Of course, Yura was the first to be hosed down.
“Don’t forget my head! Start with my head!” he yelled jumping under the stream.
As if I didn’t know. Yura pressed his hands to his chest and leaned his head way forward, and I directed the stream right in his face.
“A-a-a-a-ah!” a long, triumphant, ringing cry was heard. It’s amazing how much one can express with just one sound. I pressed my finger to the end of the hose, and the pressure became even more powerful. Doughnut turned into a top. His solidly built, shiny little brown body, his bottom wrapped in short underpants flashed by. My cousin had a great suntan. Unlike me, he never got sunburned. His suntanned face turned up, his white teeth sparkled and clicked slightly. Yura resembled our Jack at such moments. He also turned and clicked his teeth when he was ecstatic. It seemed as if Yura had shaken himself out, as Jack did after washing when water would also fly in all directions, as if from a fan.
Yura’s shower could last forever; he was insatiable and failed to remember that I wanted it too. But, after all, I also had a nice entertainment: lashing my cousin with water as if with a whip.
Yura and I had been friends from as early as we could remember. Naturally, we quarreled quite often, usually through no fault of mine. Yura had a more explosive temperament. He was the first to attack, but now the initiative was in my hands, literally. I could get even with him for old offenses, so I tickled Doughnut under his armpits, on his neck. I spanked him on the butt with the stream using it like a koshka-devyatikhvostka. He roared with laughter, yelped and dodged. But the merciless stream always found him.
“That’s enough, enough!” he shouted at last. “Now it’s your turn.”
Aha, at last he remembered. He would definitely pay me back, but I had no choice. “Get undressed!” Yura ordered.
What for? I was wet all over anyway. Well, all right, I took off my wet clothes and dashed under the stream.
“Ou-ou-ouch!” I yelled, perhaps, more loudly than Yura, but not from ecstasy. The water seemed ice cold to me. It burned as if I had been stung by a swarm of bees. I choked. I became numb. It always happened to me when I was doused with water or dived into water. Perhaps it was because I was skinny. I jumped away from him, to the gate. I began to whirl, hopping to the left, then to the right, but the ice-cold water continued to lash me. Doughnut knew his job. He laughed loudly, spraying me harder and harder. I was driven into a corner with nowhere to retreat. All I could do was run to another part of the yard, but that would be a disgrace. Then, suddenly I didn’t feel so cold. I had gotten used to it, or the stream of water had warmed up in the sun. The spray had become pleasant. I hopped about, yelling with pleasure, from overcoming the shameful weakness. And Jack, who had envied us for a long time and dreamed of joining us, yelped and barked and rattled his chain. And Yura laughed loudly and yelled, becoming a firefighter who was rescuing a man on fire.
“…immediately! Can you hear me? Stop yelling immediately!”
Uncle Misha stood on his porch. We didn’t know how long he had been standing there yelling. His face was very angry. We had distracted him from his studies. It would be all right if this were the first time. But no, it wasn’t the first time, far from the first time.
“All right…” he said, “we’ll have to keep you apart.”
Yura and I exchanged terrified glances. Robert had said that he would call my father, and now Uncle Misha wanted to keep us apart.
Would they ruin our vacation?
Chapter 54. “A Spring by the Name of Larisa”
The ninth grade. The bell is silent.
A ray of April sun is on the wall.
How long will the lesson drag on.
How long before I get a break…
There was not a single ninth grader in town who didn’t know this song. It was hummed and sung at home, in school corridors, at bus stops, anywhere.
I, for example, was humming it now, not out loud, of course, but to myself because it was happening in class, and that class was dragging on unbearably.
In the beginning, everything was normal. I was in class listening to our math teacher, Nina Stepanovna. I was listening quite attentively and taking notes. And then I looked out the window. My desk was right by the window, which was wide open. And I could see the branches of an apple tree in bloom, which was right near the sports field, and the green velvet hills beyond the sports field through the opening between buildings.
And here that song began to resound inside me all by itself. Perhaps it happened because the song contained the following lines:
And there is spring outside,
A spring by the name of Svetlana…
Those lines turned over and over in my mind, in my soul, but I heard a different name in them: Larisa.
Yes, it was that same Larisa. Ten years had passed, but I had only to look at her, and I was still crazy about her just as I had been in kindergarten. It seemed to me that she hadn’t changed at all. She was still slender with fluffy bows at the ends of her light braids, which trembled slightly as if they were alive when Larisa nodded, nice freckles around her nose, and her sweet shyness and reticence.
Three years ago, when Flura Merziyevna had to leave the school, our sixth grade was disbanded, and all the students were distributed to three other parallel classes. It was sad to part with my classmates, particularly with Zhenya Andreyev and Vitya Smirnov. You get used to your class. It feels like home. But there was something that comforted me – Larisa Sarbash had been moved to the same class as I.
It seemed like some kind of a secret omen. Soon, I got sick and couldn’t attend school for two weeks. Afterwards, I had to make up what I had missed, particularly in math.
“Let’s choose a helper for you,” Nina Stepanovna said, and she cast her eyes over the class. “For example…” “Larisa,” a crazy hope flashed in my mind. “Oh, if only she would choose Larisa.”
“Larisa Sarbash,” Nina Stepanovna said.
It was a miracle. Nina Stepanovna rose considerably in my estimation: she could read minds.
We attended the second session of school, and I would go to Larisa’s place an hour and a half before classes. She sat me down at her desk and, bending over my shoulder, opened a textbook. The chair on which I sat was the only one in her small room.
“What about you?” I asked, moving to the very edge of the seat. Larisa didn’t seem to hear me.
“Here, read this rule,” she said.
And while I was reading, she walked back and forth behind my back.
And I read very slowly, pretending that I was trying to delve into that very simple rule. Good heavens, I had figured out all those trifling rules and problems myself at home long ago. That was definitely not what I came to Larisa’s for. Should I have turned down such luck? So, I did my best to pretend to be a dimwit, and I made mistakes in problems. Then Larisa bent so far over the desk that I could feel her breath and the smell of her hair, passed her pencil over my notebook and explained to me how to solve a problem.
She tied her hair at the back of her neck at home. It fell down her back as a ponytail, and when Larisa bent down, the tail slid across her back to her shoulder and fell forward, brushing my cheek. When Larisa noticed it, she tossed it back with an amazingly delicate, graceful movement of her head.
I liked Larisa at home even more than at school. Her light, colorful short-sleeved house dress was very becoming on her. When she sat down or turned quickly, her dress flew up, revealing her slim graceful legs. If Larisa seemed beautiful to me in her school uniform, you can imagine how she was in her house dress… Ah, I should have been looking and looking at her, but she was walking back and forth behind my back.