The Faraway Nearby (7 page)

I came to it too, walked up and said hello to Olafur just as Fríða arrived, so he introduced us and we fell to talking as he was taken up by other obligations. She was my age and my height and not far from my coloring, though she was leaner and more glamorous, with cheekbones you could build castles on and magnificent poise. And so we met and I said it was a pity that she was just in town so briefly and offered to show her the city, prompted by some affinity or resemblance or maybe by her foreignness and by hospitality, since she was in my realm I knew and loved so well. It didn't hurt that she'd just finished my book. I also had a minor notion that someday it might be good to know someone in Iceland well enough to look them up for coffee, and Olafur had treated me with a courtesy that was a balm in those bad days.

I picked Fríða up the next morning and showed her facets of my city on the way to the airport as we talked about art, about books, about our parents with dementia, about light and seasons and weather. I told her that I'd always wanted to visit Iceland, but thought nothing of it until the other end of the month, when I was walking my mother around that lake, and the phone rang and Fríða asked if I'd like to be the first international resident at the Library of Water in Iceland, and I said yes.

Never turn down an invitation without a good reason, and I had every reason to seize this one with both hands. It was as though the book had become a door; people were entering the book and then stepping into my life and drawing me into theirs. And it was my ticket out of deep trouble. Iceland would for the seven months it took me to actually get there serve as an amulet, a window onto another world, a thought that there was some place far away from all my troubles, and that I would myself be far away from them there soon enough.

There was even a webcam on the roof of the Library of Water I would log on to sometimes, with a view of the other world that would relieve me of this one. It showed a harbor near a great rock to which a causeway had been built, the town of square separate buildings like children's blocks, and beyond it the fjord full of islands and a sky sometimes full of clouds, sometimes of darkness. I watched it as snow arrived, as the days grew short and the webcam mostly showed harbor lights shining in blackness and headlights sweeping across snow. It was like a snow globe on my desk to shake in idle moments, but the world in it was real and awaited me. Like Wu Daozi I was going to step into the picture, through a door I had made myself, out of words.

A
sentence by the Marquis de Sade I read when I was young sometimes returns to me: “Ah, what does it matter to her hand, which is always at work creating, that this or that mass of flesh which today constitutes an individual biped may be reproduced tomorrow in the form of a thousand insects?” It matters to the individual biped, but the exclamation in the form of a question points out that what is ordinarily imagined as disintegration is also, or instead, metamorphosis.

Even decay is a form of transformation into other living things, part of the great rampage of becoming that is also unbecoming. It is cruel, it is death, and it is also life, degeneration and regeneration, for nearly all things live by the death of other things. Even a harvest of wheat annihilates mice and insects unless poisons have sterilized the field beforehand; even the large animals we call herbivorous eat the small creatures on the grass as they graze. Even the earth and the very grass that grows out of that earth are carnivorous. The Marquis de Sade spoke with scorn for fear and attachment; the Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki-Roshi was once asked by a sheepish student if he could sum up Zen in a sentence, and gave another version of the same answer: “Everything changes.”

All stories are really fragments of one story, the metamorphoses, a fate sometimes as eagerly embraced as Daphne turning into a laurel tree to escape Apollo's embrace, sometimes resisted as frantically as the affluent arranging for their remains to be cryogenically frozen, but embracing or resisting are optional, and metamorphosis inevitable. You can rescue someone from danger, but not from change and death; the soldier who survives the battle becomes someone else, something else, somewhere else. His war subsides; his memory fades; his nation ceases to exist; all but the elemental structures decay away; the very atoms that were once warring sides are now soil, trees, lovers, birds; all the medals are playthings for strangers; the cannons have been melted down and turned back into church bells that will become cannons again for another war.

Have they been decaying for the length of four chapters, that horde or hoard of apricots on my bedroom floor, or only for the four or five days it took to do something about them? I culled the decaying fruits until my friend found a free evening, and we began to address the fruit together. It constituted a race against time, and time was winning. Time always wins; our victories are only delays; but delays are sweet, and a delay can last a whole lifetime.

For this mountain of stone fruit, though, not much more delay was possible. My apricots were being eaten by what I later read up on and found was brown rot, a common fruit fungus that arrives even on blossoms, though immature fruit generally resists it, unless that fruit suffers hail damage, insect feeding, or another injury. Ripe fruit is far more susceptible, and the fungus can appear as soft spots whose brown spreads rapidly. Some fruit undergoes a process that turns it into a wrinkled mummy, though my apricots seemed to head straight to soft brown mush, their liquid released as their cell walls broke down. Rot suggests something decaying, but the process is as much about something growing, something digesting its immediate surroundings and preparing to disintegrate it into its larger environment.

I wrote in a letter that week, “It felt so much like my life, this pile of what might be abundance in other circumstances requiring scrutiny, weeding, becoming slightly disgusting as the pile began to seep juices onto my floor and to smell a little. It felt like a living organism, a slime mold, an occupying army of apricots, as though it might multiply, as though it might move of its own accord, and it was impossible to pick it free of rot.”

The Marquis de Sade himself left instructions that he was to be buried without ceremony in a grove on his country estate and that the grave was to be sown with acorns so it might disappear and the trees themselves might consume him. The earth in the form of bacteria, fungi, insects, and the other minute hordes within the soil undoubtedly devoured him, and maybe his corpse metamorphosed into oaks, though de Sade's books continued to devour trees as they kept memory of his furious, destructive, productive life from disappearing.

In those days, before corpses were injected with the poisonous preservatives that now contaminate whole cemeteries and the water tables beneath, bodies just disappeared, though dust to dust is not quite the right description for the most common sort of damp transmigration, and sometimes the bones remained. There's a legend that, when apples were planted over the grave of a seventeenth-century New England patriarch buried in his own garden, one of the trees sent down a root that devoured his body while assuming its form. The forked root is still on display in a Rhode Island museum, but metamorphosis is generally more creative than that, not echoing but erasing forms and inventing other ones from the material, a kaleidoscope of atoms and molecules tumbling into new formations over and over.

Cooking is likewise a mode of transformation and a pleasure to which I often repair, and it sometimes seems so pleasurable because it is the opposite of writing; it engages all the senses; it's immediate and unreproduceable and then it's complete and eaten and over. The tasks are simple, messy, fragrant, and brief, and success and failure are easy to determine. Perhaps it's that cooking operates in the realm of biology, of things arising and falling away, sustaining bodies, while writing tries to shore up something against time and in the course of doing so appears only slowly and takes you away from the here and now.

A pie might be eaten warm from the oven by the cook and her companions but a book is read many months or years after it's written, out of sight of the writer, who never knows quite what she's done.
Ars longa, vita brevis
—art is long, life is short—used to be a popular saying, and cooking is usually on the side of life, but making preserves is an art of stalling time, of making the fruit that is so evanescent last indefinitely. To cook something is to prepare for its disappearance by devouring, the festive funeral at which it will be buried in the eater and thenceforth metamorphose into the next life and the next round of excrement and thence back to earth.

But to preserve something is to delay that act indefinitely. Maybe preserves are where a historian's urges meet a cook's capacities. I wish that I could put up yesterday's evening sky for all posterity, could preserve a night of love, the sound of a mountain stream, a realization as it sets my mind afire, a dance, a day of harmony, ten thousand glorious days of clouds that will instead vanish and never be seen again, line them up in jars where they might be admired in the interim and tasted again as needed. My historian's nature regards with dismay that all these things arise and perish, though there will always be more clouds and more days, if not for me or for you. Photographs preserve a little of this, and I've kept tens of thousands of e-mails and letters, but there is no going back.

In our machines we seek to speed everything up, but in our preserving technologies to slow down the decline of our flesh, the fading of our goods, the crumbling of our buildings, to keep out of the mouth of time all those things that she will chew up and then devour anyway. What does it matter to her hand? Time itself is our tragedy and most of us are fighting some kind of war against it. Napoleon had the Marquis de Sade arrested and imprisoned in 1801, and his family had him transferred to an insane asylum in 1803, where he remained for the eleven years until his death and burial in that grove. Napoleon's administration also offered a reward of 12,000 francs for anyone who could come up with a better way of preserving food on a grand scale.

Human beings had used drying, fermenting, salting, pickling, and, in cool climates, storing in cold cellars and, in the coldest, freezing food for later, but none of these could adequately provision a vast army. So as he prosecuted his wars against all Europe, Napoleon also sought to fight a war against decay. The confectioner and cook Nicolas Appert won the prize in 1810 after many years of experiments with sealing and boiling glass jars, pretty much the method that is still used, the one that my friend and I were using in my kitchen on an August evening in the twenty-first century.

I always liked canning, something I learned from the inserts that came with the cases of Ball and Kerr jars and from the worn copy of the
Joy of Cooking
my mother passed along when she got a newer one, the edition old enough to have a diagram on how to skin a squirrel and instructions on cooking possums and muskrats. I used to go to a creek near her house outside the city, spend a good part of a summer day down in the shady depths, and bring gallons of berries back to my home. Landscape is something we usually admire from a distance, but my annual day in the creek was about looking at everything up close, mostly less than the length of my arm.

I learned to recognize the ripe berries by their gleam, to recognize and skip the dull, soft berries past their prime, spot the sprays of berries that hung in the shadows of the leaves, to reach through the thorny branches with a minimum of scratching, though my hands were always purple and welted by the end, to pull the berries off so that they would not squish in my fingers. Then, after a day of looking at spiderwebs, at the small jewel-like beetles that roamed the blackberries, at minnows in the stream, and at water striders on its surface, a day of wading knee-deep in cool water and picking mint and watercress and red-orange lilies along with berries, I went home with my bounty. I poured the bowls of berries into a pot, added sugar, let the smell and steam fill the room, and made a runny, seedy form of preserves that looked black in the jars but tasted like summer in wintertime.

Those days were violet and midnight blue; this was an evening in orange, except that that word that is the name of another fruit doesn't describe the soft color of apricots, richer than peaches, blushing red, a flush like an evening sky or a golden-skinned baby's cheek. We sorted through the huge pile on the impermeable tarp that had replaced the bedsheet, creating a big heap that would go straight into the compost and filling many of my biggest bowls with halved apricots, then trays and pots, because there was still an embarrassment of riches left over.

I cut an apricot in half, pared away any bad spots, took out the pit. Then I took up another apricot, split it along the seam—the little cleft and ridge that gives each fruit a pair of hemispheres, so that when they're ripe you can sometimes halve them neatly without tools—and then another one. In that moment when everything was falling apart and nothing was certain, a pile of fruit even that vast was pleasantly manageable by comparison. And the smell when the little hemispheres of fruit were simmering in their vanilla bath was exquisite.

In canning you first heat the contents to a temperature that will kill nearly anything that might grow on the fruit. The sugar and acids of the fruit help create an environment without microbes, and you finish off the process by putting it all in jars that have themselves been sterilized in boiling water, and put a sterilized lid on top. As the contents cool they create a vacuum that seals the jar tightly. By sterile, we mean nothing grows. Each container is a capsule in which time stands still. We put up fourteen pints in vanilla syrup that night, and then I went on and made jams and chutneys and put the many pounds left in the freezer of a nearby friend, where they would stay until her marriage broke up suddenly and she moved in with me. We somehow never recovered them and they were undoubtedly thrown out. I don't remember why I didn't dry any apricots.

Even so, I tried to make the most of my birthright, my inheritance, my windfall, my fairy-tale ordeal. I had a long row of pint jars of apricots in syrup and of jam and chutney. I saved a lot of the pits and made an Italian liqueur out of apricot pits, grain alcohol, and sugar, left to sit together in the dark for three months. During that time the delicate almondlike essence at the center of the pits seeps out to flavor the liquid and somehow turns it a ruddy amber color that could be called apricot. I had learned the recipe from my friends with the big old apricot tree in their courtyard in New Mexico, the tree they dined and napped under in summertime, that I had slept under myself on a few warm nights, that in stormy springs lost all its blossoms and bore no fruit and in other years gave them more than they knew what to do with and smeared the courtyard with fallen fruit.

There's a painting of a basket of rosy apricots in the museum a few miles northwest of my home. The fruits look so firm they seem to almost float in the basket, weightless but not immortal. Several have the small flecks that might augur impending decay, and a fly is on the foremost one, exquisitely painted and undoubtedly ominous for the fate of the fruit. A couple of dark boughs of plums and leaves lie across this abundance; a peach lies to the left of the basket and a lemon to the right, while three quarter sections of a cut lemon are scattered across the foreground. Some of the carefully painted apricots still have woody stems; some have only the dents like navels where the stems broke off.

On a few of the leaves are dewdrops, gleaming like jewels, signs both of the ephemerality of the contents of the composition and the talent of the painter, probably Jacob van Hulsdonck, painting sometime in the first half of the seventeenth century. The label doesn't attribute the painting definitively, but other paintings by Hulsdonck even show the same wicker basket with upright stakes like bars on a window, through which more fruit can be seen. Around the corner from that painting is a more typical Golden Age Dutch still life painted by Abraham van Beyeren in a brushier manner and showing a much more lavish cascade of fruit, glassware, silver platters, bread, a cut ham, and a lobster whose right claw seems about to seize a pocket watch, though the crustacean's coral color makes it clear it's already been cooked.

The Netherlands was exploding in this era, suddenly affluent on an unprecedentedly broad social scale and amid an extraordinary flowering of the arts, particularly the art of painting. The country was expanding outward in the trade that sent Dutch ships to China and around the world; it was expanding upward with its wealth; and it was expanding inward through science. The painter Johannes Vermeer was baptized in the same Delft church the same week as Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the man who pioneered the making and use of microscopes. His tubes with lenses, like telescopes in reverse, began to open up the miniature world of bacteria, mold, one-cell creatures, and the cells of the human body, an unsuspected universe where so much happens that affected the visible human-scale world. Recognizing the cause of so much illness and death lay centuries away, but when it was found it would be found with microscopes.