radish times

“And on the road you may find help unlooked for.” - paraphrase from The Lord of the Rings.

Mr. Kadum sits in his little room day in and day out. White walls are broken only by the scattered graffiti left by prior inmates. The bottom half of the window is covered by strips of wall paper for curtains. The windowsill is filled with silverware and dishes. A bed stands to one side of a small table which bears evidence of a heavy smoker and coffee drinker. A wooden chair covered with newspaper sits next to the table ready for any chance visitor.

Mr. Kadum is waiting for an answer for his application of asylum in the Czech Republic. He is a man in his mid-fifties with no visible signs of age, except the thinning of his hair or perhaps the extra girth around his midsection. He has left a life full of inquiry and study in Iraq to seek safety and protection in Europe. He, as a university professor with an independent mind and a propensity to challenge popularly accepted “truths”, is no longer welcome in his home country.

In Bela, where he waits, Mr. Kadum has no occupation, no outlet for his knowledge and experience. His living allowance of 12 crowns enables him to buy one pack of cigarettes every three days, or one box of a hundred “cigarettes” each week. His hands carry purplish-blue stains from daily blueberry picking and his body, older than it used to be, tolerates the aches and pains. But the labor, difficult as it is, brings him the possibility of 50 crowns a day. The younger men can earn much more as they pick faster and longer. But at his age, Mr. Kadum has his limits.

“Without optimism, life is not possible,” he told me as we sat together drinking coffee in that little white cell. “Of course, absolute optimism is impossible, as is absolute pessimism. The are no absolutes in life. Everything is relative. Things which seem absolute are those things which for a time control everything else in the environment. But, those things are many, temporary, and ever-changing. The control can not last. Everyone and everything is moved by circumstances beyond their control. I never imagined that I would come here to Bela to wait without possibility of leaving for the mercy of some great bureaucracy. Did you ever imagine as a child living in New York that you would one day live in a place called the Czech Republic thousands of miles from home? It was not your choice directed by your absolute control of your life. You made choices, of course. But circumstances, people, events, limited you, moved you, directed you, led you…”

Mr. Kadum (as we call him - it is actually an abrasion of his name. Kadum is his first name. We add the “Mr.”, a word outside of his mother tongue and the native language of this place, to show respect.) gave me a great gift. He reminded me of that true connection between people, the connection that can bridge differences as great as the oceans which separate our native lands. Mr. Kadum, whose nation is at war with my nation, whose land was destroyed by my people, who sits in a small white room waiting for someone else to decide his future, renewed my belief in people, in the possibility of great things, and in myself.

He gave me his blueberries. And this liter and a half of little blue balls lifts my heart every time I look at it. This too was a great gift. I have no idea how to thank him. I only hope that a blueberry cobbler and a pack of cigarettes will let him know how deeply grateful I am.

So, now that I have no official things to do, I have an enormous list of things that I think I should be doing - and it is good because it keeps me moving. There is always the danger that when nobody is expecting you to do anything you will just come to rest and do nothing at all.

In the past week I have learned some very useful things:

1) I now know how to peel and seed tomatoes and can do so with ease.

2) I know how to peel, mince or grate, and collect the juice of fresh ginger.

3) Peter figured out how to grind spices with a very old manual grinder. And now I also know how to do it.

4) I can make Miso Soup (a Japanese soup based on Miso, a soy product), Japanese ginger miso salad dressing, a Japanese meat marinated in Soy sauce, white wine and sugar for 24 hours, a spicy Indian rice dish, and an Indian Chicken dish with tomatoes.

5) Peter and I can make very tasty vegetarian stuffed red peppers.

6) I am finally learning how not to make too much rice.

The cat litter crusade continues but today I purchased something that just may help win the war. It is an independent cat litter freshener.
—–
It is about 24 hours since I wrote the above. So far so good with the cat litter.

Last night we had an unexpected visitor: a very large unidentifiable flying bug. It looked something like a wasp or hornet, but it also looked something like something else. Anyhow, the cats were not pleased with the visit and made, in the beginning, a very energetic attempt to catch him. But, as he stayed very high in the air and they soon lost interest. So in the end it seems that he slept with us in our bedroom, for at 5 o’clock in the morning he woke us up trying to find a new place to perch. I have no idea whether he is with us still or not. I was not exactly calm about the whole thing but as we did not really want to kill him and he did not really want to leave, there was nothing to do but go to sleep. I, of course, begged Peter to read in bed so that I would have a protector close to me as I was trying to fall asleep.

We had a very nice day on Sunday. We went with our friend Arkady to a big forest/park not far from Prague. We spent the morning hiking around through enormous rhododendron bushes, flat fields, and swamps. I had forgotten how nice it is to get away from cities sometimes. It reminded me of vacations past, in Maine and other places. Some of the bushes smelled exactly like those on the sea side in Maine. There were wild raspberries ready for picking. There were trees with really fragrant nuts and berries. There were ducks and birds, but no squirrels and no bears. It must have reminded Peter of past trips too because he began telling us about them, lots of stories about going on mountain trips in Russia.

Then we went to a French crepe cafe and each ate two delicious crepes. It was hot and after the long walk and good food, we were all extremely sleepy. So we went to Vyshehrad (a castle with a big park near our apartment) and took a nap on a bench overlooking Prague. Then we went to Arkady’s house, cooled off, walked to our house, cooled off again and set out in search of a good place for dinner. It took us about an hour to find a place that met our criteria: not crowded, outside, good beer, cheap good food. But we finally did find a place. I ate a hamburger European style (no hands - only untensils) while Peter and Arkady burned out their mouths on hot Mexican tacos.

I have just come home from trying to buy cat litter and something for dinner for 150 crowns or less ($5 or less). I didn’t succeed. I got the cat litter but I didn’t get any food. This is not because it would have been impossible. The thing is that I was thinking about making something Indian - as we have both rice and an Indian cookbook. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any fresh ginger or hot peppers (even knowing how to say both in Czech!). So without further inspiration I gave up and came home. I could have tried to make something Indian without these ingredients - but I have done it before and it ends up being the kind of food that you eat the first night but the leftovers rot in the refrigerator for weeks until you finally admit that it wasn’t really good and no one will ever eat it.

I have recently been having some depressing cooking experiences. I feel like everything I cook tastes the same. Even when I do everything completely differently and emanate huge amounts of positive energy, the food turns out in the end to taste just the same. And then things happen like making a cream of tomato soup exactly resembling an Italian pasta sauce and forcing your poor husband to eat it with a spoon. So I have decided that in order to escape this depressing pattern I must stop leaving out key ingredients and skipping boring sounding cooking processes.

So some important nonsense along (possibly) with some sense:

1) I have noticed that in Prague when it feels like there is a bug crawling on you, there usually is.

2) I am too disconsolate with our cat litter problems to say much about them. But this I will say: we have switched one problem for another. Now the smell is much better. (We switched to non-clumping cat litter - and I believe the litter box is cleaner now on a regular basis then it ever was before). But some cat, who I believe to be Krolik, started peeing on the floor beside the litter box about 3 or 4 days after fresh litter has been added. Blah! I would much prefer he shit there as it is much easier to clean. Soon I am afraid the whole hallway will have a permanent cat urine odor.

3) I bet you know already that if you really want to listen to some music on the radio there will be a talk show on every station. Do you know that it works the other way too? Today I was trying to find some Czech talk show, so that I could listen to Czech while I was eating lunch - and I couldn’t find ANY station where people were talking (except one station where they were speaking English).

4) I finally learned today that it is not necessary to exhaust yourself when trying to vacuum cat hair off the carpet. Previously I believed that the only way to remove all the cat hair was to press very hard with every stroke of the vacuum cleaner - which invariably results in profuse sweating and sore arms. But actually it is not at all needful! You don’t have to press at all and you will remove the same amount of cat hair. A small miracle…