Сергей Огольцов – DIY Masterpiece (страница 4)
‘Zzzzz! Vvvzzzz! Beep-beep! Go away with your car!’
‘Go away yourself! Dirrr! Dirrr!’
The cars banged, butted, their tin noses colliding with each other; specks of sunlight sifted through the foliage flickered in the hair of the unyielding drivers. Flickering and fading, the specks spilled about, here and there, in the sandbox. That’s what they did, when a stray breeze ruffled the leaves in the tops of the cherry trees.
But finally, the wiser driver takes pity on their little car, takes a U-turn, and swerves around the sandy hill. Behind it 3-4 toddlers, clad only in one-piece underwear and white buttoned sunhats, are carefully loading their buckets with meager pinches of sand—as much as they can carry in their clumsy shovel—and then immediately shake the sandy stream over the side of the sandbox, tipping the plastic bucket upside down.
Two mothers keep chatting at the pensioners’ table who will appear in the evening with their chess and dominoes…
And there's no one else in the entire yard, but a third-grader is above playing in the sand. After a few more slow steps beneath the clotheslines strung to the single iron post, like the spokes of a bicycle wheel at their meeting place in the center (but only when they're completely empty, like today, of even a thread of washing), she stopped to touch the rough, dense bark of a tree, because further on, there again was the midsummer a-blaze…
Today, Dad had already arrived for lunch. He heated up some borscht on the gas stove, and they ate at the kitchen table, because Mom had left for work at the institute that morning. And the kitchen table, though small, was just right for two.
The borscht was delicious—Dad always puts a heaping spoonful of sour cream in it. But sometimes he's just grumpy, like today.
So he remained silent the whole time, until he finally yelled at her, if she could eat without swinging her feet and she’d better stop banging the stool with her heels before it breaks. And let she quicker finish up her kompote.
Mom cooked it of cherries from the market, and Dad filled two cups from the white pot with the kompot in the fridge, just as he was putting the borscht on to warm up.
Then Inna went to the toilet for a minute, and when she came out, Dad had already left for work.
So she went out into the yard full of the endless summer…
. . .
Standing by the tree, she kept her hand moving over the dark, rough surface. The bark gently tickled her palm, up and down, until Inga from the next staircase entrance came also out into the courtyard.
Of course, as always, the wide brim of her yellow straw beach hat drooped around her head. When she's home alone, that's the only way she goes out into the yard—in her mom's hat.
But even the straw doesn't save her from her red freckles. They only keep growing. Every day. She looks like a red traffic light.
‘Hi’.
‘Hi’.
Inga's sundress is almost identical to Inna's, but her sandals are white, not light brown. Yet, after half the summer, the white paint has already peeled off completely, while in Inna’s light brown, the cracks are almost invisible. If not to look too closely…
A leisurely beetle crawled onto the hard-packed ground beneath the clothlines, heading for the transformer hut.
‘Let's kill it!’ Inga said. ‘It's a calarada; they're harmful.’
‘No, calaradas come in green-and-black stripes down the back.’
‘Oh! As if you know much about them! You're a fool!’
‘You're a fool yourself!’
A dust-stained sandal with its once-white strap across the instep rose up with her foot, stomping with all her might against the brown, stripeless back of the slow-moving beetle.
She even twirled the toe of the sandal back and forth, and when she stepped aside, instead of a beetle, there was only some wet turd.
‘Ve!’
Inna decided not to talk to Inga at all and not to be friends with her anymore.
And then Inga started hassling a man who happened to be passing through the yard, along the soft asphalt path by the entrances.
She grabbed her nose with her fingers, as if she needed to blow it or hold back a sneeze, but in reality, she was hiding her freckles with her palm, as if under a mask, and began her hassle:
‘Uncley! Have you seen my kitty? The little gray one!’
In fact, Inga doesn't have a kitten, and there aren't any in the entire yard. The mothers of the various toddlers they let loose in the sandbox had long ago chased away the only outdoor cat.
Murka had to drag the kittens by the scruff of their necks, out of the weeds behind the transformer hut, and then across the alley to the neighboring vegetable garden behind a fence made of old boards.
The man politely spread his hands and said he hadn't seen any kitten, no, and continued walking along the asphalt, toward the next five-story building.
Inga let go of her nose and started giggling, but Inna still didn't speak to her.
Then Vitalik came out of the second entrance:
‘How’s that by you?’
‘Oh, nothing special.’ Inga said, adjusting her straw headdress and crossing her legs as she stood, then suddenly screamed, ‘Oh, look! More calaradas!’
Two new beetles were crawling under the washing lines, heading toward the transformer hut. But they hadn't yet reached the wet spot left by the recently rubbed out one.
‘I'll whack them right now!’ Vitalik said.
‘Me too! Me too!’ Yelled Inga eagerly.
‘Don't squash the beetles! Don't squash the beetles!’ Inna screamed.
But they ran up and trampled the harmless pair, neither green nor striped, laughing like fools.
Then Inna turned and walked away to her staircase entrance, past the sandbox where the little ones were sweeping sand out, saying 'boo!' after it, and the little drivers had already stopped vyzz-byzzing and were busy digging a cave-garage for their cars in the side of the sand pile…
By her door, Inna stopped to get the key that hung on a string around her neck, under her sundress, but she heard someone’s trot down the steps from above, whistling. So she turned to see.
It was Vitya from the second floor, a very grown-up ninth-grader.
He stopped whistling and strutted past Inna as she made way for him, turning her back to her door.
However, after going down one step from the landing, the ninth-grader suddenly stood up, turned around, and stuck his hand between her legs, under her sundress. And he pinched her kitty, as far as her panties would go.
It wasn't so painful as to make her cry, but it was still bad. Inna pressed her lips tightly together, placed her index finger to her temple, and screwed it, hither-thither, mutely, saying not a word.
It happened just all of itself, because she'd seen it before: if Mom showed Dad that, it made him very angry.
Vitya laughed, whistled again, and galloped out, through the ever wide-open door of the entrance…
Stopping in the middle of the living room, Inna decided not to even go to the window and look at what those two fools were doing, who could only kill beetles and laugh stupidly.
But there was nothing to do in the living room either; there were only stacks of festive plates with tall wine glasses behind the glass front of the sideboard, a thick stack of central newspapers on the oilcloth table by the window, and—silence…
Should she check on Dasha the doll in the bedroom? Inna hadn't changed her into a different dress in a long time, and Dasha probably wanted to.
In the meter-long hallway between the living room and the bedroom, she was suddenly hold up by the door to the niche closet.
No, it wasn't open at all, not even a tiny bit. But something stopped her. It was as if it was calling, only not with a voice, but somehow inaudibly…
Inna very quietly took hold of the closet door handle and, as if jumping with both feet into a puddle, swung it open. And there!
Huge, ceiling-high eyes bulging at her!
Inna squinted hers shut and screamed so loudly that…
. . .
…yep. Yes! YEAH!!
It was That Very Screech.
A deafening, ringing Screech drawn out on and on, without the slightest modulation, in the suddenly frozen eternity around…
The Screech that instantly cuts through the noise of a busy city highway full of traffic in all its lanes…
The Screech that makes drivers—all of them, no matter how many there are—slam on the brakes, not daring to look up, their heads lowered, their shoulders drawn in, lest they suddenly see…