Solzhenitsyn Matrenin yard. Matryonin yard

Matryonin yard

At the one hundred and eighty-fourth kilometer from Moscow along the line that goes to Murom and Kazan, for a good six months after that all the trains slowed down almost to the touch. Passengers clung to the windows and went out into the vestibule: they were 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 drivers knew and remembered why it all happened.

In the summer of 1956, I returned from the dusty hot desert at random - simply to Russia. No one was waiting for me or calling for her at any point, because I was ten years late in returning. I just wanted to middle lane– without heat, with the leafy roar of the forest. I wanted to worm my way around and get lost in the most intimate Russia - if such a thing existed somewhere, it lived.

A year before, on this side of the Ural ridge, I could only get hired to carry a stretcher. They wouldn’t even hire me as an electrician for decent construction. But I was drawn to teaching. They told me knowledgeable people, that there is no point in spending money on a ticket, I’m passing through in vain.

But something was already beginning to change. When I climbed the stairs of the Vladimir oblono and asked where the personnel department was, I was surprised to see that personnel they no longer sat here behind a black leather door, but behind a glass partition, like in a pharmacy. Still, I timidly approached the window, bowed and asked:

– Tell me, do you need mathematicians? Somewhere away from railway? I want to live there forever.

They looked through every letter in my documents, went from room to room and called somewhere. It was also a rarity for them - after all, everyone is asking to go to the city, and bigger things. And suddenly they gave me a place - Vysokoye Pole. Just the name made my soul happy.

The title didn't lie. On a hillock between spoons, and then other hillocks, entirely 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 like not to have to have breakfast and lunch every day, just to stay here and listen at night to the branches rustling on the roof - when you can’t hear the radio from anywhere and everything in the world is silent.

Alas, they did not bake bread there. They didn't sell anything edible there. The entire village was hauling food in bags from the regional town.

I returned to the HR department and pleaded in front of the window. At first they didn’t want to talk to me. Then they went from room to room, rang the bell, creaked and stamped on my order: “Peat product.”

Peat product? Ah, Turgenev didn’t know it was possible to write something like this in Russian!

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

And in this place, dense, impenetrable forests stood before and have survived the revolution. Then they were cut down by peat miners and a neighboring collective farm. Its chairman, Gorshkov, destroyed quite a few hectares of forest and profitably sold it to the Odessa region, raising his collective farm and receiving a Hero of Socialist Labor for himself.

The village is scattered randomly between the peat lowlands - monotonous, poorly plastered barracks from the thirties and, with carvings on the facade, with glazed verandas, houses from the fifties. But inside these houses it was impossible to see the partition that reached the ceiling, so I couldn’t rent rooms with four real walls.

A factory chimney smoked above the village. A narrow-gauge railway was laid here and there through the village, and locomotives, also smoking thickly and whistling shrilly, dragged trains with brown peat, peat slabs and briquettes along it. Without a mistake, I could assume that in the evening there would be a radio tape playing over the doors of the club, and drunk people wandering down the street and stabbing each other with knives.

This is where my 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. There was such a fresh wind blowing there at night and only the starry vault swung open overhead.

I couldn’t sleep on the station bench, and just before dawn I wandered around the village again. Now I saw a tiny market. In the morning, the only woman stood there selling milk. I took the bottle and started drinking right away.

I was amazed by her speech. She did not speak, but hummed touchingly, and her words were the same ones that longing pulled me from Asia:

- Drink, drink with all your heart. Are you a newcomer?

- Where are you from? – I brightened up.

And I learned that not everything is about peat mining, that there is a hillock behind the railroad bed, and behind the hillock is a village, 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 there is a whole region of villages: Chaslitsy, Ovintsy, Spudny, Shevertny, Shestimirovo - all quieter, further from the railway, towards the lakes.

A wind of calm blew over me from these names. They promised me a crazy 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 turned out to be a profitable tenant: in addition to the rent, the school promised me a car of peat for the winter. Concern, no longer touching, passed over the woman’s face. She herself had no place (she and her husband brought up her elderly mother), so she took me to some of her relatives and to others. But even here there was no separate room; everywhere it was cramped and crowded.

So we reached a drying dammed river with a bridge. This place was the closest I liked in the whole village; two or three willows, a lopsided hut, and ducks swam on the pond, and geese came ashore, shaking themselves.

“Well, maybe we’ll go to Matryona,” said my guide, already getting tired of me. “But her latrine is not so good, she lives in a desolate place and is sick.”

Matryona's house stood right there, nearby, 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 to look like a tower. The house is not low - eighteen crowns. However, the wood chips rotted, the logs of the frame and the gates, once mighty, turned gray from age, and their cover thinned out.

The gate was locked, but my guide did not knock, but stuck her hand under the bottom and unscrewed the wrapper - a simple trick against cattle and strangers. The courtyard was not covered, but much in the house was under one connection. Behind front door the internal steps rose to spacious bridges, high overshadowed by a roof. To the left, more steps led up to upper room– a separate log house without a stove, and steps down to the basement. And to the right was the hut itself, with an attic and underground.

Even summary The story “Matrenin's Dvor”, written by A. Solzhenitsyn in 1963, can give the reader an idea of the patriarchal life of the Russian rural hinterland.

Summary of “Matrenin’s Dvor” (introduction)

On the way from Moscow, at kilometer 184 along the Murom and Kazan lines, even six months after the events described, the trains inevitably slowed down. For a reason known only to the narrator and the drivers.

Summary of “Matrenin’s Dvor” (Part 1)

The narrator, returning from Asia in 1956, after a long absence (he fought, but did not immediately return from the war, received 10 years in the camps), got a job in a village school in the Russian outback as a mathematics teacher. Not wanting to live in the village barracks "Torfoprodukt", he looked for a corner in rural house. In the village of Talnovo, the tenant was brought to Matryona Vasilievna Grigorieva, a lonely woman of about sixty.

Matryona's hut was old and well built, built for a large family. The spacious room was a little dark; ficus trees, the housewife's favorites, were silently crowding in pots and tubs by the window. There was still a lanky cat, mice in the house, and cockroaches in the tiny kitchen.

Matryona Vasilievna was ill, but she was not given disability, and she did not receive a pension, having no relation to the working class. She worked on the collective farm for workdays, that is, there was no money.

Matryona herself ate and fed Ignatich, the resident teacher, sparingly: small potatoes and porridge from the cheapest cereal. The villagers were forced to steal fuel from the trust, for which they could be imprisoned. Although peat was mined in the area, local residents were not supposed to sell it.

Matryona’s difficult life consisted of various things: collecting peat and dry stumps, as well as lingonberries in the swamps, running around offices for pension certificates, secretly obtaining hay for the goat, as well as relatives and neighbors. But this winter, life improved a little - the illness went away, and they began to pay her for a lodger and a tiny pension. She was happy that she was able to order new felt boots, turn an old railway overcoat into a coat and buy a new padded jacket.

Summary of “Matrenin’s Dvor” (Part 2)

One day, the teacher found a black bearded old man in the hut - Thaddeus Grigoriev, who had come to ask for his son, a poor student. It turned out that Matryona was supposed to marry Thaddeus, but he was taken to war, and there was no news from him for three years. Efim, his younger brother, wooed her (after the death of his mother there were not enough hands in the family), and she married him in the hut built by their father, where she lived to this day.

Thaddeus, returning from captivity, did not chop them up only because he felt sorry for his brother. He got married, also choosing Matryona, built a new hut, where he now lived with his wife and six children. That other Matryona often came running after the beatings to complain about her husband’s greed and cruelty.

Matryona Vasilyevna did not have any children of her own; she buried six newborns before the war. Efim was taken to war and disappeared without a trace.

Then Matryona asked her namesake for a child to raise. She raised the girl Kira as her own, whom she successfully married - to a young driver in a neighboring village, from where they sometimes sent her help. Often ill, the woman decided to bequeath part of the hut to Kira, although Matryona’s three sisters were counting on her.

Kira asked for her inheritance so that she could eventually build a house. Old man Thaddeus demanded that the hut be given back during Matryona’s lifetime, although she was sorry to death to destroy the house in which she had lived for forty years.

He gathered his relatives to dismantle the upper room, and then reassemble it again; he, as a boy, built a hut with his father for himself and the first Matryona. While the men's axes were hammering, the women were preparing moonshine and snacks.

When transporting the hut, the sleigh with planks got stuck. Three people died under the wheels of the locomotive, including Matryona.

Summary of “Matrenin’s Dvor” (Part 3)

At a village funeral, the funeral service was more like settling scores. Matryona's sisters, wailing over the coffin, expressed their thoughts - they defended the rights to her inheritance, but the relatives of her late husband did not agree. The insatiable Thaddeus, by hook or by crook, dragged the logs of the donated room into his yard: it was indecent and shameful to lose the goods.

Listening to the reviews of fellow villagers about Matryona, the teacher realized that she did not fit into the usual framework of peasant ideas about happiness: she did not keep a pig, did not strive to acquire goods and outfits that hid under her brilliance all the vices and ugliness of the soul. The grief from the loss of her children and husband did not make her angry and heartless: she still helped everyone for free and rejoiced at all the good things that came her way in life. But all she got was ficus trees, a spiny cat and a dirty white goat. Everyone who lived nearby did not understand that she was the true righteous woman, without whom neither the village, nor the city, nor our land could stand.

In his story, Solzhenitsyn (“Matryona’s Dvor”), the summary does not include this episode; he writes that Matryona believed passionately, and was rather a pagan. But it turned out that in her life she did not deviate one iota from the rules of Christian morality and ethics.

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

Only the drivers knew and remembered why it all happened.

1

In the summer of 1956, I returned from the dusty hot desert at random - simply to Russia. No one was waiting for me or calling for her at any point, because I was ten years late in returning. I just wanted to go to the middle zone - without the heat, with the deciduous roar of the forest. I wanted to worm my way around and get lost in the most intimate Russia - if such a thing existed somewhere, it lived.

A year before, on this side of the Ural ridge, I could only get hired to carry a stretcher. They wouldn’t even hire me as an electrician for decent construction. But I was drawn to teaching. Knowledgeable people told me that there’s no point in spending money on a ticket, I’m wasting my time.

But something was already beginning to change. When I climbed the stairs of the Vladimirsky oblono 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 glass partition, like in a pharmacy. Still, I timidly approached the window, bowed and asked:

– Tell me, do you need mathematicians? Somewhere away from the railway? I want to live there forever.

Alas, they did not bake bread there. They didn't sell anything edible there. The entire village was hauling food in bags from the regional town.

Peat product? Ah, Turgenev didn’t know it was possible to write something like this in Russian!

I was amazed by her speech. She did not speak, but hummed touchingly, and her words were the same ones that longing pulled me from Asia:

- Drink, drink with all your heart. Are you a newcomer?

- Where are you from? – I brightened up.

A wind of calm blew over me from these names. They promised me a crazy 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 turned out to be a profitable tenant: in addition to the rent, the school promised me a car of peat for the winter. Concern, no longer touching, passed over the woman’s face. She herself did not have a place (she and her husband were raising her elderly mother), so she took me to some of her relatives and to others. But even here there was no separate room; everywhere it was cramped and crowded.

“Well, maybe we’ll go to Matryona,” said my guide, already getting tired of me. “But her latrine is not so good, she lives in a desolate place and is sick.”

The gate was locked, but my guide did not knock, but stuck her hand under the bottom and unscrewed the wrapper - a simple trick against cattle and strangers. The courtyard was not covered, but much in the house was under one connection. Behind the front door, internal steps rose to spacious bridges, high overshadowed by a roof. To the left, more steps led up into the upper room - a separate log house without a stove, and steps down into the basement. And to the right was the hut itself, with an attic and underground.

It had been built long ago and soundly, for a large family, but now lived a lonely woman of about sixty.

When I entered the hut, it 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 ficus trees. They filled the hostess's loneliness 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 also behind the chimney, the roundish face of the hostess seemed yellow and sick to me. And from her clouded eyes one could see that the illness had exhausted her.

While talking to me, she lay face down on the stove, without a pillow, with her head towards the door, and I stood below. She did not show any joy in getting a lodger, she complained about a bad illness, the attack of which she was now recovering from: the illness did not strike her every month, but when it did,

- ... holds for two days and three days, so I won’t have time to get up or serve you. But I wouldn’t mind the hut, live.

And she listed other housewives for me, those who would be more comfortable and pleasing to me, and told me to go around them. But I already saw that my lot was to live in this darkish hut with a dim mirror that was absolutely impossible to look into, with two bright ruble posters about the book trade and the harvest, hung on the wall for beauty. It was good for me here because, due to poverty, Matryona did not have a radio, and due to her loneliness, she had no one to talk to.

And although Matryona Vasilyevna forced me to walk around the village again, and although on my second visit she refused for a long time:

- If you don’t know how, if you don’t cook, how will you lose it? - but she already met me on my feet, and it was as if pleasure awoke in her eyes because I had returned.

We agreed on the price and 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 ruble from anywhere. Because she was not paid a pension. Her family didn't help her much. And on the collective farm she did not work for money - for sticks. For sticks of workdays in the accountant’s dirty book.

So I settled with Matryona Vasilyevna. We didn't 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 ficus trees away from the light, I placed a table at another window. There was electricity in the village - it was brought in from Shatura back in the twenties. The newspapers wrote then - “Ilyich’s light bulbs,” and the men, their eyes widening, said: “Tsar Fire!”

Maybe to some from the village, who were richer, Matryona’s hut did not seem like a good-looking hut, but for us that autumn and winter it was quite good: it had not yet leaked from the rains and the cold winds did not blow the stove heat out of it right away, only in the morning, especially when the wind was blowing from the leaky side.

Besides Matryona and me, the other people living in the hut were a cat, mice and cockroaches.

The cat was not young, and most importantly, she was lanky. Out of pity, she was picked up by Matryona and took root. Although she walked on four legs, she had a strong limp: she was saving one leg because it was a bad leg. 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: stupid! - such a strong blow that it took me a while to get used to it, I shuddered. It was she who put up three legs at once to protect the fourth.

But there were mice in the hut not because the lanky cat couldn’t cope with them; She jumped into the corner after them like lightning and carried them out in her teeth. And the mice were inaccessible to the cat due to the fact that someone once, in a good life, covered Matryona’s hut with corrugated greenish wallpaper, and not just in a layer, but in five layers. The wallpaper stuck to each other well, but in many places it came off the wall - and it looked like the inner skin of a hut. Between the logs of the hut and the wallpaper skins, the mice made passages for themselves and rustled impudently, running along them even under the ceiling. The cat angrily looked after their rustling sound, but could not reach it.

Sometimes the cat ate cockroaches, but they made her feel unwell. 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. But the kitchenette was swarming at night, and if late in the evening, having gone in to drink water, I lit a light bulb there, the entire floor, the large bench, and even the wall were almost completely brown and moving. I brought borax from the chemistry laboratory, and, mixing it with the 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 multiplied again.

At night, when Matryona was already asleep, and I was studying at the table, the rare, rapid rustling of mice under the wallpaper was covered by the continuous, unified, continuous, like the distant sound of the ocean, rustling 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 rude poster beauty, who from the wall constantly handed me Belinsky, Panferov and a stack of other books, but was silent. I got used to everything that happened in Matryona’s hut.

Matryona got up at four or five in the morning. The Matryonin walkers were twenty-seven years old when they were bought at the general store. They always walked forward, 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 light bulb behind the kitchen partition and quietly, politely, trying not to make noise, heated the Russian stove, went to milk the goat (all of her bellies were - this one dirty-white crooked horned goat), walked through the water and cooked in three cast iron pots; one cast iron for me, one for myself, one for the goat. She chose the smallest potatoes from the underground for the goat, small ones for herself, and for me - with egg. Her sandy garden, not fertilized since the pre-war years and always planted with potatoes, potatoes and potatoes, did not produce large potatoes.

I hardly heard her morning chores. I slept for a long time, woke up in the late winter light and stretched, poking my head out from under the blanket and sheepskin coat. They, plus a camp padded jacket on my feet, 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 each time said measuredly:

– Good morning, Matryona Vasilievna!

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

- Mmm-mm... you too!

And a little later:

- And breakfast is in time for you.

She didn’t announce what for breakfast, but it was easy to guess: unhusked cardboard soup, or cardboard soup (that’s how everyone in the village pronounced it), or barley porridge (you couldn’t buy any other cereal that year at Torfoprodukt, and even barley with battle - as it was the cheapest one, they fattened pigs and took them in bags). It was not always salted as it should, it often burned, and after eating it left a residue on the palate, gums and caused heartburn.

But it wasn’t Matryona’s fault: there was no oil in the Peat Product, margarine was in great demand, and only combined fat was available. And the Russian stove, as I took a closer look, is inconvenient for cooking: cooking occurs hidden from the cook, the heat approaches the cast iron unevenly from different sides. But it must have come to our ancestors from the Stone Age because, once heated before dawn, it keeps warm food and drink for livestock, food and water for humans all day long. And sleep warm.

I dutifully ate everything that was cooked for me, patiently putting it aside if I came across anything unusual: a hair, a piece of peat, a cockroach leg. I didn’t have the courage to reproach Matryona. In the end, she herself warned me: “If you don’t know how to cook, if you don’t cook, how will you lose it?”

“Thank you,” I said quite sincerely.

- On what? On your own on good? – she disarmed me with a radiant smile. And, looking innocently with faded blue eyes, she asked: “Well, what can I prepare for something terrible?”

Towards the end meant - towards the evening. I ate twice a day, just like at the front. What could I order for the terrible one? All of the same, cardboard or cardboard soup.

I put up with this because life taught me to find the meaning of everyday existence not in food. What was dearer to me was this smile on her round face, which, having finally earned enough money for a camera, I tried in vain to catch. Seeing the cold eye of the lens on herself, Matryona assumed an expression either tense or extremely stern.

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

That autumn Matryona had many grievances. A new pension law had just come out, and her neighbors encouraged her to seek a pension. She was lonely all around, but since she began to get very sick, she was released from the collective farm. There were a lot of injustices with Matryona: she was sick, but was not considered disabled; She worked on a collective farm for a quarter of a century, but because she was not at a factory, she was not entitled to a pension for herself, and she could only get a pension for her husband, that is, for the loss of a breadwinner. But my husband had been gone for fifteen years, since the beginning of the war, and now it was not easy to get those certificates from different places about his stash and how much he received there. It was a hassle to obtain these certificates; and still write that he received at least three hundred rubles a month; and certify that she lives alone and no one is helping her; and what year is she? and then carry it all to social security; and reschedule, correcting what was done wrong; and still wear it. And find out whether they will give you a pension.

These efforts were made more difficult by the fact that the social security service from Talnov was twenty kilometers to the east, the village council was ten kilometers to the west, and the village council was an hour’s walk to the north. From office to office they chased her for two months - now for a period, now for a comma. Each passage is a day. He goes to the village council, but the secretary is not there today, just like that, as happens in villages. Tomorrow, then, go again. Now there is a secretary, but he does not have a seal. The third day, go again. And go on the fourth day because they signed blindly on the wrong piece of paper, Matryona’s papers were all pinned together in one bundle.

“They oppress me, Ignatich,” she complained to me after such fruitless walks. - I was concerned.

But her forehead did not remain darkened for long. I noticed that she had the right remedy regaining a good mood is work. Immediately she either grabbed a shovel and dug up the cart. Or she would go for peat with a bag under her arm. And even with a wicker body - up to the berries in the distant forest. And bowing not to the office desks, but to the forest bushes, and having broken her back with burdens, Matryona returned to the hut, already enlightened, satisfied with everything, with her kind smile.

“Now I’ve got the tooth, Ignatich, I know where to get it,” she said about the peat. - What a place, what a delight!

- Yes, Matryona Vasilievna, isn’t my peat enough? The car is intact.

- Eww! your peat! So much more, and so much more - then, sometimes, it’s enough. Here, as winter swirls and a duel hits the windows, it’s not only drowning, but blowing out. In the summer we trained a lot of peat! Wouldn’t I have trained three cars now? So they get caught. Already one of our women is being dragged to court.

Yes, it was like that. The frightening breath of winter was already swirling - and hearts were aching. We stood around the forest, but there was nowhere to get a firebox. Excavators roared all around in the swamps, but the peat was not sold to residents, but only transported - to the bosses, and whoever was with the bosses, and by car - to teachers, doctors, and factory workers. There was no fuel provided - and there was no need to ask about it. The chairman of the collective farm walked around the village, looked into his eyes demandingly, or dimly, or innocently, and talked about anything except fuel. Because he himself stocked up. And winter was not expected.

Well, they used to steal timber from the master, now they stole peat from the trust. The women gathered in groups of five or ten to be bolder. We went during the day. Over the summer, peat was dug up everywhere and piled up to dry. This is what’s good about peat, because once it’s mined, it can’t be taken away right away. It dries until the fall, or even before the snow, if the road doesn’t work or the trust gets tired. It was during this time that the women took him. At a time they carried away six peats in a bag if they were damp, ten peats if they were dry. One bag of this kind, sometimes brought three kilometers away (and it weighed two pounds), was enough for one fire. And there are two hundred days in winter. And you need to heat it: Russian in the morning, Dutch in the evening.

- Why talk about both sexes! - Matryona was angry at someone invisible. “As the horses are gone, so what you can’t secure on yourself is not in the house.” My back never heals. In winter you carry the sled, in summer you carry the bundles, by God it’s true!

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

“Will they really guess, the enemies,” she smiled, wiping sweat from her forehead, “otherwise they won’t find it.”

What was the trust to do? He was not given the staff to place guards in all the swamps. It was probably necessary, having shown the abundant production in the reports, then to write it off - to crumbs, to the rains. Sometimes, in impulses, they assembled a patrol and caught women at the entrance to the village. The women threw their bags and ran away. Sometimes, based on a denunciation, they went from house to house with a search, drew up a report on illegal peat and threatened to take it to court. The women gave up carrying for a while, but winter was approaching and drove them out again - with sleds at night.

In general, looking closely at Matryona, I noticed that, in addition to cooking and housekeeping, she had some other significant task to do every day; She kept the natural order of these affairs in her head and, waking up in the morning, always knew what her day would be like that day. Besides peat, besides collecting old stumps turned up by a tractor in a swamp, besides lingonberries soaked in quarters for the winter (“Sharpen your teeth, Ignatich,” she treated me), besides digging potatoes, besides running around on pension business, she had to have 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 can get enough milk from a goat.” If you get a cow, it will eat me with my feet. Don’t mow the canvas - they have their own owners, and there’s no mowing in the forest - the forestry is the owner, and on the collective farm they don’t tell me - I’m not a collective farmer, they say, now. Yes, they and the collective farmers, down to the white flies, are all on the collective farm, all on the collective farm, and from under the snow - what kind of grass?.. As usual, they were boiling with hay in low water, from Petrov to Ilyin. It was believed that the grass was honey...

So, one goat had to collect hay - for Matryona it was a great job. In the morning she took a bag and a sickle and went to the places that she remembered, where the grass grew along the edges, along the road, along the islands in the swamp. Having filled the bag with fresh heavy grass, she dragged it home and laid it out in a layer in her yard. A bag of grass made dried hay - a fork.

The new chairman, recently sent from the city, first of all cut off the vegetable gardens of all the disabled people. Matryona left fifteen acres of sand, but ten acres remained empty behind the fence. However, even for fifteen hundred square meters the collective farm Matryona sipped. When there weren’t enough hands, when the women refused very stubbornly, the chairman’s wife came to Matryona. She was also a city woman, decisive, with a short gray short coat and a menacing look, as if she were a military woman.

She entered the hut and, without saying hello, looked sternly at Matryona. Matryona was in the way.

“So-so,” the chairman’s wife said separately. - Comrade Grigoriev! We will have to help the collective farm! We'll have to go take out the 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 her work.

“Well,” she drawled. - I'm sick, of course. And now I’m not attached to your case. - And then hastily corrected herself: - What time is it to come?

- And take your pitchforks! – the chairwoman instructed and left, rustling her hard skirt.

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

And then I thought all evening:

- What can I say, Ignatich! This work is neither to the post nor to the railing. You stand, leaning on a shovel, and wait for the factory whistle to ring at twelve. Moreover, women will start to settle scores, who came out and who didn’t come out. When, dressing up, they worked on the CEB, there was no sound, only oh-oh-ohing, now the lunch rolled up, here the evening came up.

Still, in the morning she left 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 to help me. We'll dig up the potatoes.

And Matryona could not refuse. She left her line of work, went to help her neighbor and, returning, still said without a shadow of envy:

- Oh, Ignatich, and she has big potatoes! I dug in a hurry, I didn’t want to leave the site, by God I really did!

Moreover, not a single plowing of the garden was done without Matryona. The Talnovsky women clearly established that digging up your own garden with a shovel is harder and longer than taking a plow and harnessing six of them to plow six gardens on your own. That’s why they called Matryona to help.

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

– She doesn’t take money. You can’t help but hide it for her.

Matryona also had a lot of fuss when it was her turn to feed the goat shepherds: one - a hefty, mute one, and the second - a boy with a constant slobbering cigarette in his teeth. This queue was once a month and a half long, but it drove Matryona into great expense. She went to the general store, bought canned fish, and bought sugar and butter, which she did not eat herself. It turns out that the housewives gave their best to each other, trying to feed the shepherds better.

“Be afraid of the tailor and the shepherd,” she explained to me. “The whole village will praise you if something goes wrong with them.”

And into this life, thick with worries, at times a severe illness would still burst in. Matryona collapsed and lay flat for a day or two. She didn't complain, didn't moan, but didn't move much either. On such days, Masha, Matryona’s close friend from her youngest years, came to care for the goat and light the stove. Matryona herself did not drink, did not eat, and did not ask for anything. Calling a doctor from the village medical center to your home was surprising in Talnov, somehow indecent in front of the neighbors - they say, lady. They called me once, she arrived very angry, and told Matryona, after she had rested, to come to the first aid station herself. Matryona walked against her will, they took tests, sent her to district hospital- and so it died out.

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

“It’s you who haven’t seen me before, Ignatich,” she justified herself. “All the bags were mine, I didn’t count five pounds as a tizhel.” The father-in-law shouted: “Matryona! You'll break your back! The Divir did not come to me to put my end of the log on the front. We had a military horse, Volchok, a healthy one...

- Why military?

- And they took ours to the war, this wounded one - in return. And he got caught in some kind of verse. Once, out of fear, he carried the sleigh into the lake, the men 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, they don’t even recognize them as tizhels.

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

- How can I go to Cherusti? The train will get out of Nechaevka, its big eyes will pop out, the rails will hum - it will make me feel hot, my knees will shake. By God it's true! – Matryona was surprised and shrugged her shoulders.

- So maybe it’s because they don’t give tickets, Matryona Vasilyevna?

Yet by that winter, Matryona’s life had improved as never before. They finally began to pay her eighty rubles in pension. She received more than a hundred more from the school and from me.

- Eww! Now Matryona doesn’t even need to die! – some of the neighbors were already beginning to envy. – More money She, the old one, has nowhere to go.

- What is a pension? - others objected. – The state is momentary. Today, you see, it gave, but tomorrow it will take away.

Matryona ordered new felt boots to be rolled up for herself. I bought a new padded jacket. And she put on a coat from a worn railway overcoat, which was given to her by a driver from Cherustei, the husband of her former pupil Kira. The hunchbacked village tailor put cotton wool under the cloth, and the result was such a nice coat, the likes of 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. Cheerful:

“Manenko and I saw peace, Ignatich.”

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

Only one event or omen darkened this holiday for Matryona: she went five miles to the church for the blessing of water, put her pot between the others, and when the blessing of water ended and the women rushed, jostling, to take it apart, Matryona did not make it among the first, and at the end - she was not there her bowler hat. And no other utensils were left in place of the pot. The pot disappeared, as if an unclean spirit had carried it away.

- Babonki! - Matryona walked among the worshipers. – Did someone take someone else’s blessed water due to a mistake? in a pot?

Nobody confessed. It happens that the boys called out, and there were boys there. Matryona returned sad. She always had holy water, but this year she didn’t have any.

It cannot be said, however, that Matryona believed somehow earnestly. Even if she was a pagan, superstitions took over in her: that you can’t go into the garden to see Ivan Lenten - on next year there will be no harvest; that if the snowstorm is swirling, it means that someone has hanged himself somewhere, and if you get your foot caught in the door, you should be a guest. As long as I lived with her, I never saw her pray, nor did she even cross herself once. And she started every business “with God!” and every time I say “God bless!” she said when I was going to school. Maybe she prayed, but not ostentatiously, embarrassed by me or afraid of oppressing me. There was a holy corner in a clean hut, and an icon of St. Nicholas the Pleasant in the kitchenette. The oblivions stood dark, and during the all-night vigil and in the morning on holidays, Matryona lit a lamp.

Only she had fewer sins than her wobbly cat. She was strangling mice...

Having escaped a little from her life, Matryona began to listen more attentively to my radio (I did not fail to set up a reconnaissance device for myself - that’s what Matryona called the outlet. My radio 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 of a remote hut for me - reconnaissance). That year, it was customary to receive, see off, and drive around many cities, holding rallies, two or three foreign delegations a week. And every day the news was full of important messages about banquets, dinners and breakfasts.

Matryona frowned and sighed disapprovingly:

- They drive and drive, they run into something.

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

- Everything is new, new, they don’t want to work on the old ones, where are we going to put the old ones?

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

- Oh, oh, oh, they’ll change something, winter or summer.

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

- They sing wonderfully, not like us.

- What are you saying, Matryona Vasilyevna, listen!

I listened again. She pursed her lips:

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

“But this is our way...” she whispered.

2

So Matryona got used to me, and I got used to her, and we lived easily. She did not interfere with my long evening studies, did not annoy me with any questions. She was so lacking in womanly curiosity, or was she so delicate, that she never asked me once: was I ever married? All the Talnov women pestered her to find out about me. She answered them:

– If you need it, you ask. I know one thing - he is distant.

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

And I also saw today’s Matryona, a lost old woman, and I also didn’t bother about her past, and I didn’t even suspect that there was anything to look for there.

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

Once, coming home from school, I found a guest in our hut. A tall black old man, with his hat on his knees, was sitting on a chair that Matryona had placed for him in the middle of the room, next to the Dutch stove. His entire face was covered with thick black hair, almost untouched by gray hair: a thick, black mustache merged with his thick black beard, so that his mouth was barely visible; and continuous black whiskers, barely showing the ears, rose to the black hair hanging from the crown of the head; and wide black eyebrows were thrown towards each other like bridges. And only the forehead disappeared like a bald dome into the bald, spacious crown. In the entire appearance of the old man, I seemed to be knowledgeable and dignified. He sat upright, with his hands folded on his staff, the staff resting vertically on the floor - he sat in a position of patient waiting and, apparently, spoke little to Matryona, who was fiddling around behind the partition.

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

- Father!.. I see you badly. My son is studying with you. Grigoriev Antoshka...

He might not have spoken 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 boy from the 8th grade, who looked like a cat after pancakes. He came to school as if to relax, 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 for which the schools of our district, our region and neighboring regions were famous, 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 need to study for this. He just laughed at us. He was in the 8th grade, but did not know fractions and did not distinguish what kind of triangles there are. In the first quarters he was in the tenacious grip of my twos - and the same awaited him in the third quarter.

But to this half-blind old man, fit to be Antoshka’s grandfather, not his father, and who came to me to bow to me in humiliation, how could I say now that the school deceived him year after year, but I can’t deceive him any longer, otherwise I’ll ruin the whole class, and Will I turn into a balabolka, and will I have to give a damn about all my work and my title?

And now I patiently explained to him that my son is very neglected, and he lies at school and at home, we need to check his diary more often and take a hard approach from both sides.

“It’s much cooler, father,” the guest assured me. “I’ve been beating him for a week now.” And my hand is heavy.

In the conversation, I remembered that once already Matryona herself for some reason interceded for Antoshka Grigoriev, but I did not ask what kind of relative he was to her, and then also refused. Matryona has now become a wordless petitioner at the door of the kitchenette. And when Thaddeus Mironovich left me with the idea that he would come and find out, I asked:

- I don’t understand, Matryona Vasilyevna, how is this Antoshka to you?

“My son is Divira,” Matryona answered dryly and went off to milk the goat.

Disappointed, I realized that this black persistent old man - brother her husband, missing.

And the long evening passed - Matryona no longer touched on this conversation. Only late in the evening, when I forgot to think about the old man and wrote my own in the silence of the hut to the rustle of cockroaches and the clicking of walkers, Matryona suddenly said from her dark corner:

– I, Ignatich, once almost 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 harassing her.

Apparently, all evening Matryona was thinking only about that.

She got up from the wretched 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 ours big room like a forest filled with ficus trees. From the table lamp the light fell all around only on my notebooks, and throughout the entire room, to eyes that looked up from the light, it seemed twilight with a pink tint. And Matryona emerged from it. And her cheeks seemed to me not yellow, as always, but also with a pink tint.

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

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

– And you…? And what?..

“That summer... we went with him to sit in the grove,” she whispered. “There was a grove here, where the horse yard is now, they cut it down... I couldn’t get out, Ignatich.” The German war has begun. They took Thaddeus to war.

She dropped it - and the blue, white and yellow July of 1914 flashed before me: a still 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, rosy, hugging the sheaf. And - a song, a song under the sky, which the village has long since stopped singing, and you can’t sing with the machinery.

– He went to war and disappeared... For three years I hid, waited. And no news, and not a bone...

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

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

“Their mother died, and Efim asked me in marriage.” Like, you wanted to go to our hut, so go to ours. Efim was a year younger than me. They say here: the smart one comes out after the Intercession, and the fool comes out after Petrov. They didn't have enough hands. I went... They got married on Peter's Day, and Thaddeus returned to Mikola in winter... from Hungarian captivity.

Matryona closed her eyes.

I was silent.

She turned to the door as if it were alive:

- I stood on the threshold. I'll scream! I would throw myself at his knees!.. It’s impossible... Well, he says, if it weren’t for my dear brother, I would have chopped you both up!

I shuddered. From her anguish or fear, I vividly imagined him standing there, black, in dark doors, and swung his ax at Matryona.

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

- Oh, oh, oh, poor little head! There were so many brides in the village, but he never married. He said: I will look for your name, the second Matryona. And he brought Matryona from Lipovka, they built a separate hut, where they live now, you walk past them to school every day.

Ah, that's it! Now I realized that I saw 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 her stingy husband was pulling the veins out of her, and she cried here for a long time, and her voice was always in her tears.

But it turned out that my Matryona had nothing to regret - that’s how Thaddeus beat his Matryona all her life, to this day, and so he squeezed the whole house.

“He never beat me,” she said about Efim. – He ran down the street at the men with his fists, but didn’t give a damn about me... That is, there was one time – I had a fight with my sister-in-law, he smashed a spoon on my forehead. I jumped up from the table: “You should choke, drones!” And she went into the forest. Didn't touch it anymore.

It seems that Thaddeus had nothing to regret: the second Matryona also gave birth to six children for him (among them my Antoshka, the youngest, scraped by) - and they all survived, but Matryona and Yefim had no children: until three months Without living and without any illness, everyone died.

“One daughter was just born, they washed her alive, and then she died. So I didn’t have to wash the dead one... Just as my wedding was on Peter’s Day, I buried my sixth child, Alexander, on Peter’s Day.

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

- The portion is in me! – Matryona nodded with conviction now. - They took me to a former nun for treatment, she made me cough - she was waiting for the portion to throw out of me like a frog. Well, I didn’t throw it away...

And the years passed, as the water floated... In '41, Thaddeus was not taken to the war because of blindness, but Efim was taken. And just like the older brother in the first war, the younger brother disappeared without a trace in the second. But this one didn't come back at all. The once noisy, but now deserted hut was rotting and aging - and the deserted Matryona was aging in it.

And she asked that second, downtrodden Matryona—the womb of her little snatch (or Thaddeus’ little blood?)—for their youngest girl, Kira.

For ten years she raised her here as her own, instead of her own ones who did not survive. And not long before she married me off to a young driver in Cherusti. Only from there now did she get help: sometimes sugar, when a pig was slaughtered - lard.

Suffering from ailments and near death, Matryona then declared her will: a separate log house of the upper room, located under the common connection with the hut, after her death, be given as an inheritance to Kira. She said nothing about the hut itself. Three more of her sisters were aiming to get this hut.

So that evening Matryona revealed herself to me completely. And, as it happens, the connection and meaning of her life, barely becoming visible to me, began to move in those same days. Kira arrived from Cherusti, old Thaddeus became worried: in Cherusti, in order to get and hold a piece of land, the young people had to build some kind of building. Matryona’s room was quite suitable for this. And there was nothing else to put in, there was nowhere in the forest to get it from. And not so much Kira herself, and not so much her husband, as for them, old Thaddeus set out to seize this plot in Cherusty.

And so he began to visit us often, came again and again, spoke instructively to Matryona and demanded that she give up the upper room now, during her lifetime. During these visits, he did not seem to me like that old man leaning on a staff, who was about to fall apart from a push or a rude word. Although hunched over with a sore lower back, he was still stately, over sixty, retaining the rich, youthful blackness of his hair, he pressed him with fervor.

Matryona did not sleep for two nights. It was not easy for her to decide. She didn’t feel sorry for the upper room itself, which stood idle, just as Matryona never felt sorry for her labor or her goods. And this room was still bequeathed to Kira. But it was scary for her to start breaking the roof under which she had lived for forty years. Even for me, a guest, it was painful that they would start tearing off the boards and turning out the logs of the house. And for Matryona this was the end of her entire life.

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

And Thaddeus and his sons and sons-in-law came one February morning and knocked on five axes, screamed and creaked as the boards were being torn off. Thaddeus’s own eyes sparkled busily. Despite the fact that his back was not completely straightened, he deftly climbed under the rafters and quickly fussed around below, shouting at his assistants. He and his father once built this hut as a boy; This room was built for him, the eldest son, so that he could settle here with his wife. And now he was furiously picking it apart, piece by piece, in order to take it away from someone else’s yard.

Having marked the crowns of the frame and the boards of the ceiling flooring with numbers, the 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 expect Matryona to have to live here for a long time.

And while the men were breaking, the women were preparing moonshine for the day of loading: vodka would be too expensive. Kira brought a pound of sugar from the Moscow region, Matryona Vasilievna, under the cover of darkness, carried that sugar and bottles to the moonshiner.

The logs in front of the gate were taken out and stacked, the son-in-law driver went to Cherusti to pick up a tractor.

But on the same day a riot began - a duel, in Matryonin’s style. She caroused and circled for two days and covered the road with enormous snowdrifts. Then, as soon as they knew the way, a truck or two passed by - suddenly it became warmer, one day it cleared up all at once, there were damp fogs, streams gurgled through the snow, and the foot in the boot got stuck up to the top.

For two weeks the tractor couldn't handle the broken chamber! These two weeks Matryona walked like lost. That’s why it was especially hard for her because her three sisters came, all unanimously cursed her as a fool for giving away the upper room, said that they didn’t want to see her anymore, and left.

And on those same days, a lanky cat wandered out of the yard - and disappeared. One to one. This also hurt Matryona.

Finally, the frozen road was covered with frost. A sunny day arrived, and my soul became happier. Matryona dreamed something good about that day. In the morning she found out that I wanted to take a photograph of someone at the old weaving mill (these still stood in two huts, and rough rugs were woven on them), and she smiled shyly:

- Just wait, Ignatich, a couple of days, maybe I’ll send the upper room - I’ll lay down my camp, because I’m intact - and then you’ll take it off. By 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 entryway, now shortened, glowed slightly pink, and Matryona’s face was warmed by this reflection. Those people always have good faces who are at peace with their conscience.

Just before dusk, returning from school, I saw movement near our house. The large new tractor sleigh was already loaded with logs, but a lot of things still didn’t fit - both the family of grandfather Thaddeus and those invited to help were finishing up knocking down another homemade sleigh. Everyone worked like crazy, in that ferocity that people have when they smell big money or are expecting a big treat. They shouted at each other and argued.

The dispute was about how to transport the sleigh - separately or together. One son of Thaddeus, lame, and his son-in-law, a machinist, explained that it was impossible to wallpaper the sleigh right away, the tractor would not pull it. The tractor driver, a self-confident, fat-faced big man, wheezed that he knew better, that he was the driver and would carry the sleigh together. His calculation was clear: according to the agreement, the driver paid him for transporting the room, and not for the flights. There was no way he would have made two flights a night - twenty-five kilometers each and one trip back. And by morning he had to be with the tractor in the garage, from where he secretly took it for the left one.

Old man Thaddeus was impatient to take away the entire upper room today - and he nodded to his men to give in. The second, hastily put together sleigh was picked up behind the strong first one.

Matryona ran among the men, fussed and helped roll logs onto the sleigh. Then I noticed that she was wearing my padded jacket and had already smeared her sleeves on the icy mud of the logs, and I told her about it with displeasure. This padded jacket was a memory for me, it warmed me during difficult years.

So for the first time I became angry with Matryona Vasilyevna.

- Oh, oh, oh, poor little head! – she was puzzled. - After all, I picked up her begma, and forgot that it was yours. Sorry, Ignatich. “And she took it off and hung it up to dry.”

The loading was over, and everyone who was working, about ten men, thundered past my table and ducked under the curtain into the kitchenette. From there, glasses clattered rather dully, sometimes a bottle clinked, the voices became louder, the boasting became more fervent. The tractor driver especially boasted. The heavy smell of moonshine reached me. But they didn’t drink for long—the darkness forced us to hurry. They began to leave. The tractor driver came out smug and with a cruel face. The son-in-law, the driver, the lame son of Thaddeus and one more nephew went to accompany the sleigh to Cherusti. The rest went home. Thaddeus, waving a stick, was catching up with someone, in a hurry to explain something. The lame son paused at my table to smoke and suddenly started talking about how much he loved Aunt Matryona, and that he had recently gotten married, and that his son had just been born. Then they shouted at him and he left. A tractor roared outside the window.

The last one to hurriedly jump out from behind the partition was Matryona. She shook her head anxiously after those who had left. I put on a padded jacket and threw on a scarf. At the door she told me:

- And why couldn’t the two be matched? If one tractor fell ill, the other would pull it up. And now what will happen - God knows!..

And she ran away after everyone.

After drinking, arguing and walking, it became especially quiet in the abandoned hut, chilled by the frequent opening of the doors. It was already completely dark outside the windows. I also got into my padded jacket and sat down at the table. The tractor died down in the distance.

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

And another hour passed. And further. Not only darkness, but a kind of deep silence descended on the village. I couldn’t understand then why there was silence - because it turned out that during the whole evening not a single train passed along the line half a mile away from us. My receiver was silent, and I noticed that the mice were busier than ever: more and more impudently, more and more noisily they ran under the wallpaper, scratching and squeaking.

I woke up. It was one o'clock in the morning, and Matryona did not return.

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

In the light, I looked around, however, that two of them had railroad overcoats. The older man, fat, with the same face as that tractor driver, asked:

-Where is the hostess?

- Don't know.

– Did the tractor and sleigh leave this yard?

- From this.

– Did they drink here before leaving?

All four squinted, looked around in the semi-darkness at table lamp. As I understand it, someone was arrested or wanted to be arrested.

- So what happened?

- Answer what they ask you!

- We went drunk?

-Did they drink here?

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

I retreated to the kitchen door and blocked it with myself.

- Really, I didn’t notice. It was not visible.

(I really couldn’t see it, I could only hear it.)

And as if with a confused gesture, I moved my hand, showing the interior of the hut: a peaceful table light above the books and notebooks; a crowd of frightened ficus trees; the harsh bed of a hermit. No signs of debauchery. And over the course of hours, hours, the moonshine smell dissipated.

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

- It turned them all around. You won't collect it.

- Yes, that’s what! The twenty-first ambulance almost went off the rails, that would have happened.

And they quickly left.

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

I returned to the hut, pulled back the curtains and went into the kitchenette. Here the moonshine stench still lingered and hit me. It was a frozen carnage - loaded stools and benches, empty lying bottles and one unfinished one, glasses, half-eaten herring, onions and shredded lard.

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

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

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

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

- Matryona Vasilievna?

Her friend Masha staggered into the hut:

- Matryona... Matryona is ours, Ignatich...

I sat her down, and, between tears, she told me.

At the crossing there is a hill, the entrance is steep. There is no barrier. The tractor went over the first sleigh, but the cable broke, and the second sleigh, homemade, got stuck at the crossing and began to fall apart - Thaddeus did not give the forest any good for them, for the second sleigh. The first ones drove a little - they returned for the second ones, the rope got along - the tractor driver and Thaddeus's son were lame, and Matryona was carried there too, between the tractor and the sleigh. What could she do to help the men? She was always interfering in men's affairs. And a horse once almost knocked her into the lake, under an ice hole. And why did the damned one go to move? - she gave away the upper room, and paid off all her debt... The driver kept watching so that the train would not come from Cherusti, its lights would be far away, and on the other hand, from our station, two coupled locomotives were coming - without lights and backwards. Why there are no lights is unknown, but when the locomotive is going backwards, the tender sprinkles coal dust in the eyes of the driver, it’s hard to watch. They flew in and crushed those three who were between the tractor and the sleigh into meat. The tractor was mutilated, the sleigh was in splinters, the rails were raised, and both locomotives were on their sides.

- How come they didn’t hear that the locomotives were coming?

- Yes, the tractor is screaming when it’s running.

-What about the corpses?

- They don’t let me in. They cordoned off.

- What did I hear about the ambulance... like an ambulance?..

- And the ten o’clock express will leave our station on the move, and also for the crossing. But as the locomotives collapsed, two drivers survived, jumped off and ran back, waving their arms as they stood on the rails, and managed to stop the train... My nephew was also crippled by the log. Now he’s hiding at Klavka’s so that they won’t know that he was at the crossing. Otherwise, they drag him in as a witness!.. Dunno is lying on the stove, and Know-it-all is being led on a string... And her husband Kirkin - not a scratch. I wanted to hang myself, but they took me out of the noose. Because of me, they say, my aunt and brother died. Now he went himself and was arrested. Yes, now he’s not in prison, he’s in a madhouse. Ah, Matryona-Matryonushka!..

No Matryona. Killed dear person. And on the last day I reproached her for wearing a padded jacket.

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

Aunt Masha sat and cried some more. And she already got up to go. And suddenly she asked:

- Ignatich! Do you remember... Matryona had a gray knit... She gave it to my Tanka after her death, right?

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

But I remembered:

– I read it, that’s right.

- So listen, maybe let me take her now? My relatives will come here in the morning, and then I won’t get it.

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

That's probably how it should have been.

“Of course... Take it...” I confirmed.

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

The mice were seized by some kind of madness, they walked along the walls, and the 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. In the morning school was waiting for me. It was three o'clock in the morning. And there was a way out: lock yourself up and go to bed.

Lock yourself because Matryona won’t come.

I lay down, leaving the light on. The mice squeaked, almost moaned, and kept running and running. With a tired, incoherent head, it was impossible to escape the involuntary trembling - as if Matryona was invisibly rushing about and saying goodbye here, to her hut.

And suddenly, in the darkness at the entrance doors, on the threshold, I imagined young black Thaddeus with a raised ax:

“If it weren’t for my dear brother, I would have chopped you both up!”

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

3

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

“The Lord left her her right hand.” There will be a prayer to God...

And so the whole crowd of ficuses, which Matryona loved so much that, having woken up one night in the smoke, she did not rush to save the hut, but to throw the ficuses onto the floor (they wouldn’t be suffocated by the smoke) - the ficuses were taken out of the hut. Swept the floors clean. Matryona’s dull mirror was hung with a wide towel from an old home sewer. Idle posters were taken down from the wall. They moved my table. And by the windows, under the icon, they placed a coffin, knocked together without any fuss, on stools.

And Matryona was lying in the coffin. A clean sheet covered her missing, mutilated body, 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 brought small children to look at the dead woman. And if crying began, all the women, even if they entered the hut out of empty curiosity, all would definitely cry from the door and from the walls, as if they were accompanying in chorus. And the men stood silently at attention, taking off their hats.

The actual crying was left to the relatives. In the crying I noticed a coldly thoughtful, primordially established order. Those who filed away approached the coffin for a short time and wailed quietly at the coffin itself. Those who considered themselves closer to the deceased began crying from the threshold, and upon reaching the coffin, they bent down to cry over the very face of the deceased. Each mourner had an amateur melody. And they expressed their own thoughts and feelings.

Then I learned that crying over the deceased is not just crying, but a kind of politics. Matryona’s three sisters flew in, seized the hut, the goat and the stove, locked her chest, gutted two hundred funeral rubles from the lining of her coat, and explained to everyone who came that they were the only ones close to Matryona. And over the coffin they cried like this:

- Oh, nanny-nanny! Oh, lyolka-lyolka! And you are our only one! And you would live quietly and peacefully! And we would always caress you! And your upper room destroyed you! And I finished you off, cursed one! And why did you break it? And why didn't you listen to us?

So the sisters’ cries were accusatory cries against their husband’s relatives: there was no need to force Matryona to destroy the upper room. (And the hidden meaning was: you took that upper room, but we won’t give you the hut!)

The husband's relatives - Matryona's sisters-in-law, sisters Efim and Thaddeus, and various other nieces came and cried like this:

- Oh, auntie-auntie! And why didn’t you take care of yourself! And, probably, now they are offended by us! And you are our darling, and the fault is all yours! And the upper room has nothing to do with it. And why did you go to where death was guarding you? And no one invited you there! And I didn’t think about how you died! And 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, whom Thaddeus once took by just her name - strayed from this policy and simply screamed, straining over the coffin:

- Yes, you are my little sister! Are you really going to be offended by me? Oh-ma!.. Yes, we used to talk and talk with you! And forgive me, wretched one! Oh-ma!.. And you went to your mother, and, probably, you’ll come pick me up! Oh-ma-ah!..

At this “oh-ma-ah” she seemed to give up all her spirit - and beat and beat her chest against the wall of the coffin. And when her crying exceeded the ritual norms, the women, as if recognizing that the crying was completely successful, all said in unison:

- Leave me alone! Leave me alone!

Matryona lagged behind, but then 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: how I was born - I don’t remember; how I will die - I don’t know.

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

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

- Oh, my sick one! Oh, my Vasilievna! Oh, I'm tired of seeing you off!

And not at all ritually - with a simple sob of our century, not poor in them, the ill-fated adopted daughter of Matryona sobbed - that Kira from Cherusti, for whom this room was broken and transported. Her curled locks were pathetically disheveled. The eyes were red, as if filled with blood. She didn’t notice how her scarf bunched up in the cold, or she put her coat on past the sleeve. She walked insanely 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 turned out that her husband was doubly guilty: he was not only driving the room, but he was a railway driver, knew well the rules of unguarded crossings - and should have gone to the station and warned about the tractor. That night, in the Ural ambulance, a thousand lives of people sleeping peacefully on the first and second shelves in the half-light of train lamps were about to end. Because of the greed of a few people: to seize a piece of land or not to make a second trip with a tractor.

Because of the upper room, which has been under a curse since the hands of Thaddeus set out to break it.

However, the tractor driver has already left the human court. And the road management itself was guilty of the fact that the busy crossing was not guarded, and that the locomotive raft was running without lights. That’s why they first tried to blame everything on booze, and now they hush up the trial itself.

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

And the first sleigh, loaded and intact, stood not far behind the crossing.

And it was precisely this - that one sleigh was teasing, waiting with a ready-made cable, and the second could still be snatched from the fire - this is what tormented the soul of black-bearded Thaddeus all Friday and all Saturday. His daughter was losing her mind, his son-in-law was on trial, own home his son, whom he had killed, was lying; on the same street was the woman he had killed, whom he had once loved. Thaddeus only came briefly to stand at the coffins, holding 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 Matryona’s sisters.

Having sorted through the Talnovskys, I realized that Thaddeus was not the only one in the village.

That our language strangely calls our property our property, the people's or mine. And losing it is considered shameful and stupid in front of people.

Thaddeus, without sitting down, rushed first to the village, then to the station, from superior to superior, and with an unbending back, leaning on his staff, asked everyone to condescend to his old age and give permission to return the upper room.

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 torn up crossing, in a roundabout way through three villages, transported the remains of the upper room to his yard. He finished it on the night from Saturday to Sunday.

And on Sunday afternoon they buried him. Two coffins came together in the middle of the village, the relatives argued about which coffin came first. Then they were placed on the same sledge, side by side, aunt and nephew, and on the newly dampened February crust under a cloudy sky they took the dead to a church cemetery two villages away from us. The weather was windy and unpleasant, and the priest and the deacon waited in the church and did not go out to Talnovo to meet them.

People walked slowly to the outskirts and sang in chorus. Then he fell behind.

Even before Sunday, the woman’s bustle in our hut did not subside: the old woman at the coffin was humming a psalter, Matryona’s sisters were scurrying around the Russian stove with a grip, from the forehead of the stove there was a glow of heat from the hot peats - from those that Matryona carried in a sack from a distant swamp. Tasteless pies were baked from bad flour.

On Sunday, when we returned from the funeral, and it was already in the evening, we gathered for the wake. The tables, arranged in one long one, also covered the place where the coffin stood in the morning. First, everyone stood around the table, and the old man, my sister-in-law’s husband, read the “Our Father.” Then they poured it to the very bottom of the bowl for everyone - they were full of honey. To save our souls, we swallowed it with spoons, without anything. Then they ate something and drank vodka, and the conversations became more lively. Everyone stood up in front of the jelly and sang “Eternal Memory” (they explained to me that they sing it before the jelly). They drank again. And they talked even louder, no longer about Matryona. Sister-in-law's husband boasted:

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

Finally dinner was over. Everyone stood up again. They sang “It is Worthy to Eat.” And again, with triple repetition: eternal memory! everlasting memory! everlasting memory! But the voices were hoarse, discordant, the faces were drunk, and no one eternal memory no longer invested feelings.

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

“Efim is dead, he’s dead!” How could he not return? Yes, if I had known that they would even hang me in my homeland, I would still have returned!

The shoemaker nodded in agreement. He was a deserter and never parted with his homeland: he hid underground with his mother throughout the war.

High on the stove sat that stern, silent old woman who had stayed overnight, older than all the ancients. She looked down silently, condemningly at the indecently animated 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 Matryona’s funeral, perhaps because he was commemorating his son. But in the coming days he came to this hut twice in hostility to negotiate with his mother’s sisters and with the deserter shoemaker.

The dispute was about the hut: who should it belong to - a sister or an adopted daughter. The matter was about to go to court, but they reconciled, deciding that the court would give the hut not to one or the other, but to the village council. The deal was completed. One sister took the goat, a shoemaker and his wife took the hut, and to account for Thaddeus’s share that he “took over every log here with his own hands,” the upper room that had already been brought was taken, and they also gave him the barn where the goat lived, and the entire inner fence between the yard and a vegetable garden.

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

Matryona's hut was closed until spring, and I moved to one of her sisters-in-law, not far away. This sister-in-law then, on various occasions, remembered something about Matryona and somehow shed light on the deceased for me from a new perspective.

“Efim didn’t love her.” He said: I like to dress culturally, but she – somehow, everything is in a country style. And one day we went to the city with him to earn money, so he got himself a girlfriend there and didn’t want to return to Matryona.

All her reviews about Matryona were disapproving: and she was unclean; and I didn’t chase the factory; 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 came - there was no one to call the garden to plow with a plow).

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

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

Indeed! - after all, there’s a piglet at every hut! But she didn't. What could be easier - to feed a greedy piglet who recognizes nothing in the world except food! Cook for him three times a day, live for him - and then slaughter and have lard.

But she didn't have...

I didn’t chase after acquisitions... I didn’t struggle to buy things and then cherish them more than my life.

I didn’t bother with outfits. Behind clothes that embellish freaks and villains.

Misunderstood and abandoned even by her husband, who buried six children, but did not have a sociable disposition, a stranger to her sisters, sisters-in-law, funny, foolishly working for others for free - she did not accumulate property for death. A dirty white goat, a lanky cat, ficus trees...

We all lived next to her and did not understand that she was the very righteous person without whom, according to the proverb, the village would not stand.

Neither the city.

Not all the land is ours.

Current page: 1 (book has 3 pages in total)

Matryonin yard

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

Only the drivers knew and remembered why it all happened.

1

In the summer of 1956, I returned from the dusty hot desert at random - simply to Russia. No one was waiting for me or calling for her at any point, because I was ten years late in returning. I just wanted to go to the middle zone - without the heat, with the deciduous roar of the forest. I wanted to worm my way around and get lost in the most intimate Russia - if such a thing existed somewhere, it lived.

A year before, on this side of the Ural ridge, I could only get hired to carry a stretcher. They wouldn’t even hire me as an electrician for decent construction. But I was drawn to teaching. Knowledgeable people told me that there’s no point in spending money on a ticket, I’m wasting my time.

– Tell me, do you need mathematicians? Somewhere away from the railway? I want to live there forever.

Alas, they did not bake bread there. They didn't sell anything edible there. The entire village was hauling food in bags from the regional town.

Peat product? Ah, Turgenev didn’t know it was possible to write something like this in Russian!

I was amazed by her speech. She did not speak, but hummed touchingly, and her words were the same ones that longing pulled me from Asia:

- Drink, drink with all your heart. Are you a newcomer?

- Where are you from? – I brightened up.

A wind of calm blew over me from these names. They promised me a crazy 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.

“Well, maybe we’ll go to Matryona,” said my guide, already getting tired of me. “But her latrine is not so good, she lives in a desolate place and is sick.”

The gate was locked, but my guide did not knock, but stuck her hand under the bottom and unscrewed the wrapper - a simple trick against cattle and strangers. The courtyard was not covered, but much in the house was under one connection. Behind the front door, internal steps ascended to spacious bridges, high overshadowed by a roof. To the left, more steps led up to upper room– a separate log house without a stove, and steps down to the basement. And to the right was the hut itself, with an attic and underground.

It had been built long ago and soundly, for a large family, but now lived a lonely woman of about sixty.

When I entered the hut, it 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.

- ... holds for two days and three days, so I won’t have time to get up or serve you. But I wouldn’t mind the hut, live.

And although Matryona Vasilyevna forced me to walk around the village again, and although on my second visit she refused for a long time:

- If you don’t know how, if you don’t cook, how will you lose it? - but she already met me on my feet, and it was as if pleasure awoke in her eyes because I had returned.

We agreed on the price and the peat that the school would bring.

Besides Matryona and me, the other people living in the hut were a cat, mice and cockroaches.

Matryona got up at four or five in the morning. The Matryonin walkers were twenty-seven years old when they were bought at the general store. They always walked forward, 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 light bulb behind the kitchen partition and quietly, politely, trying not to make noise, heated the Russian stove, went to milk the goat (all of her bellies were - this one dirty-white crooked horned goat), walked through the water and cooked in three cast iron pots; one cast iron for me, one for myself, 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. Her sandy garden, not fertilized since the pre-war years and always planted with potatoes, potatoes and potatoes, did not produce large potatoes.

– Good morning, Matryona Vasilievna!

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

- Mmm-mm... you too!

And a little later:

- And breakfast is in time for you.

She didn’t announce what was for breakfast, but it was easy to guess: burly unhulled, or soup cardboard(that’s how everyone in the village pronounced it), or barley porridge (it was impossible to buy any other cereal that year at Torfoprodukt, and even barley was a struggle - as it was the cheapest one, they fattened the pigs and took them in bags). It was not always salted as it should, it often burned, and after eating it left a residue on the palate, gums and caused heartburn.

“Thank you,” I said quite sincerely.

- On what? On your own on good? – she disarmed me with a radiant smile. And, looking innocently with faded blue eyes, she asked: “Well, what can I prepare for something terrible?”

TO terribly it meant towards evening. I ate twice a day, just like at the front. What could I order for the terrible one? All of the same, cardboard or cardboard soup.

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

That autumn Matryona had many grievances. A new pension law had just come out, and her neighbors encouraged her to seek a pension. She was lonely all around, but since she began to get very sick, she was released from the collective farm. There were a lot of injustices with Matryona: she was sick, but was not considered disabled; she worked on a collective farm for a quarter of a century, but because she was not at a factory, she was not entitled to a pension for myself, and it was only possible to achieve for my husband, that is, for the loss of a breadwinner. But my husband had been gone for fifteen years, since the beginning of the war, and now it was not easy to get those certificates from different places about him. senior and how much he received there. It was a hassle to obtain these certificates; and still write that he received at least three hundred rubles a month; and certify that she lives alone and no one is helping her; and what year is she? and then carry it all to social security; and reschedule, correcting what was done wrong; and still wear it. And find out whether they will give you a pension.

“They oppress me, Ignatich,” she complained to me after such fruitless walks. - I was concerned.

But her forehead did not remain darkened for long. I noticed: she had a sure way to regain her good mood - work. Immediately she either grabbed a shovel and dug up the cart. Or she would go for peat with a bag under her arm. And even with a wicker body - up to the berries in the distant forest. And bowing not to the office desks, but to the forest bushes, and having broken her back with burdens, Matryona returned to the hut, already enlightened, satisfied with everything, with her kind smile.

“Now I’ve got the tooth, Ignatich, I know where to get it,” she said about the peat. - What a place, what a delight!

- Yes, Matryona Vasilievna, isn’t my peat enough? The car is intact.

- Eww! your peat! So much more, and so much more - then, sometimes, it’s enough. It's like winter is here, yeah duel into the windows, it not only drowns you, but also blows it out. In the summer we trained a lot of peat! Wouldn’t I have trained three cars now? So they get caught. Already one of our women is being dragged to court.

Women walked a day - more than once. On good days, Matryona brought six bags. She piled my peat openly, hid hers under the bridges, and every evening she blocked the hole with a board.

“Will they really guess, the enemies,” she smiled, wiping sweat from her forehead, “otherwise they won’t find it.”

- Why don’t you keep cows, Matryona Vasilievna?

She entered the hut and, without saying hello, looked sternly at Matryona. Matryona was in the way.

“So-so,” the chairman’s wife said separately. - Comrade Grigoriev! We will have to help the collective farm! We'll have to go take out the 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 her work.

“Well,” she drawled. - I'm sick, of course. And now I’m not attached to your case. - And then hastily corrected herself: - What time is it to come?

- And take your pitchforks! – the chairwoman instructed and left, rustling her hard skirt.

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

And then I thought all evening:

- What can I say, Ignatich! This work is neither to the post nor to the railing. You stand, leaning on a shovel, and wait for the factory whistle to ring at twelve. Moreover, women will start to settle scores, who came out and who didn’t come out. When it happened on my own worked, but nothing sound there was no, just oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-no-way moment, now lunch has arrived, now evening has arrived.

Still, in the morning she left 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 to help me. We'll dig up the potatoes.

And Matryona could not refuse. She left her line of work, went to help her neighbor and, returning, still said without a shadow of envy:

- Oh, Ignatich, and she has big potatoes! I dug in a hurry, I didn’t want to leave the site, by God I really did!

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

– She doesn’t take money. You can’t help but hide it for her.

Matryona also had a lot of fuss when it was her turn to feed the goat shepherds: one, a hefty one, dumb, and the second - a boy with a constant slobbering cigarette in his teeth. This queue was once a month and a half long, but it drove Matryona into great expense. She went to the general store, bought canned fish, and bought sugar and butter, which she did not eat herself. It turns out that the housewives gave their best to each other, trying to feed the shepherds better.

“Be afraid of the tailor and the shepherd,” she explained to me. “The whole village will praise you if something goes wrong with them.”

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

- Why military?

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

- So maybe it’s because they don’t give tickets, Matryona Vasilyevna?

Yet by that winter, Matryona’s life had improved as never before. They finally began to pay her eighty rubles in pension. She received more than a hundred more from the school and from me.

- Eww! Now Matryona doesn’t even need to die! – some of the neighbors were already beginning to envy. “She, the old one, has nowhere to put any more money.”

- What is a pension? - others objected. – The state is momentary. Today, you see, it gave, but tomorrow it will take away.

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

“Manenko and I saw peace, Ignatich.”

- Babonki! - Matryona walked among the worshipers. – Did someone take someone else’s blessed water due to a mistake? in a pot?

Nobody confessed. It happens that the boys called out, and there were boys there. Matryona returned sad. She always had holy water, but this year she didn’t have any.

It cannot be said, however, that Matryona believed somehow earnestly. Even if she was a pagan, superstitions took over in her: that you couldn’t go into the garden on Ivan Lenten’s day - there would be no harvest the next year; that if the snowstorm is swirling, it means that someone has hanged himself somewhere, and if you get your foot caught in the door, you should be a guest. As long as I lived with her, I never saw her pray, nor did she even cross herself once. And she started every business “with God!” and every time I say “God bless!” she said when I was going to school. Maybe she prayed, but not ostentatiously, embarrassed by me or afraid of oppressing me. There was a holy corner in a clean hut, and an icon of St. Nicholas the Pleasant in the kitchenette. The oblivions stood dark, and during the all-night vigil and in the morning on holidays, Matryona lit a lamp.

Only she had fewer sins than her wobbly cat. She was strangling mice...

Having escaped a little from her coop, Matryona began to listen more attentively to my radio (I didn’t fail to put on reconnaissance– that’s what Matryona called the outlet. My radio was no longer a scourge for me, because I could turn it off with my own hand at any moment; but, in fact, he came out of a remote hut for me - reconnaissance). That year, it was customary to receive, see off, and drive around many cities, holding rallies, two or three foreign delegations a week. And every day the news was full of important messages about banquets, dinners and breakfasts.

Matryona frowned and sighed disapprovingly:

- They drive and drive, they run into something.

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

- Everything is new, new, they don’t want to work on the old ones, where are we going to put the old ones?

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

- Oh, oh, oh, they’ll change something, winter or summer.

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

- They sing wonderfully, not like us.

- What are you saying, Matryona Vasilyevna, listen!

I listened again. She pursed her lips:

In the summer of 1956, the narrator (Ignatich) returns to Russia. His absence from the beginning of the war lasted for ten years. The man has nowhere to rush, and no one is waiting for him. The narrator is on his way to the Russian outback with forests and fields, where you can find solitude and tranquility. After long search he gets a job as a teacher in the village of Talnovo, which is located next to a village with the strange name Torfoprodukt.

At the local bazaar, the author meets a woman who finds him housing. Soon the narrator moves in with a lonely woman venerable age, whom everyone calls only by her first name - Matryona. In addition to the owner herself, the dilapidated house is inhabited by mice, cockroaches and a lame cat.

Every day Matryona woke up at five in the morning and went to feed the goat. Now she had to prepare breakfast for the tenant. Usually it was potatoes from the garden, soup from the same potatoes (cardboard) or barley porridge.

One day Matryona learned from her neighbors that a new pension law had been passed. He gave the woman a chance to receive a pension, which she was not paid. Matryona wanted to resolve this issue at all costs. But in reality, everything was quite complicated: the offices that needed to be visited were located in different directions from Talnovo. The woman had to walk several kilometers every day. Often such trips turned out to be in vain: either the accountant was not there, or the seal was taken away.

In Torfoprodukt and the surrounding villages they lived poorly. Since the soil in these places was sandy, harvests were scarce. And the peat bogs around belonged to the trust. Residents had to secretly stock up on fuel for the winter, hiding from the guards.

Fellow villagers often asked Matryona to help in the garden. She didn’t refuse anyone and didn’t even take money. She dropped what she was doing and went to help. Even on a foreign land, the woman worked with desire and was sincerely happy about the good result.

About once every month and a half it was Matryona’s turn to feed the goat shepherds. Such a lunch was not cheap for her, since she had to buy butter, sugar, canned food and other products at the general store. Matryona did not allow herself this, even on holidays, but ate only what grew in the garden.

The hostess loved to tell Ignatich a story about the horse Volchok, who once carried a sleigh into the lake. All the men got scared and jumped to the sides, and Matryona grabbed the horse by the bridle and stopped it. But she also had her fears. Matryona was afraid of fire and trains.

Finally, in the winter, the woman began to receive a pension, and her neighbors began to envy her. Matryona was able to order felt boots and a coat from an old overcoat and put aside two hundred rubles for the funeral. The woman seemed to come to life: her work was easier, and illnesses bothered her less often. Only one incident darkened Matryona’s mood - at Epiphany, someone took her pot of holy water from the church. The missing item was never found.

Neighbors often asked the woman about Ignatich. Matryona passed on questions from her fellow villagers to the lodger, but did not ask anything herself. The author only told the owner that he was in prison. He himself never delved into Matryona’s soul or asked about the past.

One day Ignatich found the black-haired old man Thaddeus in the house, who had come to ask for a teacher for his son Anton. The teenager was famous throughout the school for his bad behavior and falling behind in subjects. In the eighth grade, he did not yet know fractions and did not know what triangles were.

After Thaddeus left, Matryona was silent for a long time, and then suddenly began to open up with the tenant. It turned out that Thaddeus is her husband’s brother. In their youth, Matryona and this black-haired old man were in love with each other and were planning to start a family. Their plans were disrupted by the First World War. Thaddeus went to the front and disappeared there. Three years later, his mother died, and the hut was left without a mistress. Soon, Thaddeus’s younger brother Efim wooed Matryona. In the summer they had a wedding, and in the winter Thaddeus, who had long been considered dead, unexpectedly returned from Hungarian captivity. Having learned about what had happened, Thaddeus said right at the door: “If it weren’t for my dear brother, I would have chopped you both down!”

A little later, he married a girl from another village, whose name was also Matryona. He told his fellow villagers that he chose her only because of his favorite name.

Thaddeus’s wife often came to the hostess and cried that her husband was hurting her, even beating her. But she and Matryona’s ex-fiancé had six children. But the children of Matryona and Efim died in infancy; no one survived. The woman was sure that these troubles were due to the damage that had been brought upon her.

On Patriotic War Thaddeus was no longer taken, and Efim did not return from the front. A lonely woman took in Thaddeus's daughter Kira. Having matured, the girl quickly married a driver and left for another village.

Since Matryona was often ill, she made a will early. It followed from it that the owner was giving the extension to the hut to Kira. The fact is that the pupil needed to legalize her plot of land in a new place. To do this, it was enough to put any building on your “claptic”.

The extension bequeathed by Matryona was very useful, so Thaddeus decided to resolve this issue during the woman’s lifetime. He began to often come to Matryona and persuade her to give up the room now. Matryona didn’t feel sorry for the extension itself, but she really didn’t want to destroy the roof of the hut.

Thaddeus finally achieved his goal. One cold winter day he came to Matryona with the children to separate the upper room. For two weeks, the dismantled extension lay near the hut, as a snowstorm swept away all the roads. The sisters came to Matryona and scolded the woman for her stupid kindness. At the same time, Matryona’s lame cat left the house somewhere.

One day Ignatich saw Thaddeus in the yard with people who were loading a dismantled room onto a tractor sled. In the dark they took her to the village to see Kira. Matryona also left with them, but did not return for a long time.

After midnight, the narrator heard conversations on the street. Two men in overcoats entered the house and began to look for signs of drinking. Having found nothing, they left, and the author felt that a misfortune had happened.

His fears were soon confirmed by Matryona’s friend Masha. She said in tears that the sleigh got stuck on the rails and fell apart, and at that time a steam locomotive was walking and ran over them. The driver, the son of Thaddeus and Matryona, were killed.