Travel - Vesna McMaster

They’re picking the cherries one by one, and then by twos, and fistfuls. The wasps buzz as they move up the ladders. Up the tree, pushing past the branches, reaching. Fingers, arms, sides, legs, all scratched, red as casualties after a rough night down town. Impossible to tell whether the hum through the head is incipient heatstroke, tinnitus, or the cicadas. A woman laden like a tortoise with a wrapped bundle bigger than herself full of straw-like substance, rolling slowly up the hill past the view from half way up the tree.

That afternoon they tumble down to the rivulet at Basha’s. Sneak under the hole in the fence, scraping past the rough grasses, worming through the dust towards the shallow murmur. The delight erupts when the skin touches the water, and gasps echo back, floating up towards the house. Basha puts down her teacup and squints down the gardens, shaking her head at the incorrigible youth. She has a head for practicalities. She sits and waits for the enjoyment to soak into the flesh, mentally tallying how many empty jam jars she has and how much the sugar will cost, once she has suggested a payment of cherries for the price of access to the stream. Basha does not climb cherry trees.

Half a century later, Alexei takes a detour from a trip. The cherries are long gone. He checks his phone, turning around to get his bearings. What was once a meadow leading to Basha’s is, confusingly, a wood. He surveys the gnarled hazel, the striped birch, considering pushing through the undergrowth to get down the hill, but does not want to arrive at his daughter’s place with chinos torn. She already worries about him. He skirts the patch of woodland. The area has long been abandoned. Absentee property owners, gone abroad. He walks through a never-never land that only exists officially in some title-deed in a musty vault. The birds and snakes have it now, here on the ground.

The rivulet has gone, or perhaps he can’t find it. The outer walls of Basha’s place still stand beneath the brambles. A bucket, half-buried, visible.

Three thirty. Time to get back, or he won’t make it in time back to Yelena’s. He starts back up the hill. And as he does, the memory of that day cherry-picking as a summer job evaporates into the late summer air, disintegrating like last month’s lacewings, fluttering, dying.