Valya and Tolya in Fall

Valya and Tolya Konoplyannikov had divorced two years back after a whole forty-two years of marriage, sent running in different directions by a mutual hostility that had gnawed into their very innards. A village divorce is a tiresome, no-win business. If you’re in Moscow, you can move from Beskudnikovo to Novo-Gireyevo and disappear into thin air. But in the village? No dice. You’re going to bump into each other at the cooperative store, the post office, or the clinic, and there you’ll be, nose to nose, with nowhere to run this time.

And then there’s the marital home. How can you possibly saw it in two? Where do you put the halves? In a small village like this, if someone sneezes at one end, someone else catches cold at the other. The Konoplyannikovs divided things up and divided some more, and when all was said and done, Granny Valya stayed in the Konoplyannikov abode, and Grandpa Tolya took himself off to an abandoned hut behind the old state farm’s stables. And so, after sharing out the barns, the woodsheds, the cowshed, the bathhouse, the cow, the sheep, the piglet, the chickens, and Tolya’s deaf old grandma, they made a fresh start at opposite ends of the village.

Valya’s retirement came before Tolya’s, and she started living like a princess, spreading store-bought butter on her bread, skipping the potato planting, and going to the dances at the club. But Tolya, now free of the spouse who had once been the love of his life, began pining for her warm back, her thick cabbage soup simmering away in the stove, the funny, gaudy socks she knitted so skillfully on five needles (always forgetting to bind off the heel end properly), and her tuneful snoring that sent him to sleep better than the television. And he hit the bottle. He drank for a week, then gave a thought to his deaf grandma, pined even more than before, and started building a new life, one inspired by the old state farm. “Forward” had been its name, so forward he went. And then cabbage soup came back into the picture, and woolen socks too, because his grandma, deaf as she was, could still wield a set of knitting needles. He built a new bathhouse, cemented a great big kettle into the stove to supply his hot water, bound together leafy branches to make a winter stash of bathhouse switches, and started waiting for fall to arrive and offer him an escape from the sorrows of his past life.

In fall, everyone in Kolpakovo – old and young alike – quit caring about their daily bread and raced off into the forest, because it was the start of mushroom season. They toted the mushrooms in tightly lidded birchbark buckets, in baskets, in backpacks, or transported them in wheelbarrows, in car trunks, even in tractor carts. So bountiful was the area around Kolpakovo that prominent mycologists would actually publish articles on “the Kolpakovo phenomenon” in scientific journals. Mushrooms sprouted up far and wide. In gloomy stands of spruce, and in patches of birch, and in bashful aspen groves, and in pine thickets free of undergrowth, there were mushrooms everywhere. Some went as far as to grow right under people’s windows, along pathways, behind the bathhouse, even by the cooperative store, where a bench had been set firmly into the ground, which was littered with cigarette butts – even here, for better or worse, there’d be death caps poking through.

The folks in Kolpakovo would start by pouncing on every mushroom, but come September they cooled off and started picking only the sturdy little boletuses with their chocolatey-looking caps and the Caesar’s mushrooms, for brining. The little boys lobbed russulas at each other and gathered the itty bitty caps of birch boletes, kicking their swollen stems all over the place.

The Konoplyannikovs, no longer husband and wife, started mushrooming solo. Granny Valya would leave her hut on the first side street that meandered leftward from the highway, while Grandpa Tolya would trudge off from the other end of the village. But all roads, as the saying goes, lead to Rome, and they would always be making their way into the forest at the same time. Because there was only one way in. It was where the river that flowed around the mushroom-rich places went all meek and mild, narrowing to a stream and obligingly letting folk stride right over it. Granny Valya, wearing sweatpants and a scarlet checked shirt cinched with a military belt and carrying a birchbark bucket set in her backpack, bore left from the fork in the path, and Grandpa Tolya, wearing identical pants and an identical shirt cinched with an absolutely identical belt, bore right. Tolya, mind you, had ditched the backpack in favor of a birchbark basket that he’d woven himself. And had a lid.

The meeting at the way into the forest caused the former Konoplyannikov couple considerable annoyance mixed with a competitive envy. What if the other one picks more? Makes a better job of it? What if one of them gets ahold of the tiny, robust little boletuses, the sort that are just begging to be canned in brine, and you end up with nothing but flabby old aspen mushrooms and rough-stemmed boletes with spores already spilling from their slack mouths onto the withered grass?

Back in the day, the Konoplyannikovs would roam through the places where mushrooms grew, hallooing and calling to each other, the words winging their way over the spruce saplings: “You got anything, Valya?” “Not a thing here, Tolya. How about you?” Valya – young then, a chubby cheeked cutie – would give a whispered gasp when she discovered a whole clutch of prized white mushrooms under the low-hanging spruce boughs, and Tolya would “oooh” and “aaah” when he happened on a family of Caesar’s mushrooms nestled comfortably among the roots of a pine. And then, calling back and forth loudly enough to drown out and fluster the forest’s bird population, they would hurry toward each other, perch on a fallen tree, and upend their baskets to tip out their haul.

“You got more,” the generous-hearted Valya would sing out.

“But look at yours. They don’t get any better than that.”

Tolya would stroke his wife’s damp, sweaty back and take from his faithful old duffel bag a half-pint of vodka, some boiled eggs, and a little slab of lard rubbed with garlic, that had tobacco flakes sticking to its pink flank, and they would feast, with an occasional glance at the stingy fall sun. And it might be that they’d tumble to the ground, doing as young people do, in the pleasant shade of the late-year foliage, until the spiteful little black ants started harassing them, biting them all over their tender spots, so thoroughly that for a week afterward they couldn’t so much as dream of sitting down.

But oh, the old days, those sweet old days, are long gone, and the Konoplyannikovs, two halves that had once been a whole, prowl the woods on their lonesome, and it gives Granny Valya no joy to find a sturdy-legged boletus, and Grandpa Tolya has no use anymore for a Caesar’s mushroom. They begrudgingly cram into their baskets whatever comes to hand – a family of red-headed chanterelles, a gray milk cap – and they aren’t even too squeamish to pick those runny-nosed rough-stemmed boletes or a clutch of identical honey mushrooms with spotted caps. There’s no zest in it, there’s no love, there’s nothing but the mean-spirited moodiness that drives them into the forest for no apparent reason than to mock all that had been good about their life together.

And so they wander, walking in circles, and Grandpa Tolya sees Valya’s scarlet shirt flickering amid the birches, and Granny Valya hears Tolya groaning as he straightens up, and realizes that his back has stiffened again and thinks, out of old habit, that he needs to go to the healer woman to have the lumbago beat out of him, because that’s helped before... And the old man wants so much to hug that fool of an old woman, and grab a big handful of a soft rump snugly tucked into old sweatpants, and tumble her to the ground again under the same spruces that long ago had shot up to become slender beauties...

But no. They come out of the forest at the same time, and Granny Valya makes a wry face and says, “You’ve picked some death caps,” to which Grandpa Tolya replies, “You’re a death cap, Valya. One bite’s all it takes to poison a man,” and she follows up with, “An old toadstool like him is good for nothing but steeping in store-bought vodka to cure the arthritis...” And they go their separate ways, into a new and lonely life where even mushrooms bring no pleasure.