Bloj

My grandma used to shout for me in this weird way that I tried for years to correct until I gave up. “Ustiiiinahhh!”, she’d call. The iiii which should sound like the i in alien, sounded more like the e in elephant elongated to almost infinity to my ears. I hated that distortion of my name, but she was my grandma, so I learned to ignore it. On the outside. I always flinched a little on the inside when she changed me like that. The little difference overlaid itself onto the regular me and for a while pretended to be real. We fought a savage little battle, this invented girl and I, before I could vanquish her and come back to normal.

Sometimes when she called me like this from the other room, or from the street below where I always wanted to be, hoping I might trick some kid into playing with me, she needed to send me to the shops for the thirteenth time that day. I was always down for another walk in the neighbourhood. As I’m writing I don’t even retain the memory of what so much energy felt like. Other times she just wanted to tell me something because she’d been by herself for too long that day. 

That particular time she sent me out for flour. She was set on baking cozonac, a sweet bread with various possible fillings, raisins, walnuts, poppy seeds or Turkish delight. She knew I liked the walnut and poppy seed ones and had a mind to make me some even if it was after Easter. “You haven’t tasted mine this year,” she said. A truth, but not the whole truth. What she really craved was to show I eat better at her place. 

This incomprehensible competition with my mother confused me. Why all the effort to prove she was better? She already was. She made me pancakes whenever I wanted, her tea was the only one I could drink without wanting to vomit from the herbal smell, she told me she loved me, she hugged me often and gave me shoulder massages when my schoolbag knotted my puny muscles. And her cozonac was spectacular, soft, silky, almost half of it filling, not remotely resembling the crumbly, mealy, barely-smeared-with-walnut-cream variety my mother made. 

Later I’d figure out she wasn’t trying to convince me, but to show off through me. From where I stood, had it been possible, I would’ve moved with her permanently, to live the life of a child granddaughter in the quiet symbiosis of me providing connection to the outside and she keeping me alive with sweets and telling me silly stories I never believed. I was too little still to fathom the power of growing up, of the world altering me and her and the radical rifts that’d bring. Then, she and I were eternal in that duality of care and indulgence I’d never find again. 

“Find poppy seeds, and the big crystal sugar, and helas, and sifon,” she said when ready to go, I extended my hand for the money. 

“I thought you just needed flour,” I moaned a little because the list required multiple long trips in opposing directions, poppy seeds and helas forced me to go all the way to the open market, but for the special sugar I had to walk to the other side of the neighbourhood. 

Helas, a favourite of mine, came in a little, gaudy, plastic, yellow bottle full of the sourest liquid, a replacement for lemons, which I hadn’t had the privilege to see until that point. The tinge of sweetness, an aftertaste of sugar it left on my tongue made me brave the tartness and squirt some directly in my mouth when no one was watching. 

Sifon, water infused with carbon dioxide by a mystifying contraption connected to massive, bomb-like containers, could be procured from a retired old man who’d opened a smashingly successful little business in a garage at the bottom of a block of flats. Waiting in line to get two bottles usually took more than half an hour, the caterpillar of people extending down the street, the size of the whole school opposite the shop. 

All of this meant the arrival of cozonac got pushed back at least an hour and I was already drooling for it. Of course, I’d get it that night or maybe even the next morning as the preparation was lengthy and effortful. Only the kneading and the main proofing of the dough could take the better part of 4 hours and there were other steps in between. I refused to consider the baking time and the cooling, you never ever, under any circumstance cut cozonac before it was cold. This last commandment sounded like another of grandma’s superstitions, although my mother said it, too. That didn’t mean it wasn’t one, or some invented rule to keep me away from what I loved most in the world, cake.