I want to share what happened in my life. It happened in 1976. I then studied at a medical school in the city of Elabuga, the Republic of Tatarstan. Girls from a neighboring village studied with me and on Saturdays we left for our villages to visit their parents.
The next autumn Saturday turned out to be extremely foggy and very dense, so buses between cities did not travel that day and any transport was prohibited from leaving the city in the morning so as not to create emergency situations. Yes, in those years the administration was still concerned about the safety of its citizens!
But we, the girls, still managed to get out in a passing car, in which the oilmen were on duty. And we with them that morning were probably the only ones on the road. We managed to get to the village of my friends, and I still had to walk about 4 km from their village to my own along a dirt road across the field.
I was in a neighboring village only a couple of times in my life, but I was sure that the road from there would take me home. And the girl I was not shy. I thought that maybe the fog would clear by that time, and I really wanted to get to my mother as soon as possible.
So I was walking along the road and now I remember that there is a cemetery somewhere near this village, and I thought, what if this road leads there? And then I decided to take a little to the right, that is, to go across the field. I walk, I walk, but the fog does not dissipate. Still walking, walking and here silhouettes of trees, like forest plantations, began to be seen a little in the distance from the right and left sides. I did not even know about the presence of them.
A single loud shot rang out on my left side. “Hunters are hitting the hares,” I thought, and two minutes later a shot rang out on the right side, already much louder by audibility.
"How do they see these hunters in such a fog, no matter how they accidentally hit me," I thought, and I felt somehow creepy from this situation. I quickened my steps and went out onto some kind of dirt road driven by cars.
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I walked along this road for a long time until I noticed lattice fences and trees again in the fog. I realized then that I was in a completely different direction, 5 km from my village and these cemetery fences. From the cemetery where four neighboring villages are buried and where my father is buried.
I won't say that this made me feel bad, no, now at least I knew which road to go to home. I got home all the same and didn’t tell anyone, so that it wouldn’t come to my mother that she wouldn’t be afraid for me.
Over the years, I think that I found myself in a thick fog during the Civil War. My mother told me (she was born in 1912) that on the right side of the village there were white men, and on the left there were red ones, and they often shot themselves. And then the whites chased the Reds and killed a lot of them.
The people of our village buried them in a mass grave in the same field where I wandered in the fog.
Author: Margarita