Cucumbers

Lyusya Kamyshova, known to all as Lyuska-Cuke, sowed her cucumbers all out of season that year. Not like any normal person – on the fifth of June, the feast day of St. Leontius of the Cucumbers – oh no! In March, if you please.

“What a life,” Lyusya said to herself, as she and her friends were downing cheap wine in the empty clubhouse. “What a life. But if the cucumbers freeze all to hell, I’ll be free for the whole year, have time to work out what makes me happy.”

The thing is that Lyusya was famous village-wide as Yamtsovo’s most successful cucumber farmer. Cucumbers were birthed all over the village but, either because the Yamtsovites were too greedy or because the weather had been less than bountiful, they always came out as enormous as hot air balloons or as crooked as Grandpa Matvey’s fingers, or shriveled, or shaped like a light bulb or a mini-cantaloupe. Only Lyusya’s were high grade and easy to recognize by variety – some cornichons for pickling, some salad cucumbers to be sliced just so, some neither massive nor too small but sweet enough to feed to little kids, some with black spines, prickly, for the cold brining known as monastery style. And the yellow, seedy, huge, depressed-looking ones Lyusya picked early, so that no one would pilfer them and horn in on her priceless stash of cucumber seeds.

All summer the hullaballoo went on around the hothouses, the open beds, the special planters raised high off the ground from which twined the “Indian lianas” – to wit, our own, dear, darling Russian cucumbers.

Lyusya never left off fussing over her cucumbers, not even for a day. She loosened the soil, pulled up the pesky weeds, liberally dispensed a reddish-brown mash that stank so bad even the moles would crawl, sneezing, from their burrows. She’d have friendly talks with the cucumbers, scold them, chivvy them along, take them to task, sing to them (insisting that their favorite songs were “Chamomiles Have Hidden, Buttercups Have Withered” and “The White Steamship”). Everywhere labels were driven into the soil – home-made plant labels, a stick split at the top that held a piece cut from a beer can. They could be written on with a felt-tip marker and later wiped clean, to be used again next year.

And was there any variety she didn’t grow? There were Vyaznik cucumbers, and Nezhin cucumbers, needless to say, and Cornichon de Paris, and Rodnichok, and April, and Zozulya... Each variety was valuable in its own way, either because of where they grew best, in a greenhouse or an open bed under the sun, or because of their yield, or because of their time to harvest. In the warm June nights, the skinny little cucumber stems would pop up, their yellow caps soon turning into tasty little cucumbers, either hairy or prickly.

“Cucumber, cucumber – in the gut you don’t slumber,” Lyusya would say over and over, as she carefully placed the cucumbers into a basket lined with straw. “Dandies chew candies, but it’s cucumbers for the likes of us.” “Oh, a man to remember, with a nose like a cucumber!” she’d holler as she weeded the rows. And “Briny, briny cucumber, greedy little hog; no one’ll ever eat you if you tumble off that log” and “Out came the drunkards to pick over the cucumbers.” And the rest of it was not fit for polite company, but as salty as it needed to be.

The seasonal visitors came to Lyusya as well as the locals, to sort through her tender, subtly fragrant wares, not to mention the fresh, cucumber-flavored borage that perfumes salads in such a special way. Lyusya sold seasonings too, but shiftily and a little dishonestly, and to all tricky questions on the lines of “How much garlic do you put in, Lyusya?” she would reply, scratching her heel on a fence post, “Much as I can spare.”

“And how much would that be?” the pushy seasonal visitor, used to measuring everything in ounces, would persist.

“Depends,” Lyusya would reply, and vanish behind the fence.

Lyusya made especially good money with her lightly brined, finger-sized cucumbers and the huge ones best fit for plus-sized mouths. She sold them in “batches,” avoiding high-flown words like “assortment.” She put them into barrels that had first been scalded with a mixture of vinegar and water poured over hot bricks, then she added herbs in addition to the usual garlic, dill, mint, blackcurrant leaves, horseradish leaves, and cherry leaves. Oak leaves made it tart and strong, nettles added a searing delicacy, and the salt always had to be the coarse-grained kind from Iletsk, which brined the cucumbers all the way down to the seeds.

Resistance was only an illusion. When the men rolled the barrels out to start the selling, the aroma would seep out, taking material form, and creep into everyone’s nostrils, awakening an appetite for whatever that person loved the most. The drinkers ran off after a bottle, the womenfolk flung themselves into the boiling of jacket potatoes, the youngsters went to catch them some perch, and those women who were in the family way ate their cucumbers right next to the barrel, not in the least ashamed of their joyful tears.

For the winter, Lyusya cold-brined some cucumbers monastery-style, in frigid water with chunks of ice, and put the tubs in the old well, where they stayed until the November celebrations, and some until spring.

But that March, after deciding to get her personal life on track, Lyusya made some paper funnels, mixed soil in them, spat on the seeds she’d chosen, and buried it all in the greenhouse.

“Heck with you,” she said. “I can’t take it anymore, you green nuisances! We’ve made a deal: I’ll do my civic duty by planting you, you’ll freeze, and I’ll live in peace.”

But the cucumbers were nobody’s fools. They sat quiet through March, then got mad and sprouted in April. April came in hot, and already in June, Lyusya was selling the first, crunchy cucumbers in their yellow flower-hats.

“Such is my dismal fate,” Lyusya thought, musing on herself. “It’s like the cucumbers take the place for me of a mommy and a daddy and a dog named Laddie. There’ll be no happiness for me, and I’ll never live to have a husband, and a maiden I shall die,” she lamented, wiping away the bitter, yet also salty, tears.

But you can’t trick fate. The fame of Lyusya’s cucumbers reached Moscow, and a whole movie was made about the renowned Lyuska-Cuke and posted on YouTube, and Lyusya received a visit from the famous, the world-famous Rajan Thakur, an Indian whose nickname was Kheera, which is Hindi for... yes, for cucumber. To share best practices.

At first they almost came to blows over who was best at pickling cucumbers, but Rajan fell so deeply in love with Lyusya that he let her be right. They married, Lyusya and Rajan, and lived a long and happy life together, because the folks in Yamtsovo have as soft a spot for cucumbers as folks in India do, for all that the climate in Uttarakhand is more congenial to those beloved vines.