Montenegro Market

I’ve come for a bottle of fresh-pressed olive oil. The market is a garden-level garage, grey and muted concrete. There are few windows, if any. They have a fleeting hold on my memory. The market is defined by what it is not: not a Sunday-market in the sun; not a mélange of spices and human bodies; not the clamor of haggling, the reprisals yelled at a deal gone bad; it is not a Baltic beat, or a melody off of the Adriatic. But it is not entirely cold either. There is something there beyond the necessity for fresh fruits and vegetables that keeps drawing me back. Something like two fingers feeling across skin for a healthy vein. There is a pulse. 

The man with tobacco skin greets me, this time recognizing who I am. His unkempt cotton eyebrows raise and he smiles with what teeth remain. “Dobro jutro,” he says and extends his hand. I take it and respond still with weakness—in the greeting and in the handshake. He speaks to me in Serbian and I nod as if I understand. He knows that I don’t speak the language but what else is there to do? He must let me know of all the delicacies he has available today.

Here we have homemade wine. Two liters the white. One liter the red. Probajte. Probajte. He pours me a few shots of the white and it is very good—bone dry and flinty like limestone. Here we have dried figs. The summer season for fresh ones is now over but you can have them dried. Try one. Probajte. Remember the sweltering days and the girls in bikinis and the turquoise sea, its coolness when you dive and it envelops you. Remember when all this was new and full of potential. Here we have olives. They taste of no other olives but mine. You see the garlic cloves in there with them? You see? You can only get olives like these in Montenegro. There are no others like these. Probajte.

Now my bag has two liters of wine in a salvaged plastic bottle, a hundred grams of olives, and a string of dried figs. “The olive oil,” I say, pointing to another unmarked plastic bottle. He pushes a capful of it on me and I sample it for the performance only. I know it is good. The best I’ve ever had. My backpack is bulging and I have not even gone to the woman at the fruit stand who knows I will visit her next.

She also greets me and immediately tells me about all there is to offer. The fruits are arranged in short boxes and cascade down in tiers. There are not so many options today, but last time I went to the stand right beside this one and the lady frowned at me, upset that I did not buy from her. This week I must buy there.

The pomegranates are heavy. I weigh them in my hand and pass them to the woman who gives me a motherly smile, only vaguely patronizing. I can still just guess if I have picked good ones. She seems to know that all of this is a farce, that I am playacting. She plays along, because I am a good customer perhaps, or because she pities me. Now the basiliko, now the parsley sprigs gleaming with moisture, and the sanguine tomatoes. She puts them all on her digital scale and adds the totals by hand. I put grapes on the scale and she adds them to the total. She hands the grocery bag to me and shows me the price as she says it aloud. I split the atmosphere with English words – “Thirteen. Yes. Thank you.” And then I try and make up for it, take it back and return to the past – “Trinaest. Da. Hvala.” She looks impressed, maybe because she just wants my business next week. She takes a handful of small zwetschge plums and drops them into my bag. “Hvala,” she says.

At home I arrange the fruits delicately on my table. I serve myself a glass of wine and I listen to the lapping water of the bay that finds its way into my window. It is part of the pulse. It beats with the sound of banter from Corleone Café, with the conversations of the last beachgoers of the season. And I faintly feel it in my temples as I sip at the wine, and as I watch the sun set across the bay.