From Siberia With Love

by Ilana Cohen

  “I’m a very busy man, I have no time for having fun,” he bluntly cut her off and gave her his famous slogan.

  “Nonsense, we’re all students and we’re all just as busy as you are. One must also go out and meet people, don’t you think? It’s something legitimate and essential considering our social status and our age.”

  “Perhaps you’re right, but it’s not for me. Besides, you’ve found me without me having to go outside and start looking for girls,” he winked at her.

  “All of us, all the girls here, are fantasizing about you. Do you know that, sweetheart?”

  Alex didn’t have the opportunity to give her a clever answer or to avoid the subject. She didn’t wait for any more words and kissed him once more with a lust-filled passion, all over his naked body.

  “You’re even more beautiful from up-close. Now I know everything about you…” she repeated and became excited once more.

  Alex’s crystallography department won an award for several scientific articles its students had published. The amount of the reward the apartment had won was so modest, there wasn’t any point in dividing it between the team members. Their boss decided to spend the entire amount to do some team building and take his people for a trip in the bosom of nature. They rented a bus and travelled far. After a few hours of driving, they all got off the bus which had stopped by the side of a deserted road, at the edge of the forest which was their trip’s destination. The same exact conifer tree forest they had at home, in the institute’s back yard. The purpose of the trip was to have a traditional barbecue, drink vodka and sing together in the fresh air, away from home. A summer sun was in the middle of the sky, and the company chose a partially shaded clearing not far from the bus. They carried there a grill they’d brought with them, coals, folding chairs, meats and salads the girls had prepared in advance at the laboratory. They had a merry time; men swung at the meat-scented smoke and drank vodka, each from his own paper cup. The women added some color to the vacation day when they took off their clothes and generously exposed their pretty bodies to the sun, wearing only tiny bikinis. They all sang together Russian folk songs and romantic songs.

  “Who would like to join me for a walk in the forest?” their guide and driver surprised them all right after they had finished the meal.

  “Leave us alone, we haven’t got the energy. It’s nice to lazily sunbathe here and pretty soon, we’ll have some coffee brewed as well.” People were too lazy to rise from their chairs; full, a little drunk, waiting for the coffee that was slowly broiling on the fire in an aluminum kettle, its aroma already filling the air.

  “I’ll come with you to the forest,” Alex, the youngest, and the most restless of the company jumped to his feet, ready to join their guide. He was also curious why the hell the driver had travelled with them for so many hours to this place in particular. The two men entered a dense coniferous forest. After walking a few hundred feet, they noticed low, wide bushes among the trees. These were paporatnik bushes, a rare species whose stalks bore large, wide leaves, ordered in layers, one beneath the other, all the way to the ground. A shrub of the Far East with high nutritional values.

  “Where are you, Nicolai, Nicolai!” Alex screamed in panic, because suddenly he couldn’t see the driver who had stood next to him only a second ago. “Nicolai!”

  “Shh, quiet, what are you screaming for, you are chasing the forest animals away!” Alex heard him speaking close to him, but couldn’t see him, as if the earth had swallowed him whole.

  “Where are you, man, you’re really scaring me!” he still spoke loudly, all frightened.

  “Shh, I told you not to shout, get down, under the bush, I’m right here at your feet.”

  Alex bent to the ground, pushed aside the leaves of the bush, and saw his driver crawling on the earth, covered with dry thorns. He stepped toward him and heard a sound under his soles, “crunch,” and another “crunch.” He immediately realized he was stepping on something brittle, breaking it with the weight of his feet.

  “Careful, don’t ruin our booty, our mushrooms! Get on all fours carefully and crawl like me.” Alex did as he had been told to and from up close noticed groups of small white mounds on the ground. Wow, it cannot be, he thought, it’s a rare and precious mushroom called gruzdy grown by only this particular type of bush, the paporatnik bush. This was the first time he had seen the mushroom growing from the earth, and so many of them! One next to the other covering the entire area below the paporatnik bush.

  “Careful not to step on the mushrooms, crawl on the ground,” the driver instructed him. “Cut the stem of the mushroom gently with a knife, don’t even think about tearing them! Don’t ruin my field, I come here several times during the summer to collect them,” he explained the purpose of the trip’s destination.

  “I don’t have a knife with me to cut the mushrooms,” Alex became stressed by the famous mushroom gatherer’s warnings.

  “A young Siberian man with no knife with him?” the guide got upset.

  “As you can see, I don’t,” he admitted his ignorance in the ways of the forest.

  “How do you enter a forest without a knife in your pocket? Aren’t you one of us, a rough Siberian man? Here, take one, I have two knives.”

  Alex took the knife and when he cut off the cap of a mushroom, he noticed a small bucket next to the crawling driver who was cutting one mushroom after the other.

  “Why didn’t you tell me to bring a container for placing the mushrooms in? Where will I place them now? See how many mushrooms we have here! And here and here!” he became as excited as a little child, but felt entirely hopeless.

  “That’s your problem muzhik, I’ve got everything I need,” the driver laughed at him and at the same moment, Alex improvised a crazy idea. He took off his pants, tied them at their ends and voila, he had an improvised sack with which to gather the precious gruzdy mushrooms. Very quickly, the improvised sack was filled with many mushrooms, but much of the booty still remained on the ground. He took off his shirt, tied its ends as well and had another mushroom sack. He still had his undershirt on and made a small improvised sack of it as well. In the end, he remained only in his underwear, carrying two smaller sacks on his back and dragging the trouser sack after him. Three sacks filled with rare and precious gruzdy mushrooms.

  “Take a look at our Alex! He got drunk and came out of the forest naked. What is he carrying on his back, this crazy idiot?” his friends rose toward him to help him with his load, booty from the forest.

  “Oh my, oh my, paporatnik bush gruzdy mushrooms! Beautiful, what a miracle!” everyone became excited at the sight of the three sacks filled with the precious mushroom strain.

  “Look, friends, I don’t eat mushrooms and I don’t know how to cook them. Let’s cast lots, and the first prize winner will get my pants, the largest sack of the three. The second prize will be a shirt full of mushrooms and the third will be my undershirt, the smallest sack,” he declared ceremoniously about an improvised lottery.

  “I’m not interested in your pants or shirt or undershirt,” a naughty PhD student whispered in his ears. “I’ll settle for the content of your underpants, young man.”

  Luckily for him, at the same moment, the driver announced the end of the team-building trip.

  “Gang, it’s getting late, we need to get going in order to get back home before dark,” the driver saved him from an intense embarrassment that threatened to betray his body’s reaction to the girl’s whispering. The entire group shared the expensive booty from the forest and filled up all the bags they carried with mushrooms. Alex dressed up quickly with moist clothes that smelled like fresh mushrooms, which didn’t bother him in the least. The main thing was to cover his body before the others would notice the changes it was undergoing. He took off the same clothes again late at night in the naughty PhD student’s room. This time he took off his underwear as well, for the lady’s sake. A week after the team-building trip, he received from another girl in his department
a jar full of gruzdy mushrooms, ready to be eaten.

  Chapter 10

  A Woman Alone

  Spinning with dizziness, tightness in the chest, heart exploding with the weight of emotions. It was an especially hot afternoon of the last day of July. A midsummer hell on earth. Scorching sunbeams covered the asphalt of the country’s roads, heavy with traffic following the large immigration wave from Russia during the nineties. A million and a half new immigrants from the former Soviet Union immigrated to Israel in just a few years, following the second gulf war, and flooded the small country.

  “Edith, please see the manager, you have a phone call in his office,” Edith received a message while serving a customer.

  “A phone call for me in the manager’s office? What’s with them? Why can’t they transfer it to my extension?” she answered.

  “Aryeh asked me to give you this message and that’s what I’m doing. I think you’d better go to him,” said her coworker from the next desk.

  Edith apologized briefly to the customer and went to the bank manager’s office. The telephone on his desk was open and he handed her the receiver with a grim expression on his face as soon as she had stepped inside.

  “Mrs. Weiss, you should come here right away, your husband is here with us.”

  “Excuse me, who am I speaking with?”

  “The hospital, intensive care unit.”

  “What happened?” she swooned.

  “There was an accident at work. They’ve brought us your husband Joseph Weiss. He is your husband, right? He was critically injured; he fell off the scaffolding of a three-story building.”

  “Oh no!”

  Edith didn’t even notice she sat down and couldn’t recall who had brought her the glass of water she was holding in her hand.

  “I called a taxi to take you to the hospital, Edith, I don’t think you should be driving now,” Aryeh said gently, his face showing concern.

  When she arrived at the cardiac intensive care unit, Edith was taken to the doctors’ room. “So, Mrs. Weiss, your husband suffered from fractures in his chest, ribs and pelvis. Additionally, he suffered a heart attack while falling and got buried under the scaffolding of the building that collapsed with him. We’re struggling to save his heart now, fighting for his life.”

  “What’s his condition now?”

  “Your husband is critically injured. Unfortunately, his life is still in danger. We cannot assess yet the extent of the damage suffered by his myocardium. You can see him now.”

  “Is he conscious?”

  “He is heavily sedated and suffers from breathing difficulties, but he’s conscious.”

  Edith covered her face with her hands, but she didn’t cry, she remained sober and in control. There wasn’t anyone there to comfort or cry with her.

  She did not leave the hospital for an entire month and remained with her wounded husband, giving him personal and devoted care, as if she had somehow connected with his veins and infused him with her life energy.

  Surprisingly, her aunt Anna from Natanya showed up at the hospital. She hadn’t seen or heard from her in years.

  “God bless you, auntie, how did you know about what happened to us? How did you know to come to the hospital?”

  “My darling child, you know me, I’m the family witch. What can I tell you, I had a feeling there was trouble at the settlement. I called and found out I was right, little Alex told me everything about it, I’m with you my dear. I haven’t forgotten you; you’re the only family I have.”

  “You see, aunt Anna, my Yossi is all broken up,” she said and burst into bitter tears on the elderly aunt’s shoulders. She suddenly felt weak after months of physical strain and emotional restraint. During that time of emergency, she had no time or strength to shed tears. Now that someone had arrived to comfort and aid her, she finally allowed herself to weep.

  “You, my child, should simply return to your work at the bank. You mustn’t endanger the only source of livelihood you have now.” It was obvious that she, little Edith, would become the family’s sole provider for the foreseeable future.

  “You will do well to go back to your work and the children as soon as possible. You should visit Yossi only after work, life must go on. Take a nurse or a private caregiver, he needs professional care. I’ll pay all the expenses involved with caring for him.”

  And so it was. Edith willingly accepted the savior aunt’s assistance and returned to her duties as a mother and investment advisor at the bank. She ran to and fro, from the bank to the hospital, for another month, filled with sweat and fatigue.

  Yossi underwent a series of orthopedic and plastic surgeries and the fractures in his body healed, his injured heart stabilized and began to function.

  “Your husband won’t be the same man he’d been before the accident. He mustn’t strain himself and he will need to take medications for the rest of his life,” the doctor’s words still echoed in Edith’s head – when Yossi suddenly passed away. During his first physiotherapy treatment, while still hospitalized, he suffered a deadly heart attack and instantly died.

  Edith reorganized her life pretty quickly as a new widow. She didn’t need to empty out living-room drawers to get familiar with the paperwork following her husband’s death. She was the one who had run their accounts and managed the household paperwork throughout their marriage and knew the content of each and every drawer well. Yossi had always been too tired to check the invoices. He had no idea how much they paid the electric company and phone company or about the amounts of municipal taxes. He wasn’t familiar with their bank account and had no idea about their credit card payments. Edith had always exclusively taken care of all monetary issues. She simply kept taking all the decisions by herself, just as she had always done. At the end, she simply got back to being herself, even without her husband.

  Chapter 11

  Love and Alex

  This book is all love,

  It is the only star above.

  It never leaves the stage,

  Not even for a single page.

  From first to last,

  My story is illuminated by love.

  Burning love, aching love.

  A love that shoots passionate flames to the sky,

  A creative love,

  Jotting down thought after thought,

  Impressions of excitement,

  Impressions of disappointment.

  Insolently daring to shorten the limitless distance between birth and death.

  A string of consciousness bursts from beneath my pen and is written onto the page,

  Forms and rhymes into creation.

  Much has changed from the time since she had lost her husband. She herself had changed; a change of status first of all. Now she was a widow, a mother of two older children, both already high school students. The dream-queen was gone, leaving behind a tough and resilient woman. She healed from her excessive tendency to dream very quickly, or perhaps she was indeed dreaming – trapped in the frigidity of constant stress, unable to let go even for a moment, to allow herself even a single pleasuring dream.

  A dramatic change had also taken place with Edith’s children since their father’s death, even though she had done everything she could to make up for their loss. It was as if both of them, Ruthie and Alex, had matured too quickly and in a sudden way. Alex was seventeen, tall and handsome, and how could he not be? After all, he was the son of the beautiful Edith. His face was much like hers, symmetrical and gentle. He had become too introverted, abandoned the few friends he had had, or perhaps they had left him, and would shut himself in his room after school. Edith bought him the most sophisticated computer that could be brought in Israel, Apple Microsoft הוספתי את הדגם-, in order to try and somewhat alleviate the pain of his loss.

  Unlike him, Ruthie didn’t like to return home from school and would go to meet her girlfriends. The girls began to go out on Friday nights and dolled themselves up before going out. They’ve turned into young ladies and
spent hours in front of the mirror, applying vulgar makeup, changing clothes in Ruthie’s room, giggling and make noise with no apparent reason.

  On Friday nights, when Ruthie would go out dancing, Edith couldn’t fall asleep until her daughter came back home. It sometimes happened that the young lady did not return home all through the night, and Edith, crazed with worry, went out into the street and desperately looked for her, seeking a miraculous salvation.

  “Mother, what are you doing outside? What happened, why aren’t you sleeping?” At daybreak, the young lady finally showed up, accompanied and supported by two of her friends.

  “We need to run back home,” the two girls said and quickly disappeared, before Edith could even open her mouth. She wanted to vomit, she wanted to die, her little fourteen-year old had been drinking and was now completely drunk.

  She didn’t lack for trouble, they kept on coming and she needed to handle them all by herself. She decided to go a little wild, to get out of the house and her dreary routine and get back to exercising in the gym that she hadn’t visited for the past six months. She needed to stretch her muscles and bones, to release the overwrought nerves and forget her troubles.

  Alex was already there, as if he had been waiting for her. He regularly worked as a trainer there, three evenings a week. He noticed her as soon as she came in, but did not approach her. The two greeted each other from afar. While she exercised by herself, he did not come to her, he had been busy with an entire crowd of female exercisers who were aided by his muscular arms to move their behinds left and right, up and down.

  “Tomorrow, right? Do I remember it correctly? You don’t work on Wednesday afternoons,” she heard him speaking to her and raised her head in complete surprise when he blocked her way outside.