The Dough Does Not Argue at Three

My shift starts at ten in the evening, in a bakery on a side street south of the river. For the first hour there is only the radio turned low and the ovens coming up to heat. I tie my apron, wash my hands twice, and weigh out the rye. Nobody says much. The building is empty in a way it never is during the day.

Rye does not behave like wheat. It is heavy, it holds water, it goes sour if you look away too long. I keep the starter in a stoneware crock at the back of the cold room, and it has been alive longer than I have worked here. Some nights it smells of apples. Some nights of vinegar.

Feeding, Twice a Night

The starter gets fed at ten and again at two. Flour and water, roughly equal, stirred with a wooden spoon that has a crack down the handle. It rises slowly, which is what I want. A fast starter makes a bread with no patience in it, and the people at the market can taste the difference even if they cannot name it.

A starter is an argument with time, and by morning time has usually given in.

Shaping begins around half past two. I weigh each piece, round it, let it rest, then press it into the baskets. My hands know the temperature before I do. If the dough is too warm the loaves spread in the oven and come out flat and wide; too cold and they tear at the seam. I have made both mistakes many times.

The oven is loaded at four. For the next fifty minutes there is nothing to do but watch through the glass and listen. When the crust sets it cracks, a small ticking sound, like something cooling too fast. That sound is the only part of the job I would call beautiful, and I would not say so out loud in the bakery.

Six O'Clock, the Market

At six the first loaves go into the crates and I wheel them to the market, three streets over. The vegetable seller on the corner takes the dark rye and pays me in coins from a tin. We talk about the weather for perhaps two minutes. Then I walk back with the empty crates and the sky doing whatever it does in Graz in the morning.

By the time the city is loudest I am closing my curtains, and that is the arrangement I have made with it.

I am home by half past seven. The curtains in my room are heavy and the neighbours are already at work, so the stairwell smells of coffee and shoes. I eat something small, something I do not have to think about, and lie down. Sleep comes easily now. It did not in the first year.

People ask when I will go back to normal hours. I say I am waiting to see, which is true and also polite. The truth is that I like the hours between two and four, when the dough is quiet and no one expects anything of me.