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Last summer my love of mushrooming took me to a distant part of the Kaluga district. A friend who had bought himself a house for a song in an almost abandoned village, assured me I would find this a mushroom paradise. As a newcomer to these parts, he did not know the way to the mushroom haunts and for a long time we roamed about over old roads and new turnpikes. As a certain road-sign flashed past I felt my heart scratched by a name: “To Sukhinichi.”I didn’t see how many kilometres away from Sukhinichi we were. At last we found ourselves in a young wood of birches, aspens and small firs. In a dubious tone, as if asking my advice, my friend said: “Looks as if we’ve arrived….”

Perhaps we had not arrived at the place we set out for, but it did look enchanting to us, used as we were to Moscow’s suburbs with their thin woods and grass flattened by the trodding of many feet. We found many sorts of mushrooms, most of them second-rate, but among them were some “birch” mushrooms and a few “white” ones. The wood itself was delightful: clean, untrodden, undesecrated, steeped in sunlight, without cobwebs and pestering flies. Walking was easy in this wood, which had neither thick underbrush nor bogs where you might suddenly find yourself knee-deep in peat. The young and cheerful trees sprang no unpleasant surprises on us. Perhaps that was why I felt more resentment than pain when I stepped on something sharp hidden in the grass. I lunged forward, miraculously keeping my balance though my feet were entangled, in barbed wire. My friend hurried to my aid. After we had freed my tennis shoes and trousers from the barbs, we unearthed a large coil of wire that is essential equipment on any front line. There it lay at our feet, in places dry and rusty, in others wet and black and covered with mould—ugly and long dead but still capable of biting painfully.
I was not at all expecting to be confronted by war. Yet this youngwood had grown up on land where there had once been dug-outs, communication trenches, machine-gun nests, barbed wire entanglements, mine fields and razed villages.

At this point I was pierced by the arrow of the road-sign:”To Sukhinichi.” It was here, perhaps close at hand, perhaps on this very spot that Pavlik had lived out his brief life. It was the end of his living I thought of, rather than his death. Until all was transformed into flame he lived the life of the mind; he had thoughts, feelings, memory, words and little desires: the desire to drink water, smoke a cigarette, wipe the sweat off his brow. He lived and, like all who live he had a past. Before him rose the faces of those he had had time to love and of those he had not had time to hate; he saw them against the background of boulevards, streets, theatres, lecture halls, barrack-rooms. Some of them he kept and took with him, others he rejected as unnecessary and unwanted.

And again, for the hundredth time, the thought occurred to me that if I appraised my life in the light of Pavlik’s final act, I could hardly consider myself guiltless. I was guilty in many ways, guilty of not having given my life for my friend, of not having saved or even defended the millions who perished, of concentration camps’ and jails’ existence. I was guilty of the assassination of presidents and preachers, of the world’s endless shootings and burnings, of the death of children and the sufferings of the needy.