They usually went to the station to buy bread. Bought there, it was almost always fresh, sometimes even warm. True, the freshness depended on when a small local mine released a small, noisily puffing engine for the haul. When he set out on his journey, he created huge clouds of steam around himself, hissed, whistled, and when he approached the platform, sometimes he also hummed, as if he was trying to prove his importance and indispensability. Thus, three or four times a week this little engine pulled a heated train with bread from the Avdeevka bakery. After the locomotive stopped at the station, at the beginning of the platform, the door to the heated heater opened, a shiny iron counter rolled out, separating the buyers from the seller, and the sale of bread began. It was sold to everyone who came here and stood in a not particularly long, but strict, grumbling line for order.
And after some hour, when the flow of buyers dried up, a bread truck arrived (at first a horse-drawn wheeled hut, and later on a GAZ-AA lorry), and the remaining, already frozen bread was taken to a food store on the square in front of the village council, a couple of kilometers from the station. And now the bulk of people flocked there, for whom it was too far to get to the station on foot. It seemed that the only feeling that united all the residents of the station was the desire to buy bread.
Mom said that she remembered the trailer with the inscription “BREAD” from her girlhood. It used to be repainted. First from gray to blue, then to black, then to dirty green, protective. They replaced the skin on the trailer, secured it with rivets and tied it together with rods, welded it with metal strips, and insulated it. In general, something was constantly updated in it. The sellers were different, the norms for the sale of bread changed, and were strictly observed under pain of punishment. The heads of the village council and the secretaries of the station district committee were appointed and removed. A lot has changed. But only the smell of freshly baked bread remained unchanged. It spread far beyond the station. And in winter, and in summer, and in snow, and in rain, the smell of bread informed everyone that, despite political peculiarities, industrialization, famine, the fateful 30s, war or Khrushchev’s thaw, life went on. And man’s need for bread did not weaken.
I was lucky enough to remember the smell of this bread too. When I was little, when I came to Ocheretino with my mother, I absorbed and remembered this unique bread aroma for the rest of my life. Whether it was combined with the smell of creosote used to impregnate railway sleepers, or with the aroma of freshly mined Donbass coal, I don’t know. But I have never smelled such a smell anywhere else in my life. I also remembered how in the congregation tired women or men, local brothers and sisters in Christ, who were buying bread on the way to the service, broke off a piece and, trying not to drop a single crumb, gave it to me. And although I was usually not hungry, I devoured the bread, shortening the time of long and incomprehensible sermons. It happened that I was not treated to bread, but the unique aroma of bread certainly hovered in the congregation.
Over the course of my life, I have listened to several dozen, maybe even a hundred sermons on the topic of bread. Almost all of them were interesting and worthy of attention. However, for me, that smell of bread from childhood, that attitude towards bread, the national desire to always have bread in the house, the taste that the congregation had from the hard, calloused hands of the children of God remains, perhaps, the only real interpretation of the text from the Bible: “...I am the bread of life; he who comes to Me shall never hunger, and he who believes in Me shall never thirst” (John 6:35).
