Country house

Chapter one

When people ask me how my life has changed since the birth of my daughter, I answer: I learned to play the drums. This is how I do it: I take the laundry basin and turn it over on the floor in front of Monka. I muffle one half with a diaper folded in half and start banging with black maracas. Everyone is absolutely delighted.

But it’s impossible to do this all day long, especially when it’s so hot: attention begins to float like an iceberg of butter in a frying pan. The curtains are drawn, but that doesn't seem to help. So we decide to play dacha. Or rather, my wife and I first decide what to play when we have a small child: my adult life consists of painfully quick decisions or such empty boredom that you can feel the epithelium dying off. One of these lightning-fast decisions was the game of dacha. Despite Monka's indignation, I put the maracas aside.

The first thing I did was Google for turtles and wigs, but predictably I didn’t find anything useful; except that two turtles guard the gates to the forbidden city. And wigs, the internal Internet told me, appear at Akutagawa’s “Rashomon Gate”. Then we got used to the controls: at first it was like frying pancakes with an excavator bucket. But, thank God, you can always replay; On the third attempt, we somehow learned how to pack our equipment. That's when dusk overtook us.

The next day we left: I forgot the exact address and something else. There was tension in the cabin. This is the house, I exclaimed. For some reason the driver was in no hurry to drive back to the city; instead, he stuck his slippered feet out the front window and dozed off as if we should be back soon, lulled to sleep by the ticking of the meter. The spotted shadow of a birch tree wandered across his face.

The door to the veranda opened, but the door to the house itself did not. I didn't have the key to this lock. Having searched all the clickable shelves and cabinets, as well as rugs, floorboards, a refrigerator and tea boxes, I discovered a lot of mysterious women's things, collected a full inventory of keys that didn't fit anywhere (they seemed to have budded in a warm closet drawer), but nothing needed.

“Call your uncle?” - the wife suggested. I replied that I had already guessed: my uncle’s voice passed through the speaker with such force, as if it had to be squeezed through the membrane, like speech puree.

“You haven’t come for so long that we decided to lock the door with a different lock,” he said at first guiltily, “and suggested checking the hiding places where the spare keys might be: a woodlice lived under the floorboard, and under the oilcloth, instead of a key, there was a thin cigarette butt with a trace of purple lipstick.” My uncle spoke very slowly and difficultly: wandering for a long time in search of a suitable word, he kept saying “this... what’s his name..., well...” until, finally, his strength ran out and he began to reproach me for the lack of keys in the hiding places. His intonation at that moment changed strangely: it was as if the words sat on a carousel and rode in angry bends. I hung up, deciding not to tell my wife about the strange conversation.

Attempts to penetrate through the slightly open window also did not work: a cool and motionless semi-darkness was dimly visible there. The dacha was inaccessible; I could not find the keys. “Perhaps the key you are looking for does not look like a key,” my wife told me, rocking a disgruntled child.

“To understand what a key is, you must first understand what a dacha is,” I reasoned, wandering barefoot along the concrete path, every now and then sparkling with the mucus of snails. The dacha is a post-izba, an anchor of reality down there while we are fooling around in cloud services. These are logs, this is a stove, this is a bathhouse and the spirits of ancestors: this. Thinking in this way, I suddenly noticed that bushes were growing under each of the entrances: to the house and to the bathhouse. They did not bear fruit of anything interesting and were even completely dried out and twisted, unlike other plants in the dacha. Taking a closer look, I found figures of turtles under them: one was a Gzhel-style ashtray, blue and white, with round surprised eyes, somewhat reminiscent of a lamb. The other was also an ashtray, but tin and with red stone eyes. They were all filled with ash, which, of course, scattered across the lawn. The sensations from the turtles were grim. I took them to show Monka, she reached out to touch them and burst into tears. My wife looked at me reproachfully: all I could do was shrug my shoulders and go light the bathhouse.

Why don't we stay here for a few days? - I suggested. - Fresh air, it will be pleasant and useful for a child to crawl on the grass. My wife agreed so much that we almost decided to move the washing machine to the dacha. “Now I’ll go take a steam bath and we’ll discuss this option,” I promised restrainedly and plunged into the hot darkness (the light in the bathhouse was turned on from the closed house) of the steam room.

When I returned, I tried to relax. The wife said: “Just now a woman was passing by the fence, she stopped, put her fists on her hips and began to stare at us. That’s it—staring.” I tried to calm her down when she went back: this woman, indeed, did not look suspiciously stern, but glanced at how the three of us were sitting on the veranda, in the shade of grape leaves.

A little later I decided to check if the phone was charged: but the electricity died. The heart of the refrigerator stopped beating: the food was in danger of death and decomposition. At this moment, the look of that woman wandering back and forth along the road clearly began to seem like a dark hint to me. Even though I grew up in this dacha, a lot had changed during the years of my absence: even though my uncle, my mother’s brother, formally owned it, someone else’s will, I saw more and more clearly, entwined the dacha: someone else’s feminine, almost old woman’s, tough and persistent will laid out turtles under the bushes, hung up her robes, weaved invisible but sticky intrigues around the dacha. We discussed my suspicions with my wife and decided that in this situation it seems to be true. Plans to stay faded like autumn leaves.

“She wears a wig,” said the wife, after thinking. "Who?" - I didn’t understand. “This is a witch who is trying to take over the dacha,” she explained and took out a long hair from under her. My wife is a hairdresser, she knows a lot about such things. Indeed, the hair was something subtly strange: a strange spirit came from it, like from damp excavated clay. Rather, it was not even a smell, but a feeling.

“You know, wigs are often made from the hair of the dead,” said the wife. “Fuck you,” I answered and thought.

When we first arrived, the neighboring plots seemed empty to me, however, as if on cue, neighbors with children came out of the houses: the children began to scream, the parents began to shout at them. They did it somehow too calmly, but too loudly, as if they were trying to shout someone down. I approached the eastern border, above which the river and the city were visible, and shouted a little: good afternoon! do you have electricity? Ours was turned off - a woman in a headscarf, who was just walking past, right through the cabbage, did not even respond with a glance and entered some old barn door. Afterwards I didn’t see her leave there.

As soon as we recognized the machinations, the electricity suspiciously returned to the wires. The phone was charging now so we could call a taxi and get out of here. However, we were not going to give up so easily: we got ready and went to the food stall at the bus stop. As I locked the gate, I glanced at the blanket left lying in the middle of the sunlit lawn: its inverted edge reminded me of a crime scene photograph.

It was pleasant to move away from the dacha: after all, we were walking in that blessed part of summer when there were only a couple of weeks left until the end and, no matter what the weather was, it was still appropriate: in cloudy weather you take a break from the heat, in hot weather you again plunge into the past summer. The dachas on both sides of the path were just dachas, mostly empty on this weekday: there the sea buckthorn was filling with juice, the tips of the willows were turning yellow, and a serious toad was jumping out from under the porch.

In a good mood, we returned with food, determined to destroy any evil witchcraft: even Monka squealed recklessly in her wife’s arms, having become infected from us.

There was no blanket on the lawn.

Crumpled, it hung on wild raspberry bushes, near the western border of the dacha. The light seemed to me to have dimmed, although throughout the day there were plenty of translucent clouds wandering overhead. I went to help out the blanket, suffering from small but extremely persistent fluffy thorns, when from the other side of the mesh fence I heard a crackling rustling sound, the kind that happens when you climb deep into a bush as a child for a hard-to-reach berry. A stale pancake hung in the gap between the bushes and the fence. It unpleasantly resembled an old woman’s face, and there were even short gray hairs sprouting here and there.

Without saying a word, we ate hastily, in the dressing room. The neighbors were making louder and more insistent noise around us. Returning to the hallway of the house to get the phone to collect my things and call a taxi, I suddenly clearly heard something move behind the wall and become silent.

Taxi drivers canceled the trip several times, Monka screamed non-stop. The sky darkened and a cold wind came. We couldn't remember where we left what things and we ran around like birds, screaming at each other.

When we finally drove away from the dacha, I was ready to swear that in the slightly open window I saw a woman in a wig sitting motionless on a chair in the middle of a dark room.

I remembered how I tried to crawl through the crack of a slightly open window with my hand and I felt completely unwell. The last straw was my uncle's call:

“The neighbors called me,” he said, with pauses lacing his words with dissatisfaction, “you left the window on the veranda open.” Okay, they came and closed it. You have to be more careful: otherwise you didn’t close the window, and then what?

“Okay, I understand,” I squeezed out and hung up. My wife looked at me without saying anything.