Funny and sad, sometimes funny stories from the author’s childhood are united by a single storyline with a story about the life path of two of his fellow villagers. Both are veterans of the Great Patriotic War. But what a gap there is between them. One is the embodiment of honesty, modesty and heroism. The second is an example of deceit, vanity and cowardice. The difference in characters multiplied by the difference in destinies is the “square of the difference.”