A message about the work of fm Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky's creativity

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Anatoly Ignatievich Pristavkin
The golden cloud spent the night

I dedicate this story to all her friends who accepted this homeless child of literature as their own and did not allow its author to fall into despair

1

This word arose on its own, just as the wind is born in a field.

It appeared, rustled, and swept through the near and far corners of the orphanage: “Caucasus! Caucasus!" What is the Caucasus? Where did he come from? Really, no one could really explain it.

And what a strange fantasy in the dirty Moscow region to talk about some kind of Caucasus, about which only school readings out loud (there were no textbooks!) it is known to the orphanage shantrap that he exists, or rather, existed in some distant strange times, when the black-bearded, eccentric highlander Hadji Murat fired at the enemies, when the leader of the Murids, Imam Shamil, defended himself in a besieged fortress, and the Russian soldiers Zhilin and Kostylin languished in a deep hole.

There was also Pechorin, from extra people, also traveled around the Caucasus.

Yes, here are some more cigarettes! One of the Kuzmenyshes spotted them on a wounded lieutenant colonel from an ambulance train stuck at the station in Tomilin.

Against the backdrop of broken snow-white mountains, a rider in a black cloak gallops and gallops on a wild horse. No, it doesn’t jump, it flies through the air. And under it, in an uneven, angular font, the name: “KAZBEK”.

A mustachioed lieutenant colonel with a bandaged head, a handsome young man, looked at the pretty nurse who had jumped out to look at the station, and tapped his fingernail meaningfully on the cardboard lid of the cigarettes, not noticing that nearby, with his mouth open in amazement and holding his breath, the little ragged little Kolka was looking at the precious box.

I was looking for a crust of bread left over from the wounded to pick up, and I saw: “KAZBEK”!

Well, what does the Caucasus have to do with it? Rumor about him?

Nothing to do with it at all.

And it is not clear how this pointed word, sparkling with a shiny icy edge, was born where it was impossible for it to be born: among the everyday life of an orphanage, cold, without firewood, always hungry. The whole tense life of the boys revolved around frozen potatoes, potato peelings and, as the height of desire and dream, a crust of bread in order to survive, to survive just one extra day of war.

The most cherished, and a pipe dream any of them was able to at least once penetrate the holy of holies of the orphanage: the BREAD SLICER - so we’ll highlight it in font, because it stood before the eyes of the children higher and more inaccessible than some KAZBEK!

And they were appointed there, just as the Lord God would appoint, say, to heaven! The most chosen, the luckiest, or you can define it this way: the happiest on earth!

Kuzmenyshi was not among them.

And I had no idea that I would be able to enter. This was the lot of the thieves, those of them who, having escaped from the police, reigned during this period in the orphanage, and even in the entire village.

To penetrate the bread slicer, but not like those chosen ones - the owners, but with a mouse, for a second, for an instant - that’s what I dreamed about! With an eye to look in reality at all the great wealth of the world in the form of clumsy loaves piled on the table.

And - inhale, not with your chest, with your stomach, inhale the intoxicating, intoxicating smell of bread...

That's all. All!

I didn’t dream about any tiny little things that could not help but remain after the dumplings were dumped and fragilely rubbing their rough sides. Let them be gathered, let the chosen ones enjoy! It rightfully belongs to them!

But no matter how you rubbed against the iron-lined doors of the bread slicer, it could not replace the phantasmagoric picture that arose in the heads of the Kuzmin brothers - the smell did not penetrate through the iron.

It was not at all possible for them to get through this door legally. It was from the realm of abstract fiction, but the brothers were realists. Although the specific dream was not alien to them.

And this is what this dream is like in the winter of forty fourth year brought Kolka and Sashka: to penetrate the bread slicer, into the kingdom of bread by any means... Any way.

In these especially dreary months, when it was impossible to get frozen potatoes, let alone crumbs of bread, there was no strength to walk past the house, past the iron doors. Walk around and know, almost imagine what it’s like there, beyond gray walls, behind the dirty, but also barred window, the chosen ones are casting spells, with a knife and scales. And they shred, and cut, and knead the droopy, damp bread, pouring the warm, salty crumbs into the mouth by the handful, and saving the fatty fragments for the tiller.

Saliva boiled in my mouth. It hurt my stomach. My head was getting fuzzy. I wanted to howl, scream and beat, beat on that iron door so that they would unlock it, open it, so that they would finally understand: we want it too! Let him then go to a punishment cell, anywhere... They will punish, beat, kill... But first let them show, even from the door, how he is, bread, in a pile, a mountain, Kazbek towering on a table mangled with knives... How he smells!

Then it will be possible to live again. Then there will be faith. Since there is a mountain of bread, it means the world exists... And you can endure, and be silent, and live on.

A small ration, even with an additive pinned to it with a sliver, did not reduce hunger. He was getting stronger.

The guys thought this scene was very fantastic! They come up with it too! The wing didn't work! Yes, they would immediately run anywhere by the bone gnawed from that wing! After such a loud reading aloud, their stomachs twisted even more, and they forever lost faith in writers: if they don’t eat their chicken, it means the writers themselves are greedy!

Since they drove away the main orphanage boy Sych, many different big and small thieves have passed through Tomilino, through the orphanage, twisting their half-raspberries here for the winter far from their native police.

One thing remained unchanged: the strong devoured everything, leaving crumbs for the weak, dreams of crumbs, taking small things into reliable networks of slavery.

For a crust they fell into slavery for a month or two.

The front crust, the one that is crispier, blacker, thicker, sweeter, cost two months, on a loaf it would be the top one, but we're talking about about soldering, a tiny piece that looks like a flat transparent leaf on the table; the back one is paler, poorer, thinner - months of slavery.

And who didn’t remember that Vaska Smorchok, the same age as the Kuzmenyshes, also about eleven years old, before the arrival of a relative-soldier, he once served for the back crust for six months. He gave away everything he could eat, and ate buds from trees so as not to die completely.

Kuzmenysh were also sold in difficult times. But they were always sold together.

If, of course, two Kuzmenysh were combined into one person, then in the entire Tomilinsky orphanage there would be no equal in age, and, perhaps, in strength.

But the Kuzmenyshis already knew their advantage.

It is easier to drag with four hands than with two; run away faster on four feet. And four eyes see much more sharply when you need to grab where something bad is lying!

While two eyes are busy, the other two watch over both. Yes, they still have time to make sure that they don’t snatch anything from themselves, clothes, the mattress from underneath when you sleep and see your pictures from the life of a bread slicer! They said: why did you open the bread slicer if they pulled it from you?

And there are countless combinations of any of the two Kuzmenysh! If, say, one of them is caught in the market, they drag him to jail. One of the brothers whines, screams, beats for pity, and the other distracts. You look, while they turned to the second one, the first one sniffed, and he was gone. And the second one follows! Both brothers are like vines, nimble, slippery, once you let them go, you can’t pick them up again.

Eyes will see, hands will grab, legs will carry away...

But somewhere, in some pot, all this must be cooked in advance... It’s difficult to survive without a reliable plan: how, where and what to steal!

The two heads of Kuzmenysh were cooked differently.

Sashka, as a world-contemplative, calm, quiet person, extracted ideas from himself. How, in what way they arose in him, he himself did not know.

Kolka, resourceful, tenacious, practical, figured out with lightning speed how to bring these ideas to life. To extract, that is, income. And what’s even more precise: take some food.

If Sashka, for example, had said, scratching the top of his blond head, “shouldn’t they fly to, say, the Moon, there’s a lot of oilcake there,” Kolka would not have said right away: “No.” He would first think about this business with the Moon, what kind of airship to fly there on, and then he would ask: “Why? You can steal it closer..."

But it happened that Sashka would look dreamily at Kolka, and he, like a radio, would pick up Sashka’s thought on the air. And then he wonders how to implement it.

Sashka has a golden head, not a head, but the Palace of Soviets! The brothers saw this in the picture. All sorts of American skyscrapers a hundred floors below are at hand. We are the very first, the highest!

And the Kuzmenyshis are the first in something else. They were the first to understand how to get through the winter of 1944 without dying.

When they made a revolution in St. Petersburg, I suppose - in addition to the post office and telegraph and the station - they didn’t forget to take the bread slicer by storm!

The brothers walked past the bread slicer, not for the first time by the way. But it was painfully unbearable that day! Although such walks added their torment.

“Oh, how I want to eat... You can even gnaw on the door! At least eat the frozen ground under the threshold!” – so it was said out loud. Sashka said, and suddenly it dawned on him. Why eat it if... If it... Yes, yes! That's it! If you need to dig it!

Dig! Well, of course, dig!

He didn’t say anything, he just looked at Kolka. And he instantly received the signal, and, turning his head, assessed everything, and scrolled through the options. But again, he didn’t say anything out loud, only his eyes flashed predatorily.

Anyone who has experienced it will believe: there is no more inventive and focused person in the world than a hungry person, especially if he is an orphanage who has grown his brains during the war on where and what to get.

Without saying a word (there will be crooked throats all around, and then any, even Sashka’s most brilliant idea, will be screwed), the brothers headed straight to the nearest shed, located about a hundred meters from the orphanage, and twenty meters from the bread slicer. The shed was located right behind the bread slicer.

In the barn, the brothers looked around. At the same time, they looked to the farthest corner, where, behind a worthless iron scrap, behind a broken brick, there was Vaska Smorochka’s stash. When firewood was stored here, no one knew, only the Kuzmenysh knew: a soldier, Uncle Andrei, was hiding here, whose weapons were stolen.

Sashka asked in a whisper:

- Isn’t it far?

- Where is closer? – Kolka asked in turn.

Both understood that there was nowhere closer.

Breaking a lock is much easier. Less labor, less time needed. There were crumbs of strength left. But there was already an attempt to knock the lock off the bread slicer, and not only the Kuzmenys came up with such a bright answer! And the management hung a barn lock on the doors! Weighing half a pound!

You can only tear it off with a grenade. Hang it in front of the tank - not a single enemy shell will penetrate that tank.

After that unfortunate incident, the window was barred, and such a thick rod was welded that it could not be taken with a chisel or a crowbar - unless with an autogenous one!

And Kolka thought about the autogen, he noticed carbide in one place. But you can’t drag it down, you can’t light it up, there are a lot of eyes around.

Only there are no strangers' eyes underground!

The other option - to completely abandon the bread slicer - did not suit the Kuzmyonyshes.

Neither the store, nor the market, and especially private houses were now suitable for obtaining food. Although such options were floating around in a swarm in Sashka’s head. The trouble is that Kolka did not see ways of their real implementation.

There's a watchman at the store all night, an evil old man. He doesn’t drink, doesn’t sleep, a day is enough for him. Not a watchman - a dog in the manger.

The houses around, too many to count, are full of refugees. But eating is just the opposite. They themselves look to see where they can snatch something.

The Kuzmenysh had a house in mind, so the elders cleaned it when Sych was there.

True, they stole God knows what: rags and a sewing machine. For a long time, the shantrap turned it one by one here, in the barn, until the handle flew off and everything else fell apart in pieces.

We're not talking about the machine. About the bread slicer. Where there were no scales, no weights, but only bread - he alone forced the brothers to work furiously in two heads.

And it came out: “Nowadays, all roads lead to a bread slicer.”

Strong, not a bread slicer. It is well known that there are no fortresses, that is, bread slicers, that a hungry orphanage cannot take.

In the dead of winter, when all the punks, desperate to find anything edible at the station or at the market, were freezing around the stoves, rubbing their butts, backs, and backs of their heads against them, absorbing fractions of degrees and seemingly warming up - the lime had been wiped down to the brick - The Kuzmenysh began to implement their incredible plan. This improbability was the key to success.

From a distant stash in the barn, they began stripping work, as an experienced builder would define it, using a crooked crowbar and plywood.

Grasping the crowbar (here they are - four hands!), they lifted it and lowered it with a dull sound onto the frozen ground. The first centimeters were the hardest. The earth was humming.

They carried it on the plywood to the opposite corner of the barn until a whole mound had formed there. The whole day, so stormy that the snow drifted obliquely, blinding their eyes, the Kuzmenyshi dragged the earth further into the forest. They put it in their pockets, in their bosoms, but they couldn’t carry it in their hands. Until we figured it out: adapt a canvas bag, a school bag.

Now we took turns going to school and taking turns digging: Kolka did the digging one day and Sashka did the digging one day.

The one whose turn it was to study, served two lessons for himself (Kuzmin? Which Kuzmin came? Nikolai? And where is the second one, where is Alexander?), and then pretended to be his brother. It turned out that both were at least half. Well, no one demanded a full visit from them! You want to live fat! The main thing is that they don’t leave anyone in the orphanage without lunch!

But if you have lunch or dinner there, they won’t let you eat it in turn; the jackals will immediately snatch it up and leave no trace. At this point they stopped digging and the two of them went to the canteen as if on an attack.

No one will ask, no one will be interested in whether Sashka is being naughty or Kolka. Here they are united: Kuzmenyshi. If suddenly there is one, then it seems like half. But they were rarely seen alone, and one might say that they were not seen at all!

They walk together, eat together, go to bed together.

And if they hit, they hit both of them, starting with the one who gets caught first at that awkward moment.

2

The excavation was in full swing when these strange rumors about the Caucasus began to spread.

For no reason, but persistently, in different parts of the bedroom, the same thing was repeated, either more quietly or more loudly. It’s as if they will remove the orphanage from their home in Tomilino and transfer it en masse, every single one, to the Caucasus.

The teachers will be sent away, and the foolish cook, and the mustachioed musician, and the disabled director... (“A mentally disabled person!” - it was pronounced quietly.)

They will take everyone, in a word.

They gossiped a lot, chewed them like last year's potato peels, but no one could imagine how it was possible to drive this entire wild horde into some mountains.

The Kuzmenysh listened to the chatter moderately, but believed even less. There was no time. Urgently, furiously, they dug their holes.

And what is there to talk about, and a fool understands: it is impossible to take a single orphanage child anywhere against his will! They won’t be taken to a cage like Pugacheva!

The hungry people will pour out in all directions at the very first stage, and catch them like water with a sieve!

And if, for example, it were possible to persuade one of them, then no Caucasus would suffer from such a meeting. They will strip you down to the skin, eat them to bits, and smash their Kazbeks into pieces... They will turn them into a desert! To the Sahara!

That's what the Kuzmenyshi thought and went to hammer.

One of them was picking at the earth with a piece of iron, now it was loose and falling off on its own, and the other was dragging the rock out in a rusty bucket. By spring, we came up against the brick foundation of the house where the bread slicer was located.

One day the Kuzmyonyshis were sitting at the far end of the excavation.

The dark red, anciently fired brick with a bluish tint crumbled with difficulty, each piece bleeding. Blisters swelled on my hands. And it turned out to be difficult to ram it from the side with a crowbar.

It was impossible to turn around in the excavation; earth was pouring out of the gate. A homemade smokehouse in an ink bottle, stolen from the office, ate out my eyes.

At first they had a real wax candle, also stolen. But the brothers themselves ate it. Somehow they couldn’t stand it, their guts were turning over from hunger. We looked at each other, at that candle, not enough, but at least something. They cut it in two and chewed it, leaving only one inedible string left.

Now a rag string was smoking: there was a recess made in the wall of the excavation - Sashka guessed - and from there there was a blue flicker, there was less light than soot.

Both Kuzmenysh sat slumped, sweaty, grimy, knees tucked under their chins.

Sashka suddenly asked:

- Well, what about the Caucasus? Are they chattering?

“They’re chattering,” answered Kolka.

- They'll drive, right? - Since Kolka did not answer, Sashka asked again: “Wouldn’t you like to?” Should I go?

- Where? - asked the brother.

- To the Caucasus!

- What is there?

– I don’t know... Interesting.

– I’m interested in where to go! - And Kolka angrily jabbed his fist at the brick. There, a meter or two meters from the fist, no further, was the treasured bread slicer.

On the table, striped with knives and smelling of a sour bread spirit, there are loaves of bread: a lot of loaf of greyish-golden color. One is more beautiful than the other. Breaking off the crust is happiness. Suck it, swallow it. And behind the crust there’s a whole carload of crumbs, pinch them and put them in your mouth.

Never in their lives have Kuzmenysh had to hold a whole loaf of bread in their hands! I didn't even have to touch it.

But they saw, from afar, of course, how in the bustle of the store they were rationing it using cards, how they were weighing it on scales.

A lean, ageless saleswoman grabbed the colored cards: workers', employees', dependent's, children's, and, glancing briefly - she had such an experienced spirit level eye - at the attachment, at the stamp on the back where the store number was written, although she probably knew all those attached by name, with scissors she made “chick-chick”, two or three coupons per box. And in that drawer she has a thousand, a million of these coupons with numbers of 100, 200, 250 grams.

For each coupon, two or three - only a small part of a whole loaf, from which the saleswoman will economically cut off a small piece with a sharp knife. And it’s not good for her to stand next to the bread - she’s dried up, but she hasn’t gained weight!

But the entire loaf, untouched by the knife, no matter how hard the brothers looked at it, no one in their presence managed to take it away from the store.

Whole - such wealth that it’s scary to even think about it!

But what kind of paradise will open then if there are not one, and not two, and not three Bukhariks! A real paradise! True! Blessed! And we don’t need any Caucasus!

Moreover, this paradise is nearby; unclear voices can already be heard through the brickwork.

Although blind from soot, deaf from the earth, from sweat, from anguish, our brothers heard one thing in every sound: “Bread, bread...”

At such moments the brothers don’t dig, I’m sure they’re not fools. Heading past the iron doors to the barn, they will make an extra hinge so that they know that that pound lock is in place: you can see it a mile away!

Only then do they start to destroy this damn foundation.

They built them in ancient times, probably without even suspecting that someone would use a strong word to defend them for their strength.

As soon as the Kuzmenysh get there, when the whole bread slicer opens up to their enchanted eyes in the dim evening light, consider that you are already in heaven.

Then... The brothers knew exactly what would happen then.

It was probably thought out in two heads, not in one.

Buharik - but only one - they will eat on the spot. So that your stomach doesn't turn out from such wealth. And they will take two more biscuits with them and hide them securely. This is what they can do. Just three boogers, that is. The rest, even if it itches, you can’t touch. Otherwise, the brutal boys will destroy the house.

And three biscuits is what, according to Kolka’s calculations, is stolen from them every day anyway.

The part for the fool of the cook: everyone knows that he is a fool and was in a madhouse. But he eats just like a normal person. Another part is stolen by bread cutters and those jackals who hang around the bread cutters. And the most main part taken for the director, for his family and his dogs.

But near the director, not only dogs, not only cattle feed, there are also relatives and hangers-on. And all of them are dragged from the orphanage, dragged, dragged... The orphanage residents themselves drag. But those who drag have their crumbs from dragging.

The Kuzmenys accurately calculated that the disappearance of three Bukhariks would not cause any noise in the orphanage. They will not offend themselves, they will deprive others. That's all.

Who needs the commissions from the rono (and feed them too! They have a big mouth!), so that they begin to find out why they are stealing, and why the orphanage residents are not getting enough of their allotted food, and why the director’s animals-dogs are as tall as calves.

But Sashka just sighed and looked in the direction where Kolka’s fist was pointing.

“Nope...” he said thoughtfully. – It’s still interesting. The mountains are interesting to see. They probably stick out higher than our house? A?

- So what? – Kolka asked again, he was very hungry. There's no time for mountains here, no matter what they are. It seemed to him that he could smell the smell of fresh bread through the earth.

Both were silent.

“Today we taught rhymes,” recalled Sashka, who had to sit through school for two. – Mikhail Lermontov, it’s called “The Cliff”.

Sashka did not remember everything by heart, even though the poems were short. Not like “The song about Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich, the young guardsman and swashbuckling merchant Kalashnikov”... Phew! One name is half a kilometer long! Not to mention the poems themselves!

And from “The Cliff” Sashka remembered only two lines:

The golden cloud spent the night
On the chest of a giant rock...

– About the Caucasus, or what? – Kolka asked boredly.

- Yeah. The cliff...

“If he’s as bad as this one...” And Kolka thrust his fist into the foundation again. - The cliff is yours!

- He is not mine!

Sashka fell silent, thinking.

He had not thought about poetry for a long time. He didn’t understand anything about poetry, and there wasn’t much to understand in them. If you read it on a full stomach, maybe it will make sense. That shaggy woman in the choir is tormenting them, and if they hadn’t left them without lunch, they would have all lathered their heels from the choir long ago. They need these songs, poems... Whether you eat or read, you still think about food. The hungry godfather has all the chickens on his mind!

- So what? – Kolka suddenly asked.

- What's wrong? – Sashka repeated after him.

- Why is he there, a cliff? Has it fallen apart or not?

“I don’t know,” Sashka said somehow stupidly.

- How you do not know? What about poetry?

- Why the poems... Well, there's this one... What's her name. The cloud, then, has hit the cliff...

– How do we get to the foundation?

- Well, I poked around... flew away...

Kolka whistled.

– They’re making up nothing for themselves! Either about a chicken, or about a cloud...

- What do I have to do with it! – Sashka was now angry. - Am I your writer, or what? – but he wasn’t very angry. And it’s my own fault: I was daydreaming and didn’t hear the teacher’s explanation.

During class, he suddenly imagined the Caucasus, where everything was different from their rotten Tomilino.

The mountains are the size of their orphanage, and between them there are bread slicers everywhere. And none of them are locked. And there is no need to dig, I went in, hung it myself, ate it myself. I went out and there was another bread slicer, and again without a lock. And the people are all in Circassian coats, mustachioed, and so cheerful. They watch Sashka enjoying his food, smile, and hit him on the shoulder. “Yakshi,” they say. Or something else! But the meaning is the same: “Eat more, we have a lot of bread slicers!”

It was summer. The grass in the yard was green. No one saw off the Kuzmenysh, except for the teacher Anna Mikhailovna, who probably wasn’t thinking about their departure either, looking somewhere over their heads with cold blue eyes.

Everything happened unexpectedly. It was planned to send two older, most thugs from the orphanage, but they immediately left, as they say, disappeared into space, and the Kuzmenyshi, on the contrary, said that they wanted to go to the Caucasus.

The documents were rewritten. No one asked why they suddenly decided to go, what kind of need was driving our brothers to a distant land. Only pupils from junior group came to see them. They stood at the door and, pointing their finger at them, said: “These! - And after a pause: - To the Caucasus!

The reason for leaving was solid, thank God, no one guessed about it.

A week before all these events, the tunnel under the bread slicer suddenly collapsed. Failed in the most visible place. And with him, the Kuzmenysh’s hopes for another collapsed, better life.

We left in the evening, everything seemed to be fine, the wall had already been finished, all that was left was to open up the floor.

And in the morning they rushed out of the house: the director and the entire kitchen were assembled, staring - what a miracle, the earth had settled under the wall of the bread slicer!

And - you guessed it, my dear mother. But this is a tunnel!

Under their kitchen, under their bread slicer!

This was something they didn’t know in the orphanage yet.

They began to drag students to the director. While we looked at the older ones, we couldn’t even think about the younger ones.

Military sappers were called in for consultation. Is it possible, they asked, for children to dig this themselves?

They inspected the tunnel, walked from the barn to the bread slicer and climbed inside, where there was no collapse. Shaking off the yellow sand, they threw up their hands: “It is impossible, without equipment, without special training, it is in no way possible to dig such a metro. Here an experienced soldier can get a month’s work, if, say, with an entrenching tool and auxiliary means... And the children... Yes, we would take such children to us if they really knew how to perform such miracles.”

– They are still my miracle workers! - said the director gloomily. – But I will find this magician-creator!

The brothers stood right there, among other pupils. Each of them knew what the other was thinking.

Both Kuzmenysh thought that if they started asking questions, the ends would inevitably lead to them. Weren't they the ones hanging around here all the time, weren't they the ones who were absent when others were hanging out in the bedroom by the stove?

There are a lot of eyes all around! One overlooked and the second, and the third saw.

And then, in the tunnel that evening they left their lamp and, most importantly, Sashka’s school bag, in which they carried the earth into the forest.

It's a dead bag, but if they find it, it will be ruined for the brothers! You still have to run away. Isn’t it better to set sail on our own, and calmly, to the unknown Caucasus? Moreover, two places have become available.

Of course, the Kuzmenysh did not know that somewhere in regional organizations In a bright moment, this idea arose about unloading the orphanages near Moscow, of which there were hundreds in the region by the spring of forty-four. This is not counting the homeless who lived wherever and however necessary.

And here, in one fell swoop, with the liberation of the wealthy lands of the Caucasus from the enemy, it was possible to solve all the issues: to drive away the extra mouths, to deal with crime, and to do a seemingly good deed for the children.

And for the Caucasus, of course.

That’s what they told the guys: if you want to get drunk, go ahead. Everything is there. And there is bread there. And potatoes. And even fruits, the existence of which our jackals do not even suspect.

Sashka then said to his brother: “I want fruits... These are the ones that this... who came talked about.”

To which Kolka replied that the fruit is a potato, he knows for sure. And the fruit is also the director. With his own ears, Kolka heard one of the sappers, as he was leaving, say quietly, pointing at the director: “He’s also a fruit... He’s saving himself from the war by looking after the kids!”

- Let's eat some potatoes! - said Sashka.

And Kolka immediately replied that when the jackals are brought to such a rich region, where everything is available, he will immediately become poor. I read in a book that locusts go where smaller in size an orphanage, and when it rushes in a heap, a bare space remains behind it. And her stomach is not like our brother’s, she probably won’t eat everything. Give her those same incomprehensible fruits. And we will eat the tops, leaves, and flowers...

But Kolka still agreed to go.

They waited two months before they sent it.

On the day of departure, they were brought to the bread slicer, not further than the threshold, of course. They gave us a ration of bread. But they didn’t give it in advance. You will be fat, they say, go to the bread, and give them bread!

The brothers walked out of the door and tried not to look at the hole under the wall, the one that remained from the collapse.

At least this pit attracted them.

Pretending that they knew nothing, they mentally said goodbye to their handbag, and to the lamp, and to all their native tunnel, in which they had lived so much during the smoke of long evenings in the middle of winter.

With ration packs in their pockets, clutching them with their hands, the brothers walked to the director, as they were told to do.

The director was sitting on the steps of his house. He was wearing breeches, but without a T-shirt and barefoot. Luckily, there were no dogs nearby.

Without getting up, he looked at his brothers and the teacher, and only now, probably, he remembered why they were there.

Grunting, he stood up and beckoned with his clumsy finger.

The teacher pushed from behind, and the Kuzmenyshi took several hesitant steps forward.

Although the director did not assault anyone, they were afraid of him. He shouted loudly. He will grab one of the pupils by the collar and at the top of his voice: “No breakfast, no lunch, no dinner!..”

It's good if it makes one revolution. What if two or three?

Now the director seemed to be in a complacent mood.

Not knowing the names of the brothers, and he didn’t know anyone in the orphanage, he pointed his finger at Kolka and ordered him to take off his short, patched jacket. He ordered Sashka to take off his padded jacket. He gave this padded jacket to Kolka, and the jacket to his brother.

He walked away and looked as if he had done a good deed for them. I was satisfied with my work.

The teacher nudged the children by the elbow, they sang in discordant voices:

- Let’s not Vik Viktrych!

- Well, go! Go!

Allowed, in a word.

When they were far enough away that the director could not see, the brothers changed clothes again.

There, in their pockets, lay their precious rations.

Maybe to the director, who has no idea, they would seem the same! But no! The impatient Sashka had the edge of the crust chewed off, but the thrifty Kolka only licked it, he had not yet started eating.

It’s good, at least I didn’t exchange my pants with any of the strangers. In the cuff of Kolka’s pants there was a folded-up thirty piece.

The money was not great during the war, but for the Kuzmenysh it was worth a lot.

This was their only value, a backup in the unknown future.

Four hands. Four legs. Two heads. And thirty.

The golden cloud spent the night Anatoly Pristavkin

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Title: The golden cloud spent the night
Author: Anatoly Pristavkin
Year: 1987
Genre: Russian classics, Soviet literature, Literature of the 20th century

About the book “The Golden Cloud Spent the Night” Anatoly Pristavkin

A stronger, heavier, more painful theme than orphans in war, perhaps, cannot be found. It is impossible to remain silent about this, and there is no strength to shout, especially if you are a participant in the events you are talking about. Honestly, I don’t envy Anatoly Pristavkin. “The Golden Cloud Spent the Night” is the apogee of what the author himself saw, experienced and suffered in childhood. This magnificent, but incredibly difficult work is included in. I recommend that you read “The Golden Cloud Spent the Night.”

You can download the book at the bottom of the page in epub, rtf, fb2, txt format.

The main characters of the book are the orphan brothers Kuzmina (in the orphanage they are called Kuzmenyshami). Actually, the story is told on their behalf. The world they live in is incredibly cruel. Children's thoughts also become corresponding: the brothers trust no one but each other; fight, cheat and steal. Dreaming of one day inhaling the smell of freshly baked bread...

Kolka and Sashka are constantly tormented by hunger, and all their thoughts are aimed only at getting food. For the sake of their goal, they do not disdain any methods. However, they do not disgust the reader; rather, on the contrary, they make them sympathize and understand. Are they guilty for being born at such a time? Are they guilty of being left without parents, in the cold and hunger of the post-war period? No. But there are still culprits.

And only adults can be blamed for all this. Having started the war, the higher-ups did not even think about taking care of millions of innocent lives. Well, those below them immediately began to steal from the completely poor, suffocating with their own greed. And only children, trying to survive, seem noble compared to all the others.

Children teach mercy and patience, love and respect for one's neighbor. Nationality is not important for them - a Chechen and a Russian may well become best friends. However, the guys also let adults into their world - but only if they prove that they are worthy.

Anatoly Pristavkin himself visited the orphanage, on this train, and felt hunger, loneliness and the indescribable bitterness of loss. I am very, very sorry that he went through such an ordeal. But I can’t help but thank him for sharing his experience with the readers, if only so that we know about it...

What is it like to be hungry, to flee, to see the death of the only one loved one?.. Lord, let us never know this. Anatoly Pristavkin’s book “The Golden Cloud Spent the Night” is simply a must-read for all people in the world! So that the events described in it will never happen again.

On our website about books you can download the site for free or read online book“A golden cloud spent the night” by Anatoly Pristavkin in epub, fb2, txt, rtf, pdf formats for iPad, iPhone, Android and Kindle. The book will give you a lot of pleasant moments and real pleasure from reading. Buy full version you can from our partner. Also, here you will find last news from literary world, learn the biography of your favorite authors. For beginning writers there is a separate section with useful tips and recommendations, interesting articles, thanks to which you yourself can try your hand at literary crafts.

Quotes from the book “The Golden Cloud Spent the Night” by Anatoly Pristavkin

“I think that all people are brothers,” Sashka will say, and they will sail far, far away, to where the mountains descend into the sea and people have never heard of a war, where brother kills brother.

There are no bad nations, only bad people.

For some reason, weapons are always beautiful. And even the more dangerous, the more beautiful it is usually.

We were afraid not because we could die. This is what happens to a terribly driven animal, which is overtaken by an unknown mechanical monster, without letting the light out of the corridor! We, like little animals, felt in our skin that we were driven into this night, into this corn, into these explosions and fires...

... and only the train knocked its wheels, confirming something: “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes...”

He would never reveal the secret of his stash to anyone. It's like giving yourself away. But Alkhuzur was now Sashka...

He couldn't stand this. He screamed, howled, screamed and, no longer remembering anything, as if he were the most hated enemy, he rushed at this crow...

Maybe from a terrible guess that no happiness awaits us in the new place... We just wanted to live...

Is it possible to extract from yourself, sitting in a comfortable Moscow apartment, that feeling of hopeless horror, which was the stronger the more of us there were! It seemed to multiply by the fear of each of us, we were together, but each of us had our own, personal fear! Taking by the throat!

Download the book “The Golden Cloud Spent the Night” for free by Anatoly Pristavkin

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Annotation

The story of A. Pristavkin about the twin orphanages Kuzmenysh, sent during the Great Patriotic War from the Moscow region to the Caucasus. It was written back in 1981, but was only released in the late 80s. A book about the war, about children's destinies broken by the war, is unlikely to leave anyone indifferent.

Anatoly Pristavkin

“WE WERE TWO: BROTHER AND ME...”

Anatoly Pristavkin

I dedicate this story to all her friends who accepted this homeless child of literature as their own and did not allow its author to fall into despair.

This word arose on its own, just as the wind is born in a field. It appeared, rustled, and swept through the near and far corners of the orphanage: “Caucasus! Caucasus!" What is the Caucasus? Where did he come from? Really, no one could really explain it.

And what a strange fantasy in the dirty Moscow region to talk about some kind of Caucasus, about which only from reading aloud at school (there were no textbooks!) The orphanage shantrap knew that it exists, or rather, existed in some distant, incomprehensible time, when the black-bearded, eccentric highlander Hadji Murat fired at the enemies, when the leader of the Murids, Imam Shamil, defended himself in a besieged fortress, and the Russian soldiers Zhilin and Kostylin languished in a deep hole.

There was also Pechorin, one of the extra people, who also traveled around the Caucasus.

Yes, here are some more cigarettes! One of the Kuzmenyshes spotted them on a wounded lieutenant colonel from an ambulance train stuck at the station in Tomilin.

Against the backdrop of broken snow-white mountains, a rider in a black cloak gallops and gallops on a wild horse. No, it doesn’t jump, it flies through the air. And under it, in an uneven, angular font, the name: “KAZBEK”.

A mustachioed lieutenant colonel with a bandaged head, a handsome young man, looked at the pretty nurse who had jumped out to look at the station, and tapped his fingernail meaningfully on the cardboard lid of the cigarettes, not noticing that nearby, with his mouth open in amazement and holding his breath, the little ragged little Kolka was looking at the precious box.

I was looking for a crust of bread from the wounded to pick up, and I saw: “KAZBEK”!

Well, what does the Caucasus have to do with it? Rumor about him?

Nothing to do with it at all.

And it is not clear how this pointed word, sparkling with a shiny icy edge, was born where it is impossible for it to be born: among the everyday life of an orphanage, cold, without firewood, always hungry. The whole tense life of the boys revolved around frozen potatoes, potato peelings and, as the height of desire and dream, a crust of bread in order to subsist, to survive just one extra day of war.

The most cherished, and even impossible, dream of any of them was to at least once penetrate into the holy of holies of the orphanage: into the BREAD SLICER - so we highlight it in font, because it stood before the eyes of the children higher and more inaccessible than some KAZBEK!

And they were appointed there, just as God would appoint, say, to heaven! The most chosen, the luckiest, or you can define it this way: the happiest on earth!

Kuzmenyshi was not among them.

And I had no idea that I would be able to enter. This was the lot of the thieves, those of them who, having escaped from the police, reigned during this period in the orphanage, and even in the entire village.

To penetrate the bread slicer, but not like those chosen ones - the owners, but with a mouse, for a second, for an instant, that's what I dreamed about! With an eye, to look in reality at all the great wealth of the world, in the form of clumsy loaves piled up on the table.

And - inhale, not with your chest, with your stomach, inhale the intoxicating, intoxicating smell of bread...

That's all. All!

I didn’t dream about any tiny little things that could not help but remain after the dumplings were dumped and fragilely rubbing their rough sides. Let them be gathered, let the chosen ones enjoy! It rightfully belongs to them!

But no matter how you rubbed against the iron-lined doors of the bread slicer, it could not replace the phantasmagoric picture that arose in the heads of the Kuzmin brothers - the smell did not penetrate the iron.

It was not at all possible for them to get through this door legally. It was from the realm of abstract fiction, but the brothers were realists. Although the specific dream was not alien to them.

And this is what this dream brought Kolka and Sashka to in the winter of forty-four: to penetrate the bread slicer, into the kingdom of bread by any means... Any way.

In these especially dreary months, when it was impossible to get frozen potatoes, let alone crumbs of bread, there was no strength to walk past the house, past the iron doors. To walk and know, almost to imagine, how there, behind the gray walls, behind the dirty, but also barred window, the chosen ones, with a knife and scales, cast their spells. And they shred, and cut, and knead the droopy, damp bread, pouring the warm, salty crumbs into the mouth by the handful, and saving the fatty fragments for the tiller.

Saliva boiled in my mouth. It hurt my stomach. My head was getting fuzzy. I wanted to howl, scream and beat, beat on that iron door so that they would unlock it, open it, so that they would finally understand: we want it too! Let him then go to a punishment cell, anywhere... They will punish, beat, kill... But first let them show, even from the door, how he is, bread, in a pile, a mountain, Kazbek towering on a table mangled with knives... How he smells!

Then it will be possible to live again. Then there will be faith. Since there is a mountain of bread, it means the world exists... And you can endure, and be silent, and live on.

A small ration, even with an additive pinned to it with a sliver, did not reduce hunger. He was getting stronger.

The guys thought this scene was very fantastic! They come up with it too! The wing didn't work! Yes, they would immediately run anywhere by the bone gnawed from that wing! After such a loud reading aloud, their stomachs turned even more, and they forever lost faith in writers; If they don’t eat chicken, it means the writers themselves are greedy!

Since they drove away the main orphanage boy Sych, many different big and small thieves have passed through Tomilino, through the orphanage, twisting their half-raspberries here for the winter far from their native police.

One thing remained unchanged: the strong devoured everything, leaving crumbs for the weak, dreams of crumbs, taking small things into reliable networks of slavery.

For a crust they fell into slavery for a month or two.

The front crust, the one that is crispier, blacker, thicker, sweeter, cost two months, on a loaf it would be the top one, but we are talking about soldering, a tiny piece that looks flat as a transparent leaf on the table; the back one is paler, poorer, thinner - months of slavery.

And who didn’t remember that Vaska Smorchok, the same age as the Kuzmenyshes, also about eleven years old, before the arrival of a relative-soldier, he once served for the back crust for six months. He gave away everything he could eat, and ate buds from trees so as not to die completely.

Kuzmenysh were also sold in difficult times. But they were always sold together.

If, of course, two Kuzmenysh were combined into one person, then in the entire Tomilinsky orphanage there would be no equal in age, and, perhaps, in strength.

But the Kuzmenyshi already knew their advantage.

It is easier to drag with four hands than with two; run away faster on four feet. And four eyes see much more sharply when you need to grab where something bad lies!

While two eyes are busy, the other two watch over both. Yes, they still have time to make sure that they don’t snatch anything from themselves, clothes, the mattress from underneath when you sleep and see your pictures from the life of a bread slicer! They said: why did you open the bread slicer if they pulled it from you?

And there are countless combinations of any of the two Kuzmenysh! If, say, one of them is caught in the market, they drag him to jail. One of the brothers whines, screams, beats for pity, and the other distracts. You look, while they turned to the second one, the first one sniffed, and he was gone. And the second one follows! Both brothers are like nimble, slippery vines; once you let them go, you can’t pick them up again.

Eyes will see, hands will grab, legs will carry away...

But somewhere, in some pot, all this must be cooked in advance... It’s difficult to survive without a reliable plan: how, where and what to steal!

The two heads of Kuzmenysh were cooked differently.

Sashka, as a world-contemplative, calm, quiet person, extracted ideas from himself. How, in what way they arose in him, he himself did not know.

Kolka, resourceful, tenacious, practical, figured out with lightning speed how to bring these ideas to life. To extract, that is, income. And what’s even more precise: take some food.

If Sashka, for example, had said, scratching the top of his blond head, “shouldn’t they fly to, say, the Moon, there’s a lot of oilcake there,” Kolka would not have said right away: “No.” He would first think about this business with the Moon, what kind of airship to fly there on, and then he would ask: “Why? You can steal it closer…” But it happened that Sashka would look dreamily at Kolka, and he, like a radio, would pick up Sashka’s thought on the air. And then he wonders how to implement it.

Sashka has a golden head, not a head, but the Palace of Soviets! The brothers saw this in the picture. All sorts of American skyscrapers a hundred floors below are at hand. We are the very first, the highest!

And the Kuzmenyshis are the first in something else. They were the first to understand how to get through the winter of 1944 without dying.

When they made a revolution in St. Petersburg, I suppose, in addition to the post office and the telegraph, and the station, and the grain cutter...

Two twin brothers - Sashka and Kolka Kuzmin, nicknamed Kuzmenyshi - live in an orphanage in Tomilino, near Moscow. The director of the orphanage is a thief (the bread intended for orphans and street children ends up with the director's relatives and his dogs; the clothes with which he is obliged to supply the children also end up with his relatives and friends). The Kuzmyonys dream of getting into the “bread slicer” (the room where the loaves of bread are kept), and for several months they have been digging under it. When the tunnel is accidentally discovered, the guys realize that they will have a bad time and agree to go to the Caucasus (where several children from each orphanage near Moscow are sent). Their only association with the concept of “Caucasus” is a picture from a pack of “Kazbek” cigarettes, as well as a couple of lines from M. Lermontov’s poem “The Cliff”. But the hungry children are promised fruit (which they have never seen) and a lot of bread, which is a decisive argument in favor of leaving. On the road, the hungry Kuzmenysh touchingly take care of each other (Kolka gives his brother a tiny ration of bread, he goes to bed hungry), at stations they run to the market to steal food (they eat the crumb of a stolen loaf and then ask the traders to pour sour cream or Varenets into it; having no money, the brothers pour the milk back, and scrape out what has been absorbed with spoons). Together with the entire horde of street children (five hundred children from the orphanage are traveling on the train), the Kuzmenysh raid young crops (when the train enters the Black Earth Region), and then “suffer their stomachs” by overeating fresh vegetables. They meet the teacher Regina Petrovna, who is traveling on the same train with her little sons Zhores and Marat (she calls them “peasants”), and the new director, an intelligent former supply worker Pyotr Anisimovich. At one of the stations, the brothers come across a strange train - the windows are barred, children's hands are reaching out to them from behind the bars, black-haired and black-eyed children in an incomprehensible language ask Kolka and Sashka for something. An armed soldier pushes them away from the train, calling the strange passengers “chechmeks.” Sashka has become very weak (from an upset stomach) and they want to hospitalize him. Kolka turns to Regina Petrovna for help so as not to be separated from his brother (she arranges for both brothers to leave on the same train).

Children from the orphanage are unloaded at the Caucasian Waters station. Children bathe in sulfur springs. A close friendship develops between the Kuzmyonyshis and Regina Petrovna: despite the fact that she takes care of the girls, the teacher often invites the brothers to her place and treats them to tea with saccharin, but the Kuzmyonyshis do not abuse her hospitality: they are used to taking care of themselves, and Regina Petrovna is the same. like all those who arrived, he is starving. The brothers are slowly stealing in the village of Berezovskaya. The village looks strange: the brothers cannot understand for sure whether people live there or not. The harvest is ripe, but the doors are boarded up, only muffled whispers and coughs can be heard from time to time. In one of the houses, the Kuzmenyshis find a guide Ilya, who tells them that the village is actually the Chechen village of Dey Churt. People have been evicted from it, and the orphanage residents should become its new “population.” Ilya treats the guys to moonshine. Based on his tip, the Kuzmenyshis begin to bring him “junk” from the warehouse, which Ilya deceitfully takes from them and then sells. Ilya himself, nicknamed “The Animal,” as a child went through a colony, and logging, and wandered, and stole, and was in prison, where he learned that there was a lot of “waste” land in the Caucasus, etc. houses are given to refugees for “free” along with belongings. The Kuzmenysh are ashamed to return to the colony. Following the example of some colonists, they decide to leave “even further,” but, remembering Regina Petrovna and the “peasants,” they stay to support her. She realized that the brothers stole things from the warehouse, but did not hand over the Kuzmenysh to the director, however, she also refused the lard they brought (from Ilya). Regina Petrovna arranges for Kolka and Sashka to work part-time with high school students at a cannery (where they can “feed themselves”). Having discovered a Chechen furry hat in the back room, the teacher begins to cut two pieces out of it. winter hats for the guys.

At night, the Chechens set fire to a building (several people on horses set off an explosion nearby), which houses a warehouse and, accordingly, winter clothes intended for the colonists.

At the cannery, the watchman Aunt Zina takes pity on the Kuzmenysh and allows them to take fresh fruits and berries, as well as eggplant caviar, jam, plum jam. She is the only one who knows how to distinguish between the brothers; they cannot deceive her with their similarity. Aunt Zina is also a migrant; she is deathly afraid of the Chechens, who were forcibly taken from here to Siberia “for treason,” but they could not force everyone to leave.” Those who stayed and hid in the mountains are taking revenge on the Russians. The Kuzmyonysh store jars of jam for the winter according to an old orphanage habit - they go out through the entrance in an embrace, so that the jars are squeezed under their clothes, and they float the jars outside the factory along the stream in rubber galoshes. The brothers do not forget about Regina Petrovna’s sons in her absence (after the Chechen attack on the warehouse, she “fell ill”), they feed Marat and Zhores with jam from their reserves. However, their plan is revealed by the older colonists and the Kuzmenysh banks are stolen. The theft of the elders is discovered, and the colonists are removed from work at the plant. They conduct a search on the territory of the colony and find a cache - five hundred cans of canned food. At this time the colonists give a concert amateur performances before the settlers. One of the guys shows tricks and takes out a document from the director’s briefcase - a search report. The colonists rush out of the hall to save their supplies, but at that moment a horse's tramp is heard. The Chechens blew up the car driven by the cheerful chauffeur Vera, who was friends with the colonists, and the house in which Ilya lived. The Kuzmenysh decide to escape from the colony. Regina Petrovna returns from the hospital and tells her brothers that on the night when the warehouse was burning, three Chechens shot at her. But the boy, the son of one of them, jerked his father’s gun at the moment of the shot, and the bullet flew past. The teacher is sent to a subsidiary farm to recover. She calls the Kuzmenysh with her, dissuades them from running away for now, and then promises to leave all together. For the first time, the Kuzmenysh people think about the reasons for the Chechens’ hatred of the Russians; they do not believe that all Caucasians, as one, are traitors to the Motherland. The brothers decide that Ilya was killed for a cause - he used someone else’s house and goods as his own, without even once working in the garden. The Kuzmenysh actively help Regina Petrovna on the farm, graze cows, collect brushwood and dung, and grind flour on millstones. One day, for old times’ sake, they are trying to make a stash, but Regina Petrovna talks to them about how it is impossible to steal from themselves: after all, they live like one family. The brothers return the food, and no one remembers what happened anymore. Regina Petrovna comes up with a holiday - she appoints Kuzmenysh's birthday (October 17), prepares a treat (sweet pie). Immigrant Demyan takes care of her and persuades her to live together. Regina Petrovna says that she is the widow of a pilot, who went to work in Orphanage to make it easier to raise your own children. The Kuzmyons are jealous, they both want to marry Regina Petrovna, despite their young age (they are probably turning 11 years old). Regina Petrovna gives her brothers gifts - shirts, skullcaps, boots, scarves. The next morning, Regina Petrovna asks Demyan to take Kolka and Sashka to the colony. The colony is empty. The windows are broken, the director's briefcase is lying on the ground, the yard is littered with things, as if "for evacuation." Demyan explains that they need to save themselves one by one: this way it will be more difficult for the Chechens scouring the area to catch them. The boys scatter and hide in the corn. Kolka, after some time, sneaks into the village and finds his dead brother there. Kolka buries Sashka, feeling at the same time that he is “burying himself.” He sees a soldier's patrol and understands from the conversations that they... They are going to “kill Chechens”, and therefore will avenge Sasha. Kolka takes his brother's body to railway, places him in an iron bunker under one of the cars and says goodbye to Sashka. Sashka dreamed of leaving; Kolka cannot leave Regina Petrovna. Kolka gets sick and loses consciousness. Opening his eyes, he notices that Sashka is giving him water from an iron mug and speaking in an incomprehensible language. In broken Russian, an unfamiliar boy explains to Kolka that his name is Alkhuzur, that he saved Kuzmenysh from his Chechen relatives, and at the same time from Russian soldiers. Alkhuzur agrees for Kolka to call him Sashka. When the boys are found by Russian soldiers, Kolka insists that his twin brother is with him. The boys set off on a long journey; meeting the Chechens, they are saved thanks to the pleas of Alkhuzur; in a collision with the Russians, Kolka tearfully convinces the soldiers not to touch them, and as a result they end up in an orphanage. Regina Petrovna finds them there. She escaped with the help of Demyan, but did not give up hope of finding the Kuzmyonyshes. She decides to take the boys and adopt them. Regina Petrovna declares that she remembers the Kuzmin brothers from the colony and Alkhuzur - this is the same Sashka. However, she is not given permission. Kolka and Alkhuzur are sent to a new settlement. The boys are lying on the same shelf, hugging each other, just as the real Kuzmenysh once set off on their journey to the Caucasus from the Kazan station. Regina Petrovna quietly asks Kolka where he is real brother. He replies that Sashka has gone far away.

The golden cloud spent the night

I dedicate this story to all her friends who accepted this homeless child of literature as their own and did not allow its author to fall into despair.

This word arose on its own, just as the wind is born in a field. It appeared, rustled, and swept through the near and far corners of the orphanage: “Caucasus! Caucasus!" What is the Caucasus? Where did he come from? Really, no one could really explain it.
And what a strange fantasy in the dirty Moscow region to talk about some kind of Caucasus, about which only from reading aloud at school (there were no textbooks!) The orphanage shantrap knew that it exists, or rather, existed in some distant, incomprehensible time, when the black-bearded, eccentric highlander Hadji Murat fired at the enemies, when the leader of the Murids, Imam Shamil, defended himself in a besieged fortress, and the Russian soldiers Zhilin and Kostylin languished in a deep hole.
There was also Pechorin, one of the extra people, who also traveled around the Caucasus.
Yes, here are some more cigarettes! One of the Kuzmenyshes spotted them on a wounded lieutenant colonel from an ambulance train stuck at the station in Tomilin.
Against the backdrop of broken snow-white mountains, a rider in a black cloak gallops and gallops on a wild horse. No, it doesn’t jump, it flies through the air. And under it, in an uneven, angular font, the name: “KAZBEK”.
A mustachioed lieutenant colonel with a bandaged head, a handsome young man, looked at the pretty nurse who had jumped out to look at the station, and tapped his fingernail meaningfully on the cardboard lid of the cigarettes, not noticing that nearby, with his mouth open in amazement and holding his breath, the little ragged little Kolka was looking at the precious box.
I was looking for a crust of bread from the wounded to pick up, and I saw: “KAZBEK”!
Well, what does the Caucasus have to do with it? Rumor about him?
Nothing to do with it at all.
And it is not clear how this pointed word, sparkling with a shiny icy edge, was born where it is impossible for it to be born: among the everyday life of an orphanage, cold, without firewood, always hungry. The whole tense life of the boys revolved around frozen potatoes, potato peelings and, as the height of desire and dream, a crust of bread in order to subsist, to survive just one extra day of war.
The most cherished, and even impossible, dream of any of them was to at least once penetrate into the holy of holies of the orphanage: into the BREAD SLICER - so we highlight it in font, because it stood before the eyes of the children higher and more inaccessible than some KAZBEK!
And they were appointed there, just as God would appoint, say, to heaven! The most chosen, the luckiest, or you can define it this way: the happiest on earth!
Kuzmenyshi was not among them.
And I had no idea that I would be able to enter. This was the lot of the thieves, those of them who, having escaped from the police, reigned during this period in the orphanage, and even in the entire village.
To penetrate the bread slicer, but not like those chosen ones - the owners, but with a mouse, for a second, for an instant, that's what I dreamed about! With an eye, to look in reality at all the great wealth of the world, in the form of clumsy loaves piled up on the table.
And - inhale, not with your chest, with your stomach, inhale the intoxicating, intoxicating smell of bread...
That's all. All!
I didn’t dream about any tiny little things that could not help but remain after the dumplings were dumped and fragilely rubbing their rough sides. Let them be gathered, let the chosen ones enjoy! It rightfully belongs to them!
But no matter how you rubbed against the iron-lined doors of the bread slicer, it could not replace the phantasmagoric picture that arose in the heads of the Kuzmin brothers - the smell did not penetrate the iron.
It was not at all possible for them to get through this door legally. It was from the realm of abstract fiction, but the brothers were realists. Although the specific dream was not alien to them.
And this is what this dream brought Kolka and Sashka to in the winter of forty-four: to penetrate the bread slicer, into the kingdom of bread by any means... Any way.
In these especially dreary months, when it was impossible to get frozen potatoes, let alone crumbs of bread, there was no strength to walk past the house, past the iron doors. To walk and know, almost to imagine, how there, behind the gray walls, behind the dirty, but also barred window, the chosen ones, with a knife and scales, cast their spells. And they shred, and cut, and knead the droopy, damp bread, pouring the warm, salty crumbs into the mouth by the handful, and saving the fatty fragments for the tiller.
Saliva boiled in my mouth. It hurt my stomach. My head was getting fuzzy. I wanted to howl, scream and beat, beat on that iron door so that they would unlock it, open it, so that they would finally understand: we want it too! Let him then go to a punishment cell, anywhere... They will punish, beat, kill... But first let them show, even from the door, how he is, bread, in a pile, a mountain, Kazbek towering on a table mangled with knives... How he smells!
Then it will be possible to live again. Then there will be faith. Since there is a mountain of bread, it means the world exists... And you can endure, and be silent, and live on.
A small ration, even with an additive pinned to it with a sliver, did not reduce hunger. He was getting stronger.
One day, a stupid teacher began to read aloud an excerpt from Tolstoy, and there the aging Kutuzov, during the war, eats chicken, eats it with reluctance, almost chewing the tough wing with disgust...
The guys thought this scene was very fantastic! They come up with it too! The wing didn't work! Yes, they would immediately run anywhere by the bone gnawed from that wing! After such a loud reading aloud, their stomachs turned even more, and they forever lost faith in writers; If they don’t eat chicken, it means the writers themselves are greedy!
Since they drove away the main orphanage boy Sych, many different big and small thieves have passed through Tomilino, through the orphanage, twisting their half-raspberries here for the winter far from their native police.
One thing remained unchanged: the strong devoured everything, leaving crumbs for the weak, dreams of crumbs, taking small things into reliable networks of slavery.
For a crust they fell into slavery for a month or two.
The front crust, the one that is crispier, blacker, thicker, sweeter, cost two months, on a loaf it would be the top one, but we are talking about soldering, a tiny piece that looks flat as a transparent leaf on the table; back
- paler, poorer, thinner - months of slavery.
And who didn’t remember that Vaska Smorchok, the same age as the Kuzmenyshes, also about eleven years old, before the arrival of a relative-soldier, he once served for the back crust for six months. He gave away everything he could eat, and ate buds from trees so as not to die completely.
Kuzmenysh were also sold in difficult times. But they were always sold together.
If, of course, two Kuzmenysh were combined into one person, then in the entire Tomilinsky orphanage there would be no equal in age, and, perhaps, in strength.
But the Kuzmenyshi already knew their advantage.
It is easier to drag with four hands than with two; run away faster on four feet. And four eyes see much more sharply when you need to grab where something bad lies!
While two eyes are busy, the other two watch over both. Yes, they still have time to make sure that they don’t snatch anything from themselves, clothes, the mattress from underneath when you sleep and see your pictures from the life of a bread slicer! They said: why did you open the bread slicer if they pulled it from you?
And there are countless combinations of any of the two Kuzmenysh! If, say, one of them is caught in the market, they drag him to jail. One of the brothers whines, screams, beats for pity, and the other distracts. You look, while they turned to the second one, the first one sniffed, and he was gone. And the second one follows! Both brothers are like nimble, slippery vines; once you let them go, you can’t pick them up again.
Eyes will see, hands will grab, legs will carry away...
But somewhere, in some pot, all this must be cooked in advance... It’s difficult to survive without a reliable plan: how, where and what to steal!
The two heads of Kuzmenysh were cooked differently.
Sashka, as a world-contemplative, calm, quiet person, extracted ideas from himself. How, in what way they arose in him, he himself did not know.
Kolka, resourceful, tenacious, practical, figured out with lightning speed how to bring these ideas to life. To extract, that is, income. And what’s even more precise: take some food.
If Sashka, for example, had said, scratching the top of his blond head, “shouldn’t they fly to, say, the Moon, there’s a lot of oilcake there,” Kolka would not have said right away: “No.” He would first think about this business with the Moon, which airship to fly there on, and then he would ask; "What for? You can steal it closer... “But it used to be that Sashka would look dreamily at Kolka, and he, like a radio, would catch Sashka’s thought on the air. And then he would figure out how to implement it.
Sashka has a golden head, not a head, but the Palace of Soviets! The brothers saw this in the picture. All sorts of American skyscrapers a hundred floors below are at hand. We are the very first, the highest!
And the Kuzmenyshis are the first in something else. They were the first to understand how to get through the winter of 1944 without dying.
When they made a revolution in St. Petersburg, I suppose, in addition to the post office and telegraph, and the station, they didn’t forget to take the bread slicer by storm!
The brothers walked past the bread slicer, not for the first time, by the way. But it was painfully unbearable that day! Although such walks added their torment.
“Oh, how I want to eat... You can even gnaw on the door! At least eat the frozen ground under the threshold!” - so it was said out loud. Sashka said, and suddenly it dawned on him. Why eat it if... If it... Yes, yes! That's it! If you need to dig it!
Dig! Well, of course, dig!
He didn’t say anything, he just looked at Kolka. And he instantly received the signal, and, turning his head, assessed everything, and scrolled through the options. But again, he didn’t say anything out loud, only his eyes flashed predatorily.
Anyone who has experienced it will believe: there is no more inventive and focused person in the world than a hungry person, especially if he is an orphanage who has grown his brains during the war on where and what to get.
Without saying a word (there are crooks all around, they will hear it, they will destroy it, and then any, even Sashka’s most brilliant idea, will be screwed), the brothers headed straight to the nearest shed, located a hundred meters from the orphanage, and twenty meters from the bread slicer. The shed was located right behind the bread slicer.
In the barn, the brothers looked around. At the same time, they looked to the farthest corner, where, behind a worthless iron scrap, behind a broken brick, there was Vaska Smorochka’s stash. When the firewood was stored, no one knew, only the Kuzmenyshi knew: a soldier, Uncle Andrei, was hiding here, whose weapons were stolen.
Sashka asked in a whisper; - Isn’t it far?
- Where is closer? - Kolka asked in turn.
Both understood that there was nowhere closer. Breaking a lock is much easier. Less labor, less time needed. There were crumbs of strength left. But they already tried to knock the lock off the bread slicer; not only the Kuzmenysh had such a bright answer come to mind! And the management hung a barn lock on the doors! Weighing half a pound!
You can only tear it off with a grenade. Hang it in front of the tank - not a single enemy shell will penetrate that tank.
After that unfortunate incident, the window was barred and such a thick rod was welded that it could not be taken with a chisel or a crowbar - unless with an autogenous one!
And Kolka thought about the autogen, he noticed carbide in one place. But you can’t drag it down, you can’t light it up, there are a lot of eyes around.
Only there are no strangers' eyes underground! The other option - to completely abandon the bread slicer - did not suit the Kuzmenyshes.
Neither the store, nor the market, and especially private houses were now suitable for obtaining food. Although such options were floating around in a swarm in Sashka’s head. The trouble is that Kolka did not see ways of their real implementation.
There's a watchman at the store all night, an evil old man. He doesn’t drink, doesn’t sleep, a day is enough for him. Not a watchman - a dog in the manger.
The houses around, too many to count, are full of refugees. But eating is just the opposite. They themselves look to see where they can snatch something.
The Kuzmenysh had a house in mind, so the elders cleaned it when Sych was there.
True, they stole God knows what: rags and a sewing machine. For a long time, the shantrap turned it one by one here, in the barn, until the handle flew off and everything else fell apart in pieces.
We're not talking about the machine. About the bread slicer. Where there were no scales, no weights, but only bread - he alone forced the brothers to work furiously in two heads.
And it came out: “Nowadays, all roads lead to a bread slicer.”
Strong, not a bread slicer. It is well known that there are no fortresses, that is, bread slicers, that a hungry orphanage cannot take.
In the dead of winter, when all the punks, desperate to find anything edible at the station or at the market, were freezing around the stoves, rubbing their butts, backs, and backs of their heads against them, absorbing fractions of degrees and seemingly warming up - the lime had been wiped down to the brick - The Kuzmenysh began to implement their incredible plan, and in this improbability lay the key to success.
From a distant stash in the barn, they began stripping work, as an experienced builder would define it, using a crooked crowbar and plywood.
Grasping the crowbar (here they are - four hands!), they lifted it and lowered it with a dull sound onto the frozen ground. The first centimeters were the hardest. The earth was humming.
They carried it on the plywood to the opposite corner of the barn until a whole mound had formed there.
The whole day, so stormy that the snow drifted obliquely, blinding their eyes, the Kuzmenyshi dragged the earth further into the forest. They put it in their pockets, in their bosoms, but they couldn’t carry it in their hands. Until we figured it out: use a canvas bag from school.
Now we took turns going to school and taking turns digging: one day Kolka was digging and one day Sashka was digging.
The one whose turn it was to study sat through two lessons for himself (Kuzmin? Which Kuzmin came? Nikolai? And where is the second one, where is Alexander?), and then pretended to be his brother. It turned out that both were at least half. Well, no one demanded a full visit from them! You want to live fat! The main thing is that they don’t leave anyone in the orphanage without lunch!
But whether it’s lunch or dinner, they won’t let you eat it in turn; the jackals will immediately snatch it up and leave no trace. At this point they stopped digging, and the two of them went to the canteen as if on an attack.
No one will ask, no one will be interested in whether Sashka is being naughty or Kolka. Here they are united: Kuzmenyshi. If suddenly there is one, then it seems like half. But they were rarely seen alone, and one might say that they were not seen at all!
They walk together, eat together, go to bed together.
And if they hit, they hit both of them, starting with the one who gets caught first at that awkward moment.

2

The excavation was in full swing when these strange rumors about the Caucasus began to spread.
For no reason, but persistently, in different parts of the bedroom, the same thing was repeated, either more quietly or more loudly. It’s as if they will remove the orphanage from their home in Tomilino and transfer it en masse, every single one, to the Caucasus.
They will send the teachers, the foolish cook, the mustachioed musician, and the disabled director... (“A mentally disabled person!” it was pronounced quietly.) They will take everyone, in a word.
They gossiped a lot, chewed them like last year's potato peels, but no one could imagine how it was possible to drive this entire wild horde into some mountains.
The Kuzmenysh listened to the chatter moderately, but believed even less. There was no time. Driven, they frantically dug their holes.
And what is there to talk about, and a fool understands: it is impossible to take a single orphanage child anywhere against his will! They won’t be taken to a cage like Pugacheva!
The hungry people will pour out in all directions at the very first stage and catch them like water with a sieve!
And if, for example, it was possible to persuade one of them, then no Caucasus would suffer from such a meeting; They will strip you down to the skin, eat them to bits, and smash their Kazbeks into pieces... They will turn them into a desert! To the Sahara!
So the Kuzmenyshis decided and went to hammer.
One of them was picking at the soil with a piece of iron, now it was loose and falling off on its own, and the other was dragging the rock out in a rusty bucket. By spring, we came up against the brick foundation of the house where the bread slicer was located.
One day the Kuzmenyshis were sitting at the far end of the excavation.
The dark red, anciently fired brick with a bluish tint crumbled with difficulty, each piece bleeding. Blisters swelled on my hands. And it turned out to be difficult to ram it from the side with a crowbar.
It was impossible to turn around in the excavation; earth was pouring out of the gate. A homemade smokehouse in an ink bottle, stolen from the office, ate out my eyes.
At first they had a real wax candle, also stolen. But the brothers themselves ate it. Somehow they couldn’t stand it, their guts were turning over from hunger. We looked at each other, at that candle, not enough, but at least something. They cut it in two and chewed it, leaving one inedible string left.
Now a rag string was smoking: a recess had been made in the wall of the excavation - Sashka guessed - and from there it flickered bluely, there was less light than soot.
Both Kuzmenysh sat slumped, sweaty, grimy, knees tucked under their chins.
Sashka suddenly asked:
- Well, what about the Caucasus? Are they chattering?
“They’re chattering,” answered Kolka.
- They'll drive, right? - Since Kolka did not answer, Sashka asked again: “Wouldn’t you like to?” Should I go?
- Where? - asked the brother.
- To the Caucasus!
- What’s there?
- I don’t know... Interesting.
- I’m interested in where to go! - And Kolka angrily poked his fist at the brick. There, a meter or two meters from the fist, no further, was the treasured bread slicer.
On the table, striped with knives and smelling of a sour bread spirit, there are loaves of bread: a lot of loaf of greyish-golden color. One is more beautiful than the other. Break off the crust, and that’s happiness. Suck it, swallow it. And there’s a whole carload of crumb and crust, pinch it and put it in your mouth.
Never in their lives have Kuzmenysh had to hold a whole loaf of bread in their hands! I didn't even have to touch it.
But they saw, from afar, of course, how in the bustle of the store they were rationing it using cards, how they were weighing it on scales.
A lean, ageless saleswoman grabbed colored cards: workers', employees', dependent's, children's, and, glancing briefly - she had such an experienced spirit level eye - at the attachment, at the stamp on the back where the store number was written, at least of her own, probably, all attached knows by name, she used scissors to make “chick-chick”, two or three coupons per box. And in that drawer she has a thousand, a million of these coupons with numbers of 100, 200, 250 grams.
But each coupon, two or three, is only a small part of a whole loaf, from which the saleswoman will economically cut off a small piece with a sharp knife. And it’s not good for her to stand next to the bread, she’s dried up and not gotten fatter!
But the entire loaf, untouched by the knife, no matter how hard the brothers looked at it, no one in their presence managed to take it away from the store.
Whole - such wealth that it’s scary to even think about it! But what kind of paradise will open then if there are not one, and not two, and not three Bukhariks! A real paradise! True! Blessed! And we don’t need any Caucasus!
Moreover, this paradise is nearby; unclear voices can already be heard through the brickwork.
Although blind from soot, deaf from the earth, from sweat, from anguish, our brothers heard one thing in every sound: “Bread. Bread..."At such moments the brothers don't dig, they're not fools, I suppose. Heading past the iron doors into the barn, they'll make an extra hinge to know that that pound lock is in place: you can see it a mile away!
Only then do they start to destroy this damn foundation.
They built them in ancient times, I suppose, and did not suspect that someone would use a strong word to defend them for their strength.
As soon as the Kuzmeyishs get there, when the whole bread-slicing machine opens up to their enchanted eyes in the dim evening light, consider that you are already in heaven.
Then... The brothers knew exactly what would happen then.
It was thought out in two heads, probably not in one.
Buharik, but only one, they will eat on the spot. So that your stomach doesn't turn out from such wealth. And they will take two more biscuits with them and hide them securely. This is what they can do. Just three boogers, that is. The rest, even if it itches, you can’t touch. Otherwise, the brutal boys will destroy the house.
And three biscuits is what, according to Kolka’s calculations, is stolen from them every day anyway.
The part for the fool of the cook, everyone knows that he is a fool and was in a madhouse. But he eats just like a normal person. Another part is stolen by bread cutters and those jackals who hang around the bread cutters. And the most important part is taken for the director, for his family and his dogs.
But near the director, not only dogs, not only cattle feed, there are also relatives and hangers-on there. And all of them are dragged from the orphanage, dragged, dragged... The orphanage residents themselves drag. But those who drag have their crumbs from dragging.
The Kuzmenys accurately calculated that the disappearance of three Bukhariks would not cause a fuss in the orphanage. They will not offend themselves, they will deprive others. That's all.
Who needs the commissions from the rono to be trampled (And feed them too! They have a big mouth!), so that they begin to find out why they are stealing, and why the orphanage residents are not getting enough of their allotted food, and why the director’s animals-dogs are as tall as calves.
But Sashka only sighed, looking in the direction where Kolka’s fist was pointing.
“Nope...” he said thoughtfully. - It’s still interesting. The mountains are interesting to see. They probably stick out higher than our house? A?
- So what? - Kolka asked again, he was very hungry. There's no time for mountains here, no matter what they are. It seemed to him that he could smell the smell of fresh bread through the earth.
Both were silent.
“Today we taught rhymes,” recalled Sashka, who had to sit through school for two. - Mikhail Lermontov, it’s called “The Cliff”.
Sashka did not remember everything by heart, even though the poems were short. Not like “The Song about Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich, the young guardsman and the daring merchant Kalashnikov”... Phew! One name is half a kilometer long! Not to mention the poems themselves!
And from “The Cliff” Sashka remembered only two lines.

The golden cloud spent the night
On the chest of a giant rock...

- About the Caucasus, or what? - Kolka asked boredly.
- Yeah. The cliff...
“If he’s as bad as this one...” And Kolka thrust his fist into the foundation again. - The cliff is yours!
- He is not mine!
Sashka fell silent, thinking.
He had not thought about poetry for a long time. He didn’t understand anything about poetry, and there wasn’t much to understand in them. If you read it on a full stomach, maybe it will make sense. That shaggy woman in the choir is tormenting them, and if they hadn’t left them without lunch, they would have all lathered their heels from the choir long ago. They need these songs, poems... Whether you eat or read, you still think about food. The hungry godfather has all the chickens on his mind!
- So what? - Kolka suddenly asked.
- What-what? - Sashka repeated after him.
- Why is he there, a cliff? Has it fallen apart or not?
“I don’t know,” Sashka said somehow stupidly.
- How you do not know? What about poetry?
- Why the poems... Well, there, this one... What's her name... The cloud, then, has hit the cliff...
- How do we get to the foundation?
- Well, it got stuck... flew away... Kolka whistled.
- All??
- All.
- They’re making up nothing for themselves! Either about the chicken, then I’ll leak it...
- What do I have to do with it! - Sashka was now angry. - Am I your writer, or what? - But I wasn’t very angry. And it’s my own fault: I was daydreaming and didn’t hear the teacher’s explanation.
During class, he suddenly imagined the Caucasus, where everything was different from their rotten Tomilino.
Mountains the size of their orphanage, and between them there are bread slicers everywhere. And none of them are locked. And there’s no need to dig, I went in, hung it for myself, and ate it for myself. I came out, and there was another bread slicer, and again without a lock. And the people are all in Circassian coats, mustachioed, and so cheerful. They watch Sashka enjoying his food, smile, and hit him on the shoulder with their hand:
“Yakshi,” they say. Or something else! But the meaning is the same: “Eat, they say, more, we have a lot of bread slicers!” It was summer. The grass in the yard was green. No one saw off the Kuzmenysh, except for the teacher Anna Mikhailovna, who probably wasn’t thinking about their departure either, looking somewhere over their heads cold blue eyes.
Everything happened unexpectedly. It was planned to send two older ones, the most thugs, from the orphanage, but they immediately left, as they say, disappeared into space, and the Kuzmenyshi, on the contrary, said that they wanted to go to the Caucasus.
The documents were rewritten. No one asked why they suddenly decided to go, what kind of need was driving our brothers to a distant land. Only pupils from the younger group came to see them. They stood at the door and, pointing their finger at them, said: “These!” And after a pause: “To the Caucasus!” The reason for leaving was solid, thank God, no one knew about it.
A week before all these events, the tunnel under the bread slicer suddenly collapsed. Failed in the most visible place. And with it, the Kuzmenysh’s hopes for another, better life collapsed.
We left in the evening, everything seemed to be fine, the wall had already been finished, all that was left was to open up the floor.
And in the morning they rushed out of the house: the director and the entire kitchen were assembled, staring: what a miracle, the earth has settled under the wall of the bread slicer.
And - they guessed it: my dear mother. But this is a tunnel!
Under their kitchen, under their bread slicer!
This was something they didn’t know in the orphanage yet.
They began to drag students to the director. While we looked at the older ones, we couldn’t even think about the younger ones.
Military sappers were called in for consultation. Is it possible, they asked, for children to dig this themselves?
They inspected the tunnel, walked from the barn to the bread slicer and climbed inside, where there was no collapse. Shaking off the yellow sand, they threw up their hands: “It is impossible, without equipment, without special training, it is in no way possible to dig such a metro. Here an experienced soldier gets a month’s work, if, say, with an entrenching tool and auxiliary means... And children... Yes, we would take such children to us if they really knew how to perform such miracles.”
- They are still my miracle workers! - said the director gloomily. - But I will find this magician-creator!
The brothers stood right there, among other pupils. Each of them knew what the other was thinking.