Poisoned Cake

As far as my parents were concerned, this could be poisoned cake …
(Image courtesy of Anna Wlodarczyk on Unsplash)

Poisoned cake was a grave danger of which my parents warned me early on.  As soon as I could talk in proper sentences, they told me that a neighbor might offer me a piece.  Refusing any food that anyone outside the family suggested I should eat was one of the big rules of my childhood.  My parents offered no explanation as to why someone might put poison in a cake and offer it to children.  Their anxiety claimed my blind trust.  They fed me their own fears.

The baker of poisoned cake could only be a woman.  In the world of my childhood, men didn’t bake cakes.  On week days, Bulgarian men went to the jobs that the communist government had assigned to them.  On week-ends, they smoked Bulgarian tobacco and gathered to work on each other’s Soviet-made cars.  Clouds of smoke enveloped both humans and vehicles.  I often wondered who or what exactly chained-puffed on the  cigarettes: the men or their cars.  Cooking in general, and specifically baking, was a female task. Therefore only a woman could come up with the idea of making poisoned cake.

My parents didn’t associate this wicked baker with a specific neighbor or identify where she might live.  As far as I was concerned, she could have been the evil queen who gave Snow White a bad apple. I certainly hadn’t seen the Walt Disney movie because as capitalist propaganda it wasn’t allowed to run on either of the two channels of Bulgarian socialist TV.  However, my grandmother read me the original Brothers Grimm fairy tale.

I’m not sure how this exactly came to be, but eventually the baker of poisoned cake came to stand for a whole group of base women.  In my wary imagination, they roamed the streets of our neighborhood first, and then threatened to invade the whole of lovely, unsuspecting Plovdiv, my native town.  This made-up image implied that in general, women were untrustworthy because they were corrupt, vile, catty, cunning, malicious, sly, and dangerous.

Yet clandestine thoughts of poisoned cake added flavor to my play.  Sometimes, I staged a poison-cake-baker hunt with my dolls.  I arranged them in a circle around me and stared at their features pretending that I could tell which one of them was capable of sordid deeds by the expression in her eyes.  Then I would drag the culprit by the arm into the corner and refuse to play with her for days.  As if this weren’t enough, I made sure that the rest of my innocent dolls avoided her as well.

Once I even attempted to bake a poisoned cake myself. I retreated into my umbrous play-kitchen and made a cake out of my wooden blocks and the metal pieces in my brother’s Soviet construction set.  I felt terrible and slightly elated at the same time.  My parents would routinely accuse me of doing bad things, which often didn’t make much sense to me.  To reprimand me, they would stop talking to me for days, and sometimes even longer. Baking a poisoned cake gave me a chance to be bad of my own accord.

I savored every bit of my voluntary misdemeanor.  To prolong the pleasure, I kept rearranging the cold, shiny pieces of the Soviet construction set.  I even offered a slice to my unsuspecting brother.  At the last minute, I dumped the whole thing onto the floor, deciding to spare his life after all.

The blame for poisoning the apple of my parents’ eye would have been too much for me to bear.

The shadowy baker of poisoned cake fascinated and terrified me at the same time.  Yet, she offered me a neat explanation for my parents’ confusing relationship.  My father expressed dissatisfaction with my mother on a daily basis.  I couldn’t help wondering why he lived with her in the first place.  (and just why did Bulgarian men marry at all when women fell short in so many significant ways?)  Eventually, I decided that my father had settled down with my mother because he must have felt safe with her.  From early on, I knew that my mother was not a cook and baker.  (Our birthdays were the only occasions when she baked walnut cake.)  If she didn’t care much for baking, she wouldn’t even think of making him poisoned cake.  (My grandmother could also be blindly trusted.  Even though she was the family’s cook, cakes were not her thing.  She baked sweet bread for Orthodox Easter as the only desert pastry in her repertoire.)  Even so, my father lamented my mother’s disinterest in cooking.  He pointed to it as one of her failures as a wife.  Already as a child, my parents’ relationship made me understand that life was complicated: my mother’s unwillingness to bake could be a good or a bad thing depending on male mood and context.

As a teenager, I didn’t explore smoking, drugs, or drinking.  I had seen on enough occasions how unappealingly people behaved under the influence of rakia (a kind of hard liquor made from plums or grapes), to find it necessary to imitate this behavior.  For me, Bulgarian tobacco was a smelly something that had to do with men, and I didn’t want to associate myself with it either.  I also didn’t steal our Škoda to drive around town late at night.  It sufficed for me to watch how my father struggled to negotiate traffic on the battered streets of Plovdiv.  By no means, did I want to attempt doing that myself.  Once his Škoda hurtled towards a truck in the next lane.  My father explained the incident with a remarkably big hole on the road. I surely didn’t want taking any chances to drive that Škoda even if it was Czech-made!

However, I still rebelled.  As a teenager I had my first piece of poisoned cake.  This is the story of how that came to be.

***

In my teens, I decided to take charge of my hair and started frequenting a salon close to the Socialist House of Newly Weds and an old Turkish public baths in the center of Plovdiv.  Despite its location, the place had a makeshift feel to it.  The furnishings appeared to be on their third or fourth cycle of appointed use.  I liked the idea that probably each piece held together various layers of character acquired from different settings.  The hooded hair dryers fascinated me the most. They looked like storks whose legs had turned to lifeless metal before they could reach the nearby Maritsa river.  The tobacco-colored lace curtains that hung behind them could have been retired from the office of some communist city official upon showing signs of wear.

The one and only sink for hair was just like a tiled household basin for doing dirty dishes or washing whatever produce a housewife could find at the not-too-far-away farmers’ market.  To amuse myself during a long wait, I oftentimes imagined my hairdresser leaving her client in order to pull out a mesh shopping tote full of aubergines, cucumbers, peppers, tomatoes, and Romano beans out of a closet.  I pictured her washing each item at the sink and then working it into her client’s hairdo.  The final touch a spring of Bulgarian chubritsa or dill.

When my turn came, I smirked in self-satisfaction while stepping to the sink to have my own hair washed. The water that came out of the faucet could be as murky as the waters of the Maritsa river. Upon turning the tap, I believed to smell photochemicals in it.  Its temperature seemed to have no happy medium: it was either ice-cold or scalding hot.  The towel that my hairdresser threw over my wet hair was too small, tattered from too much use, and hardened by repeated washes.  Drying my hair with it felt like rubbing my head with a piece of sand paper.  I could have brought a better towel from home, I suppose, but I liked using objects foreign to the life of my family.  I liked how the stained cape covered my familiar clothes and almost turned me into a different person.

Once I sat in the chair to have my hair cut, I tuned to the snapping sound of the scissors and sneaked glances at the women waiting.  I could see them in the big mirror facing me.  The crisp rhythmic sound of the cutting, like that of stork bills clacking, was a soundtrack to their soft talk.  While my attention ebbed and flowed, the clientele’s chatter would get louder or quieter than the scissors.  What could these women be talking about?  Were they exchanging recipes for poisoned cake?

I hadn’t had many chances to follow a conversation between my mother and her friends.  We hardly had any visitors at home.  I couldn’t even remember a proper exchange between my mother and my grandmother, other than a passing question and an answer on what was being cooked.  Whenever my West German aunt was visiting, surely a chance to hear conversation, I was left with only her condescending tone ringing in my ears.  She would talk, talk, talk, raving against primitive East Europeans and their uncivilized life-style, long after we had stopped listening.

There was no phone at home; they were rare at that time.  One needed personal connections in the communication office to get a line.  No conversations to overhear on the phone, however, I had heard my mother talk to a colleague with whom she shared an office at the Institute for Food and Beverage.  The two ladies always addressed each other with a formal “you” even after knowing each other for over ten years.  Their conversations never evolved beyond being extremely formal.

Sitting in the beauty parlor with a kitchen sink and spellbound storks for hair dryers, I heard a woman have a relaxed, friendly chat with another woman for the first time.  I lapped up the sounds and sensations of stork bills managing my hair, inhaled the tobacco odor of the curtains, and let myself be carried away by sweet female words.  I wanted to know what women talked about when they got along, when they enjoyed each other’s company, when they were compassionate and empathetic.  Any interruption of my haircut was welcome.  I didn’t even mind my hairdresser stopping to apply color to another client’s hair.  This just bought me more time in which I could savor kind women’s words.  I was curious, intrigued, mesmerized, and captivated.

A big part of the conversations revolved around innocent topics: patterns for sewing clothes, rationed goods occasionally popping up in the stores, home remedies for making one’s hair thicker and shinier, shades of henna; perhaps a discussion of cucumber and yogurt treatments for one’s skin.  But sometimes, unexpectedly, voices would turn softer to speak about things like photochemical solutions that a woman could take to terminate an unwanted pregnancy.  (Is this also what went into poisoned cake?)  I had never heard this sort of talk either.  Abortion in communist Bulgaria was illegal.  The state needed all its citizens to build a socialist paradise, even if violence conceived those children and their mothers didn’t want them or that ‘paradise’.

Once a woman appeared who was a former classmate of my hairdresser.  The two of them laughed and casually chatted about their school days when they once stole white lace curtains from a party club to make themselves Snow White outfits.  Then, they made cake with egg-white frosting and powdered sugar.  In the midst of their lighthearted chitchat, the stranger’s eyes lost their merry sparkle.  The woman started slipping in details about what I later pieced together to be the on-going sexual abuse that she was suffering from her neighbor and his party friends.  Could my hairdresser help with procuring a photochemical solution?  (Did this mean that they would bake together one more cake?)

Could that be what poisoned cake was all about?  Was it the unavoidable consequence of the things women did with men who burned their arms with cigarettes, held broken bottles over their heads, and displayed their party guns next to coffee cups?

At the hairdresser’s, it wasn’t unusual for a woman to bring home-baked foodstuffs to pass around.  Most brought cookies but occasionally a bundt or sponge cake would appear.  These goods were an expression of generosity: sugar and butter were rationed at the time and hard to come by.  While the plate with goodies was passed from hand to hand, the women grew even more relaxed and engrossed in their conversation.  Tongues loosened, hearts opened just a crack wider, and not so lovely secrets were spoken about more freely: husbands disrespecting their wives’ wishes, disregarding their feelings, mistreating their bodies, and forcing them to do things no woman would voluntarily do. Hold still and shut up … I know, you like it … it’s good for you … every woman dreams of being forced … this is what paradise is.

In the midst of whispering her secret, a woman would sometimes burst into loud laughter.  This was a sign for others to join in, cracking jokes and morphing pain into a feast of chilling merriment.  Whenever the conversation took this turn, I tuned to the sound and sensations of stork bills playing with my hair, focused on my breath, and fought the nausea choking my throat.

Despite the women’s easy camaraderie, I remembered my parents’ dictum to never accept home-baked items from a stranger.  On a good number of occasions, I passed on the goodies offered to me.  However, before long I started to wonder whether there really was any point in refusing the women’s cake.  How long would it take for the things that they whispered to catch up with me? Didn’t a woman’s life inevitably collapse into a whirlpool of broken will, photochemical solutions, and chilling cynicism?

One day I accepted a slice of cake and imagined a stork put down her weary foot while drops of murky water hit the kitchen sink.  The scissors made a last snapping sound, and the cape tied around my neck loosened to spill strands of cut hair onto the linoleum floor.  The hairdresser cleaned my neck.  A closet door croaked and a broom appeared to swipe my dead hair off the floor.

When I headed out of the door to go home, I wondered how long it would be before I went into the Socialist House of Newly Weds next door.  Would I also wear a Snow White dress and have a white wedding cake? Would the groom be a stranger or someone I already knew?

And exactly how long, I wondered, would it take for the poison to work?