LITMIR.BIZ

      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 mermaid’s 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 Kolchina’s 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 Kolchina’s house.

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