The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - стр. 41
When the heroes had their moments of sadness, they remembered their mothers, each one his own, but to their different, absent, mothers they all addressed one and the same reproach: why those mothers weren’t smart enough to wrap the future heroes into a piece of white cloth while they were still just silly babies and drop them into the fast running River-Mommy?
Only Ilya of Murom and Warrior Svyatogor, who grew so mighty that even the Earth Mother could bear him no more and only mountain rocks still somehow withstood his movements, they never raised that mutual lamentation, not even when having the bluest blues…
At times one or another of the hero warriors had a fight with one or another beauty disguised in armor. Those fights ended differently but the defeated would invariably say, “Do not kill me but treat instead to good food and drink and kiss on my mouth as sweet as sugar.” With all of those epic tales heard more than once, I knew by heart when such combats with gastronomic outcome were near at hand and eagerly anticipated them in advance…
Grandma Martha named the bathroom “the bathhouse”, and after her weekly bath, she was returning to our room steam-heated to red glow and half undressed—in just a tank top for menswear and one of her long skirts. Then she sat down on her iron bed to cool off while combing and braiding her gray hair into a pigtail. On her left forearm, there was a large mole in the form of a female nipple, the so-called “bitch’s udder”.
In course of one of her after-bath proceedings when she seemed to notice nothing but the curved plastic comb running thru the damp strands of her hair, I took advantage of my brother-’n’-sister’s distraction by agitated playing on the big sofa and sneaked under the springy mesh in the Grandma’s bed well sagged under her weight. There I cautiously turned over to my back and looked up – under the skirt between her straddled legs wide and firmly planted in the floor. Why? I did not know. Neither was there anything to make out in the dusk within the dark dome of the skirt. And I crawled away, as carefully as I could, feeling belated shame, regret, and a strong suspicion that she was aware of my hushed maneuvers…
Sasha was a reliable younger brother, credulous and taciturn. He was born after the brisk Natasha, and his complexion startled all by purple-blueish tinge because of the umbilical cord had almost strangled him, yet he was born in a shirt, which was taken off him in the maternity hospital and Mom explained later that from newborns’ shirts they produced some special medicine.
And Natasha turned out a really shrewd weasel. She was the first to know all the news: that the following day Grandma was to bake buns, that new tenants were to move into the flat on the first floor, that on Saturday the parents would go to a party at some people’s place, and that you should never-never kill a frog or it would rain cats and dogs.
At the sides of the back of her head, there started two pigtails split by ribbons before reaching her shoulders to fix each braid with a lovely bow-knot at its end. Yet, neither of those bows survived for long before falling apart into a tight knot with a pair of narrow ribbon tails. Probably, because of zealous spinning her head on all the quarters to find out: what-where-when?.