The Greenhouse (17 page)

My first home after Dad’s house is on the second floor of a building with a mint-green facade. The apartment stretches lengthwise and is made up of two rooms that lead into each other with incredibly high ceilings that are totally out of sync with the small size of the apartment.

—Twenty feet, says the woman when I look up at the ceiling, indicating six with her fingers. The bedroom, which is accessed through the dining room, has a double carved bed and wallpaper with a white fleur-de-lis pattern against a maroon background, and an antique-looking painting hangs over the bed.

—The flight from Egypt, the woman explains somewhat at length. The furniture could be collector’s items from an old manor. The apartment is nevertheless clean and bright and there are no personal effects, apart from two painted plaster statues standing on the chest of drawers in the bedroom: a stooping old man with a halo and a monk in a habit with a child in his arms, also with a halo.

—Saint Joseph and Saint Anthony of Padua, the woman explains to me. She tells me that the apartment belongs to her sister, who has moved out with most of her personal belongings, so it’s therefore almost completely empty.

The other room is bigger and some kind of sitting room, dining room, and kitchen all rolled into one. There’s a sofa you can pull out and use as a sofa bed, says the woman.

—If need be, she adds looking at me from head to toe, as if she were surprised that the priest should have taken me under his wing.

The rent is practically nothing. I think the woman might have even made a mistake; I actually only pay for the gas.

—Gas is extra, she says.

There are mirrors literally everywhere; I count seven of them in total, which makes the place look bigger and almost gives it the semblance of a maze. For a moment it feels like there are three women standing close to me. Although I have no experience of a nine-month-old child, it occurs to me that she might find mirrors fun.

—This is only temporary, I say.

—So Father Thomas was saying. He said it would be six weeks to begin with and that you’ll be having a little child with you.

She studies me carefully; maybe she thinks I don’t look much like a father?

I suddenly look into the mirror beside me and meet the worried gaze of a man with newly cut red hair. Although it could, of course, be a good antidote to loneliness, there is something peculiar about being mirrored all the time, about being constantly reminded of one’s self.

The woman says she is going to lend me some bedclothes. I’m not sure I fully understood whether she is coming back with them straight away or later, but meanwhile I don’t dare leave the building.

After the woman has left, I lie on the bed and discover on the bedroom ceiling, twenty feet above, the remnants of a fresco depicting winged angels spiraling around a blue hole in the celestial vault. In the middle of the blue sky there is a white dove with a wing missing. I stand up and take another round of the apartment. On the desk there is a vase with plastic flowers; to me a home can never be a home unless there are living flowers, so I take the vase and stick it into an empty kitchen cupboard.

—Where are the flowers? is the first question the woman asks me when she returns with a pile of ironed bedclothes in her arm.

I walk over to the cupboard, open it, and hand her the vase with the plastic flowers without saying a word. She takes it and puts it back on the table again, in the exact same spot as before. When the woman is gone and I’m left standing alone on the threshold of my first apartment with three keys in my hand, I put the plastic decoration back into the cupboard again. Then I draw back the thick curtains in the bedroom. They’re made of red velvet with interwoven patterns that look like fire lilies, with double silk lining; I have the feeling they might have been moved from a grander house. It makes sense; turning them, you can see that the hem has been shortened and re-sewn. The windows extend to the floor and open onto a balcony with a railing; I estimate it can hold a stool and four or five potted plants.

Unusually, the theme of the week at my guesthouse neighbor’s film club is the early movies of forgotten Hollywood stars. I decide to skip the film that shot Jane Wyman into stardom and instead scrub the apartment. I feel the need to clean up before the girls arrive, so I pop into the shop to buy a detergent with a lemon smell. This is my first purchase in the village, apart from books and postcards.

The child has to be able to crawl on the floor in her light yellow leggings. My nine-month-old daughter must be crawling by now, right? It occurs to me that I should have asked Anna if the child has started to crawl yet. While the water is heating on the gas cooker, I walk around the apartment and wonder if it’s homey enough. I can think of nothing better than filling it with plants. I’m not familiar enough with the shops so it takes me some time to find some clay pots for them. Finally I come home with carnations, hydrangea, lilies, and a rose I picked from the garden, and also rosemary, thyme, basil, and mint, and place the pots on the edge of the balcony.

I then need to buy other necessities for the new home. Some questions remain unanswered. The train is arriving in the afternoon. Will the mother of my child hand me the child at the station and take the next train back, or will she come up to the village to check out the state of the apartment? Will she even be staying for dinner? If so, should it be a formal dinner with us sitting around a table? I’ve been in the village for two months now and haven’t cooked a single meal yet. I decide to be prepared for the unexpected and assume the mother of my child will be staying for dinner. For safety I also assume that she will stay one night on the sofa bed and catch the train the day after. Although I’ve been pretending to help Dad to remember how Mom cooked things over the phone, my knowledge of cooking is pretty limited. I never cooked at home, although I sometimes used to hang over Mom in the kitchen. My baptism of fire in gastronomy happened at sea on those few occasions when we couldn’t drag the cook out of bed. I was taken out of the fish slime and transferred to the kitchen, where the Latin genius found himself trying to fry greasy meatballs and pork chops in bread crumbs with sweet-and-sour sauce for the crew—I’m incapable of cooking anything. The pork chops came preprepared in the breadcrumbs and the sweet-and-sour sauce from a bottle; all I had to do was pour the contents of the bottle into the pan. Then I fried some eggs with it, a personal added touch that went down well, so there weren’t that many complaints. I also fried eggs for my brother Jósef when he was hungry; he isn’t critical by nature and never questions anything I do. That sums up my knowledge of cooking.

What does an approximately nine-month-old eat? Presuming my daughter has two teeth on her upper gum and four teeth below, does that mean she can eat meat mashed in a sauce or only mashed baby food? I try to recall the things I might be able to cook without much bother. It occurs to me that I could handle making meatballs in brown sauce if I can find the basic ingredients.

I work until after dark on the days leading up to the girls’ arrival, but on the last morning I search the village from a new perspective: food shops. I’m quick to work my way through the streets where most of the necessities are to be found. Bread can be bought next door to the meat, and vegetables and fruit, seeds, beans, jam, and coffee are in the shop opposite. Sausage and olives and all kinds of pickles are behind a glass display at the butcher’s. In the square in front of the church they sell cheeses, raw ham, and bee honey. I start at the butcher’s but can’t see any minced meat anywhere. Instead I point at the light red pieces of meat on display.

—That’s veal, says the butcher. I’m almost relieved it’s not pork and think of Dad.

—Yes, exactly, I’ll have two pounds, I say without hesitation.

The butcher whips the lump of meat up on the carving board and cuts eight slices with a razor-sharp knife, sliding it smoothly through the bloody muscles, observing me as he does so. Next I dare to point at a bowl with some marinated delicacy in it that looks interesting to me.

—A quarter pound, I say in flawless dialect, because the woman before me asked for a quarter pound, too.

—A quarter pound? the butcher asks, raising an eyebrow. I get the feeling the other three customers are staring at me as well. He then fishes out the marinated artichokes with a sieve spoon, places them on thick wax paper and at lightning speed folds the paper at the ends and throws it on the scales.

When I come home with bags of food in my arms, Brother Marcus and Brother Paul are already far up the stairs carrying a small white cot. They’re turning on the landing of the second floor and seem relieved to see me. The neighbors on the top and ground floors have stepped out to watch these two movers in white hooded habits.

—We’ve brought you the bed, they say. Where would you like it?

I’ve no recollection of telling Father Thomas that I needed a bed for the child. I put down the bags and, once I’ve found the right key to open the apartment, help them with the cot, which we put down in the bedroom. Once Brother Marcus and Brother Paul have left again, after turning down my offer of some teabag tea, I empty the bags and arrange the shopping on the kitchen table. Two pounds of potatoes, eight flattened slices of veal, a quarter pound of marinated artichokes, a bottle of water, milk, olive oil, a jar of honey, cheese, salt, and a pepper pot.

The girls are arriving in the afternoon, and on my last trip to the garden in the morning I picked a bundle of roses that I place in the vase that held the plastic flowers. Then I knock on my neighbor’s door on the top floor, an old woman with silvery hair, to borrow an iron from her. She’s slightly bewildered but lends it to me anyway. I iron the only shirt I brought from home, which is the same shirt I was in when my daughter Flóra Sól was born.

The mother and daughter are arriving at five and I’m standing there, clueless it must be said, in front of the meat I’ve just bought. In the end I go back to the butcher and ask him how I’m supposed to cook the meat I bought from him half an hour ago. I’m wearing the white shirt.

My question doesn’t seem to surprise him in the least.

—Wasn’t it veal?

—Yeah, that’s right. Two pounds.

—Yeah, eight slices, should be enough for five adults, he says.

—Yes, there were eight slices, I say. I’ve made some progress in the language; I can form short simple sentences and hold a conversation.

—You heat the pan, he says, then put four tablespoons of oil in it and fry the slices of meat in the oil, first on one side and then you turn them over and fry them on the other side. Then just salt and pepper. It doesn’t take long.

—How long? I ask.

—Three minutes on each side.

—What about a sauce? I ask.

—You pour red wine over the pan when you’ve finished frying the meat and let the sauce sizzle a moment.

—How long?

—Two minutes.

—And spices?

—Salt and pepper.