THE ATTIC CLOCK

There are table clocks, floor clocks, and wall clocks. And I have paddashkava's watch.

I stand in the hallway on the adobe floor and, raising my head, look into the black square of the attic doorway. There are alternating grunts, loud snuffling, the clatter of things on the floor, and the flapping of wings of startled pigeons.

"Here," I hear after a while from above. "That's all I found here. Do you know how much time has passed, maybe she's already lost forever.

– Okay, - I reassured the owner, - let's have what we have.

First, green legs and pinstriped trousers appeared from the opening, then a T-shirt with some kind of Soviet emblem, and finally a curly head with cheerful eyes and a smile on his whole face.

–Here," repeated the owner of the curly head. The owner of the house holds a clock mechanism in his outstretched hands: a dial, hands, and a pendulum. – Here you go. The building was wooden and beautiful. My father told me. But why am I starting to recite fables from the middle? Let's go inside, to the stove, it's just smoking.

Just the words “to the stove” made me feel good. Everything is as it should be in the house: curtains with curtains, a painted chest, a white stove in the middle of a large room, icons under embroidered towels and yellowed photographs in wooden frames in the corner, a copper bowl with pot–bellied garbuziki on the table.

"Help yourself,– the owner says, pushing the bowl over. – This year, I'm more interested in pumpkins than ever. Previously, the farm was large, and there were many animals. It's all gone. Now we take out the seeds, and the pumpkin itself is a sucker-a sucker – yes, a plow. It's a pity, but what can you do.

We peel pumpkin seeds, firewood clicks in the fire. There is a square sunny rabbit on the floor. Beauty. To make it really good, before all this, as my interlocutor said, a story about a watch that he had just taken out of the pocket of this cozy house.

–My grandfather, Demyan Vasilyevich," he begins, "went to France several times to work in Poland. People got there for the last penny, and returned back with whole carts of various goods: sewing machines, tools, all kinds of machinery for the household, scrolls of cloth and sweet treats for children. But there is no silver lining, and there is no goodness without a silver lining. Immediately, gangs of bad people who were engaged in robbery began to appear on the roads. It happened when the wagon train was attacked – everything was taken away. And aboznikai was deprived of his life so that there would be no witnesses. So my grandfather, when he returned home, had to be in such a mess.

They attacked at dawn. He defended himself how. But you can't fight a knife and cast iron with your bare hands for long. So one of the bandits knocked our grandfather to the ground, under the wheels. He swung the knife to strike – and at that very moment, imagine, the clock began to strike time. The villain slowed down, even threw it to his grandfather: they say, you can hear the clock ticking away the last moments of your life. But it turned out the opposite. They're telling the truth:”Do not wish harm to another." A bullet hit him in the chest, knocked the bandit down: the gendarmes arrived at the noise. After that night, many among the people from the wagon train and among the bandits did not see a new day.

Demyan Vasilyevich was firmly convinced that God had helped him, had turned the needle on him. He used to say that a lot later. He valued watches. I wound the spring myself, wiped the dust myself. Only occasionally did I pick up my youngest daughter, my aunt, so that the Gaidanut pendulum would stop when it stopped.

And that's what happened next under the Soviet regime. My father's older brother worked at the monastery. He was a good carpenter. And in the twenties, he resolutely refused to join the Union of Atheists society, created by the Bolsheviks. Those were terrible years – churches and monasteries were destroyed. And how much misery the dispossession brought! The exile of entire hardworking families to the “polar bears” had a detrimental effect on our entire mother earth…

One evening, my uncle was sitting on a bench at the table, cleaning and oiling the clock mechanism. Suddenly– there was a rustle outside the window, someone's shadows, the barrel of a revolver. He was saved by this watch, which he involuntarily covered himself with. The bullets damaged the mechanism and shattered the body. According to his father, he was the most “beautiful toy" in the house.

My uncle was lucky enough to leave for Poland quickly. Then we heard from him from France and Canada, he wrote that he had set up a profitable business. And since then, the watch, no longer working and without a case, has been closer to the icons.

During the occupation by German troops, the father of the youngsters joined a partisan detachment. Only this watch was able to be taken out of the burned house. His father took him with him to the partisan camp.

One day, the bombers took a young German from the engineering troops. The council of the detachment decided that such a “trophy” was of little use and that it was needed, well, of course, it was wartime. And when they came for him in the morning, they heard the clock ticking. It turned out that the prisoner had not slept all night, and the mechanism was damaged. The watch was just in the same dugout where the German was being held under guard. They decided how and what they wanted, but they left Fritz's hand in the camp as an interpreter, because he knew Russian well. In addition, he was appointed a clockwork adjuster for homemade mines. At the end of the war, a German was sent to the Mainland. They say he later worked at our embassy in Germany.

My mother was a doctor in that partisan camp. She returned home with the watch. And my father drove the Germans, who were already retreating, further. He came as a hero with two wounds.

How did the clock end up in the attic? – my interlocutor paused and, as if justifying himself, said: The daughter-in-law, a city girl, demanded that my son remove all the trash from the house. They say, so as not to blush in front of guests from the city. As a result, I blushed in front of my fellow villagers. What about me? He paused, and then looked at his watch, which was lying next to him on the bench, and added: "It seems like it's just a pity, but it turns out that it saved three human lives." The story.”