In the Kitchen (41 page)

'When I came here, I thought ...' Nikolai shook his head. 'I got involved in ... I spent too long ...' He smiled and wagged a finger at Gabriel, as if he had nearly been caught out. 'Let us say force of circumstance, for want of a better phrase. It doesn't matter. I have accepted it. Let's call it destiny.'

Gabriel moved his elbow. It had glued itself to a sticky patch. Destiny, how grand, how grandiose! How typical of Nikolai. You had to think yourself special to feel destined for anything.

'You don't believe that. I mean, do you believe in that?'

'Believe in what?' said Nikolai.

'Destiny, fate, predestination – whatever you call it. A master plan from On High. That's rubbish, isn't it? What happens to choice, to free will?'

'There's no master plan,' said Nikolai. He took his time, laced his slender fingers, calculating no doubt that this pause would add weight to his delivery when it came. 'With that I agree,' Nikolai continued. 'But, as a man of reason and science I must disagree with your idea of free will. With that I cannot concur.'

'I take it you're joking,' said Gabe. Nikolai's hands were not chef 's hands.

They were not covered in old cuts and burns. He worked in the kitchen with surgical precision. Why should wounds be badges of pride?

'Or maybe I spent too long reading Schopenhauer,' said Nikolai.

'What? Who?'

'Seriously,' said Nikolai, 'let me ask you, let me find out what you believe.

Do you believe, for example, that we are free to choose the most important things about our lives? To be born in the West in the twentieth century is the most enormous stroke of luck. After that, the parents we are given are the most significant factors to take into account. Would you not agree that the biggest events in our lives are things that happen to us, rather than things that we decide to do? And what of the present – our day-to-day conduct? Do we control even the basic functions? Can you wake when you want to? Sleep when you want to? Can you forget your dreams? Can you decide when to think, what to think about, when not to think at all?'

Nikolai took a hip flask from his pocket, swigged and passed it to Gabe.

'A little early for me,' said Gabe, 'but OK, thanks.' The vodka reminded him about Damian. He should do something about that boy. If he had the time.

Anyway, Damian was a car crash waiting to happen. Probably not much he could do about that. He returned the flask. 'I get what you're saying,' he told Nikolai. 'But it's not the point. You miss the point.'

'Which is?' said Nikolai.

'It's obvious. I might not be able to fall asleep when I want, but when I'm awake I can decide what I do, when I do it, how I do it. That's free will. We make choices all the time. How we behave is up to us. For example, I can decide to behave decently – be good, in other words – or I can go the other way, be selfish and so on.'

'How we behave,' said Nikolai, drawing out the words, clearly pretending to think when actually he had prepared the lecture long ago. 'How we behave, you could say, is determined by our childhood, by the accidents of birth and parentage and what happened to us along the way. A particular childhood strips us of certain choices, propels us in certain directions.'

Michael Harrison, his childhood friend, slipped unbidden into Gabriel's mind.

Not difficult to see, Gabe thought reluctantly, which way Michael was going to go. Then again, no, Michael was bright enough, Michael had probably made good.

'A psychoanalyst,' Nikolai went on – God, he could go on once he was on a roll – 'might disagree with your proposition. Freud's taught us that we need to examine a person's past in order to understand his behaviour today. If a person is not "good", is sadistic even, what has caused that person to be like that? Another person is unable to form stable relationships. Why? We can discover the reasons if we are so inclined.'

'Freud,' said Gabriel, 'has been thoroughly discredited.' He had no idea if this was true, but it sounded likely enough.

Nikolai screwed up his little mouse eyes as he lit another cigarette. 'Let's look at the question from another angle. You prefer a more scientific approach?'

'Yes.'

'Scientific, controlled experimentation, measurable results – proof, in other words?'

'I suppose,' said Gabe.

'Philosophers and therapists never give us proof. But when we see hard results, we go with the evidence, isn't that right?'

'We haven't got all day,' said Gabriel. He wasn't stupid. He could see what Nikolai was doing: leading him down a corridor, closing the doors of objection along the way. It was a salesman's trick.

'I will be brief. I'm thinking of a classic experiment conducted at Harvard University in the early nineties. Psychologists explored how students evaluate their teachers. A group of students were asked to rate lectures on the basis of a thirty-second video clip with no sound. The students agreed with each other about which teachers were most competent and professional, which possessed other good classroom qualities. All this after thirty seconds of viewing complete strangers.' Nikolai had another hit of vodka. He licked his colourless lips.

'And?' said Gabriel. 'So?'

'Not only did they agree with each other – the scores those students gave also accurately predicted the evaluations that the teachers received from their real students at the end of a full semester. The first group of students were, of course, acting on instinct; the second group – the real students – believed they were acting on reason, making logical choices, but it led them to the same place.'

'If that's the best you can come up with,' said Gabriel, 'that doesn't prove anything.'

'According to many cognitive scientists,' said Nikolai, 'we only think we act consciously because our inner voice is very good at constructing explanations for behaviour that is, in fact, unconsciously generated.'

Gabriel stretched. He scratched the back of his head, in a leisurely manner for a change, enjoying a good rub. If Nikolai wanted to waste his intelligence on justifying his own inertia, on why he shouldn't even bother trying to improve his own situation, then more fool Nikolai.

'You're talking about psychologists, right, those guys at Harvard? How many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb?'

'I could talk about neuroscience,' said Nikolai, 'I could talk about the half-second delay between the initiation of an action and the conscious decision to act, I could talk about all that but it might be too ...

unsettling.'

Gabe could imagine Nikolai in a political meeting, working the crowd, manipulating emotions, plying his rhetoric. Yes, he had probably been a troublemaker, Gabe could imagine it. But he wasn't pulling Gabriel's strings.

'We have to take responsibility.'

'For what?' said Nikolai.

'For ourselves, for each other, we can't retreat into that kind of ... that kind of ... playing with words.'

'Playing with words?' Nikolai smiled his bloodless smile. 'No, OK. Maybe this is why you dream of Yuri. You take some responsibility for what happened to him.'

'No,' said Gabe, 'what do you mean? How could that be my fault? It's not as if I said he could stay down there.'

'I did not say fault. I made a speculation about your feeling of responsibility – for the world in which we live, for the kind of world in which there will always be more Yuris, struggling to exist.'

'I didn't make the world,' said Gabriel, taking the hip flask. 'I just live in it. Same as you.'

On his way back in to work Gabriel stopped at Ernie's hut. Ernie and Oona, scrunched together over the computer, sprang apart. They looked at him.

'Nothing,' said Gabe, backing out again, 'never mind. Carry on.'

He glanced back through the window and saw Oona sucking madly on the end of her pen.

Gleeson was loitering in the passageway, speaking into his mobile phone.

'Victoria, same as usual,' he said, 'but the pick-up's going to be later ...

well, they'll just have to wait.' He turned and saw Gabriel, jabbed his first and second fingers at his eyes and then poked them in Gabe's direction: I'm watching you. He could fuck right off.

Gabe floated past him and went to the pastry kitchen to speak to Chef Albert.

The place was in a mess, the bins full to overflowing, the Hobart mixer full of goo, the Carpigiani smeared with ice cream. Something was burning in the baker's oven, the Rondo had been left with a dangling pastry tongue, and there appeared to be a splatter of egg yolk up one wall. Chef Albert's muppet, piping meringue shells, was covered in flour, which also lay like a sifting of snow all over the floor.

Chef Albert leaned over a worktop examining a pair of breasts. 'Chef,' he cried. 'Look! Zis is a work of art, no?'

'What happened here?' said Gabriel.

Chef Albert closed his newspaper. He put his hands on his fat hips and tossed his head so that his toque sailed devilishly close to the wind. 'Spontaneity,'

he said. 'Creativity. To make ze omelette, one must break many eggs.'

'Oh,' said Gabe. 'For a moment I thought someone had been throwing flour bombs.'

'Ha ha! Ha he ha he ha!' The pastry chef slapped his thigh. His hat slipped over one eye. When the convulsion had passed he straightened himself and the hat. 'Yes,' he said, 'zis is correct.'

'Right,' said Gabe, 'well, I'm sure you'll get it cleaned up. I wanted to speak to you about—' 'Psst,' said Chef Albert. 'I 'ave something.' He sidled into a corner, making cod-furtive gestures for Gabe to follow.

'Do you need to check the oven?' said Gabe.

'Later, later,' said Chef Albert. 'Excuse me, Chef, but I 'ave heard ... about ze beautiful girlfriend, 'ow she ...' He gripped Gabe's shoulders, pulled him close and administered a kiss to each cheek. 'You are suffering!'

'Not really,' said Gabe. He looked over at the assistant, busy piping meringue directly into his mouth.

'Yes,' said Chef Albert, his moustache trembling. 'Suffering!' He whisked a packet of pills from his top pocket. 'Ah,' he said, 'not zis. Although, maybe zis, also. You 'ave depression, n'est-ce pas?'

'No,' said Gabe. 'Non.' He called to the assistant. 'Check that oven.'

Chef Albert shook a small brown bottle in Gabriel's face. 'Na ne na ne na,' he said, as if soothing a baby with a rattle. 'You decide – 'ow you say – to play ze field ... ba boom!' He made a phallic symbol with fist and forearm. 'You make nice with ze girlfriend ... ba ba boom! She begs you to stay.'

'Thanks,' said Gabriel, 'but no thanks.'

'Chef, I am fifty-two years old and my erection it lasts two, three hours.

What a gift of life. You should see for yourself.'

'I appreciate the offer,' said Gabe.

Chef Albert tried to stuff the bottle in Gabriel's trouser pocket. The assistant opened the oven. Thick black smoke streamed out. The bottle fell on the floor and a cloud of white flour rose.

'Genuine Viagra,' cried Chef Albert, in his haste kicking the bottle beneath a counter. He got down on his hands and knees.

Gabriel got out of there, while the pastry chef crawled this way and that calling softly to his pills and the assistant leaped around with a fire extinguisher, coating the place in foam.

Sweating up a torrent in his office, Gabe couldn't settle to anything. His mind was too restless, and he needed to get a few things straight in his head.

For example, was he heartbroken about Charlie or not? The answer seemed to be sometimes yes and sometimes no, which wasn't helpful in the least. Leave that one aside for now. What about Lena? Was he her knight in shining armour, or was he currently the last in a long list of men who had abused the poor girl?

Being painfully honest with himself he had to say he did not know. Maybe the honest answer was both. Even his career, the path he'd followed, the straight line he thought he'd walked, was twisted and looped now he looked back on it, half hidden in the undergrowth.

He went out to the kitchen floor as dinner service was about to begin. Benny was dipping veal cutlets into flour and then egg wash and coating them in breadcrumbs. One tray was fully prepared and ready to go.

'Getting on OK?' said Gabriel.

'Yes, Chef,' said Benny.

'Do you ... do you need any help?'

'No, Chef. Thank you.'

'I'll just do a few for you.'

'Yes, Chef.'

'Benny?'

Benny moved up the work surface to make room for Gabe. He bowed his big head to his work. Gabriel stared at the silvery scar across his face.

'Benny, remember you told me about your friend, the little general?'

'Kono,' said Benny, the word resonating deep in the back of his throat.

'Yes, Kono. Where is he now?'

'I do not know.'

'When ...' Gabe began. He didn't know quite what it was that he wanted to ask.

'When we went out for a drink that evening and you told me about him, about your friends, a bit about your life ...'

'I remember. Alcohol makes me talk.' He accented the words so thickly you could stand a spoon up in them. 'Usually I don't touch it.'

'But the way you spoke was ...' Benny's tales were so neat and ordered –

compact, like Benny himself. 'I mean, you tell a good story,' he said.

'Thank you, Chef,' said Benny, drawing himself up as though Gabe had fixed a medal to his chest. 'But every refugee knows how to tell his story. For him, you understand, his story is a treasured possession. For true, it is the most important thing he owns.'

He left work early, taking a couple of the veal cutlets, which he fried for himself and Lena when he got home. After supper Lena sat at the kitchen table working on her 'brief ' for the private eye, twisting alternately the pen top and her earrings. She wrote in Russian but still covered the paper with her arm whenever he approached. He kissed her on the forehead and went to get ready for bed. The earlier he went to bed, he had decided, the better he would sleep. It was overtiredness that ruined his nights.

He sat in bed with a book in his hands. He thought about Ted. He thought about Mum. He thought about catering college. Why did he quit school? He'd followed his interests, hadn't he, taken his interest in science in a practical direction. It all made sense.