In the barber’s shop a cry is heard: “Boy, water!” And then a venomous whisper: “Here, wait!” – for the fact that the boy is not quick enough or even somehow blundered. “In this barber shop, saturated with the boring smell of cheap perfume, full of annoying flies and dirt, the visitor was undemanding: porters, clerks, sometimes small employees. “Boy Petka works here, he is the least of those around him.” Nikolka is three years older, sometimes he is trusted to cut a visitor simpler. “Nikolka is more important: he smokes, drinks vodka and swears.” Petka is ten years old, he does not smoke or drink vodka, although he knows many bad words Petya and Nikolka often sit at the window and watch the life of the street, monotonous and boring, with only entertainment: drunken fights. “Petka” would like to go somewhere else. “I would very much like to.” Hearing the cry: “Boy, water! “, he jumped
up and served, often pouring water in a hurry, Petka lost weight from such a life,” and on his shaven head went bad sores (abscesses.- Author.) Near the eyes and under his nose, thin lines were cut, conducted by a sharp needle, and made it look like an old dwarf. ” His mother, the cook Nadezhda, who visited him, asked Petka to take him away from here. And Nadezhda thought that “she has one son – and that fool.” Once the mother came, talked with the host, Osip Abramovich, and said that Petka was being released to a dacha in Tsaritsyno, where her gentlemen live. The boy at first did not understand anything. He was born and grew up in the city and did not even imagine that there could be so much grass, air, space. “A mysterious and magical world opened before him from the train window.” In the first days at the dacha Petka was afraid of woods, grass, ponds. “But two days passed and Petya entered into a full agreement with nature.” This was also helped by the acquaintance with the schoolboy Mitya: the boys swam, fished the fish, climbed the ruins of the palace. “Gradually
Petya forgot that there exists Osip Abramovich and a hairdresser “. Hope rejoiced that the son grew fat, like a merchant. “At the end of the week, the gentleman brought a letter from the city to the” kofarke Nadezhda. “” Hope that she had to send her son to the city, Nadezhda burst into tears, she began to collect Petka on the road, and he did not know that he would not go fishing, but he will go to the city, Nadezhda says that maybe he will be released: “he is kind, Osip Abramovich.” Finally Petya realized that the “paradise” had ended, and the boy screamed, hammered in a fit, what surprised his mother and upset the lady, and the next day he returned to the barber shop. Petya, who accompanied his mother, said: “You put the fishing rod away!” Hope agrees, hoping for the return of her son to the dacha. Again Petya runs with water and hears: “Now, wait!” And at night he tells Nikolka “about the dacha, and spoke about things that do not happen, which no one has ever seen or heard.” And around – a familiar life with abuse, drunken fights, mournful cries., September 1899.
