pale boy looked seriously at Peter’s ear. “Wait a minute! Sorry to digress, but I must promptly finish an unpleasant matter!”
“What matter?”
The boy did not reply and disappeared, and a moment later, the iron sheet rattled terribly.
“What, running away?” Peter asked.
“No,” a weak voice came from the other side of the fence. “Not exactly. I fell off the chair.”
Peter realized that this was the same unpleasant matter that the boy had to finish. “How is it possible to fall from a chair?”
“I stood on its back, and it broke. Could you get me up please? I’m stuck.”
Peter and Vicky, followed by Kate, leapt over the fence and jumped down on the iron sheet. They were in a courtyard resembling a tennis racket. The racket handle was paved with coloured tiles. The round part of the racket was a small courtyard. Two cages were in the yard. Four chickens were languishing in the first. Five or six bikes were locked in the second cage adjacent to the wall.
A chair with a broken back lay on the iron sheet. A boy was lying on his back near the chair. His foot was stuck in the forked trunk of an acacia, on the thorny branches of which a great number of socks were drying. The boy was pressing his hand to his chest. His white t-shirt was slowly stained pink.
“Goodbye!” the boy said solemnly, looking not at them but at the sky. “Please tell my parents that I’ve died. Although, I think they’ll also guess!”
Vicky began to squeal, but Kate squatted down and asked why he decided that he was dying.
“I cut myself,” the boy informed her.
“Cut what? A vein?”
“No. I ripped open my finger on this iron sheet. Of course, my parents will now throw it out, but it’s already useless! A person cut by a rusty object dies within a few hours. Tetanus starts in him.”
Kate disengaged the boy’s leg from the forked acacia and helped him up. The boy stood and swayed. He pressed his injured hand to his chest and would not show it to anyone. His t-shirt continued to stain.
“Anyone home?” Kate asked.
“Yes.”
“Well, let’s go there! What’s your name?”
“Andrew! Andrew Mokhov,” the boy introduced himself.
Kate and Peter grabbed him by the elbows and led him away. Andrew Mokhov walked firmly, but only until he looked at his shirt. Then he began to pale and his knees buckled.
“Of course everything will be bad!” he said, making his way between the cage with bicycles and the cage with chickens. “That’s your car there? So big? I saw it from behind the fence. How many of you kids are there? Although you don’t have to answer. Already doesn’t matter to me now!”
“Seven,” Kate said.
“For some reason this would be valuable information!” Andrew admitted. “There are two of us. Nina and Seraphim.”
“Then why two? Aren’t you Andrew?”
“Correct. But when I die, only Nina and Seraphim will be left. I corrected the number, so as not to mislead you.”
“How old are Nina and Seraphim?”
“Nina’s fourteen, Seraphim’s eight. But he’s been lost since this morning, so Nina’ll probably remain alone.”
At the end of the yard, they saw a small house with cracked paint. It was entwined not with a grapevine but an ivy with a trunk the thickness of two human arms. In order that the roots of the ivy would not wreck the walls, pieces of wood were placed near them.
“Wow! Some house! Where did it come from?” Peter was surprised.
“It has always been here,” Andrew said with an air of importance. “Even before yours. Yours is sixty years old. Ours will soon be a hundred. See, what thick limestone.”
“Why didn’t we see your gate?”
Andrew sighed. “Because our gate isn’t here. There’s a wicket gate, but it’s far… it’s all very complicated in the city. A bunch of all kinds of side-streets and courtyards.”
“We already realized this when searching for our house,” Peter said.
“You realized nothing. The figure eight, it’s this here.” Andrew traced with a finger in the air. “And here’s one more lane, like a one. It turns out that it’s not 8 but 18. We’re on the 1 and you’re on the 8. In short, we’re closer over the fence. If you walk, then you have to go around everything in a circle.”
Andrew got up onto the porch and began to knock on the door with his forehead. No one answered, then Andrew pressed the handle with his elbow. “It’s open,” he said. “Come!”
They found themselves in an enclosed patio, where there was a gas boiler the same as the Gavrilovs’. Here was a large table in a kitchen area. Despite the bright day outside, the ivy shaded the window so much that the patio was lit by a chandelier with five dusty globes. A huge dried-up butterfly had hardened on one of the globes.
“We specifically did not take it off. For the sake of artistic shadows on the wall. Papa won’t allow it,” the boy explained.
“Your father’s an artist?”
“Photographer. Works on the sea front. And in schools too.”
Andrew sat quite calmly down on a chair, but looked by chance at his hand and, remembering that he was dying, started to slide from his chair onto the floor. Vicky looked at him with understanding. She loved to suffer when the appropriate occasion arose.
“Go and rinse out the wound!” Kate ordered.
“No way! I’m afraid!”
“Let me call your mama! Where is she?”
“Mustn’t disturb Mama! She was on the Internet all night and only just lay down. And Nina has gone for her guitar lesson…”
“Where’s your papa then? At work?”
“No. Papa’s searching for Seraphim. Seraphim is lost. He gets lost all the time…”
“First-aid kit?”
“In a white box!”
Kate began to look for a white box and discovered it to the right of the teapot. All its sides, the outside, and even the inside of the lid, were covered with many phone numbers. While Kate was looking for the box, she noticed many icons, including the Nursing Madonna[7] and Our Lady of Kazan,[8] on the patio walls. The stump of a candle stuck out of a candlestick by the window.
Kate looked at this with understanding. “You also go to church?”
“Mama, yes. Papa… well, probably also yes! But I’m an atheist!” Andrew said. “I don’t believe
The Nursing Madonna shows the Virgin Mary breastfeeding the infant Jesus, a depiction representing Humility.
Our Lady of Kazan is an icon representing the Virgin Mary as the protector and patroness of the city of Kazan.
