End summer there again was a squabble in our khutta, though this time not a sisterly quarrel but a scrap between a husband and his wife. The source for discontent became the newspaper-wrapped mushrooms which Uncle Tolik brought from a ride to the forest. Not a remarkably big harvest, they still would do for a pot of soup.

The insidious newspaper package was accurately cinched and put by unsuspecting Uncle Tolik into the mesh-bag which he hung on his motorbike steer not to scatter the mushrooms on the way. However, at home instead of grateful praise, he got a shrill tongue-lashing from Aunt Lyouda, who discovered that the string used for cinching was a brassiere shoulder strap. In vain Uncle Tolik repeatedly declared that he had just picked up “the damn scrap of a string” in the forest, Aunt Lyouda responded with louder and louder assertions that she was not born the day before and let them show her a forest where bras grew in bushes, and there's no use of trying to make a fool of her… Grandma Katya no longer tried to appease the quarrelers and only looked around with saddened eyes.

(And that became a lesson for 2 at once – Uncle Tolik learned to never bring home any mushrooms and I grasped the meaning of “bra strap”.)

But Aunt Lyouda, on the spur of the moment, let herself a try at forbidding even the Uncle Tolik’s fishing rides, at which point it was he who raise his voice until they reached a compromise: he was allowed to go fishing under the condition of my going along. So, the following 2 or 3 years from spring to autumn every weekend with a pair of fishing rods and a spinner hitched to the trunk rack of his “Jawa” we set off to fishing.

Mostly we rode to the river of Seim. At times we fished in the Desna river, but then we had to start off at dark because it was a seventy-kilometer ride there… Shooting ahead before the roar of its own engine, charged “Jawa” thru the city submerged in its night repose, the streets empty and free of anything including the State Traffic Control militia… Then, after the thirty-kilometer-long ride along Baturin highway, we got to the even asphalt of Moscow freeway where Uncle Tolik sometimes squeezed out of his made in Czech-Slovakia motorbike a hundred and twenty kilometers per hour…

When we turned off onto the field roads, the dawn was gradually catching up “Jawa”. I sat behind, grabbing Uncle Tolik by sides with my hands stuck in the pockets of his motorcyclist jacket of artificial leather so that they wouldn’t freeze away in the chilly headwind. The night around little by little transformed into twilight with the darker stretches of windbreak belts showing up about the fields, the sky grew lighter, showed ragged shreds of clouds in their transition from white to pink glad to feel the touches of sky-long sun rays sent beforehand from beyond the horizon…The breathtaking views stirred thrill intense no less than by wild-flight riding…

Our usual bait was worms dug in the kitchen garden but one time the fishermen-gurus advised Uncle Tolik to try dragonfly larvae. Those critters live underwater in clumps of clay by the higher river bank, and the fish just go crazy about them, like, snapping the larva-rigged hook from each other…

We drove up to the riverbank amid murky twilight. “Java” coughed out its last breath and stopped. The river lapped sleepily, wrapped in thin wisps of fog rising from the water. Uncle Tolik explained that it was me who had to fetch those lumps of clay onto the bank. A mere thought of entering that dark water in the dusk of still lingering night threw a shiver up the spine, but a good ride deserved a good dive. I undressed and, on the advice of the elder, took a headlong dive into the river.