It was the desire for mashed potatoes that finally pulled me to the grocery store for the first time in nearly a month. I was already in the neighborhood, and though I had basically resigned myself to just making do with what I have from here on out, I have always had a soft spot for mashed potatoes, and was beginning to get concerned about when I was going to run out of butter.
There is a statement by the collage artist John Heartfield, that says men will always choose guns over butter, except when they haven’t any, and then butter becomes a very dear thing.
It is true, some day I will write poetry about butter.
In the end I was glad to bear witness to what has changed in the last weeks. A line outside the grocery store entrance, queuing round the corner, two meters between groups. I wanted potatoes, but I didn’t want them that badly. In retrospect it reminds me of stories I read about the women in the war, going to the only shops that were open with their coupons for bread or flour or whatever – sometimes trading in line.
Will we get that far?
People keep calling it a war, and I have to say, perhaps in retrospect we will say that was not the right way to go about it. That perhaps that is actually the point to begin with – isolation and separation from the very body that sustains us, this planet, now the cause of our new enemy. Chinese and their diaspora around the world are now experiencing racism because ‘they created it’ – and though I think something be said about humans believing it is right and good to sell exotic wild animals in cages at a market with clearly unsanitary conditions, this example of human arrogance in the face of our relation to this planet is just one amongst so many, which are not in any way isolated to culture or country.
At the Turkish market across the street things were refreshingly fresh air, and I noticed with some pleasure the presence of an annual local fruit. It is orange, with large seeds on the inside, called a Mispeln. There were also some small green fruits that the Turkish teller called plums, told me they to eat them with salt. They looked decided high in Vitamin C, as are most sour things.
There was still a line inside for the register, but it did not feel as suffocating as across the street. I could not find the butter, ruefully concerned, and turned to ask someone with a big basket full of paper-wrapped packages of meat and asked him, assuming a man with butter would know where the meat was, and he did. For now there is still butter, no guns yet. His smile nurtured something in me, these small interactions, a kind of confirmation that we are both still human.
Indeed there has been a deterioration in these weeks. It is a strangely palpable feeling, societal depression. Smaller in all respects. Fewer people on the street, and a number I actually recognize as neighbors, locals to this area – for many, like me, have just been circling the block, going between the apartment and the park, and occasionally coming down the Main Street for some kind of diversion or necessity.
My diversion plan was originally a trip to a used book store, I had an appointment in fact. Going to visit my book seller, instead of ordering off Amazon. Felt decidedly novel, no pun intended. His shop may as well have been out of a basement in the East Village, stacks of books on tables and in boxes, everything mildly organized and majorly disorganized. But fascinating. A curation. And even just to TOUCH things! Without care! What a strange surprise that was, something I didn’t realize I had been missing. Leafing through the pages, all these pages that could contain virus for over 36 hours each. Just thinking about it made me feel comically rebellious. Threw me into all kinds of romantic feelings about what is contained in a book, what can be found there. Going into this little shop was like diving into the closet of the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and as if to prove this really was Narnia, I picked up a book of Caribbean poetry and opened the front page to find the school library stamp of MY PUBLIC HIGH SCHOOL in suburban Massachusetts! Here on the inside cover of this book of poetry from Barbados in a crowded used book store in Berlin, Germany, in the midst of a quarantine pandemic. I was baffled. Still gives me a smile. The book seller gave me the book as a gift, after I lined up nearly 100 euros worth of other things.
…
So they say we are flattening the curve, that we are now on the plateau, at least in certain areas. The Governor quotes Winston Churchill, saying this is not the end, nor even the beginning of the end, but this is the end of the beginning. And unfortunately, that resonates. It was invisible in the beginning, how it all happened. This was no nuclear bomb that decimated society in an instant. No, it was exactly what it was – a slow moving killer, a seeping virus, let loose upon the blind population of humanity. In the beginning, which has now gone by, we thought this was going to upset things for a few weeks, a month or two. But we were still in for a good summer. That was the feeling. I was going to be able to use those ticket vouchers, and perhaps go to Beirut in July, instead of Tel Aviv for Easter. I was supposed to be in Tel Aviv right now, jumping in the ocean. That was the plan. The plan was also to go to Japan in March just past. Would have gotten back last week. Canceled plans due to an injury more than the virus, but was lucky enough to be able to postpone the plans until fall with the airline. Now I hear from the bookseller who is trying to travel to Asia to visit his mother that most airlines aren’t considering truly reopening things until the fall, maybe October even.
Then what will it be?
Japan was a fairytale story for me – pink cherry blossoms in Kyoto and a thin-walled apartments in Osaka; going up in the snow to the baths of Mount Koyasan, castles and a friend and his child in Tokyo. I had never been to Japan, and was looking forward to all of it – the tatami mats, the pickled vegetables, the smell of cedar.
Before I became injured I was already doubting my plans to go, exhausted from too much travel and anyway just wanting to stay home. The injury was almost a gift, giving me the mandate to cancel. At the same time, I met an artist in this time who has Japanese roots on a train ride coming home. She encouraged me to go, told me a story about how she had traveled all over the world for her artistic work and always wanted to go to Aleppo to see the great architecture there. Never did, and now she can’t. Or rather, she could, but it would never be the same. I wonder about that, the cherry blossoms, if they will be like Fermina Daza’s manatees in the river, of which she ultimately only sees one – but then she never leaves that river, finally there with her lover, 5o years later.
Could that be what happens in this story?
I travel to Japan, finally, when all is said and done, nearly 90? I am sure I will enjoy those blossoms then. As I would have anyway this spring. But it was not the right time. I was already nervous in that time, almost inordinately, watching the numbers rise in China and then the surrounding countries. Other people didn’t think it was that big a deal. Personally, I never expected it to leave Asia. Never expected Germany to become one of those red countries on the map. That was the beginning of the end, when were were all still intoxicated by our own lives.
Even though honestly we all knew this was coming, somewhere in the back of our minds. We all just kept going, and doing, because we could, because everyone else was, because that was what we were supposed to do, and the economy is booming, everyone moving, everything going and going and going and never really thinking that stopping was even an option. You just die, that’s stopping. But now life is different. Now we are stopped, even if some are still moving in place. The course doesn’t direct us anywhere but here. Staying home, still. Only then, gradually, will we look to see the sunrise and decide after the storm what to rebuild.
It is time to go across town again; the cherry blossoms must surely by now be blooming. As it would go, I was ready to fly around the world to see those cherry trees, and there happen to be some right here.