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

“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