Aunt Sveta had lived at the Gavrilovs’ for all of two weeks and the house already resembled a construction site. Papa could only work intermittently, hiding with his laptop in the attic, where the pigeons went around his head and shoulders.
One day, he was typing and heard Peter on the stairs persuading Mama, “Don’t tell her that we need a wardrobe!”
“Well, she will meddle! I’m already studying in the bathroom because of repairs everywhere!”
Aunt, by some miracle, caught the word “wardrobe” through three walls, and a complex chain of many links started in her consciousness. “Yes-yes-yes! A wardrobe!” she exclaimed, appearing out of nowhere. “You have things lying on the floor already! We’ll give the Pautkins your shoe rack, take possession of their plastic boxes for the Fedosovs, and they in exchange will give you Arkady Petrovich’s wardrobe, which is kept at their cottage!”
“Not the one lounging around in the cottage?” Mama asked guardedly.
“Yes. To tell the truth, it also didn’t fit in Arkady Petrovich’s. But then everything absolutely goes into it!”
“But it also won’t get in here! It’s tight everywhere here!”
“That’s another question, how to make it such that the wardrobe that fits absolutely everything will get into your house!” Aunt snapped back.
“So, maybe we’ll just put our house inside the wardrobe and won’t go through the hassle? And, incidentally, it’s one thousand and four hundred kilometres from here to the wardrobe! What, it’ll fly across the sky?” Papa shouted from the attic, forgetting that he was hiding.
“That’s already the third question! We’ll cross the bridge when we come to it!” Meddling Aunt cut him off. “That’s it, Nick, come out! Now I know where you’re hiding from me! I need your minivan to ship the trough!”
“What kind of trough?”
“The construction kind. I’ve come to an agreement with a guy. We ship him your trough for mixing mortar, and he in return gives us an almost new balcony door!”
“We have a balcony door!”
“This one has a little glass area! More glass, more light! Besides, there’s a draft under this one!” Meddling Aunt began to descend the stairs triumphantly.
“I’ll tell! I can’t! I’ll tell!” came from the nursery. A flushed Alex jumped out of there and, bouncing, exclaimed excitedly, “You’re not Aunt Sveta! You’re… you’re… you’re… Aunt Mraka!”[27]
Meddling Aunt stopped and scanned Alex from head to big toes. “Why no sneakers? I’ll ask you to return for sneakers, and while searching for them, work out a clear argument why I am Aunt Mraka and who fills you with such thoughts!”
* * *
By the middle of October, even Mama had grown tired of Meddling Aunt. Mama’s favourite mattress, which occupied half the room and, besides Mama, had room for three or four more kids, was exchanged for a sofa, which had many disadvantages and only two merits: it was collapsible and the children could inconspicuously shove candy wrappers and other junk into its wooden interior.
“Now your house looks nice! Now you can have any philosopher as a visitor without shame!” Aunt said.
“I don’t know any philosophers! And if there were any, philosophers don’t care about mattresses. They’re above it,” Papa retorted dejectedly.
“One can be above a mattress, but not a sofa!” Aunt said, with one sentence including herself in the ranks of the classicists.
“It’s possible to be above a sofa too!” Papa objected.
“I’m a weak woman! You don’t understand me!” Aunt Sveta said.
“I can’t take it anymore! Let’s tell her that nothing needs to be undertaken anymore!” Papa said in the evening, when he and Mama were bathing Rita and Costa.
“Never offend a person if he does something with the best intentions!” Mama sighed, trying to guess the children by contours, because Costa gurgled so much foam that it rose half a metre above the bath.
The next morning, Uncle Blahblah came to visit the Gavrilovs. He came on a bike, in a striped vest and straw hat, and with sandals on his feet. “Sorry that I’ve stayed away for so long! I was writing a poem about love. The plot of the poem is: a playwright doesn’t want to pay his wife alimony on the grounds that she is seeing an artist specializing in battle scenes. More precisely, he wants to pay it at the minimum rate, as a creative person and without a regular income. The wife, of course, is against it, which enhances the dramatic conflict!”
Uncle Blahblah blurted out all this while jumping on one leg because he was too lazy to dismount, and he wanted to wheel the bike in but was hampered by the lower cross bar of the iron gates. Standing the bike, Uncle Blahblah came across Meddling Aunt, who was hammering four iron rods into the ground in order to hang on them a brace for a pot of ivy.
“I don’t need a bike here!” said Aunt Sveta in an indisputable voice.
“Reason?” Uncle Blahblah asked, not even moving an eyebrow.
“I don’t need it here!”
“That’s not a reason. That’s the emotional component,” Uncle Blahblah objected.
“The bike has dirty wheels!”
“That’s the subjective component. Where’s the line separating clean and dirty wheels? One speck of dust is still clean but two is already dirty?”
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27
Svet is Russian for light and mrak is Russian for darkness. So Aunt Sveta is aunt of light and Aunt Mraka is aunt of darkness.
