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Smoked fish and whole fish and fileted fish and unborn fish line the levels behind the glass display. Vermilion and charcoal, bulging, oily eyes. Their scales glisten with the grime of the unreal. Lacquered, embalmed like the corpses in a casket. To look pretty for the mourners, to look appetizing for the growling stomachs. The display on the wall flips to the next number: 27. Angling through the stalwart crowd, I arrive at the counter and drop my ticket into the assigned plastic bin. A sturgeon greets me, frocked in a soggy apron, wearing a tiny carton cap on the first of his scutes. Whaddya want, he asks, in a manner so blasé I wonder how long he has been hocking fish. His voice bears the guttural and trilling tone of an Eastern European native. Clearing my throat, I peer through the glass. Trays of caviar shine in the artificial light. The big, bulbous eggs, like gelatinous marbles, of salmon and trout, and right in the center, the opalescent gray granules of sturgeon roe. I frown and look up. Twisting his whiskers, the sturgeon says, They’re my wife’s. You want the best, these are the eggs you get. Lather some toasted bread in butter, top it with this ossetra—don’t be stingy—and you have yourself a tasty sandwich. I chew on my lip. My eyes veer to the red caviar. The sturgeon notices and says, My wife’s eggs aren’t good enough for you? I flap my hands, convincing him it isn’t so, but the sturgeon sticks his fins on his sides and says, My wife makes the best roe in all of the Caspian Sea, so you show her some respect. She’s a beautiful creature, hard-working, much integrity. If you don’t respect her, you don’t respect the ocean. And if you don’t respect the ocean, how can you respect the earth, your fellow humans, yourself? I gulp. Everyone around is staring at me, tapping their feet and checking the time. I gesture at the caviar and nod. The sturgeon picks up the largest container, shovels it full of his wife’s grainy gray seeds, and plops it on the scale. Altogether, it surpasses one pound. He slaps the sticker onto the lid: $600. With a sheepish bow, I take the caviar from the sturgeon’s slimy fin. At the checkout line, as I place the tub and a baguette and a sturdy cylinder of Italian butter on the conveyor belt, I consider the sturgeon. The sturgeon behind the counter, the sturgeon in the form of viscid beads, which will soon find its way smeared onto a slice of French bread and shuttled into my mouth where it will tantalize my tastebuds, a gastronomical experience of astronomical exhilaration, leaving me to ponder, as my tongue wrestles to dislodge those individual bits of roe from between my teeth, how something that tastes so good can come from so an unsavory a source.
