Читать книгу Небывалые былицы для Алешки - Ольга Манько - Страница 10

One nice summer morning I woke up in a good mood. I got up, washed myself, did morning exercise and whatnot- all things we have to do in the morning, then I went to the kitchen to cook breakfast. I must say, I lived on my own at that time and nobody took care of me, I had to hope for myself. I looked into the fridge and saw there an ice desert and a lonely frozen cockroach, sitting in the corner and chattering its teeth because of cold. I don’t have the slightest idea, how it got there. I took the cockroach and let it go, because it’s a living creature and it could be frozen. Instead of saying its thank-you to me, it looked at me somewhat askance and ran away home. Before it hid into the crack, it turned round and told me in a disgusting voice (you know, cockroaches have very unpleasant voices),

‘You can’t call yourself host; there isn’t a dry crust in your house!’

Feeling insulted, I threw a slipper at it, but missed. I realize why people do not like cockroaches: it’s not a pleasant thing to receive reprimands from an ill-mannered insect. Naturally, my mood was spoilt. A mood is a mood, but sometimes you feel very hungry. By the way, what kind of a host I am, if I don’t have anything in the house to feed a cockroach?

I took a shopping-bag and went to the market. I strolled there for a long time, looking for food quickly to cook and tasty to eat. Suddenly I saw a man, selling eggs. That’s what I wanted. The eggs were good and big enough. First it seemed to me, that they were expensive, one rouble twenty each. I thought a little and decided to buy one egg and test it, because if to fry it, you can feed ten people or so and a small piece will be left for my nasty cockroach. I bought an egg and went home.

I decided not to fry the egg, but to have it soft-boiled. I like soft-boiled eggs very much. I put it into a saucepan and started to read a newspaper: a lot of events had happened for that period of time and I wanted to know about them.

From the newspaper I learnt, that a spaceship had been launched on Mars to find out if life exists there. I read an article and lost in day-dreams how the spaceship would come back to Earth with blue Martians on board. And we would make friends with them. We would fly to see each other. And I made up my mind to spend my next holiday on Mars. I would swim in Martian seas, gather Martian yellow-cups and camomiles. I may even gather herbarium. Wonderful!

Then I read an article about an alligator, or a crocodile that was badly fed in the Zoo in Africa. It ran away from its cage and broke into an open-air cage with elephants. As the crocodile was very hungry, it didn’t notice how it swallowed the whole baby elephant. In the morning the Zoo workers found the alligator among the elephants and were surprised by its size. Usually an alligator is flat and long, so you can imagine what size it had become. They called for a vet, a doctor of animal illnesses. The doctor was experienced, he counted the elephants in the cage and realized, what had happened. They called for a helicopter, sent a sick crocodile to the medical centre, because it had a bad stomachache. World-known vets gathered in the centre. They performed the most difficult operation to take the baby elephant out of the crocodile’s stomach. The article said that everything ended well. The alligator lives in the Zoo again. Now the cook takes care of its food. The baby elephant grows up and develops, too, as it should be. The doctors look after it. But they say that the elephant presents itself a “non-guessed nature phenomenon”, because it turned green after the crocodile, no matter how it had been washed and rubbed. It didn’t become grey, on the contrary it reminded May grass in color. And what is interesting, its character wasn’t spoiled. It is kind, merry and loves children very much. And children love it, too. Maybe, it’s very interesting to be friends with an elephant.

Well, while I was reading, something started to knock in the saucepan, where the egg was boiling. Of course, I put aside the newspaper and looked into the saucepan. Good God, as my grandmother said, there in a boiling water a live chicken was swimming among the shell. It was getting red with every minute. Burning my fingers, I took it out, but this nasty bird bit me two times. I looked at it, looked again at this viable chicken and decided to give it back to the man, who had sold me the egg. I wrapped the chicken into the cloth and ran to the market. But the man disappeared into thin air, so I couldn’t find him and brought the chicken home. I called it Grigoriy.

Grigoriy started to grow up and turned out not a chicken, not even a goose, but a real little ostrich. It faded out a bit and now it is not red, but orange. Grisha has got a difficult character (I’m telling it in secret, because when it hears about itself such bad things, it gets offended). When I’m angry with it for its behaviour, I call it Rouble Twenty, it’s the worst punishment. But it is very smart and talks better, than any other parrot. We never part and often go to work together.