Since childhood I was certain that one must always know exactly what one wants.
After all, you never know at what moment you may catch a magic pike or even a golden fish, or when you may find the seven-colored flower.
There is also the option that you might be sent somewhere far away, and there some overseas monster will jump out and start fulfilling your wishes.
Grandmother read me fairy tales at night; with my face buried in the pillow, I tried on the roles of the main characters.
Although I did not love fairy tales. Well, except perhaps The Little Mermaid: a kind of children’s melodrama).
The Scarlet Flower would do as well, however. It too was about love.
And I also dreamed of going to London.
That is where a magic pike would have come in handy: “By the pike’s command, by my desire, buckets, go to London by yourselves.” Something like that. And so I grew and grew, while the list of my wishes grew larger and larger. It grew with me in geometric progression, one might say.
At one moment I wanted a suede skirt, at another real branded jeans. I dreamed of becoming a ballerina, then an artist. Now I needed pointe shoes, now easels.
I even began going fishing often, standing at dawn, devoured by mosquitoes, casting a rod with a piece of bread on the hook. My eyes were still asleep, my mermaid hair flew in the wind, and I kept thinking:
“Well, whom can I catch on a tiny fry hook? What sort of pike?”
If only I had a spinning rod, or better still — a net. No, a seine. I would cast it into the blue sea...
There was no seine, nor any sea. I had a semi-homemade fishing rod with a small hook threaded with a piece of bread crumb.
And no prince was carried to the shore by a passing hydrofoil either. Ugh, what a horror. Heaven forbid! A drowned man was all I needed!
Though, to be honest, there were monsters all around, countless of them. Frightening, shaggy and uncombed. But none of them hurried to fulfill my wishes. Mostly they stood there with fishing rods.
True, pointe shoes, easels, skirts and jeans appeared for me somehow by themselves. But it was no magic. No one pulled hairs from a beard — trakh-tibidoh, tibidoh — no one materialized from nowhere:
Would you like to go to the ball in this pumpkin, my dear?
Mother found terribly scarce Leningrad watercolor, which was sent from that very Leningrad (and nowhere else could it be found), brought from somewhere pink satin pointe shoes and a blue gauze tutu embroidered with silver sequins. Why did I need a pike?
Ah yes, there was still London!
And when mother’s friend sent me from London a wondrous blue Bologna-cloth raincoat and marvelous postcards with views of the English capital, I had no way out.
In the morning I again put on a T-shirt and shorts, shoved my feet into rubber flip-flops, took an old little bucket, a bag with bread and my flimsy rod, and went to the riverbank.
My eyes would not open again, my hair still fluttered, mosquitoes mercilessly gnawed my young body, but I staunchly stood through the time allotted to fishing.
That morning was utterly ordinary. I did not even notice at once how the float trembled and disappeared into the water.
Jumping back from the bank, I yanked up the rod and — oh, miracle! — opposite my face a real pike was moving its lips! At first I did not even believe my eyes: how could this be — a fry hook, a piece of bread, and suddenly such prey!
But as they say: if something looks like a pike, swims like a pike and is silent like a pike, it is probably...
“Aaaaaaa!” I uttered the victorious cry of a primitive hunter who had caught a mammoth.
“Why are you yelling like that?” came at once from every side. “You’ll scare away all our fish.” These were my fellow fishermen, shaggy monsters; since they did not fulfill my wishes, they behaved diplomatically just in case and came to see what had happened.
I stood with my head and fishing rod proudly raised and looked at everyone with the eyes of a victor, I am not afraid to use the word.
The pike looked at me questioningly, the fishermen at the pike.
“Well, well!” one uncombed monster drew out respectfully, knowing perfectly well that I was terribly afraid of worms and always tried to catch something on bread. Or, at worst, on a bun, which, as you and I know, must be taken on every walk.
I was almost as frightened of the pike as of worms, so my victorious cry continued to resound around the area and deprived the other fishermen of possible catch.
The fishermen hurried to help me, removed the pike from the hook and threw it into my bucket with river water and a couple of roaches caught earlier.
The pike tried to dive, but painfully hit its head, stuck it out of the bucket and whispered in a human voice:
“Let me go, and I will grant you three wishes.”
It even seemed to me that it winked with its right eye. Or perhaps the left. That is not the point.
Here! Here was the long-awaited moment!
Here was redemption for many sleepless mornings and mosquito-bitten arms, legs, even eyelids! Now...
I even closed my eyes in anticipation.
A kaleidoscope spun in my head:
“Would you like ice cream, would you like cake...”
“Go, bucket, home by yourself...”
No, none of that!
I have pointe shoes, I will receive my artist’s diploma in two months, I do not want to go to the North Pole, toys — even all the toys in the world — are too late, I do not wish to be a pillar noblewoman, a new washing machine stands in the bathroom... What else? What?
Lost in thought, I sat down on the sand by the water and suddenly heard experienced fishermen talking behind my back:
“Are you sure she caught a pike on a fry hook?”
“Absolutely!”
“And how can that be?”
“Well, probably some little fry swallowed the bread, and the pike grabbed the fry. Fish and bread for breakfast at once. Service!”
“So,” I thought, “there are your three wishes! I want to catch a golden fish (then the wishes will really be something!),
I want to know how I managed to catch the pike,
and I very much want to go to London!”
The pike waited patiently, smiling slyly, it seemed to me.
“By the pike’s command, by my desire...”
I did not manage to say the third wish, because the pike leapt, like an aerial gymnast, from the bucket into the river, opened its mouth as if at a dentist’s appointment and spat out a small fish that, to its misfortune, had coveted the bread crumb.
The little fish slapped its tail on the water... flashed in the sun with golden scales and swam away, probably to its blue sea.
People are right: be careful what you wish for.
P.S. But just in case, I bought a ticket to the blue sea. I very much want to go to London.
