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

are really just the same sort of infighting that has been occurring since Homeric times.”

“Where are you going with this?” Rea asked.

“It’s unsettling,” said Fanis, “but it seems that when we call them ‘Ottomans,’ we’re not really talking about an entirely different race. Just a different religion.”

“But that different religion makes all the difference in the world in their eyes, Fanis. You of all people should know that.”

Fanis ignored Rea’s reference to Kalypso. He had to stay focused. “And if the religion doesn’t differ at all?” he asked.

Gavriela, who had, until then, followed the conversation with her lips pressed tightly together, now snapped her gloves on her lap and said, “And if the religion is the same? What’s the problem then, Rea?”

“The problem,” said Rea, her whole body trembling like Dimitris’s hands, “is that we’re second-class citizens. I don’t know where you found those charts Fanis, but you can’t wipe away all that’s happened to us!”

“Ι understand your feelings, Madame Rea,” said Selin. “During World War Two one of my great uncles was hit hard by the Capitol Tax against non-Muslims and sent to a labor camp in the east. He got very sick and almost died. It’s not easy for my parents to forget that.”

“They shouldn’t,” said Rea.

“But,” said Selin, “nobody under sixty participated in that stuff—neither the Capitol Tax, nor the pogrom of ’fifty-five, nor even in the expulsions and nationalistic pressures of the sixties and seventies. And not everybody over sixty participated, either. Many of them supported us.”

“She’s right,” said Fanis. “What it really comes down to is this, dear Rea. Daphne’s father had nothing to do with what happened. He wouldn’t have married a Rum if he had. So why are you holding Daphne responsible?”

“Please. Stop,” Rea pleaded. “I don’t want to lose my son.”

Fanis put his hand on her shoulder and said, “If you keep going like this, you will.”

26

The Tomb of a Goddess

A week before daphne’s arrival, Fanis realized he was out of drinking water. He placed an order, but he knew that the service could take all day, so he put on his coat and went down to the minimart. Its Anatolian proprietress was sitting on her doorstep with her chin in her palm, probably waiting for her grandchildren, who came every afternoon to play with the balls kept in a net pinned to the shop’s exterior wall.

“Welcome, Uncle,” she said.

Fanis gritted his teeth at the respectful title, mumbled a “Well we find you,” and scanned the crates of onions, tomatoes, lemons, and potatoes lying on the sidewalk. He asked for a half-liter bottle of water.

After finishing his errand, he should have gone straight home. Instead he moved on toward the inevitable. He looked frequently over his shoulder to make sure that the next truck did not flatten him like roadkill. He turned into Ağa Hamamı Street and continued walking until he arrived at the dreaded cul-de-sac. For years his heart had been breaking whenever he unwittingly caught sight of the satellite dishes, crumbling stairs, corrugated plastic sheets installed as awnings, and other signs that the mansions of Kalypso’s street had become poor tenements. On that day, however, he received an even greater shock: the exterior of the wooden house where she had lived had been completely renovated. Its front stairs had been redone with new marble, its corroding door replaced with a steel security door painted bright green, and its shingles varnished to a shine he had not seen in over fifty years. Fanis ascended the alley. Two little girls sitting in the doorway of another house giggled. They were probably laughing at him, a short old man turning in circles and looking up at those houses as if he were lost not in space, but in time.

Fanis returned home and went straight to his mother’s room, which he maintained exactly as it had been during her lifetime. He sat down on the violet-embroidered coverlet that his mother had made before she was married. Above the headboard, in a heavy, gold-painted frame was a vista of the Bosporus lined with pine trees. On the nightstand was his parents’ wedding photograph, taken on the steps of the Panagia. He knew that if he looked into the armoire, he would find all his mother’s clothes protected by prodigious amounts of naphthalene and lavender. Since her death he had not dared open it even once.

He did not pull back the lace curtains that shielded his view of the street. Instead, he imagined his neighborhood of vines hanging from wires between the houses. He saw Ağa Hamamı Street torn up for repaving, as it had been the previous summer. He envisioned the men who had set up their plastic chairs to watch the bulldozers as if they were at a sporting event. He saw his mother and wife step out of a beauty parlor that had closed decades ago. They were whispering as they walked, and he was sure that they were talking about him.

“Mother,” he said out loud. “Why did you tell me not to go?”

Fanis took off the two wedding bands he had worn on the same finger since his wife’s death. He placed them on his mother’s pillow, took Kalypso’s photo from the side table on which he had left it after Murat’s visit, and exited the building. He climbed Turnacıbaşı Street, merged into the pedestrian traffic in the Grand Avenue, and turned off into the byway leading to the Panagia church. There he found the bishop half asleep in an office chair.

Fanis cleared his voice to wake him gently. When that didn’t work, he said, “Your Eminence.”

“Leave off with the fancy title,’” said the bishop, pulling himself up straight. “You know I’m not fond of protocol.”

Fanis stuck his nose into the narcissus flowers on the bishop’s desk and inhaled spring. “Do you remember, Elder,” he said, “when we were not alone?”

“Of course,” said the bishop.

“And do you remember when Pera was full of churches?”

“It still is. But more than