No door in that village was so tightly fitted to its frame. The heavy oak door was put on the oak frame as skillfully by his father ten or twelve years ago, the door was still there. But along the joint edge of the door and the frame, the cold had put a brittle ice and hard, slippery, gray ice had tied on the pair of hinges; moments later, when the boy and father opened the door to leave, the ice on the twin hinges would shatter with a sickening screech.
A boy named Armik Mnatsakanyan was standing under the door waiting for his father. The stove still did not smell of fire or food, the fearful flames occasionally shot out from the stove door, and the window panes were frosted. In a murky, smoky, dog-poop-colored girl's room, her father knelt on one leg against the faint sounds of the stove and picked a nail from the drawer, and if it wasn't too crooked, he dropped it into his leather jacket pocket. The mother made their bed and every time she noticed that the father put a nail in his pocket. In her mother's opinion, both the nails and the pocket were a pity, and she wanted to remark every time that the bare nails would scratch the pocket, but she did not. Before the war, when the boy's hand could not reach the drawer of the cabinet, his father had a lot of nails there, but now it was hard to find and he thought he didn't have any, and the young man named Armik Mnatsakanyan was ashamed to remember that he had once been a child and ruined his father's nails. Now those nails were in rotten wood, in the ground and in other unnecessary places. wherever it was soft and the nail went easily, the boy held it and hit it with a hammer.
What was on the stove was not food, it was smoke and slop. They didn't have a dog, the wolves took the dog, the paw was a pig's paw, it hadn't warmed up yet and they hadn't taken it outside, its sour smell was mixed with the smell of the house. The wolves took his dog from the hands of a young man named Armik Mnatsakanyan. He had chosen that dog from the pups of the papa's female, he had buried the rest of the extras, together with the grandfather, he had raised him with half of his share of milk, as the grandfather ordered him to protect the dog from wolves that winter, the dog will protect itself in the coming winter. The dog hit the door and squealed in alarm, the boy jumped out of bed and left the barn and saw the dog still alive in the snow from the old pear tree, there was even such a moment that the boy and the dog were together among the wolves, but then the boy was alone in the snow, the high jump of the white dog seemed to be seen from the old pear tree on the deserted white slope, among the wolves his sharp howl was muffled, the wolves were no longer a pack, they were leaving individually, but the dog was not coming back. The boy cautiously, surprised and horrified by what happened, called the dog, but the dog was not there. Standing in the pale snow under the moon, the boy called the dog again, the boy even heard its soft bark and bark, but it was an illusion. Under the big moon, in the pure snows, the boy did not find blood for a moment, they were torn and devoured in the jump in the air, and the confused boy stood for an eternity, their bitter commotion in his ears, where the wolves and the dog were. A little later, the mother came out and was standing at the door of the barn. The boy came looking back and forth, then stood next to his mother at the barn door looking at the white, clean slope. He was not afraid, he had been among wolves, he was now naked and barefoot in the bitter frost, but his mother's words were not praise. if the boy had not so foolishly beaten himself into the pack, the dog would not have been beaten and saved. Then already, in the house of the sleeping children and the extinguished stove, the mother praised the boy, but it was a false praise, and the real opinion of the mother was the reproach, which the mother did not repeat again, but it was already a stigma in the boy's heart.
The sister woke up, sat on the bed and, still seeing nothing and no one, began to tell how in her little dream the father had come, kissed her, but had not brought anything for her... and while telling the story, she saw her father and was surprised.
- Wow, you came in a dream.
The father was looking for a nail against the stove, there was no joy in the father, but he found something like tenderness for the girl. - I came in a dream, - said the father, - I came from a real dream.
It was a difficult tenderness in that poor, cold, gray, smelly house, but it was enough for the girl's joy. His cheeks were shining, his eyes were bright, he was silently smiling while sitting on the bed, then he said:
- Will you come as often as I see you in a dream?
Kneeling against the stove, the father froze in admiration. "As long as you see," said the father, "I will come."
The mother had made a fold in their bed, she was putting a blanket on the fold, the mother said.
- The more you see, the more will come, but you see less.
- I will see every night, - said the girl, - I will see all the time so that you don't go, I will close my eyes like this and see.
The girl covered her shoulders with a blanket, closed her eyes and rocked.
- You will see, - said the mother, - you will be brought, they will catch you and send you to someone else's work. There is no end to someone else's work.
"That will happen too," said the father. "I can't find a nail."
"It is there in the ashes," said the mother, "but will they need it?"
- What does a nail do in the ashes?
In his corner under the door, the boy huddled. Sweating with shame, the boy cowered not only because he had ended up throwing the nails into the oven (the rotting wood of the ruler had been thrown into the oven by his mother and the old nails from when he was a child were exposed), but the boy cowered even more so that his sister would not see him; The boy named Armik Mnatsakanyan wore a woolen homemaker's deira against the stove's blasts, which his mother had worn when she was a girl, and which her sister would wear a couple of years later. the girl knew that the bright red deira would be her dress and sometimes she measured it on herself, sometimes she stepped into it. With all the consciousness of need, it was an offensive cloth to the boy, but when the mother, almost by force, thrust the boy into it, one could not complain aloud, for the children, brother and girl, would wake up, and now also one could not give up one's place under the door, for the girl would see her future red cloth in the flames and be grieved; he wouldn't say anything, but he would be sick with grief.
The only thing the boy could do against the girl's clothes was to tie the rope over his right shoulder and under his left arm to his chest and wait for his father at the door like a Russian soldier wearing army uniform.
The boy himself lowered the door in front of his father at night, and the father came in from the cold outside with the smell of fresh beech sawdust, stood in the doorway for a moment against the family warmth of the room, put his heavy, tired hand on the boy's head as if caressing it, then, as if collapsing from fatigue, kissed the sleeping children, and the girl said: "What have you brought for me?" What the girl saw was not a dream, it had happened exactly like that, but when the village leadership managed to understand that her father was in the village, and when they put her father in charge, it was like a dream even for the boy. Apparently, they happened to see them coming through the village and remembered vividly that the bulls had broken the door of the barn in the mountains...
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