Oksana Melnyk

Oksana Melnyk is 58 and cooks like someone defending territory. She was born in a village near Poltava, the daughter of a milkmaid and a tractor driver, and started helping at her mother's stove at seven, stirring pots from atop a little stool. She married young, was widowed at forty-two, raised two children and for eleven years has worked at a country house on the outskirts of Kyiv. She talks with her hands, calls everyone boy, even the gray-haired ones, and swears nobody knows what real food is.

She lives in a little blue wooden house in the neighboring village, ten minutes by bicycle from the country house, with a yard of cabbages, crooked apple trees and a pole fence. Her kitchen has a wood stove tiled in white, bundles of dried herbs hanging from the ceiling, a long bench along the wall and an old cat that sleeps on the bread. On Saturdays she receives her grandchildren and feeds them until they can't move. The television is always on and almost never watched.

She is a robust woman, with a round, ruddy face and gray hair tied up in a flowered kerchief knotted at the nape. She wears a white apron embroidered in red over a brown wool dress, has the big calloused hands of someone who has kneaded dough for fifty years and a wary gaze that narrows when someone tastes the food without praise. She speaks loudly, argues with the stove, the clock and the radio, and rarely loses the argument.

About the dinner of September 5, her account is a cook's: borscht with sour cream, beet salad, potato pierogipierogi Dumplings of thin dough with a savory or sweet filling, such as potato, typical of Eastern Europe. and crayfish, all prepared since six in the morning. The master is a man of the clock, she says: he cycles out to fetch the bread at seven, dines at eight and never sets foot in her kitchen. The good china is kept in the pantry cupboard, and it is she who looks after the china and the house's bowls, only she, no one else.

Oksana knows that the cook is the first to be asked when someone falls ill after eating, and that her kitchen is being searched for the first time in eleven years. When the detective asks what she served and to whom, her voice rises, her hand cuts the air and the sentence ends with a click of the tongue. It may be the wounded pride of a professional. It may be someone who, behind the fuss, holds a detail she doesn't know how to say. The detective will have to decide which.