A downpour erupted with deafening thunderclaps.

Exercise 1

Name the characteristics of an artistic style of speech. Where is the artistic style of speech used? What are its main features?

Exercise 2

Determine your speech style and justify your answer. What is the topic and the main idea of this text? How does this text make you feel? By what means of artistic expression does the author create poetic images and convey the general emotional mood of the poem?

Exercise 3

Determine your speech style and justify your answer. What is the theme and main idea of ​​this text? Find comparisons, metaphors and personifications in the text, what is their role in the text?

Is it not so for you, Rus', that you are rushing along like a brisk, unstoppable troika? The road beneath you smokes, the bridges rattle, everything falls behind and is left behind. The contemplator, amazed by God's miracle, will stop: is this not lightning thrown from the sky? What does this terrifying movement mean? And what kind of unknown power is contained in these horses, unknown to the light? Eh, horses, horses, what the
horses! Are there whirlwinds in your manes? Is there a sensitive ear burning in your vein? They heard a familiar song from above, together and at once they strained their copper breasts and, almost without touching the ground with their hooves, they turned into elongated lines flying through the air, and all inspired by God rushes!.. Rus', where are you rushing? Give an answer. Doesn't give an answer. The bell rings with a wonderful ringing; The air, torn into pieces, thunders and becomes the wind; everything that is on earth flies past, and, looking askance, other peoples and states step aside and give way to it.

(N.V. Gogol)

Exercise 4

Read and compare these texts. Which text do you prefer, and why? What means of artistic expression did the authors use? Write an essay on the topic “Thunderstorm”. Write out examples of epithets, comparisons, metaphors, personifications from the text.

1) The darkness that came from Mediterranean Sea, covered the city hated by the procurator. The hanging bridges connecting the temple with the terrible Anthony Tower disappeared, an abyss fell from the sky and flooded the winged gods over the hippodrome, the Hasmonean palace with loopholes, bazaars, caravanserais, alleys, ponds... Yershalaim disappeared - the great city, as if it did not exist in the world. Everything was devoured by darkness, frightening every living thing in Yershalaim and its environs. A strange cloud arrived from the sea towards the end of the day, the fourteenth day of the spring month of Nisan.
She had already fallen with her belly on the Bald Skull, where the executioners hastily stabbed those being executed, she fell on the temple in Yershalaim, slid down its hill in smoky streams and flooded the Lower City. It poured into the windows and drove people from the crooked streets into their houses. She was in no hurry to give up her moisture and gave only light. As soon as the smoky black brew was ripped open by the fire, a great block of the temple with a sparkling scaly cover flew up from the pitch darkness. But it faded away in an instant, and the temple plunged into a dark abyss. Several times he grew out of it and failed again, and each time this failure was accompanied by the roar of a catastrophe.
Other trembling flickers called forth from the abyss the palace of Herod the Great, opposite the temple on the western hill, and terrible eyeless golden statues flew up to the black sky, heavy thunderclaps drove the golden idols into the darkness.
The rain poured unexpectedly, and then the thunderstorm turned into a hurricane. In the very place where, around noon, near a marble bench in the garden, the procurator and the high priest were talking, with a blow similar to a cannon, a cypress tree was broken like a cane. Along with water dust and hail, plucked roses, magnolia leaves, small branches and sand were carried onto the balcony under the columns; a hurricane tormented the garden.
Some time passed, and the veil of water before the procurator’s eyes began to thin. No matter how fierce the hurricane was, it was weakening. The branches no longer cracked or fell. The thunderclaps and flashes became less frequent. It was no longer a purple blanket with a white edge that floated over Yershalaim, but an ordinary gray rearguard cloud. The thunderstorm was blowing towards the Dead Sea.

(According to M. Bulgakov)

2) If Chichikov had listened, he would have learned many details that related to him personally; but his thoughts were so occupied with his subject that only one strong clap of thunder made him wake up and look around him: the whole sky was completely covered with clouds, and the dusty post road was sprinkled with drops of rain. Finally, the thunderclap sounded another time, louder and closer, and rain suddenly poured out of a bucket.
First, taking an oblique direction, he lashed to one side of the wagon, then to the other, then, changing the pattern of attack and becoming completely straight, he drummed straight up its body; the spray finally began to hit his face.

(N.V. Gogol)

3) A downpour broke out with deafening thunderclaps and dazzlingly fast, fiery snakes of lightning as we approached Sukhodol in the evening. A black-purple cloud fell heavily to the north-west and majestically occupied half the sky opposite. Flat, clear and deathly pale green plain of grain under its huge background, bright and unusually fresh
there was fine wet grass on high road. Wet horses, as if they had immediately lost weight, splashed, their horseshoes shining, through the blue mud, the tarantass rustled wetly...

(I.A. Bunin)

4) But the advanced clouds are already beginning to cover the sun; Here it looked out for the last time, illuminated the terribly gloomy side of the horizon and disappeared. The whole neighborhood suddenly changes and takes on a gloomy character. Now the aspen grove began to tremble; the leaves become some kind of cloudy white color, standing out brightly against the purple background of the clouds, they make noise and spin; The tops of large birch trees begin to sway, and tufts of dry grass fly across the road. Swifts and white-breasted swallows, as if with the intention of stopping us, soar around the chaise and fly under the very chests of the horses; jackdaws with disheveled wings somehow fly sideways in the wind; the edges of the leather apron with which we are fastened begin to rise, letting gusts of damp wind pass towards us and, swinging, hitting the body of the chaise. Lightning flashes as if in the chaise itself, blinds the vision and for an instant illuminates the gray cloth, the basson and the figure of Volodya pressed against the corner. At the same second, a majestic roar is heard above your head, which, as if rising higher and higher, wider and wider along a huge spiral line, gradually intensifies and turns into a deafening crash, involuntarily making you tremble and hold your breath. The Wrath of God! How much poetry there is in this common thought!

(L.N. Tolstoy)

Exercise 5

Write it off. Make a plan for a comparative portrait of Khor and Kalinich - characters in I. Turgenev’s story.

I. On the horn of the hut, a bald old man of short stature, broad-shouldered and stocky, Khor himself met me.<...>The shape of his face reminded S. Krat, the same high knobby forehead, the same small eyes, the same snub nose.<...>
He seemed to feel (?) his dignity, spoke and moved slowly from time to time... he sang... under his long mustache.
II. We drove at a pace outside the village and a man of about forty caught up with us. tall thin with a small head bent back. It was Kalinich. I liked his kind, stuffy, dark face (in some places) marked with pockmarks (at) first glance. Kalinich, as I found out, after every day I went hunting with the bar... Kalinich was a man of the most cheerful, most gentle disposition, constantly humming (in) a low voice... carefree... looked in all directions, spoke a little (in) his nose, smiling He squinted his (light) blue eyes and often took his hand to his lively wedge-shaped beard. He walked slowly, but with long steps, lightly supporting himself with a long and thin stick.<...>
I admired his face for a long time... meek and clear as the evening sky.
III. Khor was a positive person, a practical administrator, a rationalist, a rationalist, Kalinich, on the contrary, belonged to the ranks of idealists, romantics, enthusiastic and dreamy people.<...>Kalinich stood closer... to nature, but to people, to society...

1. Find other portrait details of Khor and Kapynich in the full text of the story. Write them out.
2. Prepare a comparative portrait characteristic named characters.
3. Write about a person you know well, who, in your opinion, is similar to Khorem or Kalinich. What type of human personality appeals to you?

Exercise 6

Prince Andrei, leaning on the railing, silently looked along the flood glittering from the setting sun.<...>
“We must live, we must love, we must believe,” said Pierre, “that we do not live now only on this piece of land, but have lived and will live forever there, in everything (he pointed to the sky).
Prince Andrey stood with his elbows on the railing of the ferry, and, listening to Pierre, did not take his eyes off, looking at the red reflection of the sun on the blue flood. Pierre fell silent. It was completely silent. The ferry had landed long ago, and only the waves of the current hit the bottom of the ferry with a faint sound. It seemed to Prince Andrei that this rinsing of the waves was saying to Pierre’s words: “It’s true, believe it.”
Prince Andrei sighed and with a radiant, childish, tender gaze looked into Pierre’s flushed, enthusiastic, but increasingly timid face in front of his foremost friend.
- Yes, if only it were so! - he said. “However, let’s go sit down,” added Prince Andrei, and, leaving the ferry, he looked at the sky, which Pierre pointed out to him, and for the first time after Austerlitz he saw that high, eternal sky which he saw while lying on the Field of Austerlitz, and something that had long fallen asleep, something best that was in him, suddenly joyfully and youthfully woke up in his soul. This feeling disappeared as soon as Prince Andrei returned to the usual conditions of life, but he knew that this feeling, which he did not know how to develop, lived in him. The meeting with Pierre was for Prince Andrei the era from which, although in appearance it was the same, but in the inner world his new life began.
In the evening, Prince Andrei and Pierre got into the carriage and went to the Bald Mountains. Prince Andrei, glancing at Pierre, occasionally broke the silence with speeches that proved that he was in a good mood.<...>
Pierre thought that Prince Andrei was unhappy, that he was mistaken, that he did not know the true light6 and that Pierre should come to his aid, enlighten him and lift him up. But as soon as Pierre figured out how and what he would become, he had a presentiment that Prince Andrei with one word, one argument would throw away all his teaching, and he was afraid to start, afraid to expose his beloved shrine to the possibility of ridicule.
“No, why do you think,” Pierre suddenly began, lowering his head and taking on the appearance of a butting bull, “why do you think so?” You shouldn't think like that.
- What am I thinking about? - asked Prince Andrei in surprise.
- About life, about the purpose of a person.<...>
Prince Andrei silently, looking ahead, listened to Pierre's speech. Several times, unable to hear from the noise of the stroller, he repeated the unheard words from Pierre. By the special sparkle that lit up in the eyes of Prince Andrei, and by his silence, Pierre saw that his words were not in vain, that Prince Andrei would not interrupt him and would not laugh at his words. (L. Tolstoy.)

Pierre outlined his thoughts on the purpose of a person in the previous, chapter XI of the second part of the second volume of the novel - in with Andrei Bolkonsky. State them briefly (in writing) and prepare oral communication about them.

Exercise 7

Parse the literary text.

- Why don’t you keep cows, Matryona Vasilyevna?
“Eh, Ignatich,” Matryona explained, standing in an unclean apron in the kitchen doorway and turning to my table. - I have enough milk from a goat. If you get a cow, it will eat me with my feet. Don’t mow the canvas - they have their own owners, and there is no mowing in the forest - the forestry is the owner, and on the collective farm they don’t tell me - I’m not a collective farmer, they say, now. Yes, they and the collective farmers, down to the whitest flies, are all on the collective farm, all on the collective farm, and from under the snow - what kind of grass?.. As usual, they were boiling with hay from the day of Petrov to Ilyin. The grass was considered to be honey.
So, one goat had to collect hay for Matryona - great work. In the morning she took a bag and a sickle and went to the places that she remembered, where the grass grew along the edges, along the road, along the islands in the swamp. Having filled the bag with fresh heavy grass, she dragged it home and laid it out in a layer in her yard. A bag of grass made dried hay - a fork6.
The new chairman, recently sent from the city, first of all cut off the vegetable gardens of all the disabled people. Matryona left fifteen acres of sand, but ten acres remained empty behind the fence. However, even for fifteen hundred square meters the collective farm Matryona sipped. When there weren’t enough hands, when the women refused very stubbornly, the chairman’s wife came to Matryona. She was also a city woman, decisive, with a short gray short coat and a menacing look, as if she were a military woman.
She entered the hut and, without saying hello, looked sternly at Matryona. Matryona was in the way.
“So-so,” the chairman’s wife said separately. - Comrade6 Grigorieva! We will have to help the collective farm! We'll have to go take out the manure tomorrow!
Matryona's face turned apologetic, as if she was ashamed of the chairman's wife, that she could not pay her for her work.
“Well,” she said. - I'm sick, of course. And she is no longer involved in your case. - And then hastily corrected herself: - What time should I arrive?
- And take your pitchforks! - the chairwoman instructed and left, rustling her hard skirt.
- Wow! - Matryona blamed after. - And take your pitchforks! There are no shovels or pitchforks on the collective farm. And I live without a man, who will give me 6?..
And then I thought all evening:
- What can I say, Ignatich! This work is neither to the post nor to the railing. You stand, leaning on a shovel, and wait for the factory whistle to ring at twelve. Moreover, women will start to settle scores, who came out and who didn’t come out. When we used to work on our own, there was no sound, just oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-ooh-ooh-ooh-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-oạ cạpạ cạpạ cạpạ way way.
Still, in the morning she left with her pitchfork.
But not only the collective farm, but any distant relative or just a neighbor also came to Matryona in the evening and said:
- Tomorrow, Matryona, you will come to help me. We'll dig up the potatoes.
And Matryona could not refuse. She left her line of work, went to help her neighbor and, returning, still said without a shadow of envy:
- Oh, Ignatich, and she has big potatoes! I dug in a hurry, I didn’t want to leave the site, by God I really did!
Moreover, not a single plowing of the garden was done without Matryona. The Talnovsky women clearly established that digging up your own garden with a shovel is difficult and takes longer than taking a plow and harnessing six of them to plow six gardens for yourself. That’s why they called Matryona to help.
- Well, did you pay her? - I had to ask later.
- She doesn't take money. You can’t help but hide it for her.<...>Misunderstood and further abandoned by her husband, who buried six children, but did not have a sociable disposition, a stranger to her sisters and sisters-in-law, funny, foolishly working for others for free - she did not accumulate property for death. A dirty white goat, a lanky cat, ficus trees...
We all lived next to her and did not understand that she was the very righteous person without whom, according to the proverb, the village would not stand.
Neither the city.
Not all the land is ours.(A. Solzhenitsyn.)

Exercise 8

Write the words in two columns. For each of the commonly used words (1st column), find the corresponding word of high, poetic style (2nd column).

Lifeless, lifeless, heartlessness, brotherhood, future, eternal peace (after death), prophetic, dragged along, in the name of, arise, in the presence of someone, stand up, neck, verb (speech, word), eyes, voice, voice, city , city (city), coming, lips, right hand, for the benefit of someone, something, to achieve, the unity of all people, based on the Christian understanding of love, mercy, mutual understanding; hard-heartedness, be fulfilled, cheeks, forehead, husbands, husbands, torment, for the good, be filled, vow, possessing the gift of foresight, homeland, eyes, in the face of something, someone; under the sign, right hand, happened, for the sake of, for the sake of someone, something; homeland, accomplished, wandered, word (speech), devour, acquire, judge, judge, sons, sons, sons, sons, solemn promise, die, rest, rest, lips, teachers, teachers, characterized by something, flower, flower , forehead, neck, cheeks.

In each high-style word, find a morpheme, including a root, or other sound, morphological features that give it stylistic coloring. Draw a conclusion about the means that give the word a touch of solemnity and rhetoric. (Orally.)

Exercise 9

Read the text. How do you see the difference between poetic language, or the language of fiction, and everyday, everyday language? (In writing.)

Language of fiction This:

1) the language in which works of art are created (its vocabulary, grammar, phonetics);

2) poetic language- a system of rules underlying literary texts, both prose and poetic, their creation and reading (interpretation); these rules are always different from the corresponding rules of everyday language, even when, as, for example, in modern Russian, the lexicon, grammar and phonetics of both are the same; in this sense, the language of fiction, expressing the aesthetic function national language, is the subject of poetics...(Yu. S. Stepanov.)

Exercise 10

In the novel “Eugene Onegin” A. Pushkin widely uses vocabulary, figures of speech characteristic of the language of one or another character - Onegin, Lensky and others, and verbal images characteristic of them. Select two or three passages in which, upon careful reading, you can identify elements of language, verbal images, characteristic of:

a) for Onegin;

b) for Lensky;

c) for Tatyana Larina.

Comment on them: what realities of reality are the vocabulary and verbal images associated with, how do they characterize the character, what are the dominant stylistic shades and intonations? Prepare to read the analyzed passages, trying to convey the character’s inner world with intonation.

We happened to get to the estate that gave birth to Natalya’s soul, which ruled her entire life, to the estate about which we had heard so much, already in late adolescence.

I remember it like it was yesterday. A downpour broke out with deafening thunderclaps and dazzlingly fast, fiery snakes of lightning as we approached Sukhodol in the evening. A black-purple cloud fell heavily to the north-west and majestically occupied half the sky opposite. The plain of grain under its huge background was flat, clear and deathly pale green; the fine wet grass on the high road was bright and unusually fresh. Wet horses, as if they had immediately lost weight, splashed, their horseshoes shining, through the blue mud, the tarantass rustled wetly... And suddenly, at the very turn to Sukhodol, we saw in the tall wet rusty a tall and strange figure in a robe and a shlyk, the figure of either an old man or an old woman beating a piebald cow with a twig. As we approached, the twig began to work harder, and the cow clumsily, wagging its tail, ran out onto the road. And the old woman, shouting something, headed towards the tarantass and, approaching, stretched her pale face towards us. Looking with fear into the black crazy eyes, feeling the touch of a sharp cold nose and the strong smell of the hut, we kissed the woman who came up. Isn't this Baba Yaga herself? But a tall shlyk made of some kind of dirty rag stuck out on Baba Yaga’s head, and on her naked body she was wearing a torn, waist-deep, wet robe that did not cover her skinny breasts. And she screamed as if we were deaf, as if with the goal of starting a furious battle. And by the scream we realized: it was Aunt Tonya.

Claudia Markovna, fat, small, with a gray beard, with unusually lively eyes, who was sitting at the open window in a house with two large porches, knitting a thread sock and, raising her glasses on her forehead, looked at the pasture, also screamed, but cheerfully, with institutional enthusiasm. merged with the yard. Natalya, who was standing on the right porch, bowed low and with a quiet smile - small, tanned, wearing bast shoes, a red woolen skirt and a gray shirt with a wide neckline around a dark, wrinkled neck. Looking at that neck, at the thin collarbones, at the tired, sad eyes, I remember thinking: it was she who grew up with our father - a long time ago, but right here, where from my grandfather’s oak house, which burned many times, this one remained, nondescript, from the garden - bushes and a few old birches and poplars, from services and people - a hut, a barn, clay barn and a glacier overgrown with wormwood and beetroot... There was a smell of a samovar, questions started pouring in; Crystal vases for jam, golden spoons thinned to the size of a maple leaf, and sugar candies, saved for guests, began to appear from the hundred-year-old hill. And while the conversation was heating up, intensely friendly after a long quarrel, we went to wander through the darkening rooms, looking for a balcony, an exit to the garden.

Everything was black from time, simple, rough in these empty, low rooms, which retained the same layout as in the time of grandfather, cut down from the remains of the very ones in which he lived. In the corner of the footman's room there was a large blackened image of St. Mercury of Smolensk, the one whose iron sandals and helmet are kept on the salt in the ancient cathedral of Smolensk. We heard: Mercury was a noble man, called to salvation from the Tatars of the Smolensk region by the voice of the icon of the Mother of God Hodegetria the Guide. Having defeated the Tatars, the saint fell asleep and was beheaded by his enemies. Then, taking his head in his hands, he came to the city gates in order to tell what had happened... And it was creepy to look at the Suzdal image of a headless man, holding in one hand a deathly bluish head in a helmet, and in the other an icon of the Guide - at this, like they said, the treasured image of the grandfather, which survived several terrible fires, was split in the fire, thickly bound in silver and kept on the reverse side of its genealogy of the Khrushchevs, written under the titles. Exactly in harmony with it, heavy iron bolts both at the top and bottom hung on the heavy halves of the doors. The floorboards in the hall were excessively wide, dark and slippery, the windows were small, with lifting frames. We walked through the hall, a smaller double of the one where the Khrushchevs sat down at the table with the Tatar women, into the living room. Here, opposite the doors to the balcony, there once stood a piano, played by Aunt Tonya, who was in love with officer Voitkevich, Pyotr Petrovich’s comrade. And then there were open doors to the sofa room, to the coal room, where grandfather’s chambers had once been...

The evening was gloomy. In the clouds, beyond the outskirts of the cut-down garden, behind the half-naked barn and silvery poplars, lightning flashed, revealing for a moment the cloudy pink-golden mountains. The rain probably did not capture Troshin's forest, which darkened far beyond the garden, on the slopes behind the ravines. From there came the dry, warm smell of oak, mixed with the smell of greenery, with a damp soft wind running over the tops of the birch trees that had survived from the alley, through the tall nettles, weeds and bushes around the balcony. And the deep silence of the evening, of the steppe, of remote Rus' reigned over everything...

“Please have tea, sir,” a quiet voice called out to us.

It was she, a participant and witness of this whole life, its main storyteller, Natalya. And behind her, looking carefully with crazy eyes, bending slightly, ceremoniously sliding along the dark smooth floor, her mistress moved. She had not taken off her hat, but instead of a robe she was now wearing an old-fashioned barge dress, and a faded golden silk shawl was draped over her shoulders.

– Oh tes-vous, mes enfants? – she shouted, smiling gentilely, and her voice, clear and sharp, like the voice of a parrot, sounded strangely in the empty black rooms...

III

Just as in Natalya, in her peasant simplicity, in all her beautiful and pitiful soul generated by Sukhodol, there was charm in the ruined Sukhodol estate.

The old living room with its rickety floors smelled of jasmine. The rotten, blue-gray balcony, from which, due to the lack of steps, it was necessary to jump, was drowning in nettles, elderberries, and euonymus. On hot days, when the sun was hot, when the sunken glass doors were open and the cheerful reflection of the glass was transmitted to the dim oval mirror hanging on the wall opposite the door, we all remembered Aunt Tony’s piano, which once stood under this mirror. Once upon a time she played it, looking at the yellowed notes with titles in curlicues, and He stood behind him, firmly supporting his waist with his left hand, clenching his jaw tightly and frowning. Wonderful butterflies - in colorful cotton dresses, in Japanese outfits, and in black and purple velvet shawls - flew into the living room. And before leaving, he once heartily clapped his palm on one of them, which was tremblingly frozen on the lid of the piano. All that was left was silver dust. But when the girls, foolishly, erased it a few days later, Aunt Tonya became hysterical. We went out from the living room onto the balcony, sat on the warm boards - and thought and thought. The wind, running through the garden, brought to us the silky rustle of birches with satin-white trunks speckled with black and widely spread green branches; the wind, noisy and rustling, ran from the fields - and the green-golden oriole cried out sharply and joyfully, rushing over the white flowers behind the chattering jackdaws, who lived with numerous kin in the collapsed chimneys and in the dark attics, where there is the smell of old bricks and through the dormer windows the golden light falls in stripes on the mounds of gray-violet ash; the wind died down, the bees sleepily crawled over the flowers near the balcony, doing their leisurely work - and in the silence only the smooth, flowing, like a continuous light rain, babble of the silvery foliage of the poplars was heard... We wandered around the garden, climbing into the wilderness of the outskirts. There, on these outskirts, merging with the grain, in my great-grandfather’s bathhouse with a collapsed ceiling, in the very bathhouse where Natalya kept the mirror stolen from Pyotr Petrovich, lived white cowards. How they softly jumped out onto the threshold, how strangely, moving their mustaches and forked lips, they squinted with far-spaced, bulging eyes at the tall Tatars, henbane bushes and thickets of nettles that choked the thorns and cherry trees! And in the half-open barn lived an eagle owl. He sat on the fence, having chosen a darker place, with his ears erect, his blind yellow pupils rolling out, and he looked wild, devilish. The sun was setting far behind the garden, in the sea of ​​grain, the evening was coming, peaceful and clear, the cuckoo was cuckooing in Trosha's forest, the pitiful notes of the old shepherd Styopa were ringing pitifully somewhere over the meadows... The owl sat and waited for the night. At night everything slept - the fields, the village, and the estate. And the owl did nothing but hoot and cry. He silently rushed around the barn, through the garden, flew to Aunt Tony’s hut, easily landed on the roof - and cried out in pain... Aunt woke up on the bench by the stove.

“Sweet Jesus, have mercy on me,” she whispered, sighing.

Flies buzzed sleepily and displeasedly along the ceiling of the hot, dark hut. Every night something woke them up. Then the cow scratched its side against the wall of the hut; then the rat ran across the abruptly ringing keys of the piano and, breaking loose, fell with a crash into the shards that the aunt carefully put in the corner; then an old black cat with green eyes would return home late from somewhere and lazily ask to go into the hut; or this owl flew in, prophesying trouble with his cries. And Auntie, overcoming her drowsiness, swatting away the flies that crawled into her eyes in the darkness, got up, rummaged around the benches, slammed the door - and, going out on the threshold, randomly launched a rolling pin up into the starry sky. The eagle owl, with a rustling sound, brushing the straw with its wings, fell off the roof and fell low into the darkness. It almost touched the ground, smoothly reached the barn and, soaring, sat on its ridge. And his crying was heard again in the estate. He sat as if remembering something, and suddenly let out a cry of amazement; fell silent - and suddenly began to hoot hysterically, laugh and squeal; fell silent again - and burst into groans, sobs, sobs... And the nights, dark, warm, with purple clouds, were calm, calm. He ran sleepily and the babble of sleepy poplars flowed. The lightning flashed cautiously over the dark Trosha forest - and the warm, dry smell of oak. Near the forest, above the plains of oats, in a clearing in the sky among the clouds, Scorpio burned like a silver triangle, a grave cabbage...

We returned to the estate late. Having inhaled the dew, the freshness of the steppe, wild flowers and herbs, we carefully climbed onto the porch and entered the dark hallway. And they often found Natalya praying in front of the image of Mercury. Barefoot, small, with her hands clasped, she stood in front of him, whispered something, crossed herself, bowed low to him, invisible in the darkness - and all this was so simple, as if she were talking with someone close, also simple, kind, merciful.

- Natalia? – we called out quietly.

- I'm with? – she responded quietly and simply, interrupting the prayer.

- Why are you still not sleeping?

- Maybe we’ll still get some sleep in the grave...

We sat on the bunk, opened the window; she stood with her hands clasped. Lightning flashes mysteriously flashed, illuminating the dark rooms; The quail was beating somewhere far away in the dewy steppe. The duck that woke up on the pond quacked in warning and alarm...

- Were you walking, sir?

- We were walking.

- Well, it’s a young thing... We used to spend all nights walking... One dawn will drive us out, another will drive us away...

– Was life good before?

- Good with…

And there was a long silence.

- Why is this owl screaming, nanny? - said the sister.

- He’s not shouting at the court, sir, there’s no abyss for him. At least hit him with a gun. And it’s downright creepy, I keep thinking: either it’s going to cause some kind of trouble? And everything scares the young lady. But she’s shy to death!

- How did she get sick?

- Yes, it’s known, sir: all the tears, tears, melancholy... Then they started to pray... Yes, everything is more and more vicious with us, with the girls, and more and more angry with the brothers...

And, remembering the arapniks, we asked:

- Not amicably, so they lived?

- How friendly! And especially after they got sick, how their grandfather died, how the young gentlemen came into power and the deceased Pyotr Petrovich got married. They were all hot – pure gunpowder!

– Do you often flog servants?

“We didn’t have that in our establishment, sir.” How wrong I was! And all that happened was that Pyotr Petrovich ordered me to fool my head with sheep’s scissors, put on a shabby shirt and send me to the farm...

- What did you do wrong?

But the answer was not always direct and quick. Natalya sometimes told stories with amazing directness and thoroughness; but sometimes she stammered and thought about something; then she sighed lightly, and from her voice, without seeing her face in the darkness, we understood that she was smiling sadly:

- Yes, that’s what I did wrong... I already told you... I was young and stupid, sir. “The nightingale sang for sin, for misfortune in the garden...” And, you know, my business was a girl’s...

The sister asked her tenderly:

- Just tell me, nanny, these poems to the end.

And Natalya was embarrassed.

- This is not poetry, sir, but a song... Yes, I don’t even remember it now.

- It's not true, it's not true!

- Well, if you please...

And she ended quickly:

- “As for sin, for misfortune...” That is: “For sin, for misfortune, the nightingale sang in the garden - a languid song... The fool did not let me sleep - in the dark night...”

Overcoming herself, the sister asked:

– Were you very much in love with your uncle?

And Natalya stupidly and briefly whispered:

- Very With.

– Do you always remember him in prayer?

- Always, sir.

“They say you fainted when they were taking you to Soshki?”

- In a faint, sir. We, the servants, were terribly tender... ready for reprisals... we can’t compare with the gray one-yard man! As Yevsey Bodulya took me, I was stupefied with grief and fear... In the city I almost suffocated from being unaccustomed to it. And as soon as we left for the steppe, I felt so tender and pitiful! An officer who looked like them rushed towards me - I screamed, and dead! And when I came to my senses, I lay there in the cart and thought: I feel good now, exactly in the kingdom of heaven!

- Was he strict?

- God forbid!

- Well, was Aunt the most wayward of all?

- One, sir, one, sir. I’m reporting to you: they were even taken to the saint. We suffered through passion with them! They should now live and live as they should, but they became proud and moved... How Voitkevich loved them! Well, there you go!

- Well, what about grandfather?

- What about those? They were weak in mind. And, of course, it happened to them too. Everyone at that time was passionate... But the previous gentlemen did not disdain our brother. Sometimes, your dad would punish Gervaska at lunchtime - that’s what should have happened! - and in the evening, lo and behold, they’re already fattening on the mongrels, jockeying with him on balalaikas...

- Tell me, was he good, Voitkevich?

Natalya was thoughtful.

- No, sir, I don’t want to lie: I was like a Kalmyk. And serious, persistent. I read all the poems to her, kept scaring her: they say, I’ll die and come for you...

- After all, grandfather went crazy with love?

- Those after your grandmother. This is a different matter, madam. And our house was gloomy - gloomy, God bless him. If you please listen to my stupid words...

And in a leisurely whisper Natalya began a long, long story...

The Sukhodolsk peasants visited Lunevo not for the same purposes as the courtyard servants, but more about the land; but they also entered our house as if they were their own. They bowed to their father on the waist, kissed his hand, then, shaking their hair, kissed him, Natalya, and us on the lips three times. They brought gifts of honey, eggs, and towels. And we, who grew up in the fields, sensitive to smells, greedy for them no less than for songs and legends, forever remembered that special, pleasant, hemp-like smell that we felt when kissing the dry land; They also remembered that their gifts smelled of the old steppe village: honey - of blooming buckwheat and rotten oak hives, towels - punka, chicken huts from the time of grandfather... The Sukhodolsk men did not tell anything. What was there to tell them! They didn’t even have legends. Their graves are unmarked. And lives are so similar to each other, so meager and without a trace! For the fruits of their labors and worries were only bread, the real bread that is eaten. They dug ponds in the rocky bed of the Kamenka River, which had long dried up. But the ponds are unreliable - they dry up. They built houses. But their dwellings are short-lived: at the slightest spark they burn to the ground... So what drew us all even to the bare pasture, to the huts and ravines, to the ruined estate of Sukhodol?

II

We happened to get to the estate that gave birth to Natalya’s soul, which ruled her entire life, to the estate about which we had heard so much, already in late adolescence.

I remember it like it was yesterday. A downpour broke out with deafening thunderclaps and dazzlingly fast, fiery snakes of lightning as we approached Sukhodol in the evening. A black-purple cloud fell heavily to the north-west and majestically occupied half the sky opposite. The plain of grain under its huge background was flat, clear and deathly pale green; the fine wet grass on the high road was bright and unusually fresh. Wet horses, as if they had immediately lost weight, splashed, their horseshoes shining, through the blue mud, the tarantass rustled wetly... And suddenly, at the very turn to Sukhodol, we saw in the tall wet rusty a tall and strange figure in a robe and a shlyk, the figure of either an old man or an old woman beating a piebald cow with a twig. As we approached, the twig began to work harder, and the cow clumsily, wagging its tail, ran out onto the road. And the old woman, shouting something, headed towards the tarantass and, approaching, stretched her pale face towards us. Looking with fear into the black crazy eyes, feeling the touch of a sharp cold nose and the strong smell of the hut, we kissed the woman who came up. Isn't this Baba Yaga herself? But a tall shlyk made of some kind of dirty rag stuck out on Baba Yaga’s head, and on her naked body she was wearing a torn, waist-deep, wet robe that did not cover her skinny breasts. And she screamed as if we were deaf, as if with the goal of starting a furious battle. And by the scream we realized: it was Aunt Tonya.

Claudia Markovna, fat, small, with a gray beard, with unusually lively eyes, who was sitting at the open window in a house with two large porches, knitting a thread sock and, raising her glasses on her forehead, looked at the pasture, also screamed, but cheerfully, with institutional enthusiasm. merged with the yard. Natalya, who was standing on the right porch, bowed low and with a quiet smile - small, tanned, wearing bast shoes, a red woolen skirt and a gray shirt with a wide neckline around a dark, wrinkled neck. Looking at that neck, at the thin collarbones, at the tired, sad eyes, I remember thinking: it was she who grew up with our father - a long time ago, but right here, where from my grandfather’s oak house, which burned many times, this one remained, nondescript, from the garden - bushes and a few old birches and poplars, from services and people - a hut, a barn, a clay barn and a glacier overgrown with wormwood and beetroot... There was a smell of a samovar, questions started pouring in; Crystal vases for jam, golden spoons thinned to the size of a maple leaf, and sugar candies, saved for guests, began to appear from the hundred-year-old hill. And while the conversation was heating up, intensely friendly after a long quarrel, we went to wander through the darkening rooms, looking for a balcony, an exit to the garden.

Everything was black from time, simple, rough in these empty, low rooms, which retained the same layout as in the time of grandfather, cut down from the remains of the very ones in which he lived. In the corner of the footman's room there was a large blackened image of St. Mercury of Smolensk, the one whose iron sandals and helmet are kept on the salt in the ancient cathedral of Smolensk. We heard: Mercury was a noble man, called to salvation from the Tatars of the Smolensk region by the voice of the icon of the Mother of God Hodegetria the Guide. Having defeated the Tatars, the saint fell asleep and was beheaded by his enemies. Then, taking his head in his hands, he came to the city gates in order to tell what had happened... And it was creepy to look at the Suzdal image of a headless man, holding in one hand a deathly bluish head in a helmet, and in the other an icon of the Guide - at this, like they said, the treasured image of the grandfather, which survived several terrible fires, was split in the fire, thickly bound in silver and kept on the reverse side of its genealogy of the Khrushchevs, written under the titles. Exactly in harmony with it, heavy iron bolts both at the top and bottom hung on the heavy halves of the doors. The floorboards in the hall were excessively wide, dark and slippery, the windows were small, with lifting frames. We walked through the hall, a smaller double of the one where the Khrushchevs sat down at the table with the Tatar women, into the living room. Here, opposite the doors to the balcony, there once stood a piano, played by Aunt Tonya, who was in love with officer Voitkevich, Pyotr Petrovich’s comrade. And then there were open doors to the sofa room, to the coal room, where grandfather’s chambers had once been...

The evening was gloomy. In the clouds, beyond the outskirts of the cut-down garden, behind the half-naked barn and silvery poplars, lightning flashed, revealing for a moment the cloudy pink-golden mountains. The rain probably did not capture Troshin's forest, which darkened far beyond the garden, on the slopes behind the ravines. From there came the dry, warm smell of oak, mixed with the smell of greenery, with a damp soft wind running over the tops of the birch trees that had survived from the alley, through the tall nettles, weeds and bushes around the balcony. And the deep silence of the evening, of the steppe, of remote Rus' reigned over everything...

“Please have tea, sir,” a quiet voice called out to us.

It was she, a participant and witness of this whole life, its main storyteller, Natalya. And behind her, looking carefully with crazy eyes, bending slightly, ceremoniously sliding along the dark smooth floor, her mistress moved. She had not taken off her hat, but instead of a robe she was now wearing an old-fashioned barge dress, and a faded golden silk shawl was draped over her shoulders.

– Oh tes-vous, mes enfants? – she shouted, smiling gentilely, and her voice, clear and sharp, like the voice of a parrot, sounded strangely in the empty black rooms...

III

Just as in Natalya, in her peasant simplicity, in all her beautiful and pitiful soul generated by Sukhodol, there was charm in the ruined Sukhodol estate.

The old living room with its rickety floors smelled of jasmine. The rotten, blue-gray balcony, from which, due to the lack of steps, it was necessary to jump, was drowning in nettles, elderberries, and euonymus. On hot days, when the sun was hot, when the sunken glass doors were open and the cheerful reflection of the glass was transmitted to the dim oval mirror hanging on the wall opposite the door, we all remembered Aunt Tony’s piano, which once stood under this mirror. Once upon a time she played it, looking at the yellowed notes with titles in curlicues, and He stood behind him, firmly supporting his waist with his left hand, clenching his jaw tightly and frowning. Wonderful butterflies - in colorful cotton dresses, in Japanese outfits, and in black and purple velvet shawls - flew into the living room. And before leaving, he once heartily clapped his palm on one of them, which was tremblingly frozen on the lid of the piano. All that was left was silver dust. But when the girls, foolishly, erased it a few days later, Aunt Tonya became hysterical. We went out from the living room onto the balcony, sat on the warm boards - and thought and thought. The wind, running through the garden, brought to us the silky rustle of birches with satin-white trunks speckled with black and widely spread green branches; the wind, noisy and rustling, ran from the fields - and the green-golden oriole cried out sharply and joyfully, rushing over the white flowers behind the chattering jackdaws, who lived with numerous kin in the collapsed chimneys and in the dark attics, where there is the smell of old bricks and through the dormer windows the golden light falls in stripes on the mounds of gray-violet ash; the wind died down, the bees sleepily crawled over the flowers near the balcony, doing their leisurely work - and in the silence only the smooth, flowing, like a continuous light rain, babble of the silvery foliage of the poplars was heard... We wandered around the garden, climbing into the wilderness of the outskirts. There, on these outskirts, merging with the grain, in my great-grandfather’s bathhouse with a collapsed ceiling, in the very bathhouse where Natalya kept the mirror stolen from Pyotr Petrovich, lived white cowards. How they softly jumped out onto the threshold, how strangely, moving their mustaches and forked lips, they squinted with far-spaced, bulging eyes at the tall Tatars, henbane bushes and thickets of nettles that choked the thorns and cherry trees! And in the half-open barn lived an eagle owl. He sat on the fence, having chosen a darker place, with his ears erect, his blind yellow pupils rolling out, and he looked wild, devilish. The sun was setting far behind the garden, in the sea of ​​grain, the evening was coming, peaceful and clear, the cuckoo was cuckooing in Trosha's forest, the pitiful notes of the old shepherd Styopa were ringing pitifully somewhere over the meadows... The owl sat and waited for the night. At night everything slept - the fields, the village, and the estate. And the owl did nothing but hoot and cry. He silently rushed around the barn, through the garden, flew to Aunt Tony’s hut, easily landed on the roof - and cried out in pain... Aunt woke up on the bench by the stove.

What always struck us about Natalya was her affection for Sukhodol.
Our father's foster sister, who grew up with him in the same house, lived with us in Lunev for eight whole years, lived as her own, and not as ex-slave, simple courtyard. And for eight whole years she rested, in her own words, from Sukhodol, from what he made her suffer. But it’s not without reason that they say that no matter how you feed the wolf, he still looks into the forest: coming out, having raised us, again
she returned to Sukhodol.
I remember excerpts from our childhood conversations with her:
- You’re an orphan, Natalya?
- Orphan, sir. All in their masters. Your grandmother Anna Grigorievna folded her white hands so early! No worse than my father and mother.
- Why did they die early?
“Death came, so we died, sir.”
- No, why is it early?
- So God gave it. The Lord gave the father up as a soldier for misdeeds, and Mother did not live to live because of the Lord’s turkey poults. Of course, I don’t remember, sir, where I was, but the servants said: she was a poultry farmer, there were countless turkeys under her command, a hailstorm captured them in the pasture and killed every single one of them... She rushed to run, ran, I looked - and my spirit was absolutely terrifying!
- Why didn’t you get married?
- Yes, the groom has not grown up yet.
- No, no jokes?
- Yes, they say that madam, your auntie, ordered it. That’s why I, a sinner, was glorified as a young lady.
- Well, what a young lady you are!
- Exactly, young lady! - Natalya answered with a thin smile that wrinkled her lips, and wiped them with a dark old woman’s hand. - I’m Arkady Petrovich’s milkmaid, your second auntie...
Growing up, we listened more and more attentively to what was said in our house about Sukhodol: the previously incomprehensible became more and more clear, the strange features of Sukhodol life became more and more pronounced. Didn’t we feel that Natalya, who lived almost the same life with our father for half a century, was truly dear to us, the pillar gentlemen Khrushchev! And so it turns out that these gentlemen drove her father into a soldier, and her mother was in such trepidation that her heart broke at the sight of the dead turkey chicks!
“It’s true,” said Natalya, “when was it possible not to drop dead from such an opportunity?” Gentlemen would have driven her beyond Mozhai!
And then we learned something even stranger about Sukhodol: we learned that there were no simpler, kinder Sukhodol gentlemen “in the whole universe,” but we also learned that there were none “hotter” than them; we learned that the old Sukhodolsky house was dark and gloomy, that our crazy grandfather Pyotr Kirillich was killed in this house by his illegitimate son, Gervaska, a friend of our father and cousin of Natalya; they learned that Aunt Tonya, who lived in one of the old courtyard huts near the impoverished Sukhodol estate and enthusiastically played the ecosaise on the humming and ringing piano from old age, had long ago gone crazy - from unhappy love; We found out that Natalya was also going crazy, that as a girl she fell in love with her late uncle Pyotr Petrovich for the rest of her life, and he sent her into exile, to the Soshki farm... Our passionate dreams about Sukhodol were understandable. For us, Sukhodol was only a poetic monument of the past. And for Natalia? After all, it was she who, as if answering some thought of her own, once said with great bitterness:
-- Well! In Sukhodol they sat down at the table with the Tatars! It’s even scary to remember.
- That is, with the arapniks? - we asked.
“Yes, it’s all one,” she said.
-- What for?
- And in case of a quarrel, sir.
— Did everyone quarrel in Sukhodol?
- Boron God! Not a day passed without war! They were all hot - pure gunpowder.
We were thrilled at her words and looked at each other enthusiastically: for a long time we then imagined a huge garden, a huge estate, a house with oak log walls under a heavy and black thatched roof - and lunch in the hall of this house: everyone is sitting at the table, everyone is eating , throwing bones on the floor, to the hunting dogs, they look sideways at each other - and everyone has a black arapnik on their knees: we dreamed of that golden time when we grow up and will also dine with a rapnik on our knees. But we understood well that it was not Natalya who brought joy to these arapniks. And yet she left Lunev for Sukhodol, the source of her dark memories. She had neither her own corner nor close relatives there; and she now served in Sukhodol no longer to her former mistress, not to Aunt Tonya, but to the widow of the late Pyotr Petrovich, Claudia Markovna. Yes, Natalya could not live without this estate.
“What to do, sir: habit,” she said modestly. “Where there is a needle, there is obviously a thread.” Where he was born, he was good enough...
And she was not the only one who suffered from attachment to Sukhodol. God, what passionate lovers of memories, what ardent adherents of Sukhodol all the other Sukhodol residents were!
Aunt Tonya lived in poverty, in a hut. Sukhodol deprived her of happiness, reason, and human appearance. But she never even allowed the thought, despite all our father’s persuasion, to leave her native nest and settle in Lunev:
- Yes, it’s better to hit a stone in the mountain!
The father was a carefree man; for him, it seemed, there were no attachments. But deep sadness was heard in his stories about Sukhodol. A long time ago he moved from Sukhodol to Lunevo, the field estate of our grandmother Olga Kirillovna. But he complained almost until his death:
- Alone, only Khrushchev remains in the world now. And even that one is not in Sukhodol!
True, it often happened that, following such words, he began to think, looking out the windows, into the field, and suddenly smiled mockingly, taking the guitar off the wall.
- And Sukhodol is good, to hell with him! - he added with the same sincerity with which he had spoken a minute before.
But he also had a Sukhodol soul, a soul over which the power of memories is so immeasurably great, the power of the steppe, its inert way of life, that ancient family life that united the village, the servants, and the house in Sukhodol. True, we, the Khrushchevs, are pillars, included in the sixth book, and among our legendary ancestors there were many noble people of centuries-old Lithuanian blood and Tatar princes. But the blood of the Khrushchevs has been mixed with the blood of the servants and the village since time immemorial. Who gave life to Pyotr Kirillich? Legends say different things about this. Who was the parent of Gervaska, his killer? From an early age we heard that Pyotr Kirillich. Where did such a sharp dissimilarity in the characters of the father and uncle come from? They also say different things about this. His father’s foster sister was Natalya, and he exchanged crosses with Gervaska... It’s long, long ago, time for Khrushchev to consider his kin with his servants and the village!
My sister and I lived for a long time in an attraction to Sukhodol, in the seduction of his old times. The household, the village and the house in Sukhodol constituted one family. Our ancestors still ruled this family. But this can be felt for a long time in the offspring. The life of a family, clan, clan is deep, knotty, mysterious, and often scary. But it is strong in its dark depth and also in its legends and past. Sukhodol is no richer in written and other monuments than any ulus in the Bashkir steppe. In Rus' they are replaced by legend. And legend and song are poison for the Slavic soul! Our former servants, passionate lazy people, dreamers - where could they unwind their souls, if not in our house? Our father remained the only representative of the Sukhodolsk gentlemen. And the first language we spoke was Sukhodolsky. The first stories, the first songs that touched us are also from Sukhodol’s, Natalya’s, fathers’. And could anyone sing like his father, a student of the servants, - with such carefree sadness, with such gentle reproach, with such weak-willed sincerity about “his faithful, mannered lady”? Could anyone tell the story like Natalya? And who was dearer to us than the Sukhodol men?
Feuds, quarrels - this is what the Khrushchevs, like any family living long and closely in unity, have been famous for since time immemorial. And during our childhood there was such a quarrel between Sukhodol and Lunev that my father’s foot did not set foot for almost ten years native threshold. We didn’t see Sukhodol that way when we were children: we were there only once, and then only on our way to Zadonsk. But dreams are sometimes stronger than any reality and we vaguely but indelibly remembered a long summer day, some undulating fields and a stalled high road, which charmed us with its spaciousness and here and there the surviving hollow willows; we remembered a hive on one of these branches, far away from the road in the grain - a hive left to the will of God, in the fields, with a dead road; we remembered the wide turn under the sloping road, the huge bare pasture on which the poor chicken huts looked, and the yellowness of the rocky ravines behind the huts, the whiteness of the pebbles and rubble along their bottoms... The first event that horrified us was also from Sukhodolsk: the murder of grandfather Gervaska. And, listening to the stories about this murder, we endlessly dreamed of these yellow ravines going somewhere: it all seemed that Gervaska was running along them, having done his terrible deed and “sank like a key to the bottom of the sea.”
The Sukhodolsk peasants visited Lunevo not for the same purposes as the courtyard servants, but more about the land; but they also entered our house as if they were their own. They bowed to their father on the waist, kissed his hand, then, shaking their hair, kissed him, Natalya, and us on the lips three times. They brought gifts of honey, eggs, and towels. And we, who grew up in the fields, sensitive to smells, greedy for them no less than for songs and legends, forever remembered that special, pleasant, hemp-like smell that we felt when kissing the dry land; They also remembered that their gifts smelled of the old steppe village: honey - of blooming buckwheat and rotten oak hives, towels - punka, smoking huts from the time of their grandfather... The Sukhodolsk men did not tell anything. What was there to tell them! They didn’t even have legends. Their graves are unmarked. And lives are so similar to each other, so meager and without a trace! For the fruits of their labors and worries were only bread, the real bread that is eaten. They dug ponds in the rocky bed of the Kamenka River, which had long dried up. But the ponds are unreliable - they dry up. They built houses. But their dwellings are short-lived: at the slightest spark they burn to the ground... So what drew us all even to the bare pasture, to the huts and ravines, to the ruined estate of Sukhodol?

We happened to get to the estate that gave birth to Natalya’s soul, which ruled her entire life, to the estate about which we had heard so much, already in late adolescence.
I remember it like it was yesterday. A downpour broke out with deafening thunderclaps and dazzlingly fast, fiery snakes of lightning as we approached Sukhodol in the evening. A black-purple cloud fell heavily to the north-west and majestically occupied half the sky opposite. The plain of grain under its huge background was flat, clear and deathly pale green; the fine wet grass on the high road was bright and unusually fresh. Wet horses, as if they had immediately lost weight, splashed, their horseshoes shining, through the blue mud, the tarantass rustled wetly... And suddenly, at the very turn to Sukhodol, we saw in the tall wet rusty a tall and strange figure in a robe and a shlyk, the figure of something like an old man , or an old woman beating a piebald, polled cow with a twig. As we approached, the twig began to work harder, and the cow clumsily, wagging its tail, ran out onto the road. And the old woman, shouting something, headed towards the tarantass and, approaching, stretched her pale face towards us. Looking with fear into the black crazy eyes, feeling the touch of a sharp cold nose and the strong smell of the hut, we kissed the woman who came up. Isn't this Baba Yaga herself? But a tall shlyk made of some kind of dirty rag stuck out on Baba Yaga’s head, and on her naked body she was wearing a torn, waist-deep, wet robe that did not cover her skinny breasts. And she screamed as if we were deaf, as if with the goal of starting a furious battle. And by the scream we realized: it was Aunt Tonya.
Claudia Markovna, fat, small, with a gray beard, with unusually lively eyes, sitting at an open window in a house with two large windows, screamed, but cheerfully, with institutional enthusiasm, knitting a thread sock and, raising her glasses to her forehead, looking at the pasture, merged with the yard. Natalya, who was standing on the right porch, bowed low with a quiet smile - small, tanned, wearing bast shoes, a red woolen skirt and a gray shirt with a wide neckline around a dark, wrinkled neck. Looking at that neck, at the thin collarbones, at the tired, sad eyes, I remember thinking: it was she who grew up with our father - a long time ago, but right here, where from my grandfather’s oak house, which burned many times, this one remained , nondescript, from the garden - bushes and a few old birches and poplars, from the services and people - a hut, a barn, a clay barn and a glacier overgrown with wormwood and beetroot... There was a smell of a samovar, questions started pouring in; Crystal vases for jam, golden spoons thinned to the size of a maple leaf, and sugar candies, saved for guests, began to appear from the hundred-year-old hill. And while the conversation was heating up, intensely friendly after a long quarrel, we went to wander through the darkening rooms, looking for a balcony, an exit to the garden.
Everything was black from time, simple, rough in these empty, low rooms, which retained the same layout as in the time of grandfather, cut down from the remains of the very ones in which he lived. In the corner of the footman's room there was a large blackened image of St. Mercury of Smolensk, the one whose iron sandals and helmet are kept on the salt in the ancient cathedral of Smolensk. We heard: Mercury was a noble man, called to salvation from the Tatars of the Smolensk region by the voice of the icon of the Mother of God Hodegetria the Guide. Having defeated the Tatars, the saint fell asleep and was beheaded by his enemies. Then, taking his head in his hands, he came to the city gates in order to tell what had happened... And it was terrible to look at the Suzdal image of a headless man, holding in one hand a deathly bluish head in a helmet, and in the other an icon of the Guide - on this, as they said, was the treasured image of the grandfather, which survived several terrible fires, was split in flames, thickly bound in silver and kept on the reverse side of its Khrushchev family tree, written under the titles. Exactly in harmony with it, heavy iron bolts both at the top and bottom hung on the heavy halves of the doors. The floorboards in the hall were excessively wide, dark and slippery, the windows were small, with lifting frames. We walked through the hall, a smaller double of the one where the Khrushchevs sat down at the table with the Tatar women, into the living room. Here, opposite the doors to the balcony, there once stood a piano, played by Aunt Tonya, who was in love with officer Voitkevich, Pyotr Petrovich’s comrade. And then there were open doors to the sofa room, to the coal room - to where grandfather’s chambers had once been...
The evening was gloomy. In the clouds, beyond the outskirts of the cut-down garden, behind the half-naked barn and silvery poplars, lightning flashed, revealing for a moment the cloudy pink-golden mountains. The rain probably did not capture Troshin's forest, which darkened far beyond the garden, on the slopes behind the ravines. From there came the dry, warm smell of oak, mixed with the smell of greenery, with a damp soft wind running over the tops of the birch trees that had survived from the alley, through the tall nettles, weeds and bushes around the balcony. And the deep silence of the evening, of the steppe, of remote Rus' reigned over everything...
“Please have tea, sir,” a quiet voice called out to us.
It was she, a participant and witness of this whole life, its main storyteller, Natalya. And behind her, looking carefully with crazy eyes, bending slightly, ceremoniously sliding along the dark smooth floor, her mistress moved. She had not taken off her hat, but instead of a robe she was now wearing an old-fashioned barge dress, and a faded golden silk shawl was draped over her shoulders.
- Ou etes-vous, mes enfants? - she shouted, smiling gentilely, and her voice, clear and sharp, like the voice of a parrot, sounded strangely in the empty black rooms...

Just as in Natalya, in her peasant simplicity, in all her beautiful and pitiful soul generated by Sukhodol, there was charm in the ruined Sukhodol estate.
The old living room with its rickety floors smelled of jasmine. The rotten, blue-gray balcony, from which, due to the lack of steps, it was necessary to jump, was drowning in nettles, elderberries, and euonymus. On hot days, when the sun was baking it, when the sunken glass doors were open and the cheerful reflection of the glass was transmitted to the dim oval mirror hanging on the wall opposite the door, we all remembered Aunt Tony’s piano, which once stood under this mirror. Once upon a time she played it, looking at the yellowed notes with titles in curlicues, and he stood behind, firmly supporting his waist with his left hand, clenching his jaw tightly and frowning. Wonderful butterflies - in colorful cotton dresses, in Japanese outfits, and in black and purple velvet shawls - flew into the living room. And before leaving, he once heartily clapped his palm on one of them, which was tremblingly frozen on the lid of the piano. All that was left was silver dust. But when the girls, foolishly, erased it a few days later, Aunt Tonya became hysterical. We went out from the living room onto the balcony, sat on the warm boards - and thought and thought. The wind, running through the garden, brought to us the silky rustle of birches with satin-white trunks speckled with black and widely spread green branches, the wind, noisy and rustling, ran from the fields - and the green-golden oriole cried out sharply and joyfully, sweeping over white flowers behind chattering jackdaws, who lived with numerous kin in collapsed chimneys and in dark attics, where there is the smell of old bricks and through the dormer windows golden light falls in stripes on the mounds of gray-violet ash; the wind died down, the bees sleepily crawled over the flowers near the balcony, doing their leisurely work - and in the silence only the smooth, flowing, like a continuous light rain, babbling of the silvery foliage of the poplars was heard... We wandered around the garden, climbing into the wilderness of the outskirts. There, on these outskirts, merging with the grain, in my great-grandfather’s bathhouse with a collapsed ceiling, in the very bathhouse where Natalya kept the mirror stolen from Pyotr Petrovich, lived white cowards. How they softly jumped out onto the threshold, how strangely, moving their mustaches and forked lips, they squinted with far-spaced, bulging eyes at the tall Tatars, henbane bushes and thickets of nettles that choked the thorns and cherry trees! And in the half-open barn lived an eagle owl. He sat on the fence, having chosen a darker place, with his ears erect, his blind yellow pupils rolling out - and he looked wild, devilish. The sun was setting far behind the garden, in the sea of ​​grain, the evening was coming, peaceful and clear, the cuckoo was cuckooing in Trosha's forest, the pitiful notes of the old shepherd Styopa were ringing pitifully somewhere over the meadows. .. The owl sat and waited for the night. At night everything slept - the fields, the village, and the estate. And the owl did nothing but hoot and cry. He silently rushed around the barn, through the garden, flew to Aunt Tony's hut, easily landed on the roof - and cried out painfully... Aunt woke up on the bench by the stove.
“Sweet Jesus, have mercy on me,” she whispered, sighing.
Flies buzzed sleepily and displeasedly along the ceiling of the hot, dark hut. Every night something woke them up. Then the cow scratched its side against the wall of the hut; then the rat ran across the abruptly ringing keys of the piano and, breaking loose, fell with a crash into the shards that the aunt carefully put in the corner; then an old black cat with green eyes would return home late from somewhere and lazily ask to go into the hut; or this owl flew in, prophesying trouble with his cries. And Auntie, overcoming her drowsiness, swatting away the flies that crawled into her eyes in the darkness, got up, rummaged around the benches, slammed the door - and, going out on the threshold, randomly launched a rolling pin up into the starry sky. The eagle owl, with a rustling sound, brushing the straw with its wings, fell off the roof and fell low into the darkness. It almost touched the ground, smoothly reached the barn and, soaring, sat on its ridge. And his crying was heard again in the estate. He sat as if remembering something, and suddenly let out a cry of amazement; fell silent - and suddenly began to hoot hysterically, laugh and squeal; fell silent again - and burst into groans, sobs, sobs... And the nights, dark, warm, with purple clouds, were calm, calm. He ran sleepily and the babble of sleepy poplars flowed. The lightning flashed cautiously over the dark Trosha forest - and there was a warm, dry smell of oak. Near the forest, above the plains of oats, in a clearing in the sky among the clouds, Scorpio burned like a silver triangle, a grave cabbage...
We returned to the estate late. Having inhaled the dew, the freshness of the steppe, wild flowers and herbs, we carefully climbed onto the porch and entered the dark hallway. And they often found Natalya praying in front of the image of Mercury. Barefoot, small, with her hands clasped, she stood in front of him, whispered something, crossed herself, bowed low to him, invisible in the darkness - and all this was so simple, as if she were talking to someone close, also simple, kind, merciful .
-- Natalia? - we called out quietly.
-- I'm with? - she responded quietly and simply, interrupting the prayer.
- Why are you still not sleeping?
- Maybe we’ll still get some sleep in the grave...
We sat on the bunk, opened the window; she stood with her hands clasped. Lightning flashes mysteriously flashed, illuminating the dark rooms; The quail was beating somewhere far away in the dewy steppe. The duck that woke up on the pond quacked in warning and alarm...
- Were you walking, sir?
- We were walking.
- Well, it’s a young thing... We used to spend all nights walking... One dawn will drive us out, another will drive us away...
- Was life good before?
-- Good with...
And there was a long silence.
- Why is this owl screaming, nanny? - said the sister.
- He’s not shouting at court, sir, there’s no abyss for him. At least hit him with a gun. And it’s downright creepy, I keep thinking: either it’s going to cause some kind of trouble? And everything scares the young lady. But she’s shy to death!
- How did she get sick?
“Yes, it’s known, sir: all the tears, tears, melancholy... Then they started to pray... Yes, everything is more and more vicious with us, with the girls, and more and more angry with the brothers...”
And, remembering the arapniks, we asked:
- Not amicably, so they lived?
- How friendly! And especially after they got sick, how their grandfather died, how the young gentlemen came into power and the deceased Pyotr Petrovich got married. They were all hot - pure gunpowder!
- Do you often flog servants?
“We didn’t have that in our establishment, sir.” How wrong I was! And all that happened was that Pyotr Petrovich ordered me to fool my head with sheep’s scissors, put on a shabby shirt and send me to the farm...
- What did you do wrong?
But the answer was not always direct and quick. Natalya sometimes told stories with amazing directness and thoroughness; but sometimes she stammered and thought about something; then she sighed lightly, and from her voice, without seeing her face in the darkness, we understood that she was smiling sadly:
- Yes, that’s what I did wrong... I already told you... She was young and stupid, sir. “The nightingale sang for sin, for misfortune in the garden...” And, you know, my business was a girl’s...
The sister asked her tenderly:
- Just tell me, nanny, these poems to the end.
And Natalya was embarrassed.
- This is not poetry, sir, but a song... Yes, I don’t even remember it now.
- It's not true, it's not true!
- Well, if you please...
And she ended quickly:
- “As for sin, for misfortune...” That is to say: “For sin, for misfortune, the nightingale sang in the garden - a languid song... The fool did not let me sleep - in the dark night...”
Overcoming herself, the sister asked:
- Were you very much in love with your uncle? And Natalya stupidly and briefly whispered:
-- Very With.
- Do you always remember him in prayer?
- Always, sir.
“They say you fainted when they were taking you to Soshki?”
- In a faint, sir. We, the servants, were terribly tender... ready for reprisals... we can’t compare with the gray one-yard man! As Evsei Bodulya took me, I was stupefied with grief and fear... In the city I almost suffocated from unaccustomment. And as soon as we left for the steppe, I felt so tender and pitiful! An officer who looked like them rushed towards me - I screamed, and dead! And when I came to my senses, I lay there in the cart and thought: I feel good now, exactly in the kingdom of heaven!
- Was he strict?
- God forbid!
- Well, was Aunt the most wayward of all?
- One, sir, one, sir. I’m reporting to you: they were even taken to the saint. We suffered through passion with them! They should now live and live as they should, but they became proud and moved... How Voitkevich loved them! Well, there you go!
- Well, what about grandfather?
- What about those? They were weak in mind. And, of course, it happened to them too. Everyone at that time was passionate... But the previous gentlemen did not disdain our brother. Sometimes, your dad would punish Gervaska at lunchtime - that’s what should have happened! - and in the evening, lo and behold, they are already fattening on the mongrels, jockeying with him on balalaikas...
- Tell me, was he good, Voitkevich? Natalya was thoughtful.
- No, sir, I don’t want to lie: I was like a Kalmyk. And serious, persistent. I read all the poems to her, kept scaring her: they say, I’ll die and come for you...
- After all, grandfather also went crazy with love?
- Those after your grandmother. This is a different matter, madam. And our house was gloomy - not cheerful, God bless him. Please listen to my stupid words...
And in a leisurely whisper Natalya began a long, long story...

If you believe the legends, our great-grandfather, a rich man, only moved from near Kursk to Sukhodol in his old age: he did not like our places, their wilderness, forests. Yes, this became a proverb: “In the old days there were forests everywhere...” People who made their way along our roads two hundred years ago made their way through dense forests. The Kamenka River, and the upper reaches where it flowed, and the village, and the estate, and the hilly fields around were lost in the forest. However, it was no longer the same under grandfather. Under grandfather, the picture was different: a semi-steppe expanse, bare slopes, in the fields - rye, oats, buckwheat, on the main road - rare hollow willows, and along the Sukhodolsky top - only white pebbles. All that was left of the forests was Troshin's forest. Only the garden was, of course, wonderful: a wide alley of seventy spreading birches, cherry trees drowning in nettles, dense thickets of raspberries, acacias, lilacs and almost a whole grove of silver poplars on the outskirts, merging with the grain. The house was under a thatched roof, thick, dark and dense. And he looked at the courtyard, on the sides of which there were long services and people in several connections, and behind the courtyard there was an endless green pasture and a wide-spread lordly village, large, poor and carefree.
- All like gentlemen! - said Natalya. - And the gentlemen were carefree - not economical, not greedy. Semyon Kirillich, grandfather's brother, divided with us: they took something bigger and better, the throne's estate, for us only Soshki, Sukhodol and four hundred souls were estimated. And out of four hundred, almost half fled...
Grandfather Pyotr Kirillich died at about forty-five. My father often said that he went crazy after a sudden hurricane rained down a whole shower of apples on him, who had fallen asleep on a carpet in the garden, under an apple tree. And at home, according to Natalya, their grandfather’s dementia was explained differently: by the fact that Pyotr Kirillich was moved from lovesickness after the death of his beautiful grandmother, that a great thunderstorm passed over Sukhodol before the evening of that day. And Pyotr Kirillich, a stooped brunette, with black, attentive and tender eyes, a little like Aunt Tonya, lived out his life in quiet insanity. Money, according to Natalya, before they didn’t know what to do with, and so he, in morocco boots and a colorful arkhaluk, carefully and silently wandered around the house and, looking around, poked gold into the cracks of the oak logs.
“This is me as a dowry for Tonechka,” he muttered when they captured him. - More reliable, my friends, more reliable... Well, after all that - it’s your will: if you don’t want it, I won’t...
And he poked it again. Or else he was rearranging heavy furniture in the hall, in the living room, still waiting for someone’s arrival, although the neighbors almost never visited Sukhodol; or he complained about hunger, and he made a prison for himself - clumsily grinding and grinding green onions in a wooden cup, crumbling bread into it, pouring thick foaming stern and pouring in so much coarse gray salt that the prison turned out to be bitter and it was impossible to eat it. When, after dinner, life in the estate froze, everyone scattered to their favorite corners and fell asleep for a long time, the lonely Pyotr Kirillich, who slept little even at night, did not know where to go. And, unable to bear the loneliness, he began to look into the bedrooms, hallways, and girls’ rooms and carefully call out to the sleeping people:
-Are you sleeping, Arkasha? Are you sleeping, Tonyusha?
And, having received an angry shout: “Get off, for God’s sake, daddy!” - hastily reassured:
- Well, sleep, sleep, my soul. I won't wake you up...
And he went on - passing only the footman's room, for footmen were very rude people - and ten minutes later he again appeared on the threshold and again called out even more carefully, imagining that someone had driven through the village with coachman's bells - "already Isn’t Petenka on leave from the regiment,” or that a terrible hail cloud is coming.
“They, my dears, were very afraid of thunderstorms,” said Natalya. “I was still a simple-haired girl, but I still remember, sir.” Our house was kind of black... gloomy, God bless it. And a day in summer is a year. There was nowhere to put the servants... there were five footmen alone... Yes, it is known that young gentlemen retire after dinner, and after them we, faithful slaves, exemplary servants. And here, Pyotr Kirillich, don’t approach us, especially Gervaska. "Footmen! Lackeys! Are you sleeping?" And Gervaska raises her head from the chest and asks: “Do you want me to stuff some nettles into your bag now?” - “Who are you telling this to, you such a slacker?” - “To the brownie, sir: half asleep...” Well, Pyotr Kirillich, they will walk again around the hall, around the living room, and everyone looks out the windows, into the garden: are clouds visible? And thunderstorms, indeed, where they often gathered in the old days. Yes, and there are great thunderstorms. As it happens in the afternoon, the oriole will start screaming, and the clouds will come out from behind the garden... the house will get dark, the weeds and dull nettles will rustle, the turkeys and their poults will hide under the balcony... it’s just creepy, boring, sir! And they, father, sigh, cross themselves, climb to light a wax candle near the icons, hang a treasured towel from the deceased great-grandfather - I was scared to death of that towel! - or they throw the scissors out the window. This is the first thing, sir, scissors: very good against thunderstorms...

It was more fun in the Sukhodolsky house when the French lived in it - first some Louis Ivanovich, a man in wide, narrow trousers, with a long mustache and dreamy blue eyes, putting hair on his bald head from ear to ear, and then an elderly woman, the ever-chilled Mademoiselle Sisi, - when the voice of Louis Ivanovich thundered through all the rooms, yelling at Arkasha: “Go and don’t come back again!” - when you heard in the classroom: “Maitre corbeau sur un arbre perche”* and Tonechka was studying the piano. The French lived in Sukhodol for eight years, stayed there so that Pyotr Kirillich would not be bored, and after they took the children to the provincial town, they left it just before they returned home for the third holiday. When these holidays passed, Pyotr Kirillich did not send either Arkasha or Tonechka anywhere: in his opinion, it was enough to send Petenka alone. And the children were forever left without education and without a mentor... Natalya used to say:

* - Raven climbing a tree" (French)

I was younger than all of them. Well, Gervaska and your dad were almost the same age and, therefore, the first friends, buddies, sir. Only, it’s true what they say, a wolf is not natural for a horse. They became friends, swore friendship for eternity, even exchanged crosses, and Gervaska soon did the same: he almost drowned your dad in the pond! He was a scabby man, and a master at convict undertakings. “Well,” he once says to the barchuk, “when you grow up, will you flog me?” -- "Will". - “But no.” - “How so?” - “And so...” And I thought: we had a barrel over the ponds, on the very slope, and he noticed it, and taught Arkady Petrovich to climb into it and roll down. “First,” he says, “you, barchuk, will burn through, and then I...” Well, and the barchuk listen: he climbed in, pushed, and then he went thundering down the mountain, into the water, as he went... Mother Queen of Heaven! Only the dust swirled like a column!.. Thankfully the shepherds were close...
While the French lived in the Sukhodol house, the house still retained its residential appearance. Under my grandmother, there were still masters, and masters, and power, and subordination, and state rooms, and family, and everyday life, and holidays. The appearance of all this continued even under the French. But the French left, and the house was left completely without owners. While the children were small, Pyotr Kirillich seemed to be in first place. But what could he do? Who owned whom: he the servants or the servants them? The piano was closed, the tablecloth disappeared from the oak table - they dined without a tablecloth and when it happened, there was no passage in the entryway for greyhounds. There was no one left to take care of cleanliness, and the dark log walls, dark floors and ceilings, dark heavy doors and ceilings, old images that covered the entire corner of the hall with their Suzdal faces soon turned completely black. At night, especially during a thunderstorm, when the garden was raging in the rain, the faces of the images constantly lit up in the hall, the trembling pink-golden sky opened and swung open over the garden, and then, in the darkness, they split with a crash. thunderclaps, - it was scary in the house at night. And during the day it’s sleepy, empty and boring. Over the years, Pyotr Kirillich grew weaker and more inconspicuous, and the mistress of the house was the decrepit Daria Establishing, his grandfather’s wet nurse. But her power was almost equal to his power, and the elder Demyan did not interfere in the management of the house: he knew only field farming, sometimes saying with a lazy grin: “Well, I don’t offend my masters...” His father, a young man, had no time for Sukhodol : He was driven crazy by hunting, by the balalaika, by his love for Gervaska, who was listed as a lackey, but spent whole days with him in some Meshchera swamps or in the carriage house studying balalaika and pitiful tricks.
“So we knew, sir,” said Natalya, “they’re just sleeping in the house.” If they don’t rest, it means either in the village, or in a carriage house, or on the hunt: in winter - hares, in autumn - foxes, in summer - quails, ducks or old animals; They will sit on a racing droshky, throw the gun over their shoulders, call Dianka, and be with the Lord: today to the Middle Mill, tomorrow to the Meshcherskys, the day after tomorrow to the steppes. And all with Gervaska. That first horse guide was everything, but he pretended that it was the barchuk who was dragging him around. Arkady Petrovich loved him, his enemy, truly like a brother, and the further he went, the angrier he mocked him. Sometimes they’ll say: “Well, come on, Gervasy, on the balalaikas! Teach me, for God’s sake, “The red sun has set behind the forest...” And Gervaska will look at them, blow smoke into her nostrils and so on with a grin: “Kiss first hand to me." Arkady Petrovich will turn white all over, jump up from his seat, bam with all his strength, on his cheek, and he just shakes his head and becomes even blacker, scowls like some kind of robber. "Get up, scoundrel!" He gets up, stretches out. velvet trousers hang like a greyhound... he is silent. “Ask for forgiveness.” - “Guilty, sir.” And the barchuk will choke - and they don’t know what to say next. “That’s “sir”! - they shout. “I, they say, struggle with you, the scoundrel, how to treat an equal, I supposedly sometimes think: I won’t spare my soul for him... What about you?” Are you making me angry on purpose?"
- A strange thing! - said Natalya. - Gervaska bullied the barchuk and grandfather, and the young lady bullied me. Barchuk, and, to tell the truth, grandfather themselves, doted on Gervaska, and I doted on her... I returned from Sosheki and came to my senses a little after my offense...

They sat down at the table with the arapniks after the death of their grandfather, after the flight of Gervaska and the marriage of Pyotr Petrovich, after Aunt Tonya, having moved, doomed herself to be the bride of Sweet Jesus, and Natalya returned from these very Sosheki. Aunt Tonya moved and Natalya went into exile - because of love.
The dull, dull times of grandfather gave way to the times of young masters. Pyotr Petrovich returned to Sukhodol, having unexpectedly retired. And his arrival turned out to be disastrous for both Natalya and Aunt Tony.
They both fell in love. We didn't notice how we fell in love. At first it seemed to them that “life simply became more fun.”
At first, Pyotr Petrovich turned life in Sukhodol into a new way - into a festive and lordly one. He arrived with a friend, Voitkevich, and brought with him a cook, a shaved alcoholic, who looked with disdain at the green, ribbed jelly molds, at the rough knives and forks. Pyotr Petrovich wanted to show himself to his comrade as hospitable, generous, rich - and he did it ineptly, like a boy. Yes, he was almost a boy, very vague and handsome in appearance, but by nature sharp and cruel, a boy who seemed self-confident, but easily embarrassed and almost to the point of tears, and then for a long time harboring a grudge against the one who embarrassed him.
“I remember, brother Arkady,” he said at the table on the very first day of his stay in Sukhodol, “I remember that we had a good Madeira wine?”
Grandfather blushed and wanted to say something, but did not dare and only fiddled with the archaluk on his chest. Arkady Petrovich was amazed:
- What Madeira?
And Gervaska impudently looked at Pyotr Petrovich and grinned.
“You deigned to forget, sir,” he said to Arkady Petrovich, not even trying to hide his ridicule. “It’s true that we had nowhere to put this very Madeira.” Yes, all of us, slaves, were dragged around. The wine is master's, and we fool it, instead of kvass.
- What is this? - shouted Pyotr Petrovich, blushing his dark blush. - Be silent!
Grandfather echoed enthusiastically.
- Yes, yes, Petenka! Handicap! - he exclaimed joyfully in a thin voice and almost cried. “You can’t even imagine how he destroys me!” More than once I thought: I’ll sneak up and break his head with a copper pusher... By God, I thought! I'll plunge a dagger into his side up to the hilt!
And Gervaska was found here too.
“I, sir, heard that they are punished painfully for this,” he objected, frowning. - And then everything gets into my head: it’s time for the master to enter the kingdom of heaven!
Pyotr Petrovich said that after such an unexpectedly impudent answer, he restrained himself only for the sake of a stranger. He said only one thing to Gervaska: “Get out this minute!” And then he was even ashamed of his ardor - and, hastily apologizing to Voitkevich, looked up at him with a smile with those charming eyes that everyone who knew Pyotr Petrovich could not forget for a long time.
Natalya couldn’t forget those eyes for too long.
Her happiness was unusually brief - and who would have thought that it would be resolved by a trip to Soshki, the most remarkable event of her entire life?
The Soshki farm is intact to this day, although it has long since passed to a Tambov merchant. This is a long hut in the middle of an empty plain, a barn, a well and a threshing floor with melons around it. This is, of course, how the farm was in my grandfather’s times; Yes, the city on the way to it from Sukhodol has changed little. And Natasha’s offense was that, completely unexpectedly for herself, she stole Pyotr Petrovich’s folding mirror, framed in silver.
She saw this mirror - and was so struck by its beauty - as, indeed, by everything that belonged to Pyotr Petrovich - that she could not resist. And for several days, until she ran out of mirrors, she lived stunned by her crime, fascinated by her terrible secret and treasure, as in the fairy tale about the scarlet flower. Going to bed, she prayed to God that the night would pass quickly, that the morning would come sooner: it was festive in the house, which came to life, was filled with something new, wonderful with the arrival of a handsome barchuk, smart, pomaded, with a high red collar of his uniform, with a dark face , but gentle, like a young lady's; It was festive even in the hallway where Natasha slept and where, jumping up from the locker at dawn, she immediately remembered that there was joy in the world, because at the threshold stood such light boots, waiting to be cleaned, that they were fit for a Tsar’s son to wear; and the most terrible and festive thing was behind the garden, in an abandoned bathhouse, where a double mirror in a heavy silver frame was kept - behind the garden, where, while everyone was still sleeping, through the dewy thickets, Natasha secretly ran to enjoy the possession of her treasure, to carry it out on the threshold, to reveal it in the hot morning sun and look at herself until she's dizzy, and then hide again, bury and run again, serve all morning to the one she didn't even dare to look at, for whom she, in the insane hope of being liked, was looking at something in the mirror.
But the fairy tale about the scarlet flower ended soon, very soon. It ended with disgrace and shame, which has no name, as Natasha thought... It ended with Pyotr Petrovich himself ordering her hair cut and disfigured as she dressed herself up, furrowed her eyebrows in front of the mirror, creating some kind of sweet secret, an unprecedented closeness between him and herself. He himself discovered and turned her crime into simple theft, into a stupid trick of a yard girl, who, in a shabby shirt, with a face swollen from tears, in front of the entire yard, was put on a dung cart and, disgraced, suddenly torn away from all her family, was taken away to some unknown, terrible farm, in the steppe distances. She already knew: there, on the farm, she would have to guard the chickens, turkeys and melons; there she will bake in the sun, forgotten by the whole world; there, like years, there will be long steppe days, when the horizons are drowned in an unsteady haze and it is so quiet, so sultry that I would sleep like a dead sleep all day if it were not for the need to listen to the careful crackling of dry peas, the homely fuss of hens in the hot earth, peacefully - a sad roll call of turkeys, do not follow the creepy shadow of a hawk approaching from above and do not jump up, do not shout in a thin drawn-out voice: “Shu-u!..” There, on the farm, what was one old Ukrainian woman worth, who received power over her life and death and, probably, already impatiently awaiting its victim! Natasha had the only advantage over those being taken to death penalty: possibility of hanging oneself. And only this alone supported her on the path to exile - of course, eternal, as she believed.
On the way from end to end of the county, she saw enough! She had no time for that. She thought, or rather felt, one thing: life was over, the crime and shame were too great to hope for a return to her! While her close friend, Yevsey Bodulya, still remained near her. But what will happen when he hands her over to the little Ukrainian, spends the night and leaves, leaving her forever in a foreign land? After crying, she wanted to eat. And Yevsey, to her surprise, looked at it very simply and, while eating, talked to her as if nothing had happened. And then she fell asleep - and woke up already in the city. And the city struck her only with boredom, dryness, stuffiness, and something else vaguely terrible, dreary, which looked like a dream that could not be told. The only thing I remember about this day is that it is very hot in the summer in the steppe, that there is nothing in the world more endless than a summer day and longer than the main roads. I remember that there are places on the city streets lined with stones, along which a cart thunders strangely, that from afar the city smells of iron roofs, and in the middle of the square where they rested and fed the horse, near the empty “glutton” sheds in the evening - of dust, tar, rotting hay, tufts of which, mixed with horse manure, remain in the peasants' camps. Yevsey unharnessed and put the horse to the cart, to the stern; He pushed his hot cap onto the back of his head, wiped away the sweat with his sleeve and, all black from the heat, went into the tavern. He strictly ordered Natasha to “keep an eye” and, if something happened, to shout throughout the entire square. And Natasha sat, motionless, not taking her eyes off the dome of the then newly built cathedral, which was burning like a huge silver star somewhere far behind the houses - she sat until the chewing, cheerful Yevsey returned and stood with a roll under with the mouse, bring the horse into the shafts again.
“You and I are a little late, princess!” - he muttered animatedly, addressing either the horse or Natasha. Well, maybe they won’t strangle you! Maybe not for a fire... I won’t even drive him back, “to me, brother, the master’s horse is more valuable than your hale,” he said, already meaning Demyan. - He opened his mouth: “Look at me! If something happens, I’ll see what’s in your trousers...” A-ah! - I think... I felt a pain in my stomach! Gentlemen, they say, even they haven’t taken off my trousers yet... no match for you, Black Sky. -- "Look!" -What should I watch? Maybe don't be a fool. I want to - and I don’t turn around at all: I’ll finish the girl, and I’ll cross myself, and that’s where they saw me... I’m amazed at the girl too: why, the fool, did she bother? Has the world become a wedge? If Chumaks or some old people go past the farm - just say a word: in one cop you will find yourself behind Father Rostov... And then remember what their name was!
And the thought: “I’ll hang myself” was replaced in Natasha’s shorn head by the thought of escape. The cart creaked and rocked. Yevsey fell silent and led his horse to the well in the middle of the square. Where we came from, the sun was setting behind the large monastery garden, and the windows in the yellow fort that stood opposite the monastery, across the road, sparkled with gold. And the sight of the prison for a minute aroused the thought of escape even more. Look, they live on the run! Only they say that the elders burn out the eyes of stolen girls and boys with boiled milk and pass them off as wretched, and the Chumaks are brought to the sea and sold to the Nagais... It happens that the masters catch their runaways, put them in shackles, and put them in prison... Yes, maybe even in the prison there are not bulls, but men, as Gervaska says!
But the windows in the prison went dark, my thoughts were confused - no, running was even worse than hanging myself! Yes, Yevsey also became silent and sobered up.
“We’re late, girl,” he said uneasily, jumping sideways onto the cart bed.
And the cart, having got out onto the highway, shook again, began to thrash, rattled loudly over the stones... “Oh, the best thing would be to turn it back,” Natasha either thought or felt, “turn it around, gallop to Sukhodol.” - and fall at the feet of the masters!" But Yevsey drove on. There was no longer a star behind the houses. Ahead there was a white bare street, a white pavement, white houses - and all this was closed by a huge white cathedral under a new white tin dome, and the sky above it became pale blue, dry. And there, at home, at that time the dew was already falling, the garden was fragrant with freshness, the smell was from the heated cook's room; far beyond the plains of grain, behind the silver poplars on the outskirts of the garden, behind the old treasured bathhouse, the dawn was burning down, and in the living room the doors to the balcony were open, the scarlet light mixed with the darkness in the corners, and a yellow-swarthy, black-eyed woman, looking like both grandfather and Peter Petrovich, the young lady was constantly straightening the sleeves of a light and wide dress made of orange silk, looking intently at the music, sitting with her back to the dawn, striking the yellow keys, filling the living room with the solemnly melodious, sweetly desperate sounds of Oginsky’s polonaise and as if not paying any attention to the person standing behind her officer - squat, dark-faced, supporting his waist with his left hand and watching her fast hands with gloomy concentration...
“She has hers, and I have mine,” Natasha either thought or felt on such evenings with a sinking heart and ran into the cold, dewy garden, huddled in the wilderness of nettles and pungently smelling, damp burdocks and she stood there, waiting for the impossible - that the little gentleman would come down from the balcony, walk along the alley, see her and, suddenly turning, approach her with quick steps - and she would not utter a sound from horror and happiness...
And the cart rattled. The city was all around, hot and smelly, the same one that had previously seemed somehow magical. And Natasha looked with painful surprise at the dressed-up people walking back and forth on the stones near houses, gates and shops with open doors... “And why did Yevsey come here,” she thought, “how did he decide to rattle the cart here?”
But we drove past the cathedral, began to descend to a shallow river along bumpy dusty slopes, past black forges, past rotten bourgeois shacks... Again the familiar smell of fresh warm water, silt, and evening field freshness. The first light flashed in the distance, on the opposite mountain, in a lonely house near the barrier... So we were completely free, crossed the bridge, went up to the barrier - and the stone, deserted road looked into our eyes, dimly turning white and running into the endless distance, the blue of a fresh steppe night. And the horse went at a small trot, and after passing the barrier, it began to walk. And again it began to be heard that it was quiet, quiet at night both on earth and in the sky - only somewhere far away a bell was crying. He cried more and more audibly, more and more melodiously, and finally merged with the friendly tramp of the troika, with the even clatter of the wheels running along the highway and approaching... The troika was driven by a free young coachman, and in the chaise, with his chin buried in an overcoat with a hood, sat an officer. Having caught up with the cart, he raised his head for a moment - and suddenly Natasha saw a red collar, a black mustache, young eyes flashing under a helmet that looked like a bucket... She screamed, died, lost consciousness...
A crazy thought dawned on her that it was Pyotr Petrovich, and from the pain and tenderness that passed through her nervous courtyard heart like lightning, she suddenly realized what she had lost: closeness to him... Yevsey rushed to water her shorn, fallen off head with water from road jug.
Then she woke up from a fit of nausea - and hastily threw her head over the bed of the cart. Yevsey hastily placed his palm under her cold forehead...
And then, relieved, chilled, with a wet collar, she lay on her back and looked at the stars. The frightened Yevsey was silent, thinking that she had fallen asleep, he just shook his head, and he drove and drove. The cart shook and ran away. And it seemed to the girl that she had no body, that now she had only one soul. And this soul felt “so good, exactly in the kingdom of heaven”...
A scarlet flower, blooming in fairy gardens, was her love. But to the steppe, to the wilderness, even more reserved than the wilderness of Sukhodol, she took her love, so that there, in silence and solitude, she could overcome her first, sweet and burning torments, and then bury her for a long time, forever, right up to the gravestone. the depths of your Sukhodolsk soul.

Love in Sukhodol was unusual. Hatred was also unusual.
Grandfather, who died as absurdly as his killer, like everyone else who died in Sukhodol, was killed in the same year. On Pokrov, the patronal feast day in Sukhodol, Pyotr Petrovich called the guests - and was very worried: would the leader who had given his word be there? Joyfully, grandfather was also worried about unknown reasons. The leader arrived - and the dinner was a great success. It was noisy and fun, and grandpa had the most fun of all. Early on the morning of October 2, he was found dead on the living room floor.
Having retired, Pyotr Petrovich did not hide the fact that he was sacrificing himself to save the honor of the Khrushchevs, the family nest, the family estate. He did not hide the fact that he “involuntarily” had to take the farm into his own hands. He must also make acquaintances in order to communicate with the most enlightened and useful nobles of the district, and with others - simply not to break off relations. And at first he did everything exactly, visited even all the small estates, even the farm of Aunt Olga Kirillovna, a monstrously fat old woman who suffered from sleeping sickness and brushed her teeth with snuff. By the fall, no one was surprised that Pyotr Petrovich ruled the estate with sole authority. Yes, he no longer looked like a handsome officer who had come on leave, but as an owner, a young landowner. Embarrassed, he did not blush as darkly as before. He grew well-groomed, gained weight, wore expensive arkhaluks, pampered his small feet with red Tatar shoes, and decorated his small hands with turquoise rings. Arkady Petrovich was embarrassed to look into his brown eyes, did not know what to talk to him about, at first he yielded to him in everything and disappeared on the hunt.
On Pokrov, Pyotr Petrovich wanted to charm everyone with his cordiality, and to show that he was the first person in the house. But grandfather interfered terribly. Grandfather was blissfully happy, but tactless, talkative and pitiful in his velvet cap with relics and in a new, overly wide blue Cossack, sewn by his home tailor. He also imagined himself to be a hospitable host and was fussing around from early morning, arranging some kind of stupid ceremony of receiving guests. One half of the doors from the hallway to the hall never opened. He himself pushed back the iron latches both below and above, he himself pulled up a chair and, shaking all over, climbed onto it; and having opened the doors, he stood on the threshold and, taking advantage of the silence of Pyotr Petrovich, who was frozen with shame and anger, but determined to endure everything, did not leave his place until the arrival of the last guest. He did not take his eyes off the porch - and he had to open the doors to the porch, this also seemed to be required by some ancient custom - he stomped around with excitement, and when he saw someone entering, he rushed towards him, hurriedly made steps, jumped, throwing his leg behind foot, made a low bow and, choking, said to everyone:
- Well, I’m so glad! I'm so glad! It's been a while since anyone came to see me! You are welcome, you are welcome!
It also infuriated Pyotr Petrovich that for some reason grandfather reported to everyone about Tonechka’s departure to Lunevo, to Olga Kirillovna. “Tonechka is sick with melancholy, she went to her auntie for the whole autumn” - what could the guests think after such unsolicited statements? After all, the story with Voitkevich, of course, was already known to everyone. Voitkevich, perhaps, really had serious intentions, sighing mysteriously near Tonechka, playing four-handed with her, reading “Lyudmila” to her in a dull voice, or saying in gloomy reverie: “You are betrothed to a dead man by the sacred word...” But Tonechka flared up furiously at every attempt, even the most innocent, to express his feelings - to bring her a flower, for example - and Voitkevich suddenly left. When he left, Tonechka began to lie awake at night, sitting in the dark near the open window, as if waiting for some time known to her, so that she could suddenly sob loudly and wake up Pyotr Petrovich. He lay there for a long time, gritting his teeth, listening to these sobs and the small, sleepy babble of the poplars outside the windows in the dark garden, like incessant rain. Then he went to calm him down. The sleepy girls also came to calm them down, and sometimes the grandfather ran in anxiously. Then Tonechka began to stomp her feet and shout: “Get away from me, my fierce enemies!” - and it ended in ugly abuse, almost a fight.
“Yes, understand, understand,” Pyotr Petrovich hissed furiously, throwing out the girls and grandfather, slamming the door and tightly grasping the bracket, “understand, snake, what they can imagine!”
- Ay! - Tonechka squealed furiously. “Daddy, he’s screaming that I’m potbellied!”
And, clutching his head, Pyotr Petrovich rushed out of the room.
Pokrov and Gervaska were very worried: as if he would become rude with some careless word.
Gervaska has grown terribly. Huge, awkward, but also the most prominent, the most intelligent of the servants, he was also dressed in a blue Cossack jacket, the same trousers and soft goatskin boots without heels. A purple scarf was tied around his thin dark neck. He combed his black, dry, large hair into a side row, but did not want to cut his hair in a polka-dot style - he cut it into a circle. There was nothing to shave, only two or three sparse and coarse curls blackened on his chin and at the corners of his large mouth, about which they said: “Mouth to ears, even sew strings.” Long-haired, very wide in a flat, bony chest, with a small head and deep orbits, thin ash-blue lips and large bluish teeth, he, this ancient Aryan, a Parsee from Sukhodol, had already received nickname: greyhound. Looking at his grin, listening to his coughing, many thought: “And soon you, greyhound, will die!” Out loud, unlike others, they called the milksucker Gervasy Afanasyevich.
The gentlemen were afraid of him too. The masters had the same character as the slaves: either to rule or to be afraid. For the impudent answer to grandfather on the day of Pyotr Petrovich's arrival, Gervaska, to the surprise of the servants, received absolutely nothing. Arkady Petrovich told him briefly: “You are truly a brute, brother!” - to which he received a very short answer: “I can’t stand him, sir!” And Gervaska himself came to Pyotr Petrovich: he stood on the threshold and, in his own manner, swaggeringly sat down on his long legs disproportionate to his body in wide trousers, putting his left knee out at an angle, and asked to be flogged.
“I’m very rude and hot-tempered, sir,” he said indifferently, playing with his black eyes.
And Pyotr Petrovich, sensing a hint of “hot” in the word, chickened out.
- There will still be time, my dear! There will be time! - he shouted mock-sternly. -- Get out! I can't see you, you impudent one.
Gervaska stood and was silent. Then he said:
- It is your will.
He stood still, twirling the coarse hair on his upper lip, grinned his bluish jaws like a dog, without expressing a single feeling on his face, and left. From then on, he was firmly convinced of the benefits of this manner - not to express anything on his face and to be as brief as possible in his answers. And Pyotr Petrovich began not only to avoid talking to him, but even to look him in the eye.
Gervaska behaved just as indifferently and mysteriously at Pokrov. Everyone was knocked off their feet, preparing for the holiday, giving and receiving orders, swearing, arguing, washing the floors, cleaning the dark heavy silver of the icons with blue chalk, kicking the dogs climbing into the canopy, fearing that the jelly would not harden, that there would not be enough forks, that they would be overcooked left-handers, twigs; only Gervaska calmly grinned and said to the enraged Kazimir, the alcoholic cook: “Keep it down, Father Deacon, the cassock will burst!”
“Make sure you don’t get drunk,” Pyotr Petrovich said absently, worried about the leader.
“I haven’t drunk since I was a child,” Gervaska told him as an equal. - Not funny.
And then, in front of guests, Pyotr Petrovich even shouted ingratiatingly to the whole house:
- Gervasy! Don't disappear, please. Without you it’s like without hands.
And Gervaska responded most politely and with dignity:
- Don't worry, sir. I don't dare leave.
He served as never before. He fully justified the words of Pyotr Petrovich, who said out loud to the guests:
- How impudent this big guy is, you can’t even imagine! But positively a genius! Skillful fingers!
Could he have imagined that he was dropping into the cup exactly the drop that would overflow it? Grandfather heard his words. He fiddled with the Cossack jacket on his chest and suddenly shouted to the leader across the entire hall:
-- Your Excellency! Give me a helping hand! As to my father, I come running to you with a complaint about my servant! This one, this one - Gervasy Afanasyev Kulikov! He destroys me at every step! He...
They interrupted him, persuaded him, calmed him down. Grandfather was agitated to the point of tears, but they began to calm him down so friendly and with such respect, mocking of course, that he gave in and felt childishly happy again. Gervaska stood sternly against the wall, with his eyes downcast and his head slightly turned. Grandfather saw that this giant’s head was too small, that it would be even smaller if it were cut off, that the back of his head was sharp, and that there was especially a lot of hair on the back of his head - large, black, roughly trimmed and forming a protrusion over the thin neck. From the sun and the wind while hunting, Gervaska’s dark face was peeling in places and had pale purple spots. And grandfather glanced at Gervaska with fear and anxiety, but still joyfully shouted to the guests:
- Okay, I forgive him! Only for this I will not let you go, dear guests, for three whole days. I won't let go for anything! I especially ask you not to leave for the evening. How's it going for the evening, I'm not myself: such melancholy, such horror! The clouds are setting in the Trosha Forest, they say they’ve caught two of Bonapartish’s Frenchmen again... I will certainly die in the evening - mark my words! Martin Zadeka predicted to me...
But he died early in the morning.
He insisted: “for his sake” a lot of people stayed overnight; We drank tea all evening, there was an awful lot of jam and everything was different, so you could come and try, come and try; then they set up tables, lit so many spermaceti candles that they were reflected in all the mirrors, and in the rooms, full of the smoke of fragrant Zhukovsky tobacco, noise and chatter, there was a golden shine, like in a church. The main thing is that many stayed overnight. And that means that there was not only a new cheerful day ahead, but also great troubles and worries: after all, if not for him, not for Pyotr Kirillich, the holiday would never have gone off so well, there would never have been such a lively and rich dinner.
“Yes, yes,” thought the grandfather worryingly at night, taking off his Cossack coat and standing in his bedroom in front of the lectern, in front of the wax candles lit on it, looking at the black image of Mercury. “Yes, yes, death is cruel to a sinner... Yes, no the sun will set on our wrath!"
But then he remembered that he wanted to think something else; hunched over and whispering the fiftieth psalm, he walked around the room, straightened the smoking nun that was smoldering on the night table, took the Psalter in his hands and, unfolding it, again with a deep, happy sigh raised his eyes to the headless saint. And suddenly he attacked what he wanted to think, and beamed with a smile:
- Yes, yes: if there is an old man, I would kill him, if there is no old man, I would buy him!
Afraid of oversleeping and not being able to manage something, he hardly slept. And early in the morning, when in the rooms, which had not yet been cleaned and smelled of tobacco, there was that special silence that only happens after a holiday, he carefully, on bare feet, went out into the living room, carefully picked up several crayons that were lying around the open green tables, and gasped weakly with delight, looking at the garden behind the glass doors: at the bright shine of the cold azure, at the silver of the matinee that covered the balcony and railings, at the brown foliage in the bare thickets under the balcony. He opened the door and sniffed: the smell of autumn decay from the bushes was still bitter and alcoholic, but this smell was lost in the winter freshness. And everything was motionless, calm, almost solemn. The sun, just appearing from behind, behind the village, illuminated the tops of the picture alley, the half-naked white-trunked birches, sprinkled with rare and fine gold, and there was a lovely, joyful, elusively lilac tone in these white and gold tops, shining through the azure. A dog ran in the cold shade under the balcony, crunching on grass scorched by frost and as if sprinkled with salt. This crunch reminded me of winter - and, shrugging his shoulders with pleasure, grandfather returned to the living room and, holding his breath, began moving and arranging the heavy furniture growling on the floor, occasionally glancing at the mirror where the sky was reflected. Suddenly, silently and quickly, Gervaska entered - without a Cossack, sleepy, “angry as hell,” as he later said to himself.
He entered and shouted sternly in a whisper:
- Quiet! Why are you minding your own business?
Grandfather raised his excited face and, with the same tenderness that did not leave him all yesterday day and all night, answered in a whisper:
- You see what you are like, Gervasy! I forgave you yesterday, and instead of thanking the master...
- I'm tired of you, you slobber, worse than autumn! - Gervaska interrupted. - Let me go.
Grandfather looked with fear at the back of his head, which now protruded even more over the thin neck protruding from the collar of his white shirt, but it flared up and blocked the card table, which he wanted to drag into the corner.
- Let me go! - After thinking for a moment, he shouted quietly. - It is you who must yield to the master. You will bring me to the point: I will stab you in the side with a dagger!
-- A! - Gervaska said annoyedly, flashing his teeth, and hit him in the chest with a backhand.
Grandfather slipped on the smooth oak floor, waved his arms - and just hit his temple on the sharp corner of the table.
Seeing the blood, the senselessly slanted eyes and the gaping mouth, Gervaska tore a golden icon and an amulet on a worn cord from his grandfather’s still warm neck... he looked back, tore off his grandmother’s wedding ring from his little finger... Then he silently and quickly left the living room - and disappeared into the water.
The only person from all of Sukhodol who saw him after that was Natalya.

While she lived in Soshki, two more things happened in Sukhodol. major events: Pyotr Petrovich got married and the brothers went as “Hunters” to the Crimean campaign.
She returned only two years later: they forgot about her. And when she returned, she did not recognize Sukhodol, just as Sukhodol did not recognize her.
That summer evening, when the cart sent from the manor’s yard creaked near the farm hut and Natasha jumped out onto the threshold, Yevsey Bodulya exclaimed in surprise:
- Is it really you, Natasha?
- Who then? - Natasha answered with a barely noticeable smile.
And Yevsey shook his head:
- You’ve become good, not good!
But she just didn’t look like before: from a short-haired girl, round-faced and clear-eyed, she turned into a short, thin, slender girl, calm, reserved and affectionate. She was wearing a scarf and an embroidered shirt, although she was covered with a dark scarf in our opinion. a little dark from the sun and covered in small freckles the color of millet. And to Yevsey, a devout dry lander, the dark scarf, the tan, and the freckles, of course, seemed ugly.
On the way to Sukhodol, Yevsey said:
- Well, girl, you have become a bride. Do you want to get married?
She just shook her head:
- No, Uncle Yevsey, I will never go.
- What kind of joy is this? - asked Yevsey and even took the pipe out of his mouth.
And slowly she explained: not everyone can be married; They will probably give her to the young lady, but the young lady has doomed herself to God and, therefore, will not let her marry; and she had very vivid dreams more than once...
- What did you see? - asked Yevsey.
“Yes, it’s empty,” she said. “Gervaska scared me to death then, told me some news, I lost my mind... Well, that’s what I dreamed.”
“Is it really true that he had breakfast with you, Gervaska?”
Natasha thought:
- Had breakfast. He came and said: I came to you from the gentlemen on a big matter, just give me something to eat first. They covered him like he was worth it. And he ate, came out of the hut and blinked at me. I jumped out, he told me the whole story around the corner, and went on his way...
- Why didn’t you call the owners?
- Eco-sya. He threatened to kill. He didn’t tell me to tell him until the evening. And I told them, “I’m going to sleep under the barn...
In Sukhodol, all the servants looked at her with great curiosity, and her friends and peers pestered her with questions about her girlhood. But she also answered her friends just as briefly and as if admiring some role she had taken on.
“It was good,” she repeated.
And once she said in the tone of a praying man:
- God has a lot of everything. It was good.
And simply, without delay, she entered into working, everyday life, as if not at all surprised that her grandfather was gone, that the young gentlemen had gone to war as “Hunters,” that the young lady had “begun” and was wandering around the rooms, imitating her grandfather, that a new woman was ruling Sukhodol. , a strange lady to everyone - small, plump, very lively, pregnant...
The lady shouted at dinner:
- Call this... what's her name here? - Natasha.
And Natasha quickly and silently entered, crossed herself, bowed to the corner, to the images, then to the lady and the young lady - and stood, waiting for questions and orders. Of course, only the lady asked questions - the young lady, very tall, thin, pointed-nosed, looking with her unbelievably black eyes intently and dully, did not utter a word. The lady appointed her to be with the lady. And she bowed and simply said:
- I’m listening, sir.
The young lady, still looking attentively and indifferently, suddenly rushed at her in the evening and, furiously slanting her eyes, cruelly and with pleasure tore her hair - because she clumsily pulled the stocking off her leg. Natasha began to cry like a child, but remained silent; and when she went out to the girls’ room, sat down on the bunk and picked out her torn hair, she even smiled through the tears hanging on her eyelashes.
- Well, fierce! -- she said. - It will be difficult for me.
The young lady, having woken up in the morning, lay in bed for a long time, and Natasha stood at the threshold and, lowering her head, glanced sideways at her pale face.
- What did you see in your dream? - asked the young lady so indifferently, as if someone else was speaking for her.
She answered:
- It seems like nothing, sir.
And then the young lady, again just as suddenly as yesterday, jumped out of bed, madly threw a cup of tea at her and, falling onto the bed, sobbed bitterly and screaming. Natasha dodged the cup - and soon learned to dodge with extraordinary dexterity. It turned out that to the stupid girls who answered the question about dreams: “I didn’t see anything,” the young lady sometimes shouted: “Well, tell me something!” But since Natasha was not an expert at lying, she had to develop another skill in herself: dodging.
Finally, a doctor was brought to the young lady. The doctor gave her a lot of pills and drops. Fearing that she would be poisoned, the young lady forced Natasha to try these pills and drops - and she tried them all without refusal. Soon after her arrival, she found out that the young lady was waiting for her “like white light”: the young lady remembered her - she looked with all her eyes to see if they were coming from Sosheki, and warmly assured everyone that she would be completely healthy as soon as Natasha returned. Natasha returned and was greeted with complete indifference. But weren’t the young lady’s tears tears of bitter disappointment? Natasha's heart trembled when she realized all this. She went out into the corridor, sat down on the locker and began to cry again.
- Well, is it better for you? - asked the young lady when she came in later with swollen eyes.
“Better, sir,” Natasha said in a whisper, although her heart was sinking and her head was spinning from the medicine, and, coming up, she warmly kissed the young lady’s hand.
And for a long time after that she walked with lowered eyelashes, afraid to raise them to the young lady, touched by pity for her.
- Uh, little Ukrainian little girl! - one of her girl friends, Soloshka, once shouted, who most often tried to become a confidante of all her secrets and feelings and constantly came across short, simple answers that excluded any charm of girlish friendship.
Natasha smiled sadly.
“Well,” she said thoughtfully. - And that’s true. Whoever you hang out with, that's how you'll gain. Sometimes I don’t feel as sorry for my father and mother as I do for my Ukrainians...
In Soshki, at first she did not attach any importance to the new things that surrounded her. We arrived in the morning and the only thing that seemed strange to her that morning was that the hut was very long and white, visible far away among the surrounding plains, that the little Ukrainian who was lighting the stove greeted her warmly, but the Little Russian did not listen to Yevsey. Yevsey talked incessantly - about the gentlemen, and about Demyan, and about the heat on the way, and about what he ate in the city, and about Pyotr Petrovich, and, of course, about the mirror - and the Little Russian, Shary, or, as they called him in Sukhodol, Badger, he just shook his head and suddenly, when Yevsey fell silent, he looked at him absentmindedly and whined joyfully under his breath: “Twist, turn, blizzard...” Then she gradually began to come to her senses - and marvel at Soshki, find in them more and more charm and dissimilarity with Sukhodol. One Khokhlatsky hut was worth something - hers. whiteness, its smooth, even, outlined roof. How rich it seemed in this house interior decoration compared to the slovenly squalor of the Sukhodolsk huts! What expensive foil images hung in the corner of it, what marvelous paper flowers surrounded them, how beautifully colorful the towels hanging under them were! And the patterned tablecloth on the table! And the rows of gray pots and machos on the shelves near the stove! But most surprising of all were the owners.
She didn’t quite understand why they were amazing, but she felt it all the time. She had never seen such neat, calm and well-behaved men as Shary. He was short, had a wedge-shaped head, cropped, in thick strong silver, a mustache - he only wore a mustache - also silver, narrow, Tatar, his face and neck were black from the tan, with deep wrinkles, but also somehow fine , certain, necessary for some reason. He walked awkwardly - his boots were heavy - he tucked ports made of rough bleached canvas into his boots, and into the ports - the same shirt, wide under the arms, with a turn-down collar. As he walked, he bent slightly. But neither this manner, nor the wrinkles, nor the gray hair aged him: there was neither our fatigue nor lethargy in his face; the small eyes looked sharp, subtly mocking. He reminded Natashka of an old Serbian man who once came into Sukhodol from somewhere with a boy playing the violin.
And the little Ukrainian Marina of Sukhodolny was nicknamed Spear. This tall fifty-year-old woman was slender. A yellowish tan evenly covered the thin, not Sukhodol skin of her wide-cheeked face, rough, but almost beautiful with its directness and stern liveliness of eyes - either agate or amber-gray, changing like a cat’s. A large black and gold scarf with red polka dots lay on her head like a tall turban; a black, short vest, which sharply set off the whiteness of the shirt, tightly fitted the elongated hips and shins. She wore shoes with bare feet, in shoes with horseshoes, her bare boots were thin, but round, and became like polished yellow-brown wood from the sun. And when she sometimes sang at work, with knitted eyebrows, in a strong chest voice, a song about the siege of Nechaev by the infidels, about

As the evening dawn came,
That one stood over Pochaev,

As the Mother of God herself “rattled” the holy monastery, there was so much hopelessness and howling in her voice, but at the same time so much greatness, strength, and threat that Natasha did not take her eyes off her in terrible delight.
The crests had no children; Natasha was an orphan. And if she lived with the Sukhodol residents, they would call her an adopted daughter, and sometimes even a thief, they would either feel sorry for her or sting her eyes. And the crests were almost cold, but even in their manners, not at all curious or talkative. In the fall, they brought Kaluga women and girls to mowing and threshing, who were called “vests” for their colorful sundresses. But Natasha shunned the little ones: they were reputed to be dissolute, sickly, they were busty, sassy and impudent, they swore badly and with pleasure, they threw out jokes, they sat on horses like men, they galloped like crazy. Her grief would have dissipated in her usual life, in frankness, in tears and songs. Who was there to be frank with or to sing songs with? The little girls began to draw in their coarse voices, picking them up in an excessively friendly and loud voice, with wheezing and whistling. Shary sang only something mockingly dance-like. And Marina in her songs, even love ones, was stern, proud and thoughtfully gloomy.

As we rowed, the willows made noise,
What did I plant -

She spoke in a melancholy drawl and added, lowering her voice, firmly and hopelessly:

There's no way
Milenky,
What I loved...

And alone, Natasha slowly drank the first, bitter-sweet poison of unrequited love, suffered her shame, jealousy, terrible and sweet dreams that she often had at night, pipe dreams and the expectations that tormented her for a long time in the silent days of the steppe. Often, burning resentment was replaced in her heart by tenderness, passion and despair - by humility, the desire for the most modest, unnoticeable existence near him, love, forever hidden from everyone and expecting nothing, demanding nothing. The news coming from Sukhodol was sobering. But there was no news for a long time, there was no feeling of everyday Sukhodol life - and Sukhodol began to seem so beautiful, so desirable that there was not enough strength to endure loneliness and grief... Suddenly Gervaska appeared. He hastily and sharply told her all the news from Sukhodol, in half an hour he told her what someone else would not have been able to tell in a day - right up to how he “pushed” his grandfather to death, and said firmly:
- Well, now goodbye forever!
He, burning through her, stunned, with his eyes, shouted, going out onto the road:
- It’s time to get the crap out of your head! He's about to get married, you're not even suitable for him as his mistress... Come to your senses!
And she came to her senses. She survived the terrible news, came to her senses and came to her senses.
The days dragged on after that, measuredly, boringly, as those praying men who walked and walked along the highway past the farm, resting, had long conversations with her, taught patience and hope in the Lord God, whose name was pronounced stupidly, pitifully, and most of all the rule: not to think.
“Think, don’t think, it won’t happen our way,” said the praying men, tying their bast shoes, wrinkling their exhausted faces and looking relaxed into the steppe distance. - The Lord God has a lot of everything... Pluck us, little girl, a small onion...
And others, as usual, frightened us - with sins, with that light, and also promised not such troubles and fears. And one day she had two terrible dreams almost in a row. She kept thinking about Sukhodol - it was hard not to think at first! — she was thinking about the young lady, about her grandfather, about her future, wondering whether she would get married, and if she did, then when, to whom... Her thoughts so imperceptibly passed one day into sleep that she quite clearly saw the sultry, dusty afternoon , an alarmingly windy day and the fact that she runs to the pond with buckets - and suddenly sees on a clay-dry hillside an ugly, big-headed dwarf man in broken boots, without a hat, with red hair tousled by the wind, in an unbelted, fluttering fiery red shirt. “Grandfather!” she shouted in alarm and horror. “Is there a fire?” - “Everything will fly away now!” the dwarf responded, also with a cry, muffled by the hot wind. “An unspeakable cloud is coming! And you can’t even think about getting married!” - And the other dream was even more terrible: it was as if she stood at noon in a hot empty hut, locked by someone outside, froze, waiting for something - and then a huge gray goat jumped out from behind the stove, reared up and straight to her, obscenely excited, with joyfully frenzied and pleading eyes burning like coals. "I'm your fiance!" - he shouted in a human voice, quickly and awkwardly running up, stamping his small hind hooves - and fell with a flourish on her chest with his front ones...
Jumping up after such dreams on her bed in the hallway, she almost died from heart palpitations, from the fear of the dark and the thought that she had no one to rush to.
“Lord Jesus,” she whispered quickly. “Mother Queen of Heaven!” Pleasers of God!
But the fact that all the saints seemed to her brown and headless, like Mercury, made her even more terrible.
When she began to think about her dreams, it began to occur to her that her girlhood years were over, that her fate had already been determined - it was not without reason that something unusual had befallen her, love for her master! - that some more trials await her, that she must imitate the Ukrainians in restraint, and the praying pilgrims in simplicity and humility. And since the dry people love to play roles, to inspire themselves with the immutability of what supposedly should be, although they themselves invent this should, Natasha also took on the role.

Her legs were swollen with joy when, jumping out on the threshold on the eve of Peter’s Day, she realized that Bodulya was behind her, when she saw the dusty, disheveled Sukhodolovsk cart, saw the torn hat on Bodulya’s shaggy head, his tangled beard faded in the sun, his face, tired and excited, aged and ugly before its time, even somehow incomprehensible in the squalor and disproportion of its features, I saw a familiar dog, also shaggy, bearing some resemblance not only to Bodulya, but to the whole of Sukhodol - dimly- gray on the back, and in front, from the chest, from the thickly pubescent neck, as if smoked with the dark smoke of a smokehouse. But she quickly regained control of herself. On the way home, Bodulya weaved whatever he could think of about the Crimean War, sometimes seeming to rejoice at it, sometimes lamenting it, and Natasha said judiciously:
- Well, apparently, we need to shorten them, the French...
The whole long day on the way to Sukhodol passed in an eerie feeling - looking with new eyes at the old, familiar, experiencing, approaching the native corner, the old self, noticing changes, recognizing people you met. When turning to Sukhodol from the main road, a third-sized foal was running on the fallows overgrown with sergibus: the boy, standing on a rope rein with his bare foot, clung to the foal’s neck and tried to throw the other one over his back, but the foal, not giving up, ran and shook him. And Natasha was excitedly excited, recognizing Fomka Pantyukhin in the boy. I met a hundred-year-old Nazarushka, sitting in an empty cart no longer like a man, but like a woman, with his legs straight outstretched, with his shoulders tensely, high and weakly raised, with colorless, pitifully sad eyes, so thin that “there’s nothing to put in the coffin,” without a hat and in a long, shabby shirt, gray with ash, from constantly lying in the stove. And again my heart shuddered - I remembered how three years ago the kindest and most carefree Arkady Petrovich wanted to flog this Nazarushka, who was caught in the garden with a radish tail and was crying among the servants who surrounded him, barely alive from fear, and shouting with laughter:
- No, grandfather, don’t worry: it looks like you’ll have to take off your diapers! You won't miss it!
And how her heart began to beat when she saw the pasture, the row of huts - and the estate: the garden, the high roof of the house, the back walls of the people's quarters, barns, stables. A yellow rye field full of cornflowers came close to these walls, to the weeds, to the Tatars; Someone's white calf with brown spots was drowning among the oats, standing in them, eating the brushes. Everything around was peaceful, simple, ordinary - everything became more unusual, more and more alarming only in her mind, which became completely clouded when the cart rolled rapidly across the wide yard, white with sleeping greyhounds, like a churchyard stones, when, for the first time after a two-year stay in the hut, , she entered the cool house, smelling so familiarly of wax candles, linden blossoms, the pantry, Arkady Petrovich’s Cossack saddle lying on a bench in the hallway, empty quail cages hanging above the window - and timidly glanced at Mercury, transferred from grandfather’s chambers to hallway corner...
The gloomy hall was still cheerfully illuminated by the sun shining from the garden through the small windows. The chicken, who had come into the house for some unknown reason, squeaked forlornly as it wandered around the living room. The linden blossom was drying and fragrant on the hot, bright window sills... It seemed that everything old that surrounded her had become younger, as always happens in houses after a deceased person. In everything, in everything - and especially in the smell of flowers - a part of her own soul, her childhood, adolescence, first love was felt. And I felt sorry for those who grew up, died, changed - myself, the young lady. Her peers and peers have grown up. Many old men and women, who shook their heads from decrepitude and sometimes stupidly looked out from human thresholds at the world of God, disappeared forever from this world. Daria Ustinovna disappeared. Grandfather, who was so childishly afraid of death, who thought that death would take possession of him slowly, preparing him for the terrible hour, and so unexpectedly, with lightning speed, was mowed down by its scythe, disappeared. And I couldn’t believe that he was gone, that it was he who had decayed under the grave mound near the church in the village of Cherkizov. I couldn’t believe that this black, thin, pointed-nosed woman, now indifferent, now furious, now anxiously chatty and frank with her as with an equal, now tearing out her hair, was young lady Tonechka. It was not clear why some Klavdia Markovna, small, loud, with a black mustache, was in charge of the house... Once Natasha timidly looked into her bedroom, saw the fateful mirror in a silver frame - and all her old fears came sweetly to her heart, joy, tenderness, the expectation of shame and happiness, the smell of dewy burdocks at the evening dawn... But she hid all her feelings, all her thoughts, suppressed them within herself. Old, old Sukhodolsk blood flowed in her! She ate too unleavened bread from the loam that surrounded Sukhodol. She drank too fresh water from the ponds that her grandfathers dug in the bed of a dried-up river. The exhausting everyday life did not frighten her - it was an unusual fright. Even death was not scary; but the dreams, the darkness of the night, the storm, the thunder and the fire made me tremble. Like a child under her heart, she carried a vague expectation of some inevitable troubles...
This waiting was aging her. And she tirelessly convinced herself that her youth was past, and looked for evidence of this in everything. And less than a year had passed since her arrival in Sukhodol, no trace remained of that young feeling with which she crossed the threshold of the Sukhodol house.
Claudia Markovna gave birth. Fedosya the bird-keeper was promoted to nanny - and Fedosya, a still young woman, put on a dark old woman’s dress and became humble and fearful of God. He still barely opened his milky, senseless eyes, let out bubbles of saliva, fell helplessly forward, overcome by the weight of his own head, and the new Khrushchev screamed fiercely. And they were already calling him the barchuk—old, old lamentations were already heard from the nursery:
- There he is, there he is, the old man with the bag... Old man, old man! Don't come to us, we won't give you the barchuk, he won't scream...
And Natasha imitated Fedosya, considering herself also a nanny - a nanny and friend of a sick young lady. In winter, Olga Kirillovna died - and she begged to go with the old women who lived out their lives in the commons to the funeral, ate kutya there, which disgusted her with its insipid and cloying taste, and when she returned to Sukhodol, she told with emotion that the lady was lying in honor just like alive,” although even the old women did not dare to look at the coffin with this monstrous body.
And in the spring they brought to the young lady a sorcerer from the village of Chermashny, the famous Klim Erokhin, a handsome, rich man of one palace, with a large gray beard, with gray curls combed into a straight row, a very efficient owner and very intelligent, usually simple in his speeches, but transformed into a sorcerer near sick. His clothes were extremely strong and neat - an iron-colored homespun coat, a red belt, and boots. His little eyes were cunning and sharp-sighted; he earnestly searched for an image with them; carefully, slightly bending his handsome figure, he entered the house and busily began a conversation. He first talked about bread, about rain and drought, then he drank tea for a long time, carefully, then he crossed himself again, and after all this, immediately changing his tone, he asked about the sick person.
“Dawn... it’s getting dark... it’s time,” he said mysteriously.
The young lady was struck by a fever, she was ready to roll on the floor in convulsions when, sitting in the bedroom at dusk, she expected Klim to appear on the threshold. Natalya, who stood next to her, was engulfed in horror from head to toe. The whole house fell silent - even the lady filled her room with girls and spoke in a whisper. No one dared to light a single fire, or raise a single voice. The cheerful Soloshka, who was on duty in the corridor - in case of a call or orders from Klim - had trouble in her eyes and her heart was pounding in her throat. And so he walked past her, untying as he went a handkerchief with some kind of witchcraft bones. Then his loud, unusual voice was heard from the bedroom in the deathly silence:
- Get up, servant of God!
Then his gray head appeared from behind the door.
“The board,” he threw lifelessly.
And they placed the young lady on a board laid on the floor, her eyes rolling out of her head in horror, as cold as a dead man. It was already so dark that Natalya could barely make out Klim’s face. And suddenly he began in a strange, distant voice:
- Filat will come up... He will open the windows... He will open the doors... He will click and say: melancholy, melancholy!
- Melancholy, melancholy! - he exclaimed with sudden strength and menacing authority. - You go, melancholy, into the dark forests - there are your meats! “On the sea, on the okiyan,” he muttered in a dull, ominous patter, “on the sea, on the okiyan, on the island of Buyan, there lies a twig, with a gray ruin on it...
And Natalya felt that there were no and could not be more terrible words than these, immediately transporting her entire soul somewhere to the edge of a wild, fabulous, primitive, rough world. And it was impossible not to believe in their power, just as Klim himself, who sometimes performed miracles on those possessed by illness, could not help but believe in it - the same Klim who spoke so simply and modestly, sitting in the hallway after magic, wiping his sweaty forehead with a handkerchief and starting to drink tea again:
- Well, now there are still two dawns left... Perhaps, God willing, it will feel a little better... Did you sow buckwheat this year, madam? Good, they say, but buckwheat! Very good!
In the summer they were waiting for owners from Crimea. But Arkady Petrovich sent an “insurance” letter with a new demand for money and the news that they could not return before the beginning of autumn - due to Pyotr Petrovich’s small wound, which required a long rest. They sent to the prophetess Danilovna in Cherkizovo to ask if the illness would end well. Danilovna danced and snapped her fingers, which, of course, meant: safely. And the lady calmed down. But the young lady and Natalya had no time for them. The young lady felt better at first. But from the end of Petrovka it began again: again the melancholy and such fear of thunderstorms, fires and something else that she was harboring, that she had no time for her brothers. Natalya had no time for them either. At every prayer, she remembered Pyotr Petrovich for his health, as later throughout her life, until the grave, she remembered him for his repose. But the young lady was already closest to her. And the young lady infected her more and more with her fears, expectations of troubles - and with what she kept secret.
The summer was hot, dusty, windy, with daily thunderstorms. Dark, disturbing rumors were circulating among the people - about some new war, about some kind of riots and fires. Some said that all the men were about to go free, others that, on the contrary, in the fall they would force all the men to become soldiers. And, as usual, tramps, fools, and monks appeared in countless numbers. And the young lady almost got into a fight with the young lady because of them, giving them bread and eggs. Dronya came, long, red, and excessively ragged. He was just a drunkard, but he played the blessed one. He walked so thoughtfully through the yard straight towards the house that he hit his head on the wall and jumped back with a joyful face.
- My little birds! - he screamed in falsetto, jumping, breaking his whole body and right hand, making it like a sun shield. - My little birds flew, flew across the sky!
And Natalya, imitating the women, looked at him as one should look at God's people: stupid and pitiful. And the young lady rushed to the window and screamed with tears, in a pitiful voice:
- God's servant Dronie, pray to God for me, a sinner!
And at this cry, Natasha’s eyes stopped with terrible assumptions.
Timosha Klichinsky walked from the village of Klitchin: small, effeminately fat, with large breasts, with the face of a slanted baby, stupefied and suffocating from being overweight, yellow-haired, wearing a white calico shirt and short calico porticoes. Hastily, shallowly, and on his toes, he stepped with his small, watery feet, approaching the porch, and his narrow eyes looked as if he had jumped out of the water or had escaped from imminent death.
- Damn! - he muttered, out of breath. - Damn...
They reassured him, fed him, and expected something from him. But he was silent, sniffling and slurping greedily. And having started, he again threw the bag behind his back and anxiously looked for his long stick.
- When will you come again, Timosha? - the young lady shouted to him.
And he also responded with a shout, an absurdly high alto, for some reason distorting the young lady’s middle name:
- Oh Saint, Lukyanovna!
And the young lady screamed pitifully after him:
- God's servant! Pray to God for me, a sinner, Mary of Egypt!
Every day news came from everywhere about troubles - about thunderstorms and fires. And the ancient fear of fire grew in Sukhodol. As soon as the sandy-yellow sea of ​​ripening grain began to fade under a cloud setting from behind the estate, as soon as the first whirlwind rose across the pasture and distant thunder rolled heavily, the women rushed to carry the dark tablets of icons to the threshold, to prepare pots of milk, which, as they know, would sooner All the fire is pacified. And in the estate, scissors flew into the nettles, a terrible treasured towel was taken out, the windows were covered, wax candles were lit with trembling hands... Either she was pretending or she was actually infected with fear. Previously, she said that a thunderstorm was a “natural phenomenon.” Now she, too, crossed herself and closed her eyes, screamed at the lightning, and in order to increase both her fear and the fear of those around her, she kept talking about some extraordinary thunderstorm that broke out in 1771 in Tyrol and immediately killed one hundred and eleven people. And the listeners picked up - they hurried to tell their stories: either about a willow burned to the ground by lightning on the main road, or about a woman who was knocked down by thunder the other day in Cherkizovo, or about some troika, so stunned on the way that she all fell to her knees. .. Finally, a certain Yushka, a “guilty monk,” as he called himself, became involved in these zeal.

Yushka was a man by birth. But he never lifted a finger, but lived wherever God would send, paying for bread and salt with stories about his complete idleness and his “wrongdoing.” - “I’m a man, brother, but I’m smart and I look like a hunchback,” he said. “Why should I work!”
Indeed, he looked like a hunchback - caustic and intelligent, had no facial hair, kept his shoulders raised, due to rickets of his chest, bit his nails, his fingers, with which he constantly threw back his long red-bronze hair, were thin and strong. Plowing seemed “indecent and boring” to him. So he went to the Kyiv Lavra, “grew up there” - and was expelled “for misconduct.” Then, realizing that pretending to be a wanderer in holy places, a person saving the soul, is old, and may turn out to be unprofitable, he tried to pretend differently: without taking off his cassock, he began to openly brag about his idleness and lust, smoke and drink as much as he wanted, - he never got drunk - to mock the Lavra and explain exactly why he was expelled from there, through the most obscene gestures and body movements.
“Well, it’s known,” he told the men, winking, “it’s known that now, God’s servant, I’m going to get hit in the neck for this.” I rolled home, to Rus'... I won’t be lost, they say!
And he definitely didn’t disappear: Rus' accepted him, a shameless sinner, with no less cordiality than those who save souls: they fed him, gave him water, let him spend the night, listened to him with delight.
- So you swore off work forever? - the men asked, their eyes shining in anticipation of caustic frankness.
- The devil will make me work now! - Yushka responded. - Spoiled, brother! I am more furious than the Lavra goat. These same girls - I don’t need women for nothing! - They are afraid of me to death, but they love me. Oh well! I myself - no matter what: I’m not good with feathers, but I’m well-built!
Arriving at the Sukhodol estate, he, like an experienced man, directly entered the house, into the hallway. Natasha was sitting there on a bench, singing: “I’m chalky, young, Senyushki, I found myself a Sahara…” Seeing him, she jumped up in horror.
- Yes, someone? - she shouted.
“A man,” answered Yushka, quickly looking her up and down. - Report to the lady.
-- Who is this? - the lady also shouted from the hall.
But Yushka calmed her down in one minute: he said that he was a former monk, and not at all a runaway soldier, as she probably thought, that he was returning to his homeland - and asked to search him, and then allow him to spend the night and rest a little. And he so impressed the lady with his directness that the very next day he could move into the footman’s room and become completely his own person in the house. There were thunderstorms, and he tirelessly amused the housewives with stories, came up with the idea of ​​boarding up the dormer windows to protect the roof from lightning, ran out onto the porch during the most terrible blows to show how not scary they were, and helped the girls set up the samovars. The girls looked askance at him, feeling his quick, lustful glances, but laughed at his jokes, and Natasha, whom he had stopped more than once in the dark corridor with a quick whisper: “I fell in love with you, girl!” - I didn’t dare raise my eyes to him. He was both disgusting to her with the smell of shag that permeated his entire cassock, and terrible, terrible.
She already knew exactly what would happen. She was sleeping alone, in the corridor, near the door to the young lady’s bedroom, and Yushka had already cut her off: “I’ll come. Even if you kill me, I’ll come. If you scream, I’ll burn you to the ground.” But what deprived her of strength most of all was the consciousness that something inevitable was happening, that the fulfillment of her terrible dream was near - in Soshki, about the goat - that, apparently, it was destined for her to die along with the young lady. Everyone now understood: at night the devil himself moves into the house. Everyone understood what, in addition to thunderstorms and fires, drove the young lady crazy, what made her moan sweetly and wildly in her sleep, and then jump up with such terrible screams, compared with the most deafening thunderclaps. She screamed: “The serpent of Eden and Jerusalem is strangling me!” And who is this serpent, if not the devil, the same goat that comes in to women and girls at night? And is there anything in the world more terrible than his comings in the dark, on stormy nights with silent rolls of thunder and reflections of lightning on black icons? That passion, that lust with which the rogue whispered to Natasha was also inhuman: how could one resist it? Thinking about her fateful, inevitable hour / sitting at night on the floor in the corridor, on her blanket, and with a beating heart peering into the darkness, listening to every slightest crack and rustle in the sleeping house, she already felt the first attacks of that serious illness that had tormented her for a long time subsequently: an itching suddenly arose in her foot, a sharp, prickly spasm passed through it, bending, hooking all her fingers to the sole - and ran, savagely, voluptuously twisting the veins, along her legs, throughout her whole body, right up to her throat, until that moment , when I wanted to scream even more furiously, even sweeter and more painfully than the young lady screamed...
And the inevitable happened. Yushka came - just on the terrible night of the end of summer, on the night under Ilya the Bestower, the ancient Flamethrower. There was no thunder that night, and Natasha had no sleep. She dozed off - and suddenly, as if from a jolt, she woke up. It was the darkest time - she realized this with her madly pounding heart. She jumped up, looked to one end of the corridor, to the other: from all sides the silent sky, full of fire and mysteries, flashed, ignited, trembled and blinded with golden and pale blue flashes. Every minute the hallway became as bright as day. She ran and stopped dead in her tracks: the aspen logs that had been lying in the yard outside the window for a long time were dazzlingly white in the flashes. She poked her head into the hall: there was one window up, the steady noise of the garden could be heard, it was darker, but the fire sparkled all the brighter behind all the glass, everything was filled with darkness, but immediately shuddered again, lit up here and there, and flickered grew, trembled and shone through the huge, sometimes golden, sometimes white-violet sky, the whole garden with its lacy tops, ghosts of pale green birches and poplars.
“At sea, on Okiyan, on the island of Buyan...” she whispered, rushing back and feeling that she was completely ruining herself with witchcraft spells. “There lies a piece of junk, a gray piece of rubble...
And as soon as she said these primitively menacing words, she saw, turning around, Yushka, with his shoulders raised, standing two steps away from her. His face lit up with lightning - pale, with black circles in his eyes. Silently he ran up to her and quickly grabbed her long arms by the waist - and, squeezing, in one fell swoop he threw him first onto his knees, then onto his back onto the cold floor of the hallway...
Yushka came to her the next night. He walked for many more nights - and she, losing consciousness from horror and disgust, obediently surrendered to him: and she did not dare to think about resisting or asking for protection from the gentlemen, from the servants, just as the young lady did not dare to resist the devil who enjoyed her at night , as they say, even the grandmother herself, a domineering beauty, did not dare to resist her yard Weaver, a desperate scoundrel and thief, who was eventually exiled to Siberia, to settle... Natasha finally got bored with Yushka, and Sukhodol got bored - and he disappeared just as suddenly as suddenly he had appeared.
A month after that, she felt like a mother. And in September, the next day after the young gentlemen returned from the war, the Sukhodolsky house caught fire and burned terribly for a long time: her second dream also came true. It caught fire at dusk, in pouring rain, from lightning, from a golden ball that, as Soloshka said, jumped out of the stove in grandfather’s bedroom and rushed, bouncing, through all the rooms. And Natalya, who, having seen the smoke and fire, ran as fast as she could from the bathhouse - from the bathhouse, where she spent whole days and nights in tears - later said that she came across someone in the garden dressed in red a zhupan and a tall Cossack hat with a braid: he, too, ran as fast as he could through the wet bushes and burdocks... Whether all this happened or was just an illusion, Natalya could not vouch for. What is certain is that the horror that struck her freed her from her unborn child.
And since this autumn it has faded. Her life fell into that everyday rut, from which she never emerged until the very end. Aunt Tonya was taken to the saint’s relics in Voronezh. After that, the devil no longer dared to approach her; and she calmed down, began to live like everyone else - the disorder of her mind and soul was reflected only in the brilliance of her wild eyes, in extreme sloppiness, in frantic irritability and melancholy in bad weather. Natalya was with her at the relics - and on this trip she also found peace, a resolution to everything from which there seemed to be no way out. What a thrill the thought of meeting Pyotr Petrovich brought her into! No matter how much she prepared for it, she was unable to imagine it calmly. And Yushka, her shame, her death! But the very uniqueness of this death, the unusual depth of her suffering, the fatality that was in her misfortune - it was not for nothing that the horror of the fire almost coincided with it! - and the pilgrimage to the saint gave her the right to simply and calmly look into the eyes not only of everyone around her, but even of Pyotr Petrovich: God himself marked them and the young lady with his destructive finger - why should they be afraid of people! As a blueberry, a humble and simple servant of all, light and pure, as if after the dying communion, she entered the Sukhodolsky house, returning from Voronezh, she boldly approached the hand of Pyotr Petrovich. And only for a moment did her heart tremble, young, tenderly, like a girl, when she touched his small dark hand with a turquoise ring with her lips.
It became everyday life in Sukhodol. Certain rumors about freedom came - and even caused alarm in both the household and the village: something will happen ahead, isn’t it worse? It's easy to say - start living in a new way! The gentlemen also had to live in a new way, but they didn’t know how to live in the old way. The death of grandfather, then the war, a comet that terrified the whole country, then a fire, then rumors about freedom - all this quickly changed the faces and souls of the gentlemen, deprived them of youth, carelessness, their former irascibility and easygoing nature, and gave them anger, boredom, severe pickiness towards each other: “troubles” began, as my father said, it came to the Tatars at the table... Need began to remind us of the urgent need to somehow fix things that had been completely ruined by the Crimea, the fire, and debts. But on the farm, the brothers only got in each other’s way. One was absurdly greedy, strict and suspicious, the other was absurdly generous, kind and trusting. Having come to some understanding, they decided on an enterprise that was supposed to bring in a lot of income: they mortgaged the estate and bought about three hundred rundown horses - they collected them from almost the entire district with the help of some Ilya Samsonov, a gypsy. They wanted to straighten the horses over the winter and sell them off with a profit in the spring. But, having destroyed great amount flour and straw, the horses, almost all, one after another, for some reason died by spring...
And the discord between the brothers grew. Sometimes it got to the point where they grabbed knives and guns. And it is unknown how all this would have ended if a new misfortune had not fallen on Sukhodol. In the winter, the fourth year after his return from the Crimea, Pyotr Petrovich once went to Lunevo, where he had a mistress. He lived on the farm for two days, drank there all the time, got drunk, and went home. It was very snowy; a pair of horses were harnessed to the sledge, covered with a carpet. Pyotr Petrovich ordered to unfasten the harness, a young, hot horse, which was sinking up to its belly in loose snow, and tie it to the sledge from behind, and he himself lay down, as if with his head towards it, to sleep. Foggy, gray twilight was setting in. And, falling asleep, Pyotr Petrovich shouted to Yevsey Bodula, whom he often took with him instead of Vaska the Cossack’s coachman, fearing that Vaska would kill him, who had greatly embittered the servants against him by beating him, shouted: “Get off!” - and kicked Yevsey in the back. And the strong bay root, already wet, smoking and quivering with his spleen, carried them along the heavy snowy road, into the foggy turbidity of a remote field, towards the ever thickening, gloomy winter night... And at midnight, when everyone in Sukhodol was already fast asleep, someone quickly and alarmingly knocked on the hallway window where Natalya had spent the night. She jumped up from the bench and ran barefoot onto the porch. Horses, sledges, and Yevsey standing with a whip in his hands were dimly visible at the porch.
“Trouble, girl, trouble,” he muttered dully, strangely, as in a dream, “the master’s horse was killed... by the harness... It came running, became haggard, and – with its hoof... It crushed its whole face.” He had already begun to grow cold... Not me, not me, that’s Christ, not me!
Silently leaving the porch, sinking her bare feet in the snow, Natalya walked up to the sledge, crossed herself, fell to her knees, grabbed her icy, bloody head, began kissing it and screaming at the whole estate with a wildly joyful cry, choking with sobs and laughter...

When we happened to take a break from the cities in the quiet and impoverished wilderness of Sukhodol, Natalya told the story of her lost life again and again. And sometimes her eyes darkened, stopped, her voice turned into a stern, orderly half-whisper. And I kept remembering the crude image of the saint that hung in the corner of the servant’s room of our old house. Beheaded, the saint came to his fellow citizens, bringing his dead head in his arms - as evidence of his story...
The few tangible traces of the past that we once found in Sukhodol were already disappearing. Our fathers and grandfathers did not leave us any portraits, letters, or even simple utensils for everyday use. And what was there perished in the fire. For a long time there stood in the hallway a chest, covered in shreds of woody and bald sealskin, with which it was lined almost a hundred years ago - an grandfather's chest with drawers made of Karelian birch, filled with charred French vocables and church books, completely covered with wax. . Then he disappeared too. The heavy furniture that stood in the hall and living room also broke and disappeared... The house became dilapidated and sank more and more. All those long years that passed over him since the last events told here were for him years of slow dying... And his past became more and more legendary.
The dry valleys grew up amid a life that was deaf, gloomy, but still complex, with a semblance of a stable life and prosperity. Judging by the inertia of this way of life, judging by the commitment of the Sukhodol residents to it, one could think that there would be no end to it. But they, the descendants of the steppe nomads, were pliable, weak, “ready for punishment”! And just as under a plow walking across a field, one after another the mounds above the underground passages and burrows of hamsters disappear without a trace, so the Sukhodol nests also disappeared without a trace and quickly before our eyes. And their inhabitants died, fled, those who somehow survived, somehow whiled away the rest of their days. And we no longer found everyday life, not life, but only memories of them, the semi-wild simplicity of existence. Over the years, we visited our steppe region less and less. And he became more and more alien to us, we felt more and more weakly the connection with the life and class from which we came. Many of our fellow tribesmen, like us, are noble and ancient in origin. Our names are remembered in chronicles; our ancestors were captains, and governors, and “eminent men,” close associates, even relatives of kings. And if they were called knights, if we were born in the west, how firmly we would speak about them, how long we would hold out! Could a descendant of the knights say that in half a century an entire class has almost disappeared from the face of the earth, that so many of us have degenerated, gone crazy, committed suicide, drunk ourselves, sank and simply got lost somewhere! Could he admit, as I admit, that we do not have even the slightest accurate idea of ​​the life of not only our ancestors, but also our great-grandfathers, that every day it becomes more and more difficult for us to imagine even what happened half a century ago!
The place where the Lunev estate stood had long been plowed up and sown, just as the land on the sites of many other estates had been plowed and sown. Sukhodol was still holding on somehow. But, having cut down the last birch trees in the garden, selling almost all the arable land piecemeal, even its owner, the son of Pyotr Petrovich, left it - he went into service, became a conductor on the railway. And they lived hard last years old inhabitants
Sukhodola - Klavdia Markovna, Aunt Tonya, Natalya. Spring gave way to summer, summer to autumn, autumn to winter... They lost count of these changes. They lived with memories, dreams, quarrels, worries about daily food. In the summer, those places where the estate had previously been widely spread out were drowned in peasant rustles: the house surrounded by them became visible in the distance. The bush, the remnant of the garden, had become so wild that the quails were crowing right next to the balcony. What a summer! "We're in paradise in the summer!" - said the old women. The rainy autumns and snowy winters in Sukhodol were long and difficult. It was cold and hungry in the empty, crumbling house. Blizzards swept through it, and the frosty Sarmatian wind blew through it. And drowning was very rare. In the evenings, a tin lamp shone dimly from the windows, from the old lady’s room, the only living room. The lady, wearing glasses, a short fur coat and felt boots, was knitting a stocking, bending towards her. Natalya was dozing on a cold couch. And the young lady, looking like a Siberian shaman, sat in her hut and smoked a pipe. When my aunt was not in a quarrel with Klavdia Markovna, Klavdia Markovna would put her light bulb not on the table, but on the windowsill. And Aunt Tonya sat in a strange, weak half-light that reached from the house into the interior of her icy hut, filled with fragments of old furniture, littered with shards of broken dishes, and cluttered with a piano that had fallen on its side. This hut was so icy that the chickens, on whose care all Aunt Tonya’s efforts were directed, froze their paws while spending the night on these shards and debris...
And now the Sukhodol estate is completely empty. Everyone mentioned in this chronicle died, all their neighbors, all their peers. And sometimes you think: come on, did they even live in the world?
Only in churchyards do you feel that it was like this; you even feel an eerie closeness to them. But even for this you need to make an effort, sit and think about your own grave - if only you find it. It’s a shame to say, but it’s impossible to hide: we don’t know the graves of our grandfather, grandmother, and Pyotr Petrovich. We only know that their place is near the altar of an old church in the village of Cherkizovo. You can’t get there in winter: there are waist-deep snowdrifts, from which sparse crosses and the tops of bare bushes and twigs stick out. On a summer day, you drive along a hot, quiet and empty village street, tie your horse near the church fence, behind which stand a dark green wall, baking in the heat. Behind the folded gate, behind the white church with a rusty dome, there is a whole grove of low branchy elms, ash trees, limas, shade and coolness everywhere. You wander for a long time through bushes, mounds and pits, covered with thin cemetery grass, over stone slabs that have almost sunk into the ground, porous from the rain, overgrown with black crumbly moss... Here are two or three iron monuments. But whose are they? They became so green and golden that you can no longer read the inscriptions on them. Under what mounds are the bones of your grandmother and grandfather? But God knows! You only know one thing: it’s somewhere here, close. And you sit and think, trying to imagine the forgotten Khrushchevs. And sometimes their time begins to seem so infinitely distant, sometimes so close. Then you say to yourself:
- It’s not difficult, it’s not difficult to imagine. You just have to remember that this lopsided gilded cross in the blue summer sky was the same with them... that the rye was also turning yellow and ripening in the fields, empty and sultry, and here there was shadow, coolness, bushes... and in Also wandering and grazing in these bushes was an old white nag just like this one with shabby greenish withers and pink broken hooves.

Vasilyevskoe. 1911