©Peter
The Gavrilovs, tired of Moscow, tried to go to the sea every day. All their neighbours – both Aunt Klava with the geese and Uncle Vova feeding the dogs and spending time on grapevines and tomatoes – looked at them as at the deranged.
Among the locals there even existed the sport of boasting who had not been to the sea for how long. Uncle Vova maintained that he had not been to the sea for ten years, because “he does not need it very much.” Aunt Klava remembered that the last time she swam was last year, when they went to the estuary for a barbecue.
However, the old man Abramtsev, who lived at the beginning of the street, beat Uncle Vova and Aunt Klava. According to his assertion, he had not swum for about forty years, because in his childhood, the sea was like clear tears and the sandy beaches were so long that by the time you reached the water, your legs were tired. Now they dumped slag into the sea, the sand was washed away from the beaches, and they were gradually building the devil knows what, therefore Abramtsev sat at home and watched soap operas.
Nevertheless, it was all the same to the big family. Every day around noon, when the early-rising Papa stopped working, or more exactly, when all the children started to make a noise so that Papa had to stop working, they all left home and went to the sea.
So it was that May morning. Rita sat in the stroller. Costa stood behind on the baggage rack, leaning his elbows on the handle of the stroller. Alex sometimes stayed with him and sometimes ran off to see if Stool, Lad, and Tot stuck with them. The other children had already gone off by themselves.
After about forty minutes with all the endless stops, close examinations of bugs, and “Oh! I left my swimsuit at home!” or “Where’s the bag with the towels? I think I forgot it when I got my swimsuit!” they reached the sea. Here Mama, who had not slept at night because Costa had had an earache, collapsed on a mat and warned them not to pester her. Papa went to swim in the cold water, came out blue, and said that this was the resource of health and he felt fit. The rest refrained from this resource of health.
Alex, after soaking his shorts, went waist-deep into the water looking for crabs. He found a dead one and pried it open with a nail to figure out how a crab was arranged. “Papa!” he said importantly. “A crab isn’t arranged in any way! It has no heart, no lungs, no internal organs! I didn’t find them. It only has meat and yellow gunk!”
Peter, after putting on dark glasses like a Mafioso, stood on the shore and looked indifferently into the distance, occasionally spitting into the water or throwing stones. In Peter’s mind, everyone who passed by should now look at him and think, “How cool! What an imposing young man!”
The remaining six children hardly worried about how they looked from the outside. They ran along the beach with loud screams, occasionally fishing Rita out of the water. Rita purposefully ran into the sea and to the depths. Alena and Kate pulled her out by her arms and legs and promptly unloaded her on the sand. Rita got up decisively, shook off, and ran to the sea again. Finally, Alena and Kate lost patience and dragged Rita to Papa.
“Here, take your daughter! She’s so stubborn! I was never like this!” Kate declared.
“Indeed! Remember how you wanted a lollipop in the subway? And how the woman on duty calmed you on the escalator?”
Kate blushed. “Those were errors of youth,” she said, inadvertently releasing Rita’s leg.
Rita immediately jumped up and rushed to the sea. At the same time, she looked around and laughed loudly, showing that she knew perfectly well that they would now run after her. But Papa did not run after her. He issued an amazed sound and quickly began to dig the sand with his hands. “Kate, look! Don’t show Rita! Here’s pirate treasure!”
Rita, having already reached the water, looked around. Papa and Kate were digging in the sand. Rita watched them incredulously from afar. On her face was written, “Ha, I know you! You want to lure me!”
But Papa and Kate did not even look at her but were digging in the sand with four hands. Then Alena also joined them. She dug like a dog throwing sand out with its two front paws. That is, of course, with her two hands, not paws. Then Papa shoved his hand, squeezed into a fist, into the pit, pulled it out, opened his fingers, and Rita saw candy in his palm.
TREASURE!!!!
All doubts instantly disappeared. Rita rushed to Papa and, grabbing a scoop, took the most active part in the treasure hunt. Very soon, Alex and Costa joined them with the shout “Diiiiig!” The longer they searched, the more candy they found. However, for some reason, no one was surprised that candy only appeared when Papa’s hand turned up in the pit.
Kate, Vicky, and Alena certainly knew that there was no treasure there but dug with no less passion. Kate and Alena dug with their hands and Vicky with a piece of roofing tile from a beach shed. Every now and then, Vicky checked whether sand had gotten under her nails and, after putting aside the tile, cleaned her nails with the edge of a piece of paper.
Peter alone was not digging. He was walking nearby, hands in the pockets of his shorts. He looked occasionally into the pit and it became apparent that he also wanted to dig. But then it occurred to Peter that it would not be sufficiently imposing, and he controlled himself and turned away.
Gradually they started to come across less candy, and then Alex dug out a crumpled piece of paper on which was written in crooked letters: NO MoRe CanDY. YouR TreASurE.
“What’s written here?” Alex asked greedily.
“Read it yourself! I don’t know!” Papa said.
“I can’t read!”
“Well, then you’ll never find out what they wrote to you!”
After being tormented for about five minutes, Alex managed the text after all and, on understanding the contents of the note, called it stupid.
“Why is it stupid?” Alena was surprised.
“Because it’s written here that the treasure wrote this! But pirates wrote this! A treasure can’t write,” Alex stated authoritatively.
Costa nodded, impressed by his iron logic. Mama woke up; she could not sleep because they were pelting her with sand. She was convinced that once the candy was gone, they would abandon the pit, but nothing of the kind. The pit was so great that it aroused the children’s sportive spirit to make it even deeper. Even Costa was digging. With his right hand he drove the shovel into the wet sand and with his left he knocked on it from above, as if he was hammering in beams.
“What happens when the pit reaches the centre of the earth?” Alex asked.
“Lava spews out!” Peter said. “Don’t even have to reach the centre! Drill about ten kilometres and it may already spew. This is the sea, the continental plates are thin!”
Alex was so happy that he forgot how to breathe, but he did not die, and, after staying completely stunned for about five seconds, asked, “And lava, it’s an explosion?”
“Not quite. But if there’s a volcanic eruption, then yes! Smoke to five kilometres, ash cloud and all that!”
Alex snatched the piece of tile from Vicky and jumped into the pit, and fountains of sand began to fly out from there.
“You’ll have to escape by yourself when lava spews!” Papa warned.
“Doesn’t matter! We’ll pull him out by his shorts!” Vicky promised.
Peter, passing by for the hundredth time, finally broke down. With the shout, “Everybody get out! You’re all digging wrong!” he slipped down into the pit with a hefty board rejected by the sea. Peter plunged it into the wet bottom, dislodged the sand, and the “nippers”, as he called his brothers and sisters, emptied out the sand.
