Twitter dot com reminds it’s melon season in Central Asia, which is the best season. If you stop at a roadside pyramid of melon and pay more than 3 cents for the best one you ever tasted, you are a terrible sucker. Here in southern France, where it also melon season, they have every kind of melon as long as it’s yellow or a cantaloupe. Paying 2 euro for a small, mediocre melon means it’s Tuesday.
Everyone has a melon story, right? Not the kind of story in which you and your friends got food poisoning after sharing a way-too-heavy for July melon in Murghab, Tajikistan (true story). Or you drank water while eating watermelon and your stomach exploded (I saw it once on Youtube). Good melon stories. I got one.
In August, 1991, the night train from Moscow to Brest would pass through the undifferentiated Soviet landmass now known as Belarus without the hassle of borders or visas. I shared a compartment with a person who, after a progression of legal processes common to the young and foolish would eventually become my ex-husband, an English friend who performed in a Polish circus, a man wearing a tubeteika and his young son.
Bear in mind, please, that we were 22 years old and all kinds of idiot. We were returning to Warsaw, where we lived, after spending a weekend in Moscow eating McDonalds and Pizza Hut. In our defense, such delicacies had yet to reach Warsaw and better options were thin on the ground. While the train clacked across the steppe that night, the Soviet Union had, unbeknownst to us, begun to unravel.
The man and his young son were unreasonably excited to share a compartment with two dumb Americans and English circus performer stuffing their faces with Beg Maks and apple pies. As the son darted out of the compartment, the man, who had been pretty friendly to that point, grinned and pulled out a large knife.
Outside, the night was very dark. Inside, the apple pie was very cold.
The son bounded back into the compartment, cradling a giant yellow melon. The father sliced it carefully. Everyone enjoyed a piece, and maybe had another. There was plenty to go around. Friendship among peoples was codified by a big yellow melon.
By morning they were gone, probably having disembarked in Smolensk or Minsk. Only after visiting Uzbekistan years later, it occurred to us that the man, his son, the knife and the melon were almost certainly Uzbek (I am willing to entertain the possibility they were Kyrgyz, another melon-loving people. Still, I am 80% sure they were Uzbek). But in August 1991, he was just a Soviet guy who didn’t look Slavic at all and didn’t respect well-known protocols about big knives in small train compartments.
I have no idea how many other melons he had with him. Knowing what I know now, it could have been a lot. He probably told us, in Russian, but I’m sure we stared at him like slack-jawed morons, knowing nothing of Tashkent or Fergana, or how common, yet also extraordinary, his melon was. That knowledge would come later.
Writer Caroline Eden (@edentravels) is a big melon fan, so follow her if you appreciate central Asian melon content.