At this time in the doorway Vukol with a food small knot appeared.
The boy stopped, without understanding that he happened and that the red turban on the fathers head means. His face twitched.
Andrey moved.
Breathes! the elderly worker, склонясь over him told. Mozhe, оту́ dobet! waters it is necessary! To cast!
The watchman ran behind water.
To Andrey directly from a bucket poured over the head. He poorly moaned.
All joyfully began to make a racket.
It is live! not to death! it oklematsya! Means, and from us to the answer will not be! In hospital, and about a fight mums the word! so our way!
Andrey lay unconscious. His breast hard rose. From time to time weak plaintive groans escaped from it. The left side of a forehead and person was blown up, absolutely closing an eye.
Christened! indeed!
Well and it it is good that missed, and that would cut out the hammer the head as a pot with Russian cabbage soup!
And this flatwise struck with the jointer plane: if an edge a cover!
Lifted mutilated and incurred on the carrier.
Elizar spoke to the son:
Nothing, the sonny, worry My head it nothing, will manage will heal!. now together home we will go!
The elderly worker approached Elizar and told, swinging the head:
Well, you got off lightly, Elizar! Seem, the guy will survive!
Then stroked a direct goatee with strong streaks of gray and added meditatively:
Long ago I look at you: good you, the intellectual, correct person, but the goner here in our places! With all the heart I speak: you will serve month pay off! What people at us you see. Everyone behind a top, has a knife without Alis passports with forgeries, there are which in a jail not once of a sizhivala! Vagrant people, bessemeyny! and the head is not expensive to them and not that others!
* * *
In Zaymishche there was no church: the village belonged to arrival of Petty-bourgeois Farms, and went for seven versts to a mass only for a Trinity there, in the spring when all floor in church was covered with a new-mown fragrant grass, and outside decorated with just cut off branches of birches. Still there went to church on Flora and Monastery or on Ivan Kupava. For a bestial holiday, too in the spring when to the river drove horses, cows, calfs and sheep and all of them humbly stood in water, listening as the priest in a peaked calotte, hook-nosed, with a long wedge of a beard, similar to the Tatar, coming to Zaymishche three times a year on collecting voluntary donations served after a mass a prayer in health of canine country friends ashore. Then the whole day guys and maids tried to pour unawares over each other water, ran with buckets from a log hut in a log hut, with laughter pushed stood gaping to the small river, boated on the century oak wood flooded with a high water.
Here everything that the grandmother Anna remembered by a church part: spring, joyful holidays with participation of the nature, the pets, children and youth who were coming to an end by the evening in melodious round dances after which burned down fires, jumped through fire, and in dark spring night till the dawn walked guys with maids, retiring couples: You look by fall and the village who to whom will transfer matchmakers where wedding feasts are going to feast knew.
Was in these holidays of churchism a little escaped the remains of cheerful Slavic paganism more. Because also these beautiful forest holidays together with her youth and a spring flood of mighty Volga running between the dense woods to which nobody knew neither the end, nor edge were remembered by it. It was possible to get lost in these Middle Volga woods forever. In them still there lived the laughing loudly wood goblins, and in the forest rivers and lakes the mermaids beauties bathed. In spring sunny days the invisible cuckoo cuckooed-cried about the abandoned children, and girls long looked for its blue slezk in backwoods.
Nearly sixteen years married Anyuta to the athlete Matvei, and life passed in hard country work, without coming off mother earth. It was life of patriarchal country way, in a kurny smoky log hut, and still it was fanned by unconscious poetry of agricultural work. The concept about church god was vague in the form of as if sprinkler of shoots on green country fields. The grandmother trusted in the Kingdom of Heaven, and a serious obstacle for eternal life in heaven only non-compliance with church formalities seemed it, and the main misfortune was to die, not поговев the Lent, without having received remission of the collected sins and not причастившись in church.
Having remembered it after fifty years of absolute indifference to the priest and church, the grandmother on a case of death decided to correct this omission which came from its eternal employment and remoteness of the church building from the village of Zaymishche.
Now it was possible to go to the city, to stay for a while to the daughter and the son-in-law and there to pogovet. The grandmother was not going to die yet, but decided to use an opportunity.
At the same time also other purpose of a travel joined: in the city the grandmother was not since young years, overcame thoughts that life changed, the kurny log hut is replaced new, burning in a white way long ago, the splinter was replaced by a lamp, pestryadinny sundresses print dresses, across Volga steamships went, somewhere the chugunka close goes, and illiterate parents find necessary to send children to school. Also the grandmother solved: time in the city there live the family, close now whether not to send Lavrusha to school? Gramotya Elizar by all means by a scientific part will let the Vukol.
As a result of her such reflections Yafim Chalku in sledge-rozvalni harnessed and carried mother and the brother through winter Volga. Hardly found Kolchinas house and a svetelka in the yard, asked for the yard and, having left a raspryazhenny horse under a canopy, got on a ladder.
They with surprise were met by Masha and six-year-old Vovka with traces of the begun to live scrofula on a forehead. Elizar did not return from the plant yet, and Vukol incurred to it a lunch.
The meeting was joyful. From congenital country good manners Masha told nothing about the hard work Elizara at the plant, about fragility of its situation. She sincerely rejoiced, having learned that mother came on week to fast, told her, as the church is close, namely in the semibasement floor of a tower on a market, no distance from Kolchinas house. Sending to the Monastery school, told that Elizar himself also went to the teacher with a request to accept the son. The teacher agreed, though in half of winter, to put the boy in special such office for the youngest. Here and the grandmother Anna let will go to school to the teacher and will tell that she came from Elizara from foundry sending both boys to school. The teacher Elizara knows and respects for the fact that he well and cheap worked at repair of school in the fall.
The conversation took place for small a copper samovarchik of an ancient form. Mother and the daughter spoke without stopping, but the others only listened, smiling and sweating from hot tasty tea. Not talkative Yafim, without having said almost words, except interjections with stutter, overturned a cup a bottom up, put on it a bit of sugar and, having risen because of a table, unexpectedly uttered very probably on the grandfather Matvei: It is time to go!
Having seen off Yafima, the grandmother before going to the teacher, the Monastery took by hand and went before such business to tower church.
But hardly they left gate of the house of Kolchina as became interested in a strange procession: towards to them from under the mountain slowly carried on the wood sledge of not movably lying young man with a black small beard and long hair. The big, strong body was covered with wide clothes.
The wood sledge was followed by crowd of the people, and the man driving the horse went near the wood sledge, pulling reins.
The monk was drowned! spoke in crowd.
The counter woman, having stopped, started talking to mother of Laurels:
Hear, he drank, zapoyny was, and young still, zdorovushchiya! His Odezhu the cassock and a calotte on the river were found, at the ice-hole, and in a pocket a note and as it is harmoniously written, exactly the song: Do not look for, speaks, me anywhere! My body in water, an odezha on the edge, and soul in paradise!
The laurels sedately followed mother holding it by a hand and long looked back, on the wood sledge where the dead person with long lay, as at the woman, hair, with a small dark small beard.
What is it? he asked why it?
But mother answered only:
Be silent!
They approached a tower. In its first floor through narrow long windows with the color glasses which are taken away by a figured iron lattice the burning wax candles dimly shone, and at low semicircular doors there were simple people, the most part of the woman.
Lavrushas mother, leading him by the hand, entered the close dark room with the low arches and sparks of candles shining ahead.
Mother! what is it? Lavrusha asked again.
Church! the grandmother Anna whispered, having stroked his head.
The laurels remembered how it once happened long ago to mother in church where to it the unclear word of verb which was often flashing in loud and lingering reading the person with a gray-haired beard dressed in the long heavy skirt embroidered in thick gold flowers was remembered. The word it was given by a dense echo under the high top of church decorated inside with unclear pictures which the Laurels liked to consider, showering the head up and being perplexed that this sonorous word of verb means. At the end of long reading and lingering singing mother took it on hands, bringing bearded people in long clothes with a gold bowl and a spoon in hands. One tied up to it under a chin a big zolototkanny crimson napkin, and another, without asking consent, violently put in a mouth a spoon with bitterish yellow-red liquid. The laurels always resisted and cried during this unclear operation.
Now he remembered former troubles in church and pricked up the ears though dangerous people in painted skirts were not here. Nobody read and sang.
Lets go! whispered mother and, having climbed together with it stone steps on the eminence lit with a set of thin candles, told: Be put to god!
The laurels did not know how to do it and where there is god.
Suddenly he saw not movably sitting barefoot person similar to just seen monk, in a long shirt from gray thick matter at which is around the head with the long hair and the small small beard framing a pale, lifeless face lying on shoulders the wreath from rods with the sharp prickles stuck to the person into the head was put on.
Prickles were in blood, several drops and spots of blood stiffened on a forehead, a face, a beard and clothes of the person.
The laurels frowningly looked at the silent, blood-stained figure and, having started back, nestled facing mothers short fur coat, looking for protection against terrible vision.
What you? what you? whispered mother, is god!
No! firmly the Laurels objected, are the dead! And again rested with a hostile frown.
From the twilight people and between them the comely old man in a long semi-caftan appeared.
Do not force! he said to the grandmother in low tones this statue of work of the great artist! It is small, does not understand!
It is silly still! she confirmed it ispuzhatsya
When they left a tower, the Laurels calmed down and did not ask about dead god any more.
* * *
The big gloomy room of school was full of boys of different age from small to healthy teenagers. Monastery put with the smallest. The teacher with the person in a silver bristle, with a section behind, in high stockings and boots with buckles walked in a dark green suit of unprecedented breed before pupils and constantly beat them with a big ruler the heads. It gave to laurels a goose quill, an inkwell and the fragmentary leaf which is used up by serpentine lines not clear to Laurels.
At school there was a hubbub. One wrote, others loud chorus shouted drawlingly:
Bra-vra! gra! Wad Dra!
It was reading on warehouses.
Seniors the teacher of one caused to solve problems to a big black board. There were big guys and, quickly knocking chalk on a board, covered it with ugly, negligent signs.
In a few minutes the teacher approached Laurels. The new pupil not movably and sadly sat before an empty leaf.
Well what you do not write? And itself read aloud the first line: Once sovereign Peter the Great
The laurels answered nothing. He cannot read any letter, and the teacher does not even know about it!
Behind the back of the teacher big pupils built grimaces, pulled each other hair. There passed hour. The laurels wrote nothing.
Change came. Bustle, fuss, a fight, laughter, shout and squeal did not stop. Dust dense fog was groundless.
Two biggest pupils who were called persons on duty selected several same big pupils who did not learn lessons and, having taken on a bunch розог, moved in a corridor. Guilty in turn put on a floor, they lowered cloth trousers, laid down, and companions of a sekla their long rods.
Istyazuyemye shouted, but some endured pain silently.
The crowd of boys surrounding a sekution laughed at shouting and praised courage of those which were silent under birches. Them called inveterate.
Inveterate, putting on trousers, boasted that it is trifles that they and not that still can bear.
The laurels were surprised, but not frightened by an execution show: he perplexedly waited when it are сечь birches, and resolved to endure pain silently. The pale face of the boy with the frowned eyebrows stored persistence expression.
He gloomy sat down on a threshold of the opened door. Pupils surrounded the beginner, exchanging remarks.
It seems as waits for a sekution for a start! very ha!
Teardrops! thats our way!
To see, inveterate will be!
Be not afraid, the newcomer! To you nothing will be!
Yes he is also not afraid, on a snout it is visible!
At this time Anna with a breakfast in a small knot came. Her heart clenched at the sight of the son surrounded with the school students considering it.
Long could not achieve from it to sense that happened to it. At last, the Laurels told that the head hurts it. Drearily, frowningly looked at mother, asked home.
Lavrusha did not get to city school.
VI
The fall in the village Shackles when burst the first frosts and will be chained as in iron, dirt on the wide rural street, always happened solar, windy, to the flying snare in the transparent sky.