Chapter 5

Kuzya and I flew through the air with a ball in front of us. I did not dare look down — I was too afraid. In order to contain my fright, I stared directly at the ball. I’m not sure for how long we flew. The sun was shining brightly in the sky, and Kuzya and I were following the ball through the air, as if we were tied to it with some invisible rope and it was dragging us along. Finally, the ball began to descend, and we landed on a small road in the middle of the forest.

The ball continued rolling, jumping over stumps and fallen trees. It didn’t give us any rest. Again, I can’t really tell you how long we were walking for. The sun never set; therefore, I would think that we were only walking for one day. But who knows if the sun actually sets at all in this strange land?

I was so happy that Kuzya had tagged along with me! And I was really happy that he started talking like a human! We chatted non-stop for the entire time we were walking. It’s true that I didn’t really like the fact that he talked too much about his adventures: he really liked to hunt mice and really hated dogs. He adored raw meat and raw fish. Therefore, most of his stories were about dogs, mice, and food. Nevertheless, I got the feeling that he was a very uneducated cat. It turned out that he didn’t know the first thing about soccer. He didn’t understand anything and watched the game simply because he liked to watch everything that moved. The game reminded him of a mouse hunt. It turned out that he only listened to me talk about soccer out of sheer politeness.

As we walked along the forest path, a tall hill appeared in the distance. The ball quickly went around it and disappeared. We were very scared that we would lose the ball, so we rushed after it. Once we cleared the hill, we saw a large castle with tall gates and a stone fence. Upon closer examination, the fence consisted of huge intertwined letters.

My dad owns a silver cigarette case. Two intertwined letters are carved on it: D and P. My dad explained to me that this is called a monogram. So this fence was one big monogram. I even got the feeling that it wasn’t made out of stone, but from some other type of material.

A huge eighty pound lock hung on the castle gates. Two strange-looking people guarded either side of the entrance. One of them was so hunched over that it seemed like he was constantly looking at his knees, while the other one was completely straight, just like a stick.

The person with the hunch held a huge pen in his hands and the straight one held a pencil of the same size. They did not move at all, as if they weren’t alive. I came closer and poked the one with the hunch with my finger. He didn’t move. Kuzya sniffed both of them and said that, in his opinion, they were both alive, but didn’t smell human. Kuzya and I called them Hook and Stick. Our ball tried to burst through the gates. I went up to the gates and tried pushing on them. What if the gates weren’t locked? As soon as I did that, both Hook and Stick crossed their writing utensils and blocked my path.

“Who are you?” asked Hook.

And Stick cried out in exclamations, as if someone just squeezed him:

“Oh! Oh! Oh! Ah!”

I politely answered that I was a student and that I was in the fourth grade. Hook twisted his head in a disapproving look. Stick burst out in exclamations, as if I said something that was very bad.

Then, Hook glanced at Kuzya and asked:

“And you, the one with the tail, are a student as well?”

Kuzya was so embarrassed that he said nothing.

“This is a cat,” I explained to Hook, “he is an animal. And animals have the right to not study.”

“Name? Surname?” Hook continued his interrogation.

“Viktor Perestukin,” I answered, as if responding to someone taking attendance in class.

If you could only see what happened to Stick!

“Oh! Oh! Alas! That one! Oh, oh!” he shouted without stopping for quite a while.

I was getting tired of this. The ball brought us to the Land of Unlearned Lessons. Why should we stand around at the gates and answer stupid questions? I demanded that I immediately be given a key to unlock the lock. The ball jumped up slightly. I knew I was on the right track.

Stick gave me a huge key and shouted:

“Go ahead! Open it! Do it!”

I inserted the key into the lock and tried to turn it. The key didn’t budge. It became clear to me that they were simply making fun of me.

Hook asked whether or not I could write the words “lock” and “key” correctly. If I can, the key will immediately unlock the lock. Why shouldn’t I be able to? What a silly question! Out of nowhere, a chalkboard appeared in front of me, hanging in midair, just inches away from my nose.

“Write!” shouted Stick and handed me a piece of chalk.

I immediately wrote “k..” and stopped.

“Write! More! Go ahead!” ordered Stick.

It was easy for him to tell me to write, but what if I didn’t know what to write next? KEE or KEY?

The same exact thing was true for the word “lock”. Is it LOK or LOCK? There was certainly a lot to think about.

I remembered that there was some kind of a rule about this. What grammar rules do I even know? I began to recall all of them. It seems that after consonants, you do not write… But where are the consonants? This rule was unrelated to anything that I was looking at right now.

Kuzya advised me to write at random. If you write it incorrectly, then fix it. Otherwise, how would you know which version was correct? It was sensible advice. I was about to follow it, but Stick cried out:

“It is forbidden! Ignorant, ignorant boy! Alas! Write! Correctly! On the first try!” For some reason, he never said anything calmly, opting instead to shout everything in exclamations.

I sat down on the ground and began to think about the spelling. Kuzya kept spinning around me, often hitting me in the face with his tail. I told him to knock it off, which offended him.

“All of your thinking won’t amount to anything anyway,” he said bitterly. “You still won’t be able to remember a single thing.”

But I remembered. In spite of his remark, I remembered. Perhaps, these were the only rules that I knew. I never even imagined that they would be so useful to me!

For most words, the final ‘K’ has to be protected by another letter if there’s a vowel. This is easy to check with words like FORK. Here, the ‘R’ serves as the letter protecting ‘K’ from the vowel ‘O’. The same can be applied to the word lock: even though it’s pronounced as LOK, the ‘K’ has to be protected with a silent ‘C’, since it follows a vowel. LOCK.

Another rule applies to the word KEY. Even though we hear KEE, since the long E sound is at the very end of the word, most likely it has a silent Y. On the other hand, the EE phonogram is easy to check in words like GREEN. With words that were derived from longer ones, like FREE, we use the original, longer word, FREEDOM, which has the EE phonogram.

The Stick clapped his hands together and shouted:

“Wonderful! Lovely! Amazing! Hooray!”

I boldly wrote the two words in large letters on the chalkboard: LOCK and KEY.

I then easily turned the large key in the lock and the gate swung open. The ball rolled forward, and Kuzya and I followed it. Stick and Hook trailed close behind us.