A Moveable Feast (8 page)

We never make it to the market. My teaching ends the evening before our scheduled visit. That night, Jerry and I catch a quick dinner of rice, curry and dhal at a Nepali restaurant around the corner from our hotel. When we return, men in green uniforms clog the hotel lobby. They have orders from Naypyidaw, the new political capital, to put us on a train to Yangon that night. No questions, no answers. No phone calls allowed. We must pack and go – the train leaves in less than two hours.

Two officers escort us to the station, and the four of us cram into one small cabin with a wheezing fan for sixteen hours of aching heat. The train rumbles along. Sooty grime cakes our skin. Exhaust spews through the windows. We rumble through the blackest night, through a countryside with no lights.

The officers offer us water. They don’t want to be here, but they have no choice. They begin to peel off their uniforms, removing layers in the cloying heat. They never touch us, never search us. They sleep, while my mind races with questions. I pull out my journal and write against the shaky vibrations of the moving train. In the morning, our captors buy us coffee.

When we arrive in Yangon, we are shuttled across the city, back and forth, first to the airport, then to Immigration headquarters forty-five minutes away downtown, then back to
the airport, where we’re given room to wash and eat in the air-conditioned airport lounge. The authorities take our passports and book us on the next flight to Bangkok. Then, finally, when we are sitting in our Thai Airways seats, in the very last row of the plane, our passports are returned to us with little black stamps across our Burmese visas, one small word written in faded capital letters: ‘Deportee’.

We never learn why. Rumours abound; most are ludicrous. The most plausible of all: our plans to meet the
laphet thote
man at his market, which might have been run by someone in the ruling junta – about which we knew nothing at all.

These things happen in Burma – our friends all have stories. We knew a man in Yangon who referred to his colleagues by the number of years they will spend in prison –
currently serving two years, currently serving ten years, currently serving twelve years.
That man’s passport was confiscated the last time he returned from an overseas journey. Jerry and I were sentenced to leave – the Burmese are sentenced to stay.

It’s summer. That perfect time of year when the temperature of air and skin agree, when the hot desert sun gives way to a blue-black sky with nighthawks making their rounds.

Plink
.

My computer sounds, and up pops a little orange Gmail window. Halfway around the world, the Burmese are just waking for the day, and one of my students has come online.

‘Good morning Karen … how are you today?’

It’s a young woman from Yangon, who tells me she would like to become a better journalist for her readers. If she has time, she says, she will translate some of her articles into English and send them to me.

This is how I keep abreast of my students’ lives. The government can brand my passport and put me on a blacklist but it hasn’t – yet – been able to impede the miracles of Facebook and Gmail chat. So, early in the morning and late at night, my Burmese colleagues and I tap our way through conversations about story structure, censorship, imprisonment, human rights – and the pleasures of home-cooked meals.

‘I miss & love you,’
my student writes.

She invites me to a traditional Burmese dinner. Someday.
‘If we can meet again.’

Note: I have not identified the Burmese in this story. Several of them asked me not to use their names, for their protection.

Alexander Lobrano grew up in Connecticut, and lived in Boston, New York and London before moving to Paris, his home today, in 1986. He was European Correspondent for
Gourmet
magazine from 1999 until its closing in 2009, and now contributes regularly to the
New York Times
. He has written about food and travel for
Bon Appétit
,
Food & Wine, Travel & Leisure, Departures
,
Condé Nast Traveler,
and many other publications in the United States and the United Kingdom. His website is
www.hungryforparis.com
.

The removalists had gone, and besides the two of us, as far as I knew, there were only three things left in our flat on Castletown Road in West London – two suitcases and a cold bottle of Strongbow cider in the fridge. Roger and I had sold our place, but caught a week short between when we had to leave the flat and when we could move into our new house, we’d decided on a cheap package trip to Portugal’s Algarve coast. What we wanted was lots of sun, wine and, hopefully, good food.

It wasn’t just because I’d never been to Portugal that I knew absolutely nothing about Portuguese food. Unlike Italian, Mexican or Chinese cuisine, Portuguese cooking had never entered the culinary canon of ethnic foods known and accepted in American suburbia, where I’d grown up in the 1960s and ’70s. So, in my ignorance, I assumed it would be similar to Spanish cooking. When I’d suggested Portugal to Roger, a vegetarian, he’d fretted, ‘All I care about is if they have lots of salads.’ With no evidence whatsoever to support the claim, I assured him they would.

On that sunny Saturday in early June, the wistful perfume of the lilacs in deep purple bloom in the back garden took the edge off the sharp smell of dust in the empty flat, but also heightened the melancholia inherent in any major personal migration. I decided it was time for some cider. The bottle had a cap, so I had to go upstairs to dig the bottle opener out of my shaving kit. When I opened the bedroom door, I saw a single suitcase sitting there. Mine. I looked in the other bedroom, dashed downstairs, and went from empty room to empty room. ‘Roger, where’s your suitcase? You did put it in the upstairs bedroom like I told you to, didn’t you?’

Twenty-four hours later, driving north to Lisbon to meet Roger’s plane, I sourly replayed this scene in my head again and again as I fought with the stiff U-shaped dashboard-mounted gear shift in the tinny little Renault station wagon that had come as part of our holiday. The removalists had locked Roger’s bag in a warehouse until Monday morning, so I’d gone ahead to Portugal and Roger was arriving on a later London–Lisbon flight.

It had looked like an easy drive on the car-rental-company map of Portugal, but in my first hour on the road, following old blue-and-oyster-grey enamelled signs to Lisboa, I’d travelled through several groves of alarmingly scarred cork oak trees and arrived at the very same crossroads twice. And now it was getting
hot, so hot that my skin was damp under the fat foam liners on my Walkman’s earphones. I noticed it was already noon. I hoped this meant that I was at least halfway to Lisbon, but since my map was so worthless, I decided to stop at the next gas station, buy a proper one, and find out exactly where I was.

To my surprise, there was something oddly pleasant, even a little exhilarating, about travelling in a geographical void. To be sure, I knew I was heading north, but that was about it, and if I was late for Roger’s arrival at 6pm, well, he’d just have to wait.

At this time, 1986, Portugal had only just joined the European Union (then known as the Common Market), so the imminent flood of adhesion money from Brussels had not yet arrived to modernise, standardise and ultimately ruin everything. Instead, Portugal looked just the way I imagined it always had. Here there was a field of heavy-headed yellow-petalled sunflowers with weak green necks; there, a woman with a black scarf, black dress and white apron vigorously hoeing her vegetable garden – cabbages, kale and potatoes, all of which I smelled on the hot air coming in the windows. I got stuck behind a tractor towing a cart of newly mown alfalfa for a while, then had to jam on the brakes when I came around a bend and nearly made ham of several short-legged black pigs whose bellies barely cleared the melting macadam road.

After another hour at the wheel, I still hadn’t come across a gas station, but I was hungry and thirsty and needed to stretch my legs, so I pulled up in front of a low whitewashed house with a few cars parked out the front. When I stepped through the screen door, I saw a group of men in dark suits sitting around a large table. At once they stopped talking and turned to stare at me, a tall blond foreigner wearing shorts, a T-shirt and flip-flops like some idiot who’d taken a wrong turn on his way to the beach.

Drying glasses behind the bar, the stout grey-haired man I guessed was the owner of the tavern didn’t budge. For several
excruciating seconds I thought of fleeing, then one of the dark-suited men got up, took a rush-bottomed chair from another table, added it to theirs and motioned for me to sit down. I was so caught off guard that I did.
‘Bom dia,’
they said collectively, and then offered their names – Rui, Fernao, Jao, Antonio and so on.

‘Alec,’ I said, gesturing at myself and blushing.

The tavern-keeper brought me a napkin, silverware and a glass, which the man to my right filled with cold fizzy greenish wine from a stoneware pitcher.
‘Obrigado,’
I said, using up all of my Portuguese and accepting some bread, which had a deliciously blistered crust and a chewy tart sourdough crumb. Next the owner shuffled over with a plate containing a bit of salad – sliced tomato and onion on a lettuce leaf, plus a scoop of sticky white rice and some potatoes that had been freshly fried in olive oil.

‘Frango,’
said the man on my left as he edged a stainless-steel platter of roast chicken in my direction, and another handed me a slender bottle of scarlet sauce.
‘Piri-piri. Caldo!’
I shook a few squirts of the sauce onto the chicken and tucked in.

I looked up when I realised the conversation had stopped, and with a sinking feeling I understood that they were politely waiting for me to catch up to their own empty plates. The chicken was the best I’d ever had, juicy, wild-tasting fowl full of flavour with crispy skin. The
piri-piri,
which I correctly guessed as being made from small hot red chillies, garlic, salt and vinegar, was so addictively good that I shook a few shots on my fried potatoes and rice. When I glanced up, the man across from me looked amused and gave me a thumbs-up.

I ate quickly, partly because I was very hungry and partly because I wanted to catch up with them. But when I finished, the tavern owner came back and changed my plate. I tried to signal that I’d had my fill, especially of that surprisingly potent wine, but he and my tablemates were having none of it. Seconds later he returned with a heavy ceramic casserole.
‘Porco a Alentejana,’
he said, smiling now, and I dug in, serving myself a modest portion of chunks of pork and baby clams in a light tomato sauce.

It was superb. The pork had been marinated, probably in vinegar, before being fried, and the brine-filled little clams had added their salty iodine-rich juices to the tomato sauce when they’d steamed opened. It had been ages since I’d eaten anything so good – aside from several great Indian restaurants, the food in London in 1986 was still more miss than hit – and this dish made me so happy that I willingly made a fool of myself by trying to pantomime my pleasure, a performance that caused two of the sextet to laugh and all of them to smile. As a grand finale, I ate a second portion out of sheer animal gluttony.

Finally, as the owner cleared the table, one of the men turned on a black-and-white television on a rickety table with a lace-edged doily and said, ‘Football. You like?’ I nodded.
‘Tu
– America?’ I nodded again. ‘Portugal. You like?’ I nodded enthusiastically, and the man next to me clapped me on the back. For the first time, I felt comfortable enough to wonder who they were and why they were having lunch together, but of course I couldn’t ask and in the end it didn’t matter.

Stuffed and in a fuzzy good mood from the wine, I had a shock when I glanced at my watch and saw that this feast had run for two hours. I had to go, but when I stood up, the guy next to me pulled me back into my seat by my belt and said,
‘Queijo, frutas, bicas.’
And so we ate delicious soft, creamy breast-shaped cheeses wrapped in gauze, then emptied a tray of fresh peaches, strawberries and small sweet bananas from Madeira, and finally concluded with strong shots of black coffee.

When a gentle-looking older woman with wavy silver hair and an indigo dress arrived with a bottle of port and small glasses on a tray, I stood and walked briskly over to the owner. I took out two escudo notes and put them on the counter. He pushed them back at me and shook his head. I left them there and went to the
toilet. To my relief, the money was gone when I emerged, so I walked over to the men with whom I’d just shared lunch, and said,
‘Muy, muy, muy, muy obrigado.’

‘De nada,’ ‘Bom viagem,’ ‘Salud,’
they muttered. Then one of them said, ‘Stop!’ He motioned me over, dug into his scuffed-up black leather bag, pulled out a stethoscope, fitted it into his ears, and placed the cold bud of shiny steel on my chest while pressing down on my pulse point with a strong hairy thumb. We all waited, then he shouted,
‘Okay! Bom viagem!’
and the gang, a bunch of tipsy doctors – they all had the same heavy, well-worn briefcases – had a good laugh.

During the long hot drive to Lisbon that followed lunch, I got almost teary a couple of times as I mused on this magical meal. Why had those men been so kind? And why was that food so good? Was all Portuguese food this good? I found no answers to any of these questions. Instead, my only certainty was that I would be marked forever by a craving for good simple Portuguese country food – and that I would never forget the spontaneous hospitality offered by unknown doctors to an awkward foreign boy during a nearly wordless meal.

Later, when Roger and I were driving south, he asked me why on earth I had rolled up two escudo notes and put them in the ashtray of the car. I told him it was a private joke, which indeed it was. It took more than a few years, however, before I realised that this lunch with the Portuguese doctors had also become a precious point on the personal compass I use whenever I travel.