The author arrived in the village for a wedding.
Galya’s bride is almost impossible to discern - this is how she rushes about the house: a lot of work. In the village, she was considered one of the best brides. Her virtues - incomplete, non-stratum, not strong - are that she is from a very working kind.
The mother of the bride, Maria Gerasimovna, refills with kerosene and hangs lamps under the ceiling, corrects photographs, shakes towels so that the embroidery is better visible ...
On the wedding day, long before the bridegroom arrived at the kitchen (here she is called kut), her peers gathered. The bride is supposed to cry, and she, happy, pink-haired, can not begin. Finally she decided, sobbed.
But mothers are few. She brought the lamenter-lamenter, neighbor Natalia Semenovna. “Why are you shorties singing? - Natalya Semenovna addressed reproachfully to all. “You have to sing fibrous at the wedding.”
I drank beer, wiped my lips with the back of my hand and sang sadly: "The sun is setting, the divine eyelid is passing ..."
His voice is high and clear, he sings leisurely, diligently and no, no, yes, he will explain something: he believes so little that the content of the old tribute is understandable by the current, shag-headed ...
The groom, matchmaker, thousand, friend and all the guests from the groom came to pick up the bride on a dump truck: there was no other free machine at the flax mill where the bride and groom work. Before entering the village, a barricade met the guests - as usual, a ransom should be taken for the bride. But, of course, the guys trampled in the cold (frost thirty degrees) not because of a bottle of vodka. In the huge village of Sushinovo there is still no electricity, no radio, no library, no club. And youth holidays are necessary!
A bridegroom named Pyotr Petrovich burst into the kitchen already drunk - poured so as not to freeze - and out of measure with his proud self. The matchmaker solemnly seated the young. They brought "sweet cakes", obligatory at northern rural weddings. Each invited family comes with its own cake - this is the same folk art in the North as carved platbands on the windows, cockerels and ice skates on the wings.
Among men at the feast very soon typical Russian truth-seekers appeared, advocating for justice, for happiness for everyone. Bouncers also appeared: the whole old farmer walked from table to table the whole evening and boasted of his newly inserted plastic teeth.
Immediately got drunk and went the pretzel to twirl the uncle of the groom. His wife Grunya, found a girlfriend by misfortune, and all evening in the kitchen they poured out each other's soul: either they complained about their husbands, or they were praised for their strength and fearlessness.
Everything goes “as it should be,” as Maria Gerasimovna wanted. She herself had neither time to eat nor drink.
The women seated the accordionist on a high couch and crushed them with refrains, with shouts, until the accordion fell out of hands.
The young prince got drunk and began to swagger. And Maria Gerasimovna creeps in front of her dear brother-in-law, fawns, and petitions: "Petya, Petya, Petya!"
And the prince is swaggering, swaggering, tearing his shirt on himself. "Who are you? - is selected by a skinny fist to Galina's tear-stained pink-cheeked face. - Are you my wife or not? I'm Chapai! Clear?"
When all the beer in the bride’s house was drunk, the wedding went forty kilometers to the groom’s homeland.
In the morning, in the presence of the guests, the bride swept the floor, and various rubbish was thrown at her: they checked whether she was able to manage. Then the bride - she was already called a young man - surrounded the guests with pancakes and then handed out gifts to her new relatives. Everything that was sewn and embroidered for many weeks by the bride herself, her friends and mother.
