Chapter Thirty Four
The Officer Who Bought Tomatoes Every Friday
Every Friday, just after the morning rush, Officer Karim Nasser came to Mariam's corner in his uniform and bought tomatoes. He came at the same hour, stopped at the same place before the crates, and did the same thing every time. The street came to expect it the way it expected the call to prayer and the opening of the shops. He would stand before the crate of tomatoes and look them over slowly, pick up one tomato and hold it to his nose and smell it, put it down, and pick up another and smell that one too. The first time he did it, the customers watched in silence, unsure what the smelling meant. By the third Friday they had stopped watching. By the fifth Friday the children were copying him, holding up tomatoes and sniffing them with great seriousness, and their mothers laughed and told them to put the tomatoes back.
Mariam understood, and she never hurried him. She stood behind her crates with her hands folded and watched him choose. When he had smelled three or four tomatoes and found the ones he wanted, she held open a plastic bag, and he placed the tomatoes in it himself, gently, one by one, as if they were eggs. She charged him the same price she charged everyone. He paid in coins, never asked for a discount, and she never offered one, because both knew the tomatoes were not the point and also entirely the point. He bought them for his mother Salma, who cooked on Fridays. Salma made the tomato sauce Karim had remembered when he smelled the first tomato on the pavement, the sauce his grandmother Amira had taught her, with garlic and olive oil and patience.
One Friday in the late autumn, when the light was gold, Karim stood before the crates a little longer than usual, and Mariam asked how his mother was. He said she was well, and had asked after Mariam, and had said the tomatoes from Mariam's corner were the only ones worth cooking with, because they smelled the way tomatoes used to smell. Mariam laughed, pleased, and said Salma was a woman of good taste. Karim smiled and said his mother had said Mariam should come to supper one Friday and eat the sauce made from her own tomatoes. Mariam said she would come when the stall was closed and the crates were in, and would bring greens for the table. Karim said his mother would like that.
They talked while he chose his tomatoes, the way people talk who have become friends without deciding to become friends. He told her about his week on patrol, the new rules Captain Fouad Salim had pinned on the station wall, and the vendors he now knew by name. Mariam told him about her week: Nour's essay and the school assembly, the rain and the roof, and the customer who had walked an extra street in the rain to buy greens. She told him about the tin cup filling steadily, the medicine she took every morning, and the doctor who told her to rest. Karim laughed and said he had heard about the one afternoon of rest, and that Captain Salim had said it was the shortest rest in the history of Beirut.
On the Friday before the winter festival, Karim brought his mother Salma with him. She was fifty eight, with kind eyes and flour on her hands from the morning's baking. She stood before the crates, looked at Mariam for a long moment, then took both of Mariam's hands in hers and thanked her, simply, for the tomatoes and for the smell that had brought her son home to her kitchen in his memory. Mariam blushed and said she only sold vegetables. Salma said that was enough, and enough was a great deal. Salma chose the tomatoes herself that day, smelling each one the way her son did. Mariam watched mother and son choosing together and thought about her husband Youssef, and about the way families pass knowledge down through hands and kitchens and the smell of good food. Salma paid from a small purse, and Mariam put the coins in the tin cup.
After Salma left, Karim stayed a moment longer, turning a tomato over in his hand. He told Mariam he had been afraid, on the morning of the confrontation, that he would be the kind of officer who cleared a pavement and went home and thought nothing of it. The smell of the tomato had stopped him, and he was glad it had. He had learned more from one tomato than from a year of training. Mariam put a hand on his arm, briefly, the way a mother puts a hand on a son's arm, and told him he had listened, and listening was the whole of it, and a man who listens is a man the street can trust. Karim nodded, put the tomato in his bag, paid, and walked away with his bag swinging gently at his side. Mariam watched him go and thought how strange and good it was that a tomato could change the course of a morning, and of a street, and of a life. The next Friday he came again, at the same hour, and smelled the tomatoes, and smiled, and Mariam had his bag ready. The street, which had learned to expect him, went on about its business, content.
Chapter Thirty Five