“Are the green ones tasty?”, asked Katya with charming spite, sqinting her eyes to look at Ksyusha.
“Are yours full of worms?” asked the younger sister.
At lunch time they went to the old people. The sisters immediately made peace when the discussion turned to village gossip.
“Alka’s with Seryoga,” Katya claimed.
“No way. He and Galka were going to get married. The matchmakers already made their rounds,” Katya said in disbelief.
“I’m telling you! They rode by on a motorcycle yesterday.”
“Maybe he was just taking her somewhere.”
“At three in the morning,” Ksyusha replied mockingly. “Across the bridges…”
Across the bridges meant the cozy fields where young villagers in love drove on motorcycles or walked to in pairs.
Zakharka looked at the sisters and thought that both Katya and Ksyusha had been “across the bridges.” He imagined for one painful moment the lifted skirts, hot mouths and heavy breathing, and shook his head, driving away the distraction, such a sweet distraction that it was almost unbearable.
He held back a bit, looking at the ankles and calf muscles of the sisters. He saw the frog-like, tanned ankles of Ksyusha, and through Katya’s dress full of sunlight, her hips, which only looked better since she had given birth.
He wished that the river were closer, just a few paces away. He would run and dive in and not come up to the surface for a long time, moving very slowly, touching the sandy bed, seeing elusive fishes in the cloudy semidarkness.
“Why aren’t you keeping up?” asked Ksyusha, turning around.
Zakharka wished that Katya had asked this question.
Katya was talking to Rodik.
“Shall we go swimming?” he suggested, instead of answering.
“Will you carry Rodik there?” asked Katya, turning around. She took a few steps backward along the street, smiling at her cousin.
Zakharka broke into a smile, against his morose will.
“No. Pro. Blem.” he answered, looking Katya in the eye.
Rodik, copying his mother, also turned around and started walking backwards, but turning around every second he immediately got tangled in his own legs and fell over. Everyone laughed.
There were too many of them to fit in the kitchen, and they ate in the big room, at a long table covered with a flowered plastic tablecloth which had been accidentally cut with a knife here and there, and also had a half-moon burned into it from the edge of a hot frying pan.
The sisters crunched on crisp cucumbers.
Zakharka liked their wonderful appetite.
It was very sunny.
Katya put some potatoes on a small plate for Rodik. He began poking and pushing them around with his fingers, all covered in lard and butter, and constantly spilled potatoes in his lap. Katya gathered the potato off her child’s leg and ate it, beaming.
Zakharka sat across from them, gazing at them, and silently rubbed the sole of his foot against Katya’s leg. She didn’t move her leg, seemingly paying no attention to her cousin at all. She kept goading her little sister, listened to her grandmother relate something about the neighbor, and didn’t neglect to admire Rodik. But she didn’t look at Zakharka at all.
But he didn’t take his eyes off her.
Ksyusha noticed, jealously.
The bread tasted very good. The potatoes were amazingly sweet.
They ate from a common frying pan, huge, reliable, and scarred with burn marks.
“Tomorrow Grandpa’s going to kill the pig,” said Grandma.
“Oh, I’m glad you reminded me,” said Katya.
“Why?” asked Grandma.
“I won’t come over tomorrow. I can’t watch that.”
“Who’s forcing you, don’t go out into the yard and don’t watch,” Grandma laughed.
“I’m not coming over either,” said Ksyusha, agreeing for the first time with her sister.
The sisters helped clear the table. While they were doing so, Zakharka was outside making a bow, more for himself than for Rodik. What good would a bow be to Rodik anyway. How could he handle one?
The boy, however, steadily watched as Zakharka worked: as he found and cut down a suitable bough, and bending it wound some twine around it, held in place by notches he had cut beforehand.
“Bow”, said Zakharka clearly. “Bo-ow!”
“Ow,” repeated Rodik.
“You’ll get him talking soon”, said Katya, who had come out.
“Going hunting?” asked Ksyusha, who soon followed her sister. “Can I go? Rodik, will you take me?”
Rodik looked at Ksyusha without blinking. Zakharka looked at Katya without blinking.
“In any case you still have to peel the potatoes,” said Katya, “before we go swimming. Or Papa will have nothing to eat…”
They dropped by the sisters’ house. Katya set a bucket of water, the bucket with the potatoes, and a pot on the floor. Everyone sat down, and Katya handed out knives. To Ksyusha she gave the smallest, irreparably blunt. Ksyusha, cursing, went to get a different knife.
The three of them peeled the potatoes, laughing about something or other. Rodik ran among them. Katya fed him pieces of raw potato.
Ksyusha admonished her:
“What are you doing? Some mother you are! How did they trust you with a child…”
“Just make sure they don’t trust you with one,” answered Katya, blowing a fallen strand of hair from her face and then pushing it back in place with the wrist of the hand holding the knife.
Zakharka was enjoying himself and tried not to look at the sisters’ knees: Ksyusha’s were tanned, while Katya’s were whiter. Katya’s were round, while Ksyusha’s bones jutted out daintily, like some tall-legged creature, perhaps a deer…
Also, Katya was sitting a bit farther away from the bucket of potatoes, and when she bent over…
My God, why are you pestering me with this…
Zakharka went outside. The chickens were slowly wandering about, stupid from the heat.
“Akhaka!” laughed Katya from inside the house, her voice coming nearer. “Did you hear what he said? ‘Ere Akhaka?’ Here’s your Akhaka, Rodik! Here he is.”
Rodik ran out on his staggering legs, with his sunny eyelashes and ears covered in fluffy hair.
It was ten minutes’ walk to the river. Zakharka took off his shorts and with a running jump threw himself in the water, so as not to see the sisters getting undressed. I wish I didn’t have to see them at all… he thought joyfully, and immediately turned towards the sound of their voices.
“How’s the water?” the sisters asked at the same time, looked at each other angrily at first, as if suspecting mockery, but then laughed.
They didn’t argue any more that day.
Katya had brought some apples with her. Lying on the bank, wriggling their feet in the sand, they ate the rosy fruit. Zakharka threw the core into the water.
“Why’d you do that?” said Ksyusha, with mild disgust.
“The fish will eat it.”
Katya sat up every minute or so and yelled:
“Rodik, don’t go in too deep! There are fish there! Hey!”
“There?” asked Rodik, pointing to the middle of the river, and inspired, walking in further.
“Zakharka, tell him, he’ll only listen to you.”
Gnawing on an apple core, her cousin was looking at how a few black curls had fought their way out of Katya’s bathing suit, clinging to her white, damp leg covered in shimmering golden drops.
“Rodik!” he yelled, loud enough even to surprise himself, and the boy jumped.
“Lord, why are you yelling like that?” said a startled Katya, quickly rising from the sand.
“I’ll go, you lie back down…” Zakharka went out to Rodik. “Shall we pick some cattails?” he suggested. “We already have a bow. Now we need some arrows.”