Mutiny of the Little Sweeties

Periodically, the impetuous muse of repairs visited Mama. This usually happened at night. Mama started to put up wallpaper, sew drapes, or drill something. Papa tried to help her once, but soon grasped that Mama liked gluing, sawing, and drilling by herself, and it is foolish to deprive a person of pleasure, especially if this person was the most skilled hand at the library centre.

On this July night, Papa was sleeping peacefully until a crash shuddered the building. He came down and discovered that Mama had fallen, trying to place two chairs one on top of the other to reach something on the top shelf. A jar of glue and a roll of wallpaper had fallen down together with Mama.

“Couldn’t you have taken the stepladder? Isn’t it beside you?” Papa specified.

“A basin of plaster was on the ladder! I was too lazy to move it!” Mama explained. “I intended on casting bas-reliefs!”

“That’s those in the oven?”

“No. That’s ordinary clay in the oven. You understand nothing!” Mama rubbed her knee and asked Papa to make her eggs.

Having eaten the eggs, she went to sleep, and Papa went to work while the children were still sleeping. The kids slept for a long time, then had a long breakfast, and Papa was able to work until almost noon.

At noon, Papa looked out the window. Outside the window, like two soldiers, Lad and Tot were sitting in a row in the full sun and kept on staring at Aunt Klava’s gate, beyond which were geese. Occasionally, a goose shoved its head under the gate, hissed in warning, and immediately pulled it back.

Aunt Klava came out of the gate, shouted lazily, “Guarding the goslings! Take that!” and threw a board from a box at Lad and Tot. Lad and Tot got up very quietly and, their tails between their legs, plodded to the mailbox. It seemed they were saying, “We are mortally offended and leaving. But if you call us, we will instantly forgive you.”

“Why are there two of them again? What happened to Stool?” Papa yelled through the door.

“I didn’t take it… Wait, are you talking about some stool?” Kate did not understand.

“The dog!”

“No idea. But yesterday we heard it squealing a little somewhere again. You know, where the hives are. I wouldn’t go there!” Kate declared.

She dipped a cotton swab into Brilliant Green[15] and smeared it under the wing of a pigeon, at the same time holding its feet firmly. For some reason, there were parallel scratches on one side of the pigeon, as if it had torn itself against a board with nails. The pigeons had already been living in the attic for two weeks. The attic was low, but just right for them. During the day they walked around the attic and cooed, and on and off pecked wheat with an appetite. Papa himself had made them a nest. It resembled a wooden frame of four boards, with a bundle of dry grass scattered between them. Three flight feathers on each wing were taped together as before, but Kate was going to remove the tape as soon as the pigeons lay eggs. She did not like it that the birds could not fly.

Papa still worked a little more, but the text was already lacklustre. Someone was whining behind the door that he was “bo-o-o-red!” and demanded to watch cartoons. This was clearly Alex.

“No cartoons for you! You were watching all day yesterday!” Vicky warned.

Alex went somewhere and put Costa and Rita up to howling at the door and demanding cartoons. Rita could not articulate the word “cartoons,” so she shouted “Toons!” instead and loudly banged her shoe on the door.

Realizing that he would not manage to work in the next few hours, Papa put the computer into sleep mode and opened the door. “Let’s go somewhere while Mama sleeps!” he suggested.

“Where?”

“You decide. Maybe a museum?”

When Papa suggested it, the four young ones immediately looked at the three older ones to see what expression their faces would assume. If it was written on Kate’s, Vicky’s, or Peter’s face that museums were nonsense, Alena, Alex, Costa, and Rita, getting the hint, would howl that they hated museums and would not go anywhere. But here the opinions of the older ones were divided. Kate stated that she did not want to go to a museum. Vicky carefully said that it was all the same to her, from which Alena concluded that Vicky was not against it, because Vicky, as a true lady, never said “yes” in general. Now it only remained for the young ones to find out the opinion of Peter, the family’s power broker. The power broker scratched his nose, scratched his leg, and was about to say “no,” but then suddenly grasped that he would be able to get directions on Google Maps and caught fire.