A Recipe for Daphne Nektaria Anastasiadou (the rosie project .TXT) 📖

to Fanis, “I’m on my way to Şişli Cemetery for a Trisagion. Would you like to come? We’ll say a memorial for Kalypso as well.”

“So you remember her name?”

“Of course I do. You’re the only one who pretends to have forgotten her. Now, are you coming or not?”

Fanis sat in the back of the bishop’s black Opel Astra with nervous anticipation. At the cemetery gate, the bishop gave him an affectionate shoulder shake and went off with Samuel to read the first Trisagion. Fanis asked the Antiochian caretaker to look up the location of Kalypso’s family tomb. Both her death and her funeral had been kept quiet by her family. Fanis hadn’t learned of either until she was already in the grave. He had thought of buying poison and going by night to join her, like Romeo unable to live without his Juliet, but he knew that his mother would never have been able to bear it. So he had never gone.

The caretaker spent a few minutes searching for the record of Kalypso’s burial in a dusty leather-bound book. Finally he put his finger on a listing: “There she is.” He turned to the cemetery map and pointed to the rear left corner.

Fanis was surprised. One of his friends was buried close by, yet he had never noticed Kalypso there. Then he realized that he had brought nothing—no flowers, no potted plants, no whirligigs, votives, or incense. In a childlike manner, he stated his predicament.

The caretaker grabbed a pocket knife, exited, and returned with three hydrangea mopheads. “We have plenty of these, Uncle. I don’t normally cut them, but never mind.”

“Brother,” corrected Fanis.

“Excuse me?”

“Brother,” Fanis repeated. “I prefer that you call me ‘Brother’ instead of ‘Uncle.’”

The caretaker patted him on the back.

They picked their way over the slippery mud, and cobbles still wet with the previous night’s rain. At one point Fanis nearly fell. The gardener caught him and offered to carry the hydrangeas so that Fanis could hold onto his arm with both hands. Ten minutes later, they came upon a bare metal cross.

“There must be a mistake,” said Fanis. He had always imagined that Kalypso’s tomb would be covered with a marble slab and crowned by more marble, oval photos, and carved lilies.

“No, we’re in the right place, Brother. That’s Kalypso Petridou’s grave. Says so right there.”

Fanis examined the marker more closely. Circling the four points of the cross was a metal wreath on which her name and years had been engraved and blackened. Then he remembered the state that the cemetery had been in at the time. The family tomb had probably been destroyed.

The caretaker stepped away to smoke a cigarette beneath the cypress trees. Fanis threaded the hydrangea stems through the metal wreath and knelt on the damp earth. He ran his fingers over the letters etched in black. The moisture on the ground seeped through his pants and made wet circles on his knees. Kalypso probably hadn’t had a visit since her funeral.

“Are you all right?” said the caretaker.

“Fine.” Fanis could hear the clinking of Samuel’s censor and the light shuffling footsteps of the bishop.

“Is that your wife buried there?” asked the caretaker.

Fanis ran his fingers over the first letters of her name. “No,” he said. “It is the tomb of a goddess.”

He heard the sweeping of cloth on the dry leaves and then the chant, “Blessed is our God always, both now and ever, and to the ages of ages.” He rose to his feet and crossed himself. He tried to concentrate on the prayers, but instead he heard Kalypso humming their song. He closed his eyes.

Kalypso slipped her hand into his and led him down Faik Paşa Street. Through shop windows that had existed decades ago, Fanis saw the quilt maker kneeling on a piece of pink satin and covering it with down. The maid of the stately gray–mauve building finished watering the window-box geraniums and brought out a bucket and mop to scrub her employer’s front step. The dusty silk crocuses in Fanis’s next-door neighbor’s window boxes came to life.

Fanis’s street became a beach. Kalypso in her white summer dress, laughing her careless laughter, conjured a warm land breeze. Just before stepping into a sailboat, she threw her arms around his neck, licked his outer ear, and nibbled his lobe with a tender ferocity that made him moan with pleasure. She said nothing. There was nothing to say. They both knew that the way she had gone no longer mattered.

Kalypso cast off the stern hawsers by herself. Fanis, recovering from the ear treatment, pushed the sailboat into the moonlight. She leaned on the oar, keeping the Great Bear and Orion to her left, and sang “My Sweet Canary.”

Fanis took a deep breath and opened his eyes to the swaying of the cypresses in the spring breeze.

The bishop chanted: “Establish the soul of His servant Kalypso, departed from us, in the tentings of the Just; give her rest in the bosom of Abraham; and number her among the Just, through His goodness and compassion as our merciful God.”

Fanis crossed himself again and said out loud, “Farewell.”

27

A Recipe Resurrected

Exhausted after carrying boxes up three flights of stairs, Kosmas made himself a Nescafé and collapsed onto the padded bench of his oriel window. Boiling-hot coffee spilled onto his jeans. “Siktir,” he said, feeling the coffee burn his leg. Fuck it.

He set the mug on a box, took off his pants, and threw them onto the floor. Then he examined the pink mark on his thigh: after twenty years of assessing his own burns in the pâtisserie, he could tell it wasn’t serious. He settled back down on the oriel bench and took a sip of the remaining coffee.

“Ach,” he said aloud.

He hated instant coffee, but it was better than nothing. He had only moved into his apartment the day before, and he still didn’t have a proper coffee pot. He looked out the window, over the Bosporus. A fast boat on its