a long time with dreams of my unrealizable future.

A tall midshipman with a tanned calm face walked easily along the alley. A straight black broadsword hung from his lacquered belt. Black ribbons with bronze anchors fluttered in the gentle wind. He was all in black. Only the bright gold of the stripes set off its austere form.

In land Kiev, where we almost did not see the sailors, it was an alien from the distant legendary world of winged ships, the frigate "Pallada", from the world of all oceans, seas, all port cities, all winds and all the charms that were associated with the picturesque labor of sailors ... The old sword with a black hilt seemed to have appeared in the Mariinsky Park from the pages of Stevenson.

The midshipman walked past, crunching on the sand. I got up and followed him. Galya, due to myopia, did not notice my disappearance.

All my dream of the sea was embodied in this man. I often imagined the seas, foggy and golden from the evening calm, distant voyages, when the whole world is replaced, like a fast kaleidoscope, behind the windows of the window. My God, if someone would have guessed to give me at least a piece of petrified rust, beaten off from an old anchor! I would keep it like a jewel.

The midshipman looked around. On the black ribbon of his peakless cap, I read the mysterious word: "Azimuth". Later I learned that this was the name of the training ship of the Baltic Fleet.

I followed him along Elizavetinskaya Street, then along Institutskaya and Nikolaevskaya. The midshipman saluted the infantry officers gracefully and casually. I was ashamed in front of him for these baggy Kiev soldiers.

Several times the midshipman looked around, and at the corner of Meringovskaya he stopped and called me over.

“Boy,” he asked mockingly, “why did you follow me in tow?

I blushed and said nothing.

- Everything is clear: he dreams of being a sailor, - the midshipman guessed, speaking for some reason about me in the third person.

- Let's get to Khreshchatyk.

We walked side by side. I was afraid to look up and saw only the sturdy boots of the midshipman, polished to an incredible shine.

On Khreshchatyk, the midshipman came with me to the Semadeni coffee shop, ordered two servings of pistachio ice cream and two glasses of water. We were served ice cream on a small three-legged marble table. It was very cold and was covered with numbers: stock dealers gathered at Semadeni's and counted their profits and losses on the tables.

We ate our ice cream in silence. The midshipman took from his wallet a photograph of a magnificent corvette with sail rig and wide pipe and handed it to me.

- Take it as a keepsake. This is my ship. I went to Liverpool on it.

He shook my hand tightly and left. I sat a little longer until sweaty neighbors in a boater began to look back at me. Then I awkwardly went out and ran to the Mariinsky Park. The bench was empty. Galya left. I guessed that the midshipman took pity on me, and for the first time I learned that pity leaves a bitter residue in my soul.

After this meeting, the desire to become a sailor tormented me for many years. I was torn to the sea. The first time I saw him briefly was in Novorossiysk, where I went for a few days with my father. But that was not enough.

For hours I sat over the atlas, looked at the coasts of the oceans, looked for unknown seaside towns, capes, islands, river mouths.

I came up with a difficult game. I have compiled a long list of steamers with sonorous names: Polar Star, Walter Scott, Khingan, Sirius. This list swelled every day. I was the owner of the largest fleet in the world.

Of course, I was sitting in my shipping office, in the smoke of cigars, among colorful posters and timetables. Naturally, wide windows overlooked the embankment. The yellow masts of the steamers protruded near the windows, and good-natured elms rustled outside the walls. Steamer smoke flew into the windows cheekily, mixing with the smell of rotten brine and new, cheerful matting.

I came up with a list of amazing voyages for my steamboats. There was no most forgotten corner of the earth, wherever they went. They even visited the island of Tristan da Cunho.

I took off steamers from one voyage and sent them on to another. I followed the sailing of my ships and knew exactly where the Admiral Istomin was today and where the Flying Dutchman was: Istomin was loading bananas in Singapore, and the Flying Dutchman was unloading flour in the Faroe Islands.

It took me a lot of knowledge to run such a vast shipping company. I read guides, ship directories and everything that had even a remote touch to the sea.

Then for the first time I heard the word "meningitis" from my mother.

“He’ll get to God knows what with his games,” Mom once said. - No matter how it all ends with meningitis.

I have heard that meningitis is a disease of boys who learn to read too early. So I just grinned at my mother's fears.

It all ended with the fact that the parents decided to go with the whole family for the summer to the sea.

Now I guess that my mother hoped to cure me by this trip from my excessive passion for the sea. She thought that I would be, as always, disappointed by the direct encounter with what I so passionately aspired in my dreams. And she was right, but only partially.

Once my mother solemnly announced that the other day we are leaving for the whole summer to the Black Sea, to the small town of Gelendzhik, near Novorossiysk.

Perhaps it was impossible to choose a better place than Gelendzhik in order to disappoint me in my passion for the sea and the south.

Gelendzhik was then a very dusty and hot town without any vegetation. All the greenery for many kilometers around was destroyed by the fierce Novorossiysk winds - the northeast. Only the thorny bushes of the grip-tree and the stunted acacia with yellow dry flowers grew in the front gardens. Heat was drawn from the high mountains. At the end of the bay a cement plant was smoking.

But Gelendzhik Bay was very nice. In its transparent and warm water, large jellyfish floated like pink and blue flowers. Spotted flounders and goggle-eyed gobies lay on the sandy bottom. The surf washed ashore red algae, rotten fish-net floats, and pieces of dark green bottles rolled by the waves.

The sea after Gelendzhik has not lost its charm for me. It only became simpler and thus more beautiful than in my elegant dreams.

In Gelendzhik, I made friends with an elderly boatman Anastas. He was Greek, originally from the city of Volo. He had a new sailboat, white with a red keel and gratings washed to gray.

Anastas rode summer residents on a boat. He was famous for his dexterity and composure, and my mother sometimes let me go alone with Anastas.

Once Anastas came out with me from the bay to the open sea. I will never forget the horror and delight that I experienced when the sail, inflating, heeled the boat so low that the water rushed at side level. The noisy huge shafts rolled towards them, shining through with greenery and splashing salty dust on their face.

I grabbed the shrouds, I wanted to go back to the shore, but Anastas, gripping the pipe with his teeth, purred something, and then asked:

- How much did your mom give for these chucks? Ay, good guys!

He nodded at my soft Caucasian shoes - chuvyaki. My legs were trembling. I didn't answer. Anastas yawned and said:

- Nothing! Small shower, warm shower. You will dine with appetite. You will not have to ask - eat for papa-mama!

He turned the boat casually and confidently. She scooped up water, and we rushed into the bay, diving and jumping out onto the crests of the waves. They went out from under the stern with a menacing noise. My heart sank and sank.

Suddenly, Anastas began to sing. I stopped trembling and listened to this song in bewilderment:

From Batum to Sukhum - Ai-wai-wai!

From Sukhum to Batum - Ai-wai-wai!

A boy was running, dragging a box - Ai-wai-wai!

The boy fell, broke the box - Ai-wai-wai!

To this song we lowered the sail and, with acceleration, quickly approached the pier, where the pale mother was waiting. Anastas picked me up in his arms, put me on the pier and said:

- Now you have it salty, madam. Already has a habit to the sea.

Once my father hired a ruler, and we drove from Gelendzhik to the Mikhailovsky Pass.

At first, the gravel road ran along the slope of bare and dusty mountains. We passed bridges over ravines where there was not a drop of water. The same clouds of gray dry cotton wool lay on the mountains all day, clinging to the peaks.

I was thirsty. The red-haired Cossack cabman turned around and told me to wait until the pass - there I would drink delicious and cold water. But I didn’t believe the cab. The dryness of the mountains and the lack of water frightened me. I looked longingly at the dark and fresh strip of the sea. You couldn't drink from it, but at least you could bathe in its cool water.

The road climbed higher and higher. Suddenly, freshness came to our face.

- The most pass! - said the driver, stopped the horses, got down and put iron brakes under the wheels.

From the ridge of the mountain, we saw huge and dense forests. They stretched in waves over the mountains to the horizon. In some places, red granite cliffs protruded from the greenery, and in the distance I saw a peak burning with ice and snow.

“The Nord-Ost doesn't reach here,” said the cab. - Here is paradise!

The ruler began to descend. Immediately a thick shadow covered us. In the impassable thicket of trees we heard the murmur of water, the whistle of birds and the rustle of foliage agitated by the midday wind.

The lower we went, the thicker the forest became and the more shady the road became. A transparent stream was already running along its side. He washed the multi-colored stones, touched the lilac flowers with his stream and made them bow and tremble, but he could not tear them off the stony ground and carry them down into the gorge.

Mom took water from the stream into a mug and gave me a drink. The water was so cold that the mug was immediately covered with sweat.

“It smells like ozone,” said my father.

I took a deep breath. I didn’t know what smelled around, but it seemed to me that I was overwhelmed with a heap of branches soaked in fragrant rain.

The vines clung to our heads. And here and there, on the slopes of the road, a shaggy flower protruded from under the stone and looked with curiosity at our ruler and at the gray horses, which raised their heads and performed solemnly, as in a parade, so as not to break off at a gallop and not to roll out the ruler.

- There is a lizard! - said my mother. Where?

- Over there. Do you see the hazel? And to the left is a red stone in the grass. See above. Do you see the yellow corolla? This is an azalea. Slightly to the right of the azalea, on a felled beech, near the very root. There, you see, such a shaggy red root in dry earth and some tiny blue flowers? So next to him.

I saw a lizard. But while I found her, I made a wonderful journey through hazel, red stone, azalea flower and fallen beech.

"So this is what it is, the Caucasus!" - I thought.

- Here is paradise! Repeated the cab, turning off the highway onto a narrow grassy clearing in the forest. - Now we will unharness the horses, we will swim.

We drove into such a thicket and the branches hit us in the face so hard that we had to stop the horses, get off the line and continue on foot. The ruler followed us slowly.

We went out into a clearing in a green gorge. Crowds of tall dandelions stood in the lush grass like white islands. Under thick beech trees we saw an old empty barn. He stood on the banks of a noisy mountain stream. She tightly poured clear water over the stones, hissed and dragged many air bubbles along with the water.

While the cabman unharnessed and went with his father to fetch firewood, we washed ourselves in the river. Our faces burned with heat after washing.

We wanted to immediately go up the river, but my mother spread a tablecloth on the grass, took out provisions and said that until we had eaten, she would not let us go anywhere.

I gagged and ate sandwiches with ham and cold rice porridge with raisins, but it turned out that I was in no hurry - the stubborn copper kettle did not want to boil over the fire. It must be because the water from the stream was completely icy.

Then the kettle boiled so unexpectedly and violently that it filled the fire. We drank some strong tea and began to rush my father to go into the forest. The driver said that we must be on our guard, because there are many wild boars in the forest. He explained to us that if we see small holes dug in the ground, then these are the places where boars sleep at night.

Mom was worried - she could not walk with us, she had shortness of breath - but the cabman calmed her, noticing that the boar had to be deliberately teased so that it rushed at the man.

We went up the river. We pushed our way through the thicket, stopped every minute and called to each other to show the granite pools, gouged by the river, - trout swept through them with blue sparks, - huge green beetles with long whiskers, foamy grumbling waterfalls, horsetails taller than our height, thickets of forest anemones and meadows with peonies.

Borya came across a small dusty pit that looked like a baby bath. We walked around it carefully. Obviously, this was the place where the wild boar spent the night.

The father went ahead. He started calling us. We made our way to him through the buckthorn, bypassing the huge mossy boulders.

My father was standing near a strange building overgrown with blackberries. Four smoothly hewn gigantic stones were covered, like a roof, with the fifth hewn stone. It turned out to be a stone house. A hole was punched in one of the side stones, but it was so small that even I could not get through it. There were several such stone buildings around.

“They are dolmens,” said the father. - Ancient burial grounds of the Scythians. Or maybe these are not burial grounds at all. Until now, scientists cannot find out who, why and how built these dolmens.

I was sure that dolmens are the dwellings of long-extinct dwarf people. But I did not tell my father about this, since Borya was with us: he would have made fun of me.

We returned to Gelendzhik completely burnt by the sun, drunk with fatigue and forest air. I fell asleep and through my sleep I felt a breath of heat on me, and heard the distant murmur of the sea.

Since then, in my imagination, I have become the owner of another magnificent country - the Caucasus. Began a passion for Lermontov, abreks, Shamil. Mom was alarmed again.

Now, in adulthood, I remember with gratitude my childhood hobbies. They taught me a lot.

But I was not at all like noisy and carried away boys choking with saliva from excitement, giving no one rest. On the contrary, I was very shy and didn't bother anyone with my hobbies.

I sat in Mariinsky Park and calmly read Stevenson's Treasure Island. In the morning there was a sad rain, but the clear sky of spring shone. Large and belated raindrops flew from the lilac. I shook the lilacs and a little rain fell. At that moment I saw a man who poisoned even me for a long time with dreams of my unrealizable future.

A tall young sailor with a tanned and calm face was walking along the road. A straight black broadsword hung from his lacquered belt. Black ribbons with bronze anchors fluttered in the gentle wind. The midshipman walked past, crunching on the sand. I followed him. I often imagined the seas, foggy and golden from the evening calm, distant voyages, when the whole world is replaced by the windows of the porthole. The midshipman looked around. On the black ribbon of the peakless cap was written "Azimuth."

Once my parents and I went to the Black Sea for the whole summer. The town where we arrived was small and was located near Novorossiysk. The town was very dusty and hot, and all the greenery was destroyed by the winds. Thorny bushes and stunted acacia with yellow dry flowers grew in the front gardens. Heat was drawn from the high mountains. At the end of the bay a cement plant was smoking. It was good on the bay. Large jellyfish swam in the clear and warm water, and spotted flounders and goggle-eyed gobies lay on the sandy bottom. The surf threw red algae onto the shore, as well as rolled-in pieces of bottles.

In Gelendzhik, I made friends with a boatman who was a Greek and a native of the Volom mountains. He had a white sailboat with red calm and washed up to the middle of the flooring. He rode summer residents in his boat, becoming famous for his dexterity so that my mother let me go with him into the open sea.

We also went to the Mikhailovsky Pass. A road made of rubble ran along the slope of bare mountains, and we passed bridges over ravines where there was no water and we were thirsty. From the ridge of the mountain, one could see huge and dense forests, which in waves stretched over the mountains to the horizon. In the thicket we could hear the murmur of water, the whistle of birds and the rustle of grass, agitated by the midday wind. The forest began to thicken, and the stream ran along the side, washing the stones. After drinking water from the stream, we moved on.

We went out into the clearing. Crowds of tall dandelions stood in the tall grass, and under the beeches we saw an empty barn, which stood on the banks of the noisy river, where it hissed and pulled clear water with many bubbles. We washed ourselves in the river, and our faces immediately caught fire. We made a pass. Mom got food. Having refreshed ourselves and drank hot tea, we began to rush my father to go into the forest. Our path ran up the river. Stopping often, they called each other to show the granite basins, gouged out by the river, in which the trout sparkled.

My father was standing near a strange stone structure overgrown with grass. A hole was punched in one of the side stones. There were some buildings around. Father said that these are ancient burial grounds of the Scythians.