The Gems of Siberia. Tamara Bulevich

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      © Tamara Bulevich, 2016

      © International Union of writers, 2016

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      Grandfather Ignat

      Dyomin was completely exhausted with the busy hot day. Road men barely stood on their feet, sullenly, in silence gathering tools in canvas bags and waiting for the train, which would finally save them from hellish toil in clay dust, from sticky midges, from squeaky mosquitos, mercilessly stinging, ineradicable, and leaving no escape.

      Ignat was late. Today, his team completed scheduled repairs and backfilling of fabric. The chief of road service Efremov will be at acceptance tomorrow. Though Ignat is calm: everything was made to last. The men did not disappoint, as it happened in the first months of joint work. Brigadier abstained from praise. «Tomorrow will tell what we have achieved». He was silent, grimly staring into the cloud on the top of the Karaulnaya Mountain. Looked like thunderstorm. The weather in the second decade of August was a safe bet – definitely spoiled. Downpours with squally wind will ruin the work schedule again. And only taiga will rejoice in the rain, revelling in the long awaited, rich, warm, as in summer, and life-giving water, which will definitely help it gain strength to grow new green.

      Ignat could not stand this terrible season. It coincided with a strictly planned preparation of the assigned to their brigade part of the railway for the winter, ruthlessly wasting their golden years.

      «Then try and catch up! People are not made of iron», – he lamented, knowing that the following days, from dusk to dawn, would be very busy.

      It has been seven years since Ignat bought a house at the station Snezhnitsa. He bought it for his own convenience: it was next to his work, so he did not need to spend precious time waiting for trains. But the main reason was that nobody knew about the past life of Ignat and it was easier for him to start life with a clean slate. Although, in his native village of Minino, only the weak-sighted friend of his mother-in-law recognized him.

      Having come home, Dyomin brought into the inner porch wind-beaten pots of geraniums. Usually geranium, being the delight for the eyes of the villagers, stood in the rows on the specially made wooden platform. It encircled the well-kept log house, pleasing the owner with pink and white flowers. He spent quiet evenings admiring them. This brought joy and peace to his soul.

      The second house looked like the house of the Dyomin family in Minino. When his parents were alive, the same geranium blossomed on wide, white windowsills from spring to winter. Mama Lyuba used its rounded, crownlike, sometimes with brown colour on the edge leaves for a toothache. She used them as seasoning to game and veal.

      Ignat went down the vegetable garden, where green branches of recently planted little cedars waved, like wings, greeting him on his way. He stumbled upon this garden of little cedars at the platform of Ryabinino, having gone up the steep small hill during lunch break. These powerful cedars have been here for a long time, growing among the age-old pines and firs. The white-haired Siberian man feasted his eyes upon gorgeous, silky, with an emerald sheen branches of cedars. They were not old and had plenty of ripening greenish brown cones. «It will be good to come here in September and gather cones», – Ignat thought and went to a gentle slope to join his brigade, when in the windswept place he found a dozen of one-year-old cedars. «How come you are here? That is impossible for you to survive here, on the northern side». Having gone down to the men, he asked to help dig out and deliver these little cedars, this fleeting miracle, to his vegetable garden. Every single one of them. The men, being town-dwellers since their childhood, were perplexed and surprised at the unconcealed joy of Ignat.

      – You live in taiga and want to bring it to your garden. Why do you need this? – Ignat genially smiled and turned everything into a joke.

      – I am too lazy to go far into the cedar forests. I am getting old. Perhaps, I will live till the day, when they will grow big and powerful. I will gather nuts and will share some with you. When people take care of cedars, they grow faster than normally.

      By nightfall, bad weather covered the mountains, the taiga and the village with its darkness. The sky looked like a swirling kaleidoscope full of dark, evil pictures. Suddenly it began to boil, torn into small scraps, which frantically moved back and forth from the horizon, compressing into a multi-layered pie on half the sky. At that same time, burdened, leaden black horizon almost exploded from the inside, bubbling and breaking up into glowing fiery heavy particles and then transforming again into even more terrible, rushing in different directions, airy monster. It seemed that the monster is about to be pierced with another spear of lightning and to be dissolved in the water. «The sooner the better, – Ignat thought, – Then the tension of the violent confrontation between irreconcilable heavenly elements will go away».

      The hot weather was in Snezhnitsa for more than a month. Finally, the sky, remembering its bygone promises to Mother Earth, decided to pay her tribute and fill the summer with pouring rains.

      Now Ignat was worried about the tree that fell in the spring – dry vegetation, which he called a wizard. It hung, caught by the upper boughs, as hooks, on the powerful branches of the pine at the fence. In windless days, the wizard remained silent, but with the slightest flow of wind the pine trembled and it began to sing a mournful song that reminded either the creak of the ungreased door, or the roar of the beast, or the cry of the broken string, sometimes clearly warning: «no, no… do not come up!». And then suddenly one could hear it anxiously crying with the voice of some frightened bird.

      Ignat intuitively «interpreted» its intricate edification and rush from side to side, with which the wizard, having nothing against the meteorological service, accurately predicted the bearing of an apparent wind, as well as the weather for the day ahead. It helped Dyomin at his work on the railways: he knew how the day would turn, from where the wind would blow, at what side the signalman should stand, where it would be better to put crushed stone to protect men from inhaling caustic limestone.

      And now Ignat listened to disturbing, lingering sobs of dry vegetation and kept thinking about something, obviously being worried about little cedars: the wizard will fall down and will wreck them. But it was difficult for him to do something alone, with no help.

      «I should saw it into chocks. Otherwise, little cedars will be in danger!». And, nearly falling from the effort, he alternately dragged three two-metre-long decommissioned rails. He leaned them against the fence. «That’s more reliable. Rails will take the hit and will cover little cedars if the wizard falls down».

      After viewing the vegetable garden and making sure that it was completely ready to overcome the on-coming storm, Ignat slowly, slightly limping, went to the house.

      Without switching on the lights and having dinner he went to the shower. He was snorting and moaning with pleasure there for a long time, splashing in the flowing stream of cool invigorating water. After an hour of bathing, he wrapped up in the colourful linen sheet and went to bed. Despite the fatigue, he could not sleep. When he turned fifty, he lost his habit to fall asleep after barely touching the cushion and to remain in the kingdom of Morpheus until the first splashes of dawn. Sometimes, during the sleepless nights, he had time to live more than one life, each time reshaping them in a new way. The only thing that he never changed was his joyful childhood. He really loved that time in his life. It was a happy, serene moment of life with his parents still alive, with staying overnight with the older boys at taiga fires on the banks of the mountain River Minka, with awakening in the light of warm splashes of dawn, with silent mornings in order not to scare clever, black-sided grayling before the morning fishing.

      As a boy, he spent hours staring at the distant twinkling stars, following the clouds and in the storm, safely hiding from the rain under the fir branches, watching the clash of clouds and the birth of lightning. Everybody in the village knew that their Ignat would grow up and would become a pilot.

      But the war broke out. His dream suddenly collapsed.

      The big family of Grigoriy Dyomin, the father of Ignat, lived in the old spacious house, which they inherited from grandfather Semyon. The vegetable garden was on the south side of the house, in the direction of the river and the forest.

      The rays of the rising sun lit the