The Birch Tree Murder

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.