... Anna Gyeorgyevna Brasul caresses that ray of sunshine with a hand traversed by a network of thick purple veins. She looks through misty eyes at the lemon which I have taken from my rucksack. 'It is such a long time since I saw a lemon,' she says. Then she talks to me of the Crimea, of the orange-groves of Yalta, of the happy days of long ago.
...
In the meantime, Pellegrini has lit the spirit-stove and is heating a little water for a cup of tea. I produce a lemon from my haversack, and at once the children press round me, gazing at the lemon and sniffing the air. One of them asks: 'Chto eto takoye? - What's that?' 'It's a lemon,' I reply. 'A lemon, a lemon,' the children repeat to one another. The original speaker tells me that it is the first time they have ever seen a lemon. 'It's a bit sour,' I tell him, 'but it's good. Would you like to taste it?' I let him try a slice. The boy puts the slice of lemon into his mouth, pulls a wry face and spits it out. Another boy bends down quickly and picks it up, sucks it for a moment, grimaces, and passes it to one of his companions. Each in turns tastes it, pulls a face, and spits it out. They have never seen a lemon before.
...
Seated on a bench are an old man and a youth. Pellegrini busies himself about the spirit-stove, the water for the tea is already starting to boil. I sit down in the corner occupied by the icons (which in Russian homes is the place of honour specially reserved for guests) and proceed to cut a slice of lemon. ... The old man and the girl also gaze at the strange fruit, and the old man says: 'Why, that's a lemon!' It is more than twenty years since he saw a real lemon. 'And yet the Crimea isn't far away,' I say to him. 'Yes,' replies the old man, 'but perhaps -who knows? - perhaps the lemon-trees in the Crimea have all run to seed.' (The truth is that almost as soon as they came to power the Communists earmarked the whole of the Crimea's annual yield of citrus-fruits for export, and since then it has been impossible to buy a lemon or an orange anywhere in Russia, except in the big centres like Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev and Odessa.) The older men, those aged forty and upwards, remember what lemons were like. They form part of their memories of the old regime. But the young men have no such memories; they do not even know what lemons are.
...
Curzio Malaparte, 1943, The Volga Rises in Europe. Το βιβλίο κυκλοφορεί και στα ελληνικά: Curzio Malaparte, 2008, Οι πηγές του Βόλγα, Αθήνα: Ιωλκός.
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