A Recipe for Daphne by Nektaria Anastasiadou (reading well .txt) 📕

this idea. He tried to concentrate on those who had protected the Rums, but still, Aydın and others like him existed.

So Fanis stalked the captain, learned where he drank tea, with whom he played backgammon, where he lived, which football team he supported, what he did on his days off, and how many children and later grandchildren he had, but he never had the courage to ask why he had done what he did. In the late eighties, Fanis came to realize that what had happened to his fiancée might have occurred even if her father had been present, but his questions goaded him on. In 1993, he lost the captain’s tracks entirely. Some people said that Aydın had been hospitalized after suffering a heart attack in Ankara. Others said he had moved to Antalya.

Now here he was once again, scattering birdseed just a few hundred meters from Faik Paşa Street. He was at least ten kilos heavier than the last time Fanis had seen him and significantly more wrinkled, but there could be no doubt. Fanis’s heart felt like it would beat out of his chest. For over half a century he had fantasized about confronting Aydın, showing him a photograph of Kalypso, and asking him why he had been so ungrateful to Petridis. But Fanis wasn’t prepared to do it that afternoon. He opened his umbrella, even though it was no longer raining, shielded his face, and walked as quickly as he could past the byway.

5

Mother and Son

“Such a perfect son,” said Rea. “I knew I didn’t have to remind you to stop by the cobbler’s. How did they come out?”

Kosmas changed into his slippers and stepped into the musty living room. He kissed his mother’s powdered forehead, nodded to Dimitris Pavlidis, the retired journalist who often came to their house for tea, and joined them at the dining-room table. “I’m so sorry, Mother,” he said. “I completely forgot the shoes.”

“You forgot?”

“I’ll get your shoes tomorrow.”

“But you’ve never forgotten my errands.”

Dimitris, who was rolling candy foils into a ball on the shiny silver tablecloth, said with a slight stutter, “It’s not a big deal. Tomorrow’s another day.”

Kosmas glanced at Dimitris’s thick yellow fingernails. Half of the index claw had separated from the rest, popping up like a wire fence barb. A simple fungicide would cure the condition, but Dimitris refused to go to the doctor.

“For somebody else it wouldn’t be a big deal,” said Rea, “but it’s not like my Kosmas to forget an errand.”

Dimitris stood and held out a trembling hand. “Give me the ticket and I’ll go get them right now.”

“Please, Mr. Dimitris,” said Kosmas, “the shoes can wait until tomorrow.”

Rea removed a limp yellow leaf from the African violet serving as the table’s centerpiece and dropped it onto the bed of cookie crumbs on her plate. “Have a seat, Dimitraki. He’ll do it.”

Dimitris tilted his head back and held up his hand in a gesture of refusal. “I’ll have your shoes in twenty minutes, Ritsa.” He took the cobbler’s ticket from Kosmas, grabbed the canvas briefcase he still carried, even though he had retired from his politics beat at the Tribune over twenty years ago, and was out the door.

As soon as he had gone, Rea looked at the shopping bag still in Kosmas’s hand. “What’s that?” she asked.

“Never mind.”

“I don’t know what’s gotten into you. You know how much I was looking forward to my new shoes.”

She limped into their tiny box-like kitchen and turned on the wall-mounted television to a rerun episode of The Foreign Bridegroom, a soap opera about a Muslim girl in love with the son of a Christian shipowner. Neither she nor Kosmas had missed an episode during its first broadcast. She poured Kosmas’s tea and turned up the volume so that they could listen while she chopped onions, threw them into the pan with olive oil, cut a cauliflower into large pieces, sliced a red pepper into thin rounds, and julienned a carrot.

Kosmas drank his tea at the two-seater linoleum table under which his legs hardly fit. How dare she snap at him? He took her shopping, to tea with friends, to the beauty parlor. He never argued about the visits to the dead, as his father had. Every Saturday he led Rea arm in arm up the cemetery’s central path and kicked the round cypress cones out of her way so that she wouldn’t trip. He enthroned her on a folding stool beside the family plot, in the shade of the cypress trees and laurel bushes, and then he scrubbed the tombstone with soap and water, and polished the inlaid photographs of his father, grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents, a few great-uncles, aunts, and distant cousins. All the while, she had nothing to do but tend the censor, pray, and watch. But it wasn’t just the cemetery visits: he brought her footrest whenever he saw that her feet were aching, called the doctor at the first indication of indisposition, and only saw his friends at night, after he had put her to bed. Furthermore, he said that her cooking—not his grandmother’s—was the best in Pera.

Rea took a casserole dish from the oven and served Kosmas a piece of the cheese pie that she had warmed as a snack. Kosmas picked at it with his fork. “Mother,” he said, “I’ve been wanting to tell you this for a while. You know that we sell cheese pies in the Lily. Uncle Mustafa bakes them every morning. They’re not as good as yours, but I really have no desire to eat cheese pie of any kind after work. You understand it has nothing to do with you, don’t you?”

Rea looked at him like a scolded puppy. “But that cheese pie was your favorite when you were a boy.”

“I’m forty-one.”

“You’ve changed,” she said, shaking a wooden spatula at him. “Something’s changed you.” She turned to the window and stared at the pink hydrangeas bowing in the rain that had just begun