Tragedy
In the midst of the horrors of war our attention can be captured by trivia and absurdities. (Leopold Barth)
The farmer Kyrylo Mintz’s son has been lost in battle. He is not coming home. He stands in the middle of his garden just outside the town of Bila Tserka, thinking, paralyzed. His garden may soon be a morgue.
Kyrylo Mintz can’t think of anything except his son dead, the invasion horrors of Ukraine continue. Death continues. No end. No spring. The sky grows grayer each day. Soon those who are left will stumble along in the dark hoping to sometimes forget what has happened.
Each day more lives lost, houses windowless, cities destroyed, husbands with raised fists fighting back, shouting at the invaders while women and children desperately seek safety somewhere and always the ever-present fear, while the world of people beyond Ukraine’s borders are watching, cringing wondering that perhaps soon it will be their turn in the crucible. On their television screens they see it all, shattered buildings, bodies lying in the streets, sounds like that of exploding bombs and the cries of escapees, hungry weeping, cold, in anguish. On the faces of wives thinking of their husbands facing Russian tanks. It is a catastrophic opera in many acts with more to come.
Kyrylo stands motionless in his garden. He looks around and then to his astonishment he sees a mound sticking out of the ground. He hesitates then slowly walks toward the unknow shape of what, what could it be lying on top of the ground in the midst of his cabbage patch. He looks closely at the mass at his feet and whispers to himself “I think I have unearthed, yes, this mostly buried, what, and it appears to be, can it be maybe, yes, a huge potato. He gets a shovel and starts to release the potato from its soil prison. It is so large that it takes hours to release it’s from its burial site. He is drenched with sweat. He stops shoveling, breathless, stoops down and snips off a piece of the potato. He is talking to himself. “ It really is a potato.” He tastes it and yes, it tastes just like a potato. For the moment he forgets the war. He finds a scale and rolls the potato on the scale and it weighs 17.4 pounds. He can’t wait and rushes into his house and looks up the Guinness book of world records and finds the world’s record for huge potatoes, was listed as 11.6 pounds. Alongside that record is the world’s heaviest strawberry that had grown in Israel and weighed in at 10.19 ounces. He realized he could be famous having uncovered his gigantic potato. If only he could find a place to register it with Guinness which would mean going across the border into Hungary. He called his neighbor to share his discovery. His neighbor knew a great deal about horticulture and looked at the gargantuan potato and declared, “Kyrylo, it isn’t really a potato but rather a tuber, a kind of gourd and they can get to be huge. Kyrylo was crestfallen and fell to the ground weeping.