The Road Home (12 page)

“Tell Ina to take them inside the house at night,” he said.

“And put them where?” said Rudi.

“Anywhere. The kitchen.”

“And then they shit all over the floor, and that bastard breaks in the house to nab them. D’you want that?”

“Tell Ina to double-bolt the door.”

“Sure, I’ll tell her that. But you know, Lev, she keeps saying to me, ‘Rudi, why did my son go away? Tell me why Lev went away.’ ”

“She knows why I went away. You all know, so don’t torture me with it, Rudi. At the end of next week, my first money will arrive. Then Ina will be happy.”

“Okay, okay. I’ll tell her that, too: happy at the end of next week.”

Lev changed the subject. He asked after the taxi business, and Rudi replied, “Well, nothing’s changed since you left. As you know, people don’t want to cycle places anymore, now they know the Tchevi’s available. They want to ride in style on my leather upholstery. But I’ve just noticed something: they’re wearing the fucking upholstery
away!
They let their bums slide around on it. I guess they like the feeling of their bums sliding around, but it’s doing my interior no fucking good.”

“If it’s just the upholstery wearing away,” said Lev, “you can live with that.”

“Well, I can live with it, but it makes me mad.”

“Better that than any of the machine parts going wrong.”

“Well said, my friend. You’re bright today, I see. But maybe now you’ll be able to ship auto parts to me from London?”

“Yes,” said Lev. “When I get on my feet. When I can find my way . . .”

“You lonely?” said Rudi.

“Yes,” said Lev.

There was another silence now, in which Lev imagined Rudi in his hallway, where, on a mahogany dresser, he kept his taxi log and an old cuckoo clock which spat out a broken wooden bird to announce all the hours of the day and the night.

“I saw your Diana card,” said Rudi after a while. “Ina showed it to me, and I got a hard-on. I thought, Princess, smile me your lovely smile, then come sit on me.”

Lev laughed. He heard his own laughter as a distant and surprising thing. Then, after a moment, Rudi’s familiar laughter began to chime with it, and Lev remembered the vodka-soaked railway journey to Glic and dancing the tango under the stars and the blue-neon fish of Lake Essel.

“Forget Diana,” said Lev. “I’ve got a date tomorrow with two-point-five meters of steel draining top.”

G. K. Ashe wasn’t the way Lev had imagined him; he was a wiry man, not tall, with wild black hair he stuffed inside a cotton hat and eyes of a startling blue. Lev put his age at about thirty-five.

He came into the kitchen just before four and found Lev ready at his sinks with his striped apron on. “Okay,” he said, shaking Lev’s hand, “I’m G. K. Ashe. Glad you’re joining us, Olev.”

“I am glad also, sir,” said Lev.

“Don’t call me ‘sir.’ Call me ‘Chef.’ ”

“Chef . . .”

“Damian told you I run a tight ship?”

“Tight ship?”

“The difference between a kitchen where some people are lazy and careless and one where everybody’s tasking at maximum stretch is the difference between a successful enterprise and a failed one. And the word ‘failure’ pisses me off. I don’t want even to contemplate it, right? Everybody in this space has to cut the mustard, okay?”

“Mustard, Chef?”

G. K. Ashe moved past Lev toward the sinks. “Now,” he said, “this station. Treat it like an operating theater. I want all the stuff—every spoon, every tin, every colander, every bowl, every crusher, chopper, stoner, grater, every last potato peeler—sterile-clean. When you’ve scrubbed up a roasting pan, I want to be able to drink a cocktail out of it. Okay?”

“Cock tail, Chef?”

“Yes. The hygiene in some kitchens is bloody pitiful. Seventy percent of cases of food poisoning in this country begin in restaurant kitchens. But not in mine. Not in mine. So see to it, right?” G.K. put his hand on Lev’s shoulder. “ ‘Nurse’ is going to be your nickname,” he said. “That’s what I call my KPs:
Nurse
. And you have to live up to your name.”

“Nurse?”

“Yup. Don’t take it as an insult. Quite the contrary. It’s a
designation.
Just do your work with pride and you’ll be okay.”

“I will try,” said Lev.

G.K. smiled. He pirouetted away from Lev, but turned to say, “New menu begins this evening, so it may get a bit hot in here, there may be a fair bit of replating going on, but what do nurses do? They stay calm. They clear up the mess. You got it? We’re counting on you, Olev.”

More staff began to arrive. They came over and introduced themselves to Lev, and Lev tried to remember their names: Tony and Pierre, sous-chefs; Waldo, pâtisserie and dessert chef; Sophie, vegetable and salad preparation; then the waiters, Stuart, Jeb, and Mario. All were younger than Lev, and they seemed solemn, as actors seem when they’re nervous.

At five, the group sat down at a table at the back of the restaurant and Jeb served poached chicken legs with celery, carrots, and gnocchi, cooked by Tony. Lev ate very slowly. There was some cleansing herb in the gnocchi he wanted to identify. He savored the delicious potato ball, rolled it round in his mouth. Parsley, that was it. He ate it silently, wondering how it was made, while all around him the dishes for the new menu were being discussed and final notes scribbled by the chefs.

“Plating up the trout terrine,” he heard G. K. Ashe say, “I want the leaves in a rosette shape and clear of the slice. I don’t want them touching the fish or lying all over the plate like some stupid paper chase. Barely dress them, okay? Just a glisten of vinaigrette. And the grapefruit mayonnaise should look like an army button on the cuff of the terrine. You see the image?”

“Yes, Chef,” said Pierre.

“And keep it small,” G.K. went on. “The trout’s moist enough, rich enough. What we’re saying with this mayo is, Okay, we’re going to spoil you now, but not too much. You have to
savor
it.”

Lev understood only words here and there. He ate more gnocchi. He imagined serving these, in their beautiful chicken broth, to Maya.

The menu discussion went on, charged with intensity. “The
pintade,
Chef,” said Tony. “The
vin de noix
is going to make it lovely and dark. I was thinking . . . lay on the breast three batons of . . . maybe steamed beetroot, and get a nice vibrant color contrast.”

“No,” said Ashe. “No beetroot.
Cèpes
. We discussed this. Just the
cèpes
and the little sandcastle of potato gratin. Now, everybody okay with the halibut?”

“Yes, Chef.”

“Did you get some nice endive, Pierre?”

“Yes, Chef.”

“Don’t overcook it, then. I don’t want to see my lovely halibut sitting on bogie slime.”

There was a clatter of laughter. Sophie said, “You’re putting me off my grub, Chef.”

“Good,” said G.K. “You’re too fat as it is.”

The group went silent. Lev looked up and saw Sophie blush and lay down her knife and fork on her half-finished meal, and he remembered Lora once saying, “In a workplace, as a woman in this country, you’re fighting a war. Every day.”

He looked away from Sophie as Stuart and Mario cleared the chicken plates and Waldo brought in a dish of
crème brûlée,
its crust still bubbling from his blowtorch.

“Chef,” said Waldo, “I want everybody to try this. I’m using blueberries, just cooked for one minute to soften their shape, as a nice astringent base to the
crème
.”

“Okay,” said G.K. “Give us a spoon.” Then he turned to Lev. “You taste this, too,” he said. “We call desserts ‘puddings’ in England; hangover from the days when that’s what desserts were: steamed puddings. It’s probably why Queen Victoria was the shape she was. But in Britain now a pudding can be a mint sorbet; it can be a poached lychee in a spun-sugar basket. You get it, Olev?”

“Pudding?” said Lev. “Yes. I know English pudding.”

“Sure,” said G.K., lightly investigating the
brûlée
crust with the edge of his spoon, “but now you can know it properly—know it for what it means. If you’re coming to work in a kitchen, Olev, you have to get the words right. You have to get the
glossary
into your head.”

“I will, Chef,” said Lev. And he wanted to add, as politely as he could, that there was one word G .K. Ashe himself could get into his head and that word was “Lev,” but when he opened his mouth to speak, G.K. had turned away and everybody was concentrating on Waldo’s
brûlée.

“I like it,” said Damian. “It’s quite refreshing.”

“Bloody nice, Waldo,” said Mario.

“It’s okay,” said G.K., “but vary the fruit base over the week. Try rhubarb. Try damsons.”

Lev tasted the pudding. The texture of the cream was delicate and cool and the crust hot and sweet, and once again, he had no idea what had gone into the making of this dish or how these surprising contrasts were achieved. He thought of his father saying, “Things can only be
what they are
. We Communists always understood this, but the new generation doesn’t. They need reminding: a loaf of bread is just a loaf of bread. It’s not a bag of gold. It’s not a ruddy music box.” And then Lev remembered Ina standing up to Stefan, for once, and saying, “If things can only be what they are, why has the Church of St Nicolas at Baryn been turned into an indoor swimming pool?”

Now Lev’s arms were deep in his sinks. Round his head, G. K. Ashe had tied a clean white cotton bandana. He’d done this almost tenderly, tucking Lev’s springy hair underneath it. “Nurse’s hat,” he said. “Keep it tight, okay, Olev? I don’t want human DNA in the dishwater.”

Lev worked, trying to keep pace with the rising tumult at the chef’s stations. The hot water, the grandeur of the steel surfaces, the fierceness of the rinse faucet made him forget that this was a lowly job. Steam clouded the tiles. On his right-hand surface, the chefs hurled down mixing bowls, strainers, knives, stock pans, whisks, and chopping boards, and Lev’s hands took them up and immersed them. He’d been nicknamed “Nurse,” so now, in his imagination, he became a nurse to these objects. He told himself to examine each pan, each utensil, in a clinical way, to coax the dirt out of it, to keep watch, moment to moment, over its arduous alteration.

After a while, running clean hot water, beginning everything again with, at his back, the chefs hunched over their burners and the smell of poaching fish fumigating the air, Lev’s mind began to drift. He imagined himself dressed in a nurse’s white cotton clothes, walking down to the sulfur lake at Jor and immersing helpless people in the gray deeps. Storks on a chimney top regarded the people as the lake water washed over them and their pale skins began to shine through the bluish mist.

One of these helpless people was Marina, and Lev started to scrub at her flesh. He scoured her neck, her armpits, her arse, her feet, her ears; he rinsed her mouth. Then she lay back on the surface of the water, and Lev’s arms lifted her up and wrapped her in a clean white towel and set her down where the other people waited, on a wooden balcony. She wasn’t cured, of course. His task had only just begun. What would cure her was his nurse’s endurance, his willingness to repeat the immersion and the harsh but inevitable scraping and scouring of her flesh, to repeat it over and over again, without giving up, without breaking . . .

A food-scented presence at Lev’s elbow woke him from his reverie. G. K. Ashe threw a mop into his hands. He pointed at the floor. “What’s that?” he said. “You’re turning my kitchen into a fucking inland sea!”

Lev looked down. His brown shoes stood in a puddle. A scum of water lapped against the back of the vegetable chiller. His apron was soaked, and even his trousers were wet and clung to his legs. “Sorry, Chef,” he said.

Ashe snatched up a red plastic bucket from under one of the sinks. He hurled this at Lev, and it struck him on the thigh and bounced away onto the slippery floor.

“
Swab it!
” he said. “And stop dreaming. I’ve been watching you. Concentrate!”

Mario, headed for the restaurant door, carrying three servings of venison
ragù
with pasta, called out, “Table four’s away, Chef!”

Ashe turned, almost lunging at Mario. “I don’t call that ‘away,’ Mario,” he shouted. “Where’s the
ballotine?
”

“Coming next, Chef . . .” said Mario, and disappeared, leaving Ashe mumbling, “Don’t say a table’s away when it isn’t away. Can’t anybody here count?”

Ashe moved away from Lev’s station, and Lev filled the bucket from the rinse faucet and began to mop the floor. Now that he’d left the lake at Jor and was back in the kitchen, he realized that his eyes were stinging and that an immovable pain had lodged itself between his shoulderblades. He longed for a cigarette. The water all round him surprised him, but he knew he had to vanquish this, too, keep on mopping and squeezing out the mop until the tiles were dry. But he couldn’t get them dry. He couldn’t even get them clean, because where his own feet trod, grimy footprints remained.

He looked around for a floor cloth or a rag. (At home, when Ina washed the floor, she, like Ahmed, laid newspaper over it and the paper slowly darkened with moisture and Maya sometimes knelt down on it to watch the people in the photographs gradually turning black.) Unobserved, Lev snatched a clean tea towel off its peg and knelt and began to rub the floor with this while, at his back, he could feel the heat from the ovens and the burners reach a new intensity.

Lev squeezed the tea towel and threw it out of sight under the sink. He dried his hands. He stared at a large pan that had arrived beside his sink. It was smeared with what looked like yellow glue. He remembered an article in the
Baryn Informer
about the new craze, in the West, for a peasant dish from Italy known as polenta. “Polenta,” said the
Informer,
“is maize flour mixed with seasoned water. It is what the poor blacks of South Africa have called ‘mealie-meal’ for generations. It is starvation food, sold at high prices. To put polenta on an expensive menu is a mendacious and decadent act.”

Lev lifted up the polenta pan. The smell of it was like the smell of a barley field at harvest time. Lev ran more hot water.