My Big Family. A Day of Tots

«You mean, we consider beauty only among good people?» Liuba asked with a challenge.

«No,» Papa said. «But beauty is a vague concept. Every person is inevitably beautiful to someone.»

«Even a complete Quasimodo?» «Mouse girl» asked with doubt.

«I think so, yes. But only on condition of kindness.»

Alena did not like to wander in the thickets of theory. «Papa! When you married Mama, was she a beautiful or a good person?»

«Both beautiful and good!» Papa said.

«Right! Was! And then toddlers hung onto me!» Mama said, pulling out of Costa's hand a stick, with which he wanted to whack Alex for throwing a clump of algae at him.

Alex yanked Papa's hand. «Look!» he shouted, pointing to an overhang approaching the water.

Along the sea, a tall guy with a metal detector was walking on the beach and searching with wide movements along the sand, as if mowing invisible grass. Occasionally the guy froze, and his movements became cautious, groping. When the place was accurately found, he began to shovel sand carefully with an entrenching tool, and, having taken something out, sometimes discarded it and sometimes casually dropped it into a bag.

«And this one is here! Wherever you go, he sticks out everywhere!» Liuba grumbled, moving her hat on her forehead.

«Who?» Kate asked.

«This one here!» «mouse girl» repeated, and by the way she said it, everything became clear to Kate.

«This one» was Pokrovskii, Liuba's classmate, who raced around the city on a bike and tied shoelaces in the middle of the road.

«What's he doing here?» Alex asked.

«Searching! Vacationers in the summer lose earrings, rings, chains of all kinds, they drop them in the sand, and he walks and searches!» Liuba said.

«Really?» Peter became interested. «What, does he find anything?»

«A bunch of rusty nails! Would be better begging!» «mouse girl» deliberately said loudly.

The lanky guy heard her voice, shuddered, and turned around. «Hi! It's you?» he asked.

«Imagine, me!»

«Taking a walk?»

Liuba snorted loudly: «Did you guess or did someone suggest it?»

Pokrovskii shrugged coldly and continued searching. Costa and Alex could not leave him alone anymore and followed him like a tail. Pokrovskii was generous and allowed Alex to hold the metal detector. It was a great carelessness, because Costa, of course, also immediately wanted it and grabbed the metal detector with his right hand. Pulling the metal detector from each other, Costa and Alex starting running off somewhere and fell into a pile of sand.

Pokrovskii rushed after them. He was obviously worried about his new metal detector. «Hey! Don't swing it! Don't scrape the stones! It isn't a club!» he cried out in fright.

Watching the anguish of her former classmate, «mouse girl» grinned mischievously.

Finally, Pokrovskii managed to take his metal detector away. Without letting go of it, he sat down on a rock and stretched out his scrawny legs. Alex stood beside him and, admiring the metal detector with respect, greedily asked if Pokrovskii had found a bomb. It turned out that Pokrovskii had not yet found a bomb. Mostly he found beer caps and small things that poured out of pockets.

«Of course!» Alex said unhappily and, without any change, added, «Is it true that one person put chicory in coffee and became drunk?»

«Mouse girl» laughed triumphantly. Pokrovskii squinted at her suspiciously, checking whether she had taught Alex such a crazy question. «I don't know. Don't ask me this. I don't drink coffee. I don't drink at all,» he said.

Not getting a clear answer, Alex shook his head reproachfully. He could not believe that such a knowledgeable person might not be aware of such nonsense. «Is it true that you can blow up a gas station with a cell phone?» he continued.

«How's that?»

«What do you mean by 'how'?» Alex was surprised. «There they paint a crossed-out phone! So, it's possible! And what word should one say on the phone so that it would blow up gasoline for sure?»

Seeking to hide his global ignorance, Pokrovskii began treating the children to a baguette, a third of which he had already gnawed off. Vicky refused the baguette, saying that she did not like it.

«And what do you like?» Pokrovskii asked.

«She loves horses!» Alena willingly informed him. Vicky blushed, because her love of horses was her biggest secret.

«Really?» Pokrovskii shoved his hand into the bag slung over his shoulder. «Well, if you love them, then I'll give you this! Just found it today! Wanted to hang it over my door!» He handed Vicky an iron semicircle. Vicky hesitantly took it. It was a heavy horseshoe, rusty on one side, but polished to a shine on the other.

After giving away the horseshoe, Pokrovskii again took the metal detector and, getting rid of the seaweed with his wet sneakers, continued his search. Papa Gavrilov walked beside Pokrovskii and asked him about metal detectors.

Pokrovskii explained authoritatively. This one, according to him, was middle of the road, though not quite. «Here's such a thing! Military equipment is good, reliable, but clumsy, and its design is usually such that enemies fear it. Civilian equipment has a bunch of cute figurines and convenient lights, but this isn't technology. And this one is exactly in between!» he said and gently stroked his metal detector.

«So?» Papa asked. «Have you discovered any treasures?»

Pokrovskii took the metal detector off the sand and quickly turned around, checking to see if anyone was near. His face became very secretive. «Not yet, but…» he paused and again went back to the sand. Then he quickly turned to Papa and held him by a button. «We have a lot of treasures in the Crimea!» he said in a ringing whisper. «Simply scattered around with treasures literally!»

«Where's this even from?» Papa doubted.

«What? Crimea was settled a very long time ago! Here all the cities are contemporaries of Rome! And this is only the story that we know! The Scythians, Greeks, Genoese, Turks, Tatars, Armenians. And how many merchants were here! They sold slaves, fabrics, bread, and wine! Huge turnaround! And every self-respecting merchant inevitably had his own treasure buried in a pot in the basement of his home!»

«Why buried?» Papa Gavrilov did not understand.

Spots flared up on Pokrovskii's gaunt face. «How else?» he was amazed. «Houses burn. Thieves tunnel under walls. No banks yet. How would a merchant store his gold? Why in a pot? Because pots aren't afraid of soil. A wooden chest will rot in three years. I won't talk about iron at all. No one had yet eliminated rust.»

«And why exactly in the basement?»

«Where else? The most convenient place for a hoard is the basement,» Pokrovskii explained importantly. «We're not talking about pirate stashes on uninhabited islands. A self-respecting merchant's hoard had to be hidden so that it would be convenient for him to use. He took a handful of coins, placed a handful of coins, sort of like a safe. Besides, while you dig in your cellar, no one will see you. If you go with the money to the forest, then the whole street will shout, 'Honourable Joseph, where are you going with a jug of coins and a shovel? Do you need any help?'»

Papa Gavrilov listened with interest, wiggling his frozen toes in his boots. «What? The merchants later didn't pull out their treasures?» he asked doubtfully.

«Some, of course, did and spent it or left it as an inheritance. But some were lonely misers. Or another option. The city was attacked; the merchant died and didn't have time to tell anyone. The house was burnt and turned into rubbles. The city is overgrown with forest and grass. And somewhere there, under the roots, even now lies a dark two-handled amphora for wheat, full of gold and silver coins,» Pokrovskii said with such conviction, as if he had found dozens of such amphorae. He even ran his finger through the air, precisely feeling the long crack in this very amphora.

«Well, have you found any?» Papa Gavrilov asked.

«Not yet!» Pokrovskii uttered bitterly and stared at his metal detector with deep resentment. «It's rather weak for me to search for something serious. I have to limit myself to sand… But there're a lot of coins here. Over the years, ships smashed in storms, o-ho-ho, the bay is shallow, and gradually the coins wash ashore from the sand. And there are only fragments of grain amphorae, just rake it. The sea in general throws out everything superfluous, everything not its own.»

«Costa's frozen! Let's go, huh?» Mama hollered piteously, her nose was already quite blue from the cold.

Papa harnessed himself to the stroller, and the Gavrilovs continued their journey along the sea. Vicky held the horseshoe in her hands, looking at it with undecided joy. They walked for about a hundred metres along the beach when they heard someone catching up to them. It was Pokrovskii, carrying in his hand something extracted from his bag.