"E.Voiskunsky, I.Lukodyanov. The Crew Of The Mekong (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

She thanked them politely, her gaze on a point somewhere between Privalov
and the mast, wrung out her dripping hair and then went down into the cabin.
Val came out of the cabin with the red sun-dress and hung it up to dry in
the sun.
When the boat reached the marina the woman sprang gracefully onto the
pier. "Please don't trouble yourselves," she said. "I'll get home all right
without any help." Her red dress flashed among the trees on the seaside
promenade and vanished. That was the last they saw of her.
The two men turned oft the bustling avenue into quiet Cooper Lane.
"Will you come in for a while?" Nikolai asked, stopping under an
archway that led into a courtyard.
"Can you lend me something to read?"
"Of course I can."
They crossed the yard diagonally. It was a yard they had known from
childhood, with a glassed-in gallery running the length of the two-storey
house. An outside stairway supported by iron posts, down which it had been
so convenient and pleasant to slide, led up to the top floor. In the cellar
the children used to hunt for buried treasure and hide from pursuit, sending
arrows flying through the air.
Yura and Nikolai had grown up in this wonderful courtyard which could
be turned, in the twinkling of an eye, into a prairie or the deck of a
frigate. Here they had invented their earliest games and read their first
books. They had raced about the yard, shooting arrows from their bows and
lassoing the rubber plants set out for watering.
One of the ground-floor tenants in those days was a sailor. The boys
used to gaze respectfully at his black cap with its gold emblem and the gold
stripes on his sleeve. The sailor would be away for weeks at a lime, leaving
behind, at home, a live turtle and a daughter with freckles and yellow
braids.
Although girls were not invited to play Red Indians, Yura and Nikolai
made an exception in the case of the sailor's daughter. Yellow Lynx, as they
named her, could run like the wind and slide down the stairway posts like a
cat. She did not cry when they pulled her by her braids. She plunged
courageously into courtyard battles, using her fingernails and screaming in
a high, piercing voice.
Besides the live turtle there were other interesting things in the
sailor's flat. A real dirk hung on one wall and a barometer on another. On
the desk, beside a bronze inkwell, lay two pieces of iron with mysterious
letters carved on them. Yellow Lynx and the boys resolved that some day they
would discover the meaning of those mysterious letters.
The sailor and his daughter left for Leningrad early in the spring of
1941. Nikolai copied a picture from a volume of Pushkin's Tales showing a
ship with a huge taut sail decorated with a drawing of the sun, approaching
a wharf on which men in old-fashioned long robes were firing cannons. He
presented it to Yellow Lynx as a farewell gift. They were both about nine
years old at the time.
Soon after, a husky young man by the name of Bugrov, whom the boys
addressed as Uncle Vova, moved into the sailor's flat. He had a blue
motorcycle on which he sometimes took the boys riding. What is more, he
taught them the Greco-Roman style of wrestling. A circus poster on the wall