Book: Fox Mickey's Diary

There is no one in the house. A dog wind blows in all the cracks (why a dog wind?). In general, the wind is a fool: it blows in a bare park, and there’s nothing there to pick. In the yard I still deal with it somehow: I’ll stand with my back to the wind, my head down, my legs apart - and “I don’t give a damn,” as the gardener says. And you can’t hide anywhere from this bandit in the room. He bursts from under the door, through the window cracks, through the fireplace hole, and squeaks, and whines, and howls, as if his mother were a dog. He has no muzzle, no throat, no belly, no backside. I can’t figure out what he’s blowing...

I came up with a thing. It’s very embarrassing, but what can you do? You have to eat. When the rain subsides, I sometimes run to a nearby place to visit a familiar baster maker. In the evenings he dances to the gramophone. They dance the foxtrot. Must be a dog dance. I’ll stand on my hind legs, pull up my stomach, spin around and nod my head. All the couples will stop dancing... They will gather in a circle and laugh so hard that you can’t hear the gramophone. And they order me such a portion of meat that I can barely get home. Moreover, I’ll bring a veal bone in my teeth for breakfast... That’s how much you have to humiliate yourself for the sake of hunger!

Kittens! Tell me please!... Their mother, a cunning creature, disappears in the park for the whole day: she sniffs and is gone, like a mosquito in a Christmas tree. And I have to play with her children... One licks my nose. I licked it too, although for some reason my teeth suddenly clicked... The other one was sucking my ear. Am I his mother, or what? The third climbs onto my back and scratches me as if they were scraping me with a grater. Rrrrrr! Hush, Mickey, hush... Zina laughs and chokes: you, she says, are their cousin.