The thread of music is breaking. Men start talking about their own things and drinking. Not that they haven't drunk before, but the announcement: "Well, we're going to kick?" - sounds only now. "Dad, what's a kicker?", Oleg asks. Dad explains, warning his son not to use this word, especially in the presence of his mother. Oleg and his father sit with the others for some time. When they leave the house, it is already evening. Cows are driven out of the pasture.
The station smells of hot sleepers, grass and dust. Oleg gladly inhales this smell. Everything he sees now: a small village shop, passing cows, women in dressed up dresses, his father, people on the platform - as if lining up for him in one line. He sees everything at once, not stopping attention on separate subjects.
- Dad, can we stay? Uncle Pike will probably play tomorrow.
- You can`t, - smiles father, - Mom will be worried. And together with her all the morgues and the police.
Oleg giggles.
- What's funny? Mm? - his father pinches his nose.
A train fits. They climb inside. Oleg sits down and looks greedily at the blurring landscape through the window.
***
There's a pigeon in the room. At first Oleg thought that he was on the other side of the window. Until he noticed that the bird was sitting on the window sill next to the money tree. Having turned his head ninety degrees, the pigeon stared at Oleg with a big funnel-shaped red eye through the tulle. Oleg turned his back, but continued to feel this terrible bird's-eye look on himself.
"Yulia, there was a dove there," he wheezes.
Yulia smiles, nods, as if she understood what he meant.
Oleg looks around the room looking for a pigeon. He doesn't find it, but he feels the presence and the tiresome look.
"Yul, remember how my mother died? She kept saying that a big bird had closed the window. Do you think you can die? At all. Stop jumping from one time to another? How many lives do you think I have lived? How many lives can I collect? It seems to me that I experience some fragments more often than others. You know, I'm not...", he's overcome by a coughing attack.
After breathing, Oleg continues: "I like this life, but... what next? After I die, do I go somewhere else? Maybe I never died completely? No matter how much I think I can't remember the moment of my death. Maybe if we do something then, in the very last moments, the wheel will finally stop ... We used to talk about these things a lot.
Julia's smiling again. She stretches out her hand, which Oleg suddenly clenches tightly.
She tries to remember what it feels like to die. She remembers how her fingers were cold, how she was lying in something sticky and thought it was her grandmother's jam. Then the visions intensified, strange creatures walked around the room, she danced, lay on the bed again, fell down somewhere. Yule seemed to be waving her from side to side. Then came liberation, peace. It was the most wonderful feeling she had, incomparable to anything else. The peace was empty, nothing was happening there. Maybe this peace was death? But even at that moment, she still felt remotely in the room where she was lying.
The conversation tires Oleg, he leans back on the pillow and closes his eyes. When he turns off, he hears the slamming of his wings in the room.
***
Lucky for him, he found some saddlebags, they're delicious. Daddy's around here somewhere. Oleg hears him pushing the bushes apart and resents the fact that there are no mushrooms, not at all.
Happy Oleg puts the cut mushroom in the bucket and moves on to the next one. In his wide hat, the load resembles a Mexican. It must be bad to be a mushroom. First of all, there is no certainty that you are neither an animal nor a plant. Secondly, you can be cut off and eaten at any time. It's enough not to be born with a fungus, but that's not all. Oleg once read in the encyclopedia that mushrooms are cut, not torn out, so as not to damage the fungus, which is under the ground. Then the fungus grows out of the fungus again.
What does it turn out to be? They cut you, eat you, and then you grow up again, and everything repeats itself? Oleg imagines himself as a mushroom, cut and chewed over and over again.
To be continued on the next part