‘Only one. I’ve made just enough.’ He took two cups and saucers from a cupboard and put them on a tray.
Makeda grabbed one and bit off a piece.
The water was boiling. He poured out the tea and carried the tray into his small sitting room.
The deepam was burning by his domestic shrine and just for once the aroma of sandalwood was in the air. As a sacrifice to accompany his last prayer, Maravan had offered up smoke. In front of the shrine was the photo with the dead child soldiers. Makeda looked at it while Maravan set the table for the tea.
‘Which one is he?’
Maravan did not look up. ‘The first on the left.’
‘A child.’
‘He wanted to be a chef. Like me.’
‘I bet he would have been a good one.’
‘Definitely.’ Maravan looked at the photograph. ‘It’s just so unfair,’ he said, his voice faltering.
Makeda nodded. ‘I had a cousin. She wanted to become a nurse. She was recruited when she was ten, and instead of caring for people and making them better she had to learn how to maim and kill people with a Kalashnikov. She didn’t live to see her twelfth birthday.’
Now Makeda’s voice was faltering too. Maravan put a hand on her shoulder.
‘To a free Eritrea.’ She wanted to laugh, but it sounded more like a sob.
They sat down. Both sipped carefully at the tea, which was still far too hot.
Makeda put down her cup and said. ‘It’s people like Dalmann who have these children on their conscience.’
Maravan shook his head slowly from side to side. ‘No. It’s the people who instigate these wars.’
‘Those are the ideologues. They’re pretty bad, too. But not as bad as the suppliers. Who make wars possible in the first place by supplying the weapons. Who make money from the war, thereby prolonging it. People like Dalmann.’
Maravan waved his hand dismissively. ‘Dalmann’s a small fish.’
Makeda nodded. ‘Yes, but he’s our small fish.’
Maravan said nothing.
After a long silence, Makeda said insistently, ‘He stands for all the others.’
Maravan still said nothing.
‘You said you wanted to stop. So why are you doing this dinner? This one in particular?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You’re planning something, aren’t you?’
‘I don’t know. What about you? Why are you doing it?’
‘I know.’
Outside a police car siren became loud and then slowly quiet again.
‘Dalmann’s got a heart condition,’ she said.
‘Something bad I hope.’
Makeda smiled. ‘He had a heart attack. They’ve inserted a little tube into a coronary vessel. Now he has to keep on lowering his blood pressure and thin his blood or he’ll have another one.’
Maravan did not reply and blew on his tea.
‘Do you know where he had it?’
Maravan shook his head.
Makeda let out her happy-go-lucky laugh, but it sounded a bit forced. ‘In the Huwyler. At the busiest time.’
No reaction from Maravan.
‘He needs to look after himself. Mustn’t strain anything. No overdoing it.’
‘I understand.’
Makeda took a gulp of her tea. ‘Can you remedy erection problems too?’ she asked directly.
‘I think so – why?’
‘Could you put something in the food to help him get an erection?’
‘Not an immediate one. But in time, yes.’
‘But it’s got to be immediate.’
Maravan shrugged apologetically.
‘There are products that work in half an hour.’
‘I don’t have those sorts of products.’
‘I do,’ Makeda said.
When she left the flat a quarter of an hour later, a foil wrap with four pills lay next to the tea service.
In the middle of the night Maravan awoke with a fright. He had been standing by a wall of dense, green – dark green and wet from the rain – jungle. All of a sudden tanks broke through the undergrowth, turned, cut new swathes and vanished until their diesel engines were scarcely audible. Then they came back, turned and vanished, came back, turned and vanished, until there was nothing left of the green of the jungle. In the distance he could now see the dark, calm ocean.
Maravan turned on the light. The curry plants beside his bed stood there motionless, like petrified creatures.
He looked at the clock. Three. If he did not get up now and make himself some hot milk with cardamom and turmeric, he would be unable to get to sleep again before dawn.
While he waited in the kitchen for the milk to heat up he thought about Makeda’s proposition.
The milk was lukewarm by the time he had reached his decision.
49
‘In the federal prosecutor’s archive? Just like that? Are you taking the piss?’ Already dressed for dinner, Dalmann was in his study, sitting at his desk with its brass fittings and green leather top with gold patterning. The catering team had been in the house all afternoon and he had wanted to treat himself to a small sherry before Makeda arrived. Then, all of a sudden, Schaeffer had turned up unannounced, standing there on the rug with something urgent for him.
And it really was urgent. The bunglers at the federal prosecutor’s office had left lying around in some archive a whole set of copies of the so-called nuclear smuggling documents, which the Bundesrat (in a rare moment of wisdom and under pressure from the CIA) had destroyed. And instead of shredding them, as any halfway sensible person would have done, they were now shouting about them from the rooftops.
‘Do we know whether they’re all there? I mean, are they complete? Sod it, what I want to know is whether there’s any mention of bloody Palucron.’
‘Nothing that I know of. But we have to assume there is. All I know is that experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency examined the documents several days ago and they’ve separated the highly sensitive ones from the harmless ones.’
‘I doubt Palucron will be among the highly sensitive ones.’
‘For now this is what we’d like to assume.’
‘So those atomic energy blokes should just take the sensitive ones and put the rest in the shredder.’
‘I fear it’s the sensitive ones that will be shredded.’
Dalmann took exception to his being corrected. ‘So what do you suggest then, Schaeffer?’ He gave his colleague a look of reproach, as if he were expecting an unforgivable mistake to be rectified immediately.
‘It’s still too early for any prognosis. I just wanted you to be kept informed. And I didn’t want to discuss the matter over the phone, you understand.’
‘You don’t say! I’m already being bugged.’
‘One can never be too careful where the secret services are involved.’
The doorbell rang.
‘That’ll be my visitor. Anything else?’
Schaeffer stood up. ‘In spite of everything I hope you have a pleasant evening. Relax, I think the matter will turn out to be fairly harmless.’
‘It better had,’ mumbled Dalmann half-seriously. He stood up, too, and accompanied Schaeffer to the hallway, where Lourdes was helping Makeda out of her coat. Even Schaeffer seemed to notice how stunning she looked.
All afternoon Maravan had been standing in the impractical kitchen of this spacious and yet quite stuffy house. He worked with great care and concentration. He could sense clearly that Ulagu and Nangay were in the room with him. They watched as he rattled his knife over the chopped, cored tomatoes, transformed white onions into mountains of tiny dice, removed the green shoots from garlic cloves with two cuts, worked coriander, cumin, chilli and tamarind to a fine paste. He showed them the new cooking techniques, jellification, spherification, working with foams, extracting essences. He spoke to them quietly, ignoring Andrea, who wanted to vent her bad mood on someone.
The day before, Maravan had risen early and bought some Minirin with Nangay’s repeat prescription from the local chemist. The pharmacist had recognized him and asked sympathetically, ‘How’s your aunt? Or was it your mother?’