The Demon of Dakar aka The Demon from Dakar

Eight

The party at the far end of the restaurant was singing so loudly they could hear it all the way in the kitchen. Johnny smiled to himself, leaning with the torch over a crème brûlée so that Pirjo would have time to pee.

“It is the medicine,” she said apologetically.

Johnny wondered what kind of medication an eighteen-year-old girl needed, but had not asked, only waved encouragingly.

It had been a full-speed start. The day after Johnny had met Slobodan for the first time, and the other chefs Feo and Donald, he found himself in the kitchen at Dakar, with his knives wrapped in a kitchen towel, full of anticipation but also a little tense about a new workplace and new routines.

He would help out, above all with the cold food and desserts, the presentation and general kitchen organization.

Feo was the one who seemed the most open and talkative. Almost as soon as they met, he had started talking about the woman he had met in Algarve, how he had served her, fallen in love, saved up money, and traveled to Sweden for better or for worse, stepped off at Arlanda with a note in his wallet with her name on it and the city where she had said she lived.

With the help of a friendly man outside the railway station in Uppsala he had located the woman’s name in the telephone directory.

“Now I am very happy,” he said and Johnny saw that he really meant it.

“It will be a boy!” Feo laughed as he chopped celery. “I promise you!”

He radiated joy, and not only because he was going to be a father. He performed his work in the kitchen with a degree of accuracy that testified to a deep-seated sense of personal satisfaction. Many times that day Johnny found himself staring at his colleague.

Feo’s joie de vivre also found expression in his body movements, which could have been a disaster in such a narrow space, where his long legs and windmill arms always appeared to be in motion. But like a professional dancer, he was coordinated and in complete control.

He had brought his love of fish and shellfish from Portugal. The most wonderful sauces were magically transfigured by his fish broth.

Donald, who was the head chef, was much more restrained. He had wished Johnny welcome but not said much else. He always worked at the meat stove and disliked, not to say hated, Slobodan Andersson.

“The lying poodle is a miscreant, a spectacularly failed combination of Skåne and Belgrade,” he said when Johnny asked how Dakar’s management worked.

“Slobodan is a pig, but a good pig,” Feo objected. “He is perhaps not… what do you say about dogs that do their business inside?”

“House-broken,” Johnny suggested.

“Exactly. Slobban is perhaps not house-broken, but he makes things happen.”

As he talked he put a couple of pieces of halibut into the frying pan. Donald stood frozen at the stove. A fillet was sizzling in the pan. Tessie requested another order of halibut. Donald nodded, and Feo laughed.

“Yes, please, another halibut. Hello there, Tessie!” he yelled out after Tessie, who left as quickly as she came in. Donald shot him a sharp look.

Johnny smiled to himself. He thought that he would enjoy working in Dakar’s kitchen. He had not thought about Sofia in Jönköping for several hours.

“How long has Tessie been working here?” he asked Feo.

“She started at about the same time as me. She is from New York.”

“Long Island,” Donald added.

Feo grinned.

“She is never in love, that is her biggest problem,” he continued. “She needs a man.”

Pirjo returned from the bathroom. Tessie came in with two new orders.

“Two anglerfish,” Donald said.

“Loud and clear,” Feo replied.

Johnny helped Pirjo. Gonzo came in from the dining room, went without a word to the dirty dishes, and started loading up the dishwasher.

It was his last week. Everyone had heard how he and Armas, in connection with opening up after the summer break, had screamed at each other in the changing room. Armas had emerged with a satisfied expression, as if he had killed a rat.

Gonzo came out after five minutes but did not go out into the dining room. It was only after Armas came in and told him that Gonzo went out to do his job. Everyone was amazed that he had not left immediately. He also didn’t try to engage his coworkers’ support in the conflict, only muttering to himself.

No one asked him what it was all about, but Tessie had mentioned something about Gonzo trying to pressure Armas, that he had information that could hurt Armas. It was gossip of the kind that Feo and Donald thought laughable-what could little Gonzo know that could possibly harm the powerful Armas?

A woman came into the kitchen a little after nine. Donald glared at her but said nothing.

“The bathroom is to the right in the corridor,” Feo said.

Sometimes customers went through the wrong door.

“I’m supposed to start working here,” the woman said.

“You are the new one! Wonderful! We need many beautiful women here, isn’t that right, Johnny?”

Feo closed the door of the warming cabinet and wiped his hands on the cloth he had tied at his waist.

“Welcome. I am Feo.”

“Thank you. I’m starting tomorrow and I’m more than a little nervous. I’ve never waitressed before.”

“Typical Slobodan,” Donald muttered.

“That is Donald. He is nice, I promise. Johnny talks funny and he is also new. You will have to start a club, don’t you think? What is your name?”

“Eva Willman.”

“Of course I will,” Feo exclaimed in an attempt at a pun, and Donald stared at him.

“Your anglerfish,” he said and Feo threw himself over the stove.

Johnny introduced himself and shook hands.

“You are the brother of Simon’s mother, aren’t you?”

Johnny nodded.

“It was through her…”

He returned to the dessert but snuck glances at the new waitress while Feo enthusiastically talked about Dakar. She was around Johnny’s own age. His sister Bitte had told him that Eva was divorced with two teenage boys. Johnny studied her from behind. He had noticed that he had started staring at women, not to check them out but to find faults and defects, as if his time with Sofia had perverted his sight.

She had rejected him too many times, and when she later approached him, he was unable to make love. Their cooling relationship had made him limp. It was not only the physical change, more fundamental was that his view of women had changed. He was as interested in women as before, but now he felt disdain, or even sometimes hatred had stolen in, like a malignant virus.

A woman’s laughter in the street, the hint of a beautiful curve in a woman’s body, or a woman’s voice now left Johnny largely indifferent. If any feelings made themselves known then it was simply disdain, a cold dismissiveness. Where he had earlier thought he saw genuine joy, desirable beauty, and promising optimism, he now increasingly saw hypocrisy and falseness.

Women had become a foreign and antagonistic group.

The feeling of being rejected was not pleasant, and he was not happy with the change, it was nothing he had wished for. In moments of clarity he questioned his perception, tried to get some insight into what it was that had perverted him. Was it simply the disastrous relationship with Sofia? Was there something in himself that had nurtured these feelings?

Sofia had rejected him, and not only in bed. He felt that she had also shut him out of the different parts of her life, as if he was not worthy of accompanying her.

“You are so immature,” she would say, and he would feel as if he were a child caught doing something wrong.

He became more and more disgusted with himself, as if he had allowed himself to become a victim, and one day he did what Sofia had perhaps wanted for a long time. He packed up his few possessions and left.

Now he stared at the waitress who was laughing together with Feo. Johnny heard the Portuguese tell her about the expected baby, how happy he was and what a fantastic woman he lived with, and he saw how Eva lit up.

Donald sighed, making a little extra noise when he carelessly tossed the pan into the sink.

“Fix the pan,” he told Pirjo, who obeyed him immediately and started scrubbing it under the faucet.

Her face was flushed from the heat in the kitchen. She cast a brief glance at Johnny, pushed some stray hairs off her forehead, and turned her body as if she wanted to hide from the world.

You think I’m nothing but an old man, Johnny thought, and wished he could show his disdain for all little girls who thought they were hotshots in the kitchen.

Tessie appeared in the window again. After a period of calm, the pressure was once again mounting in the dining room. It was as if waves of customers were washing in over Dakar.

Johnny sensed that Gonzo was not being much help. He was not going to put in much effort this last week.

“One veal,” Tessie said, but Donald did not answer.

“Did you get it or do you want it in writing?” Tessie said with such aggression in her tone that even Donald looked up.

Then he turned his back to her, nabbed a piece of meat, and threw it in the pan.

“Deep down she’s nice,” Feo said. “All Americans think everyone hates them.”

“Why do you say that?” Eva asked. She had placed herself in the doorway.

“They’re bombing the hell out of everyone,” Feo said.

“They should bomb this place,” Donald said.

“Then you would die,” Feo said.

“I am dead.”

Donald smiled unexpectedly at Johnny and leaned nearsightedly over a plate. He painstakingly arranged a few leaves in a salad, then straightened his back and regarded the arrangement before bending down again for a final adjustment.

Tessie turned up again.

“Sweet love,” Donald said in English, and pushed over a plate.

The waitress stared at him, but the hint of a smile swept across her for the moment rather tense features before she left.

“Just think what a little diplomacy can achieve,” Donald said, and Johnny was forced to revise his opinion of him. There would be many times that he would get to experience how Donald awakened from a basically catatonic state and started to engage in wry and lightly ironic banter.

The new waitress hung around and watched them attentively in their work. It was as if Feo’s introduction and jocular patter had done her good, because she looked relaxed. Johnny could see that she, like most visitors in a restaurant kitchen, was careful not to get in the way. The kitchen in Dakar was narrow. Three chefs and an apprentice were crowded into the space of several square meters.

At his last restaurant in Jönköping, where Johnny had worked for about a year, the dining room had swelled out into a veritable sea while the chefs worked with the claustrophobic feeling of being in the cabin of a submarine.

The work required a choreography of quick but well-thought out movements and an intuitive ability to sense where one’s coworkers were and where they were likely to move in the next moment.

“Behind you,” came from Feo, who was between the fish stove and the window, and with a smile he slipped past Donald, who in turn was making a sudden excursion with the meat thermometer.

Pirjo was sent out to fetch more filets. Donald watched her brushing the meat, while he prepared two Cornish game hens.

The temperature rose. Feo, who was preparing a sauce for the salmon, was bright red in the face. Pirjo returned to the desserts. Donald poked the poultry breasts with his index finger and then lifted them onto the plates that had been prepared for them. He drizzled the morel sauce over them, corrected the potato-and-duck liver terrine, and rang the bell. Tessie appeared and took the plates away.

Dozens of pots and pans were cooking at once. Steam rose lazily from the fish broth, pans sizzled, an open flame suddenly appeared on the stove and the plates that Pirjo supplied clattered.

Feo looked up and gave Johnny a quick glance as if to say: now you understand why we are grateful that you came.

Johnny, as yet untrained in the particular routines and the others’ patterns of movement, tried to keep the pace and see to the priorities.

A sudden break in the flow of orders created a few minutes of breathing room. Everyone straightened their backs. Feo drank a little water and Donald slipped off to the hand sink.

“You smoke too much,” Feo called out.

Donald did not reply, but the cloud of smoke from the sink area showed the lack of impact of his coworker’s views. Johnny was surprised that a kitchen chef would take a smoke break. He had never experienced this before, but he did not comment on it.

It was completely quiet in the kitchen. Pirjo was resting against the counter, examining her cuticles with a dreamy expression. Feo was standing at the sink provided for their personal use, looking at his face in the mirror while he thoroughly dried his hands with a paper towel.

Eva lingered in the doorway. She had not said anything in a while. She knows us, Johnny thought, and it struck him that she reminded him a little of his sister. A somewhat reserved manner, often with a cool smile on her lips, a smile that could come across as superior but that in his sister’s case expressed a desire for mutual understanding. Johnny was often irritated by Bitte’s tentative personality, her somewhat lazy appearance and her tendency to submit to others.

If Eva was the same, it would be hard for her. You had to be able to take what you needed in this business. If you didn’t stand up for your rights, you would be taken advantage of.

“How much are they paying you?” Johnny asked.

Eva looked around the kitchen. Feo was studying her in the mirror. Donald, who had returned from his smoke break, let out a snort.

“Not very much, but it’s supposed to increase later,” Eva said.

“That’s what they always say,” Donald muttered.

“It’s a job,” Eva said and tried to catch his gaze.

“A job,” Feo repeated.

Johnny knew that his question had broken a silent agreement not to publicly discuss their remuneration, especially not with someone who was newly hired. At that point one was expected to hold one’s tongue and only slowly develop a clearer picture of all the constructions and agreements in the business. One had to make the mark before one gained the right to ask such questions, and that could take half a year, perhaps longer.

“At least we share the tips equally,” Eva said.

Johnny hoped she would not ask how much that yielded, and he thought she understood the look he gave her, because she swallowed her next comment and laughed as if she didn’t want to be pulled into a game in which she only guessed at the rules.

“See you tomorrow,” she said and glided out the door, returning almost immediately.

“There’s a famous cop out there,” she said.

Donald froze in the middle of his movements. Feo turned around.

“Who is it?” they asked at the same time.

“Her name is Lindell,” Eva said. “She has a kid at the day care next to the school where my youngest is.”

“What is she doing here?”

“Having dinner, of course. What did you think?”

Feo shrugged and chuckled. Donald stared sourly after the waitress.

“What the hell is up with her?” he asked.

“I wonder what the cop is doing here,” Feo said.

“You heard her,” Johnny said, “she’s having dinner.”

“I don’t believe in cops,” Feo said.

“What the hell is up with her?” Donald repeated. “Gonzo isn’t the greatest, but at least he doesn’t gab so damn much.”

Feo peered out through the window.

“Cops don’t just come here and eat,” he said. “She’s probably investigating something.”

“Is that a problem?” Johnny asked. “Are you working under the table?”

For a moment, Feo looked upset and he shot Johnny an angry look, but then he resumed his carefree demeanor.

“No, but I am from Portugal,” he said.

Johnny waited for an explanation but it never appeared, and he simply shrugged.

Pirjo, who had hardly said one word all evening, laughed. A dry, joyless laugh that made even Donald look up.

“I am from Finland,” she said.

“I am from Småland,” Johnny said.

“Tessie is from the USA,” Pirjo said.

“Gonzo is from Gonzoland,” Feo added.

Everyone’s gaze was directed at Donald. It was as if a great seriousness had gripped the staff of Dakar, as if someone had entered the kitchen in order to deliver some grave news.

The meat chef turned a fillet in the pan and then looked around, allowing his gaze to travel from Johnny, on to Pirjo, and finally landing on Feo with a contemplative smile, stroking his chin with one hand while the other reached for a frying pan, seemingly of its own accord.

“I was born in Kerala,” he said after a couple of trembling seconds of absolute silence, turning his back to the others and pulling down yet another pan from the rack above the stove. He held it outstretched above his head for a moment, as if it were a torch.

“Kerala,” he repeated.

Feo burst into a thunderous laughter but stopped as suddenly.

“Where is that?” Pirjo asked.

“To the East,” Donald said.

“So is Lempälä,” she said.

“And we are all gathered here,” Johnny said. “In Dakar’s kitchen.”

For a few moments he experienced a feeling of expansion, despite the limited space of the kitchen. He was suddenly very happy that he had left Jönköping and Sofia. It was as if life had taken a little hop, and not simply straight up in order to land in the same spot, but Johnny now knew that the move to Uppsala meant a forward movement. He studied Feo, who was leaning over a plate of anglerfish, and then let his gaze wander over to the head chef. Donald really was a complicated person. Johnny could not yet decide when he was joking and when he was serious.

His face looked as if it had been carved out of marble, with heavy cheeks and a meaty nose above the deeply set eyes. Eyes that appeared to regard the kitchen as the only possible refuge, but also a prison for the dreams he painstakingly concealed behind a dismissive facade.

Donald had worked in perhaps fifteen different kitchens in his thirty years as a chef. Johnny had met many of these cooking nomads. If they could maintain some semblance of balance between the late work shifts, the subsequent late nights, alcohol, and an attempt at a social life, then their professional skill could flower and become a security in any stormy and stressful kitchen, a rock for many a restaurant owner.

Maybe Donald was this kind of man, he would find out in time. He watched over the plates that left Dakar’s kitchen like a hawk, and they were a series of perfection.

“This and nothing else,” he said and showed Johnny how the veal should look.

“Nothing else,” he repeated and polished away a spot that was quite invisible to Johnny.

He nodded, studied the plate, and, realizing that there was nothing to alter, tried to memorize the arrangement.

Donald left the kitchen at ten o’clock. Pirjo also went home after Johnny promised to handle the cleaning up. He put things away, rinsed and scrubbed the floor while Feo made a rapid inventory check and called in orders to suppliers’ answering machines.

Afterward they each sat down with a beer. Feo smoked a cigarette, only one, in silence, with obvious pleasure.

“You go home,” Johnny said. “I’ll take out the garbage.”

Feo shook his head.

“This is the best time,” he said and smiled at Johnny. “Let’s drink some coffee and have a calva. We have to celebrate your start here.”

“How come you speak such good Swedish?”

“Practice,” Feo said. “I talk with my wife all the time and she corrects me. Our place is like a language course. It is the only way to become a person, to understand the words. Should I go around like a svartskalle and understand nothing?”

“One thing,” Johnny said. “Where does Donald come from? He said Kerala, but that’s in India.”

“His father was a missionary,” Feo answered. “Donald lived in India for fifteen years. You should taste his bean dishes and lamb cooked in yogurt. He could open an Indian restaurant.”

He stood up, left the kitchen, and returned with espresso and calvados on a platter.

“Slobodan’s treat,” he said.

They drank their coffee in silence. Johnny experienced the fatigue in his body as a pleasant mutedness. Voices and laughter could be heard from the dining room and the bar while the kitchen rested in stillness. The best time, Johnny thought, and stared into the shimmer of the calvados for a long time before he tasted it.

The spirits exploded in his mouth and he jerked forward as if he had received a violent blow to his back, but he managed to put the glass down before he ran over to the sink.

Feo watched him but said nothing. Johnny remained leaning over the sink. He spit, and did everything he could to quell his impulse to retch.

“Damn,” he said, when his body had calmed down, “it must have gone down the wrong way.”

“Have a little water,” Feo said.

After exchanging a few words with Måns in the bar, Feo and Johnny said their good-byes in the alley outside Dakar’s kitchen entrance. The Portuguese unlocked his bicycle and rolled away. Johnny stood and watched his new colleague as he left.

He should have known better than to have a strong drink like that. It had started about a year ago, the nausea and heaving and a diffuse ache in his abdomen. An ache that sometimes turned into a stabbing pain. Beer was all right and sometimes also white wine, even if the enjoyment of having a glass was now diminished since he feared the nausea and pain. At first, Sofia had urged him to go to a doctor, but then it was as if she had lost interest in his well-being and she stopped commenting on his contorted expressions.

What had Feo thought? Did he sense that Johnny’s claim that the drink had gone down the wrong way had been a lie? Feo had not said anything, but his eyes revealed that he had not completely bought the explanation.

Johnny walked home. He did not mind that it was a long way, perhaps two kilometers. He actually appreciated the mild and restful evening, the occasional person he encountered did not bother him, and he thought that his new city reminded him of a foreign country. It was a feeling he would carry with him for a long time, that he was a guest, a stranger who did not have any duties to the town and its inhabitants.

If anyone talked to him, posed a question, or sought his opinion, he could excuse himself with the fact that he was new, a temporary visitor, and in this way avoid all responsibility.

It was Sofia, connected to his dream of a life with meaning, who haunted him. He knew that his self-imposed outsider status was a defense. He lived as if in quarantine. Working as a cook at Dakar was the only thing that made him human, a social creature. He did not seek the company of others, their warmth or acceptance. He could just as well have been wandering in an uninhabited land. It was as if he had taken a job that was offered out of habit. Lacking all will, he had allowed himself to be influenced by his sister and moved to Uppsala.

There had been a time when he had loved his work, but his goal of becoming a great chef had started to fade. Now he saw it as his only possibility to survive, nothing more. It gave him a salary and the illusion that he had a task. The passion was gone, and deep inside he was terrified. At least thirty more years in the business and the disdain for food magazines, enthusiastic guests, and curious aquaintances, their constant chatter about newly discovered dishes, exhausted him, made him increasingly embittered. His former friends had no idea what it was like: the constant pressure to turn out beautiful presentations of delicious food, while life itself was distasteful and anything but beautiful.

When did the whole thing start, this process of decomposition as life crumbled away? Or rather, rotted, as there was nothing life-affirming about the process, no healthy microorganisms that diligently and naturally went about their business. This was oxygen-poor putrefaction, the stinking decay of unblemished blood and flesh, that was wreaking havoc inside Johnny.

He observed this change with fear but also fascination, because it was with the misanthropy of a masochist that he presided over his own deterioration as a human being. He wanted, and did not want, to sink to the bottom and from thence spread his inhuman venom, spiked with self-disgust and an increasing animosity, to the people around him who still appeared to nurture hope.

When he arrived at the apartment, a one-bedroom flat by Klockarängen, he lit a candle. Candles belonged to winter, the dark season, but as he was unpacking his things he had found a candle, which he placed on the old teak coffee table.

The candle gave off the slightly sweet scent of vanilla. He sat for a while in the sofa, made of a plasticky artificial leather, and stared at the fluttering flame before he got up with a sigh, blew it out, and went to bed.

He fell asleep and slept heavily and without dreaming for ten hours, but was awakened by a nightmare when it was already late morning. He sat up with a start. The morning sun shone in through the provisionally erected curtains.