The wide, generous sky over it has darkened, shines with lightning, laughs sharply and eerily with thunderous roars, throws at people who have not had time to hide in a cozy and light house, with handfuls of cold, fierce rain, and whips up with gusts of desperate wind. People are running, people are in a hurry to hide in bright houses, to get in a big, cozy armchair with their feet, to get close to the side of the beloved person - mother, father, brother, husband - and to freeze, listening to the nature raging outside the window.
And the thin as a splinter, dark-browed, gloomy boy has nowhere to hide. He doesn't have a house, only a cozy cave on the cliff of Stenki Razing, which is inhabited in its own way, but it's not a house anyway.
The house is like Makaki's house," thinks the dark-browed boy and smells better than his jacket, which is too big for him. - Big, big, blue windows glow, and Lina sings songs while she washes dishes, and Nikich gets along with the next stool, or there's a casket so that Marina Leonidovna could put all the women's belongings there... I would help him. Together, Lenka squeezes lips, stubbornly reduces dark eyebrows on his nose bridge, clenches his fists and gloomy shakes his unwashed head. In dark gray eyes, frowning like the sky above the Volga, the orange flame of the fire is reflected. - No. No! I am not the one to feed you! What are they going to do, just feed me and drink me? Yes, now! Dismissed. Nothing happens just like that! That's what they'll get back at - that's when I'll come in a beautiful dress..."
Dry, hard, devoid of even a hint of touching childish puffiness of the boy's lips barely shake noticeably, the expression of his skinny, cheekbone face slightly softened, even becomes dreamy. The boy looks back a little bit, flinching from the thunder and quietly pulls the sugar head out of the hidden place. She looks at it with greedy eyes, moistly shining in the light of the fire, swallows noisily the saliva that has swollen up instantly, but remembers Macaque and only licks sugar, not even biting it off. Let Makaka eat.
The thought of a girlfriend first makes Lenka smile, but then between the boy's eyebrows again lies a gloomy wrinkle.
"Somehow she is there... - he thinks anxiously. - I wish I'd stayed home, ah! Because I know her, she'll run away from her mother and come here, wet as a mongrel! You fool. And if it gets cold? What do I do with it then? Ugh, one thing with this... Macaque.
But still...
She smiles so that he thinks it's sunny, even in a storm. And blue eyes remind - no, no, not the sea, and not the sky, and that blue enamel cup from which Lenka once drank sweet tea in the kitchen of Nikolai, before he was taken away. And a strong association, though Lenka does not know such a clever word: blue is a holiday. Blue is coziness and home. Blue is warmth. Blue is Makaka.
And the thought that Makakaku may be offended by someone makes him shrink into spring, like a predator, like an angry dog to rock white, flat teeth.
I will always, always be there for you," thinks Lenka with frenzied, gloomy stubbornness, and pulls her callous hands to the fire. - And who will offend - the one at once in Volga and without conversations!
Flax moved very close to the fire, squeezed his lips so that they wouldn't shiver from the cold, leaned toward the cave entrance. Even the stone flap does not save, it can be sprayed with ice rain.
Only I won't be like this with her," Lenka thinks businesswise and concentrates, biting her lips. - Not a raggedy one from the cliff. No. She comes from a good family. Antelligent... So I have to! - The boy shakes his head, gets up, worried, excited walks through the cave, laying his hands behind his back. - I also need to learn to read and write well, tables there are all sorts of things - again a soft, inefficient smile touches Lenkin's lips. - I will read to her. Out loud. Whatever she wants.
He smiles dreamily and spends his hand through his hair a little embarrassed. He doesn't know what strange feeling he has in his chest, warm, trembling like a bird, and warming in this rain better than a jacket and fire. He doesn't know why his hands shiver strangely, but his head is spinning with these bright dreams and wants to laugh - but Lenka laughs once in a century! He doesn't know why he wants to see Makaka so much...
He knows one thing: she's his friend. His Macaque. His unbearable, blue-eyed girlfriend. His reason for getting better.
Therefore, when a wet as a mongrel, but happy, suffocated Macaque shouts something to him from the other end of the transition, Lenka does not even grumble that she is abnormal. He throws over the board for her and stretches out his hands to her. And hides a smile behind her dirty hair.