Climbing a steep hill, the car easily glided down to the beginning of the village street, to the first houses, which were comfortably hidden in shady gardens and front gardens and from there looked out curiously with their small windows, artfully bordered with carved architraves, painted mostly white. The house next to which I stopped to ask for directions to the neighboring village was not very different from the neighboring houses.
A house like a house – there are tens of thousands of them in our lovely hinterland. The porch on four pillars opens onto an oblong courtyard, from which a small garden begins. To the right, outbuildings of various sizes and purposes line the field. At first glance, the windows of the house have simple carved skirting boards painted with white paint, which has cracked in places and exposed the old blue paint.
- Well, what do you see in the samples of our baseboards? What do they remind you of? "What is it?" asked the owner of the house, who came out to meet me when he saw how carefully I was examining his house and yard.
Confused, I just shrugged my shoulders: baseboards are like baseboards. During my long travels, I have seen real masterpieces, and this is just a modest window decoration.
The owner smiled and, with the words “if you have a minute,” invited me to follow him, waving his hand towards a low bench by the well, opposite the porch and windows of the house. And thanks to the fact that I had that very minute, I heard an incredible story about these modest baseboards.
My narrator's ancestors on his father's side were from the old noble family of the Spensberger coat of arms: A golden lion on a green field with a saber in its raised paw. His great-grandfather married a beautiful noblewoman from the noble family of the coat of arms.” Pravdich " with the image of a lion behind a stone wall holding a Golden ring in its paw.
Immediately after the wedding, the newlyweds moved into a newly built spacious wooden manor house, which stood until 1938. Her windows had skirting boards in the shape of two lions looking at each other. Each of them has small crowns on their heads. After 1938, the farms began to be demolished. This manor was also demolished. It was dismantled, and a paramedic and midwifery center and a collective farm board building were built from logs in a neighboring village.
My new friend's parents moved to the nearest village, where they built a new house. Before the old manor was dismantled by a construction team invited by the collective farm, my father took off the skirting boards with lions and hid them. And then, on the new house, above the new windows, he nailed them with the words:”At least let it remind you, son, who we are and where our ancestors came from." In the same year, at the very beginning of winter, my father caught a severe cold and died. The widow left four children in her arms, of whom my interlocutor was the eldest.
Apparently, according to the neighbors' denunciation that a house with lions had been built in the village, the chairman of the collective farm came to their yard one day. "Remove it!"- he shouted, as soon as the hostess came out on the porch. The woman began to quietly justify that it was a memory of their ancestors, everyone knows that she hails from…
”Originally from...," the chairman abruptly interrupted her. - I don't want to hear anything. Now we need to know that everyone is equal. Maybe I also come from – But, apparently, frightened, I stopped short and looked warily at the neighboring yards.
- Remove it, and now, today! he shouted from the very freckles, without even turning to the hostess of the house. - I'll check it out!
The woman immediately asked her eldest son to remove the baseboards and hide them. To this day, it remains a mystery where the baseboards were hidden. Sometime in the 1970s, when his mother was no longer alive, the owner, covering the old roof, at the same time arranged these simple skirting boards on the windows.
"I'm not a master," he defended himself. - How did it happen. It's good enough for me, and the second one won't hurt my eyes either. But maybe they won't guess.…
And only now, after hearing this story, I was able to see in the samples of white baseboards the dim outlines of two lions looking at each other: here are paws, here are tails, gaping traps and tongues... The heads end in four teeth, apparently crowns.…
It was this story that made me look more closely at the intricate patterns of the skirting boards, so diverse, so mysterious. Thanks to them, perhaps tomorrow I will hear another interesting story or legend, touch such a fragile and vulnerable human fate.