Sholokhov Mikhail
Man's destiny
Mikhail Sholokhov
Man's destiny
Evgenia Grigorievna Levitskaya,
member of the CPSU since 1903
The first post-war spring on the Upper Don was unusually friendly and assertive. At the end of March, warm winds blew from the Azov region, and within two days the sands of the left bank of the Don were completely exposed, snow-filled ravines and gullies in the steppe swelled up, breaking the ice, steppe rivers leaped madly, and the roads became almost completely impassable.
During this bad time of no roads, I had to go to the village of Bukanovskaya. And the distance is small - only about sixty kilometers - but overcoming them was not so easy. My friend and I left before sunrise. A pair of well-fed horses, pulling the lines to a string, could barely drag the heavy chaise. The wheels sank right up to the hub into the damp sand mixed with snow and ice, and an hour later, white fluffy flakes of soap appeared on the horses’ sides and hips, under the thin harness straps, and in the morning fresh air there was a pungent and intoxicating smell of horse sweat and the warm tar of generously oiled horse harness.
Where it was especially difficult for the horses, we got off the chaise and walked. The soaked snow squelched under the boots, it was hard to walk, but along the sides of the road there was still crystal ice glistening in the sun, and it was even more difficult to get through there. Only about six hours later we covered a distance of thirty kilometers and arrived at the crossing over the Elanka River.
A small river, drying up in places in summer, opposite the Mokhovsky farm in a swampy floodplain overgrown with alders, overflowed for a whole kilometer. It was necessary to cross on a fragile punt that could carry no more than three people. We released the horses. On the other side, in the collective farm barn, an old, well-worn “Jeep” was waiting for us, left there in the winter. Together with the driver, we boarded the dilapidated boat, not without fear. The comrade remained on the shore with his things. They had barely set sail when water began to gush out in fountains from the rotten bottom in different places. Using improvised means, they caulked the unreliable vessel and scooped water out of it until they reached it. An hour later we were on the other side of Elanka. The driver drove the car from the farm, approached the boat and said, taking the oar:
If this damned trough doesn’t fall apart on the water, we’ll arrive in two hours, don’t wait earlier.
The farm was located far to the side, and near the pier there was such silence as only happens in deserted places in the dead of autumn and at the very beginning of spring. The water smelled of dampness, the tart bitterness of rotting alder, and from the distant Khoper steppes, drowned in a lilac haze of fog, a light breeze carried the eternally youthful, barely perceptible aroma of land recently freed from under the snow.
Not far away, on the coastal sand, lay a fallen fence. I sat down on it and wanted to light a cigarette, but putting my hand into the right pocket of the cotton quilt, to my great chagrin, I discovered that the pack of Belomor was completely soaked. During the crossing, a wave lashed over the side of a low-lying boat and washed me waist-deep. muddy water. Then I had no time to think about cigarettes, I had to abandon the oar and quickly bail out the water so that the boat would not sink, and now, bitterly annoyed at my mistake, I carefully took the soggy pack out of my pocket, squatted down and began to lay it out one by one on the fence damp, browned cigarettes.
It was noon. The sun was shining hotly, like in May. I hoped that the cigarettes would dry out soon. The sun was shining so hotly that I already regretted wearing military cotton trousers and a quilted jacket for the journey. It was the first truly warm day after winter. It was good to sit on the fence like this, alone, completely submitting to silence and loneliness, and, taking off the old soldier’s earflaps from his head, drying his hair, wet after heavy rowing, in the breeze, mindlessly watching the white busty clouds floating in the faded blue.
Soon I saw a man come out onto the road from behind the outer courtyards of the farm. He led by the hand little boy, judging by his height, he is no more than five or six years old. They walked wearily towards the crossing, but when they caught up with the car, they turned towards me. A tall, stooped man, coming close, said in a muffled basso:
Hello, brother!
Hello. - I shook the large, callous hand extended to me.
The man leaned towards the boy and said:
Say hello to your uncle, son. Apparently, he is the same driver as your dad. Only you and I drove a truck, and he drives this little car.
Looking straight into my eyes with eyes as bright as the sky, smiling slightly, the boy boldly extended his pink, cold little hand to me. I shook her lightly and asked:
Why is it, old man, that your hand is so cold? It's warm outside, but you're freezing?
With touching childish trust, the baby pressed himself against my knees and raised his whitish eyebrows in surprise.
What kind of old man am I, uncle? I’m not a boy at all, and I don’t freeze at all, but my hands are cold - because I was rolling snowballs.
Taking the skinny duffel bag off his back and wearily sitting down next to me, my father said:
I'm in trouble with this passenger. It was through him that I got involved. As soon as you take a wide step, he starts to trot, so please adapt to such an infantryman. Where I need to step once, I step three times, and we walk with him separately, like a horse and a turtle. But here he needs an eye and an eye. You turn away a little, and he’s already wandering across the puddle or breaking off an ice cream and sucking it instead of candy. No, it’s not a man’s business to travel with such passengers, and at a leisurely pace at that. “He was silent for a while, then asked: “What are you, brother, waiting for your superiors?”
It was inconvenient for me to dissuade him that I was not a driver, and I answered:
We have to wait.
Will they come from the other side?
Don't know if the boat will arrive soon?
In two hours.
In order. Well, while we rest, I have nowhere to rush. And I walk past, I look: my brother, the driver, is sunbathing. Let me, I think, I’ll come in and have a smoke together. One is sick of smoking and dying. And you live richly and smoke cigarettes. Damaged them, then? Well, brother, soaked tobacco, like a treated horse, is no good. Let's smoke my strong drink instead.
He took out a worn crimson silk pouch rolled into a tube from the pocket of his protective summer pants, unfolded it, and I managed to read the inscription embroidered on the corner: “To a dear fighter from a 6th grade student at Lebedyanskaya Secondary School.”
We lit a strong cigarette and were silent for a long time. I wanted to ask where he was going with the child, what need was driving him into such muddiness, but he beat me to it with a question:
What, you spent the entire war behind the wheel?
Almost all of it.
At the front?
Well, there I had to, brother, take a sip of bitterness up the nostrils and up.
Laureate's name Nobel Prize M.A. Sholokhov is known to all of humanity. Sholokhov's works are like epochal frescoes. During the Great Patriotic War the writer considered it his duty to repel the enemy with words of hatred, to strengthen the love of the Motherland among the Soviet people. In early spring In 1946, in the first post-war spring, Sholokhov accidentally met an unknown man on the road and heard his confession story. For ten years the writer nurtured the idea of the work, the events became the past, and the need to talk about them increased. And in 1956, the epic story “The Fate of Man” was completed in a few days.
This is a story about the great suffering and great resilience of an ordinary Russian person. The main character Andrei Sokolov lovingly embodies the traits of the Russian character: patience, modesty, a sense of human dignity, merged with a feeling of true patriotism, with great responsiveness to someone else's misfortune, with a sense of front-line camaraderie.
A story has three parts: exposition, hero's narrative, and ending. In the exhibition, the author talks about the signs of the first post-war spring, he seems to be preparing us for a meeting with the main character, Andrei Sokolov, whose eyes, “as if sprinkled with ashes, filled with inescapable mortal melancholy.” He recalls the past with restraint, tiredly, before confession he “hunched over”, put his big hands on his knees, dark hands. All this makes us feel that we are learning about a difficult, and perhaps tragic, fate.
And indeed, Sokolov’s fate is full of such difficult trials, such terrible losses that it seems impossible for a person to endure all this and not break down, not lose heart. This man is shown in extreme tension mental strength. The hero's whole life passes before us. He is the same age as the century. Since childhood, I learned how much a “pound is dashing”, in civil war fought against the enemies of Soviet power. Then he leaves his native Voronezh village for Kuban. Returning home, he worked as a carpenter, mechanic, driver, and started a family.
The war destroyed all hopes and dreams. From the beginning of the war, from its first months, Sokolov was wounded twice, shell-shocked and, finally, the worst thing - he was captured. The hero had to experience inhuman physical and mental torment, hardship, and torment. Sokolov was in fascist captivity for two years. At the same time, he managed to maintain human dignity and did not resign himself to his fate. He tries to escape, but is unsuccessful, he deals with a coward, a traitor who is ready, to save his own skin, to betray the commander. The hero's virtues were revealed with particular force in the moral duel between Sokolov and Muller. An exhausted, exhausted, exhausted prisoner is ready to face death with such courage and endurance that it amazes even the concentration camp commandant who has lost his human appearance.
Andrei still manages to escape and becomes a soldier again. But troubles do not leave him: destroyed native home, his wife and daughter died from a fascist bomb, and Sokolov now lives with the hope of meeting his son. And this meeting took place - at the grave of his son who died in last days war. It would seem that everything is over, but life “distorted” a person, but could not break and kill the living soul in him. Sokolov's post-war fate is not easy, but he steadfastly and courageously overcomes his grief and loneliness, despite the fact that his soul is filled with a constant feeling of grief. This internal tragedy requires great effort and will of the hero. Sokolov wages a continuous struggle with himself and emerges victorious; he gives joy to a little man by adopting an orphan like him, Vanyusha, a boy with “eyes as bright as the sky.” The meaning of life is found, grief is overcome, life triumphs. “And I would like to think,” writes Sholokhov, “that this Russian man, a man of unbending will, will endure, and near his father’s shoulder will grow one who, having matured, will be able to withstand everything, overcome everything on his way, if his Motherland calls him to this.” .
Sholokhov's story is imbued with a deep, bright faith in man. At the same time, its title is symbolic, because this is not just the fate of the soldier Andrei Sokolov, but it is a story about the fate of the people. The writer feels obligated to tell the world the harsh truth about the enormous price the Russian people paid for humanity’s right to the future. “If you really want to understand why Russia won great victory in the Second World War, watch this film,” one English newspaper once wrote about the film “The Fate of Man,” and therefore about the story itself.
In this story, Sholokhov depicted the fate of a private Soviet man who went through war, captivity, experienced a lot of pain, hardships, losses, deprivations, but was not broken by them and managed to maintain the warmth of his soul.
For the first time we meet the main character Andrei Sokolov at the crossing. We get an idea of him through the impression of the narrator. Sokolov is a tall, stooped man, he has large dark hands, eyes “as if sprinkled with ashes, filled with such an inescapable mortal melancholy that it is difficult to look into them.” Life has left deep and terrible marks on his appearance. But he says about his life that it was ordinary, although, as we learned later, in fact it was full of terrible shocks. But Andrei Sokolov does not believe that God should give him more than others.
And during the war, many Russian people suffered the same tragic fate. Andrei Sokolov, as if inadvertently, told a random stranger a sad story that happened to him, and before our eyes stood a generalized image of a Russian person, endowed with the features of true humanity and true heroism.
Sholokhov used the “story within a story” composition here. Sokolov himself narrates his fate, by this the writer ensures that everything sounds sincere and authentic, and we believe in the real existence of the hero. Much had accumulated and ached in his soul, and so, having met a random listener, he told him about his whole life. Andrei Sokolov went through his own path, like many Soviet people: he had the opportunity to serve in the Red Army, and experienced a terrible famine, from which all his loved ones died, and “go after the kulaks.” Then he went to the factory and became a worker.
When Sokolov got married, a bright streak appeared in his life. His happiness was in his family. He spoke of his wife Irina with love and tenderness. She was a skilled homemaker, tried to create comfort and warm atmosphere, and she succeeded, for which her husband was immensely grateful to her. There was complete understanding between them. Andrei realized that she, too, had suffered a lot of grief in her life; for him, it was not her appearance that was important in Irina; he saw her main advantage - a beautiful soul. And she, when an angry man came home from work, did not become embittered in response, did not fence himself off from him with a prickly wall, but tried to relieve the tension with affection and love, realizing that her husband had to work a lot and hard to provide them with a comfortable existence. They created their own little world for each other, where she tried not to let in the anger of the outside world, which she succeeded in, and they were happy together. When they had children, Sokolov broke away from his comrades with their drinking sessions and began bringing all his pay home. This demonstrated his quality of absolute lack of selfishness towards his family. Andrei Sokolov found his simple happiness: a smart wife, excellent students, his own house, modest income - that’s all he needed. Sokolov has very simple requests. Spiritual values are important to him, not material ones.
But the war destroyed his life, like thousands of other people's lives.
Andrei Sokolov went to the front to fulfill his civic duty. It seemed hard for him to say goodbye to his family. His wife's heart had a presentiment that this separation would be forever. Then he pushed away for a moment, got angry, thinking that she was “burying him alive,” but it turned out the other way around: he returned, and the family died. This loss is a terrible grief for him, and now he blames himself for every little thing, remembers his every step: did he offend his wife in any way, did he ever make a mistake, where he did not give warmth to his loved ones. And with inexpressible pain he says: “Until my death, until my last hour, I will die, and I will not forgive myself for pushing her away!” This is because nothing can be returned, nothing can be changed, everything that is most precious is lost forever. But Sokolov unfairly blames himself, because he did everything he could to return alive, and honestly fulfilled this duty.
When it was necessary to deliver ammunition to a battery that found itself without shells under enemy fire, the company commander asked: “Will you get past Sokolov?” But for him this issue was initially resolved: “And there was nothing to ask here. My comrades may be dying there, but I’ll be sick here?” For the sake of his comrades, he, without thinking, was ready to expose himself to any danger, even to sacrifice himself: “how can there be any caution when there are guys fighting empty-handed, when the entire road is covered with artillery fire.” And a shell hit his car, and Sokolov became a prisoner. He endured a lot of pain, hardship, and humiliation in captivity, but in any situation he retained his human dignity. When the German ordered him to take off his boots, he handed him his foot wraps, which put the fascist in a stupid position in the eyes of his comrades. And the enemies laughed not at the humiliation of the Russian soldier, but at their own.
This quality of Sokolov was also evident in the scene in the church, when he heard that one of the soldiers was threatening to betray him to the young commander. Sokolov is disgusted by the idea that a Russian person is capable of such a vile betrayal. Andrei strangled the scoundrel, and he felt so disgusted, “as if he was not strangling a person, but some kind of reptile.” Sokolov tried to escape from captivity, he wanted to return to his people at all costs.” However, the first time he failed, he was found with dogs, beaten, tortured and put in a punishment cell for a month. But this did not break him; he still had the dream of escape. He was supported by the thought that in his homeland they were waiting for him, and should wait. In captivity, he experienced “inhuman torments,” like thousands of other Russian prisoners of war. They were brutally beaten, starved, fed so that they could only stand on their feet, and forced into backbreaking work. There was also news about German victories. But this did not break the unbending spirit of the Russian soldier; bitter words of protest burst from Sokolov’s chest: “They need four cubic meters of production, but for each of us, one cubic meter through the eyes is enough for the grave.” And some scoundrel reported this to the camp commander. Sokolov was summoned to the Lagerführer, and this meant execution. Andrei walked and said goodbye to the world around him, but in these moments he did not feel sorry for himself, but for his wife Irina and children, but first of all he thought about gathering his courage and fearlessly looking death in the face, not losing the honor of a Russian soldier before his enemies.
But a test still awaited him. Before the execution, the German invited Andrei to drink German weapons for the victory and gave him a piece of bread with lard. This was a serious test for a man starved to death. But Sokolov had an unbending and amazingly strong patriotism. Even before his death, brought to the point of physical exhaustion, he did not compromise on his principles, did not drink to the victory of his enemies, he drank to his own death, he did not take a bite after the first or second glass, and only after the third did he take a small bite. Even the Germans, who did not consider Russian prisoners as people, were amazed by the amazing resilience and sense of the highest human dignity of the Russian soldier. His courage saved his life, he was even rewarded with bread and lard, which he honestly shared with his comrades.
In the end, Sokolov managed to escape, but even here he thought about his duty to his homeland and brought with him a German engineer with valuable information. Andrei Sokolov is thus an example of the patriotism inherent in the Russian people.
But life did not spare Andrei, he was no exception among thousands tragic destinies. The war took his family away from him, and on Victory Day his pride was his only son. But she could not destroy the spirit of the Russian man. Andrei managed to preserve warmth in his soul for the little boy, an orphan, whom he found at the door of the teahouse and became his father. Sokolov could not live only for himself, it seemed pointless to him, he needed to take care of someone, to turn to someone his unspent love for his forever lost family. Sokolov’s whole life was now concentrated in this boy. And even when another misfortune befell him: an unfortunate cow was run over by a car on the road, and his driver’s license was unfairly taken away from him, he did not become embittered, because now he had little man, for which it is worth living and maintaining warmth.
This is how Sholokhov presented to us the difficult life of one ordinary Russian man. He is an ordinary soldier - a hard worker, the kind in Soviet army there were millions. And even the tragedy he experienced is not exceptional: during the years of the Nazi invasion of our country, many people lost their dearest and closest ones.
Thus, we see behind this personal, individual fate the fate of the entire Russian people, a heroic people who bore on their shoulders all the hardships and horrors of war, who defended the freedom of their Motherland in an impossible struggle with the enemy.
Mikhail Alexandrovich Sholokhov
Man's destiny
MAN'S FATE
Evgenia Grigorievna Levitskaya,
member of the CPSU since 1903
The first post-war spring on the Upper Don was unusually friendly and assertive. At the end of March, warm winds blew from the Azov region, and within two days the sands of the left bank of the Don were completely exposed, snow-filled ravines and gullies in the steppe swelled up, breaking the ice, steppe rivers leaped madly, and the roads became almost completely impassable.
During this bad time of no roads, I had to go to the village of Bukanovskaya. And the distance is small - only about sixty kilometers - but overcoming them was not so easy. My friend and I left before sunrise. A pair of well-fed horses, pulling the lines to a string, could barely drag the heavy chaise. The wheels sank to the very hub into the damp sand mixed with snow and ice, and an hour later, on the horses’ sides and whips, under the thin belts of the harnesses, white fluffy flakes of soap appeared, and in the fresh morning air there was a sharp and intoxicating smell of horse sweat and warmed tar generously oiled horse harness.
Where it was especially difficult for the horses, we got off the chaise and walked. The soaked snow squelched under the boots, it was hard to walk, but along the sides of the road there was still crystal ice glistening in the sun, and it was even more difficult to get through there. Only about six hours later we covered a distance of thirty kilometers and arrived at the crossing over the Elanka River.
A small river, drying up in places in summer, opposite the Mokhovsky farm in a swampy floodplain overgrown with alders, overflowed for a whole kilometer. It was necessary to cross on a fragile punt that could carry no more than three people. We released the horses. On the other side, in the collective farm barn, an old, well-worn “Jeep” was waiting for us, left there in the winter. Together with the driver, we boarded the dilapidated boat, not without fear. The comrade remained on the shore with his things. They had barely set sail when water began to gush out in fountains from the rotten bottom in different places. Using improvised means, they caulked the unreliable vessel and scooped water out of it until they reached it. An hour later we were on the other side of Elanka. The driver drove the car from the farm, approached the boat and said, taking the oar:
If this damned trough doesn’t fall apart on the water, we’ll arrive in two hours, don’t wait earlier.
The farm was located far to the side, and near the pier there was such silence as only happens in deserted places in the dead of autumn and at the very beginning of spring. The water smelled of dampness, the tart bitterness of rotting alder, and from the distant Khoper steppes, drowned in a lilac haze of fog, a light breeze carried the eternally youthful, barely perceptible aroma of land recently freed from under the snow.
Not far away, on the coastal sand, lay a fallen fence. I sat down on it, wanted to light a cigarette, but putting my hand into the right pocket of the cotton quilt, to my great chagrin, I discovered that the pack of Belomor was completely soaked. During the crossing, a wave lashed over the side of a low-slung boat and doused me waist-deep in muddy water. Then I had no time to think about cigarettes, I had to abandon the oar and quickly bail out the water so that the boat would not sink, and now, bitterly annoyed at my mistake, I carefully took the soggy pack out of my pocket, squatted down and began to lay it out one by one on the fence damp, browned cigarettes.
It was noon. The sun was shining hotly, like in May. I hoped that the cigarettes would dry out soon. The sun was shining so hotly that I already regretted wearing military cotton trousers and a quilted jacket for the journey. It was the first truly warm day after winter. It was good to sit on the fence like this, alone, completely submitting to silence and loneliness, and, taking off the old soldier’s earflaps from his head, drying his hair, wet after heavy rowing, in the breeze, mindlessly watching the white busty clouds floating in the faded blue.
Soon I saw a man come out onto the road from behind the outer courtyards of the farm. He was leading a little boy by the hand; judging by his height, he was no more than five or six years old. They walked wearily towards the crossing, but when they caught up with the car, they turned towards me. A tall, stooped man, coming close, said in a muffled basso:
Hello, brother!
Hello. - I shook the large, callous hand extended to me.
The man leaned towards the boy and said:
Say hello to your uncle, son. Apparently, he is the same driver as your dad. Only you and I drove a truck, and he drives this little car.
Looking straight into my eyes with eyes as bright as the sky, smiling slightly, the boy boldly extended his pink, cold little hand to me. I shook her lightly and asked:
Why is it, old man, that your hand is so cold? It's warm outside, but you're freezing?
With touching childish trust, the baby pressed himself against my knees and raised his whitish eyebrows in surprise.
What kind of old man am I, uncle? I’m not a boy at all, and I don’t freeze at all, but my hands are cold - because I was rolling snowballs.
Taking the skinny duffel bag off his back and wearily sitting down next to me, my father said:
I'm in trouble with this passenger. It was through him that I got involved. As soon as you take a wide step, he starts to trot, so please adapt to such an infantryman. Where I need to step once, I step three times, and we walk with him separately, like a horse and a turtle. But here he needs an eye and an eye. You turn away a little, and he’s already wandering across the puddle or breaking off an ice cream and sucking it instead of candy. No, it’s not a man’s business to travel with such passengers, and at a leisurely pace at that. “He was silent for a while, then asked: “What are you, brother, waiting for your superiors?”
It was inconvenient for me to dissuade him that I was not a driver, and I answered:
We have to wait.
Will they come from the other side?
Don't know if the boat will arrive soon?
In two hours.
In order. Well, while we rest, I have nowhere to rush. And I walk past, I look: my brother, the driver, is sunbathing. Let me, I think, I’ll come in and have a smoke together. One is sick of smoking and dying. And you live richly and smoke cigarettes. Damaged them, then? Well, brother, soaked tobacco, like a treated horse, is no good. Let's smoke my strong drink instead.
From the pocket of his protective summer pants, he took out a raspberry silk worn pouch rolled into a tube, unfolded it, and I managed to read the inscription embroidered on the corner: “To a dear fighter from a 6th grade student at Lebedyansk Secondary School.”
We lit a strong cigarette and were silent for a long time. I wanted to ask where he was going with the child, what need was driving him into such muddiness, but he beat me to it with a question:
What, you spent the entire war behind the wheel?
Almost all of it.
At the front?
Well, there I had to, brother, take a sip of bitterness up the nostrils and up.
He placed his large dark hands on his knees and hunched over. I looked at him from the side, and I felt something uneasy... Have you ever seen eyes, as if sprinkled with ashes, filled with such an inescapable mortal melancholy that it is difficult to look into them? These were the eyes of my random interlocutor.
Having broken out a dry, twisted twig from the fence, he silently moved it along the sand for a minute, drawing some intricate figures, and then spoke:
Sometimes you don’t sleep at night, you look into the darkness with empty eyes and think: “Why, life, did you cripple me like that? Why did you distort it like that?” I don’t have an answer, either in the dark or in the clear sun... No, and I can’t wait! - And suddenly he came to his senses: gently nudging his little son, he said: - Go, dear, play near the water, big water There is always some kind of prey for the kids. Just be careful not to get your feet wet!
While we were still smoking in silence, I, furtively examining my father and son, noted with surprise one circumstance that was strange in my opinion. The boy was dressed simply, but well: and in the way he sat on him, lined with a light, well-worn long-skirted jacket, and the fact that the tiny boots were sewn with the intention of wearing them on wool sock, and a very skillful seam on the once torn sleeve of the jacket - everything betrayed feminine care, skillful motherly hands. But the father looked different: the padded jacket, burnt in several places, was carelessly and roughly darned, the patch on his worn-out protective trousers was not sewn on properly, but rather sewn on with wide, masculine stitches; he was wearing almost new soldier's boots, but his thick woolen socks were moth-eaten, they had not been touched by a woman's hand... Even then I thought: “Either he is a widower, or he lives at odds with his wife.”
But then he, following his little son with his eyes, coughed dully, spoke again, and I became all ears.
At first my life was ordinary. I am a native of the Voronezh province, born in 1900. During the civil war he was in the Red Army, in the Kikvidze division. In the hungry year of twenty-two, he went to Kuban to fight the kulaks, and that’s why he survived. And the father, mother and sister died of hunger at home. One left. Rodney - even if you roll a ball - nowhere, no one, not a single soul. Well, a year later he returned from Kuban, sold his little house, and went to Voronezh. At first he worked in a carpentry artel, then he went to a factory and learned to be a mechanic. Soon he got married. The wife was brought up in orphanage. Orphan. I got a good girl! Quiet, cheerful, obsequious and smart, no match for me. Since childhood, she learned how much a pound is worth, maybe this affected her character. Looking from the outside, she wasn’t all that distinguished, but I wasn’t looking at her from the side, but point-blank. And for me there was no one more beautiful and desirable than her, there was not in the world and there never will be!
Evgenia Grigorievna Levitskaya
member of the CPSU since 1903
The first post-war spring on the Upper Don was unusually friendly and assertive. At the end of March, warm winds blew from the Azov region, and within two days the sands of the left bank of the Don were completely exposed, snow-filled ravines and gullies in the steppe swelled up, breaking the ice, steppe rivers leaped madly, and the roads became almost completely impassable.
During this bad time of no roads, I had to go to the village of Bukanovskaya. And the distance is small - only about sixty kilometers - but overcoming them was not so easy. My friend and I left before sunrise. A pair of well-fed horses, pulling the lines to a string, could barely drag the heavy chaise. The wheels sank to the very hub into the damp sand mixed with snow and ice, and an hour later, on the horses’ sides and whips, under the thin belts of the harnesses, white fluffy flakes of soap appeared, and in the fresh morning air there was a sharp and intoxicating smell of horse sweat and warmed tar generously oiled horse harness.
Where it was especially difficult for the horses, we got off the chaise and walked. The soaked snow squelched under the boots, it was hard to walk, but along the sides of the road there was still crystal ice glistening in the sun, and it was even more difficult to get through there. Only about six hours later we covered a distance of thirty kilometers and arrived at the crossing over the Elanka River.
A small river, drying up in places in summer, opposite the Mokhovsky farm in a swampy floodplain overgrown with alders, overflowed for a whole kilometer. It was necessary to cross on a fragile punt that could carry no more than three people. We released the horses. On the other side, in the collective farm barn, an old, well-worn “Jeep” was waiting for us, left there in the winter. Together with the driver, we boarded the dilapidated boat, not without fear. The comrade remained on the shore with his things. They had barely set sail when water began to gush out in fountains from the rotten bottom in different places. Using improvised means, they caulked the unreliable vessel and scooped water out of it until they reached it. An hour later we were on the other side of Elanka. The driver drove the car from the farm, approached the boat and said, taking the oar:
If this damned trough doesn’t fall apart on the water, we’ll arrive in two hours, don’t wait earlier.
The farm was located far to the side, and near the pier there was such silence as only happens in deserted places in the dead of autumn and at the very beginning of spring. The water smelled of dampness, the tart bitterness of rotting alder, and from the distant Khoper steppes, drowned in a lilac haze of fog, a light breeze carried the eternally youthful, barely perceptible aroma of land recently freed from under the snow.
Not far away, on the coastal sand, lay a fallen fence. I sat down on it, wanted to light a cigarette, but, putting my hand into the right pocket of the cotton quilt, to my great chagrin, I discovered that the pack of Belomor was completely soaked. During the crossing, a wave lashed over the side of a low-slung boat and doused me waist-deep in muddy water. Then I had no time to think about cigarettes, I had to abandon the oar and quickly bail out the water so that the boat would not sink, and now, bitterly annoyed at my mistake, I carefully took the soggy pack out of my pocket, squatted down and began to lay it out one by one on the fence damp, browned cigarettes.
It was noon. The sun was shining hotly, like in May. I hoped that the cigarettes would dry out soon. The sun was shining so hotly that I already regretted wearing military cotton trousers and a quilted jacket for the journey. It was the first truly warm day after winter. It was good to sit on the fence like this, alone, completely submitting to silence and loneliness, and, taking off the old soldier’s earflaps from his head, drying his hair, wet after heavy rowing, in the breeze, mindlessly watching the white busty clouds floating in the faded blue.
Soon I saw a man come out onto the road from behind the outer courtyards of the farm. He was leading a little boy by the hand; judging by his height, he was no more than five or six years old. They walked wearily towards the crossing, but when they caught up with the car, they turned towards me. A tall, stooped man, coming close, said in a muffled basso:
Hello, brother!
Hello. - I shook the large, callous hand extended to me.
The man leaned towards the boy and said:
Say hello to your uncle, son. Apparently, he is the same driver as your dad. Only you and I drove a truck, and he drives this little car.
Looking straight into my eyes with eyes as bright as the sky, smiling slightly, the boy boldly extended his pink, cold little hand to me. I shook her lightly and asked:
Why is it, old man, that your hand is so cold? It's warm outside, but you're freezing?
With touching childish trust, the baby pressed himself against my knees and raised his whitish eyebrows in surprise.
What kind of old man am I, uncle? I’m not a boy at all, and I don’t freeze at all, but my hands are cold - because I was rolling snowballs.
Taking the skinny duffel bag off his back and wearily sitting down next to me, my father said:
I'm in trouble with this passenger! It was through him that I got involved. If you take a wide step, he will already break into a trot, so please adapt to such an infantryman. Where I need to step once, I step three times, and we walk with him separately, like a horse and a turtle. But here he needs an eye and an eye. You turn away a little, and he’s already wandering across the puddle or breaking off an ice cream and sucking it instead of candy. No, it’s not a man’s business to travel with such passengers, and at a leisurely pace at that. “He was silent for a while, then asked: “What are you, brother, waiting for your superiors?”
It was inconvenient for me to dissuade him that I was not a driver, and I answered:
We have to wait.
Will they come from the other side?
Don't know if the boat will arrive soon?
In two hours.
In order. Well, while we rest, I have nowhere to rush. And I walk past, I look: my brother, the driver, is sunbathing. Let me, I think, I’ll come in and have a smoke together. One is sick of smoking and dying. And you live richly and smoke cigarettes. Damaged them, then? Well, brother, soaked tobacco, like a treated horse, is no good. Let's smoke my strong drink instead.
From the pocket of his protective summer pants, he took out a raspberry silk worn pouch rolled into a tube, unfolded it, and I managed to read the inscription embroidered on the corner: “To a dear fighter from a 6th grade student at Lebedyansk Secondary School.”
We lit a strong cigarette and were silent for a long time. I wanted to ask where he was going with the child, what need was driving him into such muddiness, but he beat me to it with a question:
What, you spent the entire war behind the wheel?
Almost all of it.
At the front?
Well, there I had to, brother, take a sip of bitterness up the nostrils and up.
He placed his large dark hands on his knees and hunched over. I looked at him from the side, and I felt something uneasy... Have you ever seen eyes, as if sprinkled with ashes, filled with such an inescapable mortal melancholy that it is difficult to look into them? These were the eyes of my random interlocutor.
Having broken out a dry, twisted twig from the fence, he silently moved it along the sand for a minute, drawing some intricate figures, and then spoke:
Sometimes you don’t sleep at night, you look into the darkness with empty eyes and think: “Why, life, did you cripple me like that? Why did you distort it like that?” I don’t have an answer, either in the dark or in the clear sun... No, and I can’t wait! - And suddenly he came to his senses: gently pushing his little son, he said: - Go, dear, play near the water, there is always some kind of prey for the children near the big water. Just be careful not to get your feet wet!
While we were still smoking in silence, I, furtively examining my father and son, noted with surprise one circumstance that was strange in my opinion. The boy was dressed simply, but well: in the way he was wearing a long-brimmed jacket lined with a light, worn tsigeyka, and in the fact that the tiny boots were sewn with the expectation of putting them on a woolen sock, and the very skillful seam on the once torn sleeve of the jacket - everything betrayed feminine care, skillful motherly hands. But the father looked different: the padded jacket, burnt in several places, was carelessly and roughly darned, the patch on his worn-out protective trousers was not sewn on properly, but rather sewn on with wide, masculine stitches; he was wearing almost new soldier's boots, but his thick woolen socks were moth-eaten, they had not been touched by a woman's hand... Even then I thought: “Either he is a widower, or he lives at odds with his wife.”