The bus jerked a few times and stopped. The driver jumped off his seat and announced to the passengers:
“Ladies and gentlemen, the bus has broken down. I will contact the base and request another bus. For those who cannot walk, I suggest waiting here, but I must warn you—the heater is not working. If you can walk to the final stop, it’s best to get off now. It’s only about 6 kilometers left.”
People started to complain, but a stern woman in her fifties, dressed in worn clothes, shouted:
“Why are you yelling? It’s clear: those who can’t walk can sit and wait. I’m going.”
She slung her worn backpack over her shoulder and exited the bus. A light snow was falling outside, the frost was mild, and she briskly walked down the road.
“I should get there in an hour,” she thought, glancing at the button cell phone she had found at the station. “I just need to hurry; it gets dark early now.”
She quickened her pace but then felt her back break into sweat. “Slow down. No, this isn’t good. If I sweat, I’ll freeze right away. Better to walk slowly,” she decided and continued at a normal pace.
Suddenly, a gust of cold wind pushed her to the side.
“Oh no, not this,” she thought. “Just missing a blizzard.”
But the snowstorm had already begun. The wind quickly piled up impassable snowdrifts on the road, and Rita, that was the traveler’s name, had to step onto the shoulder where the snow was blown onto the highway. She turned around to look at the bus, but it was no longer visible through the snowy veil.
At one point, the road turned right and was entirely covered with snow. Rita couldn’t see where to go next, so she headed in a random direction. With each step, walking became increasingly difficult, her feet sinking into the snow in her low boots.
Rita stopped and began to think about what to do: return or continue further. Meanwhile, the snow continued to fall heavily, burying everything around so that it was unclear where the road was and where back to the bus was.
Rita tried to remember how many times she had looked back to calculate the direction, but it was getting dark. She had to turn on her phone’s flashlight to light her way, but it lasted only a short while before going out, and Rita was once again in darkness.
“Why did I venture so far at night?” she scolded herself, when suddenly she noticed some lights ahead.
“Some settlement,” Rita rejoiced and gathered all her strength to push forward. Finally, she reached a small house on the edge of the village. It stood secluded, its windows shuttered. Rita struggled to reach the porch and began to knock:
“Please open,” she whispered, frozen, not understanding where her voice had gone.
Losing all hope that they would open, she accidentally pressed a metal lever on the lock, and the door opened. Rita smelled the old cottage and the cold, uninhabited air.
“At least it’s not draughty,” the woman thought, feeling relief, and started rummaging in her pocket.
She found a crumpled matchbox and struck a match. The room was small, with a stove. An old kerosene lamp stood on the table. Rita approached it and tried to light it. It took a while, but when the small flame lit up, it seemed to her that the house even got a bit warmer.
By the light of the lamp, she noticed a bucket with small chips and darkened firewood next to the stove. She put a few chips mixed with dry grass into the stove and lit them. They cheerfully blazed up, and Rita stretched her frozen fingers towards the fire.
“Thank God, I won’t freeze to death,” she thought.
Rita was an orphan. She spent her childhood and youth in an orphanage and a boarding school. After that, she went to a trade school, learned to be a painter-plasterer and tiler, and got married. Her husband was from the village, so they lived in a house with a stove heating and facilities in the yard. But Rita didn’t complain.
Her husband worked as a tractor driver for a farmer, and she worked in her profession. The young family quickly gathered funds for construction and renovation, brought water into the house, and made a redesign. Now they had a bathroom, a separate kitchen from the living room, and steam heating on wood. They lived and were happy, raising a son.
Later, when the son came back from the army, Rita’s brigade was invited to work in the city. She went there, hoping to earn some money for her son’s wedding. He said that his fiancée was left in the city where he served.
However, this wedding was not meant to be. One day, Rita received a call from the village council informing her that the house had burned down, and her husband and son had died from carbon monoxide poisoning. Not believing what had happened, she rushed home but found only a pile of charred remains.
“Why is this, for what?” she cried out in a voice not her own, mourning her beloved men, whom she was so proud of.
Neighbors tried to console the unfortunate woman as best they could, inviting her to live with them, but Rita was beside herself. Every morning she went to the cemetery and read prayers at the graves until she lost consciousness. She often called an ambulance, and the chairman offered to provide housing and give her a job, but she heard no one, only walking around the ashes and running to the cemetery. No one knew when she ate, when she slept.
Eventually, unable to stay in the village any longer, where everything reminded her of a broken life, she headed to the city. She tried to work in her profession, but competitors—a brigade of migrants under the management of local dealers—quickly pushed Rita out of this market, and she got a job at a municipal service, but the salary was paid irregularly, and it was hardly enough for rental housing.
And then her health began to fail: shortness of breath, her heart began to act up. Rita started to wander, begging for alms, spending nights wherever she could. The police, of course, chased her. This continued for several years.
Once, when she and an acquaintance, a fellow vagrant, were kicked out of a station building right into the cold, she decided to return to her husband’s village. After all, they knew her there, they could help. And the chairman had promised assistance. So she found herself on that ill-fated bus…
When the pile of chips in the stove was well ablaze, Rita added firewood to the furnace. The house filled with living warmth, and she felt that she would soon collapse. Rita looked behind the stove and saw a sleeping platform lined with old tiles.
She lay down on the warm stones, took off her jacket and used it as a pillow, instantly falling asleep.
In the morning, a thin ray of light that had penetrated the room through a crack between the closed shutters woke her up. Opening her eyes, she immediately squinted at the brightness. Climbing down from the platform, she dressed because the stove had long gone out, and the house had become cool. She took out half a loaf of bread and a box of juice from her backpack, snacked, and carefully collected the crumbs.
Deciding to leave the house and open the shutters, she pulled the front door towards herself and noticed fresh tracks in the snow on the porch. Approaching closer, she saw that they were children’s, probably from felt boots. On the step lay something bright red. Bending down, she picked up a child’s knitted mitten with a snowflake pattern.
“Interesting,” Rita thought, “someone was here before I woke up.”
The tracks led behind the house, and she decided to follow them. They sank into deep snowdrifts and led to the house, but suddenly they stopped. Rita looked up, puzzled, not knowing where to go next, and followed the tracks of a car, which seemed to have passed after a tractor. In a few minutes, she found herself in front of a gate near a church. In the yard behind the fence stood an old bus, and the church door was ajar.
Rita decided to enter. Apparently, the church was recently built. Inside, several men with beards were plastering the walls. She enjoyed the warmth coming from the heated floor and watched.
“No, not like that, father, like this,” one of them said to another, whose beard was even longer. The other helplessly ran a spatula over the wall, and a large piece of plaster fell to the floor.
“Oh,” exclaimed the man with the thick beard and put the spatula in the bucket. “No, Yuri Nikolayevich, plastering is not for me, my hands, you see, are hooks.”
“Come on, father, don’t sell yourself short. I’m showing you, like this…”
But the father had already noticed Rita entering and looked at her with interest.
She approached and asked:
“Hello. Can you tell me who lost this mitten?”
Yuri shrugged, and the father took the find and shouted upstairs:
“Liza!”
Rita looked up and saw a young woman in a white scarf standing on a wide wooden balcony right above the entrance.
“Is this ours?” asked the father, waving the mitten.
“It seems like ours,” she replied and quickly came down. Taking the mitten, she smiled. “Ah, this is Katya’s. She ran to the abandoned house today, insisting that she saw smoke coming from its chimney last night.”
“Really!” exclaimed the priest. “And did she find anyone?”
“No, she says the shutters on the windows were closed, she saw no one and found no tracks. Though the snowstorm might have covered them,” the woman replied and looked at Rita. “Where did you find the mitten?”
“On the porch. Yesterday, I ended up in that abandoned house off the highway when the bus broke down, so I thought I’d freeze and die,” Rita confessed. “Luckily, I found some firewood and warmed up a bit.”
“And where were you heading?” asked the father.
“To Soviy Yar,” said all three almost in chorus.
“You ended up completely in the wrong place. This is Lenskoye village, Soviy Yar is about ten kilometers away.”
Rita spread her arms.
“Well, I guess fate led me to you,” she looked at the father. “I’m a painter, plasterer, and tiler; I can help you with the renovations.”
“Really?” he gasped. “That’s wonderful because I turned out to be quite the hopeless apprentice, can’t get anything right.” He approached Rita, extending his hand. “Well, let’s get acquainted. I’m the rector, Father Andrey.” He pointed to Liza. “My wife, she’s supposed to be called ‘mother.’ We really need artisans like you. And no one agrees to come to our remote place.”
“Margarita,” she introduced herself and asked: “So, can I start working?”
She was eager to begin.
“What are you saying,” stretched the father. “You’re off the road, surely you haven’t had breakfast yet. We’ll feed you first, and then…”
He nodded to the mother, and she went into a small building next to the church, where, as it turned out, a dining hall was set up. There, several smooth-faced women were setting the table. Liza returned and invited everyone to dine.
Rita was served a hearty fish soup with croutons, a salad bowl with herring under a fur coat, a cup of hot tea, and a pie on a plate. She had forgotten when she last ate normal food, so she carefully, trying not to pounce, began to eat.
Suddenly one of the women asked:
“Rit, aren’t you from Soviy Yar?”
“Well, yes,” she replied and immediately recognized her neighbor from the street where she used to live. “Oh, Valechka, is that you! And how are you here?”
“Well, we don’t have a church in Soviy. So I come here,” replied Valentina. “Remember, the chairman allocated you a house? But you didn’t want to live there, and that house was given to a family of resettlers from a flooded area. So there you go. Where are you going to live now?”
Rita shrugged and noticed that Valentina, leaning towards the mother, whispered something in her ear. A look of astonishment appeared on Liza’s face.
“Well, we won’t find a place to settle a specialist?” said the father. “We’ll fix up that house where you spent the night, throw in some firewood, and live in health.”
Rita smiled. Never before had problems seemed so easily solvable as in the company of these people.
She finally asked for tools and to be shown the scope of work. Wall finishing resumed, and Liza and the women quietly sang troparions, apparently preparing for the service.
Rita was engaged in her favorite work and rested her soul. She didn’t care how much they would pay her or where she would live. Bringing the walls of such a beautiful church into order was a joy for her.
“Well, Margarita, enough already, you’ve worked gloriously,” said Father Yuri Nikolayevich. “And now it’s time to rest. Let’s go to our house for dinner.”
Rita started to refuse:
“What are you saying, why should I come to your house? Can’t you see who I look like?”
“Nothing, you’re about the same build as my wife. We’ll find you a robe and everything you need. You’ll bathe, sleep in the warmth,” the father stubbornly said.
When a four-year-old girl with curly hair peeking out from under her hat and laughing eyes ran into the church, Rita unexpectedly agreed for herself. It was impossible to refuse the little girl who approached her and said:
“Did you find my mitten? Thank you! I was so upset, I thought I lost it on the road, and the dogs dragged it away. My mom knitted them for me.”
The father and mother had three of their own and three adopted children who had been left without parents for various reasons.
“Sashka came on his own,” Mother Liza told Rita. “We noticed him at a service before Christmas about five years ago. He stood in a corner, folded his hands, whispered something. The grandmothers, seeing him, immediately understood that he was not local. They started asking him after the service, turned out he was an orphan. They buried his mother, sent his father to prison, and he was on his way to an orphanage. He took off and ran, I don’t know how he managed to get through the snowdrifts to us. But the father and I decided to adopt him, found the documents, got everything arranged.” Liza smiled.
Rita drank tea by the window, listening to her gentle voice.
“Mitya is twelve, his mother and father were deprived of parental rights, alcoholics. And we noticed Vika in the orphanage right away when we brought there gifts collected by the parishioners. Everyone was noisy, jumping, and she sat there, thinking something.”
Vika, hearing that they were talking about her, stopped her drawing and ran up to her mother:
“Mom, can I take my teddy bear to school tomorrow?”
“Take it, but what if it gets lost, you won’t cry?”
“No, I’ll clip it to my backpack with a carabiner,” said Vika and ran away.
“And Katya has the most unusual story,” continued Liza. “A young pregnant woman arrived in Soviy Yar looking for her fiancé by address. She came to a homestead, and there was only ashes. She screamed, and she went into labor. The neighbors called an ambulance. No one knew where she was from, and she could no longer speak. Only when they were loading her into the car did she whisper that the child was from Volodya Shmelov, who died in the fire. We went to her in the maternity hospital, but unfortunately, the mother didn’t survive, left the daughter an orphan. So we took the girl ourselves. I had just given birth to Slavik then, so I breastfed them together.”
Rita trembled as if with fever, grabbed one hand to her heart and the other to the mother’s hand.
“Lord, but that’s Volodya, my son’s, daughter!” she exclaimed.
“Yes, Margarita Efimovna,” confirmed Liza. “Valya told me that you are Katya’s biological grandmother. We recorded her as Ekaterina Vladimirovna Shmelova. We thought maybe relatives would be found.”
“Could it be?” Rita burst into tears. “I was so accustomed to misfortunes that I no longer expected anything good from life.”
Mother Liza embraced the crying woman, and the approaching father said:
“So, Margarita Efimovna, you’ll have to settle with us as Katya’s grandmother. Katya is like a daughter to us, so we won’t give her up just like that,” he joked. “And we have enough space, the parishioners built us such a house. You will live not cramped and not offended… Children, listen to what I say,” he shouted. “Today in our church, your grandmother Rita was found. Now she will live with us.”
The surprised children surrounded Margarita.
“Can you tell stories?” asked Katya.
“Granddaughter, of course,” she replied, “we read many in the orphanage.”
“So you’re from an orphanage too?” Vika and Sasha perked up. “And we thought only little kids lived in orphanages.”
“Well, I lived there too until I was little, and then I grew up and went to work.”
“What do you do?” the children asked almost in chorus.
“Painter-plasterer,” Rita replied and was surprised by the kids’ reaction. They laughed merrily.
“Dad can’t plaster,” one of them said. “Every evening he complains to mom that he can’t do it.”
The next day, all the children who hadn’t yet gone to school came with the father to the church to watch Rita work. She applied plaster evenly to the wall, leaving no wrinkles or bubbles.
The children, mesmerized by her movements, told the approaching parishioners:
“This is our grandmother, she can also paint and lay tiles. So soon all the walls will be beautiful.”
By spring, the interior work was indeed finished, and the parishioners were preparing for Easter. A few days before the holiday, a letter arrived for Mother Liza from Ostrogozhsk. It reported that Katya’s grandfather on her mother’s side had died and left his granddaughter a will for a house in the private sector of that town.
The letter said that the grandfather, having received the message about his daughter’s death and the birth of his granddaughter, grieved deeply. They had parted with his daughter after a big quarrel, he couldn’t forgive her for having a child out of wedlock. That’s when his daughter went looking for Katya’s father. All this time, the grandfather wanted to write a will for his granddaughter, but he was so suspicious that he couldn’t decide to undertake such a serious matter. And only before his death did he take a solemn promise from Mother Liza that she wouldn’t deceive him.
“Well, there you go,” said Liza, “our Katya has her own house. After Easter, we’ll go see.”
The family indeed traveled to Ostrogozhsk on the father’s bus to accept Katya’s inheritance and rent it out to good people. This trip became a bright impression in their interesting life, full of surprises and love.