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.
“Mama! Papa! Because of this painful attack, I can’t go to the test! Now I’ll have precisely a three for this term! It’s thanks to her, this idiot! I get bad marks because of her!” she howled, although Tanya knew perfectly well that Pipa viewed tests as death in white slippers. Moreover the tea was indeed not quite so hot, and if the puffed up daughter of Uncle Herman and Aunt Ninel got burned, then only in her imagination.
But the most annoying thing was that both Uncle Herman and Aunt Ninel believed every word of their girlie.
“Oh, Pipa, well what can I do with this criminal? You know meanwhile we cannot send her to the orphanage, and they don’t take anyone into the colony until they are fourteen!” Aunt Ninel lamented, when Tanya, dressed in an absurd crimson-grey jacket, on which instead of buttons there was some eyesore – either rosettes or bulbs, stood in the corridor.
“Nonsense,” Tanya could not contain herself. “If she’ll have a three, then only because she has more twos than pimples in her diary. Have you ever seen a person who wrote ‘vegetable’ not only with a soft sign but also in two words?”
“Don’t you dare speak out! And how, in your opinion, is it written, without a soft sign perhaps? That’s it, I have no more strength! Either some dirty deadbeat made an appointment with me, pretending to be invalids only on the grounds that they have no arms and legs, or this little monster… I can’t take anymore, I’m leaving…” Uncle Herman groaned and, pressing his temples with his hands, set off for the office.
Aunt Ninel moved up to Tanya, leaned toward her and, with hatred burning in her small eyes sunk into thick cheeks, started to hiss like a snake, “You’ll pay for this! You’ll pay! Now I’ll definitely chuck your idiotic double bass case from the house!”
It seemed to Tanya that they precisely jabbed her with a red-hot knitting needle. Aunt Ninel knew how to find her weakest point. Indeed it would be better she called her a dimwit or a degenerate a hundred times – she was already used to this, but to throw out the case…
“Just try to touch it!” Tanya shouted. The old double bass case, lying in a cabinet on the glazed balcony, was the only thing in the house of the Durnevs that utterly and completely belonged to her. It is complicated to say why Uncle Herman and Aunt Ninel did not chuck it before now. And another strange thing – why they never told Tanya about how this case turned up in their apartment and who, crying from hunger, lay in it.
“Indeed I’ll decide this, my dear! Have no doubt: today your case will be in the gutter! And now march to school!” Aunt Ninel snorted with satisfaction.
Pipa, looming behind mama’s
