Raspberries

By PHOEBE HYDE

The family are in the kitchen waiting to eat as the enemy soldiers approach the house. It’s already dark, and the man and child are restless at the table, waiting for the woman to pronounce the eggs set. She’s an excellent and exacting cook who will not be rushed. As the soldiers step onto the porch outside, the grandmother distracts the child with a joke: what did the rooster say to the wolf? and in the pause before the punchline, the first knock on the door falls—boom—and explodes—boomboomboomboom!

The family gasps as a single organism; the firebombs crushing half the neighborhood usually come at midday. They are not prepared with their denials and distractions. No one breathes, and their stomachs roll over and clench.

“We have no petrol!” the man shouts out in his lowest register, gripping the edges of the table.

“Open for us now,” calls back a calmer male voice, using their own language well, with hardly an accent, “or we shoot your door full of holes.”

The man rises slowly, lowering thick brows. All the men of his family have imposing glares, but what use is that now, in the face of guns? He steps around his chair and pushes it back underneath the table with slow formality. He aligns his feet toward the door and relaxes his hand before he walks down the hall. Three of them? Four? He watches his hands betray them all with automatic motions: left pushes the sticky door an inch backward into the frame and right lifts the latch.

There are six soldiers with automatic rifles of different types slung across their chests. My god those uniforms are antiques, the man thinks as winter gusts inside, and the soldiers push him backward down the hall. Thirty-six months ago, my students would have snapped those jackets up at a vintage shop and worn them to a rock show. Two of the youngest have feet wrapped in old T-shirts and bath towels as if the boots underneath are broken, or missing. Maybe they are starting to lose.

“Whatever I smell behind your back, put it on the table for us,” says the tallest and most imposing soldier, pointing his gun at the woman. “Then cook everything in the house. Make everything and don’t stop until there is nothing left. Put a gun on the rest of them in that corner,” he says to a soldier with red eyes.

The woman takes the measure of the commander, then her eyes skip from one soldier to the next. They are starving, she thinks. They can barely stand. If these young men were once from different provinces, with different skin tones and widths of eyes and different regional noses, they are identical gray countrymen now. Their cheeks are waxy and hollow like dentureless old men. When they scrape back their chairs and hunch around the tiny table, their eyes bulge, and their nostrils flare. The woman opens drawers, moves books, begins to extract all their stores, thinking feed them until they believe there’s nothing left to take.

The man, the child, and the grandmother stand in the corner of the sitting room and watch the soldiers eat their food. It is like watching the effects of a computer’s undo button: the just-cooked eggs: gone. The biscuits made this morning with the last flour, gone. The milk that came from far away yesterday, undone, vanished. The woman puts jarred cherries on the table with some spoons but the hand closest to the jar grabs it, brings it to a soldier’s mouth and he drinks half in a single gulp. The woman cracks more eggs to fry and begins to peel carrots—long kept moist in a towel, still unwilted—but the commander beckons impatiently for them. “Don’t cook. Give one to each.” While they crunch, she goes to the small pantry and comes back with two jars of pickles: red peppercorns and whole garlic cloves swirl in the brine.

“N—” yelps the child, but the man claps a hand over her vowel, not moving it when she writhes and kicks. The homemade pickles vanish. The soldiers eat the garlic and the dill weed. One dunks his carrot in the brine. The woman digs hidden cans from behind the garbage pail and heats the soup. She unwraps a block of cheese wrapped in three layers of plastic film and breaks it into hunks. She boils two pots of salted water, one for pasta, one for quick rice, but they will have to wait for those to cook. The commander watches her all this time out of the corner of his eye.

“Where’s the basement?” he asks.

“There is no basement,” the woman says, but she has hesitated a half second too long, and glanced at the grandmother.

The commander sets down his spoon and stands. “Show me the basement,” he says calmly, because he knows that eighty percent of the time there is some secret worth lying about in the rooty spaces under these old wooden homes: money, a working moped, more food.

The woman wipes her hands down her apron forcibly and slow, as if her skin is coated with thick filth, then points down the hall. As she does, she looks out the small window where the stove vents and thinks of her father-in-law bumbling around down there with his candle. No lover of factory-canned cherries, he went looking for last summer’s jam just before the soldiers arrived. He must have heard so many boots on the creaking floor, must be crouched behind the shelves, under the tarp. The woman’s thoughts are clear: I should bang pots now to cover up what happens, but her arms and hands are frozen and the only sound in the room is chewing, licking, swallowing, and men gasping for breath.

What will this commander do, do you think, when he finds the old man? Will he shoot the blue tarp when it coughs, or will he control his soldiers’ reflex, mindful of all that could go wrong in a house full of miserable and starving young men? If you, too, grew up reading and watching war stories because they were well-marketed and popular, something you could chat about with classmates on the bus, or even if you are just a peckish passerby with ordinary plot cravings, then you know that before we can sink our teeth into what happens, we must fear for this little family with their stash of food, their tender relationships, their hoarded joy. We must hold our breaths with terror as the commander stands at the top of the basement stairs…terror and delectation, because isn’t terror what we want, a little bit? This is just a story about characters we don’t know, anyway, in a place that’s vaguely like our own (fried eggs, automatic rifles) but—for historico-political reasons the story isn’t interested in—is under siege. Some of us may even be tapping at the flimsy walls like set dressings: (Why aren’t the town or languages named? How is there electricity or gas if so many bombs have fallen? The things people preserve and pickle are so geographically specific…shouldn’t we know what kind?) If we’re nitpicking, then the tread of this commander’s boots growing fainter down the stairs is just entertainment, isn’t it? It’s a tasty snack.

Or maybe, you are one of the unlucky who understand that wars and the stories that drip out of them are like desperate soldiers, and like orders to bomb essential bridges and steal the brass couplings that attach propane tanks to houses, and like black-market pricing, and like meals made under threat of death. They have their own logic. They are dark basements where anything can happen.

Listen, here are the commander’s boots growing loud again up the stairs and through the hall. He comes back into the kitchen not with a prisoner or a smoking gun but with an armload of orange soda, potatoes, and two round, blue tins of cookies.

The child—whose tether to reality is already strained and frayed by the war and the violent video game she plays during shelling—now feels that tether snap and slither away as the soldiers tear into her birthday cookies and drink the shimmering orange soda. They are drunk-faced and clawing, and seem not to know that the blonde, sugared stacks in their paper frills are extremely special. What is wrong with their faces? the child wonders. Why don’t they eat them one by one? Why don’t they examine each shape, sucking the square grains of sugar off the tops? Why don’t they love? Why don’t they care? Those are not real people at my table, the child finally decides. Those are creepers. And she starts plotting ways to kill or maim them.

The woman starts a third pot boiling for the potatoes. Some sense tells her the commander ignored grandfather, pretended not to see him cowering beside the shelves. They need more, she thinks. They need a year of meals to go away truly fed. She hunches over the sink, working something back and forth in a bowl of water. She leaves it there and turns to the cutting board, chopping, scraping, grinding something in the pestle. The commander looks over to see her pulling a plate out of the oven.

“Don’t give them the chops!” cries the man from the corner. “They deserve the shit from pigs’ asses!”

The red-eyed soldier glares at the commander, but the commander ignores him. “Give us the chops,” the commander says to the woman, nodding, a bit of cheese falling from his mouth to the table.

“I had to thaw them and now I’ll cook.”

The woman rubs a paste on the thawed meat. When the pasta and rice are done, the woman breaks a whole brick of butter and drops half in each.

“Why are you seasoning for them?” the grandmother shrieks. “Why are you….” But then she loses language and wails, and pulls her scalp, her composure melted away with the lost butter. She did not want to believe, but now suddenly does, that grandfather has been killed. She cries, stamps her feet on the floor, looks around wildly at the ceiling, and then spits. The tiny glob doesn’t make it to the table, but the red-eyed soldier whose gun lies across his knees lifts it and takes two steps into the sitting room, swinging the butt of his weapon upward into the grandmother’s stomach. She crumples to the floor.

The commander stops chewing, mid-bite. He studies his soldier, poker-faced.

“Now she will die,” he says.

“No, just a stomachache,” says the other soldier. “The same one you gave me last week.”

The commander puts down his spoon slowly, and sits back in his chair. He looks at the grandmother curled into her ruptured organs, and at his men of misery, shoveling in stolen calories, and at the child whose mind is already wrecked and contorted by fear. He looks at his own curiously man-sized hand holding a spoon that was made—he turns it and looks—in China, just like the ones in his own family’s small wooden house 300 miles away. The chair under him feels unsubstantial, and the little rickety house feels like a movie set, and even the dark outside, through the small window that vents the stove, looks phony and precious, with soap flakes sifted from above to mimic snow. Only the sound of the chops being laid in the hot pan hold him into this moment. Only that, and the smell. Of a house where people still feel alive.

How hungry we all are now! Everyone in this small wooden house—protagonists, villains, an author, his or her readers, the mice in the walls—all smell this garlic in the pan right now, hoping so much that the perfectly cooked chops will triumph over the madnesses of nations. Maybe poor old grandmother will rise up with just a cracked rib! We all sit at this table so trustingly, waiting for this story to dish out what stories should, especially those in which people suffer. Hey, we came in hungry, story! You owe us. And there is owing, there is a contract, but unfortunately the snow in the small window is cold and real. Grandmother has internal bleeding. Stories, like starving dogs, follow strange scents.

The woman pushes the cookie tins aside and wordlessly puts the pan of chops on the table, sizzling, smoking. The soldiers stare. The chops are not cooked the local way, with tomato. They are cooked the way of the soldiers’ home country, with dill.

“I was born on your side,” the woman says in the soldiers’ language. “Marriage to my husband brought me here.”

The man, the husband, crouches low, whispering to his mother, stroking her. The child presses her leg into his back, aware of the awfulness on the floor, but watching the soldiers eat the chops clean with yawning, mechanical mouths. She understands they will never fill up. The woman sees that one soldier’s eyes are wet, his tears flowing in animal relief, like his salivary glands.

“They don’t feed you enough,” the woman says. And because good drippings never go to waste in this house, she grabs the back of the commander’s chair and reaches to retrieve the pan from the center of the table. As she does, her breast lightly brushes the commander’s shoulder, as a mother might brush a son, or a wife might brush a husband or father, unthinking. And because the woman touches him this way in this small wooden house, the commander leans back in his chair and exhales, opening an unwelcome space in his mind into which rises a memory of simple after-dinner luxuries: falling onto a near bed, kissing the cook’s flushed face, leaving the dishes to wait until after a dessert of lovemaking, just as he used to after dinner with… with…. The commander stares at the empty spot on the table, digging around in his mind, but the lover’s name is now lost. Her face is blank and he cannot find her.

“I’m sorry,” says the enemy guiltily, still holding the warm pan.

The commander gets up briskly, knocking his chair back. He expertly whips his gun from back to front and with the tip pushes the woman out through the back door into the yard where no moon or stars are visible and there is no light from the shattered streetlights. The only shape in the yard is a line of collected snow lying atop a row of waist-high netted bushes. As the woman steps toward them, the commander shoots her twice in the back, his trigger-pull as reflexive as a cough or swallow.

The soldiers ransack the neighbors’ homes for other supplies, but find nothing. They shoot a teen who darts from behind a shed and he falls awkwardly against a chain fence, dying with his hand clutching the wire as if it were a climbing vine. The town is otherwise wholly deserted and as the soldiers stalk though the freezing night they think independently, but also together—why hadn’t that idiot family evacuated months ago, before the shelling was nightly and the supply lines were cut? And how in fuck’s name did they have so much food? How did they have eggs?

The walk back to their mobile barracks is terribly long: the commander tells them to keep to the bumpy hillocks and dense scrub instead of the exposed road pocked with landmines. Each of them, after hearing this order, resists it. If they must be blown up, now is a good time, when they are full and sleepy. They walk in silence, the commander’s faint headlamp bobbing along before them in the subzero night. As their thoughts turn to their sagging cots in underheated trailers, and the slime and offal of their daily meals, the soldiers begin to doubt the reality of those tender puffed eggs and fresh cheese. How could the taste of sugared berries still be fresh on their tongues? How had the commander known the little house was even there, smack in the middle of the zone slated for tomorrow’s demolition and occupation by the infantry? Separately, but also together, the soldiers decide the little lighted house with the buttered pasta must have been some collective hallucination. How else but in fantasy could their own commander—widely revered as the most prudent guy in the whole battalion, who never wasted lives or supplies or got in bullshit arguments—have killed the cook and her family so mercilessly? And then like a demon in a nightmare, obsessed over how the bodies must be laid? “Head-toe-head-toe in a straight line,” he’d insisted, “right alongside the bushes.” And when they had not gotten it right, they had to roll everyone out and deepen the ditch, while he stood leaning against the back door, watching.

In the morning, the soldiers learn that the advance of the front line is delayed—tanks were sent to the wrong region, the whole army is suffering a slow bureaucratic implosion. While the soldiers wait, the meal they ate in enemy territory eats back at them. One, the crier, throws up after a bowl of sour cabbage broth two days later. He takes his weapon into the mess tent and murders the soldier at the crusted vat, ruining the soup—or improving it, as the joke later goes. Another wakes up one night smelling the garlic. The odor is so much more promising than anything else around that he suits up quietly, follows it into the woods, and is not seen again. A third, the one who popped the grandmother’s spleen, feels himself physically strengthened by the meal. The protein goes to his muscles, the sugar to his nerves, the butter to his brain. Emboldened, he volunteers for a dangerous patrol night after night and is never shot, although others fall around him like trees. Eventually though, because his appetite pushes him to eat what others won’t, he contracts a C. difficile infection and dies of diarrheal dehydration.

The youngest two of the squad—primary-school rivals before the war—make crude jokes together about the woman’s cooking: she seasoned meat with her armpits, served ass-cheese. They do this to avoid mentioning the child, who, they’d realized separately, was someone they’d gamed with daily on their phones between rounds of shelling. Neither could erase the memory of how the child grabbed the kitchen knife—after her mother was shot—and made the familiar chopping motion from the game.

Only the commander makes it to the end of the war without injury, punishment, or death. Yes, he makes it out well enough as a mid-level commander, modestly decorated, and with all his limbs. He returns to his hometown, a farming community about 300 miles from the boundary. But the family he once belonged to now feels overconfident, foolish, unsuitable. The former girlfriend, once so youthful and naïve, is now cloying. She shrinks his pullovers and buys bread without checking for mold. She wants children, but is fickle and waffling, like the worst generals, and he will certainly become like his father in marriage, who drank and beat unruly dogs.

The newly occupied territory is better for business anyway. The destroyed city gets a new name and a publicity campaign, and the commander moves into a bachelor bunker with other entrepreneurs who spend every night drinking and streaming violent series on a TV the size of a car. The commander wears earplugs to sleep and gets up early, supervising a large staff at a construction and medical supplies distributor. The work is to build back and resupply everything that was destroyed: all the shops, homes, and hospitals that the new arrivals will need. Driving from warehouse to warehouse the commander sees his own countryfolk carrying sofas into apartment blocks once bombed, now rebuilt. Only on the outskirts are a few historic wooden homes, preserved at the last minute to make a show for the international press of the army’s restraint and urbanity.

After a year—longer than a year—he stops by one of these houses with peeling pink paint.

He walks through weeds to knock on the door, half expecting an ancient, stooped man with thick brows to open. I’m an old man, he said that night in the basement, using the commander’s own language, let me have my treat in this mess. And—God forgive them both—they’d half smiled at each other.

Instead it is a state-appointed realtor in a skirt-suit who says when the auction will be held, says the resident died last week, one of a handful in the old neighborhood who survived the siege.

“You have to feel for them, living in these sad museums,” she says. “Think of the survivors’ guilt.”

 

The commander lives alone in that house, outside that city, for thirty more years. His underlings at work say he makes enough money to buy a large walled house in the suburbs, with a study where he could write mad screenplays about all the crazy shit he saw in the war. Instead, he reads every book left in the house—every cookbook with handwritten notes (salt amply; omit ½ onions!), the fertility journals, the dissertation and drafts of papers never published, the elementary school workbook filled with little square drawings of little square people. He reads a whole shelf of WWII novels in translation—the authors pushing way beyond trite battlelines in the sensational paperbacks of his youth—and afterward, he does write a little: notes, memories. But he feels himself plagiarizing, adopting the climate and sensory details of a hemisphere that isn’t even his, and struggling mightily to imagine who he is writing for and why. To help himself think, he rescues the gardens from the weeds, since the soil around the house is so fertile, and in time he learns to preserve vegetables and berries.

When he is old and sick with cancer, he asks a woman in the apartment building next door if she will just follow him out back and shoot him under a starry sky. She says no, hasn’t he had enough gratuitous violence by now? You have to take your sad chemo and radiation like the rest of us. You don’t get to skip your pain. This is exactly the response he expects; they have been lovers for eight years and she has a whole cupboard full of his jams. So instead, he makes a great many preparations and digs a ditch of his exact length, lined with fish meal and the larvae of mealworms, who will come alive with the spring rains.

 

Here you go, at last. The fatty plot line you came for, and that you are owed. There is the gun in the long grass. It has been waiting for you since the beginning. Go ahead.

No? You balk? You say you stepped over my trip line of a story by accident? You were just scanning the shelves or pages or screen for a little something light and didn’t think you’d be rattled by a little violence? You just chose badly, or got bum advice, hit a bad patch, took a wrong turn, missed the exit and didn’t mean to come out here into the backyard at all? And since you didn’t mean to be out here—just like none of us means to end up on one side of a weapon or the other in life’s dark basements and blind alleys, in stinking trenches or airless cubicles or moonless backyards—you can’t be held responsible for your body’s impulses and reflexes? Your anger and grief and cravings?

Fine, I am the war criminal. I will use my foot. With my toe on the trigger, it reaches.

But remember: you came to watch. And now you join the rest of us holding our horror stories to our chests like broken-glass jam jars, spilling red on everything, all our lives. Since you came so far, at least dip your finger in and taste. This, I believe, is what you’re truly starving for, Reader, and what, at the end of my life, I’m trying to serve: someone else’s hope for you. The good cook’s certainty—pressing familiarly against your shoulder, resting sweet on your tongue, preserved and stacked on shelves—that you must be fed to outlast today’s gristly, hackneyed conclusion.

When I am done, for the love of all that is holy and all that is vile, pick up the shovel and push over the newly-seeded ground.

 

Phoebe Baker Hyde’s fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times, LA Times Magazine, Salon, Gulf Coast, Post Road, Confrontation, and elsewhere. She is the author of the memoir The Beauty Experiment and teaches writing in Boston. “Raspberries” comes from her story collection-in-progress, Bulletcake. You can listen to another story from Bulletcake here.