First is the soup, purplish red, your favourite. I make it every year when you come home. If lovage and garden orach are not in season, I use the leaves I picked and dried for you in summer.
This soup, you like it soured with fermented wheat bran, full of the herbs you can’t find where you live, and every year I make it redder, darker. I make it sourer, so that we can eat and talk truly.
But once a year is not enough. We run out of time.
This autumn, when you bury your spoon in the bowl, black beetles swim to the surface.
You lift them out one by one and ask me if I would move house. You see the blooms of mould, the sagging walls, the varnish curling like dried leaves. When you were little, all was light and noise; the floors and countertops shone and sang.
I tell you I will stay. Moving is useless, because one cannot move body.
• • •
In winter, I prepare the pork and chop my carrots, my onions; I soak the gelatine and set the pot to boil. You arrive unannounced, a dead crow on your shoulder. Let’s make crow jelly this year, Mother, you say, and I have never refused you anything.
Side by side we pluck, we skin, we tear, we chop. Your hands move fast; you get up and stir the pot before I even start to move, all ache and shudder. Sit, you say. How much garlic? I watch you in the blue light, in the steam. Your woollen shawl trails on the floor. It is December, and I never did fix the windows.
You arrange the pieces of crow in the festive dish. You sift the broth through gauze. I never knew you to be so patient, so meticulous. As you pour the broth, you ask me if you did it wrong, and the question startles me. Surely, I say, you know it is perfect. Looking at me, you almost let the dish overflow.
The next day it has set, our second dish. The way you arranged the crow, it looks almost whole, sleeping in its glass casket, until you cut into it with relish, your face younger, rounder for a moment. It is one of the rewards of age, the way my memories paint over faces, over things.
After we eat, you tell me you’re not leaving. You’re moving back.
• • •
The third is not really a dish, but it is the only thing I can have now, as though I have become that small child doubled over with cough you used to be. You laugh when I ask, but you make it for me. You buy the radish after my instructions, so black its leathery skin shimmers blue, so big you carry it in both hands. I watch as you cut a careful circle at the top, as you scoop out the contents. I watch you turn the spoon so that the honey pours inside slowly, catching the light. You place the radish on a shelf in the pantry and leave it to soak.
Even though you said to wait till morning, I go try it in the night. I lift the radish and it glows in my palms like a candle, shining on the rows of jars – the pickles and preserves, the relishes I made after the house fell empty. The radish warms my skin. I bring it to my mouth and sip the syrup directly. I let it drip down my chin in sticky, golden drops.
• • •
I am running out of time to teach you this bread, I say, and you scowl, but it is the first spring we have spent together in a long time, and you miss it: I know you miss the sweet and tart taste of it, the lightness, the unripe yellow of the dough.
The fourth recipe needs perfect eggs. I show you how to choose them at the market, because I feel well enough today, and the sun is shining. When we come back and break them into the saucepan, you see that the yolks are large, spilling orange into the milk and the sugar. The dough is bright and sweet and we sing as we knead, something silly with words we made up when you were young. At the end, you wrap the dough in cloth and place it on the counter.
When it rises, I teach you to braid. You pinch the ropes of dough while I weave them together, and I tell you I used to braid your hair like this, strand over strand, though you wear it short now. I let you do it and watch your hands work, gentler than mine and more like a mother’s.
I can tell your heart is lighter while we watch the oven. You talk about going back to your life overseas and how the tulips there must be in bloom. I am ashamed of how it hurts, your longing for another home.
You cut into the bread. Under your knife, the eggs we poured inside, the beautiful yolks, unmix and unbreak. In folds of dough they swell like yellow eyes, red-veined and throbbing, their dark fleshy centres expanding and hardening into beaks and claws and legs and wings. Maybe you can stay a while longer, I say as your knife clatters to the floor.
• • •
You bring me berries and don’t say what they are, only that you wish to drink them. I wash them and drain them and layer them with sugar. They bleed dark and sweet, the unknown berries you picked on your long walks. We have, in the forest, blueberries and cranberries and rowans and yews. We have berries that will wait decades for you, and surely you picked those, bitter though they are. I drown them in alcohol and let them rest in darkness.
They need time; I know this is why you brought them. You chose something that needs time, because you need time with me, and something hard and heady, because we are nearing the end. This is the fifth, this drink I strain after weeks. I pour it into the old crystal glasses, and we talk.
I know there are things you want to hear from me. You want me to say I accept it, the burden of your nightmares, of your fears, perhaps even that of the child you didn’t have. The berries, I tell you, will not help us here. For this, you will have to find your own way.
• • •
I know it is bad when the bitterness goes out of you and leaves you helpless, your eyes forever averted so I can’t read them. I lean on my pillows while you bring me fruits, the brightest you can find, their smooth flesh bursting with juice, with flavour. You pile them in every room so they are all you can smell—not these stale sheets, this old body.
You bring me the sixth food, a pomegranate, and as soon as you cut into it, eyeballs spill out, red and bright. You step back, but I am not repulsed. I pick them one by one with my fingers and inhale the tangy fresh smell. The eyes watch me, fearful and cunning and surprised, and I eat them, and I can’t have enough.
• • •
The last, the seventh dish—how I wondered what it would be when I crossed. I imagined it would be otherworldly, but in the end, it is something I ask for. You can’t hear what I am asking until you place your ear over my mouth, and then you make it for me. Toast, golden brown, the butter melting into it. Linden tea like my mother used to make. You cut the lemon thick like I asked you and drop it in the tea, and you tell me you’ll make it again tomorrow. You tell me this over and over again, but you can’t make yourself believe it, and I can’t help you; I only squeeze your hand.
The seventh dish is one I cannot eat. I inhale its smell of hurried mornings, of long nights; of this house and the house of my childhood. The smell of summer, of days so long they drag.
You made it just so, and as I cross I draw a deep breath of it, and I am sated.
• • •
