A hard-drinking rural drunkard and a story about grandma’s treasure are the same natural and compatible things as mayonnaise and herring under a fur coat. So, the people in the village are gloomy, distrustful and little talkative, which makes some drunken peasant, against the general background, seem like just a chrysostom and a standard of sociability. However, the last thirty years have been a rollercoaster of the theory of evolution through our village. Very few survived. Just ten years ago, summer residents generally had no problems finding a farm laborer to weed their beds. Drunk, they themselves went knocking on the gate, driven by the desire to find a hangover.
In general, now we have only two of these left, and therefore the Apostle Peter has been recording absenteeism in his journal for a long time. One of the survivors is Vityunya or Vitek, or, as he likes to call himself, Viktor Alekseevich, but everyone knows him as a Chechen. It’s not difficult to guess where this nickname came from; at the beginning of the 2000s, Vityunya served as a conscript, as they said then, in a hot spot.
The Chechen spends two thirds of his adult life in a drunken stupor. Not exactly, like shit, but stable from morning to evening in a permanent state. He would not have left this blissful form of existence, but he had to. So, you still need to earn money, and his relatives did not completely write him off as an intelligent life form. They are trying to drag him into the human world.
So, one day, about three years ago, I met Vityunya at the store. The guy is standing, swaying, begging people for change, piteously looking into their souls. I don’t know what the efficiency of such a fishery is, but I’ve never submitted one. And then he decided to draw my attention to himself. That’s why he’s a sociable guy, when he’s sober we can often talk about something on the street, but if he’s drunk, I culturally distance myself. And then he tells me right off the bat.
— Do you want me to tell you where the treasure is buried??? – The Chechen said and with a squinted look he looked around to see if anyone else had heard him. He’s a useless actor, and I’ve already heard enough drunken stories like this, even if you publish an almanac with a two-hundred-page guidebook.
And I already waved my hand at him, saying, come on, and then he said a phrase that shocked me a little. – So Vanka the Tankman and I collected silver fingers there.
As if lightning struck me, a cause-and-effect relationship struck me. Silver fingers??? So, these are hryvnias of the Novgorod type. Such a definition of hryvnia could only be given by a person who saw them with his own eyes, but did not know what it was.
— And where did you and Tankman dig for hryvnia??? – This was a trick question and from Vasyunya’s reaction, it was clear that he was hearing the word hryvnia for the first time. And this is already a sure sign – he is not lying and will not make things up.
Separately, I think it’s worth revealing the backstory of how Ivan, I don’t remember his last name, but I know he works part-time as a taxi driver, got the nickname Tankman. No, he did not serve in the army as a tank driver, he was not in the army at all. His father served as a tank driver. This was in the late 80s, and then in the army they dragged everything that was not screwed down, and what was screwed on was unscrewed and dragged. So Ivan’s father came from the army with a whole bag of spare parts for the tank, mainly radio electronics. Well, a week after demobilization, the boy was detained at the central market of the regional center while trying to sell a tank night vision device. I don’t know how true the story is, but in the end, out of the entire bag after the search, only a tank helmet remained. So, Vanka spent almost his entire childhood wearing this helmet, and that’s how he received the nickname Tankman from his peers.
Vityunya The Chechen sensed my interest and immediately realized that he could make money out of interest. But, I won’t fall for such scams, I told him, “Say, I won’t give you money for free, but if I find a place, I’ll have a case of good beer.”
The Chechen hesitated, shivered, he was not used to working for the future, he wanted to do it here and now, but there was nothing to do. He said that this spring he and Tankman, on his motorcycle, went to the meadows and there on Krasnaya Gorka, Tankman found more than a dozen of these very “fingers” and also, separately, in different places, small silver coins with incomprehensible inscriptions.
Red Hill is an interesting place. In the meadows, about five kilometers from the village, if in a straight line, but if along dirt roads to bypass swampy places and ditches, then all ten. According to the stories of an old-timer, the Old Believers used to gather there for various church holidays before, when they were children. I’ve been on this hill before, I spent the whole day. But I didn’t even find iron signals. It was later that I learned from a geography teacher that there are records that in the 20th century there were two strong floods from the river overflow, and as a result, Krasnaya Gorka became lower by three to four meters and washed it away. So, logically, there was nothing to hiccup there.
However, the Chechen seemed to be telling the truth. And last week I decided to check this information. Maybe the first time, I missed something there? I arrived at the place for three hours, wandered around, combing the hill, diagonally, vertically, perpendicularly, and even “horse.”
NOTHING!!!
One button of a private in the Soviet army. ALL!!! And, most importantly, not a single trace of the digging of predecessors. The last fact convinced me more than the rest that Vasyunya either lied to me or messed something up.
I met the Chechen a month later, he was just in the next phase of his human appearance. Shaved, washed, just like Barsik. I came to him with complaints, “What did you say to me?” And, he answered, “I, not me, the cow is not mine!!! It didn’t happen, this is the first time I’ve heard of it, but I could have come up with something about silver fingers. In general, sorry, I was drunk. If you ask the Tankman anything, maybe he’ll tell you something”
So think and decide here, Vasyunya came up with this story, or if he is sober, he knows that there is no need to chat about such things. It was later that I somehow got into a conversation with Uncle Misha about how he works part-time on our personal tractor, who needs to plow the garden, who needs to bring sand, or something else. So, Uncle Misha told me that Tankman once approached him with a question, “Oh, can you cut off one hillock in the meadows with a bucket and how much will it cost?” He flatly refused to indicate the place in advance. But Uncle Misha told him that he wouldn’t dig anything anywhere without the permission of the owner of the land. And so we parted ways.