Monday mornings, Geno went down to the kitchen at the crack of dawn for prep work. Jav typically stumbled in a little after five. Today, instead of Stavroula, an old man was in the kitchen. The hale kind of old, muscled with years of hard work, his white hair pulled into a little tail at the back of his neck and his thick eyebrows black. Like Martin Scorsese with a mustache.
“Ke haber, habibi?” he said to Jav.
“Miguelito, komo estash?” Jav gave him a hug. “Geno, this is Stav’s father.”
“Micah Kalo,” the old man said, shaking Geno’s hand.
“Geno. Hi.” He couldn’t see anything of Stav in this man. Stav’s musculature went up and down while Micah’s went sideways. Even his face was broader and wider.
Maybe Stav looked like her mother.
“Poor Stavi is sick to her bones,” Micah said. “I am here instead.”
“Who’s making bagels?” Jav asked.
“It’s done. I got up at three, made the dough. Now I’m here. I made coffee.”
“You kill the average guy.” Jav went to pour a cup.
Geno looked at the blackboard where Betty had written instructions for the morning prep. French onion soup was on the lunch menu. Micah was ripping open net bags of onions and spilling them onto the work table. Fifty pounds of those suckers to be chopped.
“The cooks who cry together, stay together,” Micah said, taking up a knife.
Steeling his eyes, Geno tied on an apron, got his own knife and dug in.
It was brutal work. He and Jav kept stepping away to push damp paper towels into their eye sockets, laughing through the streaming tears, blowing their noses and going back. Meanwhile, Micah quietly chopped and chopped, only making the occasional swipe at his eyes.
“All right, old man,” Jav said. “What’s your secret?”
“Contact lenses,” Geno said.
Micah smiled, shaking his head. He made an exaggerated swallow and said, “Spit.”
“What?”
“The chemical in onions is attracted to moisture. It loves your tear ducts. So you have to trick it by giving it something else wet to love. You let the spit collect in your mouth and keep your mouth open just a little. Gross, but effective.”
Geno tried it. Beside him, Jav went quiet, lips twisting, clearly trying to keep the laughter back as he worked up some spit.
“Don’t drool,” Micah said, pointing his knife across the table.
“‘Sgusting,” Jav said through his teeth.
It actually did work. With the gooey puddle behind his bottom teeth, Geno could chop through a good seven or eight onions before his eyes needed a break.
“That’s a good trick,” he said. “Where’d you learn it?”
“I don’t remember. Here or there.” Micah corralled his last batch into one of the big silver prep bins and reached for his cup of coffee. A line of blue numbers was tattooed on the inside of his forearm. “When I was a boy starving in Greece, we used to save up our spit for hours. Swallowing it a little at a time to trick our stomach into thinking it was getting soup.”
“When was this?” Jav asked, as Geno went on staring. He’d never seen a concentration camp number in person.
“Winter of forty-one, forty-two,” Micah said. “Three hundred people a day starving to death. Corpses frozen in the streets.” His bushy eyebrows raised over the rim of the mug. “Friend of mine lived through the siege of Leningrad. Each has stories about hunger only the other believes.”
“I can’t even imagine,” Jav said. “How old were you?”
“During the famine? Thirteen.” Micah set down the cup and wiped off his hands. “Aora,” he said, walking toward the stove. “We’ve cried enough. Time to light the hearth.”
Geno found Jav’s sober gaze with his own. Jav slowly shook his head, his red, damp eyes closing a moment, then opening. “Historias de anhelos que sólo el otro cree,” he said softly.
Stories about hunger only the other believes.
Micah clanged the three big kettles onto the front burners. Into each he glugged copious amounts of olive oil and a half-pound of butter. Soon the smell of frying onions was curling up in Geno’s stomach, making it rumble and growl.
“Javier, presiado,” Micah said. “Toast up some of that bread there, yeah?”
Presiado, Geno thought, his ears curious. All morning Micah and Jav had used words that sounded like Spanish, but weren’t. Like komo etash instead of Cómo estás. Presiado sounded like precioso. Precious.
“Do you speak Spanish?” he asked.
“Ladino,” Micah said, turning the flame down low under the kettles. “Sephardic Jewish dialect.”
“It’s like drunk Spanish,” Jav said.
“Like Spanish got plowed and had a one-night stand with Yiddish.” Micah scooped fried onions onto buttered toast and ground black pepper on top. “There. Wrap your bellies around that, habibis.”
Geno sank his teeth through caramelized goodness into toasty gold. Jav poured them more coffee and the three men sat eating, mostly silent except for tiny grunts of pleasure.
“Fried onions on toast,” Jav said. “So simple, but you never think of it.”
“Simple food is best,” Miach said, reaching to switch on the radio. He turned the dial through talk, static, classic rock and rap before landing on an oldies station. Real oldies. Big band and crooners from the 1940s. Music Analisa Gallinero liked to listen to on Sundays. When Micah warbled along to Dinah Shore’s “Shoo Fly Pie,” Geno sang a little, too.
Shoo fly pie and apple pan dowdy
Makes your eyes light up, your tummy say “Howdy…”
“See,” Micah said to Jav. “This boy knows good music.” As his hand reached to ruffle Geno’s hair, the blurred, blue numbers fluttered on the skin of his forearm.
Finishing his simple breakfast, Geno thought about stories of hunger nobody would believe. Corpses in the street. A starving teenager with a carefully-guarded mouthful of saliva, watching as he became 157701. The horrors he had witnessed up until that point. All the horrors yet to come. The lengths gone to survive. The will to stay alive, so he could become an octogenarian listening to Glenn Miller and frying up onions on toast.
As Geno ate and thought, a hundred questions piled up in his head.
He asked none. He wasn’t sure he’d be one of the others who would believe the answers.