Chap­ter IV opens with the intense heat of August weigh­ing down on the vil­lage, press­ing even the air into silence. Sasha, a young girl full of rest­less ener­gy, is giv­en the sim­ple task of guard­ing the geese from the kitchen-gar­den. Her grandmother’s trust rests on thin ice, for Sasha’s sense of duty is often over­pow­ered by curios­i­ty. Just as expect­ed, she soon slips away, unable to resist the pull of some­thing more engag­ing than shoo­ing birds. Her wan­der­ing feet car­ry her to the edge of a ravine, a qui­et spot touched by sun and shad­ows. There she finds Mot­ka, Marya’s daugh­ter, lost in her own world. Togeth­er, they let their minds drift toward heav­en and the church, where they imag­ine angels and divine sort­ing play­ing out behind sacred walls.

In the hands of chil­dren, the­ol­o­gy becomes a tale of glit­ter­ing stars, ascend­ing church­es, and judg­ment ren­dered by famil­iar fig­ures. Sasha and Mot­ka blend folk­lore and belief with inno­cent spec­u­la­tion, plac­ing local char­ac­ters into imag­i­nary heav­en-bound or hell-sent fates. They dis­cuss whether God ever sleeps, where angels hide dur­ing the day, and how the world might look from above. The con­ver­sa­tion holds both humor and grav­i­ty, echo­ing how deeply cul­tur­al and spir­i­tu­al notions root them­selves in even the youngest minds. Their mus­ings are unteth­ered from doc­trine, yet they strike a chord of sin­cer­i­ty that adult con­ver­sa­tions often lack. It’s in this dream­like space that they bond, shield­ed momen­tar­i­ly from the world’s harsh­ness.

Their brief escape is shat­tered by the furi­ous shout of Sasha’s grand­moth­er, who has dis­cov­ered the geese tram­pling her gar­den. She appears like a storm—loud, wild-eyed, and armed with a stick. Her anger is fierce and absolute, a voice of order in a world where sur­vival hinges on dis­ci­pline. Sasha and Mot­ka roll laugh­ing down the slope, but the joy ends when the stick finds Sasha’s back. The grandmother’s rage isn’t just about veg­eta­bles; it’s about con­trol, pover­ty, and the fragili­ty of the order she tries to keep. Each lash is pun­ish­ment not just for the moment, but for the fear of los­ing even more to chaos and care­less­ness.

What fol­lows is a strange moment of theater—the gan­der, puffed up and indig­nant, charges the grand­moth­er as though to defend its flock. For an instant, the nat­ur­al world seems to rebel against the cru­el­ty of the human one. The vil­lagers, peek­ing from their homes, laugh. But the laugh­ter is uneasy, tinged with recog­ni­tion. They see not just a scold­ing elder, but the cycle they are all caught in—of frus­tra­tion, dis­ci­pline, and fleet­ing pow­er. The grand­moth­er backs down, her pride injured more than her body, while Sasha, now sob­bing, is led away.

The chap­ter is small in scope but rich in its por­tray­al of rur­al dynam­ics. It cap­tures how author­i­ty is wield­ed not always with jus­tice, but often out of des­per­a­tion and fatigue. The grand­moth­er isn’t evil; she’s tired, per­haps bro­ken by years of scrap­ing togeth­er a life from stub­born soil and scarce resources. Her out­burst isn’t isolated—it’s the echo of gen­er­a­tions sur­viv­ing through con­trol when com­pas­sion feels like a lux­u­ry. Mean­while, Sasha and Motka’s imag­i­na­tive world offers a sharp contrast—a reminder that even in hard­ship, won­der and inno­cence find space to breathe.

By embed­ding divine nar­ra­tives into their play­ful ban­ter, the girls demon­strate how belief sys­tems are shaped not just in church­es, but in mead­ows, kitchens, and whis­pered sto­ries between chil­dren. Their imag­i­na­tions act as both refuge and com­pass, help­ing them make sense of a world that often feels unjust. The scene offers a glimpse into how harsh envi­ron­ments forge resilience but also risk extin­guish­ing the very joy that gives life its mean­ing. In the end, the clash between Sasha’s dream-filled world and her grandmother’s real­i­ty leaves a last­ing impression—one that lingers like the heat of a mid­sum­mer day and the sting of an unex­pect­ed blow.