Andrey MAKAROV

     SHARDS

     (translated from the Russian original)

     My pal from the training unit stationed near Peter{1} talked me into going mushrooming. Sure, it was autumn already, but he claimed not everything had been swept up from the forest.

     I was never an avid mushroom hunter, but wanted to fill myself with forest air before the winter comes. And my pal was still pressing me about mushrooms, boasting about some treasured hollow, where every tussock bears a mushroom, made into crystal by morning frosts – give it a boot, and like a bell it chimes.

     I doubted about the bells, but didn't argue. The allotments tending season coming to an end, the electric train was half-empty and dirty and dragged its heels unmercifully, making a stop near every milestone.

     To get to the place from the railway station, we had yet to make a twenty-minute leg by bus, which was a ragged 'cattle-mover'{2} with an ancient sign over the door, saying: 'Fine for a ride without ticket is 3 roubles'.

     'Shard of the past', exulted my friend, 'the life those people had!'

     He was grabbing the broken handrail and was just smacking his lips in envious admiration of those fabled times.

     The bus was shaking cruelly. Each time it dropped into the next pit on the road, it seemed it'll come apart in a moment. Each time, however, the bus exerted itself and resumed trudging the road, coughing up blue smoke, some onto the pine forest, some into the compartment.

     We got off near the lake.

     Indeed, there were mushrooms in the hollow. While not quite on every tussock, their dark caps jutted here and there, sprinkled with conifer needles. They were hardened after the night cold, and even couldn't be cut off, only uprooted, then heaped in the basket like a woodpile.

     We wandered apart. My pal in his camo disappeared from view now and again, then reappeared, gingerly treading a moss with his boots, as if on a minefield.

     Finally the sun got to a midday high. It didn't get warmer, however, only the many hues of the autumn forest got brighter.

     'Rest', my friend suggested.

     We glanced into each other's baskets jealously. We were even, half a basket each.

     'So, are these for a snack?', I asked.

     'Bless you! For a fry and mushroom stew for the kids.'

     'So?', I wondered, 'Weren't you single just half a year ago? How did you manage that?'

     'Nah,' he laughed, 'No ring on me yet. That's for my landlady, she'll fry those for me and for the kids, too.'

     Looked like his landlady equipped him today, too: his simple food was neatly paper-wrapped, sandwiches with cheese separately from sandwiches with sausage.

     Having had our snack, we started off again. We got too lazy for picking mushrooms and were just walking along. My pal spat at a fly-agaric which was sticking out smugly just near the path.

     'See the louse. And it's always so: something good comes forth, it gets mowed down in a blink, but anything no-good just keeps standing', and he promptly switched to his own matters. 'In our regiment half of the officers are packed into the hostels or are renting rooms or summer-houses. So I rented one, too. The flat's with two rooms, one's pass-through, so landlady and her three kids live in the pass-through one, and I'm renting another, like, the separate one. Summertime, stuffy and reeking, and yet kids stay at home. And would you look at the flat?!'

     'Zero furniture, so I guessed winos. Two months advance, she tells me. So I paid. She ran off, to get a bottle, by my guess. Then there she comes, dragging a sack of potatoes and some groats. And these kids of her were snatching half-cooked potatoes right from the pot...' He bent, broke off the mushroom, examined it. 'Damned if I know, edible or not?'

     '...So I brought her some of our canned stewed meat, right from the Napoleonic times, know those cans covered in conservation grease? I was figuring on a place of my own to bring chicks to, and here I was, just put off...'

     'Sod it!', sweared he angrily, after plunging into a pit up to his knees. With more foul words he cleaned off some of the mud and set out again, carefully checking the suspicious spots on the ground with a stick.

     Having tramped the hollow broad and long, we had almost full baskets. It pleased us to manage so quickly, and annoyed, too, to have not quite full baskets, with a pile on top, like. All right, we could heap some cones underneath the mushrooms and pretend to be top mushroomers, like many do, but we still had some time, so we left the hollow and went into the forest. Although it would be hard to make out anything in the many hues of fallen leaves, there ought to be roll-rims in the forest. It's an unpopular sort, but if salted properly...

     But there were no mushrooms, although obviously nobody had visited this cluttered place before us. Soon, having passed about half a kilometer, we were stopped by a high wire-netted fence, with some three-storied stone houses visible behind it.

     'Just wicked', sweared my friend, trudging along the fence, 'quite a city here, now we have to go round'.

     The fence stretched away, disappearing from sight between the trees. Then we found the hole. A huge tree fell on the netting, crushed it and opened a way into the enclosure.

     We looked at each other. It was anybody's guess what we had here. Would be all right if that's a military camp, we had our IDs with us, they'll let us go, but what if the site is guarded by dogs? But we just didn't feel like following the fence further or returning to the road by way of the hollow.

     Hang it all, we climbed onto the tree and passed to the other side, just like by a bridge.

     We set off at a run, passing between the houses, and then we stopped in a spacious yard – involuntarily. The houses standing round it in a square stared at us with their bleak window-panes, long unwashed. The houses, and the site itself, were abandoned, and in a hurry at that. And on the grass there were toys lying about, trodden into the ground. Toy autos, a wooden engine and cars, near the wrecked sandbox, a doll with an arm torn off still sitting on flattened sand.

     Off to the side were the washstands, paint peeling off, and there was a heap of utensils near them. There were dishes and cups, small enameled cups with berries painted on, all pictures different, so the little children wouldn't mix them.

     There was a draught of wind, and the door in the nearest house creaked willingly. You could just believe that any moment now children will come out running and form a 'crocodile', their tutors ordering them with feigned strictness, and then all will tramp to the lake.

     As it was, there weren't a living soul around us. Behind the door which just opened we could make out the children's beds and cabinets, heaped in disorder.

     'Epidemics or what?', I asked, just to break silence.

     'Yep!', my friend chimed in, voice astonished; and he'd been here and there during his ten years of service, 'Just like Chernobyl, all this'.

     He went to the house, grabbed the cornice, chinned up and looked inside.

     'Why, everything's intact', he told me, having jumped down heavily, sounding at a loss.

     'So where are the children?', I wasn't letting go.

     'Where, you say?', my friend smiled spitefully. 'Oh, at Canarian and Caribbean resorts, in Bulgarian Golden Sands. Drop it, anyway', he continued, in a somehow rasping voice, 'Better get a look at those jacks.'

     The paths weared by thousands of children's feet were sprinkled with slippery jacks, robust and buttery, sitting in bunches amidst the pine needles.

     We topped our baskets quickly and hurried off to the railway station. Over the wide-open gate we were leaving behind, the faded sky-blue sign kept saying: 'Welcome!'. We quickened our pace, and then some. There were old pioneer summer camps on both sides of the road, all empty, all with gates open. Only the names changed on the signposts: ...children's health-improvement camp of the Karl Marx industrial complex... ...of the Metal-working plant... ...'Blue Arrow' of the Leningrad subway... of the 'Arsenal' plant...

     Then this 'Pioneers street', as the remaining signposts told us it was called, turned abruptly and led us to the highway.

     Sun unfroze the mud, so we reached the railway station dirty to the tops of our heads. In a kiosk near the platform we bought a can of German vodka for each of us, to finally unwind and get warm. My pal kicked his empty one on the rails, for the train to crush.

     'There was nothing', said he irefully, who knows about what, 'there's nothing now, and never was'.

     Warmed, we boarded the electric train, and the whole way to Peter, none of us said a word.