Baba Dunya was amazed at how they live in the city… Whatever you need for cooking – you just run to the store. What a blessing it is to live in the village compared to this, a real blissfulness! The products are all their own, prepared in advance. There is meat, there is milk, eggs. And if the villagers go to the village store, it's only for matches and salt. "No, it's still better to live in the countryside than in the city," thought Baba Dunya.
The train on which Baba Dunya travelled to Ilyinsk arrived in the town late at night. Her sisters lived on the outskirts of the city, across the river, in the private sector. Buses to that area went only during the day. In the morning, the working people left for their production sites in the central part of the city, and in the evening, they returned from the centre to their "flophouses". The area was sparsely populated and the city authorities did not allow buses to drive back and forth late at night unnecessarily just for one or two passengers.
Baba Dunya had to walk to the house of her elder sister Pasha, she always stayed with her. Pasha was lonely, she had no children. But Varya, the younger sister, had four of them, plus grandchildren – eternal noise and uproar – and that’s not saying it lightly. And Varya lived a little further away than Pasha.
The road to Pasha's house was long and not the most pleasant: it was necessary to cross the bridge connecting the two banks of the small river Berd. Not a single lantern has ever been lit on the bridge. In winter, it was not scary to walk at all – there was snow under the bridge and it seemed that everything was bright around but, in the summer, at this time of night, it was pitch dark. The sound of a murmuring river overgrown with reeds and tallow, the stirring of grass and branches in the wind, making a rustle resembling the steps of a shuffling man. B-r-r-r… it was creepy.
Baba Dunya, due to her age, always "ran" (she was at the age when she couldn’t run fast but did her best to walk across that bridge as quick as possible) over this bridge with horror to get back on the street, which was also dark. In fact, there were still lights burning in the windows of houses here and there, and it was even not that creepy as on the bridge and she was much calmer walking down that street.