Forty-two-year-old Leonid Soshnin, a former criminal investigator, returns home from a local publishing house, to an empty apartment, in a very bad mood. After five years of waiting, the manuscript of his first book, “Life is the most expensive,” is finally accepted for production, but this news does not please Soshnin. A conversation with the editor, Oktyabrina Perfilyevna Syrokvasova, who tried to humiliate the author-militiaman who dared to be called a writer with arrogant remarks, distracted the already gloomy thoughts and feelings of Soshnin. "How to live in the world?" Lonely? ” He thinks on the way home, and his thoughts are heavy.
In the police, he served his own: after two wounds, Soshnin was sent to a disability pension. After another quarrel, his wife Lerka leaves him, taking with him his little daughter Svetka.
Soshnin remembers his whole life. He cannot answer his own question: why in life there is so much room for grief and suffering, but always closely with love and happiness? Soshnin understands that, among other incomprehensible things and phenomena, he has to comprehend the so-called Russian soul, and he needs to start with the closest people, from the episodes he witnessed, from the fate of people whom his life has faced ... Why are Russian people are you ready to feel sorry for the bone-breaker and the bloodletter and not notice how nearby, in the next apartment, a helpless disabled person of war dies? .. Why does a criminal live so freely and courageously among such a kind-hearted people? ..
In order to escape from gloomy thoughts even for a minute, Leonid imagines how he will come home, cook a bachelor’s dinner, read, sleep a little, so that he has enough energy for the whole night — to sit at a table, over a blank sheet of paper. Soshnin especially loves this night time when he lives in some kind of isolated world created by his imagination.
Leonid Soshnin’s apartment is located on the outskirts of Weisk, in an old two-story house, where he grew up. Father left this house for a war with which he didn’t return. Mother died here from the end of the war, and she suffered from a severe cold. Leonid stayed with his mother’s sister, Aunt Lipa, who from childhood used to call Lina. Aunt Lina after the death of her sister went to work in the commercial department of the Wei Railway. This department "was judged and transplanted at once." My aunt tried to get poisoned, but she was rescued and sent to the colony after the trial. By this time, Lenya was already studying at the regional special school of the Internal Affairs Directorate, from where he was almost kicked out because of the convicted aunt. But the neighbors, and mainly the brother-soldier of the Lavra-Cossack father, interceded for Leonid to the regional police authorities, and everything worked out.
Aunt Lina was freed by amnesty. Soshnin has already worked as a district police officer in the remote Khaylovsky district, from where he brought his wife. Aunt Lina managed before her death to nurse Leonid's daughter, Sveta, whom she considered a granddaughter. After the death of Lina, the Soshnins passed under the patronage of another, no less reliable aunt named Grania, the switchman on the shunting hill. Aunt Grania spent all her life working on other people's children, and still little Lenya Soshnin learned the first skills of brotherhood and hard work in a kind of kindergarten.
Once, after returning from Khaylovsk, Soshnin was on duty with a police detachment for a mass walk on the occasion of Railroad Day. Four guys who had fallen to memory were raped by Aunt Grani, and if it weren’t for his partner on patrol, Soshnin would have shot these drunken fellows sleeping on the lawn. They were convicted, and after this incident, Aunt Grania began to avoid people. Once she expressed to Soshnin a terrible thought that, having condemned the criminals, they thereby killed young lives. Soshnin shouted at the old woman for pitying the nonhumans, and they began to shun each other ...
In the dirty and tattered porch of the house, three booze pestering Soshnin, demanding a hello, and then apologizing for his disrespectful behavior. He agrees, trying to cool their ardor with peace-loving remarks, but the main one, the young bull, does not calm down. Excited by alcohol, the guys pounce on Soshnin. He, having gathered strength - wounds affected, hospital "rest" - defeats the hooligans. One of them, when falling, hits its head on the heating battery. Soshnin picks up a knife on the floor, staggering, goes to the apartment. And he immediately called the police, reported a fight: “One hero broke his head on a battery. If they didn’t look for it. The villain is me. ”
Recovering after what happened, Soshnin again recalls his life.
He and his partner chased a drunk who hijacked a truck on a motorcycle. With a deadly ram, the truck raced along the streets of the town, having already cut off more than one life. Soshnin, the senior on patrol, decided to shoot the offender. His partner fired, but before his death, the truck driver managed to push the motorcycle of the pursuing policemen. On the operating table, Soshnin was miraculously saved from leg amputation. But he remained lame, long and hard learning to walk. During his recovery, the investigator long and stubbornly tormented him with the proceedings: was the use of weapons lawful?
Leonid also recalls how he met his future wife, saving her from hooligans who tried to remove jeans from the girl right behind the Soyuzpechat kiosk. At first, their life with Lerka went in peace and harmony, but gradually mutual reproaches began. His wife especially did not like his studies in literature. “That Leo Tolstoy with a seven-shot pistol, with rusty handcuffs behind his belt ...” she said.
Soshnin recalls how one "took" in a hotel the town of a voyage guest performer, recidivist Demon.
And finally, he recalls how drunk, returning from places of detention, Venka Fomin put an end to his operative career ... Soshnin brought his daughter to his wife's parents in a distant village and was about to return to the city when his father-in-law informed him that he was drunk in a neighboring village the man locked the old women in the barn and threatens to set them on fire if they don’t give him ten rubles for sober hangover. During the detention, when Soshnin slipped on manure and fell, frightened Wenka Fomin and put a pitchfork in him ... Soshnin was barely taken to the hospital - and he barely passed a certain death. But the second group of disability and retirement could not be avoided.
At night, Leonid is awakened from sleep by the terrible cry of the neighbor girl Julia. He hurries to the apartment on the first floor, where Julia lives with her grandmother Tutyshikha. Having drunk a bottle of Riga balsam from the gifts brought by Yulkin’s father and stepmother from the Baltic sanatorium, grandmother Tutyshikha is already sleeping in a dead sleep.
At the funeral of grandmother Tutyshikha Soshnin meets his wife and daughter. At the wake, they are sitting nearby.
Lerka and Sveta remain with Soshnin, at night he hears his daughter sniffing his nose behind the partition, and feels his wife sleeping beside him, timidly clinging to him, sleeping. He rises, approaches his daughter, straightens her pillow, presses her cheek against her head and is forgotten in some sweet grief, in a resurrecting, life-giving sadness. Leonid goes to the kitchen, reads “Proverbs of the Russian people”, collected by Dahl, the section “Husband and wife”, and is surprised at the wisdom contained in simple words.
“Dawn, with a raw, snowball, rolled already into the kitchen window, when he enjoyed peace among a quietly sleeping family, with a feeling of unknown confidence in his abilities and strength for a long time, without irritation and longing in his heart, Soshnin stuck to the table, put a blank sheet of paper in the spot of light and froze over him for a long time. ”
