Bread on our table


Bread has become for us a means of uniting people,
because people refract it at a common meal.
Bread has become for us a symbol of the greatness of labor,
Because it is extracted by the sweat of the face.
Bread has become for us an indispensable companion of compassion,
Because it is distributed on the days of disasters.
The taste of divided bread is not comparable to anything.
A. de Saint-Exupéry

Once, while in Kiev, we went to a cafe to have lunch. At the table, except for us, sat an elderly woman with a small granddaughter. The girl was capricious, did not want to eat borsch and demanded “mushrooms” – cakes.

On the platter lay neatly sliced ​​fresh black bread, lush and fragrant.

“What a delicious and beautiful bread,” I said.

-True?! – the woman responded. – For me it is more delicious than any “mushrooms” and “Napoleons”.

And

Valentina Mikhailovna said that during the war she, then an eight-year-old girl, lived with her mother in the village, where they moved to escape starvation. My mother earned money by helping old people, whose sons went to the front, to cultivate household plots, sewing, embroidering. They paid – who than they could. After the end of the harvest, the children were allowed to collect spikelets of bread on the field. “But I always wanted to eat,” – recalled Valentina Mikhailovna. Once Valya called to her neighbor, whom everyone affectionately called Natalka. It can be seen from the sad face of Valya that the woman realized that the child is hungry. She herself had four children. She took a round loaf of black bread, pressed it against her, and quickly cut off a large chunk. Then I poured it with lean oil, salt and allowed me to pull out a bunch of young green onions in the garden. What kind of food it was!

This meeting reminded me of the story of K. G. Paustovsky “Warm bread”. There lived in the village Berezhki the boy Filka. He was sullen, he liked to say: “Come on, you!”

And one day he severely injured the horse, wounded at the outskirts and left by the commander to help the miller. All fed up the horse, regretted, and Filka not only did not give him bread, throwing a piece into the deep snow, but also painfully hit the horse on the lips. Vengeance came in the form of a terrible blizzard, dull frost, which pinched the water to great depths, and the mill could not work. People were waiting for “inevitable death” without bread and water. One was the hope – “the evil man will correct his evil deed.” Repka repented, gathered the guys from the whole village, the old people helped – they earned a millstone. Poetically described by Paustovsky bread baking: “At night in the village there was a smell of warm bread with a ruddy crust,

Bread has reconciled man and animal. The horse forgave the boy, and when he ate the bread offered by him, “put his head on his shoulder, sighed and closed his eyes from satiety and pleasure.”

The French pilot and writer A. de Saint-Exupery loved our planet, aviation and people, he dreamed of uniting them with the unity of noble goals. Dividing the meal with a simple farmer, he expressed deep thoughts and found very correct words to determine the value of bread for people.

So three people – a Ukrainian woman who survived the hungry years of military hard times, an outstanding Russian writer and a French humanist pilot – in different words expressed the same thought:

“The taste of divided bread is not comparable to anything.”


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Bread on our table