The faint rotten smell stayed in the kitchen for a long time after Nina’s sister left. The smell wasn’t unpleasant. It was a simple, cozy kitchen smell, like vegetable soup simmering on the stove, the kind Nina’s mother used to make.
Contrary to her sister’s prediction, the fifth week didn’t bring Nina any extreme pain but only added to her fatigue. Nina felt as if she were recovering from a long, exhausting illness. She tried to do as few household chores as possible. She didn’t shop for vegetables anymore. She still read her cookbooks after work, but she was too tired to decipher the recipes. Instead, she ran her finger over the index pages, which were filled with neat columns of letters. The austere phrases were logical and easy to read: “Broccoli: gratin, 17; macaroni with, 71; penne and, 79.” She had no desire to look up the recipe on the referred page, she simply went on to the next entry that caught her eye: “Eggplant: braised chicken with orange and, 137.”
Pavlik’s booming voice on the old, creaky answering machine broke into the elegant sequence of string bean recipes. Nina had turned off the ringer on the phone weeks earlier and now only listened to messages as they came through her machine. Most often they were from Nina’s sister, who called to ask if Nina was eating well and to tell her the latest news: that Nina’s husband had been seen on Brighton Beach with some “dried herring,” then that he was moving to Boston, then that he had already moved. Her sister’s voice seemed to Nina distant and somewhat unnatural.
Pavlik’s voice made her jump. “Hey! Nina! Are you home?” he shouted.
On impulse, Nina looked at the front door. It was hard to believe that all that roaring came from a modest plastic box on the kitchen counter. Pavlik’s voice suddenly went low, and it became hard to make out his words. “Don’t disappear,” he said, if Nina heard him correctly.
PAVLIK’S PLACE looked different. Nina saw it as soon as she stepped into his living room, but she couldn’t quite figure out why. The rickety food table still stood on the “Turkish” rug, the fireplace was crammed with piles of old magazines, Pavlik’s hulking figure was shaking with laughter, and the vacant sofa was waiting for Nina in the corner. Everything was there, everything was in the same place, yet something was undeniably different. The size — it’s become bigger, Nina decided, taking her seat between the sofa cushions. Pavlik’s place had more space and more air.
A thin, delicate woman’s voice sang something about a little path in the woods that meandered among the trees. Just like the words in this song, Nina thought. She liked the song. When it ended, the singer put her guitar down and walked to the food table. She was wearing a long gray cardigan with drooping pockets. There wasn’t anything mysterious about her. A balding man with a closely trimmed gray beard took over the guitar. Nina’s eyes traveled from the man’s outstretched elbow protruding through his shabby corduroy sleeve, to his stooped shoulder, to the greasy line of his hair. Nina suddenly saw that his untidiness wasn’t some kind of snobbish fashion statement but a sign of loneliness, of being uncared for. She saw that the women sitting in a circle were watching the man just as they used to watch her husband. They were tired, lonely women, just as she was. There wasn’t anything mysterious about them either. Nina also noticed that she wasn’t the only one sitting outside the singing circle. In fact, only a few people sat in the circle, while others were scattered all around Pavlik’s house. A lonely figure here and there sat quietly on a chair, an old box, or a windowsill, or wandered around the room. From time to time the paths of the lonely figures intersected, and then conversations were struck: awkward yet hopeful conversations, just as the one Nina was having now.
“You are a vegetable lover, aren’t you?” a man asked, having seated himself in the opposite corner of Nina’s sofa.
Nina nodded.
“Yes, I thought I heard that from somebody. Do you like to cook vegetables?”
Nina nodded again.
“You know, I love vegetables myself. My wife hates it when I cook, though.” The man rolled his eyes, making Nina smile. He was short, with thin rusty-red hair and a very pale complexion. A tiny piece of toilet paper with a spot of dried blood stuck to his cheek.
“Are you a computer programmer like everybody else?” Nina asked.
The man nodded with a smile.
“And in your previous life?”
“A physics teacher in high school. But I can’t say that I miss it. I was terrified of my students.”
Nina laughed. It was easy to talk to him. Nina looked at his smiling eyes, then down at his hands — short fingernails, white fingers, red hair on the knuckles. She tried to imagine what it would be like if a hand like this brushed against her breast. Accidentally.
Nina wiped the little beads of sweat off her nose. He was a strange, married, and not particularly attractive man. He introduced himself as Andrei.
“So, what’s your favorite vegetable?” Nina asked.
“I would say fennel. Fennel has an incredible flavor. Reminds me of a wild apple and, oddly enough, freshly sawed wood. Do you like fennel?”
Nina nodded. She liked fennel. It had a funny, slightly ribbed surface, and it was heavy and spouted weird green shoots that seemed to grow out of nowhere. Nina’d never tasted fennel. “I like broccoli,” she said.
“Oh, broccoli! I love how they cook it in Chinese places. How do you cook it?”
This man with the piece of tissue stuck to his cheek looked safe enough to confide in. “I’ve never cooked broccoli — or any other vegetable,” Nina said.
“Let’s have a cooking date,” Andrei offered.
A cooking date! Nina couldn’t remember ever feeling so excited. She was sure she had been as excited sometime before, she just couldn’t remember when. So the better part of the following Saturday Nina spent shopping for cooking utensils. She went to Macy’s and abandoned the fifty-percent-discount rule for the first time, buying two drastically overpriced skillets, a set of shiny stainless steel saucepans, a steamer, and a pretty wooden spoon with a carved handle.
“Do you want it wrapped as a wedding present?” the cashier asked.
Halfway home, Nina realized that she hadn’t bought nearly enough. Knives! She needed knives! And a cutting board, and a colander, and God knows what else. She swerved her car in the direction of Avenue M, where, abandoning the second rule about never ever buying anything in cheap stores, she bought a set of knives, two wooden cutting boards and one plastic, a colander, a curved grapefruit knife just because it looked so cute, a vegetable peeler, a set of stainless steel bowls, and two aprons with a picture of wild mushrooms on a yellow background. In a grocery store next door Nina bought a bottle of olive oil, black pepper, chili pepper, and a jar of something dry and dark-green with Chinese letters on it.
Well before three o’clock — the time of their cooking date — Nina had everything ready. The sparkling saucepans and the skillet stood proudly on the stove. The bowls, the colander, the cutting boards, and the knives were arranged on the kitchen counter in careful disarray around the centerpiece: the opened Italian Cuisine: The Taste of the Sun. Nina observed her kitchen, trying to shake off the embarrassing excess of excitement.
Andrei came on time, even earlier. At five minutes to three he already stood in Nina’s hall, removing his bulky leather jacket and his leather cap sprinkled with raindrops. He smelled of wet leather. He handed Nina a bottle of wine and a baguette in a sodden paper bag. “In movies, when a man hands a woman a baguette and a bottle of wine, it always seems chic, doesn’t it?” he said.