Taking along our 11-year-old daughter Anya, we and our friends set off to see some of the famous Ural museums. In the hall of iron casting Anya called me:"Mama! Come, quick! See how beautiful the Sprite is!" Having already looked at the case, I reluctantly went back to it. The Sprite was indeed fine. Very small, sitting on the round black leaf of a waterlily, with out-stretched tiny arms that were meant to hold a candle. It was a candlestick.
Ural casting is known the world over and the best samples are on display in the immense pavilion manufactured for the World Exposition in Paris a century ago and which was awarded the Grand Prix. Busts, statuettes,
candelabra, candlesticks - all attracted the eye.
Of all this profuse magnificence Anya singled out the Sprite. The object held her spellbound. Anya would leave it and come back to it again, peer at the glass case now from the side, now from above, and she dragged us over to look at the piece: she wanted us to share in her delight. I liked the Sprite, but I am not able to express my admiration aloud. Moreover, I wanted to look at the other exhibits. Losing my temper, I raised my voice at Anya. Her lips trembled and tears welled up in her eyes.
I realized suddenly, what I had done, but it was too late. Anya turned away and left. No doubt there were things of higher artistic quality in the hall but on that day and hour beauty was revealed to my daughter in that little candlestick. Whereas I preoccupied with my own feelings, thoughtlessly ignored my daughter's sudden vision of a miracle.
Thirteen-year-old Olya is reading Í. G. Wells for the first time.
But how did the central-Russian craft of toy-making ever come to be practised in these dense woods? Archaeologists say that the first human settlement appeared here at least four thousand years ago. People came here from the Volga, the Oka and the Kama, three great Russian rivers.
Close to a hundred settlements dating back to the neolithic era, the time of the birth of ceramics, have been discovered in the Kargopol area.
"Do you like Wells?" she asks her father.
"I did once." "Why don't you like him now?"
"No idea," the father brushes off her question.
"But tell me why," Olya demands. "The preface says that
Yuri Olesha thought highly of Wells."
Aware that her father admires the writer Olesha, Olya hopes that her argument will make him explain why he has lost interest in Wells. But in vain. The father takes an ironical tone.
"Olesha liked Wells, you like him, so no one will suffer if Wells does not appeal to me."
Olya blows up: "Why can't you talk about any thing serious? You always sneer. What did I say that was so stupid?"
Irritated, she runs off to another room.
Where have you been?" the father asks Andrei.
"Out there," his son gives a vague nod.
"What do you mean by 'out there'?"
"What's the difference?" Andrei snarls, as he has often been doing since he turned 14. "I had to see the kids whom you wouldn't have let in here!"
"I wouldn't have let them in all right!" the father is shouting already. "Your mother and I come home from work tired. We need a rest. Has this ever occurred to you?"
"Then don't complain if I stay out!"
On the following evening music sounds from his room as Andrei is doing his homework. If not for the previous day's spat, his father, without wasting words, would have switched off the tape-recorder. Now he opens the door slightly and asks in a low voice: "Isn't the music bothering you?"
"Not in the least."
The father is already on the point of losing self-control: he can't concentrate if there is the slightest noise. He even shuts his eyes in order to fight down the fury. Suddenly, he recalls a colleague who when he sits down to work, switches on the radio. For some reason the man feels the need of a sound accompaniment. Perhaps Andrei is the same? And he tells his son about a man like him. Their conversation jumps to the puzzles of memory, then to people who try to count as fast as a computer. As they talk they go in for supper. After the meal the boy goes back to his textbooks, and the father suggests: "Why don't you see if you can do a better job without the music."
And the son switches off the player.
As the father was coming home from work a week later, he saw several boys standing at the entrance door. Andrei was with them. "I'll come up to the boys," the father resolved. However, he didn't know what to talk about and felt selfconscious the first few minutes. The boys kept silent but it could be sensed that they were displeased with his intrusion.
Then the father recalled that in his briefcase lay a set of files, which he had just bought. One of the boys had a knack for handling tools. They fell into conversation, which attracted the interest of the other boys. Finally, the whole lot went upstairs to test the new files. In the house there were bits of wood and metal, resin and sheets of plastic. Someone respectfully said: "It's nothing short of a workshop. May I complete the construction of my model here?"
The father caught Andrei's alarmed look.
"Of course, you may."
The price he paid for his permission! His workshop was his "holy of holies" - his place of rest, concentration and relaxation - and the only person he wanted to see there was his son. Andrei had never looked into the little room made into a workshop before.
The boy never did develop a liking for fashioning things, but now that his friend came here he would stick around the work bench with him. Then the father would turn up. They got used to each other, so much so that they began to look forward to these evenings which they spent in companionable silence, or exchanged a couple of words, or crossed swords in a debate. The father was obviously proud of being able to show off his skills and knowledge in front of his son's friend.
Then Andrei's birthday drew along. The day before, the father said at supper: "A fifteenth birthday is no joke. An occasion like this calls for a celebration. Invite who you like, but not more than 20 people."
"I wish I had a million roubles," Maxim said dreamily.
Anya and her friends were sitting by the window, watching the rain coming down which had kept them in the house since morning. "What would you do with your million roubles?" Olya enquired.
"I would buy a motor car."
"Is that all you would do?"
"Why, I would buy . . . other things as well."
"But you would have to do your lessons all the same," caustically observed Anya. "Even the children of millionaires go to school. Money can't buy brains."
But it can buy everything else!"
"Everything?!" laughed Anya.
"Can it buy last year's snows? Or a flying saucer?"
"Or good weather?" Kuzya chimed in.
"Or the colour of eyes?"
"Or Mount Fujiyama?"
"Or the Flying Dutchman?"
"Or a star in the sky?"
"Strength?"
"Good memory?"
They spent another 20 minutes in vying in inventiveness. As a result, they discovered that there were many things in the world, which no amount of money can buy - things known as eternal values. One is respect for human individuality, including that of one's own child.
According to a well-known parable, a navigator who doesn't want to lose his way at sea should watch the relative immobility of the stars rather than the ever-changing beauty of the waves.