Otherwise, recently she has tended to divide the world into men’s and women’s sections, and she defends her gender. She was looking at some photographs from the end of the nineteenth or early twentieth century and said: “This isn’t female one-upmanship, but look for yourself at male history! Just look at the models of beards and mustaches. How much time has passed since the mustache of Franz Jozef was in fashion? An emperor, with something like this on his face (she taps the screen of her iPad), sideburns and mustache joined together in an unsuccessful birds’ nest! It would be a mercy to shave it off.” (She used the expression štucovati, otherwise a word we had taken from the German stutzen, meaning “cut very short,” that had reached us with the emperor Franz Jozef.) “We should go through time, since the beginning of the world, cutting all beards and mustaches very short.”
At the swimming pool. There’s a squirrel in the tree above our recliners. We watch it, and it seems to me that it’s looking at us, too. And Sanja says: “It’s possible that the molecules of water in that squirrel were once in the body of Leonardo da Vinci!”
She said she fancied pomegranate seeds. I went to the commercial center and bought six large pomegranates. When I brought them home, she said: “That’s too many. Who could eat all those? And they’re already overripe . . .” She didn’t go near them for two days, but today she cut one open. How easily the rind broke! That Saturday it was sunny in our room, and the bright sun illuminated the perfectly red seeds in the freshly opened fruit. “Oh, God was pretty inspired when he created the pomegranate. So, he had a good day!” She scooped out the seeds and went on: “It’s completely illogical for God to be male, since males don’t give birth. Religion is proof that there’s a lie at the heart of the male imagination. The pomegranate could only have been invented by an architect of the female gender. An architectess.”
She talked and talked. I broke in, in the brief pauses between her sentences, repeating: “I know, I know.”
And she said: “I know you know, but I have to say something.”
Today she’s teaching me to cook. We bump into each other by the cooker, fight over the space that used to be exclusively hers, and then a little bit mine. She says: “It’s only in sogan dolma that onion is treated with some dignity. Mostly it is chopped into a dish and so becomes an important ingredient. It’s only in sogan dolma that the whole architecture of the dish is based on it, on its form . . .” I follow her instructions obediently. She looks at those picturesque glass containers she has been filling with herbs and spices, whose aromas she is now rediscovering. She holds a dry, gray-green leaf on her open palm and, as though she were remembering everything, says: “I always liked food that included a bay leaf . . .”