home › Reviews › The last bow is a distant and near fairy tale. Viktor Astafiev - The Last Bow (a story in stories)

The last bow is a distant and near fairy tale. Viktor Astafiev - The Last Bow (a story in stories)

In the backyard of our village, among a grassy clearing, stood on stilts a long log building with a hemming of boards. It was called "mangazina", which was also adjacent to the delivery - here the peasants of our village brought artel equipment 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 in which you can throw them and grow bread, he is a peasant, a master, and not a beggar.

Away from the import - guardhouse. She snuggled under the scree, in the wind and eternal shade. Above the guardroom, high on the slope, larches and pines grew. Behind her, a key smoked from the stones in a blue haze. It spread along the foot of the ridge, marking itself with dense sedge and meadowsweet flowers in the summer, in winter - a quiet park from under the snow and kuruzhak along the bushes crawling from the ridges.

There were two windows in the guardhouse: one near the door and one on the side towards the village. That window, which is towards the village, was covered with wild cherry blossoms, stingers, hops and various foolishness that had bred from the key. The guardhouse had no roof. Hop swaddled her so that she looked like a one-eyed shaggy head. An overturned bucket stuck out of the hops like a pipe, the door opened immediately to 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 guardroom. He was small, lame on one leg, and he had glasses. The only person in the village who had glasses. They evoked shy courtesy not only from us children, but also from adults.

Vasya lived quietly and peacefully, did no harm to anyone, but rarely anyone came to him. Only the most desperate children stealthily peeped into the window of the guardhouse and could not see anyone, but they were still frightened of something and ran away screaming.

At the fence, the children pushed around from early spring until autumn: they played hide and seek, crawled on their belly under the log entrance to the fence gates, or buried under the high floor behind piles, and even hid in the bottom of the barrel; cut into grandmas, into chika. Tes hem was beaten with punks - beats poured with lead. At the blows that resounded under the vaults of fuss, a sparrow-like commotion flared up inside her.

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

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

I remember that Vasya once came to his grandmother and asked her something. Grandmother sat Vasya to drink tea, brought dry herbs and began to brew it in a cast-iron. She looked pitifully at Vasya and sighed.

Vasya drank tea not in our way, not in a bite and not from a saucer, he drank directly from a glass, laid out a teaspoon on a saucer and did not drop it on the floor. His glasses flashed menacingly, his cropped head looked small, the size of a trouser. Gray streaked across his black beard. And all of it seems to be salty, and coarse salt dried it up.

Vasya ate shyly, drank only one glass of tea, and no matter how much his grandmother tried to persuade him, he did not eat anything else, bowed ceremoniously and took away in one hand an earthenware pot with a broth from grass, in the other - a bird-cherry stick.

Lord, Lord! Grandmother sighed, closing the door behind Vasya. - You are a hard lot ... A person goes blind.

In the evening I heard Vasya's violin.

It was early autumn. The gates of the portage are wide open. A draft was walking in them, stirring shavings in the bins repaired for grain. The smell of rancid, musty grain was drawn to the gate. A flock of children, not taken to the arable land because of their youth, played robber detectives. The game was sluggish and soon died out completely. In autumn, not like in spring, it is somehow badly played. One by one, the children wandered home, and I stretched out on the heated log entrance and began to pull out the grains that had sprouted in the cracks. I was waiting for the carts to rattle on the hillside in order to intercept our people from the arable land, ride home, and there, you see, they would let the horse take to the watering place.

Behind the Yenisei, behind the Guard Bull, it got dark. In the valley of the river Karaulka, waking up, a large star blinked once or twice and began to glow. She looked like a burdock. Behind the ridges, over the tops of the mountains, stubbornly, not in autumn, a strip of dawn smoldered. But then darkness descended upon her. Dawn pretended like a luminous window with shutters. Until morning.

It became quiet and lonely. The guardhouse is not visible. It 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 out by a spring. From behind the shadow, bats began to circle, squeak above me, fly into the open gates of the import, catch flies there and nocturnal butterflies, nothing else.

I was afraid to breathe loudly, squeezed into the corner of the fuss. Along the ridge, above Vasya's hut, carts rumbled, hooves clattered: people were returning from the fields, from the castles, from work, but I did not dare to peel off the rough logs, I could not overcome the paralyzing fear that had come over me. Windows lit up in the village. Smoke from the chimneys stretched towards the Yenisei. In the thickets of the Fokinsky River, someone was looking for a cow and then called her in a gentle voice, then scolded her with the last words.

In the sky, next to that star that still shone alone over the Guard River, someone threw a stub of the moon, and it, like a bitten half of an apple, did not roll anywhere, bare, orphan, chilly glassy, and everything around was glassy from it. A shadow fell over the whole glade, and a shadow fell from me too, narrow and nosy.

Across the Fokinsky River - at hand - the crosses in the cemetery turned white, something creaked in the delivery - the cold crawled under the shirt, along the back, under the skin, to the heart. I already leaned my hands on the logs in order to push off at once, fly to the very gates and rattle the latch so that all the dogs in the village would wake up.

But from under the ridge, from the weaves of hops and bird cherry, from the deep interior of the earth, music arose and nailed me to the wall.

It became even more terrible: on the left a cemetery, in front a ridge with a hut, on the right a terrible place outside the village, where many white bones are lying around and where a long time ago, grandmother said, a man was crushed, behind it is a dark mess, behind it is a village, vegetable gardens covered with thistles, from a distance similar to black puffs of smoke.

I'm alone, alone, such a horror all around, and also music - a violin. A very, very lonely violin. And she doesn't threaten at all. Complains. And there's nothing creepy at all. And there is nothing to be afraid of. Fool-fool! Is it possible to 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 clung to the water with their lips, drinks, drinks and cannot get drunk - his mouth and inside are so dry.

For some reason, one sees the Yenisei, quiet at night, on it is a raft with a spark. An unknown person shouts from the raft: “Which village-ah?” - For what? Where is he sailing? And another convoy on the Yenisei is seen, long, creaky. He also goes somewhere. Dogs are running on the side of the convoy. The horses move slowly, drowsily. And you 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 her hair on her head.

This music speaks of sadness, it speaks of my illness, how I was sick with malaria all 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, mother put a cold hand with blue nails to her forehead. I screamed and did not hear my scream.

In the hut, a screwed lamp burned all night, my grandmother showed me the corners, she shone with a lamp under the stove, under the bed, they say, there was nobody.

I also remember a little girl, white, funny, her hand dries. The guards took her to the city to be treated.

And again the convoy arose.

All he goes somewhere, goes, hiding in the icy hummocks, in the frosty fog. The horses are getting smaller and smaller, and the fog has hidden the last one. Lonely, somehow empty, ice, cold and motionless dark rocks with motionless forests.

But the Yenisei was gone, neither winter nor summer; the living vein of the key behind Vasya's hut began to beat again. The spring began to grow stout, and more than one spring, two, three, a formidable stream is already whipping from the rock, rolling stones, breaking trees, uprooting them, carrying them, twisting them. He is about to sweep away the hut under the mountain, wash away the mess and bring down everything from the mountains. Thunders will strike in the sky, lightning will flash, mysterious fern flowers will flare up from them. From the flowers the forest will light up, the earth will light up, and even the Yenisei will not flood this fire - there is nothing to stop such a terrible storm!

“Yes, what is it?! Where are the people? What are they watching?! Vasya would be tied up!”

But the violin extinguished everything by itself. Again, one person yearns, again something is a pity, again someone is going somewhere, maybe in a convoy, maybe on a raft, maybe on foot goes to distant distances.

The world did not burn, nothing collapsed. Everything is in place. Moon and star in place. The village, already without lights, in place, a cemetery in eternal silence and peace, a guardhouse under a ridge, embraced by burning bird cherry trees and a quiet string of a violin.

Everything is in place. Only my heart, filled with grief and rapture, how it started, how it jumped, beats at the throat, wounded for life by music.

What did the music tell me about? About the convoy? About the dead mother? About a girl whose hand dries? What did she complain about? Whom did you get angry at? Why is it so anxious and bitter to me? Why feel sorry for yourself? And those out there are sorry for those who sleep soundly in the cemetery. Among them, under a hillock, lies my mother, next to her are two sisters whom I have not even seen: they lived before me, lived a little, - and my mother went to them, left me alone in this world, where an elegant mourning woman beats high against the window - a heart.

The music ended unexpectedly, 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 pain. But already, besides it, of its own accord, some other violin soared higher, higher, and with a fading pain, a moan squeezed between the teeth, broke off in the sky ...

For a long time I sat in the little corner of the fuss, licking off the large tears that rolled down on my lips. I didn't have the strength to get up and leave. I wanted to die here, in a dark corner, near the rough logs, to die abandoned and forgotten by everyone. The violin was not heard, the light in Vasya's hut was not on. “Is Vasya already dead?” - I thought and cautiously made my way to the guardhouse. My feet got stuck in the cold and viscous black soil, soaked with a spring. Tenacious, always cold hop leaves touched my face, cones rustled dryly over my head, smelling of spring water. I lifted the intertwined hop strings hanging over the window and peered through the window. Slightly flickering, a burned-out iron stove was heated in the hut. With a flickering light, she marked a table against the wall, a trestle bed in the corner. Vasya was reclining on the couch, covering his eyes with his left hand. His spectacles lay with their paws up on the table, flashing on and off. A violin rested on Vasya's chest, a long stick-bow was clutched in his right hand.

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

I sat down on the threshold, staring fixedly at the hand holding the smooth wand.

Play, uncle, more.

Whatever you want, uncle.

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

Throw wood in the stove.

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

It took a long time before I got to know the music. It was the same as the one I had heard at the haul, and at the same time quite different. Softer, kinder, anxiety and pain were only guessed in her, the violin no longer groaned, her soul no longer oozed blood, the fire did not rage around and the stones did not crumble.

The fire in the stove fluttered and fluttered, but maybe there, behind the hut, on the ridge, a fern lit up. They say that if you find a fern flower, you will become invisible, you can take all the wealth from the rich and give it to the poor, steal Vasilisa the Beautiful from Koshchei the Immortal and return it to Ivanushka, you can even sneak into the cemetery and revive your own mother.

The firewood of the cut dead wood flared up - pine, the pipe knee heated up to purple, there was a smell of red-hot wood, boiled resin on the ceiling. The hut was filled with heat and heavy red light. The fire danced, the overheated stove clicked merrily, firing large sparks as it went.

The shadow of the musician, broken at the waist, darted around the hut, stretched out along the wall, became transparent, like a reflection in the water, then the shadow moved away into a corner, disappeared in it, and then a living musician, a living Vasya the Pole, was indicated there. His shirt was unbuttoned, his feet were bare, his eyes were dark-rimmed. Vasya lay with his cheek on the violin, and it seemed to me that it was calmer, more comfortable for him, and he heard things in the violin that I would never hear.

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

In the semi-darkness, I tried to look only at the shuddering, darting or smoothly sliding bow, at the flexible, rhythmically swaying shadow along with the violin. And then Vasya again began to appear to me as something like a magician from a distant fairy tale, and not a lonely cripple, to whom no one cares. I stared so hard, listened so hard that I shuddered when Vasya spoke.

This music was written by a man who was deprived of the most precious thing. - Vasya thought aloud, without stopping playing. - If a person has no mother, no father, but there is a homeland, he is not yet an orphan. - For some time, Vasya thought to himself. I was waiting. - Everything passes: love, regret for it, the bitterness of loss, even the pain from wounds passes, but the longing for the motherland never, never goes away ...

The violin again touched the same strings that had become heated during the previous playing and had not yet cooled down. Vasin's hand trembled again in pain, but immediately resigned, his fingers, gathered into a fist, unclenched.

This music was written by my fellow countryman Oginsky in a tavern - that is the name of our visiting house, - continued Vasya. - I wrote at the border, saying goodbye to my homeland. He sent her his last greetings. The composer is long gone. 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 spoke, the violin sang, the violin faded away. Her voice became quieter, quieter, it stretched out in the darkness like a thin, light cobweb. The web trembled, swayed, and almost soundlessly broke off.

I removed my hand from my throat and exhaled that breath that I held with my chest, with my hand, because I was afraid to break off the bright cobweb. But still, she broke off. The stove went out. Layering, coals fell asleep 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 bracket, I would have fallen. My legs were all covered in needles and as if they weren't mine at all.

Thank you, uncle, - I whispered.

Vasya moved in the corner and laughed embarrassedly or asked "For what?".

I don't know why...

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

Trusting in the kindness shed by a faint heavenly light over the whole village and all over 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 about you anymore.

Dropping 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 my grandmother and me, dropped sharp-feathered wings on my mother's bump. At the neighboring graves, birch trees were loosened with threads with a yellow leaf to the very ground. There was no longer a leaf on the tops of the birches, and the bare twigs slashed the stub of the moon, which now hung over the very cemetery. Everything was quiet. Dew appeared on the grass. There was complete silence. Then, from the ridges, a chilly chill perceptibly pulled. Thicker flowed from the birch leaves. Dew glassed on the grass. My legs froze from brittle dew, one leaf rolled under my shirt, I felt chilly, and I wandered from the cemetery into the dark streets of the village between the sleeping houses to the Yenisei.

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

I don't know how long I sat on the steep ravine above the Yenisei. He made noise at the borrowing place, on stone steers. Water, knocked down from a smooth course by gobies, knitted into knots, waded heavily near the banks and in circles, rolled back to the rod in funnels. Our restless river. Some forces are always disturbing her, she is in an eternal struggle with herself and with the rocks that squeezed her from both sides.

But this restlessness of hers, this ancient riot of hers did not excite, but calmed me. Because, probably, it was autumn, the moon was overhead, the grass was rocky with dew, and the nettles along the banks, not at all like dope, rather like some wonderful plants; and also because, probably, Vasya's music about indestructible love for the motherland sounded in me. And the Yenisei, not sleeping even at night, a steep-browed bull on the other side, a sawing of spruce tops over a distant pass, a silent village behind my back, a grasshopper, with its last strength working in defiance of autumn in nettles, it seems that it is 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. My grandmother must have guessed from my face that something had happened in my soul, and did not scold me.

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

Baba, I heard the violin.

Ah, - answered the grandmother, - Vasya the Pole is someone else's, father, he plays, incomprehensible. From his music, the women cry, and the men get drunk and run amok ...

Who is he?

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

I hugged my grandmother.

What a cold one! And wet feet! They will hurt again. - Grandma tucked a blanket under me, stroked my head. - Vasya is a man without a clan-tribe. His father and mother were from a distant country - Poland. People there don't speak our way, they don't pray like we do. Their king is called the king. The Russian tsar captured the Polish land, they didn’t share something with the king ... Are you sleeping?

I would sleep. I have to get up with the roosters. - Grandmother, in order to get rid of me as soon as possible, told me on the run that in this distant land people rebelled against the Russian Tsar, and they were exiled to us, to Siberia. Vasya's parents were also brought here. Vasya was born on a cart, under an escort's sheepskin coat. And his name is not Vasya at all, but Stasya - Stanislav in their language. This is ours, the village ones, they changed it. - Are you sleeping? Grandma asked again.

Ah, to you! Well, Vasya's parents died. They tormented themselves, tormented themselves 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, takes care of her more than he takes care of himself. And he himself had grown old, when they did not notice. Oh Lord, forgive us, and we are not young! And so Vasya lived near the store, in watchmen. They didn't go to war. His wet baby's leg was chilled on the cart... So he lives... to die soon... And so do we...

Grandmother spoke more quietly, more indistinctly, and went to bed with a sigh. I didn't disturb her. I lay there, thinking, trying to comprehend human life, but none of this venture worked out for me.

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

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

Her door was open. Near the hut crowded people. People entered it without hats and came out sighing, with meek, saddened faces.

Vasya was carried out in a small, as if boyish, coffin. The face of the deceased was covered with a cloth. There were no flowers in the domino, people did not carry wreaths. Several old women dragged behind the coffin, no one was crying. Everything was done in businesslike silence. The dark-faced old woman, the former headman of the church, read prayers as she walked and cast a cold glance at the abandoned mangazin, with the gates that had fallen, the mangazin torn from the roof with clefts, and condemningly shook her head.

I went to the guardroom. The iron stove from the middle was removed. There was a cold hole in the ceiling, and drops fell into it over the hanging roots of grass and hops. There are shavings scattered on the floor. An old simple bed was rolled up at the head of the bunks. A watch mallet, a broom, an ax, a shovel lay under the bunks. On the window, behind the tabletop, I could see an earthenware bowl, a wooden mug with a broken handle, a spoon, a comb, and for some reason I did not immediately notice a glass of water. It contains a branch of bird cherry with swollen and already bursting buds. Glasses looked at me with empty glasses from the tabletop.

"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 put my spectacles in 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 group after her, crossed the logs of the Fokinsky River, tipsy from the spring flood, climbed to the cemetery along the slope, covered with a green fog of awakened grass.

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

Expenses ... expensive ... the village council does not hurt ...

I already knew how to think a little and 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, asked gloomily:

Whose violin?

Vasina, father, Vasina, - my grandmother took her eyes off me and stared at the back of the dark-faced old woman. - To the domino ... Sam! .. - my grandmother leaned towards me and quickly whispered, adding a step.

Before the people were about to cover Vasya with the lid, I squeezed forward and, without saying a word, put the violin and the bow on his chest, threw on the violin a few living mother-stepmother flowers, which I had plucked from the bridge.

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

I watched as the coffin was nailed down - is it strong? The first one threw a handful of earth into Vasya's grave, as if his closest relative, and after people sorted out their shovels, towels and scattered along the paths of the cemetery 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, something then waited. And he knew that there was nothing to wait for, but still there was no strength and desire to get up and leave.

In one summer, Vasya's empty guardhouse collapsed. The ceiling collapsed, flattened, pressed the hut into the midst of stingers, hops and Chernobyl. For a long time rotten logs stuck out of the weeds, but even they gradually became covered with dope; the thread of the key pierced a new channel for itself and flowed over the place where the hut stood. But the spring soon began to wither, and in the dry summer of 1933 it completely withered. And immediately the bird cherry trees began to wilt, the hops degenerated, and the mixed herb foolishness subsided.

The man left, and life in this place stopped. But the village lived, the children grew up to replace those who left the earth. While Vasya the Pole was alive, the fellow villagers treated him differently: some did not notice him as an extra person, others even teased him, frightened the children with him, others felt sorry for the wretched person. But then 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 he would not be remembered with a kind word on his parents' day and on other quiet holidays, and it turned out that in an inconspicuous life there was Vasya the Pole, like a righteous man and helped people with humility , respectfulness to be better, kind to each other.

During the war, some villain began to steal crosses from the village cemetery for firewood, he was the first to carry away a 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, and they will remember him with a sad long sigh, and it is felt that it is both blissful and bitter to remember him.

During the last autumn of the war, I was on duty near the cannons in a small, broken Polish town. It was the first foreign city that I saw in my life. It was no different from the destroyed cities of Russia. And it smelled the same: burning, corpses, dust. Between the mutilated houses along the streets, littered with crowbars, foliage, paper, soot circled. A dome of fire stood gloomily over the city. It weakened, descended to the houses, fell into the streets and alleys, split up into tired fires. But there was a long, dull explosion, the dome was thrown up into the dark sky, and everything around was lit up with a heavy crimson light. The leaves were torn off the trees, the heat swirled above, and there they decayed.

Artillery or mortar raids continually fell on the burning ruins, planes nudged them in the air, German rockets outside the city unevenly drew the front line, showering sparks from the darkness into a raging fiery cauldron, where the human refuge writhed in the last convulsions.

It seemed to me that I was alone in this burning city and nothing alive was left on earth. This feeling is constantly present in the night, but it is especially depressing at the sight of ruin and death. But I found out that not far away - only to jump over a green hedge, stinged with fire - our calculations were sleeping in an empty hut, and this 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 wept at the ruins, pulled something out of the conflagrations. 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 out. During the bombing, a corner fell off from this house, exposing the walls with dry-cheeked saints and Madonnas painted on them, looking through the soot with blue mournful eyes. These saints and Madonnas stared at me until dark. I was embarrassed for myself, for the people, under the reproachful glances of the saints, and at night, no, no, yes, the faces with damaged heads on long necks were snatched out by the reflections of fires.

I was sitting on the carriage of a cannon with a carbine clutched in my knees and shaking my head, listening to the lone organ in the midst of the war. Once, after I listened to the violin, I wanted to die from incomprehensible sadness and delight. Was stupid. Small was. I saw so many deaths afterwards that there was no more hateful, accursed word for me than "death." And therefore, it must be, the music that I listened to in childhood broke in me, and what frightened me in childhood was not at all scary, life had such horrors, such fears in store for us ...

Yes, the music is the same, and I seem to be the same, and my throat squeezed, squeezed, but there are no tears, no childish delight and pity, pure, childish pity. Music unfolded the soul, as the fire of war unfolded houses, exposing now the saints on the wall, then the bed, then the rocking chair, then the piano, then the rags of the poor, the wretched dwelling of the beggar, hidden from human eyes - poverty and holiness - everything, everything was exposed, from all over clothes were torn off, everything was humiliated, everything was turned inside out with a dirty inside out, and because of this, apparently, the old music turned its side to me, sounded like an ancient battle cry, called somewhere, forced to do something, so that these fires would go out, so that people they did not huddle against the burning ruins, so that they would go into their house, under the roof, to their relatives and loved ones, so that the sky, our eternal sky, would not throw up explosions and would not burn with hellish fire.

The music thundered over the city, drowning out the explosions of shells, the rumble of aircraft, the crackle and rustle of burning trees. Music dominated the numb ruins, the same music that, like a sigh of his native land, was kept in the heart of a man who had never seen his homeland, but yearned for it all his life.

Uval is a long hill with gentle slopes and a flat top.

Jacket - frost.

Zhalica is a plant of the nettle family.

Durnina - any weed plant.

The ravine is a narrow valley.

Sukhostoina - a tree withered on the vine.

Yar is a steep precipitous coast.

Strezhen is the place of the highest speed of the current and the depth of the river.

Last bow

Victor Astafiev
Last bow
Story in stories
Sing, starling,
Burn, my torch,
Shine, star, over the traveler in the steppe.
Al. Domnin
Book One
Far and near fairy tale
Zorka's song
Trees grow for everyone
Geese in the polynya
The smell of hay
Horse with pink mane
Monk in new pants
Guardian angel
Boy in a white shirt
Autumn sadness and joy
Photo without me
Grandma's holiday
book two
Burn, burn bright
Stryapuhina joy
The night is dark dark
The legend of the glass pot
Pied
Uncle Philip - ship's mechanic
Chipmunk on the cross
carp death
No shelter
Book Three
Premonition of ice drift
Zaberega
Somewhere there is a war
Magpie
Love potion
soy candy
Feast after the Victory
Last bow
demise
hammered head
Evening thoughts
Comments
* BOOK ONE *
Far and near fairy tale
In the backyard of our village, among a grassy clearing, stood on stilts a long log building with a hemming of boards. It was called "mangazina", which also adjoined the delivery - here the peasants of our village brought artel equipment and seeds, it was called "public fund". If the house burns down. even if 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 in which you can throw them and grow bread, he is a peasant, a master, and not a beggar.
Away from the imports is a guardhouse. She snuggled under the scree, in the wind and eternal shade. Above the guardhouse, high on the hillside, larch and pine trees grew. Behind her, a key smoked from the stones in a blue haze. It spread along the foot of the ridge, marking itself with dense sedge and meadowsweet flowers in the summer, in winter - a quiet park from under the snow and kuruzhak along the bushes crawling from the ridges.
There were two windows in the guardhouse: one near the door and one on the side towards the village. That window, which is towards the village, was overwhelmed with wild cherry blossoms, stingers, hops and various foolishness that had bred from the spring. The guardhouse had no roof. Hop swaddled her so that she looked like a one-eyed shaggy head. An overturned bucket stuck out of the hops like a pipe, the door opened immediately to 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 guardroom. He was small, lame on one leg, and he had glasses. The only person in the village who had glasses. They evoked shy courtesy not only from us children, but also from adults.
Vasya lived quietly and peacefully, did no harm to anyone, but rarely anyone came to him. Only the most desperate children stealthily peeped into the window of the guardhouse and could not see anyone, but they were still frightened of something and ran away screaming.
At the fence, the children pushed around from early spring until autumn: they played hide and seek, crawled on their belly under the log entrance to the fence gates, or buried under the high floor behind piles, and even hid in the bottom of the barrel; cut into grandmas, into chika. The hems were beaten with punks - beats poured with lead. At the blows that resounded under the vaults of fuss, a sparrow-like commotion flared up inside her.
Here, near the import, I was introduced to work - I twisted the winnowing machine with the children in turn and here for the first time in my life I heard music - a violin ...
The violin was rarely, very, really rare, played by Vasya the Pole, that mysterious, out of this world person who necessarily comes into the life of every boy, every girl and remains in memory forever. It seems that such a mysterious person was supposed to live in a hut on chicken legs, in a musty place, under a ridge, and so that the light in it barely flickered, and that an owl would laugh drunkenly over the chimney at night, and that a key would smoke behind the hut. and so that no one, no one, knows what is happening in the hut and what the owner is thinking about.
I remember that Vasya once came to his grandmother and asked something from his nose. Grandmother sat Vasya to drink tea, brought dry herbs and began to brew it in a cast-iron. She looked pitifully at Vasya and sighed.
Vasya drank tea not in our way, not in a bite and not from a saucer, he drank directly from a glass, laid out a teaspoon on a saucer and did not drop it on the floor. His glasses flashed menacingly, his cropped head looked small, the size of a trouser. Gray streaked across his black beard. And all of it seems to be salty, and coarse salt dried it up.
Vasya ate shyly, drank only one glass of tea, and, no matter how much his grandmother tried to persuade him, he did not eat anything else, bowed ceremoniously and took away in one hand an earthenware pot with herbal tea, in the other - a bird-cherry stick.
- Lord, Lord! Grandmother sighed, closing the door behind Vasya. - You are a heavy lot ... A person goes blind.
In the evening I heard Vasya's violin.
It was early autumn. The gates are thrown wide open. A draft was walking in them, stirring shavings in the bins repaired for grain. The smell of rancid, musty grain was drawn to the gate. A flock of children, not taken to the arable land because of their youth, played robber detectives. The game was sluggish and soon died out completely. In autumn, not like in spring, it is somehow badly played. One by one, the children wandered home, and I stretched out on the heated log entrance and began to pull out the grains that had sprouted in the cracks. I was waiting for the carts to rattle on the hillside in order to intercept our people from the arable land, ride home, and there, you see, they would let the horse take to the watering place.
Behind the Yenisei, behind the Guard Bull, it got dark. In the valley of the river Karaulka, waking up, a large star blinked once or twice and began to glow. She looked like a burdock. Behind the ridges, over the tops of the mountains, stubbornly, not in autumn, a strip of dawn smoldered. But then darkness descended upon her. Dawn pretended like a luminous window with shutters. Until morning.
It became quiet and lonely. The guardhouse is not visible. It 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 out by a spring. From behind the shadow, bats began to circle, squeak above me, fly into the open gates of the import, catch flies there and nocturnal butterflies, nothing else.
I was afraid to breathe loudly, squeezed into the corner of the fuss. Along the ridge, above Vasya's hut, carts rumbled, hooves clattered: people were returning from the fields, from the castles, from work, but I did not dare to peel off the rough logs, I could not overcome the paralyzing fear that had come over me. Windows lit up in the village. Smoke from the chimneys stretched towards the Yenisei. In the thickets of the Fokinsky River, someone was looking for a cow and then called her in a gentle voice, then scolded her with the last words.
In the sky, next to that star that still shone alone over the Guard River, someone threw a stub of the moon, and it, like a bitten half of an apple, did not roll anywhere, bare, orphan, chilly glassy, and everything around was glassy from it. A shadow fell over the whole glade, and a shadow fell from me too, narrow and nosy.
Across the Fokinsky River - at hand - the crosses in the cemetery turned white, something creaked in the delivery - the cold crept under the shirt, along the back, under the skin. to the heart. I already leaned my hands on the logs in order to push off at once, fly to the very gates and rattle the latch so that all the dogs in the village would wake up.
But from under the ridge, from the weaves of hops and bird cherry, from the deep interior of the earth, music arose and nailed me to the wall.
It became even more terrible: on the left a cemetery, in front a ridge with a hut, on the right a terrible place outside the village, where many white bones are lying around and where a long time ago, grandmother said, a man was crushed, behind it is a dark mess, behind it is a village, vegetable gardens covered with thistles, from a distance similar to black puffs of smoke.
I'm alone, alone, such a horror all around, and also music - a violin. A very, very lonely violin. And she doesn't threaten at all. Complains. And there's nothing creepy at all. And there is nothing to be afraid of. Fool-fool! Is it possible to 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 leaned his lips to the water, drinks, drinks and cannot get drunk - his mouth and inside are so dry.
For some reason, one sees the Yenisei, quiet at night, on it is a raft with a spark. An unknown person shouts from the raft: "Which village-ah?" -- For what? Where is he sailing? And another convoy on the Yenisei is seen, long, creaky. He also goes somewhere. Dogs are running on the side of the convoy. The horses move slowly, drowsily. And you 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 her hair on her head.
This music speaks of sadness, it speaks of my illness, how I was sick with malaria all 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, mother put a cold hand with blue nails to her forehead. I screamed and did not hear my scream.
In the hut, a screwed lamp burned all night, my grandmother showed me the corners, she shone with a lamp under the stove, under the bed, they say, there was nobody.
I still remember the sweat of a little girl, white, laughing, her hand dries. The guards took her to the city to be treated.
And again the convoy arose.
All he goes somewhere, goes, hiding in the icy hummocks, in the frosty fog. The horses are getting smaller and smaller, and the fog has hidden the last one. Lonely, somehow empty, ice, cold and motionless dark rocks with motionless forests.
But the Yenisei was gone, neither winter nor summer; the living vein of the key behind Vasya's hut began to beat again. The spring began to grow stout, and more than one spring, two, three, a formidable stream is already whipping from the rock, rolling stones, breaking trees, uprooting them, carrying them, twisting them. He is about to sweep away the hut under the mountain, wash away the mess and bring down everything from the mountains. Thunders will strike in the sky, lightning flashes, mysterious fern flowers will flare up from them. From the flowers the forest will light up, the earth will light up, and this fire will not be flooded even by the Yenisei - there is nothing to stop such a terrible storm!
"But what is it?! Where are the people? What are they looking at?! Vasya would have been tied up!"
But the violin extinguished everything by itself. Again, one person yearns, again something is a pity, again someone is going somewhere, maybe in a convoy, maybe on a raft, maybe on foot goes to distant distances.
The world did not burn, nothing collapsed. Everything is in place. Moon and star in place. The village, already without lights, in place, a cemetery in eternal silence and peace, a guardhouse under a ridge, embraced by burning bird cherry trees and a quiet string of a violin.
Everything is in place. Only my heart, filled with grief and rapture, how it started, how it jumped, beats at the throat, wounded for life by music.
What did the music tell me about? About the convoy? About the dead mother? About a girl whose hand dries? What did she complain about? Whom did you get angry at? Why is it so anxious and bitter to me? Why feel sorry for yourself? And those out there are sorry for those who sleep soundly in the cemetery. Among them, under a hillock, lies my mother, next to her are two sisters whom I have not even seen: they lived before me, lived a little, - and my mother went to them, left me alone in this world, where an elegant mourning woman beats high at the window someone's heart.
The music ended unexpectedly, 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 pain. But already, besides it, of its own accord, some other violin soared higher, higher, and with a fading pain, a moan squeezed between the teeth, broke off in the sky ...
For a long time I sat in the little corner of the fuss, licking off the large tears that rolled down on my lips. I didn't have the strength to get up and leave. I wanted to die here, in a dark corner, near the rough logs, to die abandoned and forgotten by everyone. The violin was not heard, the light in Vasya's hut was not on. "Is Vasya really dead?" I thought, and cautiously made my way to the guardroom. My feet kicked in the cold and viscous black soil, soaked with a spring. Tenacious, always cold hop leaves touched my face, cones rustled dryly over my head, smelling of spring water. I lifted the intertwined hop strings hanging over the window and peered through the window. Slightly flickering, a burned-out iron stove was heated in the hut. With a flickering light, she marked a table against the wall, a trestle bed in the corner. Vasya was reclining on the couch, covering his eyes with his left hand. His spectacles lay with their paws up on the table, flashing on and off. A violin rested on Vasya's chest, a long stick-bow was clamped in his right hand.
I quietly opened the door, stepped into the guardhouse. After Vasya drank tea with us, especially after the music, it was not so scary to come here.
I sat down on the threshold, staring fixedly at the hand holding the smooth wand.
- Play again, uncle.
- What do you want to play, boy?
I guessed from the voice: Vasya was not at all surprised that someone was here, someone had come.
- Whatever you want, uncle.
Vasya sat down on the trestle bed, turned the wooden pins of the violin, touched the strings with his bow.
- Throw some wood in the stove.
I fulfilled his request. Vasya waited, did not move. There was a click in the stove once, twice, its burnt sides were marked with red roots and blades of grass, a reflection of the fire swayed, fell on Vasya. He tossed his violin to his shoulder and began to play.
It took a long time before I got to know the music. It was the same as the one I had heard at the haul, and at the same time quite different. Softer, kinder, anxiety and pain were only guessed in her, the violin no longer groaned, her soul no longer oozed blood, the fire did not rage around and the stones did not crumble.
The fire in the stove fluttered and fluttered, but maybe there, behind the hut, on the ridge, a fern lit up. They say that if you find a fern flower, you will become invisible, you can take all the wealth from the rich and give it to the poor, steal Vasilisa the Beautiful from Koshchei the Immortal and return it to Ivanushka, you can even sneak into the cemetery and revive your own mother.
The firewood of the cut dead wood - pines - flared up, the elbow of the pipe heated up to purple, there was a smell of red-hot wood, boiled resin on the ceiling. The hut was filled with heat and heavy red light. The fire danced, the overheated stove clicked merrily, firing large sparks as it went.
The shadow of the musician, broken at the waist, darted around the hut, stretched out along the wall, became transparent, like a reflection in the water, then the shadow moved away into a corner, disappeared in it, and then a living musician, a living Vasya the Pole, was indicated there. His shirt was unbuttoned, his feet were bare, his eyes were dark-rimmed. Vasya lay with his cheek on the violin, and it seemed to me that it was calmer, more comfortable for him, and he heard things in the violin that I would never hear.
When the stove went down, I was glad that I could not see Vasya's face, the pale collarbone that protruded from under the shirt, and the right leg, short, short, as if bitten by tongs, the eyes, tightly, painfully squeezed into the black pits of the eye sockets. Vasya's eyes must have been afraid of even such a small light as splashed out of the stove.
In the semi-darkness, I tried to look only at the shuddering, darting or smoothly sliding bow, at the flexible, rhythmically swaying shadow along with the violin. And then Vasya again began to appear to me as something like a magician from a distant fairy tale, and not a lonely cripple, to whom no one cares. I stared so hard, listened so hard that I shuddered when Vasya spoke.
- This music was written by a man who was deprived of the most precious thing. - Vasya thought aloud, not ceasing to play. - If a person has no mother, no father, but there is a homeland, he is not yet an orphan. For some time Vasya thought to himself. I was waiting. - Everything passes: love, regret for it, the bitterness of loss, even the pain from wounds passes, but the longing for the motherland never, never passes and does not go out ...
The violin again touched the same strings that had become heated during the previous playing and had not yet cooled down. Vasin's hand trembled again in pain, but immediately resigned, his fingers, gathered into a fist, unclenched.
“This music was written by my fellow countryman Oginsky in a tavern—that’s what we call a visiting house,” continued Vasya. - I wrote on the border, saying goodbye to my homeland. He sent her his last greetings. The composer is long gone. 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 spoke, the violin sang, the violin faded away. Her voice became quieter. quieter, it stretched out in the darkness like a thin, light cobweb. The web trembled, swayed, and almost soundlessly broke off.
I removed my hand from my throat and exhaled that breath that I held with my chest, with my hand, because I was afraid to break off the bright cobweb. But still, she broke off. The stove went out. Layering, coals fell asleep in it. Vasya is not visible. The violin is not heard.
Silence. Darkness. Sadness.
"It's already late," Vasya said from the darkness. -- Go home. Grandma will be worried.
I got up from the threshold and, if I had not grabbed the wooden bracket, I would have fallen. My legs were all covered in needles and as if they weren't mine at all.
“Thank you, uncle,” I whispered.
Vasya stirred in the corner and laughed embarrassedly or asked "For what?".
- I don't know why...
And jumped out of the hut. With moved tears, I thanked Vasya, this world of the night, the sleeping village, the forest sleeping behind it. I was not even afraid to walk past the cemetery. Nothing is scary now. At that moment there was no evil around me. The world was kind and lonely - nothing, nothing bad could fit in it.
Trusting in the kindness shed by a faint heavenly light over the whole village and all over 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 about you anymore.
Dropping 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 my grandmother and me, dropped sharp-feathered wings on my mother's bump. At the neighboring graves, birch trees were loosened with threads with a yellow leaf to the very ground. There was no longer a leaf on the tops of the birches, and the bare twigs slashed the stub of the moon, which now hung over the very cemetery. Everything was quiet. Dew appeared on the grass. There was complete silence. Then, from the ridges, a chilly chill perceptibly pulled. Thicker flowed from the birch leaves. Dew glassed on the grass. My legs froze from brittle dew, one leaf rolled under my shirt, I felt chilly, and I wandered from the cemetery into the dark streets of the village between the sleeping houses to the Yenisei.
For some reason I didn't want to go home.
I don't know how long I sat on the steep ravine above the Yenisei. He made noise at the borrowing place, on stone steers. Water, knocked down from a smooth course by gobies, knitted into knots, waded heavily near the banks and in circles, rolled back to the rod in funnels. Our restless river. Some forces are always disturbing her, she is in an eternal struggle with herself and with the rocks that squeezed her from both sides.
But this restlessness of hers, this ancient riot of hers did not excite, but calmed me. Because, probably, it was autumn, the moon was overhead, the grass was rocky with dew, and the nettles along the banks, not at all like dope, rather like some wonderful plants; and also because, probably, Vasya's music about indestructible love for the motherland sounded in me. And the Yenisei, not sleeping even at night, a steep-browed bull on the other side, a sawing of spruce tops over a distant pass, a silent village behind my back, a grasshopper, with its last strength working in defiance of autumn in nettles, it seems that it is the only one in the whole world, grass, as it were cast in metal—this was my homeland, close and disturbing.
In the dead of night I returned home. My grandmother 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 is on the table, eat and lie down.
- Baba, I heard the violin.
“Ah,” Grandmother replied, “Vasya the Pole is a stranger, father, playing, incomprehensible. From his music, the women cry, and the men get drunk and run amok...
-- Who is he?
- Vasya? Yes who? yawned the grandmother. -- Human. You would sleep. It's too early for me to get up to the cow. - But she knew that I would not leave anyway: -Come to me, climb under the covers.
I hugged my grandmother.
- What a cold one! And wet feet! They will hurt again. Grandmother tucked the blanket under me and stroked my head. - Vasya is a man without a clan-tribe. His father and mother were from a distant country - Poland. People there don't speak our way, they don't pray like we do. Their king is called the king. The Russian tsar seized the Polish land, they didn’t share something with the king ... Are you sleeping?
- Nope.
- I would sleep. I have to get up with the roosters. - Grandmother, in order to get rid of me as soon as possible, ran and told me that in this distant land people rebelled against the Russian Tsar, and they were exiled to us, to Siberia. Vasya's parents were also brought here. Vasya was born on a cart, under an escort's sheepskin coat. And his name is not Vasya at all, but Stasya - Stanislav in their language. This is ours, the village ones, they changed it. -- Are you sleeping? Grandma asked again.
- Nope.
- Oh, to you! Well, Vasya's parents died. They tormented themselves, tormented themselves 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, takes care of her more than he takes care of himself. And he himself had grown old, when they did not notice. Oh Lord, forgive us, and we are not young! And so Vasya lived near the store, in watchmen. They didn't go to war. His wet baby's leg was chilled on the cart... And so he lives... to die soon... And so do we...
Grandmother spoke more quietly, more indistinctly, and went to bed with a sigh. I didn't disturb her. I lay there, thinking, trying to comprehend human life, but none of this venture worked out for me.
A few years after that memorable night, the mangazin ceased to be used, because an elevator was built in the city, and the need for mangazin disappeared. Vasya was out of work. Yes, and by that time he was completely blind and could no longer be a watchman. For some time he still collected alms in the village, but then he couldn’t even walk, then my grandmother and other old women began to bring food to Vasya’s hut.
One day my grandmother came in, anxious, put out the sewing machine, and began to sew a satin shirt, trousers without holes, a pillowcase with drawstrings, and a sheet without a seam in the middle—the way they sew for the dead.
People came in, spoke with their grandmother in restrained voices. I heard "Vasya" once or twice, and I rushed to the guardhouse.
Her door was open. Near the hut crowded people. People entered it without hats and came out sighing, with meek, saddened faces.
Vasya was carried out in a small, as if boyish, coffin. The face of the deceased was covered with a cloth. There were no flowers in the domino, people did not carry wreaths. Several old women dragged behind the coffin, no one was crying. Everything was done in businesslike silence. The dark-faced old woman, the former headman of the church, read prayers as she walked and cast a cold glance at the abandoned mangazin, with the gates that had fallen, the mangazin torn from the roof with clefts, and condemningly shook her head.
I went to the guardroom. The iron stove from the middle was removed. There was a cold hole in the ceiling, and drops fell into it over the hanging roots of grass and hops. There are shavings scattered on the floor. An old simple bed was rolled up at the head of the bunks. A watch mallet lay under the bunks. broom, axe, shovel. On the window, behind the tabletop, I could see an earthenware bowl, a wooden mug with a broken handle, a spoon, a comb, and for some reason I did not immediately notice a glass of water. It contains a branch of bird cherry with swollen and already bursting buds. Glasses looked at me with empty glasses from the tabletop.
"Where's the violin?" I remembered looking at my glasses. And then he saw her. The violin hung over the head of the bunk. I put my spectacles in 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 group after her, crossed the logs of the Fokinsky River, tipsy from the spring flood, climbed to the cemetery along the slope, covered with a green fog of awakened grass.
I pulled my grandmother by the sleeve and showed her the violin, the bow. Grandmother frowned severely and turned away from me. Then she took a step wider and whispered with the dark-faced old woman:
- Expenses ... expensive ... the village council does not hurt ...
I already knew how to think a little and 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, asked gloomily:
- Whose violin?
“Vasina, father, Vasina,” my grandmother took her eyes off me and stared at the back of the dark-faced old woman. - To the domino ... Sam! .. - my grandmother leaned towards me and quickly whispered, adding a step.
Before the people were about to cover Vasya with the lid, I squeezed forward and, without saying a word, put the violin and the bow on his chest, threw on the violin a few living mother-stepmother flowers, which I had plucked from the bridge.
No one dared to say anything to me, only the old praying woman pierced me with a sharp look and immediately, raising her eyes to the sky, crossed herself: "Have mercy, Lord, on the soul of the deceased Stanislav and his parents, forgive their sins, free and involuntary ..."
I watched as the coffin was nailed down—is it strong? The first one threw a handful of earth into Vasya's grave, as if his closest relative, and after people sorted out their shovels, towels and scattered along the paths of the cemetery 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, something then waited. And he knew that there was nothing to wait for, but still there was no strength and desire to get up and leave.
In one summer, Vasya's empty guardhouse collapsed. The ceiling collapsed, flattened, pressed the hut into the midst of stingers, hops and Chernobyl. For a long time rotten logs stuck out of the weeds, but even they gradually became covered with dope; the thread of the key pierced a new channel for itself and flowed over the place where the hut stood. But the spring soon began to wither, and in the dry summer of 1933 it completely withered. And immediately the bird cherry trees began to wilt, the hops degenerated, and the mixed herb foolishness subsided.

Far and near fairy tale

Away from the import - guardhouse. She snuggled under the scree, in the wind and eternal shade. Above the guardhouse, high on the hillside, larch and pine trees grew. Behind her, a key smoked from the stones in a blue haze. It spread along the foot of the ridge, marking itself with dense sedge and meadowsweet flowers in the summer, in winter - a quiet park from under the snow and kuruzhak along the bushes crawling from the ridges.

There were two windows in the guardhouse: one near the door and one on the side towards the village. That window, which is towards the village, was overwhelmed with wild cherry blossoms, stingers, hops and various foolishness that had bred from the spring. The guardhouse had no roof. Hop swaddled her so that she looked like a one-eyed shaggy head. An overturned bucket stuck out of the hops like a pipe, the door opened immediately to the street and shook off raindrops, hop cones, bird cherry berries, snow and icicles, depending on the season and weather.

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

Lord, Lord! Grandmother sighed, closing the door behind Vasya. - You are a hard lot ... A person goes blind.

In the evening I heard Vasya's violin.

But from under the ridge, from the weaves of hops and bird cherry, from the deep interior of the earth, music arose and nailed me to the wall.

In the backyard of our village, among a grassy clearing, stood on stilts a long log building with a hemming of boards. It was called "mangazina", which was also adjacent to the delivery - here the peasants of our village brought artel equipment and seeds, it was called "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 in which you can throw them and grow bread, he is a peasant, a master, and not a beggar.

Away from the import - the guardhouse. She snuggled under the scree, in the wind and eternal shade. Above the guardhouse, high on the hillside, larch and pine trees grew. Behind her, a key smoked from the stones in a blue haze. It spread along the foot of the ridge, marking itself with dense sedge and meadowsweet flowers in the summer, in winter - a quiet park from under the snow and kuruzhak along the bushes crawling from the ridges.

At the fence, the children pushed around from early spring until autumn: they played hide and seek, crawled on their belly under the log entrance to the fence gates, or buried under the high floor behind piles, and even hid in the bottom of the barrel; cut into grandmas, into chika. The hems were beaten with punks - beats poured with lead. At the blows that resounded under the vaults of fuss, a sparrow-like commotion flared up inside her.

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

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

I remember that Vasya once came to his grandmother and asked something from his nose. Grandmother sat Vasya to drink tea, brought dry herbs and began to brew it in a cast-iron. She looked pitifully at Vasya and sighed.

- Lord, Lord! Grandmother sighed, closing the door behind Vasya. - You are a hard lot ... A person goes blind.

In the evening I heard Vasya's violin.

It was early autumn. The gates are thrown wide open. A draft was walking in them, stirring shavings in the bins repaired for grain. The smell of rancid, musty grain was drawn to the gate. A flock of children, not taken to the arable land because of their youth, played robber detectives. The game was sluggish and soon died out completely. In autumn, not like in spring, it is somehow badly played. One by one, the children wandered home, and I stretched out on the heated log entrance and began to pull out the grains that had sprouted in the cracks. I was waiting for the carts to rattle on the hillside in order to intercept our people from the arable land, ride home, and there, you see, they would let the horse take to the watering place.

Across the Fokinskaya River - at hand - the crosses in the cemetery turned white, something creaked in the delivery - the cold crept under the shirt, along the back, under the skin. to the heart. I already leaned my hands on the logs in order to push off at once, fly to the very gates and rattle the latch so that all the dogs in the village would wake up.

But from under the ridge, from the weaves of hops and bird cherry, from the deep interior of the earth, music arose and nailed me to the wall.

Beauty has the ability to please the eye. The most mundane things can be admired for their beauty. We encounter them daily, as they are all around us. Beauty is all the most beautiful that surrounds a person and lives inside him. It is now about nature, music, animals and people. Everything conceals external and internal beauty.

It is only necessary to have the ability to see and understand it.

V. Astafiev wrote in his work about the lonely singing of the violin, which suddenly managed to open wide before the main

hero of the beauty of the world, taught the vision and understanding of beauty. It taught the boy not to be afraid of the world, but to see the good in it. The character managed to feel in music consonance with his own emotional experiences, his own orphan grief, and at the same time, faith in the best. The child was seriously ill, but managed to recover - this also seemed to him in the singing of a sad violin. Astafiev wrote “There was no ... evil around”, since the heart of the hero at that moment was filled with good.

We see the world both with ordinary eyes and with the eyes of the soul. If the soul is filled with anger and ugliness, then the world seems just as ugly.

If a person is endowed with a pure and bright soul, then only beauty is seen around him. We have all met people who see the good in everything. But there are also many people who are constantly dissatisfied with everything. E. Porter's book "Pollyanna" is devoted to this very topic: life can become happier, the sun brighter and the world even more beautiful if you strive to find joy and beauty around you, and not ugliness and grief.

The last bow is a distant and near fairy tale. Viktor Astafiev - The Last Bow (a story in stories)

Far and near fairy tale

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