– Father, everything! I’m leaving, I’m sick of such holidays!
“Go, Feofan, wherever you want,” the gray-haired, important, purebred man said quietly. He appeared out of the ground behind Theophanes.
– Again you scare me, Afanasy Afanasyevich! I am brave, but your appearances from nowhere infuriate me!
– And you do not be angry. Live in peace, although it is not given to you. You need to live not one life, but several: you will recognize the past as an archeologist, learn the present as a coach, and move from the present to the future as a designer.
– You’re visionary, father! I will be who I will be according to the situation. By the way, Katerina’s niece came to Aunt Dasha. Girl what you need. Am I by any chance a relative of hers?
– I know that she came. Our kinship with her is of ancient roots, you will not marry her, but if you meet her, help. Now you can leave, and I will call Catherine to me.
Katerina walked slowly along the village street. She came to Aunt Dasha for the summer holidays. An elderly handsome man was walking towards the girl. He stopped, staring at her, and asked her to go near him. He was handsome in the twilight of his days and divinely good.
Further more: he invited the girl to his home. Katerina was not scared, she knew that the man’s name was Afanasy Afanasyevich. She saw him last year, he lived in a posh house by local standards. His prim mansion was served by a butler, a cook and a chauffeur. One woman cleaned and put the house in order in the mornings, when the owner was still asleep.
Katerina examined the pompous house, and she felt uneasy. Something terrible through the stucco and huge paintings. She shivered involuntarily. She wanted to leave another’s secret without recognizing her. But the owner offered the girl a deal or contract. He offered her to live in his house without special duties, but with one condition: she should not leave his house during the summer holidays – it was supposedly that much time the doctors left for him to live.
She will receive so much money for her service that she can buy a new home of the same size as his old palace. As for his house, he is not subject to sale. The girl, knowing that the money goes to hard work, agreed to the conditions of Afanasy Afanasyevich. The owner promised that he would warn aunt Dasha of her whereabouts.
The butler lived on the ground floor and practically never left the mansion. The cook and the driver went to sleep at home. The chauffeur was engaged in shopping for the house, sometimes he would take a cook with him if he went to buy groceries. Katerina quickly realized that she could leave the house with the driver. And traveling around the house was her day enjoyable.
Another condition of the contract had a negative effect: she could not have cash, but she could choose the necessary things and products, and the driver paid for her requests from the owner’s wallet.
Two weeks flew like a vacation.
Then it became more difficult, and Catherine wanted to leave the house of Afanasy Afanasyevich, but she could not do that. She was ready to break the contract, but she had no way back for the next two months. The owner did not require her presence next to her in the room, she could move around the palace and the small lawn around the house at any time.
The woman who came in the morning to clean the mansion did not speak with Catherine. She collected clothes in the laundry and brought back clean and ironed. Men serving the owner, were obscenely laconic.
The owner of Catherine did not say much. More than two phrases a day it was impossible to wait. The girl was ready to talk to herself. She always communicated easily with people and often got tired of their confessions, and now she was in a verbal vacuum. In the house she counted five televisions of different times and not a single computer. There were no phones that surprised her unpleasantly. But there was a worldwide library.
Books were in the cabinets, closed by glass doors. Surprisingly, the books were without signs of aging paper. Katerina was struck by this fact so much that she was involved in reading. All the books were as if they had just been brought from the store. But looking at the year of publication, she was even more surprised.
The library contained books older than a hundred years or more! Soon Katerina noticed that the bookcases are tight enough that the doors close tightly and effortlessly on her part. A few days later she felt a strange smell in the book storage, he drove her away from the books. Books seemed to ask her not to touch them!
Katherine had no choice but to watch TV. One TV was with a lens filled with water. The second TV was black and white with a tricolor filter. The third TV was decorated with indoor horn antenna. The fourth TV was with a large screen, color and thick. The fifth flat-screen TV was in the bedroom of Prince Athanasius Afanasyevich.
The girl looked at the screens of five televisions, working according to their time of manufacture, and groaned with pity for her beloved. And not a single phone! This for her turned out to be beyond understanding. Information from the outside gradually disappeared from the life of the girl.
Driving with a driver has been reduced due to her constant expenses. Katerina wanted to look at the moon, which could still shine through the window without the permission of Afanasy Afanasyevich. She decided to go to the moon, to nature.
The girl found garden tools and zealously set about improving the land lying around the mansion.
But nothing came of her idea. Katerina quickly realized that the bayonet was constantly bumping into something hard. She squatted down and excavated the ground with her hands. Under the ground everywhere were reinforced concrete slabs! That is, around the house grew only grass on a small layer of soil!
Katerina sat down on the grass from impotence and felt a glance from the window, but she didn’t even turn her head towards the old man.
The girl’s gaze turned into the fence, she didn’t notice the barbed wire and dogs, but that didn’t make her feel any better. With nothing to do, Katerina began to do all the gymnastic exercises that had occurred to her. For several days the girl spent all her strength on various exercises.
Katerina managed to take a newspaper from Afanasy Afanasyevich’s post office and read the following lines: “Under the influence of the atmosphere, copper is covered with a durable, non-toxic oxide layer – patina, which gives the copper roof a beautiful shade. It is especially convenient to use such material for a copper roof, low temperatures do not affect the ductility of copper”.
It was after reading these lines that Katerina wanted herself a house covered with a copper roof, so that she could more easily endure the trap of Afanasy Afanasyevich.
In the courtyard, Katerina saw a sparrow swarming in a flowerpot filled with earth, but without a flower. The girl sang a song:
“A sparrow bathed in a flower pot without a flower.” His work is so easy that the sparrow is cheerful. He sketched the earth around, he scattered the grains. And happy little my friend, he sowed smeshinki.
The owner, having heard Katerina’s song, allowed her to go out of the manor’s gate for a couple of hours in search of local adventures.
The girl went into her room, opened the closet with clothes, chose a yellow trouser suit. She went to the mirror and saw in him a girl with disheveled hair. She was ashamed of her appearance. Katerina went to the shower, washed herself, brushed her teeth, and laughed with a white-toothed smile.
She wrung out her hair with a towel, dried them with a hair dryer, combed it with a comb and jumped on one leg with joy. She put on a yellow light suit, white-yellow sandals and, dancing, went down to the first floor of the house.
The butler let the girl out through the gates of the mansion.
Katerina walked around the village hoping to meet someone to hear a normal human voice. She saw near one house a wide bench, the boards