Последние тайны СССР – Проект Марс 88 - [11]

The house doors were almost never locked – the “lock” was usually a wooden spinner nailed to the door frame. If it lay parallel to the ground, the door was locked, if perpendicular, it was open. Sometimes the door was locked with the help of a padlock, but it only happened if the owners went to town for a long time to visit their children.

In summer, the population increased probably twice. Numerous grandsons, granddaughters and great-grandchildren came to visit their grandparents practically from all parts of the huge country. Only on the small street with 30 houses where Sergey lived most often, changing the houses of his grandmothers by turns, at least ten summer residents appeared – several girls from Moscow and boys from Leningrad, Siberia and the Far East…

You had to get acquainted and make friends with everybody. But it only happened for the first time, and then they just grew up together, meeting almost every year in the same village.

His grandmother’s house was situated right at the foot of a small mountain located near the street; Sergey liked to climb it and look at the spaces of this part of Central Russian Upland from above. Just below he saw his street, then fields and vegetable gardens going down from it, and orchards near the stream.

When he looked at all that, he sometimes had the desire to stretch out his arms and fly, but he surely couldn’t. He just could run very quickly down the mountain with his arms stretched to the sides, trying to jump as high as possible while running. The slope was not very steep, and sometimes he could fly for just a few meters…

Now they flew millions of kilometers together. But he did not feel that childish feeling of joy or happiness from a second-long several-meter flight.

It was left there, very far on the spaces of Central Russian Upland.

Chalk mountains, steppes and forests, valleys and small plateaus, ravines and streams: 3 months of summer holidays passed almost imperceptibly to explore all these.

The village he usually went to was situated in Bobrovsky district of Voronezh Region. Nearby there was a river Bityug – a tributary of the Don. The village comprised several dozen streets, and some were located several kilometers from the central part.

The river flowed in a huge valley bordered from two sides by huge plateaus covered with forest. Most often he visited one of the grandmothers whose house stood practically at the foot of a small 50-60-meter mountain, with several higher mountains near it, and all that merged into a vast plateau of about 200–300 meters high, with a wheat field on it stretching to the horizon.

There were not many houses – about thirty, and they lined an ordinary country road. There were a lot of corn and potato fields around going down to a big stream. Closer to the stream, the fields turned into orchards with apple trees, pear trees and plum trees – it’s difficult to remember everything that grew there…

On the other side of the street, which was the farthest from the village, along the second half of houses, closer to the beginning of mountains, there were cherry gardens. Each one of ten houses had its own Cherry Garden, and unlike the one described by Chekhov, nothing threatened them.

The cherry trees were small – it was easy to brace them with the fingers of two palms. The trunks were dark grey, almost black, with shining yellow delicious gum, more like amber, flowing down. Sergey and his friends liked to eat this gum from the tree, but sometimes they also bit some bark and then had to spit it out.

The ripening cherries were dark red, and then became almost black unless picked on time. In twenty minutes one could easily pick a full three-liter can. By this time the grandmothers rolled the dough with rolling pins and cut it into circles for the future vareniki…

Usually about one hundred vareniki were made – not the small ones like they do in town, but sized like a small cake. 6–8 cherries were put into the circle of dough, it was poured with granulated sugar, and the edges were rolled in a beautiful winding seam. The dough was thin, and the round-sided cherries bulged from the varenik, making it almost triangular.

That’s it – put them in boiling water and they are cooked after they flow up. Vareniki increased by three to four times in size, the swollen and boiled cherries looked like blue grapes bulging from the semi-transparent dough… The mixed sugar and cherry juice yielded very delicious hot sweet-and-sour syrup, and you felt like swallowing the cherries themselves with stones in them, which often happened.

Vareniki with cherries are very tasty…

Yes, they really are…

What is it? – Sergey thought. – There is an echo in my head, or I’m going mad?

There is no threat of that, said the strange voice again.

Who is talking to me, then, is there a space bogie on the rocket?

The voice grew silent and then answered a bit sadly: I am the one who has been here all the time…

Dear me! – thought Sergey. – Are you God?

The silence answered: I am something closer to Peter…