The Tula Kremlin remembers a lot: the storming of the Crimean Khan Devlet-Girey by hordes, and the troops of False Dmitry I, and the "siege seat" of Ivan Isaevich Bolotnikov. In the middle of the last century, its walls, towers and passages were completely abandoned and ravaged.
And we boys often visited there. We especially liked to rummage through the centuries-old dust of the "torture" tower. Finds were every time: arrowheads and spearheads, stone balls. Human bones, fragments of skulls were not considered valuable - they were thrown aside.
Once during the excavation, my heart beat joyfully - a coin! Antique! But alas, I was wrong. It was a 1961 dvuhkryvennik, blackened, as if from a conflagration, chipped, with a cobweb of cracks through the center, in addition, unusually light.
But for me, boys, 20 kopecks is a tangible amount: two large glasses of sunflower seeds, an ice cream with a penny of change, a battery for a flashlight or a movie ticket … But much more tempting - ten shots in the shooting range. Not every day I could afford it! However, the grandfather, who was firing bullets in the shooting range, took my two-cents in his hands, said good-naturedly:
- You, my dear, change some money first, then you are welcome.
Then I hesitated for a long time around a granny selling seeds, blushed and hesitated, not daring to give her what I was ashamed to call money. The old woman understood me in her own way, pouring half a glass of no money into my pocket.
The coin remained unclaimed, and out of vexation I put it on the line in a ballroom with the sole purpose of losing. The fellow players did not accept the bet, but they were keenly interested in how I made it. For a day or two, the coin dangled in my pockets. My irritation grew, and in the end, I simply shoved it into the slot of the ticket machine in the tram. The machines of that time already knew how to distinguish three kopecks from washers and other garbage. However, it worked. A goodbye coin chimed - and here it is, the ticket!
I came home happy, went to bed. Everything seems to be fine, but I'm uncomfortable, tossing and turning, I can't sleep, I remember the coin. There is no feeling that I got off. He began to straighten the pillow, and in the left corner in the pillowcase there was something solid, round. I feel it - a familiar gap. I was stunned! Got it - she, my annoying companion!
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I have already heard about the unchangeable penny, I am sitting on the bed, crazed, I don’t believe my own eyes, my hair is on end, primal horror! I felt like a guinea pig in a completely incomprehensible and dishonest experience for me. Someone imperious and omnipotent showed me my defenselessness and insignificance in front of someone else's whim, which tramples the logic and laws of being. He succeeded. For a long time I wondered: why go into the pillow?
In the end, I crept on tiptoe to the window and … I could hear how the coin, having touched the maple leaves, slammed dully onto the asphalt. I don't know if anyone picked her up, but she never came back to me.
Thirty years later I told this story to my mother-in-law, with whom I was visiting in Shuya. She was not surprised. She opened the chest of drawers, took out a copper round timber - a very old coin, the metal was already flaking with scales, almost nothing was impossible to read, and she told me this.
She worked in 1942 as a teacher and one winter evening she returned home through the cemetery. He walks, he warms his hands in the muff, but his thoughts are gloomy: they don’t give anything on cards, there’s no money at all, and the children are hungry at home. Suddenly, she says, her hands were seared by the cold, she pulled out her hand, and a copper penny was frosty on her palm. I didn't even have time to thaw. She showed it to me.
How did this happen? Who sent her the coin in such a mystical way? Imagination vividly carried me centuries ago, to Catherine's Russia. For some reason I imagined a beggar with a bag and in rags. Perhaps she rested in that very cemetery, and her unmarked grave was swept away without a trace by rain and wind. And so she herself somehow gave to the needy. What if I'm holding her last charity in my hands? And how this beggar herself gave through the centuries and the grave mass, then the mystery is no less than the story with my crafty two-gingerbread man.
Returning to Tula, on the way to work, I stopped the car at the edge of the forest, took out a box with a collection of old coins that had accumulated over the years, and scattered them all through the forest. Perhaps mine will be useful to someone?
Boris Nikolaevich BORISOV, Tula