– Vasya, are we going swimming today? I made a rubber boat yesterday with my father. The two chambers of the combine turned out to be very large. It will be difficult to reach the shore, but we can roll it in a circle and tie it together there on the shore, " said Lyosha to a friend who was walking in front, raking the grass on the sides, but at the same time very loudly and sonorously that he was asked by the grandmothers from the next shaft to speak down.
"That's great," Vasily said, turning his head back and wiping the sweat from his brow, which was running in a stream.
There was no water carrier today, although yesterday, when it was quite cool in the field, O.N. had already brought two cans of cold water to the field on horseback in the morning, which was not even half drunk before lunch, although there were more than fifty people in the field, counting the adults who were making a stack from the already dried-up hay plot. The tractor fed with the help of arrows, which lifted high several pounds of grass that had already dried to the color of white clay. Only the women worked upstairs, waving their hands from time to time and turning to each other, occasionally saying something. From a distance, it looked like a silent movie.
The sun was slowly moving towards the west, but the heat from which it came did not abate at all. Five boys and ten girls worked in the fields all day in the blazing sun. They were all over the age of ten and under the age of fifteen.
Afterthe holidays, parents spent some of their children's salaries, which they earned during the summer holidays, on general purchases, rarely gave money to anyone at once, but more often this money was spent at the school bazaar, which was held in a neighboring village on the penultimate Saturday in August.
After work, already at six o'clock in the evening, the guys moved towards the village. As they approached their yards, they accelerated and ran faster, almost headlong.
After drinking some water from the well, some compote from the pot, they ran out to the back yard, where there was a pond nearby, which was half overgrown with reeds. In some places it was so deep that none of the boys could dive to the bottom to touch with their hands or feet.
Vasily and Alexey were the last to reach the pond bank, or rather, they rolled two large wheels from the combine, which Alexey's father had pumped up very tightly since the previous evening. All they had to do now was tie them together with a rope that was very thick.
After a lot of effort, the guys still managed to link the two cameras together. Throwing them into the water, they almost knocked down another boy, SlavikA. He was in the fifth grade and was the only boy from his village, so he didn't have a friend and went almost everywhere by himself, and no one ever bothered him much. He almost always wore the same expression on his face, despite his rather young age.
The water was a little cold, because it hadn't had time to warm up after last night's chill, but the boys didn'tmind. They spent more than an hour swimming, shouting, laughing, and swimming in the shallow water at the end of the pond. They ran in and out of the reeds, shouting and hooting like Indians with spears, which they replaced with green cobs of reeds.
At last they had all bathed so thoroughly that they no longer wanted to scream. Their voices were already quite low, and the words came out in fragments that didn't belong together.
My parents were already home, and the cows were fed. After drinking milk, eating bread or potatoes cooked in a pot and sprinkled with dill, the children ran outside to ride a bicycle.
From afar, a car drove at high speed through the center of the village, despite the fact that children were riding bicycles, and very young children were playing catch-up in the middle of the road. The older kids called out to each other andgrabbed all the kids by force and moved them out of the way. The car did not even think to stop and continued to approach, leaving a column of dust in its wake. But as she neared the place where they were playing, she stopped. A father and son got out of the cab.
"It's very beautiful and quiet here," the father said to his son and added:
– More than thirty years have passed since all the people moved out of here, since the collective farm collapsed, but almost all the houses are intact, although everywhere the grass is overgrown to the knees. Perhaps children were playing in this place…