House in the village. Life in a remote village: an interesting story and powerful photographs - koyger - LJ Story house in the village 2

In one of the most remote corners of the south of the Bryansk region, ten kilometers from the border with Ukraine, next to the Bryansk Forest nature reserve, a village of fifteen inhabitants - Chukhrai - was lost. I have been living here for almost two decades. Thanks to the lack of roads, in Chukhrai, until very recently, the way of life of previous centuries was preserved: the village received almost nothing from the outside world, producing everything necessary for life on site.
The documents of the General Land Survey of 1781 mention that Krasnaya Sloboda with Sloboda Smelizh, Buda Chern and the village of Chukhraevka belong to Count Pyotr Borisovich Sheremetyev and the peasants “pay the count two rubles a year on rent.” This means that the Chukhraevites contributed to the construction of the wonderful Sheremetyevo palaces in Kuskovo and Ostankino! And so the whole story: the outside world remembered the village when it was necessary to get taxes from the peasants, soldiers for the war, votes for the elections.

Chukhrai is located on a low but long sandy hill among the swampy floodplain of the Nerussa River. The only street of fifteen houses, overgrown with lilacs and bird cherry trees, was all dug up by wild boars. In winter, wolf tracks are constantly seen in the snow on the street. The wooden roofs of most houses collapsed. The poles of a power line laid here in the sixties of the last century, and a trio of television antennas - these are all the signs of the present century... My red brick house with satellite dishes for TV and the Internet is dissonant with the village. I had to build a brick house because in the first years after the creation of the Bryansk Forest reserve there was a serious war against poachers, so I needed a fortress for housing... But in general, extremely friendly and curious people lived and live here, for whom the appearance of a new person is an event. I remember that about thirty years ago, in my wanderings through the Bryansk Forest, I first wandered into Chukhrai. As soon as I approached the well and looked down to see if the water was clean, the window of the nearest house opened under a spreading willow tree and a portly elderly housewife offered me a drink of birch kvass from the cold cellar. A minute later I was already in the cool house and the kindest Maria Andreevna Bolokhonova, the wife of the local forester, was extracting from me all the personal information why I had come here and answered my questions with great willingness. Meanwhile, her neighbors came up to look at me: a front-line grandfather and two grandmothers, also all named Bolokhonov. It turns out that in the entire village there are only two surnames: the Bolokhonovs and the Presnyakovs, so everyone has a street nickname, which, like an unofficial surname, is often passed down by inheritance. It turns out that front-line soldier Mikhail Alekseevich Bolokhonov’s grandfather is Elderly, and his grandmother is Elderly. The second old woman, partisan Evdokia Trofimovna Bolokhonova, was called Marfina. Two neighbors lived in the village, both Balakhonovs Ivan Mikhailovich, both born in 1932. One, a groom, is known by the street name Kalinenok, and the other, a foreman, is Kudinenok. Both receive letters from relatives, but the postman Antonina Ivanovna Bolokhonova (street name - Pochtarka) always handed the letters to the correct addressee, because she knows that letters are written to Kalinenka from Navlya and distant Ukhta, and to Kudinenko from the Moscow region. The street name is often inherited with the addition of diminutive suffixes: Kalina’s son is Kalinenok, Kalinenok’s son is Kalinenochek.
I was surprised how the residents managed without a store, but they answered that without a store the money is safe. Matches, salt and flour are brought in in the winter in a mobile shop, and vodka, bread and everything else are prepared by ourselves. The nearest store is in Smelizh, but the way there is through the Lipnitskie swamps, and you can’t bring much in a knapsack. Therefore, everyone bakes their own bread in Russian ovens on the hearth. Maria Andreevna complained about my thinness and forced me to take three kilograms of rye bread with me. I have never eaten tastier bread than this. In the meantime, the owner Ivan Danilovich himself, also a front-line soldier and a land-scarce man, appeared from his rounds and began to demand from Maria Andreevna to “kowt” on the occasion of the guest, that is, to drink in the local dialect, but I refused, which greatly upset the red-nosed Ivan Danilovich. By the way, a few days later I met him in the forest and he reprimanded me for refusing, they say, because of me, he didn’t suffer either.
Before the war, Chukhrai had its own collective farm “Our Way”. In addition, young people worked in logging. To the neighboring village of Smelizh, seven kilometers away, there was an excellent road along which timber was transported by horses and oxen, through the Lipnitskie and Rudnitskie swamps, impassable now; then log roads were laid.
About fifteen years ago I recorded on tape the stories of village residents about the past, and recently I put them on paper.
Mikhail Fedorovich Presnyakov (Shamornoy), born in 1911, tells:
“Before the war, there was a tutok taiga. They gave the plan for felling to the village council. And we, young people, were sent to cut wood for the whole winter. And in the spring they carried the forest on horses, but then there were no cars. When they killed them, they took the best horses into the forest. The kulak sheds were transported there, the workers were brought in from beyond the Desna. And my brother was timid there. They'll give you fish, they'll give you sugar, they'll give you grains - so that you won't die without eating. And they gave me clothes as part of my salary. And in the spring they raked the forest. Up to ten thousand cubic meters were transported to our meadow; the entire hayfield was occupied by forest. They drove the rafts to Chernigov for a whole month on the water. In Makosheno they often drove for Novgorod-Seversky, where the Jews took over the forest.
They dug ditches in the Horse Swamp. I dug these ditches and lined them with poles. The office was from Trubchevsk - I forgot what it was called. There were foremen Travnikov and Ostrovsky. I carried a board for them, on which they looked at the numbers. They called me: “Come with us, we will finish your education.” They paid great. Eighteen rubles were paid at that time. They gave us leather shoe covers. They dug by hand. And the tractors tore up the stumps. They dried everything out and built bridges. Hemp was under your ceiling. The cabbage was good, the Gurkhas were just like that, but the oats were bad. They dried everything out and built bridges. In the spring of thirty-two, terrible water came, rolling like a mountain. In our house I was only two fingers short of the window. A commission from the district executive committee was on its way to save us, and on Ershov Field their boat hit an oak tree, they climbed up the oak tree and shouted for slaughter: “Row!” We went to pull them together.
And in thirty-three, too, big water came. And it rained, there was water all summer, everything that was sown became soft. The state gave nothing and there was nowhere to get it. There was a great famine, half the village died. Even my dad died. The young boys died. The mother went to the city, begged: she brought bitter cabbage leaves. The cows were cut, and then there was nothing to eat. Many went to Ukraine, and there was famine there. And in 1934 the potatoes were gone, the carrots were as big as beetroot.”

During the war, this was the center of the partisan region. Not only local detachments operated here, but also formations of Oryol, Kursk, Ukrainian and Belarusian partisans. Their number reached sixty thousand. Today's Chukhraev and Smelizh old people, who were teenagers almost seventy years ago, well remember the legendary commanders Kovpak and Saburov, who began their famous raids on enemy lines from here. Between Chukhrai and the neighboring village of Smelizh in the forest there was a joint headquarters of the partisans, a central hospital, and an airfield. Here the song “The harshly noisy Bryansk forest” was heard for the first time, brought as a gift to the partisans on November 7, 1942 by the poet A. Safronov. In May 1943, the Germans burned the partisan village to the ground and drove the residents to concentration camps.

Trofimovna lived alone all her life; the men of her generation did not return from the war.

Trofimovna's funeral.

Bolokhonova Evdokia Trofimovna (Marfina), born in 1923, tells:
“I was in the Malinkovsky detachment. Our commander was Mitya Bazderkin, then he died. There were 160 of us.
We girls cleared airfields for airplanes, made dugouts, and in the summer we planted vegetable gardens in the clearings. In winter we sat in Chukhrai, sewing. My godmother had her own car, but the partisans collected cars for us. They brought us a whole bunch of parachutes, we flogged them and sewed shirts, sewed white robes - so that they would be invisible in the snow.
Whichever of the partisans was wounded, they were sent to the mainland, that’s what it was called, because we were on the small earth. One day a partisan was wounded, but by nightfall he was already sent away; he did not suffer here. Planes flew to us every night. They brought us food, otherwise we would have died here. They brought concentrate, they brought salt. Men were most looking forward to tobacco. Sukharev was brought in packs. They brought everything. I feel worse now than then.
We once went to Milici, there we sowed millet in a clearing, and it bore well. Let's go, we hear that someone is going to bend. The boy is young and tall, lying down. Both knees were damaged by bullets. White, thin: “I’ve been lying here for eighteen days - you are the first to come.” Eighteen days without eating or drinking! It turned white and white. I ate all the grass around me. Something needs to be done. They cut him with sticks, put him on sticks and dragged him to the airfield. And the airfield was between Novy Dvor and Rozhkovsky Huts. We cleared it out. They took it away, but we still had the documents. After their release, they were sent to his father-mother. And gratitude came: the son remained alive. And he sent us gratitude.
And it happened that the seriously wounded were shot... People died here...
On Spirit Day forty-three, the Germans began clearing the forest. Our local brought them here, to Chukhrai. His street name was Skobinenko. How many people were beaten here... My aunt did not run to hide: “What God wills...” And four heads died at once: two sons, a man and a grandfather. But they didn’t touch her, only the men were killed. And many were not allowed to die here; they were driven to Brasovo. There is a mass grave there. 160 only our, Chukhraevsky, small lads and old people. After the war, we went and guessed our own people. But it was ours, Chukhraevsky, who brought the Germans here. His street name was Skobinenko. Yong showed everything to the Germans here. And the Red Army came, and he himself was hanged. Himself and his son...
Difficult, Difficult... Only two cellars left from the Chukhraevs..."

When the surviving people returned to Chukhrai after liberation in 1943, they immediately began to build. The state allocated the forest for free, but in the village there was not a single car or tractor - not even a single horse! Healthy men were at the front. Pine trunks were carried from the forest by old men, women and teenagers, so they chose according to their strength: shorter and thinner ones. Therefore, most of the huts in Chukhrai are small. Oak trees for the foundation were harvested nearby, in the floodplain of the river, and they were floated directly into place along the large spring water. Clay for furnaces was also transported on boats and raw materials were sculpted from it. There were plenty of real baked bricks - survivors from pre-war kilns; They were used only on the stove floor and pipes. The roofs were made of dora - wooden plates that were plucked from pine blocks. Such a dwelling, built from local materials with minimal energy consumption, was environmentally friendly during construction; environmentally friendly during operation (which the author was convinced of after living in such a house in Chukhrai for many years); and environmentally friendly when disposed of: when people stop living in the house and caring for it, all wooden materials rot, and the adobe stove becomes limp from the rains. After a few years, all that remains on the site of the dwelling is a depression overgrown with turf from the former underground.
The post-war population reached its largest number in the fifties, when there were one hundred and fifty households. The huts were so crowded that water poured from one roof onto the next. There were no vegetable gardens in the village: the land that was not flooded by the spring flood was only enough for buildings. Vegetable gardens were built outside the outskirts in a swampy floodplain, and to prevent the crops from getting wet, they dug drainage ditches and raised ridges. In other wet years, it was possible to plant potatoes only in June, when it dried out so much that horses and plows stopped drowning in the damp soil. But now the village is spacious: when the collective farms were consolidated, the office and village council were moved ten kilometers to Krasnaya Sloboda, which is behind three swamps. The roads and highways were no longer maintained and the village seemed to be on an island. Moreover, hard, almost free work on the collective farm. People began to run away wherever they could. Most of the houses and log sheds were transported along hard winter roads to the neighboring regional centers of Suzemka and Trubchevsk.

Kalinenok only recognized tobacco grown by himself.

Bolokhonov Ivan Mikhailovich (Kalinenok), born in 1932, a child prisoner, tells:
“Immediately after I returned from captivity, I went to work as a lad on a collective farm. I carried milk to Krasnaya Sloboda on oxen for four seasons. You carry three hundred to four hundred liters. I once, out of hunger, ate too much cream, and I still can’t look at milk. They called oxen Miron and the Comedian. They walked only at a walk. Miron gave a strong light. He would definitely drag him into the bushes or into the water! He didn’t obey! He made you cry. But the Comedian was obedient. Then he worked as a groom under all the chairmen. There were twenty-five harness horses, and young people. Hay They mowed for 10 percent - first you set up nine haystacks for the collective farm, then they let you mow one. They tortured their children, forced them to help. Under Khrushchev, they began to mow for twenty percent.
Stalin surrounded us. Our procurement agent was Korotchenkov from Denisovka. Deliver 250 eggs, 253 liters of milk, 20 kilograms of meat per year. Hand over the potatoes, I don’t remember how many... And I had to work 250 days on the collective farm for workdays and they didn’t pay me a penny. At least stand, but don’t lie down! The chairman, foremen, and accountants watched over us so that they wouldn’t steal. And those who did not work 250 days were judged. Grandfather Laguna, the woman was tried, did not have time to knock out at least. The police took me and took me to Suzemka. A few days later they released me. That government did what it wanted.
And they survived by planting potatoes, making sleighs, and selling livestock. They sold hay to Trubchevsk. The women made moonshine; in Chukhrai it was the cheapest in the area. During the winter I made up to thirty sleighs, tubs, bowls, barrels. During the day I labor on the collective farm, but I come home and make a tub in two evenings.
Oak for crafts was stolen in the spring in high water. You leave in the evening, and work at night. And in the morning you take the gontier to the boat and take it home. Once with grandfather Dolbich they felled an oak tree near Nerussa, and Stepan Yamnovsky was the forester there. That year the water came in uncountably healthy quantities. And out of nowhere, Stepan comes up. Healthy uncle. There is water all around, there is nowhere to go. And we: “Stepan Gavrilovich, but you have to live with something...” And Yong: “Yes, you should ask...” And we: “Why ask, if you ask, you won’t allow it...” And Yong: “Well, what’s wrong with you?” do? To write a protocol - this way you won’t be able to pay off the huts, because you felled an oak tree a meter thick...” He let us go. We took him to the cordon with burners and a pound of flour. Yong also wants to live, they paid him four hundred rubles in those Stalinist pennies. Wow, he loved the burner - he would drink a bucket and was never drunk. Then I died from vodka.”
Only those who had nowhere to run and were unable to escape remained in the village. Now the village is quickly being taken over by the thicket of the forest, among which the last vegetable gardens of the decrepit inhabitants are scattered.

My neighbor Vasily Ivanovich Bolokhonov is taking a bath.

Chukhrai was famous for the cheapest moonshine in the area, but now the local elixir of life can only be bought in neighboring Smelizh.

In all difficult moments of history, the forest greatly helped the Russian people, serving as a refuge for him in hard times. The forest with its industries, and not agriculture, was the basis of the material existence of the Chukhraevites. In addition to horse-drawn sleighs, Chukhrai were famous for oak barrels, tubs, wooden churns, arcs, and wooden boats. The tubs and barrels were loaded onto new boats and floated either to Trubchevsk downstream to the Desna, on which this ancient city stands; or upstream until the Sev River flows into the Nerussa, along which they climbed to Sevsk. Boats were also sold along with the goods, and they returned home on foot. Already in Soviet times, many Chukhrayevites worked in logging in winter, and in spring and summer they floated timber to the Desna River and further to treeless Ukraine.

Olga Ivanovna (Kupchikha) Bolokhonova, born in 1921, tells:
« We haven't sown grain for centuries. Only on collective farms were they forced to sow. This one or this one, the grain will not be born anyway. And everyone had vegetable gardens. And those who had two or three horses, and two or three sons - their own labor force, dug out large fences. In '29 and '30 they began to dispossess them.
Hemp was planted and good hemp was born. Before collective farms, everyone planted it in their gardens. Everyone has their own shirt, their own pants, their own shoes - everything is made of linen.
Here everyone practiced their craft. They made wheels, rollers, and they still make sleighs. The rim is bent. There used to be a guy, this oak tree was floating in the guy, the runner was bent. And they took them and sold them, far away; they used to take them to Dmitrov on their horses before. And they sold barrels - they were also made from oak. And they made aspen cubes for lard.
We have oak trees all around us. In particular, men harvested oak in the spring, on boats. They stole oak trees. When the flood comes, they will go on boats, cut down the oak, beat it there for shingles, then for stave, and bring it on boats. They will hide it in the attics until winter. And they do it in winter. More oaks were cut on the other side of Nerussa. The forests are state-owned, the foresters caught fish - my mother told us this. The oak will be felled, the forester will find out, he will come and give the forester a treat. And that’s all - the forest was still noisy.”
They cut down the forest for themselves, they cut down for the state... From the post-war period until the seventies of the twentieth century, twice as much wood was cut in the Bryansk Forest as was growing. It was at this time that the bow saw and horse-drawn traction were replaced by chainsaws, skidders and powerful timber trucks. With the help of new technologies, the surroundings of forest settlements within a radius of many kilometers were turned into endless clearings, and life in them lost its meaning. Now only Skripkino, Kaduki, Staroye Yamnoye, Kolomina, Khatuntsevo, Usukh, Zemlyanoye, Volovnya, Skuty remain on the maps. On the forest river Solka alone, which is only forty kilometers long, in the sixties there were five settlements: Maltsevka, Proletarsky (before the revolution - Gosudarev Plant), Nizhny, Skuty, Solka - with schools, bakeries, shops, industrial premises. Nowadays, on the site of these villages, a young forest has already risen, and only the surviving lilac bushes here and there and grave crosses blackened by age in abandoned cemeteries hint at a still recent past.

Food was brought to the village on a tractor cart.

Chukhrai are quickly dying out. Danchonka has been gone for a long time - he was run over by a horse while drunk. His Maria Andreevna also died. Elderly, Shamornoy, Kalinenok, Marfina and other tellers of stories that you just read died. Their children are scattered throughout the former Soviet Union. People are leaving, the unique way of life and the experience of subsistence farming accumulated by many generations are disappearing. The spiritual and physical unity of people with nature disappears, a layer of life inexorably turns into history...

Now life in the village is warm thanks to the Bryansk Forest Nature Reserve. In the summer, Chukhrai can be noisy - biology students do internships and scientists work at the new base of the reserve. At this time, the village becomes the ecological capital of the Bryansk Forest. In winter, when I often go to Kamchatka and the village is covered with snow, inspector UAZs pave the way for life.

House in the village

I've been wanting to burn this waste paper for a long time. Light the stove with it. But there are still a lot of books in the closet, and even more furniture for firewood. And the coal should soon be brought by sleigh. So let it lie there a little longer.

I'll leave it to my grandchildren. Let them honor us when we leave this world. Maybe some of them will be entertained by these lines. Maybe our personal drama will seem funny to them compared to what happened next. Their right.

So, as the poet said: “Professor, take off your bicycle glasses. I’ll tell you about time and about myself.”

Everything that starts well ends badly. But if everything is bad from the very beginning, then it will be a complete star.

I didn’t realize this before everyone else, but I was one of the first. Perhaps in the first thousand of the country's 140 million population - back in the days when only the paranoid people started talking about impending cataclysms. And even those were ridiculed as city madmen.

There was peace and quiet all around, and I already knew that the mythical beast Roasted Rooster was approaching, and nothing would stop his inexorable approach. I could not share this knowledge with anyone close to me. They wouldn't believe me.

I was only wrong about the cause of the Crisis. I believed in the stories of alarmists and prepared for the depletion of energy resources. I thought that without oil, power plants would stop working, cars would stop working, the unified system of international trade would collapse, and then famine and pestilence would come.

The oil hasn't run out. Did not make it. But otherwise I was right.

My world did not collapse on the day when, in the middle of the December frosts, the power and heat were turned off. Much earlier. Still in the middle of sunny July. When, as usual, I returned from work in the evening and in her eyes I realized that she knew everything.

Oh, if only it were possible to turn back time... - this eternal cry of cowards and selfish people.

“If it were possible, I would be smarter,” I thought then. “And I would not let her know about my offense. I would keep it to myself. For her own good. Unless in confession I would say: “I’m a sinner, father.” without going into details."

For some reason I wasn't surprised. More than once I imagined this moment, replayed the situation before my eyes. With breaking dishes, her scratched face, her hysterics, valerian and corvalol.

But not in any of my visions did she react like that. Knowing her character, I expected to see a storm and destruction in the apartment, but I saw only her eyes filled with pain. And it was much worse than screaming. It would be better if she looked at me with a look of pure hatred. It would be better if she said, “Die, you bastard.” It wouldn't be so creepy and disgusting at heart.

“Don’t worry,” my beloved seemed to calmly say, taking me by the hand. - We will live with you. I'm not leaving, so relax. This is all you need. And love... there is no love, you know it yourself.

You can't prepare for this. The ground began to disappear from under our feet. I tried to hug her (Nastya, not the earth), but she pulled away. I guess I'm a masochist, but in moments of anger she always seemed the most attractive to me. Especially in this short robe. Yes, that's how shameless I am.

We've quarreled before. Almost every day. She's not a good girl at all. But usually after such outbursts of anger there was reconciliation, and we were happy.

And now I wanted her to scream. Or she threw a vase from the cabinet at me. I would have dodged it, or caught it. Yes, even if I got it in my stupid head... everything is better.

But she just looked at me. That's for sure, sometimes silence is like screaming.

I wanted to fall on my knees in front of her and press myself to her feet. Maybe I would have done that if I hadn’t thought about how I looked from the outside. And suddenly he was ashamed of his weakness.

“What am I, an emo, or what? Me too, man. Weak. Everyone lives like this... Everyone does this. And nothing, they don’t repent all their lives.”

Much later I will be ashamed of this shame. She wasn't everything, and I knew it. Maybe those who met me before... Maybe a fleeting betrayal would not have hurt them... because they themselves could have done it more than once. But she was different. And offending such a person is like frying a hummingbird as a side dish for potatoes. No matter how she sometimes pretended to be a tigress, I knew well how vulnerable she was.

“I know you’re good,” Nastya suddenly spoke. - Everyone stumbles. It's my fault. I thought that you,” she laughed nervously, “you wouldn’t believe it, you weren’t like everyone else.” That you are the only one in the whole world who understands me. The one I've been looking for all these years. And you... you are a stranger. And all this time that you were with me, you lived a double life. You know, that prince with green eyes, whom I saw and could not forget, died for me. And I will stay with you only for the sake of the child.

How she loved melodrama, damn it. "Luke, I am your father!"

I was silent, digesting what I heard. You should have seen my face.

Why didn’t she tell me anything, even though she’d known for two months? I chose the time. She wanted to give me a surprise, but it turned out that I was the one who did it.

Moral monster...

She wanted that day to be remembered forever. And so it happened.

Those were her last words as a loved one. After that, we talked only about everyday topics, like two neighbors in a communal apartment.

She had no idea how right she was. I really was living a double life. But she had no idea that my second life had nothing in common with the stupid affair that ruined the fate of both of us.

I waited and prepared. I was a member of a secret brotherhood of paranoids.

Optimists still believed in the government and the president (“Everything is fine, beautiful marquise...”), and smart people already understood that the patient was more likely dead than alive.

And while others took out plasma TVs on credit and enjoyed life, these quietly purchased weapons, stocked up on stewed meat, made nooks along future evacuation routes from cities with a population of over a million, and set up settlements in the remote taiga with warehouses of everything necessary for an autonomous life. The most stubborn even dug underground shelters.

The most reasonable and calm ones saw the peak of the crisis as an abrupt rise in prices, unemployment and hyperinflation. We were preparing for this. Others were preparing for global conflict, occupation and civil war. The most advanced cases were carried around with the idea of complete autonomy from a dying civilization. They were preparing to move to the land, voluntarily give up the benefits of civilization and set up a subsistence economy similar to the pre-industrial one. Anastasians, followers of Maigret (not the commissar), crazy ecologists and conspiracy theorists of all countries and peoples. Reading their revelations, I realized that I still had not gotten that far.

I never felt called to farming. And he treated all this paranoid public as nudists. That is, people who are boring all the time because they have too much free time. I thought that I didn’t gnaw out my honors diploma with my teeth in order to pick through the dung.

I did not move, even when the federal and then regional program “Village 2011” was announced (the project was first called “Agricultural Evacuation” - but smart officials changed the name because the word “evacuation” emanated cold horror).

Didn't even bother to find out the details. But in vain. They would interest me.

Long-term loans for starting a business. Construction materials are almost free. Rent up to a hectare of land for 50 years for half a penny. Even ten rabbits and three dozen chickens each. All provided that you live in the village for at least 5 years.

Wits on the Internet laughed at this. But the governor, apparently, was not so simple. It's a pity that I realized this too late, when the train had already left.

We had a good time here too. I wanted to live in a city with three large shopping centers, in a house with heating, hot water and an elevator, a five-minute walk from a supermarket, close to a kindergarten and a school where I was sure our children would go.

Alas, no one bothered to ask me.

That evening I went out to buy bread. This was the official version. Of course, not only this. I needed to breathe in the “fresh” air of the street and put my thoughts in order. I need this sometimes, and now especially.

A glowing green dot in the darkening (but not dark!) sky, burning even brighter than the moon, caught my attention.

“A comet in the sky is a sure sign of imminent misfortunes,” I remembered. And when I came home, I learned from the Internet that the comet “Sun-mei” (named after some Chinese folk demon) had actually appeared in the sky of the northern hemisphere. Astronomers noticed it a month ago. But, naturally, there was no danger of a collision.

The damned comet shone like a hundred-carat emerald.

I got so lost in thought that I forgot why I went and returned home empty-handed. My wife was waiting there, carrying my child. And she hated me, although she hid it under a mask of contemptuous indifference.

Naturally, I learned a lot about myself. Sluggishly plucking away, I thought that miracles should happen. I prayed to God that the course of this fireball would intersect with the Earth’s orbit in the right place, and Western Siberia would become the crash site. May it all end quickly. Let there be a lava sea here. Burning up in the epicenter of a 100-gigaton explosion probably won't hurt. Just not to see her eyes.

August turned out to be dry and hot. The comet missed the Earth, and the end of the world was postponed for another 12 years, until the arrival of the asteroid Icarus.

I sat in front of the TV without even noticing how she entered. As always, gorgeous, graceful as a doe. I recognized the green dress she wore on our first evening. She smelled of perfume, the smell of which I also could not help but recognize. Going somewhere? Did you find someone for yourself? Or does he just want to torture me?

Well, she succeeded.

Misha Petrov decided to comprehend the sweetness of the Jesus Prayer. So, he thinks, I’ll lock myself somewhere far away, so that there are no friends, no telephone, no email. Day and night, prayer, rare sleep, a meager meal, so, water, crackers, and reading holy books.

I hesitated for a long time because of the mobile phone, whether to take it, it’s still in the wilderness, you never know what will happen, but then I realized that roaming does not happen in the wilderness. And I left my cell phone at home.

The session had just ended, this year’s practice could be completed in September, and Misha decided to run to a house in the village, bought a year ago on a bet during a dialectological expedition from a grandmother - for four thousand rubles combined. Misha and his three comrades then won ten bottles of beer from the girls. It was the house of my grandmother’s late sister, and my grandmother was glad to see these thousands, she promised to look after the house, and all that.

Misha told his parents and three other co-owner friends that he was going to visit their estate; of course, not a word about prayer - and the friends were very happy, but no one wanted to go with Misha - everyone had other plans.

Misha drove for two and a half days and finally arrived in Osanovo. That was the name of this village with a house. He knocks on the door of the saleswoman; her name was a little literary, Agafya Tikhonovna, but still she was a real Siberian grandmother. In general, like Valentin Rasputin.

“Hello, Agafya Tikhonovna,” Misha says to her. - What about our little hut on chicken legs? Didn’t it burn down?

What you! - Agafya Tikhonovna got angry. - It's worth it.

And they went to the other end of the village to visit the house. The house really stood, only it seemed a little smaller to Misha this year, and poorer, but still the same. The grandmother opened the door, he entered the house - and there was a smell of some kind of herbs, and they hung in bunches in the hallway for who knows how many years.

It's a bit dark, of course, but that's okay. The grandmother left, Misha threw down his backpack, looked around, found buckets and some rags, went to the well for water, and washed the windows. It immediately became brighter. Then Misha hung up the icons - what to pray in front of? He put the sacred books in a pile next to him and hung his rosary on his hand. He just feels like it’s time to have a snack. Well, what is prayer without a meal?

I got food brought from Moscow, canned food, sugar, salt, and cucumbers, but no bread!

I went to the local store. This is what capitalism means: last year this store was not here, but now here it is - brick, neat, and in general everything is there. And Coca-Cola and Snickers. I bought myself both. But also bread. And then Agafya Tikhonovna comes to the store - she’s looking for him, you come to me, I’ll give you some potatoes, last year’s, big as a fist. And so it turned out. And Agafya Tikhonovna added three eggs to his potatoes - from her own chickens. Then Marya Egorovna, a neighbor, came to Tikhonovna and also called him to her. Misha went, Egorovna treated him to a jar of milk from her cow and invited him to come again.

Misha laid out all his wealth on an unpainted wooden table, bread, potatoes, poured fresh milk into an iron mug, and fried scrambled eggs with abnormally yellow yolks. A grass spirit spreads across the hut, oddly enough, not a single fly. He sits and thinks: “Lord, how good! So I have icons hanging here, and books are laid out, what else do I need? Now I’ll eat and start praying. And I don’t even set foot outside, all this is useless—distraction.”

But after lunch, Misha took out a sleeping bag, laid it out right on the floor and fell asleep like a log. He wakes up, and his conscience torments him - you keep sleeping and eating, but what about the Jesus Prayer, why did you come here? But the rosary got caught somewhere, it got in the way on his hand, and Misha was embarrassed to go out with it, he took it off before going to the store, but he didn’t remember where it went. I searched, I searched, I found. We ended up in the hallway, on a carnation, I forgot how I hung it. Finally, he quietly stood in front of the icons, lit the lamp, everything was as it should be. Suddenly it got dark outside, it began to rain, and - wow! - the ceiling, just above the holy corner, began to darken - water was passing through, the roof was leaking.

As soon as the rain stopped, Misha hurried to the roof, one rung on the stairs broke off, he could barely climb up, and everything there really rotted... In general, there was enough to do, and Misha, despite being a boy from an intelligent family, took on everything, did everything willingly, and he helped the grandmothers a lot, and ran his own farm, he felt like a master, a simple man in his native land, Lev Nikolaevich in the late period.

Well, what about prayer? But everything was fine anyway. Misha returned tanned and even a little fatter. Agafya Tikhonovna and Marya Egorovna fattened him up properly.

House in the village (story).

This story, as I currently plan, will become the forerunner of my first novel, with the same name. Initially, I conceived it as a novel, but I decided not to risk it and describe the emerging idea with other characters and in a different setting. If everything goes according to my plan, then after a few stories I will begin writing a novel based on this story. As they say, wait and see.

And this is my older brother Lyosha,” Nadya introduced the guy who entered the apartment.

He was tall, so he had to bend down a little when entering the room. Nadya did not always understand why he did this, but assumed that it was connected with his hobby. In those places where he often had to film his videos, the doors were small, so with his height, Lyosha could not easily go there. True, she had one more assumption, and she was leaning towards it more and more often: when Lyosha entered a room in which there were many girls, he constantly tried to attract their attention to his height and thereby took the first step towards acquaintance.

“Hey, little one,” the man who entered hugged her shoulders and kissed her on the cheek.

Nadya laughed and lightly pushed him on the shoulder. She knew that her brother had started his game of attracting attention to himself and his action had no other meaning. When they met, he rarely kissed her, since since childhood he had told her that he was afraid of contracting dwarfism from her. Nadya's height was only about fifty-two meters, which, in comparison with her brother's ninety-meter height, simply made her look like a midget against the background of a giant. She didn’t see anything funny or shameful about her height, but compared to her brother, she periodically had a complex about it. Naturally, when Lyosha teased her, she was ready to kill him, which she repeatedly informed everyone around. This difference in external data was explained by the fact that they were not siblings. Their parents lost their significant other to incurable diseases. It was on this basis that they met more than ten years ago, creating a strong family of four people. The family never had children together, so the children grew up together, getting used to their new relatives.

Lyosha patted her on the shoulder, ruffled her hair, which fell to her shoulders, and looked around. Five pairs of eyes looked at him, not counting his sister, and only two people, it seemed to him, recognized him as a well-known video blogger in some circles. It was difficult to confuse him, since the scar that crossed his entire right cheek was a very memorable feature. This scar was received in childhood, when he and one of his childhood friends, after watching enough films about midshipmen, played at his house. It just so happened that Lesha’s mother went to her neighbor’s, leaving them alone for ten minutes and they couldn’t think of anything better than picking up real knives. The fencing process was short-lived and an hour later Lyosha was already in the hospital, drenched in the tears of his mother, who was sitting next to him, in the operating room. Now this scar was known to each of his half a million subscribers on the famous video portal.

The girls giggled. Lyosha remembered that today, taking advantage of the absence of her parents at home, Nadya invited her institute friends to “purely female gatherings.” Well, yes, they definitely don’t have enough guys here, but that was a plus for Alexey. He noticed that one of the girls did not look away from him, as the others did, attracted by his sister. This one continued to look at him for a few more seconds, so he identified the victim for today.

The girls, their entire cast of future economists, moved to the kitchen, and Lyosha took a seat at his computer. He was finishing a video shot by his friend and part-time operator of his blog, Rodion. They were announcing their next foray into places where most people would not want to be. These were cemeteries, haunted houses, witch glades and other places that had a bad reputation. The purpose of their videos has always been one thing: to show the horror of what terrified people so much. Most of their spectators were young people, but there were also older people. They were all united by an interest and love for supernatural things that occur in our lives, and Lyosha and Rodion gave them the opportunity to touch this. Three times Lyosha had to become the hero of a TV show, acting as an expert in the field of the unknown, so his face was familiar to many people, and he did not suffer from a lack of attention. But, nevertheless, he has not yet met his “one”, maybe precisely because of this very attention of young females.

The video was almost ready last night, but he decided to go to bed a little early, so he had to finish it today after university. Half an hour of working with the video and the finished recording is sent to his channel. As he knew in advance, literally ten minutes later the first hundreds of views and the first comments appeared. Few people knew about the place where they were going to go this time, but the three-minute video colorfully described everything. They were going to go to Bolshaya Rogan, on one of the streets of which their goal was located. An old, dilapidated one-story building with rickety clay walls had been waiting to meet them for a couple of months, but the friends did not have time to get to it. Now the time has come for this construction of the late fifties of the twentieth century. Almost seventy years separated them from the construction of this private house to their time, so for the guys it was almost an eternity, receding into history.

Lyosha watched his video himself and made some notes for himself as he watched and read the comments. This was his regular activity after posting the material, since now, while doing this simple work, he was looking for flaws that would need to be removed when preparing the full material.

Are you getting views? - a girl’s voice came from behind.

Lyosha jumped in place in surprise, dropping the pencil from his hand. The notebook also fell to the floor and covered the leg of the girl standing next to it. There was a slight laugh and thin female hands reached out to the notebook. Lyosha looked back sharply and saw the girl who had been looking at him for the longest time after he returned home.

What? Did you ask something? - Lyosha, from unexpected fear caused by a stranger creeping up in the silence, could not speak normally. What frightened him most about this was that the girl might think that he was worried about her presence.

I subscribed to your channel and I received a message that you added a new video. So I decided to go and see the mystery of what is happening in this room, which is the holy of holies of your genius.

She uttered the last words with a smile on her lips, so Lyosha could not help but laugh. The girl also laughed, and her light, ringing laugh drowned out his bass sound.

You see... What's your name?

The strangest way of dating that I can only remember in my life,” she smiled again, “but you almost guessed it without knowing it.” My name is Lilya.

It’s very nice, and I’m Lyosha. But I think you already know this. So, Lilya, this is no longer the “holy of holies”, since today you have desecrated this place with your presence.

The girl widened her eyes and was about to say something, but Lyosha raised his index finger, urging her to be silent and listen carefully.

So, as I said, you have desecrated this place, and I know only one way to clean it. Do you know which one? Of course you do! There's blood to be shed here. Pure blood, if you know what I mean.

“You’re kidding,” Lily’s eyes were still round in surprise.

Of course not. But there is another, interesting and no less cool way to atone for your guilt.

Which one is this? - the girl looked intently into his eyes. He held his gaze firmly, so Lyosha felt like these eyes were squeezing his heart like a vice.