The Waiter

by Matias Faldbakken

  •

  As a result, when I get to The Hills at 6:45 every morning, I can free myself from my “self-chosen,” “neutral” clothes. I peel them off and pull on my uniform. It gives me breathing space. My relationship with the waiter’s jacket is clear, because it has a time-tested design, with deep roots in tradition, meaning that it doesn’t have to express some odd, cash-whipped jacket designer’s generic idea of “now,” “normality,” or anything like that. I like the waiter’s jacket, and I left it on a hanger in the back room yesterday, as neatly as possible, so that it would be ready to wear today. Ready to be pulled on, every morning, on the dot. We go through the kitchen and into the wardrobe corner of the cramped changing room one by one and pull on our jackets. All the waiters and chefs take it in turn, aside from the Maître d’. He arrives ready dressed. I think he thinks the wardrobe corner is a bit nasty, a bit cramped, which it is.

  The kitchen at The Hills resembles a forge more than a kitchen: it’s burnt, carbonized. The gas flame the head chef has burning in the corner looks like a furnace. The torching and sizzling has climbed up the walls and into every nook and cranny. His helpers stand at the other end; I don’t have much interaction with them. There is an opening between the kitchen and the restaurant, a mixture of a hatch and some kind of kitchen island. It isn’t something that was designed: it has grown organically over the past half century, through use and additions. It’s difficult to tell what’s wall, what’s shelf, what’s pan hook, and what’s bench or serving counter. The ceiling is as black as coal. The chef sweats away beneath a ceiling so opaque that you don’t even see it; it’s virtually gone. There are more pots and pans and other tools hanging above him, and above those is the ceiling, but you can’t see that. He has stood there, the chef, flambéing and flambéing, and burnt away the ceiling, so to speak. There’s an absence above the chef’s spot, a void, a hollow above. That’s how sooty it is. The ceiling reflects nothing. The kitchen is relatively small, and the chef stands in the spot where the head chef stood before him, and the one before him, and has always stood, frying up this and that all day long, and not least flambéing those endless flambés.

  His knives are lying clean and ready on a cloth to the right of the well-used chopping board. There aren’t too many of them; each one has a limited area of use. From an aesthetic point of view, they are a constant in relation to the chef’s robust build, while the purity of their steel stands in sharp contrast to his harried face—something which links him, visually, even closer to the knives, possibly paradoxically, but that’s how it is. He’s heavy-handed and lacks the gift of the gab, as they say. He’s as big as a blacksmith himself, a boor with a God-given but flat-bridged nose for gastronomy, a gorilla super-taster. He doesn’t say much. When he first speaks, he’s stiff and harsh. Like the time he mumbled that in the Maître d’ a civil war between alcohol and homosexuality is being fought.

  •

  I wipe the marble surfaces. I wipe them even if they’ve already been wiped. I spread starched tablecloths onto the underlays and straighten them out with my hands. I bring out water. I write the day’s specials in chalk on the old board by the side of the kitchen hatch. I feel like a teacher when I do that. The papers have to be brought in. It’s my job to sort them out every morning and to put the long wooden clip onto the spines of each, the so-called Zeitungsspanner. I hang them on the newspaper rail by the entrance. We don’t offer the Norwegian daily papers in a place like this; they’re too primitive. We try to maintain a Continental standard. Instead, we hang the few international papers still available in printed editions. Not that we’re desperately Continental, but, unfortunately, offering the Norwegian papers isn’t an option. They don’t abide by the duty to provide information. From time to time, when it’s quiet in here, I read one of the papers by the bar. There’s no plowing through it on my part. I read carefully and turn the crisp pages slowly. Slowly making your way through the crisp pages of a broadsheet is an activity which, from a purely aesthetic point of view, is related to tailoring or the saxophone. In other words, to a bygone era. Totally passé—over. Reserved for those with special interests. But it works perfectly. Call me old-fashioned, but changing what cannot be improved is also known as decline.

  It’s clean when I arrive at work. “Clean.” The floors and surfaces are washed every night, but The Hills is in every respect a grubby restaurant. Ingrained. Not unhygienic, exactly, but it has to be said that it is a bit grimy in here, overgrown. All the years of food and fumes and breathing have essentially taken hold of the walls and formed a kind of film over the furniture and the little mosaic tiles, not to mention the ceiling. People used to smoke indoors, as one might remember, and the interior of The Hills still bears the remnants of hundreds of thousands of smoked cigarettes, from decade upon decade of smoking. The glasses and carafes are of the highest quality, traditional, not over-designed and snazzy. The cutlery, as I might have already mentioned, is early Gebrüder Hepp, or original Puiforcat. The crockery has the characteristic Hills emblem in a Delft-blue glaze, with the perfectly drawn H wrapped in an oval at the top. I feel vigilant every time I place these plates on a table. That’s what happens with good quality. It gives you vigilance.

  PART II

  EDGAR AND ANNA

  I’M NOT HUGELY FOND OF mixing roles, but I have got used to the following: a good friend of mine—well, one of my main friends, Edgar, who I mentioned before; my best friend, actually—comes here roughly every second day. He always appears in the late afternoon, around 5:00 p.m., and always with his daughter, Anna. I serve them like I do everyone else, but the air between us is different. To them, I’m both their waiter and friend. We always chat, or rather they talk to me while I work. Both are fairly talkative; Edgar is good at having opinions.

  Edgar and I have known one another since we were seven or eight. He’s the person I’ve known longest. I always give Edgar and Anna the four-person table beneath the Per Krohg dog, so that Anna, who is nine, has space to do her homework to the side of the plates. A café table is, in many respects, the opposite of a school desk. Right? It’s been said that the café table has been the most important place for “bohemianist research” throughout European cultural history, the very place for a self-determined, autonomous study into how and when “real life” is lived; alternatively, how life is “really lived.” Research friendships have been struck and faded at the café table. Anna pulls out books and a pencil case, sharpens her pencil until the shavings scatter, and gets to work. Despite Edgar’s caustic opinions around having children—“Norway definitely needs more allergic iPhone users”—he is fond of the girl. He has sole custody of her. The mother lives elsewhere, in another city. She’s bipolar, got herself a serious benzodiazepine addiction, and had her parental rights taken away following a period of eccentric and risky behavior while Anna was a baby. I remember that Edgar was concerned about the mother’s benzo intake during the first trimester of pregnancy. Some reports suggest that the use of diazepam increases the risk of cleft lips and palates. Anna has barely seen her mother. She does not, however, have a cleft palate; quite the opposite.

  Anna stares at the bankrupt actor and whispers something to Edgar. The actor has a grotesque, unruly frizz transitioning into a frizz beard. He looks like a Leonberger that’s been drinking spirits for one hundred years. Edgar explains that they’ve been watching a program in which various celebrities have to try to teach a class of seventh graders. Some of them manage it well; others make a mess of it. Anna listens intently as Edgar tells me this, and grins when he gets to the parts she finds funny. Teeth grow at different rates at that age, something which also applies to Anna. Her teeth are brilliant white, regardless of the angle or the length. I know that some children have slightly yellowed enamel on their new teeth, and that’s not always quite so charming. Yellowed teeth in a messy row, in a mouth full of obnoxiousness—I can do without that. Anna is polite and well kept. Edgar is good at looking after her; I think he does the caring him
self. I met Anna’s friend Carl Fredrik once; he came here with them. He wasn’t too polished, let me tell you. Anna laughs loudly, and her laughter is so genuine that it’s hard not to let yourself be charmed. She’s as sharp as a knife. There are a few golden years between infancy and the teenage period, Edgar says, when kids are as smart as they’re ever going to be, or that’s how it seems, when they’re still uncorrupted. A huge amount of resources are put into corrupting children at that age, according to Edgar. One institution and business model after another is established solely to tame them and make their potential predictable, the limitless potential that a child still possesses when they’re eight, nine, ten, or eleven years old, going to school, or sitting there being invaded by one automation or the next. School grinds them down, Edgar always says. Organized activities bend and twist the kids in certain directions; their parents force them into one mold after another. Technology makes its presence known and does its best to “take” children from an early age; it presents itself as the law of nature and pulls and tears at children with its temptations and illusions, trickling into their nervous systems, into their DNA, so that it, the technology, really does become the law of nature, meaning the children can rarely or never again stand or sit with their full, uncorrupted potential, laughing loudly, straight from their bellies, the way Anna does now, as Edgar talks about the TV program. Anna is on her feet—he’s that funny. She points at him and laughs because one of these celebrity-cum-teachers, Edgar says, had the misfortune of letting out the pupils’ speckled dwarf hamster, which led to complete chaos. The children squeal and run euphorically around the classroom, climbing the walls and falling over. The TV crew must have filmed it at high speed, because there are scenes cut in here and there, in extreme slow motion, crystal clear images of chairs tipping over and pencil sharpeners opening in midair, with their contents—the shavings—going everywhere. A desk tips over, and you can actually see a handful of crumbs from erasers—rubbings—scatter across the floor at macro level. Anna is completely absorbed. The celebrity teacher shuffles around, stooped, trying to get hold of the little animal, which is running in terror from corner to corner. She is crosscut with seven other celebrities all struggling to keep their respective classes in line. Edgar says that he doesn’t know who any of these people are, apart from two of them: one is an old folk singer he remembers from his childhood, and the other is the poor, broke actor eating three tables away. The program must have been filmed before his forgery was uncovered: he looks fresher and more in shape on the TV screen than in real life, Edgar says. I’ve always thought that The Hills is a good place for Anna to sit, away from the organizing, the screens, the monitoring, the schooling, and the taming. The Maître d’ is a hawk, though: he comes over, apropos pencil shavings, and says that I need to sweep up the shavings which have fallen beneath Anna—or “the girl,” as he calls her.

  COFFEE

  COFFEE AND MOTORING HAVE, IN a slightly unobvious sense, reached the same proportions and the same metaphysical union with a “free Western life,” I’ve occasionally thought when I’m in a philosophical mood, possibly influenced by Edgar. The morning, as we all know, belongs to coffee. Regardless of the ripple effects that coffee production and motoring have, it’s hard to imagine a life without the two, ideally in combination, and preferably in the morning. The activities of slurping coffee and driving cars are, in one’s very chromosomes, linked to the idea of getting pumped up and under way. The image of the bittersweet early morning with a coffee, or in the car, or with a coffee in the car, or with the car parked up outside the coffee place to get a coffee to have in the car, or the old European café coffee, which isn’t linked to the car as such but should be viewed as some kind of transportation stage, which is also a destination in itself, the same way the car is always a transportation stage and an end station in itself. Doing away with one of these is like amputating a limb from the body of society: it’s completely out of the question. It’s hard to see how the machinery of society is meant to “get going” every morning without the two. “Decaffeinated coffee is like kissing your sister,” someone once said. Isn’t it typical that the only coffee quote I know is about decaffeinated coffee? The Bar Manager has put her foot down when it comes to serving decaf. It’s not possible, she says. She’s not some coffee fanatic, no coffee Nazi—she doesn’t have any warped barista ideology—but she is part of the old school, and the line has to be drawn somewhere, she claims.

  Morning is mainly about coffee here at The Hills. It can also be about croissants with jam and the morning papers, but the coffee itself is the crux of the morning’s activities. The Bar Manager is of the opinion that the cultural significance of coffee, not snobbish but its actual value, in terms of both history and Realpolitik, should shine through our serving rituals. I myself have to be very careful with my coffee intake, but it’s difficult to break the habit of a cup in the morning, especially since you end up distancing yourself from an important community if you don’t spend your early mornings sipping coffee. Decaffeinated coffee is a surrogate for the feeling of belonging, pure and simple. You can still nurture the image of yourself as a coffee-sipping individual if the coffee is decaffeinated, but coffee is very much about caffeine, let’s just put that out there; it’s not just aesthetics and scene. Just think of Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht—Johann Sebastian Bach’s Coffee Cantata, which Johansen regularly plays up there on the mezzanine. I’ve heard that Voltaire drank fifty cups of coffee a day. I get very shaky from coffee. Sometimes it tips over to sheer paranoia. My so-called high sensitivity isn’t a good fit with caffeine; it’s one of the stimulants we highly sensitives react most strongly to. Other things we highly sensitives react to are noise and complex social contexts. The mixing of roles. And hunger, or being given too many jobs to do at once. We can also quickly become drained in interactions with others, rather than gaining energy from them. I can’t drink coffee before I get to work in the morning. The sounds, the chatter of the guests—it all becomes too sharp. I quickly start to feel dizzy and get palpitations if I drink too much coffee; I get the feeling of internal collapse.

  This isn’t the place to bring up personal history, but I remember one morning a few years back, a morning like today, the same time of year, with the same sunlight as now, falling obliquely into the restaurant over the coffee cups and morning papers on the worn marble tabletops. I’d felt uppish and had been stupid enough to drink three or four cups of coffee before twelve. I swung behind the bar, loaded the machine, and made myself one espresso after another. The intake of more caffeine can curb the comedown after too much coffee, and I had kept up that curbing all morning, with the help of repeated espresso consumption. When it was approaching half past one I went to top up the cup of a gentleman sitting beneath the longest mirror, on the east wall. My job has two key criteria: I have to show pride in my work, and I have to be self-effacing. The pride in my work makes me adhere to rigid routines which are vital for my well-being, since being highly sensitive means that I don’t like surprises or change. The self-effacing aspect means that I can interact with and serve people without having to get involved. In times like these, when the majority of poses are tasteless, it seems that responsibility, pride in work, and being self-effacing are things one should nurture. So, with the coffeepot in hand, proud and self-effacing, I go over to the man sitting beneath the mirror on the long wall. He’s wearing the tie from hell, I’d almost say. The pattern on it is so busy that I lose my momentum and simply stand in front of him for a few seconds, completely unable to mobilize any of my standard phrases. And, slightly puzzled by my silence as he stiffly asks for a refill, I experience a collapse, primarily caused by his tie. I still think that: that it was his tie which caused it. The tie was an improbable weave of three shades of blue: an almost grayish Cambridge blue as the base, interspersed with stripes of Tufts blue and topped with speckles of what might have been periwinkle. The sight of his tie slams into my retinas and makes, physically, this house of cards of
a nervous system that I was dealt, and which has been fundamentally destabilized by my coffee drinking, come crashing down, and I fall inwards, a slide and a fall; I collapse internally. Everything becomes bright, and my head grows and becomes light as a helium balloon; it feels like my head is rising, but it’s falling, “it” is falling, everything inside me is falling, and I have to grip the side with my free hand to avoid tipping over. My hand brushes against an old woman’s cheek and bumps her table, making the cups rattle and the tea slosh as she sits cackling with her friend, completely unaware that I, her waiter, would come staggering in from one side like a character from a silent film and practically slap her soft, wrinkled cheek. I regain my balance, but don’t dare apologize, since my mouth feels completely lopsided and my tongue thick and back-heavy. If I try to speak now, I’ll make it worse by following the cheek slapping and tea spilling with the sounds of a dog or a bear. So I stand there, blinking, still with the coffeepot in my hand, and now I feel some kind of adrenaline rush rising inside; it gives me a slight lift. The man with the tie looks like he’s swallowing a series of bitter belches.

  “Refill?” I say, amazed that words and not howls are coming out. My upper arms are tingling, and I quickly glance at the hand holding the coffeepot.

  “No thank you,” says the man. It’s there, my hand: I can see it but can’t feel it; it’s numb, completely gone.

  “I’ll get someone to clean up,” I say to the old woman, before walking out into the kitchen with broad, acute psychiatric steps, as though to find my sea legs against the dizziness. The little Filipino man with the floppy ears who did the washing up back then runs away with a cloth as I say the words “spill” and “table fourteen.” What was his name again? I stand on the inside of the swinging door, breathing through my nose and squeezing my hands until I regain the feeling in them. Bayani, I think it was, Baiany, Bajanwi. The chef is flambéing repetitively beneath the carbonized ceiling. He pours cognac into the sauté pan and deftly catches a flame from the gas hob so that a fireball is thrown up from the copper pan. The blue alcohol flame against the golden copper looks amazing. He’s an aesthete, the chef. These days, I try to limit my coffee consumption to the afternoon, or the evening.