One of the most favorite characters of the authors of saint stories is a boy or girl, often frozen and hungry, who manages to meet their benefactor on earth or already in heaven, like the hero of Dostoevsky's “The Boy at Christ's Christmas Tree”.

The heroine of Riva Yevstifeeva's two documentary novels is also associated with these characters. Riva Yevstifeeva is a philologist who has been working in Europe for the last fifteen years and now lives in France.

“Internat Stories” is a collection of autobiographical stories about the boarding school childhood, where the heroine fell in the first grade. “Motherless” is about a school youth and a human rights activist mother who was not very clear about what to do with her daughter, except to put her in a boarding school. It's a dilemma with a through heroine. In fact, it is one book in two parts. And I have to admit, this is one of the saddest, poignant and purely sung books I've had the pleasure of reading in the last many, many years. Of those that you take in your hands - and you can not tear yourself away, but not because you are fascinated by the “hero's arch” and exciting construction, but because every scene and detail described here turns out to be goosebumps familiar, experienced by you too. At least, by those who lived their childhood in the USSR. They went to a Soviet kindergarten, to a Soviet school, not necessarily a boarding school.

The right of the strong, the animal laws of the children's collective, the complete powerlessness and helplessness of children in front of their elders, poverty, beatings by tutors, teachers, classmates - all this heroine “Internatskie stories” was full of bread. And, probably, would not have survived if she had not possessed two superpowers - Riva unusually expressive read aloud and could move silently. That saved her: it was fun with her - boarding school students demanded that after bedtime she read them stolen from parents books, solid, by the way, pornographic, and when it became hungry, sneaked together with the same girl at night in the dining room for pieces of bread, accidentally fallen behind the radiator: “for every night hike we found at least two crusts with only a little bit eaten middle, and sometimes we were lucky and more - there were completely whole, untouched pieces. But there were also failures.

“Sometimes we were caught - the light of a flashlight in the nurse's hand caught a heel out of the darkness, or caught a glimpse of a white T-shirt in the depths of the corridor - and then a long and grim punishment awaited us. We were put out in the corridor at midnight, in the worst case - against the wall, in the best case - to the window, from which it was blowing, but into which we could look. It was forbidden to dress: you had to stand barefoot and in your underwear. As soon as the nurses went to continue their rounds on other floors, our classmates brought us towels so that we could at least cover some part of ourselves from the cold. When the nannies approached, the towel had to be thrown lightning fast into a corner. If you hesitated - or fell asleep standing upright - the nurse Nina Trofimovna could whip you with the same towel, soaked in water and twisted into a knot, until you were bruised.

A nightmare? Not without it. It would have gone on like that, if one day American missionaries who had miraculously infiltrated the boarding school had not revealed to the girl - simply by their respectful manner of communication - that she had the right to say “no” to her mother, and she, a beaten street girl in rags, had a sense of dignity. And at the age of eleven, Riva still escaped from the boarding school prison to an uncomfortable, untidy, but a house with its own bed, in a Moscow apartment, where lived her mother, who selflessly served the cause of freedom and democracy, but did not know how to treat a child. The child grew up on her own, braided her braid, went to the library, changed schools, because everything necessarily ended with the fact that one day her classmates informed Riva that tomorrow she had better not come - she would be beaten to death.

Incredibly, this tragic story has a happy ending.

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