“You’re cruel!” Kate said. “By the way, I’ve given them our pâté! It would have gone bad anyway!”
“My pâté? It couldn’t go bad! It was wrapped up. I was planning it for dinner!”
“It’s already irrelevant, can’t get it out of the dogs anyway,” said Kate.
Then they all walked around the house for a long time, and Papa showed them everything that the grandpa had shown him last time. Here is the large room on the ground floor, here is the small room, which he, Papa, would take as his office, and here is the kitchen! There are still three small and one medium-sized room upstairs. And here is a door, but he, Papa, has no idea where it leads.
“To Bluebeard’s room! Two hundred strangled wives there!” Peter said and opened the door. Beyond the door was revealed a sinister type of staircase – dark and narrow.
Everyone began to descend cautiously, the older ones holding the younger ones just in case. There were certainly no strangled wives there, that was nonsense, but still it would be better if Papa went first. It would be safer, more secure. And better if Mama would hold onto Papa and the rest of the children clung to Mama.
The lower they went, the darker it became, like the open mouth of a passage from where light could no longer filter through. Papa fumbled on the wall. He found the light switch, turned on the light. A light bulb hanging from a wire flashed and everyone saw the cosiest basement in the world. An unfinished small sailboat was on a workbench and wooden shelves with hundreds of dusty jars stretched along the walls. Mama and Vicky immediately rushed to wipe the jars, making small windows with fingers in the dust. Preserve turned out to be in some of the jars, compote and jam in others.
“We can’t take them! They belong to someone else!” Papa said sternly.
“We won’t steal! But we can ask the old man politely, ‘Can we take your preserves?’ Most likely he’ll say, ‘Certainly!’ It's not like he’ll go on the train for two days to eat three tablespoons and return!” Kate declared.
Papa then turned off the light in the basement; everyone went upstairs and ran around the house. Papa showed Mama how to light the gas boiler and how it made the loudest “PUFF” in the world. Alex, of course, was already standing nearby, pricking up his ears, and Papa had to plug up Alex’s ears with his fingers and cover Alex’s eyes at the same time so that Alex would not nose out how to make the biggest “puff”!
While they were examining the boiler, a terrible noise surged on the second floor. The floor shook, the house jumped up and down, and Mama was glad that they no longer had neighbours who would now come running to knock on the door.
“Do you hear? What are they doing there?” she asked Papa when Alex, attracted by the general noise, ran upstairs too.
“I think they’re dividing up the rooms!” Papa suggested. “They’ve never had their own rooms. Although there aren’t enough rooms for everyone here.”
“What do you mean not enough? There’re six rooms! You said there’re three small and one medium on the second floor. One large and one small on the first!” Mama exclaimed.
“That’s right, six rooms. Seven kids and nine of us in total… Plus the big room on the ground floor is obviously the common room. No one will be able to sleep there. So, minus one. Even minus two, because the small one will be my office!”
“Wait, I need one room for the little ones… The quietest and farthest so they won’t be disturbed in the afternoon! What if you get the basement for your office? Imagine, how cool! Sitting in an outstanding, cozy, dry basement, writing novels, and eating jam!” Mama proposed carefully.
“No way! Better pack the kids in the basement! A nice, cozy, dry basement full of preserves!” Papa said gloomily, having decided to defend his office to the last.
Some time later, when the noise quieted down, Mama and Papa went upstairs. The second floor was a demarcation zone.
The boundaries of each sector were marked out with the children’s backpacks and a line of things laid out in a row stretched across the room, even taking into account the interests of Rita and Costa. The older kids assigned the far left room to them and blocked them up in that room so that they did not run and grab everything. They generously gave the next room to Mama and Papa as their bedroom. Vicky, Alena, Alex, and Kate divided the centre room among themselves, where, in principle, there would be enough space for everyone if bunk beds were put in. Kate had already managed to put the guinea pig and rat cages on the centre room windows – and there were two of them!
Vicky did not like it. “No rats! They throw sawdust out of the cage all the time! Dirt from just one of them! Choose: me, your sister, or the rats!” she yelled.
“I didn’t ask you to choose!” Kate warned ominously.
Peter won for himself the far right room. He had already managed to close the door and hung up a “DO NOT DISTURB!” sign, which he had foresightedly printed on the printer back in Moscow, glued onto cardboard, and brought with him.
Mama wandered anxiously around the house and counted the beds. This turned out to be simple; there was only one bed. There was also a huge decrepit sofa. If you tapped on it even just slightly, a cloud of dust would rise to the ceiling. Costa discovered this first when he hit the sofa with his sword. On noticing this, Alex approached it, and Rita after Alex, then all three began to bang on it with passion.
Peter watched the childish fun for some time from the height of his wisdom, and then also wanted to move onto the sofa. Better yet, to run, jump, and flop on it from the maximum possible height. “Well, break it up, pip-squeaks!” he ordered offhandedly.
However, before Peter could pound on the sofa and break all its legs, Mama ran into the room. Coughing from the dust, she began to pull the kids out of the room and demanded that Papa drag the sofa onto the street. “Okay! We’ll buy beds tomorrow. Good that we took the kids’ mattresses with us! They can sleep right on the floor!” she said, and everyone went for the mattresses.
Later, everyone still ran around a little and lay down to sleep. Papa fell asleep first, having been up for more than 24 hours. He did not even unload the things from the car. Rita, Costa, and Alex slept with him on the same mattress. Papa had to lie on the edge and pull up his knees, because they would not fit otherwise. They did not fit because the mattress was so small and Rita wanted to be right in the center, but she began to twist and turn and kick all those who accidentally touched her. Costa and Alex fenced Rita off with pillows as shields.
This was their first day at the new place.
Chapter Four
The Flying Shoe
The legendary creator of gunpowder, the monk Berthold Schwarz,[4] died in the explosion of his invention.
Children’s Encyclopaedia
The morning began with a scream. It was Vicky. Everybody woke up at once and ran to her. There was no saying what and why. A new home, a new place.
“A cockroach was climbing under my mattress!” Vicky informed them.
“That’s all? At least a large one?” Kate asked, yawning.
“Huge! Never saw anything like it!”
“Put down soggy bread for it, cockroaches love that!” Kate advised her and lifted up the mattress to look at the cockroach.
“Careful! Wrinkles!” yelled Vicky, the only one who managed to put sheets down for the night.
The cockroach turned out to be a giant purple ground beetle, which was hiding in a crack in the wooden floor. Peter immediately got on the Internet and found out that a ground beetle never attacks first, but, escaping from enemies, can secrete yellowish drops of acid. If the poison gets on the hand, for example, and the person wipes his eyes with this hand, then the retina cannot be restored.
Alena and Vicky immediately began to run away from the ground beetle, but the others, on the contrary, ran for it. Alex tried to place the ground beetle on a sheet of paper so that it would secret poison. Kate yelled, “Leave it alone! It’s in the Red List!”[5] Costa, brandishing his sword, tried to get to the ground beetle and hit it.
Rita screamed just for the company, because she saw that everyone was running and yelling. At the same time, she was also stomping loudly.
Everything ended when Papa placed the ground beetle in the palm of his hand, took it out into the courtyard, and released it onto the grass. The ground beetle did not secrete a drop of poison. It did not figure out that it was on Papa’s hand. It probably seemed to it that it was a piece of bark.
“You kicked it out of the house! It was happy here with us! Comfy and safe!” Kate said sorrowfully, and Mama forced Papa to wash his hands with soap.
“If you go blind, who will feed us? You work with your eyes!”
“Very funny! And no one ever mentioned being sorry for me!” Papa sulked and quickly went to his new office, before some crazy toddler kept him busy.
There turned out to be no desk in the office. There was only a nightstand smelling of valerian[6] with a lamp attached that had a neck like the knight in chess. Papa started to move the nightstand so that it would be closer to the light. Breaking away from the wall, the lamp immediately dislodged and fell to the ground. It turned out that where the bolts were attached had managed to rot.
“Well! First destruction!” Papa said, with sadness remembering the old man, who treated them as decent people.
“Not the first destruction! The second!” Peter corrected him. It turned out that he had already managed to break a chair, which, according to Peter, had itself to blame, because who knew that one should not stand on it.
Papa took the chair and the lamp to the basement and placed his laptop temporarily on the windowsill. When he did that, someone loudly said “honk-honk!” at him. He decided that it was Peter, but then saw a gaggle of geese, in a long chain like prisoners in the movies, walking around an enormous trough and making an awful racket. An elderly woman, hands in her apron, was standing near the geese and admiring them. All this took place some two metres from the window of Papa’s office. If Papa opened the window, he could easily stretch a mop through the small flowerbed to the geese and the woman.
“Isn’t that our yard?” Mama asked perplexedly.
“No, not ours! This is the side of the street,” Papa replied. “What, will they be honking all day? This is a city! It’s two steps to the main street! Why are there geese here?”
“Do you want me to stick some film on the window so that nothing will be visible?” Mama suggested.
“Oh no, don’t! I want to see life, not a film with flowers!”
Leaving Papa to observe life, Mama set off to the kitchen to make breakfast and save the rest of the produce from Kate. Dogs were already barking somewhere close and Mama suspected that Kate had something to do with it.
Looking out onto the street, Mama discovered that it was indeed so. Kate was feeding the dogs their remaining sausages, and Vicky was standing beside her, smearing iodine on the bald back of the long dog with a squirrel-hair paintbrush, which Mama recognized as one of her favourite paintbrushes. The bald dog was eating a sausage and it was all the same to it that they were pouring and spreading iodine on it with a natural squirrel-hair brush. True, the other dogs were looking at the bald dog with suspicion and moving away from it.
“What are you doing?” Mama shouted.
“Why is it bald? If it’s bald, that means it’s sick. If it’s sick, it must be treated!” Vicky stated.
“Don’t touch it with your hands! What if it has ringworms?” Mama was worried.
“No one is touching it with hands! I’m touching it with a brush!” Vicky explained, and the dogs, having finished the sausages, rushed to the gate to bark at a lone cyclist.
Mama was afraid that people would think that these were their dogs because they ran out of their gates, and rushed to save the cyclist. The cyclist yelled and jerked his foot, trying to kick the dogs. As he rode down the figure-eight street, the dogs ran alongside and barked horribly, and the largest even seized his pant leg. However, as soon as the cyclist approached the exit from the street, the dogs immediately lost interest and went back home. At the same time, the bald dog managed to roll about in the dust, and all traces of iodine disappeared from it.
When Mama returned, Papa was unloading things from the van. Peter and Vicky were helping him, and Alex was roaming around the courtyard seeking out anything interesting. He discovered quite a lot of interesting things. A rusty rake without a handle, a watering can in the shape of a flamingo, originally pink but faded from the sun to almost white, two very old car license plates, and a big shoe. The shoe had probably been in concrete once, because it still had cement on it now and even its shoelaces were stiff.
Alex took the shoe, thought for a bit, held it in his hands, and then with the words, “Why is it lying in our yard?” threw it over the fence to the neighbour’s yard.
“Don’t!” Mama yelled, but she was too late. She only had time to hear as the shoe fell on the other side onto something metallic, because the sound was of scraping metal.
“Well! Now we have to go to the neighbour’s to apologize!” Mama said. However, before she took a step, the shoe flew back and plopped down between Mama and Alex.
“Wow!” Alex said and, faster than Mama could even move, tossed it back again.
This time it managed without crashing. Hence, the shoe had flown past the iron sheet. But after three seconds, the shoe appeared over the fence again, spinning in the air. Obviously, someone had launched it by the stiff lace. Peter, walking across the yard with boxes, dropped the boxes and rushed to catch the shoe. He managed to intercept it immediately; it barely appeared from behind the fence and Peter hammered it exactly like a volleyball.
“You’re sick!” Vicky said.
“Cool, eh? Flinging shoes at each other!”
“We started first!”
“We can! This shoe is not ours!”
“What do you mean it’s not ours? It’s on our lot!”
“It’s still not ours. Let them show the receipt that it’s ours!”
The shoe again whistled in the air. Peter grabbed his ear and slowly began to get upset.
“Ah! It hit you? Are you hurt?” Vicky exclaimed.
“No! It tickled me! Better you all leave, because I can miss!” Peter said in a voice terrible in its quietness.
Having taken the shoe by its laces, he twirled it and launched it up with force. Almost reaching the sun, the shoe, gaining speed, rushed down, and hung safely on the branches of the walnut tree.
Peter tried to get to it, but the upper branches of the walnut tree were brittle and could not hold his weight. Then Peter sent Alex, stating, “The chief monkey goes to the arena!”
A flattered “chief monkey” climbed up the walnut tree, but the branches began to crack even under him and the “monkey” came back with nothing. Seeing that time had passed but the shoe did not come flying, someone was romping about in disappointment on the other side of the fence. They heard something being dragged, most likely a chair, onto a sheet of iron, and then someone, sighing, scrambled onto it. A pale face with red-brown freckles appeared over the fence. It belonged to a boy about eleven.
“I would like to draw to your attention that throwing objects is rude!” the boy informed them. His head was swinging like a pendulum, first disappeared, and then appeared again.
“It’s you throwing? Now I’ll give it to you in the forehead! You hit me in the ear!” Peter yelled.
The pale boy looked seriously at Peter’s ear. “Wait a minute! Sorry to digress, but I must promptly finish an unpleasant matter!”
“What matter?”
The boy did not reply and disappeared, and a moment later, the iron sheet rattled terribly.
“What, running away?” Peter asked.
“No,” a weak voice came from the other side of the fence. “Not exactly. I fell off the chair.”
Peter realized that this was the same unpleasant matter that the boy had to finish. “How is it possible to fall from a chair?”
“I stood on its back, and it broke. Cou
ld you get me up please? I’m stuck.”
Peter and Vicky, followed by Kate, leapt over the fence and jumped down on the iron sheet. They were in a courtyard resembling a tennis racket. The racket handle was paved with coloured tiles. The round part of the racket was a small courtyard. Two cages were in the yard. Four chickens were languishing in the first. Five or six bikes were locked in the second cage adjacent to the wall.
A chair with a broken back lay on the iron sheet. A boy was lying on his back near the chair. His foot was stuck in the forked trunk of an acacia, on the thorny branches of which a great number of socks were drying. The boy was pressing his hand to his chest. His white t-shirt was slowly stained pink.
“Goodbye!” the boy said solemnly, looking not at them but at the sky. “Please tell my parents that I’ve died. Although, I think they’ll also guess!”
Vicky began to squeal, but Kate squatted down and asked why he decided that he was dying.
“I cut myself,” the boy informed her.
“Cut what? A vein?”
“No. I ripped open my finger on this iron sheet. Of course, my parents will now throw it out, but it’s already useless! A person cut by a rusty object dies within a few hours. Tetanus starts in him.”
Kate disengaged the boy’s leg from the forked acacia and helped him up. The boy stood and swayed. He pressed his injured hand to his chest and would not show it to anyone. His t-shirt continued to stain.
“Anyone home?” Kate asked.
“Yes.”
“Well, let’s go there! What’s your name?”
“Andrew! Andrew Mokhov,” the boy introduced himself.
Mutiny of the Little Sweeties Page 3