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0每天五分钟听经典英文故事，读绘本，磨耳朵。一部关于苦难与光的童年回忆，讲述阿廖沙在黑暗中寻找希望的成长故事。
The first thing Alyosha remembered was not toys, not the courtyard, not his mother's smile
It was his father lying in the room
The grownups spoke in low voices, his mother Varvara seemed drained of all strength, little Alyosha did not yet understand why a person would suddenly stop opening his eyes, why every sound in the room had grown so heavy
After his father died, his mother took him back to his grandfather's house
It was a lively house
It was also like a boiling pot
His grandfather Kashrin used to run a dye shop, he was small, shrewd, and his temper was as hard as iron, his two sons, Mikhail and Yakov, quarreled all day over the family property
Who should get more, who had been shortchanged, who had gotten the better deal, they argued until nothing was left between kin but red-eyed enmity
Alyosha had barely arrived when that atmosphere closed around him
They quarreled at the dinner table
They quarreled in the courtyard
Even at night, the cursing could not be stifled
At first he thought that when family gathered together, that was home, later he learned that some homes were just places where many suffering people were locked in the same room, left to hurt one another
His grandfather's rules were strict, and his anger came fast
Once, when Alyosha made a mistake, his grandfather beat him severely, the child's body was pinned down, the whip fell, and he hurt so much he nearly lost consciousness
People in the room watched, some tried to intervene, some were afraid, but no one could truly pull him out of that fury
When the pain passed, his grandmother came to his side
Grandmother Akulina was not like this house
She was poor too, she suffered too, she was worn full of scars by fate, but she did not carry that hardness that dragged others down into misery with her, she cleaned his wounds, talked with him, told him stories
She spoke of God, of saints, of suffering people, of distant places that seemed like dreams
Alyosha lay in pain and listened
He was still under his grandfather's roof, but slowly another door opened in his heart
This house was not without light
There was a young man called "Little Gypsy"
He was lively, he could dance, he loved to laugh, like a wind that did not belong to this house, the grownups were rough, but he often looked out for Alyosha
Sometimes when his grandfather beat the child, he would quietly slip his own arm in the way to take a few blows for him
He was not preaching any great truth
He simply could not bear to see a child in pain
But people like that were not kept by life either
One day while moving heavy objects, "Little Gypsy" had an accident and died
His death came very suddenly, one moment a man who could laugh and dance, the next crushed under something heavy
The house soon returned to its noise, life pushed on, as if a kind person vanishing was just a wind that had stopped
But Alyosha remembered him
He remembered those hands that had blocked the whip
He remembered that even in a wretched place, a person could choose to protect others first
Later, Alyosha saw the old worker Grigory
Grigory had spent his whole life in the dye shop, his eyes were ruined by the work, his body drained empty, when he could no longer work, he was pushed aside
There was nothing beautiful in this old man's fate, he simply fell apart slowly, and was slowly forgotten
Watching him, Alyosha vaguely understood for the first time that people did not only suffer for their mistakes
Sometimes people were just poor, just old, just no longer useful, and so they were cast aside
His grandfather's house grew less and less like a home
His uncles' fighting never stopped, family feeling was worn thin by money, and faces grew twisted in the struggle
His grandfather guarded his own petty schemes, the more he feared loss, the tighter he held on, the tighter he held on, the more he suffocated those around him
He was not a man who had never known hardship
But what he learned from hardship was not pity, it was harder methods
Alyosha saw in him a terrible transformation, after life had beaten a person, that person might turn around and beat others with the same pain
In those days, there was a lodger people called "Good Deeds"
He was quiet, odd, liked to do his own things, and did not fit with the crude voices around him, Alyosha drew close to him and felt this man carried a rare clarity
But in his grandfather's house, not belonging was itself a crime
People did not understand him, and did not want to understand him
In the end, he was driven away
Alyosha watched another decent person disappear from his life
His mother Varvara was also slowly disappearing
It was not that she did not love Alyosha, but she too was pushed around by fate, she left his grandfather's house, then returned, she tried to start over, married again, but the new life never truly caught her
Alyosha watched his mother's face grow dimmer by the day
She had once been the person closest to him, brightest in his heart, but poverty, marriage, illness bent her little by little, when she returned to Alyosha, she no longer had the strength she once did
What a child found hardest to bear was not just losing his mother
It was seeing her still alive, yet slowly drifting away from him
Later, Varvara grew gravely ill
The breath of death filled the room again
Alyosha had already seen his father die, seen "Little Gypsy" die, seen Grigory slowly worn away by life, but when it was his mother's turn, the pain was new
After his mother died, the last soft anchor Alyosha had in this world was severed
His grandfather had fallen into decline
The man who once ruled the family, shrewd and strong, was now cornered by poverty, he no longer had the means to raise this child, so he told Alyosha he could no longer hang around his neck, it was time to go out into the world
Go out into the world
When those words fell, Alyosha's childhood ended
But he had in fact long been in the world
His first lesson in the world was his father's coffin
His second lesson was his grandfather's whip
Later came his uncles' faces torn by money, "Little Gypsy's" crushed body, Grigory's dim eyes, "Good Deeds'" retreating back, his mother's ever-weakening breath on her sickbed
Only his grandmother was there too
Her stories, her rough hands, her heart that had not turned bad even in suffering, all these stayed with Alyosha
So when he walked out of his grandfather's house, he carried more than just wounds
He also carried that little bit of light he had seen
That light was not loud, not pure, often pressed very low by darkness
But it had not gone out
With this childhood, Alyosha walked toward a larger world
