A Recipe for Daphne

by Nektaria Anastasiadou

  “I miss those days,” said Aliki. “I miss Kalypso, as well as my parents, my husband, and all who have gone. Do you miss your wife?”

  It must have been the wine that made Fanis reply, without any of his usual artifice, “Not at all.”

  “Do you miss Kalypso?”

  “Terribly. It’s as if I’ve gone through life without my right arm.”

  He finished his wine. He felt that she was near. He could hear her laughter, the laughter of all those nights on the island, the laughter of all those young men and women. He tasted the saltiness of Kalypso’s skin after she had lain on the beach, baking like a lobster. He felt her lips brushing the tip of his ear. He heard her singing one of Roza’s songs. It was a party tune, playful and upbeat, but the voice was lachrymose and dark. It whispered in his ear, “Let’s go home.”

  Fanis echoed her: “Let’s go home.”

  “All right,” said Aliki.

  The response startled Fanis. He hadn’t realized that he was speaking out loud. Damned vascular dementia. Now he was talking to himself. He wondered if Aliki could feel Kalypso’s presence, but he didn’t dare ask. Instead, he thanked her for the evening and asked for the bill.

  “But you’re my guest,” said Aliki.

  “Impossible,” said Fanis.

  “Always such a gentleman.”

  “Someday we’ll all be dancing again,” he said, picking at a piece of honeydew melon to avoid meeting Aliki’s gaze. “You’ll see. When we finally cross over to the other side, there will be plenty of rumbas.”

  On the way home Aliki placed her hand on his. Fanis thought it was a friendly gesture, or perhaps even one of pity, so he squeezed it and held on until the phaeton pulled up at her doorstep. She, too, missed Kalypso, he reminded himself, and his mourning had been delayed far too long.

  Aliki showed Fanis to the guest room. The sheets were freshly ironed and smelled of rosewater. The inlaid tables were polished and covered with starched doilies. The curtains, he could tell, had recently been washed and rehung, and the hardwood floor was waxed to a shine. Either Aliki was one of the best house-widows on the island or she had been preparing for him for over a week. Perhaps her invitation to spend the night had not been as impromptu as it had seemed. After a few minutes, she brought him a pair of her dead husband’s pajamas, wished him a pleasant dawn, and withdrew. Fanis felt immense relief. They were just good friends after all.

  The tinny pulse of the crickets soon carried him off to a June evening half a century before. He smelled the fatty smoke of roasting meat and saw the gnarly pines twisting into dark shapes before the broad wall of the sea as he sat joking with his friends, a few meters away from the little clearing that served as a dance floor. Despite the money his mother had spent on lessons, Fanis had been too shy to ask Kalypso to a rumba. He had watched her sing and laugh with her cousins on the other side of the restaurant, but he hadn’t been able to push himself past the devastation that he knew he would feel if she said no. It wasn’t until the end of the evening, when somebody announced the last dance, that Kalypso had skipped over to him and said, “Are we ever going to cha-cha?” She was fifteen then, and ten times braver than he.

  Fanis felt her homemade blue gingham dress beneath his sweaty palms. He saw her open-mouth smile, felt the whip of her ponytail. As sleep overcame him, the memory morphed into a dream: they rose into the sky, still dancing, and flew to the other side of the island, where the tall trees grew. “Set to,” she whispered, pulling an axe and an adze from behind her full skirt. “Make your sailing bark.” Then she disappeared, leaving him alone and at a loss, for he had no idea how to use an axe and adze.

  Fanis awoke. He tried to make sense of the shapes and shadows to which he had opened his eyes but, like a disoriented traveler in a foreign land, he recognized nothing. A light shone under the door. He groped his way to it and shuffled down the hallway to a bright bedroom perfumed by pink garden roses peeking out of an eighteenth-century Persian Qajar vase. Inside, Aliki was sitting on her sofa in an off-the-shoulder lace nightgown that seemed overly elegant for a regular night’s sleep.

  “I had a dream,” said Fanis.

  Aliki patted the brocade sofa cushion. “Come. Have a seat.”

  Still confused, Fanis entered, sat down beside her, and asked, “What are you doing?”

  “Waiting for you.”

  Fanis was taken aback. “How did you know I’d have a strange dream?”

  “I didn’t. But I knew you’d come.” Aliki pointed at the steaming porcelain teapot on a Chippendale piecrust table. “Look, I already made you a chamomile tea.”

  “Chamomile? Men never drink chamomile. Not good for the . . . you know.”

  “Guess it’s not for you, then,” she said with a smile. “What about mint?”

  Her effort was touching. Nobody had taken care of him like that since his mother died. “Maybe in a little while,” he said. He leaned his head on Aliki’s soft, sloping shoulder, breathed in the weedy scent of the chamomile tea, and took a peek at the current state of affairs: sagging wineskins. They couldn’t compare to Daphne’s lemons, but he also couldn’t imagine Daphne taking care of him like that. And Selin? He couldn’t afford to think of her right now.

  Fanis yawned. He was feeling drowsy again, but he didn’t want to leave. A few seconds later, he felt Aliki’s hand on his knee. Was she mothering him? Or . . . ? He lifted his head to ask about the mint tea. At the same moment, Aliki leaned forward to plant a kiss on his forehead. Their lips met by accident. Fanis jumped to his feet and murmured something about feeling better and not needing the tea.

  “It’s no trouble,” said Aliki, fiddling with the top button of her nightgown. She scanned his face as if she were searching for some sort of go-ahead. “I’ve been dreaming of this moment my whole life.”

  Fanis tried to let her down softly. “I think there’s been a misunderstanding. You see, I could never get involved with one of Kalypso’s friends. It would be disrespectful to her memory.”

  Aliki grabbed her satin robe from the back of the sofa and drew it over her shoulders. “Kalypso’s been dead for over half a century.”

  “I know, and . . . you’re lovely, Aliki, but . . .”

  “Sit, Fanis,” said Aliki, in a quieter tone. “Let’s talk about this.”

  He obeyed but perched himself on the opposite end of the sofa, his fingers buried between his thighs and his knees glued together.

  “Fanis,” said Aliki. “I’ve been in love with you since I was twelve. Sure, I married somebody else, but I never stopped imagining your face on the heroes of the romance novels I used to read with a flashlight while my husband slept. And now that we’ve both been widowed, it’s like life gave us a second chance, don’t you think?”

  “Certainly, but—”

  “No buts,” said Aliki, inching closer to him. She put her finger to his lips.

  Fanis felt panic flood his body. In a few seconds he was on his feet and out the door, calling over his shoulder, “We’ll talk in the morning.”

  He stumbled back to his room, locked the door behind him, and spat out the open window. After crawling back into bed and pulling the covers over his head, like a shy virgin, he said aloud, “She tried to take advantage of me!”

  Early the next morning, Fanis grabbed a towel from the dresser and crept down the hallway to the bathroom. Thank God, he made it without being heard. He cranked the shower lever to its hottest setting, stripped, and stepped inside for a good think session. While letting the hot water run over his face, he decided the Kalypso thing wasn’t going to be enough. He had to come up with a better excuse. As soon as his chest was fully sudsed, he recalled Julien’s crush on Aliki. Although the professeur flirted outrageously with women young enough to be his granddaughters, he still hadn’t made a move on Aliki because he was afraid of ruining the friendship. Fanis hated to betray Julien’s trust, but ultimately he would be doing a good turn to both his friends by setting them up.

  Fifteen mi
nutes later Fanis entered the kitchen fully dressed, his belt drawn more tightly than usual. Spread before him were savory pastries, garden tomatoes, plates dressed with cheeses, tiny ceramic bowls with homemade jams, and a freshly brewed pot of black Turkish tea. Fanis sighed. He tasted a small portion from each plate, just as he used to dance one song with every girl, but he was as distant as he would have been with a beauty he had pursued and possessed the night before. After his second cup of tea, which he drank scalding hot, he declared that the breakfast had been “nectar and ambrosia” and announced that he had to be off to catch the ten-thirty boat because his godson was arriving that afternoon for a two-day visit—his standard getaway excuse.

  “At least eat your breakfast,” said Aliki.

  Fanis glanced at his watch. “I had a wonderful time yesterday, a thousand thanks, but the ferry—”

  “You said we’d talk in the morning.”

  “Yes, I did, didn’t I?” Fanis noticed a smudge of blue eye shadow on Aliki’s cheek. Apparently she’d missed the mark. He finished his tea. “Listen, Aliki, you’re a lovely woman, inside and out, but, you see, it’s . . . the professeur.”

  “Julien?”

  “Yes. He’s in love with you. Has been for years.”

  Aliki threw down her napkin. “Please. He tells me I’m too fat for the chairs at Neighbor’s House.”

  “It’s an odd way to flirt, I admit. But Julien has a thing for full-figured women. You see, he confessed his feelings, and from that point on, it becomes a matter of honor for me to step aside.”

  Aliki squinted. “Fanis Paleologos, are you lying to me?”

  Fanis leaned toward her, looked directly into her eyes, and said, “I would never do such a thing.”

  “This is nonsense,” Aliki snapped. “If the professeur likes a woman, even remotely, he doesn’t hesitate.”

  “He doesn’t hesitate when he’s joking, but when he’s serious it’s a different thing altogether.”

  “Then why hasn’t he spoken to me?”

  “Perhaps for the same reason that you never said anything to me. When you’ve been friends for a long time, it’s awkward.”

  Aliki’s cheek began to twitch. “But I never caught even a hint, not for a second. . . . Are you sure?”

  “What can I say, Aliki? You’ve stolen some hearts yourself, though you’re too humble to notice.”

  She sat back in her chair, dazed. “Even if it is true . . . that doesn’t mean I’m suddenly going to be sighing aman, aman for him. I mean, I can’t just cancel my feelings for—”

  “Shh!” Fanis put a finger to her lips. “All I’m saying is think about it. For me. Now”—he tapped his watch—“I had a fabulous time. A thousand thanks for everything, but I must be going or I’ll miss the boat.”

  “Are we still on for next Saturday? You know . . . the antiques?”

  He air-kissed her forehead and said, “I’ll call you.”

  14

  An Unexpected Suitor

  “HOW WAS THE TRIP TO the island?” asked Uncle Mustafa, entering the Lily’s kitchen on Monday morning with a tablecloth-swaddled package.

  “Couldn’t have been better,” said Kosmas.

  Mustafa extended the bundle. “I think I found something. Under my bed.”

  Kosmas unwrapped it: inside were three heavy old books. Kosmas opened the first. The edges of the moldy-smelling leather binding were worn. The title page read, in the old Ottoman script that was unintelligible to most modern Turks: Recipes of Hamdi the Pastry Chef. Kosmas thanked God that he had taken those Ottoman classes four years ago.

  “Your grandfather’s?” said Kosmas.

  Uncle Mustafa winked. “Yep. Second pâtissier of the last sultan. Some of his colleagues were Rum, so it’s possible that he learned to make the Balkanik from them.”

  Kosmas looked at the date beneath the title: 1320. He added a round six hundred to the Islamic Hijri date, which placed the book in the early 1900s, the last years of the Ottoman Empire, exactly as Uncle Mustafa had said.

  “I can’t read a word of it,” said Mustafa, “so I don’t know if the Balkanik is actually in there. Good luck.”

  Kosmas hugged Mustafa, rewrapped the books—they were far too precious to be left around the kitchen—and placed them in the pâtisserie’s safe.

  “Now get going,” said Uncle Mustafa.

  Kosmas looked at his watch. It was already half past nine and he had a cake consultation at ten. He hurried up the hill to the Maison Café, an upscale Grand Avenue restaurant that his mother’s friends considered pretentious and ridiculously expensive. Kosmas rather liked the Maison’s stylish blend of retro floor tiles, pine tables, potted ferns, exposed industrial ceilings, and whimsical chandeliers. He admitted that the food prices were only appropriate for Istanbul’s elite, but as long as his clients stuck to tea and coffee, he could happily spend a few hours in the place.

  On that day, however, the happy couple—a bald, chain-smoking, phone-obsessing middle-aged attorney and his seemingly career-less twenty-year-old socialite fiancée—had ordered a full Turkish breakfast, detox juices, and cappuccinos, from which they took no more than a few sips. Apparently, they had fired the pâtissier who was supposed to make the cake for their wedding, which was to take place on the Saturday of that same week. Kosmas had tried to turn them down politely, but the bride had mentioned that she was a good friend of the Lily’s landlord. As Kosmas wanted to expand the pâtisserie by renting the adjacent shop space, he decided to make a special effort.

  Still, he had trouble paying attention during the twenty-minute conversation, which was regularly interrupted by phone calls from the groom’s work, as well as by photo-taking and Facebook-posting on the part of the bride. Moreover, Kosmas couldn’t stop thinking how much he’d rather be doing something meaningful, like reading Hamdi’s books and experimenting with the Balkanik. Perhaps he’d even translate the volumes into modern Turkish so that the work of Uncle Mustafa’s grandfather would be preserved for future generations.

  “So what do you think?” said the bride.

  Kosmas pulled himself out of his reverie and made a creative pitch based more on the couple’s appearance than on what they had said: “From what I’ve gathered, you’re bold, no-nonsense, future-oriented people. So I’d like to propose five square tiers: square is more edgy than round. I’m thinking all white, with each tier sealed by black sugar ribbons. Calla lilies at the base and crown.”

  “Mmm,” said the fiancée. She slurped the rest of her detox juice through the straw.

  Just as the attorney was about to give his opinion, Kosmas’s phone rang. He glanced at the screen: it was Mr. Dimitris, who very rarely called. Could something have happened to Rea? A fall? A sudden illness?

  “Excuse me,” said Kosmas. “It might be an emergency.” He raised the phone to his ear. “Mr. Dimitris? Is everything okay?”

  “Of course. I was just wondering if you could come by and help me change a few light bulbs.”

  “Light bulbs?”

  Mr. Dimitris had never asked him over before. In fact, nobody, not even Kosmas’s mother, had ever set foot in the old journalist’s apartment. People said he must have someone buried in there. Kosmas bit his lip and looked at his watch. He had at least ten minutes to go with this couple—maybe more—and another consultation in one hour. He’d be cutting it close. Then again, some exercise would probably help him burn off the excess energy he was feeling after that glorious Sunday outing with Daphne, and Dimitris’s building wasn’t far away.

  “I’ll try,” he said.

  He ended the call and refocused his attention on the attorney. “I’m terribly sorry. Now, getting back to the cake—”

  The attorney ostentatiously rattled his Rolex. “How much?”

  Kosmas was about to give his standard price, but a sudden instinct told him to double it. “Four thousand six hundred liras.”

  “Rather expensive,” said the attorney.

  “He’s one of the best,”
said the fiancée.

  “A little discount would help,” said the attorney.

  “I don’t usually do this,” said Kosmas, “especially for something on short notice, but you’re such a charming couple. I’ll take off fifteen percent.”

  “Thanks.” The attorney stood, shook Kosmas’s hand, and nodded to his fiancée, who picked up her Hermès purse and toddled off. As soon as the couple was out of sight, Kosmas paid the bill, dashed across the Grand Avenue, and cut through an old arcade, whose Christian and Jewish haberdasheries had been replaced by liberal booksellers, lingerie shops, and coffeehouses. He glanced at the long-haired students playing backgammon, smoking, discussing, snacking, checking text messages, and flirting. Thank God Daphne wasn’t one of those. Kosmas loved how she had given him her full attention the day before, both in the phaeton and then on the ferry trip back from the island. Daphne had an old-fashioned calmness about her. Kosmas hoped it was because she was falling in love.

  As he ducked beneath a dingy archway, hurried past the British consulate, and crossed a busy avenue into Tarlabaşı, he scrolled through his phone calendar. He’d left things open with Daphne when they said goodbye on Kabataş Quay, saying he’d call her on Monday. Now he realized just how busy he was that week: five more consultations, one anniversary, two circumcisions, an Armenian baptism, and four weddings, in addition to his everyday duties. But he would call. That evening, at the latest.

  Upon arrival at Dimitris’s ramshackle building, Kosmas rang the bell and was buzzed inside.

  “Let’s do the bedroom first, son,” said Dimitris, standing in his apartment doorway. “And then we’ll have a lemonade.”

  Kosmas was obliged to duck beneath the hand-washed boxer shorts and undershirts drying in the long corridor, which was decorated with faded prints of pashas and harem girls. He passed a small, windowless dining room containing a child’s bed, eight Empire-style chairs, and a formal mahogany table covered with newspapers, dirty coffee cups, and leftovers from last night’s dinner.