I live with my wife, my wife is a good woman, she sews, launders and cooks. She is always busy and has no time to become thoughtful and, relaxing, likes to gnaw caramels and watch movies. She sighs and weeps, having known that two little girls from the next block were taken away nobody knew where, that a boy has been smashed by a concrete plate at a building site, but when our grandchildren are brought to us for a weekend, she lets them out to the courtyard on their own being snowed under her household.

I have to go out with them, to stand and to watch how they ride down from the hillcock. I watch passer-byes -- who knows where and what for they go -- maybe this big man in a red scarf goes somewhere to rob and to kill, and maybe that woman in a fur-coat goes to entice and to inform thieves. I take children home, but one cannot sigh with relief even at home -- recently I have read that radio-active poison mixed into a wall panel ruined four children in the same bedroom.

Sometimes I think why thiefs and killers take their path -- I suppose they remote tension that way. As for me, having learned that one more acquaintance of mine is dying from cancer, that there is poison in the air, blue alga -- in water, pure nitrates -- in borsch, that militsia will not protect from anything and that you may write your testament after a prick done in a hospital, I feel like a bound hen held at its legs and beak while someone is already raising threatingly his ax -- and then I wish them to cut sooner.

Not long ago someone rang to our door at half past one at night and my wife, having read in the newspaper about racket, forbade me not only to open the door but even to go and ask who was there. The bell rang and we sat in our bed in pitch darkness, sucked sedatives and did not know what to do, but when ringing stopped my wife said "Most likely drunkards play tricks", lay and very soon already snorted. As for me, I understood that I would be unable to sleep.

On the next day I put on my old coat in which I previously went to a vegetable store, old rabbit three-eared cap and told my wife that I was going to unload a goods wagon for two days off.

I walked through teenage layabouts, through lonely courtyards, there was darkness, mud, desolation everywhere. Finally I have found them -- obviously it was a group of criminals standing near a basement and using foul language. I went to them by firm steps, they all glanced back, someone whistled, two of them dashed off, two -- disappeared in the basement, but the last one stumbled and remained standing near iron railing under rusty awning.

With hatred I looked how water was pouring from the awning on his fur-cap, having clenched my teeth, being afraid to look into his eyes I looked at his cap, offering him as expressively as I could to thrust a knife into me, or an owl into my heart as it had happened with my fellow-mate's son and no traces remained, or -- to approach from my back and to throw a running knot as it was described in an article about racket. Let it better happen now when I am ready and waiting for it.

And when, having shut my eyes, with the most brutal face I cried "Come on!", a chap, standing in front of me, having sobbed, took his cap off, threw it to me and, hobbling in his sprained ankle, dashed off into the lane. I looked at his cap lying in the mud, then turned around and ran away with all my might, and there were emptiness and silence around, only blue TVs were glimmering in yellow windows.

Being out of breath I came home, locked the door by the chain, and it was just informed in news that eight caps have been taken off from people during that day. "Nine", -- muttered I, changing clothes and my wife, having unfolded a toffee, said "Horror!"