First time we arrived at the dacha all together my father declared ‘Mixed doubles. Like tennis’. Same pairings ever since.
My mother is good. Anna can spy a cluster of gold-tops at fifty paces; she parses thickets the way she checks submarine widgets at work. There is no going back.
Rarely a demonstrative parent, my mother takes my arm with a firm grip I haven’t known in fifteen years and leads me to the forest. Dandelion dust smears my jumper. I breathe in milkweed, fermenting peat the biscuity tang of birch. Grass ears tickle through my socks. She ducks pine needles, stooping below cone-laden boughs at decapitating angles. As always I keep my eyes trained for gold-tops that thrive in lichen beds, the only variety I can distinguish from toadstools. Within Moscow I’m a born taxi driver – here out of my element, hopeless.
Parting some maple branches to rejoin me, my mother squats over my basket. ‘A decent start. Let’s see how the other two are faring before we lose track of them altogether. I nearly said team. It’s catching. How about we try over here?’
We enter a copse bordering a picnic area. Discarded paper napkins like shot pigeons litter the forest floor.
‘Anna’s looking better than she has for ages. Is it a new treatment?’
‘Treatment for what?’
‘Ssh!’ She covers my mouth with her wrist. ‘Oaks have ears and forests gossip. Of course two women confide things. Actually, we make the perfect foursome – we compensate for each other’s shortcomings.’ Afraid to let the moment slip she turns around, faces me. ‘Your father has big plans for you.’ As though she has already said too much, she breaks away.
‘Mum, wait! What plans?’
She disappears into the thicket.
‘Vasya, over here.’ Anna calls. ‘By the big pine.’
Pretending not to hear, I scramble to get my numbers up, not bothering to discriminate while keeping them in view. Let the others winkle out the toadstools. Whatever my father is up to, I don’t want him out of sight a second longer than necessary. When my basket is full I battle to a clearing where Anna and my father straddle a stump. On seeing me she shifts to its edge. She wipes my sweaty brow with a tissue, appraises my pickings.
‘You’re not getting any better at this, are you? Look, the gold-capped ones with the white stems, they’re podberyozoviki. You’ll find them under birches. Syroyezhki are the flat or domed ones, easy to spot. Pink, purple, green, grey, yellow sometimes.’ She holds up a handful. ‘These ones are okay, they’ve got the meaty taste, remember? But stay clear of the red and white spots with skirts over the stem.’
She tosses them away and nuzzles my shoulder. ‘Never mind, Sergey and I picked enough to feed the Red Army. So long as some of us know what we’re doing.’
My father stands up, takes off at a young man’s pace through sticky grass. We fan out behind. Nearer the dacha he falters, stops, kneads hands against hips as if to pump vigour down his legs. When I catch up I see his wedding ring is missing and the finger so swollen and raw that I have to stop myself asking if it came off in the forest.
Oak foliage, leaves bronzing round their edges, dapples the dacha, a two-storey unpainted wooden structure with a pitched roof. Lilacs in fading bloom encircle the verandah. The neighbour’s mangy black dog flails over a stile, lunging at sparrows. We remove our galoshes and file into the kitchen, its floorboards sagging.
Teresa and Anna sort the older and larger mushrooms for cooking straight away, the young podberyozoviki for drying at home. They sauté the orange-yellow lisichki and the kaleidoscopic syroyezhki with sunflower oil and onions and heap the others into a large shallow pan. Frying aromas envelop the dacha as the evening meanders to dusk. I draw a bucket from the backyard well, help my father set the table while the women place cream on saucers, pelmeni dumplings in a large bowl and boil the samovar for tea. My father fetches champagne from the fridge and we all sit at the table.
‘Toast, Vasya,’ Anna prompts.
‘To happiness,’ I begin, ‘past and present.’
‘To family,’ my father amends. How Sergey Vladimirovich, exemplary husband and father, loves the last word. Anywhere, anytime. As glasses clink he whooshes, clutches his chest. ‘Forgot my angina pills. Anyushka, may I have a pelmeni?’ He reaches to pluck one from the bowl then scoops some cream.
My mother pins his wrist with hers. ‘Dairy’s off the menu old fellow, you know that. Dr Pavlov summed it up – your circulation is a great system for shunting cholesterol around. Anna, salad instead for Sergey Vladimirovich, please.’
My father acquiesces without a murmur. For ten minutes or so chewing is the loudest noise until a nightingale carols on the windowsill. Its mate coos from their nest.
Anna serves tea and bonbons and the party shifts to the sitting room. Finishing the champagne, which is on the saccharine side, my father takes a bottle of Stolichnaya from the pantry, flouting the folk taboo on chasing bubbles with spirits. Anna sits beside me on the divan, my parents in armchairs on the opposite side of a rough hewn oak table, my father’s handiwork. Like a chess player arrogating the first three moves, my father advances the bottle to the commanding centre, positions his tumbler alongside, another closer to me and pours two shots.
I will remember the day as my weaknesses on parade. Perhaps that was my father’s intention all along. I’m a wary imbiber. One glass befuddles, two curdles, the third reaches my gullet and turns around. Alcohol, a disagreeable acquaintance, seeks me out. I will myself immobile. This is one contest I need only decline in order to win.
My mother cocks her head to the birdsong. Vestigial bonhomie gone, my father squints. ‘Don’t you respect me?’
Between two men it is hard to imagine a keener provocation. My father draws back his elbow like an archer, balls his fist. In his feeble defence, he has never hit me. Not technically anyway.
I stifle a yawn, stand up. ‘Been a long day. Better clamber up while I’m capable.’ I mount the stairs to the attic where Anna and I insist we sleep as courtesy to our seniors. Halfway up I hear my mother excuse herself.
‘What sort of man are you?’ my father calls after me. ‘Leaving me to drink with your wife.’
‘You’re right, Sergey Vladimirovich. I’ll never be half the man you are.’
When was the last time I refused my father anything? Including our monthly get-togethers. I undress sitting on the bed, sink into the mattress. In the small hours I’ll creep down to clean my teeth in the disused sauna outside.
I think back to the first time my parents arrived at our new apartment, hunched against late September evening. Outside the elm leaves were only beginning to yellow and drop but both were swathed in furs, and my father’s teeth chattered. We relieved them of their coats, fetched two pairs of carpet slippers, shepherded them to their seats. Upping the charm voltage, he complimented Anna on the pelmeni, their meat fillings liquid explosions in the mouth, her shortbreads appetising wedges with tea, asked for and scribbled down each recipe until she went to the kitchen flushed with praise.
Elbow cocked in my ribs, he whispered: ‘You see, my boy? The secret to marriage is in the detail. Let her sense she knows some little thing you don’t.’
My father segued via the weather – there was after all something to this global warming phenomenon, too many freak extremes, they couldn’t all be Western propaganda to entrench the productivity gap – to politics. He reminded us, loud enough for the neighbours to hear, how wonderful it was that eavesdropped or bugged conversations were no longer pretext to be hauled off in the dead of night, and you young people should never ever take this for granted but fight tooth and nail to protect it. His generation, the Sixtiers, coming of age in the post-Stalin thaw, saw off Khrushchev, tasted and squandered freedom, traded whitegoods and jazz for decades of repression. All the while my mother faced sideways, hands pressed on thin knees, twirling her wedding ring.