Chapter Three
No. 6 Vine Street

While a frog is sloshing around, it will not drown.

Papa’s motto

Before leaving, Papa walked around the minivan and rocked it, checking if it had been loaded evenly and would not lean to one side. The minivan was loaded up like a mule. Boxes and things filled it from floor to ceiling, even with the seats down.

“Poor thing!” Papa said, feeling sorry for his minivan.

The Gavrilovs’ minivan was Japanese, right-handed drive. Once, a young Alena washed it with a brick, scraping away the dirt, and then a year later the already grown Alex thoughtfully tapped it with a hammer on all sides, knocking down the ice in the winter, and covered the minivan with pockmarks. Papa sometimes thought whether it would be good to exchange the old minivan for a new one, but who is to say that they would not wash the new one with a brick, and the old one, though looking like a wild shed and more than 10 years old, was actually quite lively.

By the example of his own minivan, Papa learned to identify minivans with many children. To do this it was necessary to go to any busy intersection on Sunday mornings, when services got under way in the churches in the city centre, and see which minivan was bouncing and swaying, waiting for the green light. There turned out to be quite a lot of them.

Papa spent the day behind the wheel, listening to a good audio book and making an effort to drive faster, but all the same, because of having to load the boxes, was an hour late. Mama and the children were standing at the station, not knowing what to do, and their backpacks, boxes, and suitcases were lying in a small mound near them. Rita, whom Mama was holding so that she would not fall down, was jumping on top of said mound. However, it goes without saying, Rita was certain that she would not fall and pulled her hand away, but when Mama let go of her, Rita immediately tumbled. Papa barely managed to catch her.

“It was a quiet horror!” Mama complained. “We terrorized the entire car! Rita was running all the time, Costa didn’t want to sleep on the same berth with Alex, pushing him off with his feet, and Vicky didn’t want to take him!”

“You sleep with Costa, you wake up in a puddle! He’ll then say that he dreamt of the potty again,” Vicky explained.

“Not true!” Costa wailed.

“…and our rats slipped away!” Mama added, changing the subject.

“Yes, yes, yes! Even Schwartz!” Kate shouted. “They ran around the car! And what do you think? All the men were afraid of rats, one even jumped onto a second berth, but the women picked them up!”

“That’s because women aren’t afraid of rats but of mice! And when it’s advantageous for them!” Peter said.

“And where’re the rats now?” Papa asked, hoping that they had escaped and that would be the end of it.

“In the cage, of course! They later returned!” Kate said and looked in her backpack to check whether the rats had slipped away again.

Then everyone piled into the minivan, managing to find a seat on top of things, and Papa proceeded to show them the house. He was very proud of himself and wanted everything to be great.

“Soon you’ll see! Soon!” he repeated constantly, but the promised “soon” for some reason did not come.

They drove along the waterfront six times and crossed the tram tracks ten times, but did not find the figure 8 street. The next time along the waterfront, the children staged a mutiny. They wanted to swim, but Mama did not remember which box their swimsuits were in. And she doubted that the water had warmed up. The beaches were still quite empty.

Mama started to look at Papa with some doubt. “At least the right city?” she asked guardedly. “Do you remember the street name?”

“No. 6 Vine Street!” Papa blurted out.

“Well, so ask someone!”

Papa refused to ask out of principle. He already considered himself a local, and locals do not ask for directions. “I know how to walk from the station! But I walked through courtyards, you can’t drive through that way!”

“So, let’s leave the van and walk!” Mama, who was impatient to see the house, demanded.

“No, that’s stupid! We may lose the van and all the things! Now I remember, it’s here!” Papa became obstinate and, turning resolutely, drove into a dead end, which was complete with a wall of green shrubs. Papa started to make a U-turn, which was not easy, because boxes and his kin lying horizontally blocked up the whole rear window and the street was almost as wide as their car. Papa backed up, then drove forward and unexpectedly cut into a solid wall of green shrubs.

"Be careful! It’ll scratch!” Mama yelled, but the shrubs suddenly parted and the branches only slid along the glass.

A bewildered Papa, stepping on the gas, continued to drive to who knows where, and the van passed through the green wall without the slightest resistance. Bright tattered flowers, in which bees and beetles were crawling, drummed on the windows.

“We’re like Alice in Wonderland!” Alena shouted.

Then the shrubs finally parted and everyone saw a dusty path with undulating asphalt, cracked from the roots of the many acacias under it. A big shaggy dog ran along the path to meet them with a hoarse barking. Behind the shaggy dog, a medium-sized off-white dog also rushed over barking. Finally, a quite small short-legged dog with a bald back came hobbling last. This dog was no longer barking but coughing.

Kate rolled out of the stopped car and ran to meet the dogs. Mama yelled, afraid that the dogs would tear her to pieces, but the dogs suddenly turned and ran in the opposite direction, except the bald dog, which fell on the ground from terror and, giving up, turned over with legs up.

“See? Afraid that Kate will hug them to death! I’d be scared too!” Peter said and again started laughing so wildly that Vicky demanded pushing Peter out of the car because he had completely deafened her.

“I’ll go myself!” Peter said and crawled out of the car through the lowered rear window. Alena, Costa, Alex, and Rita got out after Peter.

They all crowded in front of the van, and Papa could no longer go anywhere and turned off the motor.

“Where is the house?” Mama asked.

“Here!” Papa said, pointing to that which Mama could not see from the van.

Mama got out and saw the house. It had peeling plaster, which was not conspicuous, because vines were embracing the second floor and the roof, and blooming dog rose, curling along the window bars, covered the first floor, where the grapevines were only thick bald trunks.

The house’s double gates were metal, twice the height of a person, and painted black. They had rusted for many years and the rust was carefully painted over. They rusted again and were painted again. As a result, the gates, oddly enough, turned out to have a very beautiful texture – so uneven, rough, really lively. At the bottom, where the gates had rusted heavily, small holes formed here and there.

Rita and Alex were already lying on their stomachs, trying to peep through the holes to see what was happening in the yard. “Mama, look! Look!” they yelled.

“Good heavens!” Mama said. She approached carefully and ran a hand along the gates. The black paint, warmed up by the sun, burned the palm of her hand. The wind swooped down. The gates stretched like a sail and buzzed. Mama wanted to stand here a bit and try to catch a response in her heart, which would suggest whether this was the house she dreamed of, but Papa was already hurrying to open the house. Alex had managed to climb up the gates and now, feet dangling, was sitting almost level with the second floor. Everyone was shouting for him to get down, but Alex liked to sit so high. He climbed the post of the gates and climbed over to the balcony from there. He was scrambling with ease, like a monkey.

Mama was afraid that Alex would fall and demanded that he come down, but Peter declared that he knew Alex. Alex would never come down himself, because he saw perfectly that no one could reach him. Peter himself had also been mischievous like that in childhood. Now he was wise.

“Wise, wise! Only don’t bray so loudly!” Vicky said and moved aside just in case.

“What if we threaten that we’ll punish him?” Kate suggested.

“Then he really won’t come down. What’s the sense of coming down if you’re going to get punished? Better to sit until everyone forgets that they’ve promised to punish you!” Peter continued authoritatively. “No! A better way to get Alex down is to throw something at him. For example, bricks.”

“Not on your life!” Mama objected.

“I wasn’t suggesting to start immediately with large bricks. Can start with small pebbles. Well, if you don’t want to, don’t! Then option number two! I’ll bet on a trick; that’ll work!”

Peter leaned down, picked up Alex’s backpack from the asphalt, and began to rummage in it. “Wow!” he exclaimed. “Soda! And what’s this in the bottle? Vinegar, perhaps?”

“Give it back! It’s mine!” was heard from the balcony. Alex deftly rolled down from there like a ball, and, clutching his backpack, started to pull it away from Peter.

“Learn from me while I live! Childish greed is the key to a child’s heart!” said Peter.

However, no one wished to learn from Peter. Everyone was already rushing into the house. Costa flew first with a sword in his right hand. Rita followed. After Rita, Vicky and Alena. Kate ran last, all three stray dogs – large, medium, and small with a bald back – sticking to her. Now these dogs did not consider themselves strays anymore, but had thought about it, talked it over, and decided to become pets. Mama waved her arms at them and stood at the door, and the dogs again became strays.

“You’re cruel!” Kate said. “By the way, I’ve given them our pâté! It would have gone bad anyway!”

“My pâté? It couldn’t go bad! It was wrapped up. I was planning it for dinner!”

“It’s already irrelevant, can’t get it out of the dogs anyway,” said Kate.

Then they all walked around the house for a long time, and Papa showed them everything that the grandpa had shown him last time. Here is the large room on the ground floor, here is the small room, which he, Papa, would take as his office, and here is the kitchen! There are still three small and one medium-sized room upstairs. And here is a door, but he, Papa, has no idea where it leads.

“To Bluebeard’s room! Two hundred strangled wives there!” Peter said and opened the door. Beyond the door was revealed a sinister type of staircase – dark and narrow.

Everyone began to descend cautiously, the older ones holding the younger ones just in case. There were certainly no strangled wives there, that was nonsense, but still it would be better if Papa went first. It would be safer, more secure. And better if Mama would hold onto Papa and the rest of the children clung to Mama.

The lower they went, the darker it became, like the open mouth of a passage from where light could no longer filter through. Papa fumbled on the wall. He found the light switch, turned on the light. A light bulb hanging from a wire flashed and everyone saw the cosiest basement in the world. An unfinished small sailboat was on a workbench and wooden shelves with hundreds of dusty jars stretched along the walls. Mama and Vicky immediately rushed to wipe the jars, making small windows with fingers in the dust. Preserve turned out to be in some of the jars, compote and jam in others.

“We can’t take them! They belong to someone else!” Papa said sternly.

“We won’t steal! But we can ask the old man politely, ‘Can we take your preserves?’ Most likely he’ll say, ‘Certainly!’ It's not like he’ll go on the train for two days to eat three tablespoons and return!” Kate declared.

Papa then turned off the light in the basement; everyone went upstairs and ran around the house. Papa showed Mama how to light the gas boiler and how it made the loudest “PUFF” in the world. Alex, of course, was already standing nearby, pricking up his ears, and Papa had to plug up Alex’s ears with his fingers and cover Alex’s eyes at the same time so that Alex would not nose out how to make the biggest “puff”!

While they were examining the boiler, a terrible noise surged on the second floor. The floor shook, the house jumped up and down, and Mama was glad that they no longer had neighbours who would now come running to knock on the door.

“Do you hear? What are they doing there?” she asked Papa when Alex, attracted by the general noise, ran upstairs too.

“I think they’re dividing up the rooms!” Papa suggested. “They’ve never had their own rooms. Although there aren’t enough rooms for everyone here.”

“What do you mean not enough? There’re six rooms! You said there’re three small and one medium on the second floor. One large and one small on the first!” Mama exclaimed.

“That’s right, six rooms. Seven kids and nine of us in total… Plus the big room on the ground floor is obviously the common room. No one will be able to sleep there. So, minus one. Even minus two, because the small one will be my office!”

“Wait, I need one room for the little ones… The quietest and farthest so they won’t be disturbed in the afternoon! What if you get the basement for your office? Imagine, how cool! Sitting in an outstanding, cozy, dry basement, writing novels, and eating jam!” Mama proposed carefully.

“No way! Better pack the kids in the basement! A nice, cozy, dry basement full of preserves!” Papa said gloomily, having decided to defend his office to the last.

Some time later, when the noise quieted down, Mama and Papa went upstairs. The second floor was a demarcation zone.

The boundaries of each sector were marked out with the children’s backpacks and a line of things laid out in a row stretched across the room, even taking into account the interests of Rita and Costa. The older kids assigned the far left room to them and blocked them up in that room so that they did not run and grab everything. They generously gave the next room to Mama and Papa as their bedroom. Vicky, Alena, Alex, and Kate divided the centre room among themselves, where, in principle, there would be enough space for everyone if bunk beds were put in. Kate had already managed to put the guinea pig and rat cages on the centre room windows – and there were two of them!

Vicky did not like it. “No rats! They throw sawdust out of the cage all the time! Dirt from just one of them! Choose: me, your sister, or the rats!” she yelled.

“I didn’t ask you to choose!” Kate warned ominously.

Peter won for himself the far right room. He had already managed to close the door and hung up a “DO NOT DISTURB!” sign, which he had foresightedly printed on the printer back in Moscow, glued onto cardboard, and brought with him.

Mama wandered anxiously around the house and counted the beds. This turned out to be simple; there was only one bed. There was also a huge decrepit sofa. If you tapped on it even just slightly, a cloud of dust would rise to the ceiling. Costa discovered this first when he hit the sofa with his sword. On noticing this, Alex approached it, and Rita after Alex, then all three began to bang on it with passion.

Peter watched the childish fun for some time from the height of his wisdom, and then also wanted to move onto the sofa. Better yet, to run, jump, and flop on it from the maximum possible height. “Well, break it up, pip-squeaks!” he ordered offhandedly.

However, before Peter could pound on the sofa and break all its legs, Mama ran into the room. Coughing from the dust, she began to pull the kids out of the room and demanded that Papa drag the sofa onto the street. “Okay! We’ll buy beds tomorrow. Good that we took the kids’ mattresses with us! They can sleep right on the floor!” she said, and everyone went for the mattresses.

Later, everyone still ran around a little and lay down to sleep. Papa fell asleep first, having been up for more than 24 hours. He did not even unload the things from the car. Rita, Costa, and Alex slept with him on the same mattress. Papa had to lie on the edge and pull up his knees, because they would not fit otherwise. They did not fit because the mattress was so small and Rita wanted to be right in the center, but she began to twist and turn and kick all those who accidentally touched her. Costa and Alex fenced Rita off with pillows as shields.

This was their first day at the new place.