Tanya Grotter And The Magic Double Bass
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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.