A blizzard was raging outside the window. She hummed, sang, howled in different voices, throwing white, moist snowballs into the small window of the clay hut. The window was already covered with snow, and the little girl continued to dance, touching him with the hollow of her long blue skirt. "You can't see God's world," dad liked to say about such weather, recalled five-year-old Ulya and, huddling, wrapped herself in her parents' old coat, leaning against the stove, which had cooled down a long time ago.

The harsh year of 1943 was passing, the second year of the great, terrible war, for which her good father was taken away.

- Ulyu, read the newspaper every day so you don't forget the letters. I'll be back soon, I'll ask," he said, saying goodbye, hiding a stingy man's tear.

This "soon" drags on for so long: the summer has passed, and autumn, and winter has already come, and dad is still gone. Ulya took out an old pre-war newspaper, folded in four, from her bag, stroked it like her father's hands, and hid it back. She has already read it three times today. And now he can read, because he knows by heart the agricultural work in the village that is described there, but he will not. You have to go to the door and listen. Every day, in the evening, she waits for her grandfather, listens to the approaching steps, rejoices when he comes. He burns in the oven, brings his granddaughter to eat. They exchange a few words.

Since mom went to bed, Ulya was left alone. My mother has a terrible disease - typhus. He took a lot of fellow villagers. Just like war. This is what her grandfather told her. For the second week now, my mother has been unconscious, sometimes delirious. Grandfather, who lives outside the village, took a cow and a horse to feed. And he calls Ulya, but she doesn't want to.

- Aren't you afraid to be alone? - he asks.

- What should I be afraid of? I'm not alone, I'm with my mother, - answers the girl. She also has a doll made of corn, with two tight braids that she braided herself. He will talk to her, calm her down, lull her to sleep, put her to sleep. Ulya has a job.

The girl puts her ear to the door and listens. Vikhola knocks on the door, and it seems to her that grandfather is coming. But for some reason he has been gone for a very long time now.

Finally, I waited for the old man. She did not have time to ask why he was late, as he himself started from the threshold:

- You, child, forgive me for being gone for so long. It's not a simple evening today, it's a generous one.

- How is it, generous? - exclaimed Ulya in surprise - and she liked this word so much that she even jumped around the rooms and, clapping her hands.

- And because the little girl is traveling the world. I met her. I brought you dinner - here is a corner and a delicious pie with raspberries, eat it later, - he said, lighting a candle. He approached Anna, put his hand to his forehead and said sadly:

"She's still feverish, poor thing, I don't know if she'll get out of that trouble, she's lost all her hair." You, Ulyu, when you have dinner, as always, blow out the candle and lie down on the stove. You can't go to my mother. Grandfather lit the stove and, as the fire flashed, he said:

"It's time for me, the family is waiting," and disappeared like a shadow, as if he had never been there.

Ulya ate a few spoonfuls of delicious sweet kuti and had just bitten into a ruddy cake, when there was a thump outside the window and she heard: "Good evening, good evening, good health to the good people." Her little heart was beating fast, fast. He remembered last year, when he and his father and mother had dinner by candlelight, and benefactors came to them under the window. Then mother brought them gifts. Ulya looked at the bitten pie in her hand and ran to the door. She opened it, poked it at the benefactor and immediately ran to the house, driven by the wind and snow. She quickly extinguished the candle and crept to the stove under Dad's old coat...