Pickle

I bought a pickle in the metro station on my way home today. The pizza I had at lunch had been small and I inadvertently paid about double what I owed, so by mid afternoon I was feeling rather foolish and rather hungry. The pickle only cost $0.15 and was much more satisfying. I bit off the end of it with my front teeth and crunched it with my molars. The vinegar so acidic it must have eaten away the thinnest outer layer of cells on my tongue.
Wearing the customary face of total indifference, verging on a misanthropic scowl, I passed the little card table where this woman was selling homemade produce. She had a type of sauerkraut and a tray full cabbage leaves stuffed with rice and meat. The pickles were in the center of the table. They were swimming in a milky bath of acid in a clear plastic drawer that would have been better suited for storing old pay-stubs and tax returns.
Next to her was a younger girl selling currants in big glass jars that she had sat on the dirty stone floors. People had been tracking filth through this corridor all day. The grey slush sticks in the tread of boots and melts in the relative warmth of the underground passage. Muddy slop covers the whole floor, and puddles form if the workers don’t squeegee it every few minutes. The granite blocks that pave the floor are completely for this climate. Rain and melted snow makes them impossibly slick. How many hips are broken on the steps leading down to the corridor, I can only guess.
These sellers had pitched their little stands just in time for the rush hour swarms that would come rushing out of the station. Maybe a few would stop to buy something. Men without wives to cook for them; wives without time to cook; young professionals who left the village and miss folksy fare. However, most of the horde would just flow past with blinders on.
There is a word in Russian to describe a traffic jam of people. They say tolpa, which is distinct from the word for a traffic jam of cars (probka). As nearly everyone relies on public transportation in this part of the world, the congestion can be horrendous. Like tens of thousands of bees in an immense underground hive adorned with icons in the style of socialist realism, they undulate and oscillate moving to and from the exits. A screeching drone fills the subterranean metro chamber as the train rolls in. A great mass of souls files out of the newly arrived train, and another mass squeezes itself in. Everyone rushes for the escalators.
The metro station is a hub for economic life. Semi-permanent vendor stalls cram together both underground in the station and up on the street. Each stall tries to corner some market. There is a stall for meat, a stall for central-Asian bread, for candy, for school supplies, tea and coffee, DVDs, and one for slippers. Sometimes old women sit at card tables and sell individual cigarettes for 20 kopek, or around $0.04. There are newspaper stands, where I buy my Komsomolskaya Pravda, and snack stands where I buy my pretzels.
I had passed by the woman selling pickles. My stomach felt sorely empty. I hesitated and then stopped, interrupting the flow of the mass behind me. I made an about-face and went back to the little woman, all wrapped up in a thick coat and a fluffy knit hat. I asked her how much her pickles were.
“Fifteen Hriven per kilo,” she said.
“How much for one?” I asked. She thought for a moment. People usually buy in bulk here, and I understand why. Often times I will go to the store and they will have none of the products that I want to buy. When they are stocked it is exciting and I feel the strong urge to buy their whole inventory and bring it home to store in my own little cache.
“One Hriven,” she said. She put a plastic bag over her hand, fished one of the pickles out of the acid bath and handed it to me. I paid her the money and munched on my pickle as I climbed the stairs out onto the street.