«Of course!» the people of Koz'ma would confirm. «The Soviet authority has us in the watering aspect as first thing. Our turn will come, and we shall drink our fill! Or did we not drink since old times? We just go downtown and drink.»

«Absolutely right,» Pyotr Yevseyevich would determine. «And one also has to appreciate in addition that life goes drier and stingier with thirst, and one feels it more from the languish.»

«One cannot escape it without water,» the peasants would agree. «One lives as if just swallowed a burning log from a fire.»

«This is merely an imaginary impression,» explained Pyotr Yevseyevich. «One would imagine many things when one has a desire to drink. The sun also seems to you and to us a heat and a force, but one can hide and quench it with some steam from a kettle — at once there will be chill on the table-cloth. It only seems that way to you and to us in the middle of the mind…»

Pyotr Yevseyevich always regarded himself and the State with more respect than the population, unaware of the sense of it, since the population constantly exists alongside with and is provided by the State with the necessary life.

Usually Pyotr Yevseyevich was offered food in Koz'ma — not because of kindness and plenty, but out of a feeling of security. However, Pyotr Yevseyevich would never eat others' food: bread grows on a peasant's lot only for one, not for two — and so Pyotr Yevseyevich had nothing to eat out of. The sun, it also burns sparingly and socially: it does not warm up more bread than for one labouring eater, therefore, there should be no feeding of guests in the State.

Amidst the summer the village of Koz'ma, as well as all rural places, suffered from diarrhea, because the berries on the shrubbery and the greens in the gardens ripened. These fruits would drive the stomachs to nervousness, to which the watery substance from the pond added. To prevent that public suffering, the young communists from Koz'ma would start to dig wells each year, but they would become worn down by the power of impassable sands and would lie on the ground in languish of fruitless labour.