Journal of a Sabbatical

August 2, 1999

sergei's hip flask

I ate breakfast off custom painted Herend porcelain plates and drank my coffee from a Herend cup and saucer. Each piece depicts a different game animal: wild boar, deer, mouflon, fox, wolverine, pheasant, great bustard. All feature the communist party crest with its red star. The wild boar on my cup looks pretty realistic. The communist star seems surreal.

The rest of the team was already out the door before poor jet-lagged me so I walked the the herbarium alone. In my jet-lagged state, I walked the long way around and ended up at the front gate. The dog there herded me toward the herbarium. No joke. I asked the guy at the gate where to find Racz István, and the dog's ears perked up, he circled me and motioned for me to follow him. He kept looking back and barking to make sure I was following.

The herbarium is 1960s ugly concrete architecture but it has a lovely woodland setting and more importantly room for the collection. Boxes and boxes and boxes of specimens lined the hallways. Our mission: unpack them and organize them.

We set to work feverishly unpacking the Japan, Taiwan, and Chile boxes. I started out working with Carol on the Japan stuff but the room was really small so I moved to the Taiwan room with Keith and Judy as they had more stuff to unpack and more space to put it in. I recognized my own handwriting on some of the Japan specimens, so that gave me a real sense of continuity.

The Japan boxes contained a number of plastic bags of unprocessed specimens - things preserved in alcohol, which we hadn't had time to press when we were there. The Japan boxes also began to reveal some surprises: a pillow labeled "Kagoshima", some balls of twine, a pair of shoes (too big to belong to István and too small to be Zsolt's) ... I was back in the Taiwan room when I heard Carol calling me as she pulled the latest surprise out of the box: a silver hip flask belonging to Sergei! We opened it of course, but it was empty. A faint sweet alcoholic smell clung to it. We reminisced about how neither of us had ever heard of Abkhazia before meeting Sergei and how much it snowed in Hokkaido and all that stuff and wondering how to get the flask back to Sergei.

But the piece de resistance was yet to come. Yes, folks, out of the Japan boxes .... drum roll please ... a genuine Hokkaido blue tarp! This cracked me up. I laughed 'til I started to get as blue as the tarp. Nothing is more authentically Hokkaido than a blue tarp. I know exactly where this came from too. István had used it to cover the tatami in the room where he had the plant dryer, in order to prevent any damage to the tatami. Man, next thing I thought she'd pull out of there was the plastic house ...

By about 5:00 PM, I was more than a little tired and we had quite a pile of empty boxes stacked in the front hall under the stairs - dramatic concrete evidence of how much we'd gotten done.

The team decided to go to the buffet at the Hotel Tanne in Budakeszi for dinner. We piled into the two little Opels we'd rented. The white one is on my credit card and lists me as the primary driver. The gold one is on Keith's card and lists Keith as the driver. I push the clutch in and attempt to put the white car in gear. It won't go. My leg is extended as far as it'll stretch and the clutch is not fully engaged. I move the seat up and push the clutch in. It sticks under the floor mat. Isabel is beside herself with anxiety. She tries it and gets the clutch unstuck from the floor mat and gives me one more chance to try to drive. The seat is so far forward the steering wheel touches my chest. Isabel concludes I can't drive the car so she takes over. I'm too tired to care.

All I remember about dinner at the Hotel Tanne was the cold sour cherry soup, which was incredible, and how hard it was for Isabel to back the car out of the parking garage.