Kenneth C. Steven,
writer, poet

 

 

Lemon Ice Cream

If I close my eyes now, very tightly, I can smell everything. The ice cream that my father is scooping into bowls in green-white curves, the little kitchen with its open dishes of herbs and its baskets of vegetables. The windows are open and all of us – my mother, my brother, my father and me – we are all looking out onto the umber sea of the fields, and the scent that is coming in is from the lemon grove.

I used to get up early in the summer to walk there, just to be there. To lie on my back and listen to the shingling of the leaves and let that scent, the scent of the lemons, fill me completely. And at night when I couldn’t sleep in my tiny room under the attic, I would open the latch of the windows and let in the lemon breath of the dark.

I was four years old. Born in Sicily under the shadows of the mountains. My father called Mount Etna the blue ghost. And when I was five we left, all of it was taken away as suddenly and completely as a teacher wiping a blackboard. There were little finches my father fed; they came to one of the windows at the very top of the farmhouse and he fed them. Most of the other boys had grown to love hunting such birds; netting them and caging them. But my father had a soft heart; he could not bear to see such beautiful things hurt, and he fed the finches. It was the last thing we did before we left, him and me; we stood there with our palmfuls of seeds, me stretching on tiptoe, the tears on my face. His voice was so soft; those words of kindness he whispered both to the finches and to me. They were for both the finches and me.

We were leaving for America, for New York. It was a time of new hope, new dreams, and no dreams came bigger than America. And the last thing my father took from that farmhouse, that place that had been home to six generations of our family, was the recipe for lemon ice cream. I don’t know where it had been hidden all that time; it was as though like a magician he snapped his fingers and brought it out from behind his ear. But there it was, in an old square envelope, with flowing writing on the front. And his dark brown eyes shone as he showed me.

We sailed to America. Everything we could carry was stowed beneath us in this great ship ploughing towards the New World. Marco and I ran everywhere – he was nine and I was five. This was our Ark; we had set out across the sea for a new world and everything we needed was onboard. We went down as deep into the ship as we could, to beside the great engines that roared and shook like angry dinosaurs. We went up to the highest deck and watched the grey swaying of the sea, and the brown smoke fluttering from the funnel.

And we smelled New York before we saw it. We smelled it and we heard it, Marco and I. Very early one morning when the sea had become a pale piece of glass, we scurried up from our cabin, went on deck and leaned out, and we smelled and we heard New York. It was such a mixture of scents, such a tumbling of things, as though an old bin full of rubbish had rolled down the side of a hill. You tried to catch things at random and always it went on rolling. The bin never stopped tumbling out of control, for ever. Hot smells and sour smells and burnt smells and fresh smells and dead smells and new smells. They made us excited, they set us on fire, but my father hushed us as he leaned out too, for he was listening to New York – he was hearing the city. ‘Those are the biggest sounds in the world,’ he whispered to us, and somehow we believed him that they must be, that they were. He quietened us with those words, he made us listen, and the smells and the sounds gave us pictures in our heads – pictures in ochre and bright green and orange. But when we came to New York a fine rain was falling, a mist like a mesh of flies that seemed to dampen the scents and the sounds and leave only the great looming greyness of the skyscrapers.

We came to our new home, four flights above the street. On the other side of the hall were the Pedinskis, and above us there was nothing but the roof space and the sky. The only place we had to play was the stairs, and we made it our train station, the launch-pad for our rockets, our cave system, our battlefield. On four flights of stairs were Jewish children, Polish children, Italian children and German children. We had nothing but our imaginations and the days were not long enough. We ate each other’s food and we never went hungry.

One Saturday in the hot summer we had been outside, all of us children. We came back panting, full of stories, and sat on different stairs, leaning against the wall. My father came out with bowls of lemon ice cream, his ice cream, and as soon as I bent my head to that bowl I smelled home. I was back in the kitchen, I was up feeding the finches, and I was down in the lemon grove. The tears flowed from my eyes and he comforted me. He rocked me in his arms that evening until I fell asleep.

He kept the recipe behind the old carriage clock in the living room. That brown, crinkled envelope. Sometimes if there was a high wind in the autumn, the fall, and the draught crept under the front door and through the top of the high windows, I would hear it rattling behind the clock, dry like an ancient seed pod. It was there behind the clock, the clock that never lost a second’s time, that flickered its passing segments of time like hurrying feet. The clock and the paper.

Then, one spring, my mother fell ill. Everything was beginning again, coming alive, after the long winter, and it was as though she went the wrong way and couldn’t come back. It was as if we kept moving and had to watch her getting further and further away, disappearing into the snow. I remember her waving to me as I set off for school in the morning. The pale oval of her face behind the glass, trying so hard to smile. That is how I saw her, that was the last memory of her every day, that painting of the pain of her smile. I remember going with Marco and my father to pray for her in a little chapel at the heart of the city. I tried so hard to pray but my head was full of the evening traffic, the shouting and laughter outside. I wanted so desperately to guard her and keep her safe from harm in that place, but not even there was there sanctuary.

My father seemed to grow old in front of us after she died. I remember thinking that one night when we sat together in the living room: the clock and my father were set at different speeds. One night I had a dream, a particularly vivid dream. It was of a field, a great wide field. I could see nothing beyond it, it was the only thing there was.

And I came on my father in that field and he was planted in the ground. Mad as that sounds now, he was planted in the ground. And I began digging out his hands and feet, his wrinkled fingers and toes, and all the time I was thinking to myself – this soil is wrong.

I was twelve years old. Marco had left school and couldn’t find a job. My father, who had worked on scaffolding high above the city, who had sat and laughed with friends on beams the width of a leg half a mile over the streets, he had grown afraid. He had lost the courage to put one foot in front of the other.

That winter the snow fell and fell and fell. The skies were quieter than silence itself and the flakes spun like ballerinas from the sky and buried the world in white. The noise of the city diminished bit by bit; like a great, old animal New York lurched into its own cave and went to sleep.

The wind fluttered the curtains in the living room. It was six o’clock in the morning and I stood there alone, twelve years old and hungry. My father and Marco were asleep. There was nothing left in the house to eat. The wind came again and I shivered; there was a rattling and it was the old envelope behind the clock, the recipe for lemon ice cream. I felt sadder than ever before in my whole life; it was as though there was only one colour in the world now, the colour grey. And I made up my mind. I felt behind the clock and I found the piece of paper. I put on my shoes and I went out into the grey, sleeping morning with that crumpled paper held tight in my left hand.

And I sold it, I say no more than that I sold it. I do not even want to think of the people to whom I went, nor the place where that was. All of it still hurts too much; it is like some red sore where new skin will never grow again. It is enough to say that I was paid a bundle of dirty notes. I caught the smell of them as I took them and I felt sick. It was the smell of the subway, the smell of the basement where no light ever reached. All the way home my hands smelled of it too, and I wanted to wash them clean, I wanted to scour them until it was no more.

Even as I came inside I felt sick, but not only with that terrible smell. I felt sick with something else and I sat by the window; I hunched there and cried and cried and cried.

Outside, the new day was just beginning, there were voices and sounds and scents. The first light came red and beautiful through the streets; beams that crept and changed all the time.

And when I stopped crying at last I looked down on all of this and I thought: the snow and the light are bigger, they are bigger than all of us together. For there were men toiling in the snow, digging out cars and pushing them and swearing at one another and at their wives. Taxi drivers in their yellow cabs were shaking their fists and yelling. They were blinded by the red light that came low through the city; they tried to shield their eyes and they had to stop. All they could do was shout and swear, and I looked down on them from where I was four flights above, and they seemed so small and what they struggled against so huge.

I looked up and listened; I listened to the one room and I listened to myself. I felt utterly empty. I had cried myself dry; my eyes were empty caves. The dirty banknotes lay strewn over my lap and some were scattered over the floor at my feet. They were like leaves that had blown in the window – old, dead leaves.

My father and brother would be up soon, my father to sit there in the living room and look at pictures and wait, just wait; and my brother to drag on his coat and go out into a city that did not want him. Except that everything had changed now. I looked up and I listened and I realised I could hear nothing at all. The clock had stopped ticking.