Mutiny of the Little Sweeties

Days passed. Papa, Mama, and the seven children gradually made themselves at home in the new place.

Not in vain was Mama considered the most skilled hand in the library. The house became cozier with each passing day. Mama brought her sewing machine and quickly sewed curtains for all the rooms, because the old ones were so saturated with tobacco smoke that everyone had a headache.

Mama’s curtains were unlike store-bought. She matched appropriate fabric, pieces of bed sheets, and duvet covers, and stitched into these fabrics certain cut-out parts of children’s clothing. For example, Kate’s favourite dress, which she had irreparably burnt with an iron, turned up in the living room on the first floor next to Rita’s colourful romper, which was already too small for her. Kate looked at her dress and grieved. Rita also pointed at her romper and, trying to explain that she recognized it, squealed like a piglet. Papa’s gloves turned up on the curtains in his office. Mama managed to make four out of two gloves by cutting them in half. As a result, it always seemed to Papa that someone was climbing along his curtains.

The old drapery rods also did not suit Mama, and she made new ones out of some thick, suitable, sawn-off vine trunks that someone had abandoned by the school on the next street. Mama did not understand how anyone could throw out such beautiful “designer” branches.

The neighbours, on the contrary, wondered why Mama dragged home this garbage, sweeping the asphalt with them. Only one neighbour, Uncle Vova, who fed all the stray dogs and puttered in the garden all day, planting cucumbers and tomatoes, understood. “Ah, you want to make kebabs! Only don’t throw in the green ones, otherwise it’ll smoke!”

The new vine drapery rods turned out to be a lot livelier than the previous ones; however, due to their roughness, the curtains did not move along them and simply had to be tied up. Mama braided the thin green shoots into large globes and hung them instead of chandeliers. In the evening, the globes cast very mysterious moving shadows on the walls.

“How contented I am!” Mama said. “I finally have a table to put my sewing machine on! And a large mattress on which I can lie down so that no one jumps on my face!”

While Mama was busy with curtains and chandeliers, Papa learned to understand the whimsies of the boiler and painted the rusting gates with black paint. True, Costa then stuck a hand in the can of black paint and left many, many handprints on the fence and on Papa’s car. Papa wanted to be annoyed, but Mama wiped off two blurred prints and intensified the others instead, so that it turned out beautifully.

In the same period, five new stools appeared in the house, but three old stools and one chair were moved to the basement. Every day the kids broke something, and one of the escaped rats managed to gnaw through the cord of the kettle and stay alive.

“Wow!” said Kate. “But it’s written on the Internet that you can kill a rat with one volt!”

“Well, probably if it’s wet!” Vicky suggested, and Alex found a battery, put water in a douche bag, and ran to chase the rats. Everything ended with his finger jammed in the cage and Papa straightening the bars of the cage with pliers.

While Papa was rescuing Alex, Rita quickly grabbed something from the kitchen table and ran to the bathroom. Then everyone heard the sound of flushing water. Mama was the first to run to Rita. Papa, who actually went for peroxide to treat Alex’s finger, hurried after her. Alex, bleeding a single drop of blood, trudged behind him and tried to show courage. He suggested to himself and those around that he was a soldier. And, as a soldier, important military matters excited him.

“What happens if a soldier starts to fight without pants?”

“Well, the other soldiers will laugh at him!” Papa replied absent-mindedly.

Alex waved his wounded hand. “But he’ll hit them while they laugh at him!” he yelled.

When Papa and the wounded Alex appeared in the bathroom, Rita was standing beside the toilet and laughing.

“What did you drop in there?” Mama asked severely.

“Keekeekeekee!” Rita said and laughed even happier. She was very satisfied that they were paying her attention. Attention, as is known, is measured in heed-mark,[10] and Rita loved getting a lot of it.

“What was it?” Mama repeated, but Rita only looked at her with huge eyes.

“She’s keeping quiet!” Mama said with despair.

“What did she do?” Papa asked.

“Dropped something from the table and flushed!”

“What did she drop?”

“How would I know? Something!”

Papa grunted philosophically and set off to bathe the soldier Alex’s finger with peroxide. Ten minutes later, Papa promptly needed to drive to register Kate and Vicky in art school. He started looking for the car keys and was unable to find them. Then he remembered that Rita had dropped something into the toilet and dashed to Mama. “Keys to the car! She flushed my keys!”

“Take the spares.”

“Have you forgotten? We have no spares!”

“I told you to make spares! Didn’t I tell you?” Mama immediately declared. She loved to say something useful and correct, with great public value. Well, there is “children should behave well” or “the country should live grandly!” If children then fought or the country did not live grandly, Mama instantly recalled that she had warned them what was right, but they had not listened.

“Think: did you leave the keys on the table?” Mama asked.

“I don’t remember where I left them! Sometimes on the table, sometimes by the window! But they’re definitely not by the window!”

“Don’t panic! Go search!”