Читать книгу Nine Rabbits - Virginia Zaharieva - Страница 13

Leftovers

I’m certain that Grandma hated Grandpa so much because he was always gone. Nikula had a family, but it consisted only of herself, her children, and the wedding photo on the wall, from which she and my grandfather gazed out determinedly. How delicate her chin was in that picture. According to the fashion of the time, both of them wore straight Astrakhan hats, which gave their high-cheekboned faces an Asiatic fierceness. On Boris, she dumped the blame for her hard lot and for all the evils in the world.

Whenever he would come back, after a brief spell of joy, Grandpa would struggle to recognize the idea of this family that he had carried with him here and there, while she would feel quite awkward with her actual husband, whom she would have liked to love. Yet the Sersemin, at whom she had so many accusations to hurl and whom she had cursed so many times in her loneliness, cast a heavy shadow, and soon they both sank into silence. So Nikula’s love most often took on the form of various smaller and larger acts of spite. God, the kinds of things she concocted for him to eat, despite the fact that she was usually an excellent cook. Often, she would crumble up the leftovers from a few days earlier into an aluminum dish. He would wonder what on earth it could be, while she quietly hemmed something or crocheted colorful little roses from which she later would make pillows and bedspreads.

When Grandpa would begin his dinner, Grandma would never sit down at the table with him. She would take bites as she cooked, and was always nibbling on something standing up or wiping some pan with bread crust. She claimed that she had a delicate stomach and that she couldn’t eat our food. Grandpa would push what passed for food around his plate. Nikula would watch him slyly over her glasses, waiting for him to explode. But he wouldn’t let on. For the time being, he would play the game. The clock in the kitchen would kill off the minutes one by one. At a certain point, however, he couldn’t take it anymore and would burst out: “Manda, girl, go get me some of those hot red peppers near the gourds. And one, no two, two heads of garlic.”

When I returned, he would crush the garlic under his strong palm, I would peel a whole heap of the cloves and he would dip first the peppers, then the garlic, into the salt and scoop up a little of his dinner. He would top it all off with thick slices of bread. His eyes would water, turning from blue to green. Sweat would roll down his forehead and fire would come from his mouth. Grandpa would sniffle and snort. Worked up by the hot peppers, he would hum a Romanian tune, belch loudly, and drag out the homemade brandy to put out the fire. At that point, Grandma would carefully set aside her knitting and go out to stroll through the fresh air in the garden, completely helpless before the fact that his presence was more unbearable than his absence.

Of course, there were other dinners, as well. At the sight of the same crap, he would suddenly get sick of playing at “I eat your absence, and now you eat slop” and would push aside the plate, saying somehow kindly, wearily: “Come on now, woman, what are these leftovers you’re giving me again?”

Grandma, crushed by this intonation, would stare at the food as if seeing it for the first time, digging around in it with a fork: “Well, it’s food, and mighty tasty, too.”

And Boris would head off for the mines in Madzharovo again.