Early morning. And it is unclear what woke you: the monotonous tapping of rain on the windowsill, or the sound of incoming text messages. Your eyes are still asleep, your head is hollow; it seems that the raindrops are beating on it. Or inside it. Knock. Knock. Knock...
“Down the road, knock and knock,
Rides a painted chest...”
A children’s verse by Marshak came to mind.
My grandfather, Evgeny Ivanovich Orlov, lived in the house with the star. On the ground floor of the building there was a café called “Keramika.” When I came to visit him, he would pick up the telephone and, in his deep actor’s voice, say: “Hello, café? Bring us some strawberry ice cream quickly, please.” We would wait a little, then Grandfather would put on his summer linen jacket and light-colored hat: “They are taking too long today; let’s go to them ourselves,” and we would go down in the large, echoing elevator, turn into the archway, and enter the café. It was almost a tradition, and I wanted that ice cream with the magical name “strawberry” so much. But the only strawberry thing I ever encountered was soap; the ice cream was cream, plombir, and crème brûlée. True, it came with different syrups. I always chose mint: densely emerald, viscous, and somehow “not ours,” as it seemed to me.
Ah, what ice cream it was! Snow-white scoops — always three — in a riot of mint. “Sugar ice cream laid on little saucers. Thick and sweet. Eat every bit.”
I never did encounter strawberry ice cream, alas, alas; mostly I encountered the kind called “clubnichnoe,” sometimes tasty, but not the same: “Well, you compared that Fanta with this one,” — recognize it?
I love ice cream, sometimes very much, but that one from “Keramika,” from childhood, from Grandfather...
From adult life I remember the ice cream I won in a bet in Italy from an Australian artist. Ha, they say: learn languages. I did not know Italian, and my English was more than approximate, but somehow I managed to make a bet. And I won! Three portions: for myself, Masha, and Yulia; and that ice cream was the tastiest I had eaten in adulthood. The bet was about rain. I have said more than once that a meteorologist was lost in me. I can predict rain unmistakably; my heart senses it in advance. It was the same then. Sunny, clear. We were standing in line for ice cream, and I told the girls, “It will rain.” A man standing behind us heard me and doubted it. I insisted. He doubted. He proposed a bet.
That time we bought our own ice cream — impossibly delicious. We ate it and went about our business. It began to rain. A couple of days later another portion found us — the winnings))
Well, sleep has gone. And the rain is still knocking somehow anxiously. Or is the anxiety coming from the sound of the text messages, which in the dark always cause unease?
I will pour myself some tea, take out a little book, and shift the tonality of the rain from anxious to soothing. And not forget the blanket! The obligatory attributes of soothing rains: tea, blanket, book. Tradition or cliché? As you like.
But the morning is good, don’t you think?
