The Greenhouse

Forty-seven

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.