Polyanskaya iron and brifley ice cream. “Iron and Ice Cream” () - download the book for free without registration
As soon as they got down to business, the grandmother sat Rita down and loudly
I began to read “Quarteronka” aloud to her in a voice. I, with a forked like a sting
snakes, I heard standing in the corridor. "Didn't I warn you?" - thundered
father. "Be quiet and mind your own business!" - Mom squealed. "... lung
a vision appeared at my head...“- the grandmother read in a rattling voice.
The sister listened to the screams from the next room, and her face looked
sleepy, and grandmother continued to read in her insincere, in a weak voice. Mother
behind the wall, she threw a cup of tea on the floor, red-hot lava poured over
threshold and poured into our room: Rita picked up her legs. Grandma before
I defiantly stuffed my ears with cotton wool as soon as they started screaming, and I,
when I was little, like Rita, I looked sideways at her in hostility and vain
waiting that she is about to intervene and finally say her weighty adult
word, but then she realized that she did not have the treasured word in stock, she only
pretends that he has power, to which he can resort at a moment’s notice, and
that in fact she is helpless, like Rita and I... But in Lately
Grandma forgot about the cotton wool because she had more important concerns: not
let Rita fall asleep, who, along the sharp turns of warring voices, seemed to
the railing, slipped into lethargy, as if Morpheus was blowing into her ears, drowning out her screams
behind the wall and blinking away Rita’s long eyelashes.
Maybe she's hibernated to loud accompaniment before
parental quarrels, but we noticed this only after the incident with the iron,
brought by her father as a gift from Moscow, which Rita, earning
authority in the yard, gave it to Galinka. Nobody but me knew what it was
for her this Galinka, and our parents hardly even suspected about her
existence. I think that no one then had such a thing over Rita
unconditional power, which Galinka had, which in the town where we
moved, all the little kids admired her, because she was cheerful, clever,
she ran the fastest, jumped the highest, and in general she did everything better,
than others. After moving here, we felt lonely for a long time, but Rita
got her bearings before me, showed will and persistence in settling in
new spaces and conquering new people, as if I was hoping there, in the yard,
create another friendly family for yourself, build a nest somewhere under a fungus or in
sandbox, because in our opinion parents' house flew by every now and then
hurricanes of family quarrels, blowing out the remaining heat, and there is nothing living there anymore
could have grown.
Soon new friends began to call her from the yard. She went out onto the balcony
like a queen to her people in the proud knowledge that without her no one worth
the game won't work. Not always long, humiliating requests to let go
her into the yard were crowned with success, since the father did not tolerate empty
pastime. Rita came out onto the porch with an imperturbable look, as if
delayed due to her own busyness, like Galinka, who taught her
cat give her his paw. So Rita came out, stretching, lazily squinting her eyes,
while her whole being sang with joy, except perhaps without a crock of salt,
because the top crust would be clearly too much, and Rita is in an invisible dispute with
her father checked her capabilities down to the millimeter so as not to break down, she was
a very careful girl. If the sun was shining, Galinka was the queen,
she was the best at hopscotch and dodgeball, but on bad days she
gave way to Rita, who interestingly retold what she had read
her grandmother gave her books and made up scary stories: here Galinka modestly
sat on the bench next to everyone, craning her neck to see Rita better
over the heads of others. When the father did not give in to her persuasion, it was always very
diplomatic and smart (trying to please him, Rita asked for "a little time off"
unload the spine" or "collect a herbarium", that is, take a beneficial walk),
- she again gathered her strength and went out onto the balcony to report
to the public waiting for her that she is not in the mood for a walk today.
I didn't have enough tricks like that. I was straightforward, just like my father, and
I responded to his refusal to let me go outside with a muffled howl; on his
When asked what movie I would like to see, I honestly answered: “Fantômas
went berserk," when it was clear as day that it was necessary to call
"Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors", a cautionary tale for children like me.
At times I despised the savvy and deceitful Rita, who in the end was
crushingly defeated by the ingenuous father, and by the unexpected tool of the father's
victory, that very iron appeared...
Rita gave it to Galinka. She gave it so simply, as if she had everything
the right to dispose of the iron at his own discretion; gave it with such a look,
as if in the future I could present Galinka with our entire house, and even with an iron
a red light on the handle is such a trifle that it’s not worth thanking. Galinka,
suspecting nothing, she took the iron, which Rita looked at with her full eyes
despair, because she knew, could not help but know, what would happen to her from her father when he
finds out about this. Galinka played a little with the iron and that same evening about it and
I forgot, and after that Rita couldn’t fall asleep for a long time, she was tossing around and groaning,
inventing a disease for herself that would delay the hour of reckoning, and during the day she tried
not to catch my dad's eye, and for a week I lived in such impenetrable fear that
when thunder finally burst over her desperate little head and her father suddenly
I remembered about the iron, she probably experienced something like relief.
I returned from school and immediately saw that Rita was standing at the epicenter
earthquake, and above it, unshakably, like a rock, in righteous anger father loomed
and asks where the iron that dad brought from the capital of our Motherland is: he
at such moments he preferred to talk about himself in the third person, as if avoiding
from the storm caused by him, as if placing himself as a judge between the unkind, absent-minded
a girl and her caring father. Rita stood with her head buried in her shoulders, although she
I hadn’t even touched a finger yet, I shuddered at the peals of his voice, and then I decided
save her...
To be honest, I wasn’t thinking about Rita’s salvation at that moment—me
I was sick of her calculating cunning, and besides, I remembered our covenant
young, beloved history teacher, who, somehow sneaking up on my
desk, when I let my neighbor copy off Pugachevsky’s main dates
uprising, thundered in my ear: “Everyone dies alone.” But here I am
I suddenly wanted to feel like Rita, to put myself through an experiment, to carry out
experiment and find out what happens if a person is smart. I
stepped forward and children's voice, tongue-tied, confused in words, like a small
child said:
- Daddy, forgive me, please. Ritochka and I were playing yesterday
iron, and then Zina Zimina came to ask what was assigned in algebra, because
that she was sick, and said: “Oh, where did you get such a wonderful iron?” Rita
answered her: “Dad brought us this iron from Moscow.” Zina said: "Oh, ah
can I show it to my dad so that he can also bring me the same one from Moscow?
Surely - with a light bulb?" I knew that you can’t give things without asking, but the point is
that your mother and grandmother were not at home, and you went to the office to work and
asked you not to disturb...
I said all this in one breath, as if on a whim, but then,
Analyzing my speech, I realized that I hadn’t missed anything, just like the words to me
suggested by someone very smart. Everything was verified before last letter: And
the mention of Zinka, the daughter of my father’s boss, whom we could not stand, and
a hint about the illness she had suffered, and her reluctance to bother her dad for this reason
trifle; slight flattery addressed to daddy blew right through this tirade and could
soften his hearing...
Then I realized from my own experience what a wonderful thing it is that is not true,
because the father's face smoothed out and his big palm rested on his head
Rita, putting out the storm... Without hesitating for a minute, I slipped out of the house and rushed to
Galinka. I knew: it would be a terrible humiliation for Rita if I demanded
Galinka received her gift back, but there was nothing to choose from. Galinka is not
turned out to be home. I babbled to her mother about the iron: apparently, there was something in my face
more persuasive than in words, because, having not listened, she
stepped aside and pointed to the box of toys. I dove into it with
head and found an iron at the very bottom. Forgetting to thank her, she rushed towards
the stairs, wiping the iron with a handkerchief as it went, ascended to our floor and
presented it to my father. “Okay, okay,” he said absently, continuing
to type in Type-machine.
For him, this iron was small and had educational value
episode. It could not have occurred to him that ironing with an iron roller
will ride throughout Rita's life, squeezing her out of my sister
prudence and ingenuity, that no matter how much her fate unwinds its
scroll, you can still see the trace of the iron on it, and in the future,
Having adopted the vaunted worldly wisdom from Rita, I cannot help her in any way.
The iron did its iron work.
Feigning indifference on my face, as if defeating my father meant nothing to me
was standing, I entered our room and saw Rita sitting on the bed,
rocking back and forth. I sat down next to her and whispered: “It’s okay, here you go.”
iron." But Rita, with her eyes closed, continued to sway. And then I
said: “Listen, Galinka won’t even remember about the iron, she wasn’t at home.” Rita
with bleary eyes, she tore the cape off the pillow and fell into bed, and
slept until evening; she slept so soundly that they forced her to wake up to
she brushed her teeth at night. The next day they let her go for a walk, but she
silently shook her head. They shouted in unison from the yard: “Rit, come out!”, but Rita did not
I went out onto the balcony. Rita began to walk with her dad in the park, following him like
glued, but when she and her mother started arguing, she suddenly started
hibernate, and my grandmother somehow noticed this and began to be afraid,
lest the granddaughter inadvertently fall asleep forever, so on the day when mother
broke a cup of tea on the floor as soon as my sister began to sleepwalk
rocking on the bed, grandma slammed the "Quarteron" and we
The two of them led Rita out onto the stairs by the hands.
We left the battlefield: I slid down the railing, grandma, feeling
steps with a stick, brought Rita down. On the street, my grandmother and I are well-mannered
the guests, who accidentally ran into the hosts' scandal, started talking in abstract
Topics.
Our young city expanded its heroic shoulders on the Zhiguli Mountains.
He was completely new, tough as a nut. The grandmother sadly noted that in
It's good to live young in a young city, and leaned over to smell the pink
bush foaming from the front garden. The city had a lot of greenery, flowers, looking
from round and rectangular flower beds. As people, they settled separately
colonies. Since the city's nobility and early builders lived in the center,
the city square was crowned with purebred roses. Along main street cheerfully
burgundy dahlias and double asters pranced;
daisies, columns of gladioli stood on the march, the outskirts breathed marigolds,
lilacs and other floral lumpen.
Our mischievous teacher ran past us, jumping across the lawns.
stories, casually sharing a nod between me and my grandmother, he cheerfully inquired:
"Are we going for a walk?" - “What are you, what are you...” - the grandmother kindly protested, and I
shouted after him: “We’re taking a walk, and how!”, and the grandmother was vindictive
said: “Ritka and I would like a folder like this!” I felt the boundaries in which
I could stick with her now, after I realized that grandma
All he knows how to do is plug his ears with cotton wool, but to stand up for children, it’s
pipes. And if she doesn’t answer me to this remark, then grandma really
weak, you can walk on your head in front of it. But grandmother could not remain silent,
which, in my opinion, would be more worthy, she could not help but make a remark, she
shifted the focus to something else. “Not Ritka, but Rita,” she automatically corrected.
We walked further past the frolicking girls with the ringing, children's, So
beloved father, voices, with large children's nylon bows,
glowing in the sun, with childish scratches on the knees. Rita barely
I moved my feet and we sat down on a park bench. Grandmother said again:
“How nice it is to be young in such a young city...”, and I chuckled contemptuously,
because I couldn’t stand this city and thought that if I could get out of here,
There's no way he'll lure me back, I'll remember him as bad all my life
dream...
(...Then why is this city now and then calling me to its place, who
Who among us can't do without? Why does it fly to me in entire streets,
separate squares, truncated cones of houses that actually stood
in a different order, and I can’t find my way to the pharmacy?.. And it happens -
you make your way along a familiar alley through the fog and just can’t reach
editorial office of the newspaper "Banner of Communism", in which my grandmother published her
funny poems. I dream about both balconies of our home: under one often
the wedding sang, while under another the funeral slowly dragged on. In a dream they
change places, I look down and am surprised: in the sandbox there is a funeral
orchestra, and the musicians’ legs move apart as if on ice, and one note suddenly
how he jumps like a sparrow on a tennis table!.. It also happens - the whole city
curls up and flows into some detail - into an ice cream kiosk near
Cinema "XX-th Party Congress". There are people sitting next to me that I want
treat me to ice cream, but I’ve never been able to do it: I’m looking for change in the dark
pocket until I plunge into this darkness myself, and then I stand sadly
at the post office and send some money to Rita and nothing to grandma, because in
in my dreams and in reality I remember that in the country where she now lives, money
invalid...)
We sat opposite the “XXth Party Congress”, flexing the heads in our fingers
snapdragon, and suddenly the grandmother said:
- Here's the news! The booth is working! They sell ice cream. I haven't eaten for a hundred years
ice cream!
The sister perked up. We went to the booth and stood right next to the window: indeed
- there was ice cream in cold, long cans, and an unfamiliar saleswoman
I cut a package of crispy cups with scissors. Grandmother leaning against
wand to the booth, slammed her hands on her pockets, but, as always, it turned out
that the wallet was left at home. And they both, Rita and grandmother, looked with hope
on me. I looked to the side, trying not to rattle my change in my pocket.
My money is also holding its breath. Grandmother said:
- I'll give you the house.
But I didn't believe her anymore. She didn’t like to repay debts: sometimes you’d buy
he and Ritka got some pillows with their own, saved at school, and then grandma
says that she gave her entire pension to her mother, and is even loudly surprised that
The father heard - why do you need money? And I saved up for one very the right thing,
Every day I ran to the store to see if they were already sold out.
Rita tugged at my sleeve, but I turned away. It was not only that
things I saved money for. I stood and thought: how do you all live?
want to! no one helps me when my father pulls my hair, no one
will intercede, as if it was necessary for him to poke my nose into my incomprehensible
blame... Screw you! I used to shed tears, Ritka was sleeping peacefully, and
Grandma says: “Today you drove another nail into your father’s coffin!”, Mom says
he just silently brings a wet towel to my bed. Everyone exists in
in your hole, if you want to live, know how to spin, our young teacher says, as if
jokingly, but I know, I see right through them all now - and he’s not joking, he’s thinking
So, his faith is such that everyone dies alone. Everyone's spinning like
knows how, and there is no point in looking at me with pitiful eyes!
I turned to them to explain why I couldn't part with
with their money, and then suddenly I was surprised by their unexpected similarity... They
looked at me with the same expression on their faces, round, childish eyes,
of which there was no trick, just a desire to enjoy ice cream.
They looked at me as if licking their lips in advance. And I pressed it tighter to the bottom
pocket my money so that it doesn’t accidentally get loose and leave me,
like newfound worldly wisdom, and that day did not buy them
ice cream.
Waxy distance
When Martin grew up and began to help her in her work, which brought them both a small addition to their pensions, Alla Viktorovna finally remembered (allowed herself to remember) how it all began, marveling at herself, the former woman standing firmly on her feet, who had years of blameless life behind her. service in the district social security, reliably connected by many threads with life...
On that black day, when her half-brother-in-law Dima called her and in a solemn tone, which he resorted to if he felt offended by something, told her the terrible news, she was just busy with her favorite thing - making paper petals from petals doused in melted wax on a wire flowers for the wedding wreath of her friends’ daughter... Hearing Dima’s solemn introduction that, unfortunately, he couldn’t please her with anything good, Alla Viktorovna shouted into the phone: “What, what’s wrong with Tanya?!”. And while the mechanism launched inside Dima, muttering that he had repeatedly warned her daughter, before last day who continued to go to work, did not make a full turn around Dima’s favorite topic, that in their family everything is not done as is customary among people (which was especially sickening to listen to, because Dima had been sitting on Tanya’s neck without work for six months), Alla Viktorovna feverishly went through There are options in my mind - what could have happened: bleeding?.. did I have to do a caesarean section?.. something with the child?.. She almost lost her mind while Dima was finishing his speech, and when he finished it and hung up, Alla Viktorovna suddenly felt a wild pain in her hand, which, out of confusion, she lowered into a saucepan with hot wax. Shaking her scalded brush, she looked at the photograph with despair. eldest daughter Tanya, standing on the table among the mugs with ready-made fake white flowers, thinking that the fate of this unfortunate newborn child, of course, was decided, although neither she nor her half-brother-in-law Dima said a word about this, it was clear what to do with the baby, one had only to wait for Alla Viktorovna’s ex-husband, who was currently vacationing in Sochi with his second wife, because only with his help could the sick little one be placed in a privileged institution where he would be as comfortable as possible in his position...
Alla Viktorovna thought first of all about her daughter, who had already suffered a lot because of her Dima, who was either divorcing his barren wife or not, because she threatened to commit suicide, and Tanya had to put up with all this; she continued to justify Dima even after it accidentally turned out that he had been divorced for a couple of years and all this time he did not stop tormenting her with stories about his wife with a hidden supply of luminal in case Dima again talked to her about divorce. And here again the situation of Tanya, languishing over the phone in anticipation of Dima’s gracious call or chasing him, who suddenly slammed the door, in slippers on his bare feet in the snow, threatened to return to its source, since Dima had not yet said his word, that clear male word, from which it would become clear what he now intends to do with Tanya, because he dreamed of an heir, of a son, for which he twice sacrificed his precious freedom... This Dima, even without a handicapped baby, was always hanging by a thread, all the time pretending to sometimes dissatisfied with Tanya - he would then leave her, then return when Tanya was already completely desperate. The only thing that was a little encouraging was the phrase with which Dima ended his speech on the phone: “Well, as they say, the first damn thing is lumpy...”.
This was the first thought that struck her heart - the thought of her own child, but it still contained some hope for taking decisive measures to accommodate the baby, which threatened to upset the fragile balance that had finally been established in the lives of Tanya and Dima. But the next thought struck Alla Viktorovna even more painfully. It was a memory of a woman in a burgundy coat who came to see her a few days ago with a sick child who was left waiting for her mother outside the office door. She, it seems, had nothing to reproach herself for; she always tried to act fairly and according to the law, and in this case too: a woman and her sick son occupied two adjacent rooms in communal apartment and could not lay claim to the third, which had just become vacant. Alla Viktorovna spoke, and the woman nodded obediently, agreeing with her arguments, but still did not take her pleading eyes off her. Finally, she sighed and rose from her chair. Alla Viktorovna stood up to see the visitor off, and when she saw her spider-boy through the open door, sitting upright on two chairs, something hit her hard in the heart, although before this incident she had seen a lot different boys and girls whom their parents dragged directly into the office in their arms or brought into wheelchair, she was already accustomed to visitors trying to influence the law with the help of a sick child. But this boy, who rose up, twitching with all his limbs, towards his mother, both embarrassed and saddened her - Alla Viktorovna even returned to the table and brought him a chocolate bar, for which the mother, with tears in her eyes, began to thank her so much that Alla Viktorovna trembled and I thought: shouldn’t I still give them this third room so that they can live in an isolated apartment without fear of reckless neighbors. But a sense of justice prevailed. There were many poor people in line for housing, including disabled people, huddled in semi-basements and dilapidated attics... And now, remembering this woman and her child, rising from chairs like a spoiled robot, Alla Viktorovna thought that he was a messenger troubles.
Now Alla Viktorovna recalled that distant March day, immersed in thick darkness, inside of which an unwanted baby, her daughter’s son, who had been born, lay in the official crib of the maternity hospital, and, surprised at herself, shook her gray head.
Starting from that very day, the paths of Alla Viktorovna and the people around her - relatives, friends and acquaintances - began to rapidly diverge...
First, she took the child from the maternity hospital and began to wait for her ex-husband to arrive. He arrived three weeks later, jumped into the situation, made several necessary calls to Moscow and took two train tickets - for himself and Alla Viktorovna with her sick child. But just before the train left, Alla Viktorovna, with the boy in her arms, left the carriage to get some air and never returned to the carriage - she suddenly disappeared somewhere with the child. And how much later ex-husband no one knocked on her door, no matter how much Tanya called on the phone, she didn’t answer the phone for anyone and didn’t pick up the phone either. After some time, Alla Viktorovna’s family learned that she had quit her job and even stopped paying party fees. True, she had nothing left until retirement. She took custody of the boy. At that moment, many understood Alla Viktorovna this way: she was saving three reputations - her own, her own daughter and her son-in-law. And besides, the boy was breathing his last breath, he was regurgitating mixtures, he was so thin that veins appeared on his tiny arms, he was panting convulsively, his pupils rolling under his eyelids, he lived literally from one ambulance to another, and as soon as Alla Viktorovna overslept fatal moment, the baby would have given his soul to God, but she always woke up on time, reached out to the phone, and the boy’s life was thus prolonged...
Alla Viktorovna decided to name him Andrey, but when she informed Tanya about this, she said that it would be tactless in relation to Dima, who dreamed of giving his heir this very name. Then Alla Viktorovna asked: what to call him? Tanya replied that she would consult with Dima, but in the evening she called back and whispered into the phone that it was impossible to talk to her husband now, he was still depressed about the child, and suggested that the mother herself find some name for him - to call him, for example , Vladimir. Alla Viktorovna strongly objected to this name, saying that it would be tactless in relation to the baby, who will never be the owner of this world... Well, I don’t know, call him something, the daughter responded tiredly and added that she couldn’t discuss this issue more. Alla Viktorovna thought a little and, somehow unexpected for Tanya, said in a soft voice that she would name the baby Martin. Why Martin, Tanya exclaimed. Because he was born in March, the mother answered gravely. Tanya was forced to agree with this, but for a long time she did not know how to tell Dima about the exotic name of his first-born, but when she finally told him, Dima, as usual, shrugged his shoulders and remained silent, and Tanya calmed down.
Meanwhile, the boy, as soon as he was given a name, began to straighten out, as if it had breathed into him an unknown strength. He stopped spitting up the formula and slept peacefully at night. This struck Alla Viktorovna so much that she called Tanya and told her about how the naming of the name strengthened the child, but Tanya, after a pause, turned the conversation to something else.
Not far from Alla Viktorovna’s house there was a shady linden square with many playgrounds, where just a few years ago she walked her twin grandchildren, her sons. youngest daughter Vera, who now lived with her journalist husband in Hungary. In those days, she, with her large, elegant stroller, in which lush toddlers lay, was held in high esteem among the same young grandmothers. She remembered the proud feeling with which she pushed the double stroller, the sympathetic interest in herself, the joyful unity between all the women with strollers, the exchange of news, where to get this or that mixture, how to squeeze the juice, and so on. Now everything was different: when she tried to join the company of happy mothers and grandmothers, she immediately felt silent, restrained, indignant resistance - people did not know how to react to the unfortunate baby, and preferred not to react in any way, carefully moving away from Alla Viktorovna with their happy strollers so that the flying virus of trouble does not stick to their children. Little by little, Alla Viktorovna began to feel as if she was pulling empty but heavy nets out of the water - with the same muscular effort, also resting her feet on the ground, but the nets were empty, this was seen by the baby carriages moving away from her. But she did not immediately move to another street, also shady, but for some time she continued to walk from end to end of the square with her stroller, never once sitting down on the bench from which several pairs of intense eyes were looking at her, and in her gloomy, There was a sense of challenge in the purposeful march. It was as if Alla Viktorovna began to be annoyed by the healthy children, already sitting and already getting on their feet in their beautiful new carriages, while Martin, wrapped in a blanket, lay and lay with an inquiring and pitiful expression on his old face and had not yet made any attempts to either sit up or stand up in my stroller, I just learned to somehow roll over onto my stomach at ten months.
In those days, Alla Viktorovna was far from a true understanding of life, she was still offended by the slow ebb of friends who completely withdrew from her house after Martin began crawling on the floor and playing for hours with the only toy accessible to his mind - the creaky kitchen door that he opened and closed, fascinated listening to its creak.
And when her youngest daughter Vera came on vacation with her family from Hungary, she was amazed at the change that had happened to her mother. In the old days, the mother happily fussed over her youngest and both grandchildren, bombarded them with questions and eagerly listened to stories about their life in a distant foreign country. And now the mother was unable to talk about anything except about her freak, about how affectionate and smart he was. Martin stood between the daughter and mother like bulletproof glass; they talked like deaf-mutes, each about their own things. And all this time, it was as if someone was running a saw across the glass: it was Martin who was opening and closing the creaking door. And when the youngest daughter started a delicate conversation about how her mother should still listen to the opinion of Tatyana and her father and send Martin to a place where he would be treated and taught some professional skills, the freak quickly, quickly, like a cuttlefish, crawled up to Alla Viktorovna and buried himself with a howl big head into her lap. “He needs to be treated,” my daughter mechanically repeated. “No, you need to be treated,” the mother said in a solemn voice.
Tanya, of course, visited them, but her son did not react to her at all and once called his grandmother “mom” in front of her. “Here is your mommy,” said Alla Viktorovna. “Leave it alone,” Tanya allowed.
Further news coming from both daughters was of the most comforting nature: the youngest and her family finally returned home from Hungary to her mother-in-law, the twins began to study at a sports school, Tanya’s girl (a completely healthy baby, whom she nevertheless gave birth to after Martin) was taken to pool and had already bought her a violin, Dima found a well-paid job... But this news did not seem to bring Alla Viktorovna the joy that was expected from her. She thought that both the twins and her granddaughter perfect pitch at one time they were hanging by a thread, and if they had not been so lucky with the necessary set of chromosomes, the kids would have rushed into a privileged institution like little ones. The holy of holies, maternal and paternal love, as it turned out, must be provided with a reliable genetic base in order to be realized in full and in its right. Invisible woodworms are sharpening the violin on which the granddaughter is performing Scarlatti’s sonatina with her innocent fingers, while her own older brother, about whom the girl was told that this is her sick uncle, dressed in his father’s nylon shirt, drags on staggering legs to VTEK, so that V Once again confirm your second disability group...
Several years passed, during which no significant events occurred, but even if they did, nothing could change for either Alla Viktorovna or Martin. The two of them seemed to be sealed inside a glass bell, and around it stretched a noisy, triumphant life.
Alla Viktorovna sits at the table in an old robe stained with paraffin, making small paper flowers, which Martin dips into melted wax, after which she diligently blows on the flowers. There are already a lot of frozen flowers, they fill the table, window sill, bedside tables, they make the room brighten, these tiny paraffin daisies from which Alla Viktorovna weaves complex multi-tiered wreaths. In her mind, she sees in front of her the customers who will soon, in turn, crown their heads with wreaths, and she doesn’t want to think about what will happen to them after. The entire floor around them is strewn with blanks, scraps of wire, and scraps of white paper. When children or grandchildren come, Alla Viktorovna does not stop what she is doing, and Martin, as if nothing had happened, continues to blow on the flowers, because they have nothing to talk about: they have their own goals and worries, she has only one concern - to survive Martin, so that he would not eventually end up in a privileged establishment. Alla Viktorovna’s relatives are now far away, she sees them as if through inverted binoculars, but quite clearly for a person gradually losing sight - in their chest beats a sick, pitiful heart, capable of loving only with a love sanctified by common sense, and even if her children saddled with all their goals and stuffed solutions to all their little problems into their pockets, she still won’t be able to help them in any way, they will always feel the horror of the unknown, captured in the image of Martin, half-man, half-plant. And Martin has his own goal - to blow on the flowers, which themselves intertwine into wreaths, which then scatter invisible flying seeds in the air, from which something will sprout.
Wild grapes
No one in the whole world knew or could know that when Gena dug up a lash of wild grapes at his mother’s grave, he extracted cemetery land his future death... So one day, many years ago, his mother, sitting down late at night with a letter addressed to a certain man named Peter, could not imagine that she was mailing her death - from overwork and despair, the mother wrote on the envelope their own address, and Genin’s father took the terrible letter out of the box and read it, after which their life became completely unbearable, and six months later the mother died of a heart attack. Her mother loved Gena very much, and because of him she tolerated the sophisticated and picky temper of her father, who worked as a production manager at a perfume factory, where the director was a mocking and rude woman, from whom his father meekly endured any antics, but at home, in order to give vent to the accumulated rage, he threw her out of the basin. soaked laundry right on the floor or kicked the front door when his mother forgot to put the keys in his pocket. Actually, the mother had nowhere to run except to the grave, which is what she did. Gena hid the photo of his mother, peeled off from her work record book, in the absence of others (his father destroyed everything), in his toys as a child, and when he grew up, he enlarged it and, finding a grave overgrown with weeds, erected a granite monument with a medallion. In the fence he planted birch and double lilac, and wild grapes grew on their own, as if they had jumped through the air from the other half of the cemetery - the old one...
The very next year, the grapes entwined the fence, caught on the branches of the birch and, sagging between them, thought for a while, wrapping themselves around their own branches, like a person chilled in the cold wraps his arms around himself, trying to save the remnants of warmth. Gena periodically cut it from a birch tree or from a lilac bush, marveling at the savage strength of a plant blooming on bones. And one day he decided to dig up a branch and plant it in a box on his loggia, so that the plant would always be with him, like the love of his deceased mother.
Gena was making a box on the loggia, and his young wife Galya was either handing him a ruler or nails, or running into the room for something else, trying to earn forgiveness for the fact that last night, without asking her husband, she received a friend who had arrived in the capital from Ukraine, and even tried to leave her overnight, to which Gena, who returned after midnight, reacted inadequately. He lifted his friend out of bed and, giving her a minute to get ready, kicked her out of the house in the middle of the night, after which he silently pointed Gala to his friend’s bed, taking her away from him for the first time for the night, and went into the bedroom. Now he was using Galya’s services in silence, thank you for not pushing her, and Galya was still trying to figure out whether she had really offended her husband that much. No matter how much she cast cautious glances at his face, she could not read on him the real degree of her guilt. Genin's restraint, his cold silence for several days, or even weeks, with the help of which he raised his young wife, frightened Galya more than any scandals and even assault; she herself would willingly give him a belt so that he could flog her properly, because , she believed, her body couldn’t be in as much pain as her soul was in pain during Genya’s protracted period of silence. “They brought some good land here in the yard,” Galya said in an ingratiating tone, and Gena graciously shrugged his shoulders, as if making it clear that he was not against Galya bringing land from the yard. And Galya was so happy about this gesture that she applied twice as much earth as required.
The grapes began to grow and that same summer began to grow along the long twigs that Gena stuck into a box of soil, her childhood friend continued to send cards for the holidays, as if no one had sent her out of the house in the middle of the night, and Galya continued to reflect on this incident , without, however, giving anything away. The massacre of her friend made a deep impression on her. In the old days, when Gena fell into stony silence, Galya was consoled by the consciousness of her own guilt, which her husband wanted to make her feel when he remembered that he did not get her as a girl, but in his current repression another person was involved, absolutely not guilty of anything . Before, she at least considered the punishment fair, when, for example, one day she applied to a medical school behind Gena’s back (she really wanted to study, but Gena was against it) or when she didn’t put an antibiotic in his bag, which he always took with him when traveling on business trips. And now she didn’t know what to think, especially since Gena, having allowed her to apply soil for grapes, never broke his silence. He silently ate the dinner she served, ate, one might say, from her hands: as soon as the bottom of the plate with the first one showed, Gena, without breaking the rhythm, transferred the spoon to the plate with the second, which Galya substituted in the blink of an eye...
But now Galya remembered in a completely different way those empty plates that were deftly pulled out from under his hands and hastily replaced with full ones. His friend’s old, shabby suitcase, tied with rope, which Gena pushed with his foot towards front door, stood in her eyes like a branch of wild grapes, thrust into the room by a gust of wind, when Gena, having sent his friend away, defiantly opened the door to the loggia wide to ventilate the house from the smell of poverty, the smell of his friend and her suitcases, and Galya shook all night from cold and grief, not daring to close this door. Galya kept thinking, reflecting on what had happened, but kept silent.
She knew that everyone considered her and Gena to be an ideal couple, because in public her husband always treated her with special attention: he lifted her into the car and fastened her belt like a child, bought and gave flowers, hastily accepted a bag from her hands with groceries, and why he needed this picture, Galya did not understand; after all, as soon as they entered the elevator, where no one could see them anymore, Gena transformed - he muttered something through his teeth, began to look through her, although he had just hugged her shoulders and showed signs of tenderness... And the grapes grew and grew, throwing away new shoots, he was stretching along the wires attached to clothesline pins, and then Galya made her most unforgivable mistake...
Probably, she would not have made this mistake if these two smiling young people to whom she opened the door did not smell of the same ineradicable smell of cheap perfume that her husband and his friends smelled through and through, despite all their expensive deodorants, that unforgettable the smell that seeped from Genya’s car on that distant day when she saw him in her hometown of Ukrainians - the mixed aroma of strawberry soap, triple cologne, “Forest lily of the valley”... Inhaling the familiar aroma, Galya let them into the apartment, not bothering to call husband to find out whether it was true that he sent them for the required paper... After rummaging in the table, Galya found the required document, but before giving it, she thought that it was still worth calling Gene at work. True, the visit of the two men came during another period of Gena’s silence, which Galya, according to unwritten laws, should not have been the first to break. At the door, one of the visitors took a toy crocodile out of his briefcase and, grinning, handed it to Gala. "What is this?" - she asked mechanically. “Crocodile Gena,” they answered her, and then Galya realized that she had done something terrible.
She sat down on the bench in the hallway. The fear inside her grew with panicky speed, her whole body was trembling, as if she had a high fever in a matter of minutes - fear spilled out of her trembling being and began to fill the room. It seemed to her that she was inhaling air mixed with crushed glass. Galya hugged herself with all her might. What's the matter with her, really! After all, Gena won’t kill her! Galya slowly looked around at the things that had much more right to be in Genya’s house than Galya. She could not understand the composition of this fear, what it was made of: from the happy and dear things around her that were not touched by her silence, from the air she breathed, from some other, more subtle matter... Why was she so afraid of him, after all, all the wives of his friends, whom he set as an example to her, self-confident women, were often also from the provinces and, nevertheless, knew how to manage their husbands well, and she, the most beautiful, trembled in front of Gena, as if he were her executioner...
Some more days passed. Gena still didn’t talk to Galya, now because of the document that she gave to his competitors, and Galya was forced to write him a note: “I’m pregnant,” which Gena brushed off the dining table with his elbow, and Galya didn’t understand, but read whether he was her or not, which, however, soon became completely unimportant, because she had a miscarriage.
And the grapes had nowhere to grow further; he crawled along the clothesline, and Gena, since they lived on the top floor, decided to drive pins under the very roof of the house so that the grapes would grow correctly - from bottom to top and over time form something like a gazebo out of the loggia.
Galya held Gena by the legs. He stood on the iron railing of the loggia, holding onto the ceiling with one hand, and with the other he performed all the required operations: inserted pins into the slot, hit them with a hammer, threw ropes with loops onto the finished pins. Gena was glad that no one in the whole house had wild grapes and, therefore, no one would have a green cozy gazebo in which he and his friends would drink tea... So it would have happened, as Gena imagined, if , moving to the other edge of the loggia, he did not lose his balance for a moment, and Galya, no matter how tightly she hugged his knees, could not hold her husband...
The neighbors were very sorry for both Gena, who had fallen to his death, and Galya, who had almost lost her mind from grief, and who one day turned gray as a young widow. Some of them saw Gena from last bit of strength, lying in a pool of blood on the asphalt, he stared at Galya, who had jumped out of the entrance, trying to squeeze something out of himself, even tried to point at her with a crooked finger, as if turning to people with a final request - not to leave his widow... Galya They barely pulled him away when the ambulance arrived, and there was no one here to help. At first, they really didn’t leave Galya, they visited her, brought her food, consoled her as best they could, saying that she shouldn’t reproach herself for not being able to hold Gennady over the abyss, because he was a very large man, and she was a fragile woman... Galya didn't dry my eyes. She uprooted the wild grapes from the box, which Gena tried to cling to after he lost his balance, and the neighbors took the box out... And no one in the whole world knew and will never know what it took for Gala to unclench her arms that were hugging Genina knees, and lightly push him into the abyss...
Convention
They wanted their mother to die so much, they wanted her to die so much that they dreamed about her in a dream: one dreamed that her father with bulging eyes was running to her at work, to the dispensary, senile tears that had lost salt were streaming down his face, and she heard him a voice: “Mom died!”, and another dreamed that she was picking up the phone, and from the depths of it echoed: “...mom died, mom died...”. Just ten years ago, they did not want their mother to die, then their mother had just begun to get sick, but an invisible compass, pierced into the center of the family nest - the ancient sofa, from which she gave her invaluable advice, rarely leaving it, rapidly rotating, began to outline narrowing circles, little by little cutting off excess space. First, my mother stopped her daily walks to the Pervomaisky Garden or to the embankment, then the nearest Bagaev store disappeared, then the courtyard covered with ivy. And when they began to bring a bench out to her on the front porch, then the sisters did not want my mother to die. One said to the other with a sigh: “Holiday is coming, and again I won’t be able to go anywhere because of my mother’s illness, but I need to unwind...”. Another picked up: “Yes, of course, let them live and live for another hundred years, but how tired of this attachment they are. Only in our country there are such difficulties with the elderly, who have no one to care for and for quite decent money...” Then the first part of the phrase disappeared - the mother’s wish for “a hundred years of life” - because the thought appeared that fate could really take it into account. The wheels of time began to spin with even greater ferocity, winding the veins of both women around themselves, cutting off conventions one after another. And five years ago, when the father once again ran with his eyes bulging, all disheveled, to his youngest daughter Katya at the dispensary and shouted: “Hurry, mom is really bad!”, and Katya, as always, rushed to save her mother, followed by her a nurse was running with an IV, then the eldest, Lida, stood in front of the door of my mother’s room, pale, stern, all gray, like her parents, and said in a quiet voice: “I won’t let you in.” “You’re crazy,” Katya whispered, hearing the approaching steps of the nurse and father on the stairs, “this is our mother!” “That’s it,” the elder sister said forcefully, “our mother.” And there is no need to torture her. You slow it down for a year or two, it will lie there and nothing else. You, as a doctor, must understand this...” They looked at each other with the same despair, but what had not yet become a convention for them - compassion and love for the poor mother and the highest justice - was on Katya’s side, and the eldest the sister retreated, covering her eyes with her hand, as if she wanted at that moment, in which she suddenly saw the future so clearly, to uproot all the white light from them, so that it would never beckon her to itself. She repeated in a weak voice: “You slow her down and nothing else.” Then a nurse approached with a sympathetic face, and everyone went in to see mom. The procession was closed by the father, looking at the backs of his daughters with caustic hatred, because he saw everything that was brewing in his two daughters’ heads, he saw and could not say anything directly to them, since the mother’s life now depended on them. Called by the nurse, Katya's husband, Victor, also a doctor, arrived. Having examined the mother, they began to confer in a low voice, and the father came close to the participants in the consultation and looked into the mouths of first one, then the other, fearing that they would agree among themselves in Latin on how to kill their mother. After listening to them for a while, he calmed down and began to serve them with the humility of a slave who hates his master so fiercely that this hatred gave him the strength not to show it.
The older sister was also now fussing - she changed mother’s diapers, helped install an IV, then with a sad expression on her face watched as the nurse tried to get into the mother’s vein. In their youth, their resemblance to their mother was not as striking as it is now: both are old women, only the mother is decrepit, and Lida is simply old.
Over the next five years, conventions were dropped one after another: in conversation, behavior, life itself. The father only helplessly threw up his hands when Katya, with a metallic glint in her eyes, said in response to his complaints: “You will outlive us all! You will have time to bury me.” So she repeated, calling death on her own head, torn between her family, work and her bedridden mother.
And twelve years ago it was still a strong, reliable family nest, spread over three houses. On mother’s birthdays, daughters and their families came to her as vassals: having lived to the age of fifty, extra years, they still didn’t dare say a word when mom spoke from the sofa in her imperious voice, accustomed to the obedience of others: “Katerina, don’t you dare buy a car. It’s of no use to you, just know that!” “Mom, we buy with our own,” Katya weakly objected. “What do you mean - ours? - Mom responded instantly. - We don’t have our own, we have everything in common. This was the only thing that helped us survive the evacuation - we thought about everyone, about you, our daughters, our nephews...” - “You weren’t in the world yet,” the father came out with his word, “when mom had to evacuate... You were born in deep asphyxia. Mom put you in a trough with thawed snow, and then warmed you in felt boots, and you came to life.” “Okay,” his mother interrupted him. The birthday party continued, the guests decorously drank tea, read aloud telegrams from relatives from other cities... Then they came for another seven years, these congratulatory telegrams, until the relatives felt the shame of convention, because how to write “we wish for long years life”, when the old woman is ninety-five. But everyone continued to warmly remember “our mother,” who never left anyone in trouble, nor Anyuta, who somehow miraculously came running from occupied Moldova, nor Shurik, whose parents were shot in Minsk, nor little Rita, whom her grandmother stuck into the train window - the last train that managed to leave for the East an hour before the city was occupied by the Germans - in Novocherkassk, she carried everyone on herself and in Alma-Ata, tirelessly sewing and knitting... But this warmth did not cost them anything, of course. They recalled that “our mother” always knew how to give practical advice, and her neighbors also took her opinion into account. And as for buying a car - here my mother, as it turned out later, gave her most wise advice, which Katya, alas, did not follow - the last important advice of her old mother.
Meanwhile, the tip of the compass had already pierced this famous sofa, on which, at the age of ninety-four, she had once died under Tsar Gorokha. mom's mother. Mom continued to visit both daughters in their distant neighborhoods to help out a little around the house.
The eldest, Lida, had a daughter, Nastya - now she lived in Moscow, and a son, the fool Sasha. Sasha and Lida lived in a communal apartment, in two rooms. My grandmother treated her Moscow granddaughter Nastya with benevolent mockery, without much love, but with interest, as a person who was not afraid to experiment on herself and others, in fact quite independent, as everyone thought.
She disdained her grandson Sasha, Down, and for twenty years she hammered Lida’s head so that Sasha would be taken to a suitable institution. Sasha, affectionate and flexible, loved everyone, including his grandmother, but did not fawn on her, like, for example, his neighbors in a communal apartment, he felt that this should not be done.
Katya's family consisted of her husband Victor and son Alik, whom her grandmother loved so much that she could not give him any practical advice, maybe that is why he, beloved by everyone, led a lifestyle that no one understood, did not want to study anywhere, got married endlessly, got divorced , sent money to some woman in Sevastopol, although he claimed that the child was not his, hung out with the simplest and most drinking people, working as a stove maker. Katya went crazy with him. Alik was so far the only failure in their prosperous family, not counting, of course, Sasha, who was a puncture of nature itself.
Twelve years ago, my mother’s house was still sparkling clean. It had partial amenities, but mom managed to do everything. Some time passed, and Katya noted that the napkins on the TV and dressing table were clean and ironed, but not starched. This was the first sign. It was from these napkins that the order in the mother’s house, and at the same time both daughters’, began to rapidly decline: the chandelier became dim, the paint came off the floor, the stove was unbleached on holidays, the windows were covered in dust.
The house began to bloom like an old pond.
A whole series of conventions were thrown away - numerous vases went into the closet and were no longer shown, the neighbors took away the flowers on the windowsills, they now began to feed from their mother, a former famous cook, with something not very edible, the dishes were not very clean, and so on. Mom grew weaker and weaker, weakness squeezed all its former authority out of her voice, but they still listened to her when she, having gathered her courage, said something. Then they stopped listening, my mother began to talk, began to wear dentures less and less, my father acted as a translator, who, on the contrary, somehow became more dignified, feeling that his time had come and it was time to take the reins into his own hands. But who to rule over? Katya has been walking around with shortness of breath for a long time, she drinks handfuls of medicine, Lida is a total wreck, her eyes are always wet, her soul is directed to Moscow, where her daughter Nastya is grieving with her husband - a lanky, maned, sleazy quitter and drunkard, but does not want to return home, and she can be understood. Where should we go back? After Lida once fell on her knees in front of her father and screamed in a bad voice, like a clique: “I conjure you by Christ the God - register Nastenka with you!” - the old man felt such bitter loneliness, as if he saw with his own eyes how someone’s stubborn hands were trying to push him and his mother into a hole. Lida was completely distraught: she didn’t seem to remember that her grandson Alik was registered in this apartment, who was now renting an attic so as not to sit on his mother and father’s head in a tiny apartment with adjacent rooms - their living space was supposed to go to him after the death of the old people.
The house, which had stood during the Civil War, when the entire street was on fire, during the Otechestvennaya Street, when German artillery from Green Island shelled the entire area, now began to collapse, as if someone was gnawing it from the inside. Every now and then the pipes burst, they were replaced - they burst again, the railings fell off the stairs, they were somehow strengthened, the front porch almost crumbled, on which until recently the grandmother sat importantly and relatives from passing trams sometimes waved to her. The compass was spinning faster and faster: mom could no longer sit, she could only lie down. Her father made her a special chair, under which she placed a bucket. Then the chair fell off, and then Down Sasha moved into the house.
The father, who imitated his mother in every emotional movement, also did not like his sick grandson, but now he finally paid tribute to Sasha, who, as it turned out, turned out to be the only real person among the entire large family.
Sasha unquestioningly went to the shops, took out a bathtub for his grandmother, turned on the TV for her, and the image streamed across the faded yellow mica of her eyes, sat next to his grandmother for hours, driving flies away from her with a rolled-up newspaper. Sometimes they talked. “Sasha, who did you see in the yard?” - the grandmother mumbled, and Sasha reported that he saw Nizhnyaya Olga, the Chentsovs and Karavaikha. “The loaf is dead,” the grandmother objected, and the grandfather, who had recently become especially irritable, reprimanded her in a thin voice: “How many times should I tell you: don’t utter this word in front of Alexander! He shouldn't know him! Our affairs do not concern him!.. Sasha, Karavaikha has gone to the Far Store. For a long time. Is that clear?" - “What do they give in the Far Store?” - Knowing how to react to the word “shop,” Sasha asked. "What? White swans on coupons!” - the father joked. “To the swan,” Sasha picked up.
The old man continued to run to Katya’s dispensary every now and then. Either mom fell off the sofa, then mom had a stomach ache... It seemed to Katya that she was standing some kind of endless, sleepless watch that she no longer had the strength to stand, and when her father once again started his: “Here we go to bed.” mother to the grave, you will still remember us!” Katya, looking to the side as if addressing an invisible interlocutor, said: “You won’t go anywhere. You are immortal." The father clasped his hands. “Yes, if your mother hadn’t stuck you in a trough with melted snow then, you wouldn’t have existed in the world!” - “Oh, take me out, finally take me out of this icy water!” - Katya suddenly began to speak in a voice that was not her own.
Meanwhile, my mother was getting worse and worse. She held Sasha’s hand, and Sasha waved a newspaper over her head, although it was winter and white flies were flying outside the window. This winter in Katya's life there was a small breakthrough: she and her husband finally bought a car, and the crowded, rarely running buses on which Katya and her husband went to work and home disappeared as horrible dream. But for Lida it turned out the other way around: in November Nastya gave birth to a boy who had no one to leave with, her husband continued to drink, play cards and hang around with women, and she had to go back to work. And Katya had no choice but to let her older sister go to Moscow.
They parted without tears. The fact that Katya let Lida go was clean water convention, - Lida would have left anyway, she had a very serious reason for this. But Katya wanted - and this turned out to be her last desire - to make it look like she was voluntarily sacrificing herself. Both understood everything and did not look each other in the eyes. But when Lida, tormented by the fact that she was still forced to accept Katya’s sacrifice and desert, said: “It was you, then you slowed down your mother with your IV!” Katya gasped, turned on her heel and walked away, without revealing her trump card to her sister: In the summer, she discovered some kind of tumor in her chest, which she had no time to even examine.
Katya left, taking away her wounds, Lida left, taking away hers. By the way, when they parted, the sisters did not say a word about Sasha. Katya could remember him as her own victim, since she now had to buy more food for two families (taking into account Sasha), but Lida had an answer in store just in case, that, firstly, there was no need to carry anything anymore, since there was a car, and secondly, Sasha now turns out to be so needed, he doesn’t eat his bread for nothing, Sasha.
When Lida returned a year later to bury her sister and her husband, who had crashed in their new car three kilometers from the city on the road to the Left Bank beach, she found the same picture: Sasha was brushing away invisible flies with a newspaper from her grandmother, who had completely lost her mind, and her father , shriveled up like a mummy, bullies Katya’s former nurse, who, out of devotion to Katya’s memory, continued to come to the elderly.
He released Lida after two weeks.
Lida left with money: her neighbor in the communal apartment bought two of her rooms and her father added from his savings; this money should have been enough for an apartment in the Moscow region, where Lida was going to live with Sasha and her grandson, so that Nastya could work calmly without worrying about anything.
On the train, Lida unpacked one heavy suitcase, all the luggage left over from her former life, and went to the toilet to change clothes. And when she returned, Sasha was animatedly telling two friendly women, mother and daughter, that his grandmother had gone to the Far Store following Aunt Katya and Uncle Victor. “It must be a good store?” - the mother asked kindly. “Everything is there, everything,” Sasha burst out, “they give white swans!” “What are you talking about,” the daughter was exaggeratedly surprised, “swans?” - “Yes, those with big wings.” And Sasha waved his arms several times, as if he was about to take off.
Iron and ice cream
As soon as they got down to business, the grandmother sat Rita down and in a loud voice began to read “Quarteronka” aloud to her. I, with my hearing forked like a snake’s sting, stood in the corridor. “Didn’t I warn you?” - the father thundered. “Be quiet and mind your own business!” - Mom squealed. “...a light vision appeared at my head...”- the grandmother read in a rattling voice. The sister listened to the screams from the next room, and her face was sleepy, and the grandmother continued to read in her insincere, weak voice. Mom threw a cup of tea on the floor behind the wall, hot lava overflowed the threshold and poured into our room. Rita picked up her legs. Grandma used to demonstratively stuff her ears with cotton wool as soon as they started screaming, and when I was little, like Rita, I would look sideways at her in hostile and vain expectation that she was about to intervene and finally say her weighty thing. adult word, but then she realized that she did not have the treasured word in reserve, she only pretended that she had power, to which she could resort, and that in fact she was helpless, like Rita and I... But lastly At that time, the grandmother forgot about the cotton wool, because she had a more important concern: not letting Rita fall asleep, who, along the sharp turns of warring voices, like on a railing, was slipping into lethargy, as if Morpheus was blowing into her ears, drowning out the screams behind the wall and freezing off Rita’s long eyelashes .
Maybe she had previously fallen into hibernation to the stormy accompaniment of her parents' quarrels, but they noticed this only after the incident with the iron that her father brought her as a gift from Moscow, which Rita, earning authority in the courtyard, gave to Galinka. No one except me knew what this Galinka was to her, and our parents hardly even suspected her existence. I think that no one later had such unconditional power over Rita as Galinka had, who in the town where we moved was revered by all the little kids, because she was cheerful, dexterous, ran the fastest, jumped the highest, and in general everything She did better than others. Having moved here, we felt lonely for a long time, but Rita got her bearings before me, showed the will and perseverance in settling into new spaces and conquering new people, as if she hoped there, in the yard, to create another, friendly family for herself, to build a nest somewhere under a fungus or in the sandbox, because hurricanes of family quarrels flew through our parental home every now and then, blowing out the remaining heat, and nothing living could grow there.
Soon new friends began to call her from the yard. She went out onto the balcony like a queen to her people, in the proud knowledge that without her no one worth playing it won't work out. Long, humiliating requests to let her go into the yard were not always crowned with success, since her father did not tolerate wasting time. Rita went out onto the porch with an imperturbable look, as if she had hesitated because of her own busyness, like Galinka, teaching her cat to give her a paw. So Rita came out, stretching, lazily squinting her eyes, while her whole being sang with joy, perhaps without a crock of salt, because a crumpet of salt would have been clearly too much, and Rita, in an invisible dispute with her father, checked her capabilities down to the millimeter, so as not to break loose, she was a very careful girl. If the sun was shining, Galinka was the queen, she played hopscotch and dodgeball better than anyone, but on rainy days she gave up her championship to Rita, who interestingly recounted the books her grandmother had read to her and made up scary stories: here Galinka sat modestly on a bench next to everyone , craning her neck to better see Rita over the heads of the others. When her father did not give in to her persuasion, who were always very diplomatic and smart (trying to please him, Rita asked to “unload her spine a little” or “collect a herbarium,” that is, to take a useful walk), she again gathered her strength and went out to balcony to inform the waiting public that she is not in the mood for a walk today.
I didn't have enough tricks like that. I was straightforward, just like my father, and I responded to his refusal to let me go outside with a muffled howl; to his question what kind of movie I would like to see, I honestly answered: “Fantômas went wild,” while it was clear as daylight that it should have been called “The Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors,” an instructive fairy tale for children like me. At times I despised the savvy and deceitful Rita, who in the end was crushingly defeated by her ingenuous father, and the unexpected weapon of her father’s victory was that very iron...
Rita gave it to Galinka. She gave it as a gift so simply, as if she had every right to dispose of the iron at her own discretion; She gave it as a gift as if she could in the future present Galinka with our entire house, and an iron with a red light on the handle is such a trifle that it’s not even worth saying “thank you.” Galinka, suspecting nothing, took the iron, which Rita looked at with eyes full of despair, because she knew, she could not help but know, what would happen to her from her father when he found out about this. Galinka played with the iron a little and forgot about it that same evening, and after that Rita could not fall asleep for a long time, tossed and groaned, inventing a disease for herself that would delay the hour of reckoning, and during the day she tried not to catch her dad’s eye and lived in bed for a week. such an overwhelming fear that when her father suddenly remembered about the iron and thunder finally burst over her desperate little head, she probably experienced something like relief.
I returned from school and immediately saw that Rita was standing at the epicenter of the earthquake, and above her, unshakably, like a rock, in righteous anger, my father was hanging and asking where the iron that dad had brought from the capital of our Motherland was: at such moments he preferred to talk about himself in the third person, as if moving away from the storm he had caused, as if placing himself as a judge between an unkind, absent-minded girl and her caring dad. Rita stood with her head buried in her shoulders, although no finger had touched her yet, she trembled at the roar of his voice, and then I decided to save her...
To be honest, I wasn’t thinking about Rita’s salvation at that moment - I was sick of her calculating cunning, and besides, I remembered the testament of our young beloved history teacher, who somehow crept up to my desk when I was letting a neighbor copy off the main dates of Pugachev’s uprising, thundered in my ear: “Everyone dies alone.” But then I suddenly wanted to feel like Rita, try it on myself, conduct an experiment and find out what happens if a person is smart. I stepped forward and children's in a voice, tongue-tied, confused in words, like a small child, she said:
Daddy, please forgive me. Ritochka and I were playing with an iron yesterday, and then Zina Zimina came to ask what was assigned in algebra, because she was sick, and said: “Oh, where did you get such a wonderful iron?” Rita answered her: “Dad brought us this iron from Moscow.” Zina said: “Oh, can I show it to my dad so that he can also bring me the exact same one from Moscow - with a light bulb?” I knew that you shouldn’t give things without asking, but the fact is that my mother and grandmother were not at home, and you went into the office to work and asked not to disturb you...
I said all this in one breath, as if on a whim, but then, analyzing my speech, I realized that I had not missed anything, as if someone very smart had told me the words. Everything was verified to the last letter: the mention of Zinka, the daughter of dad’s boss, whom we couldn’t stand, and the hint of the illness she suffered, and the reluctance to bother dad over such a trifle; slight flattery addressed to daddy blew right through this tirade and could soften his hearing...
Then I was convinced from my own experience what a wonderful thing it was not true, because my father’s face smoothed out, and his large palm rested on Rita’s head, extinguishing the storm... Without hesitating a minute, I slipped out of the house and rushed to Galinka. I knew: it would be a terrible humiliation for Rita if I demanded her gift back from Galinka, but there was nothing to choose from. Galinka was not at home. I babbled to her mother about the iron; Apparently, my face was more convincing than my words, because, without finishing listening, she stepped aside and pointed me to a box of toys. I dived into it headlong and at the very bottom I found an iron. Forgetting to say thank you, she rushed up the stairs, wiping the iron with a handkerchief as she went, ascended to our floor and presented it to my father. “Okay, okay,” he said absentmindedly, continuing to type.
For him, this ironing was a small episode with educational significance. It could not have occurred to him that the iron would roll like an iron roller throughout Rita’s life, squeezing out her prudence and ingenuity from my sister, that no matter how much her fate unwinds its scroll, one could still see the trace of the iron on it, and in the future Having adopted the vaunted worldly wisdom from Rita, I cannot help her in any way. The iron did its iron work.
Feigning indifference on my face, as if defeating my father had cost me nothing, I entered our room and saw Rita sitting on the bed, rocking back and forth. I sat down next to her and whispered: “Everything is okay, here’s the iron.” But Rita, with her eyes closed, continued to sway. And then I said: “Listen, Galinka won’t even remember about the iron, she wasn’t at home.” Rita, with bleary eyes, pulled the cape off the pillow and fell into bed, and slept until evening; She slept so soundly that they forced her to brush her teeth at night. The next day they let her go for a walk, but she silently shook her head. They shouted in unison from the yard: “Rit, come out!”, but Rita did not go out onto the balcony. Rita began to walk with her dad in the park, followed him as if glued to him, but when she and her mother started an argument, she suddenly began to hibernate, and the grandmother somehow drew attention to this and began to be afraid that her granddaughter might inadvertently fall asleep forever , so that day, when my mother broke a cup of tea on the floor, as soon as my sister began to rock somnambulistically on the bed, my grandmother slammed the “Quarteron”, and together we took Rita by the hands to the stairs.
We left the battlefield: I slid down the railing, grandmother, feeling the steps with her wand, brought Rita down. On the street, my grandmother and I, like well-mannered guests who accidentally ran into the hosts’ scandal, began talking about abstract topics.
Our young city expanded its heroic shoulders on the Zhiguli Mountains. He was completely new, tough as a nut. The grandmother sadly remarked that it was good to live in a young city for young people, and leaned over to smell the rose bush foaming from the front garden. There was a lot of greenery in the city, flowers looking out from round and rectangular flower beds. As people, they settled in separate colonies. Since the city nobility and pioneers lived in the center, the city square was crowned with purebred roses. Along the main street, burgundy dahlias and double asters cheerfully pranced, daisies spread along other streets, columns of gladioli stood on the march, the outskirts breathed with marigolds, lilacs and other lumpen flowers.
Our mischievous history teacher ran past us, jumping across the lawns, casually sharing a nod between me and my grandmother, and cheerfully inquired: “Are we taking a walk?” “What are you, what are you...” - the grandmother kindly protested, and I shouted after him: “We’re taking a walk, and how!”, and vindictively said to the grandmother: “Ritka and I should have such a folder!” I was groping for the boundaries within which I could stay with her now, after I realized that all grandma knew was to plug her ears with cotton wool, and to stand up for the children, she used pipes. And if she doesn’t answer me to this remark, it means that grandma is really weak, you can walk on your head in front of her. But the grandmother could not remain silent, which, in my opinion, would have been more worthy, she could not help but make a comment, she shifted the emphasis to something else. “Not Ritka, but Rita,” she automatically corrected.
We walked further past the frolicking girls with the jingling, children's, in the voices so beloved by father, with large children's nylon bows glowing in the sun, with children's scratches on their knees. Rita could barely move her feet, and we sat down on a park bench. Grandma said again: “How nice it is to be young in such a young city...”, and I chuckled contemptuously, because I couldn’t stand this city and thought that if I got out of here, it would never lure me back, I would remember it all my life. it's like a bad dream...
(...Then why now does this city constantly call me to itself, which of us cannot do without whom? Why does it fly to me with entire streets, individual squares, truncated cones of houses that actually stood in a different order, and I can’t find the way to the pharmacy?.. And sometimes you make your way along a familiar alley through the fog and just can’t get to the editorial office of the newspaper “Banner of Communism”, in which my grandmother published her funny poems. I dream of both balconies of our home: under one often a wedding was being sung, under another a funeral was slowly dragging on. In the dream they change places, I look down and am surprised: in the sandbox there is a funeral orchestra, and the musicians’ legs move apart, as if on ice, and one note suddenly jumps like a sparrow on the tennis table! It also happens - the whole city collapses and flows into some detail - into an ice cream kiosk near the cinema “XX Party Congress". There are people sitting next to me whom I want to treat with ice cream, but I have never succeeded: I am looking for small change in the dark pocket until I plunge into this darkness myself, and then I sadly stand at the post office and send some money to Rita and nothing to my grandmother, because both in my dreams and in reality I remember that in the country where she now lives, money is invalid ...)
We were sitting opposite the “XX Party Congress”, kneading the heads of snapdragons in our fingers, and suddenly my grandmother said:
Here's the news! The booth is working! They sell ice cream. I haven't eaten ice cream in ages!
The sister perked up. We went to the booth and stood right next to the window: and indeed, there was ice cream in the cold long cans, and an unfamiliar saleswoman was cutting a package of crispy cups with scissors. The grandmother, leaning her wand against the booth, slammed her hands on her pockets, but, as always, it turned out that the wallet was left at home. And both of them, Rita and grandmother, looked at me with hope. I looked to the side, trying not to rattle my change in my pocket. My money is also holding its breath. Grandmother said:
I'll give you the houses.
But I didn't believe her anymore. She didn’t like to repay debts: it used to be that you would buy her and Ritka pillows with their own, saved at school, and then the grandmother would say that she gave her entire pension to her mother, and she would even be loudly surprised so that her father would hear - why do you need money? And I saved up for one very necessary thing, every day I ran to the store to see if it was already sold out.
Rita tugged at my sleeve, but I turned away. It wasn't just the thing I was saving money for. I stood and thought: you all can live as you want! no one helps me, when my father pulls me by the hair, no one will intervene, as if this is the way it should be, so that he rubs my nose into my incomprehensible guilt... Screw you! I used to shed tears, Ritka was sleeping peacefully, and my grandmother said: “Today you drove another nail into your father’s coffin!”, My mother just silently brought a wet towel to my bed. Everyone exists in their own hole, if you want to live, know how to move around, our young teacher says, as if jokingly, but I know, I see them all right through now - and he’s not joking, he thinks so, he has such faith that everyone dies alone. Everyone spins as best they can, and there is no point in looking at me with pitiful eyes!
I turned to them to explain why I couldn’t part with my money, and then I was suddenly surprised by their unexpected similarity... They looked at me with the same expression on their faces, round children’s eyes, in which there was no cunning, only a desire to feast ice cream. They looked at me, as if licking their lips in advance. And I pressed my money tighter to the bottom of my pocket so that it wouldn’t inadvertently come loose and leave me, like my newfound worldly wisdom, and that day I didn’t buy them ice cream.
I adore spring so much that I go crazy when it starts! I drop everything I’m doing, take a sick leave - you know, I can take it at any moment - and still walk, wander, wander around the spring like a drunk!..
These words, spoken in a voice shimmering with naivety and childish whim, sounded from the depths of the uniformly humming monolith of the crowd. The sinuous body of the queue, pulling numerous necks towards the counter, suddenly, as if stung in one of its bends, turned its heads inward to look at who it was wandering around in the spring, like a drunk, and for some time this couple, still imperceptibly attracted snail's steps towards the counter, the general curiosity of the people around him seemed to carry him out of the crowd like a surf...
She noticed the glances directed at them, and even if he felt them, his face did not change at all, as if distant sea stars were looking at them from all sides, and not close ones human eyes. He behaved much more constrained than she, because at that moment his whole fate was in her hands; he didn't pay any attention to the queue. People's eyes ran from him to her and back to him again, because they did not find in her an explanation for the boundless faith and humility that was in his gaze.
In terms of age, she was fit to be a matron, if not for her thinness, even emaciation. The years of a wildly lived youth, like annual rings, closed around her hot brown eyes. Cheeks, lips, eyelids, hair, tinted with basma, were experiencing autumn. It was clear how tired the skin was; together with powder, cream, lipstick, the freshness drained from the face, how many burning tears left, how last year's snow, and love, changing only its name and appearance, like a vampire, sucked away the blush, but the eyes burned with a hundredfold life and irresistible courage, which are only imaginable in a man drowning in a black well, gasping for air, and above him calmly, like close annual rings, the frame narrows, the high sky closes.
That’s how she wanted to jump out, throw herself out of the lazy water onto the unattainable land, where her serene and awkward companion stood, and with her hands, in her iridescent voice, with a child’s hairpin with a butterfly in her hair, she tried to turn back the flow of time or, at least, to gain a foothold in German And she was still babbling something about spring, which she no longer had the right to, trying to cast a spell on the dark water, and the line, dissolving all around the well in which she was floundering, hanging her head, looked at her with interest.
In vain she was so afraid, in vain she put a toy hairpin on herself and played with her voice: her companion now had the same little connection to her pardon as an ordinary messenger has - so he rode to the place of execution, so he raised right hand, and everything became quiet around. The rest is in Her Majesty's power; he is not a man now, he is the messenger of an eccentric queen.
The one that she, not embarrassed by the queue and her greedily protruding ears, very appropriately called “my little bird” for him, was the news into which she superstitiously delved into with her miraculous eyes, understanding: there, behind the canopy swayed by the wind, behind the continuous waterfall of spring, behind the constellations crawling along the slope of the sky, stands a capricious queen, and as she orders, so it will be.
The queue carried them along like an escalator. A tall man in a beautiful cloak with a wise, hopelessly tired face stood nearby, holding his patient daughter by the hand. The woman with hot brown eyes stopped babbling, but then her gaze, sifting through the boring gray faces, seemed to hit his hard eyes with a bang - he grinned subtly into his mustache. “What, did you eat the chick? - said his condescending gaze, ignited by the last feeling accessible to his heart - irony. - Actually, you’re okay, brave girl, I wouldn’t mind it myself. The baby gives you a rook in front of him in the form of his innocent youth, but you, pussy, give him a queen in front of him - your enormous, apparently amorous experience...” She smiled slightly, she was pleased with such attention. The boy did not notice this game of glances, and she continued to chirp. She told him that her previous landlady had lost her childhood photographs, one of them was especially dear to her, there she was as a five-year-old baby with curly hair, dressed up in a snowflake costume, oh yes, she was sorry for these photographs, sorry for the childhood that they could have remind.
Do you remember the address? - the boy asked her hotly. - We have to find this woman, seriously. Yes, we will definitely find her and demand that she give up your cards.
The man in a beautiful raincoat exchanged glances with the woman next door, who was listening to this conversation with a contemptuous grin. The woman was the same age as the chirper. And everyone who listened to them probably experienced the same feeling: constrained, irritated contempt. The men wanted to take this doll by the shoulders and shake it thoroughly so that the doll’s word wouldn’t get stuck on it; the women wanted to spit after this fluttering butterfly - in its small footprint, flying away from their wretched, righteous, martyr’s life. Two girls, friends, also grinned, one said to the other: “The old woman has fallen into childhood.” “That’s for sure,” confirmed the second. The third woman, an older woman, had a thought bubbling in her head like water in a kettle: “Poor guy! God forbid, my boy will come across the same bitch,” the fourth exactly continued her thought: “The stupid boy fell for the old idiot out of loneliness, out of self-doubt...”. Only one girl, the daughter of her tall, tired father, looked at this scene with her mouth open, and listened, listened, looking at the lovers, like the deaf listen, afraid to miss a word, an unfamiliar word...
A few minutes later, the chirper came up to the counter and began to feel for a long time, looking into the light at the thing she wanted to buy.
“Perhaps it will be too big for me,” she said to her companion, “grown-up things are always hanging on me, I’m so thin, really... No, I’ll take it, I’ll take it,” she hurriedly said to the saleswoman, who was already tired of her, “it’s a pity, great, but what can I do... I usually buy everything for myself at Detsky Mir.
In response, the saleswoman only rolled her eyes and took a deep breath, and served the next customer very cordially.
And the lovers, having received the thing, went on their way, followed by their gazes, and through the store window one could see how she kept running forward and looking into his face, like a younger woman to an older one; and then they, like children, held hands and ran across the road between cars from one lane and the other, as if in front of the noses of predators, and where they went, on what weak branch they made their nest - this, of course, remained out of sight people looking after them.
As soon as they got down to business, the grandmother sat Rita down and in a loud voice began to read “Quarteronka” aloud to her. I, with my hearing forked like a snake’s sting, stood in the corridor. "Didn't I warn you?" - the father thundered. "Be quiet and mind your own business!" - Mom squealed. “...a light vision appeared at my headside...” the grandmother read in a rattling voice. The sister listened to the screams from the next room, and her face was sleepy, and the grandmother continued to read in her insincere, weak voice. Mom threw a cup of tea on the floor behind the wall, hot lava overflowed over the threshold and poured into our room: Rita pulled up her legs. Grandma used to defiantly stuff her ears with cotton wool as soon as they started screaming, and when I was little, like Rita, I looked sideways at her in hostile and vain expectation that she was about to intervene and finally say her weighty adult word, but then I realized that she doesn’t have the treasured word in her reserve, she only pretends that she has power, to which she can resort, just a little, and that in fact she is helpless, like Rita and I... But lately grandma has forgotten about cotton wool , because she had a more important concern: not to let Rita fall asleep, who, along the steep turns of warring voices, as if on a railing, was slipping into lethargy, as if Morpheus was blowing into her ears, drowning out the screams behind the wall and freezing off Rita’s long eyelashes.
Maybe she had previously fallen into hibernation to the stormy accompaniment of her parents' quarrels, but they noticed this only after the incident with the iron that her father brought her as a gift from Moscow, which Rita, earning authority in the courtyard, gave to Galinka. No one except me knew what this Galinka was to her, and our parents hardly even suspected her existence. I think that no one later had such unconditional power over Rita as Galinka had, who in the town where we moved was revered by all the little kids, because she was cheerful, dexterous, ran the fastest, jumped the highest, and in general everything She did better than others. Having moved here, we felt lonely for a long time, but Rita got her bearings before me, showed the will and perseverance in settling into new spaces and conquering new people, as if she hoped there, in the yard, to create another friendly family for herself, to build a nest somewhere under a fungus or in sandbox, because hurricanes of family quarrels flew through our parental home every now and then, blowing out the remaining heat, and nothing living could grow there.
Soon new friends began to call her from the yard. She went out onto the balcony like a queen to her people in the proud knowledge that without her, not a single worthwhile game would work out. Long, humiliating requests to let her go into the yard were not always crowned with success, since her father did not tolerate wasting time. Rita went out onto the porch with an imperturbable look, as if she had hesitated because of her own busyness, like Galinka, teaching her cat to give her a paw. So Rita came out, stretching, lazily squinting her eyes, while her whole being sang with joy, perhaps without a crock of salt, because a crumpet of salt would have been clearly too much, and Rita, in an invisible dispute with her father, checked her capabilities down to the millimeter, so as not to break loose, she was a very careful girl. If the sun was shining, Galinka was the queen, she played hopscotch and dodgeball better than anyone, but on rainy days she gave up her championship to Rita, who interestingly recounted the books her grandmother had read to her and made up scary stories: here Galinka sat modestly on a bench next to everyone , craning her neck to better see Rita over the heads of the others. When her father did not give in to her persuasion, who were always very diplomatic and smart (trying to please him, Rita asked to “unload her spine a little” or “collect a herbarium,” that is, to take a useful walk), she again gathered her strength and went out to balcony to inform the waiting public that she is not in the mood for a walk today.
I didn't have enough tricks like that. I was straightforward, just like my father, and I responded to his refusal to let me go outside with a muffled howl; to his question what kind of movie I would like to see, I honestly answered: “Fantômas went wild,” while it was clear as daylight that it should have been called “The Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors,” an instructive fairy tale for children like me. At times I despised the savvy and deceitful Rita, who in the end was crushingly defeated by her ingenuous father, and the unexpected weapon of her father’s victory was that very iron...
Rita gave it to Galinka. She gave it as a gift so simply, as if she had every right to use the iron at her own discretion; She gave it as a gift, as if she could in the future present Galinka with our entire house, and the iron with a red light on the handle is such a trifle that it’s not worth thanking. Galinka, suspecting nothing, took the iron, which Rita looked at with eyes full of despair, because she knew, she could not help but know, what would happen to her from her father when he found out about this. Galinka played with the iron a little and forgot about it that same evening, and after that Rita could not fall asleep for a long time, tossed and groaned, inventing a disease for herself that would delay the hour of reckoning, and during the day she tried not to catch her dad’s eye, and lived for a week in such overwhelming fear that when thunder finally broke over her desperate little head and her father suddenly remembered about the iron, she probably experienced something like relief.
I returned from school and immediately saw that Rita was standing at the epicenter of the earthquake, and above her, unshakably, like a rock, in righteous anger, my father was hanging and asking where the iron that dad had brought from the capital of our Motherland was: at such moments he preferred to talk about himself in the third person, as if moving away from the storm caused by him, as if placing himself as a judge between an unkind, absent-minded girl and her caring father. Rita stood with her head buried in her shoulders, although no finger had touched her yet, she trembled at the roar of his voice, and then I decided to save her...
To be honest, I wasn’t thinking about Rita’s salvation at that moment - I was sick of her calculating cunning, and besides, I remembered the testament of our young, beloved history teacher, who somehow crept up to my desk when I was letting my neighbor copy the basic dates of the Pugachev uprising, thundered in my ear: “Everyone dies alone.” But then I suddenly wanted to feel like Rita, try it on myself, conduct an experiment and find out what happens if a person is smart. I stepped forward and in a childish voice, tongue-tied in my words, like a small child, I said:
Daddy, please forgive me. Ritochka and I were playing with an iron yesterday, and then Zina Zimina came to ask what was assigned in algebra, because she was sick, and said: “Oh, where did you get such a wonderful iron?” Rita answered her: “Dad brought us this iron from Moscow.” Zina said: “Oh, can I show it to my dad so that he can also bring me the exact same one from Moscow - with a light bulb?” I knew that you shouldn’t give things without asking, but the fact is that my mother and grandmother were not at home, and you went into the office to work and asked not to disturb you...
I said all this in one breath, as if on a whim, but then, analyzing my speech, I realized that I had not missed anything, as if someone very smart had told me the words. Everything was verified to the last letter: the mention of Zinka, the daughter of dad’s boss, whom we couldn’t stand, and the hint of the illness she suffered, and the reluctance to bother dad over such a trifle; slight flattery addressed to daddy blew right through this tirade and could soften his hearing...
Then I was convinced from my own experience what a wonderful thing it was not true, because my father’s face smoothed out, and his large palm rested on Rita’s head, extinguishing the storm... Without hesitating for a minute, I slipped out of the house and rushed to Galinka. I knew: it would be a terrible humiliation for Rita if I demanded her gift back from Galinka, but there was nothing to choose from. Galinka was not at home. I babbled to her mother about the iron: apparently, my face was more convincing than my words, because, not listening enough, she stepped aside and pointed me to a box of toys. I dived into it headlong and at the very bottom I found an iron. Forgetting to say thank you, she rushed up the stairs, wiping the iron with a handkerchief as she went, ascended to our floor and presented it to my father. “Okay, okay,” he said absentmindedly, continuing to type.
Polyanskaya Irina
Iron and ice cream
Irina Polyanskaya
Iron and ice cream
As soon as they got down to business, the grandmother sat Rita down and in a loud voice began to read “Quarteronka” aloud to her. I, with my hearing forked like a snake’s sting, stood in the corridor. "Didn't I warn you?" - the father thundered. "Be quiet and mind your own business!" - Mom squealed. “...a light vision appeared at my headside...” the grandmother read in a rattling voice. The sister listened to the screams from the next room, and her face was sleepy, and the grandmother continued to read in her insincere, weak voice. Mom threw a cup of tea on the floor behind the wall, hot lava overflowed over the threshold and poured into our room: Rita pulled up her legs. Grandma used to defiantly stuff her ears with cotton wool as soon as they started screaming, and when I was little, like Rita, I looked sideways at her in hostile and vain expectation that she was about to intervene and finally say her weighty adult word, but then I realized that she doesn’t have the treasured word in her reserve, she only pretends that she has power, to which she can resort, just a little, and that in fact she is helpless, like Rita and I... But lately grandma has forgotten about cotton wool , because she had a more important concern: not to let Rita fall asleep, who, along the steep turns of warring voices, as if on a railing, was slipping into lethargy, as if Morpheus was blowing into her ears, drowning out the screams behind the wall and freezing off Rita’s long eyelashes.
Maybe she had previously fallen into hibernation to the stormy accompaniment of her parents' quarrels, but they noticed this only after the incident with the iron that her father brought her as a gift from Moscow, which Rita, earning authority in the courtyard, gave to Galinka. No one except me knew what this Galinka was to her, and our parents hardly even suspected her existence. I think that no one later had such unconditional power over Rita as Galinka had, who in the town where we moved was revered by all the little kids, because she was cheerful, dexterous, ran the fastest, jumped the highest, and in general everything She did better than others. Having moved here, we felt lonely for a long time, but Rita got her bearings before me, showed the will and perseverance in settling into new spaces and conquering new people, as if she hoped there, in the yard, to create another friendly family for herself, to build a nest somewhere under a fungus or in sandbox, because hurricanes of family quarrels flew through our parental home every now and then, blowing out the remaining heat, and nothing living could grow there.
Soon new friends began to call her from the yard. She went out onto the balcony like a queen to her people in the proud knowledge that without her, not a single worthwhile game would work out. Long, humiliating requests to let her go into the yard were not always crowned with success, since her father did not tolerate wasting time. Rita went out onto the porch with an imperturbable look, as if she had hesitated because of her own busyness, like Galinka, teaching her cat to give her a paw. So Rita came out, stretching, lazily squinting her eyes, while her whole being sang with joy, perhaps without a crock of salt, because a crumpet of salt would have been clearly too much, and Rita, in an invisible dispute with her father, checked her capabilities down to the millimeter, so as not to break loose, she was a very careful girl. If the sun was shining, Galinka was the queen, she played hopscotch and dodgeball better than anyone, but on rainy days she gave up her championship to Rita, who interestingly recounted the books her grandmother had read to her and made up scary stories: here Galinka sat modestly on a bench next to everyone , craning her neck to better see Rita over the heads of the others. When her father did not give in to her persuasion, who were always very diplomatic and smart (trying to please him, Rita asked to “unload her spine a little” or “collect a herbarium,” that is, to take a useful walk), she again gathered her strength and went out to balcony to inform the waiting public that she is not in the mood for a walk today.
I didn't have enough tricks like that. I was straightforward, just like my father, and I responded to his refusal to let me go outside with a muffled howl; to his question what kind of movie I would like to see, I honestly answered: “Fantômas went wild,” while it was clear as daylight that it should have been called “The Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors,” an instructive fairy tale for children like me. At times I despised the savvy and deceitful Rita, who in the end was crushingly defeated by her ingenuous father, and the unexpected weapon of her father’s victory was that very iron...
)
Irina Polyanskaya
Iron and ice cream
As soon as they got down to business, the grandmother sat Rita down and in a loud voice began to read “Quarteronka” aloud to her. I, with my hearing forked like a snake’s sting, stood in the corridor. "Didn't I warn you?" - the father thundered. "Be quiet and mind your own business!" - Mom squealed. “...a light vision appeared at my headside...” the grandmother read in a rattling voice. The sister listened to the screams from the next room, and her face was sleepy, and the grandmother continued to read in her insincere, weak voice. Mom threw a cup of tea on the floor behind the wall, hot lava overflowed over the threshold and poured into our room: Rita pulled up her legs. Grandma used to defiantly stuff her ears with cotton wool as soon as they started screaming, and when I was little, like Rita, I looked sideways at her in hostile and vain expectation that she was about to intervene and finally say her weighty adult word, but then I realized that she doesn’t have the treasured word in her reserve, she only pretends that she has power, to which she can resort, just a little, and that in fact she is helpless, like Rita and I... But lately grandma has forgotten about cotton wool , because she had a more important concern: not to let Rita fall asleep, who, along the steep turns of warring voices, as if on a railing, was slipping into lethargy, as if Morpheus was blowing into her ears, drowning out the screams behind the wall and freezing off Rita’s long eyelashes.
Maybe she had previously fallen into hibernation to the stormy accompaniment of her parents' quarrels, but they noticed this only after the incident with the iron that her father brought her as a gift from Moscow, which Rita, earning authority in the courtyard, gave to Galinka. No one except me knew what this Galinka was to her, and our parents hardly even suspected her existence. I think that no one later had such unconditional power over Rita as Galinka had, who in the town where we moved was revered by all the little kids, because she was cheerful, dexterous, ran the fastest, jumped the highest, and in general everything She did better than others. Having moved here, we felt lonely for a long time, but Rita got her bearings before me, showed the will and perseverance in settling into new spaces and conquering new people, as if she hoped there, in the yard, to create another friendly family for herself, to build a nest somewhere under a fungus or in sandbox, because hurricanes of family quarrels flew through our parental home every now and then, blowing out the remaining heat, and nothing living could grow there.
Soon new friends began to call her from the yard. She went out onto the balcony like a queen to her people in the proud knowledge that without her, not a single worthwhile game would work out. Long, humiliating requests to let her go into the yard were not always crowned with success, since her father did not tolerate wasting time. Rita went out onto the porch with an imperturbable look, as if she had hesitated because of her own busyness, like Galinka, teaching her cat to give her a paw. So Rita came out, stretching, lazily squinting her eyes, while her whole being sang with joy, perhaps without a crock of salt, because a crumpet of salt would have been clearly too much, and Rita, in an invisible dispute with her father, checked her capabilities down to the millimeter, so as not to break loose, she was a very careful girl. If the sun was shining, Galinka was the queen, she played hopscotch and dodgeball better than anyone, but on rainy days she gave up her championship to Rita, who interestingly recounted the books her grandmother had read to her and made up scary stories: here Galinka sat modestly on a bench next to everyone , craning her neck to better see Rita over the heads of the others. When her father did not give in to her persuasion, who were always very diplomatic and smart (trying to please him, Rita asked to “unload her spine a little” or “collect a herbarium,” that is, to take a useful walk), she again gathered her strength and went out to balcony to inform the waiting public that she is not in the mood for a walk today.
I didn't have enough tricks like that. I was straightforward, just like my father, and I responded to his refusal to let me go outside with a muffled howl; to his question what kind of movie I would like to see, I honestly answered: “Fantômas went wild,” while it was clear as daylight that it should have been called “The Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors,” an instructive fairy tale for children like me. At times I despised the savvy and deceitful Rita, who in the end was crushingly defeated by her ingenuous father, and the unexpected weapon of her father’s victory was that very iron...
Rita gave it to Galinka. She gave it as a gift so simply, as if she had every right to use the iron at her own discretion; She gave it as a gift, as if she could in the future present Galinka with our entire house, and the iron with a red light on the handle is such a trifle that it’s not worth thanking. Galinka, suspecting nothing, took the iron, which Rita looked at with eyes full of despair, because she knew, she could not help but know, what would happen to her from her father when he found out about this. Galinka played with the iron a little and forgot about it that same evening, and after that Rita could not fall asleep for a long time, tossed and groaned, inventing a disease for herself that would delay the hour of reckoning, and during the day she tried not to catch her dad’s eye, and lived for a week in such overwhelming fear that when thunder finally broke over her desperate little head and her father suddenly remembered about the iron, she probably experienced something like relief.
I returned from school and immediately saw that Rita was standing at the epicenter of the earthquake, and above her, unshakably, like a rock, in righteous anger, my father was hanging and asking where the iron that dad had brought from the capital of our Motherland was: at such moments he preferred to talk about himself in the third person, as if moving away from the storm caused by him, as if placing himself as a judge between an unkind, absent-minded girl and her caring father. Rita stood with her head buried in her shoulders, although no finger had touched her yet, she trembled at the roar of his voice, and then I decided to save her...
To be honest, I wasn’t thinking about Rita’s salvation at that moment - I was sick of her calculating cunning, and besides, I remembered the testament of our young, beloved history teacher, who somehow crept up to my desk when I was letting my neighbor copy the basic dates of the Pugachev uprising, thundered in my ear: “Everyone dies alone.” But then I suddenly wanted to feel like Rita, try it on myself, conduct an experiment and find out what happens if a person is smart. I stepped forward and in a childish voice, tongue-tied in my words, like a small child, I said:
Daddy, please forgive me. Ritochka and I were playing with an iron yesterday, and then Zina Zimina came to ask what was assigned in algebra, because she was sick, and said: “Oh, where did you get such a wonderful iron?” Rita answered her: “Dad brought us this iron from Moscow.” Zina said: “Oh, can I show it to my dad so that he can also bring me the exact same one from Moscow - with a light bulb?” I knew that you shouldn’t give things without asking, but the fact is that my mother and grandmother were not at home, and you went into the office to work and asked not to disturb you...
I said all this in one breath, as if on a whim, but then, analyzing my speech, I realized that I had not missed anything, as if someone very smart had told me the words. Everything was verified to the last letter: the mention of Zinka, the daughter of dad’s boss, whom we couldn’t stand, and the hint of the illness she suffered, and the reluctance to bother dad over such a trifle; slight flattery addressed to daddy blew right through this tirade and could soften his hearing...
Then I was convinced from my own experience what a wonderful thing it was not true, because my father’s face smoothed out, and his large palm rested on Rita’s head, extinguishing the storm... Without hesitating for a minute, I slipped out of the house and rushed to Galinka. I knew: it would be a terrible humiliation for Rita if I demanded her gift back from Galinka, but there was nothing to choose from. Galinka was not at home. I babbled to her mother about the iron: apparently, my face was more convincing than my words, because, not listening enough, she stepped aside and pointed me to a box of toys. I dived into it headlong and at the very bottom I found an iron. Forgetting to say thank you, she rushed up the stairs, wiping the iron with a handkerchief as she went, ascended to our floor and presented it to my father. “Okay, okay,” he said absentmindedly, continuing to type.
For him, this ironing was a small episode with educational significance. It could not have occurred to him that the iron would roll like an iron roller throughout Rita’s life, squeezing out of my sister her prudence and ingenuity, that no matter how much her fate unwinds her scroll, one could still see the trace of the iron on it, and in the future, Having adopted the vaunted worldly wisdom from Rita, I cannot help her in any way. The iron did its iron work.
Feigning indifference on my face, as if defeating my father had cost me nothing, I entered our room and saw Rita sitting on the bed, rocking back and forth. I sat down next to her and whispered: “It’s okay, here’s the iron.” But Rita, with her eyes closed, continued to sway. And then I said: “Listen, Galinka won’t even remember about the iron, she wasn’t at home.” Rita, with bleary eyes, pulled the cape off the pillow and fell into bed, and slept until evening; She slept so soundly that they forced her to brush her teeth at night. The next day they let her go for a walk, but she silently shook her head. They shouted in unison from the yard: “Rit, come out!”, but Rita did not go out onto the balcony. Rita began to walk with her dad in the park, followed him as if glued to him, but when she and her mother started an argument, she suddenly began to hibernate, and the grandmother somehow drew attention to this and began to be afraid that her granddaughter might inadvertently fall asleep forever, Therefore, that day, when my mother broke a cup of tea on the floor, as soon as my sister began to rock somnambulistically on the bed, my grandmother slammed the “Quarteron”, and together we led Rita by the hands to the stairs.
We left the battlefield: I slid down the railing, grandmother, feeling the steps with her wand, brought Rita down. On the street, my grandmother and I, like well-mannered guests who accidentally ran into the hosts’ scandal, began talking about abstract topics.
Our young city expanded its heroic shoulders on the Zhiguli Mountains. He was completely new, tough as a nut. The grandmother sadly remarked that it was good to live in a young city for young people, and leaned over to smell the rose bush foaming from the front garden. There was a lot of greenery in the city, flowers looking out from round and rectangular flower beds. As people, they settled in separate colonies. Since the city nobility and pioneers lived in the center, the city square was crowned with purebred roses. Along the main street, burgundy dahlias and double asters cheerfully pranced, daisies spread along other streets, columns of gladioli stood on the march, the outskirts breathed with marigolds, lilacs and other lumpen flowers.
Our mischievous history teacher ran past us, jumping across the lawns, casually sharing a nod between me and grandma, and cheerfully inquired: “Are we taking a walk?” - “What are you, what are you...” - the grandmother kindly protested, and I shouted after him: “We’re taking a walk, and how!”, and vindictively said to the grandmother: “Ritka and I should have such a folder!” I was groping for the boundaries within which I could stay with her now, after I realized that all grandma knew was to plug her ears with cotton wool, and to stand up for the children, she used pipes. And if she doesn’t answer me to this remark, it means that grandma is really weak, you can walk on your head in front of her. But the grandmother could not remain silent, which, in my opinion, would have been more worthy, she could not help but make a remark, she shifted the emphasis to something else. “Not Ritka, but Rita,” she automatically corrected.
We walked further past frolicking girls with ringing, childish voices so beloved by their father, with large children's nylon bows glowing in the sun, with children's scratches on their knees. Rita could barely move her feet, and we sat down on a park bench. Grandmother said again: “How nice it is to be young in such a young city...”, and I chuckled contemptuously, because I couldn’t stand this city and thought that if I got out of here, it would never lure me back, I would remember it all my life its like a bad dream...
(...Then why now does this city constantly call me to itself, which of us cannot do without whom? Why does it fly to me with entire streets, individual squares, truncated cones of houses that actually stood in a different order, and I can’t find the way to the pharmacy?.. And sometimes you make your way along a familiar alley through the fog and just can’t get to the editorial office of the newspaper “Banner of Communism”, in which my grandmother published her funny poems. I dream of both balconies of our home: under one she often sang a wedding, under another a funeral slowly dragged on. In a dream they change places, I look down and am surprised: there is a funeral orchestra in the sandbox, and the musicians’ legs move apart, as if on ice, and one note suddenly jumps like a sparrow on the tennis table!.. It also happens - the whole city collapses and flows into some detail - into an ice cream kiosk near the cinema "XXth Party Congress". in my dark pocket until I plunge into this darkness myself, and then I sadly stand at the post office and send some money to Rita and nothing to my grandmother, because both in my dreams and in reality I remember that in the country where she now lives, there is money invalid...)
We were sitting opposite the 20th Party Congress, kneading the heads of snapdragons in our fingers, and suddenly my grandmother said:
Here's the news! The booth is working! They sell ice cream. I haven't eaten ice cream in ages!
The sister perked up. We went to the booth and stood right next to the window: and indeed, there was ice cream in the cold, long cans, and an unfamiliar saleswoman was cutting a package of crispy cups with scissors. The grandmother, leaning her wand against the booth, slammed her hands on her pockets, but, as always, it turned out that the wallet was left at home. And both of them, Rita and grandmother, looked at me with hope. I looked to the side, trying not to rattle my change in my pocket. My money is also holding its breath. Grandmother said:
I'll give you the houses.
But I didn't believe her anymore. She didn’t like to repay debts: it used to be that you would buy her and Ritka pillows with their own, saved at school, and then her grandmother would say that she gave her entire pension to her mother, and she would even be loudly surprised so that her father would hear - why do you need money? And I saved up for one very necessary thing, every day I ran to the store to see if it was already sold out.
Rita tugged at my sleeve, but I turned away. It wasn't just the thing I was saving money for. I stood and thought: you all can live as you want! no one helps me, when my father pulls me by the hair, no one will intervene, as if this is the way it should be, so that he rubs my nose into my incomprehensible guilt... Screw you! I used to shed tears, Ritka was sleeping peacefully, and my grandmother said: “Today you drove another nail into your father’s coffin!”, My mother just silently brought a wet towel to my bed. Everyone exists in their own hole, if you want to live, know how to move around, our young teacher says, as if jokingly, but I know, I see them all right through now - and he’s not joking, he thinks so, he has such faith that everyone dies alone. Everyone spins as best they can, and there is no point in looking at me with pitiful eyes!
I turned to them to explain why I couldn’t part with my money, and then I was suddenly surprised by their unexpected similarity... They looked at me with the same expression on their faces, round, childish eyes, in which there was no cunning, only desire enjoy ice cream. They looked at me as if licking their lips in advance. And I pressed my money tighter to the bottom of my pocket so that it wouldn’t inadvertently come loose and leave me, like my newfound worldly wisdom, and that day I didn’t buy them ice cream.
