Tanya Grotter And The Magic Double Bass

No one answered his cry. Only for a moment, it seemed to Durnev, pushing his head through between the rails, that a shadow flickered several floors below. Then the external door slammed and everything was quiet. The director of the firm Second-Hand Socks considered that the old foxes, having tossed the mysterious thingamajig up to him, had run out.

Screaming out yet a couple more threats, Herman Nikitich dragged his feet back. The case was in its previous place. Walking a few steps toward it, Durnev squatted down and propped up his head with his palms.

“Ninel, Ninel, come here – see what was tossed up to us!” he called mournfully.

From the apartment the fat-cheeked head of his spouse looked around. Ninel clutched a T-Fal frying pan in her hand, grabbed for the same purpose as her husband arming himself with a hammer.

“Look, a case!” she was astonished.

“Don’t take it into your head to touch it! For sure it’s a bomb!” Herman Nikitich yelped.

At that moment, a strange sound came from the case. The Durnevs decided that it was the ticking of a clock mechanism.

“Now it’ll go off with a jerk! Down!” the head of the firm Second-Hand Socks started to shout and quickly began to crawl away. His spouse flopped onto the linoleum, covering her head with the T-Fal frying pan.

But the expected explosion did not follow. Instead, the weeping of a demanding child was heard from the case. Exchanging dumbfounded glances, Durnev and his spouse crawled up to the case. The old lock clicked, the cover was thrown back…

“Ah-ha! Do you see? It’s a child!” Ninel exclaimed, her forehead bumping into her husband.

“A bomb would be better!” Herman Nikitich groaned.

In the case, on a carefully stretched out red blanket, lay a little girl with curly hair. On the tip of her nose was a small buckwheat grain, the birthmark. The baby just woke up and now she was crying loudly from hunger, energetically drumming on the double bass case with her hands and feet. Ninel winced with disgust, “No, I’ll not take her into our home! What if she has some infection? Even infectious for sure! Look at this suspicious spot on the nose! And I’ll be shaking with loathing if she turns up in the same bed with Pipa. But we also can’t abandon her here. The neighbours will gather…”

“Oh, it goes without saying, we won’t abandon her! We’re humane people! We’ll turn the girl in to the orphanage! There she’ll learn to paint fences, sweep the streets, and a hundred other remarkable professions!” Durnev said cheerfully.

Having gathered the sneakers scattered on the landing, he already started to drag his feet to the telephone when suddenly his wife exclaimed, “Look, mousie, here’s a letter! Here it is, attached to the child’s wrist! And don’t you swing your hands, little frog, all the same I’ll take it away!”

Leaning down, Ninel freed the envelope with disgust. In it was inserted a photograph, after glancing at which Herman Nikitich was covered with beads of sweat. In the photograph were two boys – one whitish, emaciated, with a sour and evil face, and the other pensive and sad, with a large nose and red ringlets of hair.

“Oh, no!” Durnev groaned. “It’s Lenchik Grotter, my grandmother’s second cousin’s nephew. Here, look: I’m trying to whack him on the forehead with a truck, and he’s staring into his own devil’s telescope! It was not without reason that today presented itself as such a bad day. Is this little girl really his daughter? If so, we’ll have to take her in or my political career will come to an end. You know, Ninel, I want to be a candidate for deputy…”

Hearing that the girl would remain with them, his wife swelled up with anger so that she was hardly accommodated on the landing.

“You NEVER told me about LENCHIK GROTTER!” she yelped angrily.

Durnev started to cough in embarrassment.

“Well, he’s not Lenchik at all but Leopold… My grandmother called him Lenchik… Oh, that one was a real rogue, not grandmother of course, but this Grotter! We fiercely hated each other in childhood. Fought every time we met. More precisely, it’s I who beat him up, and he stayed more in the corners or turned the pages of his idiotic books. He was eternally busy with some nonsense: either puttering around with hedgehogs or learning to talk in cat’s language, and they held him up to me as an example! And what do you think? At ten, he drove his first motorcycle, and at twelve, robbed a bank! Here, trust a goody-goody after this!”

“A twelve-year-old boy robbed the bank?” his spouse could not believe her ears.

“Without efforts. He carried this out with the help of a computer, not even leaving the house, but they traced him. When the police arrived, he simply disappeared. Everyone thought that he was in the room, forced open the door, but no one was there. They searched for him, but also didn’t find him. Even thought that he had perished. I of all people was most pleased, because you know where this idiot transferred all the stolen money? To a fund for helping stray dogs!!! Not to me, his second cousin, but to some mongrels…”

Durnev flushed with indignation. It seemed that steam just about came out of his nostrils and ears.

“Well, okay, he disappeared and vanished,” he continued, calming down somewhat. “And now listen further. Fifteen years passed, and I received from this character a New Year postcard with an idiotic stamp depicting a winged monster. I read it, flung it onto a chair, and it immediately got lost somewhere before I had time to look at the return address. And now here’s this baby! Interesting, but for what reason did Grotter abandon his own offspring to me?”

“Look, there’s even a newspaper clipping!” Ninel exclaimed, guessing again to glance into the envelope.

TRAGEDY IN THE MOUNTAINS

A year does not pass that avalanches would not take away new lives.

This time their victims were the archaeologists Sophia and Leopold Grotter, exploring the tombs of prehistoric animals in the Tien Shan Mountains. An enormous snow avalanche literally headed right for their tent, which they had the imprudence to pitch on the dangerous part of the slope. The bodies of the courageous archaeologists were never discovered. Sophia and Leopold left a daughter, Tatiana, whom now, apparently, will be handed over to relatives.

It is known that not long before the tragedy the Grotters succeeded in finding the excellently preserved remains of a sabre-tooth tiger.

“Unlucky tiger! Found to be connected with them! Had no luck even after death!” Durnev exclaimed with feeling.

It was the only regret that Herman Nikitich expressed, learning about the demise of his second cousin. The girl lying in the double bass case piped down while they were reading the note, but afterward began to cry twice as loudly.

“You see how she spills as if she understands something!” Durnev hesitated. “I bet when she grows up they’ll put her in prison! Only for the sake of admiring this spectacle, we’ll register ourselves officially as her guardians! Feed her, Ninel! There’s an expired kefir left in the refrigerator. It’s just the same as throwing it out.”

So Herman Durnev and his wife Ninel became Uncle Herman and Aunt Ninel. Under these pompous names, they, in their time, went into the reference publication A Thousand of the Most Unpleasant Moronoids.

Chapter 2

The Gold Sword

Tanya Grotter awoke at dawn from the cold. There was ice on her thin blanket, and the same icy crust, only slightly thinner, stiffened on the pillow. For a while, Tanya was still lying, hoping to hide under the damp blanket, but it was useless – it became even colder and more disgusting. Then Tanya threw off the blanket and hurriedly leaped up, dreaming of diving quickly into the apartment, into warmth.

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.