MADE IN CYLAND

My grandma sent us apples from Byelorussia. They were in this plywood parcel with the address written on it with a copying pencil. The parcel was also wrapped in a white cloth with wax seals and basted with a white thread. The parcel emitted a downright mind-blowing smell. I always pitied the head of Isaac Newton hit by a falling apple. However, it was very metaphorical. The bewigged Newton under an apple tree in my physics textbook. I wanted to think that he was hit by the same apple that my grandma sent us – of the variety “Autumn Stripes”. Since then, the obscure force of gravity has been solidly associated in my mind with the smell of Byelorussian apples.

This whole story with the apples took place, in fact, in the sixties when Gagarin flew into space.

He overcame this gravity, this smell of “Autumn Stripes”. And at a later time we were standing in a memorial lineup at summer camp when he was killed in a plane crash. The noise of an apple hitting the ground is very disturbing and tragic in its certainty and irrevocability.

It takes so much force to overcome gravity and it is so easy just to ripen and fall to the ground in an orchard…