TE15 Lithuanian Honey Cake

Undinė Radzevičiūtė

Cooking days come and go for her between long bouts of non-cooking. Her cooking days got a red-faced officer to marry her thirty years ago. “But when I stopped cooking fifteen years ago,” says Nr. 10, “he left.” “Before that, I told him, I’m not an outdoor cooking unit, I won’t cook and bake anymore, even if I’m sentenced to the firing squad.” This is how Nr. 10 tells the story. But you can’t believe her, she only tells the whole truth about others. With the beginning of Nr. 10’s cooking days, everything is so full of the smell that you want to eat twice as much as usual. It’s the same for the others in the stairwell. The veterinarian is complaining. My suspicion: this time, Nr. 10 is cooking from longing. Her son hasn’t visited in a long time. Also a Russian, but when I saw him the first time on the stairs – black suit, black shoes, black tie, black briefcase, white shirt – I thought he’s catching aliens. There are no other aliens in our building: just me. He only lacked a nickel-plated pistol in his hand. Maybe he lost it, I thought.

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