A day passed, two days, then a week, and the old man did not call. However, Mama all the same looked at the phone in horror, like looking at a planted bomb that will definitely blow up someday. At times, she even tried very inconspicuously, as if by accident, to cover the phone with a pillow.
“Perhaps we should call him?” Papa suggested.
Mama grabbed his hand. “No! What are you doing? What if he has made up with his granddaughter, but you’ll stir him up with your call, they’ll fight, and he’ll come back!”
Papa looked at the phone and sighed. “Sad to be old. He’s a good person, but he lives in three rooms with his granddaughter, who doesn’t let him smoke or file his nails with a pumice stone. But he’ll get used to it all,” he said.
“Yes,” Mama agreed. “I thought about it. Imagine, we’ll also be subject to a granddaughter this way.”
“That’s alright,” Papa said. “Chin up! One hope is that we’ll have many grandchildren and it will be possible to find among them the least harmful. One that will let us file our nails with a pumice stone.”
Autumn by the sea is the golden season. It is the time of poets, artists, old men with beautiful beards and skinny legs, and ladies in hats. The sun no longer turns shoulders into steaks, the nights are chilly, but the sea is still warm, mothers with children have gone home, and only the gulls disturb the sleepy beaches with their calls. The Gavrilovs, living on the coast for the first year, earlier perceived this as a cliché, but it turns out that everything was exactly so, and all their former friends knew this.
After waiting till mid-September, their old friend Uncle Blahblah came to them. They called him Uncle Blahblah because he could explain for twenty minutes what a normal person would understand after four and a half seconds.
Uncle Blahblah was formerly a lawyer who left work to write detective stories and scripts of police serials. His detective stories were somewhat long-drawn-out and very didactic, but employees of Internal Affairs really liked them because everything in them was very thorough. That is, not like Papa Gavrilov’s heroes flying across the sky, attaching themselves by suspenders to the sun, and falling in love without a break. With Uncle Blahblah, if a bench participated in a book, then he specified the material from which it was made, its length, weight, the number of nails, its combat capabilities in a fight, and a lot of other details. Later on, this bench might not be mentioned at all.
In addition to scripts and detective novels, Uncle Blahblah also wrote poems not containing punctuation. His poems had never been published, but Papa considered them good and advised Uncle Blahblah on how to release his poems to the world. “You either perform them with a guitar or present your poems to your heroes!”
“How do I present them?”
“Well, say you have a criminal lawyer or senior investigator who writes poetry! Then you can introduce them directly into the main text and a reader will understand!”
“Oh! That’s an idea!” Uncle Blahblah exclaimed happily, and in his books appeared the head of the homicide department who, after putting aside his pistol (the description of the pistol followed on the second page), wrote poetry.
Upon learning of Uncle Blahblah’s arrival, Mama groaned that they had no place to put him. “He’s rich! He can rent a room in any hotel!”
“First, he doesn’t like unnecessary spending. Second, he wants to talk with me and show me his new poems. Third, he intends on improving his health and soaking up the sun,” Papa defended him.
“Let him soak up the sun somewhere else! I don’t want a lawyer in my house seeing that our things are all over the place!” Mama said, but yielded.
The next day Papa met Uncle Blahblah at the station. Uncle Blahblah emerged from 1st class, although he had written in the mail to Papa that he would come by 3rd class.[23] After jumping out of the car, Uncle Blahblah shook Papa’s hand and immediately rushed to a flowerbed to smell the flowers. He smelled flowers anywhere and scared people unaccustomed to this.
“I waited for you by another car,” Papa said.
“You mean 1st class?” Uncle Blahblah asked. “Oh, yes! Such nice people showed up! You see what the deal is: I pointed out some minor corrupt practices to the conductor. In a completely friendly manner. They took offence and called the head of the train. He rushed over as red as a lobster, but we talked and it turned out that they had a free 1st class compartment. Expensive, you know, few people can afford it.”
“Free?” Papa asked, knowing that Uncle Blahblah would not pay an extra three kopeks.
“Why free? How narrow your thoughts are!” Uncle Blahblah was indignant, picking up the handle of his suitcase on wheels. “Are you aware that each train has a book of ‘Complaints and Suggestions’? I wrote words of gratitude and my own poems in there!”
The Gavrilovs settled Uncle Blahblah in Papa’s office on the first floor. On this occasion, Papa’s laptop moved into the next room and Uncle Blahblah’s computer was assigned to the table. However, he rarely worked on his computer. He more often wrote in a quick hand in a thick notebook with metal springs.
Uncle Blahblah was chubby and well-nourished, led a healthy lifestyle, and rode a bike to the sea every morning, where he doused himself with water from a child’s bucket, considering bathing unwholesome. Then Uncle Blahblah returned to the Gavrilovs and walked around the room, occasionally stopping to smell the blooming geranium.
In the evening, Uncle Blahblah drank wine, which he bought in plastic bottles from a Tatar. They were very cheap, because it was an illegal enterprise, trading under the counter, and completely lacking sanitary certificates.
“You’re great, I’m great! We’re both geniuses, you know? Friendship of the great, you know? Pushkin and this… Turgenev![24] Pour yourself another!” Uncle Blahblah said to Papa.
“Thank you, I have juice,” Papa refused.
“You don’t respect me as a person!”
“I respect you as a poet!”
“This is great! C’mon! To the muse! Where’s your muse?”
“The kids packed it away.”
“But who’s this running?”
“The kids are still up!”
“Why aren’t they sleeping?”
“The light distracts them. When there’s light somewhere, children flock to it like moths. Therefore, we usually arrange ‘night’.”
“How’s that?”
“Turn off the lights in the whole house. The children see that there’s nowhere to run to, there’s darkness everywhere, and go to sleep with grief,” Papa explained, going for the bare heel of Costa, who especially came down to see Uncle Blahblah.
“Uncle Blahblah!” he uttered loudly.
“Who’s he talking about? Who’s this Uncle Blahblah?” Uncle Blahblah, not knowing that he was Uncle Blahblah, tensed up. He naively thought he was Valentin Sergeevich.
Mama came down, lifted Costa onto her shoulder, and carried him away. In the kitchen remained Papa, Uncle Blahblah, Kate, and Peter. Having finished eating, Peter got up from the table and trudged to his room. He was hoping to slip away unnoticed, but far from it.
“Wash up after yourself! Once or twice!” Kate said in her usual voice, not even her most commanding.
She said this to Peter, but Uncle Blahblah decided that it was to him, and he was frightened at first, but then was carried away. “What a woman this one will be in ten years! A character!” The poet-lawyer was delighted. “A true woman should be heard a long way away! She’ll be a hybrid of a dictator, mother, muse, and victim. Precisely so!”
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23
Long-distance trains within Russia have 3 main classes of accommodation. First class has 2-berth compartments with both beds at the lower level on both sides of the compartment. Second class is 4 berths per compartment. Third class is an open-plan dormitory car with bunks arranged in bays of 4 on one side of the aisle and bays of 2 along the coach wall on the other side of the aisle.
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24
Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818-83) was a Russian prose writer and playwright. His works are regarded as major 19th century Russian Realism.
