"Now, why would I want to turn you into smelly little goats and then eat you?" the witch asked indignantly. "If I wanted to eat you, I'd eat you as you are, without turning you into anything else. You shouldn't watch so many of Row's fairytales, little boy!"

Romka pouted sulkily, nudged Ksyusha with his foot and asked in a whisper, "Who's Row?"

Ksyusha didn't know and she hissed, "Drink your tea and be quiet! Some wizard or other…"

They didn't turn into little goats, the tea tasted good, and the bread rings and honey tasted even better. The witch asked Ksyusha all about how she was doing in school. She agreed that fourth grade was absolutely terrible, not like third grade at all. She scolded Romka for slurping when he drank his tea. She asked Ksyusha how long her brother had had a stammer. And then she told them she wasn't a witch at all. She was a botanist. She collected all sorts of rare herbs in the forest. And, of course, she knew which herbs the wolves were terribly afraid of.

"But why did the wolf talk?" Romka asked doubtfully.

"It didn't talk at all," the botanist-witch retorted. "It barked, and you thought it was talking. Isn't that right?"

Ksyusha thought about it and decided that was the way it had really been.

"I'll show you to the edge of the forest," said the woman. "You can see the village from there. And don't come into the forest anymore, or else the wolves will eat you."

Romka thought for a moment and then offered to help her gather herbs, only she would have to give him a special herb to keep the wolves away so they wouldn't eat him. And one to keep bears away, just in case. And she could give him one to keep lions away too, because the forest here was just like in Africa.

"No herbs for you," the woman said strictly. "They're very rare herbs, in the Red Book of threatened species. You can't just go pulling them up."

"I know about the Red Book," Romka said, delighted. "Tell me, please…"

The woman looked at the clock and shook her head. Well-mannered Ksyusha immediately said it was time to go.

Each of the children received a piece of honeycomb to take with them. The woman showed them to the edge of the forest-it turned out to be really close, the paths seemed to run under their feet.

"And don't you set foot in the forest again," the woman repeated strictly. "If I'm not there the wolf will eat you."

As they went down the hill toward the village, the children looked back several times.

At first the woman was standing there, watching them walk away. But then she disappeared.

"She is a witch really, isn't she, Ksyusha?" Romka asked.

"She's a botanist!" Ksyusha said, taking the woman's side. Then she exclaimed in surprise: "You're not stammering any more!"

"I am stam-stam-stammering!" said Romka, playing the fool. "I didn't really need to stammer before, I was just joking!"

Where do we get the idea that milk straight from the cow tastes good?

It must be something we do in first grade. Some memorable phrase from the textbook Our Native Tongue, about how wonderfully tasty milk is straight from the cow. And the naive city kids believe it.

In fact milk straight from the cow tastes rather peculiar. But after it's been left to stand in the cellar for a day and cooled off- now that's a different matter. Even those poor souls who lack the necessary digestive enzymes drink it. And there are plenty of them, by the way: As far as mother nature's concerned, grown-ups have no business drinking milk-it's children who need it…

But people usually don't pay much attention to nature's opinion.

And Others pay even less.

I reached for the jug and poured myself another glass. Cold, with a smooth layer of cream… why does boiling make the cream so smooth, the tastiest part of milk? I took a large swallow. No more-I had to leave some for Svetka and Nadiushka. The whole village-it was quite a big one, with fifty houses-had only one cow. It was a good thing there was at least one… and I had a strong suspicion that the humble Raika had Svetlana to thank for her magnificent yields. Her owner, Granny Sasha, already an old woman at forty, had no real reason to feel proud. As well as Raika, she owned the pig Borka, the goat Mishka, and a gaggle of miscellaneous poultry without any names.

It was just that Svetlana wanted her daughter to drink genuine milk. That was why the cow never caught any illnesses. Granny Sasha could have fed her on sawdust and it wouldn't have changed a thing.

But genuine milk really is good. Never mind the characters in the ads-they can arrive in a village with their cartons of milk and that jolly gleam in their eyes and say "the real thing!" as often as they like. They're paid money to do that. And it makes things easier for the peasants, who were long ago broken of the habit of keeping any kind of livestock. They can just carry on abusing the politicians and the "city folk" and not worry about pasturing any cows.

I put down my empty glass and sprawled back in a hammock hung between two trees. The locals must have thought I was a real bourgeois. I arrived in a fancy car and brought my wife lots of funny foreign groceries, spent the whole day lounging in a hammock with a book… In a place where everybody else spent the whole day roaming about, searching for a drop of something to fix their hangovers…

"Hello, Anton Sergeevich," someone said over the top of the fence-it was Kolya, a local alcoholic. He might have been reading my thoughts-and how come he'd remembered my name?

"How was the drive?"

"Hello, Kolya," I greeted him in lordly fashion, not making the slightest attempt to get up out of the hammock. He wouldn't appreciate it in any case. That wasn't what he'd come for. "It was fine, thanks."

"Need any help with anything, around the house and the garden, or you know…" Kolya asked hopelessly. "I thought, you know, I'd just come and ask…"

I closed my eyes-the sun, already sinking toward the horizon, glowed blood-red through my eyelids.

There was nothing I could do. Not the slightest little thing. A sixth or seventh-level intervention would have been enough to free the poor devil Kolya from his hankering for alcohol, cure his cirrhosis and inspire him with a desire to work, instead of drinking vodka and thrashing his wife.

And what if I had defied all the stipulations of the Treaty and made that intervention in secret? A brief gesture of the hand… And then what? There wasn't any work in the village. And nobody in the city wanted Kolya, a former collective farm mechanic. Kolya didn't have any money to start 'his own business'. He couldn't even buy a piglet.

So he'd go off again to look for moonshine, getting by on money from odd jobs, and working off his anger on his wife, who drank as much as he did and was just as weary of everything. It wasn't the man I needed to heal-it was the entire planet Earth.

Or at least this particular sixth part of the planet Earth. The part with the proud name of Russia.

"Anton Sergeevich, I'm desperate…" Kolya said pathetically.

Who needs a former alcoholic in a dying village where the collective farm has fallen apart and the only private farmer was burned out three times before he took the hint?

"Kolya," I said. "Didn't you have some kind of special trade in the army? A tank driver?"

Did we have any paid professional soldiers at all? It would be better if he went off to the Caucasus, instead of just dropping dead in a year's time from all that fake vodka…

"I wasn't in the army," Kolya said in a miserable voice. "They wouldn't take me. They were short of mechanics here back then. They kept giving me deferments, and then I got too old… Anton Sergeevich, if you want somebody's face smashed in, I can still do that all right. Don't you worry, I'll tear them to pieces!"