PART 8 — The soup of memories
Lunch was simple: pumpkin soup steaming in deep bowls, and crusty brown bread with butter. Initially a tense silence hung in the room, the sort of silence where every sound—the rattling of a spoon against a bowl, the ticking of the clock on the wall—sounded too loud to ignore. Daan ate in silence, his eyes alternating between his plate and me. He sensed something was brewing between his mother and this old woman who had so suddenly popped up from the past, but he didn't know how to put the puzzle pieces together.
“Did you have a good training session this morning, Daan?” I asked to break the silence. He looked up, surprised that I used his name so naturally. “Yeah. Won the match. Three-two.” “Congratulations,” I said. “That’s impressive.” Emma looked at me over the rim of her soup bowl. In her eyes was a flash of recognition—the way I used to inquire with interest about Emma’s own school results before everything was ruined by fear and poverty.
She said nothing, but pushed the basket of bread a little closer to me. A small gesture, but meaningful. “Mom said yesterday you used to live in this neighborhood,” Daan said suddenly, dipping a piece of bread into his soup. “Long before I was born.” “Yes,” I replied, my throat going dry for a moment. “Just a few streets away, in that red-brick townhouse with the apple tree in the garden.” Daan’s eyes widened.
“That tree is still there! Only there are hardly any apples on it now because the municipality has it pruned. But my friends and I play there sometimes.” “I planted that apple tree myself,” I said softly. “When I was twenty. The exact same age your mother was when she left.” The silence at table changed then. No longer cold or tense, but heavy with history.
Emma put her spoon down. She looked right at me, long and intently, as if checking whether I was speaking the truth about that tree. “That tree always bore sour apples,” Emma said then, her voice sounding almost gentle, as if she were thinking out loud about a long-forgotten time. “We always had to put sugar on them to be able to eat them.” “That’s right,” I laughed, and it felt strange to hear my own laughter after all those years of silence. “As sour as lemons.” Daan looked from his mother to me, and back again. A faint smile appeared on his face. He still didn't understand the whole story, but he sensed the invisible wall between us developing a small crack.
