Sapphire fairy. Prose in English. Natalia Patratskaya
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on a stick for 11 kopecks and milk ice cream for 9 kopecks. The country has changed money. Ten-year-old Katerina realized that 90 kopecks with old coins is 9 kopecks new or three 3 kopecks old. The girls regretted one thing: that they had not accumulated yellow coins, otherwise they would have been richer ten times. Katerina had another treat for 8 kopecks – a bag of pressed cocoa with sugar.
Katerina was given a two-room apartment in a two-story house without central heating batteries. In the square they won, in comfort they lost.
The house was wooden, plastered. This is where the first TV appeared. Neighbors came to Katerina’s apartment and looked at the small screen together.
Katerina well remembers her second apartment without prompts. They had an apartment with stove heating. In the big room there was a sofa, on a shelf of a sofa there were seven elephant ivory. There was a painting on the wall where bears walked along a broken tree. Standing on a bedside table made of oak was one of the first TVs. All the neighbors went to them to watch TV.
Katerina had her first working day when the Fashion House opened. Needed a model. The school from the fashion house was across the road. Two women came to school and began to examine girls of twelve and older. Chose Katerina. She came to the Fashion House, where she was taught to walk on the catwalk. She began to sew trousers, skirts, jackets. She stood, and she was wrapped with cloth and cut off with needles. By nature, she is not a mannequin. For a long time it could not continue. The time has come to pay her money, but she could not take it. Catherine could not take the money and everything!!! And she left the fashion house. Came to her house, brought the money. She bought flippers, a mask, a tube for money. For a long time the flippers served her, and she never fell in love with diving.
Once a red-haired boy approached Katerina in school and said:
– Katerina, do you want to be a radio announcer?
Why not. Let’s go to the audition. She read the text. Everyone came running to her: very much.
They say:
– Read again.
I read it. All fled. Everything is like with fashion – duplicates are not its elements.
Sometime in May, Katerina in twenty minutes decided to complete a control work in mathematics. She was released from class to the street. Spring fluttered fresh leaves. The school was one-storeyed, several classes were temporarily transferred here. But most of all in this school, she remembered the flight of the first cosmonaut.
There was a lesson in Russian, which was interrupted by a call. From all the classes, the schoolchildren ran out into the corridor with exclamations: “Man in space!”
Katerina invented newspapers on one sheet of a school notebook. With a classmate, they drew the first newspaper on the drawing paper. Katerina wrote the first lines of poetry under each picture.
The first trees were planted around the school in the spring, the school is new. Next to the school was a deli in a five-story building. The queue for soy bars was included in the list of receiving children’s joy.
Katerina lived in a two-story house. On the ground floor, there was a friend at home, Valya. In her house they loved to make one potato dish: boiled potatoes were put on a large frying pan and fried. In the kitchen they cooked on the stove with cast-iron circles. They stoked coal in the apartment and in the kitchen where they cooked food. Next to the stove there was always a broom and a poker.
In the next two-story house lived the remaining girlfriends. Favorite game in the yard – “Gardener”, it was held on a bench against a neighboring house. Behind the bench was a table for table tennis, which was rarely empty. Volleyball is a game common to the whole yard. The yard limited the third house. The fourth house was demolished and built a brick, two-story. It settled family from the capital. In the summer they went in slaps. These shoes are called Muscovites.
The first enemies appeared simply: Katerina drew all the friends, and they didn’t speak to her for half a year after the drawings. And she painted them beautifully! In lush skirts in the fashion of the early sixties.
Getting to know fiction was simple. In the apartment of Nadya’s classmate there was a shelf, while rare books were then on the shelf – J. Verne. In this apartment, Katerina first saw and remembered the eggs.
Bath was a holy place once a week for Katerina and her mother. There was no shampoo at that time, but there was laundry soap and long hair. In the bath were long lines. At the end of the washing process, the mother poured Katerina on the head with a basin of cool water, with the words: “Water from the goose, thinness from Caterina.” Perhaps that is why Katerina was never thin.
At home in the corner of the kitchen hung an icon. Through the yellow copper was visible face painted in colors on the tree. Icon when moving disappeared.
The school held the firework – An hour of fun competitions, such as KVN.
Ira once suggested:
– Katerina, let’s go to the dance club at DK. I will say that you already danced.
I came. Danced. Has reached performances at concerts, has acted in two and all. The school had a set in the volleyball section. She played Katerina, trained, reached the competition between schools. Got the nickname “evil captain.”
Went to a summer camp. She played table tennis. The best tennis player of the camp was not indifferent to her. Pretty quickly, she mastered the wisdom of the game. Together they all won and played the most. This is not all. With girls Katerina played musketeers. At the end she tied her long hair with a ribbon and tucked it up, this was how the musketeer’s hair did and no less.
She was sent to the Olympiad, but she solved them well, that is, the first places she did not smile. In the courtyard of his house on the street, the children played “The Gardener”, tennis, volleyball, and theater. In the new school they wrote with pens with steel feathers and dipped them into inkpots.
Katerina was tall, slim and played volleyball, danced in the friendly team of the house of culture, but the dances did not detain her for a long time. She had long, luxurious hair that she braided and twisted so that it seemed shorter.
Katerina’s father bought clothes and shoes several times. He chose beautiful things and shoes. She was involved in sports, so the food could not for the time being spoil her figure. She was bought skates-knives in honor of the countrywoman, Olympic champion. Winter evenings Katerina spent on the rink. My father had a garden in which, apart from apple trees, pears, plums, currants, and stretchers, tiger lilies always grew.
We went to the garden by train to the cottage. The memory of unusual taste and slate apple trees remained in my memory. Cottage sold and went to the sea. Cherries, stones on the beach, portraits of pioneers-heroes. Concerts of Lilliputians. Divine evening view of the sea. Pancakes on the beach. Bagels. Closed museum of paintings by Aivazovsky. It was wonderful!
Katerina has no offense for the wonderful time of her childhood, for the wonderful time of her youth. Everything was as it was, and her parents did everything so that she had what she had.
Katerina felt that her magical energy dried up, ordinary life began. So she remembered the summer, spent not in the village, but on the lakeside.
Residents of the village, located in the spurs of the mountains, believed that the village of Medny bucket has its own spirit, which protects it from ancient times. According to local legends and eyewitnesses, on one side of the village there is an exit to the space portal. The appearance of the village has changed over seven centuries. In recent years, the village seemed younger, new houses appeared, and old ones began to be tiled.
Katerina arrived in the village Copper bucket for the holidays to Aunt Dasha, who lived in an ordinary wooden house. And the house of the prince… The house with the towers stood on the edge of the village, on the bank of a small river. The copper roof gleamed in the sun. The vertical