Vasily, already pressing the gas pedal to the floor, was rushing along the highway to his dacha. He had just turned onto a secondary road, and then onto a country lane. Vasya remembered this road — every pothole, every turn, even that crooked birch tree along the roadside.
His father always thought about his own father when going to the dacha, because it was his father who was the initiator and main lover of the dacha, and it was with him they spent most of the summer time here.
Vasily arrived at the place and turned off the car, noticing that the once gleaming body of his “Lada” was now covered with a layer of dust from the country road.
The sunset was slowly descending on the dacha cooperative. It seemed the dacha was holding its breath. Vasily froze by the gate, watching two figures of his third cousins already emerge from behind the gate and struggle with the old keyhole trying to close the estate gate.
“Hey, relatives!” Vasily’s voice sounded louder than he intended. The sisters turned simultaneously, like twin dolls. Their pouted lips opened in an ugly expression of surprise, as if wild bees had bitten them at the dacha.
“Keys to the dacha, please, dear ones!” Vasily flatly extended his hand, expecting the keys to the dacha to be in his pocket. “Your month of stay at the dacha ended long ago.”
One of the twin sisters snorted, shaking curls the color of rust:
“Your mom herself gave us the keys to the dacha!” The keychain with a unicorn dangled on one sister’s finger like a trophy. “Look at you, so quick — we’ll leave whenever we want: anyway, now the keys are with us.”
“Besides, Petrovna never asked us to return the keys to the dacha, so she must not need them,” the bold relatives replied and quickly left the property. The other sister giggled, poking at a phone with a purple case.
The young dacha residents drove off, leaving behind a trail of exhaust fumes and the scent of cheap perfume — and that was that.
“Good thing I took the ownership certificate and a general power of attorney from mom with me. I thought it would end like this,” Vasily sighed heavily.
The hardware store was still open, and luckily new lock cylinders were on sale there. In the trunk, the man had a cordless drill with two batteries and a set of metal drill bits. Ten minutes later, Vasily had already opened the gate and was heading towards the house.
The sight of the neglected countryside plot did not inspire optimism in the young man right from the doorstep. Vasily barely recognized the once well-groomed and beloved dacha of his parents.
Lyudmila Markovna had promised the dacha would be kept in perfect order, but instead of the low green grass, the entire dacha had grown over with some waist-high thickets.
“This alarm clock isn’t something you mow with a lawnmower — you need to get a trimmer here!” Vasily swore as he walked around the suburban house territory.
The lawn at the dacha, planted right in front of the house, had also been completely neglected — it hadn’t been raked, watered, or mowed, and in the most visible places, a children’s pool and a trampoline were set on it. Naturally, the grass under the pool had already rotted.
All of Petrovna’s flower beds were also neglected, and the largest flower bed had been plowed up. Apparently, the relatives had other plans for this area and already considered the dacha their property.
“Yes, the sisters clearly had no intention of ever returning the estate keys!” Vasily scratched his head.
Inside the house, everything was scattered and tossed about.
Vasily walked through the once-perfect country house and grabbed his head — all the wallpaper was scribbled over with children’s drawings, some wallpaper was completely missing, door jambs were broken off in places, and the doors were punched through — apparently, adults had been settling scores among themselves.
In the bathroom, the relatives somehow managed to break the sink by dropping something heavy on it, and the washing machine smelled so bad that Vasily realized he would have to rinse the drum more than once.
The entire dacha house was cluttered with junk — old adult things and children’s toys: apparently, the relatives dragged all the junk from their city apartments to the dacha.
One of the sisters, apparently doing renovations in her apartment, turned the garage into a construction materials warehouse — filling it with boxes of furniture, new appliances, tiles, laminate, and various building mixtures.
“That’s something,” Vasya thought, changing the padlock on the garage.
Vasya walked around the plot and house, documented all the mess on his phone, then locked the dacha with new locks and drove back to the city.
“Mom, your dacha was ‘preserved’ like a museum exhibit,” Vasily threw a bunch of new keys onto his mother’s kitchen table so hard that the vase with fresh flowers on the countertop rang. “Now you can even shoot a post-apocalyptic movie there — no special effects needed.”
Petrovna, kneading pie dough, flinched, leaving a flour handprint on her apron. “Son, maybe we should just give them their things back?” her voice trembled like a candle flame in a draft. “What if Katya’s childhood things are there…”
“And what about the ruined lawn? And the spoiled wallpaper all over the house? The broken sink and the washing machine in awful condition???” Vasily jabbed at his phone, scrolling through photos of the relatives’ antics at the dacha. “If they start calling — tell them to talk to me. Deal?”
Petrovna barely nodded; she was afraid to spoil relations with the bold relatives until the last moment.
The call thundered on Friday evening. Apparently, the relatives had arrived and couldn’t get into the dacha, which they already considered their full-fledged property.
“Vasya, are you in your right mind?” Lyudmila Markovna’s voice screeched disapprovingly like an unlubricated gate hinge at the dacha fence. “You could have asked nicely, we would have moved out immediately!”
“Come right now and open the dacha, we need to collect our things!” the aunt commanded Vasily.
“Aunt Lyud, did you see the photo report on the ‘work’ your daughters did maintaining the dacha? Take a look. Who is going to clean up this mess now?!” Vasily said calmly to the aunt.
“Listen, Vasya, you seem like a decent person, but you’re being petty like a shopkeeper!” sighed Lyudmila Markovna, but without her usual vigor. “If needed, my Vitka will break the locks down in five minutes!”
“Let him try,” Vasily looked at the drops on the glass, “the neighbor’s cameras record continuously and directly to the cloud. If anything, that’s illegal intrusion…”
Vasily kept calm till the end and tried not to yell while arguing with the bold aunt.
“Are you… blackmailing us?” Lyudmila’s voice turned threatening.
“I’m educating you, auntie. Article 139 of the Criminal Code. Burglary — up to two years. If Vitka breaks the gate and breaks into the house, he’ll go to jail!”
“What do you mean, Vasya? The things are ours, we’re just taking what’s ours?” Lyudmila Markovna yelled into the phone.
“But the dacha is mine. I have the ownership documents in my hands. And all the property at the dacha is mine as well. And breaking in with intrusion is already a criminal offense, got it?”
“So you mean you want to put your own relatives in jail?” the aunt was outraged.
“I will, you can check, go ahead, call Vitka, what questions do you have for me?” Vasya calmly hung up.
Ten minutes later, Vitka was already calling Vasya.
“Listen, Vasyan, our things are stored in the garage, we want to pick them up,” said Lyudmila Markovna’s son-in-law.
“No problem, I already sent your mother-in-law the list of repairs needed to restore the dacha with volumes. There are two options — either you compensate me with money, or you fix it yourselves.”
The next week Vasya, Vitka, and his wife went to the hardware store, bought materials, and arranged delivery to the dacha.
On the weekend, all the relatives, including Lyudmila Markovna, under Vasily’s leadership, were wallpapering, changing doors, the sink, and laying rolled lawn in the damaged areas.
“Eh, Vasya, you’re such a skinflint,” Lyudmila Markovna told the young man after they carried the last things out of his dacha.
“With relatives like these, you don’t need enemies, Aunt Lyud,” Vasya replied. “You got off easy!”