Myslovitz
(translation: Antoine Cassar)

He’d never seen such bizarre, gawky seeds as those before. They were like roasted peanuts split in two. Almost everyone thought they were coffee beans.

"Sambuca memories, eh?"

“Yep. Sambuca memories,” he would routinely answer, whenever someone peered among the shelves in the lounge and spotted the three seeds placed together on one of the ledges. And each had their own particular story related to Sambuca, and it wasn’t long before he’d heard them all. First off, Richard’s account of how once, after about twenty attempts, he managed to stick the glass on fire to the palm of his hand: then, chuffed as he was, he began circling his hand as swiftly as if he were wiping a window, until the glass took off, and of all possible directions, it flew like an arrow towards the head of his ex-girlfriend, who just happened to be there in the bar at the same time. Luca told him five or six different stories. The best was the one about the gas chamber, when in a tapas bar on the Costa Dorada, he let the barman bring the lighter to his mouth to inflame the puddle of Sambuca. Luca ended up blanketing the group of friends around him with the reek of aniseed, so strong that you wouldn’t smell it with such intensity even in the cell of the most alcoholic nun.

“Yep. Sambuca memories.”

By now, this Sambuca business had begun to rub him the wrong way. What irked him the most was his girlfriend’s insistence in finding out what was so special about those seeds. Belonging as they did to an era before she came along, she simply didn’t want to let them be, there on the shelf. Of course, had he picked them up somewhere during a stroll with her, well, that would be different wouldn’t it? She´d have framed them like the buttons of Keith Richards on the wall of a Hard Rock Café. The same complaint time and again. “So are we going to leave these seeds here?”

Until one day, he took the seeds and threw them into a small plant pot, which soon found itself being watered along with those around it.

A little time passed, and one morning, before rushing out to work, his eyes fell upon the pot, and in the middle of the humid soil he spotted a kind of pointed stalk with the appearance of a badly cut nail. And for the first time in his life, he went to work with excitement. Why on earth did he have to listen so long to the Sambuca stories and the drab questions of his girlfriend? Why didn’t he plant them in the pot to begin with, the very day he took them out of the small pocket of his jeans?

* * *

Zsofi was one of those girls who likes to organise everything to the minutest detail, even if it’s a simple little party at her apartment. You should see her sending the invitations, concocting one theme after another, cutting out paper hats and downloading dozens of mp3s related to the theme she’d have chosen. Of course, she surely wasn’t going to let an opportunity like this pass her by without her planning everything from start to finish. After all, she had months to get things ready, and she had already given Pawel a few details of the programme she was preparing - until he couldn’t stand listening to her any more and wouldn’t let her go on.

He arrived in front of the church in the company of Tomek, Agnieszka, Peter, Luca and Martina. Soon afterwards he saw Janek and Jacek, hand in hand and with their same old lethargic pace, and then came Pawel and his new girlfriend, undoubtedly his prettiest so far. The programme she had drawn up minute by minute, and which she left in the directing hands of her big brother, had everybody moved. First the chosen music. Fix You ... Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own ... and he remembered when he saw her for the first time in the park, that hot sunny day, the kind of day his own town seldom enjoys. That day when she threw him an apple, and when he caught it, she explained the ancient Greeks’ belief that when a man throws an apple to a woman and she catches it, it would be a sign that the couple wanted to marry. "But only when the man throws it. Not the other way round."

No Surprises played during the communion. And finally - how could it have been left out? - I'd Like to Die of Love. And he went back to that night full of colour, Johnnie Walker and Myslovitz. That night when he first saw the apple tattooed close to her navel. The day she told him the story of William Tell, as only she knew how to tell it. And when she almost had him fall into the lake, the day she threw him an apple and he didn’t catch it, and together they saw it float away, little by little, on the surface of the water. And when with that inimitable accent of hers, which she said she'd picked up whilst on Erasmus in Cardiff, she told him: "See! It won't sink. Because the volume of a ripe apple is 20% air and 80% wat..." And he stopped her with a long kiss, two hundred, two thousand words long. And he can’t believe he was remembering everything as if their encounter in the park was only two days ago. It was two years since she left his town.

And when they went to her grandparents’ house after the burial, they found a wicker basket full of green apples, and her mother gave an apple to each one of them. "It was in her instructions," she said to them with a sweet smile, in broken English and with a warm tear. "She just loved apples." And everyone made a gesture of agreement - she just loved apples.

He didn’t want to eat it. He wanted to freeze it and preserve it for ever. But it occurred to him that freezing was not part of Zsofi´s plan - the one she drew up once there was no treatment left for her to take. He ate it on his way to the airport. And when he came to the core, the large seeds fell softly on his thigh. He took them and put them in the small pocket of his jeans.

* * *

“Do you remember what we planted in this one, my darling?”
“The seeds your aunt sent us from South Africa, I think.”
“No. They’re in the garden.”
“Well, maybe the ones your brother brought us from the Holy Land?”
“Good heavens! From the Holy Land! We better take good care of it then! But the stalk doesn’t seem to want to grow.”
“What’s the rush, my dear?"