it’s excellent! Be glad! A holiday!” Tanya said.
As if hearing obvious nonsense, the spectre indignantly flickered before her eyes. “What’s to be glad about? The King of Ghosts always comes on New Year and kills one of us… Wonderful occasion for happiness! I’m simply touched, what ignorant people one has to deal with!”
“The King of Ghosts?” Tanya perplexedly asked him to repeat. “But indeed ghosts are immortal, how is it possible to kill them?”
“Not on your life!” Lieutenant cleared his throat. “Immortal! And why then forget the knives in my back? You’re joking unsuccessfully and – wow! – twelve spoons and one dagger… Really, it couldn’t be explained in an amicable way? Well, so it’s not possible to put feet on the table and to rush to the ball with cutlets? True, then I was still alive, but what’s the difference?” Tanya was interested. She heard for the first time the tragic circumstances, with which Rzhevskii became a ghost.
Unhealed Lady also wanted to have a say, and she interrupted Lieutenant. “He’s right…” picking at her ear with a thermometer, she barged in. “Immortal is only the one who was never born. Yes, in contrast to the so-called living, we cannot be pierced with a sword or killed with a brick! We’re not afraid of head colds and we pass through the majority of obstacles. But the King of Ghosts has been given unlimited authority over us. Once a year one of us spectres compulsorily disappears and a new one appears. Of course, no one wants to vanish. Even I, in spite of all my ailments… a-choo! still want to live…”
Lady looked around at everything with a distressed gaze. “And besides, although alone, if you could call it that, even a pig could feel!” she declared. “At least someone asked me in the morning, ‘How are you feeling, my dear? Is your back aching? Blood hammering in your temples?’ But no – everyone only runs away even before I have time to appear! They screwed up their faces as if I am a leper!”
Observing that his companion again started whining, Lieutenant with a loud chomping made his way into the floor. A whole minute passed before his head, carefully looking around, appeared in the flowerpot.
“Well then… the King of Ghosts. In Tibidox before New Year, we always hid, but someone disappeared nevertheless. Last year Crackpot Grandpa vanished… He was such a strange spectre, clearly not in his right mind. All the time running and searching for something. Didn’t want to hear about my migraines and the polyps in my nose!” Unhealed Lady continued with such a reproach as if this was also the reason why he disappeared.
“And what was he searching for?” Tanya asked with sudden interest.
“Crackpot Grandpa?” Lieutenant responded. “Either treasure or something… He was generally terribly tight-lipped. Only walked through walls and forever disappeared somewhere. No one ever heard his voice in 300 years. True, they said that he alone knew the way to the Vanishing Floor, a way along which it’s possible to return.” Tanya moved forward. It was the second time she heard about the Vanishing Floor. So it means there is a safe passage!
“What’s with you, Rzhevskii?” Lady suddenly exclaimed fearfully. “Why are you telling her this? It’s a secret… A secret of all the ghosts! If the King finds out, he’ll send you a marker, and then…”
“Don’t barge in, pain in the neck! I told her nothing! How can I describe to her the way when I myself don’t know where it is?” Lieutenant growled. Rzhevskii pretended to be brave, but it was noticed that he was pretty disheartened.
Soon Lieutenant became a wave of smoke and dived into the trunk. Unhealed Lady, continuing the non-stop whining, rushed after him. After understanding that they would tell her nothing more, Tanya slammed the cover shut after them.
In the week before winter vacation, two teachers – for Russian and for geography – in one stroke came down with the flu. The principal put in as replacement so much mathematics that numbers and fractions, Xs and Ys were literally dancing before everyone’s eyes.
The mathematician in the school where Tanya and Pipa studied was simply a nightmarish type. His name was Igor Valentinovich. A huge person with a dove-coloured nose and hair straight up like a hedgehog, he resembled Lifeless Griffin. Perhaps he did not smell like rotten stuff but merely earwax. Tanya was almost certain that Professor Stinktopp, the head of the “black” department of Tibidox, would like him.
Most of all Igor Valentinovich hated jokes and approximate answers. He would give “twos” for the slightest deviation from rules. And he set many rules. Margins in notebooks must be exactly four squares. The compass must be to the right of the ruler. In the pencil case there must be two ordinary pencils; moreover each sharpened at both ends. The textbook must be propped up on the bookstand. The mark book must lie immediately behind the textbook, opened onto the page where observations were usually written. A hand raised was strictly perpendicular to the desk – and so on without end. And finally the last, the most impossible rule consisted of knowing all these rules by heart… But then at the same time there was simply deathly silence in Igor Valentinovich’s class. Any student coughing by accident instantly pulled his head in his shoulders.
On that day, the mathematician for some reason was especially out of humour. Having sullenly greeted them, he wrote on the board a problem and ordered everyone to solve it. The problem read as follows:
At a contest, 34 firefighters put out 75 bonfires in 3 minutes. How much time will 3 firemen need in order to put out 109 bonfires?
Tanya despondently stared at the board. Well, the moronoids know how to invent problems for themselves! Any, even the dullest, student of the school of Tibidox, even that Gunya Glomov, would make short work of these bonfires in a second! In order to extinguish a fire, one must say Trigus sputterus and release a magic spark, and all fires would go out, no matter how many are nearby. Five or a hundred and five if you want. And all firemen, if they are not magicians, have no choice but only to sigh, to water the flowers with the hoses, and to exchange helmets for something to do.
Reflecting on this, Tanya mechanically began to sketch firefighters and bonfires in her notebook and she was so absorbed that she shuddered when above her head she suddenly heard a furious howl, “GROTTER!” Lifting her head, Tanya with horror discovered that Igor Valentinovich was leaning over her notebook and enraged like hundreds of swamp bogeys.
In Tibidox no one was forbidden to sketch during lessons. Well, you say, is this really bad if you have in a notebook thirty-four firemen running with their ladders and axes, from time to time vaulting over from page to page? And they will certainly rush, because all figures drawn by a magician immediately come alive. Sometimes even before there is time to draw ears, hair, and feet on them. And it is most inconvenient. Try drawing a helmet on a firefighter who rushes along the page like one possessed.
“Grotter, what are you doing? I’m asking you!” Igor Valentinovich repeated with fury.
“Nothing,” Tanya answered fearfully, quickly covering with her hand the scattering firefighters, who were threatening the mathematician with their hoses and crowbars.
“I also see for myself that it’s nothing! But you must solve the problem!” Igor Valentinovich grew red. “Hand over the mark book!”
Tanya tarried, afraid to remove her hand, under which the little fellows bustled, quickly dragging away their ladders. The mathematician grabbed the bookstand, but there was no mark book in place. As ill luck would have it, Tanya had forgotten it at home, because all night she was writing letters to Vanka and Bab-Yagun.
The ruler, which Igor Valentinovich was holding in his hands, broke with a crack. “And no mark book? Parents
