I had been meticulously scrubbing off crusted tomato paste, flinging a piece of chain mail sloppily back and forth across the cast iron surface of my cooking pan, when the combination of the two metals conjured up a scent so particular and vibrant that I stopped what I was doing entirely and stood at my sink until the tips of my fingers began to wrinkle. I could not lift my hands out of the running water. Perhaps it was the waste slipping into the depths of the disposal that had stirred me so evocatively. It was in fact a rancid kind of smell. But this was a peculiar and rare instance; the sight of an average kitchen had suddenly transported me against my will to a memory of a rundown, nonfunctioning bathroom, one that was thousands of miles away from my current address, in a different country, and from a different decade. My grandmother bathing me: fuzzy. The color of the walls is indifferent. Why was the shower broken? I could not recall. But the smell of the tub was ghastly and the act of being bathed was unpleasant.
Instead of standing under a working showerhead, I patiently let myself be cleaned by my grandmother with water from a bucket. I remember feeling like a ship in open ocean as I sat naked in her bathtub. It was another one of my earliest memories. It was also summertime, but every square inch of my grandparents’ apartment was cold. I was surprised by my inability to catalog the memory as happy or sad, but I can guess how the outside looked of where my father’s Soviet upbringing transpired. The apartment was a nearly identical copy to the one next to it, a khrushchevka wrapped up in everlasting concrete. Other than that, I don’t have an exact description of the outside of this apartment, or much of the inside, other than remembering smoke-drenched oriental rugs hanging from the walls. The rugs must still be positioned exactly as they were two decades ago and during sunsets, radiate a reddish tint. I can’t say whether my grandparents’ stereotypical khrushchevka evoked any childlike joy. I was too young to understand why there was a draft inside and why the play structures like slides and monkey bars outside of the building were shedding flakes of white paint, revealing dull copper rust underneath.
I was always sticking my hands where they didn’t belong on the rim of a baking sheet fresh out of the oven or a drawer full of knives. I still give myself a new constellation of paper cuts every week it seems. My hangnails worsen in the winter when the frigid air gets to be too much, and out of all the injuries that I give myself year-round, it is this time of year that I am tasting blood the most. My dry lips suffer from the same affliction as my hands. Letting my morbid curiosity get to me each time, when I suck on my lips or nails, I find that there is always a metallic savouriness under the layers of my bodily surface.
I give it some more thought: my bare palms…one gripping the handle of my cast iron pan, the other swishing around the piece of chain mail. The contact of my skin against these two metals is what produced the odor. I was smelling “my own rust”.
A 2006 scientific study titled “The Two Odors of Iron when Touched or Pickled (Skin) Carbonyl Compounds and Organophosphines”, published in Angewandte Chemie by Dietmar Glindemann Dr., Andrea Dietrich Prof. Dr., Hans-Joachim Staerk Dr., Peter Kuschk Dr., reveals in the abstract that touching iron such as coins produces an illusory metallic scent. It is a human body odor linked “to the decomposition of skin peroxides”, that toys with the senses. Reading the article, I discover that Fe2+ (Ferrous ion) is found in my own vessel and that when skin meets metal or blood, I am experiencing my awareness of my own self. The study details how chemicals are the explanations for illusions.
“Ironically, the iron odor on skin contact is a type of human body odor.”
I have a hard time believing that science can be humorous and light-hearted, especially since my father –who also happens to be a scientist and merely a stone statue of a man– has passed down his DNA to me. He is my blood, and I am his.
Without a doubt, this evocation of a memory of a Russian bath, a bucket, and a cast iron tub, was an ingenuous reminder of my living, breathing, apparatus. Perhaps it came to me because of unidentifiable smells mimicking the inefficiency to understand my own emotions. Here, now, or then. I’ve been writing down definitions for what “my own rust” might mean. Is it holy or evil? Is it an unstoppable, crippling disease that will consume the mind or muscle? Or is it a simple fact, a trait, embedded in what I have inherited, such as I inherited my cast iron pan from an old roommate?