“It is time to go!”
Having seen off Yafima, the grandmother before going to the teacher, the Monastery took by hand and went before such business to tower church.
But hardly they left gate of the house of Kolchina as became interested in a strange procession: towards to them from under the mountain slowly carried on the wood sledge of not movably lying young man with a black small beard and long hair. The big, strong body was covered with wide clothes.
The wood sledge was followed by crowd of the people, and the man driving the horse went near the wood sledge, pulling reins.
– The monk was drowned! – spoke in crowd.
The counter woman, having stopped, started talking to mother of Laurels:
– Hear, he drank, zapoyny was, and young still, zdorovushchiya! His Odezhu – the cassock and a calotte – on the river were found, at the ice-hole, and in a pocket – a note and as it is harmoniously written, exactly the song: “Do not look for, speaks, me anywhere! My body in water, an odezha on the edge, and soul in paradise!”
The laurels sedately followed mother holding it by a hand and long looked back, on the wood sledge where the dead person with long lay, as at the woman, hair, with a small dark small beard.
– What is it? – he asked – why it?
But mother answered only:
– Be silent!
They approached a tower. In its first floor through narrow long windows with the color glasses which are taken away by a figured iron lattice the burning wax candles dimly shone, and at low semicircular doors there were simple people, the most part of the woman.
Lavrusha’s mother, leading him by the hand, entered the close dark room with the low arches and sparks of candles shining ahead.
– Mother! what is it? – Lavrusha asked again.
– Church! – the grandmother Anna whispered, having stroked his head.
The laurels remembered how it once happened long ago to mother in church where to it the unclear word of “verb” which was often flashing in loud and lingering reading the person with a gray-haired beard dressed in the long heavy skirt embroidered in thick gold flowers was remembered. The word it was given by a dense echo under the high top of church decorated inside with unclear pictures which the Laurels liked to consider, showering the head up and being perplexed that this sonorous word of “verb” means. At the end of long reading and lingering singing mother took it on hands, bringing bearded people in long clothes with a gold bowl and a spoon in hands. One tied up to it under a chin a big zolototkanny crimson napkin, and another, without asking consent, violently put in a mouth a spoon with bitterish yellow-red liquid. The laurels always resisted and cried during this unclear operation.
Now he remembered former troubles in church and pricked up the ears though dangerous people in painted skirts were not here. Nobody read and sang.
– Let’s go! – whispered mother and, having climbed together with it stone steps on the eminence lit with a set of thin candles, told: – Be put to god!
The laurels did not know how to do it and where there is god.
Suddenly he saw not movably sitting barefoot person similar to just seen monk, in a long shirt from gray thick matter at which is around the head with the long hair and the small small beard framing a pale, lifeless face lying on shoulders the wreath from rods with the sharp prickles stuck to the person into the head was put on.
Prickles were in blood, several drops and spots of blood stiffened on a forehead, a face, a beard and clothes of the person.
The laurels frowningly looked at the silent, blood-stained figure and, having started back, nestled facing mother’s short fur coat, looking for protection against terrible vision.
– What you? what you? – whispered mother, is god!
– No! – firmly the Laurels objected, are the dead! – And again rested – with a hostile frown.
From the twilight people and between them the comely old man in a long semi-caftan appeared.
– Do not force! – he said to the grandmother in low tones – this statue of work of the great artist! It is small, does not understand!
– It is silly still! – she confirmed – it ispuzhatsya…
When they left a tower, the Laurels calmed down and did not ask about dead god any more.
* * *
The big gloomy room of school was full of boys of different age – from small to healthy teenagers. Monastery put with the smallest. The teacher – with the person in a silver bristle, with a section behind, in high stockings and boots with buckles – walked in a dark green suit of unprecedented breed before pupils and constantly beat them with a big ruler the heads. It gave to laurels a goose quill, an inkwell and the fragmentary leaf which is used up by serpentine lines not clear to Laurels.
At school there was a hubbub. One wrote, others loud chorus shouted drawlingly:
– Bra-vra! gra! Wad Dra!
It was reading on warehouses.
Seniors the teacher of one caused to solve problems to a big black board. There were big guys and, quickly knocking chalk on a board, covered it with ugly, negligent signs.
In a few minutes the teacher approached Laurels. The new pupil not movably and sadly sat before an empty leaf.
– Well what you do not write? – And itself read aloud the first line: – “Once sovereign Peter the Great…”
The laurels answered nothing. He cannot read any letter, and the teacher does not even know about it!
Behind the back of the teacher big pupils built grimaces, pulled each other hair. There passed hour. The laurels wrote nothing.
Change came. Bustle, fuss, a fight, laughter, shout and squeal did not stop. Dust dense fog was groundless.
Two biggest pupils who were called persons on duty selected several same big pupils who did not learn lessons and, having taken on a bunch розог, moved in a corridor. Guilty in turn put on a floor, they lowered cloth trousers, laid down, and companions of a sekla their long rods.
Istyazuyemye shouted, but some endured pain silently.
The crowd of boys surrounding a sekution laughed at shouting and praised courage of those which were silent under birches. Them called inveterate.
“Inveterate”, putting on trousers, boasted that it is trifles that they and not that still can bear.
The laurels were surprised, but not frightened by an execution show: he perplexedly waited when it are сечь birches, and resolved to endure pain silently. The pale face of the boy with the frowned eyebrows stored persistence expression.
He gloomy sat down on a threshold of the
