Читать книгу Sapphire fairy. Prose in English - Natalia Patratskaya - Страница 4

The train went north along the ridge of the ancient mountains, where Katerina was a lady of Nedra in her previous life, and the train turned towards the Northern capital. They arrived in the big city of Leningrad. At the station, Katerina saw yellow cars with checkered side doors, they were called “Victory”. But they rode the subway to her mother’s aunt, who was a couple of years older than her mother. They stopped at Aunt Ani. In the northern capital there were still houses destroyed by the war, but this did not prevent them from walking around the Hermitage and Petrodvorets, where not all the rooms had been restored.

Not far from the golden figures on the bridge, there lived the cousin of Baba Vari, Baba Tanya, with her brother Sergey Kirillovich, they lived on the bank of the canal, near Nevsky Prospect.

Aunt Ani’s husband, Aunt’s husband, introduced Katerina and her mother to the city. Aunt Anya didn’t go on trips with them, she cooked food and drained pots to mirror cleanliness. Katerina forever remembered a tall, thin man who tirelessly showed the Northern capital and its environs. They then lived in the same room, in an apartment with their neighbors, in a very old area of the city.

The fairy tale has a long effect, and quickly people grow up and age. So Katerina returned her soul to the world of people, as if she had returned from a long business trip. Katerina is seven years old again. Katerina and her mother returned home from Leningrad, they had a penny in their pocket.

Children’s joy at that time cost 4 kopecks. She was sold by Frosya the gazirovschitsa. She stood behind a metal stand under a striped fabric roof. On a metal counter two glass cylinders with syrup towered, sparkling water without syrup cost 1 kopeck. You could buy a box of matches for a penny, but the girl added three more and bought water with syrup.

Glasses were washed on a turntable with a fountain and turned upside down on trays. The second joy cost 9 or 11 kopecks, naturally, it was ice cream: a popsicle on a stick for 11 kopecks and milk ice cream for 9 kopecks. The country has changed money. Ten-year-old Katerina realized that 90 kopecks with old coins is 9 kopecks new or three 3 kopecks old. The girls regretted one thing: that they had not accumulated yellow coins, otherwise they would have been richer ten times. Katerina had another treat for 8 kopecks – a bag of pressed cocoa with sugar.

Katerina was given a two-room apartment in a two-story house without central heating batteries. In the square they won, in comfort they lost.

The house was wooden, plastered. This is where the first TV appeared. Neighbors came to Katerina’s apartment and looked at the small screen together.

Katerina well remembers her second apartment without prompts. They had an apartment with stove heating. In the big room there was a sofa, on a shelf of a sofa there were seven elephant ivory. There was a painting on the wall where bears walked along a broken tree. Standing on a bedside table made of oak was one of the first TVs. All the neighbors went to them to watch TV.

Katerina had her first working day when the Fashion House opened. Needed a model. The school from the fashion house was across the road. Two women came to school and began to examine girls of twelve and older. Chose Katerina. She came to the Fashion House, where she was taught to walk on the catwalk. She began to sew trousers, skirts, jackets. She stood, and she was wrapped with cloth and cut off with needles. By nature, she is not a mannequin. For a long time it could not continue. The time has come to pay her money, but she could not take it. Catherine could not take the money and everything!!! And she left the fashion house. Came to her house, brought the money. She bought flippers, a mask, a tube for money. For a long time the flippers served her, and she never fell in love with diving.

Once a red-haired boy approached Katerina in school and said:

– Katerina, do you want to be a radio announcer?

Why not. Let’s go to the audition. She read the text. Everyone came running to her: very much.

They say:

– Read again.

I read it. All fled. Everything is like with fashion – duplicates are not its elements.

Sometime in May, Katerina in twenty minutes decided to complete a control work in mathematics. She was released from class to the street. Spring fluttered fresh leaves. The school was one-storeyed, several classes were temporarily transferred here. But most of all in this school, she remembered the flight of the first cosmonaut.

There was a lesson in Russian, which was interrupted by a call. From all the classes, the schoolchildren ran out into the corridor with exclamations: “Man in space!”

Katerina invented newspapers on one sheet of a school notebook. With a classmate, they drew the first newspaper on the drawing paper. Katerina wrote the first lines of poetry under each picture.

The first trees were planted around the school in the spring, the school is new. Next to the school was a deli in a five-story building. The queue for soy bars was included in the list of receiving children’s joy.

Katerina lived in a two-story house. On the ground floor, there was a friend at home, Valya. In her house they loved to make one potato dish: boiled potatoes were put on a large frying pan and fried. In the kitchen they cooked on the stove with cast-iron circles. They stoked coal in the apartment and in the kitchen where they cooked food. Next to the stove there was always a broom and a poker.

In the next two-story house lived the remaining girlfriends. Favorite game in the yard – “Gardener”, it was held on a bench against a neighboring house. Behind the bench was a table for table tennis, which was rarely empty. Volleyball is a game common to the whole yard. The yard limited the third house. The fourth house was demolished and built a brick, two-story. It settled family from the capital. In the summer they went in slaps. These shoes are called Muscovites.

The first enemies appeared simply: Katerina drew all the friends, and they didn’t speak to her for half a year after the drawings. And she painted them beautifully! In lush skirts in the fashion of the early sixties.

Getting to know fiction was simple. In the apartment of Nadya’s classmate there was a shelf, while rare books were then on the shelf – J. Verne. In this apartment, Katerina first saw and remembered the eggs.

Bath was a holy place once a week for Katerina and her mother. There was no shampoo at that time, but there was laundry soap and long hair. In the bath were long lines. At the end of the washing process, the mother poured Katerina on the head with a basin of cool water, with the words: “Water from the goose, thinness from Caterina.” Perhaps that is why Katerina was never thin.

At home in the corner of the kitchen hung an icon. Through the yellow copper was visible face painted in colors on the tree. Icon when moving disappeared.

The school held the firework – An hour of fun competitions, such as KVN.

Ira once suggested:

– Katerina, let’s go to the dance club at DK. I will say that you already danced.

I came. Danced. Has reached performances at concerts, has acted in two and all. The school had a set in the volleyball section. She played Katerina, trained, reached the competition between schools. Got the nickname “evil captain.”

Went to a summer camp. She played table tennis. The best tennis player of the camp was not indifferent to her. Pretty quickly, she mastered the wisdom of the game. Together they all won and played the most. This is not all. With girls Katerina played musketeers. At the end she tied her long hair with a ribbon and tucked it up, this was how the musketeer’s hair did and no less.

She was sent to the Olympiad, but she solved them well, that is, the first places she did not smile. In the courtyard of his house on the street, the children played “The Gardener”, tennis, volleyball, and theater. In the new school they wrote with pens with steel feathers and dipped them into inkpots.

Katerina was tall, slim and played volleyball, danced in the friendly team of the house of culture, but the dances did not detain her for a long time. She had long, luxurious hair that she braided and twisted so that it seemed shorter.

Katerina’s father bought clothes and shoes several times. He chose beautiful things and shoes. She was involved in sports, so the food could not for the time being spoil her figure. She was bought skates-knives in honor of the countrywoman, Olympic champion. Winter evenings Katerina spent on the rink. My father had a garden in which, apart from apple trees, pears, plums, currants, and stretchers, tiger lilies always grew.

We went to the garden by train to the cottage. The memory of unusual taste and slate apple trees remained in my memory. Cottage sold and went to the sea. Cherries, stones on the beach, portraits of pioneers-heroes. Concerts of Lilliputians. Divine evening view of the sea. Pancakes on the beach. Bagels. Closed museum of paintings by Aivazovsky. It was wonderful!

Katerina has no offense for the wonderful time of her childhood, for the wonderful time of her youth. Everything was as it was, and her parents did everything so that she had what she had.

Katerina felt that her magical energy dried up, ordinary life began. So she remembered the summer, spent not in the village, but on the lakeside.

Residents of the village, located in the spurs of the mountains, believed that the village of Medny bucket has its own spirit, which protects it from ancient times. According to local legends and eyewitnesses, on one side of the village there is an exit to the space portal. The appearance of the village has changed over seven centuries. In recent years, the village seemed younger, new houses appeared, and old ones began to be tiled.

Katerina arrived in the village Copper bucket for the holidays to Aunt Dasha, who lived in an ordinary wooden house. And the house of the prince… The house with the towers stood on the edge of the village, on the bank of a small river. The copper roof gleamed in the sun. The vertical protrusions on the house smoothly passed into the turrets. The first floor of the perimeter was lined with greenish marble. All the tracks on the site were lined with greenish ceramics, a slender young man ran along them. Soon he got tired of this occupation, and he shouted towards the windows:

– Father, everything! I’m leaving, I’m sick of such holidays!

“Go, Feofan, wherever you want,” the gray-haired, important, purebred man said quietly. He appeared out of the ground behind Theophanes.

– Again you scare me, Afanasy Afanasyevich! I am brave, but your appearances from nowhere infuriate me!

– And you do not be angry. Live in peace, although it is not given to you. You need to live not one life, but several: you will recognize the past as an archeologist, learn the present as a coach, and move from the present to the future as a designer.

– You’re visionary, father! I will be who I will be according to the situation. By the way, Katerina’s niece came to Aunt Dasha. Girl what you need. Am I by any chance a relative of hers?

– I know that she came. Our kinship with her is of ancient roots, you will not marry her, but if you meet her, help. Now you can leave, and I will call Catherine to me.

Katerina walked slowly along the village street. She came to Aunt Dasha for the summer holidays. An elderly handsome man was walking towards the girl. He stopped, staring at her, and asked her to go near him. He was handsome in the twilight of his days and divinely good.

Further more: he invited the girl to his home. Katerina was not scared, she knew that the man’s name was Afanasy Afanasyevich. She saw him last year, he lived in a posh house by local standards. His prim mansion was served by a butler, a cook and a chauffeur. One woman cleaned and put the house in order in the mornings, when the owner was still asleep.

Katerina examined the pompous house, and she felt uneasy. Something terrible through the stucco and huge paintings. She shivered involuntarily. She wanted to leave another’s secret without recognizing her. But the owner offered the girl a deal or contract. He offered her to live in his house without special duties, but with one condition: she should not leave his house during the summer holidays – it was supposedly that much time the doctors left for him to live.

She will receive so much money for her service that she can buy a new home of the same size as his old palace. As for his house, he is not subject to sale. The girl, knowing that the money goes to hard work, agreed to the conditions of Afanasy Afanasyevich. The owner promised that he would warn aunt Dasha of her whereabouts.

The butler lived on the ground floor and practically never left the mansion. The cook and the driver went to sleep at home. The chauffeur was engaged in shopping for the house, sometimes he would take a cook with him if he went to buy groceries. Katerina quickly realized that she could leave the house with the driver. And traveling around the house was her day enjoyable.

Another condition of the contract had a negative effect: she could not have cash, but she could choose the necessary things and products, and the driver paid for her requests from the owner’s wallet.

Two weeks flew like a vacation.

Then it became more difficult, and Catherine wanted to leave the house of Afanasy Afanasyevich, but she could not do that. She was ready to break the contract, but she had no way back for the next two months. The owner did not require her presence next to her in the room, she could move around the palace and the small lawn around the house at any time.

The woman who came in the morning to clean the mansion did not speak with Catherine. She collected clothes in the laundry and brought back clean and ironed. Men serving the owner, were obscenely laconic.

The owner of Catherine did not say much. More than two phrases a day it was impossible to wait. The girl was ready to talk to herself. She always communicated easily with people and often got tired of their confessions, and now she was in a verbal vacuum. In the house she counted five televisions of different times and not a single computer. There were no phones that surprised her unpleasantly. But there was a worldwide library.

Books were in the cabinets, closed by glass doors. Surprisingly, the books were without signs of aging paper. Katerina was struck by this fact so much that she was involved in reading. All the books were as if they had just been brought from the store. But looking at the year of publication, she was even more surprised.

The library contained books older than a hundred years or more! Soon Katerina noticed that the bookcases are tight enough that the doors close tightly and effortlessly on her part. A few days later she felt a strange smell in the book storage, he drove her away from the books. Books seemed to ask her not to touch them!

Katherine had no choice but to watch TV. One TV was with a lens filled with water. The second TV was black and white with a tricolor filter. The third TV was decorated with indoor horn antenna. The fourth TV was with a large screen, color and thick. The fifth flat-screen TV was in the bedroom of Prince Athanasius Afanasyevich.

The girl looked at the screens of five televisions, working according to their time of manufacture, and groaned with pity for her beloved. And not a single phone! This for her turned out to be beyond understanding. Information from the outside gradually disappeared from the life of the girl.

Driving with a driver has been reduced due to her constant expenses. Katerina wanted to look at the moon, which could still shine through the window without the permission of Afanasy Afanasyevich. She decided to go to the moon, to nature.

The girl found garden tools and zealously set about improving the land lying around the mansion.

But nothing came of her idea. Katerina quickly realized that the bayonet was constantly bumping into something hard. She squatted down and excavated the ground with her hands. Under the ground everywhere were reinforced concrete slabs! That is, around the house grew only grass on a small layer of soil!

Katerina sat down on the grass from impotence and felt a glance from the window, but she didn’t even turn her head towards the old man.

The girl’s gaze turned into the fence, she didn’t notice the barbed wire and dogs, but that didn’t make her feel any better. With nothing to do, Katerina began to do all the gymnastic exercises that had occurred to her. For several days the girl spent all her strength on various exercises.

Katerina managed to take a newspaper from Afanasy Afanasyevich’s post office and read the following lines: “Under the influence of the atmosphere, copper is covered with a durable, non-toxic oxide layer – patina, which gives the copper roof a beautiful shade. It is especially convenient to use such material for a copper roof, low temperatures do not affect the ductility of copper”.

It was after reading these lines that Katerina wanted herself a house covered with a copper roof, so that she could more easily endure the trap of Afanasy Afanasyevich.

In the courtyard, Katerina saw a sparrow swarming in a flowerpot filled with earth, but without a flower. The girl sang a song:

“A sparrow bathed in a flower pot without a flower.” His work is so easy that the sparrow is cheerful. He sketched the earth around, he scattered the grains. And happy little my friend, he sowed smeshinki.

The owner, having heard Katerina’s song, allowed her to go out of the manor’s gate for a couple of hours in search of local adventures.

The girl went into her room, opened the closet with clothes, chose a yellow trouser suit. She went to the mirror and saw in him a girl with disheveled hair. She was ashamed of her appearance. Katerina went to the shower, washed herself, brushed her teeth, and laughed with a white-toothed smile.

She wrung out her hair with a towel, dried them with a hair dryer, combed it with a comb and jumped on one leg with joy. She put on a yellow light suit, white-yellow sandals and, dancing, went down to the first floor of the house.

The butler let the girl out through the gates of the mansion.

Katerina walked around the village hoping to meet someone to hear a normal human voice. She saw near one house a wide bench, the boards of which were pulled together by copper strips. The bench was not far from a modest wooden house under a magnificent birch tree.

The golden branches of a birch tree moved so beautifully from the light wind that the girl decided to sit on a bench and look around. She remembered how she first came to visit Aunt Dasha last year.

The sun shone through the curtains just like a copper ladle into which it fell by its rays. But the sun and the copper ladle by common efforts did not make stars out of Catherine. Now all the stars are singers, thin, small in stature and weighing up to 50 kilograms. “Probably, so that the scene under them does not fail,” – thought the girl. Yes, to be a star is not for her, but for singing birds, and she has a different weight category.

There are racing horses, and there are heavyweights that are heavy, but slow. They are closer to Katerina, and even closer to her Sisyphean labor. So, last summer she drove from the train station to the village in a real cart with wooden wheels. The cart was carried by an ordinary horse.

The next morning, Katerina went to the river in the same swimming trunks.

Neighbor Semenovna jumped out from behind the fence and screamed:

– Girl, you completely lost conscience! The chest has already appeared, and you are not covering it! You’re a big girl, you can not walk around the village like that!

Katerina stopped, eyes on the neighbor dragged out and could not understand at all, why such disfavor was for her. She was 10—11 years old at that moment, and she just had 50 kilograms of weight. Aunt Dasha weighed her on the scales for vegetables. Catherine’s mind is girlish, and her appearance is large. No, she was not fat, she was just a big girl. On it all the reliefs of the figured terrain immediately became visible.

A girl in swimming trunks reached the river, and there was a feather lying on the shore, geese swimming. She goggled her eyes again and could not understand in any way where in this river you can swim! The girl looked at the river and was afraid to go into the water, and around her swallows flew and hid in the bank, in the pits of the nest.

Katerina climbed on a slope with swallows nests and vegetable gardens passed into the house.

Aunt Dasha worked as a vegetable gardener in the village. She had a vein and was tanned in the arms to the elbow and legs to the knees. Katerina was all white, unburnt. And she was fastidious to hell. She looked at the pot on the stove and the nose of the wheel.

Why bring up the nose? There has never been any other food here. Aunt Dasha coarsely cut the potatoes, then she fried them in lard and put them on the table. Near onions put the whole arrows. Katerina choked, wanted to eat, but could not, put off the fat in the direction.

Yes, still. Aunt Dasha gave her daughter Tamara from a gypsy. Gypsy camp passed by the village, the daughter was born. Of course, by the time Tamara grew up, Aunt Dasha presented her legal father. She married married retired Ivan Kuzmich, he was very handsome, with a mustache.

Here Ivan Kuzmich and became the official father of Aunt Dasha’s daughter. Oh, and Tamara and Ivan Kuzmich loved each other. They are not relatives, and relatives were better. Oh, life sometimes – foot wrapper! Ivan Kuzmich very much footcloths after the army he loved, everyone in his boots went.

Katerina, sitting on a copper bench, noticed a rooster who ran out from Aunt Dasha’s chicken coop.

The girl sang a song:

– Rain, rain and sunshine, it is not wet at all. He is like a grain, golden and kind.

The sun blinded the rain. The rain in the sun seemed not wet drops, but sunshine. The cockerel was jumping through the puddles in the sunny rain.

The rooster came out of the chicken coop to meet and stopped under a canopy.

– Cockerel, you, why run through the puddles, so it is impossible! – cackle pestle.

– Pest, do not worry, look, what a golden rain! He is warm!

– Tell me too! Rain is damp, and kind and warm is dust on the road!

– Pestrushka, quickly turn to the chicken coop! Look what happened to him!

“Cockerel, you’re making up again,” said the nestling and slowly turned to the chicken coop. – Oh, that with our chicken coop has become! – the hen cackled.

– I do not know, our chicken coop has become a sunny palace! – the cockerel crowed.

From the song sung by Katerina, the coop black from the rains turned into a golden house and shone with its new walls in the rays of the sun under a thin sunny rain.

Five more chickens ran out of the coop. They stopped under a golden canopy. Chickens trampled on one place, they could not cluck with excitement.

– Pestros, why are you silent? – zakukarekat cock.

“Oh, Petya, look at what happened to our chicken coop inside,” said the elder pestle, barely audible.

The cockerel and his six chickens entered the chicken coop and stopped at the entrance. They could not take a step or take a flight from surprise. Instead of seven poles in a dirty hen house from the litter, they saw a golden room, made of wood, but covered with lilac varnish. Along the perimeter of the chicken coop are shelves of thin perches. On the floor were golden baskets for layers. The water shone clean in a wooden trough. In the second trough lay golden grain.

– Pestrus! Great! I like! Choose your place! Three on the left, three on the right, I’m in the center. In places!

Pestros, without saying a word, took off each in its place and happily cackled. Soon they sat in their baskets and laid down six golden eggs. The cock appreciated his work and happily zakkakrekal! And in vain. Hearing the cock crow, Aunt Dasha came running. She threw up her hands and sat down at the entrance to the chicken coop on a stool golden from lacquer.

– Chickens, what is it? Asked tired Aunt Dasha.

In the chicken coop, everyone was silent.

– Miracle! And the eggs are golden!

And suddenly, before the eyes of the rooster and the chickens, who were sitting on the new and comfortable perch, Aunt Dasha changed dramatically. From a tired woman in a calico long skirt, tucked from the sides of her incomprehensible figure, she turned into a pleasant slender woman in jeans and a white T-shirt. Her gorgeous wavy hair lay on her shoulders.

Sang a loud and joyful cockerel.

Sleepy Ivan Kuzmich jumped out of the house in old blue sweatpants, swollen on his knees, and shouted:

– Well, cock, you got me! You do not give sleep after dinner! I can say, I am following an ancient custom: I sleep after dinner, and you wake up! I’ll take my head off!

Ivan Kuzmich suddenly stopped himself, he saw a beautiful woman at the entrance to a magnificent chicken coop.

– So I still sleep? He asked himself and touched the wall of the hen house.

After Ivan Kuzmich touched the golden wood, he began to change dramatically in front of his wife and the whole chicken coop. The man’s face became smooth and pleasant. In fact, Ivan Kuzmich appeared sports suit, which made him slim. His hairstyle has become a man’s haircut, and not a felted haircut.

From behind the corner of the house came a neighbor Semenovna. She went to the numb surprise people and birds.

– What happened here? Everyone is so cool! What a beautiful chicken coop! Neighbors, when did you manage to build a new chicken coop?

– Semenovna, do not worry and do not touch anything! – shouted Aunt Dasha.

“What else, they don’t sit down on the new porch,” the elderly woman was indignant and sat down on the porch of the hen house.

Naturally, the old woman immediately turned into a decent woman of uncertain age.

“Oh,” groaned Ivan Kuzmich, astonished.

At this time, the sun hid behind the clouds, and the rain stopped. Gloomy sky surrounded the chicken coop and the whole company. Aunt Dasha got up, went into the chicken coop, took six golden eggs and went out onto the porch.

“Good people, look what eggs our hens laid today,” she said.

Everyone looked and were silent. Tamara, a girl of eight, jumped out of the house and shouted:

– Mama! Dad! I am waiting for you!

She stopped in surprise when she saw beautiful people, somewhat similar to her parents, standing on the threshold of a golden chicken coop.

– Oh! And who are you? – asked Tamara.

– Tamara, do not worry! I am your mom, and he is your dad. And here is our neighbor, Semyonovna, – and she pointed to a youthful pretty woman.

– Are you telling me a fairy tale? – Tamara asked incredulously. – My mom never wore jeans.

And then the girl saw the golden eggs in the basket in the hands of the mother.

“Good,” she said. – Are the eggs real?

Then the girl just grabbed one egg, but it burst out of her hands and rolled. Tamara ran after the egg and disappeared around the corner of the house. At this time, her father woke up and ran for her daughter.