Mutiny of the Little Sweeties

by Dmitrii Emets

  Kate and Peter grabbed him by the elbows and led him away. Andrew Mokhov walked firmly, but only until he looked at his shirt. Then he began to pale and his knees buckled.

  “Of course everything will be bad!” he said, making his way between the cage with bicycles and the cage with chickens. “That’s your car there? So big? I saw it from behind the fence. How many of you kids are there? Although you don’t have to answer. Already doesn’t matter to me now!”

  “Seven,” Kate said.

  “For some reason this would be valuable information!” Andrew admitted. “There are two of us. Nina and Seraphim.”

  “Then why two? Aren’t you Andrew?”

  “Correct. But when I die, only Nina and Seraphim will be left. I corrected the number, so as not to mislead you.”

  “How old are Nina and Seraphim?”

  “Nina’s fourteen, Seraphim’s eight. But he’s been lost since this morning, so Nina’ll probably remain alone.”

  At the end of the yard, they saw a small house with cracked paint. It was entwined not with a grapevine but an ivy with a trunk the thickness of two human arms. In order that the roots of the ivy would not wreck the walls, pieces of wood were placed near them.

  “Wow! Some house! Where did it come from?” Peter was surprised.

  “It has always been here,” Andrew said with an air of importance. “Even before yours. Yours is sixty years old. Ours will soon be a hundred. See, what thick limestone.”

  “Why didn’t we see your gate?”

  Andrew sighed. “Because our gate isn’t here. There’s a wicket gate, but it’s far… it’s all very complicated in the city. A bunch of all kinds of side-streets and courtyards.”

  “We already realized this when searching for our house,” Peter said.

  “You realized nothing. The figure eight, it’s this here.” Andrew traced with a finger in the air. “And here’s one more lane, like a one. It turns out that it’s not 8 but 18. We’re on the 1 and you’re on the 8. In short, we’re closer over the fence. If you walk, then you have to go around everything in a circle.”

  Andrew got up onto the porch and began to knock on the door with his forehead. No one answered, then Andrew pressed the handle with his elbow. “It’s open,” he said. “Come!”

  They found themselves in an enclosed patio, where there was a gas boiler the same as the Gavrilovs’. Here was a large table in a kitchen area. Despite the bright day outside, the ivy shaded the window so much that the patio was lit by a chandelier with five dusty globes. A huge dried-up butterfly had hardened on one of the globes.

  “We specifically did not take it off. For the sake of artistic shadows on the wall. Papa won’t allow it,” the boy explained.

  “Your father’s an artist?”

  “Photographer. Works on the sea front. And in schools too.”

  Andrew sat quite calmly down on a chair, but looked by chance at his hand and, remembering that he was dying, started to slide from his chair onto the floor. Vicky looked at him with understanding. She loved to suffer when the appropriate occasion arose.

  “Go and rinse out the wound!” Kate ordered.

  “No way! I’m afraid!”

  “Let me call your mama! Where is she?”

  “Mustn’t disturb Mama! She was on the Internet all night and only just lay down. And Nina has gone for her guitar lesson…”

  “Where’s your papa then? At work?”

  “No. Papa’s searching for Seraphim. Seraphim is lost. He gets lost all the time…”

  “First-aid kit?”

  “In a white box!”

  Kate began to look for a white box and discovered it to the right of the teapot. All its sides, the outside, and even the inside of the lid, were covered with many phone numbers. While Kate was looking for the box, she noticed many icons, including the Nursing Madonna[7] and Our Lady of Kazan,[8] on the patio walls. The stump of a candle stuck out of a candlestick by the window.

  Kate looked at this with understanding. “You also go to church?”

  “Mama, yes. Papa… well, probably also yes! But I’m an atheist!” Andrew said. “I don’t believe in God but in that when people die, they decompose to water and mineral elements.”

  Peter looked at Andrew with great interest and scratched his nose. “And how do your parents feel about you being an atheist?” he asked.

  “It’s alright. Mama says that atheism is a normal step towards faith and not a fear for God. Ouch, don’t pour iodine on the wound! Never iodine on the wound, only on the edges! Lord! That hurts!!!”

  Using the fact that Andrew, blowing on the wound, involuntarily stopped grabbing her finger, Kate deftly put a bandage on his hand and wiped it with a wet towel. Then she forced Andrew to change his t-shirt. The spots of blood had barely disappeared, and Andrew immediately calmed down. Even his cheeks visibly turned pink.

  “Well? Alive?”

  Andrew was embarrassed to admit that he was alive. “My finger is throbbing!” he said, paying attention to his senses.

  “A lot?”

  “No, not a lot, but it’s throbbing. Come to my room! Just don’t yell! Mama’s sleeping behind the door!”

  “Right now, no one to yell at here! No little ones!” Kate said and was mistaken. While they were busy, Alex managed to get over the fence and dragged Costa with him. No one dragged Rita over the fence, and she was screaming on the other side, demanding to join the team.

  Andrew’s room turned out to be a real pirate’s nook with an upper deck supported by four wooden pillars. A rope ladder hung from the deck. True, it turned out that Andrew did not use it because he was lazy. On a littered table were textbooks for the fifth grade, a tablet, and a laptop without a single key. Only two or three elastics and some plastic parts were intact.

  “Don’t pay attention to the keyboard!” Andrew said grimly. “Seraphim picked them off when I sat on his grasshopper. He didn’t believe that it was an accident.”

  “A grasshopper?”

  “Yes. He fed the grasshopper grass and it was all around the whole house. He deleted everything from my desktop. Now I have an eighteen-character password. I type it in front of Seraphim, but he can’t remember.”

  “How do you enter the password?”

  “On an external keyboard. I hide it just in case… Hey! Is this also your brother? Get my paper from him!”

  “Also your brother” turned out to be Costa, who had pulled some paper off the table to draw on. They caught Costa and took the sheet of paper from him. Costa wanted to be indignant but felt that there was no sympathetic public near at hand, and he very quietly got busy examining a fishing bobber, which glowed when shaken.

  “What’s this formula? You like chemistry?” Peter asked, looking at the sheet rescued from Costa’s hands.

  Andrew hastily grabbed back the sheet written on with a wide marker. He listened, looked out the window, and whispered, “Can you keep a secret?”

  “Yes!” Peter said.

  “Then here it is! Do you know where to buy uranium?”

  “What kind of uranium?”

  “Enriched. I know how to make an atomic bomb, only I have no uranium!”

  “At a drugstore?” Alex naively asked.

  “Uranium? At a drugstore?” Peter laughed his signature laugh, but Andrew looked at Alex without irony, which Alex appreciated very much.

  “You don’t understand! Such things aren’t in drugstores. They wouldn’t even sell me manganese! Said it’s forbidden to sell it.”

  Next to Andrew’s table was a huge cookie box filled to the brim with all sorts of technical treasures: parts of phones, coils of wire, tools, batteries, electric toys, and constructor components. It was worthwhile for Alex to see all this, as he stuck to Andrew exactly like a boy from the Middle Ages to the Pied Piper.

  Therefore, when Mama began to shout from behind the fence and call them to breakfast, the older children left immediately, but Alex stayed with Andrew. And Costa also stayed. He generally ta
gged after Alex all the time, and whatever Alex was interested in, he roughly determined that he had to take it away or steal it.

  Alex and Andrew started to rummage in the box. From time to time Andrew groaned, trying to bend the cut finger. They made a catapult, which was to throw batteries with an ignition mechanism fastened to them. Andrew gutted ignition mechanisms from broken plastic lighters. According to the design, all this should explode and kill everyone on site, because Andrew read somewhere that batteries contain metal salts, but also discharge gas, which would certainly ignite with the mechanism. Costa was jostling near them, grabbing everything, and interfering. Then they climbed the rope ladder to the upper deck on the pillars. Costa could not climb up the ladder because of his left hand and was starting to get rowdy below. They paid him no attention. Then Costa went out into the yard, picked up clumps of dirt, returned and began to throw dirt at them.

  “Are you nuts, kid? What do you want?” Andrew was mad when a piece of dirt hit him on the nose.

  “It’s Costa,” Alex prompted.

  “Costa! What do you want?”

  Costa did not know what he wanted and pouted angrily. “Say ‘table’!” he demanded in a voice trembling with anger.

  “Table!” Andrew repeated obediently.

  “Table! Your grandma’s a boxer!” Costa shouted. “Ha-ha-ha! Say ‘nose’!”

  “Nose!”

  “Nose! Your grandma’s a boxer!”

  Andrew shook his head. “No, doesn’t rhyme! You can’t say ‘your grandma’s a boxer’ there. Now say ‘sermon’!”

  “Sermon!” Costa repeated.

  “Sermon! Your mama loves German! Remember?”

  Costa rushed ecstatically into the yard and began to shout for them to take him home. At first, no one heard him, and then Papa sent Peter, who passed Costa over the fence to Papa.

  Costa was trembling with excitement. “Papa, Papa!” he yelled. “Say ‘sermon’!”

  “Sermon!”

  “Your grandma’s a boxer!” Costa said and laughed happily.

  Chapter Five

  A Bedtime Story

  Modern children are taught to fear everything. Children walking along the street should look no higher than the asphalt, and if someone accidentally says “Hello!” to them, they should quickly change into a run after poking the person in the eye with a pencil beforehand. Such children, who see danger everywhere, can grow up only as hunted animals.

  Joseph Emets, Hungarian philosopher

  Papa was busy searching for beds the entire second half of the day. Mama, who initially wanted to pick out everything herself, stayed home with the children. She had to get Costa and Rita down for a nap.

  There were three furniture stores in the city. One was in some basement, one on the main street, and one in a glass hangar. The shop on the main street sold office furniture, revolving chairs and huge desks for managers. Papa wanted to buy himself such a desk for his office, but he looked at the price and decided to leave it for later, when he would already be writing the brilliant novel.

  Yes! Papa had a dream – to write a brilliant novel. Sometimes this novel really was stirring in him, it was so dying to come into the world. But Papa pushed it back into his soul with both hands and said to it, “Sit quietly, mature!” So, for the time being, the brilliant novel fought its way out only in fragments.

  In the glass hangar were plenty of nice sofas, kitchen units, and bedroom furniture. There were beds too, but none shorter than 200 cm. Papa calculated what it would be if he bought beds of 200 cm for all seven children, and realized that he did not need this train of seven cars stretching to fourteen metres in the house. Hence, he bought only one such bed for Peter, who was a metre ninety tall. Thus, there even left some margin for the kid to grow in the direction of a decent member of society. Though in their former two-bedroom, Peter lodged perfectly well with knees drawn in on a small sofa.

  There was nothing else interesting in the glass hanger, and Papa went to the store in a basement. Here he immediately saw a bunk bed and, pleased, he rushed to the sales clerk, who hid a half-eaten egg in a new nightstand and smiled questioningly, waiting for a question.

  “Can I have two more of these?” Papa asked.

  The sales clerk explained patiently that what Papa saw in the store was all they had. If Papa did not see something, then they did not have it. For example, he did not see the moon, so it meant it was not for sale in the store. However, if Papa insisted that he wanted to buy exactly three beds, they were ready to do the impossible. They would get the money from Papa now and give him the beds in August, when they would have a new shipment.

  Papa turned down such a scheme and, having bought the bunk bed that was there, began to think where to find two more. In the end, he hit upon buying the city newspaper ads and found another bed. Papa phoned and drove around the city, looking for the necessary street.

  The street turned out to be in Outskirts, the name of the area bordering the city. There were many identical parallel little streets and one-story houses very similar to one another and overgrown with grapevines, cherry trees, and some southern plants, blooming.

  An old married couple opened the door, both strong, tanned, and, similar to the houses on the street, looking like each other. The bunk bed they showed Papa was a little shaky, but then a metal ladder was attached to it with hooks, and a huge number of stickers and chewing gum trading cards were glued on both the inside and outside of the bed. Some of the trading cards seemed awfully familiar to Papa. Terminator, Terminator-3, Rambo! Wow, hello childhood!

  “Your children no longer need the bed?” Papa asked cautiously.

  “No. They’re already grown. The son has gone swimming and the daughter’s in Kamchatka,” the chubby head of the family said and winced, because his wife stepped on his foot so he would not chat too much. She was afraid that Papa would not buy the bed, thinking that it was ancient.

  “They barely slept on it! We bought the bed when they were in seventh grade,” she hastily said. “And we’ll even give you the mattresses!”

  Papa immediately agreed and together with the old man began to disassemble the bed. It was secured with such strong bolts that Papa was immediately reassured. A bed with such bolts simply could not fall apart, rather everything else around would fall apart first. If it was unsteady, one could put something under the legs!

  However, the mattresses surprised Papa most of all. One was light and rustled continuously, but the other, on the contrary, was awfully heavy. Papa slipped twice loading it into the van.

  “What are the mattresses stuffed with?”

  “One with straw. But this with cotton wool, seed husks, and beans,” the head of the family said.

  “How many beans?”

  “Already hard as stone. But many, very many. Then I worked on the base!” the old guy said, and after rustling the mattress for the last time, hastily slammed shut the trunk. He was still a little sorry to part with the bed and the mattresses.

  Papa returned to Vine Street only in the evening. Having dragged stools, chairs, and even a solid box from the whole house into the kitchen, the entire family was sitting quietly at the table and having tea.

  Tea was rarely managed without adventure, because there were usually not enough cups. As soon as the happy owner of a cup of tea, especially if the tea was with lemon and sugar, got up to get something from the fridge, someone would steal his tea at a moment’s notice. The previous owner instantly discovered the thief by the pattern on the cup and rushed to take it away.

  “I thought you didn’t want it!” the thief justified himself.

  “You thought nothing! Now give it back!!!”

  “Too late! I’ve already spat into it!” the thief sighed, and still did not return the cup.

  At other times, however, it goes without saying, the robbed walked around with his cup all the time and sometimes, in a fit of suspicion, even carried it to the bathroom.

  Mama was clinking her tea with a spoon,
dissolving a fallen bit of oatmeal cookie and pondering something intensely. “How many bunk beds did you buy?” she asked Papa.

  “Two.”

  “Hurrah! I’m very happy! I was just thinking that the cribs would be enough for Costa and Rita for the time being!”

  “And Kate?”

  “Kate will sleep on the wardrobe.”

  “WHAT??? WHERE?” Papa stared at Mama and then at Kate. Kate did not look up, but one could sense that she was very satisfied.

  "It’s her idea!” Mama explained. “Remember the huge wardrobe on the second floor? Well, you still didn’t understand why there were metal corners that can withstand an elephant? We nailed a railing to it so that no one would fall, and just lay a mattress on it. Still, dust collects on the wardrobe and it has to be wiped clean all the time.”

  “So, we’ll wipe the dust with Kate! But how is she going to climb onto it? It’s so high!”

  “Easy! For the time being Kate will climb up from a table. Later, we’ll make a rope ladder, like our neighbour’s. By the way, we got acquainted with them… Very nice people! True, we talked for literally minutes. Their Seraphim was lost again.”

  “Seems that he was already lost.”

  “Then their papa found him. Then he and our Alex made a flamethrower out of deodorant and went on the sly to set fire to the dandelions. Both were lost, but then they brought Alex back, and they’re still looking for Seraphim,” Peter informed him and, with a flick of his index finger, sent a piece of beet from the vinaigrette into Vicky’s tea so that he would get the tea. He knew that Vicky would not drink tea with beets. Vicky kicked him in the kneecap under the table and poured her tea into the sink. She only left the lemon and ate it.

  “How silly! You’re selfish!” Peter declared.

  “And you’re not?”

  “I’m still young. I need it.”

  “Yesterday you were wise!” Kate sarcastically reminded him.

  “Here I’m wise,” Peter said, covering one part of his head with a hand, “and here I’m young!” and he covered another part of his skull with his hand.