The Blue Cup

50 pp. English text, translated from the Russian by B. Isaacs. The protagonist and his six-year-old daughter Svetlan arrive at a dacha in playful moods, but their (respective) wife and mother Marusya has other ideas: she burdens them with petty tasks, then departs (apparently in a sulk) to accompany her old friend, a pilot, to the station. Next morning, before going uptown, she blames her husband and daughter for breaking her blue cup in a store-room. Taking this unjust accusation as a proverbial last straw, both leave the house and embark upon an eventful and chaotic day-long "adventure". It involves pacifying the two boys (one of whom accuses another of being 'a fascist' for using an insult word 'jidovka' with regards to a Jewish girl), walking straight into a military exercise site with a lot of shooting going on, losing their stock of gingerbread to a four-year old, but getting a kitten from him as a reward, and near-drowning in a marsh. They return home at dusk, find Marusya worried and happy to see them and spend a lovely evening, with Svetlana (who initially expressed pessimism on that point) admitting that "life's a good thing, after all". The mystery of a blue cup's demise remains, though, unsolved.