Sunday, September 26, 1999

The rain finally came, the week before last, all at once and too much, from a hurricane far away in the Carolinas. The lawns in town are green again as if nothing happened. Lawns have no memory. That is their advantage.

Today I sorted seeds on the kitchen table. This year I saved from eleven of the best fruits, the most heart-shaped and the least cracked, which is selection. This is how every variety in the world was made: some woman at a kitchen table, choosing. Twelve envelopes. On each I wrote in two alphabets, БЫЧЬЕ СЕРДЦЕ / Bull's Heart, and the year, and "E.M., Pennsylvania."

One envelope for me for next year. One for the trial in House 4, if Mr. Landis says yes to the proposal; he said, "Let me sleep on it," which Lupe says means yes. One for Lupe. One for Mrs. Weaver.

And one I mailed yesterday to Moscow, inside a long letter to Galya, which this time I actually sent. She has a balcony on the seventh floor facing south. Mama's tomato, which went to America in my coat, is going back the other way. I did not declare it. I apologize again, to the U.S. Postal Service and to whoever is in charge in Russia now, whoever he is this week.

Misha is filling the application for the university in Pittsburgh at this minute, on paper with a black pen, very slowly, cursing softly in two languages. On the news NASA has lost its spaceship at Mars; they do not know yet what happened. I know how those engineers feel. Years of work, and it goes somewhere, and you do not know where.

Well. You plant it and you see.

Wednesday, September 22, 1999

Tomorrow is the equinox. The nights are cold now, and the tomatoes know it and slow down. There are forty or fifty green ones still on the plants. Before the frost I will pick them all and make what Mama made: green tomatoes in a jar with garlic and dill and horseradish leaves and one hot pepper, in salt water, a month in the cellar. Mrs. Weaver has offered her cellar. She makes chow-chow, the Pennsylvania Dutch pickle with everything in it, and I said we will have a competition. She said Mennonites don't compete. Then she asked me how much garlic.

Sunday, September 19, 1999

Misha finished his essay and let me read it.

It is not about leaving Moscow. It is not about the seeds in my coat. It is about the kitchen table last winter: the SAT book between us like a small dog, his words and my words, how he taught me obdurate and I taught him the Latin name of every weed in Mrs. Weaver's lawn, and how his mother reads plant names out loud at red lights "the way other people's mothers pray." It is about how learning a language is the same as learning a country, one ugly word at a time. It is funny. It is better English than I will ever write.

I am in it, but not how I expected. I expected to be the heroine who carried him over the ocean. Instead I am the strange woman at the table saying Taraxacum officinale at the dandelions. I think this is more accurate. Probably this is how he will remember me, and I find, at the kitchen table at one in the morning, that I do not mind.

I corrected one comma. He put it back.

Tuesday, September 14, 1999

There have been explosions in Moscow. Apartment buildings, at night, while people slept: one last week, and another yesterday morning, both in the south of the city. I will not write numbers. The numbers change every time I turn on the radio and I cannot bear them.

Galya's building is in the north, far from both, she says. It does not matter. I called at five this morning, which is one in the afternoon there, and the lines were busy, busy, busy, and I stood in the kitchen in my coat, ready for work, dialing, for forty minutes. Then she answered. "Lena, we are fine, we are fine, go to work."

She says now in every building the people take turns sitting up at night by the front door, watching who comes, who parks a truck, who carries sacks into the basement. Nastya sits on Thursday nights with the old man from the fourth floor, who was at Stalingrad and tells her about it until the sun comes up.

I went to work. I watered the mums. I do not remember watering them. Brent brought me a coffee, two sugars, and did not say anything, and for once that was exactly the right English.

Monday, September 6, 1999

Labor Day. A holiday for labor, which in America means nobody labors except people in retail and in greenhouses. I worked until two. The mums are in full color, rust and yellow and a purple which no nature ever made.

Misha starts his senior year tomorrow. Tonight he asked me questions for his college essay. Five hundred words. "Tell me about when we left," he said, with a pencil, like a journalist.

So I told him. September 1994. Two suitcases, one each, and one box of books sent by ship, which arrived in December with the corner wet. His father already here, meeting us at the airport in New York with flowers from a gas station. Galya at Sheremetyevo not crying until we were through passport control, and then crying; I saw her through the glass. Mama did not come to the airport. She said she would stay home and not make a scene, and then she made the scene at home, Galya told me later. And the envelope of tomato seeds in the inside pocket of my coat. I told him that also.

He wrote it all down. I asked what the essay will be about. He said, "I don't know yet. Maybe not this." Then why all the questions? He said, "Because I wanted to know."

Wednesday, August 25, 1999

Brent ate a tomato.

I brought four to work in a paper bag, for Lupe and for Mr. Landis. Brent came into the break room while Mr. Landis was cutting one with his pocketknife, and Mr. Landis said, "Try this," and Brent said, "That thing is ugly," and tried it. And then he stood there for a while.

Then he said, "Why don't we grow these?"

I explained about the thin skin, the shipping, how the supermarket chain wants every tomato the same size as every other tomato and able to fall off a truck. He said, "Not for the chain. For us. The farm stand. The market in Lancaster on Saturdays. People pay four bucks a pound for this stuff in Philly." He knows this because his wife reads magazines. The word, I am told, is "heirloom." In Russia we call them "tomatoes."

So now I am writing a proposal. For next spring: six varieties, one bay of House 4, a trial, with records. I write it on Misha's computer, in English, with headings and a budget, and it is (I counted) the first scientific document I have written in five years. At the Institute I wrote proposals to the Academy for thirteen years; every year they were approved and every year the money did not come.

This one is for three hundred dollars of seed and one bay of a greenhouse. I have never wanted a grant so much.

Tuesday, August 17, 1999

One year since the default. I saw the date on the calendar at work and for a minute could not do anything, only stood there with the hose.

And all day on the radio, the earthquake in Turkey, which came in the night there, with people asleep in their buildings. Many Russians went to Turkey for holidays before the crash; it was the only abroad anybody could afford. Galya says in Moscow the news is also only this.

Russia has another new prime minister, the fourth since last spring. Galya says she did not catch his name. "A grey man," she said. "They are all grey men. The only difference is the ties."

I sent money on Saturday. Less than last winter; Galya insists. Nastya pays for her own things now, and she wants to go back to the institute in the evenings. My sister has become, in one year, a woman who argues me down to smaller amounts of money. There is no better news.

Saturday, August 14, 1999

Yesterday we drove to Pittsburgh to see the university. Four hours on the Turnpike, through the mountains, and through tunnels in the mountains; Misha counted them for me, like when he was small and we rode the metro and he counted the stations. We stayed in a motel with a pool the size of a bathtub.

The university is beautiful and serious, and the young man who gave the tour walked backwards the whole time and never fell. Misha asked about computers. I asked about financial aid. The young man answered Misha for ten minutes and me for one minute, and his one minute ended with "you'll want to talk to the office about that." In the office there was a very kind woman who looked at our numbers and said, "He'd be a strong candidate for aid." I have learned that in America "strong candidate" is like a weather forecast: probably, but bring an umbrella.

On the way home, somewhere in a tunnel, Misha said, "I could go to the state school, Mam. It's fine." I said, "Apply. Apply everywhere. We will see." I said it in Russian, which is the language I use when I want to end a conversation. He knows this. He let me.

Sunday, August 1, 1999

Today the first one was ripe. I will be precise, because that is how I am. Four hundred and ninety grams, a little more than a pound. Pink, not red, with the green shoulders just going gold. Heart-shaped and a little crooked, like a heart which has been used.

I picked it at seven in the morning with the dew on it. I did not eat it right away. First I drove to Philadelphia, to the Russian store, for black bread, the real one, Borodinsky, with coriander seeds on top, and for dill, and for sunflower oil which smells of sunflowers and not of nothing like the American oil. Misha came, because he wanted pickled herring, and because, he said, he wanted to "witness this."

At two o'clock I cut it on Mama's board, the wooden one, the only thing from her kitchen I have. Thick slices. Salt. The oil. The dill. Black bread on the side. Misha and I sat at the kitchen table, with the SAT book finally gone to the shelf, and ate.

I would like to say something scientific. Sugar: high. Acid: also high, which is the secret, the sweet and the sour together. Flesh: meaty, grainy, small seed cavities. Skin: thin, which is why the supermarkets will never have it; it cannot travel. All of this is correct.

But the true report is this. It tastes like the dacha in August, with the wasps, and the smoke from the neighbor burning leaves, and Mama in her terrible straw hat, and Galya and I, six and ten years old, eating tomatoes like apples with salt from a matchbox. It tastes like home. That is not a scientific statement. I have not published anything in five years; let me publish this.

Misha ate three slices and said, "Okay. I get it." Then he said, "Can I have the last piece?" I gave it to him. That is also a kind of report.

Thursday, July 22, 1999

No rain. Weeks of it. The lawns in town are brown like the steppe, and now there are rules against watering them. The corn along the road has rolled up its leaves, which is how corn says it is suffering. The farmers stand in front of the feed store and look at the sky as if it owes them money.

The greenhouse is fine. The greenhouse has a well and a roof. It is the one place in this county where the weather is exactly what we decide.

In Mrs. Weaver's garden it is not fine. Tomatoes crack when the water comes irregular: dry, dry, dry, then a flood, and the fruit swells faster than the skin can grow, and it splits. So every evening I carry water from the kitchen, the same amount each time, and the dishwater too, which the plants do not mind. Mrs. Weaver saves hers for me in a basin. Two women, one Mennonite widow and one Russian divorcee, carrying buckets at nine o'clock at night in the half dark. We look, Misha says, like a painting of a peasant village. I told him that is exactly what we are, only with a television.

Saturday, July 10, 1999

This afternoon the American women won the World Cup of soccer, in California, on penalty kicks, after two hours of nobody scoring. Mrs. Weaver and Misha and I watched downstairs on her television, the one she does not enjoy. She enjoyed it. When the last girl scored, Mrs. Weaver stood up from her chair, seventy-two years old, and shouted "Yes!" like a sergeant. Then she sat down, said, "Well. My goodness," and smoothed her apron.

Galya writes that Nastya has a job now, in the office of a firm which sells office furniture to other firms. She has a computer on her desk. She answers the telephone in English for the foreign customers, "Hello, good afternoon," with a very good accent, Galya says, better than mine. I am sure this is true. I have heard myself on the answering machine.

My tomatoes have fruit. Green, heart-shaped, heavy. The plants are up to my chin.

Older entries: January to June 1999.