Astafiev's last bow to read online. Victor astafiev last bow (story in stories)

On the outskirts of our village, in the middle of a grassy meadow, stood on stilts a long log room with a hem of planks. It was called "mangazina", to which it also adjoined the delivery, - here the peasants of our village brought artel implements and seeds, it was called the "public fund". If a house burns down, if even the whole village burns down, the seeds will be intact and, therefore, people will live, because as long as there are seeds, there is arable land into which you can throw them and grow bread, he is a peasant, an owner, and not a rogue.

At a distance from the delivery there is a guardhouse. She snuggled under the scree, in the wind and eternal shadow. Above the guardhouse, high on the ridge, larch and pine trees grew. Behind her, a key was smoked out of the stones in a blue smoke. It spread along the foot of the ridge, designating itself as thick sedge and meadowsweet flowers in summer, in winter - a quiet park from under the snow and kurzhak over bushes creeping from the ridge.

There were two windows in the guardhouse: one near the door and one on the side towards the village. The window that led to the village was covered with wild cherries, stings, hops and various fools that had multiplied from the key. The guardhouse had no roof. Hops swaddled her so that she resembled a one-eyed shaggy head. An overturned bucket protruded from the hops, the door opened immediately onto the street and shook off raindrops, hop cones, bird cherry berries, snow and icicles, depending on the season and weather.

Vasya the Pole lived in the guardhouse. He was small in stature, lame in one leg, and he had glasses. The only person in the village who had glasses. They evoked timid courtesy not only among us children, but also among adults.

Vasya lived quietly, peacefully, he did not harm anyone, but rarely did anyone come to him. Only the most desperate children peeked furtively through the guardhouse window and could not see anyone, but they were still afraid of something and ran away screaming.

At the door, the children pushed around from early spring to autumn: they played hide and seek, crawled on their belly under the log entrance to the door, or were buried under a high floor behind piles, and hid in the bottom of the river; were chopped into grandmas, into a chica. The filing tes was beaten by punks - bats filled with lead. With the blows that echoed loudly under the vaults of the import, a sparrow commotion flared up inside it.

Here, near the delivery, I was introduced to work - I twisted the winnowing fan in turn with the children, and here for the first time in my life I heard music - a violin ...

The violin is rarely, very, very rarely, played by Vasya the Pole, that mysterious, out of this world man who necessarily comes into the life of every boy, every girl and remains in the memory forever. Such a mysterious person, it seems, was supposed to live in a hut on chicken legs, in a dark place, under a ridge, and so that the light would barely glow in it, and so that an owl would laugh drunkenly over the chimney at night, and so that a key would smoke behind the hut. and so that no one, no one knows what is going on in the hut and what the owner is thinking about.

I remember that Vasya once came to his grandmother and asked something by the nose. Grandmother put Vasya to drink tea, brought dry herbs and began to brew it in the iron pot. She looked pitifully at Vasya and sighed drawn out.

Vasya drank tea not our way, not with a bite and not from a saucer, he drank directly from a glass, put a teaspoon on a saucer and did not drop it on the floor. His glasses gleamed menacingly, his cropped head seemed small, about the size of a trouser. Gray streaked across his black beard. And he seemed to be salted all over, and the coarse salt dried him up.

Vasya ate shyly, drank only one glass of tea and, no matter how much his grandmother persuaded him, he did not eat anything else, ceremoniously bowed his head and carried away in one hand a clay pot with a herb broth, in the other - a bird cherry stick.

- Lord, Lord! - Grandmother sighed, closing the door behind Vasya. - You are a heavy share ... A man will go blind.

In the evening I heard Vasya's violin.

It was early autumn. Bring the gates wide open. There was a draft in them, stirring the shavings in the bottom borers repaired for grain. The smell of rancid, musty grain was drawn through the gate. A flock of children, not taken to arable land because of their youth, played robber detectives. The game went on sluggishly and soon died out completely. In autumn, not like in spring, it is somehow poorly played. One by one the children scattered to their homes, and I stretched out on the heated log entrance and began to pull out the grains that had sprouted in the cracks. I waited for the carts on the ridge to rattle, to intercept ours from the arable land, to ride home, and there, you see, they would give the horse to the watering hole.

It got dark behind the Yenisei, behind the Guard Bull. In the valley of the Karaulka river, waking up, a large star blinked once or twice and began to glow. She looked like a burdock cone. Behind the ridge, over the tops of the mountains, a strip of dawn was smoldering stubbornly, not like an autumn smolder. But then darkness flew over her. Dawn pretended to shuttered a shining window. Until morning.

It became quiet and lonely. The guardhouse is not visible. She hid in the shadow of the mountain, merged with the darkness, and only the yellowed leaves gleamed a little under the mountain, in a depression washed with a key. From behind the shadows, bats began to whirl around, squeak over me, fly into the open gates, bring them in, catch flies and moths there, not otherwise.

I was afraid to breathe loudly, squeezed into the corner of the import. Along the ridge, over Vasya's hut, carts rumbled, hooves rattled: people were returning from the fields, from jobs, from work, but I did not dare to peel off the rough logs, and could not overcome the paralyzing fear that rolled over me. The windows in the village lit up. Smokes from the chimneys were drawn to the Yenisei. In the thickets of the Fokinskaya river, someone was looking for a cow and either called her in an affectionate voice, or scolded her with the last words.

In the sky, next to the star that was still glowing lonely over the Karaulnaya River, someone threw the stub of the moon, and it, like a bitten half of an apple, did not roll anywhere, windless, orphaned, chilly glazed, and everything around was glazed from it. He brought a shadow over the whole clearing, and a shadow, narrow and nosed, fell from me too.

Behind the Fokinskaya river - a stone's throw - the crosses in the cemetery turned white, something creaked in the delivery - the cold crept under the shirt, down the back, under the skin. to the heart. I had already put my hands on the logs in order to push off at once, fly to the very gates and sound the latch so that all the dogs in the village would wake up.

But from under the log, from the tangles of hops and bird cherries, from the deep interior of the earth, music arose and nailed me to the wall.

It became even more frightening: on the left is a cemetery, in front there is a ridge with a hut, on the right is a terrible hare behind the village, where there are many white bones and where for a long time, grandmother said, a man was perplexed, behind a dark delivery, behind it the village, vegetable gardens covered with thistles, from a distance like black clouds of smoke.

I alone, alone, there is such a horror all around, and also music - a violin. A very, very lonely violin. And she does not threaten at all. Complains. And nothing at all creepy. And there is nothing to be afraid of. Fool-fool! How can you be afraid of music? Fool-fool, never listened to one, so ...

The music flows quieter, more transparent, I hear, and my heart lets go. And this is not music, but the key flows from under the mountain. Someone has sunk his lips to the water, drinks, drinks and cannot get drunk - his mouth and inside are so withered.

For some reason, one sees the Yenisei, quiet in the night, on it a raft with a sparkle. An unknown person shouts from the raft: "What village-ah-ah?" - Why? Where is he sailing? And the train on the Yenisei is seen, long, creaky. He also leaves somewhere. Dogs are running on the side of the convoy. The horses walk slowly, drowsily. And you can still see a crowd on the banks of the Yenisei, something wet, washed out with mud, village people all over the bank, a grandmother tearing hair on her head.

This music speaks of sadness, it speaks of my illness, how I was ill with malaria for the whole summer, how scared I was when I stopped hearing and thought that I would forever be deaf, like Alyoshka, my cousin, and how she appeared to me in in a feverish dream, my mother put a cold hand with blue nails to her forehead. I screamed and did not hear my scream.

In the hut, a screwed-down lamp burned all night, my grandmother showed me the corners, shone a lamp under the stove, under the bed, they say, no one was there.

I also remember the sweat of the girl, little white, laughing, her hand is drying out. Vozniki took her to the city for treatment.

And again the train appeared.

He is all going somewhere, going, hiding in the icy hummocks, in the frosty fog. The horses are getting smaller, smaller, and the last one was cleared away by the fog. Lonely, somehow empty, ice, cold and motionless dark rocks with motionless forests.

But the Yenisei was gone, neither winter nor summer; again the live vein of the key was hammered behind Vasya's hut. The key began to grow fat, and not one key, two, three, already a formidable stream gushes out of the rock, rolls stones, breaks trees, twists them by their roots, carries them, twists them. He is about to sweep away the hut under the mountain, wash away the delivery and bring everything down from the mountains. Thunders will strike in the sky, lightning flashed, mysterious fern flowers will flash from them. Flowers will light up the forest, light up the earth, and even the Yenisei will not be able to fill this fire - nothing can stop such a terrible storm!

“What is this ?! Where are the people? What are they watching ?! Would have tied Vasya! "

But the violin itself put out everything. Again, one person is yearning, again something is a pity, someone is going somewhere again, maybe by train, maybe on a raft, maybe on foot he goes to distant distances.

The world has not burned down, nothing has collapsed. Everything is in place. Moon with a star in place. The village, already without lights, is in place, the cemetery is in eternal silence and peace, a guardhouse under the ridge, enveloped by burning bird cherry trees and a quiet string of a violin.

Everything is in place. Only my heart, which was filled with grief and delight, shook, jumped, and beats at my throat, wounded for life by music.

What did the music tell me about? About the train? About a dead mom? About a girl whose hand is drying up? What was she complaining about? Who was she angry with? Why is it so anxious and bitter for me? Why do you feel sorry for yourself? And it’s a pity for those over there that they sleep deeply in the cemetery. Among them, under the hillock, lies my mother, next to her are two sisters, whom I did not even see: they lived before me, lived a little, and my mother went to them, left me alone in this world, where she beats high through the window in an elegant mourning -that heart.

The music ended abruptly, as if someone had put an imperious hand on the violinist's shoulder: "Well, that's enough!" In mid-sentence, the violin fell silent, fell silent, not crying out, but exhaling the pain. But already, besides her, of her own free will, some kind of violin soared higher, higher and with a dying pain, a groan squeezed into the teeth, broke off in the skies ...

I sat for a long time in the little corner, licking the large tears that rolled down on my lips. There was no strength to get up and leave. I wanted here, in a dark corner, near rough logs, to die all abandoned and forgotten. The violin was not heard, the light in Vasya's hut was not on. "Isn't Vasya dead?" - I thought, and carefully made my way to the guardhouse. My feet stabbed in the cold and viscous black soil, soaked by the key. Tenacious, always cold hop leaves touched my face, cones rustling dryly over my head, smelling of spring water. I lifted the twisted strings of hops hanging over the window and peered through the window. Flickering a bit, a burnt-out iron stove was burning in the hut. With a fluctuating light, she indicated a table against the wall, a trestle bed in the corner. Vasya was reclining on the trestle bed, covering his eyes with his left hand. His spectacles lay upside down on the table and flashed, then extinguished. A violin rested on Vasya's chest, a long bow-stick was clamped in his right hand.

I quietly opened the door and stepped into the guardroom. After Vasya drank tea with us, especially after the music, it was not so scary to come here.

I sat down on the threshold, not looking up at the hand in which a smooth stick was clamped.

- Play, uncle, more.

- What do you want, uncle.

Vasya sat down on the trestle bed, turned the wooden pins of the violin, touched the strings with his bow.

- Put some wood in the stove.

I fulfilled his request. Vasya waited, did not move. There was a click in the stove once, another, its burned-out sides were marked with red roots and blades of grass, the reflection of the fire swung, fell on Vasya. He raised his violin to his shoulder and began to play.

It took a long time until I learned about music. She was the same that I heard at the import, and at the same time completely different. Softer, kinder, anxiety and pain were only guessed in her, the violin no longer moaned, her soul did not ooze with blood, the fire did not rage around and the stones did not collapse.

The light in the stove trembled and trembled, but perhaps there, behind the hut, a fern glowed on the ridge. They say that if you find a fern flower, you will become invisible, you can take all the riches from the rich and give them to the poor, steal Vasilisa the Beautiful from Koshchei the Immortal and return her to Ivanushka, you can even sneak into the cemetery and revive your own mother.

The firewood of the cut dead wood - pine - burst into flames, the knee of the pipe heated to purple, the smell of red-hot wood, boiling resin on the ceiling. The hut was filled with heat and a heavy red light. The fire danced, the accelerating stove snapped cheerfully, firing large sparks as it went.

The musician's shadow, broken at the lower back, rushed around the hut, stretched out along the wall, became transparent, like a reflection in water, then the shadow receded into a corner, disappeared in it, and then a living musician, living Vasya the Pole, was designated there. His shirt was unbuttoned, his feet were bare, his eyes were dark in outline. Vasya was lying on the violin with his cheek, and it seemed to me that it was calmer, more comfortable for him, and he hears something in the violin that I would never hear.

When the stove went out, I was glad that I could not see Vasya's face, the pale collarbone protruding from under the shirt, and the right leg, kurguz, scanty, as if bitten by forceps, eyes, tightly, painfully squeezed into the black holes of the eye sockets. Vasya's eyes must have been afraid of even such a small light that splashed out of the stove.

In the semidarkness, I tried to look only at the quivering, darting or smoothly sliding bow, at the flexible shadow swinging regularly with the violin. And then Vasya again began to appear to me as something like a magician from a distant fairy tale, and not as a lonely cripple, to whom no one cares. I was so contemplated, so listened, that I shuddered when Vasya spoke.

- This music was written by a man who was deprived of the dearest. - Vasya thought out loud, without ceasing to play. - If a person does not have a mother, does not have a father, but has a homeland, he is not an orphan yet. - For a while Vasya thought to himself. I was waiting. - Everything goes away: love, regret for her, bitterness of loss, even the pain from wounds goes away, but the longing for the homeland never goes away and never goes away ...

The violin touched again the very strings that had heated up during the previous playing and had not cooled down yet. Vasin's hand shuddered again with pain, but immediately resigned itself, his fingers, gathered into a fist, unclenched.

- This music was written by my fellow countryman Oginsky in the inn - that's the name of our visiting house, - Vasya continued. - I wrote at the border, saying goodbye to my homeland. He sent her one last greetings. For a long time already there is no composer in the world. But his pain, his longing, his love for his native land, which no one could take away, is still alive.

Vasya fell silent, the violin was speaking, the violin was singing, the violin was dying out. Her voice grew quieter. quieter, it stretched itself out in the darkness as a thin light cobweb. The cobweb trembled, swayed, and broke off almost soundlessly.

I removed my hand from my throat and exhaled the breath that I held with my chest, with my hand, because I was afraid to break off the light cobweb. But it ended all the same. The stove went out. Layering, they poured coals in it. Vasya is not visible. The violin is not heard.

Silence. Darkness. Sadness.

- It's late, - said Vasya from the darkness. - Go home. Grandma will be worried.

I got up from the threshold and, if I had not grabbed the wooden brace, I would have fallen. My legs were all in pins and needles and seemed to be not mine at all.

“Thank you, uncle,” I whispered.

Vasya stirred in the corner and laughed embarrassedly or asked "Why?"

- I don't know why ...

And he jumped out of the hut. With moved tears I thanked Vasya, this night world, a sleeping village, a forest sleeping behind it. I wasn’t even afraid to walk past the cemetery. Nothing is scary now. In those minutes there was no evil around me. The world was kind and lonely - nothing, nothing bad could fit in it.

Trusting in the kindness spread by a weak heavenly light throughout the village and throughout the earth, I went to the cemetery and stood at my mother's grave.

- Mom, it's me. I forgot you, and I don't dream of you anymore.

Sinking to the ground, I put my ear to the mound. The mother did not answer. Everything was quiet on the ground and in the ground. A small mountain ash, planted by me and my grandmother, dropped its sharp wings on my mother's tubercle. At the neighboring graves of birch trees, threads with a yellow leaf were loosened to the very ground. The leaves on the tops of the birch trees were gone, and the bare twigs were stripped by the stub of the moon, which now hung over the cemetery itself. Everything was quiet. Dew appeared on the grass. There was complete calm. Then I felt a chilly chill from the ridges. Leaves flowed from the birch trees thicker. The dew was glazing on the grass. My legs froze from brittle dew, one leaf rolled under my shirt, it became chilly, and I wandered from the cemetery into the dark streets of the village between sleeping houses to the Yenisei.

For some reason I didn't want to go home.

I don’t know how long I sat on a steep slope over the Yenisei. He made noise at the hare, on the stone gobies. The water, knocked off the smooth run by the gobies, tied into knots, waddled heavily near the banks and in circles, rolled back to the rod like funnels. Our restless river. Some forces eternally disturb her, in the eternal struggle she is with herself and with the rocks that squeezed her on both sides.

But this restlessness of her, this ancient riot of hers did not excite, but reassured me. Because, probably, it was autumn, the moon overhead, the grass rocky with dew and nettles along the banks, not at all like dope, rather like some kind of wonderful plants; and also because, probably, that Vasin's music about the ineradicable love for the motherland sounded in me. And the Yenisei, not sleeping even at night, a steep-headed bull on the other side, sawing spruce peaks over a distant pass, a silent village behind my back, a grasshopper, working with all his last strength in defiance of autumn in nettles, he seems to be the only one in the whole world, grass, as it were cast from metal - this was my homeland, close and disturbing.

In the dead of night I returned home. Grandma must have guessed from my face that something had happened in my soul, and did not scold me.

- Where have you been for so long? She only asked. - Dinner on the table, eat and lie down.

- Baba, I heard the violin.

- Ah, - said the grandmother, - Vasya the Pole is someone else's, father, plays, incomprehensible. Women cry from his music, and men get drunk and rampage ...

- Who is he?

- Vasya? Who? - the grandmother yawned. - Human. You should sleep. It's too early for me to go up to the cow. - But she knew that I still would not leave: - Come to me, crawl under the covers.

I snuggled up to my grandmother.

- What a cold one! And my feet are wet! They will hurt again. - Grandma tucked a blanket under me, stroked my head. - Vasya is a person without family and tribe. His father and mother were from a distant country - Poland. People there do not speak our way, they do not pray as we do. Their king is called a king. The Polish land was seized by the Russian tsar, for some reason they did not share with the king ... Are you sleeping?

- I would sleep. I have to get up with the roosters. “My grandmother, in order to get rid of me as soon as possible, told me at a run that in this distant land people had rebelled against the Russian tsar, and they were exiled to us, to Siberia. Vasya's parents were also driven here. Vasya was born on a cart, under the escort's sheepskin coat. And his name is not Vasya at all, but Stasya - Stanislav in their language. It’s ours, the villagers, have altered it. - Do you sleep? The grandmother asked again.

- Oh, so you! Well, Vasya's parents died. Reckoned, repented on the wrong side and died. First mother, then father. Have you seen such a big black cross and a grave with flowers? Their grave. Vasya takes care of her, looks after her more than he takes care of himself. And he himself grew old when they did not notice. Oh Lord, forgive me, and we are not young! So Vasya lived near the mangazin, in the watchmen. They did not take to the war. He still had a wet baby's leg chilled on the cart ... And so he lives ... to die soon ... And we too ...

The grandmother spoke more and more quietly, more indistinctly, and went to sleep with a sigh. I didn't bother her. I lay there thinking, trying to comprehend human life, but nothing came of this idea.

A few years after that memorable night, the mangazin was no longer used, because an elevator was built in the city, and the need for mangazins disappeared. Vasya was left out of work. Yes, and by that time he had become completely blind and could no longer be a watchman. For some time he still collected alms in the village, but then he could not walk, then my grandmother and other old women began to carry food to Vasya's hut.

One day my grandmother came anxious, put out the sewing machine and began to sew a satin shirt, pants without a hole, a pillowcase with ties and a sheet without a seam in the middle - this is how they sew for the dead.

Her door was open. People crowded near the hut. People entered it without hats and left there sighing, with meek, sad faces.

Vasya was carried out in a small, like a boy's coffin. The deceased's face was covered with a canvas. There were no flowers in the domino, people did not carry wreaths. Several old women were dragging behind the coffin, no one was wailing. Everything was done in business silence. A dark-faced old woman, a former headman of the church, read prayers as she walked and mowed with a cold gaze at an abandoned mangazin with a fallen gate, a mangazin torn off the roof from the roof and shook her head condemningly.

I went to the guardroom. The iron stove in the middle was removed. A hole was chilling in the ceiling, and drops were falling down the overhanging roots of grass and hops. Wood shavings are scattered on the floor. An old, simple bed was rolled up at the head of the bunk. A guard beater lay under the bunks. broom, ax, shovel. On the window, behind the countertop, I could see an earthen bowl, a wooden mug with a broken off handle, a spoon, a comb, and for some reason I had not noticed at once a scale of water. It contains a branch of bird cherry with swollen and already burst buds. From the tabletop, empty glasses looked at me forlornly.

"Where's the violin?" - I remembered, looking at the glasses. And then he saw her. The violin hung over the head of the bunk. I slipped my glasses into my pocket, removed the violin from the wall, and rushed to catch up with the funeral procession.

The peasants with the domina and the old women, wandering in a bunch after her, crossed the Fokinskaya river on the logs, drunk from the spring flood, climbed to the cemetery along the slope, covered with a green fog of the newly awakened grass.

I pulled my grandmother by the sleeve and showed her a violin and a bow. Grandma frowned sternly and turned away from me. Then she took a step wider and whispered to the dark-faced old woman:

- Expenses ... expensive ... the village council doesn't hurt ...

I already knew something, and I guessed that the old woman wanted to sell the violin in order to reimburse the funeral expenses, clung to my grandmother's sleeve and, when we fell behind, I asked gloomily:

- Whose violin?

“Vasina, father, Vasina,” my grandmother took her eyes away from me and stared at the back of the dark-faced old woman. “Into the domino… Himself! ..” Grandmother leaned over to me and whispered quickly, speeding up her pace.

Before people were going to cover Vasya with a lid, I squeezed forward and, without saying a word, put a violin and a bow on his chest, on the violin I threw several living flowers of my stepmother, which I plucked from the bridging bridge.

No one dared to say anything to me, only the old praying woman pierced me with a sharp gaze and immediately, raising her eyes to the sky, baptized herself: "Have mercy, Lord, the soul of the deceased Stanislav and his parents, forgive their sins, free and involuntary ..."

I watched as the coffin was nailed - is it tight? The first threw a handful of earth into Vasya's grave, as if his close relative, and after people disassembled their shovels, towels and scattered along the paths of the cemetery in order to wet the graves of their relatives with accumulated tears, he sat for a long time near Vasya's grave, kneading lumps of earth with his fingers, why- then waited. And he knew that there was nothing to wait for, but still there was no strength or desire to get up and leave.

Over the course of one summer, the empty guardhouse of Vasya passed. The ceiling collapsed, flattened, pressed the hut into the thick of stinging, hops and Chernobyl. Rotten logs stuck out of the weeds for a long time, but they too gradually became covered with dope; the thread of the key struck a new channel for itself and flowed over the place where the hut stood. But the key soon began to wither, and in the dry summer of thirty-three it dried up completely. And at once the bird cherries began to wither, the hops degenerated, and the herbal fool calmed down.

The person left, and life in this place stopped. But the village lived, children grew up, to replace those who left the land. While Vasya the Pole was alive, fellow villagers treated him differently: some did not notice him as an extra person, others even teased, frightened the children with them, others felt sorry for the wretched person. But Vasya the Pole died, and the village began to lack something. An incomprehensible guilt overcame people, and there was no such house, such a family in the village, where they would not remember him with a kind word on parental day and other quiet holidays, and it turned out that in an imperceptible life Vasya the Pole was like a righteous man and helped people with humility , it is better to be respectful, kind to each other.

During the war, some dodger began to steal crosses for firewood from the village cemetery; he was the first to take the roughly hewn larch cross from the grave of Vasya the Pole. And his grave was lost, but the memory of him did not disappear. To this day, the women of our village no, no, yes, they will remember him with a long sad sigh, and it is felt that remembering him is both blessed and bitter.

In the last autumn of the war, I stood guard beside the cannons in a small, wrecked Polish town. It was the first foreign city that I have seen in my life. It was no different from the destroyed cities of Russia. And it smelled the same: burning, corpses, dust. Foliage, paper, and soot swirled between the disfigured houses along the streets heaped with crowns. The dome of the fire stood gloomily over the city. He weakened, descended to houses, fell into the streets and alleys, crushed into tired fireplaces. But there was a long, dull explosion, the dome was thrown into the dark sky, and everything around was illuminated with a heavy crimson light. Leaves were plucked from the trees, circled in heat above, and there they decayed.

An artillery or mortar raid fell on the burning ruins every now and then, planes were nagging at the height, German missiles were unevenly tracing the front line outside the city, sparkling from the darkness and a raging fiery cauldron, where the human refuge writhed in the last convulsions.

It seemed to me that I was alone in this dying city and nothing alive was left on the earth. This sensation constantly occurs at night, but it is especially depressing at the sight of devastation and death. But I learned that not far away — just to jump over a green hedge, which had been bitten by fire — our crews were sleeping in an empty hut, and that calmed me a little.

During the day we occupied the city, and in the evening, from somewhere, as if from under the ground, people began to appear with bundles, with suitcases, with carts, more often with children in their arms. They were crying at the ruins, pulling something out of the conflagration. The night sheltered homeless people with their grief and suffering. And only the fires could not be covered.

Suddenly in the house across the street from me, the sounds of an organ spilled over. A corner fell off the house during the bombardment, revealing the walls with dry-cheeked saints and Madonnas painted on them, looking through the soot with blue sorrowful eyes. Until darkness these saints and Madonnas stared at me. I was embarrassed for myself, for the people, under the reproachful gazes of the saints, and at night, no, no yes, with the reflections of fires, faces with injured heads on long necks were captured by the reflections of fires.

I sat on the gun carriage with a carbine clamped in my knees and shook my head, listening to the organ, lonely in the middle of the war. Once upon a time, after listening to the violin, I wanted to die of incomprehensible sadness and delight. He was stupid. Small was. Then I saw so many deaths that there was no more hateful, damned word for me than "death." And therefore, it must have been that the music that I listened to as a child broke in me, and what frightened me as a child was not at all scary, life had in store for us such horrors, such fears ...

Yes, the music is the same, and I seem to be the same, and my throat is squeezed, squeezed, but there are no tears, no childish delight and pure pity, childish pity. The music unfolded the soul, like the fire of war unleashed houses, exposing now the saints on the wall, now the bed, now the rocking chair, now the piano, now the poor man's rags, the wretched dwelling of the beggar, hidden from the eyes of the people - poverty and holiness - everything was laid bare, from everything clothes were torn off, everything was humiliated, everything was turned inside out dirty, and that is why, apparently, the old music turned its other side to me, sounded an ancient battle cry, called somewhere, forced me to do something to extinguish these fires, so that people they did not huddle up to the burning ruins, so that they would go into their house, under the roof, to those close and loved, so that the sky, our eternal sky, would not be thrown up by explosions and burned with hellfire.

Music thundered over the city, muffled the explosions of shells, the hum of planes, the crackle and rustle of burning trees. Music dominated the numb ruins, the same music that, like the sigh of his native land, was kept in his heart by a man who had never seen his homeland, but had longed for it all his life.

Last bow

I made my way back to our house. I wanted to be the first to meet my grandmother, and that's why I didn't go outside. The old, fast-paced poles in our and neighboring vegetable gardens were crumbling, where the stakes should be, props, twigs, and wooden debris stuck out. The gardens themselves were squeezed by insolent, freely overgrown boundaries. Our vegetable garden, especially from the ridges, was so squeezed by a stupid thing that I noticed the beds in it only when, having fastened last year's breeches on the breeches, I made my way to the bathhouse, from which the roof fell, the bathhouse itself no longer smelled of smoke, a door that looked like a leaf carbon copies, lying to the side, the current weed pierced between the boards. A small paddock of potatoes and a garden bed, with a densely occupied vegetable garden, plain from the house, there the ground was blackened. And these, as if lost, but nevertheless freshly darkening beds, rotten slates in the yard, rubbed with shoes, a low pile of firewood under the kitchen window testified that they lived in the house.

At once, for some reason, it became scary, some unknown force pinned me to the spot, squeezed my throat, and, with difficulty overpowering myself, I moved into the hut, but also moved fearfully, on tiptoe.

The door is open. A lost bumblebee hummed in the senets, and smelled of rotten wood. There was almost no paint left on the door and porch. Only scraps of it brightened in the rubble of the floorboards and on the doorposts of the door, and although I walked cautiously, as if I was running too much and now I was afraid to disturb the cool peace in the old house, the slit floorboards still moved and groaned under my boots. And the further I walked, the more muffled, darker it became in front, the bent, decrepit floor, eaten by mice in the corners, and everything smelled more palpably of the decay of wood, the moldiness of the underground.

Grandmother was sitting on a bench near the dimmed kitchen window, winding up a ball of thread.

I froze at the door.

The storm flew over the earth! Millions of human destinies were mixed and confused, new states disappeared and appeared, fascism, which threatened the human race with human death, died, and here, as a wall cabinet of boards hung and on it a flecked print curtain, it hangs; as there were cast iron and a blue mug on the oven, so they are; as forks, spoons, a knife were sticking out behind the wall plate, so they stick out, only there are few forks and spoons, a knife with a broken toe, and there was no smell of sour milk, cow's drink, boiled potatoes in the kuti, and so everything was as it was, even the grandmother was on the usual place, with the usual thing in hand.

Why are you standing at the door, father? Come, come! I'll cross you, sweetly. It shot in my leg ... I get scared or be glad - and it will shoot ...

And my grandmother spoke in a familiar, familiar, ordinary voice, as if I, in fact, went to the forest or ran off to stay with my grandfather and then returned, too late.

I thought you didn't recognize me.

How can I not find out? What are you, God be with you!

I straightened my tunic, wanted to stretch out and bark out what I had thought up beforehand: "I wish you good health, Comrade General!"

What a general here!

Grandmother made an attempt to get up, but she staggered, and she grabbed onto the table with her hands. The ball rolled off her knees, and the cat did not jump out from under the bench onto the ball. There was no cat, that's why it was eaten in the corners.

I was too old, father, I was completely old ... Legs ... I raised a ball and began to wind up a thread, slowly approaching my grandmother, without taking my eyes off her.

How small my grandmother's hands have become! The skin on them is yellow and shiny, like an onion peel. Every bone is visible through the hardened skin. And bruises. Layers of bruises, like caked leaves of late fall. The body, the powerful grandmother's body, could no longer cope with its work, it did not have enough strength to drown out and dissolve bruises with blood, even light ones. Grandmother's cheeks sunk deeply. In all ours, like this, in old age, cheeks will fall through holes. We are all grandmothers, cheekbones, all with sharply protruding bones.

What are you looking at? Have you become good? - tried to smile the grandmother with worn, sunken lips.

I threw the ball and grabbed my grandmother in my arms.

I stayed alive, babonka, alive! ..

I prayed, I prayed for you, ”my grandmother hurriedly whispered and poked my chest like a bird. She kissed where the heart was, and kept repeating: - I prayed, I prayed ...

That's why I survived.

Have you received the parcel?

Time has lost its definitions for the grandmother. Its boundaries were erased, and what happened a long time ago, it seemed to her, was quite recently; much of today was forgotten, covered with a fog of fading memory.

In 1942, in the winter, I underwent training in the reserve regiment, just before being sent to the front. They fed us very badly, and did not give us tobacco at all. I fired smoking from those soldiers who received parcels from home, and the time came when I had to settle accounts with my comrades.

After much hesitation, I asked in a letter to send me some tobacco.

Crushed by need, Augusta sent a bag of samosad to the reserve regiment. The bag also contained a handful of finely chopped crackers and a glass of pine nuts. This gift - crackers and nuts - was sewn into the bag by my grandmother with her own hand.

Let me take a look at you.

I obediently froze in front of my grandmother. The dent from the Red Star remained on her decrepit cheek - my grandmother became as big as my chest. She stroked, felt me, in her eyes there was a thick drowsiness, and my grandmother looked somewhere through me and beyond.

What a big you have become, big-oh! .. If only the deceased mother looked and admired ... - At this point, the grandmother, as always, trembled in her voice and looked at me with questioning timidity - am I not angry? I didn’t like it before, when she started about this. I caught it very sensitively - I’m not angry, and I also caught it and understood, you see, the boyish roughness has disappeared and my attitude to good is now completely different. She cried not rare, but continuous weak old tears, regretting something and rejoicing at something.

What a life it was! God forbid! .. But God does not clean up me. I'm getting under my feet. Why, you can't go to someone else's grave. I'll die soon, father, I'll die.

I wanted to protest, challenge my grandmother and started to move, but she somehow wisely and innocently stroked my head - and there was no need to say empty, comforting words.

I'm tired, father. I'm all tired. Eighty-sixth year ... I did the work - a different artel just right. Everything was waiting for you. Waiting strengthens. Now is the time. Now I'm going to die soon. You already, father, come to bury me ... Close my little eyes ...

My grandmother became weak and could no longer say anything, she only kissed my hands, wet them with tears, and I did not take her hands from her.

I also cried silently and enlightened.

Soon the grandmother died.

They sent me a telegram to the Urals with a call to the funeral. But I was not released from production. The head of the personnel department of the carriage depot where I worked, after reading the telegram, said:

Not allowed. Mother or father is another matter, but grandmothers, grandfathers and godfathers ...

How could he know that my grandmother was my father and mother - everything that is dear to me in this world! I should have sent the boss where I should, quit my job, sell my last pants and boots, and hurry to my grandmother's funeral, but I didn't.

I had not yet realized then all the enormity of the loss that befell me. Had it happened now, I would have crawled from the Urals to Siberia to close my grandmother's eyes, to give her the last bow.

And lives in the heart of wine. Oppressive, quiet, eternal. Guilty before my grandmother, I try to revive her in my memory, to find out from people the details of her life. But what interesting details can there be in the life of an old, lonely peasant woman?

I found out when my grandmother became depleted and could not carry water from the Yenisei, she washed potatoes with dew. She gets up before the light, pours a bucket of potatoes on the wet grass and rolls them with a rake, as if she tried to wash the bottom with dew, like a resident of a dry desert, she saved rainwater in an old tub, in a trough and in basins ...

Suddenly, quite recently, quite by accident, I learned that not only did my grandmother go to Minusinsk and Krasnoyarsk, but also went to the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra for prayer, for some reason calling the holy place the Carpathians.

Aunt Apraksinya Ilyinichna has died. In the hot season, she lay in her grandmother's house, half of which she occupied after her funeral. The deceased began to plow, I ought to smoke incense in the hut, but where can you get it today, incense? Nowadays they burn incense everywhere and everywhere, but so thickly that sometimes the white light cannot be seen, the true truth cannot be discerned in a child of words.

An, there was incense too! Aunt Dunya Fedoranikha, a thrifty old woman, set up a censer on a charcoal scoop, and added fir branches to the incense. It smokes, oily smoke swirls around the hut, it smells of antiquity, it smells of foreignness, knocks off all bad odors - you want to smell a long-forgotten, alien smell.

Where did you get it? - I ask Fedoranikha.

And your grandmother, Katerina Petrovna, the kingdom of heaven to her, when she went to prayers in the Carpathians, she endowed all of us with incense and gifts. Since then, and the coast, little has remained entirely - for my death there is ...

Mommy dear! And I didn’t know such a detail in my grandmother’s life, probably even in the old years she got to Ukraine, blessing, she returned from there, but I was afraid to talk about it in times of trouble, that as I blabbed about my grandmother’s prayer, but they would trample me from school, Kolch junior from the collective farm will be discharged ...

I want, I also want to know and hear more and more about my grandmother, but the door to the silent kingdom slammed shut behind her, and there were almost no old people left in the village. I am trying to tell people about my grandmother, so that they can find her in their grandparents, in close and loved ones, and my grandmother’s life would be infinite and eternal, as human kindness itself is eternal - but from the evil one this work. I don’t have such words that could convey all my love for my grandmother, would justify me in front of her.

I know my grandmother would forgive me. She always forgave me everything. But she's not there. And it never will.

And there is no one to forgive ...

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Victor Petrovich Astafiev

Last bow

Astafiev Victor Petrovich

Last bow

Victor Astafiev

Last bow

A tale in stories

Sing it, little bird

Burn, my torch,

Shine, star, over the traveler in the steppe.

Al. Domnin

Book one

A distant and close fairy tale

Zorkin's song

Trees grow for everyone

Geese in the hole

The smell of hay

Horse with pink mane

Monk in new pants

Guardian angel

Boy in a white shirt

Autumn sadness and joy

The photo I'm not in

Grandma's holiday

Book two

Burn, burn clear

Stryapukhina joy

The night is dark, dark

The Legend of the Glass Cricket

Pestrushka

Uncle Philip - ship mechanic

Chipmunk on the cross

Crucian doom

No shelter

Book three

Anticipation of ice drift

Zaberega

War is raging somewhere

Love potion

Soy candy

Feast after Victory

Last bow

Gored head

Evening reflections

Comments (1)

* BOOK ONE *

A distant and close fairy tale

On the outskirts of our village, in the middle of a grassy meadow, stood on stilts a long log room with a hem of planks. It was called "mangazina", which was also adjoined by the delivery, - here the peasants of our village brought artel implements and seeds, it was called the "public fund". If the house burns down. if even the whole village burns down, the seeds will be whole and, therefore, people will live, because as long as there are seeds, there is arable land into which you can throw them and grow grain, he is a peasant, a proprietor, and not a rogue.

At a distance from the delivery there is a guardhouse. She snuggled under the scree, in the wind and eternal shadow. Above the guardhouse, high on the ridge, larch and pine trees grew. Behind her, a key was smoked out of the stones in a blue smoke. It spread along the foot of the ridge, designating itself as thick sedge and meadowsweet flowers in the summer, in winter - a quiet park from under the snow and kurzhak over the bushes creeping from the ridge.

There were two windows in the guardhouse: one near the door and one on the side towards the village. The window that led to the village was covered with wild cherries, stings, hops and various fools that had multiplied from the key. The guardhouse had no roof. Hops swaddled her so that she resembled a one-eyed shaggy head. An overturned bucket protruded from the hops, the door opened immediately onto the street and shook off raindrops, hop cones, bird cherry berries, snow and icicles, depending on the season and weather.

Vasya the Pole lived in the guardhouse. He was small in stature, lame in one leg, and he had glasses. The only person in the village who had glasses. They evoked timid courtesy not only among us children, but also among adults.

Vasya lived quietly, peacefully, he did not harm anyone, but rarely did anyone come to him. Only the most desperate children peeked furtively through the guardhouse window and could not see anyone, but they were still afraid of something and ran away screaming.

At the door, the children pushed around from early spring to autumn: they played hide and seek, crawled on their belly under the log entrance to the door, or were buried under a high floor behind piles, and hid in the bottom of the river; were chopped into grandmas, into a chica. The filing tes was beaten by punks - bats filled with lead. With the blows that echoed loudly under the vaults of the import, a sparrow commotion flared up inside it.

Here, near the delivery, I was introduced to work - I twisted the winnowing fan in turn with the children, and here for the first time in my life I heard music - a violin ...

The violin is rarely, very, very rarely, played by Vasya the Pole, that mysterious, out of this world man who necessarily comes into the life of every boy, every girl and remains in the memory forever. Such a mysterious person, it seems, was supposed to live in a hut on chicken legs, in a dark place, under a ridge, and so that the light would barely glow in it, and so that an owl would laugh drunkenly over the chimney at night, and so that a key would smoke behind the hut. and so that no one, no one knows what is going on in the hut and what the owner is thinking about.

I remember that Vasya once came to his grandmother and asked something by the nose. Grandmother put Vasya to drink tea, brought dry herbs and began to brew it in the iron pot. She looked pitifully at Vasya and sighed drawn out.

Vasya drank tea not our way, not with a bite and not from a saucer, he drank directly from a glass, put a teaspoon on a saucer and did not drop it on the floor. His glasses gleamed menacingly, his cropped head seemed small, about the size of a trouser. Gray streaked across his black beard. And he seemed to be salted all over, and the coarse salt dried him up.

Vasya ate shyly, drank only one glass of tea and, no matter how much his grandmother persuaded him, he did not eat anything else, ceremoniously bowed his head and carried away in one hand a clay pot with a herb broth, in the other - a bird cherry stick.

Lord, Lord! - Grandmother sighed, closing the door behind Vasya. -You are a heavy share ... A man will go blind.

In the evening I heard Vasya's violin.

It was early autumn. Bring the gates wide open. There was a draft in them, stirring the shavings in the bottom borers repaired for grain. The smell of rancid, musty grain was drawn through the gate. A flock of children, not taken to arable land because of their youth, played robber detectives. The game went on sluggishly and soon died out completely. In autumn, not like in spring, it is somehow poorly played. One by one the children scattered to their homes, and I stretched out on the heated log entrance and began to pull out the grains that had sprouted in the cracks. I waited for the carts on the ridge to rattle, to intercept ours from the arable land, to ride home, and there, you see, they would give the horse to the watering hole.

It got dark behind the Yenisei, behind the Guard Bull. In the valley of the Karaulka river, waking up, a large star blinked once or twice and began to glow. She looked like a burdock cone. Behind the ridge, over the tops of the mountains, a strip of dawn was smoldering stubbornly, not like an autumn smolder. But then darkness flew over her. Dawn pretended to shuttered a shining window. Until morning.

It became quiet and lonely. The guardhouse is not visible. She hid in the shadow of the mountain, merged with the darkness, and only the yellowed leaves gleamed a little under the mountain, in a depression washed with a key. From behind the shadows, bats began to whirl around, squeak over me, fly into the open gates, bring them in, catch flies and moths there, not otherwise.

I was afraid to breathe loudly, squeezed into the corner of the import. Along the ridge, over Vasya's hut, carts rumbled, hooves rattled: people were returning from the fields, from jobs, from work, but I did not dare to peel off the rough logs, and could not overcome the paralyzing fear that rolled over me. The windows in the village lit up. Smokes from the chimneys were drawn to the Yenisei. In the thickets of the Fokinskaya river, someone was looking for a cow and either called her in an affectionate voice, or scolded her with the last words.

In the sky, next to the star that was still glowing lonely over the Karaulnaya River, someone threw the stub of the moon, and it, like a bitten half of an apple, did not roll anywhere, windless, orphaned, chilly glazed, and everything around was glazed from it. He brought a shadow over the whole clearing, and a shadow, narrow and nosed, fell from me too.

Behind the Fokinskaya river - a stone's throw - the crosses in the cemetery turned white, something creaked in the delivery - the cold crept under the shirt, down the back, under the skin. to the heart. I had already put my hands on the logs in order to push off at once, fly to the very gates and sound the latch so that all the dogs in the village would wake up.

But from under the log, from the tangles of hops and bird cherries, from the deep interior of the earth, music arose and nailed me to the wall.

It became even more frightening: on the left is a cemetery, in front there is a ridge with a hut, on the right is a terrible hare behind the village, where there are many white bones and where for a long time, grandmother said, a man was perplexed, behind a dark delivery, behind it the village, vegetable gardens covered with thistles, from a distance like black clouds of smoke.

I alone, alone, there is such a horror all around, and also music - a violin. A very, very lonely violin. And she does not threaten at all. Complains. And nothing at all creepy. And there is nothing to be afraid of. Fool-fool! How can you be afraid of music? Fool-fool, never listened to one, that's it ...

The music flows quieter, more transparent, I hear, and my heart lets go. And this is not music, but the key flows from under the mountain. Someone has sunk his lips to the water, drinks, drinks and cannot get drunk - his mouth and inside are so withered.

For some reason, one sees the Yenisei, quiet in the night, on it a raft with a sparkle. An unknown person shouts from the raft: "What village-ah-ah?" -- Why? Where is he sailing? And the train on the Yenisei is seen, long, creaky. He also leaves somewhere. Dogs are running on the side of the convoy. The horses walk slowly, drowsily. And you can still see a crowd on the banks of the Yenisei, something wet, washed out with mud, village people all over the bank, a grandmother tearing hair on her head.

This music speaks of sadness, it speaks of my illness, how I was ill with malaria for the whole summer, how scared I was when I stopped hearing and thought that I would forever be deaf, like Alyoshka, my cousin, and how she appeared to me in in a feverish dream, my mother put a cold hand with blue nails to her forehead. I screamed and did not hear my scream.

In the hut, a screwed-down lamp burned all night, my grandmother showed me the corners, shone a lamp under the stove, under the bed, they say, no one was there.

I also remember the sweat of the girl, little white, laughing, her hand is drying out. Vozniki took her to the city for treatment.

And again the train appeared.

He is all going somewhere, going, hiding in the icy hummocks, in the frosty fog. The horses are getting smaller, smaller, and the last one was cleared away by the fog. Lonely, somehow empty, ice, cold and motionless dark rocks with motionless forests.

But the Yenisei was gone, neither winter nor summer; again the live vein of the key was hammered behind Vasya's hut. The key began to grow fat, and not one key, two, three, already a formidable stream gushes out of the rock, rolls stones, breaks trees, twists them by their roots, carries them, twists them. He is about to sweep away the hut under the mountain, wash away the delivery and bring everything down from the mountains. Thunders will strike in the sky, lightning flashed, mysterious fern flowers will flash from them. Flowers will light up the forest, light up the earth, and even the Yenisei will not be able to fill this fire - nothing can stop such a terrible storm!

"But what is this ?! Where are the people, then? What are they looking at ?! They would have tied Vasya!"

But the violin itself put out everything. Again, one person is yearning, again something is a pity, someone is going somewhere again, maybe by train, maybe on a raft, maybe on foot he goes to distant distances.

The world has not burned down, nothing has collapsed. Everything is in place. Moon with a star in place. The village, already without lights, is in place, the cemetery is in eternal silence and peace, a guardhouse under the ridge, enveloped by burning bird cherry trees and a quiet string of a violin.

Everything is in place. Only my heart, which was filled with grief and delight, shook, jumped, and beats at my throat, wounded for life by music.

What did the music tell me about? About the train? About a dead mom? About a girl whose hand is drying up? What was she complaining about? Who was she angry with? Why is it so anxious and bitter for me? Why do you feel sorry for yourself? And it’s a pity for those over there that they sleep deeply in the cemetery. Among them, under the hillock, lies my mother, next to her are two sisters, whom I did not even see: they lived before me, lived a little, and my mother went to them, left me alone in this world, where she beats high through the window with an elegant mourning ceremony someone's heart.

The music ended abruptly, as if someone had put an imperious hand on the violinist's shoulder: "Well, that's enough!" In mid-sentence, the violin fell silent, fell silent, not crying out, but exhaling the pain. But already, besides her, of her own free will, some kind of violin soared higher, higher and with a dying pain, a groan squeezed into the teeth, broke off in the skies ...

I sat for a long time in the little corner, licking the large tears that rolled down on my lips. There was no strength to get up and leave. I wanted here, in a dark corner, near rough logs, to die all abandoned and forgotten. The violin was not heard, the light in Vasya's hut was not on. "Isn't Vasya dead?" - I thought, and carefully made my way to the guardhouse. My feet stabbed in the cold and viscous black soil, soaked by the key. Tenacious, always cold hop leaves touched my face, cones rustling dryly over my head, smelling of spring water. I lifted the twisted strings of hops hanging over the window and peered through the window. Flickering a bit, a burnt-out iron stove was burning in the hut. With a fluctuating light, she indicated a table against the wall, a trestle bed in the corner. Vasya was reclining on the trestle bed, covering his eyes with his left hand. His spectacles lay upside down on the table and flashed, then extinguished. A violin rested on Vasya's chest, a long bow-stick was clamped in his right hand.

I quietly opened the door and stepped into the guardroom. After Vasya drank tea with us, especially after the music, it was not so scary to come here.

I sat down on the threshold, not looking up at the hand in which a smooth stick was clamped.

Play, uncle, more.

What do you want, uncle.

Vasya sat down on the trestle bed, turned the wooden pins of the violin, touched the strings with his bow.

Put some wood in the stove.

I fulfilled his request. Vasya waited, did not move. There was a click in the stove once, another, its burned-out sides were marked with red roots and blades of grass, the reflection of the fire swung, fell on Vasya. He raised his violin to his shoulder and began to play.

It took a long time until I learned about music. She was the same that I heard at the import, and at the same time completely different. Softer, kinder, anxiety and pain were only guessed in her, the violin no longer moaned, her soul did not ooze with blood, the fire did not rage around and the stones did not collapse.

The light in the stove trembled and trembled, but perhaps there, behind the hut, a fern glowed on the ridge. They say that if you find a fern flower, you become invisible, you can take all the riches from the rich and give them to the poor, steal Vasilisa the Beautiful from Koshchei the Immortal and return her to Ivanushka, you can even sneak into the cemetery and revive your own mother.

The firewood of the deadwood that had been cut off - pine flared up, the knee of the pipe heated to purple, the smell of red-hot wood, boiling resin on the ceiling. The hut was filled with heat and a heavy red light. The fire danced, the accelerating stove snapped cheerfully, firing large sparks as it went.

The musician's shadow, broken at the lower back, rushed around the hut, stretched out along the wall, became transparent, like a reflection in water, then the shadow receded into a corner, disappeared in it, and then a living musician, living Vasya the Pole, was designated there. His shirt was unbuttoned, his feet were bare, his eyes were dark in outline. Vasya was lying on the violin with his cheek, and it seemed to me that it was calmer, more comfortable for him, and he hears something in the violin that I would never hear.

When the stove went out, I was glad that I could not see Vasya's face, the pale collarbone protruding from under the shirt, and the right leg, kurguz, scanty, as if bitten by forceps, eyes, tightly, painfully squeezed into the black holes of the eye sockets. Vasya's eyes must have been afraid of even such a small light that splashed out of the stove.

In the semidarkness, I tried to look only at the quivering, darting or smoothly sliding bow, at the flexible shadow swinging regularly with the violin. And then Vasya again began to appear to me as something like a magician from a distant fairy tale, and not as a lonely cripple, to whom no one cares. I was so contemplated, so listened, that I shuddered when Vasya spoke.

This music was written by a man who was deprived of his dearest. - Vasya thought out loud, without ceasing to play. - If a person does not have a mother, does not have a father, but has a homeland, he is not an orphan yet. - For a while Vasya thought to himself. I was waiting. - Everything passes: love, regret for her, bitterness of loss, even the pain from wounds passes, but the longing for the homeland never, never goes away ...

The violin touched again the very strings that had heated up during the previous playing and had not cooled down yet. Vasin's hand shuddered again with pain, but immediately resigned itself, his fingers, gathered into a fist, unclenched.

This music was written by my fellow countryman Oginsky in the tavern - this is the name of our visiting house, - Vasya continued. - I wrote at the border, saying goodbye to my homeland. He sent her one last greetings. For a long time already there is no composer in the world. But his pain, his longing, his love for his native land, which no one could take away, is still alive.

Vasya fell silent, the violin was speaking, the violin was singing, the violin was dying out. Her voice grew quieter. quieter, it stretched itself out in the darkness as a thin light cobweb. The cobweb trembled, swayed, and broke off almost soundlessly.

I removed my hand from my throat and exhaled the breath that I held with my chest, with my hand, because I was afraid to break off the light cobweb. But it ended all the same. The stove went out. Layering, they poured coals in it. Vasya is not visible. The violin is not heard.

Silence. Darkness. Sadness.

It's already late, - said Vasya from the darkness. -- Go home. Grandma will be worried.

I got up from the threshold and, if I had not grabbed the wooden brace, I would have fallen. My legs were all in pins and needles and seemed to be not mine at all.

Thank you, uncle, - I whispered.

Vasya stirred in the corner and laughed embarrassedly or asked "Why?"

I don't know why ...

And he jumped out of the hut. With moved tears I thanked Vasya, this night world, a sleeping village, a forest sleeping behind it. I wasn’t even afraid to walk past the cemetery. Nothing is scary now. In those minutes there was no evil around me. The world was kind and lonely - nothing, nothing bad could fit in it.

Trusting in the kindness spread by a weak heavenly light throughout the village and throughout the earth, I went to the cemetery and stood at my mother's grave.

Mom, it's me. I forgot you, and I don't dream of you anymore.

Sinking to the ground, I put my ear to the mound. The mother did not answer. Everything was quiet on the ground and in the ground. A small mountain ash, planted by me and my grandmother, dropped its sharp wings on my mother's tubercle. At the neighboring graves of birch trees, threads with a yellow leaf were loosened to the very ground. The leaves on the tops of the birch trees were gone, and the bare twigs were stripped by the stub of the moon, which now hung over the cemetery itself. Everything was quiet. Dew appeared on the grass. There was complete calm. Then I felt a chilly chill from the ridges. Leaves flowed from the birch trees thicker. The dew was glazing on the grass. My legs froze from brittle dew, one leaf rolled under my shirt, it became chilly, and I wandered from the cemetery into the dark streets of the village between sleeping houses to the Yenisei.

For some reason I didn't want to go home.

I don’t know how long I sat on a steep slope over the Yenisei. He made noise at the hare, on the stone gobies. The water, knocked off the smooth run by the gobies, tied into knots, waddled heavily near the banks and in circles, rolled back to the rod like funnels. Our restless river. Some forces eternally disturb her, in the eternal struggle she is with herself and with the rocks that squeezed her on both sides.

But this restlessness of her, this ancient riot of hers did not excite, but reassured me. Because, probably, it was autumn, the moon overhead, the grass rocky with dew and nettles along the banks, not at all like dope, rather like some kind of wonderful plants; and also because, probably, that Vasin's music about the ineradicable love for the motherland sounded in me. And the Yenisei, not sleeping even at night, a steep-headed bull on the other side, sawing spruce peaks over a distant pass, a silent village behind my back, a grasshopper, working with all his last strength in defiance of autumn in nettles, he seems to be the only one in the whole world, grass, as it were cast from metal - this was my homeland, close and disturbing.

In the dead of night I returned home. Grandma must have guessed from my face that something had happened in my soul, and did not scold me.

Where have you been for so long? she only asked. - Dinner on the table, eat and lie down.

Baba, I heard the violin.

Ah, - answered the grandmother, - Vasya the Pole is someone else's, father, plays, incomprehensible. Women cry from his music, and men get drunk and rampage ...

Who is he?

Vasya? Who? - the grandmother yawned. -- Human. You should sleep. It's too early for me to go up to the cow. - But she knew that I still would not leave: - Come to me, crawl under the covers.

I snuggled up to my grandmother.

How cold it is! And my feet are wet! They will hurt again. - Grandma tucked a blanket under me, stroked my head. - Vasya is a person without family and tribe. His father and mother were from a distant country - Poland. People there do not speak our way, they do not pray as we do. Their king is called a king. The Polish land was seized by the Russian tsar, for some reason they did not share with the king ... Are you sleeping?

I would sleep. I have to get up with the roosters. “My grandmother, in order to get rid of me as soon as possible, told me at a run that in this distant land people had rebelled against the Russian tsar, and they were exiled to us, to Siberia. Vasya's parents were also driven here. Vasya was born on a cart, under the escort's sheepskin coat. And his name is not Vasya at all, but Stasya - Stanislav in their language. It’s ours, the villagers, have altered it. -- Do you sleep? the grandmother asked again.

Oh, so you! Well, Vasya's parents died. Reckoned, repented on the wrong side and died. First mother, then father. Have you seen such a big black cross and a grave with flowers? Their grave. Vasya takes care of her, looks after her more than he takes care of himself. And he himself grew old when they did not notice. Oh Lord, forgive me, and we are not young! So Vasya lived near the mangazin, in the watchmen. They did not take to the war. He still had a chill in his wet baby's leg on the cart ... And so he lives ... to die soon ... And we too ...

The grandmother spoke more and more quietly, more indistinctly, and went to sleep with a sigh. I didn't bother her. I lay there thinking, trying to comprehend human life, but nothing came of this idea.

A few years after that memorable night, the mangazin was no longer used, because an elevator was built in the city, and the need for mangazins disappeared. Vasya was left out of work. Yes, and by that time he had become completely blind and could no longer be a watchman. For some time he still collected alms in the village, but then he could not walk, then my grandmother and other old women began to carry food to Vasya's hut.

One day the grandmother came anxious, put out the sewing machine and began to sew a satin shirt, pants without a hole, a pillowcase with ties and a sheet without a seam in the middle - this is how they sew for the dead.

Her door was open. People crowded near the hut. People entered it without hats and left there sighing, with meek, sad faces.

Vasya was carried out in a small, like a boy's coffin. The deceased's face was covered with a canvas. There were no flowers in the domino, people did not carry wreaths. Several old women were dragging behind the coffin, no one was wailing. Everything was done in business silence. A dark-faced old woman, a former headman of the church, read prayers as she walked and mowed with a cold gaze at an abandoned mangazin with a fallen gate, a mangazin torn off the roof from the roof and shook her head condemningly.

I went to the guardroom. The iron stove in the middle was removed. A hole was chilling in the ceiling, and drops were falling down the overhanging roots of grass and hops. Wood shavings are scattered on the floor. An old, simple bed was rolled up at the head of the bunk. A guard beater lay under the bunks. broom, ax, shovel. On the window, behind the countertop, I could see an earthen bowl, a wooden mug with a broken off handle, a spoon, a comb, and for some reason I had not noticed at once a scale of water. It contains a branch of bird cherry with swollen and already burst buds. From the tabletop, empty glasses looked at me forlornly.

"Where's the violin?" - I remembered, looking at the glasses. And then he saw her. The violin hung over the head of the bunk. I slipped my glasses into my pocket, removed the violin from the wall, and rushed to catch up with the funeral procession.

The peasants with the domina and the old women, wandering in a bunch after her, crossed the Fokinskaya river on the logs, drunk from the spring flood, climbed to the cemetery along the slope, covered with a green fog of the newly awakened grass.

I pulled my grandmother by the sleeve and showed her a violin and a bow. Grandma frowned sternly and turned away from me. Then she took a step wider and whispered to the dark-faced old woman:

Expenses ... expensive ... the village council doesn't hurt ...

I already knew something, and I guessed that the old woman wanted to sell the violin in order to reimburse the funeral expenses, clung to my grandmother's sleeve and, when we fell behind, I asked gloomily:

Whose violin?

Vasina, father, Vasina, - my grandmother took her eyes away from me and stared at the back of the dark-faced old woman. - Into the domino ... Himself! .. - Grandmother leaned towards me and whispered quickly, adding to her step.

Before people were going to cover Vasya with a lid, I squeezed forward and, without saying a word, put a violin and a bow on his chest, on the violin I threw several living flowers of my stepmother, which I plucked from the bridging bridge.

No one dared to say anything to me, only the old praying woman pierced me with a sharp gaze and immediately, raising her eyes to the sky, baptized herself: "Have mercy, Lord, the soul of the departed Stanislav and his parents, forgive their free and involuntary sins ..."

I watched as the coffin was nailed - is it tight? The first threw a handful of earth into Vasya's grave, as if his close relative, and after people disassembled their shovels, towels and scattered along the paths of the cemetery in order to wet the graves of their relatives with accumulated tears, he sat for a long time near Vasya's grave, kneading lumps of earth with his fingers, why- then waited. And he knew that there was nothing to wait for, but still there was no strength or desire to get up and leave.

Over the course of one summer, the empty guardhouse of Vasya passed. The ceiling collapsed, flattened, pressed the hut into the thick of stinging, hops and Chernobyl. Rotten logs stuck out of the weeds for a long time, but they too gradually became covered with dope; the thread of the key struck a new channel for itself and flowed over the place where the hut stood. But the key soon began to wither, and in the dry summer of thirty-three it dried up completely. And at once the bird cherries began to wither, the hops degenerated, and the herbal fool calmed down.

The person left, and life in this place stopped. But the village lived, children grew up, to replace those who left the land. While Vasya the Pole was alive, fellow villagers treated him differently: some did not notice him as an extra person, others even teased, frightened the children with them, others felt sorry for the wretched person. But Vasya the Pole died, and the village began to lack something. An incomprehensible guilt overcame people, and there was no such house, such a family in the village, where they would not remember him with a kind word on parental day and other quiet holidays, and it turned out that in an imperceptible life Vasya the Pole was like a righteous man and helped people with humility , it is better to be respectful, kind to each other.

The theme of the village, as well as the theme of war, Astafyev devoted many of his works, and "The Last Bow" is one of them. It is written in the form of a large story, composed of separate stories, of a biographical nature, where Astafyev Viktor Petrovich described his childhood and life. These memories are not lined up in a sequential chain, they are captured in separate episodes. However, this book can hardly be called a collection of stories, since everything there is united by one theme.

Viktor Astafiev "The Last Bow" is dedicated to the Motherland in his own understanding. This is his village and native land with wild nature, harsh climate, powerful Yenisei, beautiful mountains and dense taiga. And he describes all this in a very original and touching way, in fact, this is what the book is about. Astafiev created "The Last Bow" as an epoch-making work, which touches upon the problems of ordinary people of more than one generation in very difficult critical periods.

Plot

The main character, Vitya Potylitsyn, is an orphan boy raised by his grandmother. His father drank a lot and walked, eventually left his family and went to the city. And Viti's mother drowned in the Yenisei. The boy's life, in principle, did not differ from the life of other village children. He helped the elders with the housework, went mushroom and berry picking, fishing, and was amused, like all his peers. This is how you can start a summary. Astafiev's "last bow", I must say, embodied in Katerina Petrovna the collective image of Russian grandmothers, in which everything is primordially native, hereditary, forever given. The author does not embellish anything in her, he makes her a little formidable, grumpy, with a constant desire to know everything first and dispose of everything at his own discretion. In a word, "general in a skirt." She loves everyone, looks after everyone, wants to be useful to everyone.

She is constantly worried and tormented, now for the children, now for the grandchildren, because of this, anger and tears alternately burst out. But if the grandmother begins to talk about life, then it turns out that there were no hardships for her at all. Children were always happy. Even when they were sick, she skillfully treated them with various decoctions and roots. And none of them died, isn't that happiness? Once, on arable land, she twisted her hand and immediately straightened it, and she could have stayed with a braid, but she did not, and this is also a joy.

This is the common feature of Russian grandmothers. And in this image, something blessed for life, dear, lullaby and life-giving, lives.

A twist in fate

Then it becomes not so much fun as the brief summary describes the village life of the protagonist at the beginning. Astafiev's "last bow" continues with the fact that Vitka suddenly has a bad streak in his life. Since there was no school in the village, he was sent to the city to his father and stepmother. And here Astafyev Viktor Petrovich recalls his torment, exile, hunger, orphanhood and homelessness.

Could Vitka Potylitsyn then be aware of something or blame someone for his misfortunes? He lived as best he could, fleeing death, and even at some moments managed to be happy. The author here pity not only himself, but the entire young generation of that time, which was forced to survive in suffering.

Vitka later realized that he got out of all this only thanks to the saving prayers of his grandmother, who at a distance felt his pain and loneliness with all her heart. She softened his soul, teaching him patience, forgiveness and the ability to discern even a small grain of goodness in the black darkness and be grateful for it.

Survival School

In the post-revolutionary period, Siberian villages were subjected to dispossession. Ruin was going on all around. Thousands of families found themselves homeless, many were driven off to hard labor. Having moved to his father and stepmother, who lived on casual income and drank a lot, Vitka immediately realizes that no one needs it. Soon he experiences conflicts at school, betrayal of his father and oblivion of relatives. This is the summary. Astafiev's "last bow" tells further that after the village and grandmother's house, where, perhaps, there was no prosperity, but comfort and love always reigned, the boy finds himself in a world of loneliness and heartlessness. He becomes rude, and his actions become cruel, but still, grandmother's upbringing and love of books will later bear fruit.

In the meantime, an orphanage awaits him, and this just in a nutshell describes a brief summary. Astafiev's "last bow" illustrates in great detail all the hardships of a poor teenager's life, including his studies at the factory school, leaving for the war and, finally, returning.

Return

After the war, Victor immediately went to the village to see his grandmother. He really wanted to meet her, because she became for him the only and most dear person on the whole earth. He walked through the gardens, clinging to the turnips, his heart squeezed strongly in his chest with excitement. Victor made his way to the bathhouse, on which the roof had already collapsed, everything had long been without the master's attention, and then he saw a small woodpile of firewood under the kitchen window. This indicated that someone was living in the house.

Before entering the hut, he suddenly stopped. Victor's throat went dry. Gathering his courage, the guy quietly, fearfully, literally tiptoeing into his hut and saw his grandmother, just like in the old days, sitting on a bench near the window and winding up the threads in a ball.

Minutes of oblivion

The main character thought to himself that during this time a whole storm flew over the whole world, millions of human destinies were messed up, there was a deadly struggle against hated fascism, new states were formed, and here everything is as always, as if time had stood still. All the same dotted chintz curtain, a neat wooden wall cabinet, iron pots by the stove, etc. Only there was no longer the smell of the usual cow drink, boiled potatoes and sauerkraut.

Grandmother Ekaterina Petrovna, seeing the long-awaited grandson, was very happy and asked him to come closer to hug and cross. Her voice remained the same kind and gentle, as if the grandson did not return from the war, but from fishing or from the forest, where he could stay with his grandfather.

Long-awaited meeting

The soldier who returned from the war thought that perhaps his grandmother might not recognize him, but that was not the case. Seeing him, the old woman wanted to get up abruptly, but her weak legs did not allow her to do this, and she began to stick to the table with her hands.

Grandmother has grown quite old. However, she was very glad to see her beloved grandson. And she was glad that, at last, she waited. She looked at him for a long time and could not believe her eyes. And then she let slip that she had prayed for him day and night, and in order to meet her beloved granddaughter, she lived. Only now, having waited for him, the grandmother could die in peace. She was already 86 years old, so she asked her grandson to come to her funeral.

Oppressive melancholy

That's all the summary. Astafiev's "last bow" ends with Victor leaving to work in the Urals. The hero received a telegram about the death of his grandmother, but he was not released from work, referring to the charter of the enterprise. At that time, they were only allowed to go to the funeral of their father or mother. Management did not want to know that his grandmother replaced both of his parents. Viktor Petrovich never went to the funeral, which he regretted very much all his life. He thought that if it happened now, he would simply run away or crawl from the Urals to Siberia, just to close her eyes. So all the time this wine lived in him, quiet, oppressive, eternal. However, he understood that his grandmother forgave him, because she loved her grandson very much.

(1 estimates, average: 5.00 out of 5)

Astafiev Victor Petrovich

Last bow

Victor Astafiev

Last bow

A tale in stories

Sing it, little bird

Burn, my torch,

Shine, star, over the traveler in the steppe.

Al. Domnin

Book one

A distant and close fairy tale

Zorkin's song

Trees grow for everyone

Geese in the hole

The smell of hay

Horse with pink mane

Monk in new pants

Guardian angel

Boy in a white shirt

Autumn sadness and joy

The photo I'm not in

Grandma's holiday

Book two

Burn, burn clear

Stryapukhina joy

The night is dark, dark

The Legend of the Glass Cricket

Pestrushka

Uncle Philip - ship mechanic

Chipmunk on the cross

Crucian doom

No shelter

Book three

Anticipation of ice drift

Zaberega

War is raging somewhere

Love potion

Soy candy

Feast after Victory

Last bow

Gored head

Evening reflections

Comments (1)

* BOOK ONE *

A distant and close fairy tale

On the outskirts of our village, in the middle of a grassy meadow, stood on stilts a long log room with a hem of planks. It was called "mangazina", which was also adjoined by the delivery, - here the peasants of our village brought artel implements and seeds, it was called the "public fund". If the house burns down. if even the whole village burns down, the seeds will be whole and, therefore, people will live, because as long as there are seeds, there is arable land into which you can throw them and grow grain, he is a peasant, a proprietor, and not a rogue.

At a distance from the delivery there is a guardhouse. She snuggled under the scree, in the wind and eternal shadow. Above the guardhouse, high on the ridge, larch and pine trees grew. Behind her, a key was smoked out of the stones in a blue smoke. It spread along the foot of the ridge, designating itself as thick sedge and meadowsweet flowers in the summer, in winter - a quiet park from under the snow and kurzhak over the bushes creeping from the ridge.

There were two windows in the guardhouse: one near the door and one on the side towards the village. The window that led to the village was covered with wild cherries, stings, hops and various fools that had multiplied from the key. The guardhouse had no roof. Hops swaddled her so that she resembled a one-eyed shaggy head. An overturned bucket protruded from the hops, the door opened immediately onto the street and shook off raindrops, hop cones, bird cherry berries, snow and icicles, depending on the season and weather.

Vasya the Pole lived in the guardhouse. He was small in stature, lame in one leg, and he had glasses. The only person in the village who had glasses. They evoked timid courtesy not only among us children, but also among adults.

Vasya lived quietly, peacefully, he did not harm anyone, but rarely did anyone come to him. Only the most desperate children peeked furtively through the guardhouse window and could not see anyone, but they were still afraid of something and ran away screaming.

At the door, the children pushed around from early spring to autumn: they played hide and seek, crawled on their belly under the log entrance to the door, or were buried under a high floor behind piles, and hid in the bottom of the river; were chopped into grandmas, into a chica. The filing tes was beaten by punks - bats filled with lead. With the blows that echoed loudly under the vaults of the import, a sparrow commotion flared up inside it.

Here, near the delivery, I was introduced to work - I twisted the winnowing fan in turn with the children, and here for the first time in my life I heard music - a violin ...

The violin is rarely, very, very rarely, played by Vasya the Pole, that mysterious, out of this world man who necessarily comes into the life of every boy, every girl and remains in the memory forever. Such a mysterious person, it seems, was supposed to live in a hut on chicken legs, in a dark place, under a ridge, and so that the light would barely glow in it, and so that an owl would laugh drunkenly over the chimney at night, and so that a key would smoke behind the hut. and so that no one, no one knows what is going on in the hut and what the owner is thinking about.

I remember that Vasya once came to his grandmother and asked something by the nose. Grandmother put Vasya to drink tea, brought dry herbs and began to brew it in the iron pot. She looked pitifully at Vasya and sighed drawn out.

Vasya drank tea not our way, not with a bite and not from a saucer, he drank directly from a glass, put a teaspoon on a saucer and did not drop it on the floor. His glasses gleamed menacingly, his cropped head seemed small, about the size of a trouser. Gray streaked across his black beard. And he seemed to be salted all over, and the coarse salt dried him up.

Vasya ate shyly, drank only one glass of tea and, no matter how much his grandmother persuaded him, he did not eat anything else, ceremoniously bowed his head and carried away in one hand a clay pot with a herb broth, in the other - a bird cherry stick.

Lord, Lord! - Grandmother sighed, closing the door behind Vasya. -You are a heavy share ... A man will go blind.

In the evening I heard Vasya's violin.

It was early autumn. Bring the gates wide open. There was a draft in them, stirring the shavings in the bottom borers repaired for grain. The smell of rancid, musty grain was drawn through the gate. A flock of children, not taken to arable land because of their youth, played robber detectives. The game went on sluggishly and soon died out completely. In autumn, not like in spring, it is somehow poorly played. One by one the children scattered to their homes, and I stretched out on the heated log entrance and began to pull out the grains that had sprouted in the cracks. I waited for the carts on the ridge to rattle, to intercept ours from the arable land, to ride home, and there, you see, they would give the horse to the watering hole.

It got dark behind the Yenisei, behind the Guard Bull. In the valley of the Karaulka river, waking up, a large star blinked once or twice and began to glow. She looked like a burdock cone. Behind the ridge, over the tops of the mountains, a strip of dawn was smoldering stubbornly, not like an autumn smolder. But then darkness flew over her. Dawn pretended to shuttered a shining window. Until morning.

It became quiet and lonely. The guardhouse is not visible. She hid in the shadow of the mountain, merged with the darkness, and only the yellowed leaves gleamed a little under the mountain, in a depression washed with a key. From behind the shadows, bats began to whirl around, squeak over me, fly into the open gates, bring them in, catch flies and moths there, not otherwise.

I was afraid to breathe loudly, squeezed into the corner of the import. Along the ridge, over Vasya's hut, carts rumbled, hooves rattled: people were returning from the fields, from jobs, from work, but I did not dare to peel off the rough logs, and could not overcome the paralyzing fear that rolled over me. The windows in the village lit up. Smokes from the chimneys were drawn to the Yenisei. In the thickets of the Fokinskaya river, someone was looking for a cow and either called her in an affectionate voice, or scolded her with the last words.