The telegram from Arston took me by surprise. At that time, I was just basking in the sun on the southern slopes of the Moro River, not far from the coast of the Biscuit Bay, sipping a tart and weedy brownwine.

“Madam, a telegram came from your name from Aarston,” the well-trained porter in a short cylindrical cap met me when I returned to the siesta, unable to bear the heat of the noonday sun. His thin lips were curved into a respectful smile, the tendrils curled over his upper lip and his eyes expressed exceptional devotion, but in the depths of the muddy gray-blue pupils one could see how lustful eyes he glided over my figure, as if stroking my bulging my nerve fingers and quivering places. From his gaze, goosebumps ran between my shoulder blades and burned in the lower abdomen, and I hurried to retire, so as not to betray my temptation, haughtily tossed the receptionist a silver coin.

Locking the room for two turns of the key, I threw off the calico hoodie, under which was a bathing suit, and flopped my stomach on the soft cool surface of the bed, chatting in the air with bent legs and looking at the dark blue form of the telegram. The telegram (like everything, and always, and everywhere telegrams) was ridiculous.

“Come. Grandmother gathers a family. Claris "

Why did the old hag Izergeys needed to gather the whole family in our old family estate in Arston - a place that was terribly boring and dull, in which I had to spend the first 14 years of my life - I could only guess. Announce a testament? I don't think she was going to give a soul to God. Then why? Maybe she was going to get married again. Only women's curiosity and the inflexible spirit of adventurism spurred me to go to this god-forgotten land and spend at least two weekends there. Desperate to bring to the denouement the planned romance with a young cavalry captain, having a rest in the same hotel, I, having collected my luggage and grabbed my beloved traveling bag, left the evening express.

The trip in the first-class carriage was quite ordinary and did not differ in anything remarkable. I savored dry Portes from the grapes of an early autumn harvest and nibbled apple almonds, looking out the window at the colorful landscapes passing by the peasants and the tiny villages with red and green tiled roofs.

The Arston family estate was located in the north of the country, not far from the border with Rugaria, with whose peoples a couple of centuries ago our ancestors waged an endless war. Therefore, our castle rather resembled an impregnable fortress of gray stone covered with scabs of dark green moss. All of us, the whole Arston family, came out of this estate, there we also intermarried with Izergeys, Clarks and Services.

Even literally in the last century, the estate flourished, thanks to its advantageous location in the bay of the Ice River, along which endless caravans went to Rugaria, Salezia, Vanzania and other nearby states.

But the new era marked the widespread construction of railways, through which endless tracks were driven back and forth by the train: red - freight, blue and green - passenger, military - gray-sand color, white - medical. Then the disadvantage of the location of our estate among the prickly rocks, past which to lay the rail track was very expensive and unprofitable. As a result, our estate quickly fell into neglect, the nearby villages went bankrupt, the inhabitants moved in search of a better life to Wilston, Carringston and the Blackstone village mine. We, the numerous children of Arston, Yzergeys and Servants, also left the estate, as if they had grown up nestlings flying away from the nest.Someone left home to get a proper education, like, for example, me, my sister Mollis and young cousin José. Many men of our kind during the seven-year war rose under the banner of the Mean King and died. Others of close and distant relatives have acquired estates, families, and affairs in more favorable settlements and have broken off every connection with the fading tribal nest. Clark didn’t have his children, so they stayed in the estate, and they spent their whole lives living in it, caring for our elderly ancestor-founders and helping with housekeeping and maintaining order in the estate. My father, old man Carl Arston, left this world last winter at the age of 93 years, leaving as widow his third wife, 30-year-old Zoe, who was only a year younger than me. A couple of years earlier, my mother Mathilda Aurston and Joel Izergeis, the husband of an old woman Chloe, introduced themselves to the Lord with a difference of a month, which, as the Elders, ruled the now depleted property. On Thursday, the old woman turned 90, and probably for this event she timed the family gathering to ...

... here, a beehive swarm was full of guesses, but one thing was sure for sure, something unexpected would happen, for it is not in the rules of the stingy and inhospitable Chloe Izergeys to arrange noisy family gatherings without a definitive weighty reason.

Having had dinner at the train restaurant with gooseberries in sesame sauce with orange olives, I reclined on the soft bed of a first class carriage, bending my bare feet under me, and sifted in my memory which one of the numerous relatives would come to the Arston estate this time. We, the descendants of Arston, were less and less in this world, but to be honest, I just wanted to spend these days in someone’s pleasant company, rather than listening to the mothballs of the old maiden Clarice and her balding brother Baris, a ruddy fat man with steamy breathing and a bitchy mouth, and other middle-aged and boring relatives.

To admit, I have not been in the estate for more than two years. The news of the death of papa caught me on another continent, and for the funeral I did not keep up either way or that way. However, I don’t think that the old marazmatic and his arrogant bitch Zoe remembered my existence at all, so papa set off on his last journey without my hot tears. But in whom I really dreamed, there was my mother, and the news of her serious illness pulled me out of the very center of events of my academic career. It was then that I came to Arston for the last time, it was sultry August, and the propellers of military airplanes following the south still cut the skies, although officially the war of the Three Continents was considered completed.

Mother faded pretty quickly. It seemed yesterday I spent the day and night at her bedside, holding a dry, wrinkled palm in my hands, and the undertakers lowered a black lacquered box into wet gray clay under the pouring rain. And I stand and I can not squeeze out a single tear, I just don’t believe IT! Tears were later. A lot of tears. And several wrinkles formed around the eyes in these THESE sad days. It seemed, besides me, for the other members of the Family, the death of the mother was not such a big loss. On the other hand, these people are accustomed to burying their relatives with such constancy that they are already accustomed to the daily routine of death, as if they were a cook, scurrying around the kitchen every day. And I really LOST, probably, for the first time in my life, and experienced my loss almost alone. It will be wisely said, but then I felt support in only one person, my cousin José. But then he was only sixteen, and he was already preparing to leave the gray walls of the castle, as Mollis and I did once. In the meantime, he was as restless and alienated in this house of old men as I was.

After the funeral of my mother, I went to the cliff and led there all day, shedding bitter tears, then just looking at the Kostomara valley stretched before me.

Once I spotted Jose sitting nearby and just as I was peering into the distance. I called him and he sat down beside him.We were silent for a long time, thinking of each about his own, and then he pulled out a white cake from his bosom and broke it in two and stretched half to me. Until now, a piece did not crawl into my throat, but then suddenly I felt an incredible hunger, the smell of fresh bread penetrated my nostrils ...