25 Peppercorns

Emma Burnett

2012

I perch on a stool in the kitchen and watch my mother stir the soup. She has the recipe out on the countertop and she double, triple checks, making sure she has done everything she is supposed to. She stirs, sniffs, but never tastes the soup.

The whole house smells of chicken stock, and the brisket in the oven, and later it will smell of browning coconut, the macaroons perfectly measured, moulded, baked. No fingers or spoons licked. My mother has a recipe for each thing, which she follows exactly the same every year. It’s one of the few meals she cooks.

The steam rises in curls and puffs from the pot of chicken soup, large enough to feed twenty people. I sit on the counter stool, and watch her mould small matzoh balls in her fingers and drop them in. They will cook in the boiling broth, and tonight they will stare up at me from my bowl after the prayers at seder, and they will fill my mouth with ash.

Everything fills my mouth with ash.

“I’m hungry,” I say to my mother, whose hands are covered in sticky matzoh batter. She shrugs and cocks her head towards the sink, and I hop down from the stool and get myself a glass of water.

It’s a trick my mother taught me. Water doesn’t taste of ash. If I drink enough of it, I almost feel full. Fizzy water works even better.

My mother knows all the tricks.

2011

I am fourteen and this curse only landed on me a few weeks ago.

My mother had watched me like a hawk on my birthday, saying nothing, just staring, as I ate the cake she’d bought from the shops, the pizza we had ordered in, as I downed mug after mug of hot chocolate with freeze dried marshmallows made from packets.

Grandma Ruth had called to wish me a happy birthday, told me that she loved me, and then asked to be handed back to Miriam.

I had handed the phone back to my mother, and hung around, had pretended not to eavesdrop, wondered if Grandma Ruth wanted to talk about a special gift for me or something. My mother shrugged at something Grandma Ruth said, and glanced over at me.

“Not yet,” she said, playing with the curly cable on the house line. “I’ll let you know if it does. Or doesn’t. I guess we can hope?”

It happened in the evening. Dinner, just the two of us, my choice of meal. Fried chicken and doughnuts that we’d had delivered, with the smallest slivers of cucumber as an obligatory green, and suddenly the food was ash in my mouth.

My mother just nodded.

She had known it would happen. She’d been waiting.

I had cried, and my mother had rubbed my back and shoulders, not complaining that the food was dripping out of my mouth onto the table, that I gagged as I kept trying to take bites, barely able to understand her words.

She told me it was a curse, and also our legacy. That we lived with the memories passed down to us by our mothers and grandmothers. She told me that Grandma Ruth had the same, how everything she ate was ash in her mouth. She told me about her own fourteenth birthday, not all that long ago, really. She told me I’d get used to it, eventually, and that she’d teach me all her tricks.

We sat on the floor by the table, under the only partially eaten meal, and I cried into my knees, and she held me tight.

I notice, after that, how little my mother eats, how much water she drinks. How she’ll always have soup, given the option, how she sucks it down speedily, like someone dying, someone starving.

1984

M iriam was fourteen when the food in her mouth turned to ash. It was evening, and her mother had made fresh challah and brisket and honey-glazed carrots. She worked directly from the recipe, never deviating, never tasting the food as it cooked. Two tablespoons of honey. Three eggs. Twenty-five peppercorns. No about this or approximately that. It was how her mother always cooked, every meal planned the week before, recipe and exact ingredients to hand.

The smells were rich and full, and her mother took long breaths in through her nose, inhaling it all, then gulping seltzer from a tall glass near the sink. Miriam could barely wait for her birthday meal to be served. She hopped around the kitchen, getting in the way and sneaking bits from this or that whenever her mother took a drink.

They sat around the table in the evening, and sang happy birthday to her, and she jiggled her knees, impatient for them to finish so she could eat. She took her first bite of the dinner made especially for her.

Miriam gasped. Then she began to cry.

Her mother leapt up and pulled her away from the table, said quickly not to worry, that Miriam was just having women’s problems, they’d be right back. That the rest of them should go ahead and eat, eat.

In the bathroom upstairs, she helped Miriam to rinse out her mouth and rubbed her back until she stopped crying. Then they sat on the side of the bathtub next to each other, and her mother told her that this was something private, not something to be discussed in public. None of the men and boys downstairs – one father, two brothers – needed to know about it. Her mother told her not to discuss it with anyone in the neighbourhood, to tell none of her friends. This was their secret.

Her mother told Miriam that she had the same trouble, that food never tasted good again after she turned fourteen. She said it was a curse. That’s what her mother, Bubbe Berta, had called it. A curse passed down from a grandmother that Miriam couldn’t remember. That they all carried it, all the women who had come after Berta. Berta, who was rescued at fourteen, who was the only survivor from the family, the only one who hadn’t been killed in the camps, burnt and poured into a mass grave of dust and bone.

“But we don’t talk about it,” Mama said, patting her knee. “We just live with it, carry it with us. You understand?”

Miriam nodded, lying. She wouldn’t talk to anyone, but she didn’t understand.

“And, anyway,” Mama wiped the tears off Miriam’s cheeks with a washcloth. “Look on the bright side. You’ll lose all this puppy fat.”

2013

P eople begin to comment on my weight.

How slender I’m looking. How I look so much like my mother.

I am hungry all the time, and I miss the feeling of food, real food, in my mouth. But I’ve learned to cope. Drink a lot of milk. Drink chicken broth. Use a straw. Swallow quickly. Wash small bites down with big mouthfuls of water. Don’t eat anything sticky. Don’t linger over meals, don’t trust my nose, which tries to trick me into believing this time will be different.

I get compliments from my peers, who want to know how I got so slender. How I lost all the baby weight. They wonder if their eyes will look like mine, so big and dark and soulful, if they lose all their chub.

I watch them in the girls’ changing rooms after gym class. They pinch themselves, tugging at their bellies and cheeks while they suck on lollipops and smack gum, and I want to tell them they’re beautiful. I want to tell them at least they can taste the food their parents make. That I’m jealous they can even taste what’s served in the school canteen, which could probably also double as prison food.

The idea of eating for pleasure is like a fever dream, a lie from an imagined past.

I try a piece of Snickers that someone offers me, and it takes a half litre of water to wash down the ash pasted onto my soft palate. I try not to gag while I scrape off the tacky mess with my tongue. I don’t take any more handouts.

I am hired by the modelling agency my mother uses. They tell me they don’t often take children, but I am a golden opportunity. I’m just so like her, so haunted looking, those long slender limbs, those stark lines, the sad, dark eyes. They describe me to me, while they take photos of the two of us together.

My mother hugs me, after, tells me I did really well.

“Plus, the extra money will be a big help,” my mother says. “Not that we— but, you know, for clothes, and life stuff. We can start to save up for you to go to university. Or you can put your money away for if you have a family, someday. A house or something.”

“I’m never having kids,” I tell her, with finality.

1963

R uth’s desk was at the front of the classroom, and she wished it wasn’t. She didn’t like that her back was exposed.

The other girls in the class – all blonde and blue-eyed with soft, round cheeks and sweaters just starting to fill out – were giggling behind her. Ruth wished their teacher would tell them to hush, but he just smiled indulgently at them.

A spitball pinged off her shoulder, and the cluster of girls behind her burst into giggles again.

She tried to focus on her schoolwork. Maybe if she aced the test coming up, she’d be able to switch to the other class, the class that was for excellent students, mostly boys, mostly not interested in her. At least there she’d be able to escape from the chatter and the feeling so completely out of place. At least then she’d know she’d have a good chance of getting into a good university.

Ruth didn’t tell her mother about the soft pink girls at school, how no one would sit with her in the cafeteria. She didn’t tell her mother how the other kids teased her about her dark curls, visible collarbones and bony knees, and the remnants of an accent. She knew her mother would just say how lucky she was to be in school at all, how when she was fourteen there was nothing but pain and death. How when she was fourteen, she was nothing but skin and bones.

“Here, bubala, eat this, eat this,” Ruth knew her mother would say, if she told her. “And never mind what those shiksa girls say, Ruthie, you’re beautiful.”

It wouldn’t help, so she didn’t tell her.

At fourteen, Ruth began to refuse to eat the food her mother prepared. Everything her mother cooked, everything about it, was wrong. The language that the recipes were in, the smells which were so different from the fast food joints she passed and what got served in the school cafeteria, the names and the textures. It was all wrong.

Her mother refused to understand. She would say how lucky Ruth was that there was always food when she wanted it. How lucky she was that she never had to fight for more, never had to hold back her tears so she wouldn’t get dehydrated and die a shrivelled husk.

“Have this,” her mother would say, holding out a fork full of something or other, something with a name from a language Ruth was trying so hard to forget. “Ah, Ruthie, eat. I tried so hard not to die, so you could live. Eat this. One day, you’ll be cooking it for your family.”

And Ruth would chew whatever it was she was being fed, and force a smile. And when her mother wasn’t looking, she would spit it out, and promise herself she would never have a family, never cook these things.

It all tasted the same to her. Everything she ate tasted like sadness, and guilt, and death.

2029

I am pregnant, because of course I am. I am shocked, and impressed that mother nature has battled onwards despite my desiccated, stick insect, barely-there body.

It was an accident, a once-off with a friend, someone I had met last year at an evening lecture series about the legacies of intergenerational trauma. He had volunteered his own story during a session on the legacies that children and grandchildren carry, long after an event. He had offered himself up as an example, talked about the taint that runs in his family, and how none of the men can ever be happy. He explained how everything smells of rot whenever the men are happy.

He told a room full of strangers that it is the smell left behind after a bomb obliterates your house during a festival in a war over oil, a war you and your family have no part in, can’t escape. It is the smell that grows as you spend days trying to dig out anyone who might have survived. When you are the only one left. He doesn’t know this himself. It’s what his father told him, and his grandfather told his father. He’s never known it himself, but he smells it anyway, whenever he is happy.

I had been gobsmacked to hear someone talking so openly about their curse, and I had made myself be brave. I went to talk to him after the session, and we had gone for a coffee. I told him about my curse, the only person I had ever talked to about it, besides my mother and Grandma Ruth, who didn’t like when I brought it up.

He nodded as I spoke, and didn’t try to offer any suggestions, and he didn’t try to come up with ways I could fix it. He just nodded.

We had become close.

And now there’s a baby.

I know I should get rid of it. I don’t need a baby in my life. I barely have a relationship, and my job isn’t the most stable. But I worry that this might be my only chance. It’s not like my body is a temple, it’s not like I’m in the peak of health.

I sit on the sofa at my mother’s house and cry, and tell her I don’t know what to do. She says she understands, tells me that she will support me, no matter what. We don’t have a choice about what the curse does to our bodies, but I can absolutely choose this.

“But, hey,” she says, “if you decide to keep it, it could be nice. Babies can be nice, kind of. And even if they’re not, kids are okay. I could start to cook again, I haven’t done that in a while. Maybe I could teach you, even. It’s not so hard if you just follow the recipes. I have a lot of them, from your Grandma Ruth. You know she translated them from Bubbe Berta’s old handwritten ones, after she died? We can live vicariously through your kid.”

I wipe my eyes on my sleeve, then pull out a bottle of green smoothie from my bag and give it a shake. Three of my five-a-day crammed into one blended meal, which I can suck down at speed.

“Until she’s fourteen.”

“Until she’s fourteen. And then, we’ll see. Maybe she’ll be different.”

We know, somehow, that it’s going to be a girl.

I know, deeply, painfully, that I’m going to keep the baby.

I suck down the green sludge through a straw, and ignore the aftertaste of dust and smoke in my mouth.

1947

B erta was pregnant. She didn’t even know it would be possible for her to get pregnant, not after the camps and the illness and the starvation and the despair and the fear. She was pregnant and her new husband, who had also lost everything, had promised her that after the baby was born, after they were all healthy, they would travel to a new country. They would go somewhere that would be sympathetic to them, to their plight. Somewhere they could start a new life.

Berta struggled to eat. She wondered if she could blame it on the morning sickness – and why did they call it that, anyway, when it lasted all day long? – but it had been going on for years. Since the camps, even after they were rescued. The food she made, the food she ate, it gave her no pleasure. It tasted all wrong. She knew others who had survived the camps, other people who also struggled to eat, struggled to sleep, struggled to love. Their bodies and minds just weren’t used to it anymore. It was probably that, she decided. She just wasn’t used to it.

She wished she could tell her mother, wished she could tell her over a cup of sweet tea and hamentashen. But her mother was gone, lost soon after they’d been deposited at the camp along with hundreds of others. Long ago turned to ash.

Berta couldn’t bring herself to tell anyone else.

There was a small woodland near the house, and Berta walked through it, enjoying the warm spring air, the quiet, the freedom to move wherever she wanted. She rubbed her expanding belly sometimes, a gentle soothing circle. It was a prelude to the hugs and kisses she would pepper the baby with once it was born. She hummed a tune her mother had sung her, when she was young. Before the war.

The woods were peaceful, but there were people sitting in a circle ahead, clustered around a campfire. It was only campers around a campfire, she knew, but the whiff of smoke in the air caught her unaware, and she found herself clinging to a young tree and dry heaving. Somewhere in the depths of her mind, she told herself that it was nothing dangerous. But an animal fear in her reared up, and she stumbled away from the happily chattering group, a family or two, maybe on holiday.

Memories pressed themselves forward, memories of bodies on one side of the building, piles of ash on the other. Berta blocked her nose and tried to forget the hours, days, maybe years she had spent cleaning out the ovens.

Gagging, wiping her hands over and over on her skirt, she hurried away from the campfire, back towards home, as fast as she could waddle.

She would tell him that when they move, which must be soon, she wants to be in a place without smoke or ash. No forests, no industrial towns. She wanted to be in a house where they would only cook on gas or oil. Where everything would smell clean.

2030

T here is a girl, and he is thrilled.

There is also a boy, and I am.

We don’t know yet if they will inherit our curses, our taints. But we don’t hide from them, not anymore. We talk about them to each other, and we talk about them with our parents, and we agree not to lie to the children about our inheritances.

He scrunches up his nose whenever good things are happening. Always with the children, whenever they play, always when he eats good food, he looks disgusted. It’s how I know he is happy.

I gag whenever I eat, and so does my mother. But we explore the kitchen together, cooking and baking from lists and instructions, from the book of recipes written by Berta, translated by Ruth, followed religiously by my mother and by me. The food we cook is ash in our mouths, but I see on his disgusted face that it is delicious, and it always smells good, so we taste everything anyway. The children are fed, and they like the food, and they eat.

And I count out the peppercorns, one by one.

Nota bene:

This story centres on intergenerational trauma, war, and genocide, as well as a hope that the future might hold less suffering than the past. These subjects are deeply relevant right now.

For obvious reasons, this is a difficult time to explore trauma, particularly Jewish trauma. But I can’t tell this story from another perspective: I only have my lived experiences as an inheritor of stories, and fears, and tribalism. So, my deepest thanks to my sensitivity reader, Ziyad Hayatli, for his time and assistance.

I don’t think there is ever a time to shy away from intergenerational reciprocity. We can’t look away from one evil act when confronted with another. We need to tackle them head-on, in the hopes that we don’t reenact them. What is happening now cannot be excused or overlooked. What happened in the past cannot be either. This story talks about inherited traumas, the ones perpetrated against us, the ones being perpetrated right now. But we can do better. We can choose a future that is different. Reparation over repetition; sharing over supremacy; healing over harming.

Thanks for reading – but we’d love feedback! Let us know what you think of 25 Peppercorns at Bluesky.

Mythaxis is forever free to read, but if you'd like to support us you can do so here (but only if you really want to!)