In the 1960s, my parents and I lived in the city of Kustanai (Kazakhstan). My mother had a friend, aunt Nadya Lukashevich. She worked in a furniture factory and lived on the other side of town. My mother and I often went to visit her.
She was a very interesting person - cheerful, lively. During the war, she was partisan in Belarus. After I came to raise virgin soil in Kazakhstan, here my parents met her.
Aunt Nadya lived quite well at that time. She had her own one-room apartment. Small, in a barrack-type house, with stove heating, but its own. Aunt Nadya never got married. But, in order not to be bored alone, she let her lodgers - young girls, workers of a furniture factory.
Once my mother and I came to visit her. Aunt Nadia was not at home, she went to the store. Another of her tenants was busy putting things in order. She invited us to come in, while she continued cleaning. With a rag, she brushed the dust off the windowsill, on which there was an icon of the Mother of God with the baby. The icon was small, yellowed from sunlight because it was printed on photographic paper. Such in those years were usually sold by the deaf and dumb on the trains. The girl threw this icon into a pile of garbage, swept it on a scoop and sent it to the burning stove.
At this time Aunt Nadya entered. Seeing the icon on fire, she pulled it out of the stove with her bare hands. The face of the Virgin was not damaged, only the edges were burned. Aunt Nadia began to scold the tenant. But she, a Komsomol member, an atheist, only laughed and reproached the hostess for ignorance:
- You are so brave, you were in the war, you won the Nazis, but you believe in some pictures.
Aunt Nadya replied that we won because we believed.
After that, the relationship between the hostess and the tenant went wrong. After a while, the furniture factory rebuilt the warehouse into a hostel, and the girl moved there. And in the spring there was a fire in the hostel. And it so happened that there was no one in the building, only after the shift did the former tenant of Aunt Nadia sleep there. She burned to death. Aunt Nadya was very worried about this girl - did not God forgive her stupid act?
Promotional video:
Tatyana Nikolaevna IVANOVA, Gubakha, Perm region