Elena Proskuryakova, a forty-year-old resident of the North Ural city of Kizel, heard this amazing story from her grandmother Anna Gavrilovna Mamaeva in 1982. Then she took her grandmother's story as a kind and sad fairy tale. And only many years later, Elena realized that everything described in that story was a real reality.
Anna Gavrilovna Mamaeva was born in 1926 in the small Ural village Gordeevka, which has now disappeared from the map, surrounded on one side by a mountain range, and on the other by a large field, divided into plots, behind which the impenetrable taiga darkened. Young Anna's neighbors had a large and scandalous Karavaev family: the head of the family, Ivan Petrovich, with his wife Vera Vasilievna, three over-grown sons Yegor, Dmitry and Antip, and daughter Masha.
However, Masha in the noisy house of the Karavaevs was not quite her own. Vera Vasilievna was a stepmother for the girl, and her sons were Masha's older half-brothers.
In addition to this unpleasant circumstance, the girl was also a hunchback from birth and limped on one leg, which is why she was constantly ridiculed by ruthless relatives and cruel fellow villagers who loved to mock the little cripple.
Masha's father, who dearly loved his daughter, but “walked under the thumb” of his imperious wife, protected the girl as much as he could from the troubles that she seemed to attract to herself. Awkward and weak Masha was a useless worker in the field, she was afraid of livestock to death, and if she started to clean the house, then she did more damage than benefit: she would break a cup, then spill fresh cabbage soup from a cast iron, then she would fall into the underground …
For this reason, Vera Vasilievna now and then reproached Mashenka, calling her a "parasite" and "lazy", accompanying hurtful words with painful cuffs. Ivan Petrovich alone affectionately called his daughter "my onion grief", and sometimes he brought her gingerbread and candy canes from the city.
Escape from home
Promotional video:
On one of the hot August days, the Karavaev family went to field work, ordering twelve-year-old Mashenka, who remained in the household, to properly heat the bathhouse before the arrival of relatives …
For what reason this happened, later no one could establish it. However, as soon as the setting sun touched the tops of the century-old cedars, clouds of smoke rose over the Karavaevs' yard. The frightened neighbors who were in their houses with buckets full of water rushed to the Karavaevskaya hut. Running into the gate, fellow villagers saw that a bathhouse was on fire. Mashenka was sitting opposite her, burying her knees, crying …
The fire was extinguished pretty quickly
However, the worst thing began for Masha, when her stepmother returned home with her sons. Seeing what her stepdaughter had done, Vera Vasilyevna began to beat the girl, who, falling to the ground, curled up into a ball and, without uttering a single sound, shuddered from each blow. Tired, Vera Vasilyevna left Masha to lie in the middle of the yard, and she herself withdrew into the house. And an hour later Ivan Petrovich returned. The wife of Karavaev began to indignantly tell her husband what his daughter had done. Without listening to his wife, the man ran out of the hut, but Mashenka was no longer on the street …
For three days Ivan Petrovich was looking for his daughter, returning home only at night. And every time, seeing her husband without her hateful stepdaughter, Vera Vasilievna smiled maliciously, muttering: "Finally, God took the cripple …"
Happiness rolled over
And on the fourth day, early in the morning, Mashenka, alive and well, appeared on the threshold of the house. In her hands she gripped a small woolen knot tightly. Ivan Petrovich, who had gathered again in search of his daughter, at first was speechless, and then hugged Mashenka tightly and burst into tears. Under the dissatisfied and spiteful glances of Vera Vasilyevna and her sons, he took his daughter to the hut and sat down at the table, on which there was a still-cold breakfast. Smiling, Masha said that she was not hungry, and then unfolded her bundle. In the next second, the girl's relatives crowding around the table opened their mouths in amazement: on a spread woolen shawl lay two - the size of a children's fist - gold nuggets, a handful of emeralds and two large pearls …
When Vera Vasilievna came to her senses, she pounced on Mashenka with persistent questions: where did she get it? from whom did you steal? Her sons, with an avid gleam in their eyes, began to examine the jewels brought by their crippled sister. However, the girl stubbornly did not want to reveal to her stepmother the source of the fabulous wealth she had acquired.
Only in the evening, when she was left alone with her father to “whisper” (which Masha liked to do before going to bed), the girl told Ivan Petrovich how, having run away from home, she almost fell into the clutches of a ferocious bear, who was driven away by an old soldier who had crawled out of a huge hollow. According to Mashenka, the old man was wearing an unusual cut military uniform, and he seemed not to walk on the ground, but to float through the air. The soldier, who turned out to be very kind, took the girl by the hand and brought her to his dwelling, arranged in a small cave. For three days Mashenka lived with her savior, who entertained the girl with fairy tales and fairy tales. When she was getting ready for home, the old man opened his chest, took out precious stones and, giving them to Masha, accompanied the girl to the village …
Spiteful relatives
And Mashenka healed again with her former joyless life. The stepmother hid the valuables she brought in a secluded place, while rumors spread throughout the village that the little hunchback had found an ancient treasure in the taiga …
A month passed, then another, and one rainy autumn morning Mashenka disappeared again. Ivan Petrovich again decided to go in search of her, but Vera Vasilievna persuaded her husband not to worry, saying that "Masha will walk up and return with stones."
Indeed, the next day Masha appeared: joyful, happy, and with a new bundle in her hands, in which there were even more values than the previous time … After this incident in the village the girl began to be called "lucky Masha", and her older brothers every day tried to find out from the hunchback where the place where she takes the jewelry is.
Once, when Ivan Petrovich left for the city on business, Yegor, Dmitry and Antip, grabbing his half-sister by the hand, dragged her into the forest. When they went deep enough into the taiga, twenty-year-old Yegor told Mashenka that if she did not show where the treasure was, they would tie her to a tree and leave her to be eaten by wild animals. The girl burst into tears from fear, when suddenly a bear appeared from behind the bushes, which rushed at her offenders with a menacing growl.
Almost to the very village, the beast chased after Masha's brothers, and the girl ran after, through her tears persuading the bear not to touch them. When Masha's father returned home the next day, she did not tell him about what had happened. Only after that did the girl become completely silent and withdrawn into herself.
And soon Ivan Petrovich caught a cold, and two weeks later died. The fellow villagers gathered at the funeral whispered that "now, for sure, Verka will kill her stepdaughter from the world!" When the grave was buried and the people who attended the funeral began to disperse, a strange-looking old man dressed in a military uniform appeared on the slope. Seeing the stranger, grief-stricken Mashenka suddenly smiled and ran to him. The old man took the girl by the hand and they walked towards the forest. From that time on, Mashenka did not appear in the village again.
An unsolved mystery
In 2004, Elena Proskuryakova on official business came to the Yayva regional center, next to which the village of Gordeevka was located many decades ago. One evening she got into a conversation with the employee of the hotel where she lived - an elderly, but still cheerful woman who, as it turned out, was from Gordeyevka and knew the story of the hunchbacked Mashenka.
The woman told Elena that in their area there had long been a legend about the centurion of the ataman Ermak Timofeevich, whom the conqueror of Siberia, shortly before his death, entrusted to protect the treasures obtained during the campaign. Soon after the death of Yermak, when his detachments left without the chieftain began to retreat to Muscovy, the centurion, the keeper of the chieftain's treasury, also vanished without a trace. A century later, local residents began to tell that the ghost of an associate of Ermak appeared in their area, who, according to legend, became the master of the North Ural taiga. According to the hotel employee, it was he who ran away from home Mashenka met him in the taiga in the late thirties of the last century, and it was with him that she left Gordeevka forever. Later, in the middle and in the second half of the 20th century, mushroom pickers and hunters more than once in the taiga saw the ghost of a Cossack, next to whom there was always a little hunchbacked girl.
"Secrets of the 20th century" June 2012
