Work Text:
Lukas Lindqvist was not a man who knew kitchens.
A veritable logophile, he was capable of producing the definition of the word “kitchen” on command (“a room wherein food is prepared,” he might say drily to one who asked); a man who had lived around such rooms his entire life, he could identify, for the most part, the household items which belonged there and nowhere else.
The breadth of his knowledge regarding the goings-on in kitchens, however, was hindered by a simple, but unavoidable, fact: When it came to the art of food preparation itself and the processes by which a list of ingredients could be transformed into a pot-au-feu so delicately arranged even the uppity diners in New York City swallowed their peasant’s dish without a word, Lukas admittedly (contentedly?) knew nothing. Yes, it was true: at no point had the Swede’s scholarly pursuits pointed him in the arcane arts of cooking and baking. His compass had led him astray.
So when he crossed from living room to kitchen, intending to cover the length of it in several quick strides on his way to the garden, and instead met with Greta lying on the floor with her cheek pressed against the tile, he almost didn’t pause. Either she was executing some odd recipe that required a step be done on the floor, or (as he had learnt early on) she was simply being herself.
Being the host’s daughter, Greta was afforded a certain amount of privilege which her parents had never bothered limiting. If she wanted to watch the stars on Friday nights until it was three in the morning, so be it. If she tried (as she did) to turn the closet in her father’s study into a bedroom, she had their blessings.
It had taken Lukas approximately two hours after moving into their spare bedroom to realise why she held the other members of the household in her thrall. He’d realised it when, slipping out of the kitchen with an irreverent smile, Greta had winked at him, pressed one finger to her lips, and made off with an entire bar of milk chocolate the same colour as her hair, because there was no saying “no” to a smile like that.
So, it was in her nature to be odd at times. It was equally in his nature to let her continue unhindered.
That was when he saw the book.
It lay under her hand and by her head, a black, leather-bound affair, the likes of which were found predominantly in the pews of Catholic churches and dusty classroom closets. From his vantage point, Lukas could see no title or author; and, momentarily, a scholarly impulse arose to which he was helpless. He approached Greta’s prone form, trip to the garden already shelved in the back of his mind, and carefully lowered himself beside her.
She gave a loud yawn.
He froze.
For what felt like an inexorable length of time neither moved a muscle. Greta stared (as far as he could tell) at the wall opposite Lukas. Lukas, on the other hand, stared at Greta and contemplated whether he should get up or not. Was it creepy, his hanging above her? Did she mind? And would her father, encountering the scene, make good on the promise that he would murder him, a forty-year-old man, if his gaze so much as lingered too long on his fourteen-year-old daughter?
Thankfully, the decision was made for him. Not several seconds after he’d concluded he would be dead meat if they were found, Greta shifted her head so that she was facing him. Again there was silence.
Then she closed her eyes.
“It’s cold,” she said. “But soon it will be cool. If I lie here long enough it will feel like the rest of the room, and eventually, it might end up being just warm.”
Her companion acknowledged the veracity of this statement.
“Do you think it will burn eventually?” she asked, after a moment’s reflection.
It was Lukas’s turn to blink. “Burn?”
“Like a fire.”
“Hmm. No.”
“No?”
“To no extent do I consider myself a man of science, my dear, but in my experience, an otherwise unheated object will eventually achieve the same temperature as yourself in a sort of equilibrium—that is, as you warm the tile, it cools your skin.”
“Oh.”
At that, Greta opened her eyes, pulled herself from the floor into a sitting position, and began to flick invisible specks of dust from her clothes. As if to taunt Lukas for attempting to read its spine, the book followed soon after in Greta’s hands… and fell lengthwise into her lap.
Helvete.
Once she was finished with her preening, Greta looked up at Lukas again. Though she was doing her best to contain it, he could plainly see the beginnings of a smile in her eyes, an invitation to mischief he knew he was too weak to refuse.
“Didja want something?”
Somewhere under his ribcage, Lukas felt a thud. He had a sudden urge to cough, as if it would somehow cover up the sound, and did. Did he want something , his mind parroted the question. Did he want something…
“—An explanation, perhaps.”
“An explanation…?”
“Perhaps consider that not many people make a hobby of lying down on floors, my child. Indeed, the vast majority choose to lie upon sofas, chairs, beds, mats, rolls, benches—”
“—Lukases—”
Lukas flushed. “Certainly not.”
“Certainly. Go on.”
“In any event, kitchen floors were not designed for human bodies to lay themselves upon—nor any other kinds of floors, for that matter. Speaking strictly from an outsider’s perspective, the pastime seems terribly uncomfortable; and, I would add, you are obstructing traffic. Why, before I encountered you, I was on my way to the garden.”
Greta stared at him.
“You could have stepped over me. You have a big stride. And Mama and Papa aren’t in anyway.”
Well. There went that concern—only to be replaced by a new one altogether. Though her expression was simple, Lukas suspected that the purity of her intentions in letting such a vital piece of information slip was up for debate. He filed it away in the back of his mind, along with the garden, and shook his head.
“You have some fine arguments as to why you should be allowed to pursue lying on the floor,” he said, retaining as composed an expression as he could, “yet you still refuse to offer any justification as to why you were there in the first place. If you continue to obfuscate the heart of the matter in this fashion, I’m afraid I’ll be led to one conclusion and one conclusion alone—that it could only have been—what else?—mischief.”
In response, his companion produced a pout. His heart thudded again.
“I was lying down on the floor ,” Greta said, slowly, emphatically, “because I hadn’t decided what to eat. I got hungry. And this ” (she raised the black book for him to see, holding it horizontally so he could read the spine) “is Papa’s cookbook. I was originally up there ” (pointing to a stool by the counter) “because I wanted to cook something for myself. And I was reading, but now I’m down here ” (tapping the kitchen floor) “because the more I looked at it, the hungrier I got, and eventually I got so hungry, I just gave up.”
If the silence following Greta’s explanation had been a symphony, it would have been Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture , cannons and all; for Lukas, rendered deaf and dumb by the resounding absurdity of everything he had just heard, could only read the words Recipes for the Robust Russian over and over until they, in turn, became nonsensical themselves, gleaming runes against a black background as inscrutable as the cyrillic beneath them.
Greta pressed the cookbook into his hands.
Slowly, mechanically, he followed it with his eyes. A moment later he took it from her.
When he looked back up it was into her dove grey gaze, boring into him.
“You choose,” she whispered.
☀
…
“Lukas?”
“Yes, dear?”
…
“I don’t think it’s supposed to be that colour.”
“No?”
“Nuh-uh.”
“Do correct me if I’m playing the fool, but it looks perfectly palatable at present.”
“The borscht is supposed to be red because there are beets in. That looks… orange.”
The final result of his endeavours indeed bore a closer colour resemblance to a pumpkin than it did a beet, but Lukas only frowned. He had done, he felt, a serviceable job; he was especially proud of the perfectly ovoid dollop of sour cream he’d added at the end, unrivalled even by the most perfectly laid eggs with its unbroken white surface.
Which Greta proceeded to cleave in two with her spoon.
Lukas’s frown grew deeper.
“Barbaric. The Mongols were less brutal.”
“Sliced up their enemies until they bled orange,” said Greta, mixing the cream into the borscht. She raised the spoon to her lips and took a sip. “Don’t quit your day job,” she added.
“Is it so offensive?”
“It’s… strange. I think you added too much carrot. Overcooked it, too. That would explain why it’s orange.”
“My deepest and sincerest apologies.”
“That’s why I said, keep teaching, don’t become a chef! —Anyway, do you want some? You made it, after all.”
“Perhaps later.”
With a shrug, Greta turned to cover up the pot and clean up the counter. She swatted Lukas away as he stepped in to help.
“I’ll take care of this.”
Thus barred, he watched. He watched as leftover bits of tomato, sausage, and potato peel disappeared into a paper bag, guided by her hands. Compared to his own, they were small and slim, with flat fingertips. A violinist, as Lukas well knew; a symphony, unbeknownst to her, unto herself. The instruments in this orchestra, billed in order of importance, were as follows: a voice like a soprano flute, high and windy; eyes the colour of a fleeting daydream; a slender little waist, coupled with slim, shapely thighs and lovely legs…
Gentle fingers, nails neatly trimmed, tugging at his sleeve.
Blinking, he turned to the schoolgirl beside him. She stood perfectly level with his chest and, at present, wore a pout.
“Is something wrong, my darling?”
She shook her head. “Can I tell you something, sir?”
“Hm? Tell me what?”
Greta hesitated. Then, throwing every possible inquiry he might have expected out the window, she put her arms around him and leaned into his chest.
Lukas’s face flushed. Then the heat began to trickle to the base of his neck into his spine, oozing from vertebra to tingling vertebra; became a pool of oil waiting to be lit, nerves awake and aching for a sign, the striking of a match that would illuminate the paths to heaven and hell at once and obliterate him in a burst of penetrating light.
Oh, no. This was no good. Actually, it was very, very bad, and despite his atheistic leanings Lukas found himself praying for a Hail Mary. Clumsily (and not entirely with conviction) he took her by the shoulders and pulled her away, mumbling something he couldn’t quite remember after it escaped his mouth. She seemed surprised.
“Dessert? But we just cleaned up the kitchen… and—as for the thing I wanted to say—...”
“What is it—what, pray tell?”
But he never found out. He never found out, because with a hand she swept her hair out of her eyes and every thought he was struggling to keep rode along their dark brown waves and disappeared. The fact that she was studying him (trying hard not to look it, but her brow did a little dance every time his heart threatened to leap from his ribcage into hers) made it all the worse. This girl, this girl. Did she know? How he’d longed for her, imagining a moment such as this, for months? Even after trying to put his hapless heart to rest—had she reciprocated all this time, set up their encounter to go exactly like this?
“Lukas?”
Lukas’s reverie—which was beginning to incorporate the gate of St. Peter and visions of purgatory—dissipated at the sound of his name. “Ah… yes?”
“Will you be okay with that?”
“With…?”
Greta blushed, and for a moment uncertainty—something he had never seen on her face before—flashed across her features. “I said, thank you for this afternoon since Mama and Papa don’t… do this with me anymore,” she said quietly. “And—and I was hoping we could… do it again sometime…?”
And the chorus of conflicting voices, peddling their romantic theories, died off at once. If the act of her hugging him had agitated Lukas, he had now been successfully stopped, snagged, and pulled back to Earth by those words. As he ascended from the inferno, something in her tone sparked a realisation in him. A match was struck, the oil lit—but not in the way he’d expected.
Standing before him was a girl who, at the age of fourteen, had been deemed self-sufficient by her parents; whom he could scarcely remember entertaining or even visiting friends of her own; and who, most troublingly, had given no apparent thought to how her friendship with a much older man would appear to others, such was the extent of her loneliness. And though the epiphany had, in some respects, calmed his beating heart, it failed to stop the bittersweet ache that lanced, like a barbed needle embedded in the flesh, through the middle of his chest and lungs, making it difficult to breathe. He couldn’t leave her hanging; she had roused his affections in a powerful way.
“My child—”
The front lock clicked in warning. Both Lukas and Greta cast a glance in the direction of the living room, then at each other in mutual understanding. In a few seconds, the door would open and her parents return from their trip; if they didn’t desert each other now, the wrong impression might be given, and Ambrosius might quite possibly be roused to murder.
Trying in vain to collect all his thoughts into one sentence, Lukas said, “Ah, yes, we’ll—cross paths in the kitchen again, I wager.”
Though she was already halfway through the entrance, Greta turned to him, smiled, and made an OK sign with her hand. Then she slipped out to greet her parents, leaving Lukas with the borscht and book, and disappeared from his radar a moment later when she headed upstairs to carry out some other menial and unspecified task.
Downstairs, Lukas leaned against the counter and waited for her parents to appear. Indeed, he thought, listening to the duet of their shoes and voices by the entrance, he knew nothing about kitchens.