The Greenhouse

Seventy

When Anna comes home from the library she’s holding two bags. I notice her quickly checking and adjusting herself in the mirror in the hall before she puts the bags up on the kitchen table.

— I bought some food, she says, as I help her unpack the bags and arrange the shopping on the table. I want to slip my arms around her but feel this isn’t the right moment. I see that she’s bought some kind of fowl, probably duck, and different types of trimmings that I haven’t a clue of how to cook. She says she’s going to do the cooking herself.

— For a change, she says. I decided to pull up my socks and celebrate the fact that Flóra Sól and I have been with you for three weeks.

— Can you cook? I ask. I’m stunned. I thought that this girl — my child’s mother — couldn’t cook. I thought you were a geneticist, I say.

She laughs.

— Sorry, she says, for not cooking for you before, sorry for always letting you do it.

I hold my daughter in my arms and we watch her mother handling the bird like a person who knows what she’s doing, confidently chopping dates, apples, nuts, and celery and diligently shoving the stuffing into the animal, all in the space of a few minutes, as if she had a long history of working in a restaurant kitchen behind her. I can’t quite say whether I’m happy or disappointed to discover this new side to Anna. I was starting to enjoy cooking, even though I am still quite slow at it.

— I was brought up by a father who enjoyed nothing more than cooking and spent long hours in the kitchen trying to create new recipes, she explains. If he wasn’t fishing trout, he was out hunting for ptarmigan; if he wasn’t shooting ptarmigan, he was shooting geese or reindeer. One day he came home with common snipe and another with a whooper swan, which he said he’d shot by accident. I remember he spent all day cooking the swan with the kitchen door closed, and the swan filled the whole oven. But personally I soon lost interest in cooking. Besides, there wasn’t any room for me in the kitchen. But once you’ve seen how it’s done, it’s no big deal, she says, stitching up the stuffed duck on the draining board so that the filling doesn’t leak out. As I watch her make carrot mousse and sweet brown potatoes on the pan, I realize how I literally know nothing about the mother of my child, not even about the hunting interests of my child’s grandfather.

— What? she asks and smiles at me.

— Nothing.

— Yeah, what? she says again. Why are you looking at me?

— I’m trying to work out what kind of a person the daughter of a ptarmigan hunter is.

— Deep inside? she asks, looking at me with her aquamarine eyes.

While the duck is in the oven I walk all the way down to the car to get the box with the remainder of the wine bottles. On the way up I meet Father Thomas and grab the opportunity to hand him two bottles.

— To be compared with your own production, I say. He tells me that they’re all happy to have me back in the garden after my brief absence and that the monks are showing more interest in the garden than they did before.

— They’re spending more time outside, he says, and they’re realizing that it’s good for them to get some fresh air. Brother Paul tried to water a few flower beds and got his feet wet for the first time in twenty years, but was grateful to be back in touch with Mother Nature again. They’re also all very happy about the way you’ve marked the roses. Now one can walk down the rose garden’s old paths again and practice one’s Latin by reading the names of the plants on the labels.

When I get back to the apartment, Anna has placed the side dishes on the table and is taking the duck out of the oven. Flóra Sól sits ready in her chair with her bib on and a spoon in her hand. It’s got to be said, the food is delicious, but neither of us has much appetite. I admit I don’t want to sleep on the sofa bed anymore, not when there are two places in the bed in the next room. When I’m about to stand up to bathe Flóra Sól and put her to bed, Anna halts me and says:

— I’ll do it.

Looking out into the darkness through the kitchen window, I make out some lights in several windows of the monastery up on the hill. Tomorrow I’ll mow the lawns and take the garden benches out of the storage room and give them a coat of oil. Then I’ll sow various types of salad in the new beds and continue to work on the patches of spices.

I finish clearing up inside and walk straight into the bedroom, get into bed, and gently pull the quilt off Anna.

By the time Flóra Sól wakes up in the morning and stands up on the cot, we haven’t slept much. I won’t deny that I’ve started to think of the world like this: there’s the two of us, then the others. Sometimes I feel the child is in our group, and the two of us and the child are one, and sometimes I feel the child belongs to the group with the others.