‘We went together. I described and pointed them out to you. I also don’t remember exactly.’
‘Now I simply know. I walk, pick and know.’
‘Don’t be so confident. You still have to be careful.’
‘If I don’t know I don’t pick the mushroom.’
‘But how do you know that you don’t know?’ my mother asked.
‘I don’t know how, I simply know. I know that from you.’
Having finished our sandwiches, we were silent once more. We crossed the meadow to reach a stand of lime trees. Their leaves had already started to yellow. Dried blossoms were drifting from the oldest trees. There weren’t supposed to be mushrooms here. Yet through the leaves on the ground peeked red stalks with grey caps. Their shapes were like the boletes, but their colours were new. Beneath each cap was a strange yellow-gilled sponge. I didn’t recognize these mushrooms. My mother examined them with acute interest.
‘Do you know these?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, starting to cut the mushrooms and to put them in the basket.
‘Why are you cutting them, then?’
‘I’ll have to check them out,’ my mother answered.
On our way back, the sun disappeared and a light rain began to fall. Exhausted, rain-soaked, with full baskets, we returned home.
I was convinced that once my mother looked over the mushrooms found in the lime tree copse, she’d throw them on the compost. But she cleaned them carefully and made a separate pile for them. I felt a pinch of the old fear.
‘Mamma, you aren’t going to try those mushrooms on yourself, are you?’ I spoke up when the pots on the wood stove were already bubbling and the pans were sizzling.
‘There are only two possibilities: either they’re safe or they’re deadly,’ my mother said. I noticed an odd kind of fascination in her eyes.
‘Are you not afraid you’ll die?’ I asked in despair.
‘No, I’m not afraid. But we don’t know if death is certain from them,’ my mother snapped back, continuing to clean the boletes, chanterelles and orange milk caps.
I wanted to grab those damn colourful pretend-boletes and throw them on the fire.
But my mother boiled them. She tasted them that very evening.
‘See, they turned out to be safe mushrooms after all,’ she said calmly, when I brought up her big mug of morning coffee.
I sat down on my mother’s bed and looked on as she lit her first cigarette. I thought about what had really happened. Was she playing with life and death? Was she the most courageous woman in the world, who wanted to know what she didn’t know? I reached for her blanket-covered legs and pressed my face against them. Thus we sat there for a moment.
The usual hamster’s wheel of the ambulatory centre began again. The hot summer had done its work. They came and came, mainly wanting to get rid of their foetuses. I thanked my exile for ridding me of the means to do this for them. I just confirmed that they were pregnant. I didn’t try to tell them how the tiny foetus can evade the instrument attempting to scrape it out of the mother’s womb. Or that this is effected knowingly by both of us, my patient and me. Or that the man often knows nothing and prefers to know nothing about it, for these are women’s concerns in a woman’s world.
I often thought of the woman who’d been chanting in the church. Finally she came to see me. As I had anticipated, her right breast had been removed. But she radiated determination and vitality. The doctor in the city had told her that for the time being she had no reason to worry. The malignancy had been cut out and she was free of it for now.
I told her that I had gone up to the church several times but had found it empty.
Well yes, no one except her ever went there. But now she would go again and more often. Because she had to thank the Giver of Life, for the malignancy had been stopped. The one who had given birth to the Healer had healed her.
She left me a tiny picture: the same icon to which she had been chanting. And she gave me a slim wax taper to light when I felt sad.
On the point of leaving, she turned around and asked how I had been able to diagnose her malady.
‘That’s just from experience,’ I said. ‘Medical experience.’
‘No, no,’ she said. ‘I see that you can see more clearly.’
She said goodbye and left.
I opened the window to air the room. The September wind whipped up a maelstrom of yellow leaves which flew into the room, scattering the papers on my desk. The picture of the Virgin had fallen face down. ‘Pokhozha na vas’ – ‘Just like you’ – was written on the back.
As always, the school year began during the beetroot and carrot harvest. The autumn squalls did not let up. Drenched, we squatted on our boxes, cutting off beetroot tops and twisting off carrot tops. The piles in the field appeared interminable. I swore to do everything possible so that I would never, ever again have to sit rain-soaked on a box, wearing freezing mud-caked gloves and cutting off beetroot tops. A year from now I would join the Young Communist League. Then it would be summer and I would move back to the city and enrol in a secondary school. It would be the start of a new era.
The work in the kolkhoz fields dragged on. Our classes, therefore, only started in October. Having gone from the wet fields into the bright, warm classrooms, we needed at least a week to get back into the rhythm of school. Our kurtkas, pullovers and rubber boots were replaced by school uniforms. Instead of eating in the field kitchen, where tea, bread and great vats of stew had been brought to us and consumed with relish on the spot, lunch was now in the school lunch room.
‘It’s good that you won’t have to slave any more,’ my mother said one evening. ‘Everything will be different in the city school.’
I sensed the pain of parting in her voice. The pain that for all these years I’d got to know in my very bones. The years of exile had brought us closer.
At school we were rehearsing Anna Sakse’s Pasakas par ziediem – ‘Fairy Tales about Flowers’. I was given the part of a jasmine plant. In the evening my mother and I role-played the fairy tale’s ending. She was the artist who loved painting in many different colours and who wanted to be begged by the jasmine to give it colour, and I was the jasmine who refused to bend or to beg.
‘It’s a beautiful fairy tale,’ my mother said. ‘Life often makes one bend.’
But I had fully entered my jasmine character. I wouldn’t bend and I wouldn’t beg. Even if my face was splashed with paint, I would stand straight or I would break. And I played my role very well. In a white costume made from an old sheet, on the steps of the small stage in the school music room, I stood unshakeable, even when the artist spattered me with yellow paint. A splash of paint even caught me in the face. People laughed. But I stood stiff as a post, looking straight in the faces of everyone laughing, until they fell silent. The narrator’s voice rang in the silence: ‘Try to bend her – she’ll break.’
Soon life dragged us from a fairy tale into ghastly reality. Brezhnev died on 10 November. Everyone had thought that he was immortal but he died. The school hung a large picture of him draped with a black mourning ribbon in the gymnasium. What would happen next? We were convinced that war would break out.
The day of Brezhnev’s funeral, our school was given a holiday, on the condition that we watched the funeral on television.
This seemed like idiocy to my mother. She had bought two bottles of wine and was drinking in her room. Still afraid that war was imminent, I settled down in the front room. I turned on our television and saw how the army and statesmen had gathered at the Kremlin in Moscow. They were playing a funeral dirge. The most awful thing was that they dropped Brezhnev’s casket into the waiting hole with an enormous clatter. No one saw it, but it’s very likely, judging from the noise, that he tumbled out of his casket, turned over and fell into his grave on his face. A dreadful thing to imagine.