People from the nearby villages who came for the holiday would eat soup, cry from the hot sauce, and put out the fire with the convent bread’s thick crust and cold water from the spring—and sometimes with wine, too, if Mother Superior allowed it. The red soup made everyone loquacious and cheerful.
One day, at the start of tomato time, Grandpa and I set off around noon in the dog buggy. We had two giant wolfhounds that he hitched up to a cart just big enough for two people and a little luggage. The people in Nesebar had gotten used to my grandfather’s eccentricities, but that dog buggy made him famous throughout the whole region. Boris had thought up this mode of transportation when he took over a pigsty in the village of Vlas, using the buggy to cart over the swill. Otherwise, he usually scooted around on his bike. The pigsty as an enterprise had come about when my mother’s younger sister, Sara, wanted to study agriculture and had to have experience with farm work in order to apply. Grandpa installed some yahoo named Boncho with the pigs as a watchman, and he and Sara started up the pigsty in Vlas. Boris went around to the restaurants in Sunny Beach in his dog buggy, collecting slop in pails. Boncho kept watch over the pigs and got tanked, and, whenever he got hungry, helped himself to the least mangy meatballs from the slop. From time to time, Grandpa also found some horse on its last legs so the pigs could have fresh meat. Once, they brought over a blind, unfortunate horse. The pigs were hungry. Boncho was dead drunk. What else could Sara do? She tossed a sack over its head and whacked it with the butt of an ax (while looking the other way, of course). Afterward, once she had made sure it wasn’t moving, she chopped it up. The pigs went crazy for it.
My aunt completed her internship, but never did end up studying agriculture, because right when she was supposed to apply, she fell in love with a handsome German choral director and, to my grandmother’s great relief, got married and moved to Germany. More to the point, this was a great relief because Sara was a beauty and had my grandmother’s wild nature. Hordes of admirers were always traipsing after her, and that “threatened the family’s good name.” My aunt’s marriage in Germany was a particular source of pride for Nikula, something like an emblem of the family’s success. Every summer, Sara would come and visit us with suitcases full of presents and her experiences abroad, with which she strengthened her belonging to the family.
It was fun traveling by dog, to say nothing of how proud I was to sit next to Boris in that strange vehicle. That day, when we reached the monastery, Mother Efrosinia had just finished parceling out the tasks. Grandpa disappeared somewhere into the garden. Around the big table under the vine-covered trellis, the nuns were working silently, as if speaking would make the tomatoes go sour. They were making tomato juice; peeled, canned tomatoes cut into large chunks; and thick tomato sauce with celery, parsley, and chili peppers in taller jars. They lugged over tubs of tomatoes; a huge cauldron of water was boiling on the fire so they could steam them for a few minutes right in the tubs to make the skins come off easily. After that, they peeled the tomatoes, cut them into large chunks, and stuffed them into the jars. Granny Petrania sealed the lids with a little machine. Her moustache was longer than Grandpa’s.
Afterward, the full jars were arranged in a big black kettle, where they would be boiled for ten minutes. They gave me a sharp little knife so I could peel tomatoes, too. The young novice usually did the same job, but that time there was something wrong with both her wrists and they were bandaged up. She sat at the end of the table, clutching a small Bible, and from time to time would stop perfectly still, her gaze empty.
I adored holding a warm, stretched-to-bursting tomato in my hand. I had my own system for peeling them. First, I made a little cross on the backside and from there pulled each corner of red skin toward the green navel. After that I would cut the naked tomato into quarters and toss it into a big wooden trough. I was important. I was working right alongside the grown-ups. Sometimes, it seemed like I could hear the red juice pulsing in our veins. The wind, gentle and round there in the monastery’s inner courtyard, rustled in the trellis. Its shadows played on our faces. From time to time, I noisily slurped up the thin streams of juice that trickled all the way down to my elbows, or ate the tomatoes whole when little ones came my way.
At the other end of the table, Evdokia stuffed the peeled tomatoes through a meat grinder for juicing. Her strong white fingers pressed them into the machine’s insatiable throat, and I kept thinking that any minute her flesh would come out of the little holes, but she always managed to save her fingers and even licked them from time to time, eyes closed. Evdokia was the liveliest and cleverest of the nuns in the monastery. Her husband had been lost at sea during a storm, and her sons had run off to America. The authorities had dragged her in for interrogation after interrogation, and in the end finally left her alone. Then, to everyone’s astonishment, she joined the monastery. She was pretty, with warm white skin and light-brown, almost yellow eyes. Instead of black, she wore a tidy dark blue habit that reached below her knees, and when she worked in the garden or at the big table, she put on a green apron with big orange flowers. Unruly copper curls often tumbled out from beneath her dark blue veil. I greatly envied her for that hair and dreamed that when I grew up, I would dye mine that color, too.
Petrania handed me a longish little tomato, and in my greediness I bit into it so ferociously that the seeds shot out and sprayed Mother Superior. Efrosinia blinked through the goo, covered in yellow seeds. I started to laugh, but the young nun shot me an angry glance.
“Ooh, Mother, it was an accident, I swear,” I started apologizing, diving under the table to clean her up.
“Don’t bother, my child, I was going to wash this habit anyway.”
Then I noticed that right in the middle of her velvet kamilavka, the seeds had formed a perfect little cross.
“Mother, look. You’ve got a tomato cross.”
“Holy Mary, Mother of God!”
The nuns crossed themselves. Mother Superior raised her eyebrows knowingly and smiled. Evdokia dumped yet another overflowing tub of tomatoes on the table.
“Mother, why do we cross ourselves?” I asked. “Didn’t they crucify Christ on the cross? So that means the cross is something bad.”
Mother Superior looked at me carefully and started to say something, but the young nun’s voice cut in: “The cross is a symbol of the soul, crucified by the human body. The soul strains upward, but the body drags it back down to earth.”
“But why did people kill God?”
“He is the Son of God,” the young nun replied. “He was sent especially to earth so that through His sacrificial death man would be redeemed from his sins.”
“So how can one person dying forgive everybody’s sins?”
“Didn’t I just tell you that He’s not just one person, but the Son of God, who loved us so much that He sacrificed Himself for us and thus washed away our sins?”
“People are still bad today. He sacrificed Himself for nothing.”
“You don’t know how much worse things would be if He hadn’t sacrificed Himself. The power of His love is great,” she snapped.
“So does everybody who loves have to sacrifice themselves? If He loved us, why did He let them crucify Him? Couldn’t He just have lived with us and loved us, instead of dying?” I insisted.
“He couldn’t, because people are constantly tempted by the devil and they always commit sins. With His sacrifice, the Son of God weakened the power of evil. We are not worthy of Him.”
“How did He weaken evil?”
“Oooof, Manda, you’re too little to understand,” the young nun shouted in an unexpectedly loud voice.
Mother Superior shot her a dark-green glance. I took this as reinforcement and pressed on. “So since Christ suffered, are only those who suffer good?”
“No,