The Ice-Cream Makers (29 page)

I couldn't imagine it either, and yet it was about to happen. Not marriage, but a child. If I wasn't also infertile like Luca, that is.

‘Where does it come from?'

‘Where does what come from?'

‘All the travelling, the love of poetry.'

‘Not from my family. Although my great-grandfather once got on a boat to America. He was involved in the construction of a skyscraper and hunted buffalo. But whether he read poems too? I doubt it.'

‘Pushkin's great-grandfather was Czar Peter the Great's adopted son. He'd been presented to him as a gift, a little Ethiopian boy. He wasn't even ten years old.'

‘I didn't know that.'

‘Pushkin's passionate nature has been ascribed to this swarthy ancestor.'

It sounded made up, like a fairytale, set in a distant period, in a time of palaces and silk-brocade suits, of carriages and pristine white horses, a tale distorted, embellished, and inflated by each new generation. A tale about a Moor, a czar, and the greatest poet of all.

The story behind a name.

Two days after the closing ceremony had taken place and more than two thousand people had listened to the poets reading on the wooden bridge across the Drim, I was supposed to get Sophia pregnant. By then, Yehuda Amichai had planted a tree, ‘the way Russian astronauts do before they go into space', as Xenia put it. His wife had helped. A stone had been placed during a formal ceremony in the Park of Poetry and we had taken a small boat to the island just off Struga. The island was home to an ancient monastery, and a well that produced an eternal murmur. One by one, the festival poets leaned over the edge and listened to it, as though it were the well of Castalia from which the poets of Parnassus derived their inspiration. Although the Russians had been drinking, nobody disembarked too early. Everybody flew back home, alive and well.

At Schiphol Airport, Xenia was met by her boyfriend. She offered me a lift, but I decided to take the train. The guy with the oil-stained hands looked at me with misgivings, the way men look at someone who has just spent a couple of days with their woman. (On the balcony, during another night, drinking from a new bottle, Xenia had confessed to cheating once. ‘Does that mean Pasternak has nine volumes to his name?' I asked. ‘Some claim there are ten,' she replied with a naughty smile.)

On the train to Rotterdam I read Charles Simic's prose poems, which Clive Farrow had given to me in Struga. Despite winning the Pulitzer Prize, the Serbo-American poet was reviled by literary critics. Not everybody was enamoured of poetry in prose form, even though the genre had been practised by some of the greats: Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Rimbaud.

As we approached Delft, I turned a page and read, ‘
I was stolen by the gypsies. My parents stole me right back. Then the gypsies stole me again. This went on for some time
.' One day the child drank from the dark breast of his new mother; the next he was sitting at a long table, eating breakfast from a silver spoon. ‘
It was the first day of spring. One of my fathers was singing in the bathtub; the other was painting a live sparrow the colors of a tropical bird.
'

It was a short poem, two paragraphs, but I didn't resurface from the lines until the train had long since come to a halt at Rotterdam Central Station and the compartment was empty.

I joined the mass of people walking into the city, past the hundreds of parked bikes and the jingling trams. Back then there was an old pontoon bridge opposite the station where a boys' choir used to rehearse. Walking past, you would sometimes hear the high voices of the young boys in sailor's outfits.
O Lamm Gottes, unschuldig. Am Stamm des Kreuzes geschlachtet.

I knew every street and every stone, but the city was under constant development. You might come back from South Africa and find an entire building gone, a building you always used to look at while cycling past. New towers sprang up, squares were transformed, railway lines disappeared underground. This had been my second visit to Struga, but despite the six years separating the two occasions I hadn't seen any major changes. No shiny new flats had been thrown up. The city felt familiar. The only thing familiar in Rotterdam was the pounding of pile drivers.

On the kitchen table I found a couple of envelopes. The cleaner had been round: the sink was spotless and the counter empty. In hotels I always lay down on the bed for a while, with my shoes on the covers, looking at the wallpaper pattern, the fly droppings on the ceiling light. I had to fight the urge to do the same in my own apartment.

That evening I sauntered over towards the ice-cream parlour, but turned on my heels when I got to the street corner. There was a long queue. Maybe it would be better to pop round the following day. On the plane I had heard it was going to get colder, it was going to rain. Tourists flying home are just as obsessed with the weather as ice-cream makers.

It turned out to be the last fine day of summer. When I walked over to the ice-cream parlour the following evening, the street was full of large puddles. It was nearly ten and quiet. My mother was alone behind the ice-cream, while my father lingered beside the espresso machine. Three Somali men sat at a table. They were regulars, drinking coffee and talking in their mother tongue about subjects we could only guess at. Luca was in the kitchen. He was making ice-cream, of course.

I greeted my parents and walked past the displays and round the back of the till, through the door leading to the stairs I hadn't climbed in months. Nobody asked me anything, neither Beppi, nor my mother. It was as though they were expecting me, as though they knew what I was about to do. When I questioned Luca about it years later and accused him of telling them everything, he reacted furiously. ‘Yes, I told them you were coming!' he exclaimed. ‘And no, of course I didn't tell them you came to go to bed with Sophia. How could you think such a thing?! I'm not stupid, you know!' He told them I was going to read her poetry, in the hope it would make her feel better, cheer her up a bit. My mother hadn't said a word, but my father had shaken his head. ‘I won't be surprised if she never got out of bed again.'

I had expected it to be dark and musty in the attic, with Sophia under the covers with her eyes closed, not saying a word. I thought she wouldn't have washed and would be looking tired, exhausted. I was expecting a sad face, bone-dry lips, and bags under her eyes, the strands of her long hair spread across the pillow like the tentacles of an octopus. But Sophia had opened the door before I had even taken the final step and welcomed me with braided hair and rosy cheeks. She looked enchanting, in a dress with a peony pattern in pink, purple, and white.

For a moment we faced each other without a word. Then, ‘Hello, brother-in-law,' she said with a smile. Just like she did when I first saw her in the ice-cream parlour, with a mop in her hands. It had been unbelievable, yet perfectly natural at the same time. That's what we were aiming for now — unbelievable and natural in equal measure.

As I planted a kiss on her cheek, I felt her take my hand. She didn't lead me to the beds in which Luca and I had once slept — which had been since pushed together to make a double bed — but to the middle of the attic, to a rug under the small, square skylight. Had the sky been clear, we might have kissed under the stars. Instead, our lips drew near under colossal blue clouds. Her eyes closed and she gently squeezed my hand, pressing her body against mine. I looked at her straw-like eyebrows and the blemishes on her skin, the pigmentation, the small dents in her forehead.

Her lips disengaged from mine. ‘Giovanni,' she whispered. ‘Close your eyes.'

I closed my eyes and felt her hand on my face — her soft hand, the round pillows of her fingers. She slid them across my cheeks, across my lips. She kissed my ear without a sound.

My right hand was guided to her lower back. ‘Touch me,' she said softly and kissed me on the mouth again. Her lips parted. I thought of snow, of innumerable flakes, millions of ice crystals. I also thought of my brother — of Luca as a boy, and how enchanted we had been by the girl who stuck her long, narrow pink tongue into the cold air.

She smelled lovely. She had showered, but not especially for me. Her hair wasn't wet and I could smell her body, the body I had never been allowed to touch or see. The sheen, the dappled light on her skin. Her cleavage.

I had dreamed of her breasts, had fantasised about them hundreds of times. They were perfect and fit neatly into my hands. Her nipples were girlish, light and small, practically transparent. But none of this I had ever actually seen. The light never reached that far; the fantasy always stopped, however much she leaned over and smiled.

I heard the floorboards creak as we made our way to the beds. I thought everybody could hear — Beppi and my mother two floors down, Luca in the kitchen, the Somali men at their table. Everybody knew.

Now we had reached the bed. Now it was about to happen.

Sophia turned round and lifted her braid. Dimples appeared in her shoulders. And so she stood for a while, like an artist's model. I didn't know what she wanted, what she wanted me to do.

‘My zip,' she said, and giggled.

It was like the first time: the same insecurity, the same clumsiness.

I took the cold fastener and pulled it all the way down. Her hips were white as milk. She dropped her dress on the floor and stepped out of the peonies around her feet. She lay down on the bed, on her side, resting her head on her hand.

‘Come here,' she said.

‘Don't you think it's weird?'

‘A little.'

‘Just a little?'

Her chest rose and fell. ‘Yes, a little.'

She sat up and unbuttoned my shirt. My clothes fell to the floor beside her dress. I felt her hands on the fabric of my boxer shorts and then her fingers behind the elastic. She planted a kiss on my prick.

‘You don't taste of broccoli at all,' she said. ‘And Luca doesn't taste of strawberry mousse.' She laughed out loud.

How could she be so light-hearted about it? This beautiful young woman who had grown sad and sombre, who could be silent for days — the woman who got tears in her eyes when a little boy ordered ice-cream from her. Had she somehow found a passage to the past within this darkness, back to the enchanting young girl she had been, the one who could touch the tip of her nose with her tongue?

She began caressing me again, and I let my hands wander across her skin, too. Her silky soft calves, her wonderfully warm thighs. Why all the tenderness? Shouldn't we just do it? Fast and hard. Sophia on her stomach, me behind her, thrusting like a stallion.

Instead we kissed as if time hadn't made a giant leap and we were still young and innocent. I unhooked her bra. Her breasts, which would get bigger, nipples which would get darker, right now were small and pink.

The light-heartedness was gone. We were making love; bodies not yet used to each other, but keen to know everything there is to know. Every nook and cranny, every millimetre of skin.

She took off her knickers herself. Her skin was paler underneath, her pubic hair curly. My fingers went down there instinctively.
Neither white petals nor snails have skin so fine
, the poet Federico García Lorca wrote,
nor moonlit crystals shine with her brilliance
.

‘Use your thumb,' she whispered. ‘I want to feel your thumb.'

I didn't know what she meant, not immediately, not when she first whispered it. But when she repeated it, effectively ordered me to, I did as I was told. I touched her with my smooth, perfect thumb. Not the calloused ice-cream maker's thumb, but the thumb that had turned countless pages of poetry. The thumb Luca didn't have.

She moaned and writhed, as though a shock passed through her body. Only then did I notice just how sallow her skin was and how dull and dark her hair. I saw my brother's wife. Unhappy, deprived of sunlight. The colour on her cheeks was blusher.

‘Go on,' she said.

‘We mustn't.'

‘He's fine with it.'

‘But it's not okay.'

She put her finger on my mouth. ‘He won't come up here, he's making ice-cream.'

For a split second I could picture him, in the white-tiled kitchen. The ice-cream machines churning, murmuring in his ear. The next day, I would hear what flavour he had made while I slept with his wife. Everybody would be talking about it. It was the first time Luca had ice made from an alcoholic beverage in the display. Grappa, barrel-aged, forty-three per cent. The trickiest ice to make.

Despite the rain, people queued. The regulars of the pub across the street. They had gotten wind of the new flavour and ordered grappa sorbet after grappa sorbet. The structure was amazing, which was a miracle in itself. Alcohol lowers the freezing point; the higher the percentage, the faster the ice crystallises. It becomes granular, slushy. But Luca had pulled it off; it was perfect. Perhaps he had spent all night on it — who knows, perhaps he had gone through ten bottles. When I peered through my office window in the morning, I saw him leaning on the counter, looking for all the world as if he had a terrible hangover.

But Sophia smiled and beamed and fluttered around the ice-cream parlour like a butterfly. They say some women are so familiar with their body they can actually feel the fertilisation of an egg-cell. Sophia had felt it and was blissfully happy.