🙂 Greetings to regular and new readers! “Bouquet of tulips” is an incredible story that I heard from a fellow traveler – we were traveling with him in the same compartment of the train. And let this person forgive me if I suddenly confuse something, because he told me it more than 30 years ago.
Accident
Somewhere in the late 1980s, I was traveling by train Andijan-Tomsk. The fellow travelers were a man named Andrei and his daughter, who were heading somewhere to Siberia. Andrey showed me a bouquet of tulips in a large jar of water.
– Here, I’m taking to the grave of my wife. You cannot find such flowers in Siberia now, so I am bringing them from Central Asia. My wife really loves white tulips.
I thought that my fellow traveler accidentally made a slip: perhaps he still loves his deceased wife and considers her as though alive. But Andrei seemed to read my thoughts and continued:
– No, no, I didn’t make a reservation at all. My wife … In general, I’ll tell you everything in order.
“Three years ago,” Andrei began, “we were driving our Zhigulenka to the wedding of a relative’s son. I was driving while my wife and daughter were resting in the back seat. The road was difficult, through the taiga, on dirt roads. Night fell, but there were only twenty kilometers left to my destination, so I decided not to stop to rest.
Old bridge
We had to cross a bridge over a river – not very wide, about a hundred meters.
The old bridge is well preserved; trucks with trailers easily passed through it. Closer to the middle of the bridge, I had to turn strongly to the right: a loaded timber truck was coming towards me. The width of the bridge made it possible to somehow disperse. I slowed down and waited for the timber truck to pass us.
He caught up with me, and suddenly I felt a terrible blow to the Zhigulenka. The car was thrown sideways and thrown off the bridge. A huge log fell on us from the platform of the timber truck. The blow came casually, so that we were not crushed – only thrown into the water.
The windows in the car were open, water immediately filled the interior. I managed to get out, opened the back door, grabbed someone’s hand, began to rake upstairs. When I surfaced, it turned out that I had saved my daughter. Eyewitnesses of the incident threw the rope. They pulled us to the bridge. The daughter began to do artificial respiration.
I was asked: was there someone else in the car? I replied that my wife remained there. Someone said: “It is useless to save, already ten minutes have passed. We must wait for the morning and call the divers ”.
– My daughter and I were put into the salon of some car, they began to drink hot tea, – said Andrey. – It is difficult to convey in words what we experienced. The divers arrived only after lunch. They drove a truck crane, pulled the car out of the water. There was no body in it!
The divers searched for the corpse for two more days, but did not find it. My daughter and I returned home.
A couple of months later, I was summoned to the prosecutor’s office. It was reported that the fishermen found the body of a woman in the river. However, he was heavily eaten by fish. There were only some fragments of flesh on the bones and scraps of clothing. I went to the morgue for identification.
I could not say with complete certainty that it was my wife. But the prosecutors convinced me that it was she …
She was buried in a closed coffin. My daughter and I went to the cemetery almost every day, looked after the grave. They always brought whole armfuls of flowers: both field flowers and purchased ones. My wife was very fond of white tulips.
Masha
We ordered tea from the conductor, and Andrey continued his story:
– The next year my daughter graduated from the eighth grade. And my sister, who lives in Central Asia, invited us to visit, so that we could get a little away from our grief. We drove off. My daughter really liked it there, she decided to stay and enter one of the local technical schools. And I went home.
About a year later, I went hunting with friends. We stopped at the hut of an old Old Believer. In the evenings we talked for a long time with him and his son.
And the son said that one of his acquaintances named Grigory, who secretly washes gold in the taiga, brought a woman to his hut about a year and a half ago. She was not all right with her head, but she turned out to be a good hostess. But it was not clear how she found herself in these places.
It so happened that the next day our company came to visit the prospector Grigory. A solid house, next to a few sheds. A woman emerged from one: in a long, to the ground, dark dress, a dark dense scarf was wound on her head, her face was almost invisible. We got out cigarettes.
– Don’t smoke here! – she said. “My master won’t like this.
“It was as if lightning struck me,” Andrei continued excitedly. – It was the voice of my dead wife! I rushed to the woman – yes, it is she! But she looked at me coldly and hostilely. When I reached out my hand to her, I screamed:
– Bounce! – and hit me.
– Masha! Masha! I muttered. – It’s me, Andrey …
But she looked with mad eyes and wry her mouth viciously. My friends also recognized Masha.
When I reached out my hand, she screamed and hit me on the head with a stick.
– Masha, are you alive? – asked one of the friends. – Do you recognize us?
– Bounce! – the woman shouted again, fell to the ground, foam came out of her mouth.
When everything was settled, we sat in the hut, drank fragrant tea made from forest herbs and listened to Gregory’s story.
May God judge …
More than a year ago, Grigory went fishing. The place I chose was a couple of kilometers from the bridge where the accident happened.
The man threw the tackle in the evening, and when it began to dawn, he went to check them. And he found a woman lying unconscious on the shore. She was in a wet dress, her body turned blue from the cold, but she was breathing. Gregory took the stranger to the fire, tried to bring her to her senses.
At night, through the doze, he heard screams and noise from the side of the bridge. In the morning he raised the woman in his arms and carried her to his hut a dozen kilometers from the fishing spot.
Unhappy woke up only the next day. Her eyes were empty and meaningless. Apparently, something happened to her head. Grigory, as he could, looked after her, gave her broths of taiga medicinal herbs.
The woman, although she calmed down a little, could not say anything intelligible. “Well, okay,” thought Grigory. “Time will heal.”
So almost a year and a half passed. They began to live as husband and wife. Maria was busy with the household, Gregory mined gold and hunted. From the locals, he learned that a terrible accident had happened on the bridge, and one woman, falling into the river, disappeared. Then he was told that the body was found by the fishermen and the drowned woman was buried.
– Such are the things, – Andrey finished the story. – I didn’t take Mashenka away from Grigory. Both friends and Grigory himself advised to leave everything as it is. In the taiga, Masha has more chances to come to her senses, remember everything and make a decision. And now the two of us are going to her. We are bringing our favorite flowers – this bouquet of tulips.
With hope for a miracle
I consulted with the doctors, they say that there is a chance to restore Mashenka’s memory, but for this she needs some kind of stress … She never recognized me. Now I hope that she will recognize our daughter. And this bouquet of tulips, perhaps, will remind her of something too.
We also need to go to the grave. After all, there, perhaps, too, someone’s soul toils, does not find a place for itself. We will look after this grave in any case. Perhaps the drowned woman will someday find relatives. And Masha … The main thing is that she is alive. And my daughter and I finally came to life too. And for the rest – let God judge …
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