I SPENT part of my summer holiday this year in a Russian cherry orchard. Not the Cherry Orchard of Anton Chekhov, peopled with languid aristocrats strolling with lace parasols, but a one woman fruit farm which involves much hard work for its owner, Yevdokia Zaitseva.
The small holding, with ducks and goats as well as the orchard, is in a village called Mikheyeva in a beautiful valley 100 km south of Moscow. Aunt Dusya, as everyone calls Miss Zaitseva, naively thought she was retiring to a life of ease here. But instead she works round the clock, as she has done all her life.
Aunt Dusya is an impressive, feisty woman. In her youth, she was married for two weeks. "But he turned out to be a drunk, so I decided to end the suffering sooner rather than later," she said. She divorced and became a career woman instead, starting out in the bread factory in the nearby town of Kolomna and rising to become its director, although she was never a member of the Communist Party, as most managers had to be in Soviet times.
So good was she at her job that she was sent to Hanoi to advise the rice eating Vietnamese on how to produce bread. She stayed there through most of the war with the US, earning a healthy expatriate's salary. When she came home, she brought gifts of fine porcelain tea sets for all her relatives. For herself, she bought a mink coat and the cherry orchard to which she planned to retire.
Even in the Communist era, Russians, were allowed to have small private plots of land, so there was nothing extraordinary about Aunt Dusya's purchase. She wanted to go back to her rural roots.
"I grew up in the countryside," she said. "My father was taken away by Stalin as an enemy of the people. My mother, my two sisters and I worked very hard on the land only to see everything we grew confiscated by the state while we went hungry. But I still loved nature. I had a dream that country life could be different."
Under President Yeltsin, it is different, of course, in the sense that human rights are more or less respected. But the labour involved in running a small holding is hardly any less.
Aunt Dusya (60) retired on a pension of 300,000 roubles, 60 a month, which seemed a princely sum. She imagined she would tend her goats, sell a little of their milk at her garden gate and otherwise potter in her orchard. The local children would be welcome to come in and pick the fruit.
But inflation has forced her to turn her idyllic garden into an industry. She's back working as hard as ever she did in the bread factory. Every morning in July, she's up a ladder picking the ripe cherries. Laden with huge baskets, she staggers five kilometres to the nearest bus stop. Then takes the train to Moscow.
On the Izmailovo street market she stands selling her crop along with hundreds of chelnaki (shuttle traders) hawking everything from leather jackets to car radios, which they have brought in suitcases from Poland and Turkey. "I stand with the poor women from Moldova who come up to Moscow with their tomatoes," said Aunt Dusya. "We don't have a licence to trade. The police move us on quite often. Imagine me, a respectable retired factory director, reduced to this.
But the money she earns from her cherries which sell for 15,000 roubles (3) per kilo, will keep her for the rest of the year. With the profit from the cherries, I will buy cooking oil, macaroni and bread, enough to last me all through the winter," she said. With her goats, ducks and vegetable plot, Aunt Dusya is self sufficient in everything except, ironically, the bread products to which she devoted her first career.
Suddenly I had a mad altruistic idea. Why didn't I buy Aunt Dusya's cherry crop and save her the exhausting trip to the capital? I knew a family in Moscow struggling hard to bring up six children, an unusually large brood by Russian standards. We could turn the cherries into jam for them.
This turned out to be easier said than done. Sugar is now available in Moscow, an improvement on recent years when it was rationed because Russians, determined to drink despite Mikbail Gorbachev s campaign against vodka, had used every last grain to distill samogon (moonshine). But large saucepans have completely disappeared from stock, as every self respecting Russian housewife is at this time of year making jam.
Finally, my friends and I found an aluminium bucket and a metal wash basin of the kind used to rinse yourself off in the banya (steam bath). Perfect for the job.
I spent part of my summer holiday this year in a Russian cherry orchard. I spent the other part in a Russian kitchen, boiling up 30 litres of cherry jam.