The first time I saw an unidentified flying object in the village of Novaya Ukrainka (formerly Zlodievka), not far from the hut, where the beloved woman of the ataman of the Zeleny gang lived out her life. We were sitting on a high steep with my grandfather Semyon, who was a boat carpenter in his young and mature days and therefore drank regularly. With one hand, the grandfather hugged a significant "suleya", which was stuffed up with a twisted and slightly chewed one, because the cork often had to be opened with his teeth, a piece of newspaper. At the bottom of the bottle gleamed pearly in the evening sun, the remnants of a dull, like highly diluted milk, beet moonshine made by the shinkarka Ganka (which, by the way, had chickens laying eggs with two yolks). Semyon's other hand lay on the tanned shoulder of a city boy, who every year came to the village for the summer month with his parents,who fished on clay at the mouth of the small river Stugna, which flows into the Dnieper and was once a border with the Polovtsians.
Lame uncle Misha and his wife, beautiful in all body, with the church name Neonila, were standing in the water with fishing rods up to their knees in the morning. He is in pajama pants rolled up to the knee to hide his leg, disfigured by the war, and she is in a loose sweater and bathing shorts, just revealing the best legs on the Kiev beach, according to pre-war ideas.
The modest prosperity of a disabled person who returned to the stage after the war while not working (who would dress him, put on shoes and go about with a stiff, short leg), a beautiful, full-breasted and incredibly economical wife allowed them to save money so that every summer, when the theater was resting, rent a room from the wonderful Marusya in a small mud-house with clay floors under a huge oak tree, on the lower branch of which, free from the theft of sausages or chickens, lay the master's cat Zhora, with the face of an inveterate hooligan and robber, justifying the old name of the village.
In these, almost my first photos, taken by FED, the cat Zhora and the neighbor's girl with unnecessary affection. Photo by the author.
Each time, after his forays and clarifying relations with neighbors, Marusya sat down on the boom and, wiping her face with the corner of her khustka, sadly said to “her dog Borshch”:
- From, Borsch, bida meni with tsim Zhor! - and then took the cat in her arms and, stroking, admonished.
On warm, clear evenings, grandfather Semyon sat "in a steeper", on a steep slope above the Dnieper, and watched as on the quiet polished surface of the golden water, reflecting the sunset sky, they floated together with the current, from the hay meadows a little higher than the village, the huge flat-bottomed boats he built - "Oaks" loaded with whole heaps of hay. At the stern of the boats sat the helmsmen, adjusting the course with an oar, and in silence and peace, as if spilled over the whole world, they sang beautifully and harmoniously over the river about Galya and her unhappy love, about how the Cossacks walk up the mountain, about the nightingale in cherry sadochka … Grandfather drank a glass and listened. And I loved to sit next to him and be calm.
And then one day, all of a sudden … What did you think? Of course, all of a sudden, we saw a large green luminous ball of incredible brightness to our right at a low altitude (half a kilometer in appearance, above the ground). Hanging in the air for some short time, he broke off and, at a terrible speed flying parallel to the meadows on the other side of the Dnieper, without inertia turned right and he left us, turning into a luminous point, before disappearing.
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- What is it, didu?
The grandfather was silent, stroked the bottle, looked at the sky and said:
- Napoleon, maybe he flew?
- Napoleon?
He waved his hand across the river.
- There seems to be a military field. But it is summative.
The next morning, the rumor about the Flying Object that I and my grandfather Semyon did not recognize, after stomping in the Ukrainka, went beyond its limits.
- You really saw? - Neela asked me, peeling under an oak tree on a plank of a kilo eight hundred bream, which my father caught on peas, steamed in a nylon stocking so as not to boil into mush. - What was it? Where did it fly?
- Grandfather Semyon said, Napoleon.
- Misha! - said Nila, throwing a fish head to Zhora. - We need to sell bonds of a 3% loan.
Dad with 1.8 kg bream, whose head went to Zhora. Photo by the author almost seventy years ago.
Towards evening, two help boys arrived from Kiev and began to ask the inhabitants of the village of Ukrainka what they had seen.
The shinkarka, keeping silent about the moonshine, told them that grandfather Semyon had been sitting "in a cooler" all evening yesterday.
- Hi, not bashing anything!
Grandfather knew that in our country at any time it is better not to see anything, hear nothing and say nothing to anyone. He has already experienced his.
- Let's go, lad! - Semyon took my hand. - We will be surprised that the great moon has burst into the sky.
At the tyna of the former green chieftain, he led me to a bench, ordered me to climb onto it, so that it would be closer to the moon and better see, and, looking around, if the good boys could hear, he said:
- Well, marvel at the yak. Maybe there is someone there.
Newspapers wrote that experts did not observe anything unusual, and rumors about a mysterious natural phenomenon were a fiction of foreign special services with the aim of sowing panic in the Obukhovsky district.
- Oh, and bresh, - said my grandfather Semyon, when we came to "twist" in the evening in the hope of a date with a UFO not betrayed by us. But no one else came.
- They scared me away! And he opened the cork with his teeth.
Yuri Rost
