Stories

An English author has rightly said that the universal flood may have disturbed the moral world as much as the physical world, and that human brains still retain the imprint of the shocks they received then.

I was born in a landowner's village on the banks of the Oka River. My father was a deacon a member of the clergy. Next to our little house lived a sexton a church official/clerk, a frail, poor man burdened by an enormous family. Among the eight children with whom God had blessed the sexton was one, my own age. We grew up together; every day we played together in the vegetable garden, in the churchyard, or in front of our house. I became terribly attached to my companion. I shared with him all the treats I was given, even stealing hidden pieces of pie or porridge for him, and passed them through the wicker fence. Everyone called my friend "Cross-eyed Lyovka"—and indeed, his eyes were slightly crossed. The more I return to my memories of him, the more attentively I sift through them, the clearer it becomes to me that the sexton’s son was an extraordinary child. At six, he swam in the Oka like a fish, climbed the tallest trees, went several versts a Russian unit of distance, approximately 1.06 km from home all by himself, and at the same time, he was extremely un-