Kettle Picks a Side

Kettle came to her kitchen on the Saturday, because she had asked him to, in a note pushed under the door of the soup place on her way home from the café on the Friday night, and because Kettle was a man who answered notes pushed under doors with the small unhurried promptness of a man who took the pushing of notes under doors seriously as a category of correspondence. He arrived at eleven. He brought, in a brown paper bag damp at one corner, two pears and a small jar of something the colour of weak tea, and he set these down on her table next to the uneaten roll from Halun's, which was still sitting where she had put it on the Thursday, and which had begun, very slightly, to harden at one end.

He looked at the roll. He looked at her. He did not, she noted gratefully, ask.

"Tell me," he said, and sat down.

She told him. She told him in the order she had walked it, because the order was the only way she had found, so far, to tell it without crying, and crying, she had decided on the Thursday, was a currency she was not going to spend on the telling when she might need it later for the doing. She told him about the dyers' quarter and the cold vats and the wiped doors. She told him about the boy on the step who had not, for three days, been called anything. She told him about the two reversed spines on the third shelf at Iden's, and about Halun, and Bell, and the candle in the chapel with the woman gone from beside it, and the game in the schoolyard that used to have a name. She told him, last, about the Friday, and about Saroya, and about the forty-one children in Aleppo, because the forty-one were, she had decided, part of the telling, and a telling that left them out was a telling she would not, later, trust.

Kettle listened. He listened in the way he had, she had begun to notice, of listening, which was to do nothing else at all with his face while a person was speaking, and to let the small silences fall where they fell without rushing to put anything into them. When she had finished, he picked up one of the pears and turned it slowly in his hand, the way a person turns a piece of fruit they are not yet ready to eat but want to be sure of the weight of.

"Right," he said. "So. I have, since you started, been making a small private list, in the back of my head, of the things I am going to need to do this week, and I would like, if you will let me, to read the list to you now, because reading it out loud is, in my experience, the cheapest way to find out whether one has, in making it, left anything important off."

"Go on," she said.

"One. I am going to stop going into Penn's kitchen scenes for the foreseeable, because Penn is now a person whose kitchens I cannot in good conscience be a guest in. Two. I am going to tell Maro, on Monday, what has happened, because Maro is, on the balance of what I know of Maro, the kind of person who would want to be told, and because telling her early is cheaper than telling her late. Three. I am going to start sleeping, for a while, on the small bed in the back room at Mr. Behr's, with his permission, which I will obtain by asking, because I would like to be, geographically, between the Society and the shop, and because the back room is closer to your café than my flat is, and a man who is going to be useful to a friend in the coming weeks ought, on general principles, to be closer rather than further. Four — "

"Kettle," she said.

" — four," he said, "I am going to need you to teach me, this afternoon if you can spare an hour, what a Lentar onion looks like, because if I am going to be of any use to you inside the door I am going to need to be able to tell, by sight, a vegetable you have written from a vegetable that has been put there by somebody who should not have been in the kitchen. Five. I am going to keep, for you, a separate small notebook of my own, in which I will write down, at the end of every day I have spent with you, the names of every person we have agreed are real, on both sides; because two notebooks are harder to mine than one, and because if your hand starts to forget a name I would like there to be, somewhere in the room, a second hand that has not. Six — "

"Kettle."

"Six is the joke," he said, "and I am working up to it. Don't rush me."

She found, to her surprise, that she was laughing. It was not a large laugh; it was the small startled laugh of a person who has not, for some days, expected to make any noise of that particular kind, and who is, on hearing herself make it, briefly suspicious of the noise. She put her hand over her mouth. She took it down again. She let the laugh, such as it was, finish.

"Six," said Kettle, with the small grave courtesy of a man arriving at the punchline of a speech he had been giving in earnest, "I read, as you know, cookbooks. I have read, in my life, perhaps four hundred cookbooks, and travelled into perhaps a hundred and twenty of the kitchens in them, and stood at perhaps eighty stoves not my own, and I have learned, from all of this, exactly one transferable principle, which is that a person who shares a kitchen with you for long enough stops being a person you cook with and starts being a person you cook for. I have, Iyla, been cooking with you for about three weeks. I am, as of this morning, cooking for you. I would like you to consider that — and I am saying this with the full understanding that it is a ridiculous thing to say in a kitchen in which the only food on the table is a hardening roll and two pears I brought myself — the operative vow."

He set the pear down. He did it carefully, on the table, in the small space between the roll and the jar, as if the placing of the pear were itself a part of the sentence and needed to land where the sentence had landed.

"That is the joke," he said. "It is also, in case it was not clear, the thing."

She did not, for a moment, answer, because her face had done a thing she had not given it permission to do, which was to fill, very quickly, with the particular heat that preceded the kind of crying she had said, on the Thursday, she was not going to spend. She let it happen. She decided, in the space of about two seconds, that crying in front of Kettle in her own kitchen on a Saturday morning was not, in fact, a spending of the currency; it was a small honest accounting of a thing that had been, by the joke, given to her, and that the accounting of gifts was a separate ledger from the spending of reserves, and that she had, in the last week, become a woman who was going to keep her ledgers properly or not at all. She cried, briefly, into her sleeve. Kettle, with the small competent indifference of a man who had been raised in a kitchen and knew what to do when a thing on the stove boiled over, picked up the second pear and began, with a small knife from her drawer, to peel it, on the grounds, she understood, that the peeling of a pear was a thing a person could be doing in the room while another person was, briefly, not in a state to be looked at.

When she had finished she said, "Christopher."

"Yes," he said, without looking up from the pear.

"Thank you."

"You are welcome," he said. "Do you want the pear with the skin on or off."

"Off, please."

"Off it is."

He finished the pear. He cut it into quarters, and then into eighths, and arranged the eighths on a small plate she had not, until that moment, remembered owning, and pushed the plate across the table to her, and took one of the eighths himself, because eating, he had told her once at the soup place, was an act it was rude to make a person do alone. She ate. The pear was, she noticed, exactly ripe, in the small specific way of a pear chosen by a person who knew, by the feel of the skin at the stem, what day it was going to be best on; and she understood, eating it, that he had chosen it on the Friday evening, after reading the note, for the Saturday morning, which meant that he had, in the small unshowy way of his profession, been cooking for her since the moment the note had come under the door.

They ate the pear. They did not, for some minutes, say anything more. The roll, on the table, did its small hard thing. The rain, outside, had stopped, and the light in the kitchen was the ordinary kitchen light, and Iyla allowed herself, for the first time since the Thursday, the small disreputable thought that whatever was coming, she was not going to be walking into it by herself; and she catalogued this thought, carefully, in the back of her head, under a heading she had not previously had, which was: things that have, today, been added.