Strawberry-Spotted Handkerchief
Publication Date: 2022
Publisher: Manshourat Difaf
Country of Publication: Lebanon, Beirut
Pages: 249
Mandil bil-frawla
In a drab Moscow apartment block, a scrap of paper and three strawberries signal the start of a dangerous affair. Raya, the wife of a powerful man in Baku, is an “improbable love” for our nameless narrator—a Syrian journalist who lives more vividly in his head than in the world.
When their secret is discovered by their watchful flatmate, the threat of a violent confrontation looms. But as Raya is whisked back to Azerbaijan, the narrator finds that her absence only fuels his obsession and deepens his love. Through daily daydreamed train rides to Baku and the arrival of new distractions—the accusing Natalia, a former love interest, and the magnetic Nonna, a new chance encounter —the narrator navigates the thin line between his internal fantasies and the messy reality of love. When Raya finally returns with her husband in tow, the climax is nothing like he imagined, forcing him to face a life where dreams finally come true—whether he’s ready for them or not.
Strawberry-Spotted Handkerchief is a modern, often comical meditation on the friction between the inner self and the outer world. Taking its title from the tragic omen in Shakespeare’s Othello, the novel subverts the tropes of jealousy and vengeance. While the plot is set in motion by an adulterous spark in a Moscow birch wood, the true journey takes place within the narrator’s psyche. The author uses the motif of the strawberry to structure a narrative that explores the ambiguity of emotion. As the narrator fluctuates between his longing for the distant Raya and his encounters with the grounding presence of Nonna, the story asks: Do we love people, or do we love the versions of them we build in our minds? Do we even truly live in the world, more than in our heads? It is a surprisingly fresh take on the tragedy of existence, showing that our emotions and expectations often shape our reality more than the truth ever could.
Translated by Margaret Litvin
“Now take off your stockings, please, and stand barefoot in the basin.”
The basin was half full of ripe strawberries, with the leaves removed.
Now Nonna seemed taken with a joy she had not expected. As her face flushed with sudden excitement, she kept looking at Volodia with gratitude and love. As she removed her stockings, I, like the others, became preoccupied with the slow appearance of her small white foot tinged with bright pink above her soft heel, and from her pure sole all the way to the tips of her miniature toes. As she lowered it into the depths of the strawberries in the red basin, she suddenly grabbed my arm for balance, then lifted her other foot to take off her other stocking.
As carefully as though harvesting two delicious, fragile tropical fruits, Volodia bent down, gathered her stockings from the floor, and placed them gently on a nearby chair. We were all – the doll and I, Maxim Vadimych, and Galia – fixing our eyes on her other foot, watching together and enjoying as it disappeared gradually into the heart of the strawberries.
“My dad taught me how to make strawberry wine. He told me once that the wine is especially delicious if the berries have been crushed by the bare feet of the woman you love on her birthday,” Volodia said, entranced by Nonna’s feet, which had begun crushing the strawberries in the basin. “Nonna’s foot-trampled wine will be ready in time for my birthday, three months and two days from now,” Volodia continued happily, as though affirming a beautiful coincidence. “You all, by the way, have an advance invitation to come over then,” he added, without taking his eyes off Nonna’s feet.
Her feet, now tinged with fresh blush, made a peculiar soft rustle as they took turns stepping in and out of the depths of the berries, while her eyes were covered with a fine network of capillaries, as if from the tactile pleasure of the fragile, shattered, living redness under her bare feet. Then I thought I saw her lips tremble suddenly as she looked at the face of the doll in my other hand. I almost thought she had lost her balance, because she squeezed my hand, which she was still holding, with unexpected force. I followed her gaze and was surprised to see that the doll’s happiness with Nonna was still mixed with some obscure deep sadness that I didn’t have a chance to think about right now. I went back to enjoying Nonna’s pleasure at her feet mashing strawberries. I imagined she would feel immeasurably more pleasure if, right now, she could plunge up to her neck in a bathtub full of ripe strawberries denuded of leaves.
“The history of the strawberry goes back to the Romans,” the teacher Maxim Vadimych said, “but some would take it back to the Greeks, even if I, personally, lack conclusive evidence of the strawberry being mentioned in their surviving written works. I read, in a nonspecialist journal, an also unconfirmed report that an excavation in Switzerland found strawberries going back to the Stone Age. What I know for sure is that Virgil regarded the strawberry as one of the beauties of the field, and he warned the children picking them to beware of snakes in the grass. Ovid also mentioned them in his Metamorphoses.” His eyes followed Nonna’s feet busily crushing the strawberries, as he articulated each letter, leaving barely perceptible silences between his words.
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