В громадном ангаре, где мы с Сережей бродим...

In a huge hangar, where Sergei and I wander among the plush furniture in search of a sofa, an elderly consultant in a dress with fat poppies suddenly turns to us.
- Dear, - she has a burned face with small bird eyes without eyelashes, - you sit down, just sit down for a second! - She is petting her unpretentious pet in a businesslike way, a gray dwarf sofa.
 We dutifully descend into the swamp from the pillows. She enthusiastically talks about the box for linen, which can enter a whole person, and the air around the sofa is rapidly filled with the monstrous smell of fumes. Fume, without any doubt, comes from a woman in poppies.
We listen to the lecture, then answer her questions, and, as if hypnotized, I ask her to show me tissue samples, I follow the path from poppies and alcohol to a wooden cabinet full of rags. She lays out the palette of patches, carefully spreading their mottled edges, and I notice that her short unpainted nails are surrounded by blue borders of tinted skin.
Do you know when this happens? This happens when for many hours in a row, forgetting about space and time, you draw with gouache or watercolor. Then it’s very difficult to wash your hands, and if the paint somehow lags behind your palms and pads, then it can almost always remain near your nails.
And while she shows creamy microfiber and a rough scotchguard, while I convince Seryozha that the blood-red color suits us, I already know what happened to this woman last night.
With Galina.
My daughter brought her five-year-old grandson, Vanechka, to Galina’s small apartment on Goncharnaya Street. Galina handed him his weak hand right on the doorstep, and she, without going in, ran away to give a lecture on the history of architecture to evening parties from Kulka. Or where the hell. To be honest, Galina did not care. After all, at that time Galina had already half-emptied a five-liter bugbier (one must somehow escape from this damned heat).
In Vanya’s bag, there was a set of gouache and two small tassels wrapped in a bag of chewing bears. First, Galina attached a torn back cover to him as a canvas from the Soviet gardener's encyclopedia (one horseradish shed on a site in Mill Stream has long been rotten, and the garden is mired in a windbreak - the cottage that she and her husband had dreamed of in the 70s did not take place ), and then, when Vanechka beat out a cardboard and his knees with blue-green dense scribbles, she undertook to help the kid.
Only a third remained in the bugbear, when she hiccupped her and suggested that Vanechka switch to the wallpaper. What's wrong with that? Is there edible paint for kids? “Grandmother has creative freedom, hear, Vanya. ... Not like your mom’s,” with these words she dumped a purple heap of paint from a round tube directly onto a table oilcloth and dipped a five into it. One, then durgu. An openwork ring of yellow gold with a malachite was hidden behind a dark veil of gouache and water. Galina scratched her cheek and went to the free wall, where on the wallpaper in a small rhombus slept a plump black and white tear-off calendar, stuck on May 1.
And she dealt a blunt relay strike to the wallpaper. The palm print looked like a large pigeon feather. With toothless milk smirk, Vanechka began to repeat after her, stamping the same sparrow marks on the wallpaper below. They laughed, Vanya got confused in her knitted skirt, a glass with the remains of a bagbir was also dirty with gouache. Galina was spinning her head. This unbearable heat continued to soar from the street.
Galina woke up from the popping of the window frame. The street was gloomy and almost dark, but still not the end. She lay in a dress and slippers on the chenille of her sofa (she grabbed this elegant and rare upholstery for herself by the new year). She tore off the lead head with gouache hair clumping from the pillows and was horrified to find black stains in the twilight covering the pink fabric. As if he was licked by a huge dog, fed up with blueberries.
The window slammed again, and Galina remembered her grandson in a trembling shiver. She jumped up and ran in one slipper: the kitchen, the blue wild art on the wallpaper - it’s empty at the table, the bugbear is sleeping on its side in a pool of paint, the window is wide open ... She shot herself on the cheek, tripped over the hallway and realized that there was no door on the floor his little sandals. ... And then I saw a piece of paper under the mirror. Her cold-blooded handwriting.
“The child took. On Monday to the narcologist. "
Galina hobbled to the kitchen. She shook the brown Bahlakh in the light in the hope of half a pound. But no. “Look for sweets with liquor,” Galina pulled off her dress and wrapped her body in a blue waffle bathrobe. She combed her hair for a long time in the bathroom (the roots had grown a lot). On the way back to the kitchen, I gently touched the gouache on the wall - the paint had long dried out. Without haste, she turned on icy water and wiped the table surface from a daub. To the narcologist, she thought, hiding the empty baklahu behind the bin under the sink - ugh on you.
The hands of the clock showed three in the morning. Galina get up soon. Sofas cannot sell themselves.
“Look,” Seryozha calls me from the next section, “there are others ...”
I go up to him and see an excellent red sofa much more interesting than Galina offers. WITH