: The narrator promises his old grandmother to be at her funeral, but breaks the promise and regrets it all his life.
Returning from the war, the narrator goes to visit his grandmother. He wants to meet her first, so he makes his way to the house in backwards. The narrator notices how dilapidated the house in which he grew up. The roof of the bathhouse collapsed, the gardens were overgrown, and there wasn’t even a cat in the house, so the mice bit the floor in the corners.
War swept over the world, new states appeared, millions of people died, and nothing has changed in the house, and grandmother is still sitting by the window, winding yarn into a ball. She immediately recognizes the grandson, and the narrator notices how the grandmother grew old. Having admired her grandson with the Order of the Red Star on her chest, the old woman says that she is tired for her 86 years and will soon die. She asks her grandson to come and bury her when her time comes.
Grandmother soon dies, but they leave the Ural plant only for the funeral of her parents.
I still did not realize then all the enormity of the loss that befell me. If this happened now, I would crawl from the Urals to Siberia to close my grandmother’s eyes and give her the last bow.
“Depressing, quiet, eternal” wine settles in the heart of the narrator. He finds out from the villagers the details of her lonely life. The narrator learns that in recent years the grandmother has depleted, could not carry water from the Yenisei and washed potatoes in the dew; that she went on a prayer to the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra.
The author wants to know as much as possible about her grandmother, "let the door to the silent kingdom shut behind her."In his stories, he tries to tell people about her so that they remember their grandparents, and that her life be "infinite and eternal, as human kindness itself is eternal." “Yes, this work from the evil one,” the author does not have words that convey all his love for his grandmother and justify him before her.
The author knows that his grandmother would forgive him, but there isn’t her, and there’s no one to forgive.
