up to the traffic light, stood a skinny red-haired woman with the dishevelled red hair moving so threateningly, as if… no, certainly these were not snakes. The skinny woman, it seemed, without special interest looked sideways at the bus and, turning, walked away. Her strange long raincoat was bespattered by mud in the same places as the fur of the borzoi rushing along the puddles. Tanya even leaped up, but the bus was already moving. An instant, and in the glass again flickered only grey houses, telephone booths, and transparent bus stops.
Several minutes passed before Tanya finally discarded this story from her head.
Yes, today was definitely a special day, resembling very little the previous three thousand two hundred and eighty-five days past since that evening when a worn double bass case appeared on the landing of a multi-storey house on Rublev Road…
The children were arranged in pairs in front of the entrance into the Armoury. Doing a recount of everyone, Irina Vladimirovna almost fainted from the responsibility. The potbellied gym teacher Prikhodkin, sent on the excursion as a second escort, behaved in a more even-tempered way: counted no one and only blinked despondently. Likely, he would doze with great pleasure in the bus.
“We’re visiting the museum in pairs! All exhibits we touch only with our eyes! With eyes, I said! Remember, everything is under surveillance! Just try to break a display case or stick chewing gum onto the tsar’s throne!” Irina Vladimirovna squeaked threateningly.
Genka Bulonov immediately came to life. It was evident that the idea of using chewing gum attracted him by its novelty.
When her turn arrived to hand over her jacket to the cloakroom, Tanya, as always, sensed awkwardness. Under the jacket, she had a dreadful jean shirt with a frayed collar, which was befitting perhaps to be tossed thievishly into the garbage bin at three in the morning. Although the Durnevs were rich, they always dressed the girl very badly – in the most worn and dirty junk, which Uncle Herman’s firm dealt in. And Aunt Ninel always picked such footwear, either too small for Tanya or big to such an extent that she had to shuffle with the soles on the floor so that her feet would not slip.
Not surprising then that, seeing Tanya in these rags, even Aunt Ninel, as dry and tactless as an African rhino, now and then experienced some kind of pang of conscience and began to tell all the teachers indiscriminately, “Yes, I agree, we don’t dress her very well. However, she’ll rip everything all the same! But what do you want from the daughter of a thief and an alcoholic? My husband and I accomplished unpardonable stupidity taking her in, and now we bear the cross.”
The classmates, dressed much better, contemptuously looked askance at Grotter.
“Here’s an eyesore… She dressed herself up so that now they’ll give her a kopeck… Disgraces everyone!” they grimaced.
Tanya had not one friend among them, and if one even appeared temporarily, Pipa and all her toadies began to ridicule her right away. Therefore not one friend remained next to Tanya for a long time. A week would not pass when she would side with Tanya’s persecutors and gloatingly ridiculed her birthmark from the opposite corner of the class. And Tanya understood her perfectly: it was necessary to curry favours with Pipa, making amends for her friendship…
Accompanied by the small round-shouldered guide, who looked so decrepit as if he was much older than all local exhibits, they passed several halls. Tanya listened at first with interest, but gradually her interest disappeared because the guide was speaking approximately one and the same words, “Eh-eh-eh… Before you a signet r-ing, presented by Catherine II to Count Orlov… Selling this ring, it was possible to purchase 10,000 pea-sa-nts… And this is the diadem, presented to the tsarina by Prince Potemkin… It would be possible to ac-qu-ire 15,000 pea-sa-nts with it.”
The guide uttered all these numbers so indulgently and ordinarily as if off-duty, he was only occupied with trading peasants, on the sly bartering them with exhibits from his museum.
They were already in the sixth or seventh hall when suddenly something compelled Tanya to stop. At the same time, it was as if something light and weightless stirred in her chest.
Under the convex armoured glass, a gold sword lay on a high pedestal illuminated by several high-power lights. Its wide blade serrated a little along the edges was covered with intricate characters. All around there were so many pleasing priceless weapons, but for some reason they did not stick in her mind, yet here was this sword… It was possible to think that once she already held it… Some delirium… Uncle Herman never even bought her a plastic sabre, but here a gold sword… And he would sooner eat his necktie than imagine such a thing to himself. Nevertheless, it stubbornly continued to seem to Tanya that this sword was known to her.
A little more and Tanya would find the answer, in her consciousness a tiny little gold spark already began to appear, but here someone carelessly removed it from the display case.
Beside it loomed the guide, automatically repeating like an old record some text cut into the memory.
“Before us a sword found in the tomb of a Scythian leader. You will focus your attention on the signs covering its blade. They are interesting in that they have no analogy to any written languages known to us… They defy deciphering, so that most likely it is simply a design with which the master decorated the sword during its casting.”
“And how many peasants can be bought with it?” Pavlik Yazvochkin, the chief wit of the class, interrupted.
The guide looked sideways first at the sword, and then at the wit. It seemed he was evaluating them with his eyes, precisely an old man and a loan shark.
“How many pea-sa-nts, I don’t know. But a couple thousand of such as you, it is indeed possible…” he said sadly. “Now let us move on to the next exhibit… You see the two-pood ring from the golden gates, which, according to the legend, fell down on the crown of Julius Caesar the minute he triumphantly entered Rome as the head of his legions…”
The entire class following the guide spilled over to the adjacent display case. Only Tanya remained near the sword. Involuntarily, not realizing what she was doing, the girl stretched out her hand in order to touch the sword. Of course, her fingers hit on the armoured glass. Immediately a bell began to jingle, and in only a second the huge supervisor, resembling a gorilla rented from the zoo and on which were stretched haphazardly a skirt and a tight wig, clutched Tanya by the sleeve.
“Didn’t they tell you: don’t touch anything! Here I’ll call security now… Where’s the teacher?” she yelled louder than the siren.
“Please don’t pay any attention! She’s with us, a character, a fool! Her papa is a convict,” Lena Mumrikova barged in, emaciated, a girl cast in unhealthy green, the chief among Pipa’s toadies.
“Shut up, green toad!” Tanya exclaimed, not recognizing her own voice.
She terribly wanted to attach Mumrikova’s nose to the glass so that the surveillance would snap to action once more, but it was not possible to do this because the supervisor continued to hold her tight.
Fortunately, instead of Irina Vladimirovna, who for sure would tell tales to the Durnevs, gym teacher Prikhodkin, falling over, approached them.
“You’re what? Her teacher?” the supervisor asked mistrustfully.
“Aha! It’s my teacher! Beloved, from the very first class,” Tanya immediately confirmed.
“And you keep quiet!” the supervisor bellowed. “I’m asking the man: are you the teacher?”
“Yes…” confirmed Prikhodkin.
“Eh-eh,
