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.
Nine
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.