RED CURRANTS AND
"GOOSEBERRIES"

KIM ADRIAN

Chekhov’s paean to sense and memory

1.
Once, about eight or nine years ago, I caught a glimpse of some wild red currants growing by the side of the road. The road traced the spine of a rolling, lightly wooded hill in West Virginia; my husband and I were on our way home from a wedding, and he was driving—forty, maybe fifty miles an hour—while I half dozed in the passenger seat. But my eyes must have been at least partially open, because I saw the berries dangling behind a thin screen of leaves and branches, glowing in a reaching bit of sunshine. And when I saw them, I felt some enormous thing—a feeling, you could call it for the sake of convenience, though it seemed much more than that— quickly rise in me and then, just as quickly, evaporate.

Twisting in my seat, I watched as the road unraveled behind us, but of course the berries were gone. And although I was strangely sad about this, I didn’t say anything to my husband, because I understood that there was no easy cure for the emptiness I felt; I knew that even if we turned back and found that same spot, those same berries—even if I picked handfuls of the tiny, ruby-red spheres and studied them for the rest of our twelve-hour trip home—whatever it was that had risen in me, then so painfully disappeared, could never be retrieved by such prosaic means.

More recently, I’ve seen red currants, still attached in grapelike clusters to their delicate twiggy stems, at the farmer’s market, where they sell for the incredible price of seven dollars a half-pint. And I have bought the berries, two pints at a time, and stared at them in their green cardboard cartons, and willed that something, that enormous feeling, to come back to me: that emotion which is not quite happy and not quite unhappy, but a fragile mix of both.

 

 

2.
We all have our preferred modes of mapping the mysteries in our lives, ways of trying to understand the people and things around us, the secret events of our own souls. Books are one such mode—the one I trust most (or at least refer to most often)—and it’s in a book, in a short story by Chekhov, that I’ve found a set of clues with which to chart the complex mess of emotion I feel about those seemingly innocuous little red fruits—red currants. The story is “Gooseberries” (written in 1898), and as the title suggests, it concerns one man’s obsession with that other, slightly larger, slightly seedier member of the genus Ribes. Gooseberries tend to be whitish or green in color (although there are purple and pink varieties), with faint vertical striations that make them look, at least to my eye, like mini hot-air balloons. While gooseberries are just as delicious as currants—puckeringly sour but, afterward, illuminatingly sweet— they are best used in jams and pies rather than in the fragrant jellies and liquors for which the latter are so well-known.

There are some odd points of overlap between Chekhov’s story and my own earliest memories of red currants. For instance, my sister was standing next to me the first time I ever saw red currants, and “Gooseberries” too concerns a pair of siblings—two men on the brink of old age: Ivan and Nikolay Ivanovitch. There’s also rain, for on the day Stephanie and I stood side by side picking those fussy, easily bruised little fruits, we did so in a cool gray mist of soaking drizzle; “Gooseberries” both opens and closes with rain— “damp, muddy, unwelcoming.” Perhaps I make too much of these small coincidences. Perhaps such specifics are beside the larger point, and yet that point is both built and governed by specifics.