pinch and fold

isha ro

Marta was making khinkali in her grandmother’s hot and sticky little kitchen. Kneading, cutting and rolling the dough to make dozens of the dumplings, the salty smell of hacked meat sticking to her skin. Filling the little pockets, the steaming, liquid fat from the meat leaking through and burning her fingers.

“Pinch and fold, Marta, pinch and fold!” her grandmother shrieked, twisting the skin on Marta’s arm as if to demonstrate. Marta flinched from her grandmother’s touch and took a deep breath. If there was anything she hated less than cooking with her grandmother, she didn’t know what it was.

Like the woman herself, her grandmother’s food was unimaginative and flat, harsh and joyless, loveless. Every Saturday they brought baskets of khinkali to the market to be sold, and every Saturday they brought baskets of them back home – no one but the desperately hungry and those with little coin would buy them.

Marta thought about her friends’ grandmothers, so fat and jolly, their faces lined with the creases of well-worn smiles, their arms full of hugs. They cooked sweet things filled with love, gozinaki and pelamushi, kaklucha and korkoti, things filled with sugar that stuck to your lips, with sticky, sweet syrup that clung to your fingers. Marta’s grandmother was only full of spite and everything she cooked had the same bitter bite. Her frame was thin and her skin ran rough with the deepest crevices, where hate ran like rivers. Her hands were quick to slap and beat, her tongue to scald with unkind words, her fingers to pinch. Pinch and fold. Pinch and fold. Until the bruises blossomed like flowers on Marta’s pale skin.

Marta would feel the twist of her grandmother’s fingers or her hair being yanked or the sting of the switch on the backs of her thighs if she dared to add a touch of spice, or if the meat wasn’t cooked all the way through until it was as tough as the sole on a boot, or if she took her eye off a boiling pot.

“Generously, Marta, fold generously,” said her grandmother, rapping Marta on her knuckles with a wooden spoon.

Marta tensed for a second, then flicked her dark hair out of her eyes and resumed the task at hand: fill the thickened dough with meat, pinch and fold. Pinch and fold. Once the dumplings were formed – dozens and dozens of them engraved with Marta’s fingerprints, the ‘bellybuttons’ firmly twisted, the bellies heavy with meat – Marta dropped them one by one into a large pot of boiling water. Marta jerked backwards as the pot spit and roiled at her like a feral cat, the drops of water so sharp they were like cuts to her skin, but her grandmother nudged her back towards it with an impatient grunt.

As Marta flung the dumplings to their death, her grandmother watched her like a carrion crow waiting for its dinner to die. On the table behind her sat a bottle of homemade vodka and a shot glass, a pair of dirty reading glasses and a long, thin reed made of birch, the familiar sting of which Marta had felt often on her back.

The steam from the pot made Marta’s eyes waters, which is why she didn’t notice the meat bursting through the dumplings’ skins where she had rolled the dough too thin. It was only the searing burn across the backs of her legs, like fire tracing a cold finger across them, that brought her back to the here and now. She cried out in pain and surprise as the switch bit into her legs once more.

“Look what you’ve done, you stupid child!” her grandmother screeched, the switch quivering in her bony hand. She grabbed Marta by the back of her head and shoved her face so close to the pot that the steam curled her hair and her face filled with blood underneath her skin. Marta closed her eyes tightly and held her hands to the edge of the counter, feeling sure her grandmother was going to push her head in the boiling water.

“They’re ruined!” her grandmother yelled. “LOOK at them!”

Reluctantly, Marta opened her eyes and saw two dumplings, gutted, the meat leaking out like entrails into the water.

“Grandmother,” she whispered, so close to the water that she was afraid to speak and draw its attention. “Grandmother, only two, only two have been ruined. I can make two more.”

Marta’s grandmother drew her abruptly away from the water.

“Only two, is it?” her grandmother screeched. “Well. Then you will not mind only two lashes for your clumsiness.”

And with that she took the switch to Martha’s legs again. But the girl counted two, and then two more, and then two more as she tried, unsuccessfully, not to cry out in pain.

“You will make two more, but you will not do it with fresh dough and extra meat I do not have,” her grandmother said, retreating back to the table, back to her bottle.

Martha, already hazy from the pain on her legs, shook her head in confusion.

“I…I don’t understand?” she said.

Her grandmother rolled her eyes. “Take the ruined ones out of the pot and make them again!” she said.

Marta furrowed her brow in confusion and looked towards the pot roiling and boiling away. The escaped meat had disintegrated into little specks and the dough was now gummy, flying around the pot like a deranged bat.

“But… that’s…impossible,” she muttered almost to herself.

“Best get it done my child, or it’s the cellar for you tonight.”

Marta sucked in a breath. More than the pinching, the slapping, the yelling, the beating, more than anything else, she feared the cellar the most. Dank and dirty, filled with the smell of rot, her grandmother would stuff her in there amongst the rats and spiders, leaving her to tremble in fear at every scritch and scratch. The room was buried underneath the ramshackle house, so dark she couldn’t see her hands in front of her face. She would get no rug or blanket, freezing down there until she could barely unwrap herself from the tight little ball she sat in when her grandmother deigned to let her out.

Once, the old woman had passed out in an alcoholic stupor and left Marta there for three whole days. She’d had to eat the rotting cabbages and onions that had been thrown there and sprouted. Her greatest fear was that her grandmother would simply leave her there to die alone and afraid.

Marta looked again at the pot, her wooden spoon in hand, without the faintest idea of how she was to put the dumplings back together again, how she was even to get them out of the raging water. She stared and she stared, and saw only her fate in the water, a trembling, quivering life spent waiting for her grandmother to die. But how long would that take? How much longer could she live like this? Then finally, as she heard her grandmother swallowing down the drink behind her, she found the answer in the raging water.

Without a word, she grabbed the pot and turned and doused the old woman from head to toe.

Her grandmother screamed and thrashed and rolled, but the water bit her skin and chomped at her brain and stabbed through her lungs until she was still. Marta stood above her grandmother, shocked and exhilarated, horrified and elated, trembling.

What had she done? What would she do?

She would be found out, she would be taken away or made to hang for her crime. A curtain of black kept folding itself over her eyes but she shook her head, she had to stay sharp, she had to figure out what to do.

She turned her back on her grandmother’s body – to clear her head, to think things through – and her eyes landed on the khinkali. The dreaded, hated, tasteless dumplings that no one ever bought.

And they gave Marta an idea…

She turned to look at her grandmother’s body sprawled out on the kitchen floor. The old woman’s skin was mottled and saggy, true, but that would make it pliable. There was scarcely any meat on her old bones but Marta was skilled in stretching their fare to make it last longer. The bones she could bury in the cellar – what justice that would be! – and no one would question that the angry old woman had up and left her granddaughter, just like her own daughter had done when Marta was just a babe.

Marta squared her shoulders and picked up the sharpest carving knives from the block on top of the stove. She ran their blades against each other, once, twice, three times, the sharp sound of the steel sending shivers down her spine. She turned to her grandmother and, with the knives, she got to work.

--

The next day, Marta stood at a stall in the market, the last of her dumplings sold to the disappointed ahhhs of the market goers. Once word had spread that Marta’s dumplings melted on your tongue -- that the meat, so expertly seasoned, burst with flavor in your mouth and that the flavor was nothing like you had ever tasted before -- the demand for her khinkali had almost caused a riot in front of the stall.

“Will you be here next Saturday?” a woman asked. She had bought one dumpling and then had scrambled back into the scrum to buy half a dozen more.

“Yes,” said Marta, “and the Saturday after that!”

“Your khinkali are a marvel!” the woman said. “Tell me, what’s your secret?”

“Just pinch and fold,” said Marta, with a smile. “Pinch and fold. Generously.”

*****