hoop over his shoulder, looked me over, taking in my boots and satchel
and asked quietly, "For good?"
I did not even wonder how he had guessed, as all that mattered now
was keeping my tears back and so I nodded again.
Vitalka walked around me, carefully touched my satchel then stood in
front of me again. For the very first time I had a good look at Vitalka's
eyes.
He was a wise fellow even in those days.
"What'll you do along in the woods? he asked. "Better come to my
place."
If I had not been afraid of opening my mouth, I would have started
arguing. How could I go home with someone I hardly knew? He'd probably
get into hot water with his folks who would say he had brought a tramp in
from the street.
But I could not say anything and standing there in silence was
ridiculous and so, with hanging head, I set off beside Vitalka.
He took me into an old house, through its hall and up a creaking
staircase to a small low-ceilinged room furnished with a couch on blocks,
a lopsided table and an antiquated chair with voluted arms and a spring
sticking out of its bottom. Its walls were lined with pictures of some
sort but I did not pay any attention to them at the time.
Vitalka dragged my satchel off me and said, "Look, you're sweaty all
over. Slip your things off and go and wash."
It was a relief to clamber out of my armour-like trekking gear.
Vitalka gave me his old slippers to wear instead of my boots and took me
downstairs to the wash basin.
The basin turned out to be just like the one at home: blue enamelled
with a long bolt for a tap which you pushed up and then a stream of water
gushed into your palms.
So familiar and homely was the basin that I hurriedly dipped my face
into my palms full of water.
At once I began feeling better.
"Perhaps everything will sort itself out after all," I thought.
Vitalka obviously sensed that I had cheered up for he slapped his wet
palm on my back above the low neck of my tee shirt and said brightly,
"Quick march!"
We "quick marched" into a room with a cut-glass chandelier which was
on although it was still quite light outside. This sparkling glassy light
was all I noticed at first.
"Auntie Valya, this is Oleg. Give us something to eat, will you?"
said Vitalka.
And then I spotted Auntie Valya.
"Go-od ev-en-ing..." I stammered in terror.
Auntie Valya was looking at us over her spectacles. She was tall,
hook-nosed and wearing a blue dress with a stand-up collar. Her smooth
hair was gathered in a tight bun at the back. I had seen stern thin
ladies like her in an English film about a boy called David Copperfield,
but never before had I met anyone like her in real life.
She nodded in reply to my "good evening" and said to Vitalka,
"Something to eat? Well... But have you washed your hands?"
Vitalka stretched out his palms spread wide and waved them about, and
as I did not dare to he took my hands and showed them to Auntie Valya
too.
"Well, in that case..." she said. "Off you go to the kitchen."
Then we ate sausages and hot potatoes and drank cold milk. I
remembered mother's lessons on how to behave at other people's houses and
sat straight with my elbows off the table and tried to handle my knife
and fork properly.
But Vitalka dangled his legs and drank the milk noisily.
"You ought to learn some table manners from your friend," remarked
Auntie Valya.
"He's just feeling shy because it's his first visit here," retorted
Vitalka fearlessly. (Alas, he later proved to be right.)
"Do you live far away?" Auntie Valya asked me.
"Why, no!" Vitalka hurriedly intervened. "He lives in our street, at
Number Fourteen where that dog Jim comes from. Know where I mean?
I expected Auntie Valya to angrily ask why she should remember dogs
called Jim, but she simply nodded.
"He's going to stay here tonight," said Vitalka in a very casual sort
of way.
Auntie Valya raised her brows slightly.
"Here we go," I thought with dread and got ready to be bombarded with
questions. Auntie Valya glanced at Vitalka, however, lowered her brows
and said, "Take another pillow upstairs."
...We lay down on Vitalka couch. It was rather cramped but it did not
matter...
"Out with it then," ordered Vitalka.
I knew I would have to tell him. The only problem was I did not know
how to explain everything.
"Left home for goods?" Vitalka whispered.
I sighed.
"Had a thrashing?" he asked understandingly.
"Why, no! Nobody even laid a finger on me!"
"But you've been hurt in other ways, have you?"
I swallowed the lump in me throat again.
"No, it's not that... It's because of Lenka... Well, not only her but
things in general. And because of the kitten..."
And so I began telling him. And very soon, of course, burst into
tears. Vitalka did not try and comfort me but simply asked me to repeat
certain things when I paused. And after hearing me out, he said wisely,
"Well, never mind. This sort of thing often happens..."
"Yes, that's true!" I thought. "But whatever's going on at home now?"
I threw back the blanket.
"Where are you off to?"
"I'm going home. Mum's probably out searching for me..."
Vitalka drew the blanket over me.
"She knows. Auntie Valya went and told her. You can go home
tomorrow."
I felt absolutely exhausted. Gratefully I nuzzled against Vitalka's
bony shoulder and fell fast asleep.
I woke up very early, left Vitalka asleep and carefully tiptoed down
into the hall and unlatched the door.
And then I rushed home like the wind! Mum was waiting for me by the
gate. She took hold of my shoulders. Her palms were dry and hot.
I smiled inanely and looked down at my feet in Vitalka's slippers.
"Oleg, darling," she said, "promise me that you won't set off on any
distant journeys without warning me first. Agreed?"
"Okay..." I replied hoarsely and buried my face in mother's blouse.
Later that day I ran over to see Vitalka. He must have been waiting
for me because he was sitting on the porch under the patterned awning
watching me walk up.
"Come for your things?" he said.
"No. I've just dropped round... Is that alright?"
He smiled and at once seemed the same age as me and no older.
"Let's climb up to my watchtower!"
... In the evening we persuaded mother to let me sleep at Vitalka's
again.
"He's got a telescope. We're going to look at the moon," I said in a
pleading tone, hopping with impatience.
"And we haven't finished making our soldiers," Vitalka chimed in.
Mum signed for some reason and gave in.
... And so my things stayed at Vitalka's. Even Mum's boots, and Dad's
medal, and the gun, the dagger and the kitten, too. Vitalka's father,
Andrei Nikolayevich, glued it together when he came back from one of his
trips. He also knocked together another bed opposite Vitalka's, pulled
his cap (just like Uncle Seva's) over my ears and said, "Enjoy
yourselves, lads..."
Chapter Two
Andrei Nikolayevich Gorodetsky was the captain of the cargo motorboat
"Tobolsk". He sailed down the river from our town to the sea, and
sometimes even sailed across the sea. Vitalka's mother always went with
him, working either a cook or a waitress. They were away for a month or
more at a time and spent only a few days at home between trips. And thus
they worked from springtime until the rivers became icebound. While they
were away Vitalka and Auntie Valya lived alone (and then I appeared).
They lived in a spacious old house which Auntie Valya's grandfather
had bought in his youth. Auntie Valya told how her grandfather had been
most reluctant to buy it but was then appointed principal of a grammar
school and it was considered improper for a headmaster to live in a
rented apartment. In the small town he was regarded as a very important
person. Later, however, he got the sack because revolutionaries had been
holding meetings in his house. Nevertheless, the house continued to be
known as the "principal's" right up to the 1917 Revolution, and the
authorities always regarded it as a "dangerous den".
There were many old things in the house. Staring down grimly at
Vitalka and me from framed photographs on the walls were bearded men in
long uniform coats and ladies in ankle-length dresses. Behind the
coloured-glass panels of the dresser sparkling cut-glass goblets were
lined. Auntie Valya cherished them greatly. There was a bookcase
containing thick tomes and journals. The books seemed boring to us but we
sometimes browsed through the bound collections of literary journals.
Auntie Valya had a cuckoo clock with a large cuckoo covered with real
feathers, which used to spring or rather flop out of a little window
every half-hour and hang on a thin spring, hoarsely crying something
halfway between "cuckoo" and "quack-quack". Vitalka and I were often
woken up at night by this eerie cry, but Auntie Valya never awoke
although she slept in the same room where the clock was. She was a deep
sleeper, and this often saved us from a scolding.
The kitchen was dominated by a huge bronze samovar with medals
stamped in its round belly. Whenever he was at home, Andrei Nikolayevich
enjoyed "stoking the works", as he put it, and we would spend the whole
evening sitting at the table while the samovar hissed and puffed and
pretended to be angry.
But the gramophone with its huge horn stood completely idle as Auntie
Valya played even her favourite old records of Chaliapin and Sobinov(*)
on an ordinary modern record player. And so the old gramophone simply
dozed under a crocheted napkin on a little table in the corner. Of course
it felt neglected! After all, its mechanism and powerful spring worked
just as well as they had done years ago.
(*) Fyodor Ivanovich Chalapin
(1873-1938) and Leonid
Vitalyevich Sobinov (1872-1934) -
famous Russian singers
When Auntie Valya went out, we used to stand the gramophone on the
floor, unhook its horn, wind its handle as far as it would go and then
take turns to sit on its turntable, which was covered with crimson
velvet. Slowly and then faster and faster the gramophone would spin you
around.
Oh, what fun it was! The room whirled round and round and everything
would turn into multi-coloured stripes. The main thing was not to get
frightened and keep your balance so you did not fly off the turntable.
Well, and if you did, it did not matter much: you simply crashed to the
floor, sat there until your head stopped spinning, and then got up.
Getting on his feet, Vitalka always used to slap the back of his trousers
in a business-like manner to make sure the record pintle had not made a
hole in them and then say, "What good training it is! Just like being
test pilots!"
Nowadays any boy would say, "Just like being astronauts", but there
weren't any at that time for, you see, Vitalka and I became friends three
months before the first sputnik was launched.
Auntie Valya, it seemed to me, guessed about our antics with the
gramophone. In fact, she guessed about many things and forgave many
things, too, because she only looked strict.
Incidentally, she was the sister of Vitalka's grandmother and not his
aunt, and Vitalka's father was her nephew. He had lost his parents at an
early age and she had brought him up. And now she was bringing up
Vitalka, and me into the bargain because I used to stay at their house
for days at a time during the summer months.
So how did she go about our upbringing? Well, she considered that
boys should not smoke, gamble or swear, and that was all she really
minded about.
As for smoking... Well, we did try once. I found a sealed packet of
cigarettes in a ditch one day and we hid behind the shed and lit up...
It was ghastly! I went around for the rest of the day feeling as if I had
drunk a bowl of soapy water and everything around was wrapped in a
revolting pea-green fog. Vitalka did not feel any better either. I never
touched a cigarette since even when I grew up. I once asked Vitalka when
he was much older if he had started smoking and he replied as he had done
as a young lad, "Do you think I'm bonkers?"
We never gambled either. More often than not we did not have any
money and if we did, we shared it. So what was the point of winning it
off each other?
We sometimes used swear words but Auntie Valya did not understand
them because we made them up on the spur of the moment, depending on what
had happened. Sometimes they sounded like the curses, she would say,
"Vitalka and Oleg! You're quite impossible people."
That meant she was really angry and we had to keep quiet and mind how
we behaved. And if we did not, she would say, "I'll turn you out of the
house and you can sleep in the yard until you learn to behave decently
again."
But not once did she ever drop a hint to me that it was her house and
not mine and that I ought not forget this, for, to tell the truth, I
sometimes did.
Mum felt I was running away from home because of Uncle Seva and Lenka
and this upset her, but it was no longer true. You see, Vitalka and I had
become inseparable and there was nothing else to it.
Mum finally realised this but something else continued to worry her.
You see, I had never suffered from lack of appetite, and I ate more meals
at Auntie Valya's than at home.
"How can she feed the two of you on her pension?" Mum would ask
anxiously.
She was not reassured when I informed her that besides Auntie Valya's
pension, she also had Vitalka's parents' wages. I found out later that
Mum had even tried to offer Auntie Valya money for my "keep" but Auntie
Valya had firmly said, "We'll let this matter drop."
Auntie Valya never said much in general and if everything was running
smoothly, we knew beforehand what she would say. For instance, in the
mornings she used to thump the ceiling with her mop handle and call,
"Gentlemen! The sun's up! It's time you were, too!"
And before breakfast she was bound to say, "I do hope you've washed,
even if it was a lick and a promise?"
And in the evenings when we came in from the street after a hard day,
she always said, "Lord! Just look at yourselves!"
Well, and if we had, what would we have seen? The likenesses of our
Mums and Dads, I suppose (although I only saw my dad on photographs
then). Otherwise, ordinary little boys. Each, of course, something
special as well.
Vitalka was slightly taller than me with fair hair which was always
far too long and unkempt. He had long greyish-green eyes, a large mouth,
thick lips, but a thin, very slightly hooked nose with five yellow
Новинки >> Русской фантастики (по файлам) | Форумов | Фэндома | Книг