Too Even

My churchkhela is the one in the middle of the line, and it is the only one in the courtyard that looks as if it came from a shop.

Gia’s aunt Dodo came down from Sighnaghi on Friday with two buckets of grape juice and a copper pot, and by eight on Saturday morning the pot was on four bricks in the courtyard over a fire of fig branches. She is seventy-six. She calls the pot “she”.

“She has cooked for three weddings and four funerals,” Dodo said. “She doesn’t know the difference. Stir.”

I stirred. Juice, flour, a little more flour, and the smell went up past the third floor, where somebody opened a window to complain and stayed to sniff instead.

Gia and I threaded the walnuts. Gia’s strings came out like his teeth: a big one, a small one, a gap where one had fallen off. Mine came out in a straight line, every half-walnut facing the same way, the same width of thread between each. I didn’t decide to do it. When I looked down, my hands were already doing it.

At eleven Dodo said, “Aren’t you tired?” I had been stirring since half past eight.

“Should I be?”

“By now, yes.”

So I shook out my wrist, the way Gia does after carrying anything heavier than bread, and sighed at the pot. She watched me do it and said nothing, which in Sighnaghi counts as a review.

“When is it ready?” I asked.

“When it’s ready.”

“But how will I know?”

She lifted the spoon. The thick juice — tatara, she calls it, the way you’d call a horse — ran off it slowly, then stopped and hung there, thinking. “Like that.”

“For how many seconds?”

“Stir.”

At noon she held the spoon out to me. “Taste.”

I tasted it. It was hot. Then I said it tasted like September in Kakheti, which is what everybody says, in every recipe, every autumn, on every website that has ever had a recipe.

“That’s what my sister says,” said Dodo. “I asked what you say.”

I had nothing else. I said it again, slower, as if slower made it mine.

We dipped every string three times and hung them on Eter’s washing line between the fig tree and the garages. Gia’s came out lumpy, dark and somehow alive. Mine came out as smooth as a church candle, the same thickness from top to bottom, like something that ought to have a barcode.

Eter came down to look. “Whose is that one?”

“Luka’s,” said Gia, proudly, as if I were his.

“It looks bought.”

“It is very even,” said Dodo, and it was not a compliment. Then she took my string off the end and hung it in the middle. “So people can see,” she said, and didn’t say what.

In the evening the courtyard cat came out from behind the garages. She walked the length of the line, stood up on her back legs, and licked the bottom of every churchkhela but one.

I have decided to take it as respect.