Valya and Tolya in Fall

Valya and Tolya Konoplyannikov had divorced two years back after a whole forty-two years of marriage, sent running in different directions by a mutual hostility that had gnawed into their very innards. A village divorce is a tiresome, no-win business. If you’re in Moscow, you can move from Beskudnikovo to Novo-Gireyevo and disappear into thin air. But in the village? No dice. You’re going to bump into each other at the cooperative store, the post office, or the clinic, and there you’ll be, nose to nose, with nowhere to run this time.

And then there’s the marital home. How can you possibly saw it in two? Where do you put the halves? In a small village like this, if someone sneezes at one end, someone else catches cold at the other. The Konoplyannikovs divided things up and divided some more, and when all was said and done, Granny Valya stayed in the Konoplyannikov abode, and Grandpa Tolya took himself off to an abandoned hut behind the old state farm’s stables. And so, after sharing out the barns, the woodsheds, the cowshed, the bathhouse, the cow, the sheep, the piglet, the chickens, and Tolya’s deaf old grandma, they made a fresh start at opposite ends of the village.

Valya’s retirement came before Tolya’s, and she started living like a princess, spreading store-bought butter on her bread, skipping the potato planting, and going to the dances at the club. But Tolya, now free of the spouse who had once been the love of his life, began pining for her warm back, her thick cabbage soup simmering away in the stove, the funny, gaudy socks she knitted so skillfully on five needles (always forgetting to bind off the heel end properly), and her tuneful snoring that sent him to sleep better than the television. And he hit the bottle. He drank for a week, then gave a thought to his deaf grandma, pined even more than before, and started building a new life, one inspired by the old state farm. “Forward” had been its name, so forward he went. And then cabbage soup came back into the picture, and woolen socks too, because his grandma, deaf as she was, could still wield a set of knitting needles. He built a new bathhouse, cemented a great big kettle into the stove to supply his hot water, bound together leafy branches to make a winter stash of bathhouse switches, and started waiting for fall to arrive and offer him an escape from the sorrows of his past life.