The Fruit Thieves

By Max Simov

In the middle of the last century, in a small remote town lost in the foothills of the magnificent Caucasus Mountains, the local children raid their neighbours’ fruit orchards during the summer holidays. The best apples for Pasha, the nine-year old boy, are behind the impenetrable fence of the Glumins, a weird Old-Believer couple who live next door, and in the orchard of a wicked neighbour, Bullin. Bullin is a cruel man who inflicts suffering on animals and deserves to be punished.

There are plenty of other orchards where the children of River End Street can satisfy their fruit hunger. The cherries of the old couple living by the riverbank can be reached by climbing up the fence, and it is possible to get away unnoticed. Or is it? Fruit adventures are risky and some end up in near disaster. There are scary stories about fruit thieves who are cruelly punished. Yet Pasha absolutely had to steal some of his neighbours’ tantalising apples. He tried and ended up being caught. But what would the punishment be?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Oct 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781800467422

Max Simov

Max Simov (real name Svetlana Carsten) is a linguist who lives in York but grew up in the Northern Caucasus, Southern Russia. The amazing events of Max’s own childhood provided the inspiration for this and the previous children’s book, The Fruit Thieves, which was published in 2020.

Book preview

Copyright © 2020 Max Simov

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Matador

9 Priory Business Park,

Wistow Road, Kibworth Beauchamp,

Leicestershire. LE8 0RX

Tel: [phone]

Email: [e-mail]

Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador

Twitter: @matadorbooks

ISBN 978 1800467 422

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The front cover image is a reproduction of Tree Climbing by Elena Figurina.

The original is in the Erarta Museum in St. Petersburg.

Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

To my children who nudged me to write more and more of the fruit thieves when I read the stories to them at bedtime. They are grown up now but I hope they will appreciate this reworking of the stories.

the author

Max Simov lives in York but grew up in the Caucasus in Southern Russia. The amazing events of Max’s own childhood provide the inspiration for this book. Max is a linguist and has published academic papers and opinion pieces in specialist journals. The Fruit Thieves is Max’s first book of fiction

the illustrator

Yulia Sharova is an animation and graphics artist and architect. Animation films to which she has contributed have received prizes at international film festivals. She has exhibited her work widely. The cover of her artist’s book Frankenstein was selected for the exhibition poster of the Frankenstein 2018 exhibition at the Liverpool Central Library. Yulia lives in Leeds.

Contents

Prologue

Saying Goodbye

It was a late November afternoon. The children of River End were playing out in the street when suddenly a gust of wind swept through, ripping the remaining leaves off the trees and picking up more from the ground, together with the dust. The wind blew the pile of leaves towards the children, thrashing them against their bodies and throwing dust in their eyes. Pasha was chasing the ball but had to stop to rub his eyes which were now full of dust. He kicked the ball towards Vlad, his friend from next door, and raised his head. He looked up at the sky to the west where the wind was coming from. A gnawing dull pain was settling in his chest as he saw a black shadow of cloud moving in from the west.

He turned to his sister Sonia and called out to her, ‘Let’s go.’

‘I don’t want to go yet,’ she replied.

‘Now!’ he insisted.

Reluctantly his sister, who was sitting on a pile of dry leaves with another girl, rose to her feet and followed her brother home.

‘You are early today,’ their father said. He was busy cooking over the stove and was not yet ready to give them his attention.

‘It’s getting dark outside,’ murmured Pasha, by way of excuse.

He went into the children’s bedroom, picked up the book he had been reading earlier and sat in the armchair by the window in the front room. But he could not concentrate on his reading. Instead, through the window, he fixed his eyes on the scarlet horizon over Frantiha Mountain. The sky was exactly the same colour as on that December night. At sunset it turned bright red in a matter of seconds. The wind grew stronger and gradually black clouds shrouded Frantiha, moving slowly towards the town. There was a scarlet strip left just on the edge of the horizon. Against that sinister red, the black crosses of the Frantiha cemetery threw up their arms in panic, instilling fear in children. According to the town myth, the black shadow was Frantiha’s spirit seeking the soul of someone who had recently departed. Pasha was brought up not to believe such nonsense. But he could not help feeling the same pain and panic he had felt that December night, the night before he saw his mother’s dead body.

Pasha could never forget the morning they had brought the coffin containing his mother’s body into the house. It was the tradition to keep the dead with the family for three nights. That morning, hard rain and wind lashed against the glass panes of their windows. When the coffin was brought in, Pasha huddled in the corner in the sitting room, pulling his jumper over his terrified eyes. He was panic-stricken and had struggled to breathe. There was a lot of commotion in the house and no one had noticed him. The boy was fear personified, bundled in a tiny twisted body. Pasha had never seen a dead person before but to think that the body in the coffin was that of his mother was unimaginable. He absolutely did not want to see it. He knew it was not his mother. It was Death that had tricked everyone into thinking that it was. And now it was here, in his house, to haunt and torment and terrify him.

Once the coffin had been installed on a couple of small tables by the window and all the mirrors covered, his father looked around, searching for the boy with his grief-stricken eyes. He approached Pasha and gently touched his head.

‘You have to say goodbye to your mother, son.’

Pasha shook his head, which was barely visible from under the thick pullover neck.

‘Courage, my boy. All people in the world have to learn to say goodbye to their loved ones. And that time has come for you.’

Slowly Pasha rose to his feet. His legs were numb, his jelly-like knees weak and shaking. His father took him by the hand and pulled him towards the coffin. Pasha made a few steps with his eyes shut tight. They stopped. His eyes still shut, he took his first breath after the short walk. He could smell it. He smelt death. And now there was no way back, no choice but to open his eyes and look.

Pasha had missed his mother terribly at first. He remembered the soft touch of her hands, her lips on his cheeks when she kissed him, and he even remembered her smell. After she died there were some of her clothes left hanging in the wardrobe. When no one was looking, Pasha used to smell her cotton blouses on their coathangers. He would close his eyes and bury his face in the fabric that had preserved his mother’s smell. He would see her smiling face and her kind eyes and remember all sorts of wonderful games they had played together. Eventually his father gave her clothes away to the needy and the memory started to fade. But on some occasions, and especially at difficult times, he knew she was watching over him, giving him her protection.

One

Forbidden Fruit

Pasha Grinev lived with his father, Matvey, and his younger sister, Sonia, in River End, a cul-de-sac on the outskirts of Gorsk. A small spa town, Gorsk sat snugly at the foot of the magnificent Caucasus mountains whose white snowy peaks could be seen in the distance all year round. Gorsk was a tiny dot on the map at the southern edge of Russia and the name of the place simply meant mountain town. Yet Gorsk was famous for its hundreds of spa hotels which were open in all seasons, receiving thousands of visitors who came from all over their big country to breathe the clean mountain air, drink pristine spring water, take hot thermal baths and enjoy relaxing massages. They were convinced that all of this should make them so much healthier and so much stronger.

Gorsk also claimed fame for other things. Its fertile fields and vegetable plots, its beautiful gardens and fruit orchards stretched for many miles out into the valley which eventually met with the foothills of the giant Caucasus mountains. The outskirts of the town were magnificent. To the local people, and especially children, they were the best part of their land. The spring and the autumn were sunny and warm, with carpets of bright wildflowers – orange, blue, yellow – growing in the meadows or on the slopes of Frantiha mountain. Frantiha was more of a hill than a mountain and yet the local people called it a mountain. A very long time ago, and probably because of the flowers, they had given the mountain the name Frantiha, a coquette, but then they had started burying their dead on its slopes and the coquettish image had been lost. The nearby woods on the edge of the town and around Frantiha were full of wild fruit in late summer and early autumn and local adults and children went foraging in that no-man’s land. Fruit was there for everyone to take and people just helped themselves to this gift of nature.

Come June, the long Russian school holidays began for the local children. This was when Gorsk’s fruit adventures would also start. The children who lived on the outskirts of Gorsk, unlike those who lived in the town centre, had the splendid world of fruit orchards to explore. The apple trees offered the best treat imaginable – that of a juicy apple, warm from the sun. The early varieties ripen at the end of July and this is when these apples were at their tastiest. You could smell their aroma as soon as you approached the tree. As you dug your teeth into the apple, its juice would squirt out in all directions and cover your nose and cheeks with tiny droplets. Your own orchard might have delicious apples to offer each season but those of a friend’s family, or the neighbour’s, were each child’s dream. Their fruit always looked so much bigger, was so much juicier and more aromatic, so much sweeter compared to the fruit in your own orchard, that the desire to get a taste of it turned into a complete obsession. You began devising plans how to get hold of it.

Yes, stealing is bad! We all know. But not fruit. Not for the children of Gorsk. For them it was the usual pastime of their summer holiday. It was part of their growing up. Everywhere you looked there was fruit in abundance. Enough for all. Naturally, adults did not approve of stealing fruit from other people’s orchards. But you could not really imagine any child sitting at home while their friends helped themselves to all sorts of delicious fruit from the orchard next door. They might even be in your own orchard! The orchards around were raided for fun and, in reality, the damage was negligible.

September was the time to go back to school and the fruit activity became less frequent, but it did not stop completely. September and October produced an abundance of mouth-watering late-season apples that stayed in cool storage the whole winter, either to be eaten or turned into tasty pies. Clusters of green and red apples, high on the tree branches, sparkled invitingly in the autumn sun and the fruit on the trees of the neighbours was naturally the biggest and the most appealing. To climb unnoticed up one of those trees in order to grab a bunch was the skill most prized.

In Gorsk there were also orchards that were well-hidden behind very tall fences and guarded by very fierce dogs. The dogs roamed the domain of their owners and if a stranger dared to peek through a narrow gap in the fence, just out of curiosity, or to admire with envy the most tantalising fruit on earth, the dogs would immediately sense the person on the other side of the fence. They would throw their body against the hard wood of the fence, foaming at the lips and sending the innocent admirer to the other end of the street in a fit of terror, heart pounding.

The Grinevs’ small house was surrounded by a large courtyard with a good-size orchard stretching out at the back of the house. For Pasha the best apples were not in his own orchard but behind the impenetrable fence of the Glumins, the Grinevs’ next door neighbours on the right. The Glumins’ guard dog, Albert, had sent many innocent passers-by fleeing to the other side of the street, even though they had taken no interest whatsoever in the Glumins’ fruit. Living next door, the Grinev children had won Albert’s trust, so it was not the dog but the fence that stood in their way.

Another impenetrable orchard belonged to Bullin,