storekeeper…’ Yerezhep blew his nose noisily… he knew a thing or two about that one… ‘The hell with them, truly, only babies are innocent.’ It was the seventh day of August in the year one thousand nine hundred and eighty-six… The last week was marked in Yerezhep’s house by a rare, lyrical mood – his wife’s younger sister and her friend, students of the Moscow Schepkin Theatre School, had come to visit them! Both of them were slim, beautiful and smiling, as if they had come out of the poster that hung on the wall of the state farm club. Waiting for the dust to settle and the cooler weather to settle on the main street, they would go out for a walk in the village, and it was impossible to find anyone indifferent to these two figures, wrapped in jeans and tightfitting blouses. The sedate inhabitants of the village had a certain aesthetic interest in the girls, while younger people, and especially the bachelors, looked at them in a fundamentally different way. The most hardened-minded misogynists headed for Yerezhep Street, though their business was in the opposite direction. Yerezhep’s house became a magnet that attracted all the male population of the village, except old men of course, to its porch. For these days, the man of the house returned from work without any delay, took a shower (which he had never done before), and cologned himself from head to toe, in an attempt to look urbane. Then he took the girls under his arm and led them to the club. Oh, how Yerezhep felt in those moments! It was an impossible dream even for the most dapper young men of the village to approach some students from the Schepkin drama school, but Yerezhep, just a driver of an old dump truck, with fuel oil under his nails, held the girls, both at once, under his arms and led them wherever he wanted! If only that! There were moments when the girls, bursting with laughter, rested their heads affectionately on Yerezhep’s shoulders… Yes, the Providence of the Creator works in mysterious ways: one man gets everything and the other gets nothing. The peculiarity of men in our village, as in all the villages on the planet, is that they do not forgive the success of their own kind in front of a beautiful woman. Yelemes and Yerezhep, who grew up