Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Matrenin yard

This edition is the true and final one.

No lifetime publications cancel it.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

April 1968

At one hundred and eighty-four kilometers from Moscow, along the branch that leads to Murom and Kazan, for a good six months after that, all the trains slowed down almost to the point of feeling. Passengers clung to the windows, went out into the vestibule: they are repairing the tracks, or what? Out of schedule?

No. Having passed the crossing, the train picked up speed again, the passengers sat down.

Only the machinists knew and remembered why this was all.

In the summer of 1956, from the dusty hot desert, I returned at random - just to Russia. No one was waiting for me or calling me at any point in it, because I was ten years late with the return. I just wanted to go to the middle lane - without heat, with the deciduous roar of the forest. I wanted to get lost in the very interior of Russia - if there was such a place somewhere, I lived.

A year before, on this side of the Ural ridge, I could only get hired to carry a stretcher. Even an electrician for a decent construction would not take me. And I was drawn to teaching. They told me knowledgeable people that there is nothing to spend on a ticket, I’ll pass for nothing.

But something was already starting to falter. When I climbed the stairs of the ... sky block and asked where the personnel department was, I was surprised to see that the personnel were no longer sitting here behind a black leather door, but behind a glazed partition, like in a pharmacy. Nevertheless, I approached the window timidly, bowed and asked:

Tell me, do you need mathematicians somewhere far away from the railroad? I want to live there forever.

They felt every letter in my documents, walked from room to room and called somewhere. It was also a rarity for them - they ask to go to the city all day, but bigger. And suddenly they gave me a place - High Field. From one name the soul cheered.

The title didn't lie. On a hillock between spoons, and then other hillocks, completely surrounded by forest, with a pond and a dam, the High Field was the very place where it would not be a shame to live and die. There I sat for a long time in a grove on a stump and thought that from the bottom of my heart I would not need to have breakfast and dinner every day, just to stay here and listen at night to the branches rustling on the roof - when the radio is nowhere to be heard and everything in the world is silent.

Alas, no bread was baked there. They didn't sell anything edible. The whole village dragged food in bags from the regional city.

I returned to the personnel department and prayed in front of the window. At first they didn't want to talk to me. Then they all walked from room to room, called, creaked and printed in my order: "Peat product."

Peat product? Ah, Turgenev did not know that it was possible to compose such a thing in Russian!

At the Torfoprodukt station, an aged temporary gray-wood barrack, hung a stern inscription: “Take the train only from the side of the station!” A nail on the boards was scratched: "And without tickets." And at the box office, with the same melancholy wit, it was forever cut with a knife: "No tickets." The exact meaning of these additions I appreciated later. It was easy to come to Torfoprodukt. But don't leave.

And in this place, dense, impenetrable forests stood before and stood up to the revolution. Then they were cut down - peat developers and a neighboring collective farm. Its chairman, Gorshkov, brought down quite a few hectares of forest and profitably sold it to the Odessa region, on which he elevated his collective farm.

Between the peat lowlands, a village was randomly scattered - monotonous poorly plastered barracks of the thirties and, with carvings on the facade, with glazed verandas, houses of the fifties. But inside these houses it was impossible to see a partition that reached the ceiling, so I could not rent a room with four real walls.

A factory chimney smoked above the village. A narrow-gauge railway was laid here and there through the village, and the engines, also thickly smoking, piercingly whistling, dragged along it trains with brown peat, peat slabs and briquettes. Without error, I could assume that in the evening a radiogram would be torn over the doors of the club, and drunks would wander along the street - not without that, and stab each other with knives.

This is where the dream of a quiet corner of Russia took me. But where I came from, I could live in an adobe hut looking out into the desert. Such a fresh wind blew there at night and only the vault of stars swung open overhead.

I could not sleep on the station bench, and a little before light I again wandered around the village. Now I saw a tiny bazaar. Porani was the only woman standing there, selling milk. I took a bottle and started drinking immediately.

I was struck by her speech. She did not speak, but hummed touchingly, and her words were the very ones for which melancholy from Asia pulled me:

Drink, drink with a willing soul. Are you a visitor?

Where are you from? I brightened up.

And I learned that not everything is around the peat extraction, that there is a hillock behind the railroad track, and a village behind the hillock, and this village is Talnovo, from time immemorial it has been here, even when there was a “gypsy” lady and there was a dashing forest all around. And then the whole region goes villages: Chaslitsy, Ovintsy, Spudni, Shevertni, Shestimirovo - everything is quieter, from the railway at a distance, to the lakes.

A wind of calm drew me from these names. They promised me horse-drawn Russia.

And I asked my new friend to take me after the market to Talnovo and find a hut where I could become a lodger.

I seemed to be a profitable tenant: in addition to the payment, the school promised me another peat truck for the winter. Worries, no longer touching, passed over the woman's face. She herself had no place (she and her husband raised her elderly mother), so she took me to one of her relatives and others. But even here there was no separate room, it was cramped and busy.

So we reached a drying dammed river with a bridge. A mile of this place did not please me in the whole village; two or three willows, a crooked hut, and ducks swam in the pond, and geese came ashore, shaking themselves off.

Well, except maybe we’ll go to Matryona, ”said my guide, already tired of me. - Only she is not so tidy, she lives in the wilderness, she is sick.

Matrona's house stood right there, not far away, with four windows in a row on the cold, non-red side, covered with wood chips, on two slopes and with an attic window decorated like a tower. The house is not low - eighteen crowns. However, the wood chips rotted, the logs of the log house and the gate, once mighty, turned gray from old age, and their top was thinned out.

The gate was locked, but my guide did not knock, but put her hand under the bottom and unscrewed the wrapping - a simple undertaking against cattle and a stranger. The yard was not covered, but there was much in the house under one connection. Behind the front door, internal steps led up to spacious bridges, high in the shade of the roof. To the left, more steps led up to the upper room - a separate log house without a stove, and steps down to the cellar. And to the right was the hut itself, with an attic and underground.

It was built long ago and soundly, for a large family, and now there lived a lonely woman of about sixty.

When I entered the hut, she was lying on the Russian stove, right there, at the entrance, covered with an indefinite dark rag, so priceless in the life of a working man.

The spacious hut, and especially the best part near the window, was lined with stools and benches - pots and tubs with ficuses. They filled the loneliness of the hostess with a silent but lively crowd. They grew freely, taking away the poor light of the northern side. In the rest of the light, and besides, behind the chimney, the roundish face of the hostess seemed to me yellow and sick. And in her cloudy eyes one could see that the illness had exhausted her.

While talking to me, she lay prone on the stove, without a pillow, with her head to the door, and I stood below. She did not show joy at getting a tenant, complained about the black ailment, from the attack of which she was now emerging: the ailment did not attack her every month, but, having flown,

- ... keeps two-days and three-days, so I won’t be in time to get up or give you a hand. And the hut would not be a pity, live.

And she listed other hostesses to me, who would be more peaceful and pleasing to me, and sent me to go around them. But I already saw what my lot was - to settle in this darkish hut with a dim mirror, which it was completely impossible to look into, with two bright ruble posters about the book trade and about the harvest, hung on the wall for beauty. Here it was good for me because, due to poverty, Matryona did not keep a radio, and because of loneliness she had no one to talk to.

And although Matrena Vasilievna forced me to walk around the village, and although she denied it for a long time on my second visit:

If you don’t know how, if you don’t cook, how can you lose? - but she already met me on her feet, and even as if pleasure arose in her eyes because I returned.

We got along about the price and about the peat that the school would bring.

I only found out later that year after year, for many years, Matryona Vasilievna did not earn a single ruble from anywhere. Because she didn't get paid. Her family did little to help her. And on the collective farm she worked not for money - for sticks. For sticks of workdays in a grimy account book.

ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN

MATRENIN DVOR

This edition is the true and final one.
No lifetime publications cancel it.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
April 1968

At one hundred and eighty-four kilometers from Moscow, along the branch that leads to Murom and Kazan, for a good six months after that, all the trains slowed down almost to the point of feeling. Passengers clung to the windows, went out into the vestibule: they are repairing the tracks, or what? Out of schedule?
No. Having passed the crossing, the train picked up speed again, the passengers sat down.
Only the machinists knew and remembered why this was all.
Yes I.

In the summer of 1956, from the dusty hot desert, I returned at random - just to Russia. No one was waiting for me or calling me at any point in it, because I was ten years late with the return. I just wanted to go to the middle lane - without heat, with the deciduous roar of the forest. I wanted to get lost in the very interior of Russia - if there was such a place somewhere, I lived.
A year before, on this side of the Ural ridge, I could only get hired to carry a stretcher. Even an electrician for a decent construction would not take me. And I was drawn to teaching. Knowledgeable people told me that there was nothing to spend on a ticket, I was wasting my way.
But something was already starting to shake. When I climbed the stairs of the ... sky block and asked where the personnel department was, I was surprised to see that the personnel were no longer sitting here behind a black leather door, but behind a glazed partition, like in a pharmacy. Nevertheless, I approached the window timidly, bowed and asked:
- Tell me, do you need mathematicians somewhere far away from the railway? I want to live there forever.
They felt every letter in my documents, walked from room to room and called somewhere. It was also a rarity for them - they ask to go to the city all day, but bigger. And suddenly they gave me a place - High Field. From one name the soul cheered.
The title didn't lie. On a hillock between spoons, and then other hillocks, completely surrounded by forest, with a pond and a dam, the High Field was the very place where it would not be a shame to live and die. There I sat for a long time in a grove on a stump and thought that from the bottom of my heart I would not need to have breakfast and dinner every day, just to stay here and listen at night to the branches rustling on the roof - when the radio is nowhere to be heard and everything in the world is silent.
Alas, no bread was baked there. They didn't sell anything edible. The whole village dragged food in bags from the regional city.
I returned to the personnel department and prayed in front of the window. At first they didn't want to talk to me. Then they all walked from room to room, called, creaked and printed in my order: "Peat product."
Peat product? Ah, Turgenev did not know that it was possible to compose such a thing in Russian!
At the Torfoprodukt station, an aged, temporary gray-wood barrack, there was a stern inscription: “Take the train only from the side of the station!” A nail on the boards was scratched: "And without tickets." And at the box office, with the same melancholy wit, it was forever cut with a knife: "No tickets." The exact meaning of these additions I appreciated later. It was easy to come to Torfoprodukt. But don't leave.
And in this place, dense, impenetrable forests stood before and stood up to the revolution. Then they were cut down - peat developers and a neighboring collective farm. Its chairman, Gorshkov, brought down quite a few hectares of forest and profitably sold it to the Odessa region, on which he elevated his collective farm.
Between the peat lowlands, a village was randomly scattered - monotonous poorly plastered barracks of the thirties and, with carvings on the facade, with glazed verandas, houses of the fifties. But inside these houses it was impossible to see a partition that reached the ceiling, so I could not rent a room with four real walls.
A factory chimney smoked above the village. A narrow-gauge railway was laid here and there through the village, and the engines, also thickly smoking, piercingly whistling, dragged along it trains with brown peat, peat slabs and briquettes. Without error, I could assume that in the evening a radiogram would be torn over the doors of the club, and drunks would wander along the street - not without that, and stab each other with knives.
This is where the dream of a quiet corner of Russia took me. But where I came from, I could live in an adobe hut looking out into the desert. Such a fresh wind blew there at night and only the vault of stars swung open overhead.
I could not sleep on the station bench, and a little before light I again wandered around the village. Now I saw a tiny bazaar. Porani was the only woman standing there, selling milk. I took a bottle and started drinking immediately.
I was struck by her speech. She did not speak, but hummed touchingly, and her words were the very ones for which melancholy from Asia pulled me:
- Drink, drink with the soul of desire. Are you a visitor?
- Where are you from? I brightened up.
And I learned that not everything is around the peat extraction, that there is a hillock behind the railroad track, and a village behind the hillock, and this village is Talnovo, from time immemorial it has been here, even when there was a lady "gypsy" and there was a dashing forest all around. And then the whole region goes villages: Chaslitsy, Ovintsy, Spudni, Shevertni, Shestimirovo - everything is quieter, from the railway at a distance, to the lakes.
A wind of calm drew me from these names. They promised me horse-drawn Russia.
And I asked my new friend to take me after the market to Talnovo and find a hut where I could become a lodger.
I seemed to be a profitable tenant: in addition to the payment, the school promised me another peat truck for the winter. Worries, no longer touching, passed over the woman's face. She herself had no place (she and her husband raised her elderly mother), so she took me to one of her relatives and others. But even here there was no separate room, it was cramped and busy.
So we reached a drying dammed river with a bridge. A mile of this place did not please me in the whole village; two three willows, a sloping hut, and ducks swam in the pond, and geese came ashore, shaking themselves off.
“Well, maybe we’ll go to Matryona,” my guide said, already tired of me. - Only she is not so tidy, she lives in the wilderness, she is sick.
Matrona's house stood right there, not far away, with four windows in a row on the cold, non-red side, covered with wood chips, on two slopes and with an attic window decorated like a tower. The house is not low - eighteen crowns. However, the wood chips rotted, the logs of the log house and the gate, once mighty, turned gray from old age, and their casing was thinned out.
The gate was locked, but my guide did not knock, but put her hand under the bottom and unscrewed the wrapping - a simple undertaking against cattle and a stranger. The yard was not covered, but there was much in the house under one connection. Behind the front door, internal steps led up to spacious bridges, high in the shade of the roof. To the left, more steps led up to the upper room - a separate log house without a stove, and steps down to the cellar. And to the right was the hut itself, with an attic and underground.
It was built long ago and soundly, for a large family, and now there lived a lonely woman of about sixty.
When I entered the hut, she was lying on the Russian stove, right there, at the entrance, covered with an indefinite dark rag, so priceless in the life of a working man.
The spacious hut, and especially the best part near the window, was lined with stools and benches - pots and tubs with ficuses. They filled the loneliness of the hostess with a silent but lively crowd. They grew freely, taking away the poor light of the northern side. In the rest of the light, and besides, behind the chimney, the roundish face of the hostess seemed to me yellow and sick. And in her cloudy eyes one could see that the illness had exhausted her.
While talking to me, she lay prone on the stove, without a pillow, with her head to the door, and I stood below. She did not show joy at getting a tenant, complained about the black ailment, from the attack of which she was now emerging: the ailment did not attack her every month, but, having flown,
- ... keeps two and three days, so I won’t be in time to get up or file. And the hut would not be a pity, live.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Matrenin yard

This edition is the true and final one.

No lifetime publications cancel it.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

April 1968

At one hundred and eighty-four kilometers from Moscow, along the branch that leads to Murom and Kazan, for a good six months after that, all the trains slowed down almost to the point of feeling. Passengers clung to the windows, went out into the vestibule: they are repairing the tracks, or what? Out of schedule?

No. Having passed the crossing, the train picked up speed again, the passengers sat down.

Only the machinists knew and remembered why this was all.

In the summer of 1956, from the dusty hot desert, I returned at random - just to Russia. No one was waiting for me or calling me at any point in it, because I was ten years late with the return. I just wanted to go to the middle lane - without heat, with the deciduous roar of the forest. I wanted to get lost in the very interior of Russia - if there was such a place somewhere, I lived.

A year before, on this side of the Ural ridge, I could only get hired to carry a stretcher. Even an electrician for a decent construction would not take me. And I was drawn to teaching. Knowledgeable people told me that there was nothing to spend on a ticket, I was wasting my way.

But something was already starting to falter. When I climbed the stairs of the ... sky block and asked where the personnel department was, I was surprised to see that the personnel were no longer sitting here behind a black leather door, but behind a glazed partition, like in a pharmacy. Nevertheless, I approached the window timidly, bowed and asked:

Tell me, do you need mathematicians somewhere far away from the railroad? I want to live there forever.

They felt every letter in my documents, walked from room to room and called somewhere. It was also a rarity for them - they ask to go to the city all day, but bigger. And suddenly they gave me a place - High Field. From one name the soul cheered.

The title didn't lie. On a hillock between spoons, and then other hillocks, completely surrounded by forest, with a pond and a dam, the High Field was the very place where it would not be a shame to live and die. There I sat for a long time in a grove on a stump and thought that from the bottom of my heart I would not need to have breakfast and dinner every day, just to stay here and listen at night to the branches rustling on the roof - when the radio is nowhere to be heard and everything in the world is silent.

Alas, no bread was baked there. They didn't sell anything edible. The whole village dragged food in bags from the regional city.

I returned to the personnel department and prayed in front of the window. At first they didn't want to talk to me. Then they all walked from room to room, called, creaked and printed in my order: "Peat product."

Peat product? Ah, Turgenev did not know that it was possible to compose such a thing in Russian!

At the Torfoprodukt station, an aged temporary gray-wood barrack, hung a stern inscription: “Take the train only from the side of the station!” A nail on the boards was scratched: "And without tickets." And at the box office, with the same melancholy wit, it was forever cut with a knife: "No tickets." The exact meaning of these additions I appreciated later. It was easy to come to Torfoprodukt. But don't leave.

And in this place, dense, impenetrable forests stood before and stood up to the revolution. Then they were cut down - peat developers and a neighboring collective farm. Its chairman, Gorshkov, brought down quite a few hectares of forest and profitably sold it to the Odessa region, on which he elevated his collective farm.

Between the peat lowlands, a village was randomly scattered - monotonous poorly plastered barracks of the thirties and, with carvings on the facade, with glazed verandas, houses of the fifties. But inside these houses it was impossible to see a partition that reached the ceiling, so I could not rent a room with four real walls.

A factory chimney smoked above the village. A narrow-gauge railway was laid here and there through the village, and the engines, also thickly smoking, piercingly whistling, dragged along it trains with brown peat, peat slabs and briquettes. Without error, I could assume that in the evening a radiogram would be torn over the doors of the club, and drunks would wander along the street - not without that, and stab each other with knives.

This is where the dream of a quiet corner of Russia took me. But where I came from, I could live in an adobe hut looking out into the desert. Such a fresh wind blew there at night and only the vault of stars swung open overhead.

I could not sleep on the station bench, and a little before light I again wandered around the village. Now I saw a tiny bazaar. Porani was the only woman standing there, selling milk. I took a bottle and started drinking immediately.

I was struck by her speech. She did not speak, but hummed touchingly, and her words were the very ones for which melancholy from Asia pulled me:

Drink, drink with a willing soul. Are you a visitor?

Where are you from? I brightened up.

And I learned that not everything is around the peat extraction, that there is a hillock behind the railroad track, and a village behind the hillock, and this village is Talnovo, from time immemorial it has been here, even when there was a “gypsy” lady and there was a dashing forest all around. And then the whole region goes villages: Chaslitsy, Ovintsy, Spudni, Shevertni, Shestimirovo - everything is quieter, from the railway at a distance, to the lakes.

A wind of calm drew me from these names. They promised me horse-drawn Russia.

And I asked my new friend to take me after the market to Talnovo and find a hut where I could become a lodger.

I seemed to be a profitable tenant: in addition to the payment, the school promised me another peat truck for the winter. Worries, no longer touching, passed over the woman's face. She herself had no place (she and her husband raised her elderly mother), so she took me to one of her relatives and others. But even here there was no separate room, it was cramped and busy.

So we reached a drying dammed river with a bridge. A mile of this place did not please me in the whole village; two or three willows, a crooked hut, and ducks swam in the pond, and geese came ashore, shaking themselves off.

Well, except maybe we’ll go to Matryona, ”said my guide, already tired of me. - Only she is not so tidy, she lives in the wilderness, she is sick.

Matrona's house stood right there, not far away, with four windows in a row on the cold, non-red side, covered with wood chips, on two slopes and with an attic window decorated like a tower. The house is not low - eighteen crowns. However, the wood chips rotted, the logs of the log house and the gate, once mighty, turned gray from old age, and their top was thinned out.

The gate was locked, but my guide did not knock, but put her hand under the bottom and unscrewed the wrapping - a simple undertaking against cattle and a stranger. The yard was not covered, but there was much in the house under one connection. Behind the front door, internal steps led up to spacious bridges, high in the shade of the roof. To the left, more steps led up to the upper room - a separate log house without a stove, and steps down to the cellar. And to the right was the hut itself, with an attic and underground.

It was built long ago and soundly, for a large family, and now there lived a lonely woman of about sixty.

When I entered the hut, she was lying on the Russian stove, right there, at the entrance, covered with an indefinite dark rag, so priceless in the life of a working man.

The spacious hut, and especially the best part near the window, was lined with stools and benches - pots and tubs with ficuses. They filled the loneliness of the hostess with a silent but lively crowd. They grew freely, taking away the poor light of the northern side. In the rest of the light, and besides, behind the chimney, the roundish face of the hostess seemed to me yellow and sick. And in her cloudy eyes one could see that the illness had exhausted her.

While talking to me, she lay prone on the stove, without a pillow, with her head to the door, and I stood below. She did not show joy at getting a tenant, complained about the black ailment, from the attack of which she was now emerging: the ailment did not attack her every month, but, having flown,

- ... keeps two-days and three-days, so I won’t be in time to get up or give you a hand. And the hut would not be a pity, live.

And she listed other hostesses to me, who would be more peaceful and pleasing to me, and sent me to go around them. But I already saw what my lot was - to settle in this darkish hut with a dim mirror, which it was completely impossible to look into, with two bright ruble posters about the book trade and about the harvest, hung on the wall for beauty. Here it was good for me because, due to poverty, Matryona did not keep a radio, and because of loneliness she had no one to talk to.

And although Matrena Vasilievna forced me to walk around the village, and although she denied it for a long time on my second visit:

If you don’t know how, if you don’t cook, how can you lose? - but she already met me on her feet, and even as if pleasure arose in her eyes because I returned.

We got along about the price and about the peat that the school would bring.

I only found out later that year after year, for many years, Matryona Vasilievna did not earn a single ruble from anywhere. Because she didn't get paid. Her family did little to help her. And on the collective farm she worked not for money - for sticks. For sticks of workdays in a grimy account book.

And so I settled with Matrena Vasilievna. We did not share rooms. Her bed was in the corner of the door by the stove, and I unfolded my cot by the window and, pushing Matryona's favorite ficuses away from the light, I placed a table by another window. There was electricity in the village - it was pulled up from Shatura back in the twenties. The newspapers then wrote “light bulbs of Ilyich”, and the peasants, wide-eyed, said: “Tsar Fire!”

Maybe to someone from the village, who is richer, Matryona’s hut didn’t seem well-lived, but we were quite good with her that autumn and winter: it didn’t leak from the rains and the cold winds blew the stove heat out of it not immediately, only in the morning, especially when the wind was blowing from the leaky side.

In addition to Matryona and me, there were also cats, mice and cockroaches living in the hut.

The cat was not young, and most importantly - a shaggy. Out of pity, she was picked up by Matryona and took root. Although she walked on four legs, she limped heavily: she took care of one leg, her leg was sore. When the cat jumped from the stove to the floor, the sound of her touching the floor was not cat-soft, like everyone else's, but a strong simultaneous blow of three legs: dumb! - such swipe that I did not immediately get used to, shuddered. It was she who substituted three legs at once in order to save the fourth.

But there were mice in the hut not because the rickety cat could not cope with them: she, like lightning, jumped into the corner after them and carried them out in her teeth. And the mice were inaccessible to the cat due to the fact that someone once, still on a good life, covered Matryona's hut with corrugated greenish wallpaper, and not just in a layer, but in five layers. The wallpaper stuck together well with each other, but lagged behind the wall in many places - and it turned out, as it were, an inner skin in a hut. Between the logs of the hut and the wallpaper skin, the mice made their own moves and brazenly rustled, running along them even under the ceiling. The cat angrily looked after their rustling, but could not get it.

Sometimes she ate a cat and cockroaches, but they made her sick. The only thing that the cockroaches respected was the line of the partition that separated the mouth of the Russian stove and the kitchenette from the clean hut. They did not crawl into a clean hut. On the other hand, the kitchenette swarmed at night, and if late in the evening, having gone to drink water, I lit a lamp there - the floor was all over, and the bench was large, and even the wall was almost completely brown and moved. I brought borax from the chemical laboratory, and, mixing it with dough, we poisoned them. There were fewer cockroaches, but Matryona was afraid to poison the cat along with them. We stopped adding poison, and the cockroaches bred again.

At night, when Matryona was already asleep, and I was busy at the table, the rare quick rustling of mice under the wallpaper was covered with a single, unified, continuous, like the distant sound of the ocean, the rustle of cockroaches behind the partition. But I got used to him, because there was nothing evil in him, there was no lie in him. Their rustling was their life.

And I got used to the coarse poster beauty, who from the wall constantly handed me Belinsky, Panferov and another pile of some books, but was silent. I got used to everything that was in Matrona's hut.

Matryona got up at four or five in the morning. The Khodik Matrenins were twenty-seven years old, as they were bought in a general store. They always went ahead, and Matryona did not worry - as long as they did not lag behind, so as not to be late in the morning. She turned on the lamp behind the kitchen partition and quietly, politely, trying not to make any noise, stoked the Russian stove, went to milk the goat (all her bellies were - this one dirty-white crooked-horned goat), walked for water and boiled in three pots: one pot - me , one for himself, one for the goat. She chose the smallest potatoes from the underground for the goat, small ones for herself, and for me - the size of a chicken egg. But her sandy garden, which had not been fertilized since the pre-war years and was always planted with potatoes, potatoes and potatoes, did not give large potatoes.

I hardly heard her morning chores. I slept for a long time, waking up in the late winter light and stretching, sticking my head out from under the blanket and sheepskin coat. They, and even a camp padded jacket on my legs, and a bag stuffed with straw underneath, kept me warm even on those nights when the cold pushed from the north into our frail windows. Hearing a restrained noise behind the partition, I always said measuredly:

Good morning, Matrena Vasilievna!

And always the same friendly words were heard from behind the partition. They began with some kind of low warm murmur, like grandmothers in fairy tales:

Mmmm... you too!

And a little later:

And your breakfast has arrived.

She did not announce what was for breakfast, and it was easy to guess: unflaked potatoes, or cardboard soup (everyone in the village pronounced it that way), or barley porridge (other cereals that year could not be bought at Peat Product, and even barley battle - how they fattened pigs with the cheapest one and took them in bags). It was not always salty, as it should be, it often burned, and after eating it left a coating on the palate, gums and caused heartburn.

But it was not Matryona's fault: there was no oil in the Peat product, margarine was in great demand, but only combined fat was free. Yes, and the Russian stove, as I looked closely, is inconvenient for cooking: cooking goes on hidden from the cook, the heat rises to the cast-iron from different parties unevenly. But because, it must have come to our ancestors from the Stone Age itself, that, heated once before dawn, it keeps food and drink for livestock warm, food and water for humans all day long. And sleep warmly.

I obediently ate everything boiled to me, patiently put aside if something unusual came across: a hair, a piece of peat, a cockroach leg. I didn't have the heart to reproach Matryona. In the end, she herself warned me: “If you don’t know how, don’t cook - how will you lose?”

Thank you, I said sincerely.

On what? On your good? - she disarmed me with a radiant smile. And, looking innocently with her faded blue eyes, she asked: - Well, what can I cook for you?

To uzhotkomu meant - by the evening. I ate twice a day, as at the front. What could I order for the snake? All from the same, kartov or cardboard soup.

I put up with it, because life taught me not to find the meaning of everyday existence in food. The smile of her roundish face was dearer to me, which, having finally earned money for a camera, I tried in vain to catch it. Seeing the cold eye of the lens on herself, Matrena assumed an expression either strained or heightenedly severe.

Once I captured how she smiled at something, looking out the window at the street.

That autumn, Matryona had many grievances. Before that, a new pension law had come out, and her neighbors advised her to seek a pension. She was lonely all around, and since she began to get very sick, they let her go from the collective farm. There were a lot of injustices with Matryona: she was sick, but was not considered an invalid; she worked for a quarter of a century on a collective farm, but because she was not at a factory, she was not entitled to a pension for herself, and she could only get it for her husband, that is, for the loss of a breadwinner. But her husband had been gone for twelve years, since the beginning of the war, and now it was not easy to get those certificates from different places about his salary and how much he received there. There were troubles - to get these certificates; and so that they wrote all the same that he received at least three hundred rubles a month; and to assure the certificate that she lives alone and no one helps her; and what year is she; and then wear it all to the social security; and re-wear, correcting what was done wrong; and still wear. And find out if they will give a pension.

These worries were made more difficult by the fact that social security from Talnov was twenty kilometers to the east, the village council - ten kilometers to the west, and the village council - to the north, an hour's walk. From the office to the office and drove her for two months - either for a dot, or for a comma. Each pass is a day. He goes to the village council, but today there is no secretary, just like that, as it happens in the villages. Tomorrow, then go again. Now there is a secretary, but he does not have a seal. Third day go again. And go on the fourth day because blindly they signed the wrong piece of paper, Matryona's papers are all chipped in one bundle.

They oppress me, Ignatich,” she complained to me after such fruitless penetrations. - I took care of it.

But her forehead did not remain clouded for long. I noticed that she had a sure way to regain her good mood - work. Immediately she would either grab a shovel and dig for potatoes. Or with a bag under her arm, she went for peat. And then with a wicker body - for berries in a distant forest. And not bowing to the office tables, but to the forest bushes, and having broken her back with a burden, Matryona returned to the hut already enlightened, pleased with everything, with her kind smile.

Now I have laid a tooth, Ignatich, I know where to get it, ”she said about peat. - Well, the place, lyubota one!

Yes, Matrena Vasilievna, isn't my peat enough? The car is complete.

Fu-u! your peat! so much more, and so much more - then, it happens, that's enough. Here, as winter spins and a duel through the windows, you don’t drown so much as blow it out. Letos we trained peat teams! Wouldn't I have dragged three cars even now? So they catch. Already one of our women is being dragged through the courts.

Yes, it was. The frightening breath of winter was already spinning - and hearts ached. We stood around the forest, and there was nowhere to get fireboxes. Excavators growled all around in the swamps, but peat was not sold to the inhabitants, but only carried - to the authorities, and whoever was with the authorities, but by car - to teachers, doctors, factory workers. Fuel was not allowed - and it was not supposed to ask about it. The chairman of the collective farm walked around the village, looked into the eyes demandingly or dully or ingenuously, and talked about anything except fuel. Because he stocked up. Winter was not expected.

Well, they used to steal timber from the master, now they pulled peat from the trust. The women gathered in five, ten, to be bolder. We went during the day. During the summer, peat was dug up everywhere and stacked to dry. This is what peat is good for, that, having extracted it, they cannot take it away immediately. It dries until autumn, and even until snow, if the road does not become or the trust gets tired. This is the time the women took him. At once they carried away six peat in a bag if they were damp, ten peat if they were dry. One bag of this, sometimes brought three kilometers away (and it weighed two pounds), was enough for one heating. And there are two hundred days in winter. And it is necessary to drown: Russian in the morning, Dutch in the evening.

Yes, what to say obapol! - Matryona was angry at someone invisible. - As the horses are gone, so what you can’t fasten on yourself, that’s not even in the house. My back never heals. In winter, a sleigh on oneself, in the summer bundles on oneself, by God, it’s true!

Women went a day - more than once. IN good days Matryona brought six sacks. She piled my peat openly, hid hers under the bridges, and every evening she blocked the hole with a plank.

Will the enemies ever guess, - she smiled, wiping the sweat from her forehead, - otherwise they won’t find it for life.

What was the trust to do? He was not allowed states to place guards in all the swamps. I had to, probably, having shown abundant production in reports, then write it off - for crumbs, for rains. Sometimes, in gusts, they gathered a patrol and caught women at the entrance to the village. The women threw their sacks and ran away. Sometimes, upon a denunciation, they went door-to-door with a search, drew up a report on illegal peat and threatened to take them to court. The women stopped wearing them for a while, but the winter approached and drove them again - with sleds at night.

In general, looking closely at Matryona, I noticed that, in addition to cooking and housekeeping, every day she had some other important business, she kept the natural order of these affairs in her head and, waking up in the morning, always knew what her day was. will be busy. In addition to peat, in addition to collecting old stumps turned out by a tractor in a swamp, in addition to lingonberries, soaked for the winter in quarters ("Sharpen your teeth, Ignatich," she treated me), in addition to digging potatoes, in addition to running around on a pension business, she had to go somewhere else. then to get hay for his only dirty white goat.

Why don't you keep cows, Matryona Vasilievna?

Eh, Ignatich, ”Matryona explained, standing in an unclean apron in the kitchen doorway and turning to my table. - I have enough milk from a goat. And get a cow, so she will eat me with her legs. Do not mow at the canvas - there are their own hosts, and there is no mowing in the forest - the forestry is the owner, and they don’t tell me on the collective farm - not a collective farmer, they say, now. Yes, they and the collective farmers, down to the whitest flies, are all in the collective farm, and for themselves from under the snow - what kind of grass? It was considered grass - honey ...

So, one stout goat had to collect hay for Matryona - a great job. In the morning she took a sack and a sickle and went to the places that she remembered, where the grass grew along the borders, along the road, along the islands in the middle of the swamp. Having stuffed a bag with fresh heavy grass, she dragged it home and laid it out in a layer in her yard. From a bag of grass it turned out dried hay - navilnik.

The new chairman, recently sent from the city, first of all cut the gardens for all the disabled. Fifteen acres of sand left Matryona, and ten acres remained empty behind the fence. However, for fifteen acres, the collective farm Matrena sipped. When there were not enough hands, when the women refused very stubbornly, the wife of the chairman came to Matryona. She was also a city woman, resolute, with a short gray short coat and a menacing look, as if from a military man.

She entered the hut and, without saying hello, looked sternly at Matryona. Matryona interfered.

Ta-ak, - the wife of the chairman spoke separately. - Comrade Grigorieva? We must help the collective farm! I'll have to go pick up manure tomorrow!

Matryona's face folded into an apologetic half-smile - as if she was ashamed of the chairman's wife that she could not pay her for the work.

Well then, she pulled. - I'm sick, of course. And now I'm not attached to your cause. - And then hastily corrected: - What time is it to come?

And take your forks! - the chairman instructed and left, rustling with a firm skirt.

How! - Matryona blamed after. - And take your pitchfork! There are no shovels or pitchforks on the collective farm. And I live without a man, who will plant me? ...

And then I thought all evening:

What can I say, Ignatich! This work is neither to the post nor to the railing. You will stand, leaning on a shovel, and waiting for the whistle from the factory to twelve. Moreover, women will start up, settle scores, who went out, who did not go out. When, sometimes, they worked on their own, there was no sound, only oh-oh-oyin-ki, then dinner rolled up, then evening came.

Yet in the morning she went out with her pitchfork.

But not only the collective farm, but any distant relative or just a neighbor also came to Matryona in the evening and said:

Tomorrow, Matryona, you will come and help me. Let's dig up potatoes.

And Matryona could not refuse. She left her turn of affairs, went to help her neighbor, and, returning, still said without a trace of envy:

Ah, Ignatich, and she has large potatoes! I was digging for hunting, I didn’t want to leave the site, by golly it’s true!

Moreover, not a single plowing of the garden could do without Matryona. The women of Talnovsky have established precisely that it is harder and longer to dig up your own garden with a shovel than, having taken a plow and harnessed with six of you, to plow six gardens on yourself. That's why they called Matryona to help.

Well, did you pay her? I had to ask later.

She doesn't take money. Involuntarily you hide it.

Another big fuss happened to Matryona when it was her turn to feed the goat herders: one - a hefty, non-deaf one, and the second - a boy with a constant slobbering cigarette in his teeth. This queue was a month and a half of roses, but it drove Matryona into a big expense. She went to the general store, bought canned fish, sold both sugar and butter, which she herself did not eat. It turns out that the housewives laid out in front of each other, trying to feed the shepherds better.

Be afraid of the tailor and the shepherd, she explained to me. - Throughout the village you will be slandered if something goes wrong for them.

And in this life, dense with worries, at times a severe illness still broke in, Matryona collapsed and lay in a layer for a day or two. She didn't complain, she didn't moan, but she hardly moved either. On such days, Masha, a close friend of Matryona from a very young age, came to look after the goat and heat the stove. Matryona herself did not drink, did not eat, and did not ask for anything. Calling a doctor from the village first-aid post to the house was amazing in Talnov, somehow indecent in front of the neighbors - they say, mistress. They called once, she arrived very angry, ordered Matryona, as soon as she was in bed, to come to the first-aid post herself. Matryona went against her will, they took tests, they sent her to the district hospital - and it just died out. There was also the fault of Matryona herself.

Deeds called to life. Soon Matryona began to get up, at first she moved slowly, and then again quickly.

You haven't seen me before, Ignatich, she justified herself. - All my bags were, I didn’t consider five pounds a weight. The father-in-law shouted: “Matryona! You'll break your back!" The divir did not come up to me to put my end of the log on the front end. We had a military horse Volchok, healthy ...

Why military?

And ours was taken to the war, this wounded man - in return. And he got some kind of verse. Once, out of fright, I carried the sleigh into the lake, the peasants jumped back, but I, however, grabbed the bridle and stopped it. The horse was oatmeal. Our men loved to feed the horses. Which horses are oatmeal, those and tizheli do not recognize.

But Matryona was by no means fearless. She was afraid of fire, she was afraid of lightning, and most of all, for some reason, of trains.

As I go to Cherusti, a train will crawl out from Nechaevka, its hefty eyes will pop out, the rails are buzzing - it throws me into a fever, my knees are shaking. Oh god it's true! - Matryona herself was surprised and shrugged her shoulders.

So, maybe because they don't give tickets, Matrena Vasilievna?

Nevertheless, by that winter, Matryona's life improved as never before. They began to pay her eighty rubles pension. She got over a hundred more from the school and from me.

Fu-u! Now Matryona does not need to die! some of the neighbors were already beginning to envy. - More money She's old and has nowhere to go.

And what is a pension? others objected. - The state - it is minute. Today, you see, it gave, and tomorrow it will take away.

Matryona ordered herself to roll up new felt boots. Bought a new sweatshirt. And she made a coat from a worn railway overcoat, which was presented to her by a machinist from Cherusti, the husband of her former pupil Kira. The village tailor-hunchback put cotton wool under the cloth, and it turned out such a glorious coat, which Matryona had not sewn in six decades.

And in the middle of winter, Matryona sewed two hundred rubles into the lining of this coat for her funeral. Cheered up:

Manenko and I saw peace, Ignatich.

December passed, January passed - for two months her illness did not visit. More often Matryona began to go to Masha's in the evenings to sit, to click seeds. She did not invite guests to her place in the evenings, respecting my work. Only at baptism, returning from school, I found a dance in the hut and was introduced to three Matryona sisters, who called Matryona as the eldest - Lyolka or nanny. Until that day, little was heard in our hut about the sisters - were they afraid that Matryona would ask them for help?

Only one event or an omen darkened this holiday for Matryona: she went five miles away to the church to bless the water, put her bowler hat between others, and when the water bless was over and the women rushed, pushing, to disassemble - Matryona did not ripen among the first, and in the end - it was not her bowler hat. And instead of a bowler hat, no other dishes were left either. The bowler hat disappeared, as an unclean spirit carried it away.

Babonki! - Matryona walked among the worshipers. - Did someone take someone else's consecrated water by inconvenience? in a pot?

Nobody confessed. It happens that the boys rejoiced, there were also boys. Matrona returned sad. She always had holy water, but this year she didn’t.

Not to say, however, that Matryona believed somehow earnestly. Even more likely she was a pagan, superstition took over in her: that you can’t go into the garden on Ivan the Lenten - there will be no harvest next year; that if a blizzard twists, it means that someone strangled himself somewhere, and if you pinch your leg with the door - to be a guest. How long I lived with her - I never saw her praying, nor that she crossed herself at least once. And every business began “with God!” and to me every time “with God!” said when I went to school. Maybe she prayed, but not ostentatiously, embarrassed by me or afraid to oppress me. There was a holy corner in a clean hut, and an icon of St. Nicholas the Pleasant in the kitchenette. Forgetfulness they stood in the dark, and during the vigil and in the morning on holidays, Matryona lit a lamp.

Only she had fewer sins than her rickety cat. She choked mice ...

Having torn herself a little out of her studded hut, Matryona began to listen more closely to my radio as well (I did not fail to put intelligence on myself - that's what Matryona called the outlet. My receiver was no longer a scourge for me, because I could turn it off with my own hand at any moment; but, indeed, he came out for me from a deaf hut - intelligence). That year it was customary to receive two or three foreign delegations a week, see them off and take them to many cities, gathering rallies. And every day, the news was full of important reports about banquets, dinners and breakfasts.

Matryona frowned, sighed disapprovingly:

They go, they go, they hit something.

Hearing that new machines had been invented, Matryona grumbled from the kitchen:

Everything is new, new, they don’t want to work for the old ones, where will we put the old ones?

Back in that year, artificial satellites of the Earth were promised. Matryona shook her head from the stove:

Oh-oh-oyinki, something will change, winter or summer.

Chaliapin performed Russian songs. Matryona stood, stood, listened and decisively sentenced:

They sing wonderfully, not our way.

What are you, Matrena Vasilievna, but listen!

Still listened. She pressed her lips:

But Matryona rewarded me. Somehow they broadcast a concert from Glinka's romances. And suddenly, after a heel of chamber romances, Matryona, holding on to her apron, came out from behind the partition, warmed up, with a veil of tears in her dim eyes:

But this is - in our opinion ... - she whispered.

So Matryona got used to me, and I to her, and we lived easily. She did not interfere with my long evening studies, did not annoy me with any questions. Before that, there was no woman's curiosity in her, or she was so delicate that she never asked me: when was I married? All Talnovo women pestered her - to find out about me. She answered them:

You need - you ask. I know one thing - he is distant.

And when, not long after, I myself told her that I had spent a lot in prison, she only silently nodded her head, as if she had suspected before.

And I, too, saw Matryona today, the lost old woman, and also did not stir up her past, and did not even suspect that there was something to look for there.

I knew that Matryona had gotten married even before the revolution, and immediately into this hut, where we now lived with her, and immediately to the stove (that is, neither the mother-in-law nor the older unmarried sister-in-law was alive, and from the first post-marriage morning Matryona took for a grip). I knew that she had six children and one after another all died very early, so that two did not live at once. Then there was some pupil of Kira. And Matrona's husband did not return from this war. There was also no funeral. The fellow villagers who were with him in the company said that either he was taken prisoner or died, but only the bodies were not found. Eleven post-war years Matryona herself decided that he was not alive. And it's good that I thought so. Even though he would be alive now - so married somewhere in Brazil or in Australia. Both the village of Talnovo and the Russian language are erased from his memory...

Once, having come from school, I found a guest in our hut. A tall, black old man, taking off his hat on his knees, was sitting on a chair that Matryona had placed for him in the middle of the room, by the "Dutch" stove. His whole face was covered with thick black hair, almost untouched by gray hair: a thick, black mustache merged with a black full beard, so that his mouth was barely visible; and continuous black buoys, barely showing their ears, rose to black tufts hanging from the crown of the head; and still wide black eyebrows were thrown towards each other like bridges. And only the forehead went like a bald dome into a bald, spacious dome. In all the guise of an old man, it seemed to me knowledge and dignity. He sat upright, with his hands folded on the staff, the staff resting vertically on the floor - he sat in a position of patient waiting and, apparently, did not talk much with Matryona, who was busy behind the partition.

When I arrived, he smoothly turned his stately head towards me and called me suddenly:

Father! ... I see you badly. My son is learning from you. Grigoriev Antoshka ...

He could not have said further ... With all my impulse to help this venerable old man, I knew in advance and rejected everything useless that the old man would say now. Grigoriev Antoshka was a round, ruddy kid from the 8th "G", who looked like a cat after pancakes. He came to school as if to rest, sat at his desk and smiled lazily. Moreover, he never prepared lessons at home. But, most importantly, fighting for that high percentage of academic performance that the schools of our district, our region and neighboring regions were famous for, he was transferred from year to year, and he clearly learned that, no matter how the teachers threatened, they would still transfer at the end of the year And you don't have to study for it. He just laughed at us. He was in the 8th grade, but he did not know fractions and did not distinguish what triangles are. In the first quarters, he was in the tenacious grip of my deuces - and the same awaited him in the third quarter.

But to this half-blind old man, fit to be Antoshka not as a father, but as a grandfather, and who came to me for a humble bow, how could I say now that year after year the school deceived him, but I can’t deceive any further, otherwise I will ruin the whole class, and turn into into a balabolka, and I won’t give a damn about all my work and my rank?

And now I patiently explained to him that my son is very neglected, and he lies at school and at home, he needs to check his diary more often and take it cool from two sides.

Yes, much cooler, father, - the guest assured me. - I beat him now that a week. And my hand is heavy.

In the conversation, I remembered that once Matryona herself for some reason interceded for Antoshka Grigoriev, but I did not ask what kind of relative he was to her, and then I also refused. Matrona even now became a wordless supplicant at the door of the kitchen. And when Faddey Mironovich left me with what he would come in to find out, I asked:

I don’t understand, Matrena Vasilievna, how is this Antoshka to you?

Divira is my son, - Matryona answered dryly and went to milk the goat.

Having read it, I realized that this black, persistent old man was the brother of her husband, who was missing.

And a long evening passed - Matryona did not touch this conversation anymore. Only late in the evening, when I forgot to think about the old man and worked in the silence of the hut to the rustle of cockroaches and the sound of clocks, did Matryona suddenly say from her dark corner:

I, Ignatich, once nearly married him.

I forgot about Matryona herself, that she was here, I didn’t hear her, but she said it so excitedly from the darkness, as if even now that old man was molesting her.

Evidently, all evening Matryona was only thinking about that.

She got up from the shabby rag bed and slowly came out to me, as if following her words. I leaned back - and for the first time saw Matryona in a completely new way.

There was no overhead light in our large room, which seemed to be full of ficuses in a forest. From the table lamp, the light fell all around only on my notebooks - and all over the room, eyes that were torn from the light, seemed to be in semi-darkness with a pinkish tinge. And Matryona emerged from it. And her cheeks seemed to me not yellow, as always, but also with pink.

He was the first to marry me ... before Yefim ... He was a brother - the eldest ... I was nineteen, Thaddeus - twenty-three ... They lived in this very house then. Theirs was a house. Built by their father.

I looked around involuntarily. This old gray decaying house suddenly appeared to me through the faded green skin of the wallpaper, under which the mice were running, as young, not yet darkened then, planed logs and a cheerful resinous smell.

And you his...? And what?…

That summer ... we went with him to the grove to sit, - she whispered. - There was a grove here, where the horse yard is now, they cut it down ... Almost didn’t come out, Ignatich. The German war has begun. They took Thaddeus to war.

She dropped it - and flashed before me blue, white and yellow July of the fourteenth year: still a peaceful sky, floating clouds and people boiling with ripe stubble. I imagined them side by side: a resin hero with a scythe across his back; her, ruddy, hugging the sheaf. And - a song, a song under the sky, which the village has long lagged behind to sing, and you can’t sing with mechanisms.

He went to war - disappeared ... For three years I hid, waited. And no news, and no bones ...

Tied with an old, faded handkerchief, Matrona's round face looked at me in the indirect soft reflections of the lamp - as if freed from wrinkles, from everyday careless attire - frightened, girlish, before a terrible choice.

Yes. Yes... I understand... Leaves flew around, snow fell - and then melted. Plowed again, sowed again, reaped again. And again the leaves flew around, and again the snow fell. And one revolution. And another revolution. And the whole world turned upside down.

Their mother died - and Efim wooed me. Like, you wanted to go to our hut, go to ours. Yefim was a year younger than me. They say with us: a smart one comes out after the Intercession, and a fool - after Petrov. They were missing hands. I went ... On Petrov's day they got married, and to Mikola in winter - he returned ... Thaddeus ... from Hungarian captivity.

Matryona closed her eyes.

I was silent.

She turned to the door as if she were alive:

Was on the threshold. How I scream! I would have thrown myself at his knees! ... You can’t ... Well, he says, if it weren’t for my own brother, I would chop you both!

I started. From her anguish or fear, I vividly imagined how he was standing there, black, in the dark doors and swung his ax at Matryona.

But she calmed down, leaned against the back of the chair in front of her, and sang in a melodious voice:

Oh-oh-oyinki, poor little head! How many brides were in the village - did not marry. He said: I will look for your name, the second Matryona. And he brought Matryona from Lipovka, they cut down a separate hut, where they still live, every day you go past them to school.

Ah, that's it! Now I realized that I had seen that second Matryona more than once. I didn’t love her: she always came to my Matryona to complain that her husband was beating her, and the stingy husband was pulling the veins out of her, and she cried here for a long time, and her voice was always in tears.

But it turned out that there was nothing for my Matryona to regret - so Thaddeus beat his Matryona all his life and to this day, and so he squeezed the whole house.

He never beat me once, - she told about Efim. - He ran down the street to the peasants with his fists, but never once ... That is, there was one time - I quarreled with my sister-in-law, he broke a spoon on my forehead. I jumped up from the table: “You should choke, choke, drones!” And she went into the forest. Didn't touch anymore.

It seems that Thaddeus also had nothing to regret: the second Matryona also gave birth to six children (among them is my Antoshka, the youngest, scratchy) - and everyone survived, but Matryona and Yefim did not have children: they did not live up to three months and did not ill with nothing, everyone died.

One daughter, Elena, was just born, they washed her alive - then she died. So I didn’t have to wash the dead ... As my wedding was on Peter’s Day, so I buried my sixth child, Alexander, on Peter’s Day.

And the whole village decided that there was damage in Matryona.

Portion in me! - Matryona nodded confidently now. - They took me to a former nun for treatment, she made me cough - she was waiting for a portion of me to throw out like a frog. Well, it didn't get thrown...

And the years went by, as the water floated ... In the forty-first, Thaddeus was not taken to the war because of blindness, but Yefim was taken. And like the older brother in the first war, so the younger one disappeared without a trace in the second. But this one never came back. The once noisy, but now deserted hut rotted and grew old - and the homeless Matryona grew old in it.

And she asked that second downtrodden Matryona - the womb of her snatches (or the little blood of Thaddeus?) - their youngest girl Kira.

For ten years, she raised her here as her own, instead of her weak ones. And shortly before me, she married me off as a young machinist in Cherusti. Only from there now help oozed out to her: sometimes sugar, when the piglet is slaughtered - lard.

Suffering from ailments and tea near death, at the same time Matryona announced her will: a separate log house of the upper room, located under a common connection with the hut, after death, give it as an inheritance to Kira. She said nothing about the hut itself. Three more sisters marked her to get this hut.

So that evening, Matryona opened up to me in full. And, as it happens, the connection and meaning of her life, having barely become visible to me, began to move in the same days. Kira came from Cherusti, old Thaddeus got worried: in Cherusti, in order to get and keep a piece of land, it was necessary for the young to put up some kind of building. Matryona's room was quite suitable for this. And there was nothing else to put up, there was nowhere to get the forest from. And not so Kira herself, and not so much her husband, as for them old Thaddeus caught fire to seize this site in Cherusty.

And so he frequented us, came once, again, didactically spoke with Matryona and demanded that she give up the upper room now, during her lifetime. In these parishes, he did not seem to me like an old man leaning on a staff, who is about to fall apart from a push or a rude word. Although hunched over with a sore lower back, but still stately, over sixty with a juicy, youthful blackness in his hair, he pressed with ardor.

Matryona did not sleep for two nights. It was not easy for her to decide. It was not a pity for the chamber itself, which stood idle, just as Matryona never spared any labor or goodness of her own. And this room was still bequeathed to Kira. But it was terrible for her to start breaking the roof under which she had lived for forty years. Even I, the guest, was hurt that they would start tearing off the boards and turning the logs of the house. And for Matryona it was the end of her whole life.

But those who insisted knew that her house could be broken even in her lifetime.

And Thaddeus with his sons and sons-in-law came one February morning and banged on five axes, squealed and creaked with torn boards. The eyes of Thaddeus himself gleamed businesslike. Despite the fact that his back did not fully straighten, he deftly climbed under the rafters and bustled around below, shouting at his assistants. This hut, as a boy, he once built with his father; this upper room for him, the eldest son, and cut down so that he settled here with the young one. And now he was vehemently taking it apart by the ribs in order to take it away from someone else's yard.

Having marked with numbers the crowns of the log house and the boards of the ceiling flooring, the upper room with the basement was dismantled, and the hut itself with shortened bridges was cut off with a temporary plank wall. They left the cracks in the wall, and everything showed that the breakers were not builders and did not assume that Matryona would have to live here for a long time.

And while the men broke, the women prepared moonshine for the day of loading: vodka would have cost too much. Kira brought a pood of sugar from the Moscow region, Matryona Vasilievna, under the cover of night, carried that sugar and bottles to the moonshiner.

Logs were taken out and stacked in front of the gate, the son-in-law, the driver, left for Cherusti to fetch a tractor.

But on the same day a blizzard began - a duel, in a motherly way. She drank and circled for two days and swept the road with exorbitant snowdrifts. Then, a little way down the road, a truck or two passed - it suddenly became warmer, one day it dissolved at once, there were damp fogs, streams gurgling, breaking through in the snow, and the foot in the boot got stuck all the way to the top.

For two weeks the broken room was not given to the tractor! These two weeks Matryona walked like a lost woman. Because it was especially hard for her that her three sisters came, they all unanimously scolded her a fool for having given away the upper room, said that they did not want to see her anymore, and left.

And in the same days, the rickety cat wandered out of the yard - and disappeared. One to one. It also hurt Matryona.

Finally, the thawing road was seized with frost. A sunny day has come, and my soul is cheerful. Matryona had a good dream that day. In the morning she found out that I wanted to photograph someone behind the old weaving mill (these still stood in two huts, coarse rugs were woven on them), and she smiled shyly:

Just wait, Ignatich, a couple of days, sometimes I’ll send the upper room - I’ll lay down my camp, because I’m intact - and then you’ll take it off. Oh god it's true!

Apparently, she was attracted to portray herself in the old days. From the red frosty sun, the frozen window of the vestibule, now shortened, filled with a little pink, - and Matrena's face was warmed by this reflection. Those people always have good faces, who are at odds with their conscience.

Before dusk, returning from school, I saw movement near our house. The large new tractor sleigh was already loaded with logs, but much still did not fit - both the family of grandfather Thaddeus and those invited to help finished knocking down another sled, homemade. Everyone worked like crazy, in the same vehemence that people get when they smell of big money or are waiting for a big meal. They shouted at each other and argued.

The dispute was about how to carry the sled - separately or together. One son of Thaddeus, a lame man, and his son-in-law, the machinist, argued that the wallpaper of the sleigh was not allowed right away, the tractor would not pull it away. The tractor driver, a self-confident fat-faced big fellow, croaked that he knew better that he was a driver and would take the sled together. His calculation was clear: by agreement, the engineer paid him for the transportation of the upper room, and not for flights. Two trips a night - twenty-five kilometers and once back - he would not have made. And by morning he had to be with the tractor already in the garage, from where he secretly took him away for the left.

Old Thaddeus was impatient to take away the whole room today - and he nodded to his people to give in. The second, hastily put together, sledges were picked up behind the strong first.

Matryona ran among the men, fussing and helping to roll the logs onto the sled. Then I noticed that she was in my quilted jacket, had already smeared her sleeves on the icy mud of logs, and told her about this with displeasure. This quilted jacket was my memory, it warmed me in difficult years.

Thus, for the first time, I became angry with Matryona Vasilievna.

Oh-oh-oyinki, poor little head! she wondered. - After all, I picked up her begma, and forgot that it was yours. I'm sorry, Ignatic. And took it off and hung it up to dry.

The loading was over, and everyone who worked, up to ten men, thundered past my table and dived under the curtain into the kitchenette. From there, glasses rattled dully, sometimes the bottle clinked, the voices became louder, the boasting became more fervent. The tractor driver especially boasted. The heavy smell of moonshine wafted up to me. But they did not drink for long - the darkness forced them to rush. They began to go out. Smug, with a cruel face, the tractor driver came out. Accompanying the sleigh to Cherusti was the driver-in-law, the lame son of Thaddeus, and one more nephew. The rest went home. Thaddeus, waving his stick, was catching up with someone, in a hurry to explain something. The lame son lingered at my table to light a cigarette and suddenly started talking about how much he loved Aunt Matryona, and that he had recently married, and now his son had just been born. Then they shouted at him, he left. Outside the tractor growled.

Matryona was the last to hurriedly jump out from behind the partition. She anxiously shook her head after the departed. She put on a padded jacket, threw on a scarf. At the door she told me:

And what was the two not to unload? One tractor would fall ill - the other pulled up. And now what will happen - God knows! ...

And she ran after everyone.

After drinking, arguing and walking around, it became especially quiet in the abandoned hut, chilled by the frequent opening of the doors. Outside the windows it was already quite dark. I also got into a padded jacket and sat down at the table. The tractor is silent in the distance.

An hour passed, then another. And the third. Matryona did not return, but I was not surprised: after seeing the sleigh, she must have gone to her Masha.

And another hour passed. And further. Not only darkness, but some kind of deep silence descended on the village. I could not then understand why the silence was due - it turned out that during the whole evening not a single train passed along the line half a verst from us. My receiver was silent, and I noticed that the mice were running around like never before: more impudent, more and more noisy, they ran under the wallpaper, scraping and squeaking.

I woke up. It was the first hour of the night, and Matryona did not return.

Suddenly I heard several loud voices in the village. They were still far away, but how it pushed me that it was to us. Indeed, soon a sharp knock was heard at the gate. Someone else's imperious voice shouted to open. I went out with an electric flashlight into the thick darkness. The whole village was asleep, the windows did not light up, and the snow had melted for a week and also did not shine. I unscrewed the bottom wrap and let it in. Four people in overcoats walked to the hut. It is very unpleasant when they come to you loudly and in overcoats at night.

In the light, I looked around, however, that two of them were wearing railway overcoats. The elder, fat, with the same face as that tractor driver, asked:

Where is the mistress?

Do not know.

Did the tractor with the sleigh leave this yard?

From this.

Did they drink here before leaving?

All four squinted, looking around in the semi-darkness from the table lamp. I understand that someone was arrested or wanted to be arrested.

So what happened?

Answer what you are asked!

Let's go drunk?

Did they drink here?

Did anyone kill whom? Or was it impossible to transport upper rooms? They really pressed on me. But one thing was clear: what kind of moonshine Matryona could be sentenced to.

I stepped back to the kitchen door and blocked it with myself.

Right, I didn't notice. It was not visible.

(I really couldn’t see it, I could only hear it.) And, as if with a bewildered gesture, I held out my hand, showing the furnishings of the hut: a peaceful table light over books and notebooks; a crowd of frightened ficuses; the harsh bed of a hermit. No traces of the run.

They themselves have already noticed with annoyance that there was no drinking party here. And they turned to the exit, saying among themselves that, therefore, the booze was not in this hut, but it would be nice to grab what was. I followed them and wondered what had happened. And only in the gate one muttered to me:

Destroyed them all. You won't collect.

Yes, that's what! The twenty-first ambulance almost went off the rails, that would be.

And they quickly left.

Who - them? Who - everyone? Where is Matryona?

I quickly returned to the ebu, opened the curtain and went into the kitchenette. Moonshine stench hit me. It was a frozen carnage - unloaded stools and a bench, empty lying bottles and one unfinished, glasses, half-eaten herring, onions and shredded lard.

Everything was dead. And only cockroaches quietly crawled across the battlefield.

I rushed to clean everything up. I rinsed the bottles, cleaned the food, carried the chairs, and hid the rest of the moonshine in the dark underground away.

And only when I did all this, I stood like a stump in the middle of an empty hut: something was said about the twenty-first ambulance. Why? ... Maybe it was necessary to show them all this? I already doubted. But what kind of manner is damned - not to explain anything to an unofficial person?

And suddenly our gate creaked. I quickly went to the bridges:

Matrena Vasilyevna

Her friend Masha staggered into the hut:

Matryona... Our Matryona, Ignatich...

I sat her down, and, interfering with tears, she told.

At the crossing there is a hill, the entrance is steep. There is no barrier. With the first sledge, the tractor overturned, and the cable burst, and the second sledge, self-made, got stuck at the crossing and began to fall apart - Thaddeus did not give the forest good for them, for the second sledge. They drove a little first - they returned for the second, the cable got along - the tractor driver and the son of Thaddeus was lame, and Matryona was also carried there, between the tractor and the sleigh. What could she do to help the peasants there? She always interfered in men's affairs. And the horse once almost knocked her into the lake, under the hole. And why did the damned go to the crossing? - I gave up the upper room, and all its debt, paid off ... The driver kept watching so that the train would not descend from Cherustya, it would be far to see the lights, and on the other side, from our station, there were two coupled steam locomotives - without lights and backwards. Why without lights is unknown, but when the locomotive goes backwards, it pours coal dust into the eyes of the engineer from the tender, it’s bad to look at. They swooped in - and those three were flattened into the meat, who are between the tractor and the sleigh. The tractor was mutilated, the sleigh was in pieces, the rails were reared up, and the locomotive was both on its side.

But how could they not have heard that the locomotives were approaching?

Yes, the tractor is yelling.

And what about the corpses?

They don't let me. They cordoned off.

And what did I hear about the ambulance ... like an ambulance? ...

And a ten-hour ambulance - our station on the move, and also to move. But as the locomotives collapsed - two machinists survived, jumped off and ran back, and waved their arms, standing on the rails - and managed to stop the train ... The nephew was also crippled by a log. He's hiding now at Klavka's, so that they don't know that he was at the crossing. Otherwise, they’ll drag him in as a witness! ... Dunno lies on the stove, and they lead the know-it-all on a string ... And Kirkin’s husband - not a scratch. I wanted to hang myself, they pulled me out of the noose. Because of me, they say, my aunt died and my brother. Now he went himself, he was arrested. Yes, he is now not in prison, he is in a crazy house. Oh, Matryona-Matryonushka! ...

No Matryona. A family member was killed. And on the last day I reproached her for her quilted jacket.

The painted red-and-yellow woman from the book poster smiled happily.

Aunt Masha sat still and cried. And got up to go. And suddenly she asked:

Ignatic! Do you remember ... Matryona had a gray knitting ... After all, after her death, she read it to my Tanya, right?

And she looked at me hopefully in the semi-darkness - have I really forgotten?

But I remembered

Read it, right.

So listen, maybe let me take it now? In the morning, relatives will fly here, I won’t get it later.

And again she looked at me with prayer and hope - her half-century friend, the only one who sincerely loved Matryona in this village ...

It probably should have been.

Of course ... Take ... - I confirmed.

Ono opened the chest, took out a bundle, put it under the floor and left ...

Some kind of madness took possession of the mice, they walked along the walls with a walk, and green wallpaper rolled over the mice's backs in almost visible waves.

I had nowhere to go. They will also come to me and interrogate me. School was waiting for me in the morning. It was the third hour of the night. And the solution was: lock yourself up and go to bed.

Lock yourself up because Matryona won't come.

I lay down, leaving the light. The mice squealed, almost groaned, and they all ran and ran. Tired incoherent head could not get rid of involuntary trembling - as if Matryona was invisibly rushing about and saying goodbye here, to her hut.

And suddenly, in the dark at the entrance door, on the threshold, I imagined a black young Thaddeus with a raised ax: “If it weren’t for my brother, I would have chopped you both!”

For forty years his threat lay in the corner, like an old cleaver, but it still hit ...

At dawn, the women brought from the crossing on a sled under a dirty bag thrown over - all that was left of Matryona. Dropped the bag to wash. Everything was a mess - no legs, no half of the torso, no left arm. One woman crossed herself and said:

The Lord left her the right hand. There will be prayers to God...

And now the whole crowd of ficuses, which Matryona loved so much that, having woken up one night in smoke, she rushed not to save the hut, but to bring down the ficuses on the floor (they would not have suffocated from the smoke), the ficuses were taken out of the hut. The floors were swept clean. The dim Matrenino mirror was hung with a wide towel of an old domestic outlet. Removed the posters from the wall. They moved my table. And to the windows, under the icons, they put a coffin, knocked together without any fuss, on stools.

And in the coffin lay Matryona. Her missing mutilated body was covered with a clean sheet, and her head was covered with a white scarf, but her face remained intact, calm, more alive than dead.

The villagers came to stand and watch. Women also brought small children to look at the dead. And if crying began, all the women, even if they went into the hut out of empty curiosity, they all necessarily wept from the door and from the walls, as if they accompanied the chorus. And the men stood silently at attention, taking off their hats.

The very same crying went to relatives. In weeping, I noticed a coldly thought-out, primordial routine. Those who were far away approached the coffin for a short time and, at the very coffin, lamented softly. Those who considered themselves closer to the deceased began to weep from the threshold, and when they reached the coffin, they leaned over to wail over the very face of the deceased. The melody was amateur for each mourner. And their own expressed thoughts and feelings.

Then I learned that crying over the dead is not just crying, but a kind of politics. The three sisters of Matryona flew in, seized the hut, the goat and the stove, locked her chest with a padlock, gutted two hundred funeral rubles from the lining of her coat, and told everyone that they were the only ones close to Matryona. And over the coffin wept like this:

Ah, nanny-nanny! Ah, lyolka-lyolka! And you are our only one! And you would live in peace and quiet! And we would always caress you! And your upper room has ruined you! And I finished you, cursed! And why did you break it? And why didn't you listen to us?

So the sisters' cries were accusatory cries against her husband's relatives: there was no need to force Matryona to break the upper room. (And the underlying meaning was: you took that room, you took it, but we won’t give you a hut itself!) My husband’s relatives - Matryona’s sisters-in-law, sisters Efim and Thaddeus, and various other nieces came and cried like this:

Ah, aunty aunty! And how could you not take care of yourself! And, probably, now they are offended by us! And you are our dear, and all your fault! And the mountain has nothing to do with it. And why did you go to where death guarded you? And no one called you there! And how you died - did not think! Why didn't you listen to us?

(And from all these lamentations, the answer stuck out: we are not to blame for her death, but we’ll talk about the hut later!) But the broad-faced, rude “second” Matryona - that dummy Matryona that Thaddeus had once taken for just one name - strayed from this politicians and simply yelled, straining over the coffin:

Yes, you are my sister! Are you offended by me? Oh-ma! ... Yes, we used to talk and talk with you! And forgive me, miserable! Oh-ma! ... And you went to your mother, and, probably, you will pick me up! Oh-ma-ah-ah!…

On this "oh-ma-a-a" she seemed to give up all her spirit - and beat, beat her chest against the wall of the coffin. And when her crying crossed the ritual norms, the women, as if recognizing that the crying was quite a success, they all said in unison:

Leave me alone! Leave me alone!

Matryona lagged behind, but then she came again and sobbed even more furiously. Then an ancient old woman came out of the corner and, putting her hand on Matryona's shoulder, said sternly:

There are two mysteries in the world: I don’t remember how I was born, I don’t know how I will die.

And Matryona fell silent immediately, and everyone fell silent until complete silence.

But this old woman herself, much older than all the old women here, and as if even a stranger to Matryona, after a while, she also cried:

Oh my sick! Oh, my Vasilievna! Oh, I'm tired of following you!

And it’s not at all ritualistic - with a simple sob of our century, which is not poor with them, the ill-fated Matryona’s adopted daughter sobbed - that Kira from Cherusti, for whom this room was brought and broken. Her curled curls were pathetically disheveled. Red, as if filled with blood, were the eyes. She didn't notice how her handkerchief got tangled in the cold, or put on her coat past the sleeves. She went insane from the coffin of her adoptive mother in one house to the coffin of her brother in another, and they also feared for her mind, because they had to judge her husband.

It appeared that her husband was doubly guilty: he not only carried the upper room, but was a railway engineer, knew the rules of unguarded crossings well - and had to go to the station to warn about the tractor. That night, in the Ural ambulance, a thousand lives of people, peacefully sleeping on the first and second shelves in the half-light of train lamps, should have been cut short. Because of the greed of a few people: to seize a piece of land or not to make a second run with a tractor.

Because of the upper room, on which the curse has fallen since the hands of Thaddeus seized to break it.

However, the tractor driver has already left the human court. And the road administration itself was to blame for the fact that the busy crossing was not guarded, and for the fact that the locomotive raft went without lamps. That is why at first they tried to blame everything on drunkenness, and now they hush up the trial itself.

The rails and the canvas were so mangled that for three days, while the coffins were in the houses, the trains did not go - they were wrapped with another branch. All Friday, Saturday and Sunday - from the end of the investigation to the funeral - at the crossing, day and night, the track was being repaired. The repairmen froze for warmth, and at night for light they laid out fires from free boards and logs from the second sleigh scattered near the crossing.

And the first sleigh, loaded, whole, stood behind the crossing not far away.

And it was precisely this - that one sleigh was teased, waiting with a ready cable, while the second could still be pulled out of the fire - this was precisely what tormented the soul of the black-bearded Thaddeus all Friday and all Saturday. His daughter was touched by reason, a court hung over his son-in-law, his son killed by him lay in his own house, on the same street - the woman he had killed, whom he once loved - Thaddeus only came to stand at the coffins for a short while, holding on to his beard. His high forehead was darkened by a heavy thought, but this thought was - to save the logs of the upper room from the fire and from the machinations of the Matryona sisters.

After sorting through Talnovsky, I realized that Thaddeus was not alone in the village.

What is our good, national or mine, the language strangely calls our property. And to lose it is considered shameful and stupid before people.

Thaddeus, without sitting down, rushed now to the village, then to the station, from the authorities to the authorities, and with an unbending back, leaning on a staff, asked everyone to condescend to his old age and give permission to return the chamber.

And someone gave such permission. And Thaddeus gathered his surviving sons, sons-in-law and nephews, and got horses from the collective farm - and from the other side of the ruined crossing, in a roundabout way through three villages, he brought the remains of the upper room to his yard. He finished it on the night from Saturday to Sunday.

And on Sunday afternoon - buried. Two coffins converged in the middle of the village, the relatives argued which coffin should go first. Then they put them on the same sledge side by side, aunt and nephew, and along the newly dampened crust in February under a cloudy sky they took the dead to the church cemetery two villages from us. The weather was windy and unwelcome, and the priest and the deacon were waiting in the church, but did not go out to Talnovo to meet them.

To the outskirts of the people walked slowly and sang in chorus. Then - lagged behind.

Even before Sunday, the bustle of women in our hut did not subside: the old woman purred a psalter at the coffin, the Matryona sisters scurried around the Russian stove with a grip, from the forehead of the stove there was heat from red-hot peat - from those that Matryona wore in a bag from a distant swamp. From bad flour they baked tasteless pies.

On Sunday, when they returned from the funeral, and it was already in the evening, they gathered for a wake. The tables, drawn up in one long one, also captured the place where the coffin stood in the morning. First, everyone stood around the table, and the old man, the husband of the sister-in-law, read the Our Father. Then they poured everyone at the very bottom of the bowl - full of honey. Her, in memory of the soul, we gulped down with spoons, without anything. Then they ate something and drank vodka, and the conversations became livelier. Everyone stood up in front of the jelly and sang "Eternal Memory" (they explained to me that they sing it - before the jelly it is necessary). They drank again. And they spoke even louder, not at all about Matryona. Zolovkin's husband boasted:

Have you, Orthodox, noticed that the funeral service was slow today? This is because Father Mikhail noticed me. He knows that I know the service. Otherwise, b - help with the saints, around the leg - and that's it.

Finally dinner was over. Everyone got up again. They sang "It's Worthy to Eat." And again, with a triple repetition: eternal memory! everlasting memory! everlasting memory! But the voices were hoarse, different, the faces were drunk, and no one in this eternal memory no longer invested feelings.

Then the main guests dispersed, the closest ones remained, pulled out cigarettes, lit up, jokes and laughter were heard. It touched Matryona's missing husband, and the sister-in-law's husband, beating his chest, proved to me and to the shoemaker, the husband of one of Matryona's sisters:

Died, Yefim, died! How could he not come back? Yes, if I knew that they would even hang me in my homeland, I would still return!

The shoemaker nodded to him. He was a deserter and did not part with his homeland at all: he hid underground with his mother throughout the war.

High on the stove sat that strict, silent old woman who had stayed overnight, older than all the ancients. She looked mutely from above, condemning the obscenely lively fifty- and sixty-year-old youth.

And only the unfortunate adopted daughter, who grew up within these walls, went behind the partition and cried there.

Thaddeus did not come to the wake of Matryona - whether because he remembered his son. But in the next few days he hostilely came to this hut twice to negotiate with the Matryona sisters and with a deserter shoemaker.

The dispute was about the hut: to whom she is - a sister or an adopted daughter. Already the matter rested on writing to the court, but they reconciled, reasoning that the court would give the hut not to one or the other, but to the village council. The deal went through. The goat was taken by one sister, the hut

The shoemaker and his wife, and in return for Faddeev’s share, that he “took care of every log here with his own hands,” the already brought upper room went, and they also gave him the shed where the goat lived, and the entire inner fence, between the yard and the garden.

And again, overcoming weakness and aches, the insatiable old man revived and rejuvenated. Again he gathered the surviving sons and sons-in-law, they dismantled the barn and the fence, and he himself carried the logs on sleds, on sleds, in the end only with Antoshka from the 8th "G", who was not lazy here.

Matrona's hut was filled until spring, and I moved to one of her sister-in-laws, nearby. This sister-in-law later, on various occasions, recalled something about Matryona and somehow illuminated the deceased for me from a new perspective.

Yefim did not love her. He said: I like to dress culturally, and she - somehow, everything is rustic. And once we went to the city with him to work, so he got himself a sudarka there, and didn’t want to return to Matryona.

All her comments about Matryona were disapproving: she was also unscrupulous; and did not chase the equipment; and not careful; and she didn’t even keep a pig, for some reason she didn’t like to feed it; and, stupid, she helped strangers for free (and the very reason to remember Matryona fell out - there was no one to call the garden to plow the plow).

And even about the cordiality and simplicity of Matryona, which her sister-in-law recognized for her, she spoke with contemptuous regret.

And only then - from these disapproving reviews of the sister-in-law - did the image of Matryona emerge before me, which I did not understand her, even living side by side with her.

Indeed! - after all, a piglet is in every hut! And she didn't. What could be easier - to feed a greedy pig that does not recognize anything in the world but food! Boil him three times a day, live for him - and then slaughter and have fat.

And she didn't have...

I didn’t chase after the factory ... I didn’t get out to buy things and then take care of them more than my life.

Didn't go after the outfit. Behind clothes that embellish freaks and villains.

Not understood and abandoned even by her husband, who buried six children, but did not like her sociable nature, a stranger to sisters, sisters-in-law, funny, stupidly working for others for free - she did not accumulate property to death. Dirty white goat, rickety cat, ficuses…

We all lived next to her and did not understand that she is the same righteous man, without whom, according to the proverb, the village does not stand.

Neither city.

Not all our land.

1959-60 Ak-Mosque - Ryazan

Break into literature, forever declaring a personal right to express opinion. Before having to submit to circumstances, forgetting about himself, Solzhenitsyn turned out to be in demand.

The material accumulated several years earlier found interest in the face of Novy Mir. Deserving success “One day of Ivan Denisovich” was supplemented by another publication, modestly titled “Two stories”. The first of them told about Solzhenitsyn himself, who, after the camps, found peace in the Russian hinterland. The second is a case told by acquaintances about the everyday life of the railway station during the Great Patriotic War. It is worth noting the special relationship between them, since railway given special importance.

Without claiming to be published, Alexander wrote notes. He did not feel the need to invent, agreeable to reflect what took place in reality. Finding himself in silence, not experiencing pressure from outside, Solzhenitsyn calmly contemplated his surroundings. He had the opportunity to observe the life of ordinary village people, whose tragedies are worthy of a separate work. There was a lack of a special incident that could give interest to the narrative. Will the reader be interested in describing a crumbling house in a run-down village, where the land has long exhausted the resource allotted to it by nature? Local residents vegetate in poverty, almost eating each other, if it were not for the need to take care of their neighbor, otherwise they are destined to die when the first cold weather sets in. It is here that the figure of Matryona appears, without which “there is no village without a righteous man”.

Alexander did not change the manner of narration. He shows himself to the reader as a detached person. Yes, he is characterized by awareness of what is happening, a manifestation of sympathy for everything, but at the same time he does not seek to take the initiative. The narrator can endlessly complain about the fate of Matryona, be horrified by the conditions of her existence, but he will not lift a finger to help her in any way. The reader understands that much remains outside the reported text. It is more important to show not the narrator, whose fate should not be of interest. He is just a camp inmate, unable to achieve anything, always limited by the barbed wire of the fence. Another thing is Matryona! It would be too late to realize what kind of person she really was.

Her difficult fate led to a lonely old age. Living without a husband and children, she never asked for anything, ready to help others in everything. The villagers bestowed only one thing - black ingratitude. AND Matryona lived with a sense of this, not daring to ask for even a grain of respect. And Solzhenitsyn will tell the reason for that. Matryona herself deserved her own punishment, having made a number of minor mistakes that turned into a curse for her. Or maybe someone cursed, which Alexander does not tell the reader about. Assessing the content of the work in general, the reader will definitely think about how true the story presented to him is.

The final is important. That's where the tragedy on the railroad is. Everything becomes meaningless. Even if the house is dilapidated, the economy is destroyed, life itself has failed: it fades before the end of history. Sooner or later everything is threatened with desolation. How not to follow and maintain order, time will erase the past. Only memories will remain. And if there were no Solzhenitsyn, there would be no such thing.

Having expressed his will, Alexander found new idea for the work. No longer based on personal experience, he confided in an acquaintance whose experience as a military commandant's assistant on duty helped recreate one day out of many that happened at the railway station. The reader will understand how difficult it is to be responsible for an insignificant area through which many trains pass daily. There were problems in abundance, their abundance may well make you dizzy. Solzhenitsyn will also remember the need to describe a love line, which, speaking to himself, he did not think about.

Every job is hard. There are no easy working conditions. The reader is immediately immersed in an abundance of problems. Most importantly, it is important to send the composition with canned blood. After all, blood is thousands of saved fighters. Only one gets the impression that the hero of the work is trying to take care of others, while the rest are indifferent, the main thing for them is to receive and send trains with soldiers, forgetting about the rest. Just as blood is not important, so there is no need to worry about wagons filled with sapper shovels. Small chaos every moment threatens to turn into new problems, postponing the solution of the former to distant times.

In such a mess, the duty assistant of the military commandant works. People with problems turn to him - he quickly solves them. Someone needs to be fed, another - to put on a train moving in the required direction. Sometimes enemy air raids happen, adding headaches. Solzhenitsyn tried to be truthful, showing what really happened. If the source of information authentically told him everything, then the reader should have no objections.

It is not so important that the narration will be reduced to the usual plot for understanding. Thanks for the very description of the work of the station, while looking for spies was not required at all. This stratification is not of significant importance, giving the described additional volume. It remains to agree that you can’t throw out words from someone else’s song if you don’t want to lose its semantic content.

Now we need to pay more attention to the next creative way Solzhenitsyn. After "Two stories" his gait moved from a small step to a sweeping step.

When you read a true story about people's lives, about the injustice of fate or state system you start to look at things differently. Sometimes it reveals what previously fell into the field of view. This is what happens when reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn's stories. They were not always allowed to print, because they too clearly showed a negative attitude towards the entire socialist system. The book includes the stories "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", "Matryonin's Yard" and miniatures of the "Baby" cycle.

The first story touches more political system. It tells about the difficult life of one of the prisoners. Only one day is depicted, but everything is conveyed so vividly that it evokes a great response in the soul of readers. Even the prisoners at first believed that the story would be fiction, but when they read it, they expressed the opinion that it was very true. The injustice of the entire socialist system is shown, an analogy is drawn between the hard work of prisoners and the backbreaking work of ordinary people.

The second story also reflects the cruelty and injustice of a person's fate, but from the side of the life of ordinary villagers. The narrator does not hide his past, it becomes clear that he was a prisoner, and now he wants to start new life getting a job as a teacher. He settles in the house of Matrena, who gradually tells him about her hard lot. She herself does not see anything outstanding, but the narrator understands that it is precisely such women who deserve to be called righteous women, without whom not a single village, not a single village can survive. The only pity is that neither the villagers nor Matryona's relatives understand this.

The work belongs to the genre Educational literature. It was published in 1959 by the publishing house © "Children's Literature". The book is part of the series School library(Children's Literature)". On our website you can download the book "Matryonin Dvor. Stories" in fb2, rtf, epub, pdf, txt format or read online. The book's rating is 4.36 out of 5. Here you can also refer to the reviews of readers already familiar with the book before reading and find out their opinion. In our online store partner, you can buy and read the book in paper form.