Harvest, Part III

Autumn Morning- Dugaev

Fear and I glimpsed each other when I went to pick my boss up from the airport and I saw that five flights from three regional airlines had been delayed indefinitely due to lack of fuel.  Fear and I were formally introduced when I asked the medical rep if worries about a shortage were normal "winter is coming" paranoia, of whether there was a real problem.  He replied, carefully, " I hope that it is not real.  But...if it is real, I feel Yekaterinburg has a lot of trees.  The wood stove at my parent's dacha works quite well, and the second floor I feel will be completed.  You and your husband can join us."

He had been thinking about the possibility of freezing to death when the temperature was still 70 degrees Farenheit.

By the time I attended a banquet dinner with my boss and the chief of the local hospital, Fear and I were chatting comfortably.    It was interesting to note that Dr. Takchidi happened to mention in the middle of dinner that the heating supply for his 300-bed clinic and its adjacent hotel was now renovated and completely independent from the city.  Next year he plans to liberate his water supply.

Russians live in the constant company of Fear and its consort, Disaster.  Whereas, in the US, we assume despite past experience that in the face of calamity, each family will strike out for itself, deny fortune's favors to the less prepared, and barricade themselves into lonely isolated fortresses, Russians look to the unthinkable as a way of breaking down the walls that divide the individual from the community, the stranger from the status of guest.  Just as the American assumption is often erroneous, so is the Russian; but since Disaster will always be mostly an exercise in anticipation, its contemplation gives Russians the rarely afforded opportunity to be generous.

Just as one American will reassure another in the face of tragedy by saying, heartlessly, "It will be ok, everything always turns out for the best", the Russian knows that the worst will happen. The future is uncertain, and it has the ability to consume you whole.  You don't congratulate a pregnant woman until her child is born living, healthy, and has a name.  You don't congratulate someone on a vacation until they've returned.  If destiny has dealt an evil blow, the American will try to cheer you up; the Russian will commiserate, and tell you exactly how much worse it's going to get.  Then they'll give you enough alcohol and trips to the halls of gratuitous praise that you'll feel like you can handle it.

On the other hand, Russians have a veneration for accomplishment that could only be achieved in a country where everything is so hard to accomplish.  Every crop and every child that grows to maturity is a miracle, albeit a miracle wrought with prayer and heralded by numerous stigmata.

Even though cold weather threatens, along with another devaluation, another confirmation that the country's administration has plundered and pillaged its populace once more, the joy and pride of the harvest is piled on cartons and crates at every street corner.  Melons and berries and garlic and peppers and tomatoes and plums and apples so sweet they brown in their skins tumble in green and rosy heaps around their cultivators.  A line of women chat, toothless and rish in the treasures coaxed and teased and torn from the earth by their own hands.

I buy red peppers and garlic from the Georgian family- their daughter is round and cheerful and openly curious about Americans, and she always picks the best tomatoes from the pile for me.  I buy sweet white strawberries from one babushka, flowers in season from the next.  There is a man on whom the dirt is pressed and creased into every wrinkle, from whom I buy gooseberries and currents, in Mason jar measures.  One family has a talent for growing brown, yellow and red potatoes, and they burnish them clean until they glow like gold and copper; others' potatoes lie in muddy unbought heaps to the side of them.

There is an Armenian couple that can sell me anything- dozen's of cucumbers I didn't want, slices of a melon I couldn't even name; they introduced me to a melon that tasted like cool tranches of honey sherbet, all twenty kilos of it.  The wife has the marketing skills of a professional, her powers of persuasion and ability to incite cravings defies description.  Meanwhile, her handsome husband lays on the guilt.  Now why did you buy flowers and tomatoes over there? Aren't ours more beautiful? Don't we always treat you right?  Doesn't your husband always love whatever we send home with you?

Among the women gossiping, the summer lovers enjoying their last desperate kisses, twilight sweeps, stretching its blue skin and shadows over the street.  Women yawn, men get restless, the cash is counted, produce bundled, deep discounts offered to the hungry schoolboys hanging around the carts.  Cars are loaded, and by the last light, the streets are deserted.

Once that Autumn, I saw the women stay deep into the dark.  It was almost midnight: Ivan and I were in a gypsy cab driving past Lunacharskova street, and there they were.  Ten women, all ages, were sitting still at their tables, which were heaped high with harvest.  The night wa a cold black sea swimming with an enormous golden moon.  In the center of each table, a candle flickered in a jar, highlighting the face of each woman.  The women sat silently, facing the night with both the fear of a coming battle and the peace that comes with knowing that you've done everything that could be done.  They were as old as death and as new as creation and as beautiful as faith, priestesses presidng at Harvest's altar.

8:42:23 PM