Free A Heaven of Others by Joshua Cohen Page A

this Mushroomtry this Mushroomsophy he went on and on laughing to himself until the Queen said to Be quiet and eat your soup it’s getting cold The Soup Aba always ate with a tablespoon and I always ate with a teaspoon though it was soup and not tea with mint which was served later though sometimes To demonstrate solidarity with my son as Aba always said he too ate his soup and not just mushroom soup but also pea soup and at other times beet soup which is called borscht and tomato soup too occasionally with a teaspoon and not the tablespoon Aba usually used though he never even once ate a table with it and which the Queen always used to eat her mushroom soup too which was set alongside a fork to eat her salad with Three firm ripe tomatoes the Queen always said and three peeled cucumbers and one pepper green with envy of its seeds removed to the trash as the Queen always said A few small green onions say three of them For good measure then olive oil good olive oil and the juice of half a lemon and salt and spices Hyssopus Aba always said and sometimes even When I’m feeling adventurous as the Queen would say when she’d added ginger grated or else a few chilies or at other times maybe a very small pinch of pepper Cayenne then mixed them all up together and they’re called a salad these agglomerates of different vegetables liquids and spices this amalgamation of diverse produce sprinklings and oil is called by just the one word Salat meaning prayer in Arabic the most important word to the Queen this Salad prayer the Queen always said to Eat your salad to grow up strong and live forever with your health as if a wife and so we did my Aba and I ate our salad and then the fish which fish I didn’t know because while it’s easy relatively easy to say that this is a chicken and that this is a cow that this is a lamb and that this is a turkey it’s difficult Relatively difficult as Aba always said that even meat it was Einsteinian or arguable at least for me to differentiate between fish like the two unrelated indistinguishable Dagim I had one I flushed the other I hope’s still swimming around Lake Kinneret is what I called his bowl the Sea of Galilee whose fish we had with a dill and lemon juice and paprika and mayonnaise homemade mayonnaise sauce to dip then for dessert a platter of fruits dates figs apricots and pears dried and fresh and nuts that was a present for my Aba from An elderly admirer all the way out in Gilo whose piano the previous week he my Aba had tuned for free then cleared the table to leave the dishes Yesterday you forgot the pots and pans to the Queen so that Aba he could give me my bath in the water he first had to negotiate with always first had to negotiate with negotiations were always going on in my house our apartment because our water was strange or rather it was that the process necessary to obtaining a temperature of the water or waters appropriate to desired for any given purpose say bathing me was A process as strange and involved as that of any political negotiation Aba always said what exactly it was was that the hot water tap produced only the most hot water gave forth the height of hot water and that oppositely the cold water tap gave forth only the coldest of cold waters almost freezing though not scientifically freezing as Aba once explained was o° Anders Celsius of Uppsala and so to achieve a livable median an acceptable if mud-died middleground of water temperature for conducive to let’s say bathing me required An artful and experienced manipulation of both taps and so both temperatures the boiling and the freezing to A happy medium Aba always said the two taps those twinned faucets pouring individually because it was An old porcelain tooth bathtub Aba always said it had to be replaced soon enough Any day now the Queen always said and so the mingling and so the mating of the two waters As if husband and wife was accomplished not down at the Dead Sea Desalinization Plant or in the