Jerinnik

Prunus domestica - italica

After shedding my outer layer of cooking oils and pizza musk, I enter the house, sweat from my eight hour shift (plus sweet, sweet overtime) still clinging to my brow. I hurry upstairs, flipping all the light switches. I change into sleeping shorts, feeling the long day start to settle into my tired legs. I splash some water on my face, washing up a bit faster than usual, before creeping into my parents’ bedroom, excited to see my father, who just flew back from Lebanon earlier this afternoon. He visited on his own this year to check on his parents’ health, as COVID-19 seems to have infiltrated his entire family at once, a particularly worrisome predicament for older people with only one vaccination, in a country with unpredictable infrastructure.

My parents have this silly rule that I need to wake them whenever I come home at night, though I’m 18 years old. It’s 11:20, which means they’re both asleep. So, I place my seasoned hand on the knob to their bedroom door and take a breath. It’s significantly cooler on this side of the house, the open window bringing a cross-wind on summer nights. The window is situated right across from the door, so I’m hit with a refreshing gust of cool air. 

Carefully choosing each step, I strike my balance between quiet but loud enough to gently wake a sleeping person. I think it’s rude to wake somebody up just to tell them you’re home. Especially for a man whose day has been long enough, traveling across the world. 

I try my mother’s side of the bed first. 

“Hello…?” I barely whisper. She jolts awake, her surprise making me jump as well. “Hi, hi it’s me.” In the dark, I find her cheek to kiss.

“How was today?” She asks slowly, sliding up her eye mask. 

“Good, yeah, I think. I helped roll the dough again today, so that was fun. I can do it at almost the same pace as the head chef.” I say, looking over to my father, who is still sleeping soundly. “How is he? I don’t want to wake him. He’s had, what, a 26 hour day?”

A sudden change of wind slams the bedroom door shut, a deep percussive boom that bounces off the vaulted ceiling, and Baba suddenly breathes into consciousness. I’m secretly happy. I make my way over to him, giving him a big hug. Our conversation isn’t long. I ask him about his flights. He responds in slow, calculated sounds, his eyes closed, and his mouth barely open enough for the words to escape. 

“Did you see what’s on the counter?” he asks.

“No, why?”

“Sittu froze some plums for you.”

Plums? Before I can respond, I hear his breathing return to its deep rise and fall. I whisper another goodnight as I leave the room. Easing the door closed, I push against the steady stream of air from the window.

I follow my trail of flipped light switches back downstairs. There’s a bowl of familiar purple fruits on the counter. Beside it are several plastic bags, bursting with various containers of unknown goods. I take a quick peek, hoping I’m not ruining any sort of surprise. Inside, I find an assortment of surely undocumented goods (Baba never fills out the declaration forms at Customs). There are various nuts, a bag of dried kishik, a jar of his mother’s olives, and several other packages I can’t identify. A note, in my father’s simple writing reads, Enjoy– from Sittu/backyard orchard.

I hold up a plum to the light; it’s heavy with sweet juice. I bite into it and close my eyes.

I open my eyes. I don’t know what first alerted me to morning. A thickening heat settling or birds outside the open windows or the dry air. I’m eight, and it’s my first time in Lebanon. At least in conscious memory. As I sit up, I peel the pink sheets from sticky legs. Carefully getting up, I emerge from the mattress on the floor. Reacting to the subtle difference in weight, Leila shifts, pulling the scratchy sheet closer to her chin, her face bundled in tired curls.

I tiptoe toward the door, peeking over to the bed where my parents sleep off the jetlag, then back at Leila on the mattress on the floor. I close the door behind me, shushing it as the hard wood makes contact with its frame. 

I look down the hallway to my grandparents’ bedroom. Nobody seems to be awake. No aroma of tea or breakfast cooking. There’s no way for me to know the time; there are no clocks in the house. The sun’s out. My best guess is sometime in the early seven a.m. hour. 

I put on my sandals, unlatch the front door, and wander outside, searching for a snack. Around the marble patio, I enter the little backyard orchard. Shuffling among loose dirt and fallen fruit, I pull a reddish plum from one of the trees lining one side of the yard. The plum is the size of my palm. The skin is slightly warm to the touch, brushed by the morning sun. But, the fruit is cool from the night’s refrigeration. I finish the plum in just a few bites, savoring the last strands clinging to the pit, before tossing it off to the side.  

I should have brought out my book to read. There’s not much else for me to do. I stay hidden, as I wouldn’t be able to say much if I were to come across another person. I forge a path between the tall grass, under the latticed grapevines, and the mulberry tree. I hear a motorcycle approach, and I peer out toward the main road to see it pass. An old man buzzes by, atop his dusty bike, the tails of his kaffiyeh flying a few feet behind him. He’s smiling. 

The sun quickly warms my skin, so I return to the shade of the plum trees. I twist another fruit from a bending branch. 

Plum trees have small leaves with serrated edges. The leaves grow in clusters, close together. Sittu tends to these trees; they’re the perfect size for her. She is 5’2” or 5’3”, and at that height she can reach almost all of the fruit from her two-step ladder. These must be dwarf trees, only eight feet at their tallest, as typical plum trees grow as tall as 35 feet.

I climb into the nook of a couple branches, maybe four feet from the ground. There’s a branch ahead of me, a perfect row of four plums. I eat another. 

There’s a slowness here. 

I watch birds collect on the laundry line draped across the length of the backyard. I eat the plum in three big bites, juice running down my hands. I wipe them off on my shirt and pick another plum. The branch flexes as I pull down on the fruit, then springs back into position. I don’t know what’s more addicting, the taste, the texture, or the deep purple flesh. I soon finish it, tipping my head over my shoulder, spitting out the seed. It falls and hits the loamy soil, soundless.

“Maya? What are you doing out here?” 

I turn suddenly, bracing my feet against the trunk of the tree so as to not fall. Baba lunges forward ready to catch me. 

“Just eating some plums. Why? Is it breakfast time?”

He looks like he just woke up, barefoot, glasses that have yet to sink into his nose. He reaches up to grab a plum as well.

“How many have you had?” He bites into his plum, juice rolling down his stubble.

“Five or six, maybe?” I reach up to grab another. His eyebrows shoot up.

“Jesus, Maya. You are going to be constipated! That’s too many.”

“No, that doesn’t happen to me. Plus, these ones are so small.” I say, rather blasé.

“How do you know? Come inside, Sittu’s making cheese and zaatar.” He shakes his head, whisking me away from the trees before I try to eat another. I’ll have to come back later.

//

Baby green plums, also known as greengages, are thought to have originated in Iran, then brought to France, then English royalty, and finally popularized and given a name by Sir William Gage. To me, they’re sour plums. A special treat that comes at the end of March. Little green balls, no bigger than a square inch or two. Tart, incredibly crunchy, and a bit sweet and a bit sour. 

There are varieties by different names around the world. In Iran, sour plums are goje sabz; in Turkey, they are erik; in China, mei; in Japan, ume; and, in Lebanon, janerik or jarareng.

Baba knows them as jerinnik. He’s not sure why he knows them by a different name, but he used to buy jerinnik from the market in Baalbeck. They weren’t grown in Maaraboon, but people in Baalbeck had them around their houses. They are known as notoriously difficult to maintain, as they require a close eye and constant pruning. So, it’s no surprise that he doesn’t remember seeing any orchards or farms of jerinnik trees. They were desirable and highly sought-after, especially given their rarity. 

Usually, the season doesn’t last more than two weeks. Their commercial value was to be eaten green only, because once they ripen, they aren’t that good to eat, nor sweet enough to make jams.

We now harvest our produce from suburbia, in plastic cartons, from the Persian marketplace down the street. (Though one of the most disorganized grocery stores that I’ve ever been to, the range of their products is impressive.) Baba shops here for all our Mediterranean staples, though, of course, it is always slightly different from the stuff he grew up with. But, whether it’s packaged in Farci or Arabic, it’s still the same for the most part. 

Our season for sour plums usually lasts a month, between the freezing of produce and different suppliers. 

On Sunday afternoons in early spring, I listen as the garage door opens and Baba calls out his signature, “Hello, I’m back!” 
I listen for the rustling paper and plastic bags, the opening and closing of various cabinets. I listen for the stillness when the fridge alarm finally ends, after having been open too long, the incessant beeping ending with a satisfying chhhk as he closes the door, like a chord progression finally resolving from growing dissonance.

I finally hear the distinct crunch of sour plums and rush downstairs. Baba stands in the kitchen with a plate of them, glistening from a quick rinse. His post-shopping snack. There is a small mound of salt that he dips one in, before sending it into his mouth.

I prefer the original, salt-free method and to nibble around the little pit. I welcome its tart sweetness.

//

“Dude! What are those?”

Suddenly conscious of my loud crunching, I freeze, looking up in the direction of the voice, apparently directed at me. A classmate is unexpectedly making his way over to my desk. Class (ninth grade English, that is) has yet to start, and I am eating my midmorning sour plum snack as I flip through the next book in The Odyssey. I shift my feet, which were propped up on the chair ahead of me, and sit up.

I lift up my plastic bag of little green spheres in question. 

“Sour plums.” I answer, explaining their young nature and taste.

“Oh, can I have one?” he asks.

“Uh, no. Sorry.” I’m selfish, especially when it comes to fruit. I look up to gauge his reaction. He starts to turn, heading back to his seat.

“Is it because you’re hiding bombs in them?” He throws a chuckle in the stale air as he leaves.

I look around, to see if anybody else heard this interaction. Did he really just say that?

“No. What?” I feel heat rush to my face, angry. If he heard me, he shows no sign of it.

I spit out the pit into my fist, where the other gnawed-off browning seeds sweat in my palm. I stand up and walk over to the trash bin, emptying my fist. The bell rings, I wipe my hands off on my jeans, and head back inside.