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By Root 996 0

a friendship not directed against anybody else, as seems often to be the case nowadays: we just enjoyed each other’s company and all that went with that. Friendship, especially if it lasts for many years, is a living organism. Like molecules in a cell, we were sometimes drawn to each other, sometimes repelled. Sometimes we existed quite autonomously, before again drawing close. We were forever asking Anna to write about us because so many interesting things happened; life threw up plots which the scriptwriters of soap operas might have envied. She did not take the suggestion seriously, and said she would think about it when she was old and sitting at home with her grandchildren. During the last decade, however, she never had time to sit anywhere. She periodically disappeared from our cosy, well-ordered life in the center of Moscow and went back again and again to a different, terrifying life where a war was being fought, people were dying, a life of pain and suffering. She flew there to give help and hope, to rescue people and restore the truth. Protecting the peace of our families, we instinctively avoided letting that war into our hearts. We told her she only lived once, that she should think about her children and parents, that she shouldn’t take such risks. Anna didn’t even try to argue with us. She considered herself duty bound to relieve the pain of others. In the traditional photographs taken during our happy reunions in recent years, her eyes are always sad. That other life never completely freed her to return to our life in Moscow.

Anna was absolutely convinced of the rightness of her choice to fight for justice, and to defend the weak and the wronged. It is the way saints live but, as we know from history, their lives are unfortunately often short. She cannot write any more now. Now it is our turn to write about her.

The idea of forming our association came to us one time when, joining hands, we jumped off a garage roof into a deep snowdrift. Alas, I doubt there are any garage owners left who are so kindly disposed towards children. A few months before we had all been new pupils in Class 1B. We were all born leaders and a happy childhood intuition must have suggested to us that it would be better to join forces, to form a nucleus which would attract our classmates, rather than fight it out with each other to be the leader of this new pack. We were minded to do good, having been brought up on the edifying novellas of Valentina Oseyeva and Arkadiy Gaidar, and tales about heroic Young Pioneers.

Our first good deed was to help the class dunce, a boy called Volodya, to revise for a series of class tests and to improve dramatically on his disgraceful marks. We gathered at Anna’s. She proposed an original incentive: for every mistake he made in the maths examples Volodya would have to eat several sugared cranberry sweets. Soon the sweets were all gone, but the mistakes persisted. Volodya did not come to school the next day. Sweet things disagreed with him and he came out in a terrible rash which took ages to clear up.

Our inclination to do good deeds evolved into a determination to catch criminals. Every day as we walked to school we passed a stand in the street which had photographs of people wanted for questioning by the militia. This inspired us to new feats. For several days we followed close on the heels of a suspicious person who evidently lived somewhere nearby. Perhaps he really did have a criminal past. At all events, he spent most of the day in the company of the local alcoholics or just hanging around aimlessly. We were convinced that we had detected a terrible saboteur and that the Motherland would be proud of us. We were never to forget the militiamen seating us in a motorbike sidecar, and with eyes ablaze and our Pioneer neckerchiefs flying in the wind we were driven round the courtyards in search of our suspect. We do not know to this day what the militia talked to him about, but for years after that our hypothetical criminal crossed to the other side of the road whenever he saw us.

We were good at