Uncle Blahblah blurted out all this while jumping on one leg because he was too lazy to dismount, and he wanted to wheel the bike in but was hampered by the lower cross bar of the iron gates. Standing the bike, Uncle Blahblah came across Meddling Aunt, who was hammering four iron rods into the ground in order to hang on them a brace for a pot of ivy.
“I don’t need a bike here!” said Aunt Sveta in an indisputable voice.
“Reason?” Uncle Blahblah asked, not even moving an eyebrow.
“I don’t need it here!”
“That’s not a reason. That’s the emotional component,” Uncle Blahblah objected.
“The bike has dirty wheels!”
“That’s the subjective component. Where’s the line separating clean and dirty wheels? One speck of dust is still clean but two is already dirty?”
“There are a hundred specks of dust here! And piles of mud! No need to ride through puddles!”
“Examine, please! A clear differentiation of dirt and dust! And also the original condition of the yard!” Uncle Blahblah demanded, scowling. When Uncle Blahblah was angry, he never shouted, but stooped a little somehow, pressed his chin to his chest, and began his “Blahblah”.
Meddling Aunt swung the hammer in her hand. Mama was afraid that she would now attack Uncle Blahblah with it. However, Aunt Sveta waved her free hand instead and said, “We’ll return to this conversation!”
Uncle Blahblah realized that he had won. “Valentin!” he said with the voice of a victor.
“Svetlana!” Meddling Aunt muttered.
Mama had washed the kitchen floor and it was not possible to enter the house, so Aunt Sveta and Uncle Blahblah set off to the playground of the nearest school. Rita, Costa, Alex, and Alena tagged along behind them. Alena went on rollerblades because the playground had good asphalt.
Going for a walk with Aunt Sveta and Uncle Blahblah was not easy, as they worried very much because of their inability to adjust. They demanded that the children held their hands, did not pick up cones, did not climb over a fence, and generally behaved like little lords. Uncle Blahblah confiscated Alex’s store of chemicals: crushed calcium gluconate tablets, detergent powder stained by a marker dissolved in cologne, matches, glass, syringes without needles, and a vitamin bottle filled with dead bugs. The only thing he did not take was a large magnifier, and he was utterly amazed when Alex, using this magnifier and the sun, soon caused a lighter found in the bushes to go bang.
Rollerblading, Alena turned around and saw Aunt Sveta arguing about something with Uncle Blahblah. From her direction, their dialogue – Alena could not hear the words – went as follows:
Uncle Blahblah twisted a button on Meddling Aunt’s jacket and quietly rattled, “Blahblah-blahblah-blahblahblah!”
“Bratatat-ratatat!” Aunt Sveta exploded with the sound of fireworks on New Year’s Eve.
“Blahblahblahblahblah-blah-blah-blah-blah!”
“Pew-pow!”
“Blahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblah!”
“Pew!”
“Blahblahblahbblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahbblahblah!”
“Whaam!”
“Blahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblah!”
As each “blahblah” became longer, the responding explosion got shorter, and Alena concluded that Uncle Blahblah was gaining the upper hand. Costa, Alex, and Rita were standing beside them and, with mouths open, watching whether the lion or the rhino would win.
Having gone around another circle, Alena stopped and sat down on the curb to adjust the insole bunched up inside the boot. She, by chance, turned out to be beside Uncle Blahblah, who was saying severely to Meddling Aunt, “Women are evil. They throw everything about! I got married the first time because of an extension cord!”
“How because of an extension cord?” Aunt could not believe it.
“Simple. One girl studying Roman law asked me for an extension cord. I gave it to her like an honest and noble person. Then I needed it. I reminded her three times. She still forgot. Then I went to her place to pick it up. She was a terrible mess. I began to clean up. While I was cleaning up, she managed to break her pinkie. I took her to emergency, someone sneezed on her on the bus, and she got sick with the flu. And so on endlessly! I only managed to escape eight years later.”
“And the extension cord?”
Uncle Blahblah waved his hand, indicating that he never got back his extension cord. He was very angry with women.
After the walk with the children, Aunt Sveta and Uncle Blahblah returned home with them.
“Somehow they’re suspiciously clean. Did you sit in a café perhaps?” Papa wondered.
“No! We walked in circles, hands behind our backs!” Alex said.
Papa looked interrogatively at Uncle Blahblah, who awkwardly cleared his throat. Meddling Aunt went to answer her mail, because while she was gone for a walk, eight letters came to her, four of which were important.
“Interesting woman! Formulated her thoughts very clearly. And she has a lot of different ideas,” Uncle Blahblah praised.
“An off-the-scale number of ideas,” Papa agreed, but it seemed Uncle Blahblah did not catch the irony because he nodded very seriously.
However, Meddling Aunt did not like Uncle Blahblah. She said that this Valentin was a smug character and she hated smug characters.
* * *
In the evening, the older children did their homework, but the younger ones interfered with them, so Papa took Rita, Costa, and Alex for a stroll to the sea. All the way, Costa and Alex were teasing Rita, telling her that she had ugly sandals. Rita did not have on any sandals but light boots; however, Costa and Alex found that when they told Rita she had ugly sandals, she got angry and chased them. Most of all they were amused that Rita was teased the same way countless times and could not figure out that they teased her precisely because she could be teased.
In the end, Papa gave Costa and Alex a stern dressing down and sat Rita on his shoulders so that she would not listen to “all sorts of nonsense.” Walking, they turned up at the house where Uncle Blahblah was living. Rita recognized the house and began to point a finger at it, shouting and informing Papa at great pains that see, it is that same house! Hearing her voice, Uncle Blahblah appeared in a second-floor window and invited Rita in, promising that he would keep an eye on her.
Rita, of course, immediately agreed, because Uncle Blahblah had a small loaf in his hands and Rita had not eaten for an hour now and had lost a lot of energy during the teasing. Papa lowered Rita from his shoulders and she ran to the staircase and began to climb the stairs.
On the first floor, the old woman of the lower floor was standing by her apartment. On seeing a little girl climbing the high steps alone, the old woman held out her index finger and began to help Rita. She and Rita climbed to the second floor together. The door there was open, and Uncle Blahblah and the old woman of the top floor were standing at the threshold.
The old woman from below did not expect that the little girl, so plump and seemly in looks, would turn out to be from the enemy camp. She became uncomfortable, blushed, and tried to escape, but Rita did not let go of her finger and pulled her into the apartment. The old woman from below froze, but Rita, digging both her heels in, pulled like a tractor. The old woman from below hesitated to pull out her finger, and the old woman from above did not dare to chase the old woman from below but invited her to tea.
The old woman from below was thinking that now she would be having someone else’s tea, and later they would say that she was a freeloader and did not have her own tea. She ran to her home and brought a wicker basket of pastries. The woman from above in the meantime set out a lot of pâtés, smoked chicken legs, and other goodies.
Initially, both old women were unsociable and looked at each other like Mafiosi from warring clans, but between them sat Rita and Uncle Valentin, not stopping his “blahblahblahblah” for one second
.
Little by little, the old women calmed down and, having stopped exchanging caustic remarks, took it upon themselves to feed Rita. Rita took a cheese Danish in one hand and a sandwich with pâté in the other and nibbled on them in turn, but never drank any tea, because what is the point of drinking tea while eating pâté and a cheese Danish?
At the end of the meal, the old women had made up so well that Uncle Blahblah persuaded them to withdraw their claims. The old women agreed. After all, they had been acquainted for more than forty years and living in the same building all this time.
“And the ceiling?” the old woman from below remembered.
“I’ll pay for the ceiling! I live here just like that and I feel uncomfortable!” Uncle Blahblah said.
“No! I’ll pay for the ceiling. Because I flooded it!” the old woman from above said. “But I’ll pay only for the plaster without any painting and not a penny more!”
Here Uncle Blahblah again started his “blahblahblah” because he felt that the subject was becoming slippery and the old women could easily fall out.
When, after an hour and a half of walking with Alex and Costa, Papa returned for Rita, Uncle Blahblah was already writing his alimony poem very quietly and Rita was already on the street. She was strolling along with the old women, who were holding her hands.
The old woman from below was small and round. The old woman from above was large and stern, with unpleasantly painted lips and bright red hair. Rita seemed like a thumbtack between the old women. Nevertheless, in the end, she was precisely the one who reconciled them.
Chapter Seventeen
The Heart and a Drill
“I personally would keep track of any kid with my heart! The eyes would not see, but the heart would tip off that he’s doing something wrong!” Aunt Sveta stated after Rita fell off her chair with a crash in front of everybody and no one managed to catch her.
“With the heart? Well, well… Look behind you!” Papa said.
Meddling Aunt looked back. Costa was standing behind her; in his hands was a drill with a very large drill bit, and it was aiming at her like a machine gun. Aunt Sveta jumped up half a metre. “You all saw it and said nothing?! He almost drilled me like a wall!”
“He wouldn’t. Its thirty-centimetre cord isn’t long enough to reach the socket! And now look over there!”
Aunt Sveta now turned more quickly. Alex was standing by the table and coolly covering a piece of chocolate with Brilliant Green. “I’m killing germs! I dropped it!” he explained.
Aunt Sveta snatched the chocolate away from him and, her hand stained by the green dye, threw it into a bucket with disgust. Alex, whose body Papa seized crosswise, threw himself at his aunt with his fists and shouted through his tears, “You don’t understand! You’re stupid! Green kills ninety-two percent of germs!”
“Where did he pick this up?” Aunt asked suspiciously.
“Andrew,” Papa explained.
“Which Andrew?”
“Andrew, our neighbour across the fence. They’re working on an atomic bomb together. By the way, do you by any chance have enriched uranium?”
Aunt Sveta sighed, twirled her finger at her temple, and said, “You Gavrilovs are all a little – you know! If I had children, then, first of all, no more than two. And, secondly, they would be well-mannered children, who wouldn’t walk around with a drill, lick swings, or kill microbes with green dye!”
Mama was sitting at the table and, while listening to the conversation, loading the fretsaw with a new blade. She had just finished a wooden lampshade, but something did not join and needed a fretsaw. “Somehow you’ve been talking regularly about children! And you have become softer and lazier in general. We haven’t moved cabinet at night for a long time now. Even somewhat unusual, you know!” she said.
Aunt Sveta blushed. True, she had changed. Recently, Vicky, doing math till late at night, went downstairs and saw Aunt Sveta on her knees crying in a corner of the kitchen, and Mama stroking her arms and hair and talking, saying something. Vicky froze in surprise with her mouth open and forgot why she went down.
However, Meddling Aunt was not inclined to cry now. She was in a business state of mind. “Nonsense, Annie! By the way, you need to change the boiler! When it flares up, the flame reaches the middle of the kitchen in the first second! I burned my eyebrows!”
“So, don’t put your face there! Light it with a match in an outstretched hand,” Papa said.
“Stuff and nonsense! I’ll ask what kind of boiler it is that I can’t put my face to it!” Aunt snorted.
Rita’s puppy responded to her from under the chair. The puppy still did not know that he was Rita’s and, bugging everyone without exception, snapped at everyone’s socks or stockings with its teeth, sharp as nails.
Someone knocked on the glass with a stick pushed through the dog rose. It was Uncle Blahblah. Peter opened it. Uncle Blahblah was in flip-flops and a t-shirt, but, for some reason, with a bowtie on his neck.
“Where’s Svetlana? We agreed to go to the oriental café! They say that they make dumplings there the size of a thumbnail!” he asked Peter.
Peter could not believe his ears, because he considered Uncle Blahblah a skinflint, talented for going to a café only at the expense of others, disguising it as a business dinner with a client.
“Coming!” Aunt Svetlana shouted through the window.
“Yes-yes! I’ll wait!” Uncle Blahblah replied tenderly.
The poet in him awoke. The poet began to smell the flowers and was moved by the sky. Then he saw a seagull and melted. “Ah! A wonderful white bird! Beautiful wings! The seagull is a symbol of freedom, Chekhov, and the Art Theatre![28] By the way, what’s she doing there?”
“Going through garbage bags. Someone threw out rotten fish!” Peter said.
“Ah-h-h! How sweet!” Uncle Blahblah was carried away, waved his arms in delight, and the poet in him jumped up to the roof.
Someone honked from the street.
“Oh, the taxi!” Uncle Blahblah said.
“You came in a taxi?”
“Are you proposing that I transport a woman on the back of a bike? I’m forty years old! I’m a member of the Literary fund.[29] And an honourable lawyer. Why’s he honking? Let’s find out!”
The taxi driver got out of the car and squatted in front of it, examining something and occasionally half-rising to honk once again. On noticing Uncle Blahblah, he began to grumble that the paint was scratched when he forced his way through the bushes on this cursed street. Did they warn him about the bushes? No! He will have to charge extra for this.
The poet instantly fell asleep in Uncle Blahblah and the lawyer woke up. “Fine! Do you have a transport license? What do you mean it’s not with you? Did you turn your document over to another person?”
The taxi driver, having gone quiet, pulled his head into his shoulders, hid in the car, and began to play “Don’t touch me! I’m in the house!”
Aunt Sveta appeared only five minutes later and not alone. In her arms was happy Rita, holding in her hands the biggest of her Aunt’s phones, and behind her, Costa and Alex were walking like two soldiers, pulling Aunt’s tablet away from each other.
“They’re coming with us?” Uncle Blahblah was surprised.
“Of course!” Aunt Sveta confirmed. “The kids haven’t had their walk today and Annie wants to wash her hair!”
“Can’t she wash her hair with the kids around?” Uncle Blahblah said more precisely.
“Please, more details here. Tell me in the smallest details how you see this!” Aunt Sveta asked very politely.
Uncle Blahblah quickly ducked towards the taxi driver in the car, and they both began to play “Don’t touch me! I’m in the house!” Aunt Sveta and the children settled in the car. The taxi driver sullenly drove through the prickly bushes. A strong desire to grumble was written on his face. When this desire almost reached his vocal apparatus, Meddling Aunt exclaimed happily, “Oh! One more! Stop!”
&nb
sp; “One more” turned out to be Alena. She was returning from the school grounds with a pair of twins and was laughing loudly. “Ha-ha! Runt! Ha-ha-ha! Squirt!” The boys were puffing angrily, not knowing how to retort.
“Get in with us! Who do you have here?” Aunt Sveta asked, when the taxi driver stopped.
“Shh! I told them that I’m nine years old!” Alena whispered, joining Costa on the seat.
“And are you?”
“Shh! Not in the least! They’re two to three months older than me! Let’s go!”
The taxi driver began winding through the narrow streets of the old Tatar city, on many of which two donkeys with loads could barely pass by each other.
“This intersection, this intersection! Here Kate and I saw the red guy with an arm and a leg cut off!” Alena suddenly shouted. Costa and Alex pricked up their ears, but Aunt Sveta said in a hurry that there was no need to describe all these horrors to the children.
“What horrors? Just the half-burned-out light bulb of the pedestrian traffic light!” Alena was surprised.
They walked for half an hour in the old town and then set off to the café, which was located in a house settled into the ground and where nothing had changed for three hundred years already. After eating large portions of dumplings, Alex and Costa were intoxicated from satiety and began chatting incessantly and talking complete nonsense. Uncle Blahblah even summoned the waitress to ask what kind of herb they had put in the seasoning.
“Ah! Nonsense! They’re always like this after eating! Papa says that the blood pumps out of their heads to their stomachs!” Alena declared.
Costa left Alex alone and teased Rita. “Rita, you’re stupid!” he said.
“No! Not stupid!” Rita yelled.
“Fat!”
“No! Not fat!” Rita yelled even louder.
Mutiny of the Little Sweeties Page 14
