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GIVE CHILDREN A HOMELAND
chure you gave me. I dried it.’
“‘Thank you.’
“All in all, this director is a good man and loves the children. Later, he
and I talked, and he asked me about Sonya’s behavior and gave me some
practical advice.
“Sonya spent the whole summer in the tent on her hectare of land. Her
flowerbed bloomed in the middle with beautiful flowers. Onions, radishes,
and other things came up in her beds.
“In the evenings, when the days started getting shorter, you could often
observe the light of the lamp flickering in the tent under the birch. Every
evening, Sonya read the books on folk medicine and kept drawing in her al-
bum the future of her land.
“When at the end of the summer the old van came to take her back to the
children’s home, I helped load Sonya’s supplies. There was quite a lot to
load. She had dried two hundred or so bundles of herbs. A sack of potatoes,
three melons—we really loaded up that van. I asked her, ‘What about next
year? Should I hold onto your tent?’
“‘I’ll definitely come for the next vacation. I’ll come to my land the very
first day. Thank you for being such a good neighbor, Uncle Kolya!’
“She held out her hand, now much stronger, to shake. Over the summer,
too, Sonya herself not only had tanned but also had become stronger and
more self-confident.
“She came the next year with fruit tree saplings and some seedlings and
immediately got down to work.
“At an assembly, the people of our settlement decided to build Sonya a
little house.
“Zina, the wife of an entrepreneur who had built the largest house, began
to insist it not be small.
“‘I’d be ashamed to look people in the eye. Everyone in the settlement is
laying foundations for palaces, and the one and only child is living in a tent.
Guests come and who knows what they think of us.’
“Knowing the little girl’s ways and her sensitivity to any kind of charity,
they assigned me to negotiate with her about building a house.
