My
mother's stories
chapter
19
The
forest of my dreams
(the ending)
So
it was quite understandable why I was fascinated with the idea of the
forest. It was it seemed to me a completely different world full of
hidden magic. So many creatures found their home in its mysterious
depth that every few steps there promised new wonders and new
discoveries. I always felt a thrill of excitement when I examined
woodland sceneries on postcards or in reproductions of paintings in
my textbooks. And who knows how many pages in my sketch-book I
covered with drawings of trees and huge flowers and mushrooms
sticking out of spiky grass between their trunks? If I couldn't get
to a real forest at least I could create it with my coloured pencils.
The
forest out-of-reach continued to tantalize me even after we moved
from the factory region with its foul smells to a new settlement
among wild steppe, where the land seemed untouched and the air filled
with herbal scents was fresh and sweet. But it was definitely a place
of heavy battles during the Second World War, and people digging
virgin soil for future kitchen-gardens used to find a lot of empty
cartridge-cases there. I forgot how our plot of land looked like when
we just arrived there, but my father used to tell me later that there
was a big old crater in the middle of it. He served as an artillery
man in the Army, so I could trust his judgment that it was a
shell-hole or a pit left by an aircraft bomb explosion.
None
of these things, however, disturbed me very much. They rather added
charm to the place I had already loved for its unspoilt nature. We
even had our own small forest near the railway. It was actually a
narrow forest-belt planted there with soil-binding purposes, but it
gave us so many opportunities for entertainment. Moreover, just
opposite our dwellings two forest-belts met each other. They went at
different angles and before coming to an end they overlapped each
other a bit. So in our vicinity we were lucky to have two
forest-belts with a nice wide lawn between them. That lawn covered
with motley grass was a wonderful place for outdoor games or for
sitting near the fire telling scary stories. It was so easy to
imagine, sitting there in the dark, that we were in a remote corner
of a real forest.
Playing
among the trees we met another reminder of the War. As my father
explained to me those strange oblong pits, that we came across in our
forest-belts, were just old half-crumbled trenches. As for me those
oddly-shaped hollows only increased some mysterious aura of the
place, especially in winter, when my beloved forest-belts were
covered with white sparkling snow. In summer my favourite occupation
was to hunt insects there with my best friend Tonya. It was the time
when I learnt how to catch tiny creatures without doing them any
harm. Most of our captives I released in a day or two because I
couldn't discover how to feed them. I loved to watch all the
creatures that lived in our forest-belts, even frightful spiders.
And, certainly, I was fond of nightingales spilling their warbles in
May, cuckoos with their repetitive calls, magpies chattering and
swaying their long tails, not to mention hedgehogs with their funny
tapping and snorting.
All
these observations only increased my desire to see a real forest,
which would be definitely much more beautiful and diverse than our
humble forest-belts stretched along the railway. But no matter what I
said to my mother she wouldn't even listen to me when I pestered her
with requests to go to the village. I was sure if only we got there
she, unlike my father and aunt, would go to the forest with me. But
her face darkened every time I started talking about visiting the
village.
I
remember how startled I was by my mother's reaction when I had just
arrived from my only trip to the village. I began to tell her at once
that I noticed tears in grandmother's eyes when she was saying
farewell to my aunt, my father and me, asking us to visit her again.
I expected my mother to be touched but instead she turned towards me
with her face distorted and snapped in response that her mother was a
filthy hypocrite and I shouldn't take her words literally. She used
to tell me very often how easily her mother would lose her temper and
beat her with a leather belt for every tiny fault that her eye could
catch. This time my mother threw another piece of shocking
information at me, describing vividly how her mother stopped beating
her at once if someone knocked at the door. And that was not all –
after letting a guest in she usually kissed her freshly beaten
daughter and asked her in a sweet voice to go to the yard to play.
After
such a story I should have understood there was no hope for me to
persuade my mother to go to the village. But it's difficult for a
child to accept that something is impossible. In childhood you
believe that everything is achievable – just be persistent and try
again. I don't remember how much time passed before I realized that
my mother would never change her mind about the village. As a matter
of fact, it was impossible to persuade her to go anywhere further
than the center of the city, and even those trips she often canceled
under some far-fetched pretext. I just couldn't understand her
behaviour! Didn't she like to repeat that she traveled across half of
the country when she was pretty young and had just escaped from the
village? And she really loved to describe her adventures and
wanderings at that time.
To be continued...
To be continued...
(c) Anna Shevchenko
