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Darkness falls on the old steps. Alexander Chudakov - darkness falls on the old steps

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1. Armwrestling in Chebachinsk

Grandpa was very strong. When he, in his faded, high-sleeved shirt, worked in the garden or planed the shank for a shovel (when resting, he always planed the shank, in the corner of the barn there was a supply of them for decades), Anton said to himself something like: “Muscle balls rolled under his skin” (Anton liked to put it bookishly). But even now, when my grandfather was over ninety, when he struggled out of bed to take a glass from the bedside table, a round ball rolled familiarly under the rolled up sleeve of his undershirt, and Anton grinned.

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

And before Anton's eyes, that grandfather's hand from the past floated up when he unbent nails or roofing iron with his fingers. And even more clearly - this hand is on the edge holiday table with a tablecloth and shifted dishes - could it really have been more than thirty years ago?

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

Grandfather carefully hung on the back of a chair a black jacket of an English Boston, left over from a three-piece sewn before the first war, double-faced, but still looking (it was incomprehensible: even mother did not exist in the world, and grandfather already flaunted in this jacket), and rolled up the sleeve of a white cambric shirt, the last of two dozen taken out of Vilna in 1915. He firmly put his elbow on the table, closed his opponent's palm, and it immediately sank into the blacksmith's huge, razor-sharp brush.

One hand is black, with stubborn scale, all intertwined not with human, but with some kind of ox veins (“The veins swelled like ropes on his hands,” Anton habitually thought). The other was twice as thin, white, and that bluish veins were slightly visible under the skin, only Anton knew, who remembered these hands better than his mother's. And only Anton knew the iron hardness of this hand, its fingers, without a wrench unscrewing the nuts from the cart wheels. Only one other person had the same strong fingers - the second grandfather's daughter, Aunt Tanya. Having found herself in exile during the war (as a Cheseirka, a member of the family of a traitor to the motherland) in a remote village with three young children, she worked on a farm as a milkmaid. Electric milking was unheard of then, and there were months when she hand-milked twenty cows a day—twice each.

A Moscow friend of Anton, a specialist in meat and milk, said that these were all fairy tales, this was impossible, but it was true. Aunt Tanya's fingers were all twisted, but their grip remained steely; when a neighbor, greeting her, jokingly squeezed her hand hard, she in response squeezed his hand so much that it swelled and hurt for a week.

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

- Well, the proletarian on the intelligentsia!

Is this Pereplyotkin a proletarian?

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

- Well, Lvovich - he also found the Soviet intelligentsia.

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

A volunteer referee checked whether the elbows were on the same line. We started.

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

Kuzma, Kuzma! they shouted from there.

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

Grandfather's hand stopped moving. Pereplyotkin looked surprised. It can be seen that he gave up, because another rope swelled - on his forehead.

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

His hands vibrated slightly, like a double mechanical lever connected to some kind of powerful motor. There - here. Here - there. Here again a little. A little there. And again immobility, and only a barely noticeable vibration.

The double lever suddenly came to life. And again began to lean. But grandfather's hand was now on top! However, when there was absolutely nothing left to the tabletop, the lever suddenly went back. And froze for a long time in an upright position.

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

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

– Perhaps.

- So what? ..

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

The other day, when my grandfather was in the hospital, before going around the doctor with a retinue of students, he took off and hid the pectoral cross in the nightstand. He crossed himself twice and, glancing at Anton, smiled weakly. Grandfather's brother, oh Pavel, said that in his youth he liked to brag about strength. They unload the rye - he will move the worker away, put his shoulder under a five-pound bag, the other - under the second one, and go, without bending, to the barn. No, it was impossible to imagine such a boastful grandfather.

Grandfather despised any gymnastics, not seeing any use in it either for himself or for the household; it is better to split three or four chocks in the morning, throw manure. My father was in solidarity with him, but he summed up the scientific basis: no gymnastics gives such a versatile load as chopping firewood - all muscle groups work. After reading the brochures, Anton said: experts believe that with physical labor just not all the muscles are occupied, and after any work you need to do more gymnastics. Grandfather and father laughed together: “If only these specialists could be put at the bottom of a trench or on top of a haystack for half a day! Ask Vasily Illarionovich - he lived in the mines for twenty years next to the workers' barracks, everything is in public there - did he see at least one miner doing exercises after the shift? Vasily Illarionovich never saw such a miner.

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

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

- So what?

“And that—as your Darwin would say—artificial selection.

When enrolling in the seminary, there was an unspoken rule: not to accept the weak, undersized. Boys were brought by their fathers - they looked at their fathers. Those who were to carry the word of God to people should be beautiful, tall, strong people. In addition, they often have a bass or baritone - also an important moment. These were selected. And - a thousand years, since the time of St. Vladimir.

Yes, and o. Pavel, Archpriest of Gorkovsky cathedral, and another grandfather's brother, who ministered in Vilnius, and another brother, a priest in Zvenigorod - they were all tall, strong people. Father Pavel served ten years in the Mordovian camps, worked there at the logging site, and even now, at ninety, he was healthy and cheerful. "Priest's bone!" - said Anton's father, sitting down to smoke, when the grandfather continued slowly and somehow even silently breaking up birch logs with a cleaver. Yes, grandfather was stronger than his father, and after all, his father was not weak either - wiry, hardy, from the peasants of the same palace (in which, however, the remnant of noble blood and dog eyebrows still roamed), who grew up on Tver rye bread - was not inferior to anyone on the mowing, or skidding the forest. And for years - twice as young, and then, after the war, my grandfather was over seventy, he was dark brown-haired, and gray hair only slightly broke through in his thick hair. And Aunt Tamara, even before her death, at ninety, was like a raven's wing.

Grandpa never got sick. But two years ago, when the youngest daughter, Anton's mother, moved to Moscow, his toes on his right foot suddenly began to turn black. Grandmother and older daughters persuaded me to go to the clinic. But in Lately grandfather obeyed only the youngest, she was not there, he didn’t go to the doctor - at ninety-three it’s stupid to go to the doctors, and he stopped showing his leg, saying that everything was gone.

But nothing happened, and when the grandfather nevertheless showed his leg, everyone gasped: the blackness reached the middle of the lower leg. If captured in time, it would be possible to limit the amputation of the fingers. Now I had to cut off the leg at the knee.

Grandfather did not learn to walk on crutches, he turned out to be recumbent; knocked out of the half-century rhythm of all-day work in the garden, in the yard, he became sad and weakened, became nervous. He got angry when the grandmother brought breakfast to bed, moved, clutching the chairs, to the table. Grandmother, out of forgetfulness, served two felt boots. Grandfather yelled at her - so Anton found out that his grandfather could scream. Grandmother fearfully stuffed the second felt boot under the bed, but at lunch and dinner everything started again. For some reason, they did not immediately guess to remove the second felt boot.

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

- Just like in the story of the famous Siberian writer " Deadline”, she said. The librarian of the district library, Ira followed modern literature, but did not remember the names of the authors well, complaining: "There are so many of them."

Anton marveled when he read in his grandfather's letter about inheritance issues. What legacy?

A closet with a hundred books? A hundred-year-old, still Vilna, sofa, which the grandmother called the chaise longue? True, there was a house. But he was old and decrepit. Who needs it?

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

2. Pretenders for the inheritance

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

Among the five grandfather daughters, Tatyana was considered the most beautiful. She was the first to marry - a railway engineer Tataev, an honest and ardent person. In the middle of the war, he punched the head of the movement in the face. Aunt Tanya never specified why, saying only: "well, it was a scoundrel."

Tataev was unarmored and sent to the front. He got into the searchlight team and one night by mistake illuminated not the enemy, but his own plane. The Smershevites did not doze off - he was arrested right there, he spent the night in their arrest dugout, and in the morning they shot him, accusing him of deliberate subversive actions against the Red Army. Having heard this story for the first time in the fifth grade, Anton could not understand how it was possible to compose such nonsense, that a person, being at the location of our troops, among his own, who would immediately seize him, would do such a stupid thing. But the listeners - two soldiers of the Great Patriotic War - were not at all surprised. True, their remarks are “orders?”, “didn’t they get to the numbers?” - were even more incomprehensible, but Anton never asked questions and, although no one warned him, he never recounted home conversations anywhere - maybe that's why they spoke without embarrassment in front of him. Or thought he didn't understand much. Yes, there is only one room.

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

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

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

In the hungry forty-sixth, the grandmother discharged the eldest - Vovka - to Chebachinsk, and he began to live with us. He was silent, never complained about anything. Having severely cut his finger one day, he crawled under the table and sat, collecting the dripping blood into a handful; when filled, carefully poured blood into the slot. He was sick a lot, they gave him red streptocide, which made his trickle on the snow scarlet, which I was very envious of. He was two years older than me, but he only went to the first grade, while I, having enrolled immediately in the second, was already in the third, which I was terribly wondering about before Vovka. Taught by his grandfather to read so early that he could not remember being illiterate, he ridiculed his brother, who read in warehouses. But not for long: he learned to read quickly, and he added and multiplied in his mind by the end of the year already better than me. “Father,” the grandmother sighed. “He did all the calculations without a slide rule.”

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

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

I was shocked. Vovka, who just a year ago read syllables in front of my eyes, now wrote poetry - and even acrostics, the existence of which in nature I had no idea! Much later, Vovka's teacher said that she did not remember another such capable student in thirty years. In his Smorodinovka, Vovka graduated from seven classes and the school of tractor and combine operators. When I arrived at the letter of my grandfather, he still lived there, with his wife, a milkmaid, and four daughters.

Aunt Tanya moved with the rest of the children to Chebachinsk; their father took them out of Smorodinovka in a truck along with a cow, a real Simmental cow, which was not to be abandoned; all the way she mooed and banged her horns against the side. Then he got the middle one, Kolka, to the school of projectionists, which was not so easy - after otitis media, which was poorly healed in childhood, he turned out to be deaf, but a former student of his father was on the commission. Having started working as a projectionist, Kolka showed extraordinary resourcefulness: he sold some kind of fake tickets, which were clandestinely printed for him at a local printing house, and took payment from patients at sessions in tuberculosis sanatoriums. The rogue came out of him first-class. He was only interested in money. Found a rich bride - the daughter of a well-known local speculator Mani Delets. “He will lie under the covers,” the young mother-in-law complained to Honeymoon, and turns back to the wall. I press my chest and everything, and put my foot on him, and then I also turn away. So we lie, ass to ass." After his marriage, he bought himself a motorcycle - his mother-in-law did not give money for a car.

Katya lived with us for the first year, but then she had to be refused - from the first days she stole. She very cleverly stole money, which there was no way to hide from her - she found them in a sewing box, in books, under a radio; took only a part, but tangible. Mom began to carry both salaries, hers and her father's, in a briefcase to school, where he lay safely in the teacher's room. Having lost this income, Katya began to carry silver tea spoons, stockings, once she stole three-liter jar sunflower oil, for which Tamara, another daughter of her grandfather, stood in line for half a day. Mom identified her in a medical school, which was also not easy (she studied badly) - again through a former student. Becoming a nurse, she cheated no worse than her brother. She gave some kind of left injections, dragged medicines from the hospital, arranged fake certificates. Both were greedy, constantly lying, always and everywhere, in large and small things. Grandfather said: “They are only half to blame. Honest poverty is always poverty up to certain limits. Here there was poverty. Terrible - from infancy. Beggars are not moral." Anton believed in his grandfather, but he did not like Katya and Kolka. When the grandfather died, his younger brother, a priest in Lithuania, in Siauliai, where their father's estate once was, sent for burial a large sum. Kolka met the postman and said nothing to anyone. When from about. Vladimir received a letter, everything was revealed, but Kolka said that he had put the money on the window. Now Aunt Tanya lived with him, in a state-owned apartment at the cinema. Apparently, Kolka was coveting the house.

The eldest daughter Tamara, who lived all her life with the elderly, never married, a kind, unrequited creature, and did not realize that she could lay claim to something. She stoked the stove, cooked, washed, washed the floors, drove the cow into the herd. The shepherd drove the herd in the evening only to the outskirts, where the housewives sorted out the cows, and the smart cows went on by themselves. Our Zorka was smart, but sometimes something came over her and she ran across the river to Kamenukha or even further - into the izlogs. The cow had to be found before dark. It happened that Uncle Lenya, grandfather, even mother were looking for her, I tried three times. Nobody has ever found it. Tamara always found. To me, this ability of her seemed supernatural. Father explained: Tamara knows that a cow necessary find. And finds. It wasn't very clear. She was at work all day long, only on Sundays her grandmother let her go to church, and sometimes late in the evening she took out a notebook where she clumsily copied Tolstoy's childhood stories, texts from any textbook that appeared on the table, something from a prayer book, most often one evening prayer: "And grant me, Lord, in this night of this dream to pass away in peace." The children teased her "Shosha" - I don't know where it came from - she was offended. I did not tease, I gave her notebooks, then I brought blouses from Moscow. But later, when Kolka chopped off her apartment and stuffed her into a nursing home in distant Pavlodar, I only sent parcels there from time to time and was going to visit - only a three-hour flight from Moscow - I didn’t visit. There was nothing left of her: neither her notebooks, nor her icons. Only one photo: turning to the camera, she is squeezing out the laundry. For fifteen years she had not seen a single familiar face, none of us, whom she loved so much and to whom she addressed in letters: “The dearest of all.”

The third applicant was Uncle Lenya, the youngest of grandfather's children. Anton recognized him later than his other uncles and aunts - in the thirty-eighth year he was drafted into the army, then the Finnish war began (he got there as a good skier - he was the only one from the entire Siberian battalion to admit it), then - domestic, then - Japanese, then With Far East he was transferred to the far west to fight the Benderites; from the last military expedition, he took out two slogans: “Long live Pan Bender, that wife of his Paraska” and “Long live the twenty-eighth rock of the Zhovtnevoy revolution.” He returned only in the forty-seventh. They said: Lentya is lucky, he was a signalman, but he was not even wounded; True, he was shell-shocked twice. Aunt Larisa believed that this affected his mental abilities. She meant that he enthusiastically played sea battles and cards with his young nephews and nieces, was very upset when he lost, and therefore often cheated, hiding the cards behind the tops of his tarpaulin boots.

And before Anton's eyes, that grandfather's hand from the past floated up when he unbent nails or roofing iron with his fingers. And even more clearly - this hand on the edge of the festive table with a tablecloth and shifted dishes - could it really have been more than thirty years ago?

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

- Well, the proletarian on the intelligentsia!

Is this Pereplyotkin a proletarian?

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

- Well, Lvovich - he also found the Soviet intelligentsia.

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

A volunteer referee checked whether the elbows were on the same line. We started.

Kuzma, Kuzma! they shouted from there.

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

Grandfather's hand stopped moving. Pereplyotkin looked surprised. It can be seen that he gave up, because another rope swelled - on his forehead.

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

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

– Perhaps.

- So what? ..

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

Grandfather despised any gymnastics, not seeing any use in it either for himself or for the household; it is better to split three or four chocks in the morning, throw manure. My father was in solidarity with him, but he summed up the scientific basis: no gymnastics gives such a versatile load as chopping firewood - all muscle groups work. After reading the brochures, Anton said: experts believe that not all muscles are occupied during physical labor, and after any work, you need to do more gymnastics. Grandfather and father laughed together: “If only these specialists could be put at the bottom of a trench or on top of a haystack for half a day! Ask Vasily Illarionovich - he lived in the mines for twenty years next to the workers' barracks, everything is in public there - did he see at least one miner doing exercises after the shift? Vasily Illarionovich never saw such a miner.

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

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

- So what?

“And that—as your Darwin would say—artificial selection.

Yes, and o. Pavel, the archpriest of the Gorky Cathedral, and another brother of my grandfather, who was priest in Vilnius, and another brother, a priest in Zvenigorod - they were all tall, strong people. Father Pavel served ten years in the Mordovian camps, worked there at the logging site, and even now, at ninety, he was healthy and cheerful. "Priest's bone!" - said Anton's father, sitting down to smoke, when the grandfather continued slowly and somehow even silently breaking up birch logs with a cleaver. Yes, grandfather was stronger than his father, and after all, his father was not weak either - wiry, hardy, from the peasants of the same palace (in which, however, the remnant of noble blood and dog eyebrows still roamed), who grew up on Tver rye bread - was not inferior to anyone on the mowing, or skidding the forest. And for years - twice as young, and then, after the war, my grandfather was over seventy, he was dark brown-haired, and gray hair only slightly broke through in his thick hair. And Aunt Tamara, even before her death, at ninety, was like a raven's wing.

* * *

1. Armwrestling in Chebachinsk

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

- Well, the proletarian on the intelligentsia!

Is this Pereplyotkin a proletarian?

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

- Well, Lvovich - he also found the Soviet intelligentsia.

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

A volunteer referee checked whether the elbows were on the same line. We started.

Kuzma, Kuzma! they shouted from there.

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

Grandfather's hand stopped moving. Pereplyotkin looked surprised. It can be seen that he gave up, because another rope swelled - on his forehead.

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

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

– Perhaps.

- So what? ..

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

Grandfather despised any gymnastics, not seeing any use in it either for himself or for the household; it is better to split three or four chocks in the morning, throw manure. My father was in solidarity with him, but he summed up the scientific basis: no gymnastics gives such a versatile load as chopping firewood - all muscle groups work. After reading the brochures, Anton said: experts believe that not all muscles are occupied during physical labor, and after any work, you need to do more gymnastics. Grandfather and father laughed together: “If only these specialists could be put at the bottom of a trench or on top of a haystack for half a day! Ask Vasily Illarionovich - he lived in the mines for twenty years next to the workers' barracks, everything is in public there - did he see at least one miner doing exercises after the shift? Vasily Illarionovich never saw such a miner.

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

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

- So what?

“And that—as your Darwin would say—artificial selection.

Grandpa never got sick. But two years ago, when the youngest daughter, Anton's mother, moved to Moscow, his toes on his right foot suddenly began to turn black. Grandmother and older daughters persuaded me to go to the clinic. But recently, the grandfather obeyed only the youngest, she was not there, he didn’t go to the doctor - at ninety-three it’s stupid to go to the doctors, and he stopped showing his leg, saying that everything was gone.

In the last month, the grandfather completely weakened and ordered to write to all the children and grandchildren to come to say goodbye and "at the same time solve some hereditary issues" - this wording, said the granddaughter Ira, who wrote letters under his dictation, was repeated in all messages.

- Just like in the story of the famous Siberian writer "Deadline", - she said. The librarian of the district library, Ira followed modern literature, but did not remember the names of the authors well, complaining: "There are so many of them."

Anton marveled when he read in his grandfather's letter about inheritance issues. What legacy?

A closet with a hundred books? A hundred-year-old, still Vilna, sofa, which the grandmother called the chaise longue? True, there was a house. But he was old and decrepit. Who needs it?

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

Title: Darkness Falls on the Old Steps

Publisher: Vremya, Moscow, 2018, 640 pages.

« Darkness falls on the old steps"- the only fiction book outstanding philologist and Chekhovologist Alexander Pavlovich Chudakov. The novel received the prestigious Russian Booker of the Decade award and was recognized the best work the beginning of this century. The novel is strange, a friend told me when she started to read. The novel is amazing, she told me when she finished reading. It was the inconsistency in assessments, as well as the bizarre genre of "idyll novel" and Blok's line in the title that made me pay attention to this book. Bought. Started reading. And disappeared.

And now I'm sitting and trying to write a review of a book, the plot of which cannot be described in two words and even in two sentences. Because it doesn't exist. Yes, yes, there is no coherent plot, there are no rapidly developing events, there is no familiar for the novel love line. And there is not even a single form of narration: the author now and then switches from the first person to the third and vice versa. This, indeed, at first surprises, even somehow annoying. But as soon as you delve into reading, you completely stop noticing this feature. It is a feature, and not a drawback, as some readers believe, who do not share the decisions of the Russian Booker jury.

The idea of the author was to write the history of modern young man based on autobiographical facts. But still it piece of art. And we are not allowed to forget about this by the fictional North Kazakhstan city of Chebachinsk, instead of the real Shchuchinsk, and the boy Anton, about whom Chudakov writes in the third person, but sometimes suddenly introduces the author’s “I” into the text.

The events described in the novel take place in the time period from the end of the Great Patriotic War until the mid eighties. The small town of Chebachinsk is something like a little Switzerland in the north of Kazakhstan. Paradise place, where, however, no one from the union capital goes of their own free will. The city of settlers, evacuees and those who wisely chose not to wait for exile, to leave the heart of their homeland of their own free will. The whole book is a collection of stories about these people, who in one way or another entered the lives of the main characters.

There are two of them in the center of the novel. The first is grandfather. The work begins with his appearance, and ends with the story of how he died. According to the author, grandfather knew two worlds. One - understandable and familiar - collapsed with the advent of chaos and a change in values. In its place came the unreal world, which the grandfather could neither understand nor accept. But old world remained in his soul, and he built his life and the life of his family, based on the postulates of that real world. Every day he carried on an internal dialogue with his spiritual and secular writers, with his seminary mentors, with friends, father, brothers, although he never saw any of them again.

The second hero, placed at the center of the novel, although not as catchy as the grandfather, is the narrator himself, "the smart boy Anton Stremoukhov." Child new era who absorbed the values of the grandfather's world. Can you imagine how difficult it is for him to get along with the absurdity of the surrounding reality? He does not find common language with the majority of classmates and classmates at the university, women leave him because of his almost maniacal love for a reasonable, rational structure of the world. The annotation to the novel says that Novaya Gazeta called it an intellectual robinsonade. This is probably the most precise definition to describe those life upheavals that influenced the formation of the personality of the hero.

If you think about it, then grandfather, he is also like that same Robinson, thrown to the outskirts of life, but not surrendered. Inner rod. Strength of mind. Loyalty to beliefs. Is this not best defense from destructive external circumstances.

It would seem that once we are talking about the life of settlers, minor notes full of drama should prevail in the stories. But no. The beauty is that the book is surprisingly kind, light and delightfully light. Life is not easy, but the look at it is bright. Exactly. There is no evil and resentment. The pain did not break, did not embitter. There is only light sadness.

You know how it is. You are on the bus. Stop. The door does not have time to open, as a kind of mug breaks from the street with a cry and claims. Wants to sit down. And in all directions it splashes with its anger. I just don't want to give up this place.
Or here's another story. An old woman of about eighty will enter the bus. All so intelligent, light, transparent. It seems that the blow will disappear. He will stand modestly in a corner, so that God forbid someone does not interfere. And you immediately want to give up your seat. Not because she's older, but because she's like that. There is a special light coming from her. Jump off: "Sit down, please." And she: “What are you, what are you! Do not worry". Get embarrassed. She doesn't understand what it's for. So much has endured in life, standing on the bus is a mere trifle.

So it is in the book. A special light is on every page. Quiet radiance of Life.

And how much gentle humor is in the novel! Reading the chapter about the spelling genius Vaska Eighty-Five, I laughed out loud. Now all the time, when I see a brick, I will remember this Vaska with his “kerdpich”. That's right - "kerdpich", and also "honest" and many, many others funny words, because Vaska firmly grasped the main orthographic postulate: words are not written the way they are heard.
And about how he recited poetry, you can’t tell at all - just read!

Talking about the book, I want to quote at least a few pages. And then more and more. But, perhaps, I will confine myself to the duty phrase: the book is written in excellent Russian, where each line evokes real philological ecstasy. Myself main character- the prototype of the author of the novel, from childhood was fascinated beautiful words, names, surnames. Particularly intricate in syllables and repeated with pleasure before going to bed in order to better remember. Here is an unusual "childhood" - from the novel.

I love books where it's all in the details. And here I just enjoyed these endless little things that allow you to visibly touch the memory. To history. The novel is filled with the rules of old etiquette, all kinds of recipes and life hacks of that time. How to cook soap, melt a candle, make sugar from beets, live in times of famine on only carrots and starch jelly.
And also: what condoms were made of under Louis XIV, how Ford came up with automotive glass where "Evening Bells" came from.

The novel is a revelation. The novel is nostalgia. With tears on the last pages and understanding, it seems to me, of the main message:

Life is changing. Some people leave, others appear. But the departed people are alive as long as we remember and love them. This makes sense. The meaning of this life.

It is foolish to say that I highly recommend the book for reading. Strong work. Powerful emotions. Older people will definitely find in the novel something to remember, something to think about. And for young people - a wonderful digression into the life of peers from the last century. 640 pages of the book are read in one breath. You just open it ... And then you will say to your friend: “Read it for sure! She's so weird and so amazing."

... my soul will look at you from there, and you, whom I loved, will drink tea on our veranda, talk, pass a cup or bread with simple earthly movements; you will become different – older, older, older. You will have another life, a life without me; I will look and think: do you remember me, my dearest?

In the photo from the book: A.P. Chudakov (1938 - 2005) at his dacha in Alyokhnovo.

Have you read a book? Share your impressions in the comments below!

Grandpa was very strong. When he, in his faded shirt, with his sleeves turned up high, worked in the garden or cut a shank for a shovel (when resting, he always cut shank, in the corner of the barn there was a supply of them for decades), Anton said something to himself

something like: “balls of muscles rolled under his skin” (Anton liked to put it bookishly). But even now, when my grandfather was over ninety, when he struggled out of bed to take a glass from the bedside table, a round ball rolled familiarly under the rolled up sleeve of his undershirt, and Anton grinned.

Are you laughing? - said the grandfather. Have I become weak? He became old, but he was young before. Why don't you tell me, like the hero of your tramp writer: "What, you're dying?" And I would answer: "Yes, I'm dying!" And before Anton's eyes, that grandfather's hand from the past floated up when he unbent nails or roofing iron with his fingers. And even more clearly - this hand on the edge of the festive table with a tablecloth and shifted dishes - was it really more than thirty years ago? Yes, it was at the wedding of Pereplyotkin's son, who had just returned from the war. On one side of the table sat the blacksmith Kuzma Pereplyotkin himself, and from him, smiling embarrassed, but not surprised, Bondarenko, a slaughterhouse fighter, whose hand had just been pressed to the tablecloth by a blacksmith in a competition that is now called arm wrestling, but then was not called anything. There was no need to be surprised: in the town of Chebachinsk there was not a person whose hand Pereplyotkin could not put. They said that earlier his younger brother, who died in the camps, who worked as a hammerer in his forge, could do the same. Grandfather carefully hung on the back of a chair a black English Boston jacket, left over from a three-piece sewn before the first war, double-faced, but still looking, and rolled up the sleeve of a white cambric shirt, the last of two dozen taken out in the fifteenth year from Vilna. He firmly put his elbow on the table, closed his opponent's palm, and it immediately sank into the blacksmith's huge, razor-sharp brush.

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

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

Well, proletarian against the intelligentsia!

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

Well, Lvovich also found the Soviet intelligentsia.

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

A volunteer referee checked whether the elbows were on the same line. We started.

Kuzma, Kuzma! - shouted from there.

Enthusiasm is premature, - Anton recognized the creaky voice of Professor Resenkampf.

Grandfather's hand stopped moving. Pereplyotkin looked surprised. It can be seen that he gave up, because another rope swelled - on his forehead.

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

Grandfather, - said Anton, giving him a glass of water, - and then, at the wedding, after the war, you could put Pereplyotkin down, right?

Perhaps.

So what?..

For what. For him, this is a professional pride. Why put a person in an awkward position. The other day, when my grandfather was in the hospital, before going around the doctor with a retinue of students, he took off and hid the pectoral cross in the nightstand. He crossed himself twice and, glancing at Anton, smiled weakly. Grandfather's brother, oh Pavel, said that in his youth he liked to brag about strength. They unload the rye - he will move the worker away, put his shoulder under a five-pound bag, the other - under the second one, and go, without bending, to the barn. No, it was impossible to imagine such a boastful grandfather.

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