The village where my grandmother lives is about 30 kilometers away from the city where I live. Apart from me and my dad (my grandmother's son, who lives 400 km away from the village) she has no one left, she lives alone in the house, there is almost no one left in the village either, no neighbors, but despite this, all attempts to take her to the city did not lead to anything good. The grandmother flatly refused to even hear that in the city she would be given all the conditions: running water, sewerage, stores at hand, not a delivery truck, which appears in the village once a week, a hospital two steps away... But it is impossible to bribe the grandmother with anything, I will not go and that's it. So I went to grandmother every other day, the good thing is that I had my own car, brought food, did all the housework: stove heating, washing, cleaning, and other household chores, on weekends I stayed in the village.
That's how we lived, until my grandmother started to get sick often. I took a vacation and went to the country for the time of vacation. Grandma was fading every day, we had an ambulance almost every day, they didn't take her to the hospital (because of the epidemiological situation they only took her with the symptoms of coronavirus), I kept in touch with the doctors, before going to bed I put a drip, thanks to my training as a doctor. The day went like this: early in the morning I called the hospital, got breakfast, took shots, pills, did housework, then lunch, during the breaks I helped my grandmother get out of bed, put on clothes, took her to another room, then again took pills, shots, if necessary an ambulance, then again housework, household chores, dinner. After supper I would put my grandmother to bed, put her on an IV, sit down next to her in a chair, and we would talk. All the chores would end before midnight, and, tired, going to bed, I would fall asleep quickly.
This night there was no sleep, I tossed and turned, trying to sleep, but to no avail. Then I heard a knock at the door, the clock was about 3 a.m. I don't call an ambulance at that time, no one was waiting for me. I got up quietly, went to check on my grandmother, she was asleep. I went to the door and listened, someone was obviously behind it. The knocking repeated again, I asked: "Who?" No one answered, but continued knocking, not loudly, but very often and persistently, and there was a damp smell in the hallway, a draught, even though the windows and doors were tightly closed. Then I heard my grandmother calling me from the room, the knocking stopped, and I ran to her. When I came to the room, I saw that my grandmother was asleep, and she obviously could not call me. There was another knock on the door, and on top of that someone was pounding on the roof (the roof was made of professional sheet metal, so it felt like a hammer had been used), someone was knocking on the windows (the windows were curtained and, thank God, I didn't want to see who was knocking there), I was already on the verge of hysteria. Then something rumbled in the hall, the smell intensified, and in the corridor I heard the sound of breaking glass (later I saw that the window had broken), and then suddenly everything was gone, as if nothing had happened.
In the morning my grandmother felt much better, she got out of bed, came out into the corridor, and asked me why the window was broken. I did not, of course, tell her everything, I said that I had accidentally broken it myself, I asked her if I had woken her up, much to her surprise, she said that she had slept soundly and had not heard anything.
I stayed at my grandmother's for the rest of my vacation, and nothing else happened, neither during the vacation nor after. But I still tortured myself with questions: Who was it that came? Why? Why did he break the window? Did he break it to scare me? Or did he want to break in? And why didn't he get in? And what would happen if I did open the door?
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