Mutiny of the Little Sweeties

by Dmitrii Emets

  On the ground floor were one large room, one small room, and the kitchen. On the second were three small rooms and one medium one. The sea was not visible from the window, but the lighthouse standing on the seashore was.

  “Does it work?” Papa asked.

  “Of course! The searchlight turns at night. I lived here for forty-two years with my wife and now seven years without her. I played the trumpet in a military orchestra. We bought the house here when my wife said that she had bad lungs and needed warm winters,” the grandpa said and stroked the windowsill, as if it was alive.

  “Then maybe you shouldn’t…” Papa began, but the old man hastily repeated that he had decided everything a long time ago; it was dangerous for him to live alone because he had trouble with his heart from time to time, and he was very glad that everything was finally taking shape.

  They agreed on how much to pay and on how to send money, and the grandpa began to show where the fuse box was, where the meters were, how to shut off the water, and what bad habits the gas boiler had.

  “It’s good, this boiler, better than other new ones, but a little stubborn. Need to get a feel for it. It lights with matches, here… Only when you light it, keep your face away!”

  Papa looked suspiciously sideways at the boiler. It looked like a huge cannon projectile, and tubes of different diameters were connected to it. Something was puffing and raging in the boiler.

  “Any instructions for it?” Papa specified timidly.

  “What instructions? It’s almost the same age as me. The main thing is just be friendly to it,” the old man said, sighing, and began to twist a big valve. “Here, I turned it off! Now I’ll light it! Careful!”

  The old man held a match up to the boiler, and – PUFF!

  It was the loudest “puff” in the world. Papa even squatted, saving his head just in case, but the boiler was already peacefully heating water, and an extremely satisfied old man stood beside it.

  “Well, that’s all! Seems I’ve shown you everything! Now run for the train!” he hurried Papa and Papa travelled to Mama and the children.

  * * *

  April and May went in a terrible rush. They advertised the Moscow apartment with an agency and rented it to a family with two children, which would take possession in June. The children of this family were so quiet that Papa was certain the watchful neighbour would like them. Although, possibly she would now decide that the tenants’ children sat quietly because the parents gagged them or tied them to chairs.

  “Not a sound for an hour! Just sat and drew with markers! Why can’t ours be so docile!” Mama said enviously.

  “Ours can’t, but others can. It seems to me that ours are Italian spies,” Papa responded.

  “You and I are Italian spies! Only the Italians don’t know about it yet,” Mama added.

  She had barely slept in recent weeks. No one knew when she rested. Since the beginning of May, Mama had been packing what they would take with them and giving away what they would not take at all.

  During these two months, the dried-up grandpa changed his mind three times about going to his granddaughter, and then made up his mind again. This confused Papa, but all the same, Mama persisted in continuing packing, declaring that she had already made up her mind, and once she did, it was then too late to give up. Whatever happened, they would just go and sit on the bags at the station, and then somehow everything would work out by itself.

  Then the grandpa raised the price slightly and went to his granddaughter after all. This took place a few days before the end of the last school term. The children would start in a new school in a new town in the new school year. Now everyone realized that the journey was actually happening and started to pack four times faster.

  Each child packed his own things in his own backpack. The younger had a smaller backpack, the older, a bigger one, with the exception of Rita, who was so little that her backpack was a frog with a zipper at the mouth.

  Alex assembled a full backpack of toys, and when they did not fit into it, he started banging on the backpack with a hammer, kneading it so that it turned out to be more compact. At the same time, by way of selfless help, he also “kneaded” with the hammer the big bag in which Mama had packed the dishes, after which it turned out that all the dishes left whole could easily fit in one package.

  “Well, doesn’t matter!” Mama said, consoling herself. “Indeed, we could break them on the road, and then it would be much more annoying!”

  Kate filled her whole backpack with animal cages. At the bottom was the cage with a guinea pig, then a rat cage on it, and at the top of the pyramid – the red-eared slider turtle Mafia. They named the turtle Mafia because, when it was living in the aquarium, it ate newts, crayfish, and goldfish. It gobbled up absolutely everything at night without a trace, but during the day, it stayed at the bottom like a completely respectable individual, so they started to suspect it only because the newts, crayfish, and goldfish simply could not have just gotten up and gone somewhere on business. Later Kate suddenly remembered that they were not going yet and pulled out all the cages so that the animals would not suffocate. Nevertheless, having pulled out the cages, Kate again succumbed to the mood of general packing and put everything back. She again thought that they would suffocate and again pulled them out.

  Alena whined and did not want to go anywhere. She had fallen in love with Vadik from the next class, who always threw a heavy medicine ball at her back during physical education, but never at the other girls. Although there were bruises from the ball on her back, it was still not worth ignoring Vadik.

  Kate, the older sister, interrogated Alena, “Vadik! Ha! What was the name of the boy you fell in love with last week? Dima?”

  “Cyril. He stuck gum in my hair.”

  “But Dima didn’t?”

  “Cyril also stuck gum in Dima’s hair.”

  Kate twirled a finger at her temple. “Ugh! Such drama! Cyril and Dima stick gum in each other’s hair, and she falls in love with some unfortunate Vadik! That’s it, go pack your backpack!”

  Alena took a broom, swept her broken heart away into the dustpan, and started packing.

  Finally, the day of departure arrived. Papa took Mama and the kids to the station. Then he was to return, load into the minivan the things that amounted to much more than seven backpacks, and drive for a whole day. However, the train also took a day. So they should turn up in the same place around the same time.

  The watchful granny from the second floor unexpectedly went to see them off at the station. Papa and Mama did not want to take her at all and made up a story about broken seatbelts in the third row of seats, but it turned out to be quite difficult to turn her down. In the car, the old woman held Rita on her lap and kissed the top of her head, and Rita turned her head, because the kiss was moist.

  “Look! She’s drinking from her brain!” Peter whispered and laughed so wildly that they wanted to send him to the station by subway.

  At the station, the old woman kissed all the children, not even excluding Peter, who had to bend down because he was two heads taller. Peter, after being kissed, made scary faces and tried to catch free Wi-Fi at the station.

  “I remember when you were still so tiny!” the old woman said, showing with her hand the level of her knee. Then she gave the children a transistor radio with a solar charger. Rita, of course, immediately wanted the radio for herself alone and she lay down on the asphalt right on the platform so that everyone could see how indispensable it was to her.

  “It will be shared! And it’s yours too!” Kate said, but Rita wanted it only for herself and kicked.

  “Look here! No one is torturing her!” Papa Gavrilov could not refrain from saying.

  “Work with the child’s character, work! Explain to her!” the watchful granny said, but in a rather weak voice.

  The train started moving and the watchful granny waved to them. “Kate, Alex, Rita, Costa, Vicky, Alena, Peter! Goodbye! Write me! I don’t even know your address!” s
he shouted.

  Mama was astonished. She had not even suspected that the watchful granny knew all their children by name. The train pulled away, and it was visible from the window that the neighbour was walking along the platform and wiping her eyes.

  “You know, but she’s kind of good! How come we didn’t notice this before?” Mama said uncertainly.

  “We can go back! It’s not too late to jump off the train!” Vicky proposed.

  “No! We won’t go back!” Mama hastily replied. “But now that I know she’s good, my heart will be lighter!”

  Vicky chuckled and sat down to read The Headless Horseman,[3] in which there were often horses.

  Chapter Three

  No. 6 Vine Street

  While a frog is sloshing around, it will not drown.

  Papa’s motto

  Before leaving, Papa walked around the minivan and rocked it, checking if it had been loaded evenly and would not lean to one side. The minivan was loaded up like a mule. Boxes and things filled it from floor to ceiling, even with the seats down.

  “Poor thing!” Papa said, feeling sorry for his minivan.

  The Gavrilovs’ minivan was Japanese, right-handed drive. Once, a young Alena washed it with a brick, scraping away the dirt, and then a year later the already grown Alex thoughtfully tapped it with a hammer on all sides, knocking down the ice in the winter, and covered the minivan with pockmarks. Papa sometimes thought whether it would be good to exchange the old minivan for a new one, but who is to say that they would not wash the new one with a brick, and the old one, though looking like a wild shed and more than 10 years old, was actually quite lively.

  By the example of his own minivan, Papa learned to identify minivans with many children. To do this it was necessary to go to any busy intersection on Sunday mornings, when services got under way in the churches in the city centre, and see which minivan was bouncing and swaying, waiting for the green light. There turned out to be quite a lot of them.

  Papa spent the day behind the wheel, listening to a good audio book and making an effort to drive faster, but all the same, because of having to load the boxes, was an hour late. Mama and the children were standing at the station, not knowing what to do, and their backpacks, boxes, and suitcases were lying in a small mound near them. Rita, whom Mama was holding so that she would not fall down, was jumping on top of said mound. However, it goes without saying, Rita was certain that she would not fall and pulled her hand away, but when Mama let go of her, Rita immediately tumbled. Papa barely managed to catch her.

  “It was a quiet horror!” Mama complained. “We terrorized the entire car! Rita was running all the time, Costa didn’t want to sleep on the same berth with Alex, pushing him off with his feet, and Vicky didn’t want to take him!”

  “You sleep with Costa, you wake up in a puddle! He’ll then say that he dreamt of the potty again,” Vicky explained.

  “Not true!” Costa wailed.

  “…and our rats slipped away!” Mama added, changing the subject.

  “Yes, yes, yes! Even Schwartz!” Kate shouted. “They ran around the car! And what do you think? All the men were afraid of rats, one even jumped onto a second berth, but the women picked them up!”

  “That’s because women aren’t afraid of rats but of mice! And when it’s advantageous for them!” Peter said.

  “And where’re the rats now?” Papa asked, hoping that they had escaped and that would be the end of it.

  “In the cage, of course! They later returned!” Kate said and looked in her backpack to check whether the rats had slipped away again.

  Then everyone piled into the minivan, managing to find a seat on top of things, and Papa proceeded to show them the house. He was very proud of himself and wanted everything to be great.

  “Soon you’ll see! Soon!” he repeated constantly, but the promised “soon” for some reason did not come.

  They drove along the waterfront six times and crossed the tram tracks ten times, but did not find the figure 8 street. The next time along the waterfront, the children staged a mutiny. They wanted to swim, but Mama did not remember which box their swimsuits were in. And she doubted that the water had warmed up. The beaches were still quite empty.

  Mama started to look at Papa with some doubt. “At least the right city?” she asked guardedly. “Do you remember the street name?”

  “No. 6 Vine Street!” Papa blurted out.

  “Well, so ask someone!”

  Papa refused to ask out of principle. He already considered himself a local, and locals do not ask for directions. “I know how to walk from the station! But I walked through courtyards, you can’t drive through that way!”

  “So, let’s leave the van and walk!” Mama, who was impatient to see the house, demanded.

  “No, that’s stupid! We may lose the van and all the things! Now I remember, it’s here!” Papa became obstinate and, turning resolutely, drove into a dead end, which was complete with a wall of green shrubs. Papa started to make a U-turn, which was not easy, because boxes and his kin lying horizontally blocked up the whole rear window and the street was almost as wide as their car. Papa backed up, then drove forward and unexpectedly cut into a solid wall of green shrubs.

  "Be careful! It’ll scratch!” Mama yelled, but the shrubs suddenly parted and the branches only slid along the glass.

  A bewildered Papa, stepping on the gas, continued to drive to who knows where, and the van passed through the green wall without the slightest resistance. Bright tattered flowers, in which bees and beetles were crawling, drummed on the windows.

  “We’re like Alice in Wonderland!” Alena shouted.

  Then the shrubs finally parted and everyone saw a dusty path with undulating asphalt, cracked from the roots of the many acacias under it. A big shaggy dog ran along the path to meet them with a hoarse barking. Behind the shaggy dog, a medium-sized off-white dog also rushed over barking. Finally, a quite small short-legged dog with a bald back came hobbling last. This dog was no longer barking but coughing.

  Kate rolled out of the stopped car and ran to meet the dogs. Mama yelled, afraid that the dogs would tear her to pieces, but the dogs suddenly turned and ran in the opposite direction, except the bald dog, which fell on the ground from terror and, giving up, turned over with legs up.

  “See? Afraid that Kate will hug them to death! I’d be scared too!” Peter said and again started laughing so wildly that Vicky demanded pushing Peter out of the car because he had completely deafened her.

  “I’ll go myself!” Peter said and crawled out of the car through the lowered rear window. Alena, Costa, Alex, and Rita got out after Peter.

  They all crowded in front of the van, and Papa could no longer go anywhere and turned off the motor.

  “Where is the house?” Mama asked.

  “Here!” Papa said, pointing to that which Mama could not see from the van.

  Mama got out and saw the house. It had peeling plaster, which was not conspicuous, because vines were embracing the second floor and the roof, and blooming dog rose, curling along the window bars, covered the first floor, where the grapevines were only thick bald trunks.

  The house’s double gates were metal, twice the height of a person, and painted black. They had rusted for many years and the rust was carefully painted over. They rusted again and were painted again. As a result, the gates, oddly enough, turned out to have a very beautiful texture – so uneven, rough, really lively. At the bottom, where the gates had rusted heavily, small holes formed here and there.

  Rita and Alex were already lying on their stomachs, trying to peep through the holes to see what was happening in the yard. “Mama, look! Look!” they yelled.

  “Good heavens!” Mama said. She approached carefully and ran a hand along the gates. The black paint, warmed up by the sun, burned the palm of her hand. The wind swooped down. The gates stretched like a sail and buzzed. Mama wanted to stand here a bit and try to catch a response in her heart, which would suggest whether this was t
he house she dreamed of, but Papa was already hurrying to open the house. Alex had managed to climb up the gates and now, feet dangling, was sitting almost level with the second floor. Everyone was shouting for him to get down, but Alex liked to sit so high. He climbed the post of the gates and climbed over to the balcony from there. He was scrambling with ease, like a monkey.

  Mama was afraid that Alex would fall and demanded that he come down, but Peter declared that he knew Alex. Alex would never come down himself, because he saw perfectly that no one could reach him. Peter himself had also been mischievous like that in childhood. Now he was wise.

  “Wise, wise! Only don’t bray so loudly!” Vicky said and moved aside just in case.

  “What if we threaten that we’ll punish him?” Kate suggested.

  “Then he really won’t come down. What’s the sense of coming down if you’re going to get punished? Better to sit until everyone forgets that they’ve promised to punish you!” Peter continued authoritatively. “No! A better way to get Alex down is to throw something at him. For example, bricks.”

  “Not on your life!” Mama objected.

  “I wasn’t suggesting to start immediately with large bricks. Can start with small pebbles. Well, if you don’t want to, don’t! Then option number two! I’ll bet on a trick; that’ll work!”

  Peter leaned down, picked up Alex’s backpack from the asphalt, and began to rummage in it. “Wow!” he exclaimed. “Soda! And what’s this in the bottle? Vinegar, perhaps?”

  “Give it back! It’s mine!” was heard from the balcony. Alex deftly rolled down from there like a ball, and, clutching his backpack, started to pull it away from Peter.

  “Learn from me while I live! Childish greed is the key to a child’s heart!” said Peter.

  However, no one wished to learn from Peter. Everyone was already rushing into the house. Costa flew first with a sword in his right hand. Rita followed. After Rita, Vicky and Alena. Kate ran last, all three stray dogs – large, medium, and small with a bald back – sticking to her. Now these dogs did not consider themselves strays anymore, but had thought about it, talked it over, and decided to become pets. Mama waved her arms at them and stood at the door, and the dogs again became strays.