Jenny was silent for a moment and then resumed:
"Olga, who is Timur?"
"He's not God, he was a king," replied Olga grudgingly as she soaped her hands and face. "A cruel, lame king out of the Middle Ages."
"But if this Timur isn't a king and isn't cruel and isn't out of the Middle Ages, then who is he?"
"In that case I don't know.
Leave me alone!
What's all this about Timur anyway?"
"Because I have a kind of feeling that he's a person I love very much indeed."
"Who is?" Olga raised an incredulous, lathered face. "What nonsense are you talking? Why must you always be making things up? Why can't you let me wash in peace!
Just wait till Dad comes home. He'll see about this love of yours!"
"Will he, how?" Jenny cried with feeling. "Even if he does come, it won't be for long.
And he certainly wouldn't mistreat anybody so lonely and defenceless."
"Who's lonely and defenceless?" Olga asked in surprise. "You? Oh, Jenny, I really don't know what to make of you; I can't imagine who you take after!"
Jenny lowered her head. Staring at her reflection on the nickel-plated surface of the tea kettle, she replied proudly and without hesitation:
"After Dad.
Just Dad. Him and him only.
And after no one else in the world."
The elderly gentleman, Doctor Kolokolchikov, was sitting in his garden tinkering with a wall clock.
In front of him stood his grandson Nick with a doleful expression on his face.
Nick was supposed to be helping his grandfather.
Actually, however, he had been holding a screwdriver in readiness for more than an hour, waiting for his grandfather to ask for it.
But the steel spring which had to be pressed back into place was proving stubborn, and his grandfather was very patient.
And it seemed there would be no end to Nick's waiting.
It was just too silly, especially since Sima Simakov's tousled head had already bobbed up several times over the fence, and Sima was a fellow who always knew everything that was going on.
And this same Sima was making such strange and mysterious signs at Nick with his tongue, head and hands that even Nick's five-year-old sister Tata, who was sitting under a linden tree trying to stuff a bur into the mouth of a sprawling dog, suddenly let out a scream and jerked her grandfather by the trousers. At this Sima Simakov's head instantly disappeared.
At long last the spring was properly installed.
"Man must toil," observed the grey-haired gentleman Kolokolchikov raising his moist forehead and addressing Nick. "You've no call to look as though I'd been giving you a dose of castor oil.
Give me the screwdriver and take the pliers.
Toil is ennobling.
And nobility of character is just what you lack, my boy.
Yesterday, for example, you had four helpings of ice cream and didn't share any with your little sister."
"She's lying, the shameless little brute!" cried Nick indignantly. He glared at Tata. "I let her have two bites three times.
And she goes and tells on me and takes four kopeks off Mum's table as she goes."
"And you climbed out of the window on a rope last night," Tata announced imperturbably, without turning her head. "And you've got a torch under your pillow.
And yesterday a bad boy threw stones through our bedroom window.
He kept on and on—throwing stones and whistling, throwing stones and whistling."
Nick gasped at this base treachery on the part of the shameless Tata.
He began to tremble from head to foot.
Fortunately his grandfather was too occupied to pay attention to such dangerous slander, or else he simply had not heard.
Luckily, too, the milkwoman came into the garden with her cans at that moment. Pouring out the milk, she lamented:
"Can you imagine, dear doctor, some burglars got into the yard and tried to steal my oak barrel last night!
And people say that two fellows were seen on my roof early this morning: sitting on the chimney, mind you, and dangling their legs, the scoundrels."
"On the chimney?
Why should they do that, pray?" inquired the puzzled gentleman.
But at that moment an ear-splitting clanging and jangling issued from the chicken coop.
The screwdriver jolted in the old gentleman's hand and the capricious spring took advantage of this opportunity to pop out and hit the roof with a bang.
Everybody, even Tata and the lazy dog, spun round at once, wondering what it could be.
Without uttering a word Nick scampered off across the carrot patch like a hare and disappeared behind the fence.
He halted near a cow byre from which, as from the chicken coop, was issuing the sound of sharp, clanging blows; it sounded as if somebody were hitting a section of steel rail with a hammer.
Here he ran into Sima Simakov and asked him excitedly: