Звонок
The Phone Call
A2 · Elementary · fiction · 10 scenes · Premium story
An elementary story about the hardest thing anyone does in a new language: arranging something by telephone, with no face to read and a bad line. Lena tells it herself. She has a number on a scrap of paper in handwriting that is not hers, and one digit could be a three or an eight. What follows is one arrangement going wrong in four perfectly ordinary ways: a wrong number, an answering machine, a misheard time, and a bus that does not move. The discovery at the end is that all four are survivable if you are willing to ask people to say it again.
Characters
- Lena (Лена) — The narrator
- Maksim (Максим) — On the other end
- The stranger (Незнакомый голос) — The wrong number
Vocabulary from this story
- звонок — phone call
- трубка — receiver
- цифра — digit
- гудок — ringing tone
- процент — per cent
- телефон — telephone
- номер — number
- сообщение — message
- связь — connection
- голос — voice
- бумажка — scrap of paper
- ошибка — mistake