Same Recipe, Two Cities

We started the cooking thing in February because the calls had become a list. What did you do today. How was work. Did you call your mother. It was like two colleagues doing a handover. So one Sunday I said, let's just cook, and he said cook what, and I said the same thing, both of us, and we'll see. Seven months now. Every Sunday at seven, which is six in Lisbon, which he still gets wrong about once a month. Tonight it's a fish stew, his mother's recipe. He's sent me the list and I've been to the Turkish market on Sonnenallee and the fish man gave me a look when I asked for the specific one, because the specific one does not exist in Berlin, and I've come home with something he says is "close enough, it's all the sea." "You're chopping the onion wrong," Tomás says. His phone is propped against the oil bottle and I can see mostly his forearms. "There's no wrong way to chop an onion." "There is. You're doing it like it owes you money." I laugh, and then I don't, because this is the thing about the calls. There's a moment in every one where it's easy, and I feel it, and I think, this is it, this is the reason, and then a second later I think, this is a video of a man, I am talking to a video of a man in a kitchen I have been in twice. We met at a conference, which is a stupid way to meet someone. Three days in Porto. He was the one who talked me out of going back to my hotel room on the second night and I was the one who talked him into calling in sick on the third. That was fourteen months ago. We've been in the same room, since, for a total of thirty-one days. I've counted. Of course I've counted. "Garlic now," he says. "Lots. My mother would say more." "How is she?" "She asks about you. She calls you 'the German,' but nicely." "I'm Dutch."

"I've told her. She's decided." The stew is coming together. Mine is redder than his, I can see on the screen, because my tomatoes are different, because everything is slightly different, that's the whole problem, that's the thing nobody tells you about distance. It's not the big absence. It's the tomatoes. It's that his Sunday and my Sunday are an hour apart and his sea is not my sea and I cannot, from here, pass him the salt. "Aniek," he says. He's stopped chopping. "You've gone quiet." "Just concentrating." "You concentrate loudly. You're quiet quiet." I put the knife down. "I applied for the thing," I say. "The Lisbon thing. The transfer." He doesn't say anything. On the screen his hand is flat on the counter. "I didn't want to say until I'd sent it. I sent it Thursday." "Aniek." "It might not happen. It probably won't. They said the office is small." "Aniek, I was going to tell you tonight. I have an interview in Berlin. Next month. The Charlottenburg office." We look at each other through the phones, through the oil bottles, two kitchens with the same stew going in them in two colours of red. "So one of us is moving," I say. "Or both of us and we pass each other at the airport." "That would be very us." "That would be extremely us." The stew needs twenty minutes. We leave the phones propped up and sit at our two tables and don't talk much, and I can hear his kitchen, the fridge hum and a car outside, and it's the closest we've been in a while. When it's done we eat at the same time, more or less, and he says mine looks better and I say his does, and neither of us is lying, exactly. Next Sunday it's my turn to pick. I'm thinking something Dutch. Something his mother will have opinions about.