The Ethiopian guy with the sambussa stand at the Chula Vista farmer’s market has a beautiful, deliberate way of moving. He is leaving for college soon, years after most kids have already gone and graduated, now that he’s no longer needed to help run the family restaurant. He’s not sure where yet. He asks me about Santa Cruz, what I majored in, how long the drive was, listens intently and it begins to feel like I’m talking about someone else’s life. I’m not sure I’ve brought much of it with me into the present, save a $15,000 sheet of laser printed paper and a couple good friends. I wish him luck and he gives me an extra curry chicken. The next time I come back, he’s gone.
In his place is a new food stand, selling Serbian cevapi, a kind of sausage roll, tended by a young man and an old one.
“How do you know cevapi?”
“I’ve only read about it in a book.”
“From a cookbook!”
“No, by a forensic anthropologist.“
“What kind?”
“Forensic anthropologist. Kind of like an archaeologist and doctor combined. They study skeletons, bones, other human remains and try to figure out what happened. She came with a group of UN workers – to investigate.”
“What?”
“The mass graves. She was helping to identify the bodies, and determine how they’d died.”
“I see. Yes, I see. And she ate cevapi while she was there.”
“Yes. She couldn’t speak the language, but she learned to order cevapi and coffee right away.”
He’s quiet for awhile. The old man, I assume his father, has been standing back and smiling the whole time. He’s meticulous about the placement of my bread, my salad, my onions, my sauce. Deliberate in that way, too, which makes me think of the Ethiopian guy. The son explains to him what I’ve said, maybe more quickly than it should have been. There is a breathless few seconds and in that span, they might have been anyone – victim, aggressor, aggrieved, displaced, completely unaffected, and no way of telling – before the other shoe dropped.
But his smile doesn’t falter when he hands over my to-go box. He explains, through his son, how my food should be assembled and to be more careful with the spicy spread. The younger man shakes my hand as we make our good-byes, but the moment never comes. It’s not my history to share, I know, and ultimately we all three of us just wanted me to buy a sausage roll. The cevapi is cold by the time I get home. I put it away for a little while, content to wait before ingesting this whatever it is. Sympathy. Distance. An “I’m sorry this happened to you,” whether it did or not. Knowing that I’m no longer thinking about the son and father at the farmer’s market, or any bunch of tangled limbs and silence left at the bottom of a hole in the ground. It catches in the throat. I can warm the food in the microwave later and chew and swallow it down into something more closely resembling hunger.
