Παράδοση (parádosi)

Dear Red,
dear thread tails,
dear chalk red quail egg, swollen with luck,
dear pesticide shade of a coming heatwave,
gessoed haloed figurine,
simmered thyme-and-bean,
skin of pruned red aubergine,
warp and wail of liquid memory,
dear glass plate,
red nerves and their woven endings,
Dear Red.

You were always supposed to be named after me, she said into the pot, hair from her temples frilled around her head like a halo. I liked the idea of being named for a yew tree, which I started to tell her, but she was dicing the onions with animal ferocity and the pasta water was frothing over the lip, so I kept quiet, peeling figs from their skins with my teeth.

My seven-year old body didn’t possess the language for the smells of her kitchen: orange zest clotted under her fingernails; buttered fish skins coated festively with herbs; crisped artichoke hearts, petals curled like half-open fists. To cook is to be reverent, she said over her shoulder, her apron undone at the back. She wiped a peach-sticky palm on her chest, leaving a handprint there.

I stood on a chair to open a cupboard and felt like a pirate, discovering forgotten wreckage: lace tablecloths with frayed tassels, electric tealight candles, jars of mandarin jam that neither of us could reach. How did they get there in the first place? I tried to ask her, but she was singing a cantata, head lolled out the kitchen window like a dog in a car.

She pointed to objects in the room and made me name them in English: magnet, placemat, tupperware. I felt haunted by all the words I didn’t know yet, which I knew floated somewhere out there, like unlit candles wedged into a birthday cake. They sound ugly, I said. Not from your mouth, my girl.

Nene always denied being of two countries. Under the whiplash Pontic sun, she was all Turkish. Kissing the dusty icon of Agios Nektarios, she was Greek.

While the rest of our family sat in pews and whispered holy words, our Sundays were reserved for cooking. The only time I remember being devout was in that kitchen. I never knew if Nene wasn’t religious or if she just preferred fennel-clad piety. I do know some things. I know that I loved the evenings best, when the duskglow of the cirro clouds tinted the kitchen into the skin of a ripe peach, and the silhouettes of dancing swallows played on our walls like a shadow puppet show.

Eight-year-old eyes in a pluvial episode because of a half-chopped onion. Two bodies whorling in a blue-tile-blur, prongs and ripped tea bags and the cool from a fridge door left ajar. Honey-soaked halloumi and a glass decanter of lemonade, sweating into the plastic rose tablecloth.

Nene always whispered prayers to her vegetables as she sliced into their backs.

let us have rain this summer

no more leaks in the bathroom roof

little fig, make Nene’s bones heal faster

And sometimes she whispered secrets. I only ever caught slices of them, foaming from the kitchen into the marble hallways where I was sometimes exiled.

keeping me from her

big wide guilt

gave him the burned corner of the πορτοκαλόπιτα

The two of us spent more time alone together than anyone else in the family. I wanted to ask what it felt like to be born from the cleft between two mountains, what it felt like to belong on both sides of one border. But she was always dissolving the brown sugar and licking spoons and cauterising her wounds with filo and butter, so I kept quiet, polishing the doorknobs until they glowed like silver marbles.

*

I never knew a full recipe. Nene would never let me cook to completion. I was not welcome at the helm.

Instead, I:

Rip lotus leaves with my teeth

Smear my wrists with canned cherries

Roll plum pits in the grout between floortiles

Remember Nene’s very first kitchen and the whip of forest fire that stole it

Open drawers, count the silver forks with all my cousins’ initials etched into their necks, close drawers

Think of how in this kitchen it is always summer

And made by hands that are peeling, peeling, peeling.

*

In that bowl is something sacred that only two people had witnessed the creation of. I ask Nene if this is what God felt like when he made the world. She tells me that we must feel better, because we never use a recipe.

Her rhythm was a letter, a lullaby to soothe me. Isn’t that all people want? A bowl of peppered cashews and to be soothed? In those moments, intoxicated by the nutty fumes of a certain kitchen, that was all I seemed to think about.

Now, a syrup purring patiently on the stove, its cloy threatening to drown me. Nene and I must have both heard the siren songs of the stove, and we peer over the rim of the pan at the same time, and so quickly that we bump heads. Nene laughs first, but she is always the first to laugh.

Only one sniff, otherwise you will spoil your nose. Ready?

I don’t need telling twice. It is so beautiful that I have to look away. Cherries in a garnet so bright that I feel my pupils dilate. Why is it that I shy away from the things that remind me of a paradise? If I were older or steel-skinned, I would dunk my spoon in greedily, and write a poem about how long this sweetness has waited to be born.

Do you think the bee thinks twice about his honey?

I linger near the window and try to remember a day when I was only dreaming in one language. In Greek, to thank someone for cooking, you must cast a wish. Health to your hands. One bite down and all is forgiven. I can hardly recall the word for yesterday in that second tongue. Everything that I say in English is fossilized forever in simple present, like a wing-pinned moth: the sun rises, water boils at 100°C, the fork is on the left, knife is on the right.

Sliced courgette, translucent apple skins over shoulders of sourdough, clouds of rice and thin fingers of vanilla bean. My lungs must be coated with their wax. Winded, always, by the thought that I have likely spent more waking hours in this kitchen than anywhere else. I could recognise an exact teaspoon by the soft clink against its neighbour, even if deaf, even in death.

*

I’m always accidentally setting out an extra plate for some stirring phantom. Twenty-eight year-old eyes are teary for reasons unrelated to onions. I float around the kitchen, tiles still warm from where her feet stood. Still warm from where her feet stood, I write:

God speaks to me through these kitchen floor tiles, surely. But is there a way to know for certain?

Do the heavens know that my Nene sleeps within them?

God, be honest with me. Heaven must be getting superheavy.

I have never cried in this kitchen before.

A spoon lies on the countertop, encrusted with a lick of jam, fuzzing with mould.

I don’t know how long it has been sitting there. I might never wash it.

I hope that heaven looks like a kitchen.

Now I am smeared with cherry juice, now tears crystallise in my eyes like brown sugar, now I think I hear singing, now I remember the jam jars and her real name and the rising steam that blurs her face, memory leaking through scent, through skin.

Kalliste is a Greek-Australian writer living on unceded Gayamaygal land, currently pursuing a Master of Creative Writing at the University of Sydney. Her work has been published in Voiceworks, miniMAG, Notch, Two Thirds North and more. She can be found on Instagram at @applebottomreads or on X (Twitter) at @umkalli. She is currently writing a novella about two sisters packing up their father’s potentially haunted home in rural Macedonia.