“Mr. Dimitris,” he said, “I thought you’d never been married. If you don’t mind me asking, why do you have a child’s bed in here?”
“Mine, of course.” Dimitris ushered him into the bedroom and opened the balcony door.
In the daylight Kosmas saw that the bedroom, too, was filled beyond capacity with furniture. On the walls were icons, a wooden cross, and a framed photo of a 1950s football team. By the balcony door, Dimitris’s suitcase lay half unpacked.
“Planning a trip?” said Kosmas.
“Oh, no,” said Dimitris, waving his hand dismissively. “Just haven’t unpacked since my last jaunt to Athens to see my sister.”
“When was that?”
“About six months ago.”
Kosmas loosened his collar. “That big carved bed doesn’t seem your style.”
“Mother’s,” said Dimitris. “Haven’t changed a thing since she left us.”
For a second Kosmas wondered if he, too, would end up living in a time-warped pigpen after his mother died. His heart began to race. He had a choking sensation in his throat. İdare, he told himself. Management. Control. It was his favorite Turkish word, the one he had whispered during the Pfeifenberger competition. He still repeated it whenever he was building a difficult cake on deadline and afraid that the creation wouldn’t hold. İdare.
“Are you all right?” asked Dimitris.
Without waiting for a reply, he pushed Kosmas out onto the iron balcony, where more lines of laundry hung above a neighboring gypsy’s garden. Kosmas took a few deep breaths and attempted to release his fears of becoming a lonely old man. Things are going well with Daphne, he assured himself. This apartment is not your destiny.
He returned inside to change the light bulb that Dimitris could not reach. Tall as he was, Kosmas didn’t even have to stretch. “Mr. Dimitris,” he said, “how have you been changing your bulbs all these years? Don’t you have a stepstool?”
“Broke yesterday,” said Dimitris. “I suppose I could’ve run out for a new one, but . . . I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”
Great, thought Kosmas. Another get-married-fast pep talk.
After they had replaced the bulb in the blue glass fixture of the living room, Dimitris cleared the old bills and other papers from the round table at the room’s center and brought a tray laden with bowls of chocolate ice cream and bottled lemonade.
“Listen, Kosmaki,” he said, “I’ve always boasted that I would remain a lifetime bachelor. Over the past year, however . . .”
“Yes?”
“You might have noticed yesterday at Antigone, or on other days . . .”
“What?”
Dimitris took a deep breath. “My feelings for a certain lady have blossomed. I think my time has finally come. How would you feel about your mother remarrying?”
“My mother?”
Kosmas had never maintained any silly notions about widows’ virtue. He teased his mother about her flirtation with their cobbler, and he had once suggested that Dimitris would make a nice boyfriend for her, but she had dismissed his idea. After fidgeting for a moment with the bottle cap, Kosmas said to Dimitris, “Well, you could ask, but you might be disappointed. Not that she doesn’t consider you a very good friend. It’s just that . . . it’s a big step, and I doubt she’d—”
“Are you sure? Because I thought that maybe, felt that maybe . . . I mean, when I come to your house for dinner, I have the impression that . . .”
Kosmas stood. “I’m really sorry, Mr. Dimitris, but I have a cake consultation in ten minutes. I’ve got to go.”
“Of course, of course. I didn’t mean to keep you from work. A thousand thanks for your help. Just forget what I said.”
Kosmas felt his head spinning. He said a hasty goodbye and was soon traversing the underpass that led out of Tarlabaşı and back to the Grand Avenue. He hardly noticed the urine stench, which usually made him want to vomit, for he was trying to understand how these old folks with one foot in the grave could have so much more courage than he did.
15
A Friend at the Door
At about the same time that Kosmas was leaving Tarlabaşı, Fanis skipped onto Kabataş Quay with the exhilaration of a prisoner just escaped from an island fortress. He felt bad for Aliki. Her attentions had been both flattering and sweet, but she wasn’t for him. At least he’d put fleas in her ears about Julien, however: now they’d be whispering to her day and night, tempting her with the possibility of romance with the professeur. Fanis hoped things would work out. Both deserved a companion.
After a five-minute taxi ride and a two-hundred-meter walk up a one-way street, Fanis turned into Faik Paşa, looked up, and saw that the windows of the blue mansion’s garret apartment were wide open. Sheer curtains were blowing through the empty frames and waving over the street in a subtle invitation. This was going to make for some delightful window watching.
“Fanis, is that you?”
He lowered his gaze to ground level. Beside him stood a man in a Panama hat and mirrored sunglasses. “Murat,” he said. “Good morning.”
“I’m on my way back from the greengrocer’s.” Murat raised a blue plastic bag of vegetables.
“Perfect timing,” said Fanis. “I’ve just returned from Antigone, and I’ve got cherry liqueur and cheese pies. Made by a friend of mine on the island. Come on up.”
“Sounds delicious, but I don’t want to put you to trouble.”
“Don’t be silly.”
As they climbed the four flights of stairs, Fanis tried to remember in what sort of state he had left the place. He always made his best effort to keep bachelor laziness from encroaching upon the feminine elegance with which his wife and his mother had graced the apartment, but every so often something escaped him. Upon opening the door, he darted inside and glanced around. Not too bad. He turned on the air-conditioning with one of the remotes from the bonbon bowl and pulled down the Elle Décoration calendar that he had taped to the kitchen door. There wasn’t time for anything else.
“The house is a little untidy,” he said, ushering Murat into the living room. “Please excuse me. Have a seat here and I’ll get us a glass of water.”
Like a good host, Fanis went into the kitchen, put a paper doily on his mother’s best silver tray, and loaded it with two glasses of water, napkins, the bottle of liqueur, and the cheese pies, properly arranged on a Kütahya plate. He returned to the living room, wished his guest afiyet olsun, good digestion, and took two silver liqueur goblets from the display cabinet that still housed his mother’s crystal. After pouring the liqueur, he begged his friend to take one of the Pavlidis chocolates whose gold foil wrapping bore the portrait of a sad Mona Lisa. “Yeia mas,” he said, in Greek, clicking his goblet against Murat’s.
“Şerife,” replied Murat, in Turkish. “I’ve always thought that one can learn the most important values of any culture through its toasts and salutations. You say to health, we say to honor. You sign letters with appreciation, whereas we sign them with respect.”
“Interesting,” said Fanis. “But ultimately no culture can get very far without all four.”
“True,” said Murat. “Magnificent liqueur, by the way.”
Fanis took a sip and swished it around his mouth. “She uses peppercorns. A sly one, that Aliki.”
“Excuse me?”
“My mother always said that women who put peppercorns in their liqueur are looking for something.”
“Has she found it?”
“Not in me,” said Fanis. “But she’s a good soul. I wish I could reciprocate, but it’s not possible. I want crazy love. Do you know what I mean?”
“At our age?”
“Absolutely. I don’t understand why everybody thinks that after seventy you should curl up with a warm blanket and wait to die.”
“What about friends and family?”
“I don’t have any family. I love my friends dearly, but I live for Eros. As Philostratus of Lemnos said, ‘Love is not illness,
but rather not-loving.’ I want to be in love. Not just hold somebody’s hand.”
Murat shrugged his shoulders. Fanis saw that it was useless to try to convince him.
“Anyway,” said Fanis, “have a cheese pie. They’re absolutely delicious. Shall I make coffee?”
“No. There’s nothing better than sour-cherry liqueur.”
Fanis looked at Murat sitting on the sofa beneath the fading and chipping blue and ochre wall. “Listen, friend,” he said. “I want to apologize for the other day.”
“Don’t mention it. I’m glad we had a chance to clear things up.”
Fanis topped up their goblets. “You’re kind.”
“I hope you don’t mind me asking,” said Murat, “but do you have a picture of your fiancée? I haven’t been able to stop thinking about what you told me.”
Fanis paused for a second, then sucked down the whole goblet of liqueur. He hadn’t looked at a picture of Kalypso for more than thirty years, not since he had hidden them away on the night before his wedding. On many occasions he had been tempted to take them out, but he had always resisted. “Well,” said Fanis, trying to buy himself some time. He almost felt as if he were protecting Kalypso by keeping her photographs hidden.
“I wondered if I knew her,” said Murat. “And I wanted to understand a bit better.”
Wasn’t that what Fanis had been searching for all these years? Some understanding? Some empathy? Some regret? And here was Murat, offering exactly those. Fanis had an obligation to show him the pictures, however upsetting it might be.
He emptied the sideboard drawer, pulled it out from the slides, and turned it over: to the bottom was taped an envelope that he had wanted his wife never to find. He opened it, removed two photographs, and showed them to Murat. One was a stiff portrait of Kalypso and Fanis, taken in a photography studio after their official engagement. Kalypso wore her hair in a high chignon with a satin headband that Fanis had stolen as soon as the photo session was over. She had scolded him for messing her hair, so he did it again when the lights dimmed in the movie theater to which they went afterwards. How he had loved it when she scolded him.
The other photo was a Polaroid snapshot of a tanned Kalypso sitting on a stone wall beneath the pine trees of Saint George Karypi, with the sea behind her. Fanis had taken it himself on Antigone, just a few weeks before the riots. That night, they had sneaked away from a party and made love for the first time, in a horse barn. He remembered nuzzling her breast, just beneath the collar bone. He remembered her tentative kisses, her chapped lips, their tongues mixed up, the lovely smell of her hair, and his fingers around her neck. He was sure that barns and straw were made only and exactly for moments like that.
Fanis handed the photos to his guest.
“She was beautiful,” said Murat. “But I don’t remember her. If I may ask, what exactly happened?”
“Suicide,” Fanis said. “Dishonored during the pogrom. Jumped from the rooftop two days later.”
“How terrible. I can’t even imagine how great her shame must have been, to do that . . .”
“I never saw her after the pogrom, you know,” said Fanis. “My mother told me to give her some time, let her mother and grandmother take care of her for a while, and then . . .” Fanis choked up. He tried to blink away his tears.
“No need to say more, friend.” Murat rubbed Fanis’s upper arm and handed him a tissue. “But you ought to keep the photos out. Confrontation is the only way to exorcize ghosts.”
Fanis took the pictures from Murat and looked at them again. Perhaps his friend was right. He set them on the table with the photographs of his parents and wife, unsure whether he would be able to bear the sight of them every day, but certain that they could no longer hide in that envelope, taped to the bottom of the drawer.
16
The Vespa and the Maenad
On monday afternoon, fifteen minutes before the end of her Turkish class, Daphne received a text from Kosmas: “Stop by if you have time. Sıraselviler Avenue, next to the German Hospital.”
She entered the Lily while the midday call to prayer was sounding from the loudspeaker of the local mosque. Vanilla-scented air, blown by the fan above the door, refreshed her sweaty forehead. Through the half-open door to a back room, she spied a mustachioed old man performing the namaz prayers. A few feet away from her, a shy twenty-something employee was quietly manning the cash register. At the opposite counter, a middle-aged fellow with a brush-cut attended to customers and wrapped their orders in white boxes with lavender ribbons. Both the cashier and the server wore black ties and white lab coats, as if the sticky summer weather had no business entering the Lily.
While patiently waiting her turn, Daphne peered into the glass cases full of crescent-shaped cheese pies, golden batons salés, French viennoiseries with tempting bits of chocolate peeking through their seams, trays of mille-feuille, and a variety of delicate cakes and tarts decorated, she supposed, by Kosmas himself.
“Can I help you, Madame?” The mustachioed old Turk was standing squarely in front of her, wearing a white paper hat instead of the knit prayer cap in which she had seen him earlier.
“Allah kabul etsin,” she said, in Turkish. May God accept your prayer.
“Amen,” he replied. “How could God refuse the wish of such a beautiful lady?”
Daphne wondered if non-flirtatious Turkish men existed. Her dad had charmed every woman in Little Havana, including their toothless ninety-three-year-old neighbor Josefina and her tattooed lesbian great-granddaughter.
“Is Kosmas here?” Daphne asked.
The old man winked playfully, passed halfway into the kitchen, and called, “Lady wants you.”
Through the swinging door, Daphne glimpsed Kosmas whipping something by hand in a wooden bowl. He looked up from his work and said a few words to the old man, who then returned to the shop floor, allowing the door to swing back into place. “He needs a minute to finish up. I’m Mustafa, by the way. Taught him everything he knows. Correction. Everything he knew before he went off to Vienna and became a hotshot.”
“He speaks of you fondly.”
“None of my kids is interested in pastry-making,” said Mustafa. “It’s a passion I share only with Kosmas, which makes him like a son to me.”
Daphne reached over the counter. “I’m—”
“Daphne.” Mustafa shook her hand. “A pleasure to finally meet you. Now go out the door, turn right, and follow the building around to the kitchen entrance.”
Kosmas was waiting out back, wearing his white chef’s coat with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. “June’s always like this,” he said. “Super-busy.” He held out a small box with an elaborate gold and lavender bow. “I made you something.”
Daphne stepped into the shade beneath the door’s awning. “It looks too pretty to open.”
“Don’t, then. Until you get home.”
“What are you making in there?”
“Uncle Mustafa finally found his grandfather’s book, but I haven’t had time yet to read through the minuscule Ottoman script. So right now I’m experimenting with Uncle Mustafa’s help.”
“Can I taste?” Daphne reached for the doorknob, wondering what this mystical Ottoman creation would look like. But she didn’t have a chance to see anything before Kosmas pulled the door shut.
“Sorry, but I’m as superstitious as a bride about her dress.”
“Not even a peek?”
“I’ve only been trying out different creams, which I’m going to pipe into a regular wedding cake. In any case, the cake is half finished, and I don’t let anyone but Uncle Mustafa see my stuff before delivery—”
“Please.”
Kosmas sighed. “Not one woman has ever been in the back room. . . . It might be bad luck to start now.”
“So it’s a sexist thing?”
“Not at all. Just the way it’s always been.”
“A little taste, then?”
Kosmas brushed Daphne’s cheek with ci
nnamon-scented fingers. “You’ve already got it. In that box.”
She closed her eyes and leaned her head into his hand. It was the first time he had really touched her.
“Can I take you out tomorrow tonight?” he asked. “Nine o’clock?”
She looked into his eyes, then at the endearing scar above his brow. “Perfect,” she said.
Later that afternoon, while Aunt Gavriela made tea, Daphne opened the box and found a small, snail-shaped pastry crowned by a single orchid. Her heart fluttered. She had never before seen such an artistic outpouring of love. She carefully lifted Kosmas’s creation from the box, cut it down the middle, and gave half to her aunt. The pastry was soft, fresh, and buttery. The creams were smooth and rich. The cardamom, cinnamon, and rose flavors transported Daphne to the Egyptian Bazaar as she imagined it would have been a hundred years before. This was the taste of Ottoman Istanbul.
“Lucky girl,” said Gavriela.
“You mean he got it?” said Daphne.
“No. It’s not what I remember. But he’s trying so hard. That’s what makes you a lucky girl.”
While finishing a wedding cake, Kosmas thought about where he would take Daphne the following night, whether they should go in a taxi or on his scooter, and how he could bring things to some sort of favorable conclusion before her scheduled departure on Sunday. He wanted to pick her up with his new Vespa, but he wouldn’t be able to wear a suit if he took the bike. Then he remembered how much his teenage sweetheart had loved their rides, and how he had felt so much less inhibited as he sped through Istanbul’s back streets and boulevards with her arms wrapped around him. So he dressed casually and rode the Vespa Super Sport over to Gavriela’s at half past eight on Tuesday evening.
Naphthalene-scented air wafted out of the apartment when Madame Gavriela opened the door. She was wearing an old-lady housedress and flat slippers that took away three inches of what Kosmas remembered as her natural height.
“Kosmaki,” she said. “What are you wearing?”
He looked down at his suede athletic shoes, his jeans, and the black shirt with double breast pockets that made him look as if he had been working out in the gym. “Is it so terrible?”
A Recipe for Daphne Page 18
