“Rita, you’re pretty!”
“No! Not pretty! Not pretty!” Rita was outraged, not noticing that the cunning Costa had changed tactics.
However, she was not outraged for long because she fell asleep right there on the oriental sofa. Despite this, or maybe because of this, Aunt Sveta and Uncle Blahblah spent the evening talking pleasantly about something for a long time. Again, it seemed that Uncle Blahblah was saying “Blahblahblahblahblahblahblahblah!” continuously and Aunt Sveta was responding with gunshots “Ratatat-tat-tat!” But these “Ratat-tat-tat!” were somewhat quieter, as if the artillery were shooting somewhere very far away.
Costa and Alex did not realize that they were in an expensive café and remembered nothing, because they were playing on the tablet all evening. Alena was also playing until she dropped Aunt Sveta’s phone into the salad.
“You see, there was free Wi-Fi!” Alena explained.
“Did you at least see what kind of stucco moulding was on the ceiling?” Mama, who had never managed to visit an oriental café, asked disappointedly.
“No. But then I took a whole bunch of sword-shaped toothpicks!” Alena said.
After returning from the café, Aunt Sveta was behaving strangely. She rushed around the room, and time and again phoned someone but hung up. She started answering emails but also did not finish, because she did not know what she was writing.
“What’s the matter with you?” Mama asked.
“Nothing!” Aunt Sveta quickly replied, but later, not holding back, ran to Mama and said in a shaky whisper, “Valentin proposed to me!”
“And you accepted?”
“I said I’d give it some thoughts, but now I don’t know how I should think and when to respond!”
Mama and Papa looked at each other knowingly. They knew that Aunt Sveta always thinks very quickly. Uncle Blahblah, on the contrary, thinks much more slowly. Therefore, Aunt Sveta would have to wait at least two days, so as not to appear hasty.
“And how will you respond?”
“No, of course!” Aunt Sveta stated firmly. “How else can I answer? We’re completely different people!”
“That’s right!” Mama said cheerfully. “Completely different! You must categorically refuse!”
Aunt Sveta looked despondently at Mama. “But he’s suffering!” she said.
“Really?” Mama asked. “Somehow I haven’t noticed!”
“But he is!” Aunt Sveta shouted, because it was very important to her that Uncle Blahblah was suffering and she would be able to pity him a little.
Kate and Vicky certainly found out everything already after five minutes. Kate, unable to suppress her curiosity, came to Aunt Sveta and asked, “And what dress will you wear? A white one?”
“No, beige! The top a little lighter,” Aunt Sveta replied mechanically and instantly, recollecting herself, added, “I will say no!”
“And shoes?” Kate asked.
Aunt Sveta waved her hand and ran away from Kate. “You Gavrilovs are intolerable! I won’t invite you to the wedding! Well, maybe a few of the quietest kids, to carry the veil!” she shouted from a distance.
Chapter Eighteen
Hurrah! Noise!
Mothers should not hit children or yell at them, no matter how strongly they provoke this. Because when someone hits or shouts at children, they instinctively rush to mama to seek salvation. And this is a deadlock situation.
Joseph Emets, Hungarian philosopher
Mama was away in Moscow for a few days. The next morning, Papa got up stealthily and carefully pushed Alex and Costa together; they were sleeping with him now using the excuse that they were afraid. Papa moved them because, being moved, they felt something warm nearby and believed that Papa was still lying right beside them. If they were not moved, after some time, someone would wake up for sure and start to wander around the house, looking for adults.
In complete darkness, lit only by the screen of his phone, Papa went to work. It was dark and cold. In the dark room, there was a continuous swishing, squeaking, rustling of papers, and short frenzied quarrels. It was the huge rat, Schwartz, with a tail thick as a ring finger, educating his wives. The awakening parrots responded to the rats. Half an hour later, when dawn began to appear weakly beyond the window, high, continuous, melodic sounds were added to the choir of rats and parrots. These were the guinea pigs squealing a little, demanding food.
Wrapping himself in a blanket, Papa made coffee, sat down at the computer, and began to work immediately in three windows, in each of which lived a separate chapter or story line. At seven, the alarm went off on Papa’s phone. He climbed the stairs, and while he was climbing, all new alarms above snapped into action. Each had a different melody and some even a train whistle. These were now the children’s alarms on phones, smartphones, and tablets.
The alarms did their best, but still no one woke up. Papa got angry and ran, pulling blankets off everyone and repeating monotonously, “School, school, school!” Occasionally one of the children half rose in the bed, looked at Papa with eyes seeing nothing, and settled back on the pillow again.
Finally, Vicky woke up, followed by Kate and Alena, and then Papa went downstairs, knowing that everything would go as usual. He washed buckwheat kasha, added water, and placed it on the stove. Kasha is valued because one can eat it in any way: with milk or without milk, with sausages or without sausages, with sugar or without sugar. And cooked kasha is quite edible even after two days.
The kids could be heard screaming at each other upstairs.
“Turn off your alarm!”
“I can’t! It won’t turn off!”
“Well, at least put it under the mattress!”
Somewhere in the process of the overall noise, Costa got into a fight with Alex, then he went to the mirror and, lifting up his t-shirt, began to study his chest earnestly. Mama once told him, “You’ll have a black heart when you fight!” And now, after fighting, Costa always lifted up his t-shirt, looked, and then yelled, “Not black! Not black!” However, it was apparent all the same that this issue troubled him. After yelling “not black!” several times, Costa just in case put the shoes back in the place where Rita had left them, went to Papa, and asked in a whisper, “Is my heart red now? Look!” And, not waiting for an answer, he quickly ran away.
Finally, Papa brought the chapter to a turning point, where it was possible to break safely. He sat Costa and Rita down on the bike and took them to kindergarten, where a crowd of mothers, getting excited, were discussing buying shampoo or a vase for the teacher’s birthday. While Papa was trying to get away from the discussion, the children went to school with Alex in tow.
Walking to school with them were Nina, Andrew, and the lost Seraphim, a quiet boy with long wheaten hair, whom Nina was leading by the hand so that he actually got to class. Andrew walked beside Alex and authoritatively argued that school is worse than kindergarten, college worse than school, work worse than college, family life worse than work, and worst of all retirement, after which there is only death. Alex nodded importantly, agreeing with him.
On the school steps, Nina discovered that Seraphim had not taken his backpack with textbooks and, shouting at him, dragged him home on the double. Seraphim rushed after his sister, managing on the run to crane his neck and look at the sky. Already on the way back, it was discovered that he had lost a shoe while running and did not even remember where it had come off.
Returning home from kindergarten, Papa walked around the kitchen, amazed at the silence disturbed only by the rhythmic knocks on the glass. This was the turtle swimming in the aquarium, knocking with its shell. Papa contemplated the unusual silence for some time and then realized that he was ALL ALONE in the house.
Finally! What happiness it is to write a book when they do not pester you! When the computer does not rumble with cartoons and no one sings in your ear! When there is SILENCE in the house! Now the opportunity for him to work has arisen!
“There!” Papa Gavrilov said aloud, add
ressing the turtle. “It’s high time!”
Rubbing his hands, Papa walked around some more, dreaming how he would work for a bit now, and sat down at the computer. He wrote about five lines, but somehow got stuck and brewed coffee. Then he wrote two more lines, made a sandwich, and deleted about ten lines. Then he got up and began to walk again, trying to understand why he did not feel like working.
Something was wrong. But what?
Papa fed the turtle, changed the guinea pigs’ sawdust, and isolated the rat Schwartz in a free cage. In the separate cage, Schwartz was shaking the bars and squealing like a tyrant locked up in prison.
“That’s it! I will write! I will work! And you’re free, women of the East!” Papa informed Schwartz’s wives and returned to the computer. And again he did not feel like working. At first, Papa deleted individual words, then sentences, then paragraphs, and in the end almost deleted the whole storyline.
However, here he discovered that now he would be deleting the entire book and hastily stood up. Terrible shrieks reached him from the rat cage. Left without the tyranny of Schwartz, his wives were fighting among themselves and began to steal each other’s food and children. They managed to shove one of the rats’ heads between the bars and, had Papa not appeared in time, everything would have ended badly. Papa hurriedly transferred Schwartz. An enraged Schwartz instantly gave all his wives a dressing-down, took all their food, with his hind legs sent the children flying by the handful, approximately an equal number in each, and again restored the fragile family peace in the cage.
Papa began to wander through the house, collecting cups forgotten in corners. But inspiration did not come to light in the empty cups. He climbed up to the pigeons and scared them with the broom, hoping that they would take off to the infinite sky, but the pigeons had grown lazy and, barely having flown away from home, returned to the attic. Papa had to launch the broom again.
“What’s with you! You’ve Become fussy!” Papa said to the pigeons. “You’re just like people! To get you to fly, someone has to constantly bash you with a broom!”
He poured wheat for the pigeons and tried to work again, but did not even reach the laptop, feeling that it was useless. Not knowing what to do, he washed all the dishes and wrote “so?” on the fridge with a marker, putting down the date.
This was a “time bomb” – a timid attempt of today’s Papa to stretch a hand out to tomorrow’s Papa, who will already know everything. Papa had a score of such temporal beacons around the house. He was constantly throwing them at himself, when no book had come out for a long time or no new kid was born for more than two years.
Papa Gavrilov loitered this way till one in the afternoon and then he had to go for Alex. Peter appeared at two, Vicky, Kate, and Alena returned, and the house was filled with noise. Something fell and crashed, someone got into the fridge, soup was being warmed, someone grumbled, and someone clambered onto a stool looking for Kate’s stash.
Peter wandered around the house and, rewarding himself for pretending to be a decent person in school all morning, disturbed all the smartphones, tablets, and computers. He updated, changed systems, connected to and disconnected from Wi-Fi, restricted access, and added passwords. Alena and Kate groaned, because Peter had installed a program throwing them off the Internet every ten minutes and demanded for every subsequent logon something delicious from their caches.
At half past five, Papa brought Costa and Rita home from kindergarten and began to work with Costa on his left hand, because, although Mama was not home, Costa’s left hand had not disappeared anywhere. Costa repeated that he did not need his left hand, that his right was strong, and tried to run off.
“The female approach is doing everything according to plan!” Papa said. “But the male approach…”
“… is to do nothing at all!” Kate got in.
“No! The male approach is creative improvisation!” Papa contested and, proposing to Costa to play pirates and captives, tied his right hand to his body with a rope. His left hand, however, Papa, like a careless pirate, forgot to tie up. Now, in order to free himself, Costa had to untie the knot with his left hand. After panting for fifteen minutes, he managed it and was then very proud of himself.
“Here, I’ll untie any knot!” Peter said and ordered Costa and Alex to tie him up.
They tied him up, and Peter, it goes without saying, easily freed himself. Then Peter began to demand that Alena and Kate tie him up, and he also got free.
“Now you!” he said to Vicky, and Vicky tied Peter with so many small knots that he could no longer free himself and started yelling that she had tied incorrectly and only damaged the rope and made other similar criticisms.
While everyone was tying Peter up, Papa mechanically checked whether the left hands of the remaining children worked and was very surprised that they did. For example, Alex even managed to twirl a pencil like a propeller between the fingers of his left hand, because in a movie one thrower did this with knives.
Costa became bored and began to fool around. All the same, the poor guy was unaccustomed to being without Mama, who was busy making a bust of him in clay, appliqué, and many other things. Alex was walking around in a bike helmet, because Costa was hitting him on the head with a boot.
“Doesn’t hurt! Doesn’t hurt!” Alex shouted and moved the helmet, until Costa hit him on the nose. Then Alex wrested the boot from him and quickly ran off somewhere with it. The boot was only found in the freezer an hour later. It was Alex’s terrible revenge. True, he no longer remembered that he had hid it and was no less surprised than the others.
Costa continued to behave badly. He grabbed the girls’ things, put them somewhere, and would not tell where.
Vicky tried talking to him in a nice way. “DID YOU TAKE MY STUFF? Tell me, please!”
“Please!” Costa repeated slyly.
Vicky went to complain to Papa. “He’s stupid! Let’s turn on the computer, let him be glued to it and turn into a zombie!” she yelled.
“No. Read to him instead!” Papa said.
Vicky grumbled, then threw Costa over her shoulder and dragged him into the room to read. Alex also went upstairs with Costa, although Vicky repeatedly reminded him not to stick with her but to go to Kate. However, Alex did not go to Kate, but Kate herself soon came, supposedly looking for something at her desk. Very soon, it became clear that she was not searching, because she was lying on the air mattress behind the curtain and listening also as Vicky read. Then she grew quite bold and began to correct the stresses, “VIllage! Not ‘telephOne’, but ‘tElephone’! Not ‘overGoat’, but ‘overCoat’!”
Meanwhile, Peter was setting up the router and was unable to get it working, although he had done it dozens of times. He also followed the instructions and changed the settings, all to no avail. Rita was bouncing up and down beside him and animatedly saying something, bursting to help.
“Get her away! She’s bothering me!” Peter dismissed her with kingly negligence. Who was he and who was Rita? Fat belly in tights straining at the chest.
Nevertheless, Rita would not leave. She was jumping up and down and trying to communicate something, but the words became entangled.
“No, do you see this squirt? I’ll bet a billion that she can’t fix it! The whole thing needs to be disassembled here!” Peter exclaimed, leaning back in his chair.
Now Rita, continuing to mutter something, stretched out a finger and everyone saw that one of the wires into the router was not inserted properly. No one had noticed, but Rita did. Hence, Peter lost a second billion to Rita.
However, Papa did not hear any of this. He was sitting in his office and typing quickly and greedily. Thoughts overtook one another and his fingers barely had time to type. Occasionally, Papa stopped suddenly in the middle of a sentence and it remained unfinished, because the idea had already hastened on. It does not matter, he will finish later.
Now Papa knew what had interfered with his work during the day. To work, he needed NOISE, as continuous a
s the sound of ocean waves. Long live noise!
Chapter Nineteen
A Photo Keepsake
Saturday morning Kate got up late and on the wrong side of the bed; the night before, an unknown someone from the remaining urchins had poured compote on her phone. She roamed around the house, stood against the wall for some time, butting it with her forehead, and went outside looking for trouble. She found it pretty quickly. Alex was sitting under the walnut tree and stuffing the hollow of a toy soldier with sulphur from matches. Andrew and Seraphim were squatting next to Alex.
“They force me to clean up in the room! But I’ve made a devil ray!” Alex complained, indicating with his chin a tiny dot on his shoulder.
Seraphim and Andrew looked knowledgeably at his dot.
“Not worth it for you to do this. You’re most likely going to get sick and die… But don’t you worry, it’s not scary to die in childhood!” Andrew said.
Seraphim nodded sadly. He was sorry for Alex, sorry for everyone. Kate was always burying her dead rats and pigeons anywhere, and Seraphim would find the place, place a stone on top, sit beside it and think about something. Alex did not want to die. He was upset, but not enough to stop stuffing the soldier with the heads of matches. He wanted to blow it up so that it would soar above the walnut tree.
Kate began to sneak up to grab Alex’s ear. But an iron plate clanked under Kate’s foot. Seraphim, Andrew, and Alex suddenly looked up and hurriedly flew up onto the fence.
“No need to build bombs here! Build them at your own place!” Kate yelled and returned home, after deciding to go on the Internet. But it also did not work out. She discovered Vicky in front of the computer, on a social network, and putting dozens of horses on as wallpaper. Then she liked and admired herself.
“Like me, huh? From your account! Please!” she asked Kate.
“I can’t,” Kate muttered.
“Why?”
“Have you forgotten? You’re on my black list! I unfriended and blocked you!” Kate reminded her.
Mutiny of the Little Sweeties Page 15