The Last Laugh by Lynn Freed

Author:Lynn Freed
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Here’s a recipe we favor:

6 small eggplants cut into cubes

½ cup olive oil

½ cup chopped onion

4 garlic cloves chopped (you might use less if you want to be loved)

½ cup chopped olives (we prefer the wrinkled, strong-tasting ones)

fresh oregano

fresh mint

salt and pepper to taste

Preheat the oven to 425°.

Salt the eggplant and bake in olive oil until soft (about half an hour).

When cool, mix with feta and chopped olives.

Mix ½ cup olive oil, juice of one lemon, onion, garlic, oregano, and mint in a small bowl and pour over eggplant mixture. Toss.

Serve on rounds of French bread or melba toast.

* * *

Ruth, dear, great that you’re all back in the kitchen! My assistant, who’s something of a foodie, says you left out the feta in the list of ingredients. Would you check to see whether anything else was left out? Also, it would be good to know the name of the wrinkled olives (love ’em, don’t you?) and that cream cheese: Is it sheep or goat? And could you give us its name, too? And resend ASAP? We’re keen to get it into the food issue, closing Friday. Sxx

* * *

THERE WERE THREE WEEKS TO go before the first of the children would arrive, and Dionysos was supervising the cleaning of his aunt’s house down the hill. His wife was in Athens, Bess reported, threatening him with lawyers. She was always threatening him, she said, she’d even threatened to go to the police about Wendy when Yorgos found the heel of a woman’s shoe.

Except that it wasn’t Wendy’s.

“Not high enough for that pig!” said Dania, in high glee herself. It was as if Yorgos, failing to find Wendy’s body, absolved her from blame. “It’s a miracle!” she crowed. “Like the bread and the fishes.”

“Until she hacks back into your e-mail,” said Bess from her perch in the window. “Or barges in here with a gun next time.”

Dania shrugged. “Let her heck, let her barge, why do I care?”

And she didn’t. Even when the goat farmer told his wife he’d heard screams that night, and she told her friends, and the friends told the policeman’s wife at church on Sunday, and then Gladdy told them all that, yes, a woman had come screaming into our house with a knife and Dania had taken her away in the car—even then Dania was quite sure the miracle would hold.

She was still sure when the policeman himself turned up at the house with Eleftheria. “Get for me that knife, please, Gladdy,” Dania said quite pleasantly. And, with Eleftheria interpreting, she demonstrated for the policeman how the woman had wielded it. “I have for many years,” she said, “been for that woman a psychotherapist.” And when Eleftheria seemed to have trouble untangling words from word order, she turned to me and said, “Ruthi, please explain to this man.”

* * *

Sorry, Stacey! Greeks are inspired cooks and seem to proceed by instinct. So, I’ve got into a sort of grab-and-throw habit myself. Like going the wrong way down one-way streets, which I do here all the time.

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