Plot
After losing his wife during the World War II Veteran Kuzma Kuzmich Iordanov do not work, drinks alcohol, makes up his living by doing some odd jobs. From time to time they call him up at one of the Militia (Police) department to shame him and to threaten him with some jail time because of his "parasitiŃ" type of living his life, but all that staff does not seem to bother him much.
One time Kuzma agrees to help one old lady to deliver a washing machine to her house (there used to be different fees for doing do - if the building had an elevator - there would be one price for it, if there was not one - then it would cost you more money to deliver it as it requires more time and effort) he accidentally drops it and while running downstairs trying to catch it he stumbles and gets hurt bad enough so they have to take him to the hospital. The same old lady that he was delivering this washing machine for comes and visits him. He gets scared thinking she came to talk to him about the washing machine that he broke but as he realizes later she actually came to see if he was doing fine. As they talk she tells him her life story, as well as the story about one poor orphan child Natasha from her village. Kuzma decides to go out there and try to pretend to be Natasha's father.
Natasha indeed thinks this is her father and so truly believes so, that Kuzma decides to become a different person and stay on the right track. He does want to live a different life now as that poor girl really thinks he is her father - that changes Kuzma and not for his own sake but to make somebody's life better he becomes a new man opposed to the heavy drinker he was before.
Read more about this topic: When The Trees Were Tall
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)