The stranger arrives from the gulag to a forgotten rural Russian village. He
asks about lodgings, and winds up boarding with a poor kind old lady with a tragic past. Matryona lives in a house once alive, now being dismembered by remote family in a place where lumber, even recycled lumber, is gold. An old addition is dismantled to be removed in service of a relative's dream of a new homestead. Instead the lumber and its stewards are destroyed on the way, Matryona included.
We had all lived side by side with her and never understood that she was the righteous one without whom, as the proverb says, no village can stand.
Nor any city.
Nor our whole land.
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