Sea Buckthorn Brew
It only takes Dima a couple of seconds to see through the darkness and begin a silent conversation with the knots on the wooden wall, whose peculiar patterns vaguely resemble faces. Two small brown dots—slightly misaligned horizontally—with a large oval marking lower down: that must be a surprised drunk man. To his left there is a laughing child, with three squeezed oval dots for eyes and mouth. Then, right near the ceiling, there is the most perfect face of all—two circular markings and a single vertical stripe for a nose. That must be a girl, just like Alice.
The wooden people smile back at Dima, telling him their silly stories about times long gone, accompanied by his grandma’s heavy breathing from the bed on the other side of the room.
“Why are you not sleeping, dear?”
“I… I…” What could he say? That he wants to remember everything including the wooden walls and the dark knots in them? That he never wants to leave a single piece of this place behind?
“I just don’t want to leave. Ever.”
“No one wants to, dear. But Maria would never let you stay. And she might be right. I’ve had my fair share of messy city life. Maybe every youngling should…”
“Do you mean you are going to stay?”
“Well, you can’t sell a house with an old crook still living in it.” She laughs quietly, afraid of provoking her asthma.
“That’s unfair. Since I’m a minor, they’d just kick me out.”
Dima’s grandmother can’t see his eyes, yet she can feel how every teardrop he loses twists a knife in her frail lungs.
“Oh, if that’s so… And if it will make you feel better, you can stay by my side, but only if you fall asleep right now.”
“Deal.”
As Dima lets his body drift into the darkness, he is almost sure the drunken man has winked at him.
“I don’t know where he is! I just…” Maria struggles to balance her phone between her shoulder and her ear as she repeatedly pulls her wallet and two document folders in and out of a fashionably shiny yet austere black bag.
“Dima’s been acting weird ever since I introduced you to him, and with Diana’s death and all of this, I just don’t know!” She slowly collects herself, guided by the deep baritone on the other end of the phone.
“He’s run away before, yes, but he was so close to her… I don’t know what he could have…” Her sigh lingers on the verge of tears. “Right… I shouldn’t say that. Right. The police are convinced he’ll come back. If he doesn’t, we’ll escalate it, and then they’ll put together a search team. It’s still warm in September. He could even potentially survive in the forest…”
She throws the documents onto the kitchen table, between dirty plates, and slips a laptop into her bag.
“No, you’re right, I can’t think that way. Me, you… our family—we will all be better off if I just focus on the things I can control.” She quickly zips up her bag, drinks her stone-cold black coffee in one gulp, and forces a nervous smile at the mirror in the hallway.
“A sick leave for my ex-in-law’s death? No way. I’ve told Anna a lot about her, and she’s such a gossip, so everyone knows how I truly felt about Diana. Heck, they might even congratulate me… Bye, Vadim, dear, I’m so late!”
Maria doesn’t wait for a goodbye before running out of her apartment.
“Are you sure that old prof allowed it?” Alice gets over the fence gracefully, like a wildcat. As she jumps down, her white dress, patterned with orange peaches, fans out around her in a perfect circle. Her hands fly up, index fingers reaching for the middle ones—she always says it’s the only thing she remembers from gymnastics lessons.
“Well, he doesn’t care much for this garden anyway. Besides, I don’t think his opinion would matter to you.”
“I’m too easily swayed by sea buckthorn!” She suddenly bursts into laughter, making Dima temporarily forget his crippling fear of heights.
“And you… you look like my kitten climbing his first fence! Do you need help?”
“No, I should be fine…” Dima clutches the metal wires so tightly he wonders if his fingers will end up scraped raw. His trembling ankles protest the climb as his stomach threatens to erupt with a myriad of gurgling sounds, but he can’t fall just yet. Not now, not when there are only a dozen centimeters left. If he thinks about Alice, it should be fine. He must simply always think about Alice.
She waits for him to clumsily land on the ground, barely avoiding a pile of rotten wood. As soon as he straightens up, her white dress joins the dancing circle of the sea buckthorn trees. She pulls out a pair of scissors and hurries to cut the nearest branches.
“Please, be careful! The branches are pretty sharp. Don’t get hurt.”
“I was born in the wilderness. I can’t get hurt by it.” She throws a bunch of shimmering orange berries at Dima, who is too distracted by her burning blue eyes to bother catching them.
“So how many?”
“All of it, of course. What are you asking about, by the way?”
“How many buckets of sea buckthorn will convince your parents to adopt me?”
“Don’t say that! Your mom is a great woman! Maybe I would like to live in Moscow too!”
“Not if it costs you everything…” Dima stares at the soil littered with smashed sea buckthorn berries. He must remember them too.
“Don’t you dare look down.” Alice lifts Dima’s chin with her calloused fingers, sticky with juice, and for a second he remembers nothing but her. “There must be a way for you to stay!”
“What way? Getting married?”
“No, you’re getting it all wrong!” She turns away to hide her face. “First of all, it’s the bride, not the groom, who’s supposed to pay the family. And secondly, it’s going to take us at least two years to be legal…”
“Then maybe I could hide in the professor’s house, eat sea buckthorn, and learn to climb fences properly…”
“Oh, that must be your mom! You should say hello.” Alice interrupts him, paying no mind to his plan, her eyes glued to the road while her hands absent-mindedly weave a crown of sea buckthorn branches.
Dima endures the steady growl of a car and, with painstaking effort, brings himself to admit that the approaching vehicle is indeed the familiar, drab grey colour.
“Go, go! I’ll make a crown for you too, then you come back!”
“Can you get some more branches for Granny? She needs them for some sort of special brew or something like that.”
“Well, if we get married, I will have a witch in the family!” She jumps up and down, clapping her hands, while Dima recklessly jumps over the fence, hoping to fall and break something really, really badly.
Dima has to hug his mom even though he doesn’t want to. She smells like Moscow: gasoline and a drunken cherry air freshener, a scent barely distinguishable from her own perfume. She smells of thousands of people, smoke, and chemical-laced dirt. She smells of everything he had hoped never to know. He pulls out of the hug, studying her face for any sign of the decision she has already made.
“I made it!” The way she jumps up and down is painfully similar to Alice’s. “It’s a permanent position now! You, and me, and Vadik—we, we will finally have a future, a real one!” She hurries toward the house, just in time to let Dima hide his tears from her.
Dima regains the ability to move when the sun is already setting. Alice approaches him from behind and gently places a wreath of trimmed branches on his head. “Dima, look, I made you a crown!”
“Alice…” The fire in her eyes almost dies out as Dima turns to her and asks, “If reincarnation exists, how many years do you think it takes to be reincarnated?”
“A hundred years, obviously.”
“Why?”
“Because I like that number!”
“Then I will find you in one hundred and fourteen… no, one hundred and sixteen years, and we will get married.”
“You’re getting it all wrong again! I wouldn’t marry a stranger, so you would have to find me as soon as you’re reincarnated. And most importantly, reincarnation isn’t real, so you’re never allowed to leave me in the first place!”
Alice handed Dima the sea buckthorn branches she had collected for his grandma and let the ferocious red rays of the setting sun hide her expression as she turned away.
“I think I found him.” Maria shivers in her half-buttoned, thin coat, utterly inappropriate for the beginning of November. She staggers toward Vadim, a feverish rush on her cheeks contrasting with her otherwise bloodless skin.
“What? Where?” Maria grabs Vadim’s hand and drags him up the wooden stairs, through the living room, and into Dima’s and Diana’s bedroom.
“Here.” She points at three dark wooden knots on the side of Dima’s bed: two round spots with even darker dots inside, and a large oval shape a little lower.
“The police didn’t find him. But I did. I did!” Her laugh turns into a cough, which Vadim struggles to soothe by pulling her into a hug.
“I don’t get it…”
“Diana, that witch, I once overheard her telling Dima that the wood is alive. That if you brew sea buckthorn in a special way, you can become one with the wood and stay in the place of your choosing forever, like an everlasting observer. She said she would drink it before her time came so that Dima would not be completely alone in this world.”
Vadim slowly lowers Maria onto Dima’s bed.
“Dima isn’t alone, and neither are you, dear. I am with you. And if these knots make you nervous, I can paint over them. That was just an old, scary story. Diana didn’t actually mean any of it, and I’m sure Dima knows that.”
“Then why, why would she take him?” Maria springs up, a new haunted expression forming on her swollen face. “She would only do it if he asked her to. He never wanted to move. That’s why.”
“Hey, it’s just a legend, and such knots are normal in older wood. You’re scaring me, sweetheart. You should take a break.”
“You might be right. For me, for you, these were just legends. But for Dima and Diana, it was the truth. And look, they got what they wanted. They got to stay here.” She barely traces the wooden knots with her fingers before Vadim gently ushers her out of the room.
“Granny, are you alright?” Dima had always felt there were more ghosts in their house than his granny ever told him about, and he never knew exactly when those spirits might take her away.
“I’m fine, Dimochka. I haven’t died just yet.” Diana struggles to open the bedroom door, seized by a fit of coughing.
“Don’t say that, Granny. You’re not going to die anytime soon.” Dima grabs her shoulders to help her lower herself onto the bed. She smells of sea buckthorn tea, herbs, wood, and home.
“I will. Everyone in our family knows when they are about to die. And my time is soon.”
“Didn’t you promise you would never leave me alone?”
“I won’t. Anytime you come here, you will see those old, narrow eyes and sunken cheeks on the wall.”
Dima knew this was not going to happen. Some strangers would stare at the knots or, worse, cover them with paint and efface his granny’s history, erasing any memory of her, while he would be drowning in a sea of gasoline, completely alone. No one would talk to the faces in the walls, and even Alice would marry someone else.
“But this house will be sold in a month. And… and I don’t want to forget you.”
“You will grow old and buy this house back and do right by your old granny. Besides, you can only forget someone if you really, really want to.”
Dima withers in her hands, searching for the right words, but finding only empty ones.
“Granny, can you make one more portion for me?”
“No way! You’re too young to even think of it. It’s your time to live. You will have an eternity to watch over and remember others.”
“Watching silently is everything I ever did, Granny. It’s everything I know.”
She demonstrably turns her head toward the window, raising her chin with visible effort.
“Listen, Granny… have you seen that apartment? It’s on the twenty-sixth floor. I have a balcony in my room. The sound insulation is good enough. Mom isn’t even going to notice. If I die in Moscow, it will be an eternity without you… and one without me for you.”
She looks straight at him, her eyes growing narrower with every passing minute.
“I made a second portion, just in case. But it will take a lot to transform a healthy, young body like yours. Your brew will be different. Worse.”
At first, the potion blooms in Dima’s mouth with the honeyed yet tangy taste of sea buckthorn tea. Then the wooden notes assert themselves as the liquid congeals in his mouth, leaving him almost unable to swallow. In the numbness of his fading senses, the embrace of the wall feels welcoming. The potion blinds him, but it only takes a couple of seconds to see through the darkness. As the knots forming Dima’s face take their place, he watches his grandma’s body sink onto the bed, leaving three more dots on the opposite wall.
“So why is this the only painted room?” Suspicion crept beneath the rounded glasses of a man in a carefully ironed suit who held his briefcase tightly against his chest.
“Oh…” Maria glances absently at the wall. “Well, we just noticed there were too many wooden knots, so we decided to cover them up. We still have some paint left, so if you decide to buy the place, we can make the other rooms match.”
“No, I think I’d rather keep the wooden look. It makes you feel like you’re surrounded by life,” the gentleman remarks, nodding.