Tomatoes

(with a continuous admiration for J.L.Borges)


I've never been close to my Uncle: my mother's brother is a somewhat rough small-town ex-star grown old, embittered, and bibulous, mowed down by the harsh and reduced provincial life in an impoverished country. We both know there is an unspoken-of barrier between us that keeps us infallibly distant from each other, but nevertheless, we both try. We make the effort, mostly because of my mother.

(Come to think of it, I was also uneasily but constantly distant from my other Uncle, on my father's side. In fact, when I was little, my unease about him - possibly fostered by a beard he always had, a booming voice, and an ability to engulf everyone into his dominant personality -- was of such substantial dimensions that I used to cry at the sight of him. One of the proudest days of my early childhood was the one when, knowing that he would be visiting, I had prepared myself for it, and then, when he rang the doorbell, opened the door widely and smiled. A rough-edged sentimentalist, he was the one who cried that time -- from happiness)

That summer day -- I was visiting -- my mother's brother and I went to the market place. The market place in Knjazevac is small: one corner at the edge of the chestnut-tree-lined "downtown" street sectioned off for several long stands where the locals mingle, gossip, and trade, never in a hurry. Was it tomatoes we needed? The peasant from whom we decided to buy was Uncle's acquaintance but apparently they hadn't seen each other in quite a while. He was a quiet man, with large hands which reminded me of potatoes, and a humble look in his small eyes. I was standing a little to the side during their small talk but I heard when the peasant asked my Uncle: "How is Zlata?" My Uncle pretended not to have heard; or he was buying time -- a matter of seconds -- before he'd have to finalize the issue with the answer. The peasant was looking at him expectantly.

I was listening.

I was listening carefully to something beginning to happen, a vague sense of movement in the air, which soon burst into a flurry of activity, a tectonic change of molecules rapidly rearranging themselves into billions of fresh patterns, creating busily a whole new world. The world which seemed to know that it didn't have a lot of time to spring into being and run its course -- only until my Uncle pushed the air through his vocal chords in answer to the question, currently still on the rising note of honest inquiry.

First there was a self-directed, physically indescribable motion of backward undoing, speeding deeper into the past, knocking over the building blocks of each sensation from the last few years, the mass of which had already solidified into a thickening texture of inevitability. It felt like finding a secret zipper and unzipping what looked like real skin. In a flash, my moments and memories as I knew them were overturned, the disappearance of each dismantling also a minute piece of the world as I knew it, the backward movement sweeping furiously further and further into the past, leaving in its wake a clean slate, grief-free. In the space of a second, it whizzed like an arrow of joyful destruction all the way back to the instant of that second -- fatal -- myocardial failure, and slightly beyond the first -- milder -- tripping of her heart, erasing them both, and stopping with a screeching halt. Then, with her heart beating obliviously, it turned about fiercely, gushing like an elemental force back into the future with a minor change to the original trajectory, weaving a brand new scenery and a context for each forward move. In a unit of time immeasurable by human standards, a whole new world was created, both radically and insignificantly different from the old one, whose newness was a function of this one beating, unbroken, heart that with its continuous presence entailed a subtle modification to how the sun rose and set, or what shade of blue the sky wore, or how the rain felt on your face if you were caught without the umbrella. A world in which her voice had a physical volume, where her whistle with an old-fashioned trill resonated in the kitchen, where she sent me recipes she had just found and demanded pictures of me and my friends so she could study us, where I found new classical and African music for her and she listened, eyes closed, sinking into the armchair, her glasses hanging on a chain around her neck. Where we had time to get older together, where she came for a visit and asked a load of personal questions, where we travelled each summer, walked slowly side by side and gossiped about the remote family members, where this summer -- today -- we went to the market with Uncle to buy tomatoes and the two of them laughed about some childhood incident that happened at that corner, and then recognized and waved at the peasant with potato hands.

"She died," my Uncle answered, under his breath, and there was a sudden, brief silence while both he and the peasant looked at their feet. The fat summer flies buzzed, the hot air was lazy and unperturbed, the world old and indifferent.

The five-second lifetime, spawned in the interstice between our facts and the peasant's, played itself out and was gone in a flicker. All that was left was a handful of succulent red tomatoes I carried in a bag as my Uncle and I walked home.