“If you’d agreed to marry that wizard, none of this would have happened to us,” said one voice.
“Right, and now you’d be a teakettle,” said the other.
“No, we’d have convinced him not to do that! And anyway, I’d rather be living as a teakettle than dying like this.”
“Don’t worry,” said the first soft and kind voice, “soon the angels will bring us to Mother and Father.”
“We don’t need anything!” wailed Marilena. “No money, no Vladimir -just let us go live somewhere on the islands of Fuji-Wuji!”
“If only,” Marilena answered herself curtly.
And then a miracle occurred: with a soft rustle one of the walls slid aside, and Marilena felt the night’s dampness against her skin, though she couldn’t believe it.
The room slowly filled with an evening fog and the smell of jasmine and hyacinths.
The head of Marilena’s bed now pushed against a wild rose bush, and its simple pink flowers hung over her pillow.
With great difficulty Marilena picked herself up, crawled into the garden, and collapsed into some stinging weeds, and a whole rain of dew fell upon her.
With her dry tongue, the thirsty Marilena licked the moisture from the grass and from her wet hands. Then she jumped up-the quiet music was already playing-and began to perform some kind of dance among the bushes, either a cricket dance, or a mosquito dance, with hops and jumps.
“Don’t you see?” Maria cried out happily. “We’re in heaven!”
“Oh no, already?” Lena sobbed without tears. “What about my life? Is it over?”
Just then the two ballerinas were grabbed by two sets of strong paws, and as it happens they belonged to people without any wings or white robes-just regular security guards with guns and sweaty shirts.
And the moment Lena squeaked out something like “I don’t think this is heaven,” they grabbed the ballerinas and dragged them along roughly, even though they didn’t resist in the least bit.
The guards apparently dragged their prisoners through the wild rose bushes, because pretty soon their hands and shoulders were scratched and even bleeding, so that by the time the girls were dragged into the porter’s room, they looked like a pair of wild bums.
Right away the guards wrote up a protocol about the violation of a secure zone, and then they began interrogating the sisters as harshly as they could, especially on the subject of whether the prisoners could immediately pay a fine of three million rubles. If so, they’d be released.
“Where would we get that kind of money?” the blonde Maria asked them. “We don’t even know anyone here; we’re just passing through. We’re dancers from the ballet.”
“Are you out of your minds?” the brunette Lena yelled at them. “Just grabbing people for no reason! We’ll file a complaint!”
“All right-if you have no money, you’re going to get a prison sentence of life without parole!” the guard said cruelly. “You don’t maybe have two million? We’re not greedy.”
But here something strange happened. Another guard ran into the room and barked: “Who’s this? This isn’t her! You let her escape! What are you two doing here? Nelly’s yelling like a madwoman! There’s supposed to be one fat one-and you’ve got two ragged clothes hangers! You’ll answer for this yourselves, then. She’s coming now.”
And sure enough, a woman all bundled up in bandages ran into the porter’s room, accompanied by a suite of doctors in their robes. With all her bandages, you could recognize her only by her low, mean voice.
“What’s this? Where is she? What? You want to go to back to prison? Why were you hired, huh? As soon as she escaped from her room, you kill her in self-defense! Who’s this you’re showing me?”
“They were just, just standing right where the wall opens,” the guard defended himself. “These two rag dolls. There was no one else there.”
“What, what-you crook! You dead man! Why, I’ll send you to Fuji-Wuji for this! Did you forget what your sentence was? Vladimir did everything for you! He saved you from death row, and now this? What are you waiting for? Get out there and comb that garden! And put these two in separate rooms and interrogate them. Maybe they know something.”
With that, Nelly and her suite of doctors left the room.
The only one left was the head guard, the one who had asked for the three million.
With a sweet smile he said: “Oh, you’ll tell me everything! I have such methods-such nice methods! Oh, you’ll talk, you’ll confess that you killed the fat girl yourselves and ate her. And raw, at that. There’s no other way. And you’ll be executed! Whereas we’ll be paid three million for our hard work. Marilena was supposed to be killed accidentally, anyway. Do you hear? And anyway that big fatso was all filled up with narcotics. And she was supposed to kill one of us here, by the way. That one, she looked in, she doesn’t know, naturally. Telling everyone what to do. Too bad it didn’t work out. But this is even easier. Oh, I have such terrible methods of torture! You’ll be amazed, I guarantee you. You’d be better off confessing now, so as not to suffer too much before your execution. Because you ate her, didn’t you?”
But here the two hours of dancing apparently came to an end, because Maria began to be drawn inexorably toward Lena, and Lena toward Maria, and the guard found himself in between them.
“Hey!” he yelled. “What are you doing? What’s gotten into you two? I’ll shoot! Stay where you are!”
Maria and Lena were already melding into each other around him.
Here the desperate guard reached behind his belt for a knife and began blindly chopping the air with it.
And right after the first blow, when he divided Maria’s arm from Lena ’s arm, the sisters felt that they no longer needed to join together.
The bloodied, scratched-up ballerinas found themselves standing there, just staring at each other. The guard was gone.
“You know what happened?” cried the incredulous Lena. “It’s just as the wizard predicted. Whoever tries to divide us will turn into a little dysentery germ!”
“Eww,” said Maria, “let’s get out of here! We’ve had enough trouble without picking up dysentery.”
Shocked and staring at the floor-where, according to their calculations, right now a fat, hairy dysentery microbe should have been crawling-the sisters ran out of the room.
Sometimes one evil defeats another, and two minuses make a plus!
No one stopped them.
They ran out into the garden and stumbled around for a long time in the wet bushes until they found a gate and a guard on the lookout.
“Hurry, there’s a fat woman with a knife in there! She threatened to stab us!”
“A fat one?” The guard became excited and hurled himself toward the telephone.
Lena and Maria jumped out the gate. They were free. They ran away from that cursed place as fast as they could, ran and ran, until they reached the train station, familiar from long ago.
Where else is a homeless person to go?
They washed up, first in a puddle behind some bushes (apparently it had rained in the city that night, while they were escaping) and then in the bathroom.
The few scratches on their foreheads and hands were nothing-all sorts of things can happen to wandering poor people.
At the train station, Lena and Maria looked through some newspapers that were lying around and learned that tomorrow would see the long-awaited triumphant return of big Marilena, the star of the circus, who now weighed fifty kilograms instead of one hundred.
Next to this announcement was a photo of the new Marilena (quite obviously the secretary Nelly, but with big teeth and widened eyelids, which made her look a little cross-eyed, like a bulldog-but what can you do) and an ad for a remarkable clinic where in three days a person can get a new body and also adopt a new healthy diet through the use of miraculous herbs.
It also said that Marilena was leaving the circus to pursue a new life, since she can no longer lift heavy things or eat whole lambs, and is no longer in fact the world’s strongest woman nor the champion of the islands of Fuji-Wuji.