The wind is rocking snow-covered branches of someone’s garden, quivering cold white fluff from them. In the early dusk, the apples, looking like Christmas toys, glitter, catching the glow of the lamppost. Small yellow fruits on the very pinnacle, which couldn’t have been reached in September, were left to meet the winter. And they’re called respectively – Calville Blanc d’hiver. Indigenous Vinnytsia cultivar, from those “old” ones, that are difficult to remember now.
In the winters of my childhood, grocery shops were dim and spaceless, full of tickling darkness, like fabulous underground kingdoms. Netty cylinders, three-four times taller than me, towered the foreground of the tiled hall, which evoked the associations with a hospital or an operating theatre. There, the beetroot with hairy rat tails darkened, the potato acutely smelled and silently rustled, sprouting towards the spring. Further, the boxes with dirty-coral carrot and hard glossy cabbage stretched out next to the aisle. This aisle led to the place where the things changed their nature, freshness stepped aside for alternative characteristics of a substance, cucumbers in the barrels became pale and salty and tomatoes in the huge jars – soft and pickled. The memory of smells is one of the most piercing. I remember how it approached from the furthest, the darkest corner and embraced everything around – the smell of sozzled apples which filled the baths lined along the wall. Golden Antonivkas. We scooped them up into a sack with a crumpled aluminium ladle, listening in to a leisurely splashing of liquid in the dark bath and then weighed them on the scale pans – blue beaks of steal birds swung and froze on the same level when apples were balanced by a set of rusty weights – to carry home, feeling the apples harden in the cold and lay them out on the plate, enjoying the smell of fermented summer that filled the kitchen. Yes, I really remember that smell although I’ve almost forgotten the precious flavour of winter sweets which had amused us long before tangerines and oranges became available in the winter.
Somehow these apples always follow people, follow the trail. Stolen from the Garden of the Hesperides and secret orchards of Hera; presented to Eva by the serpent-seducer; nestled in the hands of Graces on Renaissance paintings and rulers on the thrones, golden and heavy; painted on the heraldic shields – inside the wild boar’s jaw, pierced with arrows; in the river next to the fish and on the ground under the bird feet; green apples on the face of Magritte’s The Son of Man and even a pale apple of the winter sun, which rolls on the plate of the winter sky in these darkest days and waits for equinox. Apple is a basic association, it’s easy to compare with anything: from previously unknown vegetables and fruit brought to Europe (pomme de terre, that is earth apple, potato and pomme d’amour – the apple of love, tomato) to an old, wrinkled human face, which really looks like a baked apple.
When my family got a piece of plot in the Vinnytsa outskirts, my granny Maria almost immediately bought apple seedlings. She dreamt about White Transparent cultivar. And as it often happens, the sellers deceived her and the apples turned out to be a red cultivar Slava Peremozhtsiam (Glory to Winners). However, we have never regretted it. The apple tree grew dwarfish on the clay soils although it was fruitful and abundant. Granny managed to catch more that one of its crops and every time she was childishly happy with the big, as fists, juicy and red apples. And here, she’s been gone for twelve years and a stubborn Slavka, even though it remained small, spread across half of the plot. Every spring, it blooms with pink and yield, its fiery-red fruits lie in the fridge all the winter and its juice, pre-squeezed and closed in jars, bring back to August in the midst of any gloomy winter day. As a teen, I read that Slava was selected in the Mliiv Research Station by Levko Symyrenko, the “father” of famous Reinette. Selected in 1928 and tested by the state from 1948. What winners was it about in this stretch of time? Actually, about any. I mean, not that I was trying not to think about it but for me, these red embers are first of all the defeat of death, the viscosity of memory, simple and honest, as the taste of juicy apples.
Our family Slava belongs to the “old” cultivars that are scarcely known to the young admirers of apples. And the seedlings would be hard to find if a sudden surge to change the outmoded tree appeared. Daneshta is as old as Slava (strictly speaking, it’s Doneshta, but people’s phonetics prefers A here) about which I have a life story and a verse. Same old is Pepinka with its pale blush and oily shine of skin, almost human-like. And another Vinnytsa indigenous is Pannochka cultivar, elongated white-green lanterns with mint flavour. This applied pomology could become a test not worse than the pronunciation of the word “palanytsa” – to recollect as much as possible old apple cultivars of Ukrainian selection.
There’s no longer Antonivka apple trees near my parents home, planted by my grandad Kostya. They were cut down without us but I still regret those trees with a long memory and cool fruits, picked up from the grass in the yard. I regret a big city apple garden not far from the Vinnytsa railway station, closed between two tram lines. A municipal market has long grown in its place and a new housing estate is being slowly risen and every time when I go on the tram from the railway station, I remember that dizzy blooming and the trucks with autumn harvest and how I cried when these trees were being cut down. But incredible stories also happen as if in compensation. For instance, one wonderful colleague poetess found and planted in her garden Daneshta – named for my verse. Now the colleague is in hot Africa and the apple tree winters in Ukrainian snows and waits for her return. What’s more – on the plot, next to our old Slavka, the apple trees-migrants are growing – Sinap kandille, aboriginal Crimean cultivar.
The friends from Crimea gifted my father some seedlings long before occupation. The climate change was rough for young trees, they had been long strengthening and putting down roots up to the moment of annexation and the souvenir magnets from Bakhchysarai and Chufut-Kale started to treacherously fade on my fridge. Then our apple trees-migrants bore first fruits, elongated and noble, like the yellow-red festive lanterns. Every year, the apple crops increase and the fruits themselves become larger. And I think that Crimea was glorified by its flourishing gardens in times of the Crimean-Tatars – it has been testified by all travellers, but after deportation in 1944 the gardens quickly dried out. And I can’t stop thinking that until my stubborn dwarfish trees keep yielding, the possibility of the garden is preserved, the subtle connection with land which will soon return home.
And, after all, on the eve of holidays, it’s worth remembering that Christmas tree balls are direct descendants of apples, those paradise ones, which were used to decorate Christmas trees since the dawn of time. And quote to oneself Andrukhovych’s rehash of Pasternak, which always induces tears – about “all thoughts of centuries and gusts and winds on the squares of future”. Because every day, it happens that “the winds came howling in across the plains”. But they are always there and always warm us up – “all the apples of the world and all the colours”. The most durable will survive the winter and when their wrinkled faces will be taken out from the cool deep cellars to the daylight – it will mean that the spring came.
Kateryna Kalytko