"So you’ll let Kate sleep on the wardrobe?” Mama asked.
Papa looked at Kate, who was beaming like a new coin. She was very pleased that she would be sleeping above everybody, near the ceiling, where the little ones would not reach her. Well, except for Alex, who was able to run up the ceiling and screw a light bulb into the socket.
“Fine!” Papa yielded. “Only I’ll have to check the railing! But you and I, Mama, have no bed. Only a huge mattress!”
“That’s very good,” Mama said. “I didn’t really want a bed. The young ones often still sleep with us and constantly roll down onto the floor. But they won’t roll anywhere from a mattress!”
Papa assembled the beds after dinner. Peter helped him, and Costa and Alex were underfoot and hindering terribly, but they also could not dismiss them because Mama said that they would not grow up to be men then. Meanwhile, the “future men” carried off all the nuts and bolts, fought because of them, and scattered them around the entire room. As a result, not all of them were found, and Papa had to be very creative, even screwing on the bottom rack with a wire. Finally, everything was assembled, the mattresses were beaten with a stick on the balcony, and the room gained an inhabited look.
By that time, night had already quite set in. Beyond the window curled with grapevines, the lighthouse was rotating a searchlight, music was blaring, and salutes were cracking. Papa closed the window and all the extra sounds disappeared.
“Father! Come here!” Peter called from the next room. “Cool! Seems like they’re cutting up someone!”
“Who?”
Everybody rushed to Peter. Peter was standing with binoculars and looking at a four-storey block, which was a short distance from them. At the most two rows of low-rise houses over. All its windows were dark or if lit, dimly yellow, normal, except for the top floor, bathed in a bright blue, almost otherworldly light. It was visible how figures were floating slowly, like shadows dragged by a draft, from the window across the middle and gathering in the centre. It looked ominous.
Papa took the binoculars from Peter and noticed that all the figures except two were in blue robes. “It’s probably a hospital, and the top floor is surgery. Or maybe resuscitation, because where else would they be operating at night?”
“My nerves can’t stand this! We’ll be living here and they’ll be cutting someone up over there!” Mama lamented.
“Memento mori.[9] Easier to pray. Are you putting Rita to bed?” Papa asked.
Mama looked anxiously at Rita, who, singing monotonically, was already hanging from her shoulder like a scarf, and agreed to go crazy a little bit later.
“That’s all! I’m calling it a night!” Papa said and closed the curtain.
The hospital immediately disappeared. Together with the blue robes bathed in otherworldly light. Everything unnecessary vanished.
Mama set off to put Rita down. Peter locked himself in his room and began to try the password to the neighbour’s Wi-Fi. At the same time, he was laughing demonically and tapping the tabletop with his elbows. Vicky smoothed out her sheet and moaned that there was a wrinkle near her pillow and that the mattress was puckered.
“I’ll release a rat!” Kate warned seriously, shifting the cages.
Before climbing onto the top bunk, Alena went to the bathroom and got a basin of water. She brought the basin into the room and put it under the bed. The children watched the installation of the basin rather maliciously but kept quiet, and Costa even walked with Alena and, helping her, supported the basin with his right hand.
Everyone knew that an invisible dragon flew to Alena at night and drank water from the basin. If there were no water in the basin, the dragon would die, because dragons need to drink a lot. It is well known that they are hot, and water cools them. Once, two years ago, Peter decided to play a joke. He dropped a fizzy aspirin into the basin and stated that it was a poison pill, and that the dragon would now die for sure.
Although they then changed the water in the basin a hundred times, Alena cried all night and calmed down only by eight in the morning. From then on, no one touched her dragon and no one meddled with the water. Only Kate occasionally dared to put into the basin the red-eared slider Mafia, which, though it devoured all living things, was not dangerous to a fire-breathing dragon.
Having taken care of the dragon, Alena climbed into bed. Papa lay down on the spare bunk under Alena. Costa and Alex immediately came to him, kicked each other a couple of times as a formality, and one squeezed in on the right side and the other the left. It was necessary to keep them exactly the same, each head had to be strictly at the level of Papa’s armpit, otherwise intense jealousy would start.
“Tell a story!” Alena demanded.
“I want to sleep!” Papa rebelled.
“You slept yesterday! Alex and Costa, shout ‘story’!” Alena ordered from above.
“Story, story!” shouted Costa and Alex, who did everything Alena ordered except in those cases when it was unprofitable for them.
Papa raised his head and scratched his forehead along Costa’s forehead, because his hands were occupied.
“Fine,” he said, starting to make it up on the go. “Well, once upon a time, there was a girl. Her name was Lena.”
Papa was talking in a dull voice, constantly yawning, and Alena was keeping an eye that he did not fall asleep, because when Papa fell asleep for at least thirty seconds, his processor would overload and he would forget the story he was telling. Then the children would shake him and ask, “What comes next?”
“Huh? What? The hedgehog went on!” Papa would answer randomly.
“You said that the hedgehog died!”
“Really? And you believed it? Have to read between the lines, clearly see the author’s secret plan! So, it ate a magic mushroom. Or it was a hedgehog-zombie!”
On hearing that the girl’s name was Lena, Alena hung from the bed and lit Papa with the phone flashlight.
“What’s her name?” she asked suspiciously. Alena could not stand it when the hero of a story had her name. Papa knew this but loved to tease her.
“Well, let it be Luna!” Papa corrected himself.
“It’s not me?”
“Of course, it’s YOU! Who else?” Kate said from her wardrobe.
“Not me! Not me!”
“Not you, not you at all!” Papa yielded. “There are all kinds of Lunas in the world! In short, Luna (Not you! Not you!) was walking down the street. She saw a dirty coat, falling apart, so wet and disgusting, but with shiny new buttons! Luna felt sorry for the buttons. She snipped them off with a nail clipper and took them.”
“Where did she get a nail clipper? She carried it with her?” Kate, who enjoyed creating literary problems for Papa, cut in again.
“It was in the coat pocket. Blunt and rusty. And with suspicious brown marks!” Papa parried.
“And, of course, they turned out to be magic buttons?” Alena asked.
“Yes. There were five altogether. Four big and one small. Luna came home and sewed two buttons onto the toy bunny with a torn ear. And the other two buttons she sewed onto a monster made out of an old sweater and with sofa springs in it.”
“Why?”
“Ah! She liked to sew! And put in springs.”
“What did she do with the small button?” Alena asked.
“She sewed the little one onto a mouse made from a sock and stuffed with cotton wool. Then Luna went to sleep, but when she woke up in the morning, there was neither bunny nor monster nor mouse. They had all come to life and ran away. Then Luna got scared! She was sorry that she gave the monster a scary face and sewed two serrated knives to the sleeves of his jacket!”
Someone sobbed near Papa’s right armpit. It was Alex, whom Papa believed had fallen asleep a long time ago, because there had long been snoring under the left armpit.
“Don’t!” Alex squeaked. “I’m scared!”
“Must!” Kate said from the wardrobe. “Scared, cover your ears!”
�
�I can still hear.”
“Continue! Pa, hello! Pa!”
“Don’t!” Alex began to argue, but Kate and Alena demanded a continuation. However, Papa was suspiciously silent for some reason, and then Kate came down and shone her phone on Papa, making sure that he was asleep. Knowing that he could not be shaken out of slumber now, she climbed onto the wardrobe, and soon the whole house plunged into sleep.
Chapter Six
Rita’s Terrible Secret
“I have… what is called… the word is… sclerosis, in short!”
©Kate
Days passed. Papa, Mama, and the seven children gradually made themselves at home in the new place.
Not in vain was Mama considered the most skilled hand in the library. The house became cozier with each passing day. Mama brought her sewing machine and quickly sewed curtains for all the rooms, because the old ones were so saturated with tobacco smoke that everyone had a headache.
Mama’s curtains were unlike store-bought. She matched appropriate fabric, pieces of bed sheets, and duvet covers, and stitched into these fabrics certain cut-out parts of children’s clothing. For example, Kate’s favourite dress, which she had irreparably burnt with an iron, turned up in the living room on the first floor next to Rita’s colourful romper, which was already too small for her. Kate looked at her dress and grieved. Rita also pointed at her romper and, trying to explain that she recognized it, squealed like a piglet. Papa’s gloves turned up on the curtains in his office. Mama managed to make four out of two gloves by cutting them in half. As a result, it always seemed to Papa that someone was climbing along his curtains.
The old drapery rods also did not suit Mama, and she made new ones out of some thick, suitable, sawn-off vine trunks that someone had abandoned by the school on the next street. Mama did not understand how anyone could throw out such beautiful “designer” branches.
The neighbours, on the contrary, wondered why Mama dragged home this garbage, sweeping the asphalt with them. Only one neighbour, Uncle Vova, who fed all the stray dogs and puttered in the garden all day, planting cucumbers and tomatoes, understood. “Ah, you want to make kebabs! Only don’t throw in the green ones, otherwise it’ll smoke!”
The new vine drapery rods turned out to be a lot livelier than the previous ones; however, due to their roughness, the curtains did not move along them and simply had to be tied up. Mama braided the thin green shoots into large globes and hung them instead of chandeliers. In the evening, the globes cast very mysterious moving shadows on the walls.
“How contented I am!” Mama said. “I finally have a table to put my sewing machine on! And a large mattress on which I can lie down so that no one jumps on my face!”
While Mama was busy with curtains and chandeliers, Papa learned to understand the whimsies of the boiler and painted the rusting gates with black paint. True, Costa then stuck a hand in the can of black paint and left many, many handprints on the fence and on Papa’s car. Papa wanted to be annoyed, but Mama wiped off two blurred prints and intensified the others instead, so that it turned out beautifully.
In the same period, five new stools appeared in the house, but three old stools and one chair were moved to the basement. Every day the kids broke something, and one of the escaped rats managed to gnaw through the cord of the kettle and stay alive.
“Wow!” said Kate. “But it’s written on the Internet that you can kill a rat with one volt!”
“Well, probably if it’s wet!” Vicky suggested, and Alex found a battery, put water in a douche bag, and ran to chase the rats. Everything ended with his finger jammed in the cage and Papa straightening the bars of the cage with pliers.
While Papa was rescuing Alex, Rita quickly grabbed something from the kitchen table and ran to the bathroom. Then everyone heard the sound of flushing water. Mama was the first to run to Rita. Papa, who actually went for peroxide to treat Alex’s finger, hurried after her. Alex, bleeding a single drop of blood, trudged behind him and tried to show courage. He suggested to himself and those around that he was a soldier. And, as a soldier, important military matters excited him.
“What happens if a soldier starts to fight without pants?”
“Well, the other soldiers will laugh at him!” Papa replied absent-mindedly.
Alex waved his wounded hand. “But he’ll hit them while they laugh at him!” he yelled.
When Papa and the wounded Alex appeared in the bathroom, Rita was standing beside the toilet and laughing.
“What did you drop in there?” Mama asked severely.
“Keekeekeekee!” Rita said and laughed even happier. She was very satisfied that they were paying her attention. Attention, as is known, is measured in heed-mark,[10] and Rita loved getting a lot of it.
“What was it?” Mama repeated, but Rita only looked at her with huge eyes.
“She’s keeping quiet!” Mama said with despair.
“What did she do?” Papa asked.
“Dropped something from the table and flushed!”
“What did she drop?”
“How would I know? Something!”
Papa grunted philosophically and set off to bathe the soldier Alex’s finger with peroxide. Ten minutes later, Papa promptly needed to drive to register Kate and Vicky in art school. He started looking for the car keys and was unable to find them. Then he remembered that Rita had dropped something into the toilet and dashed to Mama. “Keys to the car! She flushed my keys!”
“Take the spares.”
“Have you forgotten? We have no spares!”
“I told you to make spares! Didn’t I tell you?” Mama immediately declared. She loved to say something useful and correct, with great public value. Well, there is “children should behave well” or “the country should live grandly!” If children then fought or the country did not live grandly, Mama instantly recalled that she had warned them what was right, but they had not listened.
“Think: did you leave the keys on the table?” Mama asked.
“I don’t remember where I left them! Sometimes on the table, sometimes by the window! But they’re definitely not by the window!”
“Don’t panic! Go search!”
Papa went searching for the keys. He looked at all the windows, everywhere. When he returned, it was clear to Mama from his expression that he had returned with empty hands.
“Maybe in your pocket?” she asked.
Papa patted his pockets, crouched down, and was on the same level with Rita. “Let’s remember! What did you drop? The keys, yes?” he asked in a frighteningly gentle voice.
“Yeth!” Rita blurted out.
“Aha!” Papa shouted triumphantly. “I knew it! She confessed! Did you hear?”
“Wait!” an approaching Kate dampened him. “You asked wrong!”
“What do you mean, wrong? She said ‘yes’!”
“She always answers ‘yes’. To all questions. Watch this!” Kate also squatted next to Rita. “You dropped dynamite! Dynamite, yes?”
“Yeth!” Rita willingly acknowledged.
“Not dynamite, but a big house? Did you drop it?”
“Yeth!” Rita acknowledged still more willingly.
“You see!” Kate said. “She simply can’t say anything besides ‘yes’!”
“No!” Rita suddenly said. “Keekeekee-thee!”
Papa grabbed his head. “Keekeekee-thee! That’s keys! The words are similar! Everything’s clear! We’re without a car!”
“Get a mechanic!” Mama said.
“Do you know how much it’ll cost? The car is Japanese, thousands of cables there. They’ll gouge us with triple the price, and then nothing will work. Would be cheaper to break the toilet. Where’s our axe?”
Alex and Costa happily rushed for the axe. They knew that tools were in hand-made boxes under the wooden step, although their parents hid this from them. Nevertheless, the more hidden from them, the more they found out.
Mama caught both by the collar. “Stop! Why touch the toilet when the ke
ys are already in the pipe? How do you imagine a house without a toilet?”
“How do you imagine a house without a car?”
“Easy. Better a house without a car than a house without a toilet. We’ll go by bike!”
“We have no bikes!”
“We’ll buy them!” Mama said, and the children immediately pricked up their ears. They liked the idea. In such a case, it was very worthwhile to flush the car keys down the toilet.
“I want a bike! Me too! And me!”
Papa fancied that he would have to buy nine bikes and diplomatically answered, “I’ll think about your proposals.”
“When you say ‘you’ll think about’, it means ‘no’!” Peter declared from the stairs.
“Fine. We’ll do this gradually.”
“Aha, gradually! Today the seat, tomorrow the handlebar, and in two weeks the pedals?”
“Indeed!” Papa said glumly. “What’s this: mutiny of the little sweeties?! We’ll buy bikes as soon as money appears. And preferably used, from newspaper ads! Used bikes are often better than new ones because people often add a bunch of accessories and then sell them just as they are.”
An hour passed. Already no one tried to find the keys. Certain that they were flushed away, Papa made up his mind to go find a mechanic, but Mama decided to feed him dumplings before he went so that he would be nicer. She opened the freezer and the first thing she came across was the car keys, covered by a white layer of frost.
“Did you see this? Who put them there?” Mama exclaimed in amazement.
“Oh, no!” Papa said. “It seems I did! I wanted to get ice when Alex squeezed his finger. And the keys were obviously in my hand. I put them down purely automatically so they’d be out of the way.”
“Then what did Rita flush? Rita, what did you drop? What’s ‘Keekeekee-thee’? Huh?” Mama asked.
Everyone stared at Rita, but she laughed and ran away somewhere, loudly stomping her plump legs on the stairs.
Chapter Seven
Beasts of Mine
Let us put mice in our basement, then we will need to get a cat! What, my plan is not great? Answer me: why?!
Mutiny of the Little Sweeties Page 5