as if it was trying with all its being not to remember how icy, how invigorating, how ringing and crisp it once knew how to be.
There was a place on the way back from Klyaz’ma, a mixed grove where one November we picked mushrooms in the first snows. That day, remember, was also foggy, but the sky was still bright above. The road was smeared with such terrible sludge that the old car with its bald summer tyres shot into the ditch. Fortunately, we were driving slowly – so got away with just a little fright. Aleksei set off back to the dachas on foot to get help, while we, not wanting to hang around on the road, walked deep into the winter grove with Lenechka.
Soft, clinging snow was lying on the pine needles and yellow leaf-fall, thickening the arms of the spruces and forming fringes along the branches of birches and aspens. It was Lenechka who spotted a cluster of small snowy mounds in a shallow dip, and scattering away the snow revealed huge, creamy milk mushrooms12 – real milk mushrooms, freshly fringed, beaded on their silvery undersides with white dew drops of their secret juices.
Lenechka skipped back to the car for a penknife and they, lost in awe, cut half a dozen mature mushrooms, and were struck by the rich aroma which brought the soul alive with its sense of warm summer rain and dew-soaked forests plants. It emanated not only from the exposed milky caps, but rolled in waves from their leafy nests that were laced with the whitish threads of their hidden mycelium. Life itself, continuing against the odds, smiled on them in that white grove, where it seemed, every living thing was held forever in suspense.
Lenechka would have already been twenty-two. He died four years back, appallingly and stupidly – not in Chechnya, but during a student winter hike in Kolsky.13 He broke his leg and froze to death in the tent, while the rest went vainly to get help.
After that, Nina couldn’t look at snow for a long time. She’d even had to find a job in Cyprus to escape it. But she couldn’t settle in the Mediterranean and had eventually returned to Russia and learned to face the snow again. Now it flew and beat the window and smothered, smothered everything, and her heart, Nina felt, was humbled in waiting for the coming white, pure, infinite spaces of eternal winter, so light and perfect that her soul would feel neither warmth nor cold but reflect only the light of the skies that still glows even in the total Russian darkness.
The electronic orchestra, mechanical and predictable as the duties of existence, went on boom-boom, boom-boom, officiously leading Nina back to the banalities of life, but she wouldn’t turn it off. She suddenly regretted that she’d let the idea fill her head that she must come home so early, because nothing now seemed to save her from mortal vanity, not even calling her husband’s name, nor screaming, nor howling aloud to the God of the Just for Justice – and all that was left to her was to swallow her usual strong sleeping pills and slump at once into a deep sleep.
But before that she must still dry her hair – and kill another two hours, or else she would wake before it was light. And she’d have to while away the hours in silence, because those snooty neighbours wouldn’t tolerate music late.
7A diminutive name for the road running east from Moscow to Vladimir, made famous in a great painting by Isaac Levitan from 1892 (now hanging in Moscow’s Tretyakovsky Gallery), which shows the lonely, open road stretching into the distance.
8The Church of the Intercession on the Nerl is one of Russia’s most treasured architectural monuments, a perfectly square twelth-century church in white stone built on a man-made mound above the Nerl river.
9The flower known in English as coltsfoot, once widely used in herbal medicine in the treatment of gout, but which has been found to contain alkaloids that cause liver damage.
10The Russian common name for meadow buttercup.
11In Russia, wormwood is often used in herbal medicine and its bitter taste is a symbol of a bitter truth that must be acknowledged. In contemporary Russian poetry, it is often a symbol of the loss of illusory beliefs.
12Milk mushrooms or milk-caps, known as gruzd in Russia, are mushrooms of the genus Lactarius, and get their name from the milky liquid they secrete when you cut them. They are little thought of in the West, but Russians love them. There is a Russian proverb, ‘If you think yourself gruzd, get into the basket’ – that is, if you’re as good as you say you are, get on with the job.
13A district in the extreme north of Russia, on the Kola peninsular deep within the Arctic circle.
3
THE GHOST OF THE
BIRD-CHERRY TREE
COMING BACK TO the present day from the past, from Karlovy Vary where the freedom from schedules gave me those mountain walks so good for the heart, spring has arrived at last – and it has arrived on the heights of London, too.
I once thought of London as flat, like a tourist’s map. But, no, to the south and to the north of the Thames, first gently, then more dramatically, this great city rises to various hills, some completely built over, others sweetening the view with the dark green of mature trees rising above the lighter green of grassy parks and open spaces.
Hampstead Heath to the north is famous, known for its absurdly expensive mansions and conserved woods and heathland, but I dwell in the south, amongst lesser known hills, with less appeal to tourists. Indeed, so little is their appeal that even the whimsical drivers of London’s black cabs cannot always be persuaded to venture ‘south of the river’. But if you take the bus from Waterloo, as we often do, you find the ups and downs begin even in Camberwell, reminding us continually that to reach the next crest, you must always first descend – so there is no need to be upset when your life takes a downturn …
All the hills around Sydenham, on top of one of which nestled our house, have their own names: Honor Oak, Gypsy Hill, Denmark Hill, Forest Hill, Norwood. When you’re approaching this domain, already from the crest of Denmark Hill you can see that, alone among the southern hills, our hill, a deep overturned bowl, is entirely mantled in green, and from the taxi home after the night shift at the BBC, you can’t see a single light twinkling on it – as if it was left entirely untouched from those ancient times when all of London’s southern hills were the province of thick forests inhabited by deer and bears.
But it’s neither down to the English love of nature or divine disinterest that this wooded hill survives barely fifteen minutes drive from Buckingham Palace, and that the village of Dulwich at its foothills looks so historic. The reason, I discovered, is bears – or rather baiting bears for the pleasure of Londoners, arranging which considerably enrichened Shakespeare’s chum, the famous Elizabethan actor Edward Alleyn. It was Alleyn that bought the village of Dulwich and then bequeathed his estate to a special trust that has managed all the local land for four centuries, and prevents any unfortunate changes. Alleyn’s name is preserved in the names of roads. At the
