THE GRAVE OF A BEGGAR

End of September. I am walking through the Smolensk cemetery to the chapel of St. Xenia. It's warm, quiet, windless. Graves, graves, graves with crosses. Old ones, from the end of the XVIII century, are interspersed with later ones. Marble crosses are adjacent to cast-iron and granite, here they are modern, painted with bright silver.

Yellow and red leaves slowly fly off the maples. They fall on the mutilated crosses of abandoned graves, where instead of garden flowers planted by a loving hand, there are yellow untouchable flowers, goutweed and nettles. No one remembers these people for a long time, no one loves them, the memory has been interrupted.

And here is a sandy mound, completely filled with wreaths: "To the beloved son", "Dear grandson", "Daughter" - three faces look from the photos: mom, dad, a twelve-year-old boy. They have just been buried. Here is another fresh grave: a mother with a one-year-old daughter, a celluloid purple elephant with a raised trunk peeks out from under the wreaths and flowers, causing shivering. What will remain of these graves in ten, fifty, a hundred, two hundred years? Will the memory of these people be preserved, the one that is asked for in the funeral service: "... and their memory for generations and generations"?

At last I come to the chapel. It is placed over the grave where the St. Petersburg tramp Ksenia Petrova lies. When was she born? Unknown. The date is set more than approximately, between 1719 and 1730. When did she die? Unknown. Either in 1780, or in 1806, or between these dates. Who buried her? How? No records in church books, no accurate testimonies.

For half a century she wandered around the outskirts of the city, lonely, poor, homeless, insane, half-dressed. She did not leave behind children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Who has been going to her grave for two centuries if she has no descendants on earth? Who decorates? For what money?

The freshly painted, delicately azure chapel is crowned with a gilded onion dome. A lot of candles burn brightly near the wall. People walk quietly along the path paved with granite paving stones around the chapel. There are many of them. Here is a young man in camouflage with a patch of internal troops making a bow; here are two girls in light stretch jeans; here is a young short-haired grandmother with her grandson in a stroller; here is a very young mother with a baby in a pink cap and with a pink pacifier, he is staring from a kangaroo on his mother's belly; Here are three women in long dark skirts with open books in their hands, reading the akathist in a low voice. Someone approaches, someone leaves. In the chapel itself, prayers are served one after another before the marble tombstone over the grave of St. Xenia. The prayer service is brief, only fifteen minutes. I walk out slowly.

A handy black-and-white cat with eyes as light azure as the walls of a chapel rubs against her legs.

A crimson leaf flies from the maple into the palm of your hand.

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