Boris Field

Tale of this man

Part one

The stars were still sparkling sharply and cold, but the sky in the East had already become brightened. Trees gradually performed from darkness. Suddenly, there was a strong fresh wind on top of them. The forest immediately came to life, slammed flatly and ringing. The whistling whisper was spinned among themselves with a centenary of pines, and dry frills with a soft rustic was watered with disturbed branches.

The wind verse is suddenly, as she flew. Trees again froze in cold chopping. Immediately began to be heard all the preliminary forest sounds: greedy wolf gnawing on the neighboring glade, cautious impressions of the foxes and the first, still unsure blows of the wokendown, driving in silence of the forest so musically, it was not a wood trunk, and the hollow body of the violin.

Again, the wind was pushed in heavy needles of pine vertices. The last stars quietly went out in the breathless sky. The sky itself compressed and narrowed. The forest, who finally shook the remnants of the night darkness, got up in his green magnitude. According to the way, the crochemonic heads of pines and sharp spiers of the firs, the curly heads were lit up, guessing that the sun rose and that the day did it promise to be clear, frosty, poorer.

It became completely light. Wolves went to the forest quantles to digest night prey, removed from the glade of the fox, leaving in the snow lace, cunning tangled track. Old forest loosely smoothly, inexorable. Only birds breaking, a knockdown knock, a cheerful zwicane shooting between the branches of yellow dogs, and a greedy dry mild haze diversified this damn, disturbing and sad, soft waves rolling noise.

Forty, which brings black sharp beak on the branch, suddenly turned his head side, listened, sat down, ready to break and fly away. Anxious crunches of the bitch. Someone is big, strong walked through the forest, without disassembling roads. The bushes glanced, the peaks of small pines were noticed, creaped, settled, washing. Soroka screamed and, blossoming the tail, similar to the plumage of the arrows, in a straight line flew away.

From the sweetened morning, the needles leaned with a long brown muzzle, crowned with heavy branched horns. Frightened eyes examined the huge clearing. Pink suede nostrils, spent hot parks of alarmed breathing, frantically moved.

Old Elk froze in Pine, like sculpture. Only a rumblery skin was nervously blurted on his back. Hooned ears were caught every sound, and his rumor was so Oster, which heard the beast, like a core sharpening pine wood. But even these sensitive ears did not hear anything in the forest, except for bird crackles, the knocking of the dyatla and even pine peaks.

Rumor calmed down, but the smell warned about the danger. A sharp, heavy and dangerous smells, alien to this dense forest, were mixed with a fresh aroma of the melon. Black sad eyes of the beast saw the dark figures on the dazzling scaway. Not moving, he fonded, ready to make a jump in the thicket. But people did not move. They lay in the snow thick, in some places on each other. There were a lot of them, but none of them moved and did not violate virgin silence. Needed some monsters in the drifts in the drifts. They source sharp and disturbing smells.

I scared my eye, stood on the edge of Elk, not understanding what happened to all this herd of quiet, still and not dangerous people.

Attention he was attracted by the sound heard from above. The beast flinched, the skin on his back was disturbed, the hind legs were still pinned.

However, the sound was also not terrible: as if several May beetles, Basovito buzz, circled in the foliage of blooming birch. And there was sometimes frequent, short crackling, similar to the evening creaking twist, sometimes for the buzz.

But these beetles themselves. Complete wings, they dance in blue frosty air. Again and again creaked in the embroidered Dergach. One of the beetles, not folding the wings, darted down. The rest again danced in heavenly lazuries. The beast dismissed the tense muscles, went out to the clearing, licked the nasty, sinking the eye on the sky. And suddenly, another beetle dropped from the Roy from dancing in the air and, leaving behind him a big, lush tail, rushed straight to the glade. He grew up so quickly that Elk could hardly make a jump in the bushes - something huge, more terrible than a sudden gusting of the autumn storm, hit the tops of the pines and branched about the Earth so that the whole forest went down, groaned. Echo rushed over the trees, ahead of the moose rushing to the whole spirit into the thicket.

Bogged down in the thick of green needles echo. Revealed and sparkling, crouched by frost from wood vertices, shot down by the fall of the aircraft. Silence, druming and power, mastered the forest. And it was clearly heard, as a moaned man and how hard it was choking under the feet of the bear, whom the unusual hum and crackle were expelled from the forest to the clearing.

The bear was great, old and Kosmat. The untidy wool with brown flocks was sticking out on his impossible sides, hungry hung with skinny, tortured. In these edges, the war raged in the fall. She penetrated even here, in the preserve the wilderness, wherever, and that was not often, only the forester and hunters came. A rumble of a close battle was raised by the Berloga bear in the fall, violating his winter hibernation, and now, hungry and angry, he wandered through the forest, not knowing peace.

The bear stopped on the edge, where he just stood. I snapped his fresh, tasty smelling traces, heavily and greedily silent, moving with the shoulder sides, listened. Elk left, but the sound, produced by some alive and, probably, a weak creature was distributed. Wool rose on the beast camp. He pulled out the face. And again this plaintive sound is a little heard from the edge.

Slowly, cautiously stepping with soft paws, under which the dry and strong nasty failed with the crunch, the beast went to the stationary, drove into the snow of a human figure ...

The pilot Alexei Meresyev fell into double "ticks". It was the very bad thing that could happen in air battle. His, who shot all the ammunition, actually unarmed, was surrounded by four German aircraft and, not giving him to turn around, to deviate from the course, led to her airfield ...

And it turned out all this. The links of fighters under the team of Lieutenant Meresyev flew to accompany the "Ils", sent to the assault on the enemy airfield. A bold causing was successful. The attack aircraft, these "flying tanks", as the name of them in the infantry, gliding almost on the tops of the pines, drunk straight to the summer field, on which the rows were large transport "Junkers". Suddenly, nourishing because of the teeth of the Size of the Forest Ridge, they rushed over heavy shops of "Litoviki", watered them from the guns and machine guns lead and steel, throwing tauty-tailed shells. Meresyev, who guarded with his fourser over the place of attack, was well seen from above, as dark figures of people have noticed on the airfield, as they began to crawl into the rolled snow by the snow, as the attack aircraft made new and new goals and as the crews of the "Junkers" began under Fire to maintain on the start and raise cars into the air.

This is where Alexey made a mishand. Instead of strictly wandering the air over the storming area, he, as the pilots say, seduced with a light heart. Throwing the car in a peak, he rushed to the stone on the head of a heavy and slow "Liver" from the ground, with pleasure a few long queues his quadrangular motley, made from corrugated duralum body. Confident, he did not even look like the enemy he pisses into the ground. On the other side of the airfield, another "Junkers" broke into the air. Alexey chasing him. Attacked - and unsuccessful. His firing tracks slid over slowly sabised the height of the car. He turned cool, attacked once again, again missed, again overtook his sacrifice and dumped it somewhere in the side over the forest, violently adding a wide cigar-like torso a few long queues from the entire on-board weapon. Setting the "Junkers" and giving two victorious circles at the place where a black pillar rose over the green unwitted sea of \u200b\u200ban endless forest, Alexey turned the plane back to the German airfield.

But there was no one to go there. He saw how three fighters his links lead a fight with nine "messes" caused by probably the command of the German airfield to reflect the plaque of the attack aircraft. Boldly rushing to the Germans, exactly three times superior in terms of them, the pilots sought to distract the enemy from the attack aircraft. By leading the battle, they pulled the enemy farther and farther aside, as the tetherk makes it, pretending to be filtered and distracting hunters from their chicks.

Aleksey became ashamed that he was fascinated by light prey, ashamed before he felt said under the cheek helmet. He chose himself an opponent and squeezing his teeth, rushed into battle. His goal was "Messer", somewhat confused from others and, obviously, who also looked at her prey. Having squeezing the entire speed from his "Ishchechka", Alexey rushed to the enemy from the flank. He attacked the German for all the rules. The gray body of the enemy car was clearly seen in the paw-painted cross, when he pressed the gay. But he calmly slid past. Prosha could not. The goal was close and visible to the rarity clearly. "Ammunition!" - Alexey guess, feeling that the back was immediately covered with a cold later. I clicked for checking the gay and did not feel that trembling goulah, what a pilot feels all the body, put on the weapon of his car. Charging boxes were empty: chasing behind "Liverses", he shot all the ammunition.

But the enemy did not know about it! Alexey decided unarmed to see in the koutherma of the battle in order to significantly improve the ratio of forces. He made a mistake. On the fighter, which he so unsuccessfully attacked, sat an experienced and observation pilot. The German noted that the car is unarmed, and ordered his colleagues. Four "Messerschmitt", coming out of the battle, postponed Alexei from the sides, closed on top and bottom and, dictating him the way with bullement tracks, clearly visible in blue and transparent air, took it into double "ticks".

A few days ago, Alexey heard that here, in the area of \u200b\u200bStaray Russa, flew from the West, the famous German Aviation Device Richtgofen. She was equipped with the best asami of the fascist empire and was under the auspices of Geering himself. Alexey realized that she got into the claws of these air wolves and that they obviously want to bring him to their airfield, make it take to take captive alive. Such cases were then there. Alexey himself saw how once the links of fighters under the team of his buddy Hero of the Soviet Union Andrei Degtyarenko led and planted on his airfield of the German intelligence officer.

Long greenish-pale face of the prisoner German, his staggering step instantly arose in the memory of Alexey. "Captivity? Never! This number will not come out! " He decided.

But he failed to turn away. The Germans blocked him the path of machine-gun queues as soon as he made the slightest attempt to deviate from the course they dictated. And again the face of the captive pilot with distorted features flashed before him, with a trembling jaw. There was some kind of humiliating animal fear in this face.

Meresyev firmly clenched his teeth, gave full gas and, putting a car vertically, tried to dive under the Upper German, pressed him to the ground. He managed to escape from under the convoy. But the German managed to press the gay in time. The engine shot off from the rhythm and earned frequent jerks. The entire plane shook in the deadly fever.

Born! Alexey managed to turn clouds into white torture, knocking down his tracks. But what's next? The pilot felt a shiver of a fitted car with his whole creature, as if it was not an agony of a mutilated motor, but a fever, kolotivating his own body.

What is the engine wounded? How much can a plane hold out in the air? Will the tanks explode? All this did not think, but rather felt Alexey. Feeling himself sitting on a dynamite checker, to which the flame was smelled along the cord, he put a plane for a reverse course, to the front line, to his own, in order to at least be buried native hands.

The interchange occurred immediately. Motor cut and silent. The plane, precisely slipping off the steep mountain, rapidly rushed down. Under the plane, he was overflowed with green and gray waves, unawarded, like the sea, forest ... "And still not captivity!" - I managed to think the pilot when close trees, merging into the longitudinal stripes, rushed under the wings of the aircraft. When the forest, like a beast, jumped on him, he turned off the ignition instinctive movement. There was a crossed cracking, and everything instantly disappeared, for sure, he began to go to the dark thick water with the car.

Falling, the plane was the top of the top of the pine. This softened the blow. Crawling several trees, the car fell apart, but the moment before Alexey pulled out of the seat, threw into the air, and, falling onto a broad-speaking age of a spruce, he slipped through the branches in a deep snowdrift, stamped by the wind at her foot. It saved him life ...

How much he lay down without movement, unconscious, could not remember Alexey. Some unspecified human shadows, contours of buildings, incredible cars, rapidly clamped, rushed to him, and from the vortex of their movement in all his body felt a stupid, scrubbing pain. Then something big, hot, indefinite forms, and had a hot smolden on him, came out of chaos. He tried to remove it, but his body was exactly in the snow. Tommy with unrecorded horror, he made a jerk - and suddenly felt frosty air, bursting into his lungs, the cold of snow on the cheek and acute pain is no longer in the whole body, but in his feet.

"Alive!" - flashed in his mind. He made a move to climb, and heard the crisp creak of Nasta under whose legs and noisy, hoarse breathing. "Germans! - He immediately guessed, suppressing the desire to reveal his eyes and jump, defending. - captivity, it means, still captive! .. What to do? "

He remembered that his mechanic Yura, a master of all his hands, took up yesterday to pumped up to the holster, who broke his strap, and did not fit and did not fit; I had to fly, put a gun into the hide pocket of the jib. Now, to get it, it was necessary to turn on the side. This can not, of course, do it imperceptibly for the enemy. Alexey lay a prick. Herrow He felt the sharp edges of the pistol. But he lay motionless: maybe the enemy will take him for the dead and leave.

The German swallowed near, somehow sighed strangely, again approached Meresyev; Muck with Nastya, leaned. Alexey again felt the mind breathing of his pharynx. Now he knew that the German one, and in this there was an opportunity to escape: if we burst into it, suddenly jump out, cling to him in the throat and, not letting it go into the course of weapons, tie a struggle on an equal footing ... But it is necessary to make sure and accurately.

Without changing the poses, slowly, very slowly Alexey opened his eyes and through lowered eyelashes saw in front of him instead of German brown shaggy spot. She opened her eyes wider and immediately snorted snugly: in front of him, a large, skinned bear was sitting in his hind legs.

Quiet, as you can only know, the bear sat near the stationary human figure, barely seen from the snowdrift blossoming.

His dirty nostrils quietly twisted. Of the open mouth, in which the old, yellow, but still mighty fangs were visible, hung and swayed in the wind thin thread of thick saliva.

Raised by the war from the winter beard, he was hungry and angry. But the bears do not eat well. Sniffing a fixed body, a sharply smelling gasoline, the bear lazily moved to the clearing, where in abundance lay the same fixed, frozen in the present of human bodies. Stone and rustle returned it back.

And here he was sitting near Alexey. Hungry fought in it with disgusting to dead meat. Hunger began to win. The beast sighed, climbed, the paw turned the man in a snowdrift and rushed to the "damn skin" of the overalls. The overalls did not succumb. Bear deeply buried. Higher efforts were worth Alexey in this moment to suppress the desire to open his eyes, to push, scream, push out this cargo, tumbling to his chest chest. While all the creature rushed to the turbulent and fierce defense, he forced himself a slow, inconspicuous movement to lower his hand in his pocket, to grope there rubbed a gun handle, carefully, so as not to clicked, to put the trigger with a large finger and start imperceptibly to remove the armed hand.

The beast pulled the jumpsuit even more. Strong matter shook, but she asleep again. The bear was frantically roaring, grabbed the jumpsuit with his teeth, having grated through fur and cotton body. Alexey, the last effort of will suppressed the pain and at the moment when the beast snapped him out of a snowdrift, pistol threw up and pressed the trigger.

Deaf shot cracked Rascato and Gulko.

Speaken, agile flew forty. Animes fell from disturbed branches. The beast slowly released the victim. Alexey fell into the snow without tearing away from the enemy. He sat on the hind legs, and in black, overgrown with fine wool, fastened his eyes froze. The thick blood of the matte trickle made his way between his fangs and fell on the snow. He buried hoarsely and scary, rose heavy to the rear paws and immediately donkey in the snow, before Alexey managed to shoot again. The blue chained slowly swimmed red and, tapping, slightly smoked at the head of the beast. The bear was dead.

Alexey voltage shot. He felt sharp again, burning pain in the steps and, hurt on the snow, lost consciousness ...

He woke up when the sun was already high. Rays, pierced by a chew, sparkling glare lit up. In the shadow, the snow seemed not even blue, but blue.

"Well, a bear rushed, or what?" - It was the first thought of Alexey.

Buuray, shaggy, untidy carcass was lying beside the blue snow. The forest was noisy. Due to the church of the woodpecker. Zvikali's bellied, jumping in the bushes, prompt yellow-protech cinemas.

"Alive, alive, alive!" - Mentally repeated Alexey. And all of him, his whole body was pushing him, absorbing the wonderful, mighty, drinking feeling of life that comes to man and captures it every time he suffered a deadly danger.

Who obeying this mighty feeling, he jumped on his feet, but immediately, I groaned, sat down on a bear carcass. Pain in the feet burned all his body. In the head stood deaf, heavy noise, they definitely rotated in it, rumble, shaking brain, old, shrumbed millstones. Eyes lomico, as if someone had pressed against them on top of the age finger. All the surrounding, it was clearly clearly and bright, damped with cold yellow sunny rays, it disappeared, covered with a gray, flickering sparks by a veil.

"Bad ... There must be a contused when falling and something happened to my legs," Alexey thought.

Raised, he was surprised to loyaded a wide field, seen behind the forest edge and limited on the horizon with a naiz semicircle of a distant forest.

It must be in the fall, and the most or rather, in early winter in the edge of the forest through this field, one of the defensive frontiers, which is not long, but stubbornly, as they say - to death, kept the Red Army part. Blizzards covered the wounds of the earth with a blind snow wool. But under it, the municipal strokes of the trenches were easily guessed, the hilly of broken firing points, endlessly potholes and large shell funnels, visible up to the foot of the beaten, wounded, decapitated or twisted the edges trees. Among the extercined field in different places, there are several tanks in the snow, painted in the motley color of the buying scales. All of them - especially the extreme, which must be a burst of grenades or mines poured a nation, so that the long trunk of his guns was hanging out of the tongue hung to the ground, they seemed to the corpses of unknown monsters. And around the field - Bruisters are shallow trenches, near the tanks and on the forest edge - they lay the corpses of the Red Army and German soldiers. There were so many of them that they were piled up alone on another. They lay in the same clouds attached by frost, in what a few months ago, on the verge of winter, she inspired people in battle.

All said Alexey about perseverance and rage of the battle of the battle here, that his combat comrades fought, forgotten about everything, except what needs to be stopped, not to miss the enemy. It is not far, by the edge, near the declined trash pine shell, the high, spiteless barrel of which is now expiring with a yellow transparent resin, the Germans are lying with swollen skulls, with fragmented faces. In the center, across one of the enemies, lies overnight the body of a huge 19 bullest boyfriend without coinles, in one gymnaster without a belt, with a torn gate, and a rifle with a broken bayonet and bloody, beaten butt.

And then, the road leading to the forest, under the sandy-eyed young Christmas tree, half in the funnel, also nodded lies at her edge of dark Uzbek with a subtle face, as if sharpened from the old ivory. Behind him, under the branches of the Christmas tree, a neat stack of not yet spent grenades can be seen, and he himself holds a grenade in the dead hand thrown back, as if, before throwing it, he decided to look at the sky, and he froze.

And further, along the forest road, near the spotted tank carcass, at the slopes of large funnels, in the spots, beside old stumps, - everywhere dead figures in the vitro and quilted pants, in the dirty green french and horned caps, for the heat of the treated on the ears; Starting from the snowdrifts, bent knees, trapped chins, which pulled out of Nasta waxes, unloaded with foxes, crushed by forty and crow.

Several crows slowly circled over the clearing, and suddenly she reminded Alexey solemn, full of gloomy relics of the Igor Side, reproduced in the school textbook of history from the canvas of the Great Russian artist.

"So I've lying here!" - He thought, and again his whole being was filled with a rapid sensation of life. He shakeped. In the head, the pinching mills were still slowly spinning, legs burned and westing the former, but Alexey, sitting on the already cold and silver plated dry snowy bears, began to think what to do, where to go, how to get to his advanced parts.

He lost a tablet with a map when falling. But without a map, Alexey clearly imagined today's route. The German field airfield, which was flewing the attack aircraft, lay kilometers in sixty west from the front line. By connecting German fighters by air fighting, his pilots managed to delay them from the airfield to the East of about twenty, and he, after he broke out of the double "ticks", succeeded, probably still a little stretch to the east. It became, it fell approximately kilometers in thirty-five from the front line, far behind the back of advanced German divisions, somewhere in the area of \u200b\u200bthe huge, so-called black forest, through which it has repeatedly had to fly, accompanying bombers and attack aircraft in their short raids by Middle German reasons. This forest always seemed to him from above the infinite green sea. In good weather, the forest was smoking with the caps of pine vertices, and in Necotka, twisted with a gray fog, reminded the lurided water surface, which goes small waves.

The fact that he collapsed in the center of this protected forest was well and bad. Well because it is unlikely here, in these virgin chats, it was possible to meet the Germans, and usually towards roads and housing. Bad because I had to accomplish although not very long, but a hard way on forest thickets, where you can not hope for the help of a person, on a piece of bread, on the roof, on a sip of boiling water. After all, the legs ... will the legs raise? Will you go? ..

He quietly highlighted with a bear carcass. The same acute pain that arose in the feet pierced his body from the bottom up. He cried out. I had to sit again. I tried to throw off the CNT. CNT did not get out, and every jerk forced to moan. Then Alexey squeezed his teeth, climbed, rushed with all his hands with both hands - and immediately lost consciousness. Having woke up, he carefully unfolded the bike port. The whole feet of swollen and was a solid gray bruise. She burned and shouted every joint. Alexey put his leg on the snow - the pain was weaker. In the same desperate jerk, as if he had pulled his tooth, he took off the second CNT.

Both legs did not go anywhere. Obviously, when the blow of the aircraft on the tops of the pines threw it out of the cabin, the feet of something risen and crushed small bones of the plus and fingers. Of course, under normal conditions, he would not even think of climbing these broken, swollen legs. But he was alone in the forest more often, in the rear of the enemy, where a meeting with a man was not relieving, but death. And he decided to go to the east, go through the forest, not trying to look for comfortable roads and residential places, to go, whatever it cost.

He strongly jumped up with a bearish carcass, hurried, creaked his teeth and took the first step. Convened, I snatched another leg from the snow, took another step. In the head rustled, the forest and the glade swung, floated to the side.

Alexey felt that weakening from tension and pain. Arriving a lip, he continued to go, getting to the forest road, which led past the tank, past Uzbek with a grenade, deep into the forest, east. There was nothing to go on soft snow, but as soon as he stepped on a solid, blown by the winds, covered by the ice hump of the road, the pain became so unbearable that he stopped, not deciding to make even a step. So he stood, embarrassing his legs, shaking, exactly from the wind. And suddenly everyone squeezed before his eyes. The road, pine, sinage of the needles, the blue oblongable lumen over it disappeared ... He stood at the airfield from the aircraft, his plane, and his mechanic, or, as he called him, "Techinar", Lolant Yura, shining her teeth and eye proteins, always sparkling At his unshaven and eternally chumad face, an inviting gesture showed him to the cabin: they say, ready, let's go to the flight ... Alexey made a step to the plane, but the earth was burned, the foot shut down, rightly stood on a hot plate. He rushed to jump through this silent earth straight on the wing, but pushed around the cold fuselage and was surprised. The fuselage was not a smooth, covered with varnish, and grungy, lined with pine bark ... no aircraft - he is on the road and shakes his hand on the trunk of the tree.

"Hallucination? I am going crazy from the contusion, "Alexey thought. - Walking on the way is unbearable. Collapse? But it will slow down the way ... "He sat on the snow, again the same decisive, short jerks pulled the Unit, nails and teeth ruined them in the risks, so that they did not close the broken feet, removed the big fluff scarf from Angora wool, he drove him in half , wrapped the feet and shoved again.

Now it has become easier to go. However, it is wrong to go, it is incorrectly said: not to go, but to move, move carefully, coming on the heels and high-raising legs, how they walk on the swamp. From pain and tension after a few steps began to circle his head. I had to stand, closing my eyes, leaning back to the tree trunk, or sit down on a snowdrift and relax, feeling the sharp tension of the pulse in the veins.

So he moved several hours. But when it looked around, at the end of the appearances, the illuminated turn of the road could have seen, whose darkest speck out the dead Uzbek. This is very saddened by Alexey. Disappeared, but not frightened. He wanted to go faster. He rose from the snowdrift, firmly climbed his teeth and went ahead, outstanding small goals in front of him, focusing on them, - from pine to the pine, from hemp to hemp, from a snowdrift to a snowdrift. On the virgin snow of the desert forest road, the sluggish, winding, fuzzy trace, which leaves the wounded beast.

So he moved to the evening. When the sun, who came somewhere behind Alexei, threw a cold sunset flame on the top of the pines and the gray twilight began to thicken in the forest, near the road, in the crushing juniper, the Loschkin, Alexey opened a picture, at the form of which he had a wet towel along his back to The neck and hair moved under the helmet itself.

While there, in the glade, there was a fight, in the hollow, in the thickets of juniper, was located, should be a sanitary company. Here were the wounded and here they laid them on pillows from the needles. So they lay now with rows under the seven of the bushes, half of the snow, and at all covered with snow. At first glance it became clear that they did not die from the Russian Academy of Sciences. Someone clever sniffing knives cut them all the throat, and they lay in the same poses, throwing away their heads, exactly trying to look at them, what was done behind them. Immediately clarified the mystery of the terrible picture. Under the pine, near the bodies brought by snow, holding his head on his knees, sat on the belt in the snow sister, a small, fragile girl in a ruin, tied under the chin ribbons. Between the blades braided her knife handle, gleaming polishing. And near, clutching each other in the throat in the last dead battle, the German was frozen in black uniforms of the SS troops and the Red Armyman with a head stuck bloody gauze. Alexey immediately realized that this in black finished off the wounded by his knife, the sister silent and here was captured by the man who had all the strength of his who had fallen into his fingers squeezed the enemy's throat.

So they buried the blizzard - a fragile girl in the ruin, covered by her body of the wounded, and these two, the executioner and the avenger, that they clung to each other at her feet, drove into the old Kizzy boots with wide tops.

For a few moments of Meresyev stood amazed, then snowed to the sister and pulled out the dagger out of her body. It was a Single knife made in the form of an ancient German sword, with a red wood handle, which was embedded by a silver sieu sign. On the rusty blade, the inscription is preserved: "ALLES FIR Deutschland". Leather scabbard Aleksey took off with a sieve. The knife was necessary on the way. Then he dug out from under the snow scalded, an icing cloak, carefully covered her sister's corpse, put a few pine branches from above ...

While he was engaged in all this, hemnelted. In the West went out the lumens between the trees. Frosty and thick darkness overturned. It was quiet here, but the night wind walked on the tops of the pines, the forest was noisy than the burning-singement, then I was deeply disturbing. At the hollow, he pulled an invisible eye, quietly rustling and tingling the snowball face.

Born in Kamyshin, among the Volga Steppes, the town dweller, inexperienced in forest affairs, Alexey did not take care of anything about overnight, no about the fire. Castled with a pitch darkness, feeling unbearable pain in broken, bored legs, he did not find the strength to go behind the fuel, climbed into the thick pig of the young pine, sat down under the tree, all squeezed into a lump, hid his face in his knees embraced by hand, and heating With his breath, froze, greedily enjoying the peace and immobility.

At the ready, there was a gun with a crusher, but unlikely to Alexey could apply it to this first night spent in the forest. He slept like a stone, not hearing a flat noise of pines, nor Wuhan Filina, who wanted somewhere around the road, neither distant war of wolves - nothing of those forest sounds, which was full of thick and impenetrable, tightly overlooking his darkness.

But he woke up immediately, exactly from the push, when a little bit sulfur dawn and only the closest trees were obscure silhouettes performed from the frosty MGLL. I woke up, I remembered that with him, where he, and the thoughts scared this so carelessly spent in the night of the night. The drooping cold made his way through the "damn skin" and the fur of the overalls and stroke to the bones. The body beat the finely uncredit trembling. But the worst thing was - legs: they were still sharper, even now, when they were alone. With fear, he thought about to get up. But he stood as decisively, a jerk, as the Unty drank himself yesterday. Time was expensive.

Hunger attributed to all of the same terms that fell on Alexey. Yesterday, covering the body of the sister with a cloak, he noticed near her a canvas bag with a red cross. Some animal is already there, and in the snow, crumbs were lying around behind the buried holes. Yesterday, Alexey almost did not pay attention to it. Today he raised his bag. It turned out to be several individual packages, a large canned bank, a pack of someone's letters, a mirror, on the back of which was inserted a photo of a slight old woman. It was visible in a bag of bread or a cruck, yes birds or animals dealt with this meal. Alexey sanking the bank and bandages on the pockets of the overalls, saying to himself: "Thank you, my dear!" - corrected the rained wind with the feet of the girl's cloak and slowly walked to the east, which is already orange flames behind the grid of wood branches.

He was now a kilogram of canned bank, and he decided to eat once a day, at noon.

To drown out the pain that every step hurt him, he began to distract himself, thinking about and hoping his way. If you do a day ten or twelve kilometers, it comes to his three, at most - in four days.

So good! Now: What does it mean to get ten and twelve kilometers? Kilometer - these are two thousand steps; Therefore, ten kilometers are twenty thousand steps, and this is a lot if you consider that after every five hundred and six hundred steps you have to stay and relax ...

Yesterday, Alexey to cut the way, came out for himself some visible reference points: Pine, Penet, whipped on the road - and they sought them, as to the place of recreation. Now he translated all this into the language of the numbers, shifted to the number of steps. He decided to distil between rest sites to make a thousand steps, that is, in Polkilometer, and rest on the clock, not more than five minutes. It came out that from dawn to sunset he, although with difficulty, will pass ten kilometers.

But how hard it was given to him the first one thousand steps! He tried to switch his attention to counting to weaken the pain, but, having passed five hundred steps, began to be confused, lie and could not think about anything other than the burning, twigging pain. And yet he passed this thousand steps. Without having a strength to sit down, he fell face and the snow began to greedily licking. I pressed his forehead, whisms in which the blood was told, and experienced unspecified bliss from the chilling touch.

Then he shuddered, looked at the clock. The second arrow declined the last moment of the fifth minute. He looked at her with fear, as if she completed his circle, something terrible should happen; And when she touched the numbers "sixty," immediately jumped on his feet, groaned and moved further.

By noon, when the forest twilight was brushed with thin threads made his way through the thick cheese of sunlight and firmly smelled with a resin and melting snow in the forest, he made only four such transitions. He sat down in the middle of the road in the snow, no longer having the strength to get to the barrel of Big Birch, who was almost an outstretched arm. He sat for a long time, dropping his shoulders, without thinking about nothing, not seeing anything and not hearing, without even hunger.

Sighed, threw a few lumps of snow in his mouth and, overcoming the foul broom, pulled out a rusty bank from his pocket, opened it with a dagger. He put a piece of frozen, tasteless sala in his mouth, wanted to swallow him, but fat melted. He felt his taste in his mouth and suddenly felt such a hunger that he hardly forced himself to break away from the bank, and began to have snow to just swallow.

Before moving again into the path, Alexey cut out from juniper sticks. He relied on them, but it became more and more difficult to go.

... The third day of the path to the dense forest, where Alexey did not see a single human track, marked the unexpected incident.

He woke up with the first rays of the sun, trembling from the cold and the inner chill. In the pocket of the overalls, he found a lighter made by him for the memory of the rifle cartridge by the mechanic Yura. He somehow had completely forgotten about her and that it is possible to breed the fire. Nalleav with ate, under which he slept, dry mossy branches, he covered their cheese and lit. Yellow shock lights broke out from under the sizogo smoke. A resinous dry tree took up quickly and fun. The flame ran into a cheva and bloated by the wind, flared up with moans and whistle.

The bonfire crackled and spitted, spreading a dry benefactor. Alexey has become cozy, he lowered the "zipper" of the overalls, took out a few exterior letters from the pocket of the gymnasters, written by the same round diligent handwriting, took out a thin girl with a thin girl in motley, colorful dress, sitting, picking her legs, in the grass. He looked at her for a long time, then he again wrapped himself in cellophan, laid himself in his letter and, thoughtfully hollowed in his hands, removed back to his pocket.

"Nothing, nothing, everything will be fine," he said, turning not to this girl, not that herself, and thoughtfully repeated: "Nothing ..."

Now he has already habitable movements with the legs of the Unit, unwinding the slices of scarf, carefully examined the legs. They are even more swollen. The fingers sticking out in different directions, exactly the feet were rubber and inflated them with air. The color they had even darker than yesterday.

Alexey sighed, saying goodbye to the faded Kostroma, and again wandered on the road, creaking with sticks in the icing snow, biting her lips and sometimes losing consciousness. Suddenly, among other noise, the forests that accustomed ear almost stopped capturing, he heard a distant sound of working motors. At first he thought that it would see him from fatigue, but the motors were buzzed all louder, then at running in the first speed, then quietly. Obviously, there were Germans, and they drove along the same road. Alexey felt how he was immediately frowning in him inside.

Fear gave Alexey forces. Forgetting about fatigue, about the pain in the legs, he turned out from the road, descended at virgin to the thick firing undergrowth and here, going into the thicket, sank on the snow. From the road it, of course, it was difficult to notice; He was also clearly visible to him, illuminated by a midday sun, having already stood over the gear fence of spruce vertices.

The noise is approaching. Alexey remembered that his lonely trail was clearly visible in the snow of the abandoned road.

But it was too late to leave, the motor of the front car buzzed somewhere closely. Alexey was still stronger in the snow. First flashed among the branches flat, like a colun armored car painted with lime. Shaking and ringing chains, he approached the place where Alexei trail rolled into the forest. Alexey hid his breath. Armored person did not stop. Behind the armored car was a small open all-terrain vehicle. Someone in the high-squirrel cap, bolding with his nose into a brown fur collar, sat next to the driver, and the vehicle gunners in gray-green overcoats and helmets were swaying at a high bench. At some distance, Fyrccha and clawing caterpillars, she walked one more, already big, all-terrain vehicle, on which a man was sitting in rows of fifteen Germans.

Alexey jested in the snow. The cars were so close that he smelled to the face with a warm grill of gasoline Gary. The hair moved from him on the back of his head, and the muscles curled in tight tangles. But the cars passed, the smell was dispelled, and from somewhere left the disassembled discernible noise of motors.

After waiting until everything sits, Alexey got on the road, on which the stair traps of the caterpillars were clearly imprinted, and the path continued on these traces. He moved by the same uniform transitions, he also rested, as well, passed half the day. But now he was in the animal, carefully. Alarmed hearing caught every rustle, her eyes were growling around, as if he knew that somewhere nearby, he was swayed, hiding a big dangerous predator.

The pilot, accustomed to fight in the air, he first met the living, intact enemies on Earth. Now he walked along their trail, smiling gloatingly. He sadly lives here, uncomfortable, not the grocery area occupied by them! Even in the virgin forest, where in three days did not see Alexei any human, livingaries, and they have to go to the officer under such a convoy.

"Nothing, nothing, everything will be fine!" "He prompted himself Alexey and all walked, walked, walked, trying not to notice that his legs would hurt everything sharper and that he himself would noticeably weaken. The stomach was no longer deceived by neither pieces of young firing bark, which he all the time gnawed and swallowed, nor bitter birch kidneys, nor tender and sticky, stretching under the teeth of the Kashitz of a young lime bark.

Before Twilight, he barely passed five distances. But at night, he spread a big bonfire, putting a huge half-burning birch barrel, having fallen on Earth. While the trunk of this tel was hot and Neyarko, he slept, stretching out on the snow, feeling the living warm, then in one, then in the other side, instinctively turning and waking up to throw drying to the fallen log that was in the lazy flame.

Among the night was a blizzard. Started, worried anxiously, moaned, squeakly over her heads. The clouds of barbed snow walked on the ground. Rusteing gloom piled over a scaring, sparkling flame. But the snowstorm was not alarmed by Alexey. He slept sweetly and greedily protected by the heat of the fire.

Fire defended from animals. And the Germans could not be afraid in this night. They will not dare to appear in a blizzard in the deaf forest. And yet, while the bodied body rested in smoking warmth, the ear, already accustomed to the animal caution, caught every sound. Under the morning, when the storm slept and in the dark over the crumbling land, it was not a thick whisper fog, preparing Alexey, that he heard the remote sounds of battle, gaps, automatic sinks, rifle sounds behind the rustling snow.

"Did the front line? So soon?"

But when in the morning the wind raned the fog, and the forest, silver overnight, gray and cheerful, spurled on the sun by the Inem, and, as if rejoicing this to his sudden transformation, lasted, squeezed, stupid the bird of breeding, who revealing the coming spring, how much did he listened to Alexey, He could not catch the noise of the battle - neither shooting, nor even the hum of cannonada.

White smoky jetings, spiny twisted in the sun, lined with trees snow. Someone in the snow with a slight knock fell heavy spring drops. Spring! At that morning, she first declared himself so decisively and persistently.

The miserable remnants of canned foods are a few fibers covered with fragrant saber meat - Alexey decided to eat in the morning, as it felt that otherwise he would not climb. He is thoroughly slipping by the jar with a finger, cutting into several places about her sharp edges, but he has experienced that there was still fat. He filled the bank with snow, the overturnish ashes of the fallen fire, put the jar in the tremendous coal, and then with pleasure, a little sip drank this hot, a little bit smelling water with meat. He put the bank in his pocket, deciding to boil tea in it. Drink hot tea! It was a pleasant discovery and slightly seen Alexei when he again moved into the path.

But here it was expected great disappointment. Night Buran completely outlined the road. He blocked her oblique, islandic snowdrifts. The eyes cut a monophonic glittering blue. The legs are knitted in a plump that has not yet sleeved snow. They accounted for them with difficulty. Even the sticks that are alone themselves have poorly helped.

By noon, when the shadows under the trees became black, and the sun looked through the tops on the races of the road, Alexey managed to make only about a thousand five hundred steps and was tired so that every new movement was delivered to him with the voltage of will. His swung. The earth slipped out of her feet. He faded fell into a moment, motionlessly lay on top of a snowdrift, pressing his forehead to the crisp snow, then he climbed and did a few more steps. Uncontrollably clone into sleep. Dropped forgotten, forget, do not move any muscle. Let it be! He stopped, Chapens and stalking from side to the side, then, painfully bitten her lip, brought himself into consciousness and again did a few steps, with difficulty squeezing his legs.

Finally, he felt that she could no longer be that no force would shift him from the scene and that if he was sitting now, he was no longer climbed. With longing, he looked around him. Nearby, on the side of the road, standing curly young pine. The last effort stepped toward her and fell on it, hitting the chin in the crevice of her split vertices. The severity, which came to the broken legs, decreased somewhat, became easier. He lay on spring branches, enjoying the rest. Wanting to lie down more comfortably, he leaned his chin on a slingshot of pines, pulled his feet - one, the other, and they, not carrying the severity of the body, easily freed from the snowdrift. And here Alexei again flashed the thought.

Yes Yes! After all, it is possible to cut out this small tree, make a long stick out of it, with a slingshot at the top, throw away a stick forward, rest in the horns of the chin, to transfer the severity of the body on it, and then, like this pine, rearrange the legs forward. Slow? Well, yes, of course, slowly, but you will not be tired and you can continue the path, not expecting until you fall, drifts will be cleaned.

He immediately fell on his knees, quit a dagger, cut off the branches, wrapped the slingshot with a nasal handkerchief, bandages and immediately tried to move on the road. Throwing a stick forward, rested into her her chin and hands, took a step, two, again threw a stick, again rested, again step, two. And he went, counting steps and establishing new standards of movement.

Probably, from the side, it would be strange to see a person wondering in such an incomprehensible way in a deaf forest moving on deep snowdrifts at the speed of the caterpillar coming from dawn to dawn and passing for this period no more than five kilometers. But the forest was empty. No one, except for forty, did not watch him. Soroki, for these days, convinced of this strange three-headed, harsh creature, did not fly away when it was approaching, but only reluctantly swore from the road and, turning the head of the side, mockingly looked at him with their curious black eyes.

So he walked two days over a snowy road, throwing forward a stick, licking on her and pulling her legs to her. The feet of the already petrified and did not feel anything, but the body pierced with each step. Hunger stopped tormented. Clear convulsions and threw in the stomach and switched to constant stupid pain, as if the empty stomach turned and, embarrassing overgrown, squeezed all the insides.

Alexei fed on young pine bark, which was lying on his holiday by Dagger, Berez and Lip kidney and a green moss. He knocked him out of snow and dysquitated in boiling water. He was "tea" from the collected on the protanes of lacquered leaflets of lumps. Hot water, filling the body with warmth, even created the illusion of satiety. Hot, smelling smoke and broom, hot seizure, Alexey somehow calmed all over, and not such an endless and terrible way he seemed to him.

On the sixth of the night, he settled down again under the green tent of the sprawling spruce, and the fire decomposed near, around the old resinous stump, which, according to his calculations, was to be hot to smooth all night. It has not yet happened. At the top of the ate, an invisible protein was fussed. She brought the bumps and from time to time, empty and confused, threw down. Alexey, who has now did not go out of the mind, he was interested in what he finds in the bumps of the animal. He raised one of them, hesitated the untouched scales and saw an overlooking seed with a seed grain under it. It resembled a tiny cedar nut. He crushed his teeth. In the mouth felt a pleasant smell of cedar oil.

Alexey immediately gathered around several unaccustomed raw fir-tidy, put them to the fire, threw the branches, and when the bumps were silent, began to shake the seeds from them and rub between the palms. He blew the wings, and the tiny nuts threw in her mouth.

Quietly rustled forest. Threll resinous stump, spreading fragrant, giving a lad far the smoke smoke. The flames flamely flared up, it was blurred, and from the noisy darkness they performed into the illuminated circle, they were rejected back into the darkness trunks of golden pines and silver birches.

Alexey threw the branches and was again taken for fir bumps. The smell of cedar oil wakes in memory for a long time forgetting a picture of childhood ... A small room, densely populated by familiar things. Table under hanging lamp. Mother in a festive dress, who returned from the vigil, solemnly pulls out a paper pantic from the chest and pouring cedar nuts from him in a bowl. The whole family is a mother, grandmother, two brothers, he, Alexey, the smallest, sits around the table, and the solemn plum of nuts begins, this festive delicacy. All are silent. Grandmother picks up the grains with a pin, mother - pin. She deftly sucks the nut, removes the nucleoli from there and folds them with a handful. And then, by giving them to the palm, he sends someone from the guys into his mouth, and at the same time the lucky one feels his lips the stiffness of her labor, not knowing the hands tired, smelling the sake of the holiday with strawberry soap.

Kamyshin ... childhood! Cozy lived in a tiny house on an outdoor street! ..

Summit the forest, the face is hot, and a spiny cold is selected from the back. Felling in the darkness of the Filin, foxes are twisted. The fire cripped at the fire, thoughtfully looking at the fearful, distorted coals, hungry, sick, deadly man, the only thing in this huge to the forest, and in front of him there is an unknown, full of unexpected dangers and tests.

- Nothing, nothing, everything will be fine! - Suddenly, this person suddenly, and at the last bugs, the fire is seen that he smiles with flourishing lips with some kind of distant thoughts.

For the seventh days of his hike, Alexey learned, where the sounds of a remote battle came to him in a pleasant night.

Completely already exhausted, remembering stopping to pass, he dragged on the fatal forest. Spring now did not smile from published. She entered this protected forest with her warm, gusty winds, with sharp sunbeams, breaking through the branches and sheeping snow from the bodies, hillocks, with sad tricks in the evenings, with slow, solid robes on the robbery hump of road, with porous, as The bee honeycombs, a wet snow, with sparkle puddles on Protanes, with this mighty brightened smell, from which the head of all lives is fun.

Alexey, from childhood, loved this time, and even now, dragging his sick legs in wet, risking untes, hungry, losing consciousness from pain and fatigue, sickness, viscous snow and early dirt, he still eagerly inhaled a crumpled moist fragrance. He no longer disassembled the road, did not go to the puddle, stumbled, fell, got up, it was hard at his stick, stood, swaying and gathering with the forces, then threw a stick forward, as far as possible, and continued to slowly move to the east.

Suddenly, the turn of the Forest Road, having sharply brave here, he stopped and froze. Where the road was especially narrow, clamped from two sides with a frequent young fishing line, he saw German cars that overtake him. The path of them was blocked two huge pines. Near the most of these pines, bolding in them with a radiator, stood like a colun armored car. Only he was not spotfully white, as before, and the bug-red, and it was low on iron rims, as the tires were burned. The tower was lying aside, in the snow under a tree, like a wing mushroom. Three corpses were lying near the armored car - his crew - in black grilled short peepers and cluttered helmets.

Two all-wheel drives, also burned, crimped, with black, charred insides, stood back to the armored car on the dark from Gary, ash and coals by the snow by snow. And around - on the side of the road, in the roadside bushes, the bodies of German soldiers were lying around, and it was seen that the soldiers were blown in horror, not even understanding that it happened that the death had erased them for each tree, for each A bush, hidden by a snowy veliga blizzard. A corpse of an officer in Mundir was tied to the tree, but without pants. To the green of his french with a dark collar of the hook was a note. "What are you going for, then you will find," it was written on it. And below, by another handwriting, the ink pencil has been added by the large-broken word "dog".

Alexey looked at the scene for a long time, looking for something edible. Only in one place he discovered a tweed in the snow, already peeled, old, moldy tender and brought it to his mouth, greedily breathing with a sour smell of rye bread. I wanted to squeeze this tear entirely in the mouth and chew, chew, chew the fragrant grain mass. But Alexey divided it into three parts; Two removed the looting pocket, and one began to pinch on the crumbs and these crumbs, like lollipops, trying to stretch the pleasure.

He walked around the battlefield once again. Here it painted his thought: the partisans should be somewhere here, nearby! After all, this is their legs of the fruitful snow in the bushes and around the trees. Maybe his, wandering between the corpses, has already noticed and from somewhere from the top ate, because of the bushes, because of the snowdrifts, the partisan intelligence officer is observing him. Alexey put his hands to his mouth and shouted that there are urine:

- Wow! Partisans! Partisans!

- Partisans! Partisa-s-s! Ege-E-th! "Alexey called, sitting on the snow among black engine gary and silent enemy bodies."

Called and strained rumor. He is hoarse, threw the voice. He already realized that the partisans, having done their job, gathering trophies, long left, - and why did they have to stay in the deserted forest more often? "But he shouted everything, hoping for a miracle, that now, the bearded people will come out of the bushes, which he heard so much, will pick it with them, and it will be possible at least a day, at least a time to relax, obeying someone else's good wax, Nothing taking care of anything, not seeking anywhere.

Only the forest answered him a sonorous and fractional echo. And suddenly - or is it, maybe it seemed from a large voltage? - Alexey heard through the melodic, deep noise of the covers deaf and frequent, then distinctly distinguishable, then completely fallen off strikes. He was all fixed, accurately made a friendly call to him in the forest desert. But he did not believe hearing and sat for a long time, pulling her neck.

No, he was not deceived. The wet wind pulled from the east and again reports clearly distinguishable sounds of canonades. And this cannonade was not lazy and rare, what the last months heard, when the troops, wrapped around and strengthened on a durable line of defense, leisurely were moved by projectiles, disturbed each other. She sounded often and tensely, as if someone swore heavy cobblestones or was taken often to beat fists in the bottom of the oak barrel.

Clear! Tense artillery duel. The front line, judging by the sound, was kilometers in ten, something happened on it, someone came down and someone desperately shoot himself, defending. Joyful tears flowed on Alexei's cheeks.

He looked east. True, in this place the road cooled the road in the opposite direction, and in front of him lay a snowy peel. But he heard this calling sound. There were the dacing in the snow, the oblong fumes of the partisan traces in the snow, somewhere in this forest they lived, brazing forest people.

Murdering for a nose: "Nothing, nothing, comrades, everything will be fine," Alexei darely poked a stick in the snow, leaned her chin, threw it all the severity of the body, with difficulty, but resolutely rearranged his feet in a snowdrift. He turned off the road to a snowy virgin.

On this day he failed to do in the snow and one and a half hundred steps. Twilight stopped him. He again chosen the old stump, laid him down by drying, took out the cherished lighter made from the cartridge, chircked the wheel, he chirped again - and frowning: gasoline ran out in the lighter. He shake her, blew, trying to squeeze the remains of gasoline vapors, but in vain. Hummer. Sparks, filled from under the wheel, like small zippers, for a moment, messed the darkness around his face. Pechers are exterminated, and the fire never managed to get.

I had to touch the upstarts to a young thick pine man, curly curl, put the chin in his knees, embrace them with a ring of hands and so frightened, listening to forest rods. Maybe this night Alexei would cover despair. But in the sleeping forest, the sounds of canonades were heard clearly, it seemed to him that he even began to distinguish short blows of shots from the deaf Wuhan gaps.

Waking up in the morning with a feeling of scotchless anxiety and grief, Alexey immediately thought: "What happened? Bad sleep? " Remember: Lighter. However, when gentlely fitted the sun, when everything is all around - and the buzzing grapple snow, and the trunks of the pines, and the most needles - glanced and glittered, it didn't seem like a big trouble. Worse was the other: setting up his hands, he felt that he could not get up. Having made some unsuccessful attempts to climb, he broke his stick with a slingshot and, like Kul, collapsed to Earth. Turned onto the back to give to move away to the stake members, and began to look through the shelled pine branches on the bottomless blue sky, which hurriedly floated clean, fluffy, with gold-plated curly edges of the cloud. The body gradually began to move, but something happened to the legs. They could not stand at all.

Holding for a pine, Alexey once again tried to stand up. It was finally managed by him, but as soon as he tried to pull his legs to the tree - immediately fell out of weakness and from some terrible, new, itching pain in the feet.

Is it all? Is it really you will have to die here, under the pines, where, maybe no one will ever find and does not bury him from the bones of the beast? Weakness was repeatedly pressed against the ground. But the canonade thundered away. There was a fight, there were their own. Does he not find his strength to defeat these last eight or ten kilometers?

Canonada attracted, Bodried, insistently called him, and he answered this call. He climbed on all fours and in animals in the east, rags first validated, hypnotized by the sounds of a distant battle, and then consciously, realizing that it was easier to move in the forest than with the help of a stick, that the feet no longer bearing no gravity that, we are in the animal, he will be able to move much faster. And again he felt how his joy rises in the chest and rolling the tangle to the throat. I don't definarily, and convincing someone else who weak spirit and doubted the success of such an incredible movement, he said out loud:

- Nothing, dear, now everything will be fine!

After one of the distils, he stopped the seeded brushes, clinging them under the arms, the sleeves to the young fir, cut out square pieces of the bark from it, then breaking the nails, spoiled several long white skits from the birch. He took out the pieces of a woolen scarf from the Unites, wrapped his hands on top, on the back side of the palm, put a bark in the form of a sole, tied her barking and screwed the bandages from individual packages. On the right hand turned out a very comfortable and wide cooler. On the left, where to bind the teeth already, the construction was less successful. But the hands were now "shirts", and Alexei crawled on, sick, that it became easier to move. At the next prival, tied a piece of bark and knees.

By noon, when it became noticeably nice, Alexey made a fair number of "steps" with his hands. Canonada, as a result of what he approached her, or as a result of some acoustic deception, sounded stronger. It was so warm that he had to lower the "zipper" of the jumpsuit and unbutton.

When he quarreled the Mokhovaya Bolotze with green bumps, found out of the snow, fate prepared him another gift; In the gray-made cheese and soft moss, he saw thin threads of stalks with rare, sharp, polished leaves, and between them, right on the surface of the bumps, lay the bugs, slightly marked, but still juicy berries of cranberries. Alexey leaned toward the Kochka and straight lips began to shoot from a velvety, warm, smelling with the swamp damp one berry for another.

From a pleasant, sweetish acid of snowy cranberries, from this first real food, which he ate in the last days, in his stomach, he had spasms. But there was not enough will to wait for an acute, cutting pain. He chopped around the bumps and, already adapting, as a bear, tongue and lips collected sweet-sweet fragrant berries. He cleared so a few bumps, without feeling neither the floating dampness of the raised water, squandered in the Untes, nor burning pain in the legs, nor fatigue - nothing but the sensation of sweet and tart acid in the mouth and pleasant gravity in the stomach.

His stuck. But he could not keep himself and began again for berries. He took off his homemade shoes from her hands, scored a berry in the jar, put it with a helmet, tied it with ribbon to the belt and crawled further, with difficulty overcoming heavy Drema, filled his entire body.

For the night, climbing under the tent of the old ate, he was berries, wished the bark and seeds from fir bumps. He fell asleep with a guard, anxious sleep. Several times it seemed that someone in the dark silently sneaks to him. He opened his eyes, was alarmed so that he began to ring in her ears, snatched a gun and sat, Ocalev, shuddering from the sound of a fallen cone, from the rustle of the frozen snow, from a quiet jurrying of small snowy streams.

Only in the morning the stone dream broke it. When it was completely dawn, around the tree, under which he slept, he saw small lace traces of foot paws, and between them was seen in the snow who had a loyal tail.

So who did not give him to sleep! In the footsteps it was seen that Lisa went around and around, sat down and went again. Non-good idea flashed by Alexey. Hunters say that this cunning beast feels human death and begins to pursue the doomed. Is it really a premonition and tied a cowardly predator to him?

"Chepukha, what nonsense! Everything will be fine ... "He picked up himself and crawled, crawled, trying to quickly get away from this place.

That day he was lucky again. In the patching bush of juniper, from whom he broke off the lips of the SIZY, matte berries, he saw some strange lounge to the sheet. He touched his hand - the lump was heavy and did not crumble. Then he began to rub the leaves and swollen on the needles protruding through them. He guessed: hedgehog. A big old hedgehog, taking into account the chest of a bush to wintering, rolled the autumn leaves for heat for heat. The insane joy took possession of Alexei. All his sorrowful path dreamed of killing a beast or bird. How many times he took out a gun and aimed at Soroka, then in the junction, then in a hare and every time he hardly overwhelmed the desire to shoot. Only three ammunition remained in the gun: two for the enemy, one, in case of need for themselves. He forced himself to clean the gun. He had no right to risk. And then a piece of meat fell to him in his hands. Without a minute, without thinking about the fact that the hedgehogs are considered, according to beliefs, animals were frowning, he quickly threw the science foliage from the animal. Hedgehog did not wake up, did not deployed and looked like a funny, tasted with the needles huge bob. Alexey killed a blow to the dagger, dismissed him, disrupted his yellow skirt on the trouser and a needle shell, slammed on the part and enjoyed the teeth, the siza, fatty meat, tightly affected by the bones. Hedgehog was eaten immediately, without a residue. Alexey spruce and swallowed all the small bones and only after that he felt in his mouth the opposite smell of a pillow. But what does this smell mean compared to the full stomach, from which satiety, warmth and drema spill throughout the body!

He once again examined, hesitated every bone and predicted on the snow, enjoying warmth and peace. He may even fell asleep if he had not woke him out of bushes a cautious breech fox. Alexey was alerted, and suddenly through the deaf hum of the gun cannonade, all the time heard from the east, he was distinguished by the short crackles of machine-gun queues.

Immediately shook the fatigue, forgetting about the fox, about rest, he again crawled forward, deep into the forest.

Behind the marsh, which he is overwhelmed, opened Polyana, crossed by the old hedge from the stakes from the winds, Lyk and Ives knats screwed to the stoles knocked into the ground.

Between the two rows of the hedge, somewhere he looked out from under the snow of the king of an abandoned, the faint of the road. So somewhere close housing! Alexey's heart worried anxiously. It is unlikely that the Germans will take such wilderness. And if so, there are still their own, and they, of course, hide, will tighten the wounded and help him.

Feeling close to the end of the wardings, Alexey crawled, without sorry forces, not resting. He is plenty, falling, falling face in the snow, losing consciousness from tension, plenty, in a hurry to get to the crest of the hill, from which, probably, a saving village should be visible. In an effort from the last forces to housing, he did not notice that, besides this hedge, yes, herself, everything is more distinct and more clearly awaiting from under the module, nothing speaks about the proximity of man.

That's finally the top of the earthen hump. Alexey, barely translating his breath and convulsively swallow air, raised his eyes. Raised and immediately lowered - such terrible seemed to him what was revealed before him.

Undoubtedly, even recently it was a small forest village. Its outlines were easily guessed in two uneven rows of chimneys, who protruded over the light-disabled snow fights. Someone survived the parisades, Plentress, risels of Ryabbi, who once stood at the windows. Now they sticking out of the snow, burnt, killed by fervor. It was an empty snowy field, on which, as the stumps of the resulting forest, sticking out the pipes and in the middle - completely ridiculous - a well-made caravel with a wooden, green, loudshed along the edges of the infantry, slowly swinging by the wind on a rusty chain. Yes, at the entrance to the village near the fenced green fence of the kindergarten, the coquette army rummaged, on which quietly swayed and squeezed rusty loops of the wicket.

And neither the soul, no sound, no haze ... desert. As if never lived here. The hare, whom Alexey ragged in the bushes, ran from him, ridiculously throwing ass, straight into the village, stopped, stood up, raising the front paws and hoping his ear, stood at the wicket and, seeing that some incomprehensible big and strange creature continues to crawl According to him, crushed further, along the burnt empty parisades.

Alexey continued to mechanically move forward. Large tears crawled along his unshaven cheeks and fell on the snow. He stopped at the wicket, where the hare stood a minute ago. A piece of boards and the letter on it remained above it: "Children ..." It was not difficult to imagine that a pretty building of kindergarten was towering behind this. There are also small benches that overshadled and screamed the sharp rustic joiner. Alexey pushed the gate, climbing to the bench and wanted to sit down. But his body was already accustomed to a horizontal position. When he sat down, the spine gave the spine. And in order to enjoy the rest, he lay down in the snow, having seduced, as it makes a tired beast.

In the heart of his bastard boil.

The bench has snowdown. The ground of Chernela, and above it, noticeable for the eye hesitated and overflowing, the warm moisture rose. Alexey took in a handful of warm, fatal land. She was butterbished between her fingers, smelled with manure and damp, smelled of a barn and housing.

People lived ... Wood once, in the old days, in the Black Forest, this block of scarce gray earth. We teleshed her dry, scratched with a wooden harrow, holly, fertilized. They lived hard, in the eternal struggle with the forest, with the beast, with the Things on how to reach the new crop. In Soviet times, the collective farm was organized, a dream about a better life appeared, cars appeared, wearing wealth. Rustic carpenters built kindergarten. And, watching this green fence, how a rosyant latch is sitting here, men in the evenings, maybe they thought already: and whether they could not lie with the forces, whether they could not cut the reading room and the club, where it would be warm and peace, under the world blizzards Sit winter evening; Whether it does not light up here, in the forest wilderness, electricity ... And here - nothing, desert, forest, age-old, no disturbed silence ...

The more Alexey hesitated, the sharper his tired thought worked. He saw Kamyshin, a small dusty town in a dry and flat steppe at the Volga. In the summer and autumn, the town blown over sharp steppe winds. They carried clouds of dust and sand with them. He colole faces, hands, he blinked into the house, leaning into closed windows, blinded his eyes, crunched on his teeth. These clouds of sand, brought from the steppe, called the Kamyshin rain, and many generations of Kamyshinsev lived a dream to stop the sands, to breathe with clean air. But only in the socialist state their dream came true: people agreed and together began to fight winds and sand. On Saturdays, the whole city went outside with shovels, axes, lows. The park appeared on the empty area, along the little streets lined the alleys of thin topols. They were carefully watered and endured, as if it were not urban trees, but flowers on their own windowsill. And Alexey remembered how the whole city, from Mala to Velik, shoved in spring, when naked thin twigs gave young shoots and dressed in greens ... And suddenly he was visited by the Germans on the streets of his native Kamyshin. They harness fires from these trees, with such love grown by Kamyshin. Look at the smoke of his native town, and in place, where there was a house in which Alexey grew, where his mother lived, sticking out such a smoky and ugly tube.

In his heart, he was thrown and terrible melancholy.

The sun has touched the Size of the Forest Teeth.

Alexey Polz where there was a village street once. The heavy body odor was carried from the fire. The village seemed more deserted than a deaf, deserted bowl. Suddenly some extraneous noise made him alert. At the extreme ash, he saw a dog. It was a courtyard, long-haired, Fold, ordinary sort of bobby or bug. Quietly, she treasured a piece of sluggish meat, closing it in the paws. At the sight of Alexey, this dog, who was supposed to be a good-natured creature, the subject of permanent cottage owners and the favorite of the boys, suddenly buried and scolded his teeth. In his eyes, such a ferocious fire was caught fire that Alexey felt his hair was moved. He threw off his shoes and climbed into his pistol pocket. For a few moments, they are a man and this dog, who has already become a beast, - stubbornly peeking each other. Then the PSA moved, must have been the memories, he lowered the face, I wandered the tail, I took my prey and, pressing the ass, I was removed for the black hilmik of the fius.

No, away, rather away from here! Using the last minutes of Light time, Alexey, without disassembled the roads, right along the virgin, crawled into the forest, almost instinctively striving where the sounds of canonadas were already clearly clearly clear. She, as a magnet, with an increasing, as the strength approached, pulled him to him.

So he is still a day, two or three ... he lost his time account, everything merged into one solid circuit of automatic effort. Sometimes it's not that Dund, it was not for challenge to them. He fell asleep on the go, but the force pulling him to the East was so great that he continued to be in a state of forgotten, until she stumbled on a tree or bush or his hand was not cold and he fell as a face in a drain snow. All his will, all unclear his thoughts, as in focus, were concentrated in one small point: crawling, move, move forward by anything.

On the way, he greedily looking for each bush, but more hedges did not come across. Feed on snowy berries, sucked moss. Once he met a big ant a bunch. She towering in the forest, like smooth, hungry and washed by the rain siene. The ants have not yet woke up, and their abdication seemed dead. But Alexey put his hand into this loose stack, and when he took her out, she was littered with ant calves, firmly absorbed into his skin. And he began to eat these ants, with pleasure feeling in a dry, cracked the mouth of the spicy and tart taste of formic acid. He again and again sowned his hand into an anthow, until the whole anthill came to life, awakened by an unexpected invasion.

Little insects were fiercely defended. They sang Alexey's hand, lips, the language, they climbed under the overalls and stamped the body, but these burns were even pleasant to him. The sharp taste of formic acid picked it up. I wanted to drink. Between the bumps, Alexey noticed a small puddle of the brown forest water and leaned over her. He leaned up - and immediately pulled out: from a dark water mirror against the background of the blue sky looked at him a terrible, unfamiliar face. It resembled the skull-covered dark skin, which has grown untidy, already curly bristles. From dark prides looked big, round, wildly glittered eyes, plowed hair icicles fell on the forehead.

"Is it really me?" - Alexey thought and, afraid to lean over the water again, did not drink, the snow was singing and crawled away, east, attractable all the same powerful magnet.

He climbed over the night into a large bomb funnel, surrounded by a yellow bruscher of the sand thrown by an explosion. At the bottom it was quiet and cozy. The wind did not fly here and only rustled in confined downwards. The stars seemed unusually bright from the bottom, and it was imagined - they hang low above their heads, and the shaggy branch of Pine, shared under them, seemed hand, which was wiped with a cloth and cleaned these sparkling lights. Under the morning it was cold. Raw yarrow hung over the forest, the wind changed the direction and pulled from the north, turning this frost into ice. When the dull belated dawn was finally made through the branches of the trees, the thick fog donkey and gradually melted, everything turned out to be covered with slippery glacial crust, and the pine branch above the funnel seemed no longer hand holding a rag, but a bizarre crystal chandelier with small pendants. Pendants are quiet and coldly ranked when the wind shake it.

For this night, Alexey is somehow especially weakening. He did not even chew a pine bark, whose supply was carried out for the sinus. He hardly broke away from the ground, exactly the body was glued to her per night. Without shaking off the overalls, with a beard and mustache of the Iceller, he began to climb on the wall of the funnel. But the hands were powerlessly slid by the sand icing overnight. He tried again and again to get out, again and again sculpted on the bottom of the funnel. Once at once, attempts to him became weaker. Finally, he convinced him with horror that without help he did not get out. This thought once again made him climb on a slippery wall. He made only a few movements and slipped, exhausted and weak.

"Everything! Now all the same! "

He curled down at the bottom of the funnel, feeling in the whole body that terrible peace, which demagnetizes the will and paralyzes it. With a sluggish movement, he pulled the gymnasters from his pocket, but there was no power to read them. I took out a photo of a girl in a motley dress, sitting in the grass of a flowering meadow in the cellophan. He's serious and sad, he asked her:

- Are you just goodbye? "And suddenly shuddered and frozen with a photo in his hand: somewhere high above the forest in a cold, drooping air rushed to him a familiar sound.

He immediately woke up from Dream's dreet. There was nothing special in this sound. He was so weak that even the sensitive ear of the beast would not distinguish him from a smooth rustling of garbage vertices. But Alexey heard him all distinct. According to special, whistling notes, he unmistakably guessed that the "Ishach" flies, on which he flew and he.

The rotor of the motor approacted, grew up, moving into a whistle, then in the moan, when the plane turned in the air, and the tiny, slowly moving cross appeared in the gray sky, then he drove the clouds from gray haze again. Here are already the red stars on his wings, it's over Alexei's heads herself, shrinking with planes in the sun, he made a dead loop and, turning, began to go back. Soon the rocus of his verse, drowning in the noise of icy, gently rummaged under the wind branches of the forest, but Alexei still seemed to hear that he hears this whistling, a thin sound.

He presented himself in the cockpit. For one moment, in which a person would not have time to even smoke a cigarette, he would be in his native forest aerodrome. Who flew? Maybe Andrei Degtyarenko entered the morning intelligence? He loves to recover in the secret hope of meeting the enemy ... Degtyarenko ... Machine ... Guys ...

Sensing a new tide of energy, Alexey looked around the climbing walls of the funnel. Well yes! So you will not get out. But do not lie on the side and wait for death! He pulled out a dagger out of herbal and sluggish, weak blows began to chop the ice crust, straw in the nails of the fatal sand, make steps. He broke his nails, turned his fingers, but he wrapped all stubborn knife and nails. Then, leaning with his knees and hands on these steps-holes, he began to slowly rise. He managed to get to Bruzier. Even the effort is to lie on it, turn over. But the legs slipped, and painfully hitting the face about the ice, he rolled down. He hurt firmly. But the rotor of the motor was still in his ears. He began to climb him again and slipped back again. Then, I critically examined my work, he began to deepen the steps, made the edges of the upper more sharp and again climbed, carefully straining the strength of all the weakening body.

With great difficulty, he turned through the sandy brush, rolled out of him. And they crawled there, where there was a plane and from where, overclocking the fog-snowdrome and sparkling in a crystal, the sun rose over the forest.

But the crawl was completely difficult. Hands trembled and, without holding the severity of the body, lay down. Several times he picked up a face in a melting snow. It seemed that the earth had increased its strength of attraction many times. It was impossible to overcome it. I wanted to lie down and relax at least a little, at least half an hour. But today Alexei was frantically stretching. And, overcoming astringent fatigue, he is all CHRAND and CHRAND, fell, rose and again plenty, not feeling neither pain nor hunger, nothing seeing and not hearing, except for the sounds of canonades and shootout.

When the hands stopped holding, he tried to crawl on the elbows. It was very uncomfortable. Then he lay down and, pushing out of the snow with his elbows, tried to roll. It was possible. Roll into the side on the side was easier, did not necessarily need a lot of effort. Only a head was very spinning, consciousness flooded, and often had to stop and sit on the snow, waiting until the circular motion of the earth, the forest, sky stops.

The forest became rare, in some places he shouted his shafts. In the snow, the stripes of winter roads were visible. Alexey no longer thought about whether he would be able to get to his own, but he knew that he would crawl, roll, while his body was able to move. When, from this terrible work of all his weakened muscles, he lost consciousness, hands and all his body continued to make the same complex movements, and he rolled through the snow - on the sound of canonades, east.

Alexey did not remember how he spent this night and a lot more suggested in the morning. All tone in the darkness of the painful half feet. We vaguely remembered only obstacles that stood on the way of his movement: the golden trunk of a fledged pine, expiring by an amber resin, a stack of logs, sawdust and chips, laying throughout, some kind of stump with distinct rings of annual layers on a cut ...

An extraneous sound brought him out of half fee, returned to him the consciousness, made him sit down and look around. He saw himself in the midst of a large forest cutting, filled with solar rays, littered with foolish and continued trees, logs, stuck with stacks of firewood. The midday sun stood over her head, thickly smelled of resin, heated by a cheese, snowy dampness, and somewhere high above the land who had not flawed, poured, poured, choking in his own nursed song, lavet.

The full feeling of uncertain danger, Alexey looked around the Lessek. The deforestation was fresh, inappropriate, the needles in undetected trees did not have time to be taped and yellowed, honey resin dripped from cuts, smelled with fresh chips and raw bark, laying throughout. So the cutter lived. Maybe the Germans are harvested here the forest for blocks and fortifications. Then you need to get cleaned as soon as possible. Lumberjacks can be about to come. But the body is precisely petrified, coward the cast-iron pain, and there is no strength to move.

Continue to crawl? But the instinct, who developed in him for the days of forest life, was alarmed. He did not see, no, he felt like someone carefully and slowly watch him. Who! Forest, rings above the cutting of the larks, Dyatli duffle deeply, the cinemas are crying angry, rapidly pecking in the drooping branches of chopped pines. And yet, the whole being for his Alexey felt that he was followed.

Cracked the branch. He looked around and saw in the SIZY clubs of a young frequent pine tree, according to the winds of the trees, the curly vertices, several branches that lived some special life and did not shudder in the tact with a common movement. And preparing Alexey that he had a quiet, agitated whisper - a human whisper. Again, how, when meeting with the dog, I felt Alexey, how the hair moved.

He grabbed a rusty sinus, dusted a gun and was forced to take a trigger for the efforts of both hands. When the trigket clicked, someone renewed in the pines. Several trees shook the tops, as if they were thrown for them, and again everything was amended.

"What is this: beast, man?" - Thought Alexey, and it seemed to him - in the bushes someone also said in question: "Man?" It seemed or really there, in the bushes, someone speaks Russian? Well, yes, it is in Russian. And because they spoke in Russian, he suddenly felt such a crazy joy that, at all, without thinking about those who are there a friend or enemy, published a triumphant cry, jumped to his feet, the whole body rushed forward to his voice and immediately fell like a subdued, dropping a pistol in the snow ...

After unsuccessful attempts to get up, Alexey lost consciousness for a moment, but the same feeling of close danger led him to himself. Undoubtedly, people were hidden in Pine, they watched him and they were whispering about something.

He raised himself on his hands, raised a gun from the snow and, unnoticed by his earth, began to observe. The danger returned it from half fees. Consciousness worked clearly. Who were they? Maybe the loggers, whom the Germans chase here on the harvesting of firewood? Maybe the Russians are the same as he, the surrongations, made through the German rear through the front line to their own? Or someone from local peasants? After all, he heard, how someone clearly cried out: "Man?"

The gun was trembling in his hand, won from crawling. But Alexey was prepared to fight and well spend the remaining three cartridges ...

At this time, an agitated children's voice rang out of the bushes:

- Hey, who are you? Doych? Ferstite?

These strange words alerted Alexey, but shouted, undoubtedly, Russian, and undoubtedly a child.

- What are you doing here? - asked another child's voice.

- Who are you? He replied Alexey and Smallk, amazed at how unrefected and quiet his voice was.

Behind the bushes, his question made a stir. There they whispered there, gesturing so that thumbnail sprigs rushed.

- You can not twist balls, do not deceive! I know German for five miles in spirit. Are you Doych?

- Who are you?

- Do you know how to know? Not Fershtiu ...

- I am Russian.

- Vreash ... Impnis your eyes, lie: Fritz!

- I am Russian, Russian, I am a pilot, my Germans shot down.

Now Alexey is not careful. He was convinced that behind the bushes - their own, Russians, Soviet. They do not believe him - Well, war teaches caution. For the first time, he felt for the first time, he felt completely wearing that he could no longer stitch her leg or hand, nor to defend themselves. Tears flowed across the blacks of his cheeks.

- Look, crying! - Over the bushes. - Hey, what are you crying?

- Yes Russian, Russian I, your own, pilot ...

- And what airfield?

- Yes, who are you?

- What do you want? You answer!

- From Monchalovsky ... Help me, go out! What the heck…

In the bushes they whisper lively. Now Alexey clearly heard phrases:

- You say - with Monchaworsky ... Maybe it's right ... and crying ... Hey you, a pilot, throw a Nagan! - shouted to him. - Throw, I say, otherwise you will not come out, run away!

Alexey leaning down a gun. The bushes spread out, and two little workers, wary, as curious cinemas, ready every minute and give stringly, carefully, holding hands, began to approach him, and the elder, slender, blue-eyed, with the Rusie Hair, held an ax, in his hand Deciding, must be applying it. Behind him, hiding behind his back and peeping because of her full of indomitable curiosity eyes, she walked smaller, reddish, with spotted from the freckles, she walked and whispered:

- crying. And right, crying. And here is something, something!

The eldest, coming to Alexei, still holding an ax, with a huge fatherly feet, dropped away lying on the snow on the snow.

- Speak, pilot? Is there a document? Show.

- Who is here? Our? Germans? - Whisper, unwittingly smiling, asked Alexey.

- And I know? I will not be reported. The forest here, - the senior answered diplomatically.

I had to climb into the gymnaster for the certificate. The Red Commander Book with a Star made a magical impression on the guys. Exactly childhood, lost in the days of the occupation, returned to them since because he was his own, native, the Red Army pilot.

- His yours, your third day!

- Uncle, why are you so skinny?

- ... they were so shaking them here, they scanned, so scared! The fight was here, passion! Bashed them so much, well, so much!

- And who were surprised on what ... one tied a trough to the robs and rides in the trough. And then two wounded go, for the horse's tail hold, and the third horse is riding like a background-baron ... Where are you, uncle, shot down?

Postpotive, guys began to act. Before the housing was from cutting, according to them, five kilometers. Alexey, who was completely weakened, could not even turn to be more convenient to lie on his back. Sanki, with whom the guys came for her winds on the "German deforestation", were too small, and they were not able to drag the boys without a road, in a snowy virgin, man. The eldest, whose name was gray, ordered his brother Fedka to flee into the whole spirit into the village and call the people, and he himself remained near Alexey wrapped around him, as he explained, from Germans, in secret, not trusting him and thinking: "And Lyad knows him, Fritz Hiter - And the roming will estimate, and the document will get ... "And however, we scattered the fear of the fear of the fear of the fear.

Alexey Dremal with half-closed eyes on a soft, fluffy needle. He listened and not listened to his story. Through the calm Drema, immediately suddenly his body, only some unincound words were reaching until consciousness. Not delight in their meaning, Alexey through sleep enjoyed the sounds of his native speech. Only then he learned the history of the inhabitants of the village of Floa.

The Germans came to these forest and lake edges in October, when the yellow leaf of the flames on the birch, and the aspen was exactly covered were alarming red fire. The battles in the smooth area did not happen. Kilometers in thirty west, destroying the Red Army part, which ran up on the fortifications of the dysphem built by the defensive line, the German columns headed by a powerful tank avant-garde, have passed the floats hidden from the roads, in the forest lake, and rolled east. They strove to the big railway hub in the hospital, to capture him, disconnect the West and North-West fronts. Here, on distant approaches to this city, all summer months and all autumn residents of the Kalinin region - citizens, peasants, women, old men and adolescents, people of all ages and all professions - day and night, in the rain and in a heat, suffering from mosquitoes , from swamp dampness, from bad water, digging and built defensive frontiers. Strengths stretched from the south to the north of hundreds of kilometers through the forests, swamps, on the shores of lakes, robusts and streams.

There were a lot of growing builders, but they did not disappear for them. The Germans from the move broke through several defensive belts, but they were detained on one of the last frontiers. Fights have become positional. It was not possible to break through the city of Holy Germans, they were forced to postpone the center of impact south, and then they switched to defense.

The peasants from the village of Floa, supported usually a scarce harvest of their suesy fields with successful fishing in the forest lakes, was completely glad that the war had passed them. We renamed how the Germans were required, the chairman of the collective farm in the headman and continued to live as before, hoping that he was not eternidate the occupiers to trample the Soviet land and that they were, the plastic, and in their wilderness could, and would be able to reinforce the attack. But after the Germans, the Germans in black, with a skull and bones on the piloters arrived in the mandides of the colors of the marsh rod. The inhabitants of the smoothness were prescribed to expose twenty-four hours fifteen volunteers who want to go to regular work in Germany. Otherwise, the village was thrust out big troubles. The volunteers will appear to the extreme hollow, where the seed fish warehouse and the board were placed, to have a change of linen, a spoon, fork, knife and products for ten days. Nobody came to the deadline. However, the Germans in black, already, must be a scientific experience, not very well and hoped. They grabbed and shot for an oestrup before the board of the board of the chairman of the collective farm, then you beat the elder, an elderly educator from the kindergarten Veronica Grigorievna, two collective-farm brigadiers and a man ten peasants, who turned into arm. The bodies were not ordered to bury and stated that it would be so with the whole village, if, after a day, volunteers will not be in place, named in the order.

Volunteers again did not appear. And in the morning, when the Germans from the SSR speech went around the village, all the horses were empty. They did not have a soul - neither old, nor small. At night, throwing her houses, the land, all his years is good, almost all the cattle, people under the cover of thick in these parts of the night fogs disappeared without a trace. The village is all as it is, until the last man, starred and went into the forest wilderness - for eighteen miles, on the old cutting. The hint of the dump truck, the men went to partisan, and women with the children stayed to worship in the forest until spring. The rebellious village of Sonderkanda burned her down, like most villages and villages in the area, called the Germans by the Dead Zone.

- ... I had a chairman of the collective farm, the head-age called it, "said Sereyka, and his words were delivered to the consciousness of Alexey exactly because of the wall," so they killed him and the older broth was killed, the disabled he was, without his hand Sliced \u200b\u200bon the gum. Sixteen people ... I saw myself, we were warned to watch everyone. Katya shouted everything, everything was powered ... "I register for us, Sukina Sons! - shouted. - bloody tear, - shouted - for us will pay! .. "

A strange feeling was tested by a pilot, listening to a little blonde peen with a big sad, stupid eyes. He exactly sailed in a viscous fog. Unexposed fatigue firmly let out all its exhausted inhuman tension body. He could not move even with his finger and simply did not imagine how he was just two hours ago later moved.

- So live in the forest? - barely heard the boy asked Alexey, with difficulty freed from Path Dund.

- And how, we live. Three us now: we and Fedka and the uterus. The little sister was Nyushka - in winter, I died, swollen and died, and still a little died, so, it turns out, we are three ... And what: the Germans do not arrive, eh? SADAY OUR, MASTKIN, Therefore, Father, he now for the chairman, says, do not turn away, the dead, says, do not drag out. And the uterus is afraid, everything wants to run: well, he says, come back again ... And Won and Santa and Fedka, looked!

On the edge of the forest stood reddish Fedka and showed a high sutowless old man on Alexei finger in Rvana, from an army-painted Armenian, tied by a rope, and in the high officer German cap.

The old man, Santa Mikhail, as his children called him, was high, sutula, hood. He had a good face of the Nikola-wedliness of a non-lodge rural letter, with clean blond, children's eyes and a soft-nursing beard, a jet and completely silver. Pocking Alexei in the old Baranu's fur coat, all who consisted of the motley patches, without difficulty lifting and turning his light body, he said everything with naive surprise:

- Oh, you, sin, what a man was exhausted at all! What happened ... oh you, God you are, well, a decent shotlet! And that only war with people does. Oh no no no! Oh no no no!

Caution, as a newborn baby, he lowered Alexei on Salazki, screwed to them a rope convulsion, thought, pulled off his Armyak, turned and score to his head. Then he went ahead, harmed into a small clamp, made of burlap, gave the rope to the Maiden, said: "Well, with God!" - And threesome, they pulled the sleds on the talom snow, which clung to the sun, creaked, like potato flour, and sunned under his feet.

The next two or three days were shrouded for Alexey thick and hot fog, in which he was clear and ghostly saw what was happening. Reality was mixed with nonsense dreams, and only a lot of time later, he managed to restore the true events in their entire sequence.

A fluent village lived in a century-old Bor. Squash dressed still with snow, covered on top of a mustache, at first glance it was difficult to even notice. Smoke of them piled exactly from the ground. On the day of appearance, Alexei was quietly and raw, smoke blurted to Moss, clung to the trees, and Alexei seemed that this terrain was embraced by a fading forest fire.

The whole population is predominantly women and children and a few old people, - having learned that Mikhail is lucky from the forest in the forest, from where the Soviet pilot, on the stories of Fedki, similar to the "Justchwear", poured towards meeting. When "Troika" with Salazki knocked himself between tree trunks with Salazzo, Baba was surrounded by her and, drivening off the kids, so the wall and went, surrounding the sleigh, oha, hurt, surrounding the sleigh, oha. They were all trim and all seemed equally elderly. Soclot dugouts that were treated in black, did not go with their faces. Only on sparkling the eye, on the brilliance of teeth, highlighted with its whiteness on these brown faces, it was possible to distinguish the brownie from grandmother.

- Baba, women, ah, women! Well, what gathered, what? Theater is it to you? Performance? - Server Mikhail, snorkeling by pressing his clamp. - Yes, you do not squeeze under your feet, God forget, sheep, forgive the Lord, France!

And from the crowd to Alexey came the:

- Oh, what! True, skill! Do not move, is it alive?

- Without memory, he ... what is it with him? Oh, Babonki, so, so much!

Then the wave of surprise hit. Unknown, but, obviously, the terrible fate of this pilot struck the women, and while the sleigh was dragged by the edge, slowly approaching the underground village, the dispute was started: who had Alexei to live?

- I have a dugout sula. Sand sand and free air ... Pechora I have, - argued a little chicken woman with a loosely sparkling, like a young negra, eye squirrels.

- "Pechur"! And how much lives you? From one spirit will be praised! .. Mikhail, let me go to me, I have three sons in redarmeys and a mellow's little thing left, I will become a bake to him!

- No, no, to me, I have spacious, we live together, there is enough space; Top cakes for us: Anyway, after all, he is where there is. Already we are offended by Ksyuha, I have a bream of ice cream and white thread fungi ... Eschitsa him, soup with mushrooms.

"Where is the wisen, he is one foot in a coffin! .. To me, His, Uncle Misha, we have a cow, milk!

But Mikhail traded Sani to his dugout, which was in the middle of the underground village.

... Alexey remembers: he lies in a small dark earthlock; Slightly in chading, crackling and dropping sparks, burns stuck in the wall of the mud. In the light, it is visible with a narrow table, incomplete from the box from the German mines and approved on the patched in the ground, and chocks near him instead of stools, and thin, in old women dressed a woman in a black scarf, leaned toward the table, - Junior Santa Mikhail Barbara, and the head of the old man, reitted by gray-haired rustic curls.

Alexey lies on a striped mattress, naked straw. He covers all the same ladder coat consisting of multicolored patches. From the fur coat, it smells like something sour, such every way and residential. And although the whole body whines, like beaten with stones, and the legs are burning, the hot bricks are attached to the feet, it is pleasant to lie like that that is so motionless, knowing that no one will touch you that you do not need to move or think nor do it.

Smoke from Kamelka, folded on the ground in the corner, is sprinkled by the SIZY alive, overflowing layers, and seems to be Alexey that not only this smoke, but also the table, and the Santine Head of Grandfather Mikhail, is always something busy, something crazy, and thin Figure Course - all this breaks down, fluctuates, stretches. Alexey closes his eyes. He opens them, awakened by a current of cold air, which smelled to the door, happily a sudium with a black German eagle. The table has some kind of woman. She put the bag on the table and still holds his hands on it, exactly hesitating, not to take him back, sighs and says Varvar:

- Manka is ... from a peaceful time for the costumes burned. Do not need him now anything, the costume. Take, Kaskas here is a party to your weld. She is for the children, Kashka, he is just.

Turning, she quietly leaves, having all his sadness. Someone brings the ice cream bream, someone - cakes, baked on the stones of a chamber, spreading across the dump truck with sour warm bread parks.

Camerer with Fedka come. With the peasant degree of Sereyka, he shoots a pilot in the doorway, says: "Hello to you", - two pieces of sawn sugar put on the table with the crumbs of Mahra and Bran crumbs.

- Mamka sent. It is useful, sugar, eat, "he says and delelly appeals to her grandfather:" I went to the ashes. " Cast iron dug off. Two outposts are not painted burnt, ax without topping. Brought, fit.

And Fedka, looking out because of his brother, greedily looking at whitles on the table pieces of sugar and pulls saliva with noise.

It is only much later, thinking about all this, Alexey managed to assess the offering, which was made to him in the village, where in this winter about a third of the inhabitants died of hunger, where there was no family who did not lose one, and then two dead.

- Eh, women, women, prices you, women, no! BUT? Hear, Aleja, I say - the Russian woman, hear, there is no price. It stands at the heart to touch, she will give the latter, the head will put, the woman is ours. BUT? Not this way? - Santa Mikhail said, taking all these gifts for Alexey and again takes over some of his eternal hard work: for the repair of the breakdown, the sewing of the clamps or the stitching of the protoded felt boots. - And in the work, the brother of Aleja, she, this same woman, does not give us, and then and Tu-Tu! - Look, she will furnish a man at work! Only this Babi language, oh, tongue! Focused me, Aleja, these the most damn women's head, well, just fought in Naviv. As an Anusya, I died, I, a sinful man, and thought: "Slava those god, live in silence!" Here is my God and punished. The men are us, koi remained in the army Non-dusty, all with the Germans went to the partisans, and I stayed for great sins of the Babi commander, like a goat in a sheep's flock ... Oh-ho-ho!

Many such that deeply struck him, saw Alexey in this forest settlement. The Germans have deprived of inhabitants of smooth houses, good, inventory, livestock, everyday rhowdy, clothes - just that it was difficult for the work of generations; People now lived in the forest, they suffered great disasters, fear of every minute threat that the Germans will open them, starved, Merley, - but the collective farm, which in the thirtieth year after semi-annual brethren and disputes barely managed to organize, did not fall apart. On the contrary, the great disasters of the war even more ordered people. Even the dugouts were digging collectively and settled in them not in the old way, where to whom it had to, but by brigades. Chair duties instead of the dead son-in-law took the grandfather of Mikhail. He sacredly observed collective farm customs in the forest, and now he led by the cave village, drove into the thicket of Bora, according to the brigades and the links, was preparing for the spring.

The peasants suffering from the hunger demolished and referred to the total dugout until the last grain, who had what was preserved after the flight. For calves from cows, a strictest care was installed in advance from the Germans. People are starved, but did not cut public cattle. Risching to pay life, the boys went on old ashes and in the coals of the fires dug out of the heat of the plows. Wooden handles attached to the most preserved of them. From burlap Masteryli Yarma to start plowing on cows from spring. Baba Brigades were caught on the outfits in the lakes of fish, and she had a village all winter.

Although grandfather Mikhail and grumbled on "his women" and clamped her ears when they climbed the evil and long quarrels in his dugout because of any little clear Alexey of economic affairs, although he screamed sometimes on them with his falset He knew how to appreciate them and, using the accuracy of his silent listener, more than once he was taken to heaven to extol "Women's Female":

"After all, you look, Aleja, friend you are my kind, what happened." Baba - she from centuries for a piece of both hands is holding. BUT? Not this way? And why? Skup? No, because she is a piece of the road, then she feeds children, the family, that there is not talking, she, Baba, leads. Now see what business. We live, you yourself see how: I consider crumbs. Yeah, hunger! And then, it means that it was in January, they granted partisans to us, and not our rustic, no - our somewhere, hear, be fighting under the deer, and some kind of cast iron. Okay. Granted. "With the hunger I remember." And what do you think, the next day of Boyfish, they have a full bags. And the kids themselves are chubby, they do not rise on their feet. BUT? Not so? .. So that's it! If I was what commander, I would like the Germans, we would gather the best of my troops and trigger the Baba and we would tell all my troops, it means that before her, before the Baba of Russian, to march and honor her, Baba! ..

Alexey dreamed sweetly under the senile chatter. Sometimes, listening to the old man, I wanted to get a letter of gymnasters from my pocket, a photo of a girl and show them to him, but my hands did not rise, so was weak. But when Grandfather Mikhail was taken to pick up his women, it seemed to be Alexei that he feels the warmth of these letters through the cloth gymnasters.

Immediately, the table, too, eternally busy in some business, deft and silent, worked in the evenings of Santa Mikhail's snow.

At first, Alexey took her for the old woman, grandfather's wife, but then I saw that she was not more than twenty - twenty-two years, that she is light, slim, the pretty and that, looking at Alexei, somehow frightened and anxious, she sighs exactly, precisely swallows Some one stuck in the throat lump. Sometimes at night, when Zhoich Gasla and in a smoking darkness, the dugouts began to pensively drink a cricket, accidentally found by Sant Mikhaila on the old ash region and brought here in a mitten "for a residential spirit" along with the burntable dishes, it seemed to hear what he hears like someone Quietly cries on the horses, burying and burning the pillow with his teeth.

On the third day of the guest of Alexey, Santa Mikhail, the old man in the morning strongly told him:

- Did you, Aleja, was a misfortune: that the beetle was dung. And it is difficult to hurry. That's what: Boyku I will build you. What? .. Balca. I will help you, bone beast. It, with the work, is yours, it hurts well, the bathhouse. What? Not this way?

And he began to build a bath. The focus in the corner nodopil so that they began to burst the stones with noise. Somewhere on the street, I also burned the bonfire, and on it, as Alexey said, a big boulder was killed. Varya applied water into the old tub. On the floor was postponed with gold straw. Then Grandfather Mikhail undressed on the belt, remained in some confers, quickly spread in a wooden badge of the liquor, he died from the rogge-smelling in the summer of urine. When in the dugout it was so hot that heavy cold drops began to fall from the ceiling, the old man jumped out on the street, on the iron sheet, he dragged red from the heat of the boulder and lowered it into the tub. The whole cloud of a couple of chibanla to the ceiling, mounted on it, moving into white curly clubs. Nothing became visible, and Alexei felt that he was stripped by deft old men.

Cooking helped mother-in-law. From the heat, she threw off her vocket and head shawl. Heavy braids, the existence of which under the leaky scarf was difficult to even suspect, turned around and fell on the shoulders. And she, she, thin, Bolshaya, Easy, unexpectedly transformed from the old woman of the mantis in a young girl. This transformation was so unexpectedly that Alexey, originally not paying attention to her, sacked his nudity.

- Hold on, Aleha! Ay, friend, hold on, so our business, then with you now! I heard, in Finland, and at all, they say, men with women in one bath ride. What is not true? Mozda, and lie. And she, Varka, now, it means, it seems like a nurse with a wounded warrior. Yes. And it is not allowed to be ashamed. Hold him, I will rent a shirt. I wanted the shirt and crawl!

And then I saw the expression of horror in the big and dark eyes of a young woman. Through the mechanical shovel of the veil, for the first time after the catastrophe, he saw his body. On the golden spring straw lay the human backbone with a sharply outstanding balls of knee cups, with a round and sharp pelvis, with a completely faulty belly, sharp semi-windows of ribs.

The old man fired at the gang with a lycus. When he, having dippeding the washcloth in a gray oily liquid, brought her over Alexey and saw his body in a hot fog, a hand with a washcloth froze in the air.

- Oh, you, trouble! .. Surrive Your business, Brother Aleja! BUT? Surround, I say. From the Germans, you, brother, means to install, and from her, scythe ... - And suddenly it fell on the cook, who supported Alexey from the back: - And you stared at a naked person, Puncher, well! What lips are biting? Wow, all of you, women, Sorochye Fundard! And you, Alexey, do not think, do not think about anything. Yes, we, brother, you, scythe, do not give you away. We are, it means, we go out, we will correct, it's right! .. be healthy!

He deftly and carefully, exactly the little, soap Alexei Klokhak, turned over, pushed with hot water, again ter and ter with such an excitement that his hands, sliding along the bumps, soon squeezed.

Varya silently helped him.

But in vain she shouted her old man. She did not look at this terrible, the bony body, feeling cursed from her hands. She tried to look past, and when her gaze involuntarily noticed through the fog of a pair of foot or the hand of Alexey, horror sparks lit up in it. She began to seem that it was not unknown to her, there was a pilot who fell into their family, and her Misha that was not this unexpected guest, and her husband, with whom she lived only one spring, a mighty guy with large and bright freckles on Light faceless face, with huge, strong hands, brought the Germans to such a state and that it is his, Mishino, powerless, sometimes the deadly body keep her hands now. And she got scared, her head began to spawn, and only biting her lips, she kept himself from fainting ...

... And then Alexey lay on a striped skinny mattress in a long, cut and stumpped, but a clean and soft shirt of grandfather Mikhail, with a feeling of freshness and cheerfulness in the whole body. After the bathhouse, when the pair pulled out of the dugouts through the magician window, which was done in the ceiling above the hearth, Varya drank him with a camp, staring with a smack of tea. He drank him with the crumbs of those two pieces of sugar who brought him the kids and who Varya finely chopped for him on a white bearer. Then he fell asleep - for the first time firmly, without dreams.

Woke up his loud conversation. In the dugout, it was almost dark, the mound barely trel. In this smoky darkness, a sharp tenorok grandfather Mikhail rattled:

- Baby mind, where is your consideration? Man eleven den in the mouth of the wigkey grain did not hold, and you drive ... Yes, these are the coolest eggs - he was death! .. - Suddenly the grandfather's voice became a spier: - he would not have eggs now, he would have now, you know that Vasilisa, he Now the chicken soup will pour! ABOUT! That's what it is necessary for him. It would like it now to life. Here is a guerrice, eh? ..

- I'm not giving it! I will not give and not give, and do not ask if you're old! Hang! And talk about it not dare. So that I am a guerrice of my ... Supper to pour ... Supper! Won and so Eva, how much did it downtired everything, purely for the wedding! Invented too!

- Eh, Vasilisa, conscientious to you, Vasilisa, for these of your dabs! - Torodok old man snaveed. - The shortest on the front, and you have such stupid concepts! Man, one might say, it was at all crushed, blood shed ...

- I do not need his blood. My shed for me. And do not ask, it is said - I will not give, and I will not give!

The Dark Old Silhouette slid to the exit, and in the opening door there was such a bright strip of spring day that Alexey involuntarily closed and groaned, blinded. The old man rushed to him:

- Ay you did not sleep, Aleha? BUT? Ay heard conversation? I heard? Only you, Aleha, do not judge; Do not judge, friend, the words of it. Words - they are that the husk, and the nucleolo in it is good. Do you think the chicken was regretted for you? And, no, Alyosha! His whole family - and the family was a big, ten shower, the German translated. She's a colonel from her senior. Now it was realized that Polkovnikov was a family, all of them, the okromi of Vasilisa, overnight in the ditch. And the farm has taken everything. And, of them, big it is a trouble - in her years without a kind of tribe stay! From the farm from everything turned out to be one chicken, it means. Sly Chicken, Alyosha! Back in the first week, the Germans of all Kury-ducks flew, because for the German Bird - the first delicacy. All - "Smoke, Matika, Jurik!". Well, this was saved. Well, just an artist, not a chicken! It happened, the German is to the courtyard, and she - in the attic and sits there as if she was not. And his will enter - nothing, walks. The jester knows her how she found out. And she remained alone, this chicken, on the whole of our village, and here for the trick for her here this very partisan we dubbed it.

Meresyev dreamed with open eyes. So accustomed to the forest. Grandfather Mikhail silence him must have bothered. Cutting on the dugout, something like the table, he returned to this topic again:

- Do not judge, Aleha, Babo! You, a friend of kind, in that breath: She was like an old birch in the big forest, Nostkel did not blow on her, and now sticks out, like a dull stump on cutting down, and one of her joy is this chicken. What are you silent something, ah fell asleep? .. Well, sleep, sleep.

Alexey slept and did not sleep. He lay under a coat breathing breathable to him with a sour bread, the smell of old peasant housing, listened to the soothing cricket pilikan, and did not want to move at least with his fingers. It was like that his body was devoid of bones, packed with warm cotton, in which blood pulsates blood. Broken, swollen legs burned, they were pulled from the inside of some kind of pain, but there was no strength to turn or move.

In this halfway, Alexey perceived the life of the devils by knockers, for sure it was not a real life, and on the screen flashed in front of him alone for another incoherent, extraordinary paintings.

It was spring. A fucked village experienced the most difficult days. The last harshs made out of those that managed to pause and hurt and so that secretly died at nights from pits on the ashes and wore to the forest. Ottaled the Earth. Hasp's noodles "cried" and floated. Guys, partitioning the west of the village, in the Oleninsky forests, and before there is no no, even one, at least at night, visited the underground villages, were now cut off the front line. From them there was no rumor neither spirit. The new burden fell on the already exhausted Babel's shoulders. And here Spring, snow melts, and it is necessary to think about sowing, about the gardens.

Baba wandered concerned, evil. In the dugout Grandfather Mikhail, the business flashed between them noisy disputes with mutual popresses, with the listing of all old and new, real and fictional offense. Gomon sometimes stood terrible in her, but it was worth a hitromed grandfather to throw in this homonymous porridge of evil woman's voices any economic thinker - about whether it was not time, they say, to send walkers to look at the ashes: Maybe the land has already moved away, or not suitable whether The breeze to ventilate the seeds, kicker from stuffy dating damp, - as they immediately go through these quarrels. Once the grandfather returned during the day and contented and concerned. He brought the green blades and, carefully putting it on the scorst palm, showed Alexei:

- Did you see? From the field I. He leaves the Earth, and I fame, thank you by the Lord, nothing, marked. Snow is abundant. I watched. If we do not take out with spring, I will give it a piece. I'll go babam hukna, let them be happy, poor people!

For sure, the package of the spring, loosely, shouted in dugout women, in which the green bladder brought from the field, woke up new hope. And in the evening, Grandfather Mikhail rubbed his hands.

- IT, and I decided not yet my long-haired ministers. Ahleha? One brigade, it means that the cows plow, this is where spoons in the lowland, where the smell of heavy. Yes, much is attacking: only six cowmen from the flock of our remaining! The second brigade is the field, which is higher, sustain, is a shovel and hoe. And Nishto is a garden after all, there is a coup. Well, and the third - on the waters, there sand, under potatoes, it means, we cook the den; It is easily easily: there are kids with shovels to dig for and koi women are weak - those. And there, you look, and we will be helped by the government, it means. Well, not, it's not enough of the trouble again. Already, we yourself somehow, we will not leave the land uncovered. Thank you, the German from here shifted, and now burn will go. We have the people of the housist, either pull out.

Grandfather could not sleep for a long time, grumbled on straw, Kryakhtel, scorn, moaning: "Oh my God, God you!" "Sit down several times with Nar, approached the bucket with water, thundered a bucket, and it was heard, as he loudly, just a swed horse, drinks large, greedy sips. Finally, he could not stand, Lucin lit up from his temple, Trebon Alexei, who had fallen with open eyes in a serious half-fear:

- Sleep, Aleja? And I think everything. BUT? Everyone is thinking, you know. We have in the village on the old place of the Dubok on the square, yes ... Him is thirty years ago, just in the Nikolaev war, the zipper closed - and the top completely. Yes, and he is strong, Dubok, the root of his mighty, a lot of juice. Up to him the move did not, gave a stem sprock, and now, looked, what a kudryava hat again ... So our smoothness ... If only the sun shine, and the land gave birth, and our native power is, and we, the brother Alek, years old Be away the heels, we will disrupt! Living. Oh Ho-ho, be healthy! Yes, even - so that war would quickly end! Would smack them, and for the matter to all, it means that the world! What do you think?

At that night, Alexey became bad.

Dedova Banya shook his body, brought him out of the state of a slow, depleting fading. He immediately felt with an unprecedented strength and exhaustion, and inhuman fatigue, and pain in the legs. Being in a delusional halfway, he rushed on the mattress, moaned, crossed his teeth, called someone, he swore with someone, demanded something.

Varbara promoted all night near him, picking up his legs, boring his chin in his knees and greeted with big round sad eyes. She put him on his head, then on the chest rag moistened with cold water, straightened a coast on him, who he dropped something, and thought about his distant husband, unknown where we were carrying military winds.

A little light rose an old man. I looked at Alexei, already sacrificed and rearranged, whispered from Varai and began to gather on the road. He spoiled large homemade calories from car chambers on the boots, the Lychka firmly confused Armenian, took the juniper stick, polished with his hands, which always accompanied the old man in long-haired camps.

He left without saying Alexey a word.

Mereisev lay in such a state that he did not even notice the disappearance of the owner. All the next day he stayed in forgetting and woke up only on the third, when the sun had already standing high and from the wicker end in the ceiling through the entire dugout, to the worst Alexei's feet, not dispelning the darkness, but, on the contrary, a jumper, stretched a light and tight solar pole The rays penetrated by the SIZY, layered smoke of the hearth.

The dugout was empty. From above through the door, a quiet, harsh voice Vari. Busy, must be some kind of business, she sang an old, very common song in these forest edges. It was a song about the lonely sad rowan one that dreams of how she would move to the oak, too alone standing somewhere from her.

Alexey more than once and used to hear this song. She sang her girls, having fun of the collapse of the collengeous villages to smoke and clear the airfield. He liked the slow, sad motive. But earlier, he somehow was not thought about the words of the song, and in the fuss of combat life, they slipped past the consciousness. But now, from the mouth of this young big-eyed woman, they pulled out, painted with such a feeling and so much in them was a big and not a song, but a real female longing that he immediately felt Alexey all the depth of the melody and realized how Varya-Ryabina would tell about his oak.

... but it is impossible rowan

To the oak to move.

Seen, Sirotine

Century one swing ... -

she was missing, and in his voice it was silent of real tears, and when this voice, Alexei presented, as she was sitting somewhere there, under the trees, flooded spring sun, and the tears are full of her big round tears. He felt that he had a sorrow in his throat, he wanted to look at these old, gymnasters, who had a gymnasters in his pocket, take a look at a photo of a girl sitting in a meadow. He made a move to reach the gymnaster, but his hand fell out of the mattress. He walked everything again in a grayish, blurred light rainbow circles of darkness. Then in this darkness, quietly rustling with some prickly sounds, he heard two voices - Varin and another, female, old, also familiar. Spoke in a whisper:

- Does not eat?

- Where it eats there! .. So, yesterday, Lepéchki, the smallest thing - was stuck. Is it meant? Milk here pulls little gland. Give me.

"And here, I looked, sucking ... Maybe the soul will take a soul.

- Aunt Vasilisa! - screamed cooking. - Surely ...

- Well, yes, chicken, what did it rave? Ordinary business. Threaten him, the wonder - can, sun.

And before Alexey, heard all this in half feces, managed to open his eyes, Varya shook him strongly, unceremoniously, joyful:

- Lexy Petrovich, Lexi Petrovich, wake up! .. Grandma Vasilisa brought a soup of chicken! Wake up, I say!

The beaches, crackling, burned, stuck in the wall at the entrance. In the uneven spotlight, her Alexey saw a small, born old woman with a wrinkled long-axis angry face. She hung up with a large knot, who stood on the table, launched a burlap, then old shushun, then paper, and cast iron there; It hit such a tasty and greasy spirit of chicken soup from him that Alexey felt convulsions in an empty stomach.

The wrinkled face of grandmother Vasilisa retained a harsh and angry expression.

- Brought here, do not score, eat on health. Maybe God will give, benefit will go ...

And I remembered Alexey sad story of a grandfather family, a story about a chicken, who worn a funny nickname: a guerrilla, and all - and grandmother, and cooking, and tastyly smoked the bowler - broke into Muti tears, through which he was sternly, with endless pity and participated He is strict old ears.

- Thank you, grandma, - just managed to say, when the old woman went to the exit.

And he heard:

- Not on what. What is there to thank something? My thing is also fighting. Maybe they will give them a soup. Drink yourself on health. Refractory.

- Grandma, Grandma! "Alexey rushed to her, but the hands of Warie kept him and laid on the mattress."

- And you learn, learn! Eat here is the best soup. - She brought him instead of a plate an old aluminum cover from the German soldier's kitf, from which tasty fatty pair. Having brought it, she rejected, must be in order to hide the unwitting tear: - Eat here, eat!

- Where is Grandfather Mikhail?

- He left ... on business left, search for. Soon there will be no. And you eat, eat here.

And the most of his face saw Alexei big, blackened from time to time, with a wooden edge, full of amber broth.

The first spoons of the soup woke the animal appetite in it - to pain, before spasm in the stomach, but he allowed himself to eat only ten spoons and several white soft chicken meat fibers. Although the stomach persistently demanded also, and again, Alexey resolutely pushed food, knowing that in his position, excessive food could be poison.

Babkin Sack had a miraculous property. Having sowned, Alexey fell asleep - did not fell into oblivion, namely fell asleep - strong, healing sleep. Woke up, root and fell asleep again, and nothing - neither the smoke of the hearth, nor Babi talk, neither the touch of clouds, which, fearing if he did not die, no, no yes and leaning to listen, if he had his heart, could not be his to wake.

He was alive, breathing smoothly, deeply. He slept the rest of the day, the night and continued to sleep so that it seemed that there was no strength in the world that could break his sleep.

But in the early morning somewhere far away, he was completely distinct among other noises that filled the forest, distant, uniformly stunning sound. Alexey was fixed and, all after morning, raised his head from the pillow.

The feeling of wild, unbridled joy rose in it. He froze, accusable with his eyes. The cooling stones were wrapped in a focus, sluggishly and rarely piloted the cricket chained overnight, it was heard that old pines are calm and smoothly ringing over the dugout and even as drums at the entrance is a full spring droplet. But through all this was heard smooth rokat. Alexey guess that it taheds the "ears" motor - aircraft U-2. The sound then approached and increased, it was heard the wilderness, but did not leave. Alexey captured the Spirit. It was clear that the plane somewhere nearby that he was circling over the forest, whether he was looking out for something, or looking for a landing place.

- Vary, cooking! - shouted Alexey, trying to raise on the elbows.

Var was not. From the street heard excited female voices, hurried steps. There was something happening.

For a moment, the door of the dump truck was averaged, the motley face of Fedki crushed into it.

He made an effort and sat down. He felt his whole body as a heart beats, as he excitedly pulsates, giving up in temples and in sick legs, blood. He considered the circles performed by the plane, counted one, the other, the third and fell on the mattress, fell, broken by excitement, again rapidly and powerfully plunged into the same almighty, healing dream.

He was awakened by the sound of a young, juicy, bassovito of a rumble voice. He would distinguish this voice in any choir of other votes. So only the squadron commander Andrei Degtyarenko had a fighter regiment.

Alexey opened his eyes, but it seemed to him that he continues to sleep and in a dream he sees this widespread, soften, coarse, precisely made by the joiner, but not wrapped in a skirt, nor whisker a good-natured angular face of a friend with a bugger scar on his forehead, with blond eyes, Suggested as light and colorless, pork - as Andrey's enemy spokes - eyelashes. Blue eyes with bewilderment peered into smoky twilight.

"Well, I'm watching, showing the swarm trophy," Degtyarenko.

Vision did not disappear. It was really degtyarenko, although it seemed completely incredible, as a friend was able to find him here, in the underground village, in the forest wilderness. He stood, big, broadly, with unbuttoned, as usual, gate. In his hands, he held a helmet with radiophone wiring and some other kulets and convolution. Lucky lights illuminated him from behind. Golden Bobrik Briefly Outlied Hair Nimba gone over his head.

Due to the back of Degtyarenko, the pale, completely exhausted physiognomy of Grandfather Mikhail with excitedly stacked eyes, and next to him was the nurse of the lenochka, smoking and mischievous, looking into the darkness with animal curiosity. The girl kept under the mouse to a thick tar with a red cross and pressed some strange flowers to the breast.

Stood silently. Andrei Degtyarenko looked around with bewilderment, must be blinded by darkness. Two times his eyes indifferently slid along the face of Alexey, who also could not be mastered with an unexpected appearance of a friend and everything was afraid if all this would be a crazy vision.

- Yes, here he, Lord, is lying! - Varya whispered, breaking the fur coat with Meresyev.

Degtyarenko once again misunderstood the face of Alexei's face.

- Andrew! - said Meresyev, rushing to climb on the elbows.

The pilot with bewilderment, with a poorly hidden fear looked at him.

- Andrei, do not know? - Shept Meresyev, feeling that he started shaking everything.

Another instant the pilot looked at the living skeleton, covered with black, precisely charred, skin, trying to admit a fun friend of a friend, and only in the eyes, huge, almost round, he caught a familiar stubborn and open Meresyev expression. He handed his hands forward. On the earthen floor fell helmet, convulsions and convolutions fell, apples, oranges, cookies rolled.

- Leshka, are you? - The pilot's voice became dominated, colorless and long eyelashes merged. - Leshka, Leshka! - He grabbed this sick, childishly a light body, pressed him to him as a child, and all told: - Leshka, friend, Leshka!

For a second, I tear off myself, greedily looked at him from afar, accurately convinced, is it really his friend, and tightly pressed against him again.

- Yes, then you! Leshka! Bisov son!

Varya and Nurse Lena tried to snatch out of his strong, bear paws a semi-art body.

- Yes, let him go, God, he is barely alive! - Varya was angry.

- He is harmful to worry, put! - Spear, speaking his speech by endless "F", told the sister.

And the pilot, truly believing that this black, old, weightless person is really no one else, like Alexey Meresyev, his combat comrade, his friend, whom they have already buried twirled to all the regiment, grabbed his head, made a wild, triumphant Creek, grabbed him by the shoulders and, staring in his black, happily sparkling from the depths of the dark orbit eyes, shouted:

- Live! Ah, mother is honest! Live, Bis Toby in a shovel! But where were you so many days? How are you so?

But the sister is this little funny bbw with a trunny face, which was called everything in the regiment, ignoring her lieutenant title, Lenochka or the sister of medical sciences, as one day she, for dying himself, has been the bosses, singer and lancer, in love with all lieutenants immediately, - Surovo and firmly removed the separated pilot:

- Comrade Captain, move away from the patient!

Throwing a bouquet of flowers on the table, followed by yesterday they flew into the regional city, the bouquet, which turned out to be completely unnecessary, she opened a canvas bag with a red cross and tried to examine. Shortly her fingers were deftly ran through the legs of Alexey, and she asked everything:

- Painfully? And so? And so?

For the first time, truly Alexey drew attention to his legs. The feet are monstrously swollen, handled. Each touch to them caused pain, exactly the current pierced the whole body. But what I didn't like it, apparently, the Lenochka is that fingertips have become black and completely lost sensitivity.

At the table sat Mikhail and Degtyarenko. Slowly hijacked on joy from the flyer's flask, they led a lively conversation. By fractional senile tenor, grandfather Mikhail, apparently not the first time, was taken to tell:

"So, then, it comes out, our kids on cutting down and found it." Germans Forest on the blonders slammed there, well, the children of these mother, that is, my daughter, for choping there and drove. There they saw him. Yeah, what a miracle for that? At first they, it means, the bear was riser, "they say, the stroke and rolls it. They were craving, and they turned curiosity: what kind of bear for such, why rolls? Yeah! Not this way? Look, hence, rolls up with her side on the side, rolls and moaning ...

- How does it "roll"? "Degtyarenko doubted and stretched his grandgigon's grandgame:" smoke? "

The grandfather took a cigarette from the portrait, pulled out a folded piece of the newspaper from his pocket, gently tear off the corner, poured a tobacco to him from the cigarette, turned out and, soaring, was glad.

- How not to smoke, smoke-sip. Yeah! Only we didn't see him with German, tobacco something. Moss smoke, Again, a dry mopine leaf, yes! .. And how he rolled, you ask him. I did not see. The guys say, she rolled away - from his back on the belly, from the bug on his back: she was crawling in the snow, you walked, it was not for the power, "that's what he is!

Degtyarenko all greeted to jump, look at each other, near which women hung up, biting him to gray, brought by the sister army blankets.

- And you, friend, sit, sit, not our men's business - swaded! You are listening, yes on the mustache, and the boss of some retells there ... the great feat of this man! Hit what! Full week, all the collective farm is taught, and he can not move. And then there was no strength in myself, in the forests and the swamps of our Polz. On this, brother, few people capable! And the holy fathers on the lives of such an attitude did not accomplish. Where there! Eclaus, think - stand on the post! What's wrong? Yeah, and you, guy, listen, listen! ..

The old man leaned toward the ear Degtyarenko and lasted him with his fluffy soft borogoque.

"Only, I give up to me, he, - as if not to die, eh? From the German, he, you hang, fillets, and from her, from oblique, you can not use it? Some bones, and how he is plenty, I do not comprehend. Very, it must have been pulling. And it's all one: the airfield, and the airfield, and the words there are different, yes Olya somehow. Do you have such there? Al wife, maybe? .. Do you hear me or not, letun, and letun, you hear? Ay ...

Degtyarenko did not hear. He tried to imagine how this man, his comrade, seemed in the shelf with such a regular guy, with a frozen or kicked his feet and night crawling on the talom snow through the forests and swamps, losing forces, crawling, rolls to only get away from the enemy and get to their own. The profession of the fighter pilot taught Degtyarenko to the danger. Rushing into the air battle, he never thought about death and even felt some special, joyful emotion. But so that like this, in the forest, one ...

- When did you find it?

- When? "The old man hatched his lips, again took a cigarette out of an open box, lasted her and began to make a cigar. - When's it? Yes, clean Saturday, for the most forgiveness Sunday, - it became, just a week ago.

The pilot figured in the mind of the number, and it came out that Polz Alexei Meresyev was eighteen days. Incain so much time to wounded, without food - it seemed just incredible.

- Well, thank you, watching! "The pilot hugged firmly and pressed the old man to himself." - Thank you brother!

- Not on what, nothing to thank you for what! IS, thanks! What am I, a foreign stranger what! Yeah! Say, no? "And he angrily shouted the daughter-in-law that stood in the eternal pose of the Baby Gorky meditation, put the cheek with his palm: - Pick care with the floor of the product, crow! You have scattered such value! .. "Thank you", you are!

Meanwhile, the Lenochka finished wondering Meresyev.

"Nothing, nothing, Comrade Senior Lieutenant," she puffed clean and small, like peas, the words, "in Moscow, you will put two bills on your feet. Moscow Well - the city! Not these cure!

According to the fact that she was unnecessarily revived, which was repeated without silence, as Meresyev cured in two bills, understood Degtyarenko: the inspection gave the imperfect results and the affairs of his buddy. "And what exacts, forty!" - He thought about the "sister of medical sciences". However, in the regiment, no one took this girl seriously: they joked that she can only be treated from love, - and this somewhat consoles Degtyarenko.

Wrapped in the blankets from which only head was sticking out, Alexey reminded Degtyarenko Mumia of some pharaoh from an ancient history school textbook. A big hand held a pilot along the cheeks of a friend, on which the thick and rigid reddish pigle bushed.

- Nothing, Leshka! Put! There is an order - you are in Moscow today, in the Garny Hospital. Professor there are solid. And sisters, - he rushed his tongue and winks to the lamb, the dead on their feet raise! We are still with you in the air at the air! - here Degtyarenko caught himself on what he says, like the Lenochka, with the same intake, wooden revival; His hands, who smoolded his friend's face, suddenly felt under the fingers moisture. - Well, where is the stretcher? I suffered that what to pull! - He angrily commanded.

Together with the old man carefully laid them in a ripe Alexey on stretcher. Varya collected and turned into a nodule his little things.

"That's what," Alexey stopped her, when she began to put in a nodule, the Essovsky dagger, who more than once looked at curiosity, cleaned, sharpened, tried to finger the economic grandfather Mikhail, "take a grandfather, for memory."

- Well, thanks, Aleja, thank you! Stool is notable, look. And something is written not in our opinion. - He showed Dagger Degtyarenko.

- "Alles Fur Doychland" - "All for Germany", - translated the Degtyarenko launched on the blade inscription.

"Everything for Germany," said Alexey, remembering how this dagger went to him.

- Well, try, try, old man! - shouted Degtyarenko, catching in the front of the stretcher.

The stretchers were swollen and with difficulty, showering the earth from the walls, climbed into the narrow passage of dugouts.

All who stuffed to accompany the found to be found to the top. Only Varya remained at home. She didn't hurry on Lucin in Svetz, she approached the striped mattress, who still kept the outlines of the human figure with the outlines of the man's outlines, and stroked his hand. Her gaze fell on a bouquet, about which everyone was forgotten. It was a few twigs of a greenhouse lilac, pale, calam, similar to the inhabitants of the runaway villages, spent winter in raw and cold dusts. The woman took a bouquet, breathed in silence, barely calmed in a carbon monottement, a gentle spring smell and suddenly fell on the Nau and he flooded with bitter women.

To accompany the unexpected guest, all the cash population of the village of Plave came out. The plane stood behind the forest at the lounge at the edges, but also even even and strong ice of the oblong forest lake. There were no roads there. On loose, stewed snow, straight along the virgin, the stitch was conducted, the ranked hour ago by Sant Mikhail, Degtyarenko and Lenochka. Now, along this stitch, the crowd, headed by boys with a powerful ceremony and enthusiastic fed, ahead. At the rights of an old friend, who found a pilot in the forest, Solidly walked in front of the stretchers, trying not to get stuck in the snow, the huge, remaining from the murdered Father, Wovenki, and the powerfully smoked for the chumased, sparkling his teeth, fantastically torn away. Degtyarenko and grandfather, stepping in the leg, dragged stretchers, and on the side, at the virgin, fled the lenochka, then a poverty blanket, then a hoping of Alexei's head with his scarf. Behind the bobs, girls, old women. The crowd is depricted gomonila.

First, the bright light reflected in the snow was blinded by Alexei. Sweat the spring day struck him into his eyes that he closed himself and almost lost consciousness. Longly reunion of eyelids, Alexey taught his eyes to the light and then looked around. Before him, a picture of the underground village was opened.

Old forest stood a wall where neither loaves. The tops of the trees almost closed above their heads. Their branches, scorching the sun's rays, created a twilight below. The forest was mixed. White columns barely birches, whose vertices resembled the SIZY, frozen the smoke in the air, adjacent to the golden trunks of the pines, and between them, then there were dark triangles of fir trees.

Under the trees who defended the enemy eyes and from the ground and from the air, where the snow was long pulled out with hundreds of legs, burdens were insoles. Children's diapers were dry on the branches of century-old fools, the tipped clay pots and kinky were ventilated on the bunches of pine, and under the old Christmas tree, from the trunk of which beards of the gray-haired moss, at the very mighty Komlya, on Earth. The predatory beast, sitting old, squeezed rag doll with a flat good-natured physiognomy drawn ink pencil.

The crowd preceded by stretchers was slowly moving along the street "Street".

Updated in the air, Alexey felt the rapid tide of an ingenustful animal joy first, then a sweet and quiet sadness came to replace her.

Little handkerchief Lenochka lost tears from his face and, in his own way, conceived them, ordered porters to go hide.

- No, no, faster, let's faster, well! - Mereviews hooked.

It was already seemed to him that he was too slow. He began to be afraid that because of this, you can not fly away, which suddenly the plane sent after him from Moscow will leave, without waiting for them, and he will not be able to get into a saving clinic today. He moaned from pain, causing him a hurry flow of porters, but everything demanded: "Rather, please rather!" He was in a hurry, although he heard that Grandfather Mikhail suffocates, then it stumbles and gets off his legs. Two women changed the old man. Grandfather Mikhail seated next to the stretchers, on the other side of the Lenochka. I wip out an officer's cap of his foam, a worried face, wrinkled neck, he was pretty mumbling:

- You are driven, huh? Hurry up! .. Right, Lesha, your truth, hurry! Once a person is in a hurry, life in it is strong, you are found in our disastrous. What, you say - no? .. You write to us from the hospital! Addresses I remember: Kalininsky region, Bologda district, Future float village, eh? Future, eh? Nothing, come, do not forget, the address is correct!

When stretchers raised the plane and Alexey breathed the familiar tart smell of aviation gasoline, he again experienced a rapid joy. Above it was closed the celluloid lid. He did not see how the hands were waving his hands, like a small nickerty old woman, similar to his gray scarf on an angry crows, overcoming the fear and the wind raised by the screw, broke away to the Sidewayed already in the cockpit of Degtyarenko and put him a knot with an unstilled chicken, as grandfather Mikhail fussed around Machines, smoking on the women, accelerating the children, as a disbeling with his grandfather with a wind of a cap and rolled over the ice and as he stood, prolonged, sparkling by Lisina and silver liquid gray, waving the wind, similar to Nicholas-descendant of a Nimudren Rural Letter. Stood, waving her hand after the running plane, the only man in the motley watery crowd.

Tinging the aircraft from the ice, Degtyarenko passed over the heads of those who defended and carefully, almost touching ice skis, flew along the lake under the cover of a high swollen coast and disappeared behind a wooded island. This time, the regimental Sorvigolov, which on combat discords was often delivered from the commander for excessive straight things in the air, flew carefully, - did not fly, but there was a breakdown, blurred to the ground, went through the rugs of the stream, hiding behind with lake shores. I have not seen anything about Alexey and did not hear. Familiar smells of gasoline, oil, the joyful sense of flight forced him to lose his mind, and he woke up only at the airfield when his stretchers were taken out of the plane to transfer to the high-speed sanitary car, who had already arrived from Moscow.

He fell at his native airfield in the midst of a flight day, loaded to the limit, like all the days of that combat spring.

The hum of motors did not sink for a minute. One squadron, severing on refueling, replaced another, third in the air. All, from pilots to the chauffeners of benzocystunn and storekeepers, who squeezed fuel, were shot on this day. The head of the headquer lost his voice and now defeated some kind of squeaky.

Despite universal employment and emergency tension, all on this day lived with Meresyev's expectation.

- Did not bring? - shouted pilots to mechanics through the roar of the motor, not yet twisted to their caponor.

- Do not hear about him? - Interested in "gasoline kings", when the next fuel truck twisted to the tanks buried to the ground.

And everyone listened to whether a familiar regimental sanitary aircraft was cracking over the fishing line ...

When Alexey woke up on elastically swaying stretchers, he saw a dense circle of familiar persons. He opened his eyes. The crowd was delighted with noise. Near the most stretcher, he saw a young stationary, reservedly smiling face of the regiment commander, next to him a wide red and sweaty physiognom of the headquarters and even round, full and white face of the Commander Bao - a battalion of the airfield service, - which Alexey could not have tolerated for formalism and misfortune. How many familiar persons! The stretcher carries the Dollance of Jura. He always tries to look back all the time, look at Alexei and therefore stumbles at every step. Near the redhead girl - a sergeant with a meteorological station. Alexey used to seem that she didn't love him for something, she tries not to fall into his eyes and always a cookie watches him some strange look. Joking he called her "meteorological sergeant." Near the seed by the pilot of Cukushkin, a small man with an unpleasant, bile face, which in the squadron did not like for the titon temper. He also smiles and tries to get into the beat of the huge steps of Yura. Meresyev remembered that in front of the departure he was in the big company Evil played Kukushkina for not a duty that was not given to them, and was confident that this evil person would never forgive him offense. But now he runs near the stretcher, carefully supports them and fiercely swells the crowd with his elbows to protect him from the impetus.

Alexey never suspected that he had so many friends. Here they are, people when they are revealed! He became a pity "Meteorological Sergeant", which for some reason was afraid of him, was embarrassed before the Bao commander, about whose fadedness he let so much jokes and jokes, I wanted to apologize to the corn and say to the guys that this is not so unpleasant and non-advisable human. Alexei had a feeling that after all the torment, he finally got into his native family, where he was sincerely glad.

He was carefully carried through the field to a silver sanitary aircraft masked on the edge of a naked birch fishing line. It was clear that the techniques were already launched using a rubber shock absorber cooled the "Sanitar" engine.

- Comrade Major ... - Suddenly Meresyev said the regiment commander, trying to speak as louder as possible and more confident.

The commander, according to custom, quietly, smiling mysteriously, leaned toward him.

- Comrade Major ... Allow me not to fly to Moscow, and here, with you ...

The commander threw a helmet from his head, which hindered him to listen.

"No need to Moscow, I want here in Medsanbat."

Major removed the fur glove, groped under the blanket of Alexei's hand and shook her.

- Chudak, you must be treated seriously, truly.

Alexey dismissed his head. He was good, deceased. Neither experienced nor pain in the legs seemed to be scary.

- What is he? - seized the head of the headquarters.

- asks to leave him here, with us, - answered the commander, smiling.

And his smile at this moment was not mysterious, as always, but warm, sad.

- Fool! Romance, an example for the "Pioneer truth," - the head of the headquarters. - He is honored, for him the plane from Moscow sent by order of the commander of the army itself, and he - tell me please! ..

Merelesyev wanted to answer that he was not a romantic that he was simply sure - here, in a tent of Medsanbat, where he once spent a few days, healing dislocate the legs after an unsuccessful landing on a chopped car, in his native atmosphere, he would recover rather than among unknown Facilities of the Moscow Clinic. He picked up the words to answer the headquarters of the headquarters corridiously, but they did not have time to pronounce them.

Shovily dried siren. Persons at all immediately became businesslike, concerned. Major gave a few short orders, and people began to scatter as ants: who to the aircraft that fastened on the edge of the forest, who to the carman of the team, hilly rumped at the edge of the field. Who is to machines hidden in the fishing line. Alexey saw a clearly launched smoke in the sky and slowly broken gray trail of a multi-way rocket. He understood: "Air!"

He was hammered by his heart, the nostrils came in, and he felt in all his weak body the exciting chill, which has always happened to him in a minute of danger.

Lenochka, Mechanic Yura and Meteorological Sergeant, who had nothing to do in the busy fuss in the airfield, threesome, picked up the stretchers and run, trying to fall asleep and, of course, without excitement, they suffered them to the nearest forest edge.

Alexey groaned. They switched to step. And there are already convulsively caravan automatic anti-aircraft. Have already crawled on the take-off track, rushed along it and went into the sky one by one units of aircraft, and through the familiar ringing of their motors Alexey already heard the uneven, swinging rumble, from which the muscles did somehow collected themselves in Komki, dived, and he, this weak man, tied to the stretcher, felt himself in the cockpit of the fighter to meet the enemy, felt herself with a hound that teaching game.

The stretcher did not fit into the narrow "gap". When the caring Jura and the girl wanted to demolish Alexei down in her arms, he protested and said to leave stretcher on the edge, in the shadow of a large chorean birch. Lying under her, he became an eyewitness of events, rapidly, as in a heavy dream, unfolding in the last minutes. Pilots rarely have to watch the air battle from the ground. Meresyev, flying in combat aviation from the first day of the war, did not see the air battle from the Earth. And here he, accustomed to the lightning speed of the air fight, watched with surprise, what slow and unstained the air battle looks from here, like the drums of the movement of old stupid "Ishachkov" and how harmlessly hears the thunder of their machine guns, which resembles something home here: not that Dragging of the sewing machine, not the crunch of a slowly torn crankcore.

Twelve German bombers goose-building bypassed the airfield and disappeared in the bright rays of the highly standing sun. From there, because of the clouds with the winds from the sun, the edges hurt, the bass was heard, a roar of their engines, like a buzz of May beetles.

More desperately and ledged automatic anti-aircraft gunners in the fishing line. The smoke breaks broke into the sky, similar to the flying seeds of the dandelion. But nothing was visible, except for rare desalination of fighter wings.

Hood giant May beetles increasingly and more often interrupted short sounds of the crankshaft: Grrr, Grr, Grr! In the sparkling of the sun rays, the battle was invisible from the earth, but he was so unlike what he sees the participant of the air fight, and he seemed to be at the bottom with such minor and uninteresting that Alexey was watching him completely calmly.

Even when there was a shrill drilling, growing screaming, and, exactly black drops, shakeped with brushes, rushed down, rapidly increasing in the volume, a series of bombs, he was not frightened and slightly lifted his head to see where they would fall.

This was not surprised by Alexey Meteorological Sergeant. When the screech bomb rose to the highest note, the girl standing on the belt in the gap and, as always, the sulk gladly looked at him, suddenly jumped up, rushed to the stretcher, fell and closed him all trembling from excitement and fear, pressed against the ground.

For a moment, nearby, near the very nast, he saw her tanned, completely children's, with chubby lips and a blunt-eyed face. I hit the gap - somewhere in the forest. Immediately, the other, the third, fourth rang out. The fifth crashed so that, bouncing, the land went down and the widespread crown of birch was fell with a whipped fragment, under which Alexey lay. Once again flashed before the eyes of a pale, distorted by the horror of the girl, he felt her cool cheek on his cheek, and in a short break between the roar of two bombing queues of this girl's lip, whispering and frantically whispering:

- Cute! .. Cute!

The new bombing turn shook the earth. Above the airfield with a crash, they pulled out the head of the ruptures - accurately jumped out of the land of the tree of the trees, their crowns were swollen instantly, then with a thunder, with a thunder of frozen soil, leaving the brown, caustic, smelling garlic smoke.

Boris Nikolayevich Polyeva

"Tale of this man"

PART ONE

The stars were still sparkling sharply and cold, but the sky in the East had already become brightened. Trees gradually performed from darkness. Suddenly, there was a strong fresh wind on top of them. The forest immediately came to life, slammed flatly and ringing. The whistling whisper was spinned among themselves with a centenary of pines, and dry frills with a soft rustic was watered with disturbed branches.

The wind verse is suddenly, as she flew. Trees again froze in cold chopping. Immediately began to be heard all the preliminary forest sounds: greedy wolf gnawing on the neighboring glade, cautious impressions of the foxes and the first, still unsure blows of the wokendown, driving in silence of the forest so musically, it was not a wood trunk, and the hollow body of the violin.

Again, the wind was pushed in heavy needles of pine vertices. The last stars quietly went out in the breathless sky. The sky itself compressed and narrowed. The forest, who finally shook the remnants of the night darkness, got up in his green magnitude. According to the way, the crochemonic heads of pines and sharp spiers of the firs, the curly heads were lit up, guessing that the sun rose and that the day did it promise to be clear, frosty, poorer.

It became completely light. Wolves went to the forest quantles to digest night prey, removed from the glade of the fox, leaving in the snow lace, cunning tangled track. Old forest loosely smoothly, inexorable. Only birds breaking, a knockdown knock, a cheerful zwicane shooting between the branches of yellow dogs, and a greedy dry mild haze diversified this damn, disturbing and sad, soft waves rolling noise.

Forty, which brings black sharp beak on the branch, suddenly turned his head side, listened, sat down, ready to break and fly away. Anxious crunches of the bitch. Someone is big, strong walked through the forest, without disassembling roads. The bushes glanced, the peaks of small pines were noticed, creaped, settled, washing. Soroka screamed and, blossoming the tail, similar to the plumage of the arrows, in a straight line flew away.

From the sweetened morning, the needles leaned with a long brown muzzle, crowned with heavy branched horns. Frightened eyes examined the huge clearing. Pink suede nostrils, spent hot parks of alarmed breathing, frantically moved.

Old Elk froze in Pine, like sculpture. Only a rumblery skin was nervously blurted on his back. Hooned ears were caught every sound, and his rumor was so Oster, which heard the beast, like a core sharpening pine wood. But even these sensitive ears did not hear anything in the forest, except for bird crackles, the knocking of the dyatla and even pine peaks.

Rumor calmed down, but the smell warned about the danger. A sharp, heavy and dangerous smells, alien to this dense forest, were mixed with a fresh aroma of the melon. Black sad eyes of the beast saw the dark figures on the dazzling scaway. Not moving, he fonded, ready to make a jump in the thicket. But people did not move. They lay in the snow thick, in some places on each other. There were a lot of them, but none of them moved and did not violate virgin silence. Needed some monsters in the drifts in the drifts. They source sharp and disturbing smells.

I scared my eye, stood on the edge of Elk, not understanding what happened to all this herd of quiet, still and not dangerous people.

Attention he was attracted by the sound heard from above. The beast flinched, the skin on his back was disturbed, the hind legs were still pinned.

However, the sound was also not terrible: as if several May beetles, Basovito buzz, circled in the foliage of blooming birch. And there was sometimes frequent, short crackling, similar to the evening creaking twist, sometimes for the buzz.

But these beetles themselves. Complete wings, they dance in blue frosty air. Again and again creaked in the embroidered Dergach. One of the beetles, not folding the wings, darted down. The rest again danced in heavenly lazuries. The beast dismissed the tense muscles, went out to the clearing, licked the nasty, sinking the eye on the sky. And suddenly, another beetle dropped from the Roy from dancing in the air and, leaving behind him a big, lush tail, rushed straight to the glade. He grew up so quickly that Elk could hardly make a jump in the bushes - something huge, more terrible than a sudden gusting of the autumn storm, hit the tops of the pines and branched about the Earth so that the whole forest went down, groaned. Echo rushed over the trees, ahead of the moose rushing to the whole spirit into the thicket.

Bogged down in the thick of green needles echo. Revealed and sparkling, crouched by frost from wood vertices, shot down by the fall of the aircraft. Silence, druming and power, mastered the forest. And it was clearly heard, as a moaned man and how hard it was choking under the feet of the bear, whom the unusual hum and crackle were expelled from the forest to the clearing.

The bear was great, old and Kosmat. The untidy wool with brown flocks was sticking out on his impossible sides, hungry hung with skinny, tortured. In these edges, the war raged in the fall. She penetrated even here, in the preserve the wilderness, wherever, and that was not often, only the forester and hunters came. A rumble of a close battle was raised by the Berloga bear in the fall, violating his winter hibernation, and now, hungry and angry, he wandered through the forest, not knowing peace.

The bear stopped on the edge, where he just stood. I snapped his fresh, tasty smelling traces, heavily and greedily silent, moving with the shoulder sides, listened. Elk left, but the sound, produced by some alive and, probably, a weak creature was distributed. Wool rose on the beast camp. He pulled out the face. And again this plaintive sound is a little heard from the edge.

Slowly, cautiously stepping with soft paws, under which the dry and strong nasty failed with the crunch, the beast went to the stationary, drove into the snow of a human figure ...

The pilot Alexei Meresyev fell into double "ticks". It was the very bad thing that could happen in air battle. His, who shot all the ammunition, actually unarmed, was surrounded by four German aircraft and, not giving him to turn around, to deviate from the course, led to her airfield ...

And it turned out all this. The fighter links under the command of Lieutenant Meresyev flew to accompany the il, sent to the storming of the enemy airfield. A bold causing was successful. The attack aircraft, these "flying tanks", as the name of them in the infantry, gliding almost on the tops of the pines, drunk straight to the summer field, on which the rows were large transport "Junkers". Suddenly, nourishing because of the teeth of the Size of the Forest Ridge, they rushed over heavy shops of "Litoviki", watered them from the guns and machine guns lead and steel, throwing tauty-tailed shells. Meresyev, who guarded with his fourser over the place of attack, was well seen from above, as dark figures of people have noticed on the airfield, as they began to crawl into the rolled snow by the snow, as the attack aircraft made new and new goals and as the crews of the "Junkers" began under Fire to maintain on the start and raise cars into the air.

This is where Alexey made a mishand. Instead of strictly wandering the air over the storming area, he, as the pilots say, seduced with a light heart. Throwing the car in a peak, he rushed to the stone on the head of a heavy and slow "Liver" from the ground, with pleasure a few long queues his quadrangular motley, made from corrugated duralum body. Confident, he did not even look like the enemy he pisses into the ground. On the other side of the airfield, another "Junkers" broke into the air. Alexey chasing him. Attacked - and unsuccessful. His firing tracks slid over slowly sabised the height of the car. He turned cool, attacked once again, again missed, again overtook his sacrifice and dumped it somewhere in the side over the forest, violently adding a wide cigar-like torso a few long queues from the entire on-board weapon. Setting the "Junkers" and giving two victorious circles at the place where a black pillar rose over the green unwitted sea of \u200b\u200ban endless forest, Alexey turned the plane back to the German airfield.

But there was no one to go there. He saw how three fighters his links lead a fight with nine "messes" caused by probably the command of the German airfield to reflect the plaque of the attack aircraft. Boldly rushing to the Germans, exactly three times superior in terms of them, the pilots sought to distract the enemy from the attack aircraft. By leading the battle, they pulled the enemy farther and farther aside, as the tetherk makes it, pretending to be filtered and distracting hunters from their chicks.

Aleksey became ashamed that he was fascinated by light prey, ashamed before he felt said under the cheek helmet. He chose himself an opponent and squeezing his teeth, rushed into battle. His goal was "Messer", somewhat confused from others and, obviously, who also looked at her prey. Having squeezing the entire speed from his "Ishchechka", Alexey rushed to the enemy from the flank. He attacked the German for all the rules. The gray body of the enemy car was clearly seen in the paw-painted cross, when he pressed the gay. But he calmly slid past. Prosha could not. The goal was close and visible to the rarity clearly. "Ammunition!" - Alexey guess, feeling that the back was immediately covered with a cold later. I clicked for checking the gay and did not feel that trembling goulah, what a pilot feels all the body, put on the weapon of his car. Charging boxes were empty: chasing behind "Liverses", he shot all the ammunition.

In 1946, from under Boris Nikolayevich Polevoy, a "story about a real man" came out. This is one of those stories that it is customary to tell quite desperate people. An analysis of the "Tale of this person" will show that there is nothing impossible and not so easy to break the person who has faith in his strength and the desire to live in spite of everything.

What will be the story?

The plot "Tale of the present person" of Polevoy B. N. is based on the real events that occurred with the pilot Alexei Mareshev, the hero of the Soviet Union. During the Great Patriotic War in one of the air battles, his plane was shot down. The pilot received serious injuries, because of which his legs amputated in the hospital. For many, such a turn would be the end of everything, but Alexey did not give up. Thanks to his perseverance and unsinkable power, he not only did not despair, but returned to the ranks of existing combat pilots.

A legple military pilot ... For us, modern people, it is something on the verge of fiction. We, citizens living in a peacetime, are hard to understand how after such a catastrophe can be closed again to the Rod, fighting the enemy again, again and re-defend their homeland.

Publications, awards, reviews

The book "Tale of a true person" from the crust to the crust is impregnated by humanism and the present, immense, Soviet patriotism. At one time, this work was awarded the Stalinist Prize. For more than eighty, the book was published in Russian, about fifty times the story was released in the languages \u200b\u200bof the peoples of the Soviet Union and almost forty times they were published abroad.

Russian writer Elena Sazanovich wrote in one of his essay that this story won the whole world. Such Russian and such a Soviet, simple and complex, understandable and unthinkable. The world, far from Soviet reality, enthusiastically accepted it. Only until 1954 total circulation has numbered 2.3 million copies. This story has become popular not only because he told about the legendary feud or taught courage. First of all, this is the story that every person has a chance for life, even when there is no chance. The main thing is to know what you exist in this world.

Time of action

Analysis of the "Tale of this person" is worth starting with the consideration of the time when events occur. It is not difficult to guess that this is the Great Patriotic War. The time, washed by the blood rivers, mutilated thousands of tragedies, through the darkness of which was imparted by a uncertain light of heroism. Words it is impossible to describe that feat that the people committed themselves. Defending the honor, dignity and freedom of their homeland, soldiers, as if forgetting about fear, fought to the last.

Everyone who was on the front line, everyone who covered the rear, everyone who cared for the wounded, hero. And the "story about the present" tells us about one of these heroes, the courage and perseverance of which were legend. Alexey Maresyev is a real man, with a capital letter. He became the personification of Russian, taking his origins with selfless devotion to his homeland.

Hero History

"The story of the real man" field tells the story of A. P. Mareseva. Such a person really existed. He was born in 1916, worked as a turner. In 1929, he joined the ranks of the VLKSM, took an active part in the construction of Komsomolsk-on-Amur. In 1939, an aeroclub was created in the new city with a flight school, not thinking Marinsiev for a short time. Although it was difficult to learn and work, but he managed to successfully graduate from flight school and tie his further fate with flight aviation. The beginning of the Great Patriotic War, he met as a fighter pilot. During the time spent in the sky, hit four enemy aircraft, when in the early spring of 1942 in the sky over Novgorod, his plane and the pilot itself turned out to be seriously edged.

From now on, it is the story of Boris Polava in his story, changing the name of the real hero of Maresev for a character of Meresyev.

So, in the content of the "Tale of this person" it is said that Meresyev's military pilot plane fell and fell into the thicket of forest. The pilot was hardly injured, his legs literally were fragmented, and he was in the rear of the enemy. Eighteen long days he had to wade his way to his. The desire to live allowed the unbearable pain, hunger and cold. The author writes that Alexey could not think about anything else, except for burning pain. He did insecure steps, and when there was no strength to go, crawled. They doubted only one desire - to be in the ranks again and fight for his homeland.

He was saved by boys from a forest village of smooth. When the war began, the inhabitants of the nearest villages were forced to settle in the forest trenches, which they themselves died. They suffered from hunger and cold, but still retained humanity and responsiveness. They all penetrated the tragedy of the pilot and helped who could.

The most complex episodes are Meresyev's life in a military hospital. Because of the long stay in the frost, Gangrena developed in the legs, so the doctors had to amputate the feet to the leg. During this period, Alexey despair begins to eat. For him to live - it meant to fly and fight, that's just the pilot without legs can not even think about such things. Sometimes the hero was thinking, did it cost so many days at all if he knew that everything would end so?! In the pistol, because there were still three cartridges!

Hope

But there are a meeting in the life that change it for the better. Heavily sick Commissioner Sparrows carefully and with care to get to the hero. Thanks to him, Alexei had hope, and the real battle began with her weakness. When analyzing the "Tale of this person", it can be understood that the forces of the pilot gave an unauthorized desire to destroy the enemy, and for the sake of it, he wanted to return to line as soon as possible. He learned not only to use prostheses, but also sat behind the steering wheel of the aircraft.

The climax is the first flight of Meresyev. The instructor of Naumov, seeing the joy of the pilot, simply can not give the "landing!" Command. Alexei's eyes read no request, but a requirement. Requirement to fly. And again the front. Decisive battle with German ASA. The victory was given to Meresyev not easy, but "he dug into the goal of all his will" and the enemy won.

Even without analyzing the "Tale of the Real Man" you can confidently say that this is a story about exposure, unshakable courage and love for the Motherland. In difficult post-war years, this story returned from the puchin of despair. Boris Field Taki managed to reach each reader and show that in the most uneven situations you can live and survive. And moreover, even in inhuman conditions can always be a person.

"The story of the real man" is the work of Boris Nikolayevich Polevoy (real name Kamov, 1908 -1981), dedicated to the feat of the military pilot, Hero of the Soviet Union A.P. Mareseva.

During the Great Patriotic War, the Soviet writer B.N.Poleva has already been recognized as an existing army as a correspondent of the Pravda newspaper. He first wrote about the feat of the 83-year-old peasant Matthew Kuzmich Kuzmin, who repeated, according to the writer, the feat of Ivan Susanin, published a number of front-line reports. After the war, four books of his military memoirs "these four years" came out. Less known materials about the presence of B.Polevoy in the Nuremberg process as the correspondent of the newspaper "Pravda" - "in the end" (1969).

True glory B.Polevoy brought published in 1946 "The Tale of the Real Man", in which the author spoke about the pilot Alexei Maresyev (in Tale - Meresyev). On April 4, 1942, his plane was brought in battle. Once in the snowy forest, in the rear of the enemy, a wounded pilot of 18 days plenty to his. He frosted his legs, and they had to amputate. However, the disabled person Alexei Maresyev managed not just to return to normal life - he got into operation and continued to beat the enemy as a military pilot-fighter, making combat departures and destroying opponent's aircraft.

History of creating book

In "Afterword" to "Tale of this person", its author, writer B. N. Field, reports that everything, told by him, is based on real events.

During the Great Patriotic War on one of the plots of the Bryansky front, the Pravda Military correspondent B.Poleva met with the fighter pilot Alexei Mareshev, which he was told that this is the best shelf shelf. He invited the writer to spend the night in his dugout. And here, when they went to bed, it happened that the writer was terribly struck:

"Something hard round about the floor. I looked around and saw such what I did not believe himself. He left his legs on the floor. Overall pilot! Fighter pilot! The pilot, only today made six combat departures and knocked down two aircraft! It seemed completely incredible. "

In response to the amazement of the writer, the pilot said: "... Do you want to tell you all this story with my legs?"

And he began his story. "The amazing story of this man was so captured me," the author writes, - that I tried to record it as much as possible ... Alexey Maresiev brought his story until the day when, having shot down three German aircraft ... He again felt his full and full-fledged pilchy.

"... an unexpected confession," the writer says, "shook me with his simplicity and greatness ...

Since then, I have not met Alexey Mareshev, but everywhere, wherever my military fate, I drove with me two student notebooks, on which it was recorded an extraordinary Odyssey (story) of this pilot. "

The story of a non-lawy pilot could not be written and published by the author during the war. Hitler's propaganda immediately took into service this fact and ran into the information that in the Soviet army, the disabled people were sent against the Luftwaffe asks.

According to Alexei Mareshev himself, in him, as a full-fighter pilot, no one believed. After the hospital and the sanatorium, he was sent to the Ibresinian flight school (Chuvash ASSR) - away from Moscow, so that it was easier to hide from high bosses if something happened to a legal pilot. Then, after appointment in the 63rd Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment, the regiment commander did not release the Maresev's pilot on combat mission, while he having risen into the sky as a slave, did not commit a real feat - saved his two comrades and destroyed two opponent aircraft.

Only after the end of the war, in the spring of 1946, when all military people with disabilities became civilians, it was time to process the recorded since the words of Maresev.

"Much at your time I did not have time to write down," the author of "afterglows" is recognized, - a lot in memory for four years has been lost. Much, by modesty, did not tell the then Alexey Maresyev. I had to think, supplement. Portraits of his friends, who were warm and brightly told about the night in memory. They had to be renovated. Without having the opportunity here to strictly adhere to the facts, I slightly changed the surname of the hero and gave new names to those who accompanied him who helped him on the difficult path of his feat.

I called the book with the story about the real man, because Alexey Maresyev is a real Soviet man. "

A few years after the death of Alexei Mareshev, his son Viktor Maresev said in one of the interviews of the Russian press:

"Boris Nikolayevich Polyeva told me that after the war it was at first not going to write a book about father. But in 1946 he fell into the Nuremberg process. Walking in the evening in the park, suddenly in the bushes noticed the fox. He had a German driver - a former Luftwaffe pilot, who reminded him of a guilty pilot and a detail from his story: When Maresyev Polz East, for him for several days he was followed by a hungry fox, who was waiting for his death. And the last impetus that prompted the writer to sit behind the "story of the real man" was recognized at the trial of Reichs Marshal, Nazis number two German Gering. He stated that the German attack on the Soviet Union was not a crime, but the mistake of the Nazi tip, who knew the number of the Red Army, the number of tanks and aircraft and the power of the Soviet military factories, but not knew the Soviet people ... "

A shot down flying Alexei Maresyev 18 days only plenty in the forest, making his way to his own, and the writer B. Polevoy took about the same time to create a truly talented work about his feat. "The story of the real man" was written in 19 days, immediately went to the seal and was soon awarded the Stalinist Prize. Only until 1954, the total circulation of its editions amounted to 2.34 million copies. More than eighty it was published in Russian, forty-nine - in the languages \u200b\u200bof the peoples of the USSR, thirty-nine - abroad.

After the end of the war, Soviet propagandists picked up the history of the pilot of Alexei Maresev. The book of Boris Polevoy knew every schoolboy, she glorified the only hero on the whole world.

Already in 1948, according to "Tale of this person", the same feature film with pp. Kadochnikov in the lead role. The column offered to play the main role of Maresiev himself, but he refused.

In 1960, Sergey Prokofiev's opera "Tale of a true person" was delivered.

Today it is quite obvious that if the journalist B.Poleva did not meet during the war Alexei Mareshev and did not write a book about him, the front-line pilot was unlikely to become so famous. During the Great Patriotic War there were other pilots who fought without legs, but their names are completely unknown to the general public. Why did the country have so many heroes? To upbringing the younger generation of one positive example is quite enough.

It's not a secret to anyone that immediately after the end of the war, the Soviet leadership quickly shared all military disabled people on the "real" and "unreal" people. The abundance of military cakes on the streets of large cities was not satisfied with the authorities, nor the most society that was trying to bring up on the heroic example of a shot down flyer.

In 1949, Moscow, Leningrad, the capital of the Union republics and other major cities overnight were "closed" to resolving military disabled people - those who repeatedly fought for their liberation from German invaders. From the cakes, the streets were cleaned, they were caught up to train stations and suburban trains. Those who did not have relatives who would have cared for them, could not find strength in themselves to stand up on prostheses, make, like Maresyev, a feat of spiritual and physical rehabilitation, was announced out of law. Gentleless, nozzles, lackless crips sent there, where, according to the authorities, there should be people to be "unrealized": distributed to the closed houses of persons with disabilities in the deaf province, took out to remote areas of the country.

So the Stalinist authorities belonged to the true heroes of the war, who donated too many in it. And the people? The people were silent. He saw on the screen of brave flying Alexei Meresyev in the brilliant execution of his favorite of Kadoykov. Film Meresyev donated the "lady" before the medical commission, in order to conquer the right, do not begging in trains, do not go to the 101st kilometer, but beat the enemy and be called a "real man." At that moment it seemed the only true and right.

Here is the report of the Minister of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Kruglov for 1954 (almost ten years after the war), which provides sad statistics on the poor - disabled people of the Great Patriotic War:

Report of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR in the Presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU On measures to prevent and eliminate purests Secret In the Presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU Comrade Malenkov G.M. Comrade Khrushchev N.S. The USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs reports that, despite the measures taken, in large cities and industrial centers of the country, it still continues to take place such an intolerant phenomenon as a benchmark. Among the detainees, the disabled people of war and labor are 70%, the persons who fell in temporary need - 20%, professional beggars - 10% and among them of the working citizens - 3%. These data do not indicate the valid number of bent in the country, since many of them were delayed by the police by several times. So, in the city of Leningrad, 2160 beggars were delayed to 5 times, up to 30 times - more than 100 people, in the mountains. Gorky over two times delayed 1060 people, in Stalinabad - 50 people, etc. Social security bodies and local councils of workers' deputies do not pay due attention to work on the prevention and elimination of poorness, are poorly engaged in the device beggars in the houses of people with disabilities and the elderly, their employment, as well as the definition of pensions and patronization. So, from among the detained beggars in G.G. Moscow, Leningrad and Rostov is employed and placed in the houses of persons with disabilities and the elderly no more than 2-3%. One of the main reasons for the unsatisfactory device of the beggars is the absence of a sufficient number of houses for disabled people and elderly and boarding schools for blind persons with disabilities, the construction of the Council of Ministers of the SSR No. 2590-1264 from July 19, 1951, is extremely slow, and the funds allocated for it Every year not mastered. Of the 35 houses of disabled and boarding schools, the construction of which should have been completed in 1952, as of January 1, 1954, only 4 houses were built. In this regard, the police are forced by the overwhelming majority of delayed beggars to release. The fight against the benchmark is also hampered by the fact that some of the bent disabled people and the elderly refuses the direction of them in the house of persons with disabilities, and the arranged often leave themselves and continue to be disappeared. The law on the compulsory content of such persons in the disabled homes is not.

Nevertheless, the complete helplessness and unwillingness of the authorities to solve the problems of persons with disabilities forced yesterday's front-line to become not only the beggars, but also in real heroes in a peaceful life. Filled with kindness and optimism, Boris Polevoy's book instilled hope in those who had a chance for salvation, gave them faith in themselves. Many military disabled people were mastered by new professions, they were rehabilitated independently and socially adapted, gradually turning from the burden in the breadwinners of their families.

Not too high literary advantages did not prevent "Tale of this person" for many years to enter the obligatory school curriculum in literature. She became a real bestseller for boys and girls, taught to love life and not to grasp the difficulties.

The fate of the hero

Almost every schoolboy, reading the story by B. Polevoy, inevitably wondered: what's next? How was the fate of this "real man", almost superman, live legend? ..

During the war, the pilot, the hero of the Soviet Union, Alexei Petrovich Maresiev made 86 combat departures, hit 11 aircraft of the enemy: four before injury and seven - after injury.

In 1944, A. Maresyev agreed with the proposal to become a pilot inspector and move from a combat regiment to the Office of universities of the Air Force. In 1945, he served as instructor headquarters of the Moscow Military District Air Force, was under the beginning of V.I. Stalin. Since 1946 - retired.

Nowadays it looks ridiculous and implausible, but the writer Boris Field, as it turned out, did not even receive a special consent from Alexey Maresev to writing a book about him.

As already mentioned, before the release of the story, the author no longer interviewed his hero. He created a work, guided solely with the materials of the only meeting with the pilot in 1943 and its own fantasy. For Maresev, the appearance of a "story of this man" in print was almost a surprise.

In 1946, the hero and the author met for postfactum to discuss just a published book. In one of the last interviews, the former pilot admitted to journalists that he didn't like everything in the work of the field. For example, Alexey Petrovich always left the writer's conscience completely invented by him episode with eating hedgehog. During his journey through the Winter Forest, Alexei Maresyev did not eat any hedgehogs and did not even see them. However, the combat pilot was not a big connoisseur in the field of literature, and therefore only slightly dressed the author for his "writing liberties":

Indeed, "offended" at B. Polevoy Alexey Petrovich was not for. In many ways, thanks to his traveler "Tale", a former pilot after the war became very famous. He was constantly invited to many celebrations, meetings were organized with schoolchildren. Unlike many yesterday's heroes-veterans, whose expressions were forgotten in the 1950s, Alexei Maresyev did not drink, did not fall. On the contrary, he became a public person known to the whole world.

In 1949, he was a member of the First World Congress of Peace supporters, held in Paris. In 1952 he graduated from the Higher Party School under the Central Committee of the CPSU, in 1956 - graduate school of the Academy of Public Sciences under the CPSU Central Committee, defended his master's dissertation on history. Since September 1956, Alexey Maresiev became the responsible secretary of the Soviet Committee of War Veterans, in 1983 - the First Deputy Chairman of the Committee. In this position he worked until the last day of his life.

Colonel in resignation A.P. Maresyev was awarded the two orders of Lenin, the orders of the October Revolution, the Red Banner, the Patriotic War of 1 degree, two orders of the Labor Red Banner, the orders of the Friendship of Peoples, the Red Star, the sign of honor, "For merits to the Fatherland" 3 degrees, medals, foreign orders. He was an honorary soldier of the military unit, the honorary citizen of the cities of Komsomolsk-on-Amur, Kamyshin, Eagle. A small planet of the Solar System, the Public Foundation, Youth Patriotic Clubs are named after him. He was elected by the deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. The author of the book "On the Kursk Arc" (M., 1960).

Interestingly, after the war, the pilot-disabled person who perfectly manifested himself in air battles, did not want to issue the rights to driving the car. He helped not so much all-union fame as an outstanding perseverance in achieving the goal. Later, when machines with manual control appeared (the so-called "disabled lodges"), Maresyev continued "for a special resolution" to drive on a regular car.

In 1989, A.P. Maresyev was elected by the People's Deputy of the USSR.

On May 18, 2001, a solemn evening had a solemn evening on the occasion of the 85th anniversary of Maresev, but an hour before, Alexei Petrovich had a heart attack. He was taken to the intensive care of one of the Moscow clinics, where he died, not coming into consciousness. The solemn evening was still held, but he began with a minute of silence. Burodelen A.P. Maresyev in Moscow at the Novodevichy Cemetery.

Out of doubt, the ideological reinforcement of the Entrepreneur Alexei Maresev in Soviet times and the hostess gloss, which covered the pages of the "Tale of this person", played a dick joke with the work of B. N. Polevoy.

In the post-pre-drawn time of "great revelations and renunciations", the book about the Soviet pilot Maresyev was almost forgotten with the young generation of readers. In the 1990s, when her hero was still alive, the "story" was no longer reissued. Many independent publications arising in the space of the former USSR hurried immediately throw this work from school programs, declaring the true history of the Soviet pilot "Heritage of the Cursed Past".

Today it is impossible and even ridiculous would deny the meaning of this work for several generations of readers. And those of modern Russian schoolchildren who have not yet learned to read and perceive anything other than commercials and dosage information in the media will appreciate it. After all, the real feat always remains a feat, whatever ideological frameworks he is squeezed, and there are no borders or obstacles to the courage and prowess the winners of fascism in our memory.

PART ONE

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The stars were still sparkling sharply and cold, but the sky in the East had already become brightened. Trees gradually performed from darkness. Suddenly, there was a strong fresh wind on top of them. The forest immediately came to life, slammed flatly and ringing. The whistling whisper was spinned among themselves with a centenary of pines, and dry frills with a soft rustic was watered with disturbed branches.

The wind verse is suddenly, as she flew. Trees again froze in cold chopping. Immediately began to be heard all the preliminary forest sounds: greedy wolf gnawing on the neighboring glade, cautious impressions of the foxes and the first, still unsure blows of the wokendown, driving in silence of the forest so musically, it was not a wood trunk, and the hollow body of the violin.

Again, the wind was pushed in heavy needles of pine vertices. The last stars quietly went out in the breathless sky. The sky itself compressed and narrowed. The forest, who finally shook the remnants of the night darkness, got up in his green magnitude. According to the way, the crochemonic heads of pines and sharp spiers of the firs, the curly heads were lit up, guessing that the sun rose and that the day did it promise to be clear, frosty, poorer.

It became completely light. Wolves went to the forest quantles to digest night prey, removed from the glade of the fox, leaving in the snow lace, cunning tangled track. Old forest loosely smoothly, inexorable. Only birds breaking, a knockdown knock, a cheerful zwicane shooting between the branches of yellow dogs, and a greedy dry mild haze diversified this damn, disturbing and sad, soft waves rolling noise.

Forty, which brings black sharp beak on the branch, suddenly turned his head side, listened, sat down, ready to break and fly away. Anxious crunches of the bitch. Someone is big, strong walked through the forest, without disassembling roads. The bushes glanced, the peaks of small pines were noticed, creaped, settled, washing. Soroka screamed and, blossoming the tail, similar to the plumage of the arrows, in a straight line flew away.

From the sweetened morning, the needles leaned with a long brown muzzle, crowned with heavy branched horns. Frightened eyes examined the huge clearing. Pink suede nostrils, spent hot parks of alarmed breathing, frantically moved.

Old Elk froze in Pine, like sculpture. Only a rumblery skin was nervously blurted on his back. Hooned ears were caught every sound, and his rumor was so Oster, which heard the beast, like a core sharpening pine wood. But even these sensitive ears did not hear anything in the forest, except for bird crackles, the knocking of the dyatla and even pine peaks.

Rumor calmed down, but the smell warned about the danger. A sharp, heavy and dangerous smells, alien to this dense forest, were mixed with a fresh aroma of the melon. Black sad eyes of the beast saw the dark figures on the dazzling scaway. Not moving, he fonded, ready to make a jump in the thicket. But people did not move. They lay in the snow thick, in some places on each other. There were a lot of them, but none of them moved and did not violate virgin silence. Needed some monsters in the drifts in the drifts. They source sharp and disturbing smells.

I scared my eye, stood on the edge of Elk, not understanding what happened to all this herd of quiet, still and not dangerous people.

Attention he was attracted by the sound heard from above. The beast flinched, the skin on his back was disturbed, the hind legs were still pinned.

However, the sound was also not terrible: as if several May beetles, Basovito buzz, circled in the foliage of blooming birch. And there was sometimes frequent, short crackling, similar to the evening creaking twist, sometimes for the buzz.

But these beetles themselves. Complete wings, they dance in blue frosty air. Again and again creaked in the embroidered Dergach. One of the beetles, not folding the wings, darted down. The rest again danced in heavenly lazuries. The beast dismissed the tense muscles, went out to the clearing, licked the nasty, sinking the eye on the sky. And suddenly, another beetle dropped from the Roy from dancing in the air and, leaving behind him a big, lush tail, rushed straight to the glade. He grew up so quickly that Elk could hardly make a jump in the bushes - something huge, more terrible than a sudden gusting of the autumn storm, hit the tops of the pines and branched about the Earth so that the whole forest went down, groaned. Echo rushed over the trees, ahead of the moose rushing to the whole spirit into the thicket.

Bogged down in the thick of green needles echo. Revealed and sparkling, crouched by frost from wood vertices, shot down by the fall of the aircraft. Silence, druming and power, mastered the forest. And it was clearly heard, as a moaned man and how hard it was choking under the feet of the bear, whom the unusual hum and crackle were expelled from the forest to the clearing.

The bear was great, old and Kosmat. The untidy wool with brown flocks was sticking out on his impossible sides, hungry hung with skinny, tortured. In these edges, the war raged in the fall. She penetrated even here, in the preserve the wilderness, wherever, and that was not often, only the forester and hunters came. A rumble of a close battle was raised by the Berloga bear in the fall, violating his winter hibernation, and now, hungry and angry, he wandered through the forest, not knowing peace.

The bear stopped on the edge, where he just stood. I snapped his fresh, tasty smelling traces, heavily and greedily silent, moving with the shoulder sides, listened. Elk left, but the sound, produced by some alive and, probably, a weak creature was distributed. Wool rose on the beast camp. He pulled out the face. And again this plaintive sound is a little heard from the edge.

Slowly, cautiously stepping with soft paws, under which the dry and strong nasty failed with the crunch, the beast went to the stationary, drove into the snow of a human figure ...

2

The pilot Alexei Meresyev fell into double "ticks". It was the very bad thing that could happen in air battle. His, who shot all the ammunition, actually unarmed, was surrounded by four German aircraft and, not giving him to turn around, to deviate from the course, led to her airfield ...

And it turned out all this. The fighter links under the command of Lieutenant Meresyev flew to accompany the il, sent to the storming of the enemy airfield. A bold causing was successful. The attack aircraft, these "flying tanks", as the name of them in the infantry, gliding almost on the tops of the pines, drunk straight to the summer field, on which the rows were large transport "Junkers". Suddenly, nourishing because of the teeth of the Size of the Forest Ridge, they rushed over heavy shops of "Litoviki", watered them from the guns and machine guns lead and steel, throwing tauty-tailed shells. Meresyev, who guarded with his fourser over the place of attack, was well seen from above, as dark figures of people have noticed on the airfield, as they began to crawl into the rolled snow by the snow, as the attack aircraft made new and new goals and as the crews of the "Junkers" began under Fire to maintain on the start and raise cars into the air.

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