Souring on war

In the third excerpt from "Bittersweet," Matt McAllester picks lemons and longs for home.

Matt McAllester May 8, 2009 11:43Updated May 30, 2010 11:54

(Courtesy of Matt McAllester)

LONDON — There was one major problem with my plan to spend hours in the kitchen, hours reading cookbooks. I was a foreign correspondent. I did not have a domesticated lifestyle. “You need to know,” I had told the woman who would later become my wife when we began to date seriously, “that this is the only thing I know how to do. It’s the only way I can make money. Besides, I love it. I will never stop doing it. I will always travel. I will always be away for much of the year.”

“Sure,” she said, “that’s ﬁne. I’m busy too, you know.”

She meant it; she truly didn’t mind my going away for long spells. But I minded, more and more. The truth was, I had begun, for some indistinct period of months or possibly a couple of years, to feel less in love with war zones that I proclaimed.

This was me at 30: I was with my dear friend Richard Miron, a radio reporter for the BBC, and we were making our way through a dusty lemon grove in the Gaza Strip at the start of the Second Intifada. It was the fall of 2000. We were near a heavily fortiﬁed Israeli army position, and in recent days the Israeli soldiers, unseen behind their walls of concrete, had been shooting dead quite a few Palestinians. The lemon trees provided us with cover, but then the bullets started zipping through the heavy early-afternoon citrus air of Gaza and past us, breaking the sound barrier in a sharp crack. “Look at these lemons,” I said, stopping to pick some off a tree as we ran through the grove with our bodies bent low. “They’re the most lemony lemons I’ve ever smelled.”

“What the fuck are you doing?” Richard said.

“Picking fruit,” I replied, stufﬁng the ﬁrm lemons and their green pointy leaves into my pockets. I tore one open, and the sour, delicious juice dripped down my hand. The perfect meeting of a fresh ingredient with a life-threatening moment. I was very happy. “They can’t see us among all these trees, you know.” The bullets continued to crack nearby.

Something would happen in my brain in those moments. The ﬁght-or-ﬂight chemical, norepinephrine, seemed to surge inside me, making me feel hyperalert, almost limitlessly strong, and completely in control of my body. I experienced a beatiﬁc calm, a sense of extraordinary well-being and generosity. The lemons glowed with the deepest yellow. Their leaves seemed perfectly formed. My friend Richard was the most amiable companion possible. A distilled form of friendship was born amid the ﬂying lead and the norepinephrine. Richard would be a friend for life, I immediately knew. I wanted to stay in the grove all afternoon gathering these perfect lemons with my friend.

“This is ridiculous. I’m getting the fuck out of here,” he said, turning his back on me. I followed.