The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - стр. 66
And now Natasha, with happy giggles, was following my vain search and after my frantic cry addressed to our absent brother that, okay, I agreed to be the “it” one more time, only let him go out from wherever he was now, Natasha also yelled instructing him to sit tight and quiet, and not to give up. I ran out of patience completely and refused to play anymore, but she suggested that I leave the room for a moment. Returning from the corridor, I saw Sasha in the middle of the room pleased and silent, and blinking bemusedly at Natasha’s report how he climbed the fourth drawer in the wardrobe where she piled socks over him…
At times there happened exclusively family games at home, with no neighbors taking part…
Merry laughter of several voices was heard from the parents' room, I put the book aside got up from the big sofa and trotted over there.
"What’s the fuss?" asked I envious of the mutual mirth.
"Checking the pots!"
"How’s that?"
"Come on and have a check!"
I was told to sit on Dad's back and grab him by the neck while he was firmly holding my legs. So far, so good, I liked it. But then he turned my back towards Mom and I felt her finger rooting my ass as deep as the pants let go.
"This pot is leaky!" announced Mom.
Everyone laughed and me too, although I felt somehow ashamed…
Another time Dad asks me, "Wanna see Moscow?"
"Wow! Sure!"
Coming from behind, he puts his hands over my ears, tight, and lifts me up above the floor by my head squeezed in between his hands.
"How now? D'you, see Moscow?"
"Yes! Yes!" scream I.
He puts me back where taken and I do my best not to hide the tears from the smarting pain in my ears flattened against the skull.
"Aha! Got fooled! It's so easy to fool you!"
(…much later I figured out that he just was repeating the practical jokes played on him in his childhood…)
In the course of the Hide-and-seek with Sasha’s disappearance, when checking the cloth wardrobe in the hallway, I noticed a bottle of lemonade stuck all by itself in the narrow cleft between the wall and the wicker chest. Lemonade then was something I adored in earnest, that carbonated nectar had only one annoying feature— it disappeared so too fast from my glass. As for the discovered bottle, it obviously was stored for some holiday and then just forgotten about.
I did not care to remind of it to anyone and the following day, or maybe the day after the following day, taking the opportunity of being home alone, I pulled the lemonade from behind the chest and hurried to the kitchen. Still in the corridor, my impatient fingers felt some slackness in the bottle cap, I tore it off and clapped the bottle up to my eager lips… Half-way through the second gulp, I realized that the lemonade was not somehow not quite it, but quite not it at all. Reversing the bottle to the normal position, I saw that after the holiday it was filled with sunflower oil for storage.
It’s good that no one witnessed my attempt at drinking sunflower oil, except for the small white box with a red cross on its door, the hoard of first-aid kits, unknown pills and dark glass phials, fixed up in the wall between the cloth wardrobe and the door to the storeroom, and also the black electric meter just above the entrance door. But they were not to tell anyone…