Boy Petya lives in the country with his mother, his mother’s brother, Uncle Borey, a little brother and a dying grandfather. One day, Petit's ball rolls into someone else's garden. In this garden on a flower glade, he sees a spacious veranda and on it in a Tamil rocking chair, whose laughter looks like a cry. She drinks a glass of something from a black bottle and says that she was waiting for Petya. She wants Petya to bewitch her, and she drinks "a panacea - a cure for all evil and suffering ...". Tomila asks Petya to collect lemon seeds for her. Wearing beads of thousands of lemon seeds, you can fly together to where the treasure is buried. Petya understands: this is his girlfriend for life.
Uncle Borya scoffs at Petit’s new girlfriend, calls Tomil “a crazy alcoholic”. Petya is worried about his grandfather and does not like his uncle, rude and mocking, who "dispelled fragile secrets with a loud, insulting laugh, threw out a fairy tale."
The boy meets with Tomila every day. She tells him about miracles, says that she is seven thousand years old and she saw the death of Atlantis. They wanted to burn her at the stake for witchcraft, but she escaped. The dragon carried her away from the glass mountain, from the glass palace, and the beads made of lemon stones remained there. Tomila asks Petya if he wants to marry her. Petya blushes and answers: “I want to.”
Tamila offers the boy to look at books pile in the corner. Petya randomly opens a book with a color drawing of a female bird. According to Tamila, this is the bird of Sirin, the bird of death. There is also a bird Finist. The Alkonost bird lays one egg very rarely. Who will find such an egg, for the rest of his life yearns for the impossible. Tamila gives Petya such a magic egg. He stores it in a matchbox. In Tomila Pete’s house, you can do anything, even walk through flower beds and cut pictures from books.
All this time, the bird Syrin has been trying to get into his grandfather’s room, but his mother drives her away with a black and terrible oxygen pillow. One night a thunderstorm begins. Petya jumps up, goes to his grandfather’s room, and discovers that his grandfather is dead - the bird Sirin strangled him. Petya runs to the sorceress Tamila, wakes her and Uncle Borya, lying nearby. Uncle Borya jumps up, hiding her bare legs, and begins to swear in terrible, inhuman words. Petya jumps out of the Tomilin House, runs to the lake, throws himself under a tree, screeches, driving out “the terrible Uncle Borina words, the terrible Uncle Borina legs”. Then it calms down, lies, getting used to, and goes home.
