V. P. Astafiev

Photo without me
(abbreviated)

In the dead of winter, in quiet, sleepy times, our school was agitated by an unheard-of important event.

A photographer came from the city on a cart!

And not just because he came, on business - he came to take pictures.

And to photograph not the old men and women, not the village people, hungry to be immortalized, but us. Ovsyanskaya school students.

The photographer arrived after noon, and on this occasion the school was interrupted. The teacher and the teacher - husband and wife - began to think about where to put the photographer for the night.

They themselves lived in one half of a decrepit little house left over from the settlers 1 , and they had a little howler lad. My grandmother, secretly from her parents, at the tearful request of Aunt Avdotya, who was a housewife with our teachers, spoke three times to the navel of the child, but he still yelled all night long and, as knowledgeable people claimed, bellowed the navel into an onion size.

1 They themselves lived in one half of a decrepit house left over from the settlers... - In the late 1920s - early 1930s. in the struggle against the so-called kulaks by the authorities from their native places, the peasants were forcibly resettled (exiled) to other territories.

In the second half of the house there was an office of the rafting section, where a pot-bellied telephone hung, and during the day it was impossible to shout at it, and at night it called so that the pipe on the roof crumbled, and it was possible to talk on this telephone. The floating bosses and all the people, drunk or just wandering into the office, shouted and expressed themselves into the phone.

It was inappropriate for teachers to keep such a person as a photographer. They decided to put him in a visiting house, but Aunt Avdotya intervened. She called the teacher back to the kut and with pressure, albeit embarrassing, undertook to convince him:

They can't go there. The hut will be full of coachmen. They will conceive of drinking, onions, cabbages and potatoes will turn up and begin to behave uncivilized at night. - Aunt Avdotya considered all these arguments unconvincing and added: - Lice will be released ...

What to do?

I'm chichas! I instantly! - Aunt Avdotya threw on a half-shawl and rolled out into the street. The photographer was attached for the night at the foreman of the alloy office. There lived in our village a literate, businesslike, respected person, Ilya Ivanovich Chekhov. He came from the exiles. The exiles were either his grandfather or his father. He himself had long ago married our village young lady, he was all godfather, friend and adviser in terms of contracts for rafting, logging and lime burning. For a photographer, of course, in Chekhov's house is the most suitable place. There he will be occupied with smart conversation, and city vodka, if necessary, will be treated, and a book will be taken out of the closet to read.

The teacher breathed a sigh of relief. The students sighed. The village sighed - everyone was worried. Everyone wanted to please the photographer, so that he would appreciate the care for him and take pictures of the guys as expected, take good pictures.

Throughout the long winter evening, schoolchildren walked around the village, wondering who would sit where, who would wear what, and what the routine would be. The solution to the question of routines was not in our favor with Sanka. Diligent students will sit in front, middle students in the middle, bad students in the back - it was decided so. Neither in that winter, nor in all subsequent ones, Sanka and I did not surprise the world with diligence and behavior, it was difficult for us to count on the middle. To be behind us, where you can’t make out who is filmed? Are you or are you not? We got into a fight to prove by battle that we are lost people ... But the guys drove us out of their company, they didn’t even contact us to fight. Then Sanka and I went to the ridge and began to ride from such a cliff, from which no reasonable person would ever ride. Ukharsky whooping, swearing, we raced not just like that, but to death, smashed the heads of the sled on the stones, knocked our knees out, fell out, scooped full wire rods in the snow.

Grandmother, already in the dark, found Sanka and me on the slope, whipping both of us with a rod.

At night, retribution for a desperate revelry came - my legs ached. They always ached from “rematism,” as my grandmother called the disease, which I allegedly inherited from my deceased mother. But as soon as I got cold feet, scooped snow into the rolled wire - immediately the nud in yoga turned into unbearable pain.

I endured for a long time, so as not to howl, for a very long time. He scattered his clothes, pressed his legs, evenly twisted at the joints, to the hot bricks of the Russian stove, then rubbed his palms dry as a torch, crispy joints, thrust his legs into the warm sleeve of a sheepskin coat - nothing helped.

And I howled. At first quietly, like a puppy, then in a full voice.

So I knew! So I knew! - woke up and grumbled grandmother. “Wouldn’t I have stung you in the soul and in the liver, didn’t say: “Don’t be stunned, don’t be studed!” she raised her voice. - So he's smarter than everyone! Will he listen to his grandmother? Does he speak kind words? Bend over now! Bend over, it's too bad! Pray better! Be quiet! - Grandma got up from the bed, sat down, clutching her lower back. Her own pain has a calming effect on her. - And I'm going to be killed...

Russian oven. The story is framed by photography of household items and interiors of a Russian peasant hut. Photographer A.V. Opolovnikov. 1960s-1970s

She lit the lamp, took it with her to the hut, and there she rattled dishes, bottles, jars, flasks - she was looking for the right medicine. Intimidated by her voice and distracted by expectations, I fell into a weary slumber.

Where are you here?

Here-e-e-xia, - I responded as plaintively as possible and stopped moving.

Here-e-esya! - Grandmother mimicked and, groping for me in the dark, first of all gave me a crack. Then she rubbed my legs with ammonia for a long time. She rubbed alcohol thoroughly, dry, and kept making noise: - Didn't I tell you? Didn't I warn you? - And she rubbed it with one hand, and with the other she gave in and gave in: - Ek tortured him! Eck hooked him! He turned blue, as if he was sitting on ice, and not on foam ...

I didn’t goog, didn’t snap, didn’t argue with my grandmother - she treats me.

Exhausted, the doctor’s wife stopped talking, plugged the long faceted bottle, leaned it against the chimney, wrapped my legs in an old downy shawl, as if she had stuck it with warm dough, and even put a short fur coat on top and wiped the tears from my face with an effervescent palm from alcohol.

Sleep, little bird, the Lord is with you and Andels at the head.

At the same time, my grandmother rubbed her lower back and her arms and legs with smelly alcohol, sank down on a creaky wooden bed, muttered a prayer to the Most Holy Theotokos, guarding sleep, peace and prosperity in the house. Halfway through the prayer, she interrupted, listening to me fall asleep, and somewhere, through my clinging ear, you can hear:

And what is attached to the child? His shoes are repaired, human sight ...

I didn't sleep that night. Neither grandmother's prayer, nor ammonia, nor the usual shawl, especially affectionate, healing because mother's, did not bring relief. I fought and yelled at the whole house. My grandmother no longer beat me, but, having tried all her medicines, she began to cry, attacked grandfather:

Sauna stove

You'll sleep, you old oder!

I don't sleep, I don't sleep. What to do?

Flood the bath!

Middle of the night?

Middle of the night. What a baron! Robin something! Grandmother covered herself with her hands. - Yes, what an attack such, but why does she break the orphan, like a thin waist-and-inca ... Will you grunt for a long time, fat-thinker? What are you up to? Are you missing yesterday? There are your gloves. There's your hat!

In the morning, my grandmother took me to the bathhouse - I could no longer walk on my own. For a long time my grandmother rubbed my legs with a steamed birch broom, warmed them over the steam from red-hot stones, hovered all over me through a rag, dipping the broom in bread kvass, and in conclusion, again rubbed it with ammonia. At home, they gave me a spoonful of nasty vodka, infused with a wrestler to warm up the insides, and cobbled lingonberries. After all this, they gave me milk boiled with poppy heads to drink. I could no longer sit or stand, I was knocked off my feet, and I slept until noon.

He can't, he can't... I interpret them in Russian! - said the grandmother. - I prepared a shirt for him, and dried my coat, fixed everything, whether it was bad or poor, I fixed it. And he lay down...

Grandma Katerina, the car, the apparatus were instructed. The teacher sent me. Grandma Katerina! .. - Sanka insisted.

It can't, I say... Wait a minute, it's you, Zhigan, who lured him into a ridge! - it dawned on my grandmother - I lured, but now? ..

Grandma Katherine...

I rolled off the stove with the intention of showing my grandmother that I can do anything, that there are no barriers for me, but my thin legs gave way, as if they were not mine. I plopped down near the bench on the floor. Grandma and Sanka are right there.

I'll go anyway! I shouted at my grandmother. - Give me the shirt! Pants come on! I'll go anyway!

Yes, where are you going? From the stove to the floor, - the grandmother shook her head and imperceptibly made a signal with her hand so that Sanka would get out.

Sanka, stop! Don't go-and-and-and! I yelled and tried to walk. My grandmother supported me and already timidly, pitifully persuaded:

Well, where are you going? Where?

I'll go-u-u! Come on shirt! Come on, hat!

My appearance plunged Sanka into dejection. He wrinkled, wrinkled, trampled, trampled, and threw off the new brown quilted jacket given to him by Uncle Levontiy on the occasion of the photograph.

OK! Sanka said decisively. - OK! he repeated even more decisively. If so, I won't go either! All! - And under the approving glance of grandmother Katerina Petrovna, he proceeded to the middle one. - Not the last day in the world we live! Sanka said solidly. And it seemed to me: not so much me as Sanka convinced himself. - We're still shooting! Nishtya-a-ak! Let's go to the city and on a horse, maybe we'll take pictures on a car. Really, grandma Katherine? - Sanka threw a fishing rod

True, Sanka, true. I myself, I can’t leave this place, I myself will take you to the city, and to Volkov, to Volkov. Do you know Volkov?

Sanka Volkov did not know. And I didn't know either.

The best photographer in town! He wants to take a portrait, even a mail port, even a horse, even a aeroplane, whatever he takes pictures of!

And the school? Will he film the school?

School something? School? He has a car, well, the apparatus is not transportable. Screwed to the floor, - despondent grandmother.

Here! And you...

What am I? What am I? But Volkov will immediately frame it.

In hell! Why do I need your frame?! I want no frame!

No frame! Want? Duck on! On the! Back off! If you fall off your stilts, don't come home! - Grandmother threw clothes into me: a shirt, a coat, a gang, mittens, wire rods - she left everything. - Get on, get on! Grandma wants bad for you! Grandmother is your enemy! She curls around him, the asp, like a weed, and he, you saw, what thanks to the grandmother! ..

Then I crawled back onto the stove and roared from bitter impotence. Where could I go if my legs don't walk?

I didn't go to school for over a week. My grandmother treated me and spoiled me, gave jams, lingonberries, cooked boiled dryers, which I loved very much. For days on end I sat on a bench, looking at the street, where I had no way to go yet, from idleness I began to spit on the glass, and my grandmother frightened me, they say, my teeth would hurt. But nothing happened to the teeth, but the legs, spit don’t spit, everything hurts, everything hurts.

A rustic window sealed up for the winter is a kind of work of art. From the window, without even entering the house, you can determine what kind of hostess lives here, what kind of character she has and what is the everyday life in the hut.

Grandmother inserted frames into the winter with sense and discreet beauty. In the upper room, between the frames, she put cotton wool with a roller and threw three or four rowan rosettes with leaves on top of the white - and that's it. No frills. In the middle and in the kuti, the grandmother put moss between the frames interspersed with lingonberries. On the moss there are several birch coals, between the coals a heap of mountain ash - and already without leaves.

Grandmother explained this quirk like this:

Moss sucks in moisture. The ember does not freeze the glass, but the mountain ash from intoxication. There is a stove, with kuti fumes.

My grandmother sometimes laughed at me, invented various gizmos, but many years later, at the writer Alexander Yashin, she read about the same thing: mountain ash from intoxication is the first remedy. Folk signs do not know borders and distances.

Grandmother's windows and neighboring windows I literally studied thoroughly, but in the words of the chairman of the Mitrokha village council.

Uncle Levonti has nothing to learn. Nothing lies between the frames, and the glass in the frames is not all intact - where the plywood is nailed, where it is stuffed with rags, in one sash a pillow has stuck out with a red belly.

In the house diagonally, at Aunt Avdotya, everything is piled between the frames: cotton wool, moss, mountain ash, and viburnum, but the main decoration there is flowers. They, these paper flowers, blue, red, white, have served their time on icons, on the corner, and now they have ended up as decoration between frames. And Aunt Avdotya also has a one-legged doll behind the frames, a noseless piggy bank dog, trinkets without handles are hung, and a horse stands without a tail and mane, with nostrils open. All these city gifts were brought to the children by Avdotya's husband, Terenty, who is now where she is - she does not even know. For two or even three years, Terenty may not appear. Then, like pedlars, they will shake him out of a bag, smart, drunk, with goodies and gifts. Then there will be noise-sharing life in the house of Aunt Avdotya. Aunt Avdotya herself, torn up by her whole life, thin, stormy, running, everything in her is in bulk - both frivolity, and kindness, and womanish quarrelsomeness.

What anguish!

He tore off a leaf from a mint flower, crushed it in his hands - the leaf stinks, like ammonia. Grandmother brews mint leaves into tea, drinks with boiled milk. There was still scarlet on the window, and two ficuses in the upper room. Grandmother guards the ficuses more than her eyes, but all the same, last winter such frosts hit that the leaves of the ficuses darkened, they became slimy, like remnants, and fell off. However, they did not die at all - the ficus root is tenacious, and new arrows from the trunk hatched. Ficuses came to life. I love to watch the flowers come to life. Almost all pots with geranium flowers, catkins, prickly roses, and bulbs are underground. The pots are either completely empty, or gray stumps stick out of them.

But as soon as a titmouse strikes the first icicle on the viburnum under the window and a thin ringing is heard in the street, the grandmother will take out an old cast-iron pot with a hole in the bottom from the underground and put it on a warm window in the kuti.

In three or four days, pale green sharp shoots will sprout from the dark uninhabited earth - and they will go, they will go hastily upwards, accumulating dark greens in themselves on the go, unfolding into long leaves, and one day a round stick will appear in the bosom of these leaves, it will quickly move a green stick in growth, ahead of the leaves that gave birth to it, swells with a pinch at the end and suddenly freezes before creating a miracle.

I always guarded that moment, that moment of the sacrament-blooming being accomplished, and I could never watch for it. At night or at dawn, hidden from the human ugly eye, the onion bloomed.

You used to get up in the morning, run still sleepy before the wind, and your grandmother's voice would stop:

Look, what a living creature we have born!

On the window, in an old cast-iron pot, near the frozen glass, above the black earth, a bright-lipped flower with a white-shimmering core hung and smiled and, as it were, said with a childishly joyful mouth: “Well, here I am! Have you waited?

A cautious hand reached out to the red gramophone to touch the flower, to believe in the near spring now, and it was scary to frighten away in the middle of winter the harbinger of warmth, the sun, the green earth that fluttered towards us.

After the bulb lit up on the window, the day arrived more noticeably, the thickly frosted windows melted, the grandmother took out the rest of the flowers from the underground, and they also arose from the darkness, reached for the light, for warmth, sprinkled the windows and our house with flowers. Meanwhile, the bulb, pointing the way to spring and flowering, rolled up gramophones, shrank, dropped dry petals on the window and remained with only flexibly falling stems covered with a chrome sheen, forgotten by everyone, condescendingly and patiently waiting for spring to awaken again with flowers and please people hopes for the coming summer.

Sharik flooded in the yard.

Grandmother stopped obeying, listened. There was a knock on the door. And since in the villages there is no habit of knocking and asking if it is possible to enter, the grandmother was alarmed and ran into the dungeon.

What kind of leshak is breaking there? .. You are welcome! Welcome! - grandmother sang in a completely different, church voice. I understood: an important guest came to us, quickly hid on the stove and from a height I saw a school teacher who swept a wire rod with a broom and took aim where to hang his hat. Grandmother took the hat and coat, ran away the guest's clothes to the upper room, because she believed that it was indecent to hang in the teacher's kuti, and invited the teacher to pass.

I hid on the stove. The teacher went to the middle room, greeted me again and asked about me.

He's getting better, he's getting better, - my grandmother answered for me, and of course she could not resist, so as not to hook me: - He’s already healthy for food, so far he’s sick for work.

The teacher smiled, looked for me with his eyes. Grandmother demanded that I get off the stove.

Fearfully and reluctantly, I went down from the stove, sat down on the oven. The teacher was sitting near the window on a chair brought by my grandmother from the upper room, and looked at me kindly.

The face of the teacher, although inconspicuous, I have not forgotten to this day. It was pale in comparison with the rustic, wind-hot, rough-hewn faces. Hairstyle under the "politics" - the hair is combed back. And so there was nothing more special, except perhaps a little sad and therefore unusually kind eyes, and ears sticking out, like those of Sanka Levontievsky. He was twenty-five years old, but he seemed to me an elderly and very respectable man.

I brought you a photograph, - the teacher said and looked around for a briefcase.

Grandmother threw up her hands, rushed into the kut - the briefcase remained there.

And here it is, the photograph, on the table.

I look. Grandma is watching. The teacher is watching. The guys and girls in the photo are like seeds in a sunflower! And faces the size of sunflower seeds, but you can recognize everyone. I run my eyes over the photograph: here is Vaska Yushkov, here is Vitka Kasyanov, here is Kolka the crest, here is Vanka Sidorov, here is Ninka Shakhmatovskaya, her brother Sanya...

In the midst of the guys, in the very middle - a teacher and a teacher. He is in a hat and coat, she is in a half-shawl. The teacher and the teacher barely noticeably smile at something. The guys did something funny. What to them? Their legs don't hurt.

Because of me, Sanka didn't get in the photo. And what did you come up with? Then he bullies me, harms me, but then he felt it. It's not visible in the photo. And I can't be seen. I keep running from face to face. No, it's not visible. Yes, and where will I come from, if I was lying on the stove and bent me "badly sick."

Nothing, nothing! the teacher reassured me. - Photographer, maybe even come.

What am I telling him? I'm interpreting the same thing... I turned away, blinking at the Russian stove, which stuck out its thick bleached ass into the middle one, my lips trembling. What should I interpret? Why interpret? I am not in this photo. And it won't!

Red corner in the hut

Grandmother tuned the samovar and entertained the teacher with conversations.

How is the boy? The bite didn't subside?

Thank you, Ekaterina Petrovna. Son is better. Late nights he sleeps better.

And thank God. And thank God. They, robots, while they grow up, oh how much you will suffer with a name! There I have how many of them, there were subchikov, but nothing, they grew up. And yours will grow...

The samovar began to sing a long, delicate song in the kuti. The conversation was about this and that. My grandmother did not ask about my success at school. The teacher did not talk about them either, he asked about his grandfather.

Self-off? He himself went to the city with firewood. Sell ​​it, get some money. What are the wealth? We live by a garden, a cow and firewood.

Do you know, Ekaterina Petrovna, what happened?

What lady?

Yesterday morning I found at my doorstep a pile of firewood, dry, firewood. And I can't figure out who dumped them.

What is there to know? There is nothing to know. Stoke - and all the cases.

Yes, it's kind of inconvenient.

What's inconvenient. Is there no firewood? No. Wait for the Monk Mitrokha to give orders? And they will bring the village Soviet - raw materials with raw materials, too, there is little joy.

Grandmother, of course, knows who dumped firewood for the teacher. And the whole village knows it. One teacher does not know and will never know.

Respect for our teacher and teacher is universal, silent. Teachers are respected for their politeness, for the fact that they greet everyone in a row, not making out either the poor or the rich, the exiles, or self-propelled vehicles. They also respect the fact that at any time of the day or night you can come to the teacher and ask to write the necessary paper. Complain about anyone: the village council, the robber husband, the mother-in-law. Uncle Levonty is a villain of villains, when he is drunk, he will beat all the dishes, Vasya weighs a lantern, and drives the children away. And as the teacher talked to him, Uncle Levonty corrected himself. It is not known what the teacher was talking about with him, only Uncle Levonty joyfully explained to everyone he met and crossed:

Well, did you remove the crap with a clean hand? And all politely, politely. You, he says, you ... Yes, if it’s human to me, am I a fool, or what? Yes, I will turn anyone and everyone's head off if such a person is hurt!

Silently, sideways, village women will seep into the teacher's hut and forget there a glass of milk, or sour cream, cottage cheese, lingonberries tuesok. The child will be looked after, treated if necessary, the teacher will be inoffensively scolded for ineptitude in everyday life with the child. When a teacher was on demolition, the women would not allow her to carry water. Once a teacher came to the school in wire rods hemmed over the edge. The women stole the wire rod - and took it to the shoemaker Zherebtsov. They set up a scale so that Zherebtsov would not take a penny from the teacher, my God, and so that by morning, by school, everything would be ready. Shoemaker Zherebtsov is a drunkard, unreliable. His wife, Toma, hid the scale and did not give it away until the wire rods were hemmed.

The teachers were ringleaders in the village club. They taught games and dances, put on funny plays and did not hesitate to represent priests and bourgeois in them; at weddings they were guests of honor, but they cursed themselves and taught the people who were intractable in a party not to captivate them with a drink.

And in what school did our teachers start working!

In a village house with carbon monoxide stoves. There were no desks, no benches, no textbooks, no notebooks, no pencils either. One primer for the entire first grade and one red pencil. The guys from the house brought stools, benches, sat in a circle, listened to the teacher, then he gave us a neatly sharpened red pencil, and we, sitting on the windowsill, wrote sticks one by one. Counting was learned on matches and sticks, hand-cut from a torch.<...>

The teacher somehow left for the city and returned with three carts. On one of them there were scales, on the other two there were boxes with all kinds of goods. A temporary stall "Utilsyryo" was built from the chopping blocks in the school yard. Schoolchildren turned the village upside down. Attics, sheds, barns were cleared of goods accumulated over the centuries - old samovars, plows, bones, rags.

Pencils, notebooks, paints like buttons glued to cardboard, transfer pictures appeared at the school. We tried sweet cocks on sticks, women got hold of needles, threads, buttons.

The teacher again and again went to the city on a village Soviet horse, procured and brought textbooks, one textbook for five. Then there was even relief - one textbook for two. Village families are large, so every house has a textbook.

Tables and benches were made by village peasants and they didn’t take a stove for them, they managed with a magarych, which, as I now guess, was put up for them by the teacher on his salary.

The teacher persuaded the photographer to come to us, and he took pictures of the children and the school. Isn't that joy! Is this a failure!

The teacher drank tea with grandma. And for the first time in my life, I sat at the same table with the teacher and tried with all my might not to get dirty, not to spill tea from the saucer. Grandmother covered the table with a festive tablecloth and set-a-a-a ... And jam, and lingonberries, and dryers, and lamps, and city gingerbread, and milk in an elegant creamer. I am very glad and pleased that the teacher drinks tea with us, talks to my grandmother without any ceremony, and we have everything, and there is no need to be ashamed in front of such a rare guest for a treat.

The teacher drank two glasses of tea. Grandmother begged to drink more, apologizing, according to a village habit, for a poor treat, but the teacher thanked her, said that he was very pleased with everything, and wished grandmother good health.

When the teacher left the house, I still could not resist and inquired about the photographer. "Will he come back soon?"

Ah, the headquarters raised you and slapped you! - grandmother used the most polite curse in the presence of the teacher.

I think soon, - the teacher answered. - Get well and come to school, otherwise you will fall behind. - He bowed to the house, to his grandmother, she trotted along, escorting him to the gate with an order to bow to his wife, as if she were not two settlements away from us, but in God knows what distant lands.

The sheck of the gate rattled. I hurried to the window. The teacher with an old briefcase walked past our front garden, turned around and waved his hand to me, they say, come to school soon, - and at the same time smiled as soon as he knew how to smile - seemingly sad and at the same time affectionate and welcoming. I followed him with my eyes to the end of our alley and looked out into the street for a long time, and for some reason I felt a pinched feeling in my soul, I wanted to cry.

Grandmother, gasping, cleared the rich food from the table and never ceased to be surprised:

And he didn't eat anything. And I drank two glasses of tea. What a man of culture! That's what diploma is doing! - And she exhorted me: - Learn, Vitka, do it well! Maybe you can become a teacher, or you can become a foreman...

That day my grandmother did not make noise at anyone, she even talked to me and Sharik in a peaceful voice, but she boasted, but she boasted! To everyone who came to us, she boasted in a row that we had a teacher, drank tea, talked with her about different things. And so he spoke, so he spoke! She showed me her school photo, lamented that I didn't get it, and promised to put it in a frame, which she would buy from the Chinese in the bazaar.

She actually bought a frame, hung the photo on the wall, but she didn’t take me to the city, because I was often sick that winter, I missed many lessons.

By spring, the notebooks exchanged for salvage were used up, the paints were stained, the pencils were shattered, and the teacher began to lead us through the forest and tell us about trees, about flowers, about grasses, about rivers and about the sky.

How much he knew! And that the rings of a tree are the years of his life, and that pine sulfur is used for rosin, and that needles are treated for nerves, and that plywood is made from birch; from conifers - he said so - not from forests, but from rocks! - they make paper so that forests retain moisture in the soil, and therefore the life of rivers.

But we also knew the forest, albeit in our own way, in a village way, but we knew what the teacher did not know, and he listened to us attentively, praised, even thanked us. We taught him to dig and eat the roots of grasshoppers, chew larch sulfur, distinguish birds and animals by their voices, and if he gets lost in the forest, how to get out of there, especially how to escape from a forest fire, how to get out of a terrible taiga fire.

One day we went to Lysaya Gora to get flowers and seedlings for the school yard. We climbed to the middle of the mountain, sat down on the stones to rest and look at the Yenisei from above, when suddenly one of the guys shouted:

Oh snake, snake!

And everyone saw a snake. She wrapped herself around a bunch of cream snowdrops and, gaping her toothy mouth, hissed angrily.

Nobody even had time to think anything, as the teacher pushed us away, grabbed a stick and began to thresh on the snake, on the snowdrops. Fragments of a stick flew up, petals of shots. The snake was seething with a key, tossed on its tail.

Don't hit over your shoulder! Don't hit over your shoulder! - the children shouted, but the teacher did not hear anything. He beat and beat the snake until it stopped moving. Then he stuck the head of the snake in the stones with the end of the stick and turned around. His hands were trembling. His nostrils and eyes widened, he was all white, his "politics" crumbled, and his hair hung like wings on his protruding ears.

We found it in the stones, dusted it off and gave him a cap.

Come on guys, get out of here.

We fell down from the mountain, the teacher followed us and looked around, ready to defend us again if the snake comes to life and chases.

Under the mountain, the teacher wandered into the river - Malaya Sliznevka, drank water from the palms of his hands, sprinkled it on his face, wiped himself with a handkerchief and asked:

Why did they shout so as not to hit the viper over the shoulder?

You can throw a snake on yourself. Oma, the infection will wrap itself around the stick! .. - the guys explained to the teacher.

Have you ever seen snakes before? - someone guessed to ask the teacher.

No, the teacher smiled guiltily. - Where I grew up, there are no reptiles. There are no such mountains, and there is no taiga.

Here's to you! We had to defend the teacher, and we?!

Years have passed, many, oh many have passed. And this is how I remember the village teacher with a slightly guilty smile, polite, shy, but always ready to rush forward and defend his students, help them in trouble, ease and improve people's lives. While working on this book, I found out that the names of our teachers were Evgeny Nikolaevich and Evgenia Nikolaevna. My compatriots assure that not only in name and patronymic, but also in face, they resembled each other. “Purely brother and sister!..” Here, I think, a grateful human memory worked, bringing together and akin to dear people, but no one in Ovsyanka can remember the names of a teacher with a teacher. By the name of the teacher, you can forget, it is important that the word "teacher" remains! And every person who dreams of becoming a teacher, let him live to such an honor as our teachers, to dissolve in the memory of the people with whom and for whom they lived, to become a particle of it and remain forever in the heart of even such negligent and disobedient people like me. and Sanka.

School photography is still alive today. She turned yellow, broke off at the corners. But I recognize all the guys on it. Many of them died in the war. The whole world knows the famous name - Siberian.

How the women fussed around the village, hastily collecting fur coats and quilted jackets from their neighbors and relatives, the children were still rather poor, very poorly dressed. But how firmly they hold the matter nailed to two sticks. Kara-kulisto is written on the matter: “Ovsyanskaya early. 1st grade school. Against the backdrop of a village house with white shutters - children: some with a dumbfounded face, some laughing, some pursing their lips, some opening their mouths, some sitting down, some standing, some lying on the snow.

I look, sometimes I smile, remembering, but I can’t laugh and even more so mock at village photographs, no matter how ridiculous they are sometimes. Let a pompous soldier or a weatherer be filmed at a coquettish bedside table, in belts, in polished boots - there are most of them and (packed up on the walls of Russian huts, because in soldiers it was only possible to “remove” on a card earlier; let my aunts and uncles show off in a plywood car, one aunt in a hat like a crow's nest, an uncle in a leather helmet sitting on the [manhole; let the Cossack, or rather my brother Kesha, sticking his head into the hole on the cloth, depicts a Cossack with gazyrs and a dagger; let people with accordions, balalaikas, guitars, with watches poking out from under the sleeves, and other objects demonstrating wealth in the house, stare from photographs.

I still don't laugh.

Village photography is an original chronicle of our people, its wall history. And it’s also not funny because the photo was taken against the background of a generic, ruined nest.