Eating Crow (16 page)

T
here were many things I loved about Lynne McPartland; her cooking was not one of them. She was lousy, unburdened by either technique or good taste. In the early months of our relationship this was a terrible problem because she refused to accept it was so.

“I’ve survived into adulthood on my own food well enough, thank you,” she said one evening, when I offered a little constructive advice. “I think I can get along just fine without you now.”

I did wonder. The casual manner in which she cut up raw and bleeding pieces of meat on our wooden cheese board threatened us repeatedly with poisoning, and even the dishes that came out the way she intended promised a certain measure of gastric distress. She refused to believe, for example, that the order in which ingredients were introduced to each other was of any importance. If Lynne attempted a coq au vin you could never be sure whether the onions would be sweated down before the wine hit the pan or after, uncooked. She insisted upon frying garlic to a bitter brown crisp before allowing anything else near it. And then there was her love of cupboard condiments. One evening she watched me beat a little red currant jelly and Dijon mustard into a lamb
jus.
This flicked a switch; the secret to flavor, she concluded, lay in the sticky jars that crowded our cupboards. This was the vital intelligence I had kept from her. The next evening I found her spooning neat strawberry jam into a fish pie “to add a touch of sweetness.” The liquor from ajar of pickled onions became a particular favorite “to add an oniony acidic edge” and no Lynne McPartland dish was ever complete unless half a bottle of Heinz Tomato Ketchup had been upended into it.

I took to patrolling the kitchen whenever she was cooking, like a prison guard watching for escapees. I couldn’t help myself. I knew terrible things were happening to innocent ingredients and it was my duty to protect them. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the guts to face the situation head-on. Instead of just telling her to cease and desist I would hover by her shoulder and say things like “Are you sure you want to put that smoked salmon in the pan before you’ve scrambled the eggs?” or “Salted anchovies in the mushroom risotto?” She would become ever more hunched over the stove, as if convinced she could hide its tragedy from me.

Inevitably my frustration boiled over, and in the worst possible of places: a review. It was a London hotel restaurant specializing in the fusion of Turkish and Austrian cooking, the resulting horrors served up on overengineered lumps of white porcelain by Villeroy & Boch or Royal Doulton. Koftka schnitzel. Caramelized aubergine puree Strudel. And so on. As I put it:

The last time Austria and Turkey were introduced to each other was on the field of war, and the result here is no less murderous or bloody. Why had I come? After all, if I genuinely wanted to eat food this bad I could have stayed home and got my girlfriend to cook dinner. What’s more, she wouldn’t have charged me fifteen percent for the dismal service. The service would have been equally as dismal. She just wouldn’t have charged me for it.

I told her it was a joke. I told her lots of things, but she was still furious, and rightly so. Yet it did the trick. A division of labor developed in our household which gave us a certain balance; we filled in each other’s gaps and made a kind of whole. I did all the cooking and the washing up. She attended to the rest of the domestic duties, at which, in any case, I was terrible. This suited me perfectly for I was, by nature, a solitary cook who both wanted and needed to keep control of everything that happened in the kitchen. I suspect that even if Lynne had been a good cook I would have done everything in my power to keep her out of there. She could have the bathroom and the living room. She could have the hallway and the bedroom. The kitchen was mine. I was not a team player.

This was what made my first three days down in Louisiana so curious and special. There in our house by the heavy waters of the Mississippi, Jennie and I cooked together, hemmed in by volumes of recipes from Camille Glenn and Craig Claiborne, Bill Neal and Jeanne Voltz and the Culinary Institute of America. We fried chicken that had been dusted only with flour, after Glenn, and then fried some more that had first been soaked,
pace
Claiborne, in milk and Tabasco, and decided we preferred it unsoaked. We tried our hand at Frogmore stew, thick with lumps of smoked sausage and shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico and hacked-up ears of corn. I made a wild rice gumbo, spiky with cayenne and andouille, and Jennie cooked crawfish in a huge pot that took up half the stove and steamed the windows, and the two of us swapped spoons to taste and check and advise. We took turns beating our grain to make hominy grits until our forearms ached, and boiled them up with salt and butter. We practiced gently kneading buttermilk biscuit dough so that the gluten didn’t become overdeveloped and the biscuits too tough. We cooked up a pasty milk gravy that looked no more appealing for being made according to the instructions. We even tried to invent a macadamia nut pie, using a pecan pie recipe, but it wasn’t a success.

“This tastes like something died,” Franky said after trying it, and as Franky was a Southern boy and wore a pistol in the holster strapped to his chest, it didn’t seem right to argue.

“Franky knows his pie,” said Alex approvingly, as they sat side by side at the breakfast bar in the kitchen, jackets off in the early summer heat, a little sweat staining their shirts, tasting our efforts.

“So we make Key lime pie instead,” Jennie said. “And just chocolate-coat the macadamias?”

Franky and Alex agreed. “That’s all you need with a fine macadamia,” Franky said, heavy with the wisdom of the world bequeathed by a childhood in Alabama. “A good overcoat of chocolate.”

It felt good to be in that kitchen, cooking hard alongside Jennie. We understood each other. So when late on the second day she asked me how my meeting with Max Olson had gone at the Dayton Air Force Base—my “Max Moment,” as she called it—I felt relaxed enough to tell the truth.

“I think he meant it to be special,” I said. “But in truth it was just bizarre.”

Following Schenke’s second law—that no one can apologize for a hurt unless it is their responsibility—it had been deemed necessary to invite individual nations to appoint their own representatives to deal with areas of “local penitential interest” which would fall outside of my purview. For example, because I had opposed South Africa’s apartheid regime during my student days, and had even played a part in The Struggle (by refusing to shop in my nearest supermarket, which insisted upon stocking cans of South African pineapple rings), I clearly wasn’t the best person to say sorry. Instead the job would be falling to a Dutch apologist. Likewise the French apologist would be dealing with various issues in North Africa and Indochina (although I would get to keep the Vietnam War because of the American connections in my family and a certain unwillingness by the French, the former colonial power, to admit they had anything to do with it at all). An Italian countess had been chosen to deal with Ethiopia and Albania, and a trio of Germans had been appointed to do nothing but say sorry to Israel for the grievous hurt of the Holocaust, on a monthly basis, for the next two years.

A former KGB man called Vladimir Rashenko had been appointed by Russia to say sorry for all the things it had done to its neighbors during the Soviet era, “which is particularly fitting,” Jennie said as she led me toward him across the ballroom of the airbase conference center where the UNOAR inaugural meeting was being held, “because dear old Vlad was directly involved in most of them.” Around us the opening cocktail party was in full swing, and the room was packed with UN diplomats and apparatchiks, many of whom Jennie seemed to know.

“You’re kidding me?” I said, trying to keep up.

“No, really. He was a wonder with the cattle prod and the thumbscrew, apparently. Wrote the KGB handbook on modern interrogation techniques.”

Rashenko was a huge man of muscle gone to fat, his heavy Slavic head pedestaled upon a neck as thick as my thigh. Seeing me, he rose from his seat, his cavernous, double-breasted, midnight blue satin suit pulling against itself like a sail catching the wind, until he was looking down at me from somewhere near the ceiling. And then, without warning, he burst into tears. Hefty sobs made his shoulders heave and roll as he wrapped his arms about me and pulled me deep into the padded, sweaty cell of his man-cleavage. He muttered something damply into my ear about being really sorry for the Cold War and all the general unpleasantness it had caused and said he watched the video of my apology to Jennie every evening because it was “inspire-ration-al.” He let go of me and returned to his seat, his face suddenly impassive once more.

“And that’s it?” I said to Jennie when we had escaped back to the other side of the room.

She smiled. “That’s his schtick. Rashenko cries a lot when he apologizes. Look …” He was on his feet again, another startled man swept up in his arms, tears dribbling down his cheeks. “I’m told it goes down very well with other Slavs.”

“I’m glad it goes down well with somebody.”

“They all have a routine of some sort, actually. Watch the Italian girl …” On the other side of the room an elegant woman in a red Chanel suit was standing at a table deep in conversation with a balding mustachioed man. She was taking off her expensive jewelry, piece by piece.

“Once the Greek apologist has gone she’ll put it all back on again to be ready for the next one. Apparently she has some teasing speech about stripping herself bare before you. The French guy quotes Molière endlessly, you know.”

I scanned the room.

“It all seems a bit …”

“… unsubtle?”

“I was going to say ‘calculating,’ but ‘unsubtle’just about does it.”

“Exactly, Marc. That’s why you’re here. True empathic engagement is an art.” She jabbed me in the left side of my chest. “You feel it
here.”
She started looking about the room as if searching for someone. “Plus you’ll cook up a mean gumbo, I’m sure. Ah, there’s Max. Let’s go see him. I know there’s something he wants to show you.”

Jennie left us together while she went off to work the room. Max immediately walked me toward the door. “Come on, son. I want to get us out of here before Rashenko gets his hands on me.”

“You’ve met him, then?”

Max gave a weary nod. “Met him? I’m on temporary assignment at the Russian Federation so it’s unavoidable. I’ve had a lot of damp shoulders, I can tell you.”

“You’re no longer with the Foreign Office? I didn’t know.”

“Busy, busy, busy,” he said simply. “Always busy.”

A small golf buggy was waiting for us in the evening gloom. Max took the wheel and drove us out to one of the aircraft hangars, a cigarette tucked neatly between his lips so that the smoke streamed over his shoulder as we drove. At the hangar an engineer in greasy blue overalls unlocked the sliding doors and we slipped through the gap into the darkness, illuminated only by a blade of light from security lights outside. Max took a new cigarette from a pack in his pocket and cupped his hand around the guttering flame as he lit it, a discrete pool of orange warmth illuminating half his dry, angular face in the blackness. Somewhere off beside me I heard the solid clunk of a switch being thrown, then another, and a third. Away at the far end of the hangar, banks of arc lights expanded into life.

A floor-to-ceiling theatrical backdrop hung across the entire width of the hangar, shimmering silkily in the light. Before it was a podium set up with a lectern and microphones from where, tomorrow, my appointment would be officially announced. Printed on the vast expanse of curtain was a black-and-white photograph. A man is outdoors, kneeling on the ground at the top of a short flight of broad steps, his body stiff and upright. His hands are clasped in front of him, very pale against the blackness of his raincoat. His head, with its elegant swept-back receding hair and long forehead, is bowed so that his gaze appears to be fixed on a spot on the ground perhaps two feet in front of him. He appears oblivious to the large crowd that surrounds him at a respectful distance. Many in the crowd are holding cameras and, like the photographer who took this picture, recording the scene. This was clearly an important moment, although I didn’t recognize it.

Max Olson was looking up reverentially, as if stopped by a memory. He took a drag on his cigarette and exhaled, the long plume of smoke guttering in the beams of light around him.

“Warsaw,” he said gravely. “December 1970.” He didn’t look back at me. He waved the hand holding the cigarette at the image. “Do you recognize him?”

I said I was sorry but I didn’t.

He laughed. “No need to apologize to me, young man. Not for that. It’s Willy Brandt …” He sounded the
W
in Willy as a soft Germanic
V.

“Chancellor of West Germany?”

“Very good. Chancellor of West Germany. Arguably the greatest postwar German chancellor. Do you know where he is?”

“Well, you said Warsaw …”

“He’s at the memorial to the half-million Jews of the city’s ghetto murdered by the Nazis.”

“And he’s …” I hesitated, wary of failing the test. “… Apologizing?”

“A seminal moment for West Germany,” Max said, approvingly. And then, with a weary shake of his head: “Jesus, but it was cold that day.”

“You were there?”

“Oh, sure. I’m back behind the fat army guy in the peaked cap. You see him? Well, I’m just to the right and back a little with the—”