Here Is Where We Meet by John Berger

between his teeth – the sap of a nameless pale wood, which he calls girl-tree.
    It was enough that one greengage in a hundred reminded us of that.

     

Cherries
     
    In cherries, there was the flavour of fermentation as in no other fruit. Picked straight from the tree, they tasted of enzymes laced with the sun and this taste was complementary with the special shiny polish of their skins.
    Eat cherries – even one hour after they have been picked – and their taste blends with that of their own rottenness. In the gold or red of their colour there is always a hint of brown: the colour into which they will soften and disintegrate.
    The cherry refreshes, not on account of its purity – as does the apple – but by slightly, almost imperceptibly, tickling the tongue with the effervescence of its fermenting.
    Because of the small size of the cherry and the lightness of its flesh and the insubstantiality of its skin, the cherry stone was always incongruous. The eating of the cherry never quite prepared you for its stone. When you spat it out, it seemed to have little connection with the flesh that surrounded it. It felt more like a precipitate of your own body, a precipitate mysteriously produced by the act of eating cherries. After each cherry, you spat out a cherry tooth.
    Lips, as distinct from the rest of the face, have the same gloss as cherries do and the same malleability. Both their skins are like the skin of a liquid. A question of their capillary surfaces. Make a test to see whether our memory is correct or whether the dead exaggerate. Put a cherry in your mouth, don’t bite it yet, now for a split second remark how the density, the softness and the resilence of the fruit match perfectly the nature of your lips which hold it.

     

Quetsch
     
    A dark, small, oval plum, not much longer than a human eye. When they are ripe in September on the tree, they glance between the leaves. Quetsches.
    Ripe, their colour is a blackish-purple, but their skin, unless when handling it you rub it off with your fingers, has a bloom on it: a bloom the colour of blue wood-smoke. These two colours made us think of drowning and flying at the same time.
    Their pale yellowy-green flesh is both sweetish and astringent, so that its taste is a serrated one – like the blade of a minute saw along which you gently run your tongue. The quetsch doesn’t seduce as the greengage does.
    The trees were always planted near the house. During the winter, looking out through the window, we saw each day small birds searching for food and assembling and perching on the branches. Finches, robins, tits, sparrows and an occasional poaching magpie. In the spring, before the blossom flowered, the same small birds would sing in the quetsch tree.
    There is another reason why they are the fruit of song. From barrels full of quetsch, when the fruit were fermented, we distilled illegal gnôle, plum brandy, slivovitz. And sparkling little glasses of this invariably prompted us to sing songs of love, solitude and endurance.

5
     
    Islington
     
    The borough of Islington has, during the last twenty-five years, become fashionable. In the fifties and sixties, the name Islington, when pronounced in central London or in the north-western suburbs, conjured up a remote and faintly suspect district. It is interesting to note how poor and therefore uneasy districts, even when they are geographically near a city centre, are pushed, in the imagination of those who are prospering, further away than they really are. Harlem in New York is an obvious example. For Londoners today Islington is far closer than it used to be.
    When it was still remote, forty years ago, Hubert bought a small terraced house there, with a narrow back garden that sloped down to a canal. At that time he and his wife were teaching part-time in art schools and had no money to spare. The house, however, was cheap, dirt cheap.
    They’ve moved to Islington! a friend told me at the time. And this news was like