When he entered the newsroom that sweltering July day, I remember we’d thrown open the windows. He came in like a hurdler, vintage Pertak, sprinting through the shared open floor plan to his private office, already in a huff and on the phone, as usual. At the hilltop bar some nights, after quitting time, I’d indulged in a few malicious theories about the guy, wondering whether everything he did, from his brisk walk to his marathon phone calls that sucked the air from the room, was to remind us cubicle dwellers—and above all himself—that he was more important. Speed and volume were his stock in trade; they set him apart, even entitled him to his own office. So, he blew past our desks that day on stilt-walker legs, mid-call, one shoe tip kicking aside the greasy, shopworn wooden stop we’d jammed under his door, so air would circulate in the heat. Once Pertak had shut the door behind him, he rarely emerged before late morning, to bang around the office kitchen scrambling together breakfast. And like most stuffed shirts holding up half the world from their corner offices, he usually dined alone at his desk, leaving Ms. Kőszegi to winnow the breadcrumbs from between the rows of his keyboard at night. We heard him clattering around the kitchenette, ransacking the silverware drawer and cursing the fact that not everything was where he thought it should be. He hacked a plank of crispy flatbread in two with his teeth—and then it happened: he cracked the lid on a pickle jar. Next thing we knew, a scream came whizzing over our heads into the newsroom, followed by a tormented hiss and a string of the most guttural expletives. Ms. Schweiger, who sat across the table hammering out her daily sports column, looked at me over the top of her monitor.
“Is something wrong?” we asked in near unison, already in the kitchenette’s doorway.
Because there stood Pertak, cursing and seething, the ball of his hand pressed against his left eye socket. “Can you imagine,” he started. Here he was, just making his breakfast—everything bagel, cream cheese, salami—when, from the mouth of some piece of shit pickle jar . . . “I mean, for Christ’s sake,” he fumed, “who brought this sonofabitch to work in the first place?” He pointed to the five hundred milliliters of yellowish liquid blear standing on the counter, where a couple of cukes circled around, still visibly shaken by what had just gone down. Because he, Pertak, had fished a lone pickle out of this miserable shitheap of a jar. He picked one and bit down, but then the thing was so damned crisp, it kicked back, spraying its raggedyassedshizpickle juice in his left eye, which was now burning like piss and vinegar and about to scorch the living bejeezus out of his whole goddamned eyeball. That’s how it felt, anyway.
“Have you rinsed it yet?” Schweiger asked. I’d never seen her lose her cool—Germany could be beating Brazil 7-1 and all you’d hear out of her, the sports correspondent, was a slightly less subdued, “Yowza!”
Pertak, hand lodged in his left eye, stared. First at her. Then over at the pickle jar. Then at me. Then back at Schweiger.
“Your eye,” she finished. Pertak nodded dumbly, then lunged for the sink—even in this tiny office kitchen, he could haul ass—to stick his head under the running water.
The dampness slowly ate into the pale blue of his shirt collar.
*
The next day, when I got to the newsroom, Pertak was already seated in his office typing intently. Beneath the skin of his furrowed brow was a white bandage; it covered his entire left eye—the pickle juice eye. He’d gone to the doctor last night, he explained, after the incident. Both eyebrows shot up at the word “incident,” but the one under the bandage didn’t rise quite as high, leaving his face twisted, to his obvious chagrin, in cartoon skepticism.
Pertak wore the eye bandage all week—then, on Friday, his column came out. The rest of us were floored. Huddled in a scrum around Schweiger’s desk, peering over her shoulder, we read Pertak’s account of The Pickle Juice Affair, which he’d had the gall to publish in our small-town paper. You had to hand it to the guy: it took skilled wordsmithing—and exaggeration, every journo’s first friend in need—to concoct a scorched-earth rant from a squirt of vinegar in his eyeball.
Isn’t it time we took a closer look, he wrote, at pickles packed in vinegar? The liquid can rob a person of his sight, yet it is being sold on local supermarket shelves as-is, no warning labels, within easy reach of children! Who knows what damage accidents involving pickle juice have already caused? And what about our much-vaunted socialized health care system, already on shaky ground: shouldn’t we help save it by calling these liquids what they are? A menace!
A surprisingly un-stoic Schweiger slammed the economics section shut. “What a shitstorm. The critics’ll have a field day!”
Somehow, though, they didn’t. Instead, we all watched in disbelief as the editor-in-chief, seated in the conference room with her reading glasses on, licked her fingertips to page through the economics section.
“Razor sharp,” was her verdict. “Summer holidays, silly season, canning time—what a hoot! And why not? No harm printing a gag now and then. Just make sure you place a clarification in the next edition; otherwise, we’ll catch hell from the pickle bottlers.”
*
Suffice it to say that the editor-in-chief’s requested explanatory note for Pertak’s dead-serious pickle piece didn’t appear the following Monday. And passing by his office, I noticed a cloud of snowy-white perm padding the back of a head seated across from him.
“Mrs. Kemety,” Schweiger explained. “She read his pickle story and wanted to speak with him.”
Then, in Tuesday’s edition: an interview with the perm lady; full-page, no less. It seems Pertak’s provocative questions about pickles had led this retired elementary school principal down memory lane. Because during her years on the job, whenever she’d spied a sandwich with a gherkin—on the playground, say, its glistening snout poking between lunch meat and bread—she’d yanked it out with her bare hand. Most people these days never stopped to think what mayhem a pickle can inflict upon a school—such tiny things, swimming in their acidic juices. It isn’t just that a child might get the juice in their eye. Let that same kid wolf one down the wrong pipe, and what’s next? Aspiration! Not only that, but pickle slices can threaten life and limb, for instance when they slide out of a sandwich and land on the floor, perhaps in a hallway. One minute, some unsuspecting faculty member steps on the thing, and the next, he’s down with a broken tailbone, fractured femur, ruptured aorta: Lord knows what! “And furthermore,” she continued, waxing philosophical, “as far back as the sixties, I never understood why cucumbers still needed pickling. The war was long over, and the fields where we fought the Battle on the Marchfeld were so full of vegetables, you’d need a cow’s gut to digest them all!” Besides, with so much produce coming in from overseas and all those greenhouses across the border in Holland, you could get anything you wanted these days, any time of year. A pickle, really, was just an adulterated cucumber: a mockery, stripped of its own dignity. And these back-to-the-land crazies were the real ones to blame—they wouldn’t rest until they’d “cultivated” everything nature and God gave us beyond recognition!
How a pickle could arouse such passion was beyond me, but then what did I know? I wasn’t that kind of reporter, not ambitious like Pertak. “Opinionated,” people liked to call him. I had zero opinions, whether about pickles or most anything. I’d spent years moseying along, writing my features page, which covered anything and everything on the margins of the real news stories. For a few days, I was sure the pickle story had peaked and would just vaporize in the interminable summer heat. But, as always when life jumps the tracks, that isn’t what happened next.
*
A press release from a daycare center found its way to my desk. Prompted by the recent interview in our paper, it said, management had revisited its risk reduction policies and agreed to ban pickle consumption on the premises with immediate effect. The caustic, vinegary nature of the juice from pickles, their overall sliminess—the thing actually used that word, “sliminess”: all of these were safety risks the daycare wanted to avoid. Worst of all were those presliced pickles, the blade-shaped ones so popular as garnishes. My gut said to forward this to Pertak; he was the one who started all the pickle palaver. Something in me balked, though, so I handed it off to my intern.
Which I then had to hear about the very next day, when Pertak came charging over and slapped the open paper down on my keyboard.
“You could have told me, you know,” he said, tapping his index finger on the “news in brief” column, which read: Pickle Ban in Daycare.
His left eye was Band-Aid free by now, but the tan lines left behind were unmissable, as was some leftover adhesive around the eye that his morning ablutions hadn’t rubbed off.
“This is a hot topic these days! You can’t just pass it off as ‘news in brief.’”
“Maybe in your world it is,” I said, “but this pickle drama is over the top if you ask me.”
“Oh yeah?” Pertak flared his nostrils. “Well, how about this, then: If you’re such a flaming pickle freak, why don’t you write me a rebuttal for tomorrow’s edition?”
*
I hate writing opinion pieces, mostly because—like I said—my opinions are so tame. Assign me an op-ed and I’ll morph into a novelist every time. I’ll imagine myself as this crack reporter, pondering whatever subject he’s covering and taking a stance, when in reality, the opinions were rarely my own, more a bunch of random, strung-together thoughts I assumed someone else must’ve thought.
A gherkin is a gherkin is a gherkin, I wrote in my pickle op-ed. It may be true that humans first invented pasteurization to preserve vegetables over long, bitterly cold winters. One could also argue that in today’s highly globalized world, where it’s always cucumber season somewhere, such techniques are obsolete. But pickles in vinegar are more than cucumbers: they are an integral part of our culinary tradition. And traditions being what they are, it’s not about necessity, but the thing itself. Do we still drink fermented water because it is potable and bacteria-free? No! We just like the taste of beer. And that’s why we eat pickles: because a pickle is a pickle. The sudden drumbeat for prohibition—all this outrage over the mere fact that pickles exist—flies in the face of a long tradition of eating pickles for the sake of it. Everyone needs to stop and think before the pickle gets cancelled, written off as a dangerous, reactionary relic.
*
Pickle-related fights spread like brushfire on social media that drought-stricken August. In the comments for my apologist op-ed, someone wrote: “Mention the slightest change and there you people go again, prophesying the downfall of the West!” As an opinionless hack, critiques of whatever confabulations I’d put in my op-ed didn’t bother me. What did set me off—the thing pitching me into an ever-deepening state of disbelief—was the sight of so many people working themselves into a lather over cucumbers packed in brine.
Because suddenly, pickle talk was everywhere, and everyone you met wanted to know: were you for or against? The anti-picklers mainly cared about health—or so they claimed. How could you risk another person’s right to bodily integrity, they said, so a few über-capitalist pickle-bottlers could line their pockets? Human rights groups even claimed to have hidden camera footage of migrants toiling in inhumane conditions, most of them women. They handed out flyers at the pedestrian mall, decrying “the pickle in its bourgeois bun” as “the yoke around the neck of marginalized workers.” This uproar soon spread from our tiny local paper to major news outlets. From the capital, a nationally syndicated weekly traced the gherkin back to the Ming Dynasty in China, where it was fed to the workers forced to build the Great Wall. When a vegetable has such a problematic past, the paper wrote, the structural injustices it helped entrench are bound to perpetuate themselves if no one will bear witness. Society must confront the question: do we really still need the pickle?
The pro-picklists—among whom I was numbered because of my op-ed, not that I cared—saw things differently. They invoked history and tradition, proud things the radical anti-picklers were hellbent on destroying. That and freedom, because shouldn’t every consenting adult get to choose whether to expose himself to pickle risk, willfully or not? Common sense in this debate had gone straight out the window and it was time to restore sanity.
Meanwhile, opinions at the paper were split. The editor-in-chief had thrown in with Pertak and the anti-picklers; even my intern had slapped a No Pickle Zone sticker on his laptop. But then Schweiger came out as pickle-positive, stacking a year’s supply of jars in the kitchenette and half-blocking the fridge. I stayed comfortably neutral, like always, watching things unfold. With my new rep as an alt-brine activist, thanks to my non-opinion piece, requests to defend the pickle poured in. I added some economics to my schtick, reminding people that the local pickle factory was a major regional employer and a reliable wholesale client for our farmers. For this, I was branded “a neoliberal pickle Nazi” on social media.
*
It was the workers who organized the first protest, a real dyed-in-the-red marching parade. I made my way, reporter-like, through the crowd, amid all the whistles, serious mustaches, and fluttering union flags. “We’re just scared a pickle ban is coming,” Sabrina told me. She worked at the factory, running the machine that vacuum-seals jars, and if she lost that job, then what? She loved her job, she said, before I could answer: it was full-time work, finally, after years of lousy cash-in-hand gigs. Three kids she had raised as a single mom—three! Could I imagine raising three kids on my own? “And what do these nutjobs think, anyway? Jerking off to their financial reports, their rich-people problems. These . . . these . . . these . . .” A peal of whistles drowned her out, then Walter, a few meters away, thundered: “They won’t stop with pickles, either!” He was a shipping contractor, near retirement, bellowing straight into my ear through his beard bristles. “Because pickles ain’t the only things packed in brine, ya know. You got your sauerkraut, your hot chilis, your cocktail onions—those little ones, what’s the deal with them? Are they getting banned too? I mean, what’s next?”
Picklegate had become that blistering summer’s Godzilla, a real blockbuster. Everyone had a hot take, but you had to watch what you said, and to whom. Not even the lunch counter was safe: the guy waiting on you might slap a fat pickle you never ordered between your Kaiser roll’s cold cuts and say, “It’s the principle of the thing!” Or, if you found yourself at a shop run by the opposing camp, you might not get the pickle you asked for because, again, principles. It was a complicated time.
*
One night, I startled awake from a dream where pickles of every color and size were hovering around my face. I couldn’t fall back asleep, so I trudged to the living room and turned on the TV. Channel 2 was showing this Sunday talk show, one I usually skipped. I poured myself a small glass of bitter schnapps left over from an Advent party, looked up, and there he was, seated between a grizzled gent with a bright green pocket square, the show’s moderator, and a young woman with a razor-edged helmet cut. Pertak. Wide awake, with that manic gleam in his eye.
“But the fact is,” he buzzed, half an asscheek balanced on his chair’s edge, “the pickle—or ‘gherkin’, if you will—is merely a social construct.”
Helmet Cut Lady gave an energetic nod. “It’s the juice, the brine,” said Pertak, “that makes a pickle a pickle. Otherwise, it’s a cucumber. And this act of socio-culinary transformation is precisely what we as a society could—should!—put a stop to, assuming we can still stand up for what is right.” More nodding from Mizz Helmet, her hairdo’s razor-sharp edge menacing her pencil-thin neck as it glided back and forth. Professor Pocket Square gave a snort: “But who can even follow what this whole mess is about? Mr. Pertak got a drop of vinegar in his eye, that’s all, and now we’re supposed to start banning pickles? Enough is enough already!”
I let out a weary laugh, emptied my schnapps glass in a swig, then poured another. “The pickle is far more than the sum of its parts,” Helmet Head was telling Green Square now; the tips of her headgear twitched furiously. Pertak’s grin was so damned smug and the pancake makeup on his spotlit face hid the eye tan lines perfectly. And that’s when I thought I heard it: the door, somewhere behind me, squeaking open. I turned, schnapps glass slipping from my hand—no, it couldn’t be! I sucked air and made a leap for the leather couch, because on the floor, on the walls, all around me were . . . tendrils. Thick green vines, scrambling and groaning, rustling nonstop as they lengthened and fattened. God in Christ, how . . . Fresh shoots sprouted from stems as I watched: cucumbers, some big, some small, all curvy and dangling from their vines. So crisp, moist, and glossy, like they were fresh from the jar. A dream, sure, it had to be, yet the vines closed in, thick with intent. They clambered up the couch as I tried jumping down, entangled my leg—too late! The plant wound itself around my ankle, my arms, my chest until it was forcing the air from my lungs. I felt myself blacking out, used my remaining strength to scream for help. The last thought I remember was: maybe Pertak was right, the little bitch.
*
I came to in a rush of glaring light. Everything ached. All around me, only white: was I dead, maybe? I saw myself from above, vines still around my wrists. Kept squinting, felt the leather straps around my shoulders. When I tugged at them, something rattled: a bed frame. It seemed I was lying in a bed that—
“Good morning!”
A door creaked open.
“Finally awake, are we?”
A white figure approached, smiling.
“The restraints are unpleasant, I know.” She spoke slowly and with great volume.
I opened my mouth, hearing the smack my tongue made as it peeled free from my gums. Tried speaking, but a raspy squawk was all that came out. The figure in white whipped out a clipboard, clicked a ballpoint pen.
“I just need to ask a few questions right now. Have you ever dyed your hair pea green?”
I shook my head.
“When was the last time you did a somersault?”
“Long time,” I whispered.
“What about red-headed woodpeckers? Seen any in the past eight weeks?”
I lifted my immobilized shoulders an inch, maybe, just as my head grew heavy on the pillow and I sunk into a long, deep sleep.
*
How much time passed before I was back at my newsroom desk, I don’t know, and I don’t really feel comfortable asking the others. Long enough, anyway, for the pickle affair to have vanished from the pages of our paper. No more leaflets fluttered around the pedestrian mall, no more scathing, seething letters to the editor piled up. My intern had even peeled the no-pickle sticker off his laptop. Things felt normal again: the familiar clatter of keys, Pertak’s hectic stilt-walking, the wheeze of the printer.
Then, one afternoon, with winter upon us and glühwein stands being hammered together outside, a rumble came from the kitchenette. A holler, a clatter, a curse, and a clack, then Pertak stormed into the newsroom on his circus performer legs. “Quick!” he gasped. “Who’s got a Band-Aid?” It was a pineapple, he told us, a goddam shit-for-brains Hawaiian pineapple. “Those leaves on top—Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, help! Shit-assed pineapple leaves, mother of fuck. They’re so sharp!”
I went all hot inside. Silently, a single drop of red fell on the gray carpet.
