The End of the Mountain

Today I want to tell a story from my childhood. I will tell it again, and in new words. There are some things that cannot be copied, only told anew. Really, I'm a worse storyteller. Have you noticed how much, for example, the words "this" have become in my posts? Or "here." Sure, I can see that. But I don't see the point in doing anything about it. Still.

If it's true that one sees some important events of one's life in the last seconds, I think the ouch to the end of the mountain should definitely show up there. In it is everything. The beginning, infinity, and its end.

When I was about eight years old, I first discovered travel. That is, travel began earlier, but in my imagination. I told about it too: even earlier, when I was five, I invented my first big game where in the corners of the yard my friend Sashka and I would find some iron pieces, crocks, glass, stones - and we made up stories about them, as if they were foreign goods and jewels, and we brought them from faraway lands and now we boast of our loot, put them into our chests, sell them to each other... About each of these jewels composed its own story, so that the value of the find depended not only on its attraction in itself, but on how you knew how to talk about this thing.

Well, there were other games-travels, too, of course. But one day Sashka and I went looking for the End of the Mountain.

At the time, I was spending a lot of time at my grandparents' house. And there was the Mountain looming over our village. It was visible from everywhere. Its beginning was about six hundred meters from my house, but to get to the foot of the mountain, you had to walk through the "meadows" - as we called the flooded meadows with hayfields, overgrown here and there with willows, willows, blackthorns, guavas, pear trees and all kinds of other vegetation. I well remember this sultry grass jungle, a significant part of my childhood passed in the hayfields, this special world of grasses, hot sun, the smell of meadows with a distinct swampy scent, the sound of countless gnats and mosquitoes, all kinds of jumping, crawling, flying little things...

This was the country that had to be crossed to get to the mountain.

At the very beginning of the mountain the thickets got thicker, in some places absolutely impassable, especially where sedge and rushes were closed by the wall...

Until I was about eight years old, I had never gone further than a couple of hundred meters from the house. The street was interesting as it was. If I tried to list all the games we played on it... And the Mountain... It became available to me, probably, with the beginning of school life. We were taken on a hike (well, such, very small, to the abandoned gardens at the edge of the village), I met a boy from an infinitely different world, almost three kilometers from my home, and visited him several times. And of course, sooner or later I had to go on the road, to discover the Mountain

Not alone. With my roommate friend Sashka. I don't remember now whether we decided at that time to go straight to the Edge of the Mountain or just went there to play and explore. It was a magical world. From the top you could see the whole village and far away. There were also sand pits with white, yellow, red, orange sand, so soft that we wanted to dive into it like into hot water.

We also once found something like a small dump, and in it we found an old book called "Arithmetic" - absolutely magical, big format, with beautiful pictures. From maybe the '40s or '50s... How I would love to hold that book in my hands again! But I have no idea what we did with it back then.

On the Mountain, we often came across various bones and skulls. By the way, I forgot to tell you, there was a tank in the jungle at the foot of the mountain, as my friends assured me, somewhere hiding a tank left over from the war. I even came across this "tank" once, though it wasn't really a tank, but something incomprehensible, iron, with a hatch at the top. Unless I was dreaming, of course, it could have been some kind of large cast-iron wall of an oven, something like the ones that used to be in the stoke room (boiler room) of the House of Culture; however, I hardly remember what I saw, and whether I saw it at all, and what kind of an oven the stoke room was, I don't remember, and how such a thing could ever get into the bogs and swamps under the Mountain, and how it then disappeared from there, so I'm more likely to have dreamt about it.

...Anyway, what happened was that my friend and I went to the top of the Mountain on a bright, sultry, endless summer day, and somehow it just so happened that we decided to go to the other side of it.

The edge of the Mountain had to have an end. Everything has an end, we knew that. Even a mountain like ours. So we walked up the mountain, under an endless sky, on and on. We came out on the road, and we walked and walked... The village disappeared, steppes and fields and the road were ahead. The mountain became a plain.

And one day we met a man. I vaguely remember that it could have been a man on a roller, well, what is it called, I don't know, a roller, which is a paver... It was around that time that they were actively paving asphalt roads around our village. We asked him if it was far to the Edge of the Mountain.

...I wonder what the man thought then, seeing two small friends in the middle of the road with this question... And his answer was something along the lines of, no, the Mountain's Edge is very, very far away. I don't remember if he gave a specific figure. But we realized that we weren't going to make it to the edge of the mountain.

That's how we discovered then that the mountain could be almost endless. I think that in some special way changed the picture of my world altogether. A little bit later, just a couple of years later, I was playing a lot with other spaces, where you cross, say, a small moat and find yourself in a completely different place, a completely different place from where you would have been if you'd gone around that moat. Well, you know, the world is very different, depending on whether you're going directly to the goal or bypassing it. And the mountain is really a plain, and you've been living at the bottom of a huge gully, thinking the whole world is sea level below.

...Then there was the way back. I wouldn't say that we felt like losers. What had changed, I repeat, was the world. Well, and so had we, of course.

It was a bright, bright summer. The heat breathed over us. The sky. We walked and walked, and what I remember for sure is that we were dying of thirst, but it was also a game, because it was terribly wonderful to walk, dreaming about how we would finally reach the water pump, beautiful, delicious, cold, fresh water, and we would drink, drink, drink... In the meantime, we told each other how much money we were willing to pay for a mug of the most wonderful water in the world.

And at the end of the road, we reached the water column and drank the water. It was Summer. There was a Road, an endless road that we walked and walked and walked... It was as if it penetrated my blood, that road under the sky of Summer, the road that was with me always, all this eternity.

Respect, love, cherish your friends!!!! And then any "mountain" in your life will seem like just a small hill that together with your friends you can easily overcome. 🤝