“Somebody must have written it down,” said Daphne. “Perhaps we could contact the families of other old pastry chefs.”
“Even if the recipe could be found,” said Gavriela, “you have to remember that the Balkanik was a pastry for parties. Where would you eat it now? With which friends? We used to drink our tea every day at five o’clock. We used to play cards on Tuesdays, do something else on Wednesdays, go dancing on Fridays and Saturdays, to church on Sundays, and to the buffets after church. Every day there was something to do, and there was always a pastry to go with it. Now there’s nobody left.”
“Excuse me, Gavriela,” said Fanis, “but who are we? Nobody?”
Without waiting for a reply, Fanis excused himself to the restroom. He could take only so much of that “we’re finished” rubbish. Even if he sometimes thought the same things, he didn’t want to hear about them in the church tea room. For God’s sake, it was the only place where he could almost pretend that they weren’t near the end.
He climbed the stairs to the hot, rancid lavatory, fumbled for the light switch, and unzipped his pants. At least he could still see his nicely circumcised penis. His uncle had always said that you were in fine form as long you could look down from a standing position and see your pecker. Until the age of seventeen, Fanis had suffered from phimosis. His tight foreskin hadn’t bothered him at all until he reached puberty and began to masturbate, and even then it had only caused him a small amount of discomfort. On the day that he fell in love with Kalypso, however, he was obliged to tell his uncle that something was wrong.
It was the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, 1952. The entire neighborhood was perfumed with the scents of mastic and mahleb baking in Saint Basil cakes. A light, feathery snow was falling, and hordes of children had filled the streets, singing carols and collecting baksheesh. Fanis was seventeen and in the first year of his apprenticeship with Mr. Yorgos, the neighborhood antiques merchant. Kalypso, just fifteen, was one of the carolers. She wore a heavy wool coat and a red beret. A brown braid hung over her shoulder. Her voice—a sweet mezzo soprano—rose above the others and passed straight through Fanis.
That evening, while reimagining Kalypso beneath his thick winter blankets, Fanis had a date with his right hand, which he affectionately called Madame Fist. But his phimosis was so painful that he wasn’t able to finish. The next day he told his uncle. On January 4, 1953, Fanis was circumcised at the German Hospital. His penis became a clean, free, handsome acorn, just like those of his Jewish and Muslim friends. He hadn’t had any other problems since, except for those few weak erections of late, and now, for the first time in the church lavatory, a reduced flow.
As Fanis was shaking it, he felt a contracting pain in his chest. An image of Kalypso’s braid flashed before him. His eyes overflowed with tears. There it was: uncontrolled weeping. Another symptom of vascular dementia. Perhaps he shouldn’t have burned those prescriptions.
Fanis rezipped his pants, washed his hands with the bit of dirty soap resting on the edge of the sink, and covered his eyes with wet fingers. Then he noticed the muffled sounds of a radio. They were coming from somewhere outside the church complex.
That was how it had started, with the announcement, at half past four in the afternoon, on September 6, 1955, from the Ankara radio station: Atatürk’s birthplace in Thessaloniki had been bombed. Fanis had heard it at Mr. Yorgos’s antiques shop while beating out an antique Bergama carpet in the back garden. The news made him go to the front of the shop and look across the way, toward the windows of the mint-green mosque, but he pushed the thought out of his head and returned to his work. At a quarter to five, a boy passed selling the Istanbul Express. Fanis bought a copy and beheld the falsified photos of the damage to Atatürk’s first house. A few seconds later he heard hateful shouts resounding from the direction of Sıraselviler Avenue: “They destroyed the house of our father! Infidels! Cyprus is Turkish!”
Fanis called out to his boss: “Do you hear?”
Mr. Yorgos emerged from his office. “Lower the shutter,” he said.
Mr. Yorgos was a practical man, and he already had a practical solution to whatever little disturbance might occur. He called one of the toughs to whom he regularly gave protection money. They would pass once per month for their allowance, always with the same assurance: “Whatever happens, we’re here.” It was understood that Mr. Yorgos was buying protection from the thugs themselves rather than from any unknown enemy, but calling them was worth a shot.
To his surprise, Mr. Yorgos was told that two men would be dispatched within the hour. While waiting, he emptied the safe of cash and stuffed half of it into his underpants and the other half into his trouser pocket. He bound some of the more expensive jewelry to his chest and to Fanis’s. Then he called a friend in Taksim. “Close up,” said the friend. “They’re going mad.” By six o’clock, the toughs had arrived and, true to their word, they kept the shop safe. Fanis left thinking only of his mother, who had been widowed when he was eleven. It was natural that he should go to her instead of trying to find Kalypso. In any case, Fanis didn’t believe that things would get as bad as they did.
Weeping in the stench of the church lavatory and unable to relieve himself, Fanis couldn’t justify his lack of thought for Kalypso as he had taken his precautions, gone home, and tipped the doorman of his building with some cash that Mr. Yorgos had stuffed into his
