The mother was weeping, and the father couldn’t look up from shame:
The mother was weeping, and the father couldn’t look up from shame: they hadn’t been able to scrape together enough money for their son’s tutor. But five years later, a gleaming Porsche rolled into the village…
A heavy silence hung in the house—thick, like the air right before a thunderstorm. On the oilcloth tabletop, amid crumbs from the evening bread, lay a pile of crumpled bills: large ones, small ones, and a few completely worn ones.
Stepan, a stout man with hands deeply stained by grease and soil, stared blankly at the money.
“It’s not enough, Nyura. No matter how you slice it, it’s just not enough,” he said, his voice flat and dead. “We have to pay for electricity tomorrow, and if we give Palna her fee for the math lessons, we’ll be sitting here without a bite of bread.”
Nyura, his wife—a woman who had withered before her time from northern winds and grueling work at the dairy farm—let out a quiet sob, hiding her face in her apron.
“What kind of parents are we, Stepushka? Everyone else’s kids have tutors. But our Vaska? He’s going to fail those damn exams. He’ll never get into the city. He’ll spend his whole life up to his elbows in muck, just like us!”
Stepan slammed his fist on the table hard enough to make the teacups rattle plaintively. As a man and the provider, he felt sick with disgust and shame. Sick to his stomach. He hadn’t been able to do it. He hadn’t earned enough. He had let his own flesh and blood down.
Vaska failed the exam. He missed the cutoff by just a few pathetic points.
On the day the results came out, Stepan got drunk. He sat on the bank of the wide northern river, staring at the cold, leaden water, and wept angry, drunken tears. It felt as though his own calloused hands had choked the life out of his son’s future.
That evening, Vaska—thin, unkempt, with his permanent notebook tucked into the pocket of his baggy pants—walked up to his father.
“Dad. Look… don’t tear yourself apart over this. I don’t need that math. And I don’t need that college either. I’m going to the big city.”
“Where?!” Stepan roared. “To sweep streets?”
“To make music, Dad. To write beats. I rap. The guys online listen to my tracks, and they say it’s fire.”
Stepan just waved a dismissive hand. Good grief! Rap! That devilish mumbling. The boy had completely lost his mind from the disappointment.
But Vaska left anyway. With just a single backpack and an old laptop.
The years dragged on. The village went on living its sluggish, gray existence. Nyura practically went blind staring out the window, waiting for letters, while Stepan clenched his teeth whenever the neighbors asked with snide grins:
“So, Stepan, how’s your artist doing? Still singing in the subway tunnels? Man, you should’ve just sold the cow and paid for the boy to become an accountant!”
Stepan said nothing. He had grown older, his shoulders permanently hunched. The bitterness toward life and his own poverty lodged in him like a festering splinter, making it hard to breathe. Bad luck. Blind, hopeless bad luck.
It was late April. Stepan was in the yard fixing an old car, cursing at a stripped thread. Suddenly, a deep, well-fed roar echoed from the main road—a sound unlike any local engine.
A car rolled slowly down the street, kicking up spring mud. It wasn’t just a car; it was a spaceship. Black, sleek, and predatory. It came to a complete stop right by Stepan’s leaning wooden fence. Neighbors poked their heads out of windows, completely forgetting about their seedlings.
The door clicked open softly. A young man stepped out of the cabin…
The continuation is in the first c0mment
