Читать книгу The Secret Life of the Two-Faced Virgin. Part 1 - Группа авторов - Страница 11

After grandmother Pelageya’s death, Natasha’s parents received a summer cottage plot and began building a temporary house while arranging the plot. Natasha and her sister spent the entire summer at the cottage. At the age of twelve, Natasha and her sister were already independently handling all household chores and preparing their own meals. They lived in an unfinished temporary shed – a small room with a kitchen – while construction of a permanent house began nearby. But this suited Natasha and her sister perfectly, as the cottage was the place where they could fully escape the torment of their brother, who never came there. While living at the cottage, they took full care of the garden, cultivating flowers, vegetables, and berries. They were the first among the local cottages to build a plastic greenhouse and achieved an unprecedented cucumber harvest in it. Their parents only visited on weekends, collected the harvest, and returned to the city. Natasha and her sister lived at the cottage with their dog Gemma, a mix of poodle and mongrel. Gemma was very funny and guarded the sisters at night from passersby.

During one of the rare visits by her brother to the cottage, he nearly set the under-construction house on fire. At that time, the parents were only beginning to build the cottage, and there was a lot of sawdust and insulation dust on the second floor. An iron bed stood there with an old mattress on it. Her brother rested on the bed and smoked. On that day, the entire family went back to the city. Upon arriving home, the neighbors called and reported that as soon as everyone left, smoke began pouring from the second-floor window. The neighbors broke in through the window and found the mattress on fire. They managed to quickly extinguish the fire before the house caught fire. Had the neighbors not been there, Natasha’s family would have returned to a pile of ashes.