Мох перевод рассказа на английский

Part One: Silence
The wind hummed in the wires above the slanted house. The sound was even, monotonous, like the noise of the roof in the womb. This man was called Moss. Not because he was green and soft, but because his father, registering him at the village council after a long and drunken night, shook his head at the wall of the old log house and muttered: "Write down... Moss." And so it remained.
Mokh lived alone on the outskirts, in a village from which life had gone. All that remained were old people, and the wind, and the endless forests that came right up to the vegetable gardens. He fished, chopped wood, sometimes went hunting, but more often he simply sat on the porch, looking at the road that was lost in the black-green thicket. He was part of this landscape, its continuation - a mossy boulder, an old snag. The world consisted of the smells of pine needles, dampness, smoke and silence. Not just the absence of sounds, but a dense, heavy substance in which thoughts drowned.
One early autumn day, when the marshes began to shroud themselves in cold steam, Mokh went to pick cranberries. He walked a long way, across familiar paths, then through abandoned burnt-out areas where the black skeletons of birches pierced the low sky. He was not looking for anything but red berries, but he came across something else.
In the thicket, at the foot of a huge spruce, lay an airplane. Not a modern airliner, but a small, old one, resembling a fighter from the war. It was all green with moss, the propeller was jammed, the canopy was broken. It seemed as if it had not fallen yesterday, but had lain there for decades, and the forest was slowly, unhurriedly swallowing it.
Moss walked around him. His heart beat slowly and loudly, like a drum in the void. He looked into the cockpit. The pilot's seat was empty. No remains, no signs of a struggle. Only dust, shards of glass and a strange, incomparable silence. It seemed as if the plane had not fallen, but had landed here quietly, like a seed carried by the wind.
He returned home silently. But the silence inside him was different. A crack appeared in it.

Part Two: Rust and Paper
The thought of the plane wouldn't leave him. He returned to it the next day with a backpack containing a crowbar, an axe, and a flashlight. Instinct told him he needed to look for something. Evidence. Explanations.
He opened the luggage compartment. There, among the snapped straps and rotted leather, he found a metal box. It was heavy, and the lock was rusted through. Moss spent several hours trying to pry it open with a crowbar.
Inside, wrapped in oiled, yellowed paper, were diaries. Several thick leather-bound notebooks. And a stack of letters tied with string.
Mokh was not a big reader. But that evening he did not light the lamp, but sat in the darkness until it was completely dark outside, peering into the neat, beaded handwriting. He slowly, syllable by syllable, read the words written by a man named Alexei Petrovich Zarubin.
These were not just flight reports. They were a life story. A love story. Alexey wrote about the sky, which he had dreamed of since childhood. About his woman, Maria, who was waiting for him in Leningrad. He wrote about the war, which was already thundering in the West, but only reached him in the form of echoes of reports. The last entries were incoherent. He wrote about a secret mission, about ferrying a plane to a northern airfield. About bad weather, about a malfunction… and about the decision to fly against all odds. The last entry was fragmentary: “Failure… I see a lake… I can’t make it… forgive me, Masha…”
The letters were from Masha. Full of tenderness, anxiety, hope. The last one was dated November 1941. It contained lines about the beginning of the blockade, about how she believed in his return, and that they were saving bread, but their spirits were not low.
Moss sat and looked at these yellowed sheets. He held in his hands not paper, but fragments of other people's, hot, interrupted lives. His own life, gray and mossy, suddenly seemed unworthy, insipid. He had not found an airplane. He had found pain.

Part Three: The Road
Now the silence became completely unbearable. Voices were heard in it. The whistle of the wind in the braces of the wings, the voice of Alexei reading his notes, the quiet whisper of Maria reading lines of love in a cold Leningrad apartment.
Moss realized he couldn't just leave it. He wasn't a historian, nor a searcher. He was a caretaker. A keeper of this secret. And it was the keeper's duty to tell.
He carefully packed his diaries and letters into a waterproof bag and set off for the regional center. The journey took the whole day. At the military registration and enlistment office, they listened to him skeptically. An elderly major, looking at his dirty clothes and stern face, asked:
- An airplane? A military one? Grandpa, did you overheat in the forest?
But when Mokh silently unfolded the diaries on his desk and put on top the death notice for Alexei Zarubin, which he had found in one of the notebooks, the major fell silent. He took off his glasses, wiped them, and looked out the window for a long time.
“Okay,” he said finally. “Finish the paperwork. We’ll send a request to the archive.”
The answer came quickly from the archives. Yes, the plane and the pilot were listed as missing in action in the fall of 1941. Zarubin Aleksey Petrovich. Awarded posthumously.
People came to the village. Mokh led them to the spruce. There were rescuers, an enthusiastic historian, a representative of the administration. They cordoned off the place, filmed it, carefully removed the box with the remains of personal belongings. Mokh stood aside and said nothing. He was like a guide who had done his job.
The historian, a young guy with glasses, approached him.
"Thank you," he said sincerely. "Thanks to you, the family will find peace."
“What family?” Moss asked hoarsely.
— We found Alexey Zarubin's granddaughter. She lives in St. Petersburg. Maria, his fianc;e, survived the siege, got married, but waited for him until her death. Her daughter, this woman's mother, kept her mother's secret all these years.
Moss just nodded.

Part Four: The Name
A month later she arrived in the village. An elderly, refined woman with surprisingly young and sad eyes. In them was the same pain that Mokh had first felt while reading the diaries.
He was waiting for her on the porch of his house. She got out of the car and slowly walked up to him.
“Hello,” she said. “I’m Anna. Granddaughter of Alexey Zarubin and Maria Semenova.”
He invited her into the house and gave her tea from an iron mug. He was silent and awkward. She did not ask questions, but simply sat, looking around the modest hut, absorbing the atmosphere of this place, the last refuge of the man her grandmother had loved all her life.
“Thank you,” she said quietly. “You gave him back his name. And his story to us. For Grandma, he was forever young, beautiful, lost somewhere in the sky. Now we know. Now he has found earth.”
She was leaving in the evening. Before leaving, she handed Mokh a small box.
- This is for you. From our family.
When the car disappeared into the dust, Mokh opened the box. There was an old photograph. Alexey and Maria. Young, beautiful, happy. They looked into the lens with serene faith in the future. And on the back was Maria's neat handwriting: "Leshenka and Masha. Forever. 10.07.1941."
Moss framed the photograph and placed it on the shelf. Next to the cuckoo clock and a packet of salt.
The next morning he went into the forest again. Not to the plane - that had already been taken to the museum. He went about his business. Check the nets, gather brushwood.
The wind hummed in the wires again. But the silence was no longer the same. It was filled with echo. Echo of another time, someone else's love, someone else's feat. He was still the same Moss, the stone man, the moss man. But now another story touched his roots. And this made him a little more alive.
He stopped and listened. Not to the wind, but to something inside. To a quiet, barely perceptible hum that had settled forever in his silence. The hum of a life past but not forgotten.

Part Five: Hum
Winter came suddenly, as always, overnight. Snow covered the paths, creaked on the roof like a heavy blanket, and the world shrank again to the size of a hut, a stove, and a trickle of steam from a cup. But something had changed. The silence that Moss had known all his life was no longer empty. It was filled with a hum.
It was not a sound, but a feeling. As if someone had left a tuning fork in his soul, and it vibrated silently but inexorably. Mokh caught himself not just looking at the photograph of Alexei and Maria, but seeing a whole world behind it. Leningradskaya Street, the sound of a tram, the smell of the frosty Neva and a cigarette, the light in the window where a young woman was writing a letter to a man who would never receive it.
He began to reread the diaries. Slowly, in the evenings, by the light of a kerosene lamp, running his finger along the yellowed lines. He no longer read the words, but listened to the voice. Alexei's voice. It was clear, firm, a little ironic. The kind of voice a pilot should have.
"Today the "seagull" (that's what Alexey called his plane) was acting capriciously. Apparently, it senses a thunderstorm approaching. And I sense the approach of something bigger. War... Masha writes that the city is uneasy. And from above I can see how vast and calm the earth is. It seems that nothing can disturb this peace. Naive, of course."
Mokh tore himself away from his notebook and looked out the black window. His hut stood firmly, rooted in the ground. And there, in the cockpit of the plane, there was a feeling of flight, freedom and terrible loneliness in the vast sky. He had never flown. But now it seemed to him that he knew what it was like.

Part Six: Answer
One day, in the middle of winter, a letter arrived. The postwoman, a rare guest in these parts, brought it on skis, cursing the weather and her boss.
The envelope was from St. Petersburg. From Anna.
Moss held it in his hands for a long time before opening it. The paper was smooth and smelled of a strange, big city. He carefully opened the envelope with a knife.
Anna wrote politely and warmly. She thanked him again. She reported that Alexei Petrovich's remains were reburied with honors at the memorial cemetery next to Maria's grave. "They met after so many years," she wrote. A small photograph was attached - two modest granite stones next to each other.
And then came the most important lines.
"Among my grandmother's letters that you found, there was one that was not sent. She wrote it during the most difficult days of the blockade, probably not hoping that it would ever reach its destination. But now I understand that it had to find its addressee. Even if in such an unlikely way. I made a copy for you. The original, of course, will remain in our family archive. I think you will understand."
On a separate sheet was a neatly retyped text. Mokh began to read.
“Leshenka, my darling. Today there was shelling, and a bomb fell on the house next door. We were sitting in the basement, and I was holding a little girl, a neighbor, in my arms. She was crying and calling for her mother. And I was thinking about you. I was thinking that somewhere up there, in the sky, you were probably even more scared. And I was sending you all my strength. All my love. We get 125 grams of bread. But I divide it into three parts: in the morning, afternoon, and evening. It helps to deceive the stomach. And the soul is deceived by poetry and the memory of you. I remember your hands. I remember how you laugh. I remember how we ran in the rain along Nevsky and hid under one raincoat. You are alive, I know. You must be alive. Because I can’t live without you. Come back. Survive. Your beloved Masha.”
A tear rolled down Moch's cheek. Rough, salty, unfamiliar. He had not cried since his mother died. He brushed it away with the back of his hand, convulsively, as if ashamed. He looked at these lines written in hell, and suddenly a dimension of depth appeared in his own simple, harsh life. His deprivations, his loneliness - all of it was insignificant compared to this courage, this faith.
He didn't find the plane. He didn't find the remains. He found love. Stronger than war. Stronger than death. Stronger than time.

Part Seven: Forever
Spring came early. The snow melted, revealing frozen but living earth. And the first thing to sprout from under last year's leaves by the porch was moss. Bright green, velvety, full of life.
Mokh stepped out onto the porch, inhaled the air that smelled of melted water and rotting leaves. He looked at the road, at the forest that began right beyond the fence.
He was still the same man. His name was still Moss. He still chopped wood, fished, and was silent. But his silence was different now. It was not the absence of words, but their depth. He was a keeper. A keeper of a place where one flight ended. A keeper of a story that should not have been lost. A keeper of love that he found in the remote taiga.
He returned to the hut, went to the shelf and adjusted the frame with the photograph. The young faces looked at him with a serene belief in "forever".
And Moss smiled quietly to himself for the first time in many years. He realized that they had not deceived him. Their "forever" had found a home. At least here. In his silence. In his moss.
He went outside to chop some wood. It was getting late. But life had to go on.