(c) Vladislav Krapivin 1975,2000
(c) Translated by Jan Yevtushenko, 1984
Vladislav Krapivin
The Magic Carpet
To my little
drummer Pavlik
I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night feeling tremendously
happy and then lie there staring at the ceiling, trying to remember why.
Why of course! Only a moment ago Vitalka was laughing here beside me.
No, not that tall thin man by the name of Vitaly Andreyevich who recently
came to stay: I mean the real Vitalka - a young lad in a blue tee shirt
with shaggy fair hair, peeling sunburnt shoulders and scratched bony
elbows.
Yes, only a moment ago we were flying over familiar streets together
with our legs dangling from the carpet. The warm wind seemed to be
beating its soft furry wings against our legs and the morning sun was
warming our backs.
Drifting past down below were dark green clumps of poplars, brown
iron roofs and the silver dome of the town circus. Rising out of the
scanty yellow clouds and heading towards us was the white belfry, which
looked like a fortress tower, and looming in its top windows were bells
which had withstood the passage of time. Its convex roof was made of
rusty iron squares, some of which had come off and were sticking up as if
the roof had been ruffled by the wind.
Vitalka and I sat with our arms round each other's shoulders and
laughed. How funny that ruffled roof looked! How funny those small
toy-like barges and launches were on the river below! How funny one of
Vitalka's old canvas shoes had dropped off his foot! It was worn down at
the heel and had developed a little hole in the part covering his big
toe, so we did not bother chasing it. After landing on the circus dome
and swishing downwards like a toboggan down a slope, it jumped off the
cornice as off a ski-jump and somersaulted into the dense poplars.
"Kick the other one off!" I yelled for what good was one shoe?
But Vitalka shook his head, got a reel of cotton out of his pocket
and tied it to his shoe.
"I'll tow it!" he said.
We swooped sharply down towards the river and flew so low over the
water that our feet dipped into it and swept up fountains of spray and
foam. Vitalka let go of his shoe and skimmed the water behind us as if it
really was in tow. What fun that was!
"A hydrofoil!" I shouted and laughed so much I fell flat on my back
and kicked my wet feet in the air.
The thread snapped and the shoe went on swimming along on its own.
Sooner or later some unlucky fisherman was bound to fish it out instead
of a gudgeon. What a joke! We flew under an old wooden bridge creaking
under the weight of heavy lorries, and began climbing towards some old
white walls and towers on a grassy slope...
... My memories gradually fade but I still feel happy and lie there
smiling in the dark because, you see, it all actually happened. And so
what if it's over! What really matters is that it actually happened!
Yes, it really did.
Chapter One
I spent my childhood in a small northern town spreading on the bank
of a large river. The houses were mostly made of wood with plank
pavements running along their board fences and intricate patterns carved
on their lopsided old gates. And behind the gates stretched spacious
yards covered with soft grass and dandelions with dense burdock and
nettle patches around their edges. In the yards stood sheds and long
stacks of pine and birch logs which smelt of forests and mushrooms.
What a lot of space there was. There was even enough for a game of
football - unless some had hung out their washing on the lines.
Of course, there were new districts in the town as well, five-storey
houses made out of multi-coloured blocks. Here and there you came across
old brick buildings with columns and patterned balconies, but most of the
streets were lined with one and two-storey wooden houses, which, unlike
peasant cottages, had large, two-metre-high windows.
The streets ran down to the steep riverbank where stood a stone
monastery which had been built on the orders of Peter the Great(*). It
* Peter the Great (1672-1725) -
Russian tsar; it was on his instructions
that a navy was formed in Russia, towns
and fortresses built, factories and workshops
opened and the Academy of Sciences founded. (Tr.)
was not only a monastery but also a fortress with high walls and towers
with narrow loopholes.
Rising high over the walls and towers and church's domes was a white
belfry with a huge round black clock, about three metres in diameter. It
was a pity that the clock did not work.
It had stopped a very long time ago, in 1919, during the Civil
War(**). Word has it that a machine-gunner climbed to the top of the
** The Civil War (1918-1920) - the struggle
waged by Russia to defend the state of
workers and peasants established after
the Revolution of 1917 against counter-
revolutionary forces attempting to restore
the rule of the rich in the country. (Tr.)
belfry and kept half the town under fire for a long time. Finally, a
steam tug, which had been converted into a gunboat and named "World
Revolution", chugged round Stony Cape and let rip at the belfry from its
gun.
What happened to the machine-gunner is anyone's guess, but the clock
was damaged and stopped ringing. Nobody tried to mend it. Its wooden
beams and staircase were badly burnt and wrecked and so it was
practically impossible to get near the clock. And even if you did, how
could you fathom out its complex mechanism? You see, it had been forged
from bronze, turned and assembled by a self-taught clock-maker back in
the time of Catherine II(*) and he had not left a draft behind him.
* Catherine II (1729-1796) - Empress of
Russia from 1762.
Anyway, who had time for clocks in those days? In the '30s someone
decided to blow the whole monastery up and take it apart brick by brick
as had been done with several churches. True, the plan was never carried
out but nobody thought of repairing the belfry a shipyard and a new port.
Then the war(**) broke out and afterwards there were plenty of other
things that needed doing.
** Second World War in Russia (1941-1945).
That is why the hands on the huge clock-face looming over the town
like a black moon stood at five to one for over forty years.
But all the same the belfry was beautiful and famous. It was
especially admired by ship captains. All the motorships going down-stream
from Stony Cape set their course on the belfry and it was on all the
pilots' charts.
Motorships often passed by. Vitalka and I would go to sleep and wake
up to the sound of their drawn-out and rather sad hooting.
Vitalka and I lived together or, at least, in summer we did, ever
since we made friends. And that was simply ages ago and two years before
the adventure with the carpet. I was then going on eight and Vitalka had
only just turned nine. He saved me then. It's a long story with a sad
beginning but a happy ending.
Before I was born, my father had fought in the war against the nazis.
He returned home alive but he had had a lung wound. At first it did not
cause him much pain and he started working as a physics teacher and
married. Then I came along. The years rolled quietly by and then all of a
sudden he fell ill again and died.
Mother and I lived alone for almost three years but when I was in the
first year at school, Uncle Seva, Vsevolod Sergeyevich, that is, and
five-year-old Lena appeared on the scene. He worked in the river-port's
administration and wore a cap with an anchor.
But neither this cap nor its owner appealed to me. Nothing about him
did, not even his manner of talking, rather muffled and hollow, almost
the same as Dad's.
Ha had a thin face, a beard, to straight wrinkles above his thick
brows, and large brown eyes. If you weren't trying to find fault with it,
you could say it was a perfectly normal and even pleasant face. His eyes
weren't angry-looking but quite the reverse and he used to gaze adoringly
at Mum and rather guilty at me.
Who wanted his looks, guilty or not!
Don't imagine I was rude to him or sulked. No, I always said good
morning and good night to him and even started calling him Uncle Seva
instead of Vsevolod Sergeyevich. Because Mum asked me to. But whenever
Uncle Seva tried to pat my shoulder or stroke my head, I shied away as if
I had been stung. And I could do nothing about it, and, to tell the
truth, did not want to.
And then there was Lenka! She immediately fastened to Mum as if she
had always been her daughter. Even started calling her Mummy! Whenever
she did that, I shuddered as if cold drops of water were trickling down
my neck. Mum once took me aside, stood me in front of her and said
quietly, "Oleg, darling... She's only little. And she doesn't even
remember her own mother. Can't you understand how hard it is not to have
a mother?"
I did understand. Oh yes, I understood that perfectly well! Of course
I did! Even in my last year at kindergarten, I was ready to burst into
tears if mother was held back and did not arrive in time to pick me up.
And whenever she went out to the cinema in the evening, I was plunged
into grief as into icy water.
That's why I swallowed the lump in my throat and nodded. But it makes
no difference how often you nod if you still feel resentful.
I wasn't mean to Lenka. Sometimes I even went to the kindergarten to
collect her. And once I showed her how to make two-funnelled little
steamers out of paper. But when Lenka took my china kitten without asking
and dropped it smashing it to smithereens that was the last straw.
Silently, choking back my tears, I gathered all the pieces in a newspaper
(thinking I might glue them back together later) and got my old school
satchel from under the sofa.
I stuffed the bits of china into my satchel along with a sweater, a
book entitled "The Snow Queen", a bottle of water, half a loaf of bread,
a length of sliced sausage, a box of matches and Dad's "For Victory"
medal on its black and orange ribbon. Then I took my school uniform out
the wardrobe: trousers with a neat patch over the left knee, shirt with
buttons like army ones except without stars, and belt with a brass buckle
inscribed with twigs, a book and the letter "S". Over the long months of
school life I had got fed up with this uniform, which was lumbering and
heavy like a knight's armour. But what could I do? You won't get far on a
long journey without warm clothes.
"Are you going to school?" Lenka asked dejectedly.
"You fool," I said vindictively. "Who goes to school during the
holidays?"
I wiped my eyes, snapped my buckle and dug my feet into Mum's rubber
boots, which were far too big for me. I turned back their tops so that
they look like hunters' or musketeers' boots and poked the long thin
dagger I had made from a metal hacksaw down the right one. Its handle
was wrapped in insulating tape and its hilt was made of copper wire.
Finally, I put a small spade down my left boot.
I also took the gun with a tight rubber band which fired
aluminium-wire pellets. One of them could go right through a thick sheet
of paper thirty feet away. And if you hit a wild animal in the eye, it
was as good as dead.
Without saying another word to Lenka, I left home, stamping loudly
along in my boots and silently bidding farewell to childhood.
I decided to head for the woods on the other side of the river and
make a dugout among the roots of an old tree. I would sleep on bedding
made of sweet-smelling forest grass, hunt hares and sit by a small cosy
camp-fire in the evenings, talking to my faithful dog and reading it the
fairy-tale about the Snow Queen. After covering a whole block at a fairly
brisk pace, I began to feel less sure of myself.
In my heart of hearts I knew perfectly well that I would hardly
manage to make a real dugout suitable for living in not only in summer
but also winter. I also realised it would be terrifying to sit alone by
a campfire. And, what's more, I felt very bad about killing lovely,
sweet little hares which I had read tons of stories about.
But most of all (why make a secret of it) I felt sad about leaving
Mum.
My faithful dog Jim (which lived in our street and was not really
mine) treacherously left me as soon as I had fed it my last bit of
sausage. I stopped at a crossroads completely at a loss about what to do
next.
I would have been simply delighted if Mum and Uncle Seva had spotted
me then: they should have been coming back from the cinema at any moment.
Mum would have taken me firmly by the hand, led me home, given me a good
scolding and perhaps even put me in the corner behind the wash basin.
But I wouldn't have minded! I would have been captured but not defeated.
But how could I go home myself! It would be such a disgrace and such a
defeat!
But Mum and Uncle Seva did not appear, and all that was left for me
to do was lie down in the gutter and die of grief. However, this was not
a very suitable place to die in, firstly, because passers-by would see me
and, secondly, because although it was evening, it was very hot and I was
sweating in my trekking gear. Just try lying down to die in such stifling
heat! You wouldn't lie there long, I assure you.
So nothing was left to do but keep going. I wandered on, and another
half block later destiny sent me Vitalka, who was trotting along the edge
of the pavement, rolling a barrel hoop ahead of him. He stopped a short
distance away from me and spun the hoop round and round until it became a
transparent ball. Then he burst out laughing, banged the "ball" on its
head, stopped its spinning, looked up and spotted me.
"Hey, Oleg! Where are you off to?"
We knew each other by sight but had never been friends. We simply
played in the same crowd sometimes. I did not even know where he lived.
But it just so happened that it was he I ran into on my sad journey.
"Going to camp?" he asked.
I knew if I started speaking, I would burst into tears and so I just
shook my head. Vitalka stopped laughing and enquired in a different
tone, "Going to the woods?"
I nodded. Vitalka grew serious and for some reason or other put the
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