"Lev Kassil. The black book and Schwambrania (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора off to war, fell in love, saved people, kidnapped people and played
chess. But their children were made to stand in corners. The grown-ups had probably forgotten the games they had played as children and the books they had found so interesting. Indeed, they had probably forgotten all about that part of their lives. Otherwise they would have let us play with whomever we wanted to, climb fences, wade through puddles and pretend that a chessman called a king was a boiling samovar. That was what we were thinking about as we sat in the corner. "Let's run away! We'll gallop off!" Oska said. "Go ahead, what's keeping you? But where'll you go? Everyplace you go there'll be grown-ups, and you're just a little boy." At that moment I had a brainstorm. It cut through the gloom like a bolt of lightning, so that I was not at all surprised to hear the roll of thunder that followed (actually, Annushka had dropped the roasting pan). There was no need to run away, to search for a promised land. It was here, somewhere very close at hand. We had only to invent it. I could practically see it in the gloom. There, by the bathroom door, were its palm trees, ships, palaces and mountains. "There's land ahead, Oska!" I shouted excitedly. "Land! It's a new game we can play all our lives!" Oska's one thought was a good future ahead. "I'll blow the whistle, and I'll be the engineer!" he said. "What'll we play?" "It's going to be a game about a land, our own land. We'll live in it every day, besides living here, and it'll belong to us. Left paddle ahead!" "Aye, aye, Sir! Left paddle ahead! Whoooo!" "Shhh," Oska hissed, letting off steam. We disembarked from our bench onto a new shore. "What's it called?" At the time of the events described, our favourite book was Greek Myths by Gustav Schwab, and so we decided to name our new land Schwabrania. However, the word sounded too much like the cotton swabs Papa used in his practice, so we added an "m", making our new land Schwambrania. We were now Schwambranians. All of the above was to be kept a deep dark secret. Mamma soon let us out of our dungeon. She had no way of knowing that she was now dealing with two citizens of a great nation known as Schwambrania. A week later the black queen surfaced. The cat had rolled it into a crack under the trunk. However, Papa had by then ordered a new queen,- and so this queen was ours. We decided to make it the keeper of the secret of Schwambrania. Mamma had a beautiful little grotto made of seashells that she had put away behind the mirror of her dressing table and had forgotten all about. A pair of tiny filigree brass gates guarded the entrance to the cosy cave. The cave was empty. We decided to hide our queen there. We wrote "C.W.S." (Code Words of Schwambrania) on a slip of paper, pulled away an edge of the felt circle on the bottom of the black queen and stuck the paper into the space. Then we put the queen in the cave and sealed the gates with sealing-wax. The queen was now doomed to eternal imprisonment. I will tell you of what happened to it later. |
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