I watched with the children “Old men go to battle” and remembered.

In our kindergarten worked cook Antonina Vasilyevna. She was fifty years old or older, and I didn’t know much at the time. Of all the workers of the kindergarten dining room, I remembered only her - Antonina Vasilyevna could always get a supplement, running for a glass of compot or a bowl of gray even during a walk. The other change did not allow anything like this and, as a rule, pushed us away.

One day, when I got an extraordinary portion of cocoa, I noticed that the eyes of the cook, as my mother said, were on a wet spot. Then I didn’t give that importance and quickly forgot. But a couple of days later, rushing to the kitchen for a snack, I saw Antonina wiping her eyes with the edge of a towel.

I asked my mother, who worked in the same garden as an educator, why Antonina Vasilyevna was crying all the time. My mother told me that when the war began, Antonina, who just finished school, volunteered for the front. She served in the dining room of the aviation regiment. With this regiment she almost went to Berlin. Once, one of the pilots, a young lieutenant, who had recently arrived from school, ran to her kitchen and asked for cocoa. The time was rough, everything prepared for lunch was drunk and eaten, and dinner was just beginning to cook. In principle, cooking cacao was a matter of a couple of minutes, but Tonia was not the spirit that day and the lieutenant refused. Come in, she said, tonight. He did not come in tonight. As she later learned, the lieutenant was killed while performing a combat task - his fighter was shot down by the Nazis.

Twenty-five years have passed since then, and there has not been a single day when Antonina Vasilyevna did not think that if she poured that unfortunate glass of cocoa, everything could have turned out differently - and the battle would have gone differently, and the lieutenant would not have died. That’s why she never refuses any of the children in the supplement. She just cries often.

When I was six years old, this story shocked me.