14

My nightmare about the villa began to come true as early as August of that year. When the excruciating July in the country was over and I was dumped like a log at the villa again I figured out that the sick aura exactly like that I had dreamed about was already forming. To get the whole picture the place only lacked the debris and the creaking pole with the black flag, but my gut told me that they wouldn’t be long in coming…

Sue would come over almost every day, begging me for forgiveness and promising from now on to make any sacrifice for the sake of our friendship if only I gave her another chance. And I, kicking myself for being such a softy, made it up with her and we started to hang out as before.

Meanwhile, things at home were getting tensier. My grandads’ attitude towards me was getting worse and worse; not a day went by without them scolding me or nagging at me for something. I saw the reason was my grandad’s deteriorating health. Almost every week came an ambulance; the rest of the time he groaned, moaned, got irritated with everything and at times even cried like a spoilt baby.

One day Gran Zoya remembering the doctors’ advice not to give Grandad too much greasy food denied him another portion of jellied pork. And she did it so brusquely that he sat down on the stair and broke into tears.

“You rascals… You’ll all regret it when I’m dead! Screw you!..”

“There you go again!” exclaimed Gran Zoya clapping her hands, “Honestly, Sasha, you’re being childish!”

I was sick and tired of all those groans and whimperings of my ailing grandad. At such moments I felt like giving him a swift kick and saying something very rude to him.

But we all got the worst of it at night. Then the senile old man would get especially anxious which was a telltale sign of a coming heart attack. He would rise from his bed and, grunting and gasping, wander around the house like a ghost with a flashlight on, not letting anyone sleep. I would frequently get woken up by the flashlight right in my eyes.

“Grandad, are you nuts? Why are you wandering around here in the middle of the night?” I grumbled.

“The car… The car might get stolen!” he snapped out gasping for breath.

“Oh come on - who wants that old jalopy of yours?”

“Shut up, you rascal! How dare you… How dare you open your mouth at your own grandfather, you filth?”

I resented him. It was difficult to say if my grandad was a good man or a bad man, but he was ill, irritable and definitely hard to deal with. I remembered that when he’d been well he’d loved me and cared about me, but I’d never truly appreciated it. I was mad at him, and he would say both lovingly and disdainfully:

“Oh you little bugger!..”

Sometimes during the day as I sat with the girls on the windowsills of an abandoned house which had been being built on an empty lot once upon a time but never got finished - we could clearly hear the tumult coming from our villa, and so we knew that my grandad was having a heart attack again. All the windows and doors were wide open, and Gran Zoya running up and down and cackling like a disturbed hen. And the terrible, harrowing screams of my grandad, I think, could be heard as far as at the railway station:

“You rascals! Let me die!!!”

And then Gran Zoya’s sister from Lithuania who’d been staying with us at the villa that summer - a dried-up little old woman, “Splinter” as my mother had nicknamed her behind her back - as calm as a zombie, would repeat the same:

“We won’t let you die.”

At times like that I tried to show up at home as rarely as possible. And Splinter, stirring her tea, would say calmly:

“She’s a callous girl, isn’t she…”

Grandad didn’t really need my sympathy, though. Having got his needle he would finally calm down and as he saw me he would only say this:

“Oh you little bugger!..”