The Door

And Clio also felt the indignant and incomprehensible stares of passengers from other tramcars as well. The stares of the passers-by who the ill-fated tram was passing by also followed. And let’s not say anything about the people in the houses overlooking the tram line! Everyone left what they were doing and stared reproachfully at one point.

And even, damn it, the people on the other side of the planet have witnessed this indelible shame.

No one could ever tell what was going on inside the moustache man at that moment. Even the author wouldn’t dare to pry into the soul of this amazing creature, who still has not moved a single muscle of the stone sculpture of his face. And who has not made a sound, except for the rustling of the grey moustache from his tense breathing – the only indicator that what is happening is not the everyday scene for him.

But we know exactly what was happening to our heroine. Because of the bright colour of the dye it was impossible to tell whether she got a couple of new grey hairs, but the back of her head went numb and her scalp just began to throb and buzz in unpleasant waves.

The last time Clio had felt this way was probably in her school years, at the sound of the key turning in the door after her parents returned from a teacher-parent meeting. Before that moment, she had skipped two weeks of school. Like then, a shiver ran down her spine and gathered in a cold, tickling lump somewhere around her solar plexus.

This has to stop. Somehow. Any way. To get up and run out? To break a window? To open fire? To start dancing to divert people’s attention to something else? To shout and call for help?

– Ahem, ahem, ahem-ahem.

For some reason, coughing always seems to be the perfect way out of an awkward situation. To everyone’s relief, it was accompanied by a handover of cash from one person to another. The planet exhaled. Yes, there were obviously no winners apart from the apathetic conductor, but at least now the participants in the outrage no longer had to face each other.

The lazy flow of incoherent thoughts stopped, all that was left was «AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAhhhhhh!» and the desire to undo the last few minutes. But now giving vent to her facial expressions would not only be an acknowledgement of the situation that had occurred, an indication of weakness, but, worst of all, a continuation of that exact situation.

And she didn’t want to continue it. So she just had to pretend that she was a moist piece of bread at the bottom of the quietest of oceans. That it was all meant to be like that, that she was suddenly very tired. And look, there is something incredibly interesting going on outside the window!..

Or I’ll just close my eyes and rest the corner of my forehead against the glass, the freezing effect of which is not bad at all, and it’s probably good for my skin, too. I have to give in to tram rhythms, their rhythmic tgdk-tgdk-tgdk soothes and lulls. We have moved on. We’ve been over all that for a long time already.

Maybe you didn’t know it, but trams are agents of chaos. Unfortunately, their peacefulness is deceptive. They don’t bounce around on potholes, it’s true, but they have their own tricks: they sway from side to side in a way that no other mode of transport can. That’s how they catch those who are careless enough not to expect anything bad from them.

One small manoeuvre was enough for the forehead and glass to part for a moment and promptly meet again. Need I say how many stares the loud exclamations of distress have collected? This time quite real ones!

I don’t think so.

Should I highlight how much relief was in realization that it’s almost her stop now?

I probably shouldn’t.

The tram doors closed with the same long-standing creak. The tram began to move, but the light from its windows for a few seconds illuminated a short girl in a warm coat, with a large backpack on her shoulders and probably even larger and quite fascinating life story behind her as well. In the warm rectangles of light one could see her pale skin, the unnatural colour of her hair, and even the universe-wide sadness in her gaze.

But here, left in the dark, our heroine threw on her hood and began her final dash towards home. There were pizza leftovers, a new film stolen by pirates6 and some time to herself ahead of her.

At least, that’s what Clio then thought.

CHAPTER 3: Meet the Cranz family

About Arthur

● Appearance:

Eyes: Sky blue, big

Hair: Light blonde, golden, wavy

Skin: Tanned

Height: 189 cm

Body build: Sturdy, tight-built

Arthur’s appearance is best summed up in one explanation, rather than describing each point individually. Take any old slavic legend, find an illustration of a great hero, bogatyr, there – bingo!

Thur does indeed resemble a hero from a myth or a fairytale – a lively, blue-eyed giant with huge arms, shaggy golden locks and a kind smile.

His tanned skin adds colour, as if all he does every day is ploughing fields and sowing rye. All he’s missing is his armour and his horse. But he has, as he should, a beard.

A belly, the herald of a well-fed family life, blurs the picture a little, but in the context of the overall enormity of this character, it doesn’t really stand out that much.

Age: 32

Date of birth: 20 June

There is an expression «sweet summer child», which is used to refer to people who are bright, naive and unencumbered by the harsh realities of our world. For the most part, this could apply to our protagonist. We do not know whether the fact that he was born in summer has anything to do with it.

Zodiac sign: Gemini

Arthur had never shown any interest in horoscopes, so it was hard to say whether he would have considered himself a typical representative of his sign. Rather, the horoscope would have made him giggle in a boyish way and tell some typical dad joke:

«– Darling, I can’t take out the rubbish now, ask the other one.

– Who?

– Well the second one, I’m a Gemini, it’s represented by twins. The rubbish is on my twin then!»

Education: Veterinary College

Ever since he was a child, Arthur was overwhelmed by an immense love for all living things. How and why exactly this happened is unknown. Maybe it originated from the fact that his parents never allowed him to have any, even the smallest and the most odourless pet. This love was leading Arthur by the hand throughout his life and has finally led him all the way to becoming a veterinarian.

The rose-coloured glasses shattered rather quickly – this profession turned out to be quite different from what it had seemed when he was a child. At least somehow our hero hadn’t thought about horse enemas and cow births before, about the blood and pain that all vets have been immersed in since their first training days. But in spite of this, Thur decided to stick with it so that he could be able to help our little fur brothers.

During one of his toughest exam preparations, Thur suffered from a lack of exercise and action in his life. That all changed when a one of his buddies invited him to a LARP party – to run through the woods, to swing swords. The rest of his college years went very differently for him.

Job: Veterinarian

At work in the big city, fewer and fewer freshly hatched calves passed through Arthur’s hands than in his studies. The city was having more and more cases like an overeating hamster or a depressed parrot.

He didn’t start thinking less about his profession, though – help is help. And if they come to him for help, he will do everything in his power to bring the animal back to normal. What can we say, the small private clinic, where he has settled in, appreciates him as an employee.

● Hobbies: LARPer, dog groomer

At this point, not quite morally mature people might start giggling at how incongruous our hero’s interests seem. But if you think so, take a step back and look at Arthur from some distance, then the bigger picture emerges. And now it’s clear that anything else would be even silly to expect.

The fact is that after about five hundred dogs had been examined and cared for, a new passion began to take root in Arthur. Seeing his patients happy was the highest reward for our personal Dr Dolittle, but it is hard to see them happy if they are all covered in tatters and tangles.

And then, all of a sudden, there was a mad desire to see them clean and neat as well. That’s how dog grooming – the art of haircuts for pets – came into Arthur’s life.

Not without the support of his superiors, Thur decided to ask the owners of his most shaggy clients for permission to «chop them up a bit». «Literally snip just the very tips,» he said to the delight of not the most mature of readers and not the most mature of his clients. There were more castration jokes after that phrase than we all would have liked, but that smile was Arthur’s pass to a new hobby.

After a while, people started asking the handy vet for this extra service themselves. After that, their friends, friends of friends and eventually some strangers in general started coming.

The owner of the clinic, being a clever man, was quick to make sure that such a talent would also bring in an extra penny. He gave Thur a small storage room to use, helped with the initial materials and even added a small poster at the entrance announcing the new service.

However, it cannot be said that dog grooming has become a second job for Arthur. For now, it is still a hobby: he has complete creative freedom, no schedule and no plans to follow, no check-ups and inspections from his bosses. He does it for himself and for his furry friends, who, after such a beauty salon, come out looking happy and smiling.

● Outstanding personal qualities:

Kindness: Do you know people who, instead of crushing a spider with whatever is at hand, gently take it outside and let it go in peace? If not, meet Arthur again. Given that touching the creature, which has eight paws, with his own hands is beyond him, our hero chooses the path of love anyway and rushes off to find a glass and a piece of paper to help the spider with the move.

Empathy: Putting yourself in someone else’s shoes is a tricky skill, but Arthur manages it. It’s what nearly destroyed his career in medicine. Thur gave his first injection in tears – he himself had experienced the fear and pain of his patient.

He almost fainted, and after the whole study group leaned him up against the nearest wall and gave him some water to drink, he seriously wanted to go and quit his studies right away.

Arthur is sympathetic to all animate objects. All inanimate objects he animates and then shows sympathy for them as well.

Whereas for most people on this planet it might just be an old spoon, for Thur it will be good old Bon-Bon – practically a childhood friend whom he purposely took away from his parents’ home as soon as he started living on his own.

Thanks to this he has a large family – in addition to his wife and son, there’s also the diva, called Prima Donna, a wayward washing machine, and his faithful four-wheeled friend called Jürgen.

Calmness: It’s not an easy task to get Thur to lose his temper. He is a big man, and given his size, no one has ever tried to make him do so. So Arthur’s nervous system is practically brand new, undisturbed by the people around him.

Conflict-free: Arthur has a big problem with confrontation. He avoids conflict at all costs. Our hero is not the type to bang his fist on the table and bark for everyone to calm down and shut up.

In emotionally heated situations, it is usually the wife dealing with the problems, while Arthur stands silently behind her back, instilling his (or at least trying hard) the most serious face expression.

When conflict situations arise with his wife, however, there is no escape for him. So he tries to keep his wife happy, content and well-fed. Not only because of that, of course, but also because he loves her to pieces in a puppy-dog way.

Fun: Arthur also likes to laugh a lot, and he does it very infectiously. So not only does he make his own jokes and laughs at them, he also drags everyone around him along with him into this maelstrom of incessant hilarity.

Some people seriously avoid spending too much time with him simply because their jaw and stomach muscles ache in the morning after a session of hysterical laughter. But there are far more people who, on the contrary, want to spend their time this way, so Arthur is a welcome guest at any gathering of even distant acquaintances.

About Agatha

● Appearance:

Eyes: Black, narrow

Hair: Black, stiff; shoulder blades length

Leather: Olive

Height: 152 cm

Body build: Slim

The contrast in appearance between Agatha and her husband was a usual subject of jokes by friends, acquaintances, and other random people. The already frail-looking girl looked even smaller and more defenceless against the backdrop of Mount Arthur.

With her looks, she would have been nothing but endearing, were it not for the heavy, cold stare of her black eyes, as black as the night itself. That gaze could not only stop a hand from reaching to pinch Agatha’s cheek, it could twist it, and the brute would find himself twisted and broken on the cold floor.

● Clothing style: Feminine, economical

Agatha loves dresses. This wardrobe item is the only thing in which our heroine does not prefer minimalism. While all of Agatha’s trousers, T-shirts, shirts and sweatshirts can fit effortlessly on one small shelf, dresses are so numerous that there is nowhere else to hang them – some have to be stacked and even crammed together.

● Age: 24

In both appearance and age, our heroine is quite young. Seeing a boy of three next to her, people with no sense of personal boundaries rush to label her as a brat with no higher education and no goals in life. They immediately see a girl who came to her parents with a baby in a belly some day after school. Or who married a man with her belly.

It doesn’t occur to these ignorant people that Agatha graduated school with flying colours at sixteen and university with a red diploma at twenty.

She got married at twenty as well, and eventually gave birth at twenty-one. And all this with an education, work experience and a lot of ambition.

● Birthday: 31 October

Zodiac sign: Scorpio

People do not like Scorpios and Scorpios are well aware of it, even if they themselves are not particularly passionate about horoscopes. The way Scorpios react to this dislike varies: they can be both resentful and angry.

But Agatha had always thought this attitude towards her zodiac sign was a real sign of character weakness. So, instead of worrying about it herself, she tolerated such reactions with a certain amount of pity towards such people.

Education: Incomplete Chemical and Biological Sciences major, complete one in Management

After saying goodbye to school life, Agatha enrolled at the university in a big city. She lived in a dorm, was studying hard full-time, so the most convenient part-time job for her was at a bar nearby. Since she got into biochemistry, she also enjoyed mixing ingredients in containers at her new job, so the work went well.

She was so enchanted by this field that after her first year, she left science and transferred to another field of study: management. This is the field in which she was destined to excel.

Job: Manager in a café

With the help of her connections in the bar business, Agatha got her son into kindergarten at the age of two and started work herself. She also found a couple of useful contacts at work, so for a little over a year now she has been running a café.

As she was a mother now, working in a café seemed a more acceptable option than going back to the nightlife.

Agatha has an iron grip on keeping her establishment clean and tidy. Not all the employees are thrilled with the new management, but the angry looks and sighs don’t bother her. For herself, Agatha knows that her strictness is a necessary measure. That she may be harsh, but she is fair.

Additional skills: Many practical skills

Being a thorough person, Agatha acquired a couple of new skills during her maternity leave. First aid, driving, a couple (hundreds, I think?) of books on pedagogy and psychology, cooking for the baby – that’s where it all started. There’s more to come.

Archery, shooting guns, and at the same time a course in cooking chocolate from scratch and baking cakes. It didn’t end there, and the only question she had in the process was why she hadn’t learned all this before. Except that there were no courses in plumbing and electrics, much to her disappointment.

If it were not for the arrival of her son, our protagonist might soon have to be found somewhere in the middle of Siberia, undergoing a survivalist course. After all, there is no telling what and when in this life might come in handy.

● Outstanding personal qualities:

Rationality: Between the call of the heart and what dictates the brain, Agatha always relies more on the organ that was originally meant to make decisions. On the brain, in case it requires clarification. This does not mean that she is insensitive and heartless, but reason should always take precedence over emotion, in her opinion.

This kind of approach and solid logic made Agatha an impossible conversationalist and even worse wife – Arthur has to live with someone who almost always turns out to be right, or at least can prove it calmly and logically.

Observation: Any incident, even the smallest one, requires serious analysis. And in order to do that analysis, you need to be able to notice the small details and see the big picture. Watch and you’ll see – Agatha likes this simple philosophy.

Calculating: Agatha always tries to think through as many things as possible ahead of time. She tries to think of and be prepared for everything. More than once her practicality and prudence have been seen as profit motive and as taking advantage of other people.

Oddly enough, this negative opinion is usually held by outsiders who would have had nothing to take from them, even if Agatha had wanted to. Agatha has had and continues to have a wonderful, at least friendly, relationship with all the «used» people. Networking7 is what she calls her alleged «commercialism».

Minimalism: Our heroine prefers minimalism in everything. Minimal clothing, minimal gimmicks, minimal furniture. In a cluttered space, Agatha gets stuffy and cramped. She also gets uncomfortable in crowds – the exception was working in a bar, but there was a bar that separated her from the clutter of bodies and tables in the hall.

Steel: Due to her toughness and stubborness, Agatha can be perceived as an ’iron lady’. With her subordinates, this lady is unwavering and stern. But people forget that steel is one of the most flexible materials. Steel can be as cold as it is scalding hot. As hard as it is fluid. Despite her cold head, Agatha is no stranger to intense feelings.

And most importantly, you can try to bend steel with your hands, but you’re unlikely to break it. Such strength of character would be the envy of many. No matter how many times life threw buckets of stones at her, every time our heroine rose again.

Agatha’s family has a legend that their ancestor was Genghis Khan8 and, frankly, that would explain a lot.

About how they met

When Agatha was in her third year of university, she was still working in a bar. One day, a new employee joined their team and started showing an unequivocal interest in her. Neither the flowers he gave her, nor any gifts, nor the guy himself were really her type. A «come to my place and let’s watch a movie» was out of the question. A couple of months of futile attempts later, he decided to go all in.

Since none of the standard tricks worked, Romeo decided to do something unusual and invited Agatha to a medieval tournament at the renaissance fair held by re-enactors and LARPers in one of the parks.

Agatha thought it would be a good idea to expand her horizons and network of acquaintances, so she agreed. The suitor was immensely pleased with himself until they went on this «date».

The girl was polite but reserved. She was more interested in the event itself than in this poor man’s feeble attempts to put his arm around her waist without being squeezed into the ground with her ice-cold gaze.

The suitor decided to make another move and invited our heroine to meet some of the participants in the tournament – he was acquainted with several of them, although he was not a regular participant in such events. He knew just a couple of people, knew which part of the park they were preparing for and knew how to get to them.

This was his fatal mistake, because among the new acquaintances was Arthur. After five minutes of talking to Agatha, the giant decided that he would never take another step away from her or let anyone else hurt her.

So the three of them were wandering around for several hours until the hapless suitor eventually got lost somewhere on the way, seeing that he could no longer even try to claim her waist or the rest of her body.

And Agatha and Arthur’s romance spiralled swiftly and relentlessly. They were completely different, but found things they did have in common. They were together all the time, and when they were near each other, they shone in a way that could dazzle those around them. Never before had either of them been seen like that.

By now their mutual friends, who were particularly sharp-tongued, were saying that this bogatyr was now under the Tartar-Mongol yoke. And Arthur didn’t mind, as well as Agatha.9

About Mark

It is not easy to write a CV for someone who is only three years old. His life history has not yet shaped him as a person, he cannot yet share his views on politics and the environmental situation in the world.

His birth story wasn’t anything special, he was lying in a city maternity hospital just like hundreds of others. He was learning to crawl and hold a spoon, just as billions of others have learned before him and billions more will learn afterwards.

At least we can try and start with his appearance. After he was born, he looked exactly like a potato, as all children except for your own do. To his parents, he was the most beautiful thing from day one, but by the time he was three years old other people could see this as well. Now they could roughly imagine what he would eventually grow up to be.

And he promised to grow up, if not dashing, then at least quite handsome.

Given the range of characteristics his parents possessed, Mark could have turned out rather comical and unsightly, but genetics were favourable.

Somehow, he was born with big sky-blue eyes, which then one day became almost as black as his mother’s, and after that they began to lighten again, resulting in a beautiful dark blue colour on his iris.

His hair, black and stiff like Agatha’s, was wavy, just a bit short of Arthur’s curls.

He took after his mother in many ways, but the huge smile that played across his face so often was clearly his father’s.