Первоцвет перевод на английский

Prologue
A sea breeze blew through the narrow streets of Pribrezhny, seeping into the crevices of old houses and whispering forgotten stories in attics. It brought with it the scent of salt, seaweed, and the promise of spring. But for Maria Ivanovna Orlova, the wind always brought something more. She sat by the window in her small room, filled with dried herbs and vials of dark tinctures, and listened to its gusts. The wind told her it was time.
Her fingers, gnarled and sinewy like the roots of an old grapevine, kneaded a lump of wax. It was warm, yielding, and smelled of honey and pollen. Her grandson, Alexei, was due soon. A stranger, a city boy, smelling of concrete and alien ambitions. He knew nothing. Not of the wind, not of the wax, not of the quiet strength that flowed through the veins of the women of their kind, like sap in tree trunks in spring.
Maria Ivanovna sighed and looked at the snowdrop drooping in its small clay pot on the windowsill. It bloomed despite the calendar, despite the frosts that still gripped the ground at night. A primrose. The first flower. Their flower.
"Remember, Marusya," she whispered to herself, hearing the voice of her long-gone grandmother, "our strength doesn't come from a scorching fire or a storm. It comes from the first ray of sun after winter. From the crack in the asphalt through which life breaks through. We are the ones who sense the awakening. And we are the ones who can hasten it."
She closed her eyes, preparing for the last lesson of her life. A lesson that would be passed on to Alexei. Through pain. Through memory. Through a flower breaking through the ice.

Chapter 1
Alexey Orlov hated buses. The musty smell of cheap gasoline, plastic, and other people's sweat reminded him of all the years he'd spent trying to escape this backwater. And now he was returning. At the behest of an old, barely known grandmother, whose letter was as terse and enigmatic as she herself: "Come. I have to. Before I die."
Death. Alexey clutched the handle of his precious briefcase. In his world, a world of digital technology and strict deadlines, death had no place. It was postponed, frozen, insured. But here, in Pribrezhnoye, it was spoken of simply and matter-of-factly, like impending rain.
The bus, bouncing over potholes, dropped him off in the square by the old lighthouse. The air hit him in the face—fresh, salty, unfamiliar. Alexey straightened his tie, feeling out of place in his perfect suit against the backdrop of sagging fences and deserted streets.
Grandma's house stood on the outskirts, right next to the forest. Small and made of logs, it was lost in the thickets of an unkempt garden. But what struck Alexey were the flowers. The flowerbeds, the windowsills, even the cracks between the porch steps—everything was covered with flowers. Not exotic ones, but the simplest: violets, forget-me-nots, primroses. And snowdrops. There were most of them. White and fragile, they grew everywhere, like fallen snow that refused to melt.
The door opened before he had time to knock.
"Come in," Maria Ivanovna's voice was dry and rustling, like autumn leaves. "I've already made some tea."
She was just as he remembered: short, straight-backed, wearing a dark dress. Her face was lined, but her eyes… her eyes were bright and youthful, the color of spring pine needles. They had seen too much.
The house smelled of old wood, dried mint, and something else, sweet and elusive. Alexey sat on the edge of a chair, feeling like a giant in this low, cluttered room.
"Grandma, you were writing about... business. About the inheritance?" he began, trying to speak in a language he understood.
Maria Ivanovna smiled, placing a clay mug of steaming tea in front of him.
"An inheritance," she drawled. "Yes, Alexey, an inheritance. But not money and not this old house. An inheritance is different. You can't put it in the bank. You can't sell it."
She looked at him intently.
- How do you feel?
— What do you mean? I'm fine. A little tired from the journey.
“No,” she shook her head. “Here.” A thin hand pointed to his chest. “In the chest. Is there a heaviness? Like a stone lying there?”
Alexey shuddered involuntarily. He had indeed been feeling an incomprehensible heaviness, a crushing melancholy, for the past few months, which he attributed to exhaustion and stress. But how could she know?
"This isn't your burden," said Grandma, as if answering his thoughts. "It's someone else's. That man's with whom you conferred yesterday. He's grieving. A great one. And you, without realizing it, have taken on part of it. Like a sponge."
"What? What nonsense!" Alexey snorted, but something inside him sank. That man, his potential investor, had indeed told him the day before about his son's serious illness. Alexey had felt uneasy and ill at ease, and by evening that same suffocating melancholy had washed over him.
"This isn't nonsense," Maria Ivanovna said calmly. "It's a gift. Or a curse. It depends on how you look at it. Women of our family have always felt it. The pain of the earth, the pain of people, the pain of animals. We absorb it, like the earth absorbs rain. And then..."
She went to the windowsill and plucked that very snowdrop from the pot.
— …then we turn it into this.
She held out a flower to him. Alexey instinctively took it. Then he dropped it with a short cry.
His fingers felt like they were struck by electricity. From the tips of his fingers, deep into his heart, a wave of… what? Not pain. A sharp, piercing, almost painful sense of life. Images flashed before his eyes for a second: a warm ray of sunlight on frozen ground, the stubborn movement of a sprout through a thick layer of compressed autumn leaves, the joyful cry of a child seeing its first flower. The heaviness in his chest vanished. It was as if washed away by this stream of pure, bright energy.
He looked at his grandmother, unable to utter a word.
"We are the primroses, Lyosha," she said quietly. "We break through the ice of other people's misfortunes and bring spring. I'm leaving. And this gift... it must go to someone. There's no one else but you."
“But I… I’m a man,” Alexey finally squeezed out.
Maria Ivanovna smiled her wise, sad smile.
"Strength doesn't look at the floor, grandson. It looks at the heart. And yours is a mother's. Sensitive. Hidden beneath the concrete, but alive."
She placed that very piece of wax in his palm.
— Tomorrow. After sunset. Come to the forest, to the clearing by the old oak tree. You'll see the light. And you'll learn your first lesson.
That night, Alexey didn't sleep. He lay on his grandmother's hard bed and stared at the moon outside the window. His rational world had cracked, and a strange, impossible light was shining through. He felt a lightness in his body he hadn't felt for months. And the scent of snowdrops, now at his head, was driving him crazy.
He was afraid. He didn't believe. But he already knew that tomorrow, after sunset, he would go into the forest. To the clearing by the old oak tree.
For something inside, something long forgotten and primordial, was already reaching out to the call of that quiet, flickering light. It wanted to bloom.

Chapter 2
The sunset over Pribrezhny was blood-red. The sun sank into the leaden waters of the sea, painting the clouds crimson and purple. For Alexey, this spectacle had always been simply a physical phenomenon—the rotation of the planets and the refraction of light in the atmosphere. Now, he saw it as the day's farewell sigh, heavy and promising. Promising what? He was afraid to think.
He stood on the threshold, clutching that very lump of wax in his coat pocket. It had become smooth and warm from the heat of his hand, almost alive.
"Go ahead," Maria Ivanovna's voice came from the depths of the house. "Don't keep them waiting. They don't like to wait."
They? A cold shiver ran down Alexey's spine. He never asked who or what was supposed to teach him. He was afraid to hear the answer.
Stepping through the gate, he plunged into the pre-evening twilight. The air was rapidly cooling. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked, the sound only accentuating the ringing silence that had descended on Pribrezhnoye. Alexey pulled his hood up and set off along a familiar but forgotten path leading into the forest.
The trees closed in above him, turning into a dark tunnel. His city shoes slipped on the damp pine needles and last year's leaves. Here, under the canopy of spruce and pine trees, it was almost dark, and he kept tripping over roots, as if the earth itself refused to let him pass.
He walked, guided by vague childhood memories. A clearing by an old oak tree. Once upon a time, he and the kids used to come here to roast sausages over a fire and tell scary stories. Back then, the oak had seemed like a giant, a guardian of the forest. Now it was simply a very old, mighty tree.
And so he emerged into a clearing. Moonlight, filtering through the sparse clouds, bathed it in a milky glow. In the center, as expected, stood an oak tree, its branches, still bare, reaching toward the sky like cracked vessels. It was empty and quiet.
"This is nonsense," Alexey thought with relief. No light. No one. He turned to leave and froze.
Between the oak tree's roots, where there should have been solid shadow, a faint, bluish light flickered. It was no bigger than a thimble and pulsed steadily, like a heart. Alexei slowly approached and crouched down.
It was a flower. Not a snowdrop. Unfamiliar, delicate, with translucent petals that glowed from within, without the need for moon or lantern. It emanated a subtle warmth and a light, intoxicating scent that made your head spin.
Remembering the wax, Alexey took it out. The lump in his hand suddenly became soft, almost liquid. It was as if he were reaching for the flower.
What to do next? Grandma didn't say.
Unsure why he was doing this, Alexey extended his hand with the wax toward the glowing flower. At that very moment, the blue flame flared brighter, and a thin, glowing thread extended from its core. It touched the wax.
And the world turned upside down.
He wasn't thrown aside. He was turned inside out. His vision dimmed, but his consciousness rushed downward, through layers of soil, through clay and rock. He felt the oak tree's roots—ancient, mighty, entangling the entire clearing in a complex, living network. He felt life slowly rising through them, sap by sap, awakening from slumber. He felt animals sleeping in burrows, larvae in rotting stumps, the quiet flow of underground water.
And he felt pain.
The dull, aching pain of the earth. Somewhere nearby, by the stream, a bag of trash rotted in a ravine—plastic and rusty iron poisoned the water. Somewhere beneath the roots of a spruce tree, a shard of glass lodged itself, digging into the living flesh of the tree. And everywhere—the heavy, alien imprint of human indifference.
The pain rushed through him like dirty water. That same familiar heaviness, but a thousand times stronger. He was drowning in it, his consciousness ready to fade under the onslaught.
And then he remembered the flower. About what needed to be done.
Mustering all his willpower, he mentally grasped the image his grandmother had given him—the first ray of sunlight, a sprout reaching for the light. He concentrated on the wax in his hand, which now glowed with the same bluish light as the flower.
“Transform,” he whispered to himself, in a voice that wasn’t his own. “Transform!”
He didn't know how it worked. He just… let it happen. Let the heaviness, the pain, the despair pass through him and merge into the soft, pliable wax.
The process was excruciating. He felt nauseous, his bones ached, his temples pounded. But gradually, wave after wave, the heaviness began to recede, flowing from his chest into the lump clutched in his palm.
When everything finally calmed down, he opened his eyes. He was squatting on the cold ground, drenched in sweat, shaking as if in a fever. He clutched the wax in his hand. But it was no longer a shapeless mass.
In his hand lay a perfectly crafted wax miniature of an ancient oak tree. Every branch, every curve of the bark, was rendered with incredible precision. And this tiny sculpture exuded such peace and quiet, ancient power that tears began to flow down his cheeks.
The glowing flower faded. Now it was just a fragile wildflower, gently swaying in the wind.
Alexei rose to his feet, clinging precariously to the trunk of a real oak tree. He was empty. Exhausted. But cleaner than he'd ever been in his life. There was no heaviness. There was only a light, happy weariness.
He looked at the wax sapling in his hand. It was proof. Insane, impossible proof.
Now he believed.
He turned to go back, and his heart sank for a moment. At the edge of the forest, in the moonlight, stood a tall female figure in a long, dark cloak. He couldn't see her face, hidden in the shadow of her hood, but he felt her intense, unwavering gaze on him.
Before he could say or do anything, the stranger turned and silently disappeared between the trees.
Alexey was left alone in the clearing, clutching a wax oak in one hand, and with the other instinctively pressing a cold lump of fear and the realization of one simple thing to his chest:
The lesson had been learned. But the game was just beginning. And he wasn't the only player.