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The Tale about Lost Time

Once upon a time there was a boy called Petia. He went to school, but was always lagging behind in class; it was the same in every subject. At the beginning of term he would always say: “There’s time enough; I’ll catch up the next term.” And when the next one, and it was always the same. “There’ll be time enough!” he would say.
One day he arrived at school late as usual. As he handed his coat to the attendant who looked after the coats, he said:
“Aunt Natasha, here’s my coat for you.”
And Aunt Natasha asked from behind the rows of coats:
“Who is calling?”
“It’s me, Petia,” he replied.
“Why are you so hoarse today?” she said.
“I don’t know why I’m so hoarse today; I just don’t know. There isn’t any reason for it.”
Natasha appeared from behind the rails of coats, glanced at him and cried out in astonishment.
Petia was frightened and asked:
“Aunt, what’s the matter?”
“What’s the matter? You told me you were Petia but you mast be his grandfather.”
“Me-my own grandfather?” said Petia. “You know perfectly well I’m Petia, a schoolboy.”
“Look in the mirror,” said Aunt Natasha.
The boy looked in the mirror and started back in the fear. He had changed into a tall, pale, gaunt old man, with a grey beard and a moustache. His face was lined and wrinkled.
He stared and stared again and his beard began to tremble:
“Mother, Mother!”
He cried in a deep voice and began to run. And as he ran he said to himself:
“If my own mother doesn’t know me, then all is lost!”
he reached his own home and rang three times; his mother opened the door. She gazed at Petia in silence. Petia was silent, too, his grey beard struck out, and tears began to well up in his eyes.
“Who is it you want, old man?” his mother asked at last.
“Don’t you recognize me?” whispered Petia.
“I’m afraid I don’t,” replied his mother.
Petia turned away in sadness and despair, and as he walked he thought:
“What a wretched lonely old man I am! No mother, no children or grandchildren, and not a friend to call my own. And I haven’t had time to learn anything. Real old men are doctors or craftsmen or scholars or teachers. What can I do, a schoolboy, after only three years of school? And such a bad pupil I was, too. What will happen to me? Oh, miserable old man that I am! Wretched little boy! How will it all ends?”
And he walked and walked and didn’t even notice that he had left the town behind and had come to the forest. He walked until it grew quite dark.
“shall I rest a bit?” he thought, and then suddenly he saw a little white house among the fir trees. He walked in-it was quite empty. There was a table in the middle of the room, a paraffin lamp hanging above it, and four chairs standing round it. There was a clock ticking on the wall. And a heap of hay in one corner.
Petia lay down on the hay buried himself deep inside to get warm; he shed a few tears and wiped them with his beard and then he fell asleep.
When he woke up, it was light in the room and the lam was burning. There were children sitting round the table-two boys and two girls. There was a large abacus in front of them. They were counting and murmuring.
“Two years and five and another seven and three…that’s for you, sir, and these are yours, madam, and these are yours.”
Who were these children? Why were they so gloomy? Why were they muttering and moaning as old people do? Why were they calling one another ‘sir’ and ‘madam’? What were they doing in this little house at night?
Petia remained very still, afraid to breathe, trying to girls at all, they were wicked magicians and the truth of the matter was this: anyone who wastes time does not notice how quickly he grows older. That was what the magicians grew younger. Which explains how Petia had suddenly grown older. And he found he was not the only one, for the magicians named two girls from his class at school and a boy the next one. They had all grown older without noticing it. And the wicked magicians sat at the table clicking on the abacus, and dividing the years the children had wasted. What was to be done about it? Was there no way to reclaim the wasted years?
The magicians finished their accounts and were going to put the abacus back in the drawer, but one who seemed to be the leader wouldn’t let them do that. He took the abacus and went to the clock: he turn the hands pulled the pendulum, listened to its tickling, and began counting again. He muttered and counted until the clock pointed to midnight, and he mixed up all the chimes and checked the result.
Then he beckoned to the magicians and whispered to them:
“Magicians! Do you know that the children that we turned into old people today can still grow young again?”
“How’s that?” the magicians cried.
“I’ll tell you,” the leader answered.
He walked out of the house on tiptoe, went round it, came back, bolted the door, and turned the key with a stick.
Petia lay still as a mouse, paralysed with fear.
But the light from the paraffin lamp was dim and the wicked magician didn’t see him. He called the other magicians round him and told them in a whisper:
“This is how it’s done: a man can save himself from any disaster if only he wishes it enough. If these children who have been turned into ole people find one another and come back here sharp at midnight, and turn the hands of the clock back seventy-times, they will become children again and that will be the end of us.”
The magicians fell silent. Then one of them said:
“How would they know what to do?”
And another one murmured:
“They won’t come here sharp at midnight. They’re sure to be late, at last one minute late.”
And the third added:
“They’ll never do it! Never! Those lazybones wouldn’t be able to count to seventy-times-they’d get mixed up!”
“You may be right,” the leader said, “but we’d better be on our guard. If the children move the hands-we’ll be frozen to the spot. Well, don’t let’s waste time, let’s go!”
And hiding the abacus in the table drawer, they ran away like children, but groaning and sighing like old men.
Petia waited till the sound of their steps faded in the distance. Then he crawled out of the house and without wasting any time, but dodging behind the trees and bushes as he went, he raced to the town in search of his elderly schoolmates.
The town was still asleep. The windows were dark; the streets were empty. Then dawn came, and the first buses began to clatter past. At last Petia saw an old woman walking slowly down the street carrying a basket.
Petia rushed up to her and asked:
“Old woman, please, are you really a schoolgirl?”
“What are you talking about?” the old woman said sternly.
“Do you go to the school?” whispered Petia timidly.
And the woman stamped her feet and brandished her basket at him. Petia escaped by the skin of his teeth. He recovered his breath and went on. The town by now was wide awake. Buses were and went on hurrying by, people were rushing to their work. Lorries were rumbling along, hurrying to deliver their loads to the shops and the factories and the railways. The roads were being cleared of snow and covered with sand so that people should not slip and fall and waste their time. Petia had seen that so many times, but only now did he understand why people were so afraid to be late, to miss their opportunities.
He kept looking everywhere, searching for old people, but there was nobody he recognized. The streets were full of old people, but you could see at once that they were real old people, not school children. There was an old man with a brief-case, probably a teacher. There was another one with a pail and a brush, a house painter. There was a fire engine racing by and an old man was driving it-the chief fireman. You could see he certainly never wasted his time.
Petia walked and walked-but there was not a single elderly child or a solitary young old man. Life was stirring all around him, and only he, Petia, was behind, late, useless, a water.
Sharp at midday Petia walked into a square and sat down to rest. And then suddenly he jumped up. On a bench nearby there was an old woman who was crying bitterly. He wanted to run up to her, but was too shy.
“I’d better wait and see what she will do next,” he said to himself.
And the little old woman suddenly stopped crying and began gangling her legs. Then she pulled out a newspaper from the pocket and a currant bun from another. She opened the paper-and Petia almost jumped for joy, for he saw it was a girl’s paper. She began to eat and read at the same time, picking out the currants from the bun. Then when she had finished the paper she folded it and put it and the rest of the bun back into her pocket and suddenly noticed something in the snow. She bent down and picked up a ball. Probably one of children playing in the square had lost it in the snow. She looked at it carefully, wiped it with her handkerchief, and then went across to a tree and began to throw the ball against it.
Petia raced to her side, across the snow and the bushes, shouting:
“Old woman! You’re from school, aren’t you?”
The old woman jumped with joy, seized Petia by the hands, and replied:
“Of course I am. I’m Marussia. And who are you?”
Petia told her who he was and what had happened in the little house in the forest. Then the two of them rushed away in search of their schoolmates who had been a lazy as they had been. They searched for one, two, three hours. At last they saw an old woman hopping about behind the woodshed. She had traced squares with some chalk on the pavement and was playing hop-scotch, hopping on one leg.
Petia and Marussia rushed up to her.
“Old woman, you’re from school, aren’t you?”
“Of course I am. I’m Nadia. And who are you?”
Petia and Marussia told her everything, and they all raced here and there searching for their other schoolmate.
But he had vanished-vanished completely. The old people searched all courtyards, the squares, the children’s cinemas and theatres and science classes, but he wasn’t to be seen.
Time was running short; already it was growing dark. Lights were beginning to glow in the windows. The day was drawing to a close. What were they to do? Was everything really lost for ever?
Suddenly Marussia shouted:
“Look! Look!”
Petia and Nadia looked and saw a bus race by and an old man hanging on to the step, his hat askew, and his beard blowing in the wind. He was whistling as he rushed by. There were his schoolmates searching for him for all they were worth and he was riding about without a thought in his head!
 They chased the bus which, as luck would have it, stopped at a red light. They pulled the old man by the tail of his coat and asked him:
“Are you a schoolboy?”
“Of course,” he replied. “I’m Vassia. And who are you?”
The children told his who they were, and so not to waste time, they all four of them got into the bus, and rode to the forest in the suburbs.
There were other schoolboys in the bus. They stood up and offered our old people their seats.
“Please, old people!” and our old people got quite embarrassed, and blushed and refused.
The schoolchildren, as it happened, were particularly polite and insisted:
“You must sit down. Think of all the thinks you’ve done in your long lives. Now you must rest.”
Luckily as at this point the bus had reached the forest, they jumped down and raced the thicket. But here a new misfortune befell them for they couldn’t find the right way.
“How strange time is!” said Petia. “Yesterday when I left the little house I was so anxious not to waste time that I didn’t really notice the way back through the forest. Now I can see that sometimes it is right to spend a little time so as to save it later.”
The old children were quite exhausted. Luck was with them, however, and a breeze cleared away the clouds and a full moon appeared in the sky.
Petia climbed up in a birch tress and saw the house quite close, with the lights in the windows gleaming through the fir trees. He climbed down again and whispered to his friends.
“Sh…not a word! Follow me!”
They crawled through the snow to the house. The magicians were lying in the hay, guarding the stolen tome.
“Are they sleep?” asked Marussia.
“Sh…” whispered Petia.
They opened the door softly and crept to the clock. At one minute to midnight they stood there and Petia reached up to the hands and began to turn them back.
Te magicians jumped up screaming, but they were frozen to the spot. They went on growing and growing, grey hair began to grow on their temples, and their faces became covered with wrinkles.
“You’ll have to lift me up!” cried Petia. “I’m growing small and I can’t reach the hands! Thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three…”
The others lifted Petia up. By the time he had reached the fortieth turn the magicians had grown quite decrepit. They stopped more and more and came close to the ground. On the seventy-seventh turn, the last on of all, they gave a loud cry and vanished as if they had never been.
The children looked at one another and cried out for joy-for they had become children again! They had conquered; they had recaptured as by a miracle all the time they had wasted.
Yes, they were all right in the end. But you must never forget that he who fritters time away never notices how he himself grows old.

Copyright © 2006 Russian Fairy Tales