There was such a roaring in her ears that she did not at once understand where she was. She lay for a while, unable to open her eyes because of lack of sleep and a strange anxiety, almost fear: where am I? What is happening to me? What is that noise?
Her hands were heavy and somehow alien. Her fingers were numb.
Slowly she moved them and, with a habitual motion, tried to throw up her hand to reach the phone that always lay on the bedside table beside her.
Her fingers felt thick, very heavy, and poorly obedient. The phone slipped from her disobedient hand and gave a plaintive clink somewhere below, as if it had fallen onto something hard.
“I must open my eyes,” she thought.
“Lift my eyelids,” flashed through her memory.
She lay a little longer. How long that little was remained unclear. Five minutes? Half an hour? An hour?
Overcoming weakness and a passionate unwillingness, she slightly opened her left eye. Soft light entered the tiny slit between her eyelids. It had a strange pearly-violet shade, like the color of the first lilac, for which it was not yet time to bloom.
This magical light made her calmer, and even curiosity awoke; she wanted to know what was making the noise. Even her eyes opened easily, her eyelashes simply flew upward like a butterfly lifting a wing. Or a dragonfly.
Right before her eyes was an open window. Who had opened the window and why, who had grown hot in the first days of April, she could not understand. There could be no one in the apartment but her, and before going to sleep she herself had drawn the thick curtains. Even the small vent windows had been closed.
The window was wide open, the vase of fruit on the windowsill had overturned, apples had rolled about, a flowerpot with a cactus had fallen, soil had spilled out, and in that spilled soil astonishing flowers had sprouted and were already blooming with all their might: tiny doll-like lilac, bright violet irises, just a little larger than the thick tailor’s needle with which she had darned yesterday the knitted socks given to her by a dear aunt the previous New Year.
At the edge of this windowsill flower bed peeped violets, and even one tender lilac buttercup had grown — no, ranunculus. She kept forgetting its name. Outside the window the rain was noisy. The first real spring rain, washing winter from the earth, streets, roofs and walls of houses, windowpanes and human souls.
On the overturned pot sat a little man, half the size of a palm. Half of her own small palm, which obeyed her so badly this morning but had once been so quick and skillful.
What surprised her was not the little garden and not the unknown creature, but the fact that the room was still warm, as if there were no open window and no insistent noisy rain.
“Who are you?” she asked. “How did you get here?”
“Me?” the little man was surprised. “I am a gnome. A garden gnome. Some call us inhabitants of the apple.”
“And how did you appear in my house?”
“The courier brought me. I’m telling you, we are garden gnomes — or inhabitants of the apple.”
And she remembered that two days earlier she had indeed ordered groceries from a large supermarket standing at the very edge of the city, near a big orchard. The warehouses were not far away either.
The courier had brought bags with pasta, potatoes, chicken and cheese. There was also a small bag of sweets — she had that sin, she was quite a sweet tooth — and a separate bag of large apples.
“Exactly,” the gnome rejoiced. “I hid in an apple all winter. And when the rain began, I understood that spring had come and it was time to come out. I was so delighted by spring and rain that I rushed to open the vent window, but overdid it. I broke your cactus pot and scattered the soil. And so you wouldn’t scold me too much, I decided to plant my seeds, the ones I had hidden in my pockets. It turned out beautiful, didn’t it?”
“Beautiful. Only I pity the cactus. But how did you get out of the apple?”
“It was the ripest one, so its side burst. In autumn we look for apples where a secret passage can be arranged. My friends are still hiding. In general our apples were lying in the farthest corner and were not supposed to be sold. We hide like that every year. By spring the apples look so bad they can only be thrown away. Then we come out and move to our garden. But this time something went wrong. Our apple community was dug out and put up for sale.”
A strange rustle sounded on the floor beside the bed.
She looked down. An apple that had rolled from the overturned vase had fallen to the floor; when the phone landed on it, it cracked, and from it appeared another little man, all in blue.
He sat up, goggled, hiccupped in surprise and said:
“Hello.”
“Hello, hello,” came from the windowsill. “Happy spring to you! Climb up to me.”
“Oh,” she covered her mouth with her palm, “are there many of you here?”
“There should still be a white one. Is he here with us? Or did he stay in another net?”
“I’m here, I’m here,” came a grumbling voice, and from an apple lying at the edge of the bed, right under the windowsill, climbed a little man in white.
The white little man listened, put his ear to the neighboring apple, smirked, and, evidently feeling like Sisyphus, rolled the apple to the edge of the bed and pushed it down. It struck, cracked, and a smiling person in pink appeared.
“Well, now everyone is assembled,” said the violet one contentedly.
“And what am I to do with you?!” she exclaimed...
Her husband looked into the room:
“What are you doing?”
“I’m writing a fairy tale. They announced the April theme in The Fairy-Tale Reserve. About garden gnomes. At first everything seemed to be leading to a theme about an attic. I was even pleased; I had already invented it, already knew what I would draw! But somehow garden gnomes appeared.”
“Will you read it to me?” asked her husband.
“All right.”
I read what had already been written.
“And what happens next?” he asked. “Why wouldn’t her hands rise and why wouldn’t her eyes open?”
“I haven’t invented that yet...”
Left alone in the room, I began to think. What do I actually know about garden gnomes? I have never had a garden; I thoroughly dislike clay garden gnomes; I am indifferent to fairy-tale gnomes. Inventing something about an attic is another matter. And drawing it. Interesting!
“That’s it,” I decided. “I’ll go draw how children found a clay garden gnome in the attic. Real gnomes do not exist at all!”
Having decided what exactly I would draw, I went to the studio room for paper and pencils. My studio table stands right by the window. And there I saw that soil was scattered on the windowsill, and in the pots with my already large plants — lemons, avocados and the like — shoots were rising wildly and violet flowers were opening: tiny lilac, little irises... and some white ones, blue ones... and one pink. Ranunculus.
And nearby lay a cracked apple...
