Written by Jadi Campbell
Neela unlocked the shop. She yawned. It was 5:45 in the morning, and the street outside
was still draped in shadow. They’d begun eating breakfast together on the days she opened
the bakery before Mustafa went home to go to bed.
Once Neela stepped inside, the yawn ended and her mouth began to water. The air
was rich with aromas coming through the swinging door to the kitchen. She raised her face
and breathed them in. Caramelized brown sugar and cinnamon and clover honey. The darker
sweetness of cooked dates and sour cherries. The swelling scent of yeast breads.
She could mark the days of the week by the smells that greeted her each morning, and
Mustafa baked Syrian cookies for Tuesdays. They sold diamond-shaped samoon flatbreads
covered with sesame seeds every day, but Tuesdays meant sweet ma’arouk brioche stuffed
with dates and fragrant with cardamom, barazek cookies, covered as well in sesame seeds and
rolled in a coat of honey syrup and crushed pistachios. Neela listed her favorites in her head,
trying to decide which ones she wanted this morning. Mustafa always had his baked goods
arrayed on enticing platters and placed in the cases already. Maybe he’d decided instead to
bake ghraibeh shortbread cookies, or walnut-filled karbeej with marshmallow-like cream. Or
perhaps ma’amoul date cookies, all these for Tuesdays.
She hung her coat and purse behind the counter and clicked on the lights for the glass
cases. Disappointed, she saw the shelves were bare. He must have set the trays in the cooler or
on the kitchen shelves.
Neela pushed through the swinging door to the kitchen. She screamed as she stumbled over
a body on the floor. It was a man, a big man, curled up on the tiles below the ovens in a green,
white, and black cloth with red stars. A hoodie shielded his head and he’d tucked his hands
between his knees. A homeless person needing shelter? A junkie?
She gasped and just managed to stop another shriek as she recognized him. “Mustafa! Are
you alright?”
He blinked at her as the door went on swinging. Light. Shadow. Light. Shadow.
Neela turned on the kitchen’s overhead lights and dropped down to his side.
He pushed the hood back from his face. “I’m okay.”
“Don’t try to get up! Let me see.” She pulled his head onto her lap, her hands cradling his
skull off the floor so she could take a closer look at his condition. His pupils weren’t dilated,
but Neela spotted something swimming in his dark eyes. “Should I call an ambulance?”
She could feel his trembling. “I’m okay, Neela. Sometimes I just stay here.”
Hands still cradling his skull, Neela settled herself cross-legged on the tiles. “What
happened? Did you fall?”
“I fell asleep.”
“And fell, sleeping, onto the floor?”
Silence.
“I sleep or take cat naps next to the ovens,” he admitted.
“When did you start doing that?”
Again a long silence as he thought about what he could say. Words were so difficult.
“Back in Syria,” he spoke slowly, “air raids came in the night. The worst one came in the
winter. I saw blood red trails in the sky.”
“You imagined blood in the sky?”
“No.”
Neela waited through another pause punctuated with hard emptiness.
Mustafa shook with the effort it took not to break down and weep. “A plane was dropping
bombs. Falling bombs have red trails. The next morning, I found a big hole instead of my
parents’ house.” They’d bombed his neighborhood, and the home had taken a direct hit. “I
spent the next month sleeping next to the ovens. I had nowhere to go. Everything just…
gone.”
“You couldn’t find any of your relatives?”
His parents must have been killed instantly. “My uncles had gone to a funeral.” He didn’t
elaborate. They’d taken a bus to bury a relative and her children, all killed on the streets. “I
stayed behind to run the bakery, it was keeping all our families going. But Akili and Akram
never came back.”
No power. No electricity. At least in the shop it was warm. “There was nowhere else to
go,” he repeated dully. Other homes were damaged in the attack and the neighbors had lost a
wall. Mustafa went back to check on them and looters had already been there.
“You feel safe here though, don’t you?”
He grasped her knee, willing her to understand. “Not always. I sleep by the ovens because
sometimes I can’t face going outside.”
“Is it because it’s winter?”
“No. It’s not the winter…. We get snow too, you know.”
“The dark?”
“No!” When he came in to work, Mustafa expected that he baked as the world existed
suspended in gloom, lit by streetlights, or headlights if a car passed by. But he finished at four
or five o’clock, and when he left the bakery he reentered brooding shadows.
“Some mornings it’s foggy.” When he was outside he was back in the desolation. Each
time it was if he experienced everything dying all over again. Back at home, the sun was
already coming up out on the desert. Nights in the desert were cold, but those morning hours
when he was heading home from baking…. A warmth seeped into the streets, it wasn’t hot
yet. People would be setting out their wares to sell in front of shops or on the edge of the
street. Soon more figures appeared, people out for their morning shopping. He missed
watching that morning light spreading over the world. He missed the sunbeams.
“When I stay here, I wake up and, before I open my eyes, it’s warm and smells of the ovens
in Syria, and everyone I love is still alive.”
He broke down and turned his head to the side. Mustafa was overwhelmed by the emotions
he’d just spoken out loud. The taste was profoundly bitter: he had hidden these feelings deep,
deep inside.
This bakery had rebuilt his life. What if Neela decided he was unstable? We’re partners,
50-50. We signed the papers and since that day we’ve made every single decision together.
Neela’s become my friend, he reminded himself. But only a fellow refugee knew the fears that
stalked him, waiting to upend his new life. Mustafa still wanted to run away and find a hiding
place if he heard a traffic helicopter overhead. The whirring of helicopter blades was a
forewarning connected to an inevitable next sound: a falling barrel bomb.
Neela kept cradling his head on her lap, but her hands were still. She cleared her throat.
She can’t understand, he despaired.
Either he spoke out loud or she read his mind. “I don’t understand,” she said slowly. “I
can’t even pretend to know. But, our partnership.” Her voice stumbled. “It means everything
to me. Everything. You can always find someone to work a cash register, but for me to find
another baker who bakes like you do? Without you, our business falls apart. You’re one of a
kind. Mustafa, you take your best memories and bake them into bread. Your old home is in
every samoon you make. Your new home too. Roswithas Bienenstich. Your Black Forest
cherry cake. Actually, you remind me of a project I read about. It’s called ‘Lovens’.”
Mustafa sat up; they faced one another on the kitchen floor. Less than a meter of floor
space separated them. “Love-ins?” He was bewildered. “Love-ins? Someone is pregnant?”
“Pregnant?” Neela asked back, just as confused.
“Love-ins? An orgy? Or is it, you taught me that American expression for being pregnant.”
He searched for the term, and when he tasted sour pickles he knew he’d found it again.
“‘Nothin’ says lovin’ like a bun in the oven?’”
Neela began to laugh uncontrollably. She laughed for some minutes, her laughter even
louder because she knew he was waiting for an answer. When she could talk, she wiped her
eyes and explained. “Love-ins are orgies sometimes, but usually love-in means a group
gathered to share love. Loving vibes and loving energy. Lovens,” she enunciated for him,
placing the emphasis on an e rather than an i, “are ovens without borders. But yeah, Lovens as
in how love is something in the oven. Lovens is a group that promotes community ovens.
People cook together and feed one another.”
“Lovens.” His wracked face smoothed out as he considered what she was saying.
“It’s helped by a group that runs Ovens for Peace.”
“How can ovens be for anything but peace?”
Horrified, she realized Mustafa was shaking again.
“Is there a group that runs Ovens for War Crimes? Ovens for the Victors?” His mouth
filled with the taste of burnt bread as he spat out each term.
“You’re right,” she hastily agreed. “English names are so stupid sometimes! But, listen!
Ovens for Peace is repurposing old military ovens in Bulgaria to bake in orphanages and
refugee camps.”
His gaze turned inward. “The Lovens. Are they electric?”
“Wood fire.”
Mustafa nodded, back in warmer territory. “Makes sense. Wood-fired ovens just make
the breads taste more authentic.”
She scooted closer so she could place her hands back over his.
“I’m okay now,” Mustafa repeated yet again, and this time they both believed him. “You
won’t mind if I still sleep in here?”
“Whenever you want.” If this was what he needed to transform the dark into something
safe, how could she say no? “Do whatever you need to, Partner. But today I’m ordering
blankets and a cot so you don’t sleep on the floor.”
“A cot would be nice. But I don’t need a blanket. I have this.” Mustafa carefully folded the
large Syrian flag he’d covered himself in.
They stood up. Neela turned to Mustafa, and in silence they waited to meet the light of the
new day that was filling the kitchen window.
A few mornings later, Neela entered the kitchen and discovered that instead of the usual
pithy quote, Mustafa had hung up the Lovens mission statement. “Bakeries and wood-fired
ovens are the quintessential hubs of humanity, globally present and culturally diverse yet
universally unifying.” He was saying thank you.
Neela scribbled out a post-it note in response and placed it next to the mission statement.
“Nothin’ says lovin’ like a bun in the oven!”
"Food is Love" is an excerpt from Campbell's novel, The Taste of Your Name.
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Jadi Campbell is an American author and has lived in Europe since 1992. She writes frequently for Stuttgart’s New English American Theater (NEAT). Her book Tsunami Cowboys was longlisted for the 2019 Screen Craft Cinematic Book Competition. Broken In: A Novel in Stories was a semifinalist for Hidden River Arts 2020 Hawk Mountain Short Story Collection Award and Finalist for Greece’s 2021 Eyelands Book Awards. The Trail Back Out was 2023 Winner in General Fiction for the San Francisco Book Festival, American Book Fest 2020 Best Book Award Finalist for Fiction Anthologies, 2021 IAN Best Book of the Year Award Finalist (Short Story Collection), 2022 Top Shelf Award Runner-up, and awarded a 2022 Wishing Shelf Book Awards Red Ribbon. The title story The Trail Back Out was longlisted for the 2021 Screen Craft Cinematic Short Story Award. Jadi blogs about arts, culture, and travels the world at http://jadicampbell.com/ and is on Instagram at Jadi.Campbell.