"Is now all right?"
"Yes."
"Well, that's fine then," I said, straightened the dagger in my belt
and walked out.
Back at home I told Mum that the head-teacher wanted to see her, but
that I had not done anything wrong and it was all to do with the magic
carpet.
"I knew as much," she said and left off her work in the kitchen and
went into her room. Five minutes later she reappeared in the beautiful
dress she wore out to friends' or the theatre. She glanced quickly at me
and said, "Well, at least change your shirt. You look like a scarecrow."
But I quickly explained that I had already been to school looking
"like a scarecrow" and that it had nothing to do with my clothes. They
wanted to ban our flying. So mother simply waved her hand and off we set.
We walked along side by side: beautiful, determined-looking mother
and her good-for-nothing son in a faded tee shirt, crumpled shorts and
with a wooden dagger in his belt.
I could see that Mum was slightly annoyed but could not decide
whether I or someone else was the cause.
When we appeared in the head-teacher's office, the scientist had
already left.
"Do be seated," Vera Severyanovna said to Mum.
Mum sat down while I remained standing by the door. However, I no
longer felt defenceless - because Mum was there and because of things in
general... I stood and waited and Mum sat and waited, too.
"I want to have a word with you about your son," began Vera
Severyanovna. "I must say he's giving me concern."
"Really?" said mother in a restrained manner and looked attentively
at me.
"Yes. As far as I remember, he was one of the top pupils in his class
last year but I'm afraid he won't be this year."
"But the term's only just begun," remarked mother.
"But it's begun in a bad way for him!" Vera Severyanovna retorted.
"Look at what he and Gorodetsky have got up to! Flying through the air,
indeed!"
"But, you know, children will..." Mum began carefully.
"That's the whole point - they're children! Let them finish school
first and then start flying. We can hardly control them on the ground as
it is, but what if all children start racing through the air?"
"All children won't," I butted in. "Not everyone's got a flying
carpet..."
Vera Severyanovna looked at me as if she had only just noticed my
existence and said, flatly, "Go out into the corridor, Lapnikov."
What a mean trick to play! They were going to discuss my magic carpet
with me out in the corridor! I looked at Mum in confusion.
"Go on, Oleg," she said sternly.
I strode out in a huff and stood by the window. Through the door I
could hear Mum's quiet voice and Vera Severyanovna's loud one but did not
try to work out what they were saying. Eavesdropping was below my
dignity!
Then the voices stopped and Mum came out and quietly said, "Let's
go."
And so we walked side by side down the corridor and the stairs and
across the school yard in silence.
Outside in the street Mum put her hand on my shoulder and said in a
rather strange way, "Well, darling..."
I looked up.
"What?"
She paused and then asked gravely, "Do you really have to fly?"
"Of course, we do," I said hastily. "Well, Mum, how can we not fly
when we've a flying carpet..."
"Well, keep on with it, then," said Mum.
And so we did, all that warm September and the following summer and
the one after that...
Then we went flying less often. We had grown older and had various
other new interests. In the eighth form Vitalka started falling in love
every month and had his head in the clouds without flying on any carpet.
And I started writing poetry and was always feeling down in the dumps
because the local newspaper had just turned down yet another poem.
The carpet was packed away in the box-room again and Auntie Valya
started storing her broken furniture in the attic room.
We left school and, before we knew it, had completely grown up.
Things did not quite work out as we had dreamed: Vetka became a
children's doctor and not a ballerina. Mind you, a very good one and all
the children in her district in Leningrag are fond of her. Breezy did, in
fact, end up doing what he wanted to - he became a navigator in the
Arctic air force. He now has a chubby little three-year-old son called
Alyoshka who is not at all like the Breezy we knew.
After listening to my heart, the doctors on the naval training
school's selection committee advised me to consider a profession on dry
land. So I started writing books for children and I must say I am now
very pleased about my profession.
Vitalka or, rather, Vitaly Andreyevich now lives near Moscow and
teaches art at a school supervising lessons, taking the children on
excursions and teaching them to draw rainbows, sunsets, moonlit lakes,
green groves, and blue rivers and to appreciate the world's beauty.
However, that is by no means all that he does. He recently sent me a
copy of a thick art magazine containing insets of paintings by young
artists which had been awarded prizes at a national exhibition. Among
them was Vitaly Gorodetsky's "Childhood Memories".
Drifting over the green earth, motley roofs and clumps of trees and
under the bright morning clouds is a magic carpet carrying two little
boys; one is sitting on the edge with his tanned legs dangling over the
side, one foot bare and the other just about to lose its sandal. The boy
is laughing with his head thrown back and looking up at the clouds.
Blazing in the sunlight under the clouds is a rectangular kite. The
other little boy is lying on his stomach with his feet in the air, gazing
down below at a little girl standing by a porch made of fresh yellow
planks. From high up she seems very tiny and in actual fact is not very
big either.
The girl is not looking at the flying carpet but at the roof of the
house where a boy in a green shirt, which is flapping in the wind, is
pulling on the string of the kite. It is the height of summer, so much so
that the painting seems to smell of goosefoot, wormwood, river sand and
sun-drenched wooden fences.
Gazing at the painting, I felt a mixture of joy and sorrow - joy
because the painting radiated it, and sorrow because I felt as if a
window looking out onto childhood - a land of no return - had been flung
open for an instant.
And I also felt envious of Vitalka for describing the fairy-tale
world of our childhood so wonderfully well in his painting! But what had
I done? How had I thanked our magic carpet? I decided there and then to
write a book about it and this is the result. However, in order to write
it, I first had to go back and visit my home town and remember
everything.
But I was afraid to. I felt the town would be different from how I
remembered it. The houses would be low and old, the streets narrow and
the river small and murky.
But I was wrong. The town was just the same as before. The wooden
houses and their large glittering windows were like tall fairy-tale
palaces and their yards were still spacious and green. And the washing
was flapping in the wind like festive flags and little boys were playing
rowdy games. There were less wooden pavements and more multi-storey
apartment blocks, and new white motor ships were tooting on the river,
but the off-shore breeze still smelt of wet sand, tarred boats and damp
logs. The same long weeds grew along the fences in the lanes.
My family's house had been demolished and a nine-storey building
erected in its place, but Auntie Valya's house was still standing and she
herself was still living there, just as she had done all those years ago.
She was now completely grey but otherwise had not changed at all. We
spent half a day chatting together and reminiscing over those far-off
days when Vitalka and I lived in her attic room. Several times I felt an
urge to ask her where the carpet was but did not dare to because it had
all begun to seem like a fairy-tale.
Auntie Valya got out Vitalka's childhood drawings, our cardboard
soldiers and even a cannon made of cotton reels. Even its elastic band
was still in perfect working order and the cannon was ready to be fired
at any moment.
"What terrible battles you used to have!" she exclaimed. "The whole
house used to shake. You certainly were awful scamps!"
"We were impossible people," I said, laughing. "You ought to have put
us out into the yard and not allowed us back until we learnt to behave
decently."
"And the things you got up to with that gramophone! You thought I
didn't know..."
I sighed. The gramophone was still standing in the same place under a
crocheted cover, and so was the cuckoo clock. The cuckoo had lost its
voice but still dutifully flopped out of its window and open its beak
every half-hour...
Then I went for a stroll in the streets. A few houses away I peeped
inside a large yard and saw some children playing in the grass by some
wooden outhouses. They were staging circus acts or wrestling matches, I
could not quite tell which.
Yes, they were in fact more like a contest of some kind. They came
out in pairs into an empty space and wrestled. The wrestlers panted hard,
fell, got up again, and threw each other, while the spectators sitting on
the stacks of logs and in the grass, clapped and whistled just like fans
do the world over. I went up without being noticed at first but then a
boy with a loud voice and defiant-looking dark fringe glanced round and
asked, "Who do you want?"
Instead of making something up, I said I used to live near hear and
was now walking about and recalling my childhood.
"May I watch you playing?" I asked.
The boy shrugged his shoulders and then said, "Well, why not! Go
ahead!"
I stepped closer and saw they were wrestling on a carpet and not on
the grass, and recognised it in a flash.
No, I did not say anything to start off with, I simply looked at the
familiar patterns over which two nine- or ten-year-olds were rolling - a
round-headed, ginger-haired boy with twinkling eyes, and a puny little
fellow with huge eyes and a few freckles on his cheeks wearing a
sleeveless tee shirt.
"I wonder if they know about this carpet," I said to myself and felt
slightly shivery with excitement.
No, they didn't. They were rolling about it with their tanned arms
and legs intertwined, thumping their feet on it and shoving their noses
into it without even guessing what a wonderful carpet they were on!
And it was calmly lying there and waiting for someone to discover its
secret. Or perhaps it had already given up hope?
... The ginger-haired boy pinned his thin opponent's shoulder-blades
against the carpet and jumped up. The audience clapped rather
unenthusiastically, and a little girl with a tousled plait said angrily,
"But what did you expect! That wasn't a fair match!"
"It's not my fault, is it?" said the ginger-haired boy, blinking.
His opponent silently stood up and walked away and the girl stared
hard after him.
"I say," I said. "... Where did you get this carpet?"
The boy with the defiant-looking fringe glanced suspiciously at me
and asked, "Why?"
"I'm just curious."
"An old lady gave it away," explained the ginger-haired boy. "To
him." He nodded towards the thin boy he had just beaten. "We used to play
at circuses in his yard and she's a neighbour of his and just gave it to
him as a present... It's a good carpet. It looks old but it's ever so
soft..."
"I know," I said, realising I was taking a decisive step. "It used to
belong to me and a friend of mine... It's a magic carpet."
They laughed quietly because they had taken what I had said as an
adult's unsuccessful attempt to win popularity among children.
"You don't believe me," I said, realising I could prove nothing.
"Well, never mind... But we used to fly on it, you know."
"Well, why not have a go now?" said the boy with the fringe
mockingly.
"Well, why not!" I thought, but I knew at once that I would never
dare to. I imagined myself - a large adult in an ironed suit - sitting in
the middle of the yard on an old carpet with little boys shrieking with
laughter all around.
Smiling awkwardly, I said, "It won't work. I'm too grown-up now."
"But how do you fly on it?" the girl with the untidy plait suddenly
asked.
"It's very simple. You just have to imagine you're flying, and off
you go..."
"Hurrah! I've imagined it!" the boy with the fringe shouted out
mockingly and collapsed on the carpet.
"Me, too! Hurrah! Yes, I have, too," shouted the others piling onto
the carpet and even the little girl with the plait dived on top.
Only the thin boy in the blue tee shirt remained sitting aloofly on a
log with his chin tucked in his knees. We caught each other's eye for a
moment, but he immediately looked away.
"Oh, get off! You're crushing my neck! Let go of my leg!" voices rang
out from the heap.
Then someone quick-witted called out, "There'll be cartoons on the
box any moment now! At four-twenty!"
The heap fell apart and the ex-wrestles and fans raced off home to
watch TV without even glancing at me. Only the little girl called
good-bye as she ran past.
I sadly watched them run off and then turned to the carpet again and
saw that I was not alone.
The boy in the blue tee shirt was standing by the carpet, looking so
pale and thin that his freckles seemed like little dark seeds.
"Please..." he began in a rather guilty but at the same time
demanding tone, "Please tell me... were you joking! You were, weren't
you?"
I gulped nervously and said quietly, "No, I wasn't."
"But things like that just don't happen," he said in a low but almost
angry tone, and his eyes grew dark.
"Yes, they do," I said, continuing to stare at him.
We were silent for a while. A strange silence hung over the yard.
"They don't usually... but they still do, you mean?" he asked in a
whisper.
"Yes," I said.
"And you've... just got to imagine you're flying?" he asked in an
almost inaudible whisper.
It was very hushed all around, and you could only just hear ringing
rising from the grass. Or perhaps it was the sunbeams or summer itself
tinkling.
With his eyes glued to me, the boy slowly knelt down on the carpet,
sat down, turned away from me, and for some reason or other stroked the
carpet. Then he stretched out his palm over it.
The carpet rose slightly, hovered for a moment about half a metre off
the ground and then gently slid over the tops of the grass.
The boy uttered a low cry, rolled off onto the ground, jumped up,
dashed over to me, hugged me tightly. I felt his heart fluttering under
his tee shirt like a ball which had been thrown into a corner and was
bouncing to and fro between the walls. He gave me a desperate look, and a
mixture of fear and delight radiated from deep inside his dark eyes.
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