"Valentin Katayev. The Cottage in the Steppe (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

They had only to book their tickets and set out. Since they had decided
to travel on an Italian ship, there was something thrilling and foreign even
in the matter of purchasing the tickets. In Lloyd's Travel Agency on
Nikolayevsky Boulevard, next door to the Vorontsov Palace-that is, in the
most fashionable part of the town-the prospective tourists were greeted with
such reverence and politeness that Petya thought his father had been
mistaken for someone else.
A gentleman in a grey morning coat with a large pearl tie-pin stuck in
a brilliantly coloured tie asked them to sit down in the deep leather chairs
which stood around a small mahogany table. The surface of the table,
polished to a high gloss, was littered with Lloyd's narrow, illustrated
prospectuses in various languages. There were photographs of many-storeyed
hotels, palm-trees, ancient ruins and ocean liners. Petya saw tiny white
Remus and Romulus at the jagged tits of the white she-wolf, St. Mark's
winged lion, Vesuvius with an umbrella-like Italian pine in the foreground,
Milan Cathedral, as thin and pointed as a fish-bone, and the leaning Tower
of Pisa; these symbols of Italian cities transported the boy into the realms
of foreign travel.
Undoubtedly, the Travel Agency office belonged to that world too, with
its flamboyant posters, price-lists, impressive rosewood filing cabinets and
counters, ship chronometers instead of ordinary clocks, models of ships in
glass cases, portraits of the King and Queen of Italy, and the gallant
gentleman in the grey morning coat, who chattered away in broken Russian
while selling Vasily Petrovich the pretty second-class tickets from Odessa
to Naples and patting Pavlik, whom he called "leetle signor turisto," on his
close-cropped head.
From then on Petya felt that the journey had begun.
When the tickets were handed to them, together with a sheaf of guides
and prospectuses, and when, in a high state of excitement, they emerged from
Lloyd's, Petya regarded Nikolayevsky Boulevard as the marine embankment of
some foreign city, and the familiar Richelieu monument with the iron bomb on
the pedestal as one of the "sights" which was now to be thoroughly
"inspected," not merely looked at. This feeling was heightened by the ships
of every flag that lay at anchor in the bay far below the boulevard.
The day of departure arrived.
Their ship was scheduled to sail at four in the afternoon. At
one-thirty Dunyasha was sent to hire two cabs. Auntie, in a mantilla and a
little hat with daisies, was seeing them off. She and a speechless, excited
Pavlik climbed into one cab; Vasily Petrovich and Petya, with the Alpine
rucksacks and the tartan travelling-bag packed so tight that it was ready to
burst, got into the other.
A group of idlers stood around discussing the event in loud voices.
Dunyasha, wearing her new calico dress, wiped her tears with her apron.
Vasily Petrovich patted the pockets of his freshly-ironed silk jacket to
make sure he had not forgotten anything, removed his black-banded straw hat,
crossed himself, and said with a show of nonchalance:
"Well, let's be off!"
The crowd parted, the cabs set off, and Dunyasha began to weep aloud.
Petya's feeling that they were already abroad never left him. To get to
the port they had to cross the city through the rich business centre. Then