Tzupzik
Noam Dorr
*
The slushies are neon green and neon pink, they have been churning in the two machines for many hours, at least since we got to the miniature park, but it could have been days or even weeks. Does sweetened ice ever go bad if it keeps turning and turning? Turbulence, constant refrigeration, an overwhelmingly high sugar content ensures it stays preserved. The day is impossibly hot—one of those khamsin days when the sun is set to destroy. A breeze only makes the heat worse and no amount of sunscreen creates a barrier that prevents the feeling that one is annihilating oneself simply by being outside. It is the first time my children are seeing the country I am from, and it is our first time in this park, which is a miniature of the country I am from, but do not live in anymore, not for years. The park’s website shows a shiny representation of the country, as if every high-rise is new, every monument to modernity is always gleaming, and every ancient religious site is well-kept and preserved, its ancientness frozen in a state that is a ruin kept back from disintegration, forever poised in such a way for endless visitors to enjoy.
But the miniature park online is not the miniature park we are in. This park has been through 1,000 days of neglect, is post-COVID empty, and the structures show it—the miniature Red Sea has evaporated completely leaving behind calcified rings on the shocking blue attempt at approximating the color of the Great Rift Valley, leaving behind the miniature models of tourists staring in the direction of the missing coral reefs. Layers of dust cover the produce on display in the model of the main city market, the tiny shoppers knocked over by the desert winds. My children do not want to be here. We are here for my research, to find a miniature model of the juice factory I worked in when I was a child, so I feel responsible for their suffering. They are tired and hungry and, more than anything, overheated. I know it will be worse once we find the factory and the excitement of discovery is over. Even the promise of a freezing cold neon slushie at the end of our adventure is not enough to keep them going. So we come up with a game: Find the Seams. Find the part of the miniature that tells you it is a miniature because you can see the edges. To find the seams is to discover where time—armed with wind, and heat, and UV rays, and sometimes rain—pries open the weaknesses in the models’ surfaces. And the surfaces appear to have many weaknesses, and the seams are many, and one might be tempted to utter the accusation “shoddy craftsmanship” and blame the artists and builders for a rushed job, but the truth is that COVID has given time lots of opportunity to do its work. And so my children have many opportunities—they call out: “Seam!” “Seam!”“Seam!” and pull us by the hand, sweaty palm to sweaty palm, to show us their discoveries.
Giant weeds grow between tiny grain silos tipped over in the model train station, full scale vines have taken over the miniature plastic plants in the model greenhouse, a roughtail rock agama has turned the top floor of an apartment building into its own dragon lair, miniature machinists are on their backs next to their workstations seemingly taking a nap or just plain dead, and every model airport and bus station looks like every scene in a post-apocalyptic film—the cars abandoned mid-road, the airplanes orphaned on the tarmac. And at the very end come the full-sized slushies—cold and sweet—which poison all of us in what will become a different kind of misadventure.
My children will not see most of these sites in real life this first visit. We always leave my parents’ house too late, the sun already too strong, and our family already excelling in ambivalence toward what we call “organized fun.” I am a horrible tourist in my own country. The miniature park, with its tiny models, its miniscule simulacra, its fabricated utopic intentions does not capture this place, my childhood. It might be tempting to point to the disintegration, the abundance of seams as the reason why the park fails to convince, but the truth is that its overall decay actually brings it closer to my experience of this land—the way everything, even the very new, feels like it is at the edge of falling apart and the story it’s trying to tell about itself collapsing at any point, the door to the factory floor knocked over to reveal no factory, no hands moving juice bottles down the line.
On this first visit to my country my children have a tiny window into my past and it’s about to close, our trip too short, the various barriers—language, culture, jet lag—in the way of understanding. How then do I bring them in? How do I capture a whole? When we are home, every night my children ask me to tell them a childhood story. Two or three or five minutes long, ten minutes if they are extra chatty and ask questions, a short journey into my past—the desire to elaborate and go into greater detail always at odds with the need for them to go to sleep. My partner jokingly suggests calling this kind of story a tzupzik, a handy word describing anything tiny, a small addendum attached to something larger, and that maybe telling these stories will make it possible for me to connect the now and the then.
Coming up with these stories is hard. After the initial obvious set of often repeated tales it becomes increasingly difficult to pull apart memories into convenient short compartmental narratives—how do I extract from the mundane and where do I choose to sidestep the more memorable plethora of family injury, or illness, or communal pain, and of course war. All of these unfit as a precursor to a dream. Sometimes a story arrives only for me to realize, once I tell it, the flaws and incongruities:
Only as I share this story, sitting in the top bunk illuminated by glow-in-the-dark stars, do I realize the obvious false memory that was always there—the children’s pool serves the entire community, and is large and deep and would hold an impossibly immense amount of coins, far too many for a community of seven hundred who swore off private property, and therefore currency. Instead, it becomes clear that my father only meant the coins were collected at the pool, probably in a large barrel, probably a castoff from the factory, not that the coins filled the pool itself. A childhood memory revisited and revised. What sense of place I give to my children through these tiny things, these minuscule tzupziks, between over there and over here, is unclear to me. No idea what whole is created there for them. If their unanswered interrupting interrogations have pried open another seam. What I do know is that, as I sit oversized in the dark of the top bunk under a canopy of miniature glow-in-the-dark stars I do not tell them the pool was never full of coins.
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