Selections from FM GALICIA

22.11

For some reason, we do not consider our territory to be a fertile land. Transcarpathia, Moldova, and, perhaps, the Kosiv region—those are the fertile lands. While all we have are potatoes, beans, some squash, and onions. But our region—the Prykarpattia foothills—is an apple paradise. Nowhere else are such winter apples found, except, perhaps, somewhere in northern France, but they’re hard to find in the winter anyway because the whole harvest is used to make calvados. And we have the most prized Rennet apples, and winter apples can last—if treated with love and care—until summer, without losing their taste or smell, even though they leave a trace of their fragrance in spaces where they have been stored.

In wintertime, mountain orchardists make their way to the stations in snowy hordes, bringing apples to the Ivano-Frankivsk market by train. If one of their sacks should tear along the way, those yellow-red apple billiard balls might utilize that which they had absorbed from the sun to warm the whole dreary Chervona Ruta1 train-car, or maybe they’ll singe the hopeless frigidity of the snows with their cooled skin.

Sometimes that is exactly what takes place. And then the apples need to be gathered. But once, it so happened, that not one single winter apple, which had been spilled along the railroad tracks, had been touched by anyone. They just lay there like that and then melted through snow’s thickness and eventually seeped into the ground, maybe without even having deteriorated; no one can say for sure because when the snow thawed, no traces remained. And no one picked up those apples because they spilled from a sack belonging to Mr. Boiko. Mr. Boiko was carrying a sack of red winter apples to the train station. It was still dark and freezing cold. His winter hat was tied tightly, his head bent from the weight sitting on his neck. That is why he didn’t hear the train approaching from the rear, and the apples spilled out along the train tracks.

The reason people didn’t gather them was not because in winter­time there were no flowers to lay at this spot, but because the apples served to remind them how difficult it was to escape one’s fate. Because Mr. Boiko had been hit by trains in the past, having gotten his wagon stuck while crossing the tracks. Never had this happened to anyone else. He had always survived, unscathed, while his wagons had been smashed into splinters. For him, trains probably had been like lightning bolts.

I don’t know why, but I find this story to be very optimistic. But it also reminds me that you never really know who will finish eating up the harvest you have gathered.

Notes

[1] For more on Chernova Ruta, see the note for Andriy Bondar’s “St. Nick No. 628.”

Translated by Mark Andryczyk