The Demon of Dakar (6 page)

“At least we share the tips equally,” Eva said.

Johnny hoped she would not ask how much that yielded, and he thought she understood the look he gave her, because she swallowed her next comment and laughed as if she didn’t want to be pulled into a game in which she only guessed at the rules.

“See you tomorrow,” she said and glided out the door, returning almost immediately.

“There’s a famous cop out there,” she said.

Donald froze in the middle of his movements. Feo turned around.

“Who is it?” they asked at the same time.

“Her name is Lindell,” Eva said. “She has a kid at the day care next to the school where my youngest is.”

“What is she doing here?”

“Having dinner, of course. What did you think?”

Feo shrugged and chuckled. Donald stared sourly after the waitress.

“What the hell is up with her?” he asked.

“I wonder what the cop is doing here,” Feo said.

“You heard her,” Johnny said, “she’s having dinner.”

“I don’t believe in cops,” Feo said.

“What the hell is up with her?” Donald repeated. “Gonzo isn’t the greatest, but at least he doesn’t gab so damn much.”

Feo peered out through the window.

“Cops don’t just come here and eat,” he said. “She’s probably investigating something.”

“Is that a problem?” Johnny asked. “Are you working under the table?”

For a moment, Feo looked upset and he shot Johnny an angry look, but then he resumed his carefree demeanor.

“No, but I am from Portugal,” he said.

Johnny waited for an explanation but it never appeared, and he simply shrugged.

Pirjo, who had hardly said one word all evening, laughed. A dry, joyless laugh that made even Donald look up.

“I am from Finland,” she said.

“I am from Småland,” Johnny said.

“Tessie is from the USA,” Pirjo said.

“Gonzo is from Gonzoland,” Feo added.

Everyone’s gaze was directed at Donald. It was as if a great seriousness had gripped the staff of Dakar, as if someone had entered the kitchen in order to deliver some grave news.

The meat chef turned a fillet in the pan and then looked around, allowing his gaze to travel from Johnny, on to Pirjo, and finally landing on
Feo with a contemplative smile, stroking his chin with one hand while the other reached for a frying pan, seemingly of its own accord.

“I was born in Kerala,” he said after a couple of trembling seconds of absolute silence, turning his back to the others and pulling down yet another pan from the rack above the stove. He held it outstretched above his head for a moment, as if it were a torch.

“Kerala,” he repeated.

Feo burst into a thunderous laughter but stopped as suddenly.

“Where is that?” Pirjo asked.

“To the East,” Donald said.

“So is Lempälä,” she said.

“And we are all gathered here,” Johnny said. “In Dakar’s kitchen.”

For a few moments he experienced a feeling of expansion, despite the limited space of the kitchen. He was suddenly very happy that he had left Jönköping and Sofia. It was as if life had taken a little hop, and not simply straight up in order to land in the same spot, but Johnny now knew that the move to Uppsala meant a forward movement. He studied Feo, who was leaning over a plate of anglerfish, and then let his gaze wander over to the head chef. Donald really was a complicated person. Johnny could not yet decide when he was joking and when he was serious.

His face looked as if it had been carved out of marble, with heavy cheeks and a meaty nose above the deeply set eyes. Eyes that appeared to regard the kitchen as the only possible refuge, but also a prison for the dreams he painstakingly concealed behind a dismissive facade.

Donald had worked in perhaps fifteen different kitchens in his thirty years as a chef. Johnny had met many of these cooking nomads. If they could maintain some semblance of balance between the late work shifts, the subsequent late nights, alcohol, and an attempt at a social life, then their professional skill could flower and become a security in any stormy and stressful kitchen, a rock for many a restaurant owner.

Maybe Donald was this kind of man, he would find out in time. He watched over the plates that left Dakar’s kitchen like a hawk, and they were a series of perfection.

“This and nothing else,” he said and showed Johnny how the veal should look.

“Nothing else,” he repeated and polished away a spot that was quite invisible to Johnny.

He nodded, studied the plate, and, realizing that there was nothing to alter, tried to memorize the arrangement.

Donald left the kitchen
at ten o’clock. Pirjo also went home after Johnny promised to handle the cleaning up. He put things away, rinsed and scrubbed the floor while Feo made a rapid inventory check and called in orders to suppliers’ answering machines.

Afterward they each sat down with a beer. Feo smoked a cigarette, only one, in silence, with obvious pleasure.

“You go home,” Johnny said. “I’ll take out the garbage.”

Feo shook his head.

“This is the best time,” he said and smiled at Johnny. “Let’s drink some coffee and have a calva. We have to celebrate your start here.”

“How come you speak such good Swedish?”

“Practice,” Feo said. “I talk with my wife all the time and she corrects me. Our place is like a language course. It is the only way to become a person, to understand the words. Should I go around like a
svartskalle
and understand nothing?”

“One thing,” Johnny said. “Where does Donald come from? He said Kerala, but that’s in India.”

“His father was a missionary,” Feo answered. “Donald lived in India for fifteen years. You should taste his bean dishes and lamb cooked in yogurt. He could open an Indian restaurant.”

He stood up, left the kitchen, and returned with espresso and calvados on a platter.

“Slobodan’s treat,” he said.

They drank their coffee in silence. Johnny experienced the fatigue in his body as a pleasant mutedness. Voices and laughter could be heard from the dining room and the bar while the kitchen rested in stillness. The best time, Johnny thought, and stared into the shimmer of the calvados for a long time before he tasted it.

The spirits exploded in his mouth and he jerked forward as if he had
received a violent blow to his back, but he managed to put the glass down before he ran over to the sink.

Feo watched him but said nothing. Johnny remained leaning over the sink. He spit, and did everything he could to quell his impulse to retch.

“Damn,” he said, when his body had calmed down, “it must have gone down the wrong way.”

“Have a little water,” Feo said.

After exchanging a few words
with Måns in the bar, Feo and Johnny said their good-byes in the alley outside Dakar’s kitchen entrance. The Portuguese unlocked his bicycle and rolled away. Johnny stood and watched his new colleague as he left.

He should have known better than to have a strong drink like that. It had started about a year ago, the nausea and heaving and a diffuse ache in his abdomen. An ache that sometimes turned into a stabbing pain. Beer was all right and sometimes also white wine, even if the enjoyment of having a glass was now diminished since he feared the nausea and pain. At first, Sofia had urged him to go to a doctor, but then it was as if she had lost interest in his well-being and she stopped commenting on his contorted expressions.

What had Feo thought? Did he sense that Johnny’s claim that the drink had gone down the wrong way had been a lie? Feo had not said anything, but his eyes revealed that he had not completely bought the explanation.

Johnny walked home. He did not mind that it was a long way, perhaps two kilometers. He actually appreciated the mild and restful evening, the occasional person he encountered did not bother him, and he thought that his new city reminded him of a foreign country. It was a feeling he would carry with him for a long time, that he was a guest, a stranger who did not have any duties to the town and its inhabitants.

If anyone talked to him, posed a question, or sought his opinion, he could excuse himself with the fact that he was new, a temporary visitor, and in this way avoid all responsibility.

It was Sofia, connected to his dream of a life with meaning, who haunted him. He knew that his self-imposed outsider status was a defense
. He lived as if in quarantine. Working as a cook at Dakar was the only thing that made him human, a social creature. He did not seek the company of others, their warmth or acceptance. He could just as well have been wandering in an uninhabited land. It was as if he had taken a job that was offered out of habit. Lacking all will, he had allowed himself to be influenced by his sister and moved to Uppsala.

There had been a time when he had loved his work, but his goal of becoming a great chef had started to fade. Now he saw it as his only possibility to survive, nothing more. It gave him a salary and the illusion that he had a task. The passion was gone, and deep inside he was terrified. At least thirty more years in the business and the disdain for food magazines, enthusiastic guests, and curious aquaintances, their constant chatter about newly discovered dishes, exhausted him, made him increasingly embittered. His former friends had no idea what it was like: the constant pressure to turn out beautiful presentations of delicious food, while life itself was distasteful and anything but beautiful.

When did the whole thing start, this process of decomposition as life crumbled away? Or rather, rotted, as there was nothing life-affirming about the process, no healthy microorganisms that diligently and naturally went about their business. This was oxygen-poor putrefaction, the stinking decay of unblemished blood and flesh, that was wreaking havoc inside Johnny.

He observed this change with fear but also fascination, because it was with the misanthropy of a masochist that he presided over his own deterioration as a human being. He wanted, and did not want, to sink to the bottom and from thence spread his inhuman venom, spiked with self-disgust and an increasing animosity, to the people around him who still appeared to nurture hope.

When he arrived at the
apartment, a one-bedroom flat by Klockarängen, he lit a candle. Candles belonged to winter, the dark season, but as he was unpacking his things he had found a candle, which he placed on the old teak coffee table.

The candle gave off the slightly sweet scent of vanilla. He sat for a
while in the sofa, made of a plasticky artificial leather, and stared at the fluttering flame before he got up with a sigh, blew it out, and went to bed.

He fell asleep and slept heavily and without dreaming for ten hours, but was awakened by a nightmare when it was already late morning. He sat up with a start. The morning sun shone in through the provisionally erected curtains.

Eva Willman took out two
apples and put them on either side of the kitchen table. It created an appealing picture, full of promise, as if Patrik and Hugo’s future rested on the fact that each morning there were two gleaming red apples at their places.

Even though it was only six-thirty she wanted to wake them up, get in those extra few minutes and tell them about Dakar. When they were young, they always woke up early, and they had some time together before Eva had to leave for work and the children to their school or child care programs, but now breakfast usually consisted of some sleepy comments, a few whining complaints, and a couple of sandwiches consumed in haste.

She looked at the apples, red, thick-skinned, with stickers declaring their land of origin: New Zealand. Someone sends fruit from the other side of the globe, she thought, and pictured an orchard in a foreign land. There were people there, dressed in khaki shorts and T-shirts with logos on the front. They drove small vehicles with carts on the back. From time to time they stopped, reached for an apple, and applied a tiny sticker. Eva imagined that they had a Patrik and a Hugo in their thoughts as they carefully laid the apples in a basket.

She made coffee and waited for the children to wake up. Today things would start in earnest. She couldn’t help feeling it in her stomach. She was going to shadow Tessie, who was teaching her.

One thing that worried her was pronouncing the names of the dishes
correctly. Anglerfish and duck breast were no problem, but the menu consisted of so much more. Then there were the wines with all those foreign names. Eva had brought home both the menu and the wine list and practiced the pronunciation, had even asked Patrik and Hugo for help.

And even if she had basically mastered the pronunciation then the question remained about what it meant. She had no idea what “confit” and
concassé
were, or if “Gevrey Chambertin” was a red or white wine.

She hoped that Tessie would have patience and that the guests would not get irritated or make fun of her.

Eva had decided she would try not to talk too much. If she adopted a calm attitude and did not chatter on, the guests could get the impression that she was skilled and reliable. She couldn’t screw up this job. Whatever it took, she was going to become a knowledgeable and quick-witted waitress, someone Slobodan Andersson could rely on.

This was not only a job, it was her entry to another life. That was how she felt. She was going to enter new areas, meet people other than the same old in Sävja and in the ICA store in Vilan, and become more interesting herself. She did not know anyone who worked at a restaurant, there were not many among her few acquaintances who were in the habit of going out to eat. Now she would be able to talk about something beyond the usual.

Suddenly she was frightened. What if it didn’t work out?

“Hugo!” she cried out. “It’s time!”

There was no sense in calling Patrik, he had to be shaken awake in the mornings.