A Basket of Mushrooms

Oleg Volk

That summer day was perfect. A comfortably warm breeze meandered across a vast expanse of the sparse pine forest, gently moving the ubiquitous ferns. The sun, just now beginning to list West, formed into radiant shafts and threw oblique shadows over the soft, green moss covering the ground. Janush limped silently through that splendor. In his left hand, he carried his heavy nailed boots. He loved the feeling of soft living moss on his callouses. On the crook of his right arm hanged a basket full of mushrooms. Reddish boletas caps mixed with the blaze orange ribbed texture of chanterelles promised a flavourful fry upon return home.

Though the trees, he heard a distant noise of a diesel truck. Unseen, the vehicle went down the dirt road ahead of an eminently visible dust cloud. He walked towards the road, not lokking forward to the dust and the stones underfoot, but knowing that the road would take him past the bogs on both sides. Janush was short, stubbly, a middle aged man of no prominent features. His face was appealing in its childlike openness, his eyes blue and guileless. He used to work at the town book store, but that closed the year before. The mushrooms, therefore, would be his dinner, fried with leeks and potatos from the little plot his wife tended.

Hemmed in on both sides by tall swamp reeds, the road turned sharply. Just past the turn, Janush saw a barricade improvised from several crates covered with sandbags. Even though he expected the checkpoint, he felt his heart race. An awning pilfered from a lemonade kiosk shaded the construction and the three men who sat within. Janush recognized two of them. The portly, florid man was one of the town's policemen. Amazingly, the other man he recognized was just recently a tramp, now in a police uniform. Janush, who had to chase this man out of the school building back in his science teacher days, was feeling most uncomfortable at the change of the circumstances. Both men had billy clubs in their hands. Their poses were languid but Janush read triumphant hostility in their expressions.

The third policeman stood to the rear. He held a carbine with the easy comfort of a man used to the weapon. Unlike the other two, he wore the uniform of the military police. His role, it seems, was to stiffen the discipline of the locals coopted by the invaders. Janush saw his hand flip some part of the carbine, then say something to the two sitting colleagues.

Both of them came up to Janush, prodding him needlessly with their batons. He set the basket on the ground and raised his hands in a gesture half-way between mollification and surrender. He got frisked.

"What's in the basket?" asked the tramp.

"Mushrooms" said Janush and immediately doubled over in pain.

"I can see that, you idiot!" the man who hit him shouted "What's under the mushrooms?"

Seeing that Janush was still laboring for a breath, he prodded the basket with the toe of his boot. It seemed heavier than it should have been, so the policeman tipped it over. Amid the spilled mushrooms, a liter bottle of moonshine wrapped in butcher paper rolled slightly and stopped. The trio watched it with silent malevolence.

"Mushrooms, he says," drawled the fat man sarcastically. "So that bottle is not yours, you say?"

Janush said nothing. He kept his eyes focused on the ground in front of him.

The fat policeman motioned to the tramp to pick up the bottle. Then he kicked the basket, buttong a hole in it with his boot and sending mushrooms flying. Janush's pick of the day lay in fragments, mixed with the dust and traces of horse dung. Janush looked at the face of the third policeman who stood back from the proceedings. When he saw the man wave him on with the carbine muzzle, he resumed his slow trot down the road.

They watched his stooped back recede, then disappear behind a turn. Janush walked slowly, shuffling his feet and looking properly forlorn. After he was well out of sight of the roadblock, he straightened his back, threw his shoulders back and continued home at a more brisk pace. His face was was composed into a serene, contented expression. In his mind, he could see the three men from the roadblock enjoying his spiked moonshine. They'd follow with a well-deserved rest and never wake up.