"Valentin Katayev. A White Sail Gleams (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

moment forget about his new travelling-bag, which hung across his shoulder
on a strap. He held it tight with both his little hands.
For in that bag, besides a bar of chocolate and a few Capitain salty
biscuits, lay his chief treasure, a moneybox made out of an Ainem Cocoa tin.
Here Pavlik kept the money he was saving to buy a bicycle.
He had put aside quite a sum already: about thirty-eight or thirty-nine
kopeks.
Now Daddy and Petya were coming towards the coach after their breakfast
of grey wheaten bread and milk still warm from the cow.
Under his arm Petya carefully carried his treasures: a jar of needle
fish preserved in alcohol and a collection of butterflies, beetles, shells,
and crabs.
All three bid a warm farewell to their hosts, who had come to the gate
to see them off. Then they climbed into the coach and set out.
The road skirted the farm.
Its water pail rattling, the coach rolled along past the orchard, past
the arbour, and past the cattle and poultry yards. Finally it reached the
garman, the level, well-stamped platform where the grain is threshed and
winnowed. In Central Russia this platform is called a tok, but in Bessarabia
it is a garman.
The straw world of the garman began just beyond the roadside
embankment, overgrown with bushes of grey, dusty scratch weed on which hung
thousands of tear-shaped yellowish-red berries.
There was a whole town of old and new straw ricks as big as houses, a
town with real streets, lanes, and blind alleys. Here and there, beside the
layered and blackened walls of very old straw, shoots of wheat broke their
way through the firm and seemingly cast-iron earth; they glowed like emerald
wicks, amazingly clear and bright.
Thick opalescent smoke poured from the chimney of the steam-engine. An
unseen thresher whined persistently. The small figures of peasant women with
pitchforks were walking knee-deep in wheat on top of a new rick.
The wheat on the pitchforks cast gliding shadows against the clouds of
chaff pierced by the slanting rays of the sun.
Sacks, scales, and weights flashed by.
Then a tall mound of newly threshed wheat covered with a tarpaulin
floated past.
After that the coach rolled out into the open steppe.
In a word, at first everything was the same as in the other years. The
flat, deserted fields of stubble stretching on all sides for dozens of
miles. The lone burial mound. The lilac-coloured immortelles gleaming like
mica. The marmot sitting beside his burrow. The piece of rope looking like a
crushed snake. . . .
But suddenly a cloud of dust appeared ahead. A police detail was
galloping down the road.
"Halt!"
The coach stopped.
One of the horsemen rode up.
Behind the green shoulder strap with a number on it bobbed the short
barrel of a carbine. A dusty forage cap, worn at a slant, also bobbed up and
down. The saddle creaked and gave off a strong hot smell of leather.