M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin has “The Tale of How One Peasant Fed Two Generals.” And our story is on the same topic, but completely different. To confirm the reality of the events, I will name the time in which they occurred – 1979. The place of action is the city of Moscow (there is also a specific address, but it is hardly necessary to indicate it here). The characters of this incredible story were a 42-year-old design engineer with an 18-year-old student son and a “wet nurse”, a cat Milka.
And it happened when the male part of the family found itself without female supervision because of the wife-mother who had gone on a business trip. Left free, the men quickly squandered the money and supplies in the refrigerator and only after that asked themselves how to live on. The same question was put to them in the most categorical form by the cat, representing both her own interests and her bosom friend – a friend nicknamed Fluffy (a permanent partner in the game of rugby).
Father and son sat down and began to think. They thought and thought, but still did not come up with anything. And Milka kept walking around them and hurrying them until she realized that it was useless: both of them looked too downcast. Then she measured them with an expressive look and silently left. The men sighed and sighed, groaned and groaned, and decided to carefully examine the kitchen again: could they find at least some edible morsel there?
And suddenly, in the doorway, they saw a fairytale picture: a cat was dragging a solid slab of meat down the corridor, and not frozen, but fresh. With purely male joy, which did not imply the need to guess the origin of the miracle that had happened, they rushed after it. For several days, everyone was full, but then the meat ran out, as all good things end.
Seeing that the owners had once again assumed the pose of thinkers, the cat snorted contemptuously and disappeared… After a while, several trout appeared in the kitchen in store-bought packaging, clearly indicating that the fish had not been brought from a fishing trip. By the time they had finished eating it, the wife-mother's business trip had ended, the family had reunited, and the specter of hunger had ceased to loom on the horizon.
But in the courtyard, grandmothers began to gather in flocks and, crossing themselves every now and then, discuss in every possible way the strange things that had been happening for two weeks in the grocery store director's apartment and horrifying both him and his wife (they said that she had even turned grey from grief): food products had mysteriously disappeared there in considerable quantities. There were two main versions: either evil spirits had appeared in the house, or God was punishing the rich man for stealing.
Our engineer, passing by protesting old ladies one day, suddenly understood everything… The thing is that the director of the grocery store, who belonged to the most representative group of wealthy citizens in the USSR, was so thrifty that the products did not fit in the home refrigerator, and he temporarily put them on the balcony. And the balcony was located next to the place where the enterprising Milka lived, although the apartment itself was in a different entrance.
But how did she manage to expropriate food that was noticeably larger than her own?! This remains a mystery forever. As well as how much food she dragged from her neighbors, since, apparently, she did not share all of her loot with the owners.
Otherwise, there is no mysticism.
