The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit by Lucette Lagnado Page B

he ate.
    By ten, the house was silent again. Leon had left to attend to his business, and Edith had returned to her room and her books. Zarifa went back to her grandson’s bedside to offer him his mid-morning snack: six bananas.
    Shortly before noon, she was back in her kitchen, grilling him a steak. He’d find apricots tucked under the meat, giving it a piquant flavor.
    By one, the family gathered again for lunch. In his bedroom, Salomone was offered a plate that overflowed with whatever Zarifa and Edith were eating in the dining room. Typically, that meant rice and vegetables, along with chunks of stewed meat or chicken.
    After having consumed the equivalent of four meals, Salomone was allowed to rest. Zarifa gave the maid strict orders not to make up the room as he slept, though only for a couple of hours, because she believed that to defeat the pleurisy, he had to be eating at all times.
    By three, she was back at his side, carrying a tray laden with four or five more bananas, which brought the day’s total to almost a dozen. The doctor had stressed the importance of calcium, but it wasn’t readily available because of the war. Eating twelve bananas a day helped give my cousin the needed vitamins even as my father arranged to buy black-market calcium tablets.
    Afternoon tea was a ritual Zarifa relished, though she substituted strong black Turkish coffee for tea. When Salomone became ill, she used the coffee he adored as an inducement for him to eat the fresh cakes and rolls she had purchased.
    She was delighted to see how, without prodding, he polished off the milk and coffee, along with the pastries, jam, fresh rolls, and butter.
    The family, with the exception of my father, came together again at dinner, which was served at eight o’clock. It was the meal in which Zarifa truly outdid herself. It didn’t matter that Salomone had already eaten six times when evening rolled around. My cousin was fully expected to consume multiple courses.
    That afternoon, my grandmother would have dispatched the maid to Zamalek, the most upscale neighborhood, to buy a kilo of cherries, which were a great delicacy, and hard to come by. They were needed to make meatballs with sour cherries, a dish that took hours to prepare, and that she had learned in her mother’s kitchen in nineteenth-century Aleppo. Zarifa would knead half a dozen spices into the chopped meat—cinnamon, of course, along with salt, black pepper, and baharat, a kind of allspice. She’d add tamarind and a large spoonful of sugar into the sauce she made with the stewed cherries, then, remembering how sick her grandson was, and the baby that Leon and Edith were expecting, she’d throw in another spoonful of sugar. The effort was worthwhile; how wonderful to see Salomone devour the dozens of miniature meatballs, which were sweet and tangy at the same time, like nothing he had ever tasted before or would ever taste again.
    The high point of dinner was also its finale. Zarifa would arrive bearing her signature dish, an immense platter of rice topped with mesh-mesh, juicy apricots that had been cooked for so many hours they had melted into a kind of syrupy marmalade. No matter what else she had made, lamb stew, steak, okra, or chicken, it was considered a must to end the meal with a plate of rice topped by mesh-mesh. Salomone gleefully helped himself to plate after plate of apricot-laden rice. He loved whatever his grandmother loved and was convinced, as was she, that the apricots would single-handedly vanquish the pleurisy.
    Edith was the only one who showed little enthusiasm.
    Zarifa tried to ignore the fact that her daughter-in-law ate only the fluffy grains of white rice, pushing aside the stewed fruit she had so lovingly prepared.
    Two months and hundreds of Zarifa’s meals later, it was time to return to Dr. Grossi.
    When Salomone got up from bed to get dressed, he found that none of his clothes fit. He had gained more than fifty