This is a true story.
Anastasia
Sergeyevna had a tree: a sixty foot tall silver birch: as beautiful a
thing as you ever saw. It stood in the bottom corner of her Dacha
plot and when the sun sank in the evenings the white metallic bark
glowed pink and red and orange, when the sun was high and bright half
of the garden seemed to flutter and swirl in the shadows cast by its
thousands of leaves, like the eddies of a stream or the wheeling
motions of a flock of birds. In winter the bark glowed dully in the
iron grey light and the branches were like a vast and erratic
spider’s web where the spirits of the air might be caught
She
and her husband Alexei Dennisovitch had planted it in 1953 when they
had received the dacha from her workplace: the ministry of economic
affairs. . The 60 square meters of land was a little boggy and it was
a fair way from the city, but it was freedom nevertheless: a place to
plant vegetables and fruit trees, a place to sit and watch the
seasons change and, as soon as the children came, a place to take
them for the whole of the summer away from the noise and dirt of the
capitol.
The
next plot, the one on the other side of the tree, was taken by Maria
Ivanovna, a colleague of Anastasia’s from the ministry. Maria was
not a well educated woman, she never read a book after finishing
accounting college, but she was kind enough in her way and doggedly
reliable so that soon enough they were looking after each others
growing children and lending each other tea or coffee when the shops
ran out.
Everything
changed around them, the leaders changed, politics changed, even
history changed, but the dachas and the lives led there each glorious
summer remained the same: the rhythm was eternal and when times were
hard, as they were often enough, the food they grew in those six
hundred square meter plots made life bearable. Coups and fights and
tanks in the street were irrelevant as long as there were evenings to
spend watching the trees sway in the wind and long summer days beside
the lake with the children splashing about or misty autumn mornings
gathering mushrooms in the forest. Then there were grandchildren and
better times undreamed of luxuries such as microwave ovens and colour
televisions even at the dachas as the now grown children took to this
new life in ways that the old could never do and made money and got
cars and other such impossibilities and still, through it all, family
remained the absolute centre of things.
And
there were the sheds: each family built a second building down in the
far corner of their plots and filled them with tools and jars for the
fruit and old boots and all the things that were too good to throw
away, and for a generation of Russians that had come to maturity
under Khrushchev and the long years of Brezhnev pretty much anything
was too good to throw away, who knew the next time that aluminium
frying pans might appear in the markets? And their children could
talk all day long about how everything was replaceable now, but it
made no difference: scarcity was too familiar. And between the two
sheds Anastasia Sergeyevna’s birch tree climbed higher and higher
every year: that constant symbol of their confused country and
inspiration to generations of poets, the silver birch, straight and
clear and beautiful; all the things they would have been themselves
if they had known how.
By
the first years of the twenty first century both Anastasia Sergeyevna
and Maria Ivanovna were grandmothers; Maria was even a great
grandmother with a little boy and a baby girl frolicking in the shade
of the tree. And this was the good life: plenty of food, long quiet
retirements and children who made up for the paucity of the pensions.
The television had more channels than you could count, newspapers
still didn't much worry about telling the truth, but they told you
everything else as they had long done elsewhere. Above all they told
you of gruesome crimes and horrendous misadventures and after a time
Anastasia Sergeyevna decided she'd be better off reading Chekhov and
Pushkin again.
Maria
Ivanovna, on the other hand, had a taste for the grim visions of the
yellow press: a world full of dreadful deeds was a satisfying
counterpoint to the long inaction of her retirement, a retirement
that started at fifty five years of age and had continued unbroken by
the time she read of the crushed man in the shed in her ninety second
year on this earth.
Her
Granddaughter's husband visited the dacha most weekends to see the
children and brought with him a fear filled rag that unnerved its
readership under the soviet title of Moscovsky Komsomolets. It was
full of nonsense, but Maria Ivanovna was a devoted fan and summer
evenings at the dacha were passed with her reading aloud from its
catalogue of daily horrors as the family went about its pleasure.
Crouched in her deck chair on the lawn, half blind she scanned the
pages with a magnifying glass in search of fresh reasons to write the
world off as a place of endless sorrow, eating her cinnamon cakes and
drinking sweet tea as the sun blew golden light through the leaves of
Anastasia Sergeyevna's birch tree, the laughter of children around
her and the garden in glorious bloom, she became the long lost sister
of the ancient Mariner, bound to tell her tales of dread to an
uncaring world, and everyone, especially Maria Ivanovna, was as happy
as could be.
But
the man in the shed, the crushed man was something out of the
ordinary run of dastardly fiends and murders most foul, for he had
been killed by, of all things, a birch tree that had fallen over in a
strong wind and brought the roof and walls of his humble shack
crashing down on him where he lay in the arms of sleep.
A
birch tree it was that had done for this noble father of three, this
was another of those tales that grew in the telling, innocent he had
been, as good a man as you could hope to meet in this veil of
sorrows, and that poor widow, left with those three children, or four
maybe, the story drifted somewhat.
It
was only a matter of time really before her eyes fell once more on
Anastasia Sergeyevna's birch tree, rising up above the shed where her
granddaughter's husband often slept on the summer nights, only now it
didn't rise so much as rear menacingly, loom even.
The
family took little notice of this growing obsession, Babushka was
ever given to exaggerating dangers: the woods by the lake were full
of rapists and murderers in her world, the little old man who drove
the ancient bus from the railway platform down to dacha land was a
homicidal maniac, prone at any moment to wilfully smashing his bus
into the wall of the cement factory with a demented cry of joy.
Nonetheless she kept at it: there was no doubt that tree was a
regular menace, look she had the article, she'd cut it from the
paper, hold on... it was here somewhere, three children without a
father, it was criminal to do nothing about such an inevitable menace
as that evil tree. And they all remembered the winds last year, well
they could come again and who was to say they wouldn't come when
someone was sleeping in that shed? Oh it's all very well to say you
wont sleep there if it's windy, but you'll forget, people do and then
what might happen, think of the children if you can't think of
yourselves.
And
reason was little use against her, the strength of the tree, it's
relative youth, it would take a tropical hurricane to knock that down
and it wasn't their tree anyway, it was in Anastasia Sergeyevna's
garden, and it was there long before they had built the shed and if
the menace was proven moving the shed would make more sense and why
won't you shut up about that tree for God's sake and finish your tea.
After
a month or so of torturing her family with these visions of horror to
no avail Maria Ivanovna took her stick and hobbled over to the fence
to tell Anastasia Sergeyevna herself of the evil that dwelt in their
midst. But Anastasia and Alexei Dennisovitch would have none of it,
they even laughed a little at the silliness of the whole thing and
kindly told Maria not to worry about it, even suggested she read less
of these trashy papers and take it easy.
And
that should have been that, short of Maria herself taking up an axe
and ridding the world of this evil there was nothing to do, and she
was far too frail to even think of any such thing: Nothing to do but
brood.
But
then the Uzbeks came. One weekday morning when Anastasia and Alexei
were back in the city and Maria Ivanovna's daughter had gone into
town to buy a few things, a group of young Uzbek guys came calling as
they often do throughout the summer to see if there is any digging or
weeding work to do so that they might make a little money to send
back to families in Tashkent or Bukhara in the dusty reaches of
central Asia. As America lives on Mexicans so modern Russia lives on
the people of the Caucasus and central Asian regions: street
cleaners, market traders, road repairers are invariably poorly paid
immigrants from these fading corners of the USSR.
And
so they came and they asked Maria Ivanovna if there was any work
needed doing and there was, they worked cheaply enough and she had
roubles enough to spare in the bag beneath her bed. If they would be
good enough to cut down that tree that her neighbours wanted
removing, they would have asked themselves but they were away for a
few days and Maria Ivanovna was happy to help out such an old friend
as Anastasia Sergeyevna, it was lucky that she was there when they
called really.
When
Svetlana, Maria Ivanovna's daughter, got back from shopping the
damage was done, the sixty foot birch that filled the sky with it's
dancing leaves was a pile of sawn branches in the middle of Anastasia
Sergeyevna's lawn and the last of the stump was already half sawn off
to leave a five foot tall monument to trickery and obsession hidden
between the saved sheds. The money paid the Uzbek men left, not
knowing that they had unwittingly taken part in a terrible betrayal
of trust and somewhere in a dusty central Asian town a child got a
bicycle for its birthday
The
next day Anastasia and Alexei returned to the dacha. Svetlana was
waiting by the fence, nearly in tears, to explain what had happened,
and Alexei was kind enough to worry more about Svetlana’s tears
than his own rage at what had been done. Anastasia Sergeyevna simply
wept, sat quietly on the steps of her Dacha and looked at the huge
pile of branches on her lawn and wept inconsolably. Maria Ivanovna
sat inside watching the television with a look of grim satisfaction
on her lined old face. Stubbornness had seen her through greater
trials than this in her ninety one years. She had been right; it
wasn't her fault if no one would listen to reason. If they didn't
care to take responsibility for what needed to be done then it was a
good thing she was still around to do so herself. God help them when
she was gone, she hardly dared to think what would become of them so
they might just as well forget about the stupid tree, what was done
was done and there was no changing it now.
Only,
the family didn't, couldn't let it go. When the arguments were
exhausted and the shouting was done and the accusations were worn
out, still they sat and looked at her in that way they had. Even her
granddaughter's husband wouldn't sit with her in the evenings any
more, and it was he whose life she had saved.
Stubbornness
was effective, but they were being as stubborn as her and sitting
alone in the main house in proud isolation was not easy for a
naturally sociable woman. After a few days it was all simply to much
and she took up her stick one more time and hobbled to the fence to
hail Anastasia and Alexei where they were picking up the last of the
leaves and tidying up their little garden.
She
called four times before Alexei came over and stood at the fence
tall, fine looking and proud with his strong kind face and his full
head of white hair, and he asked her in the politest terms what she
wanted of them.
She
answered with an explanation, then, when he didn't reply she gave
another explanation, then another then a plea then something that was
as close as she would ever get to an apology and all the time Alexei
Dennisovitch stood silent and looked her calmly in the eye until she
had finished talking then he nodded gently and walked slowly away
without speaking a word.
This
was awful, she called Anastasia. Again she called and again, but the
quiet old lady who had been her friend for fifty years and who had
never spoken a harsh word in all that time didn't answer nor turn her
head not give any sign that she heard the calls of Maria Ivanovna
just ten feet away from her by the wire fence.
The
summer was nearly over by now, and Maria Ivanovna had time enough for
no more than three or four more attempts at speaking with Anastasia,
each time with the same result. Peace would not come this summer and
Maria made a few impassioned speeches to the family on how
unreasonably stubborn some people could be, none of which met with
much in the way of sympathy. Then the cold came and the birches, the
other birches shed their leaves and bared their silver skins to the
wind and the rain and the iron grey light of the winter sky as dacha
land emptied and everyone returned to the city.
Lacking
much in the way of imagination and having only her own emotions to
guide her judgements Maria Ivanovna decided that the next summer all
would be well, she decided this many times and in many different
words and to any one who would listen. She decided it so many times
that each new decision sounded a little more desperate than the last.
After all, Anastasia was just angry, she would come round, it was
only a tree after all, and a friendship as long as theirs had to be
stronger than a tree, stronger than a silly disagreement like this,
everything would be right again, of course it would, time heals and
solves things as it has always done and time would heal this. It
would come right. Things always come right in the end.
In
February Alexei Dennisovitch called, Katya, Maria's granddaughter
took the call. Anastasia had died the day before of heart failure,
she had gone quietly. It had been a long life, hard at times, but a
good one, she had happy and healthy children and grandchildren and a
husband who had loved her dearly. The funeral would be quiet, family
only, thank you for your friendship over the years; Anastasia had
valued knowing such a good family and had been pleased that her own
children had grown up alongside Svetlana and her grandchildren with
Katya.
So
time heals only the things that fate and death allows it to heal, and
the death of Anastasia Sergeyevna was a deep shock to Maria Ivanovna.
There had been no absolution; no reconciling and a ninety two year
old woman can struggle to see beyond herself and her troubles into
the sorrow of another. To die with things like they were was almost
spiteful and she began to speak of the tree again to list the
justifications, to number the horrors that had been so closely
avoided. And her family was tired of it and would not listen: a man
had lost his wife, children and grand children had lost a dear and
lovely old woman and the tree was nothing but an emblem of Maria's
stubborn refusal to think of these things. None of them actually
allowed themselves to raise a quivering finger in the dead of night
and whisper icily “You killed her, it was you Maria Ivanovna who
took her life along with that tree, you, you, YOU!” But they
wondered if the shade of Anastasia might be visiting the dreams of
the ancient woman who was looking more haunted every day.
A
year later Maria Ivanovna passed away, on New Year’s Day in 2007
and the family's sorrow was leavened with the thought of what a long
and fairly good life she had lived, the last months of suffering had
been hard.
And
that's all, one time a tree was cut down when it should not have
been.
