Last words from Karin Brynard
Feeling low, Karin Brynard finds hope and grace in an unexpected gift.
II was feeling raw and vulnerable, the other day, when a neighbour arrived with a bowl of figs. ‘Adams’ figs. Favouritest of favourite food! Soul food. Almost black in their purpleness, plump and generous. Full of sweet promise. Normally my mouth would be watering so much that I’d barely be able to mutter my thanks before accepting such a glorious gift. But this time it was different. Because my heart was bruised, all shrivelled.
Once the kind giver had departed, that bowl of figs and I quietly contemplated each other in silence – them in their voluptuousness and I from my place of pain. Only then did I feel a slight stirring deep inside, something shifting, opening up just enough to let in the light. Because, you know, a fig is not just sommer fruit. It is a thing of depth. It has nobility and grace, an old ancestry of biblical proportions. Equally at home in the ring-adorned hands of a King David as in those of the humble Man of Nazareth. And it’s come a long way since it had to hide the shame of Adam, not so?
And did you know that there’s also an ‘Eva’ fig? It’s a uniquely South African cultivar with small, egg-shaped fruit, greenish-purple skin and pale yellow flesh. It might look mingy but it’s oh so sweet. Another local variety is the koffievy (coffee fig) or ‘Cape Black’, which apparently can be eaten in its entirety, skin and all.
My mother was someone who ate figs in their entirety, a boots-and-all eater. When I was little, and we lived in the Great Karoo, she tried to instil in us this way of loving figs. You don’t waste a single sweet molecule of fig, she’d say. I, best child that I was, obediently complied, but the other kids refused. They would rather eat green quinces with their bare teeth, my oldest sister would declare snootily.
We didn’t have our own fruit, but the town doctor diagonally across from us had ample, which he was more than willing to share. Garden figs, as they were known back then. All kinds. ‘Black Mission’, ‘Adams’ and ‘Smyrna’ figs. ‘Cape White’ and ‘Kadota’, the more common greenish type with its fleshy stalk and weeping a small sweet tear from its nether opening when ripe.
Unlike Mom, my dad was a peeler. It was a ritual to behold in his big, rough hands. He’d let his fingers gingerly glide over the fat cheeks of the fruits, lightly prodding here and there until he found one with just the right qualities: firm, but also soft enough. Just so. Then he’d peer at it from under his glasses, and with great care and precision snap the little neck and slowly, very delicately peel the skins until the fruit lay bare and moist and utterly ready for the taking on his plate.
My ma couldn’t bear to delay the gratification. She’d break it open between her two thumbs and slurp up its grainy sweetness until only the stalk remained, placing it absently on the edge of her plate, her eyes already seeking out the next one. And although she’d processed so many thousands of them into preserves and jams throughout her life, she never tired of them.
A king’s tree, the ancients used to call the fig, a tree with a hint of holiness. In the East, the banyan fig was highly regarded by Buddhists. On this side of the globe the fig was often regarded as the symbol of abundance and of God’s loving kindness. It bears a harvest twice every season, you see. The Bible is teeming with references to figs – starting with the Fall of Man, all the way through to Revelations, in which a very terrible prediction of misery is made, a day when the sun will turn black, the moon will once again be like blood, and the stars of heaven will fall to earth like the harvest of a fig tree shaken by a mighty wind.
For me, the sun was black that day my neighbour arrived with the bowl of figs. But as I broke open the first one and tasted its blessed, gritty sweetness, I remembered again that it is a fruit of solace. And grace.
Of soothing sores. Still today, a poultice of dried figs will draw the evil from a boil. In fact, the whole tree is goodness and virtue. In ancient Israel its dense shade was regarded as “more pleasant and cooler than that of a tent”.
And somewhere there’s the promise of “whoever sits under his own vine and under his own fig tree” will know peace and tranquillity.
Because a fig isn’t even a fruit. It’s a flower, a bundle of pistils and stamens wrapped in a soft, fleshy blanket.
I ask you this: which human heart wouldn’t heal a little – just so much – and become a little more whole, a little lighter once they ate a flower?