QUIRKY
His wife called him "Quirky". Sometimes affectionately.
Quirky had one peculiar quality. Something was always happening to him. He didn't want things to happen to him and he suffered when they did, but he just couldn't help getting into scrapes-minor ones, but upsetting nevertheless.
Take the episodes of just one journey.
One summer he decided to spend his holiday visiting the brother in the Urals; they hadn't seen each other for about twelve years. He started packing.
"Where's that spoon-bait?"
Quirky bawled from the storeroom.
"How should I know?" his wife replied.
"They were all here a little while ago!" Quirky tried to give her a stem look with his round, bluish-white eyes. "Now it's the only one missing."
"What does it look like?"
"It's for pike."
"I must have fried it by mistake."
Quirky said nothing for a moment.
"How did you like it?"
"What?"
"Did it taste nice? Ha-ha-ha!"
He was no good at all at being witty, though he had a great desire to be. "Got any teeth left? It's made of duralumin!"
They were a long time getting him ready for the road until midnight.
But early next morning Quirky was striding through the village with a suitcase in his hand.
"To the Urals! To the Urals!" he would reply when people asked him where he was going, and his round fleshy face and round eyes would express a couldn't-care-less attitude to long journeys-they didn't worry him. "Off to the Urals! Got to stretch my legs sometimes."
But he was still a long way from the Urals.
He arrived safely in town, where he was to buy his ticket and get on the train.
Having plenty of time to spare, he decided to buy a few presents for his nephews and nieces- sweets, gingerbread and so on. He went into a food shop and joined the queue. In front of him stood a man in a soft felt hat and, in front of the hat, a stout woman wearing a lot of lipstick. The woman was talking to the hat in a rapid, overheated half-whisper.
"Just imagine the rudeness, the lack of tact! I know he's probably got hardening of the arteries, but no one ever suggested he ought to retire. And then this new fellow- he hasn't been in charge more than five minutes-comes out with, 'Don't you think you ought to be retiring, Alexander Semyonich?' The cheek of the fellow!"
The hat gave the required answers.
"Yes, that's what they're like nowadays. What if his arteries aren't as good as they used to be. And what about Sumbatich? He was always forgetting his lines. And that other one, what's her name?.."
Quirky had a deep respect for all townspeople, or nearly all of them. He had no respect for hooligans and shop assistants, of whom he was a bit scared.
He reached -the counter and bought some sweets and gingerbread and three bars of chocolate, then stepped aside to pack-them all away in his suitcase. He opened the suit- case on the floor and, as he did so... his eyes wandered to the counter. Among the queuing feet lay a fifty-rouble banknote. There it was, the silly men thing, ignored by everybody. Quirky actually began to tremble with joy and his eyes sparkled. In a great hurry, so that no one should forestall him, he racked his brains for the wittiest and most amusing way of telling the people in the queue about the banknote.
"You're doing fine, citizens!" he said in a loud cheerful voice.
All eyes turned on him.
"People don't chuck money about like that round our way."
This got everyone rather worked up. After all, it wasn't just three roubles or five, but fifty-a whole fortnight's wages. And there was no owner.
It must have been the one in the hat, Quirky surmised.
He decided to leave the note in a prominent place on the counter.
"Someone'll soon come running in to claim it," the salesgirl declared.
Quirky came out of the shop in a very pleasant frame of mind. He kept thinking how wittily he had handled the matter, "People don't chuck money about like that round our way!" Pretty good, eh? And then all of a sudden he broke into a cold sweat. The each he had drawn at the savings bank back home had consisted of two notes-a fifty and a twenty-five. He had broken into the twenty-five roubles this morning and the fifty-rouble note ought to be in his pocket. He felt for it, but it was gone. He went through all his pockets - nothing there.
"It was mine!" he exclaimed aloud. "Hell's bells! It was my own money!"
He felt his heart turning over with grief. His first impulse was to go back and say,-"Citizens, that's my banknote. I drew it at the savings bank yesterday: one twenty-five and one fifty. I changed the twenty-five just now and the other one's missing." But then he pictured how taken aback everyone would be by this announcement, and how many people would think he had decided to pocket it himself since the real owner hadn't shown up. No, he wouldn't be able to force himself to claim that rotten bit of paper. Besides, they might refuse to give it to him.
"Why am I like this?" Quirky reasoned aloud. "What shall I do now?"
He would have to return home.
He walked back to the shop just for a last glimpse of the banknote from afar. He hung about near the entrance without going in. That would be too painful. His heart might not stand the strain.
On the way back in the bus, he kept swearing gently to himself-building up his strength for the forthcoming show-down with his wife.
They took another fifty roubles out of their savings.
Quirky, crushed by a sense of his own inferiority, which his wife had once again explained to him, was at last on the train. But gradually his depression passed. The train rumbled on and forests, woods and villages flashed by. Various people came in arid out, various stories were told... Quirky told one of his own to an intellectual-looking comrade while they were standing at the end of the corridor, smoking.
"Something like that happened in a village near us. A silly fool grabbed a chunk of burning wood and started chasing his mother with it. He was drunk, you see. And there was she running away from him and shouting, 'Mind your hands! Don't bum your hands, son! Even then she was thinking of him... And he kept on running after her, the sot. After his own mother! Just imagine the rudeness, the lack of tact..."
"Did you make this up yourself?" the intellectual comrade asked severely, looking at Quirky over his spectacles.
"Make it up? Why? It happened in Ramenskoye, just across the river from us."
The intellectual comrade turned away to the window and said no more.
After the train journey Quirky still had an hour and a half's flight by local plane ahead of him. He had flown once before in his life. A long time ago. He climbed into the aircraft with some apprehension. Something's bound to go wrong with it in an hour and a half, he thought. But he got over his fears. He even tried to start up a conversation with his neighbour, but his neighbour was reading the newspaper and found it so interesting that he had no time to listen to a living human being. But the thing Quirky wanted to get to the bottom of was this. He had heard that you got fed on an air journey. But for some reason no one was bringing any food. He would very much have liked to eat in the air- just for curiosity's sake.
They must have kept it for themselves, he decided.
He looked down at the mountains of clouds below. Somehow he couldn't quite make up his mind whether it was beautiful or not. All round him people were exclaiming, "Oh, how beautiful!" But he had only a ridiculous desire to go plunging into them as if they were cotton wool. Why doesn't it surprise me? he wondered. There's five kilometers of nothing underneath me. In his mind's eye he
measured out those five kilometers on the ground, and then stood them up on end to surprise himself, but he still wasn't surprised.
"The things man invents!" he said to his neighbor.
The latter looked at him, said nothing and rustled his newspaper.
"Fasten your seat belts!" a pleasant-looking young woman announced. "We are about to land."
Quirky obediently fastened his seat belt, but his neighbor took no notice at all. Quirky nudged him cautiously.
"They say we're to fasten our seat belts."
"Never mind," his neighbor replied. He put aside his newspaper, leaned back in his seat and said, as though remembering something, "Children are the flowers of life. They ought to be planted head downwards."
"What do you mean by that?" Quirky asked.
The newspaper reader gave a noisy laugh and said no more.
The plane lost height rapidly. Soon the ground was only a stone's throw away and racing backwards. But still there was no bump. As well-informed people explained later, the pilot had "overshot". At last the bump came and everyone was flung about so violently that you could hear their teeth chattering and grinding. The newspaper reader lurched out of his seat, butted Quirky with his bald head, did the same to the side window, then landed on the floor. Throughout the whole operation he did not utter a sound. And what astounded Quirky was that no one else did either. He, too, kept silent. They stopped. The first to come to their senses looked out of the windows and discovered that the aircraft was in a potato field. From the pilot's cabin a rather grim-faced pilot appeared and strode to the exit. Someone asked him cautiously, "It looks as if we've landed in the potatoes?"
"Can't you see for yourself?" the pilot retorted.
Their fears gone, the more cheerful passengers tried to jest. The bold newspaper reader was looking for his dentures... Quirky unfastened his seat belt and started looking too.
"Is this it?!" he exclaimed joyfully, and handed the denture to the newspaper reader.
Even his bald spot turned purple.
"Must you touch it with your hands?" he erred.
Quirky was taken aback.
"But how else?"
"Where am I going to boil it? Where?!"
Quirky could not answer that one either.
"Come with me," he suggested. "My brother lives here. We can boil it at his place... Are you afraid I've spread microbes over it? None of that stuff on me."
The newspaper reader stared at him in astonishment and stopped shouting.
At the airport Quirky wrote a telegram to send to his wife:
"Landed. A sprig of lilac fell on your breast. Never forget me, Grusha, my best. Stop. Vassily."
The telegraphist, a severe, unsmiling woman, read the message.
"You'd better word it differently. You're a grown-up person, not out of a kindergarten." she suggested.
"But why?" Quirky wanted to know. 'That's how I write to her in my letters. She's my wife! Maybe you thought..."
"You can write what you like in- a letter. But a telegram is for transmission. It's an open text."
Quirky rewrote the telegram.
"Landed. All's well. Vasyatka."
The telegraphist corrected two words herself. "Landed" and "Vasyatka". They became, "Arrived" and "Vassily".
" 'Landed'... What do you think you are-a spaceman?"
"All right then," Quirky said. "Have it your way."
... Quirky knew that he had a brother Dmitry and three nephews. But he had somehow forgotten the fact that his brother must also have a wife, who would be his sister-in-law. He had never seen her. And it was his sister-in-law who spoilt the whole holiday for him. For some reason she took an instant dislike to Quirky. '
He and his brother had a drink that evening and Quirky started singing in his best tremolo style:
Poplar-trees, poplar-trees...
Sofya Ivanovna, his sister-in-law, put her head round the door and asked ill-temperedly, "D'you mind not shouting? You're not at a railway station, you know." And shut the door.
His brother Dmitry was embarrassed.
"That's because of the children being asleep. She's a good soul, realty."
They had some more to drink and started recalling their young days, their mother and father...
"D'you remember?.." asked brother Dmitry joyously.
"As if you could remember anybody in those days! You were a baby then. They'd leave me with you, and I'd start kissing you. You even turned blue in the face once. I got it in the neck for that. Then they stopped leaving me with you. It made no difference: as soon as they turned their backs, I was with you again and kissing away like mad. A fine habit, to be sure. I was only a nipper, and even so, there was this kissing..."
"Do you remember?" recalled Quirky in his turn.
"How you and me..."
"Will you stop shouting?" asked Sofya Ivanovna again, thoroughly bad-tempered and jittery. "Who wants to hear all your slobbering and kissing? Talking your heads off."
"Let's go outside," said Quirky.
They went outside and sat down in the porch.
"And d'you remember?.." continued Quirky.
But at this point something happened to brother Dmitry: he burst into tears and began thumping his knee with his fist.
"That's it, that's my life! Did you see? How much bitterness there is in the woman!.. How much bitterness!"
Quirky began reassuring his brother.
"Come off it, don't get upset. You mustn't. They're not evil at all, they're dotty. My woman's the same."
"What's she hate you for? What for? See how she hates you! But just what for?"
Only now did Quirky understand that his sister-in-law had taken a dislike to him. But why?
"Why, because you're just small cheese, you're not a boss. I know her, the fool. She's crazy about boss-type. But who's she? A canteen girl in the management, a bump on a level place. She gets an eye full of the bosses and then off she goes... She hates me too, because I'm a nobody, a yokel."
"What management?"
"In this ... mining... I can't get my tongue round it right now. And why did she have to get married? Didn't she know, or something?"
This caught Quirky on the raw too.
"What's it all about, anyway?" he asked loudly, not of his brother, but of someone else. "If you want to know, nearly all distinguished people came from the countryside. If you see a newspaper with a black border round the photo, read on and you'll find he was country-born. You should read the papers! If he's anybody 6t all, he left early to get himself a job."
"How many times have I tried to convince her: people are nicer and not so snooty in the country. "
"Stepan Vorobyev. D'you remember him? You did know him, after all..."
"I certamly did."
"He was country-born if anybody was!" Hero of the Soviet Union, if you please. Knocked out nine tanks. Rammed them. Now his mother's going to get a sixty-rouble pension. They only found out about it recently; he'd been posted missing, presumed killed..."
"And llya Maxirnov!.. We went away together. Knight of Glory, if you please. But don't talk to her about Stepan... You mustn't."
"All right. But that one ... what's his name...?"
The brothers went on talking excitedly for a long time. Quirky even paced round the porch and waved his arms in the air.
"It's the country, don't you see! Why, the air alone is worth a million! You open the window in the morning, and it bathes you all over. You could even drink it, it's so fresh and fragrant. It smells of all sorts of herbs and flowers..."
Then they became tired.
"Have you done the new roof?" asked the elder brother quietly.
"I have." Quirky also sighed softly. "I've built a veranda onto the house. It's a joy to look at. You come out on to the veranda in the evening and you start having crazy thoughts: if mother and father were alive and you came visiting with the kiddies, we'd all sit on the veranda and sip tea with raspberry jam. We've got masses of raspberries now. Don't you have rows with her, Dmitry, or she'll make life impossible. And I'll fry to be a bit more affectionate, and you just see, she'll come round."
"But she's from the country tool" said Dmitry, quietly and sadly amazed. "You know, she's tormented the children to death, the fool: she's been torturing one on the piano and she's put the other one down for figure-skating. It makes my heart bleed; but if I try to put a word in, she starts swearing at me."
"Hm!.." Quirky was excited again. "I just can't understand those newspapers. There's a girl, she serves in a shop, and she's rude to everybody. 'Hoy, you!..' But when she gets home, she's just the same. That's where the trouble is! Even I can't understand it!" Quirky thumped his knee with his fist. "I can't understand it. Why have they turned nasty?"
When Quirky woke up in the morning, the flat was empty. His brother had gone to work, so had his sister-in-law. The two older children were playing in the yard and the youngest had been taken to nursery school.
Quirky made his bed, washed his hands and face, and started thinking what he could do to please his sister-in-law. And then he happened to notice a children's perambulator. That's it, he thought. I'll paint their pram for them!
Back home he had painted the stove in such wonderful patterns that everyone had marveled at it. He found a children's paint-box and brush and set to work. In an hour it was finished and the pram was unrecognisable. Across the upper part Quirky had painted a flight of cranes, lower down were all kinds of flowers and young grass, a pair of cockerels and some chickens... He examined the pram from all sides-it was a sight for sore eyes! Not just a pram,but a picture! He imagined how delighted his sister-in-law would be and chuckled to himself.
"And you talk about country bumpkins." He wanted to make peace with his sister-in-law. 'The little lad will be like a flower in a basket."
All day Quirky strolled round the town, looking in shop windows. He bought a toy motor launch for one nephew, a lovely job, all white, with a little search-light on it. I'll touch this up too, he thought.
He arrived back at his brother's house at about six in the evening. As he went up the steps of the porch he heard Dmitry having a row with his wife. Actually it was the wife who was making a41 the noise, while Ms brother kept smoothing her down.
"What does it matter! Let it pass, Sonya... Never mind..."
"He's got to be out of this house by tomorrow!"
"Stepan Vorobyev. D'you remember him? You did know him, after all..."
"I certainly did."
"He was country-born if anybody was!.. Hero of the Soviet Union, if you please. Knocked out nine tanks. Rammed them. Now his mother's going to get a sixty-rouble pension. They only found out about it recently; he'd been posted missing, presumed killed..."
"And llya Maximov!.. We went away together. Knight of Glory, if you please. But don't talk to her about Stepan...You mustn't."
"All right. But that one ... what's his name...?"
The brothers went on talking excitedly for a long time.
Quirky even paced round the porch and waved his arms in the air.
"It's the country, don't you see! Why, the air alone is worth a million! You open the window in the morning, and it bathes you all over. You could even drink it, it's so fresh and fragrant. It smells of all sorts of herbs and flowers..."
Then they became tired.
"Have you done the new roof?" asked the elder brother quietly.
"I have." Quirky also sighed softly. "I've built a veranda onto the house. It's a joy to look at- You come out on to the veranda in the evening and you start having crazy thoughts: if mother and father were alive and you came visiting with the kiddies, we'd all sit on the veranda and sip tea with raspberry jam. We've got masses of raspberries now. Don't you have rows with her, Dmitry, or she'll make life impossible. And I'll -fry to be a bit more affectionate, and you just see, she'll come round."
"But she's from the country tool" said Dmitry, quietly and sadly amazed. "You know, she's tormented the children to death, the fool: she's been torturing one on the piano and she's put the other one down for figure-skating. It makes my heart bleed; but if I try to put a word in, she starts swearing at me."
"Hm!.." Quirky was excited again. "I just can't understand those newspapers. There's a girl, she serves in a shop, and she's rude to everybody. 'Hoy, you!..' But when she gets home, she's just the same. That's where the trouble is! Even I can't understand it!" Quirky thumped his knee with his fist. "I can't understand it. Why have they turned nasty?"
When Quirky woke up in the morning, the flat was empty. His brother had gone to work, so had his sister-in-law. The two older children were playing in the yard and the youngest had been taken to nursery school.
Quirky made his bed, washed his hands and face, and started thinking what he could do to please his sister-in-law. And then he happened to notice a children's perambulator. That's it, he thought. I'll paint their pram for them!
Back home he had painted the stove in such wonderful patterns that everyone had marveled at it. He found a children's paint-box and brush and set to work. In an hour it was finished and the pram was unrecognisable. Across the upper part Quirky had painted a flight of cranes, lower down were all kinds of flowers and young grass, a pair of cockerels and some chickens... He examined the pram from all sides-it was a sight for sore eyes! Not just a pram, but a picture! He imagined how delighted his sister-in-law would be and chuckled to himself.
"And you talk about country bumpkins." He wanted to make peace with his sister-in-law. 'The little lad will be like a flower in a basket."
All day Quirky strolled round the town, looking in shop windows. He bought a toy motor launch for one nephew, a lovely job, all white, with a little search-light on it. I'll touch this up too, he thought.
He arrived back at his brother's house at about six in the evening. As he went up the steps of the porch he heard Dmitry having a row with his wife. Actually it was the wife who was making all the noise, while Ms brother kept smoothing her down.
"What does it matter! Let it pass, Sonya... Never mind..."
"He's got to be out of this house by tomorrow!" Sofya lvanovna was shouting. "I won't have that clown here another day!"
"All right, all right!.. Sonya..."
"Don't you alright me. I'll throw his suitcase down the stairs if he's still here tomorrow."
Quirky stepped hastily off the porch. But where was he to go from there? He felt hurt again. When people hated him he always felt very hurt. And frightened. It was like the end of everything. What was the point in living? And he wanted to get as far away as possible from people who hated him or laughed at him.
"What is it makes me like I am," he whispered bitterly, sitting in the garden shed. "I ought to have guessed she wouldn't understand folk art."
He sat in the shed until it was dark, stilt with the same ache in his heart. Then Dmitry came to the shed and was not at all surprised to find his brother there. It was as if he knew already.
"It's like this," he said. "She's at it again... That pram... you shouldn't have done it."
"I thought I'd take her fancy. I'll go rightaway, brother."
Brother Dmitry sighed-and said no more.
Quirky arrived home during a shower of fine warm rain. He stepped out of the bus, took off his new shoes and ran over the warm wet earth, his case in one hand, his shoes in the other. He skipped along, singing loudly,
Poplar-trees, poplar-trees...
Half the sky was already clear and blue and the sun was hovering nearby. The rain slackened and the big raindrops dotted the puddles with swelling and bursting bubbles.
Quirky slipped and nearly fell.
...His name was Vassily Yegorich Knyazev. He was thirty-nine years of age. He was the village cinema projectionist. He adored detectives and dogs. In childhood he had dreamed of being a spy.
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