The train gave a sudden quiver and slowly started to move.
«Hu-u-r-ra-ah!» the trio howled, but then the train stopped.
«We jinxed it,» Berg groaned.
Outside they started thrashing the car with greater fury; a dislodged board crashed down to the floor. In the breach appeared the irate faces of peasants and snow-white kerchiefs. And just then, the train once more trembled and set off.
«Come on, come on!» Alex got on her knees.
Berg threw up his hands, calling for silence, and froze in an awkward pose.
The train confidently gathered speed.
«We're off,» Berg determined with relief.
Several people were still running along the embankment. Berg opened the door and whistled at them. A rock hit him in the forehead, and he sat down on the floor.
An «Ah!» resounded from a corner they thought held only Mollie.
Alarmed, the company looked in the sound's direction. In the corner stood a young woman in a calico peasant dress. Berg, covering the bump on his head, whispered:
«Good God, how beautiful you are, mademoiselle, madam, panna, miss!»
He crept over to her, but she waved her hands in protest.
«I'm afraid of you.»
«Oh, please don't be! We're actors, servants of Melpomene's circus,» Berg babbled. «That is, culturally educated people, and those two are circus stars.»
The woman began clapping her hands.
«Really? I just worship the circus, but I've never been.»
«I myself have only seen it on televi…» Berg cut himself off. Then he noticed that Mollie was lying atop a dead chicken. He tore the bird away and offered it up to the woman like a bouquet.
«You can boil up some boullion for your husband back home.»
«Would that I had a husband,» she said, embarrassed.
«Would that I had a home,» he dreamily countered.
«I'm so tired of chickens on that farm…»
Berg chucked the fryer away with a grand gesture:
«Fly thee hence, winged one!»
«What about you? Don't you have any place to live?» asked the woman — almost hopefully, it seemed.
«Wheresoever I'm obliged to live, I have no wish to go there.»
«A mean wife?»
«Brothers, actually. But never mind. You're from that poultry farm, eh?»
«Uh-huh. I take the night train home. I live in Zheltokrysino, twelve kilometers off. I had a flat tire on my bike, so here I am, taking the freight train…»
«Is the pay any good?»
«They pay us in eggs and carcasses.»
«Convenient.»
All along Berg had been crawling up to the woman, and now his face had come level with her knee. She blushed and squatted down. They silently stared into each other's eyes.
«If you don't have a place to live, why don't you settle down with me and my mother,» said the woman. «She'll be so happy. It's been ages since we had a man in the house.»
Alex and Orest, in the meantime, had been sitting on the floor, letting their legs dangle over the side of the doorway in the open air, surveying the streaming landscape. An exhausted Mollie lay next to them, fast asleep.
«One of them manages to get out of his cage all of a sudden, with the car wide open — they'll fall out,» muttered Orest. «Or else catch cold, God forbid.»
«And they're all hungry,» Alex took up the theme. «But, come on, one of our guys has to look in on them sometime during the trip. They're always stepping out during stops.»
«Mollie's here sleeping like a baby, no skin off her back!» said Orest. «It's all her fault we're in this mess…»
Mollie slightly opened her eyes, looking at him in silent reproach.
«Zheltokrysino,» the woman announced in a happy voice. Berg, no less delighted, embraced her about the shoulders.
The train braked to a halt and all four disembarked, Berg gallantly offering a hand to his new acquaintance, and then taking her by the elbow.
Alex tossed them a «See ya!»
«Uh-huh,» answered Berg, peremptorily. For him, only the poultry farm woman in the calico dress existed. The two lovebirds paused in a small square near the station, by a fountain. Mollie went with them and jumped in the fountain, greedily lapping up some water.
«Let her drink her fill,» Alex and Orest kept an eye on her from a distance.
Her thirst quenched, Mollie decided to have a bath.
Alex noticed a policeman walking along the platform and ran to the fountain.
«Come on now, climb out of there!»
The command only egged Mollie on: she frolicked with greater abandon.
Orest hastened over to them.
«Double time outta here! Come with me!»
Mollie, splashing up a storm without let-up, poured forth some joyous barking.
Berg and the poultry woman were engaged in an ecstatic kiss.
«Second Lieutenant Bruskov,» uttered a dry, officious voice. There he was already, the policeman, plain as day.
«May I see your documents, citizens?»
«Hi, Uncle Slava,» the poultry woman turned. She was glowing a scalded red, her eyes gleamed insanely, and her chest bobbed up and down, as if she were asphyxiating.
«Nastya, is that you?!» said the amazed lieutenant. «Hmm. I didn't recognize you. Guess you'll be rich someday, like that superstition says.»
«I've already found my treasure,» Nastya leaned against Berg's shoulder. «Has your Zorka calved yet?»
«I wish! She can't seem to get it over and done with. Bad enough she's not delivering in winter, like a normal cow, but only in summer does she get it into her head. And even then, she can't do it! By the way, who're these folks with you?»
«Circus people,» Nastya tenderly caressed Berg. «They got left behind by their train.»
Bruskov penetrated the newcomers with a Sherlock-Holmeslike stare, and nodded to the sweetly smiling Berg:
«The other day someone stole a hat just like yours from the Skumbak's country store. It was American humanitarian aid. Where did you get yours?»
«On tour in America.»
«Oh really? From America?»
«From the state of Amazonka.»
«A-ah… And a long-skirted silvery raincoat…» The lieutenant produced a small notebook and buried his head in it: «Also some Finnish smoked sausage, half a kilo of 'Yeltsin's Golden Dawn' apples, 200 grams of cheese, a pair of rubber slippers, size 42…» Bruskov lifted his gaze up to Berg, who was already without his cowboy hat, raincoat and rubber slippers. «Haven't I seen you somewhere before?»
«In the arena!» Berg blurted out.
«And just how did you get left behind, if your train is ri-i-ight over there?» he was pointing to precisely where the train stood.
«Well, we're off then!» Berg tiptoed on his bare feet.
Alex and Orest were already starting to take off, but they ran into another policeman — a broad one, enormously tall.
«What's the problem?» he grabbed the would-be escapees by the scruff of their necks, like kittens.
«Well, here's the deal,» the lieutenant reported quite merrily. «They say they got left behind by the circus, but what do you know: the circus is right over there!»
The bull stood the fugitives on their feet and said in a deep, grave tone:
«Confess everything.»
At that moment Mollie climbed out of the fountain's bowl, ran over to the guardians of order and shook herself dry. A torrent of spray rained down on their gray tunics. Alex and Orest had managed to take cover behind the square-shaped policeman.
«Let's bring them in to Gorlogryzov, Pasha,» mumbled the one who resembled a tower, wiping his eyes. «Let him figure it out.»
«To Gorlogr… gr… gryzov… But what for?» Berg babbled out in anguish, rubbing his Adam's apple.