Clementine and Nicholas, After the War by Justin Portela
In 1947 London, under the shadows of wartime events, mystical savant Chef Amos takes over a hotel restaurant, where Clementine and Nicholas's relationship intensifies while they prepare the perfect tomato soup.
He was a darling chef. Darling, really. The best. Oh, the odes the boys in the kitchen were singing on the morning of his arrival; Friday, December 5, 1947. They floated chatter about the exotic woods where he foraged his ingredients: Tasmania for the saffron, Ceylon for the cardamom. Who'd heard of any of it? Not me. He himself sprang up in Italy. Somewhere in the mountains, but it was also France depending on whom you asked. He had come to take over the restaurant and the tune was electric.
There are certain sequences of Amos' history that I knew to be undeniably true. First, that Amos was a Jew. Second, that Amos opened L'appartmento in Paris two years prior, one month after the Nazi surrender. Those were true for certain. There was a story that he took the direct train overnight from Oświęcim to Paris, the night of the liberation, and by the morning L'appartmento was open. But that slipped into the acres of lore that surrounded Amos' life-before-London. I could only say with certainty that L'appartmento was a restaurant and also Amos' apartment. It hosted one party each night with a maximum of three people since Amos only had four chairs at his kitchen table and one was reserved for him.
As is always the case with a cult of personality, too much childish Telephone haunted the details of what exactly he cooked and how he cooked it, so even though word spread like wild fireworks, even to unheard-of towns in Albania and the Near East, of the man who treated trios to the best meal of their life, nobody could never separate the liquid truths from the foamy fictions - that he caught fish with his teeth, for instance, or the talk of his underground salt dealings with the Chinese. And since nothing can remain pure in the public eye, L'appartmento, which was first described with intrepid curiosity, when the writers used words like "mystifying," and "provocative," was eventually cast derogatorily as "chic" and "modish," buried under hearsay as his table quickly filled with new aristocrats, socialites, and quietly suicidal politicians, who bought reservations on the private market and swore that Amos cooked the best food in the world. But these faceless and well-named people had said the same thing at every table at every so-called "great restaurant" in Stockholm and Athens and Abruzzo. The truth was that they ate too quietly and too neatly and never discussed the food outside those politically golden utterances of "Delicious," and "Divine!"
One morning without word, Amos left his apartment to the rats and disappeared into the cool orange morning. Everybody has a story of what he did for those two years, but on the morning of December 4th we received a telegram that he was coming to London to stay; 24 hours later the rye swing of the door announced his arrival.
He moved silently towards my podium as if he walked on padded feet, and it was not until he stood over me, so many meters of sharp angles and distended bones, that I became aware of his soundless and tranquil skeleton.
"Good morning, Clementine. I am Amos," he opened, and shook my hand, his tendons extending from his closely set shoulders, which gave the appearance of an upper body that was composed entirely of taut copper wires.
"Good morning, Amos," I replied, "The boys are waiting in the kitchen for you."
"After you," he said, smiling a mouth of all-differently-sized teeth, and motioned me to the kitchen.
"Oh no," I said, in a child's voice, "I'm the maître d'hôtel. I stay at the podium."
"We can find somebody else for the podium, please," he said.
"I've never cooked," I told him.
"And I'd never assembled a Maschinengewehr 34 when I got to the Lager, but somebody saw something in me, so I learned quickly."
"Good morning," Amos opened to the boys, who had hushedly semicircled around the sparkling steel center island - recently polished. He unfurled from his bag only a single knife. "My name is Amos. I am a Jew."
Then he shook the hand of every one of the boys. He asked their names, and he said his name back each time:
"I'm Arthur, sir."
"Amos."
"Theodore, sir."
"Amos."
And so on.
Finally, he arrived at dear Nicholas.
"Which means you are Nicholas?" Amos asked.
"Yes, sir," Nicholas replied, but now it was different because Nicholas was the strongest of them all.
"And these are your men?" Amos asked.
"No, sir. They are your men. This is your kitchen."
Amos looked at Nicholas with a queer eye, still holding onto his hand, and replied, "You had a head chef before me, correct?"
"Yes," Nicholas replied.
"And he left?" Amos asked, and Nicholas said nothing. "Or you got rid of him?"
"We voted. The kitchen was going in circles, nothing new was happening and nobody was learning a thing."
"So, in short, he could not cook?" Amos asked.
"In short, yes."
"How many nights of service passed between his departure and my arrival?"
"A month, give or take," Nicholas replied.
"Which means that, for the past month, this has been your kitchen, and these have been your men?"
"Yes," Nicholas said, which was true twice over, since many of these boys had also been under Nicholas at Dunkirk and Walcheren.
"In that case it is settled. These are your men, Clementine included. And you, Nicholas, you are my man."
"Thank you, sir," Nicholas replied, and Amos interlaced his brittle digits through Nicholas' prominent fingers, and in Amos' feebly pulsing grip one saw the splotches of gray and yellow on his hands and the triangular composition of his cadaverous wrists, and between these men was a heat that spread through the room, a warmth that, I suppose, can only exist in men who have seen a world without love.
These other chefs were strong men. I teased them, but many had fought, at Normandy and Dunkirk, and they had become fluent in war and now food, which is most impressive because those things are opposites of each other. But none were like Nicholas, who was also proficient as a poet and had been published - only small magazines albeit, but everything was written directly from the trenches and nobody could deny that his writing was true. Nicholas kept diligent logs of his days and how he slept and how he dreamed. Before he went to sleep he gave names to his days. One day might be named in metaphor: "The day that I rediscovered my mind," but some were more literal - "The day spent in line at the library." And I must also disclose that Nicholas was a terrifically unselfish lover, and believe me that I tortured the boy. Most nights he came home to find me weeping on his floor; when he comforted me, I ran away. I would hurry down the steps and my tears would turn to dance as I dashed into the night to some past lover, some newly minted attorney or some son of titled landowners. Most often Belinda, who was a nurse at a local hospital and the only woman I'd ever been with. Nicholas never minded me coming back in the morning and he would only smile when I unlocked the door.
"Good morning," he would say, kissing me on the head and putting on hot water just the same. I was always cold then because I was so magnificently skinny. I never apologized to him and he always let me keep the keys. Surely he tasted other women - his life was not an ascetic or an unhappy one - but one saw clearly that he was waiting for me.
"Well then," Amos emerged from the embrace, "shall we?"
We were all going to make a ballotine. It was Amos' way of getting to know us - to conduct our orchestra. He had sent a memo in advance of his arrival with a list of ingredients he would require, and I do not need to get into all the details, because really it is painstaking. What is important is that the dish is quite technical.
Oh, what the hell, we're not rationing ink are we? And we're all Epicureans here. I'll explain. It is a French dish in which one deconstructs and reconstructs a chicken. You put first the thighs, legs and wings, diced into workable pieces, in the blender with, typically, mushrooms, cream, butter, and whatever else you would like. Then flatten the breasts out completely. Take the raw purée, which looks like anything besides food, and wrap it within the flattened breasts - does this make sense? Separately fry the detached skin in oil until crisp but still manipulable. Then cover the whole lot with the skin and bake. If done correctly one is left with something resembling the original chicken, each part cooked separately and re-attached.
No such dish occurred.
The Darling Chef smelled the raw chicken and nearly turned apoplectic. I tell you again that he grabbed the chicken by the legs and pressed the spine to his nostrils, which left a drool-like pooling of chicken liquid against the bottom of his nose and the upper crust of his thin lip hairs. This chicken, he would not even feed it to the rodents, he declared. He made this phrase literal - a sous chef was made to discard the raw chickens outside the town lines - he really did drive all the way out, he said later. "London's rats deserve better than this," Amos said. And in the strangest, wind-sucking way, not one person laughed when he said it, nor did they even come close.
Instead, after overturning the frigid airs and the pantries, deshelving cans and placing his tongue against every spice and sweet in the kitchen. The Darling Chef walked out of the refrigerator. "The tomatoes are quite nice," he said, throwing out every single other vegetable and carb, announcing we were all going to prepare tomato soup.
"We will begin tomorrow at sunrise," he said.
After the first day of Amos, Nicholas had stolen a tomato from the kitchen. I walked in on him staring with operatic intensity, trying to decode the secret of its prodigy.
He turned to me with the fever of the desert sun, "Clem! Come taste this. Does this taste like some sort of special tomato? Would you feed it to the King?"
"The skins are quite firm, they're taut," I said.
"Then why make soup? He's just going to blend them anyway, what does the texture of the skin matter?" Nicholas sat down on the counter in a huff. He jittered his hands and then stood up immediately.
He looked back at me, still vibrating. "I'm so proud of you. Do you know that? You'll be a wonderful chef."
In truth, I was impossibly excited to cook. Amos had designated me saucier: "This is the central paradox of cooking," Amos explained. "Men truly believe that we eat the charred flesh for any other reason but its nutrients. In a perfect world, we would eat nothing but the sauce. Everything else is texture and garnish. This is why all great sauces have been composed by women. They can see through the hologram of tradition."
Even life's most precious constants had changed. Everything became up for debate - buildings and nations but also boys; chubby juniors who used to play toy trains but now collected Nazi scalps and came home from France wanting to dress like women, but sometimes the changes were almost imperceptible - Nicholas returned drinking coffee instead of tea.
I had decided, personally, probably around Midway, that I was not going to change anymore when it was over. However I was at the end of the fighting - that's how I would be for the rest of my life. On the day of the Axis surrender I took reservations at the podium, drank from a flask between seatings, and spoke to nobody. That would be my perpetuity, I decided. I would drink, overeat, and sometimes throw up afterward - superfluous and safe. But now I was ready to change again.
"When I walked out the door," Nicholas opened, still eyeing the tomato, "I figured there must be some illusionist's trick. Surely, he is not going to place some tomatoes in with some butter and ladle it into a bowl, yes? But I've been thinking more. What if it is that simple? What if he is not better than us in the way that one horse is faster than another, but in the way that a tank is better than a horse, since a horse sees a tank and doesn't even understand what he's looking at."
I made this mental note. I would arrive the next morning early and I would perfect the béchamel. This is what the French call the "mother sauce," and it is one part flour, one part butter, and 10 parts milk. I would master this classic. I would sear this formula so deep into my skull that I could suffer an ischemic stroke while stirring and still cart a perfect béchamel to the pass.
"What have you been writing?" I asked him.
"I have a new poem. I like it. And not only because I wrote it," he said, adjusting himself. "It's on the table if you'd like."
"I'll read it first thing tomorrow. But hush now, my darling," I said. Tonight I would grip his hair a bit harder than usual because I only had one last night left with Nicholas as my superior. Now I was the saucier, which meant I was invincible, and tomorrow I would emerge, Aphrodite from the clamshell, and Nicholas would never be able to touch me the same way again.
I felt another change coming, just in that moment. What was my favorite food? A chef needed one, I thought. Yesterday I would have said cinnamon toast. In the days before the war, when I had a far more serious drinking problem, I became known for a pattern of behavior my friends would call The Mountain. I shared a flat in Brixton with three girls. Since living alone with other women was for whores, our home was legally considered a brothel and we spent our nights drunk with the aforementioned attorneys. We would have been happy to sleep with them for free but we were not so foolish to turn down money if offered. Arriving home, considerably sloshed, smelling like a child's birthday party - cigarettes, caramel, sweat - we sat and gossiped; they finished off aperitifs and I consumed The Mountain, which was a loaf of whatever bread we had, slathered in a stick of butter and hailstormed from on-high with cinnamon and sugar. I ate this meal as quickly as possible, told scandalous secrets between sludging bites, felt a never-before-known-to-woman sort of bliss, threw the whole thing up, then slept like the dead.
But tonight he took me, the soldier and the chef, two livings built on the destruction of flesh, and I thought to myself, in the face of this beautifully dark-haired man, in his thrusts, the hell-bound gravity of however many dark-haired Germans he had exterminated, that my favorite food is now the watermelon. My craving is for bright citrus. I'd like to eat a living garden, mint and mangoes and peach and of course clementines, each bite dripping down my neck, a honeymilk coating on my skin which would be crystalized and hardened sugar across the edges of my chin and lips in the morning.
Afterward.
"You're not staying over?" he asked, as I finally put my feet to the cold wood and began tightening my dress.
I was different now. I was always different after. Men came home colder from the war but I came home from Nicholas burning hot. I needed to get outside. Any longer in the apartment and I would be sick.
"I'll stay over once I get settled. Once we get settled with Amos," I told him.
I would leave and go to fuck Belinda, I decided. And maybe we would smoke chemical drugs and fry ourselves. Either way I wasn't planning on sleeping that night; the béchamel could wait.
"This will take some time," The Darling Chef said in the morning, by which we all thought he meant an hour. But he did not mean an hour, and in fact, he meant days.
I hadn't slept, my eyes glowed red like a burning barn, and it took my whole constitution not to tip over with each step.
We were all sent with our own lists of ingredients to be sourced and returned by the afternoon. My list had only one item and no listed quantity, in sloppy writing:
My first attempt was an arthritic Egyptian man at the Chelsea market who scanned me up and down before making his declaration: "Never 'eard of it." Outside the Egyptian's stall, the first few snowflakes were hovering down with uncertain flight. So it went with the Hungarian brothers at the next stall. "We were biologists in Budapest," they declared in unison, "We know spices." The third time was equally charmless, as well as the fourth, the fifth, and the sixth. This continued down the line until the final resort, a tall Russian man in a thick woolen overcoat whom the other vendors called "The Prowler." He kept a dark and wet stall in the farthest corner of the market where his Russian children sat on turned-over buckets reading the great works of Dostoyevsky. According to the Hungarians, The Prowler could procure anything, but not Sasiv Powder, The Prowler stated pointedly after consulting a small Russian Almanac kept in the jacket of his black coat, "There is no such thing, I swear it to you. May my mother die of cancer of the eyes."
I returned headlong, through the stain-glassed ceiling of the dining room and into the kitchen, where I told Amos confidently that Sasiv Powder did not exist. He nodded quickly.
"May I tell you a story?" He asked me.
The rest of the boys, sensing something important, killed the heat on their burners and gathered around the center island.
"Forgive me," he says, pulling a ladle from a pot of ginger cream. "But we Jews tell long and impenetrable stories. This one is no different."
An orphaned girl spends her teenage years following peddlers and circus freaks. By the age of 18 she has finally saved enough money to settle somewhere, so she wanders into the town of Sasiv, says out loud, "This is as good a town as any," and the Rabbi Leyba helps her procure a small cottage on the town's edge. "Though you must soon get married," he warns her. The woman agrees but crosses her fingers behind her back.
Behind her home is a deep forest. "What is back there?" she asks the Rabbi Leyba on the day that she moves her few belongings into the small brick home.
"I do not know, but some say it is beautiful."
The next morning, after the woman has washed the laundry and set the potatoes to boil, she clears branches with her hands and stomps fungi under her feet as she descends down the path for a minute or so. That is, until she begins to hear the barking. A large dog flies up from the bottom of the path with the speed of a rabbit, throwing barks and snarls and spit in thick ropy globule. Seeing his tail and head level with his spine, running straight and violently like a fired arrow, the woman retreats home. The clouds were breaking, the sun was wavering an orange circle in the thick sky, and the woman decides she will try again after the dog has died.
In those many years the woman becomes very busy and the dog remains healthy. Each year Rabbi Leyba calls the woman to his home, cooks her dinner, and implores her to get married. Each time she apologizes, says she has been quite busy, and promises to get married immediately. But year after year, she crosses her fingers.
Nearly two decades later, on the morning of her 35th birthday, the Rabbi arrives in a very serious tone. "This is a small town and it is not long until you are barren," he said. "There is only one man left for you, his name is Pazice." The woman knew Pazice because everyone in Sasiv knew Pazice and all joked that his brain sat in a pool of cold gazpacho. A visiting Rabbi once came from Lublin and observed Pazice exiting a pub. The visiting Rabbi turned to the Rabbi Leyba and asked if Pazice was the dumbest creature in all of Sasiv. "No," the Rabbi Leyba responded, "But he best hope the turkeys don't die."
The next day, the Rabbi Leyba brought Pazice to the woman's home, where the large fool gleamed the thousand-mile grin of the idiot, stupider than the woman had ever imagined, and ate all of the cooked food in the house before running off to pick dandelions from the grass.
The woman storms into the living room and pulls a coat from the closet. "I cannot marry this man," she tells the Rabbi Leyba, "There are many more towns like Sasiv and many generous Rabbis."
The rabbi attempts to calm her, "Pazice is simply nervous. Or perhaps he is just playing dumb."
"If he is playing dumb," she says, wrapping her tassel around her waist and tightening her scarf, "Then he is winning." But before she can fasten her final button, the Rabbi points out to the yard, "Look," he says, guiding her eyes towards idiot Pazice, galloping merrily down the path.
"Pazice!" The woman runs outside, her unbuttoned coat flying in the wind as each step of her boot imprints into the muddy grass. She yells out again, "Pazice, you idiot!" but her cries are cloaked by ear-splitting barking. "That fool!" the woman yells aloud, tumbling down the hill, expecting to find a dead dimwit and a well-fed dog at the bottom of the path, but arrives to her surprise, to discover Pazice and the dog. Playing. They are playing. Pazice is covered in bites and scratches so clearly they were not so friendly at first, but he is alive, and the dog is giddily lapping at the bloody face he has just slashed open, Pazice giggling gayly as he rolls in the grass. The path itself is a dead end, leading only to the mossy brick wall of an abandoned factory, but there they are, rolling and laughing and jumping; two slobbering beasts.
Amos' kitchen was entirely rearranged the next day and men passed through like trains through Siberian blizzards, bodies barreling through at queer hours holding unlabeled bags of unknown cargo. The restaurant had been closed for two entire days with no explanation given to the public and that day was the third. The first two days, it seemed, Amos was simply getting to know us. But now he was truly cooking - today was the leviathan.
I was assigned to a cream concoction and was given only raw milk and vinegar. I followed Amos' instructions exactly; I was made to churn the butter, convert the remaining milk to buttermilk and cream, skim the whey and casein proteins, freeze and spin the fats to further isolate the globules, and only then, after four back-breaking hours of military-grade chemistry, with constant reference to his scratchy and torn notebooks, was I allowed to begin cooking anything.
Slowly and carefully I deposited the precisely dictated quantities of spices and vegetation into my cream before stirring with religious fervor. But the sauce did not froth or thicken when exposed to heat, rather, it became a greenly discolored chemical lake and smelled like nothing that was born of Christendom. Nicholas was off collecting ingredients and none of the other boys had any idea what to do.
Theodore suggested I find Nicholas' journals, which were a cornucopia of solutions to every possible culinary issue.
I didn't mean to pry. I truly didn't. But did he not think to keep two separate journals? One for his recipes and another for his personal affairs? Yesterday's entry read:
A strange encounter with Belinda tonight.
I only knew Belinda as the woman that Clem would sometimes run off to. She was a nurse who kept harlot's hours and I had seen her some early mornings on the way to the fish market. I knew her face but it wasn't clear she knew mine, but, in either case, I never had anything but the fullest respect for her and the monopoly she had on herself and her body. Her eyes were nearly silver and they were deep.
I was meant to meet a young Irish chef who had just joined the brigade. He chose a small pub in Marlybone which was a nice walk from Paddington. The sight of the rubble is still a daily hallucination, though I have to say they are rebuilding quickly.
"Can I trade you?" Belinda approached me as I waited for the Irishman, not recognizing me, "One pint of lager for three English cigarettes."
I accepted blankly.
She stood directly next to me, smoked slowly, and said nothing. My eyes darted everywhere but at hers. It was terribly awkward for me, her standing so close, her smoke falling vacantly onto my shoulders as if she'd forgotten I was there, but I suspected she felt at ease in these sorts of tempests. When she finished she asked what I did and I told her bluntly that I cooked. I tried to convey my desire for privacy but she addressed the lingering issue: "Clementine is one of my closest friends in this world," she said from the naked blue.
"So you do know who I am?" I asked her.
"And you, me," she replied, keeping her ankles floating near mine, and still no sign of the Irish boy.
"She tells me you are a writer," Belinda followed up.
I told her I wrote in the evenings.
"You're a novelist? Like Moby Dick."
"Poetry," I said.
"May I read something?" she asked me.
"I don't have anything on me," I said.
"Can you recall something from memory?" She asked.
I remembered the first line from last night's poem.
"That's all you remember?" She was right not to believe me. I delivered the next two aloud.
She seemed to like what she heard and she locked her ankles around mine.
Aside: When I fall asleep with Clementine, I feel clean and nectarous. When I sleep alone, which are nights when Clementine sleeps with Belinda or elsewhere, I feel old and ugly. With Belinda, who asked about my poetry, I did not feel ugly, in fact, I became aware, through the sight of her lustful intoxication, of the fullness of my chest in my shirt.
Back to story: The barrier of touch is broken. New elastics. Under the bar, her knees began to scrape to my thighs and I allowed it. We share a bottle and then another. The Irishman was quite late so we smoked a fair deal and at one point I kissed her bare hand. Belinda's family had left Moscow at the same time as Nabokov, briefly to Lodz, where they had a cousin, then eastward to London where her father quickly regained his former status and wealth. She propositioned me.
"Would you like to spend the night together?" she asked.
I could see sex in the veins of her dainty wrists - the way that I had twisted and preoccupied her blood all night. I could see her desire: to drop down to her back and to be split open, like a skull, by me, whose hands once jaggedly split the neck of some curly Hungarian boy, my limbs still inexperienced in the art of spinal separation, failing the first snap, awkwardly felling the underfed child with my knees to his shoulders, pressing my thumbs to his lymph nodes in hopes to hasten the choking, then trying the snap twice, three times, four, his death coming at some point in the middle, but now, these slick fingers, my pads are polished like caviar pearls
"I can't," I said.
"Oh hell, why not? Why not let the darkness consume us?" she asked. "Here and now, let it come. I'd be devastated if we couldn't sleep together tonight. I mean that. Absolutely gutted."
Belinda kept her face close to mine. I said, "You can tell quite clearly that I am attracted to you. Isn't that enough? Do you really need me to fuck you? Or can you be content with knowing that I would?"
"No," she said, "That would not be enough." This creature, she was pushing down toward nothingness, and she was not content to stop halfway.
Important to remember however: Belinda asked about my poetry.
I do not know if the Irishman ever arrived and I do not know where Clementine slept.
I looked around briefly for an Irishman. When had we brought on an Irishman? I couldn't spot one. Not the point. I rushed out and said no goodbyes.
I had a new sort of clarity. I'd ask Nicholas to marry me. The snow was washing the dust from the sidewalk as I sped away from the restaurant, and I thought only of those Japanese suicides from the news; the failed soldiers who gutted themselves like fish. I grew warm in my armpits at the vision of this disinfection, this total reset.
I raced up the stairs into the empty apartment and over to the table where I had left the poem but the room had been tidied and rearranged from last night. I tossed open drawers and found it wedged beneath a stack of Whitman.
This was the part he had recited to Belinda. I scanned down the last three lines.
I didn't understand. Was I the circle? Or was I the salt? What is he waiting for? Who is the circle? Why can men only speak of their feelings in riddles? I wanted to yell.
I gave up on understanding Nicholas and Amos both and decided to make a frosting, which I figured was a sort of sauce. I loved Nicholas forever, this frosting would prove it, and that thought alone elevated me with the vigor of a dewy morning.
For the dry batter, in a recipe taken from Nicholas' notebook.
But then I heard the click of the door, and I felt something different. I felt that this was not a good idea.
My stomach began the ascent of a rickety biplane and I began to feel feverish. I almost yelped as I watched the jigging of the door and awaited Nicholas' entrance, but the lock did not turn fully, and I hung in some cruel infinity for a lingered moment as the hinge returned to still. I could feel the insects crawling through my arteries so I bolted to the door and swung it open, hoping to end my misery. It was only the neighbor, arriving home drunk,
"Apologies," he muttered, "I must have stuck my key in the wrong door."
Now the switch had unflipped, remembering now that Nicholas would soon be alive and standing in front of me, and I could not find anywhere to be that felt comfortable. More than anything I felt cold.
I closed the door and wrapped myself in blankets and ran the shower for additional heat. Maybe, I thought, as the steam filled the room and the timbre of the rattling showerhead echoed against the metal pots and pans, today is not the day to ask Nicholas to marry me. Is there a word for this sort of anxiety: The fear that something is simply not meant to be done at a particular place and a particular time? That, by some mandate of the universe, this was meant to happen next week, in a garden, or next summer, after they clear the rest of the rubble and rebuild Guildhall. Just maybe, I began to think, that asking Nicholas to marry me tonight would, and how can I even begin to express this, but it would ripple, you understand? And true to that ripple I might find myself, decades from now, in some small brown flat scattered with cans and old wine bottles, married to some Pazice or another. And perhaps it would be just that moment that I come to realize that it all could have been avoided if I had just shown a bit of self-restraint all those years ago. Perhaps, I thought, I should just wait for some beautiful moment with Nicholas, some gorgeous dance under some sandy moon in Tehran, and I could ask him then.
But no, I decided. Hell is a waiting room. I swallowed my nervous gut when I heard another figure coming up the stairs, ascending quickly like the blitzkrieg, surely this was Nicholas. I was simply going to say it when he opened the door. Hell, even it if is another drunkard, I will ask him to marry me just for the practice. I would take a deep breath when I heard the door open, then I would count to three, then I would say it.
3. Nicholas put a bag of provisions down and looked queerly at the running shower. 2. He had a bandage over his hand, probably because he'd burned it. 1. I could not remember what I wanted to ask because I could only see the word blitzkrieg, which had impregnated my temples and blacked out my vision, just for a moment, and there was Nicholas, behind my eyelids, being awoken in confusion by those whistling bombs and meth-addled Pantsir throwing their guttural tongue as if they were born to scream and were content to do it forever. My mind briefly flashed Nicholas dead in the flaming bunker, roasting meat, the burning bush.
"I want you to marry me," I said, remembering my cue just as the first tear loosed from my eye.
"Clem, darling," Nicholas took one stride towards me. "Sit down, you look so pale."
"I think I'm going to be sick," I said, which was true, because sometimes these things come all at once.
"Right now?"
The whole sea of my intestines on a one-way lift, I could not even tell him yes before it began to happen. The wave filled my mouth and Nicholas shoved me swiftly towards the bathroom; I tried to swallow back down the acid but more bile came up at the same time and the whole system clogged. I emptied myself across the bathroom floor, whimpering like an animal in a trap, drenching my clothes and the floor and the toilet seat.
The unflinching Nicholas reached his hands directly into my mud and slipped my shirt from me. He knelt down, indifferent to the caking filth newly upon him, and slid my socks from my feet. He put all my clothes in the bath because he is the only human that can make vomiting courteous.
I only cried more, one eye rested against the seat of the toilet, my cheek lightly soaking in a half-inch pool of sunset-colored ejection, and the other pointed towards Nicholas' infinite light. "Did you hear me? I want you to marry me."
He flushed the toilet once, sending the contents of my guts down to the sewer - how enviable. "Let's finish the task at hand, then we can talk about this," Nicholas said.
"No," I told him, and it came out more pathetic than the written word suggests, "I want to talk about it now." Then I threw up again, my head falling heavily and rising back up slowly. Nicholas stepped away for a moment then squatted down and put ginger ale to my lips. Seeing myself briefly in the metal of the can I reviled at the grease spread across my face, slick like popcorn oil, with the harvest technicolor of carrots and half-digested peas. "Is this about Belinda?" Nicholas asked.
"No," I snapped, but I knew instantly I had neither the head nor the stomach to lie. "Ok, yes, it is. But isn't that such a human thing, to only realize what you have when you're in danger of losing it?"
And then I threw up one last time, and the vomit splashed onto my underwear, so he neatly folded those into the bath as well, which gave me all the answers I needed. I laid down, my empty stomach pressing nakedly to the cool tile.
"I understand. But can you just tell me why?" I asked him, "Is it because I'm unreliable? Or is it something else? Please don't say it's because you think I can't cook. Did Theodore tell you about the buttermilk? It's only been two days. How well could you cook on your second day?"
Then, for the first time in my life, I saw Nicholas break. It was not more than a moment, and it moved as quickly as a thought, but it was a small crack in his eye and a quiver in his lip.
"No," he said, "It's because I don't believe that you actually love me."
"What? What does that even mean? How could you ever know that?" I said, at which point I was yelling.
"Tell me this," he opened, "what if you change your mind in the morning?"
"I won't. I know that I won't," I said without hesitation.
"That's my point exactly. That sort of certainty can only come from fraudulent love," he said.
"What does that even mean?" I asked him, because really, what did that even mean?
"Has Amos told you about the nurse at Auschwitz?" he asked me.
And then I got quiet, which is the only thing that can happen when that word emerges from the black hole.
"The German nurse that ran the infirmary and the men who fell in love with her on their deathbeds. This woman was nothing special, just a plain and flat-chested Nazi. But they were afraid."
And I put my head down, as if during a haircut, because I couldn't look at him. "I am scared. But why shouldn't I be?"
A moment passed and I was sweating badly. "I made frosting," I said through the lurching of my intestines.
Nicholas moved systematically to the kitchen and washed his hands. He checked my forehead with the back of his velvet hand, and, with the other, set down a small butter plate of sliced cake on a small circle of floor tile that had escaped the pooling of vomit. I was afraid to even look at it and my forearms to my fingernails were lacquered with bile, so Nicholas fed me with his clean fingers; splotches of icing spilled down my still-naked body but in terms of the taste it was the purest form of dancing decadence, melting through my whole corpse like some vomit-soaked baptism. Why hadn't he tasted it?
"You know what, I don't accept," I said, trying to pick my head up, "maybe you don't love me!"
"Why do you say that?" he asked, and to be truthful, I didn't have an answer. I laid back and motioned my head for more frosting.
"Let me think," I whispered to him.
Which I did, for a minute or so, before I came to something that I was satisfied with.
"I couldn't break your heart," I said, "But you're breaking mine. Which proves, well, it proves that you don't love me enough to let yourself get hurt."
The plate was returned to the kitchen and Nicholas silently started running the bath water to wash down the vomit. He was contemplating, which frustrated me very very badly, so I yelled at him. "No, you idiot! Don't you see! This is my point! Anybody can say that love means anything. Love isn't these little made-up tests. They're just, it's abstract, it's nothing. It's just bad poetry!"
He flushed down more vomit and we moved in the same circles and got nowhere. We agreed that I would stay the night and then in the morning I would be nothing to him but the worst chef in his brigade.
It was dark when I awoke again - Nicholas was sleeping, my heart was racing, and my breathing was labored as if I'd grown obese in the night. I knew I was going to be sick again, which I was. I threw up in the bathtub because I couldn't make it to the toilet. Then I finished off the frosting. Then I threw up one last time.
I took a bottle of wine out into the street. It was dark in the apartment and I did not want to wake Nicholas by looking for a wine opener, so I grabbed the first item I saw, which was a long needle, and I stabbed a hole through the cork and sucked the wine out as I stepped out into the faceless echo of the dark blue night.
The issue was that I had broken my own promise. I had sworn not to change, and I changed. But now I would return to the way that things were at the end of the war. I would not rely on Belinda for anything besides drugs and sex and I would never see Nicholas outside of work. I would rush around, going only where I was not needed - a small vortex of despair moving through the world like the still eye of a hurricane. I continued to suck my wine. Life would go on without me and I would become contented to the second circle of society, to the outskirts of night-dwellers and whores who expected everything and received nothing. I would spin along London streets in violet light, as I was spinning now, twice as fast as those good women who made sound investments and minded their credit. To spin twice as fast and die half as young.
It is difficult to say where I woke up because I woke up so many times. I had gone missing inside myself and inside the city. An officer jostled me before sunrise and I moved to a bench. The bench filled with commuters at dawn and I moved to the park. The morning sun burned my eyes but at least by then I was no longer shivering. I retraced my steps to the restaurant and it was neither happiness nor sadness, not even physical or even emotional, but an abstract understanding, like the force that compels men to curl up and hide before they die, that I was now the anchorite that I was meant to be forever.
But today was the day, I discovered suddenly, upon entering the doors of the restaurant. The day of the soup. I say "day" quite flippantly because it was only the day for me. It had actually happened in the middle of the night, in fact, and we all received calls from Amos to arrive immediately. I was the only one who hadn't arrived, and Nicholas was sent out in search of me.
I stood before all the boys who had congregated around a small pot of soup in the middle of the kitchen. They stared - they had been waiting for hours. There was filth from the top of my forehead to the bottom of my soul and I smelled like a dog returned from Sodom.
I apologized, at least I tried, in a sort of frenzied and crazed way where my English began to slur like drunken Gaelic. I was still drunk. Unblessed by God, I knew, corrupted in a mangy and vile body that was running at 100 degrees.
"Please," Amos said, "Try the soup. You've worked very hard."
I filled the golden spoon with the red liquid, looked at Nicholas, and sighed. I considered my obituary, in those back pages of the newspapers that were only glanced at by the chronically bored. I wished to be euthanized, but I did the second-best thing, which was to raise the spoon to my lips.
Nicholas and I spent that night, that day and also that night, mostly making love, in endless Talmudic dialogue over what Amos had done with the soup. It sounds silly to write but then again it is always embarrassing to wring out a towel that is so wet with truth.
The first revelation was I had never indeed tasted anything before that soup. Amos told us that the one bowl of soup had required 683 tomatoes. "They are all in there," he said, which he didn't much explain but he, in Nicholas' terms, "Removed every superfluous atom, leaving only the purest essence of the tomato, surely what God intended for Eden."
That other revelation is that, though one is born into this world alone and one will die alone, a day can be the day of 683 tomatoes. And surely we will still die, perhaps of cancer of the eyes, and surely the world will turn to ashes and sand in our mouths and we will die all one million small deaths in the tiny cages we will build for ourselves in the name of freedom. But we can say I love you, even just once, and we can say it hard, whether we mean it or not.
"I can't promise you anything in the morning," I told Nicholas that night.
"I've never expected you to," he pillowed his warm hand up my thighs and my whole heart was Christmastime.
"But right now, I love you," I told him. "I love you, Nicholas."
"I love you too," he said, and his words forced themselves down my esophagus and into my spine and through to my ankle bones.
Tomorrow morning, I knew, the sunshine would again burn my eyes and I would get the same half-drunk as yesterday.
But for now, I loved my poet-chef, one night at a time. Satin darkness out the window and there was cool red blood in his cheeks.
"I love you," I told him.
"I love you too," he replied.
"I love you, Nicholas. IloveyouIloveyouIloveyou."
 |
| Image generated with OpenAI |
There are certain sequences of Amos' history that I knew to be undeniably true. First, that Amos was a Jew. Second, that Amos opened L'appartmento in Paris two years prior, one month after the Nazi surrender. Those were true for certain. There was a story that he took the direct train overnight from Oświęcim to Paris, the night of the liberation, and by the morning L'appartmento was open. But that slipped into the acres of lore that surrounded Amos' life-before-London. I could only say with certainty that L'appartmento was a restaurant and also Amos' apartment. It hosted one party each night with a maximum of three people since Amos only had four chairs at his kitchen table and one was reserved for him.
As is always the case with a cult of personality, too much childish Telephone haunted the details of what exactly he cooked and how he cooked it, so even though word spread like wild fireworks, even to unheard-of towns in Albania and the Near East, of the man who treated trios to the best meal of their life, nobody could never separate the liquid truths from the foamy fictions - that he caught fish with his teeth, for instance, or the talk of his underground salt dealings with the Chinese. And since nothing can remain pure in the public eye, L'appartmento, which was first described with intrepid curiosity, when the writers used words like "mystifying," and "provocative," was eventually cast derogatorily as "chic" and "modish," buried under hearsay as his table quickly filled with new aristocrats, socialites, and quietly suicidal politicians, who bought reservations on the private market and swore that Amos cooked the best food in the world. But these faceless and well-named people had said the same thing at every table at every so-called "great restaurant" in Stockholm and Athens and Abruzzo. The truth was that they ate too quietly and too neatly and never discussed the food outside those politically golden utterances of "Delicious," and "Divine!"
One morning without word, Amos left his apartment to the rats and disappeared into the cool orange morning. Everybody has a story of what he did for those two years, but on the morning of December 4th we received a telegram that he was coming to London to stay; 24 hours later the rye swing of the door announced his arrival.
He moved silently towards my podium as if he walked on padded feet, and it was not until he stood over me, so many meters of sharp angles and distended bones, that I became aware of his soundless and tranquil skeleton.
"Good morning, Clementine. I am Amos," he opened, and shook my hand, his tendons extending from his closely set shoulders, which gave the appearance of an upper body that was composed entirely of taut copper wires.
"Good morning, Amos," I replied, "The boys are waiting in the kitchen for you."
"After you," he said, smiling a mouth of all-differently-sized teeth, and motioned me to the kitchen.
"Oh no," I said, in a child's voice, "I'm the maître d'hôtel. I stay at the podium."
"We can find somebody else for the podium, please," he said.
"I've never cooked," I told him.
"And I'd never assembled a Maschinengewehr 34 when I got to the Lager, but somebody saw something in me, so I learned quickly."
"Good morning," Amos opened to the boys, who had hushedly semicircled around the sparkling steel center island - recently polished. He unfurled from his bag only a single knife. "My name is Amos. I am a Jew."
Then he shook the hand of every one of the boys. He asked their names, and he said his name back each time:
"I'm Arthur, sir."
"Amos."
"Theodore, sir."
"Amos."
And so on.
Finally, he arrived at dear Nicholas.
"Which means you are Nicholas?" Amos asked.
"Yes, sir," Nicholas replied, but now it was different because Nicholas was the strongest of them all.
"And these are your men?" Amos asked.
"No, sir. They are your men. This is your kitchen."
Amos looked at Nicholas with a queer eye, still holding onto his hand, and replied, "You had a head chef before me, correct?"
"Yes," Nicholas replied.
"And he left?" Amos asked, and Nicholas said nothing. "Or you got rid of him?"
"We voted. The kitchen was going in circles, nothing new was happening and nobody was learning a thing."
"So, in short, he could not cook?" Amos asked.
"In short, yes."
"How many nights of service passed between his departure and my arrival?"
"A month, give or take," Nicholas replied.
"Which means that, for the past month, this has been your kitchen, and these have been your men?"
"Yes," Nicholas said, which was true twice over, since many of these boys had also been under Nicholas at Dunkirk and Walcheren.
"In that case it is settled. These are your men, Clementine included. And you, Nicholas, you are my man."
"Thank you, sir," Nicholas replied, and Amos interlaced his brittle digits through Nicholas' prominent fingers, and in Amos' feebly pulsing grip one saw the splotches of gray and yellow on his hands and the triangular composition of his cadaverous wrists, and between these men was a heat that spread through the room, a warmth that, I suppose, can only exist in men who have seen a world without love.
These other chefs were strong men. I teased them, but many had fought, at Normandy and Dunkirk, and they had become fluent in war and now food, which is most impressive because those things are opposites of each other. But none were like Nicholas, who was also proficient as a poet and had been published - only small magazines albeit, but everything was written directly from the trenches and nobody could deny that his writing was true. Nicholas kept diligent logs of his days and how he slept and how he dreamed. Before he went to sleep he gave names to his days. One day might be named in metaphor: "The day that I rediscovered my mind," but some were more literal - "The day spent in line at the library." And I must also disclose that Nicholas was a terrifically unselfish lover, and believe me that I tortured the boy. Most nights he came home to find me weeping on his floor; when he comforted me, I ran away. I would hurry down the steps and my tears would turn to dance as I dashed into the night to some past lover, some newly minted attorney or some son of titled landowners. Most often Belinda, who was a nurse at a local hospital and the only woman I'd ever been with. Nicholas never minded me coming back in the morning and he would only smile when I unlocked the door.
"Good morning," he would say, kissing me on the head and putting on hot water just the same. I was always cold then because I was so magnificently skinny. I never apologized to him and he always let me keep the keys. Surely he tasted other women - his life was not an ascetic or an unhappy one - but one saw clearly that he was waiting for me.
"Well then," Amos emerged from the embrace, "shall we?"
We were all going to make a ballotine. It was Amos' way of getting to know us - to conduct our orchestra. He had sent a memo in advance of his arrival with a list of ingredients he would require, and I do not need to get into all the details, because really it is painstaking. What is important is that the dish is quite technical.
Oh, what the hell, we're not rationing ink are we? And we're all Epicureans here. I'll explain. It is a French dish in which one deconstructs and reconstructs a chicken. You put first the thighs, legs and wings, diced into workable pieces, in the blender with, typically, mushrooms, cream, butter, and whatever else you would like. Then flatten the breasts out completely. Take the raw purée, which looks like anything besides food, and wrap it within the flattened breasts - does this make sense? Separately fry the detached skin in oil until crisp but still manipulable. Then cover the whole lot with the skin and bake. If done correctly one is left with something resembling the original chicken, each part cooked separately and re-attached.
No such dish occurred.
The Darling Chef smelled the raw chicken and nearly turned apoplectic. I tell you again that he grabbed the chicken by the legs and pressed the spine to his nostrils, which left a drool-like pooling of chicken liquid against the bottom of his nose and the upper crust of his thin lip hairs. This chicken, he would not even feed it to the rodents, he declared. He made this phrase literal - a sous chef was made to discard the raw chickens outside the town lines - he really did drive all the way out, he said later. "London's rats deserve better than this," Amos said. And in the strangest, wind-sucking way, not one person laughed when he said it, nor did they even come close.
Instead, after overturning the frigid airs and the pantries, deshelving cans and placing his tongue against every spice and sweet in the kitchen. The Darling Chef walked out of the refrigerator. "The tomatoes are quite nice," he said, throwing out every single other vegetable and carb, announcing we were all going to prepare tomato soup.
"We will begin tomorrow at sunrise," he said.
After the first day of Amos, Nicholas had stolen a tomato from the kitchen. I walked in on him staring with operatic intensity, trying to decode the secret of its prodigy.
He turned to me with the fever of the desert sun, "Clem! Come taste this. Does this taste like some sort of special tomato? Would you feed it to the King?"
"The skins are quite firm, they're taut," I said.
"Then why make soup? He's just going to blend them anyway, what does the texture of the skin matter?" Nicholas sat down on the counter in a huff. He jittered his hands and then stood up immediately.
He looked back at me, still vibrating. "I'm so proud of you. Do you know that? You'll be a wonderful chef."
In truth, I was impossibly excited to cook. Amos had designated me saucier: "This is the central paradox of cooking," Amos explained. "Men truly believe that we eat the charred flesh for any other reason but its nutrients. In a perfect world, we would eat nothing but the sauce. Everything else is texture and garnish. This is why all great sauces have been composed by women. They can see through the hologram of tradition."
Even life's most precious constants had changed. Everything became up for debate - buildings and nations but also boys; chubby juniors who used to play toy trains but now collected Nazi scalps and came home from France wanting to dress like women, but sometimes the changes were almost imperceptible - Nicholas returned drinking coffee instead of tea.
I had decided, personally, probably around Midway, that I was not going to change anymore when it was over. However I was at the end of the fighting - that's how I would be for the rest of my life. On the day of the Axis surrender I took reservations at the podium, drank from a flask between seatings, and spoke to nobody. That would be my perpetuity, I decided. I would drink, overeat, and sometimes throw up afterward - superfluous and safe. But now I was ready to change again.
"When I walked out the door," Nicholas opened, still eyeing the tomato, "I figured there must be some illusionist's trick. Surely, he is not going to place some tomatoes in with some butter and ladle it into a bowl, yes? But I've been thinking more. What if it is that simple? What if he is not better than us in the way that one horse is faster than another, but in the way that a tank is better than a horse, since a horse sees a tank and doesn't even understand what he's looking at."
I made this mental note. I would arrive the next morning early and I would perfect the béchamel. This is what the French call the "mother sauce," and it is one part flour, one part butter, and 10 parts milk. I would master this classic. I would sear this formula so deep into my skull that I could suffer an ischemic stroke while stirring and still cart a perfect béchamel to the pass.
"What have you been writing?" I asked him.
"I have a new poem. I like it. And not only because I wrote it," he said, adjusting himself. "It's on the table if you'd like."
"I'll read it first thing tomorrow. But hush now, my darling," I said. Tonight I would grip his hair a bit harder than usual because I only had one last night left with Nicholas as my superior. Now I was the saucier, which meant I was invincible, and tomorrow I would emerge, Aphrodite from the clamshell, and Nicholas would never be able to touch me the same way again.
I felt another change coming, just in that moment. What was my favorite food? A chef needed one, I thought. Yesterday I would have said cinnamon toast. In the days before the war, when I had a far more serious drinking problem, I became known for a pattern of behavior my friends would call The Mountain. I shared a flat in Brixton with three girls. Since living alone with other women was for whores, our home was legally considered a brothel and we spent our nights drunk with the aforementioned attorneys. We would have been happy to sleep with them for free but we were not so foolish to turn down money if offered. Arriving home, considerably sloshed, smelling like a child's birthday party - cigarettes, caramel, sweat - we sat and gossiped; they finished off aperitifs and I consumed The Mountain, which was a loaf of whatever bread we had, slathered in a stick of butter and hailstormed from on-high with cinnamon and sugar. I ate this meal as quickly as possible, told scandalous secrets between sludging bites, felt a never-before-known-to-woman sort of bliss, threw the whole thing up, then slept like the dead.
But tonight he took me, the soldier and the chef, two livings built on the destruction of flesh, and I thought to myself, in the face of this beautifully dark-haired man, in his thrusts, the hell-bound gravity of however many dark-haired Germans he had exterminated, that my favorite food is now the watermelon. My craving is for bright citrus. I'd like to eat a living garden, mint and mangoes and peach and of course clementines, each bite dripping down my neck, a honeymilk coating on my skin which would be crystalized and hardened sugar across the edges of my chin and lips in the morning.
Afterward.
"You're not staying over?" he asked, as I finally put my feet to the cold wood and began tightening my dress.
I was different now. I was always different after. Men came home colder from the war but I came home from Nicholas burning hot. I needed to get outside. Any longer in the apartment and I would be sick.
"I'll stay over once I get settled. Once we get settled with Amos," I told him.
I would leave and go to fuck Belinda, I decided. And maybe we would smoke chemical drugs and fry ourselves. Either way I wasn't planning on sleeping that night; the béchamel could wait.
"This will take some time," The Darling Chef said in the morning, by which we all thought he meant an hour. But he did not mean an hour, and in fact, he meant days.
I hadn't slept, my eyes glowed red like a burning barn, and it took my whole constitution not to tip over with each step.
We were all sent with our own lists of ingredients to be sourced and returned by the afternoon. My list had only one item and no listed quantity, in sloppy writing:
Sasiv Powder
My first attempt was an arthritic Egyptian man at the Chelsea market who scanned me up and down before making his declaration: "Never 'eard of it." Outside the Egyptian's stall, the first few snowflakes were hovering down with uncertain flight. So it went with the Hungarian brothers at the next stall. "We were biologists in Budapest," they declared in unison, "We know spices." The third time was equally charmless, as well as the fourth, the fifth, and the sixth. This continued down the line until the final resort, a tall Russian man in a thick woolen overcoat whom the other vendors called "The Prowler." He kept a dark and wet stall in the farthest corner of the market where his Russian children sat on turned-over buckets reading the great works of Dostoyevsky. According to the Hungarians, The Prowler could procure anything, but not Sasiv Powder, The Prowler stated pointedly after consulting a small Russian Almanac kept in the jacket of his black coat, "There is no such thing, I swear it to you. May my mother die of cancer of the eyes."
I returned headlong, through the stain-glassed ceiling of the dining room and into the kitchen, where I told Amos confidently that Sasiv Powder did not exist. He nodded quickly.
"May I tell you a story?" He asked me.
The rest of the boys, sensing something important, killed the heat on their burners and gathered around the center island.
"Forgive me," he says, pulling a ladle from a pot of ginger cream. "But we Jews tell long and impenetrable stories. This one is no different."
An orphaned girl spends her teenage years following peddlers and circus freaks. By the age of 18 she has finally saved enough money to settle somewhere, so she wanders into the town of Sasiv, says out loud, "This is as good a town as any," and the Rabbi Leyba helps her procure a small cottage on the town's edge. "Though you must soon get married," he warns her. The woman agrees but crosses her fingers behind her back.
Behind her home is a deep forest. "What is back there?" she asks the Rabbi Leyba on the day that she moves her few belongings into the small brick home.
"I do not know, but some say it is beautiful."
The next morning, after the woman has washed the laundry and set the potatoes to boil, she clears branches with her hands and stomps fungi under her feet as she descends down the path for a minute or so. That is, until she begins to hear the barking. A large dog flies up from the bottom of the path with the speed of a rabbit, throwing barks and snarls and spit in thick ropy globule. Seeing his tail and head level with his spine, running straight and violently like a fired arrow, the woman retreats home. The clouds were breaking, the sun was wavering an orange circle in the thick sky, and the woman decides she will try again after the dog has died.
In those many years the woman becomes very busy and the dog remains healthy. Each year Rabbi Leyba calls the woman to his home, cooks her dinner, and implores her to get married. Each time she apologizes, says she has been quite busy, and promises to get married immediately. But year after year, she crosses her fingers.
Nearly two decades later, on the morning of her 35th birthday, the Rabbi arrives in a very serious tone. "This is a small town and it is not long until you are barren," he said. "There is only one man left for you, his name is Pazice." The woman knew Pazice because everyone in Sasiv knew Pazice and all joked that his brain sat in a pool of cold gazpacho. A visiting Rabbi once came from Lublin and observed Pazice exiting a pub. The visiting Rabbi turned to the Rabbi Leyba and asked if Pazice was the dumbest creature in all of Sasiv. "No," the Rabbi Leyba responded, "But he best hope the turkeys don't die."
The next day, the Rabbi Leyba brought Pazice to the woman's home, where the large fool gleamed the thousand-mile grin of the idiot, stupider than the woman had ever imagined, and ate all of the cooked food in the house before running off to pick dandelions from the grass.
The woman storms into the living room and pulls a coat from the closet. "I cannot marry this man," she tells the Rabbi Leyba, "There are many more towns like Sasiv and many generous Rabbis."
The rabbi attempts to calm her, "Pazice is simply nervous. Or perhaps he is just playing dumb."
"If he is playing dumb," she says, wrapping her tassel around her waist and tightening her scarf, "Then he is winning." But before she can fasten her final button, the Rabbi points out to the yard, "Look," he says, guiding her eyes towards idiot Pazice, galloping merrily down the path.
"Pazice!" The woman runs outside, her unbuttoned coat flying in the wind as each step of her boot imprints into the muddy grass. She yells out again, "Pazice, you idiot!" but her cries are cloaked by ear-splitting barking. "That fool!" the woman yells aloud, tumbling down the hill, expecting to find a dead dimwit and a well-fed dog at the bottom of the path, but arrives to her surprise, to discover Pazice and the dog. Playing. They are playing. Pazice is covered in bites and scratches so clearly they were not so friendly at first, but he is alive, and the dog is giddily lapping at the bloody face he has just slashed open, Pazice giggling gayly as he rolls in the grass. The path itself is a dead end, leading only to the mossy brick wall of an abandoned factory, but there they are, rolling and laughing and jumping; two slobbering beasts.
Amos' kitchen was entirely rearranged the next day and men passed through like trains through Siberian blizzards, bodies barreling through at queer hours holding unlabeled bags of unknown cargo. The restaurant had been closed for two entire days with no explanation given to the public and that day was the third. The first two days, it seemed, Amos was simply getting to know us. But now he was truly cooking - today was the leviathan.
I was assigned to a cream concoction and was given only raw milk and vinegar. I followed Amos' instructions exactly; I was made to churn the butter, convert the remaining milk to buttermilk and cream, skim the whey and casein proteins, freeze and spin the fats to further isolate the globules, and only then, after four back-breaking hours of military-grade chemistry, with constant reference to his scratchy and torn notebooks, was I allowed to begin cooking anything.
Slowly and carefully I deposited the precisely dictated quantities of spices and vegetation into my cream before stirring with religious fervor. But the sauce did not froth or thicken when exposed to heat, rather, it became a greenly discolored chemical lake and smelled like nothing that was born of Christendom. Nicholas was off collecting ingredients and none of the other boys had any idea what to do.
Theodore suggested I find Nicholas' journals, which were a cornucopia of solutions to every possible culinary issue.
I didn't mean to pry. I truly didn't. But did he not think to keep two separate journals? One for his recipes and another for his personal affairs? Yesterday's entry read:
A strange encounter with Belinda tonight.
I only knew Belinda as the woman that Clem would sometimes run off to. She was a nurse who kept harlot's hours and I had seen her some early mornings on the way to the fish market. I knew her face but it wasn't clear she knew mine, but, in either case, I never had anything but the fullest respect for her and the monopoly she had on herself and her body. Her eyes were nearly silver and they were deep.
I was meant to meet a young Irish chef who had just joined the brigade. He chose a small pub in Marlybone which was a nice walk from Paddington. The sight of the rubble is still a daily hallucination, though I have to say they are rebuilding quickly.
"Can I trade you?" Belinda approached me as I waited for the Irishman, not recognizing me, "One pint of lager for three English cigarettes."
I accepted blankly.
She stood directly next to me, smoked slowly, and said nothing. My eyes darted everywhere but at hers. It was terribly awkward for me, her standing so close, her smoke falling vacantly onto my shoulders as if she'd forgotten I was there, but I suspected she felt at ease in these sorts of tempests. When she finished she asked what I did and I told her bluntly that I cooked. I tried to convey my desire for privacy but she addressed the lingering issue: "Clementine is one of my closest friends in this world," she said from the naked blue.
"So you do know who I am?" I asked her.
"And you, me," she replied, keeping her ankles floating near mine, and still no sign of the Irish boy.
"She tells me you are a writer," Belinda followed up.
I told her I wrote in the evenings.
"You're a novelist? Like Moby Dick."
"Poetry," I said.
"May I read something?" she asked me.
"I don't have anything on me," I said.
"Can you recall something from memory?" She asked.
I remembered the first line from last night's poem.
The whole of the city is underwater.
"That's all you remember?" She was right not to believe me. I delivered the next two aloud.
The arches and the doorknobs
and all the newly built cars.
She seemed to like what she heard and she locked her ankles around mine.
Aside: When I fall asleep with Clementine, I feel clean and nectarous. When I sleep alone, which are nights when Clementine sleeps with Belinda or elsewhere, I feel old and ugly. With Belinda, who asked about my poetry, I did not feel ugly, in fact, I became aware, through the sight of her lustful intoxication, of the fullness of my chest in my shirt.
Back to story: The barrier of touch is broken. New elastics. Under the bar, her knees began to scrape to my thighs and I allowed it. We share a bottle and then another. The Irishman was quite late so we smoked a fair deal and at one point I kissed her bare hand. Belinda's family had left Moscow at the same time as Nabokov, briefly to Lodz, where they had a cousin, then eastward to London where her father quickly regained his former status and wealth. She propositioned me.
"Would you like to spend the night together?" she asked.
I could see sex in the veins of her dainty wrists - the way that I had twisted and preoccupied her blood all night. I could see her desire: to drop down to her back and to be split open, like a skull, by me, whose hands once jaggedly split the neck of some curly Hungarian boy, my limbs still inexperienced in the art of spinal separation, failing the first snap, awkwardly felling the underfed child with my knees to his shoulders, pressing my thumbs to his lymph nodes in hopes to hasten the choking, then trying the snap twice, three times, four, his death coming at some point in the middle, but now, these slick fingers, my pads are polished like caviar pearls
"I can't," I said.
"Oh hell, why not? Why not let the darkness consume us?" she asked. "Here and now, let it come. I'd be devastated if we couldn't sleep together tonight. I mean that. Absolutely gutted."
Belinda kept her face close to mine. I said, "You can tell quite clearly that I am attracted to you. Isn't that enough? Do you really need me to fuck you? Or can you be content with knowing that I would?"
"No," she said, "That would not be enough." This creature, she was pushing down toward nothingness, and she was not content to stop halfway.
Important to remember however: Belinda asked about my poetry.
I do not know if the Irishman ever arrived and I do not know where Clementine slept.
I looked around briefly for an Irishman. When had we brought on an Irishman? I couldn't spot one. Not the point. I rushed out and said no goodbyes.
I had a new sort of clarity. I'd ask Nicholas to marry me. The snow was washing the dust from the sidewalk as I sped away from the restaurant, and I thought only of those Japanese suicides from the news; the failed soldiers who gutted themselves like fish. I grew warm in my armpits at the vision of this disinfection, this total reset.
I raced up the stairs into the empty apartment and over to the table where I had left the poem but the room had been tidied and rearranged from last night. I tossed open drawers and found it wedged beneath a stack of Whitman.
The whole of the city is underwater.
The arches and the doorknobs
and all the newly built cars.
This was the part he had recited to Belinda. I scanned down the last three lines.
Me? I graze dispassionately and bide my time.
I lick at the salt.
The circle closes in.
I didn't understand. Was I the circle? Or was I the salt? What is he waiting for? Who is the circle? Why can men only speak of their feelings in riddles? I wanted to yell.
I gave up on understanding Nicholas and Amos both and decided to make a frosting, which I figured was a sort of sauce. I loved Nicholas forever, this frosting would prove it, and that thought alone elevated me with the vigor of a dewy morning.
For the dry batter, in a recipe taken from Nicholas' notebook.
- 8 grams kosher salt
- 2 grams ground cinnamon
- 1 gram ground ginger
- 0.5 grams ground cardamom
- 0.5 grams ground nutmeg
- 0.5 grams ground allspice
- 0.5 grams ground cloves
- 220 grams packed brown sugar
- 220 grams white sugar
- 225 grams softened butter
- 3 large eggs, tempered
- 120 grams plain yoghurt
- 15 milliliters vanilla
- Half a liter whole milk
But then I heard the click of the door, and I felt something different. I felt that this was not a good idea.
My stomach began the ascent of a rickety biplane and I began to feel feverish. I almost yelped as I watched the jigging of the door and awaited Nicholas' entrance, but the lock did not turn fully, and I hung in some cruel infinity for a lingered moment as the hinge returned to still. I could feel the insects crawling through my arteries so I bolted to the door and swung it open, hoping to end my misery. It was only the neighbor, arriving home drunk,
"Apologies," he muttered, "I must have stuck my key in the wrong door."
Now the switch had unflipped, remembering now that Nicholas would soon be alive and standing in front of me, and I could not find anywhere to be that felt comfortable. More than anything I felt cold.
I closed the door and wrapped myself in blankets and ran the shower for additional heat. Maybe, I thought, as the steam filled the room and the timbre of the rattling showerhead echoed against the metal pots and pans, today is not the day to ask Nicholas to marry me. Is there a word for this sort of anxiety: The fear that something is simply not meant to be done at a particular place and a particular time? That, by some mandate of the universe, this was meant to happen next week, in a garden, or next summer, after they clear the rest of the rubble and rebuild Guildhall. Just maybe, I began to think, that asking Nicholas to marry me tonight would, and how can I even begin to express this, but it would ripple, you understand? And true to that ripple I might find myself, decades from now, in some small brown flat scattered with cans and old wine bottles, married to some Pazice or another. And perhaps it would be just that moment that I come to realize that it all could have been avoided if I had just shown a bit of self-restraint all those years ago. Perhaps, I thought, I should just wait for some beautiful moment with Nicholas, some gorgeous dance under some sandy moon in Tehran, and I could ask him then.
But no, I decided. Hell is a waiting room. I swallowed my nervous gut when I heard another figure coming up the stairs, ascending quickly like the blitzkrieg, surely this was Nicholas. I was simply going to say it when he opened the door. Hell, even it if is another drunkard, I will ask him to marry me just for the practice. I would take a deep breath when I heard the door open, then I would count to three, then I would say it.
3. Nicholas put a bag of provisions down and looked queerly at the running shower. 2. He had a bandage over his hand, probably because he'd burned it. 1. I could not remember what I wanted to ask because I could only see the word blitzkrieg, which had impregnated my temples and blacked out my vision, just for a moment, and there was Nicholas, behind my eyelids, being awoken in confusion by those whistling bombs and meth-addled Pantsir throwing their guttural tongue as if they were born to scream and were content to do it forever. My mind briefly flashed Nicholas dead in the flaming bunker, roasting meat, the burning bush.
"I want you to marry me," I said, remembering my cue just as the first tear loosed from my eye.
"Clem, darling," Nicholas took one stride towards me. "Sit down, you look so pale."
"I think I'm going to be sick," I said, which was true, because sometimes these things come all at once.
"Right now?"
The whole sea of my intestines on a one-way lift, I could not even tell him yes before it began to happen. The wave filled my mouth and Nicholas shoved me swiftly towards the bathroom; I tried to swallow back down the acid but more bile came up at the same time and the whole system clogged. I emptied myself across the bathroom floor, whimpering like an animal in a trap, drenching my clothes and the floor and the toilet seat.
The unflinching Nicholas reached his hands directly into my mud and slipped my shirt from me. He knelt down, indifferent to the caking filth newly upon him, and slid my socks from my feet. He put all my clothes in the bath because he is the only human that can make vomiting courteous.
I only cried more, one eye rested against the seat of the toilet, my cheek lightly soaking in a half-inch pool of sunset-colored ejection, and the other pointed towards Nicholas' infinite light. "Did you hear me? I want you to marry me."
He flushed the toilet once, sending the contents of my guts down to the sewer - how enviable. "Let's finish the task at hand, then we can talk about this," Nicholas said.
"No," I told him, and it came out more pathetic than the written word suggests, "I want to talk about it now." Then I threw up again, my head falling heavily and rising back up slowly. Nicholas stepped away for a moment then squatted down and put ginger ale to my lips. Seeing myself briefly in the metal of the can I reviled at the grease spread across my face, slick like popcorn oil, with the harvest technicolor of carrots and half-digested peas. "Is this about Belinda?" Nicholas asked.
"No," I snapped, but I knew instantly I had neither the head nor the stomach to lie. "Ok, yes, it is. But isn't that such a human thing, to only realize what you have when you're in danger of losing it?"
And then I threw up one last time, and the vomit splashed onto my underwear, so he neatly folded those into the bath as well, which gave me all the answers I needed. I laid down, my empty stomach pressing nakedly to the cool tile.
"I understand. But can you just tell me why?" I asked him, "Is it because I'm unreliable? Or is it something else? Please don't say it's because you think I can't cook. Did Theodore tell you about the buttermilk? It's only been two days. How well could you cook on your second day?"
Then, for the first time in my life, I saw Nicholas break. It was not more than a moment, and it moved as quickly as a thought, but it was a small crack in his eye and a quiver in his lip.
"No," he said, "It's because I don't believe that you actually love me."
"What? What does that even mean? How could you ever know that?" I said, at which point I was yelling.
"Tell me this," he opened, "what if you change your mind in the morning?"
"I won't. I know that I won't," I said without hesitation.
"That's my point exactly. That sort of certainty can only come from fraudulent love," he said.
"What does that even mean?" I asked him, because really, what did that even mean?
"Has Amos told you about the nurse at Auschwitz?" he asked me.
And then I got quiet, which is the only thing that can happen when that word emerges from the black hole.
"The German nurse that ran the infirmary and the men who fell in love with her on their deathbeds. This woman was nothing special, just a plain and flat-chested Nazi. But they were afraid."
And I put my head down, as if during a haircut, because I couldn't look at him. "I am scared. But why shouldn't I be?"
A moment passed and I was sweating badly. "I made frosting," I said through the lurching of my intestines.
Nicholas moved systematically to the kitchen and washed his hands. He checked my forehead with the back of his velvet hand, and, with the other, set down a small butter plate of sliced cake on a small circle of floor tile that had escaped the pooling of vomit. I was afraid to even look at it and my forearms to my fingernails were lacquered with bile, so Nicholas fed me with his clean fingers; splotches of icing spilled down my still-naked body but in terms of the taste it was the purest form of dancing decadence, melting through my whole corpse like some vomit-soaked baptism. Why hadn't he tasted it?
"You know what, I don't accept," I said, trying to pick my head up, "maybe you don't love me!"
"Why do you say that?" he asked, and to be truthful, I didn't have an answer. I laid back and motioned my head for more frosting.
"Let me think," I whispered to him.
Which I did, for a minute or so, before I came to something that I was satisfied with.
"I couldn't break your heart," I said, "But you're breaking mine. Which proves, well, it proves that you don't love me enough to let yourself get hurt."
The plate was returned to the kitchen and Nicholas silently started running the bath water to wash down the vomit. He was contemplating, which frustrated me very very badly, so I yelled at him. "No, you idiot! Don't you see! This is my point! Anybody can say that love means anything. Love isn't these little made-up tests. They're just, it's abstract, it's nothing. It's just bad poetry!"
He flushed down more vomit and we moved in the same circles and got nowhere. We agreed that I would stay the night and then in the morning I would be nothing to him but the worst chef in his brigade.
It was dark when I awoke again - Nicholas was sleeping, my heart was racing, and my breathing was labored as if I'd grown obese in the night. I knew I was going to be sick again, which I was. I threw up in the bathtub because I couldn't make it to the toilet. Then I finished off the frosting. Then I threw up one last time.
I took a bottle of wine out into the street. It was dark in the apartment and I did not want to wake Nicholas by looking for a wine opener, so I grabbed the first item I saw, which was a long needle, and I stabbed a hole through the cork and sucked the wine out as I stepped out into the faceless echo of the dark blue night.
The issue was that I had broken my own promise. I had sworn not to change, and I changed. But now I would return to the way that things were at the end of the war. I would not rely on Belinda for anything besides drugs and sex and I would never see Nicholas outside of work. I would rush around, going only where I was not needed - a small vortex of despair moving through the world like the still eye of a hurricane. I continued to suck my wine. Life would go on without me and I would become contented to the second circle of society, to the outskirts of night-dwellers and whores who expected everything and received nothing. I would spin along London streets in violet light, as I was spinning now, twice as fast as those good women who made sound investments and minded their credit. To spin twice as fast and die half as young.
It is difficult to say where I woke up because I woke up so many times. I had gone missing inside myself and inside the city. An officer jostled me before sunrise and I moved to a bench. The bench filled with commuters at dawn and I moved to the park. The morning sun burned my eyes but at least by then I was no longer shivering. I retraced my steps to the restaurant and it was neither happiness nor sadness, not even physical or even emotional, but an abstract understanding, like the force that compels men to curl up and hide before they die, that I was now the anchorite that I was meant to be forever.
But today was the day, I discovered suddenly, upon entering the doors of the restaurant. The day of the soup. I say "day" quite flippantly because it was only the day for me. It had actually happened in the middle of the night, in fact, and we all received calls from Amos to arrive immediately. I was the only one who hadn't arrived, and Nicholas was sent out in search of me.
I stood before all the boys who had congregated around a small pot of soup in the middle of the kitchen. They stared - they had been waiting for hours. There was filth from the top of my forehead to the bottom of my soul and I smelled like a dog returned from Sodom.
I apologized, at least I tried, in a sort of frenzied and crazed way where my English began to slur like drunken Gaelic. I was still drunk. Unblessed by God, I knew, corrupted in a mangy and vile body that was running at 100 degrees.
"Please," Amos said, "Try the soup. You've worked very hard."
I filled the golden spoon with the red liquid, looked at Nicholas, and sighed. I considered my obituary, in those back pages of the newspapers that were only glanced at by the chronically bored. I wished to be euthanized, but I did the second-best thing, which was to raise the spoon to my lips.
Nicholas and I spent that night, that day and also that night, mostly making love, in endless Talmudic dialogue over what Amos had done with the soup. It sounds silly to write but then again it is always embarrassing to wring out a towel that is so wet with truth.
The first revelation was I had never indeed tasted anything before that soup. Amos told us that the one bowl of soup had required 683 tomatoes. "They are all in there," he said, which he didn't much explain but he, in Nicholas' terms, "Removed every superfluous atom, leaving only the purest essence of the tomato, surely what God intended for Eden."
That other revelation is that, though one is born into this world alone and one will die alone, a day can be the day of 683 tomatoes. And surely we will still die, perhaps of cancer of the eyes, and surely the world will turn to ashes and sand in our mouths and we will die all one million small deaths in the tiny cages we will build for ourselves in the name of freedom. But we can say I love you, even just once, and we can say it hard, whether we mean it or not.
"I can't promise you anything in the morning," I told Nicholas that night.
"I've never expected you to," he pillowed his warm hand up my thighs and my whole heart was Christmastime.
"But right now, I love you," I told him. "I love you, Nicholas."
"I love you too," he said, and his words forced themselves down my esophagus and into my spine and through to my ankle bones.
Tomorrow morning, I knew, the sunshine would again burn my eyes and I would get the same half-drunk as yesterday.
But for now, I loved my poet-chef, one night at a time. Satin darkness out the window and there was cool red blood in his cheeks.
"I love you," I told him.
"I love you too," he replied.
"I love you, Nicholas. IloveyouIloveyouIloveyou."
I was intrigued by this story's distinctive combination of gastronomy, eroticism, and PTSD.
ReplyDeleteI admit it: I was prepared to dislike this story, perhaps even eager to. The illustration I found stultifying and the notion of a "long" story was not an auspicious one. I felt it smelled too profoundly literary. But then I read.
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me to be a sensuous story of sensuous people obsessed with things that are hardly important--a bowl of tomato soup?-but the story had some really marvelous descriptive passages and effective metaphors.
In the end, it is not a story I would at random choose to read, but it had something going for it in the manner in which the author steered the narrative, if that doesn't sound too MFA-ish. It was, after all, too literary for my tastes, but the author has a prodigious skill; I only wish that skill had been otherwise used, in a more prosaic way that someone like myself might appreciate.
I loved this story…because of Amos. The beginning read like Isaac Singer. I admit, I couldn’t keep track, except Amos, of who was who narrating etc. That is my limitation I’m sure. Still, I loved the story because of Amos.
ReplyDeleteThe craft of this story is impressive!
ReplyDeleteI particularly enjoy your use of Nicholas’s journal entry and Amos’s story to interlace several shorter stories with different points of view into the larger narrative.
Expanded, this story will make a terrific novel!
You are a great writer!