THE UNPRECEDENTED ADVENTURES OF A WOODEN STOOL NICKNAMED DUSIA IVANOVA

1
 
DUSYA HAS IT COMING
 
Once upon a time, in a small but warm and cosy flat on the fifth floor, there lived Papa Ivanov with his wife, Mama Ivanova, their son Vasya Ivanov, their daughter Tasya Ivanova, Ivanova Musya, a shaggy-furred, long-whiskered and bushy-tailed devouress of “Whiskas” and “Kitekat,” and a wobbly wooden stool that went by the name of Dusya.

After dinner, Papa said:

“Time to take down the Christmas tree.”

But Vasya and Tasya started whining:

“But paaaaaa….”

Clever Musya tried to snuggle up to Papa’s legs, clad in ancient jogging bottoms and oh-so-soft winter slippers, hand-sown by his beloved mother-in-law, who was living across the border in Ukraine, not far away… Wobbly Dusya, a trusted playmate, creaked away under Vasya and Tasya, who were sitting on her back to back, using her extra drawn-out and unpleasant creak, reminiscent of the unbearable screech a crooked rusty nail makes when you drag it across a pane of glass… Papa jumped up, his facial expression distorted as if he had toothache, but all of Papa’s teeth were healthy: it was in vain that he reached for his cheek – everyone knew anyway that the day before yesterday he’d been to the dentist, who’d filled his only painful tooth….

Mama, who’d been watching intently from the armchair by the floor-lamp and clattered with her needles because she was sowing a warm pillow for Dusya, unexpectedly came to Papa’s aid:

“What, kids, don’t you think it’s time? We’ve celebrated New Year, Christmas, Old New Year [according to the Julian calendar]… Half the needles have come off that poor tree already. And I’m the one who has to sweep them up…”

Papa, who’d flopped into the armchair facing the telly, immediately came to Mama’s aid as befits a husband – Mama had previously come to his aid, but she’d done it like a woman, seeking compromise, while Papa was uncompromising like a man:

“You’ve turned the house into a pigsty! It’s impossible to work!”

Papa worked for a semi-clandestine company called “Smith Brothers and Company” and would sometimes take work home, but now he evidently considered that work meant watching the “Samsung” telly set while simultaneously rustling the pages of the “Komersant-Daily” newspaper. Papa loved doing several things at once, which is why Mama sometimes called him “Our Julius Caesar!”… Meanwhile, Vasya and Tasya mounted Dusya as if she was a horse and started jumping and skipping round the room while singing Gazmanov’s cavalry hymn “Oh you my thoughts, my galloping horses!”…

But Papa wouldn’t let it rest: half-rising from the armchair like a horseman surveying the horizon, he fixed a theatrical stare at the crystal chandelier, model “Cascade”, and started yelling, trying to outdo his children:

“I’ve had enough! It’s high time we throw out all this ramshackle stuff, this dead wood, all these damn sticks and stools!”

Vasya and Tasya stopped skipping immediately and fell silent, pressing themselves against the dumbstruck Dusya and pricking their ears like mice in fear – they vaguely sensed trouble, but didn’t understand anything for sure yet…

Mama evidently didn’t understand anything either yet, but this time she cheated on Papa anyway, because everyone knew that Mama would fight like a lioness for Vasya and Tasya, through hell and high water:

“Calm down, Ivanov. When they’re finished playing they’ll put all the stuff away – right, children?”

“Riiiight,” Vasya and Tasya intoned in unison, and once again took up jumping around the half-withered Christmas tree on their battle steed as if nothing had happened.

“Knock it off already!”, Papa sighed, entranced by Fetisov’s lightning-fast pass along the left side and simultaneously by the Dow-Jones index in the newspaper column, which reflected the undulating vacillation of worldwide companies’ business activities in relation to each other.

Papa could be impulsive when mayhem reigned supreme at home; everyone knew this already, and so nobody paid any attention. But this time Fetisov again failed to score a single goal for the Sabre Tooth Tigres, and so Papa stopped simultaneously looking forward and downward like Julius Caesar. Instead, he installed himself in his armchair more comfortably and once again addressed his people:

“Listen up!” The riders froze once again, but as they no longer expected him to pull a nasty trick they looked at Papa without the slightest concern.

But Papa suddenly launched into a story which resembled an excerpt from a Christmas tale and which he, no doubt, had read in that newspaper of his: “Listen up! The Northern Swedes have an ancient Gothic ritual: before the New Year, they rid themselves of unnecessary ballast; they throw out the window old things that have served their purpose, so that the past remains safely in the past, so that they can enter the new year with no baggage, without any regrets, with new and beautiful things and friends, as they, the old Galls, used to say: everything about a human being must be magnificent – the face, the soul, and the trousers, and the boots… Listen, our Russian feast, our Old New Year, has come, come on and let’s throw out the furniture we don’t need…”

“What furniture?” Mama managed to ask without turning away from her knitting (Mama was also like Julius Caesar).

“What furniture, the stool of course,” said Papa, nodding towards the old-fashioned “furniture,” who had sagged a bit underneath the children from sheer horror.

“Dusya?!” asked Tasya, shaking her plaits.

“Yup,”, Papa managed to answer without parting his treacherous lips.

“Dusya??!!” Vasya and Mama, who had dropped her knitting by now, asked in unison.

And only sleeping beauty Musya didn’t say anything but continued to snooze without giving a damn, spread out on her sofa like a dead body in all her considerable length…

Vasya and Tasya got off Dusya and looked her in the face…

Dusya Ivanova the stool was an ordinary wooden stool, and this means she didn’t know how to live, speak, sing, walk, see, chase, hold and hate, listen, eat and write fairy tales, and there were many more things that a human being can do and she couldn’t do, and yet she had learned certain things from people during the many years she had lived among them: she had learned, if not to hear and see, then to sense, if not to speak, then to think, if not to write fairy tales, then to sleep and dream… For this reason she now sensed – and at the same time suddenly dreamed about – a long journey, love and separation, flying in a dream and in reality…

All the while Papa went on:

“Listen, actually, let’s throw her out together with the Christmas tree, because, really, it’s embarrassing in front of other people, because look, take a proper look, how she ruins all the glory in our furniture with her run-down appearance”, and then Papa Ivanov with his rustling newspaper drew an arc in the air that was enthusiastically reproachful and therefore unsteady and rough round the edges, intended, theoretically, to neatly encompass the chiffonier, the wardrobe, the wall cabinet and the dresser, all polished to a marvellous shine, next to which our old, infirm, lopsided Dusya with the paint peeling off her face really looked like a rogue fugitive from an old age facility for stools.

“Oh but what are you talking about”, interrupted Mama, now getting upset. “Remember, she’s almost like a daughter to us, and a family item on top of that: many years ago my late grandfather, Karl Ivanych Gliuklikhlein, God rest his soul, made her with his own hands from the roots of the most rare bottle tree, normally inhabited by belligerent baboons… I hope now you understand that this nice little stool is dear to me as a memory of the prematurely departed Karl Ivanych Gliuklikhlein, may he rest in peace, and of the most rare bottle tree, the secluded crowns of which artfully conceal the crafty tuaregs…

“Yes, you are right, now I understand,” it seems that Papa Ivanov was repenting of his crafty schemes and shook his now guilty head, “Yes, yes, of course, of course…”

On this note they made peace.

All the while the day was dying down quietly, outside the blizzard was whirling its witches’ broom in the dark: shursh… shursh…

Vasya and Tasya lay down on their little beds in their little room; Mama, who had let the winding thread of the next tv series slip her attention, dozed off by the screen; lazily awake Musya, once she had filled her expandable stomach with whatever she could find in the kitchen, went to the toilet probably; while Papa Ivanov, his eyes shiny as a cat’s, crept on tiptoes towards the Christmas tree behind Mama’s back…. Crafty Papa Ivanov put his cruel plan into action after all: he grabbed the feeble Dusya by the leg and stepped out onto the balcony with her…And Dusya flew off, she flew as if she had fallen into a bottomless dream, and she spun and whirled in the blizzard’s whirlwind, everything became confused – where was the sky? where was the earth?.. She was flying, she was sad, she was sighing as she flew: my life is ending, now I’m going to fall…
 

2
 
DUSYA AND DEATH
 
Once upon a time there lived a gnarly old wooden stool known as Dusya Ivanova, who had been thrown out of the house into the cold by her cruel stepfather. He threw her all the way from the fifth floor – it would have been no surprise had she fallen to her death. Forever. But Dusya Ivanova the stool flew and kept flying, thinking that everything depended on time: if it deigned to slow down so much that Dusya’s flight never came to an end, then Dusya would never fall to the blizzard-swept earth, but would fly and fly like a cheerful bird in the sky, dream of unknown distant lands, and perhaps even sleep a little on her endless flight, like some of the large talented birds do when they undertake their enormous journeys to warmer regions but do not always have the right to land when they fancy to rest to their heart’s content, because they are subject to the rigid rule of the flock, at the head of which flies a stern, powerful leader, who harshly punishes anyone who violates the order that’s been in force since time immemorial… And so they sometimes sleep and flap their wings, flap and sleep, sleep and flap, flap and sleep, sleep and sleep, sleep and sleep…

She didn’t even notice how she fell asleep between the third and second floors, and grey-haired time opened a snow-covered side door before her, through which Dusya slipped into an ingenious loophole with cheerful bends that captured her soaring spirit, and then she flew somewhere to the side, sideways, down, up… And the music of the heart’s desire, the most wonderful thing in the world, music that makes everything understandable and clear, lively and spacious music, soaring and free, gently embracing a poor quiet soul and carrying it away, poured out from everywhere, a unique joy, unpredictable in advance… In this delightful whirlpool, Dusya had almost forgotten herself, when suddenly the fantastic flight and music of the celestial spheres were interrupted and Dusya, discouraged, was suspended in the indefinite centre of times and spaces. And with all her wooden skin she sensed the approach of a very bright, but also most gentle light, the halo of which displayed a cozy tiny bookcase in bold relief, a little taller than a stool, only half filled with plump, dusty volumes. Creaking like an ungreased cart, or like new boots, or like an old stool, the alluring bookcase rolled up to Dusya and – mentally – said:

“Well, why don’t you ask?..”

“Most esteemed bookcase,” Dusya answered mentally, “how can I ask if I don’t know how to speak, and not only how to speak, but also how to listen, and not only how to listen, but also how to see, because I’m a simple stool, and I don’t know how to do anything, and I don’t have anything…

“Don’t make yourself poorer than you are”, the bookcase creaked good-naturedly, “I know everything about you: you know how, if not to hear and see, then to sense, if not to speak, then to think, and if not to weave fairy tales, then to sleep and dream.”

“Correct”, squeaked Dusya, “but who are you that you know everything about me? Perhaps you’re a relative of mine from the line of Gliuklikhleins?”

“No, dear Dusya. I am death.”

“You are death?”

“Yes, Dusya, yes, I am death.”

“My death?”

“Don’t be selfish. I am no one’s and everyone’s death at the same time.”

“But you came for me? Aren’t you early, because I kind of agreed on a postponement with grey time… mentally agreed. “

“No, I didn’t come for you. It’s too early for you; you’ve not yet filled yourself with sufficient wisdom to take your place on one of my shelves alongside the sleeping volumes that carry all the wisdom of the world. Almost all the wisdom.”

“But… I’m a stool, not a book to gather dust on your shelf somewhere in a secluded corner. I can’t even mentally imagine myself as a book: I don’t have a single book page, but I have my beloved four legs on which I can stand on the ground, although I limp a little, only on one leg… And what kind of wisdom are you talking about, dear bookcase? I’m stupid and naive, more naive than any human child. Even shaggy Musya is more clever than me…”

“You must really be a little stupid if you don’t know that books are made from wood. From trees that were essentially killed, although the spirit of the tree lives and breathes in them. So here it is. I am responsible for you before God, that’s why I rolled up to you today.”

“To take me up to heaven?”

“No, no, it’s not time yet.”

“Then why, oh bookcase, did you roll up to me?”

“To get to know you in advance, so to speak. There are some papers to be filled out, certificates… But I’ll do that myself somehow in my spare time, don’t you worry…”

“Of course, why should I worry if I’m already immortal… Oh, will I ever die?”

“You will die.”

“I will die? When will I die then, and how?!”

“Oh, Dusya, you won’t die soon. But the hour will come, and I will follow that hour…”

“What are you going to do with me?”

“I’ll take you apart for logs, that is, into five parts first: “D”, “U”, “S”, “YA” and the fifth part is your nameless square face which is, by the way, the most human part of you. And then I will chop these parts into even smaller pieces, which I will turn into wood dust, from which I will create another book for boys and girls, which they will read and then mourn your serene death, but then without it, without this death, this very book about the adventures and flights of a wooden stool known as Dusya Ivanova would not have appeared…”

“So what does that mean? I start dying from the very first chapter of this very book about myself, about Dusya?!”

“In a sense, yes. But life is not only a slow death, but also a slow birth, a slow and happy acquisition of heights and depths… After all, death is also life, the same life, but in a different quality: if you lived with dignity, you will die with dignity and fly on a cruise through the unrestricted skies, where you will be caressed by so many symphonies.”

“So, are you trying to say that death is no more scary than life?”

“Of course it’s not scarier, in this you can trust me, old fool that I am. Look at me, am I really that scary, huh, Dusya?”

“Well, no, not very much…… At least not scarier than a stool.”

“The precious time will come when you, Dusya, will become a book to take up your deserved place within me, but you still have to finish writing the story of your life, and this means that you must flip through the pages of encounters and trials so that you will not disappear without a trace once you’ve passed through them, but meet the end I’ve set out in the consciousness that you’ve fulfilled your duty.”

“I hope I won’t become a book anytime soon…”

“Live for now… After all, life is the same as death, but in a different quality: if you suffered serenely, you will be born serenely and walk cheerfully on Mother Earth, who will present you with many marvellous events.”

“How can I walk when I don’t know how to walk?!”

But as soon as Dusya screamed these words in her mind, the old bookcase disappeared – he literally evaporated. He could at least have creaked goodbye…