The Chef (25 page)

‘I do. If you grow up here you learn to have your doubts.’

With her quilted coat Sandana was wearing a pink woolly hat pulled down tight over her head. It made her look like a child. This impression was reinforced by the fact that, despite the
seriousness of the subject they were discussing, she kept on opening her mouth wide to exhale, gazing in fascination at the cloud of steam.

Maravan thought about it. ‘Must be difficult.’

‘Having doubts?’

He nodded.

‘Believing isn’t easy either.’

An elderly couple were coming the other way. The woman had been nagging the man, but now went quiet. Maravan and Sandana interrupted their conversation as well. As they passed each other, all
four of them said ‘
Grüezi
’, according to the unwritten law of forest walkers.

They came to a fork. Without wavering Maravan plumped for the path that went upwards, towards the snow.

They continued walking at the same pace. The effort increased the gaps, first between sentences, then between individual words.

‘Everyone says the war will be over soon.’

‘Let’s hope so,’ Maravan sighed.

‘Lost,’ she added.

‘But over at least.’

‘Will you go back?’

Maravan stopped. ‘In the past I was sure I would. But now, without Nangay and Ulagu . . . What about you?’

‘Back? I’m from here.’

The path led to a clearing, curving slightly. When they reached the middle, they suddenly saw a deer on the path. Terrified, it turned its head towards them, then ran away. It stopped,
absolutely still, at the highest point of the slope and looked down at them.

‘Ulagu, maybe,’ Sandana said.

He looked at her in astonishment and saw she was smiling. He put his hands together in front of his face and bowed towards the deer. Sandana copied him.

Snow was now starting to fall from the white sky above the clearing.

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.

‘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.