That small bird was the soul of the murdered and there’s no chance to make me step back from this belief…)

~ ~ ~

In the autumn following the separately spent summer vacations, the senior part of our family became fans of mushroom harvesting.

Of course, the mushrooms at the Object were always there, just take a couple of steps to any side away from the trodden school path and there’s russula growth for you, or solid portabella, long-legged enoki, or oily agarics, it’s only that too busy passers-by had no time for mushrooms… But when they give you the permit paper to get out the Zona for a whole Sunday and also provide a truck to take the mushroom-pickers to the out-of-Zona woodland, the “noiseless hunting” takes on much more attractive looks. Probably, all those conveniences were always there for the Object dwellers, only my parents did not use them until they needed a firmer reconciliation after the split-up summer.

(…though I did not think about such things at that time and was just all too happy to go with my parents to the forest for mushroom harvesting which term is more correct than “looking for”. However hard you look for, there’s no way you’ll find it, even before your very nose, until it calls you. Without the call you pass not seeing – it waits for someone else. It took me a life to understand it’s not about mushrooms only but any not-living (Ha!) inorganic thing…)

Especially for those Sundays, Dad made three pails of sturdy cardboard, lightweight and capacious. In the forest, the mushroom-pickers from the Zona parted and wandered everyone by themselves at times exchanging distant echoes of “ahoy!” by which you couldn’t guess who it was.

I liked alerted roaming in the silent autumn forest wet from the drizzle and fog. Of course, we didn’t pick too brittle russulas, but portabella or agarics were a good find. Dad made a small knife for each of us, so as not to spoil the mycelium, besides, on the cut, it’s seen at once whether the mushroom had worms.

The best sort of the mushrooms were “the whites”, or porcini, but I never came across any of them. The unfamiliar ones I took to Dad, and he explained that those were shiitake, or morels or simply poisonous throwaways.

At home, the mushrooms were poured from the pails into a big washing basin and kept overnight in the water, then Mom cooked or marinated them. All that was delicious, no doubt, but hunting them in the woods gave more delights…

One Sunday when the parents went on a visit somewhere, the three of us started chasing each other all over the apartment, just for fun. The merrymaking was cut short by a sharp knock at the door. On the landing, there stood the new neighbor from the first floor who said that our parents’ absence was not a reason to kick up such a bedlam and, when back, they’d be informed we couldn’t behave if left alone.

Later in the evening, Natasha ran in from the landing with the alert alarm: the parents were coming home already but stopped on the first floor by the neighbors from the apartment under ours. Oh-oh, we’re going to get hell!

How come she was at the right time in the right place? Quite easy. The landing was, like, the apartment’s extension wide for us to play balloon-volleyball, and Mom even started to use it as a gym, going out there in the evenings, when she was not at work, to jump a skipping rope. We followed her example, but I wasn’t as good at it as Natasha who practiced much oftener, and so she did at the moment of our parents’ intercepted return.

When they entered the hallway, Dad’s face was very angry. Without taking off his coat, he headed to the kitchen and brought a stool to the parents’ room, where he moved the rug aside and smashed the stool against the floor. “Keep quiet, eh?!” shouted he to the floorboards and squarely banged them once again with the stool’s seat, “Is it okay now?”

I realized that we would not be punished, but something still was somehow not right….

When leaving for school, we took along the sandwiches wrapped by Mom in newspaper sheets so that during a break we would take them out of our schoolbags and eat. For Sasha and Natasha, she put two sandwiches in one package because they studied in the same class. And before leaving for school, we also had breakfast in the kitchen.

However, on that particular Saturday, I left without my schoolbag and alone because that day the senior students were having a military game for which reason the classes for junior schoolchildren were canceled.

The game participants belonged to the competing groups of “the Blues” and “the Greens”, and for the start, they were to march into the forest in different directions. Their goal was to track down the opponent forces, surprise them, and capture their banner. Each trooper had to wear paper shoulder straps whose color indicated the group they were from. A gamester with one shoulder strap torn off became a prisoner of war while missing both meant they were "killed"…

That morning, I came to the kitchen late for breakfast because normally I got up wakened by the rise of the younger ones, but they enjoyed their day-off at the moment. Secondly, the previous night till late I kept sewing the shoulder straps onto my jacket with tiny, frequent, diligent stitches so that they would sit close to hinder tearing them off because of which military preparations I went to bed about midnight…

Now Mom was already leaving for her work and said there remained some pasta cooked for the previous day dinner or, if so be my wish, I could boil an egg for my breakfast.

I reminded her that I knew nothing about cooking eggs, but she answered it was as easy as pie: to have a soft-boiled egg you boil it for a minute and a half while three-minute boiling makes it hard-boiled. She even brought the alarm-clock from their room and put it on the windowsill next to the mushroom jar before taking a hurried leave…

Such three-liter jars were kept in almost every kitchen at the Object and they were filled with a mushroom that had nothing to do with the forest. It looked like some greenish slime upon the water in the jar and, in spite of the ugly looks, it turned the water into a tasty drink reminiscent of effervescent kvass, even though they called its producer ‘tea’-mushroom. When the jar contents neared their end with the mushroom wisps scratching the bottom, the jar was simply refilled with water and put aside for a couple of days to prepare the drink again. Women were gladly sharing pieces of the mushroom among themselves because when grown too thick it left no room for refilling the jar.

So, marking the time by the alarm clock next to the mushroom jar, I poured water into the small pan indicated by Mom before leaving, loaded it with an egg, lit the bluish springy fire in the gas stove and put the pan on it…

After exactly a minute and a half of waiting, the water around the egg did not look like being hot, so I decided, okay, let it be a hard-boiled egg. Additional one-and-a-half minutes past, some scanty vapors did start to rise from the pan, besides, the pan’s walls underwater developed lots of small bubbles, and I turned the gas off because I had exact instructions on how to cook boiled eggs…

(…the byword about the first pancake in the batch turning out a sorry lump can be safely expanded with “the first boiled egg is a slushy mess”…)

The military game participants were mostly in sportswear and noticeably reluctant to enter the school building. So all of us crowded together in the yard idling the time in small separate groups. In the one I was with, everybody appreciated the minuscule stitches that kept my shoulder straps in place. I proudly patted the one on my left shoulder—no way to grab at it, eh? Nothing like by those boys who fixed theirs by just a couple of stitches and now their shoulder straps stuck out like a cat's arced back asking to be torn off with just your pinky finger.