The Chef

48

Some of the time-consuming things on the menu were easily prepared the day before. The erotic confectionery, for example, kept well in the fridge. Or the urad ribbons which needed time to dry and jellify. The essences from the rotary evaporator also kept well in closed, airtight jars.

Maravan was in the middle of these preparations when the doorbell rang. He opened the door. Makeda stood in the semidarkness of the hallway, tall and smiling.

‘Don’t look so terrified. Nobody saw me, apart from your neighbour on the second floor.’

‘That’s more than enough,’ he said, letting her in.

She took off her coat to reveal a traditional Ethiopian dress. ‘Suits this area better, I thought.’

‘What do you want?’ he asked.

‘I’d love some of your white tea – I don’t imagine you’ve got any champagne in the house.’

He nodded, although this was not what he had meant, and he wondered if she had really misunderstood him. She followed him into the kitchen.

She glanced at the confectionery in various stages of completion. ‘For Dalmann and me?’

Maravan nodded and filled the tea-maker with water.

‘May I?’ She pointed to one of the chick pea, ginger and pepper pussies yet to be glazed.

‘Only one. I’ve made just enough.’ He took two cups and saucers from a cupboard and put them on a tray.

Makeda grabbed one and bit off a piece.

The water was boiling. He poured out the tea and carried the tray into his small sitting room.

The deepam was burning by his domestic shrine and just for once the aroma of sandalwood was in the air. As a sacrifice to accompany his last prayer, Maravan had offered up smoke. In front of the shrine was the photo with the dead child soldiers. Makeda looked at it while Maravan set the table for the tea.

‘Which one is he?’

Maravan did not look up. ‘The first on the left.’

‘A child.’

‘He wanted to be a chef. Like me.’

‘I bet he would have been a good one.’

‘Definitely.’ Maravan looked at the photograph. ‘It’s just so unfair,’ he said, his voice faltering.

Makeda nodded. ‘I had a cousin. She wanted to become a nurse. She was recruited when she was ten, and instead of caring for people and making them better she had to learn how to maim and kill people with a Kalashnikov. She didn’t live to see her twelfth birthday.’

Now Makeda’s voice was faltering too. Maravan put a hand on her shoulder.

‘To a free Eritrea.’ She wanted to laugh, but it sounded more like a sob.

They sat down. Both sipped carefully at the tea, which was still far too hot.

Makeda put down her cup and said. ‘It’s people like Dalmann who have these children on their conscience.’

Maravan shook his head slowly from side to side. ‘No. It’s the people who instigate these wars.’

‘Those are the ideologues. They’re pretty bad, too. But not as bad as the suppliers. Who make wars possible in the first place by supplying the weapons. Who make money from the war, thereby prolonging it. People like Dalmann.’

Maravan waved his hand dismissively. ‘Dalmann’s a small fish.’

Makeda nodded. ‘Yes, but he’s our small fish.’

Maravan said nothing.

After a long silence, Makeda said insistently, ‘He stands for all the others.’

Maravan still said nothing.

‘You said you wanted to stop. So why are you doing this dinner? This one in particular?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You’re planning something, aren’t you?’

‘I don’t know. What about you? Why are you doing it?’

‘I know.’

Outside a police car siren became loud and then slowly quiet again.

‘Dalmann’s got a heart condition,’ she said.

‘Something bad I hope.’

Makeda smiled. ‘He had a heart attack. They’ve inserted a little tube into a coronary vessel. Now he has to keep on lowering his blood pressure and thin his blood or he’ll have another one.’

Maravan did not reply and blew on his tea.

‘Do you know where he had it?’

Maravan shook his head.

Makeda let out her happy-go-lucky laugh, but it sounded a bit forced. ‘In the Huwyler. At the busiest time.’

No reaction from Maravan.

‘He needs to look after himself. Mustn’t strain anything. No overdoing it.’

‘I understand.’

Makeda took a gulp of her tea. ‘Can you remedy erection problems too?’ she asked directly.

‘I think so – why?’

‘Could you put something in the food to help him get an erection?’

‘Not an immediate one. But in time, yes.’

‘But it’s got to be immediate.’

Maravan shrugged apologetically.

‘There are products that work in half an hour.’

‘I don’t have those sorts of products.’

‘I do,’ Makeda said.

When she left the flat a quarter of an hour later, a foil wrap with four pills lay next to the tea service.

In the middle of the night Maravan awoke with a fright. He had been standing by a wall of dense, green – dark green and wet from the rain – jungle. All of a sudden tanks broke through the undergrowth, turned, cut new swathes and vanished until their diesel engines were scarcely audible. Then they came back, turned and vanished, came back, turned and vanished, until there was nothing left of the green of the jungle. In the distance he could now see the dark, calm ocean.

Maravan turned on the light. The curry plants beside his bed stood there motionless, like petrified creatures.

He looked at the clock. Three. If he did not get up now and make himself some hot milk with cardamom and turmeric, he would be unable to get to sleep again before dawn.

While he waited in the kitchen for the milk to heat up he thought about Makeda’s proposition.

The milk was lukewarm by the time he had reached his decision.

49

‘In the federal prosecutor’s archive? Just like that? Are you taking the piss?’ Already dressed for dinner, Dalmann was in his study, sitting at his desk with its brass fittings and green leather top with gold patterning. The catering team had been in the house all afternoon and he had wanted to treat himself to a small sherry before Makeda arrived. Then, all of a sudden, Schaeffer had turned up unannounced, standing there on the rug with something urgent for him.

And it really was urgent. The bunglers at the federal prosecutor’s office had left lying around in some archive a whole set of copies of the so-called nuclear smuggling documents, which the Bundesrat (in a rare moment of wisdom and under pressure from the CIA) had destroyed. And instead of shredding them, as any halfway sensible person would have done, they were now shouting about them from the rooftops.

‘Do we know whether they’re all there? I mean, are they complete? Sod it, what I want to know is whether there’s any mention of bloody Palucron.’

‘Nothing that I know of. But we have to assume there is. All I know is that experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency examined the documents several days ago and they’ve separated the highly sensitive ones from the harmless ones.’

‘I doubt Palucron will be among the highly sensitive ones.’

‘For now this is what we’d like to assume.’

‘So those atomic energy blokes should just take the sensitive ones and put the rest in the shredder.’

‘I fear it’s the sensitive ones that will be shredded.’

Dalmann took exception to his being corrected. ‘So what do you suggest then, Schaeffer?’ He gave his colleague a look of reproach, as if he were expecting an unforgivable mistake to be rectified immediately.

‘It’s still too early for any prognosis. I just wanted you to be kept informed. And I didn’t want to discuss the matter over the phone, you understand.’

‘You don’t say! I’m already being bugged.’

‘One can never be too careful where the secret services are involved.’

The doorbell rang.

‘That’ll be my visitor. Anything else?’

Schaeffer stood up. ‘In spite of everything I hope you have a pleasant evening. Relax, I think the matter will turn out to be fairly harmless.’

‘It better had,’ mumbled Dalmann half-seriously. He stood up, too, and accompanied Schaeffer to the hallway, where Lourdes was helping Makeda out of her coat. Even Schaeffer seemed to notice how stunning she looked.

All afternoon Maravan had been standing in the impractical kitchen of this spacious and yet quite stuffy house. He worked with great care and concentration. He could sense clearly that Ulagu and Nangay were in the room with him. They watched as he rattled his knife over the chopped, cored tomatoes, transformed white onions into mountains of tiny dice, removed the green shoots from garlic cloves with two cuts, worked coriander, cumin, chilli and tamarind to a fine paste. He showed them the new cooking techniques, jellification, spherification, working with foams, extracting essences. He spoke to them quietly, ignoring Andrea, who wanted to vent her bad mood on someone.

The day before, Maravan had risen early and bought some Minirin with Nangay’s repeat prescription from the local chemist. The pharmacist had recognized him and asked sympathetically, ‘How’s your aunt? Or was it your mother?’

‘Great-aunt. As well as can be expected, thank you,’ Maravan had replied.

In the kitchen he had carefully studied the information leaflet, broken up one tablet and crushed it in his finest mortar. He had dabbed his moistened little finger into a few grains of the powder and tasted it. It was bitter.

He dissolved the powder in a shot glass of water. It turned milky, but soon went clear again. He sniffed it, put it back down in front of him again and started thinking.

Suddenly he stood up, went off to the grocer’s in the street nearby and returned with a bottle of Campari.

He ground another pill in the mortar and dissolved it in Campari in the same shot glass. With the same result: milky at first, then clear.

Maravan filled a second glass with Campari, took a drop of each with a pipette, and tasted. Both bitter.

After that he pulverized ten times that amount and dissolved it in 150 millilitres of Campari. As soon as the liquid was clear again, he stirred in one and a half grams of alginate.

He drew up the Campari mixture into a caviar syringe and squeezed out uniform drops into a calcium chloride solution. He fished the tiny balls out of the solution, assessed, sniffed, but abstained from tasting them.

He pressed the juice of a deep-frozen orange into a fluted glass, decorated the glass with wafer-thin orange peel and let the little red balls swim in the liquid.

Maravan’s Campari orange Minirin.

He took a sniff of the drink and then threw it down the sink. Again he ground tablets in the mortar. This time for the following day. Enough for three Camparis. He had heard that Dalmann was a thirsty man.

The doorbell took Maravan by surprise. If it was Makeda, she was half an hour early. But shortly afterwards Andrea came into the kitchen to give the all-clear. It was just the inevitable Schaeffer, as Andrea described him.

The doorbell rang again a good half hour later. ‘There she is,’ Andrea announced darkly.

Maravan prepared the aperitifs.

‘Campari orange for the gentleman. And, of course, Makeda will stick to champagne.’

In truth, Dalmann would have preferred a normal Campari orange. Or, even better, a Campari soda. But he was not a spoilsport, never had been.

So he took the cocktail glass from the tray held by the pretty waitress and let her explain to him what the drink was. ‘Campari caviar in chilled orange juice with glazed navel orange peel. Cheers.’

Dalmann waited until she had left the room, then raised his glass and toasted Makeda who, as ever, was drinking champagne. She eyed him over the rim of her glass and smiled away all his anger at the bumbling by the federal prosecutor’s office.

The bedroom – or master bedroom as he called it, using the English expression – was scarcely recognizable. All the furniture had been taken out, apart from the bed and bedside table. A low, round table had been set and decorated exotically; the seating consisted of pillows and cushions.

‘Oh, I see. It means you’re lying down already,’ he joked when they entered the room and his eyes adjusted to the candles, which provided the only lighting.

The drink tasted – funny. It was not particularly easy to drink, the swimming carpet of tiny Campari balls was slippery, either you had to slurp the things down or catch them with pursed lips. Makeda let out her infectious laugh and, to amuse her, Dalmann rather exaggerated his efforts.

Playing this game he had soon emptied his glass, and he asked, ‘Do you think one might get a supplément of this?’

Makeda did not understand this word, and so he explained, ‘Do you think I could have another one?’

She rang the temple bell.

Maravan was in the middle of preparing the amuse-bouches. When he opened the bottle with the curry leaf, cinnamon and coconut oil essence and drizzled a few drops onto the tiny rice-flour chapattis, the aroma of his childhood filled his nostrils once again. And Ulagu’s childhood, which had ended so soon.

He did something he had never done before. He put one of the chapattis in his mouth, closed his eyes and abandoned himself to the flavour unfolding between tongue and palate.

Andrea, who was scowling by the door, waiting for the bell to ring, was watching him. ‘I thought you’d made exactly the right number.’

Maravan opened his eyes, chewed, swallowed and replied, ‘There’ll be enough.’

The bell rang out from the first floor. Andrea grabbed the plate of chapattis and took them up the stairs.

She returned to the kitchen with a tray carrying the empty cocktail glass. ‘He wants another one of those.’

Maravan mixed a second.

Dalmann enjoyed the two consistencies of urad lentil ribbons, as well as the frozen saffron and almond foam and its textures. Then Makeda came running down the stairs, ringing the temple bell loudly all the while.

‘He’s dying,’ she said and ran back up. Maravan and Andrea followed her.

Dalmann was lying on the Indian cushions and cloths. His right hand was clutching at his chest. In the candlelight his white face had a wet sheen. His eyes were wide open in terror and he was gasping for air.

Makeda, Andrea and Maravan watched the scene from a distance. Nobody made a move to go any closer; each of them was deep in their thoughts.

Dalmann seemed to want to say something, but his struggle for air and life prevented him from doing so. At times it looked as if he was giving up; he closed his eyes and hardly breathed at all. But then he would rear up again and struggle on.

‘We should call somebody,’ Andrea said.

‘Yes, we should,’ Makeda agreed.

‘144,’ Maravan added.

But not one of them moved.

When the emergency services arrived, Andrea and Maravan had already gone, taking with them everything that could be linked to Love Food. Makeda had rung 144 and waited for the ambulance.

All the emergency doctor could do was confirm the patient was dead. The autopsy revealed that the stent, which had been inserted eight months previously, following his first heart attack, had become blocked, despite the fact he had been taking Aspirin Cardio and Plavix. In the doctor’s opinion this unfortunate development was a result of the deceased’s reckless lifestyle.

This was corroborated by the statement given by the Ethiopian-British national Makeda F., who had cooked for the deceased that evening. And also by the level of alcohol in his blood.

Hermann Schaeffer organized a suitable funeral for Eric Dalmann, which fewer mourners attended than expected. And he made sure there was a nice obituary in Freitag.

The other papers settled for a short announcement. Nonetheless, the name Palucron and Dalmann’s connection to this firm had not yet cropped up.

On the Scilly Isles the daffodils are already in bloom in November. And now, in April, they were still in small clumps in the grass, which looked like an English lawn.

Andrea and Makeda had booked into a bed and breakfast for a fortnight. Every day they went walking on a narrow path along the coast, beside which the cliffs wallowed in the surf like sluggish, primeval creatures.

‘Do you want to know why I didn’t help Dalmann?’ Andrea asked out of the blue. Until now they had avoided the subject.

‘You wanted him to die.’

Andrea nodded. ‘I was so jealous.’

Makeda put an arm around her shoulder and pulled Andrea towards her.

They continued walking for a while like this, until the path became too narrow and they had to let go of each other. Andrea went in front.

Suddenly she heard Makeda’s voice behind her: ‘He was supposed to have fucked himself to death.’

Andrea stopped and turned around. ‘I thought he wasn’t able to any more.’

‘I’d planned on slipping him an erection pill.’

‘How?’

‘I’d asked Maravan to put it in his food.’

Andrea looked at her wide-eyed. ‘So you wanted to kill him?’

Makeda nodded. ‘As a representative of all those others like him.’

Andrea sat down on the soft grass beside the path. Her pale face had become even paler. ‘I bet that stuff caused his heart attack.’

Makeda sat next to her and smiled. ‘Definitely not. Maravan didn’t mix it into the food.’

‘What makes you so sure?’

‘He gave me back the pills. Very discreetly that evening.’

‘Thank God!’

They sat there for a while, looking out at the sea warmed by the Gulf Stream, and the clouds gathering in the west.

‘Maybe there is a higher justice after all,’ Andrea said thoughtfully.

‘Absolutely,’ Makeda replied.

50

On a platter were mango halves and pineapple boats. He had separated the mango halves very close to the core, cut diamond shapes in their dark-yellow flesh and turned them inside out. The tender flesh of the fruit now looked like a shell of sharp-edged cubes.

He had left the stiff, decorative leaves on the pineapple boats. With a sharp knife he had cut away the softest and sweetest part of the flesh from the scaly skin and sliced it straight across. This left small blocks of pineapple, which he pushed alternately to the right and left across the boat. Neither preparation was original, but they looked pretty and could be eaten by hand.

Maravan was in his own kitchen. It was early morning; it looked like rain – a cold, grey day. The dustcart had noisily emptied the bins. Once again an uncanny silence descended on the block of flats in Theodorstrasse. It had been quiet ever since the day when the Sri Lankan government had announced the defeat of the LTTE. Journalists, independent observers and aid organizations were refused entry to the war zones. There were no reliable news reports. Only rumours. Terrible rumours about 10,000 civilians killed, people starving or suffering from an epidemic, about war crimes on both sides. Those with relatives in these areas waited apprehensively for news or signs of life; those who had heard good news did not dare celebrate, out of respect for those who had heard bad. And everybody was burdened by the uncertainty of what the future had in store – for the people in Sri Lanka and those here.

Once again, however, other events ensured the drama was kept off the front pages. The top news story affected everybody. There had been an outbreak of swine flu in Mexico and the world was gripped by the fear of a pandemic like the one which had raged after the First World War, claiming millions of lives.

The evening before, Maravan had made a thick batter of rice flour, coconut milk, sugar and a little yeast, and allowed it to ferment overnight. Half an hour ago he had added some salt and baking powder. Now it was time to coat the small, hot, semi-circular iron pan with a little coconut oil.

He put it back on the heat, dropped in two dessertspoons of batter, took the pan by its handle from the cooker and let its contents run to form a layer at either side. He cracked open an egg and poured it into the middle of the batter. Then he returned the pan to a low flame and covered it. Three minutes later the edges of the hopper were brown and the egg was cooked through. He kept the egg hopper warm in the oven and started making the next one.

When he brought the tray with the aromatic hoppers, coconut chutney, tea and fruit into the bedroom it was still dark.

But Sandana’s voice sounded clear and awake when she said, ‘So, when are you going to cook me a love menu?’

‘Never.’