On a white plate in the middle of the table lies a banana. Yellow-brown, just short of rotten. It is neither too large nor too small, an ordinary banana with a stem. The banana is sprinkled with spots and little dots. A black spot at its centre looks like a black eye. As I look at the banana it goes through my head that bananas are considered phallic symbols.
But sometimes a banana is nothing more than a banana that a gorilla in a zoo in a large city would eat. Because there are only zoos in large cities. My city is too boring and small, there’s no zoo. But nearby, in Kharkiv, there was a petting zoo, which has now been bombed. Bombs also fell on my city. A rocket hit the building next to my sister’s one night. Early in the morning she told me on the telephone. She had gone onto the balcony to watch the fire. Even her bed had shaken.
I don’t hear the air raid sirens that my sister hears. I don’t seen the queues in front of the cash points, I only remember some. But I picture how the chestnut trees are blossoming, how I go to a café with my sister. She says yes, that it’d be possible. She goes out every day. But I would be afraid of the rockets, afraid of the air raid sirens. I would be afraid of living in the here and the now. In my imagination, my city has been destroyed by the war. But my sister lives there without fear. Even now, during the war, she keeps a diet and gets on the scale every morning. Her diet consists of one banana per day.
Exactly like the one that is lying on the plate in front of me, in Berlin.
