Ольга Палагина – Stories from Lyubavino. Chronicle of an extraordinary Incident (страница 8)
His wife’s place, we must note, was on the side of the bedroom door.
Nikolai Vladimirovich was in a state of complete bliss! Vacation! No work! His wife – right there, next to him! The kids – somewhere around the house!
What more did this slightly portly cupid need for happiness?
Anna Vasilievna, his spouse – a pretty woman of about thirty, with a great sense of humor and a love of playing jokes on her beloved husband – was also enjoying the long-awaited vacation. Awakened by her husband’s maneuvering, she lay quietly beside him, buried in her phone, unsuccessfully trying to find a signal.
At that moment, the head of the family was blissfully lost in the deep embrace of Morpheus on his trophy pillow, sleeping, as they say, “without his hind legs” – that is, dead to the world. His excessively hairy feet, by the way, were sticking out from under the blanket with utter disregard for decorum.
And then his little daughter, Lyolya – an angelic sunbeam of a girl with pigtails, four years old – padded into her parents’ bedroom as usual, rubbing her sleepy eyes with a little pink fist, and suddenly froze in the doorway.
In her mama’s place – the most beautiful mama in the world – rested… hairy legs!
Lyolya’s eyes, usually the size of decent cherries, widened to the size of respectable saucers. A complex thought process was clearly taking place in her childish mind.
“Mama, wow, you have such hairy legs!” gasped the child, clearly impressed by this unexpected discovery.
“Want to give them a pull?” her mother whispered mischievously, with a sly smile.
Lyolya was intrigued by the offer…
“Don’t worry, just give a tug, that’s all…” her kind mother encouraged.
“But it’s going to hurt you!” the girl objected. “Don’t you worry about that…” Mom replied with a mischievous smile and froze in curious anticipation.
And Lyolya, clinging with her little hands, pulled with all her might…
Nikolai Vladimirovich, who had not expected such a trick from his family, let out a sound rivaling the death throes of a castrated cat. Startled awake by his own scream, he catapulted out of bed with bulging eyes, as if he had just lost something very important.
After performing a complex acrobatic maneuver in the air, he crashed to the floor with a thud and attempted to jump up, but instead slammed into the bedside table and knocked over the lamp.
In an attempt to grab his injured head, Nikolai Vladimirovich slammed his elbow into the glass pane of the door with all his might. The glass seemed to have been waiting for this moment! With a joyful tinkle, it shattered on the floor…
Thus began the enchanting epic of replacing the banal frosted glass in an ordinary interior door, an epic that lasted several unforgettable weeks. But that is a different story, dear reader, which we will gladly tell you another time.
Chapter VI Adventures with Glass: Day One
And so… Nikolay Vladimirovich and glass! Day One… Friday…
Having cut his elbow and acquired a magnificent bump on his forehead, and after scolding his daughter for her innocent, yet fateful initiative, Nikolai Vladimirovich made the astonishing discovery that behind this entire provocation (as, indeed, one might have expected) stood his indefatigable, mischief-making wife! After giving her a thorough telling-off, he ate a hearty breakfast and set off for the glazier’s workshop.
There, a note on the door awaited him:
But Nikolai Vladimirovich was in a determined mood. In a small town like theirs, as is customary, everyone knows where everyone lives – and so he headed straight for the glazier’s home.
To his immense good fortune, he found the master at home. Launching into a brief but emotionally charged speech about the importance of both the integrity of glazed doors and one’s own peace of mind, Nikolai Vladimirovich desperately pleaded for the man to see things from his perspective. In the end, he managed to persuade the glazier to go to the workshop to cut the required piece of glass.
The fact of the matter was that, at that particular moment, our hero was more troubled by the absence of glass in his bedroom door than by the lack of electricity and other civilized comforts. What can you do – he was a perfectionist! He demanded completeness and order in all things. And a phenomenon such as a door with a yawning, blatant hole was, to put it mildly, somewhat irritating to him.
The glazier, having listened with sympathy and heeded Nikolai Vladimirovich’s impassioned appeals, readily agreed to help. They went together to the workshop, where the master carefully cut a piece of glass to the required size based on the provided measurements. Then, having kindly supplied Nikolai Vladimirovich with some useful installation tips, he sent him on his way.
Armed with this sacred knowledge, Nikolai Vladimirovich carried the fragile cargo home, picturing in his mind the perfectly installed glass in his bedroom door. It seemed the coveted goal was now within close reach…
But the path to a fervently desired outcome, as we know, is often thorny. Deciding to save time, Nikolai Vladimirovich cut through the labyrinth of the garage cooperative, hoping to avoid any unwanted (or indeed, any) encounters. However, Fate, as if on purpose, thrust Vasilich right under his nose – his stairwell neighbor, who was proudly soaping down his sparkling “swallow,” a brand-new Lada.
“Hey there, Vladimych! Check out the babe I managed to snag for myself!” bellowed Vasilich, beaming like a polished nickel. “Spacious – it’s like a cosmos inside! And fuel-efficient – words fail me, especially after my old rickety jalopy… Just look at this interior, will you!”
With an ardent enthusiasm bordering on obsession, he flung open the driver’s door as if inviting him aboard a spaceship.
Nikolai Vladimirovich, possessing decent reflexes for a man of his age, miraculously dodged this grand gesture, saving the brand-new glass from certain doom.
“Whoa there, Vasilich! Take it easy! Don’t shatter my glass! I barely managed to talk the glazier into cutting it now…”
“What, he’s working today?” Vasilich asked in surprise, vigorously wringing out his car-wash towel.
“Well, that’s just the thing, he isn’t,” sighed Nikolai Vladimirovich. After a moment’s thought, he added with almost genuine enthusiasm: “Yeeeah… that’s a classy ride you’ve got, no argument there.” He decided to praise his neighbor’s acquisition, if only to get to his bedroom door faster and seal that unpleasantly gaping breach. “Alright, Vasilich, I’ve got to run, and this glass, as you see, is no feather.”
He turned, took a couple of steps, and… stepped (without looking, of course, as always) right onto a cat lazily sunbathing.
The cat, as if deeply offended (which, to be fair, was the absolute truth), let out a shriek like a wounded groundhog and shot into the air like a rocket-propelled grenade. In the course of its epic flight, it collided with the off-balance Nikolai Vladimirovich, knocking the precious glass from his hands!
The glass, as if giving a final salute with its smooth surface, slipped from Nikolai Vladimirovich’s grasp. Hitting the asphalt with a deafening crash, it shattered into hundreds of fragments, glittering in the sun like a scattering of diamonds…
No words exist to describe the grief of Nikolai Vladimirovich. His eyes reflected a catastrophe of planetary proportions…
The angry and offended cat, having landed at a safe distance from this Armageddon, was drilling him with a gaze full of reproach and a thirst for vengeance. One could almost read in its eyes: “All sorts of people wandering about here, stepping on decent cats, the scoundrels…”
But Nikolai Vladimirovich had no time for the cat or its wounded feline pride. All that was left for him now was to rush back to the workshop at a waltz tempo – or rather, at the rhythm of a panicked gallop – praying that the glazier had not yet managed to vanish in an unknown direction. To his indescribable joy, the man was still there, fiddling with some mysterious tools.
Just five minutes ago, a client had happily scurried off with a sheet of glass under his arm. Now he was back on the workshop’s threshold. His face no longer expressed joy, but the despair of a man in urgent need of a new piece of glass – preferably as of yesterday. The master’s surprise was genuine. Without asking unnecessary questions, he cut another rectangle of the fragile material.
After lunch, with an air of importance and a clever expression on his face, Nikolai Vladimirovich attempted to install it. But, to his utmost astonishment, the glass pane, as if smirking with malicious glee, turned out to be slightly smaller than required.
Noticing this mishap, Anna Vasilievna, with her customary mocking look, proceeded to poke fun at her husband’s ability to measure anything with a tape measure. True to form, she couldn’t resist a biting jibe in his direction:
“Do tell me, my dear husband, don’t your golden little hands sometimes get in your own way?!”