Главная страница «Первого сентября»Главная страница журнала «Английский язык»Содержание №19/2002

YES

The Victim of Deficit

I’d like to tell you a funny story about my dog. She isn’t alive now, but her puppyhood happened to be about eight years ago, when our country was facing a rather serious problem with food availability. All Russian people were trying to store as much food as possible. The flats were usually full of various foods like sugar, potatoes and many kinds of groats. Among them was buckwheat. Our family was not an exception, and we, as all other normal Russian people, had these foods at home. Speaking about buckwheat, my father was extremely lucky to somewhere get a sack of this precious cereal which weighed about 5 kilograms. It was placed in the corner of my room, as our flat is not very big and we had no other possibilites. So this sack was standing peacefully not disturbing anyone.

We had two dogs (Dobermans) at that time, and the younger one was about six months old. She didn’t like to stay at home alone and my granny used to come almost everyday to baby-sit Manya (officially she was called Irma, but no one called her that). One day my granny couldn’t come for some reason. We decided to leave our dogs alone; to be more precise we had no way out. We hid all our clothes, shoes and other important and necessary things, and left the house.

I was the last one to come home at about ten in the evening. And the first thing I saw was my younger dog, who looked very strange. At first I did not understand what the matter was, but then I realized what was wrong. The dog was awfully fat. One would think that she had swallowed a basketball. I asked my mum what had happened to Manya, but my mum did not understand what I was talking about. I asked her to look at the dog more attentively, but she saw nothing. Well an hour later she finally saw that our beloved dog looked like a pig, a very fat pig. We didn’t know what to think. Suddenly I looked into the comer of my room and noticed that there was a big hole in the sack where the buckwheat was kept. When I inspected the sack, I understood that our clever and always hungry dog had eaten about 2 kilograms of buckwheat. It swelled inside our dog and she became awfully fat.

What followed was a nightmare. First of all we decided to use an enema to help our dog, as she did not look very happy, and after that, for the rest of the night, I was running with Manyasha downstairs and upstairs (we live on the fifth floor, without an elevator). In the morning I left the house and looked around. The area near our house was thickly covered with buckwheat... But all is well that ends well, and our dog felt well the very next day.

It is very funny how our life has changed since that time. Now we have another young Doberman at home, and not long ago when we left her alone at home, she ate about a kilogram of...special food for dogs. But the result was the same!

By Natalie