‘Don’t you have another chair?’
‘In the kitchen.’
‘Aren’t you going to fetch it?’
‘In my culture it is impolite to sit at the same height as one’s superiors.’
‘I’m not your superior.’
‘As far as I’m concerned, you are.’
‘Nonsense. Get a chair and sit down.’
Maravan sat on the floor.
Andrea shook her head and asked her question: ‘What was in the food?’
‘You mean the ingredients?’
‘Only the ones that produced that effect.’
‘I don’t understand.’
He was a bad liar. Until then Andrea had harboured doubts about her theory. But now he was acting as if he had been caught red-handed, so she was quite sure. ‘You understand perfectly well.’
‘I made the meal with traditional ingredients. There was nothing in there that didn’t belong.’
‘Maravan, I know that’s not true. I’m absolutely certain. I know myself and my body. Something about that meal wasn’t right.’
He was silent for a moment. Then he shook his head stubbornly.
‘These are ancient recipes. All I did was to modernize the preparation a little. I swear to you there was nothing in there.’
Andrea got up and paced back and forth between the shrine and the window. It was getting dark, the sky above the tiled roofs had turned orange; there were no voices to be heard from the street any more.
She turned from the window and thrust herself in front of him. ‘Get up, Maravan.’
He stood and lowered his eyes.
‘Look at me.’
‘In my culture it is impolite to look someone in the eyes.’
‘In my culture it is impolite to put something in a woman’s food to make her sleep with you.’
He looked at her. ‘I didn’t put anything in your food.’
‘Let me tell you a secret, Maravan: I don’t sleep with men. They don’t turn me on. They’ve never turned me on. When I was a teenager I slept with a boy twice because I thought that was what you did. But after that second time I already knew I’d never do it again.’
She paused for a moment. ‘I don’t sleep with men, Maravan. I sleep with women.’
He cast her a horrified look.
‘Do you understand now?’
He nodded.
‘So, what was in the food?’
Maravan took his time. Then he said, ‘Ayurveda is a type of medicine which is many thousands of years old. It has eight disciplines. The eighth is called Vajikarana. It’s all about aphrodisiacs. This includes certain food dishes. My great-aunt Nangay is a wise woman; she knows how to prepare such dishes. I got my recipes from her. But the way in which they were prepared was all my own invention.’
By the time Andrea left that evening, she had been initiated into the aphrodisiac secrets of milk and urad lentils, saffron and palm sugar, almonds and sesame oil, saffron ghee and long pepper, cardamom and cinnamon, asparagus and liquorice ghee.
She had given him a moderate ticking-off, even going so far as to describe his behaviour as ‘Ayurvedic date rape’, and she left his flat without saying goodbye. But now she felt more relieved than troubled. A couple of tram stops before she got off, when Andrea was able to look back at the whole affair with a little distance, she could not help laughing out loud.
A young man opposite her smiled back.
Their meeting had also brought Maravan some consolation. Now he could deal with the reasons for her rejection. He even felt a little pride at having been the only man for whom, for a night, she had betrayed her natural inclinations. And – if he were being honest – a little hope, too.
The following day he sent his sister 10,000 rupees to give him an excuse for calling her, and then he asked her to arrange a time for him to speak with Nangay. He would have to wait two more days.
When he finally got through to Nangay, she sounded weak and exhausted.
‘Are you taking your medicine, mami?’ he asked. He used the traditional polite form of the second person and called her mami: aunt.
‘Yes, yes. Is that why you’re calling?’
‘Partly.’
‘Why else?’
Maravan did not really know where to begin. She pre-empted him.
‘If it doesn’t work the first time, that’s perfectly normal. Sometimes it takes weeks, months. Tell them they have to be patient.’
‘It did work the first time.’
For a while she said nothing. Then, ‘That happens if both people believe strongly enough.’
‘But the woman didn’t believe. She didn’t even know.’
‘Then she loves the man.’
Maravan did not answer.
‘Are you still there, Maravan?’
‘Yes.’
Nangay asked quietly, ‘Is she a Shudra, at least?’
‘Yes, mami.’ The lie was excusable, he thought. Shudra was the servant caste. And Andrea was an employee in the service industry, after all.
When his sister came on again, he asked, ‘Is she really taking her medicine?’
‘How can she?’ She sounded annoyed. ‘We haven’t even got enough money for rice and sugar.’
After the conversation Maravan sat in front of the screen for a good while. He was now convinced that the rapid effect of the food must be down to his molecular cooking.
June 2008
9
It had been so sunny on Sunday morning that Dalmann had taken breakfast on the terrace. But no sooner had Lourdes brought out the scrambled eggs and bacon than the wind blew a large cloud across the sun.
Dalmann got stuck into his breakfast nonetheless, and reached for the top newspaper on the pile of four laid out by the housekeeper. Now he began to feel gloomier. The hysteria surrounding the destruction of the documents by the Bundesrat had thrown up a lot of dirt, unnecessarily. A section of the Federal News Service’s report about the nuclear smuggling affair had fallen into the hands of a journalist, and now they were talking about the Iranian connection as well as the Pakistani one. It would not be long before the name Palucron appeared in the newspaper.
Palucron was a company – now no longer trading – with its headquarters in a lawyer’s office in the city centre. At the time it had channelled payments from Iran to various firms, all of them rock-solid enterprises with impeccable reputations, who certainly had no idea that they were implicated in the development of a nuclear programme.
Of course this was also true of Palucron, officially. At least it was for its director, Eric Dalmann, who had only taken up the position at the request of a business acquaintance to whom he owed a favour.
At all events, it would be extremely inconvenient for him to be mentioned in the same breath as this story, especially at a time when business was taking a knock due to the financial crisis.
Dalmann looked up at the sky. A whole bank of cloud was obscuring the sun. He was wearing casual summer clothes – a green polo shirt and light, tartan golf slacks – and an unpleasantly cold wind chilled him to the bone.
‘Lourdes!’ he called. ‘We’re going inside.’ He stood, picked up his coffee cup, and went through the veranda door into the living room. He sat in an armchair, staring morosely, until the housekeeper had cleared the breakfast from the terrace and laid the table in the dining room.
He had scarcely sat down and started on a new plate of scrambled eggs and bacon – the first, only half eaten, had gone cold during the change of tables – before the doorbell rang. Schaeffer, as ever, was a little too punctual.
Schaeffer was Dalmann’s colleague. Dalmann could not think of another word for him. He was not exactly a secretary or an assistant, and right-hand man did not describe him accurately either. So Dalmann had stuck with ‘colleague’. They had been colleagues for nearly ten years now and had dispensed with formalities early on. Schaeffer called Dalmann Eric, Dalmann called Schaeffer Schaeffer.