Chapter 2
The Gold Sword

Tanya Grotter awoke at dawn from the cold. There was ice on her thin blanket, and the same icy crust, only slightly thinner, stiffened on the pillow. For a while, Tanya was still lying, hoping to hide under the damp blanket, but it was useless – it became even colder and more disgusting. Then Tanya threw off the blanket and hurriedly leaped up, dreaming of diving quickly into the apartment, into warmth.

She pulled the door once, twice, a third time, but it did not yield. Getting up on tiptoes, Tanya discovered that the lower latch was pushed shut. Pipa was up to her old tricks again. The last time she locked Tanya on the sunroom-balcony in the beginning of spring, Tanya caught a cold and spent a month and a half in the hospital with pneumonia. However, the time in the hospital was indeed not so bad, though they gave her a needle daily and even put her on an IV. There, in any case, she was in a warm place and no one nagged her thirty times a day. And now here again…

Tanya started to knock on the glass, but the Durnevs were sleeping soundly in the next room. Only a barrel of gunpowder exploding in the kitchen could wake them. As far as Pipa was concerned, although her bed was right next to it, she only giggled and made disgusting faces at Tanya. However, no faces, even the most disgusting, were as repulsive as her own horse face (inheritance from papa Herman) with round fish eyes (gift from mama Ninel) blinking on it.

“Hey you, fright, open now!” Tanya shouted to Pipa.

“Dream on! Sit there and freeze. All the same some day they’ll put you in prison, just like your daddy… And it’s disgusting to me: I don’t want you wandering around the apartment. You will steal anything,” snorted Pipa.

She reached from the drawer of the table a photograph in a frame and, flopping back down onto the bed, began to study it. Tanya did not know who was in this photograph because Pipa always locked it and never even casually turned the frame around. For sure Tanya knew only that Pipa was in love to distraction with whoever was in this photograph, moreover she was so in love that she stared at him no less than an hour a day.

“Come on, come! Show him your pimples!” Tanya shouted to her.

Pipa started to breathe heavily and furiously.

“Come on, come on! Only make sure you don’t stop breathing!” shivering from cold, Tanya again shouted.

Having given this advice, she fumbled around the balcony with her eyes, estimating whether there was anything to hurl at Pipa. And if there was nothing to throw, then perhaps at least a suitable rope in order, after making a loop, to lower it from the window and hook the latch.

The Durnevs never told Tanya the truth about her parents. It gave them pleasure to incite the girl with stories about her papa being in prison, and her mama, begging at a station, dead. Uncle Herman and Aunt Ninel allegedly took in the same Tanya from pity. “And it’s clear that we made a mistake! You turned out to be as big a rascal as your daddy was!” Uncle Herman added obligingly.

And it was a blatant lie – Tanya was not a rascal, although she knew how to stand up for herself. Small, quick, smart, with tiny curls, she managed to be everywhere at once. Her sharp tongue cut like a razor.

“You have to be on your guard with this one!” Ninel sometimes declared, being the kind who could easily bite off someone’s hand to the elbow and still say that it is not tasty. In reality, Tanya was completely harmless, simply with the Durnevs humiliating her every second, there was no other way to survive.

From the middle of spring to the middle of fall, the Durnevs forced Tanya to sleep on the glazed sunroom-balcony, and only when it became quite cold would she be allowed to lie down in the furthest and darkest room of the Durnev apartment. In that room were normally the vacuum, a stepladder, and a malicious dachshund by the name of One-And-A-Half Kilometres. This old bowlegged sausage hated the girl as much as the Durnevs did, and, fawning before its masters, was eternally hanging at her heels.

Ten years had gone by from that day when Herman and his spouse discovered the double bass case on their landing. It was again fall, but no longer bright and cheerful as then, but gloomy and rainy. There was night frost, and in the mornings icicles hung on the glazed balcony. Exactly the same ice was formed on both the girl’s thin mattress and her blanket. Possibly, the Durnevs would allow Tanya again to lie down in the room if it was not being redecorated recently.

“Just imagining this slovenly creature lying on the new bed and touching our new wallpaper with her fingers simply fills me with annoyance,” Aunt Ninel declared.

“Yes, pity that we threw out the old sofa… But, she’ll probably be able to sleep on the floor, on her mattress,” Uncle Herman said generously when he happened to be in a good mood. However, this occurred extremely rarely, because he had only one good mood and, as is known, one hundred and seventeen bad ones… That Uncle Herman had become deputy several years ago and even headed the committee “Loving Aid to Children and Invalids” changed him very little. He, perhaps, became even nastier. Moreover, here were new elections at hand! Uncle Herman was walking around all the time gloomy and anxious and, only when going out onto the street, would he with loathing, like pulling on old and not very clean socks, stretch on himself a smile. From constant preoccupation, he was more wizened. Even stray dogs tucked in their tails and wailed mournfully when Uncle Herman passed by.

And having failed to find anything on the balcony that would allow her to reach up to the latch, Tanya became slightly melancholy. She did not intend to beg Pipa to open it in order not to give her additional pleasure.

“Well, no matter, chuchundra! You’ll again discover five redundant mistakes in your next homework assignments!” she thought vindictively.

Tanya wrapped herself in the blanket, pressed her forehead against the glass, and began to look at the courtyard. Below, cars, small like beetles, were parked. The roofs of the garage-cockleshell glistened like silver. The sleepy yard-keeper, to spite everyone still sleeping, was rattling the cover of the waste bin.

“If only I could fly! I would open the window, spread my arms, and fly far, far away from here, hundreds, thousands of kilometres, to where my papa is! And if I would have wings, well, like that sheet, for example…” Tanya thought sadly.

Under her eyes the big red sheet, trembling on a broken branch of the maple, unexpectedly tore away, soared up the entire three floors, and was pasted to the glass directly opposite her face. While the girl was pondering how it could happen that the sheet flew up instead of down, the latch loudly clanged like the lock of a rifle.

Turning around, Tanya saw Aunt Ninel in a nightgown. Wiping her eyes, Aunt looked at her with disgust. In the past ten years, she had grown three times as stout and could now travel only in the service elevator. In order that she could squeeze into the kitchen, it was necessary to enlarge the door.

“Why are you hanging around here?” Aunt Ninel asked with suspicion.

“And why not? Your Pipa locked me in,” Tanya was bewildered. With the Durnevs she eternally felt guilty. Probably, they were aiming at this, day after day, year after year, poisoning her existence.

“Don’t you dare lie, thankless trash!” Aunt Ninel snapped, as if she did not just open the latch. “What’s this with ‘your Pipa’? And this after the cousin gave you her beloved pencil case as a birthday present?”

Tanya wanted to say that the pencil case was old, and all the pens either smeared or did not write at all, but she decided that it would be better to keep quiet. Especially as Pipa purposely cut the pencil case up with a blade the next day.

“Why do you keep quiet? You think it’s pleasant for me to talk with you? March into the kitchen to sort out the buckwheat! You love to eat – love also to prepare!” Aunt was angry.

Slipping past her, Tanya went to the Durnev’s kitchen with gleaming tiles glazed sky-blue and, having poured buckwheat out onto the table, began to sift the dark grains. To tell the truth, the buckwheat was sufficiently clean, but Uncle Herman and Aunt Ninel were crazy about ecologically clean food, extra-pure water, and other similar whims. Of filters alone, they had a whole seven pieces in the kitchen.

True, the Durnevs nevertheless forced Tanya to drink from under the faucet in order not to pay for filter cartridges for her. However, Tanya also returned the favour, periodically pouring water from the toilet tank into the teapot for them.

Unwillingly sorting the buckwheat, the girl occasionally raised her head and looked sideways at her reflection in the large nickel-plated extension above the stove. The extension was new like the kitchen, and everything was reflected in it as in a mirror, only not flat but convex.

Either the extension flattered or Tanya actually looked considerably better than Pipa. Well-built, mischievous, sharp-eyed… Here only the small birthmark on the tip of the nose gave her either a mysterious or devil-may-care look.

How many long minutes, especially in first and second grade when they teased her terribly and hurt her feelings because of this birthmark, the girl examined it in the mirror! And the longer she examined it, the more often it came to her head that she never saw similar birthmarks on anyone. Her birthmark sometimes changed colour, becoming either pink and imperceptible or almost black. It could decrease and increase in size. Every time that Tanya got sick or not long before some big trouble the birthmark began to pulsate and would even be very hot as if it were being seared with a hot nail. And finally, right beside the birthmark it was possible to make out a scar consisting of two tiny dots. And are these not bites perhaps, and if so, from what? Maybe even the birthmark itself sprung from a bite?

Aunt Ninel looked into the kitchen. Her unwieldy hulk hung above the girl like a reinforced concrete plate.

“Why are you dawdling? Have you sorted out the buckwheat? Cook for us from this pile, and you can prepare for yourself something from these little black dots. And don’t be embarrassed. If you need bread, take the leftover from guests. The mould on it can be cut off easily.”

For breakfast, besides kasha, the Durnevs ate red caviar and sandwiches with sturgeon. Tanya despondently sat on a stool next to the dog dish and chewed dry bread almost like rock. Moreover, when she started to move, the dachshund One-And-A-Half Kilometres growled and hung onto her sneakers with its teeth.

“Don’t you dare tease the dog!” Aunt Ninel screamed, and a contented Pipa unnoticeably stirred with her feet under the table, trying to anger the dachshund still more.

Unexpectedly from the frail chest of Uncle Herman, stirring the tea with a spoon, a heart-rending sigh was forced out.

“Please, don’t shout! My head aches terribly. I had an awful dream,” he asked pleadingly.

He had hardly uttered this when Aunt Ninel and Pipa instantly became quiet, and even One-And-A-Half Kilometres, this evil rheumatic pug stopped growling. The fact is that Uncle Herman NEVER IN HIS LIFE dreamt. In any case, in the past he did not talk about them.

“What did you see, pampushka?” Aunt Ninel sometimes called her husband pampushka, though it would be more correct to call him “skeletoshka.”

There and then, having altered “pampushka” into “skeletoshka” for herself, Tanya began to smile quietly and immediately looked around in fear. No, no one noticed, everyone was staring in amazement at the dreamer Uncle Herman.

Durnev looked fearfully sideways at the window.

“I dreamt of an old woman,” he said in a half whisper. “A terrible old woman who was sent to us in a cardboard box. An old woman with red eyes and disgusting slobbery jaw. She stretched out her arms… her arms were SEPARATE, not attached to the body… she gripped me by the neck with her bony fingers and demanded…”

“Mommy! What?” Pipa gave a squeak, dropping from her mouth the piece of sturgeon falling precisely onto the dachshund’s nose.

“She said: ‘Give me what she’s hiding!’”

“Give what?”

“Where am I to know that from? I don’t even know who this ‘she’ is!” Uncle Herman snapped. He wanted to add something else, but suddenly Pipa screamed deafeningly, “Eek! This fool nearly toppled the table! I’m scalded by tea!!!”

Both the older Durnevs at once turned and stared at Tanya. Pipa continued to squeal detestably, wailing that she must urgently be in the hospital and that she could not feel her legs. Tanya sat as in a fog, not understanding what happened and why everyone was looking at her. And then she suddenly perceived that she was squeezing the table-top with her hands. So this is why Pipa was squealing – she, Tanya, for some reason gripped the table and, abruptly pulling it, scalded her with tea!

Aunt Ninel turned around furiously. The stool under her – one of the new, recently purchased stools – cracked deafeningly.

“Don’t you infuriate me, I wouldn’t want to break it! Now march to get dressed and get to school!!” she yelled at Tanya.

The girl got up and, not understanding why her head was spinning, went into the room. She just now understood that everything happened at that moment when Uncle Herman mentioned the yellow old woman and her words, “Give me what she’s hiding!”

* * *

Tanya was sent off to school alone. Pipa was making use of the situation in order to dump everything on the burn and remained at home to watch TV.