"Lev Kassil. The black book and Schwambrania (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

light-bishops. Then the king and queen each had two rookfuls of tea.
When at last the samovar-king cooled off and we became tired of our
game, we decided to put the figures back in their case. Horrors! The black
queen was missing!
We bruised our knees crawling about, looking under the chairs, the
tables and the bookcases. All our efforts were in vain. The wretched queen
was gone. Vanished! We finally had to tell Mamma, who soon had everyone up
in arms. No matter how hard we all looked, we could not find it. A terrible
storm was about to break over our cropped heads. Then Papa came home.
This was no measly storm. A blizzard, a hurricane, a cyclone, a simoom,
a waterspout and a typhoon came crashing down upon us! Papa was furious. He
called us vandals and barbarians. He said that one could even teach a wild
bear to handle things carefully, and all we knew how to do was wreck
everything we touched, and he would not stand for such destructiveness and
vandalism.
"Into the corner, both of you! And stay there!" he shouted. "Vandals!"
We looked at each other and burst into tears.
"If I'd have known I was going to have such a Papa, I'd never get
borned!" Oska bawled.
Mamma blinked hard. She was about to shed a tear, but that did not
soften Papa's heart. We stumbled off to the "medicine chest". For some
reason or other that was the name given to the dim storeroom near the
bathroom and the kitchen. There were always dusty jars and bottles on the
small window-sill, which is probably how the room originally got its name.
There was a small low bench in one comer known as "the dock". Papa, who
was a doctor, felt it was wrong to have children stand in the corner when
they were punished and so had us sit in the corner instead.
There we were, banished to that shameful bench. The medicine chest was
as dim as a dungeon. Oska said:
"He meant the circus, didn't he? I mean, the part about bears being so
careful. Didn't he?"
"Yes."
"Are vandals part of the circus, too?"
"Vandals are robbers," I muttered.
"That's what I thought." He sounded pleased. "They have chains tied on
them."
Annushka, our cook, stuck her head out of the kitchen and threw up her
hands.
"Goodness! The master's lost his toy and so the babies have to sit here
in the dark. My poor little sinners! Do you want me to bring you the cat to
play with?"
"No!" I growled. The resentment which had gradually died down now
welled up in me again.
As the unhappy day drew to a close the dim room became darker still.
The Earth was turning its back on the Sun. The world, too, turned its back
on us. We looked out upon the unjust world from our place of shame. The
world was very large, as I had learned in geography, but there was no place
for children in it. Grown-ups were in charge of everything on all five
continents. They changed the course of history, rode horses, hunted, sailed
ships, smoked, made real things, went