Ilya Petrovich was not a nerd.
He simply loved school. He loved his classroom, hung with charts, photographs and pictures of beautiful pistils and stamens and all sorts of little animals, always smiling and kind. Ilya Petrovich had collected these charts and visual aids for many years, not trusting the school caretaker to buy them, because he was firmly convinced: pictures must be kind. No snarling muzzles, menacing fangs, or aggressive scenes of the weak being eaten. Nature is wise and blessed — this conviction he had inherited from his grandfather, Pyotr Ivanovich, who had worked all his life as a researcher in the Zoological Museum.
The Petrov family dynasty gave all its strength and soul to biology.
Even Ilya Petrovich’s son, Kostik, studied at the pedagogical institute and was preparing to take up the family baton. For his practice teaching he asked to be assigned to the very school where his father worked.
Kostik loved his father, loved biology, loved his father’s classroom, where he had spent so many hours doing homework in the little storeroom among charts and models. When his father taught lessons, Kostik did not so much solve assigned examples or study declensions as catch every word Ilya Petrovich spoke with inspiration about the structure of a flower, or the delightful inconstancy of amoebas, or the life of desert jerboas.
The son, holding his breath, imagined the process of pollination, seeds sprouting on wet cotton wool on a warm nursery windowsill, the games of fluffy squirrels or the trumpet songs of elephants.
Kostik was not a nerd either. He wore torn jeans, was the life of the party, rode an electric scooter and liked to be liked by girls. He too was kind and very optimistic. And he loved biology just as much.
All his weekends the boy spent at the museum with his grandfather, listening to his interesting lectures and stroking the stuffed foxes and tigers.
Grandfather was not a nerd either — he was a lover of life and a wit.
But the Petrovs had a family secret, terrible and shameful for biologists: inherited through three generations, skeleton-phobia.
Ivan Ilyich, the father of Pyotr Ivanovich, had been an archaeologist. An archaeologist to the marrow of his bones. All his time — official and personal, all weekends and holidays — he gave to archaeology. Moreover, he managed to find various artifacts in the most unexpected places. For example, he would go to help his mother-in-law, Glafira Sergeyevna, in the vegetable garden and inevitably dig up some shard or little bone together with the potatoes. He would go to the seaside with his wife and collect half a backpack of amphorae along with shells. Sometimes whole ones turned up. And also, we shall reveal a secret to you (only please tell no one!): Ilya Ilyich was a kleptomaniac, which he sincerely lamented and carefully hid from everyone.
But as soon as he saw a skeleton or a skull, his hands themselves grabbed the find and carefully hid it first among expedition things, and later in cupboards at home.
Whichever cupboard you opened, skeletons fell, tumbled or appeared from it. Some dried to paper-thinness, some strong and dense, but probably from the time of the Golden Horde.
Among supplies of tea and bay leaves a cream-colored skull was hidden; on the shelf with sweaters and long johns lay a large tibia or pelvic bone. Even in the toy cupboard one might find a small skeleton.
That was why little Petya was terribly afraid of cupboards. He never even played hide-and-seek at home. But in defiance of his fears he decided to become a doctor or a biologist. To be strong and brave. After thinking it over for a couple of months, however, he decided that museums were still safer than medicine.
Then Ilya Petrovich was born and grew up, and began to bring the reasonable, the good, the eternal.
And all would have been well, if not for the school’s new sponsor. For the next first of September, sponsor cars brought a couple of plasma televisions, several computers, a vacuum cleaner, a set of plates for the school buffet, and a model skeleton shining with fresh ochre.
Ilya Petrovich came to school, shining with polished shoes and multicolored asters, opened his classroom, and there...
... An ambulance took the teacher to the cardiology center, while the caretaker, without thinking long, hid the brand-new donated skeleton in a cupboard in the classroom where various books and stuffed birds were kept. So it would not gather dust, and so the children would not spoil it without the teacher’s supervision.
The school principal had a headache: the school year was beginning, and the biology teacher was in hospital with a heart attack. What to do?! And at that very moment Kostik — pardon me, Konstantin Ilyich — appeared most opportunely.
Kostik teaches a lesson in the familiar classroom, looks over his new pupils and begins to tell them about tits and jays, crows and jackdaws.
“Now,” he says, “I shall show you a couple of beautiful birds.”
He goes to the cupboard, opens it — and screams!
At the teacher’s scream everyone runs in, the principal comes and asks: “Why are you shouting like that, Konstantin Ilyich?”
And Kostik, white almost to blue, whispers with dead lips:
“There is... a skeleton in the cupboard...”
“So what?” says the principal. “It’s just an English idiom.”
But he carried the skeleton away. Just in case.
