Rita recently turned two. She was not talking very well yet, but she was always eating and was very round. A first breakfast, a second breakfast, a third breakfast, and then it was already time for lunch. If you hid food from her, Rita would steal the soap from the bathroom and nibble at its edge. She also constantly wanted those things that were in the hands of her brothers and sisters. Pencil case, backpack, textbook, it did not matter what it was. She would stage wild concerts to get them. Hence, the other kids were forever devising ways to outwit her. They would take some sock or unwanted head from a doll and pretend not to give it to her for anything. Rita would stage a concert, receive the doll’s head, and run off to hide it. And everyone could do homework in peace.
When such a large family went for a stroll, people exclaimed. Different people, especially the elderly, often came up to them and asked, “Are these all yours?”
“Yes, they’re ours,” Papa and Mama cautiously replied.
At home, the children slept on bunk beds, forming three sides of a rectangle; in addition, the younger ones had cribs with a removable side panel. When the side panel was removed, the crib could be placed right up against the parents’ bed and the young one could roll in and roll out like a round loaf.
However, despite all the tricks, the Gavrilovs settled themselves rather poorly in the two-room apartment. The bathroom was always busy, the bathroom door was constantly taken off the hinges, and their relations with the neighbours in the same entrance were cool. It was probably due to the internal walls, which were very thin and sounds passed through easily. The majority of the neighbours more or less understood the situation, but on the second floor lived a lonely old woman who was forever tormented by the suspicion that the children were sawing with a blunt saw at night.
“Why did they shout like that in the middle of the night?”
“Because Rita wanted to go to the store and the other children tried to soothe her,” Mama patiently explained.
“You’re the parents! Explain to her that stores don’t open in the middle of the night!”
“We did, but she only believed it when we drove her to the store and showed her that it was indeed closed!”
“I don’t like all this! I’ll be watching!” the old granny said, turning pale.
“Well, watch for yourself!” Mama gave her permission, but her mood was spoilt all the same.
Mama went from room to room and begged the children to speak in a whisper. The older kids more or less agreed with her, but the younger ones did not quite know how to whisper.
“Mama, I whispered correctly yesterday, right?” one of them yelled from the bathroom, through closed door.
Mama grabbed her head, and Papa said, “You know, I thought I understood the meaning of the word ‘horde’!”
“What?”
“Are you sure I should clarify?”
The watchful granny was very annoying. She had no idea that, under different names and with different appearances, she had become a popular character in contemporary literature. Papa, not knowing how to take revenge on her, killed her in many novels. Three times fiery dragons burned the watchful granny. Twice hungry goblins ate her. Once the murder took place in the elevator and the criminal managed to hide the body without a trace as the elevator went from the fifth to the third floor.
Somehow, when the children got noisy once again, the watchful granny called the police about “underground production at home.” Three police officers in bulletproof vests with assault rifles came to expose the operation. First, they plugged up the hallway all at once and started to feel out something, but Mama declared that there would be nothing for them to feel out, because one child was sitting on the potty and the other would soon be waking up. Then Alex appeared and began to ask the police for an assault rifle. He said that he would not shoot and only wanted to look at the bullets. The police did not give him a rifle, but while an officer was rescuing his weapon from Alex, the rifle barrel got entangled in the tab of his mesh jacket and it was difficult to extricate because the hallway was terribly tight. While all three officers were disentangling one rifle, Costa appeared, triumphantly carrying in front of him the potty with the results of his efforts, then Rita woke up, and the police began to back out very slowly to the stairs.
“What do you produce here at least?” one, the youngest, asked hopelessly.
“You still don’t understand? Come on, go, go!” the older officer said and began to push him back down the stairs.
However, the absence of an underground factory in the apartment did not improve relations with the watchful granny. Peter even drew a caricature very similar to her, under which in bold letters was the caption: I WATCH, I AM WATCHING, I WILL BE WATCHING!
The watchful granny continued to irritate them, though no one was walking on tiptoe anymore anyway. One day Mama sat on the floor in the hallway, crying, and said, “I can’t take it anymore!”
“What’s ‘it’?” Papa was puzzled, looking out from the kitchen with the laptop, where he was dealing with the watchful neighbour once again, sending her live piranhas in a jar with cucumbers.
“We’re too crowded here! We’re like sardines in a can! This city has eaten me up!” Mama repeated and cried even louder.
Then Papa and Mama began to dream about moving to a detached house by the sea, where there would be no neighbours, and renting out the apartment in the big city. They weighed, considered, and decided to take a chance.
“Good thing that you don’t have to work!” Mama said.
“What?! I work from morning to night, but the kids interrupt me all the time!” Papa was outraged.
“That’s right! In a house, you’ll have your own office! We’ll all walk on tiptoe and not disturb you!”
“Yes!” Papa Gavrilov was inspired. “A real office with a real desk! I’ll wind barbed wire with an electrical current around the door and put wolf traps near it. In addition, there’ll be holes in the door through which you can spit out poison darts.”
Chapter Two
Papa Searches for a House
Papa, did you buy worms? Did you buy food for the worms? But what will they eat?
In March, Papa Gavrilov went to the sea and began searching for a house that they could rent for a long time. The seaside town had low buildings, very picturesque, with roofs lined with red clay tiles. Leaves had not yet appeared everywhere, but many trees had already blossomed, and their soft pink flowers became blurred in the eyes, so that one could not see individual flowers. It seemed like the trees were wrapped in a luminous cloud.
Papa had a list of addresses, but, alas, it seemed that everything depicted on the Internet was not quite as in reality. What was presented as “a detached house with many rooms” turned out to be a cramped temporary shed in the owner’s yard divided by plywood partitions, and with windows looking out at a howling dog on a chain. What really looked more or less like a house cost so much that it did not suit Papa.
Wandering around town until the evening, Papa despaired. He decided to take the train and leave. However, there was still a lot of time until the train, and he sat down to rest in a confusing lane similar to the figure 8. Two entrances led into this lane, but they were very narrow and, if one did not know them, it was possible to go endlessly along the “eight” which never ended.
Papa sat on the curb near mailboxes, where there was a board and a jar with cigarette butts, and began to eat a sausage. Soon a large shaggy dog approached him, barking carefully, and calmly sat down. After a minute, a medium-sized dog of off-white colour came running, also barked at Papa, and sat down with a sense of having fulfilled its duty. Last, with a front leg drawn in, a small but very long dog with a bald back walked up, also barked, and took a seat beside the first two. It was felt that all three dogs had known each other for a long time but did not know Papa, and they were interested. Papa fed the dogs some sausage and waited for a fourth dog, because someone else was barking close by.