Eating Crow (12 page)

S
itting at a back table in a small fondue place that I found two blocks north of Union Square in New York City, I could pretend that everything was fine. It was called the Matterhorn Café and inside the air smelled unself-consciously of dairy fats and hot wine. The boss was a Swiss Italian called Bruno who every evening occupied the last booth before the kitchen door, his huge belly wedged in against the tabletop, from where he directed his staff of young Czech waitresses, each as pale as he was dark.

The interior gave out mixed signals. The walls were paneled in old varnished pine planks, and each of the booths had its own carved, overhanging faux roof, as if it were an Alpine chalet. But the tablecloths were of red and white laminated gingham and stacked about the walls were bulbous bottles of red wine, their bases encased in baskets. It turned out that Bruno, fearing New York wasn’t ready for a Swiss fondue joint, had tried to run a Swiss Italian trattoria here instead (lots of grilled meats with heavy cream and mushroom sauces and attitude) only to discover that Manhattan definitely wasn’t ready for one of those. So he had gone back to Plan A and begun serving fondues. Now they came: the middle-aged couples from the outer boroughs who remembered fondly their young-married years in the early 70s when fondues were somehow chic, and the gay boys from the Village who thought there was something kitsch about the place, and the confused former restaurant critic with a new job at the United Nations who was wondering if he had made the biggest mistake of his life.

This retreat to the Matterhorn Café had nothing to do with my dad, though I can see why some people might assume so. André Basset may have been Swiss but he was endlessly dismissive of the fondue.

“One thousand years of civilization and this is the best they can do? A gallon of boiling wine and ten pounds of cheese? This they call cooking?”

He hated any trend and fondues were exactly that when I was a kid, so he would have nothing to do with them. It was my mother who was determined not to be left out. The fondue was the only thing I ever remember her cooking before my father died and then just the once. I have scant memory of the dish itself, save the smell when it was cooking and that I burned the roof of my mouth on the hot, molten cheese. I have better memories of my mother dipping chunks of French bread into a little glass of kirsch that she, and only she, had at her side, before dipping it into the pot. She did this with every piece of bread and with a marked precision and daintiness, as if it could not be a proper fondue unless the rituals were observed. I remember my father glowering and my mother giggling uncontrollably, and us little boys joining in too because Mum, who was always steady and cool, was so very funny when she laughed. (We didn’t join in, though, with her shouts of “mountain boy” at Dad, which made him blush.) The next morning Dad made our breakfast and Mum stayed in bed because, he said, “she has become ill.” He hummed to himself as he warmed the milk for our porridge, the stove his domain once more.

In a strange city the Matterhorn Café reminded me of who I was. The main event, a
fondue des Mosses
from Vaud made with Gruyère and Appenzell, was good. There was no aftertaste of raw alcohol or uncooked cornstarch, and alongside it they served plates of
viande des Grisons
, those exquisitely fragile slices of Swiss air-cured beef that could put a Harry’s Bar Carpaccio to shame. There was also a neighborhood feel to the place. I noticed the same guys in there night after night. The balding fellow in the checked sports jacket up at the bar. Green salad. Plate of cheese, basket of bread, and the sports pages of
USA Today.
Then, a few booths behind me, an older guy with a graying buzz cut and a black suit, a steak and a magazine—fishing or cycling, always some kind of red-meat outdoor sports—whom I would pass on the way to the toilets at the front by the door. At the Matterhorn Café I could be one of them, another single man who needed dinner and who chose to take it here, where he belonged. Christ knows, I didn’t belong anywhere else in the city. I worked that one out early on.

The gatekeeper for the United Nations, the single person with the power to grant access to the headquarters of the most overarching internationalist organization the planet has ever seen, was a soft-cheeked middle-aged woman with pencil lines for eyebrows, a saggy gullet, and a name badge that read
Nora.
She peered over the counter of the tight, circular reception desk at the suitcases scattered about us.

“You the team from UNOAR?”

“Yes,” Jennie said tersely. She rocked back on one heel. She had done exactly the same when she discovered there was no limo to meet us at the airport: one foot back, rocking on the heel, as if by keeping all the movement below the knee, no one would notice her irritation. Then she muttered to me, “No one who flies first-class should ever have to take a cab. Remember that, Marc. No one. First-class. Ever.” She sent Will Masters and Satesh Panjabi to join the taxi line.

Now it was happening again.

“You got bags?” the receptionist said.

“Yes.”

“They been through security?”

“Naturally. Can you call the UNOAR secretariat’s office and tell them Marc Basset is here?”

“There’s no one in the UNOAR office.” This as if lecturing an idiot. Nora pushed herself back on her office chair from the curve of desk and barked at a colleague a few inches away over her shoulder. “Doreen? Who’d’we call for UNOAR? Larry?”

The other woman didn’t look up. She kept on punching away at a computer keyboard. Just kept on pushing those buttons. “Yeah, Larry. Extension twenty-seven sixty-four seven.”

“I’ll call Larry Zwegller.”

“Fine. Please do.”

And then he was there, a small man in a cheap blue suit with a big bunch of keys hanging off his belt and a film of sweat clinging to his top lip.

“You the UNOAR guys? Larry Zwegller, Facilities.” Vigorous handshakes all round, as if the human contact might save him. “Jesus, but am I pleased to see you. Sorry the greeting isn’t more, you know, fitting, but what with the situation an’ all … You got bags? They been through security? Good. Hey, Tony? Tony here will deal with the bags. Check ’em, won’t you, Tony? We leave ’em here and we’ll take elevator seven. I’ll show you around and then, you know, then you can get to work.”

We stood in the lift, the five of us trying not to notice the smell of dry cleaning fluid and sweat coming off Zwegller’s suit.

“So the thing is, Miss …”

“Sampson. Ms.”

“Sure, Ms. Sampson. The thing is, arrangements have been a bit … anyway, just expect a bit of noise up there.”

“On the fifteenth floor?”

“Fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth—take your pick,” he said wearily, looking upward as if through the lift ceiling he could see something the rest of us could not.

The lift doors opened on that very special kind of chaos only a failed attempt at organization can create, like the disruption of a beautiful place setting after the meal has been eaten. There were huddles of men, backs against the corridor wall, hunched down on the old gray linoleum-tiled floor shouting into mobile phones, surrounded by arcs of strewn paper. Through office doors we could see people jabbing each other in the chest across desks and others shouting into telephones or at each other, or both. Weaving in and out of them were tidy young women, with fixed smiles and shiny heels, carrying stationery supplies from one place to another as if a sense of purpose might save them from being swallowed up by this clutter of noise and motion.

“Ladies and Gentlemen,” Larry said, deadpan, “welcome to the United Nations Office of Apology and Reconciliation.”

We stepped into the thick broth of shout and accusation. Jennie flinched and pressed one hand to an ear to help herself think.

“What in god’s name is going on?”

Zwegller leaned into her. “We had to come up with a plan for the desks,” he said, all but shouting to make himself heard. “So some guy—”

Before he could finish, a short dark man with a Velcro strip of mustache battered him on the shoulder. “Mr. Zwegller, it is intolerable. We must be moved. My people, we cannot take this offense. We must—”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa there. Which delegation?” Zwegller leaned his ear toward him.

“I am from Armenia. The Turks are on the next desk. Do you know about the Armenian genocide by the Turkish? Do you know of this stain on the world’s history? We cannot tolerate to be so close to these … people.” He spat out the last word. “And the Kurds, they are there interrupting our arguments with the Turkish and saying their claim is newer and so should take precedence. It is intolerable, heinous—”

“Okay,” Larry said. “Okay. Listen. I am only Facilities. I do desks. I do telephones. Not stains on history.” He hesitated, apparently looking for a solution. “I may be able to do screens, though. Maybe I get you a screen to separate you from the Turkish delegation as a stopgap? How’s that?”

The man looked mollified. “You are a good man, Mr. Zwegller.”

“Here to serve, my friend. Here to serve.”

He turned back to us with a big see-what-I-mean shrug. “So some shmuck, he set the desks up geographically. End result, we got Israelis sharing a desk pod with the Palestinians, the Australians with the Aborigines, the East Timorese with the Indonesians. It’s a friggin’ disaster, I tell you. ’Scuse my French. So anyway—”

“Why doesn’t the secretariat sort this out?” Jennie said, leaning back in to him.

Larry Zwegller blinked for a moment, then nibbled his lip. “Okay, lady. What we have here is what I think is called a communication breakdown. Let me get you to your offices and I’ll, you know … then we can talk. And step carefully. As you can see, my friends, there are people who’ve just shifted out of their desks altogether and are camping out in the corridors. UNHCR is thinking of popping up here to have a look-see,” he said and grinned encouragingly, but none of us grinned back.

On this side of the fifteenth floor, which faced into Manhattan, were the delegations from the European and Near Eastern special interest groups who had been invited to research and register their apologizable hurts. The Middle and Far East, Africa, and Australasia delegations were on the floor above, Zwegller shouted at us, where they would eventually be joined by Financial Control. Historical and Verification was meant to be on the floor below, along with Legal Affairs, Psychology, and ancillary services like Transport and Accommodation. We pushed through a set of new double doors on the East River side of the building and the noise immediately subsided.

“And this,” Zwegller said, with a dying fall, “is the secretariat.” There was a long, thickly carpeted, newly painted, and deserted corridor off of which stood a set of deserted offices filled with empty desks and bare bookshelves, each offering a lovely, unbroken view of the East River. We padded slowly through the silence.

Jennie said, “Where is everyone?”

“Just through here, Ms. Sampson, if you please, ma’am.” Another set of double doors and into an anteroom where two young women, with nothing to do, jumped up from behind empty desks and straightened their skirts. “Alice, Francine, good to see ya, let’s take these good people onward.” They led us through a last set of doors, to a massive corner expanse that looked out in one direction on uptown Manhattan, and in the other, over the river. There was modern window seating padded in caramel-colored leather, a sofa area, and a couple of separate goldfish-bowl offices. There was tasteful modern art. There were healthy rubber plants. There was the gentle hum of air-conditioning.

I went and looked out at the view of the city, this vast, shuddering creature that looked calm and at rest compared to the craziness out beyond the doors behind me.

Jennie said, “So …?”

“We have this situation.”

The secretariat were the bureaucrats who would be responsible for the day-to-day running of UNOAR: overseeing the compilation and verification of hurts, the staging and financing of apologies, the work of various other apologists scattered about the globe (of whom I was, notionally, the head). Normally, secretariat-grade UN employees move to each new task without a murmur, but here they had made an exception.

“These guys, apparently, they don’t do feelings,” said Zwegller, whom I was coming to like. “They do administering. They say to their line managers, in this department maybe, ‘I’ll be required to have emotional responses.’ This, they say, is a dangerous business. At the least, they say, they run the risk of passive empathizing.”

“Passive empathizing?”

“These folk, they’re worried they’ll start having feelings just by being near you.”

“So?” Jenny said, rocking back on her heel again.

“You know how it is. It’s about the money. They wanna raise—like we don’t all want one of those. So anyway, none of them will come in here till management sorts them out. In the meantime, it’s just you, me, and Alice and Francine here.”

We all stared at each other in silence. Francine stepped forward.

“Mr. Basset, can I say how much I loved the video of your apology? I’m just so looking forward to seeing you emote in person.”

On my first full day in New York, instead of going to the office, I started walking the streets, and late that afternoon I found the Matterhorn Café. I went there every evening after that and ordered the same thing—fondue, salad, a carafe of white Jura—until on the fourth night the waitress didn’t even give me the menu but simply said “The same?” and I nodded. I snatched a couple of mobile phone conversations with Jennie—she had handed us each a new mobile at the airport—but she was always brisk and businesslike. She told me she was “getting to the bottom of things” and that I should “get settled in.” Will Masters called me once, to check a couple of details on my contract, and Satesh phoned to see whether I wanted to take in some new Finnish movie with him, at an art house on the Upper East Side. I told him no thanks, I was getting enough gloom and angst at work. He laughed and said everything would be sorted out soon enough.