Summary Such a war
VI Belov
This war
Vanya – the son of Daria Rumiantseva – was killed at the front in 42nd, and a paper with a seal and an incomprehensible but painfully suspicious signature (one hook with a loop) comes in more than a year. And Daria decides that the paper is false, forged by some kind of unkind man.
When the gypsies pass through the village, Daria always goes to Vanya to guess. And each time the cards are scattered as best as possible. It turns out – he is alive. And Daria waits patiently for the end of the war.
By night, in the winter and in the autumn, she goes to the stable to guard the horses and there she thinks about Ivan’s son. With the dawn she returns, dragging along a path some lomina, abandoned peg or rotten tesa – without firewood in the winter you will not live. Izbu she drowns in a day, and the potato is invented to cook in a samovar: both it is easier and more profitable, and boiling water for drinking seems to be
Daria has not yet emerged from her age, and full tax is taken from her: eggs, meat, wool, potatoes. And she has already surrendered everything, having bought something, sometimes replacing one by another, and only for meat is there a shortage and a cash tax all purposeful, not to mention insurance, loan and self-taxation. According to these articles she has not been paid for the last forty-second year. And then Pashka Neustupov, nicknamed Kouverik, for health not taken in the army of Vanin one-year-old, brings Daria new obligations. And it demands “to settle with the state”.
Hunger among the people begins somehow imperceptibly, little by little, and no one splashes with his hands when the first old woman dies of exhaustion from exhaustion. And the doors now almost do not close from the great abundance of beggars. Soon it becomes absolutely nothing to eat. The women go to a distant, still bread collective farm – to change clothes for grain and potatoes. Darya has a good half-wool Ivanov suit. Ivan bought it three weeks before the war, did not have time to wear it
On May Day, a village dad, a gray bay, Misha, buys her only remaining living creature – a goat. Half of the price Daria takes money (and immediately gives them to the finaga), half – potatoes. And he divides potatoes in half: a basket for food, a basket for seeds. But in order not to die, you have to cook this seed potato in a samovar. Finally, Daria decides: she goes with the women, exchanges Ivanov’s costume for a half a sack of potatoes and cuts one and a half rows of scraps. And the basket of the remaining circumcised potatoes is fed to the very Kazan.
Summer is coming. Daria walks every day with women to mow, and on the halts he warms the swollen legs in the sun. Her all the time pulling into a dream, dizzy and thin, ringing in the ears in my ears. At home, Daria talks to the samovar, as she used to talk to a goat or an underground mouse (the mouse in her hut does not live now).
And suddenly Pasha Kouverik comes back to Daria and demands to pay money. You alone, he says, are evil in the whole village. Pashka does not intend to wait any longer: he will obviously have to take action. After a businesslike survey of the hut, he begins to describe the property, then takes away what he finds valuable-two pounds of wool and a samovar. Daria, crying, begs to leave her a samovar: “I’ll beg God for you, Pashenka,” but he does not want to listen.
Without a samovar, it becomes completely uncomfortable and empty in the house. Daria is crying, but tears in her eyes are coming to an end. She gnaws a soft, grown-up potato in the ground, one more. Lying on the stove, Daria tries to separate the reality from the dream and can not. Faraway thunders sound like a broad noise, running two lanes of war. The war appears to Daria as two endless rows of soldiers with rifles, and these soldiers alternately shoot each other. And Ivan – on the mountain, and for some reason he does not have a gun. Daria painfully wants to shout at him so that he can quickly take the gun, but it does not turn out to be a scream. She runs to her son, but her legs do not obey, and something heavy, all-powerful hinders her. And the ranks of soldiers are farther and farther…
On the third or fourth day, Surhanich sees in the store a samovar displayed on the counter. “This Kuverik’s devil,” thinks Surhanikha, “the samovar took from the old woman.” At the mowing she talks about the samovar to the women, it turns out that Daria has not been out in the field for the third day already. Babes from the whole village gather as many as they can and, having bought out the samovar, are satisfied, go to Darya’s hut, but only the hostess does not. “It is visible, the heart, has left the world,” says Surhanikha.
Over the summer through the village there are hundreds of beggars: old people, children, old women. No one saw Daria, and she does not return home. And only in the winter until the village heard a rumor that a kilometer away from here, in the hayloft in the forest wasteland, found some dead old woman. The pieces in her basket were already dried, and her clothes were summer. The women unanimously decide that this is necessary and there is their Daria. But the old man Misha just laughs at the women: “Are not there so few old women on Mother Raseya?” If these old women are counted, duck, go, and the numbers are not enough. ”
And maybe they are right, these women, who knows? They, women, are almost always right, especially when there is such a war on the ground…
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