The Last Tomatoes
My granddad always returned from the dacha—his summer kingdom—with bucketfuls of whatever was in season: pink fleshy tomatoes, cucumbers bitter at the bottom, scratchy hairy peaches, or green solid pears still dripping juice. He carried four aluminum buckets as if gravity didn’t apply to him. Before his feet even crossed the threshold, he’d announce these were the last ones and now he didn’t know what we would eat. He said it every time, so nobody believed him.
It was the late ’90s. Granddad still carried his childhood hunger from the war in his pockets; always afraid the table might come up short. After the Soviet collapse, my parents stood blinking at salary delays, at a life they didn’t know how to work.
Dacha wasn’t just the act of survival for him – more like the stage for his invisible performances. The precise color of a tomato knots, like tuning a stringed instrument. Two-hour trips just to water strawberries for ten minutes. One early bunch of potatoes planted to ripen by my birthday—like he could dance with time. He had a kind of intuition that made things grow not by the calendar, but by his own rhythm.
In June, the strawberries came first—small, misshapen, sweeter than anything I’ve tasted since. We ate them right there in the rows, hands stained, dirt under our nails. Peaches were rarer; granddad guarded the few we had, sealing them in syrup for the single jar of compote we opened on New Year’s Eve. Cucumbers, though—I dreaded them. They filled the bathtub before canning, stealing our showers. In winter, when the snow made the pump water ache in your fingers, he’d open tomato juice, and the kitchen would smell like August again.
Anyone else wasn’t allowed to intervene here—except my mom, tidy and precise. The rest of the family was hardly let to do harvesting. Mom’s elder sister, her complete opposite—fast and careless—once didn’t pick the berries right. It was a big fight—started between a granddad and his adopted daughter, then her husband involved, and just in two minutes I’ve heard all our family arguing and yelling at each other. And I was just shitting in cranberry bushes behind the house, afraid to go outside before they solve their problems and return to work.
We didn’t even have even a toilet there. No electricity, either. My sister once told me she remembers the time before an electrical cable was stolen from the whole village to be sold for scrap metal. Water was supplied at a certain time, so grandad was to stay the night on dacha once a week. Watering was supposed to be since 5 AM on Thursday. Once we were allowed to go with granddad, too—me and my sister.
We took the old metal bed with hard feather. It was so high I couldn’t make it myself—my sister got me there. We didn’t know even approximate time—the darkness outside seemed to last for ages. The only thing to do was press play on the cassette player and listen through our carefully chosen tracks. My sister asked me if I know how old is Cher. I guessed she should be five years older than Britney. My sister said Cher was fifty-two, leaving me confused. Believe was everywhere. Neither we nor our parents had known her iconic career before. Cher’s age didn’t matter anyway—she sounded like a future.
We woke up the next day long after the crop was watered. I sat on the bed and dangled my legs down, waiting for my sister to wake up, too. I’ve looked around—white walls, ugly soviet sofa with flowery upholstery, a cloth hanger. A dining table with drawers, a usual loaf of round bread. Two plates, glued at least once. There was a swing behind the wall—when my sister finally picked me down, I got there.
Out of the house, the cherry tree still extended higher than the attic. You couldn’t pick anything without using a ladder. Anyway, it was sawed down only after granddad fell from the stairs. His daughters persuaded him he is no longer in a condition to handle dacha. The bad times were over, and we could afford to buy any of stuff that grew here. Granddad finally gave in, sold dacha, bought leather pants for my sister. But still left home to see how new owners handle everything. They did nothing and it made him mad. He kept watching over them, insisted they should save his legacy. They didn’t care even less than we did. The only thing left for my granddad was solitaire. He dealt the cards quietly on the windowsill, as if he could still sort and control something. But the tomatoes were gone. It was just him and the cards now.
But before that, we were allowed to eat as many strawberries we could pick. To get lost in the raspberry bushes, to see a strange bug there and to run scared, getting scratched. We washed our hands in an old mining trolley repurposed to hold rainwater—common in our region, where whatever survived the mines leaked into everyday life. I gave it a hug before we left. It wasn’t really a hug. I just tried to unfold it—but it was too big for me.
The way to the tram was long. A rosehip bush at the corner—I always stopped to smell it. Then the hill: dusty, steep, with small stones along the edge and a path worn in by our own feet. I got better at it each year, but it never felt easy. At the bottom was a twisted road we had to dash across before the cars came.
After that, we had two ways—through the thicket or the wide wheat field. I always chose the field. My dad once told me they were caught in a thunderstorm there, back when my mom was pregnant with me. It felt like I remembered it too.
We finally got to the last stop, waiting for the tram moving in circle to make a circle back. We always talked with my sister—about the East Coast-West Coast hip-hop war, about our favorite Saturday morning TV show, how I dreamed of becoming a fashion designer and she of being a radio DJ. We dreamed of chips, a bottle of soda in a store too expensive for us even to walk into.
The tram was never just a ride. It was a spell cast between dirt and town, duty and dream. By the time we got to the final stop, we already were someone else.
Years later, in a museum, I saw the trolley again. The same kind that stood behind our dacha—chipped enamel, sun-heated metal, holding the same yellow-green water. I pressed my chest to it and let my tears fall.
I didn’t care who was watching.
Iryna Somkina is an author based in Kyiv, Ukraine. After a decade-long silence, she returned to writing to explore memory, displacement, and quiet acts of rebellion. Her recent work has appeared in Gone Lawn, Livina Press, and Star 82 Review.
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