Home According to Beans

To My Grandparents, With Love

I dial the 14-digit number and wait. There's an indifferent silence, then small crackling sounds against the steady buzz in the background. I wait some more. Something happens, there's a faint hesitation, and then a click, which seems to set off the next level of the procedure, and the measured-out insistent rings burst hastily into my ear as if resuming an interrupted cycle. Unlike on some previous occasions (when someone answered in Italian, or another time, in Spanish), the connection is right - I recognize the peculiar ring of that phone, emitting sound waves which spread throughout my grandparents' small house in eastern Serbia, 7227 kilometres away. I'm imagining my grandmother, walking slowly and heavily towards the phone on a small wooden stand next to the TV set, on top of which is a fan-like line-up of colourful postcards I keep sending. She sometimes puts the phone on the table next to the bed to be able to reach it more quickly if it rings -- I guess she didn't do it this time.

I call twice a week, and there's never much to say. Small things. Careful treading around the sore spots -- acknowledging them, but keeping them in check. My grandparents are 86, 68 of which years they have been married to each other. In the diminishing vista of their lives there isn't much good left. The body is giving up and limits their days to slow shufflings around the small house, and sometimes, on good days, around the yard. Nights are a stretched-out consciousness of pain interrupted by the fitful surface of sleep. The sole purpose of both dreaming and waking states: remembering and mourning the loved ones who have gone, leaving them bewildered at such desertion, such loneliness. The narrow end of the funnel that nobody ever really expects. When I call on our fixed days, we usually talk about the weather, and Nadja's kittens, and the younger relatives, and we even try to joke, while all those other things hover in the air like the dark shadow of a bird.

The phone rings away despondently, but I know better and I wait. Finally, the rings are cut short by the lifted receiver on the other end; this is followed by a short vacuum buffering the silence while the hand with the receiver is travelling slowly, clumsily to the ear; then my grandmother's thinned voice says "Hello?", and we start our weekly trapeze walk on the trans-oceanic phone lines. Almost immediately, she musters some enthusiasm and tells me "Your beans have blossomed!" Six or seven weeks ago I sent her 4 scarlet runner beans from the "harvest" in my yard last year. I improvised a protective sleeve from a piece of paper, and lined the plump purple black-dotted beans next to each other on the bottom inside; I sealed it with scotch-tape, and then deposited it into one of those padded heavy-duty envelopes. In the post office they weighed it, and asked me what's inside -- I said "Papers", and off it went: 4 inert morsels of Montreal soil, embarking on an incognito voyage to a foreign territory. So not only did they make it across, but they are growing (Slavica, the woman who lives with my uncle in the house next door to my grandparents, sowed them in the garden by the side of the house); and not only that but they're blossoming.

I'm puzzled: the siblings of those 4 beans have been in the soil outside my window here -- where they came from, their home turf! -- for days, and yet there's no sign of life. I check the pots every day, but they look sadly sullen and barren. There's no other answer: the beans have adopted that faraway foreign plot of land as their home, and are thriving as if they were natives, among my grandmother's tomatoes, oregano, grapes, strawberries, and apples. A strange asymmetry, but we are both glad, my grandmother and I, and you can hear the gladness in the phone. We are glad because in their small, blind, vegetable way, these beans in my grandparents' garden are performing a tiny miracle, creating their home against all odds, negating the negated life. Offering my grandparents passionately scarlet flowers before the curtain call.

Twin tomatoes: one homeless and one with a home