The Greenhouse

Two

When I come back from the greenhouse, Jósef is sitting totally upright at the table with his hands on his lap, wearing his red tie and violet shirt. My brother takes a lot of interest in clothes and colors and, like Dad, always wears a tie. Dad has two hot plates going at once, one for the pot of potatoes, the other for the frying pan. Not that he seems to be fully in control of the cooking; maybe he’s nervous because I’m leaving. I rummage around him and pour some oil into the pan.

— Your mother always used margarine, he says.

Neither of us is particularly apt at cooking. My role in the kitchen was mainly limited to loosening the lids of red cabbage jars and applying the can opener to cans of peas. Actually Mom used to make me wash up and Jósef dry. But he took ages on each plate so in the end I’d snatch the tea cloth off him and finish the drying myself.

— You’re not likely to be getting much haddock over the coming months, Lobbi lad, says Dad. I don’t want to hurt his feeling by telling him that, after my four-month stint of handling fish at sea, I don’t care if I never eat a single morsel of fish again.

Because Dad is determined to give his boys a treat, he surprises us with a curry sauce.

— I followed a recipe I got from Bogga, he says.

The sauce has a peculiar but beautiful green color, like shimmering grass after a spring shower. I ask him about the color.

— I used curry and some food coloring, he explains. I notice he’s taken a jar of rhubarb jam and placed it beside my plate.

— That’s the last jar of your mother’s jam, he says, and I watch his shoulders as he stirs the sauce in his brown diamond-patterned waistcoat.

— You’re not going to have rhubarb jam with the fish though?

— No, I just thought you might like to take the jar with you on your journey.

My brother Jósef is silent, and Dad doesn’t say much at the table either, so the three of us don’t make a very talkative bunch, really. I serve my brother and cut his two potatoes in two for him. He obviously doesn’t like the look of the green sauce and meticulously scrapes it off the fish, pushing it to one side of his plate. I look at my brown-eyed brother, who bears an eerie resemblance to a famous movie star. There’s no way of knowing what’s going through his head. To atone for his sins and strike some balance at the table, I take an ample helping of Dad’s sauce. It’s at around this time that I feel the pain in my stomach for the first time.

After dinner, while I’m washing up, Jósef makes some popcorn, as he normally does when he visits on weekends. He fetches the usual big pot in the cupboard, measures exactly three tablespoons of oil, and carefully sprinkles the contents of the packet into the pot until the yellow corn covers the bottom. Once that’s done, he places the lid on the pot and puts the plate on at full heat for four minutes. Then, when the oil begins to simmer, he lowers the heat down to two. He grabs the glass bowl and salt and doesn’t take his eyes off the pot for a single moment until the task has been completed. Then the three of us watch Newsnight. My brother holds my hand on the sofa; the glass bowl is on the table. An hour and a half into my twin brother’s weekend visit, he hands me the CD with the songs. It’s dancing time.