“Ma-a-am!”
“And where are we going to keep them? Bear in mind: I will not look after them! Not even lift a finger. You bring them home, you feed them yourself! How many are there? Are they at least pretty? Is there a water bowl?”
“Very pretty! I’ll call back later!” said Kate, who was uncomfortable talking in the presence of Nina and “mouse girl”, especially as the earpiece was very loud.
Understanding that Kate was allowed to take the birds, Liuba closed up shop and began to hustle Kate, Andrew, and Nina into the van. “Only very fast! Otherwise THAT ONE could find out that I’ve deserted the store!” she said.
Already on the way, Kate realized that she knew absolutely nothing about pigeons. “What do I feed them?”
“Have you seen a man standing with a sack at the market? To the left of the entrance! He’s Uncle Tony. Now, tell him it’s ‘for pigeons’ and he'll give you everything. Only don’t tell him ‘no money’, but make this face and repeat ‘nada dough!’ He’ll then lower the price!”
“But where will they live?”
“Hello, move over! Where will they live! You do have an attic?”
“I don’t know.”
“How can you not know? Is there a roof? Or do you sleep in the rain?”
“There’s a roof.”
“That means there’s also an attic! For a bird not to fly away, you tie three to four feathers together. With tape or string. Tape is better. I’ll show you how! They’ll walk along the windowsill and look around but won’t be able to fly to the old place. They’ll get accustomed after two or three weeks, lay eggs, then it’ll be possible to get rid of the tape. They won’t go anywhere.”
“They also lay eggs! Will there be chicks?” Kate groaned.
“No! Crocodiles!” the “mouse girl” responded angrily and began banging on the horn, because some cyclists, young and a reasonably nice guy, decided to dismount from his bike and tie his shoelace in the middle of the street.
The cyclist raised his head, looked at the van and the one who was driving, and after turning away, calmly continued tying the lace. “Mouse Liuba” again honked furiously, turned the wheel, and drove around in the next lane, in passing splashing the cyclist with mud from a puddle. Moreover, she purposely drove into the puddle.
“What’s with you?! He’ll kill us!” Kate was horrified. She was sure that the cyclist would now jump onto his bike and catch up with their van at the next traffic light. However, for some reason he did not. He only wiped dirt off his face with his shirt and followed the van with a long look.
“He’s memorizing the number! He’ll find you!” Kate said.
“A nightmare! He’ll find me! I’ll die from terror! But then he won’t guess where to find me!” Liuba exclaimed.
“You know him?”
“Why should I? He’s my classmate, Pokrovskii! He was in love with me.”
“And now?”
“Now don’t you see? He’s tying his lace on the road!” the “mouse girl” said. She was very pleased about something. Simply off-the-scale pleased.
Chapter Ten
Museum Fans
How hard it is to love someone other than yourself. And all the rest is terribly easy.
©Papa Gavrilov
Periodically, the impetuous muse of repairs visited Mama. This usually happened at night. Mama started to put up wallpaper, sew drapes, or drill something. Papa tried to help her once, but soon grasped that Mama liked gluing, sawing, and drilling by herself, and it is foolish to deprive a person of pleasure, especially if this person was the most skilled hand at the library centre.
On this July night, Papa was sleeping peacefully until a crash shuddered the building. He came down and discovered that Mama had fallen, trying to place two chairs one on top of the other to reach something on the top shelf. A jar of glue and a roll of wallpaper had fallen down together with Mama.
“Couldn’t you have taken the stepladder? Isn’t it beside you?” Papa specified.
“A basin of plaster was on the ladder! I was too lazy to move it!” Mama explained. “I intended on casting bas-reliefs!”
“That’s those in the oven?”
“No. That’s ordinary clay in the oven. You understand nothing!” Mama rubbed her knee and asked Papa to make her eggs.
Having eaten the eggs, she went to sleep, and Papa went to work while the children were still sleeping. The kids slept for a long time, then had a long breakfast, and Papa was able to work until almost noon.
At noon, Papa looked out the window. Outside the window, like two soldiers, Lad and Tot were sitting in a row in the full sun and kept on staring at Aunt Klava’s gate, beyond which were geese. Occasionally, a goose shoved its head under the gate, hissed in warning, and immediately pulled it back.
Aunt Klava came out of the gate, shouted lazily, “Guarding the goslings! Take that!” and threw a board from a box at Lad and Tot. Lad and Tot got up very quietly and, their tails between their legs, plodded to the mailbox. It seemed they were saying, “We are mortally offended and leaving. But if you call us, we will instantly forgive you.”
“Why are there two of them again? What happened to Stool?” Papa yelled through the door.
“I didn’t take it… Wait, are you talking about some stool?” Kate did not understand.
“The dog!”
“No idea. But yesterday we heard it squealing a little somewhere again. You know, where the hives are. I wouldn’t go there!” Kate declared.
She dipped a cotton swab into Brilliant Green[15] and smeared it under the wing of a pigeon, at the same time holding its feet firmly. For some reason, there were parallel scratches on one side of the pigeon, as if it had torn itself against a board with nails. The pigeons had already been living in the attic for two weeks. The attic was low, but just right for them. During the day they walked around the attic and cooed, and on and off pecked wheat with an appetite. Papa himself had made them a nest. It resembled a wooden frame of four boards, with a bundle of dry grass scattered between them. Three flight feathers on each wing were taped together as before, but Kate was going to remove the tape as soon as the pigeons lay eggs. She did not like it that the birds could not fly.
Papa still worked a little more, but the text was already lacklustre. Someone was whining behind the door that he was “bo-o-o-red!” and demanded to watch cartoons. This was clearly Alex.
“No cartoons for you! You were watching all day yesterday!” Vicky warned.
Alex went somewhere and put Costa and Rita up to howling at the door and demanding cartoons. Rita could not articulate the word “cartoons,” so she shouted “Toons!” instead and loudly banged her shoe on the door.
Realizing that he would not manage to work in the next few hours, Papa put the computer into sleep mode and opened the door. “Let’s go somewhere while Mama sleeps!” he suggested.
“Where?”
“You decide. Maybe a museum?”
When Papa suggested it, the four young ones immediately looked at the three older ones to see what expression their faces would assume. If it was written on Kate’s, Vicky’s, or Peter’s face that museums were nonsense, Alena, Alex, Costa, and Rita, getting the hint, would howl that they hated museums and would not go anywhere. But here the opinions of the older ones were divided. Kate stated that she did not want to go to a museum. Vicky carefully said that it was all the same to her, from which Alena concluded that Vicky was not against it, because Vicky, as a true lady, never said “yes” in general. Now it only remained for the young ones to find out the opinion of Peter, the family’s power broker. The power broker scratched his nose, scratched his leg, and was about to say “no,” but then suddenly grasped that he would be able to get directions on Google Maps and caught fire.
“Only if we go where I say!” Peter said, burying himself in his phone. “It mentions this! Three museums here! The Wax Museum, the Regional Museum, and the Museum of Medieval Castles.”
“Which one shall we go
to?” Papa asked.
“All of them! They’re all close by, almost on the same street,” Peter declared.
“Rita will be afraid to go to the Museum of Medieval Castles! All sorts of spooks there!” stated Alena, who was actually afraid herself.
Peter looked slyly at Rita and crouched down. “Rita! You aren’t scared?” he asked, knowing that the question “you aren’t scared” can be answered “yes” as well as “no.”
“No!” Rita said.
“You see, she isn’t scared!”
“She doesn’t understand!” Alena yelled. “Rita, you don’t want to go to the museum, right? You’re scared, right?”
“No,” Rita said, looking at Alena with a sense of superiority.
It was absolute defeat.
Papa put Rita in the stroller, Costa as usual climbed under the handle and leaned with his elbows, and Alex, who did not have enough space to hang on at the back, because Costa butted and bit him, got under the stroller into its baggage rack and stretched out on it.
“What are you doing?” Papa asked.
“I’m dead tired!” Alex declared.
“When did you get dead tired? You were ‘bo-o-o-red! ’” Kate mimicked.
“I’m tired because I’m bored!” Alex explained.
“Don’t go onto the baggage rack! They’ll think that we’re crazy!” Vicky said.
“Everyone thinks that we’re crazy as it is. The main thing is not to go through puddles so that Alex won’t get wet,” Papa said.
Papa, Alena, and Kate pushed the stroller, which was barely rolling because of the overload. Vicky and Peter walked slightly to the side and pretended that they were seeing this whole gang for the first time.
“And this is our family! Ahoy!” Alex, egged on by Kate, shouted from below.
Vicky was embarrassed and hid behind the bushes.
Peter’s Google Maps hung once, and led them straight to a fence from time to time, but they quickly found the museums all the same. The cost for entering a museum was two hundred roubles for an adult and a hundred for children five years and older, but Papa paid nothing because he showed the page in his passport where all seven children were recorded.[16]
This page of the passport was the strangest, without any stamps. In the Registrar’s Office, upon receipt of a birth certificate, sometimes the page was filled, but sometimes they waved a hand and did not fill it and Papa added the children himself. You can even write a whole bunch if you desire. However, for some reason, the cashiers still trusted this page in the passport more than the ID of a large family, which they always studied for a long time with suspicion. Obviously, they understood that any ID is only a cover, which can also be fake, and nobody would list extra children in the passport just to go to museums and zoos.
The Museum of Medieval Castles was in three large rooms, where all sorts of cages and racks were set up and loudspeakers croaked in the corners. An obvious lunatic in an executioner’s apron was roaming around the museum selling magnets. Alex began to beg him for a free magnet. The lunatic felt sorry for the magnets and hid behind a rack.
Papa feared that Rita would be scared of all these axes and cages but she was not; however, Alena refused even to cross the threshold. Papa went out with her, taking Rita along. A minute later, Kate, Vicky, and Costa ran out to them, pursued by the executioner shouting, “They broke my nose!”
It turned out, however, that the nose was not the executioner’s, but Alex had ripped it off a plaster head in a basket under the guillotine. Alex maintained that the nose had broken off by itself. To calm the executioner, Papa bought a magnet from him.
Peter was the last to come out of the museum with his hands in his pockets.
“What do you think?” Vicky asked.
“Okay! We looked for four minutes and thirty seconds. Saved 200 roubles + 100 roubles x 4. Not a bad result!” Peter stated and led everyone to the Wax Museum.
Here they stayed for almost half an hour, although the Museum occupied all of one hall. Along the way, it turned out that Peter the Great was tall, Catherine II was a very plump and short lady, and Nestor Makhno[17] was generally a dwarf, slightly larger than his Mauser.[18] While Alex tried to find out whether he could touch the pistol in Georges d’Anthès’[19] hand and if it was loaded, Peter studied the moustache of Taras Shevchenko.[20] This moustache had produced a great, simply indelible impression on him. It was so long in all places that, hanging from the upper lip, it covered the poet’s whole mouth and half of his chin. Papa and Peter argued for a long time about how the great Ukrainian poet ate and concluded that Shevchenko either did not eat at all or drank milk from a straw passing through his moustache.
The girls liked most of all the curator, Lena, who was sleeping on a chair on the second floor, her head resting on the back, and who also turned out to be a wax figure. Rita for a long time did not believe that the curator was inanimate. She touched her leg and bounced back with a slight, excited squeal. Then, after making sure that she really was inanimate, Rita promptly grabbed the stocking of the real curator and sat down on the floor, when the curator asked, displeased, “What do you want, girl? Whose child are you?”
The Regional Museum occupied an entire building. In front of it, part of an excavation with large clay amphorae and millstones was enclosed in a glass triangle. Scythian women and warriors from burial monuments were standing along the sides of the triangle. Costa immediately got onto an old naval cannon, where, besides him, three kids of varying degrees of smallness were also hanging around and throwing coins into the barrel of the cannon. It was supposed to bring happiness. Costa had no coins and he began to ask Papa.
“It’s superstition! It won’t bring happiness!” Papa said. “Look over there, the guy is standing with a cut bottle on a stick, and when people look at him, he turns away. What do you think he’s doing here?”
However, Costa still wanted to throw coins. He agreed to hang onto the cannon for this, helping himself with his left hand. Papa found only five iron roubles.
“Let me handle this!” Kate volunteered. She unnoticeably dropped the five roubles into her pocket and gave Costa one rouble. While Costa did not understand the difference, he noticed that the coin was less than what Papa had given her and began to stand up for his rights.
“Money should be saved, not tossed into a cannon! That’s it, move!” Kate said sternly, and Costa had to content himself with one rouble.
The museum turned out to be bigger inside than expected from the outside. There was even a café selling wrapped cheese sandwiches. Rita immediately wanted these sandwiches, although she had already eaten three times at home.
“I’ll make them for you in the evening! Here they’re the price of a helicopter!” Kate declared and covered Rita’s eyes.
There were many rooms on the perimeter. Each had two cameras. Alex was running around. He did not want to fall onto any one camera and show up anywhere. For this, he squatted, ran squatting, pressed against the wall, and when the curator came into the hall, made such a stony face that Vicky almost cried from laughing.
This number of cameras simply suggested to Peter the idea of robbing the museum. He began to photograph the plans of all the rooms and whispered ominously, “You have to break through the ceiling. No, there are certainly sensors! Better to hide in this huge vase, climb out at night, then get into the vase again and remain there until the museum opens! Then go out with the crowd! And put down a fake instead of the real diamond!”
“Where do you see a real diamond? There’s even nothing for the director to steal. Some rubbish. Rocks, bones, stone axes…” Kate said, yawning. Peter waved his hand angrily at her and began to search his pockets for dark glasses in order to look at the security cameras quite ominously.
Alex, sticking out his tongue, ran after Peter. “And the tomb with the alarm system? Can’t touch, right? If you throw a screw into it? It’ll start to howl?” he specified.
“What, you have a screw?” Kate asked suspicious
ly.
“No. But here’s this piece of iron!” Alex showed an unclear something of an impressive size that could be an internal part of a tractor. With this piece of iron in his pocket, he would lose his shorts every fifty metres, which was also happening in general.
“Not the piece of iron! Put it away quickly, otherwise they’ll think that you have stolen it from here!”
Alex put away the piece of iron.
“And a stuffed fox with an alarm? And where did they put the alarm in it? And this guy with an alarm?”
“It’s a stuffed Scythian.”
“Is not! He wasn’t alive at all.”
“What, and the fox was?”
“The fox was at least real.”
“Does his spear have an alarm? And his bow? Where did they attach an alarm to the bow? And this stuffed aunty has an alarm too? Can I touch it?”
“Boy! Where are your parents?” the touched, stuffed aunty said angrily, looking up from the newspaper. Alex leaped away fearfully to Papa. “Hold him by the hand, please!”
“Vicky, hold him, please, by the scruff of his neck!” asked Papa, who was already holding Costa by the hand as well as Rita in his arms. At the same time, Papa sniffed suspiciously, as he had some vague doubts regarding Rita.
A great deal of guns, mortars, military equipment, and ammunition, all raised from the seabed, were exhibited in the next hall. Alex immediately wanted to detonate a large aircraft bomb. While they were dragging Alex away, Costa managed to wriggle out of Papa’s hand and sat right on the shells, which tumbled down in different directions like a set of dominoes.
Fortunately, the curator in the hall turned out to be kind and said that it was no problem, she would put everything back. The only thing that should not be touched was the torpedo, because she did not know for certain if it had been disarmed. On receiving such a hint, Alex and Costa immediately rushed to touch the torpedo and ascertain that it did not explode. True, they were banished from the hall to the lobby after this.
In the lobby, Rita saw a table with souvenirs and made a scene at the fountain on the topic of “Buy, buy!” Alex, Costa, and the morally unsteady Alena joined her. Fortunately, they were all afraid of Kate, who stated that they would not get ice cream then, which, most likely, would not be bought for them anyway, because everyone would have a sore throat.
Mutiny of the Little Sweeties Page 8