Elzas kitchen, p.6
Elza's Kitchen, page 6
The Dishwasher laughed good-naturedly at her, and when he did he shook like a sea monster or some lost bastard of Poseidon’s. When he shook, he sent droplets of water through the air. The droplets were warm and salty. They came from his own mess of hair—loose black tendrils that fell over his eyebrows.
“Ah, little Dora,” he would say, “that’s the smell of a real man!”
Why not carry on with him? Elza thought. There’d be no trouble there.
The line cooks were laughing. Elza walked around their stations and they grew quiet. She stopped beside the Sous-Chef and glared at him, but he ignored her. She stood for a few moments and willed him to look at her, but he would not. In fact, he walked away. While she watched, he crossed the kitchen and stood beside Dora. He put his hand on the small of her back. She responded by putting her head against his chest. Elza felt sick. The pair talked in low voices and began laughing. He helped her stir a fresh batch of batter. That is, he held his hand over hers and they stirred the same wooden spoon . . . together. Elza returned to her office quickly before the line cooks could notice her face flushing. Why not flirt with one of the waiters? she thought as she picked up the phone. All of them were single. Why wouldn’t Dora flirt with one of them?
The cause of all this tension in the kitchen was certainly not lost on the other employees. Despite their years of careful coordination of their affair, every employee at Tulip knew of Elza and the Sous-Chef’s relationship. It did not take a genius to realize that Elza’s increasingly stern demeanor correlated to the Sous-Chef’s and Dora’s increasing physical attraction. What surprised everyone else in the kitchen was how long Elza had allowed it. What surprised everyone was that Elza had rewarded the girl by giving her so much more responsibility and pay. Instead of tossing her out on her ear, she had Dora filling colorful to-go boxes with crepes and tortes. In trying to smother Dora’s passion, Elza had lost face. So now, when they weren’t arguing or fuming at the stress in the kitchen, her employees were tittering openly and beginning to shirk their duties.
“Anything goes with this lady,” the first line cook—the Saucier—said to the second. “Screw it.”
The Sous-Chef knew that the others knew, but he said nothing. As far as he was concerned, he was moving on to greater opportunities, waiting for the moment when he could escape from Elza and her restaurant entirely.
“I wasted three years on her,” he complained to his mother and sister when Elza had refused his last proposal. “Three years because I thought she loved me and would come around.”
His mother and sister nodded.
“These things are never a waste,” his mother said and patted his hand. “You learned a lot. She gave you a lot. It’s a journey.”
“Bah,” he said. “I’m done with journeys. First I’ll see how things go with Dora, then I’ll buy my flat and open my own restaurant,” he said. “I’ll take the Dishwasher with me.”
“That sounds good, dearie,” his mother said. “You can do it. You can do anything.”
“I’m thirty,” he said. “I’ve got to get my life started.”
So, the Sous-Chef accepted the line cooks’ ribbing when Elza was out of earshot with a grimace of controlled anger. The way he saw it, he was already gone.
However, the two lesser cooks were small-minded and relentless in their attacks.
“You stopped kneading the missus’s backside then?” the Saucier asked.
The Sous-Chef didn’t answer.
“You stuffing the little one now?”
The men were laughing. The Sous-Chef looked up at them threateningly. They were coarse—not trained chefs, only lost peasants who had stumbled onto a city job. However, their faces wore the expressions of conquering marauders. They behaved as if they had outwitted all of society by holding onto petty little kitchen jobs.
“He asked if you was stuffing the little one.” The second line cook asked the question again and looked over at Dora’s backside. “She’s a right piece of work, yeah? I like those black eyes she’s always got. I’ve never known a woman to do that. It’d look like a mess on my old lady, but on her it looks real good.”
The Sous-Chef slammed a cleaver down onto a cutting board. He eyeballed the line cook.
“Keep your dirty little mouth shut,” he threatened. “Shut it or you’ll be out of a job.”
This particular line cook was a lowlife Elza had hired over his protests. The Sous-Chef had taken an immediate dislike to the man. Besides being coarse he was just trouble. He seemed too at ease, too much like a criminal. But Elza had shrugged it off the way she always shrugged him off. She liked the fact that the man came from the country and knew how to butcher meat perfectly. He could slice away fat as though he had been a surgeon. He could cut through fascia gingerly and leave nothing behind but a lean piece of meat. He could even gut a rabbit if he needed to.
“Fire me!” the line cook smirked. “That’s rich. I don’t believe your dear mommy would let you.”
The two men glared at each other. The Sous-Chef knew it was true. He felt the cleaver in his hand and raised it threateningly.
“Keep it down,” he warned. “If she hears you, we’re both done for.”
The line cook smirked. “You’re a cunt. I’ve always thought so, and I don’t see any reason not to say so now. A gigolo cunt. You’ll be out of here before I am. I can promise you that. You and your pet raccoon.”
The Dishwasher and the Saucier stopped what they were doing and watched the interaction. They shook their heads. They might all have had years of experience together. They might have understood the menu. They might all have been shown by Elza how to prepare each item from scratch, have established a routine, but it had all been for naught. The men in Elza’s kitchen began threatening to castrate one another nightly—the Sous-Chef and his line cook, the Saucier and the Dishwasher—everywhere these angry men turned, an angrier man was standing next to him and brandishing cutlery at his bits. And all of them knew that mentioning the Sous-Chef’s affair with Elza or Dora was the easiest way to stir up trouble.
Five
“He’s arriving next week. We did it!”
The words coming through Elza’s phone carried the weight of an unexpected thunderclap behind them and caused her to sit upright and grip her armrest. She simultaneously caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror and saw the wide-eyed shock on her face. She also noticed how much she had stopped caring about her appearance. Her hair was greasy looking. She could have stood a facial. She wondered how long the stress had been festering on her face. While there weren’t quite half-moons underneath her eyes, she noticed a shadow she had never seen before. The thunderclap of a message jarred her. She would fix all of the things around her that needed fixing as soon as she got off the phone. Finally, she was getting somewhere. Finally, she might be able to open the throttle on her engines. Finally. She looked up at her office ceiling and mouthed a thank-you.
The Professor of Meats was still talking to her. She turned her attention back to listening. She was flabbergasted, still bowled over; her breath was taken away from her. He was relaying in full now the story of how they had hunted the Critic down—how, working in shifts on the project, the pair of them, together, had stalked and flushed him out into the open.
“The man doesn’t rest,” the Professor of Meats said. “We missed him by a day in Gothenburg. He had just left for Brussels. When we called the restaurant he was supposed to be visiting, they told us he had changed his mind—some kind of emergency, they said—and gone back instead to Paris. They were very angry. They had made a black truffle soufflé that had taken them weeks to perfect. They spent a lot of time and money on it, so I guess it’s understandable they were upset. Very inconsiderate of him. Anyway, we tried the magazine again, but they wouldn’t give us his number right away, and when they finally did a few days later, after I literally begged them, he had left town to visit his mother. So, we tried him in Italy, and then we lost track of him for a few days. We think he was on to the Netherlands next, or London, but then he was back in Paris, or maybe it was the other way around. Quite a busy fellow! Finally, we decided upon calling him at his home every evening until we reached him, and we caught him late one night, a little before midnight. He was put out by that considerably. He actually shouted at me. I must say, Elza, I’m not used to being shouted at, but I stood it for your sake. What choice did I have? His editor told me that this is a special issue they’re working on, after all—their first thorough look at restaurants in the former Eastern Bloc. He said it just like that, Eastern Bloc, as if it were Fiji or Kathmandu. I didn’t realize people still used the term.
“Anyway, when I finally got through to him, after he stopped yelling at me, he asked me to stop harassing him, and hung up. But when I called him early the next morning—early, dear, before I’d even breakfasted—well, he was in no better spirits, I can tell you that, but at least he heard me out. He said he’d spoken to his editor, and he agreed to visit if we agreed to stop calling. I agreed and gave him our details. The editor called back a day later with an itinerary in place. He agreed that an article covering traditional Hungarian kitchens would be interesting to their readers. He also liked the fact that your restaurant serves traditional cuisine in a fine-dining atmosphere. We assured him that you were an artist! That Tulip was not fusion, but something authentic and inward-looking. We also told him you were haute-cuisine and should be given consideration for the Silver Ladle. I must be honest with you here, my dear, but the editor scoffed at that. I ignored it. He’ll see! So, anyway, the Critic will arrive at the school next week, and after a tour we’ll bring him directly to you. He’ll be our summer guest at Lake Balaton afterward and we’ve arranged plenty of time for him to visit the thermals. You should think about joining us for a weekend or so as well. What do you say to that?”
Elza had stood up and pushed her chair away from her. She was pacing around her office. She was speechless. She looked at the Critic’s picture in the latest issue of Le Gourmand and then looked at herself in a mirror again. She straightened her hair and pressed her lips together. The only thing she could think to do was practice her smile. She tilted her head and retracted her lips. She did not think of the broken kitchen or the fact that the Sliver Ladle was as far out of reach as a Michelin star. All she could think to do at that moment was offer her hand to the imaginary man in front of her.
What is the matter with me? she thought. There was hardly any time left to plan. She was at the threshold of accomplishing something monumental in her medium-size city—something that might establish her reputation internationally. In an instant everything in her world came into sharp focus. She had a purpose as clear and sharp as a glass shard. Like the new capitalists around her, the rest of the burgeoning middle class, like the merchants in their boutiques, the managers in their telecom firms, the young bankers sprouting in the new banks, Elza knew she had an audit to contend with. She thought about the resources she needed to see this project to completion. She was able, in that moment of pacing, with a deadline hanging over her head, and only a moment after smiling and offering her hand to nobody, she was able to determine what her next course of action should be, exactly what needed to happen. Why can’t it just always be like this? she thought. Why, so often, did it seem that she had to muddle from cause to effect, from half-baked decision to tentative action, with no recipe or anything else to guide her? Just muddling. Throwing things into a pot and hoping they’ll get along. But then there was suddenly this! Why, this was practically heroic, she thought. Here she was, suddenly alive and steering her life in the direction it needed to go.
“Elza? Are you there?” the Professor of Meats asked at the other end of the line.
“Yes. Yes! This is wonderful—absolutely wonderful! Thank you so much. The kitchen is ready. We’re all waiting for him.”
“Good, good. You should have nothing to worry about. We are both so happy for you, my dear. It will be a fine distinction for you and for the old school. You certainly have worked hard all these years and deserve your success. You deserve to have people know it. No reason we can’t show the West a thing or two—show them what a Magyar kitchen can produce. Let them have a taste of Eastern Bloc cuisine.”
“Yes, indeed!” Elza said good-bye and hung up. She peeked out at the kitchen with fresh, purposeful eyes. Everything would be fixed—even this chaotic kitchen.
But what chaos! Dirty pots and pans were strewn over counter-tops. Too many abandoned dish towels were tossed carelessly on top of oven ranges. A trash bin was overflowing. There was a puddle of congealed fat on the floor. The door to the alley was open and the line cooks were standing outside smoking. The Sous-Chef should really have been keeping them in line. But where was the Sous-Chef? He was helping Dora prepare a batch of sour cherries for pies instead.
He stirred the cherries while Dora poured the sugar in, and something in the way they interacted struck Elza and rendered her light-headed with anger. She marched into the kitchen and moved a dishrag from a range. She watched them speaking softly to each other, speaking gently to each other. Ten years of hard work had brought her this? Ten years of scraping pots and gutting chickens and getting burned by pans that spit hot oil at her, of giving up a normal life, had led her to this: no family, no love, no respect, a filthy kitchen, and an ex-lover stirring a pot of cherries with an attractive younger woman? Elza did not think of herself as an envious woman, but right then she wanted to break a few dishes. But she also realized that she had gotten herself in to this mess. Life requires constant effort, she realized, constant vigilance. I have not been vigilant. I let everything burn while playing make-believe. She knew that to proceed, she would have to control her anger, she would have to choose wisely . . . and she almost did! She felt herself calming down enough to project a level-headed authority. She was on the brink of reaching a level of detached intelligence, akin to a mindful monk, but as she was about to open her mouth and speak to her employees in a mindful, purposeful way, she took a step and skidded on the puddle of congealed fat. Her right leg slipped out and took off on an unaccustomed trajectory from under her while her left one buckled. Then she landed on her backside with her hand in the thick mess. Her thick mess. All of it, hers. She pulled her hand away from the fat and stared at it. Her hand glistened and smelled rancid. Chicken fat—days old—from a pan that had been carelessly carried, that had tipped slightly on the way to the dish station. This was the worst part: nobody had seen or heard her fall. She was invisible in her own kitchen. The line chefs were still chatting and smoking in the back. The Sous-Chef was still talking softly with Dora over the cherries, and the Dishwasher had his back turned while he folded napkins.
Sitting there on the messy floor of her kitchen, in her restaurant, at the age of forty-eight, without a person in the world, not even her immediate world, who cared about whether she stood or fell, succeeded or failed, lived or died, had money in the bank or not, Elza succumbed to a fiery rage. If I have to set all of their asses on fire, this is my restaurant, and I’ll make it ready.
It was at this moment that the hair on the back of Dora’s neck began to stand. Dora shivered now while she and the Sous-Chef rendered the steaming pot of cherries and sugar. She turned to see Elza standing in the middle of the kitchen with a contorted mouth, a perplexed brow, and her hand raised up like a statue. Her face had gone bright red. Really, the only thing missing was smoke billowing out of her ears. Elza looked like a stovetop coffee pot about to explode. Precisely like that.
The poor girl, as good a pastry chef as she was, was no match for the brewing storm. She might as well have been a cream puff lost at stormy sea or a deviled egg tossed in front of an approaching steamroller.
“Get out of my sight!” Elza shouted at her and pointed to the exit. “Get out! Get out! Get out!”
Dora tried to make herself disappear behind the Sous-Chef. She managed enough so that only her nose and smoky eyes peeked out behind him, and indeed at that moment she looked very much like an apprehensive raccoon.
The line cooks heard Elza and peeked inside. They spotted the fat stain on her uniform, surmised the situation, and quickly put out their cigarettes and came back indoors. They shut the alley door behind them. The Dishwasher dropped a napkin when he heard the shout and instinctively reached for a knife. He spun on his heels and crouched down, ready for action, ready to take apart the intruder he thought had broken in.
Outside, in the dining room, the Headwaiter heard the shout, but tried to ignore it. He smiled at the customers and the other waiters and offered a glass of wine. The customers heard the shout also. Many of them were in the middle of chewing or swallowing or bringing their forks to their mouths. They stopped what they were doing. The Postal Inspector raised an eyebrow and stood up. He tried to look through the doors to see what was happening in the kitchen. He looked over at the Motorcycle Officer, who had resumed eating at Tulip—sans helmet, and pistol holstered—when he realized lunch really wasn’t the same anywhere else. The pair of them, being the only uniformed officials in the restaurant and therefore representing the state’s authority, stood up and made their way to the kitchen doors.
The Headwaiter ran in front of them. He knew what a mess the kitchen had become and did not want anyone to find out.
“All is well,” he said. “All is just fine. They’re only having a little spat. A little chef’s spat. Culinary differences, you know. Artistes!”
“That was Elza shouting,” the Postal Inspector said. “I recognized the voice.”
“I did too,” said the Motorcycle Officer and he nodded at the other customers. “I recognized it as well. I also heard it first.”
The Headwaiter shook his head. “Gentlemen, everything is all right. Please return to your meals. They’ll get cold.”
It took a bit of cajoling and promises of free desserts, but eventually the men sat down. They introduced themselves and moved their dishes over to a larger table where they finished their meal together.
