The Smell of Fir

One day in the fall, my husband and his friend's father went to the forest to pick mushrooms.

After the rain, the forest smelled sweetly of fir needles; Andrei had broken some fir branches for the house.

- I don't like fir, - grumbled the friend's father. - It smells like death. I'm from Perm myself, in the Urals they always scatter fir branches behind the deceased at funerals.

Andrei didn't pay much attention to these words. He remembered this episode only when his friend called him and told him that his father had suddenly died of a heart attack shortly after that trip to the forest.

In fact, in the Urals it is customary to scatter fir branches on the ground when escorting the deceased to his final resting place.

In this way, the living protect themselves from evil, as if to "cover their tracks" so that the soul of the deceased forgets the way home.

The fear that the deceased might return and take someone else with him to the other world is deeply rooted in the Urals. Rare funerals are without the superstitious murmur of old women: "One is gone, wait for two more, these things always go in threes".

According to the old women, a dead person could take anyone with him - a relative or a neighbor - it didn't matter. To protect themselves and their families, the house was carefully cleaned after the deceased - the garbage was removed, the floor was washed, the stools were turned upside down.

At the wake, the guests were given handkerchiefs, cooked kolliva - boiled rice with raisins and honey - was served to all who came, but first the soul of the deceased was given a treat. This was to prevent it from frightening the living.

Frog

Near our summer house in Tagil there was a stream where water frogs, tadpoles, pond skaters and other water creatures lived.

One day Lenka and I caught a frog. Actually, I caught it because my cousin does not like toads and thinks that they give her warts on her hands.

Knowing Lenka's weakness, I teased my cousin in every possible way, shoving the frog under her nose and swinging it by its leg, trying to push the green prisoner behind Lenka's collar.

Lenka squealed and I laughed. Soon the frog died, and the neighbor boy, Vova, offered to give it a lavish funeral.

We got a tea tin and put the frog's body in it. We buried the "coffin" by the stream, put a pebble on top and decorated the "grave" with wreaths - spruce branches. Just then we had an argument: does the frog have a soul?

Lenka, who is the oldest (she's already in the second grade), says it's all lies and nonsense - there's no God, there's no soul, especially not in a frog!

I try to convince my cousin that the frog has a soul and will go to heaven like all other creatures.

Lenka snorts:

- So you think it's not on earth anymore?

- Of course not! The angels have taken it to heaven.

- Why don't we go and see? - Vovka suggests.

I suddenly realize that my friends have misinterpreted my words, but the two of them are already running to dig up the tea tin, open the lid and see that the frog is still there.

Lenka looks at me triumphantly and sticks out her tongue:

- You are a liar!

I don't know how to prove her right. I meant the soul, not the body! But there's no turning back. Froggy, darling, I whisper, please disappear, or that stupid Lenka won't believe me. Somehow it seems to me that the frog will grant my wish, I just have to wait.

- Maybe there's a line in the heaven? - I say defiantly.

An hour later, we dig up the tin again. The frog is there. My cousin says that everything is clear to her and that she doesn't want to be friends with liars. I get angry, but secretly from my friends, I look into the tin twice more. But it looked like the damn frog wasn't going anywhere.

In anger I grabbed the dead body and threw it far into the reeds.

In the morning, Lenka wakes me up excitedly, her eyes as big as saucers:

- Nataha, look, it's not there! The tin is still there, but the frog is gone. Can you believe it?

I angrily pull away from her and turn away from the wall. Let Lenka think what she likes.

A mermaid

My grandmother never missed a funeral in Tagil.

For her it was a kind of entertainment. She was not afraid of the dead, she felt something between pity and childish curiosity for them.

One day my grandmother came home and hurried off somewhere.

- A woman drowned in Vyja, - she told me. - The divers are looking for her. I'll go and see.

- I'll go with you!

I felt a strange excitement, a mixture of fear and a burning desire to see someone else's misfortune. How could a grown woman drown in a river where the water was knee-deep to a sparrow?

- She must have been drunk, my grandmother said, hurrying to get there as fast as she could.

It was a hot day and the sun was shining brightly. We crossed a rickety wooden bridge over the river and saw two men in black diving suits on a knoll.

Years ago my father and I fished here for crucian carp, tiny ones the size of a copper nickel, and now divers were pulling the body of an unknown woman out of the water...

Grandma added her stride.

I followed her. For some reason, I got chills. I was seven years old and had never seen a dead person up close.

While the divers were taking off their wetsuits, an old woman had walked along the shore, crying, picking up the things that were strewn there - a woman's bag, a dress, stomped sandals stained on the fresh grass.

As for me, I looked at the drowned woman with all my eyes.

She was not a young woman (by my standards), with a swollen face and wet, shoulder-length blonde hair. She looked like a mermaid, with pale skin and blue, bloodless lips. The only thing missing was a fish tail.

The "mermaid" was clutching her fists to her chest, helplessly, childishly, the way babies, suddenly frightened of something, try to protect themselves from danger.

I suddenly felt sorry for her. Just half an hour ago she had been alive, drinking wine, the empty bottle still on the grass, laughing, sunbathing. Then, apparently, she decided to go for a swim, went into the water, and the result was that she was gone. God, how ridiculous!

My fine and distant future

That summer in Tagil was a record summer for death.

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On one day there were sixteen funeral processions in our neighborhood alone! The sound of the funeral march didn't stop until noon. My grandmother and I would hurry from one entrance to another, squeeze through to the coffin, bow our heads in sorrow, and hurry on.

I remember a woman with an ugly purple ligature mark on her neck. They said she had hanged herself after the death of her husband, leaving two small children orphaned.

The children stood by their mother's coffin - a boy and a girl, about five or six years old, confused and silent. I kept my eyes on them. If I had been them, I would have gone mad with grief. To lose my father and mother at once, to be left alone in the whole world, what could be more terrible!

I also remember the old man, or rather not him, but his waxen hands, huge, swollen and speckled with brown, bound tightly with string.

I have only been to three weddings in my life, but I have seen hundreds of funerals. And every time I thought about the fragility of existence, about the fact that all people are mortal, it gave me goosebumps.

I could not understand myself in my feelings, whose fate is bothering me more - the living or the dead? Which is easier - those who are gone or those who are still alive?

It seemed to me that it was harder for the living anyway...

At the cemetery I often heard the deceased addressed with the words: "Thank God it's over", "We'll all be there", "God takes the best of us".

Sometimes my sensitive childish ear even picked up a hint of envy in these phrases. It was as if the deceased hadn't gone to rot in the damp earth, but had gone to a faraway, beautiful land where there was no grief or sorrow, and therefore had acquired a certain halo of sanctity in the eyes of the living. Everyone loved the "heavenly man," shed tears for him, and forgave him his sins and debts.

So maybe it really is better THERE?

I imagined the other world neither as heaven nor as hell, but as a place where there was a parallel life, not very different from life on earth. In this unknown world lived my great-grandmother Matrena, my grandfather Slava and my other deceased relatives. But unlike life on Earth, they were all young and happy there.

Later I found confirmation of my fantasies in Raymond Moody's books "Life After Life" and "Life After Death". The idea that my soul was immortal and that I would meet my loved ones was comforting, hopeful, but at the same time frightening - it was impossible to return from the abode of the dead and become myself again. So what's the point of rushing to get there?

The death of a soldier

I soon realized that, like my grandmother, I was drawn to funerals.

When I heard the sound of the funeral march - in the past, a brass band always accompanied the funeral - I would rush to find out who was being buried.

They usually buried very old men and very old women. At some point I even began to think that there was finally justice in the world and that death was now bypassing the young. That's what I thought until our neighbor's son died in the army.

Immediately after the morgue, the neighbors took the coffin with the young man's body home so that he could spend his last night at home with his family before being buried.

In the evening we, the neighbors, were invited to say goodbye to Sergei, the name of the deceased.

A red coffin stood on two stools in the living room. There were chairs around it. The hosts brought out the food for the guests - patties and pies with meat and potatoes, poured vodka for the adults and fruit jelly for the children.

The light bulb shone dimly under the ceiling, the mirrors and windows were covered with black cloth, and in this oppressive silence the clock in the next room seemed to tick extra loud. I chewed a patty and glanced furtively at the dead man. He was dressed in a green military uniform, a cap at his feet, and a large color photograph with a mourning ribbon on the headboard of the coffin, beside which a thin church candle was burning.

According to the military, Sergei, who served in the missile forces, died of radiation exposure. But neither his relatives nor his neighbors believed it. They thought it was not the missiles, but an explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, where conscripts were sent to clean up radioactive debris. The year was 1986...

Before my young neighbor was drafted, I had seen him a few times. Tall, broad-shouldered, short-tempered, the only son in the family. His parents were too old to have another child. So why had God taken Sergei away from them?

I desperately tried to find an answer to this question, to somehow justify the soldier's death, and finally convinced myself that a twenty-year-old guy could be considered old.

And if that was the case, then there was nothing wrong or unnatural about his death.

But little children are a different matter. Children should not die, they have no right to die!

But here, too, a crushing blow awaited me.

Accident with a schoolboy

Before the summer vacation, an accident happened in our school.

A boy, a second grader, died ridiculously and horribly.

In those years, teenagers had an extremely dangerous fun - riding on the elevator cab.

The boys would go to the top floor of a high-rise building, push the door of the shaft with a crowbar, and call for the elevator. When the elevator arrived, they would jump on top of the cab and ride up and down.

The most desperate would cling to the brick ledges with their hands, and while waiting for the elevator to arrive, they would hang over the abyss to show their bravery. The boy who died was unlucky; he was hit by the counterweight, fell down the shaft, and was crushed by the elevator.

The boys from our school who visited the scene of his death said it was a horrible sight - a pool of blood, intestines coiled on the damping springs, shreds of hair...

The boy's name was Oleg.

On the day of his funeral, all classes at the school were canceled. Teachers deliberately took the pupils to the funeral ceremony so that they would remember once and for all what such pranks lead to and would not even try to repeat these risky tricks.

Mustachioed tenth graders carried the child's coffin down Karl Marx Boulevard.

With heads bowed and feet shuffling slowly, the younger children followed. Many were crying. It's hard not to cry when the wrenching sounds of brass trumpets and the pitiful beating of kettledrums pierce your heart and tear your soul apart.

I couldn't take my eyes off the dead boy's face. He seemed asleep, the wind ruffling his blond hair. Only the bruises and the unnatural bulge on his forehead, as if someone had put a triple-edged file under his skin, kept me from forgetting that this dream was eternal.

But not so long ago, he and I probably ran through the halls of school together, playing catch-up and standing in line for cake in the cafeteria. And now he's dead.

An obsession

As a child, I saw many children's graves. But when you get older, it seems like all that was a long time ago, and a lot of things in the world should have changed since then. But it turns out that children are still dying. This discovery shook me to my core.

After the funeral, I returned home more thoughtful and sad than usual. Does it mean that if an eight-year-old boy dies, I, a nine-year-old child, can also die? Would I have to lie in a coffin like him, listening to the wail of the trombone and feeling the wind ruffle my hair?

I tried to imagine the parents of the dead boy. How do they feel now? What if he had been my brother and the grief had come to our family instead of his?

Standing in front of the mirror, I would try the situation on myself and then recoil in horror, covering my face with my hands and praying to God for forgiveness for my sinful thoughts.

It was like an obsession. I moved around the house on tiptoe like a shadow, speaking in a whisper, as if I were afraid of disturbing the dead boy's sleep, of getting myself into trouble. I felt that he was somewhere near me, watching me, and I could not help thinking of him. Eventually, I became afraid of him. I was afraid of staying at home alone, of walking past the high-rise where the tragedy happened, of entering that entrance, not to mention calling the elevator and getting on it. The very name Oleg filled me with superstitious dread. It seemed that if I said it out loud, something bad would happen to me.

A Doll

At the age of thirteen, I experienced another shock, another childhood death.

A one-and-a-half-year-old girl fell from the window of a nine-story building across the street.

It all happened in a split second. My friends and I were playing catch in the yard when suddenly something white, like a cat, flashed through the air. A thud against the asphalt, someone's scream, and - as if on cue - people were running from all sides to the front door.

Someone picked up the child and carried her to a bench.

The baby lay there like a rag doll, arms and legs spread helplessly. A thin trickle of blood dripped from the "doll's" ear. The girl was dead, of course.

The guys and I stood next to her, stunned, as if we'd grown up in a flash. No one wanted to play catch anymore. The very thought of playing games now seemed sacrilegious and savage.

When the girl's body was removed, everyone went home in a depressed mood. Personally, I was most shocked by the fact that many years ago, at the same age, I had almost fallen from the ninth-floor balcony. It was as if I saw myself in that little girl...

But children's grief is short-lived, and a week later my friends and I were laughing and running around the yard as if nothing had happened. Nobody even mentioned the dead girl.

The Basement

In the sixth grade, after reading many esoteric books, I began to rant about the theory (not confirmed in practice) that a person who does not suspect danger is not in danger. I even wrote an essay on the subject, using the example of wolfsbane to prove that a child who unknowingly eats poisonous berries will not be poisoned. And it would be okay if I ate wolfberries myself and stayed alive, but no. My conclusions were only theoretical. You can get punched in the nose for that. And I did. Literally. It's like the universe decided to teach me a lesson.

There was a basement in our house where the guys and I liked to play catch-up and hide-and-seek, and to spice things up we would turn off the lights in there.

The ceilings in the basement were high enough that we could run without hitting our heads. But in some places there were reinforced concrete beams that you could only run under by ducking.

You just had to be careful.

So the lights went out. I'm running after someone in the dark, confident that there's an open space ahead. And a second later - bang! A hard blow, sparks coming out of my eyes, and a brief loss of consciousness.

I came to on the floor, my head buzzing, rainbow spots flashing in front of my eyes.

It turned out that I had hit my forehead on a beam. Even though it shouldn't have happened according to my theory, I couldn't see where the beam was, so I should have been able to walk through it, or at least not get hurt.

But the bump on my forehead was a clear indication that my theory was worthless, so I'd gotten off cheap, I could have blown my skull off.

To be continued