The Devil's Larder

by Jim Crace

  ‘There’ll be an orchard there before you know it,’ their father said. ‘Those pips are apple trees.’

  48

  THIS WAS THE second time she’d died in bed. It was her second burial as well. Nine years before the funeral, the hillside – undermined by summer rain and quarrying – had slipped and piled itself against our neighbour’s house as quietly as a drift of snow. She and her husband were fast asleep, exhausted by a day of harvesting, their suppers still uneaten at their sides. The boulder clay had shouldered all its strength against their stone back wall until their room capsized and the contents of the attic and the flute-tiled roof collapsed onto their bed. My neighbour dreamed, fooled for an instant by the sudden weight across her legs, that the dogs had jumped up on the eiderdown. This was against the farmhouse rules. She was ready in her sleep to knock them back onto the bedroom floor.

  Now she and her husband were not sleeping. But they were trapped beneath their sheets, beneath the eiderdown, by rubble from the land and from the house and so could only stay exactly where they were, their heads and chests protected by a porch of beams and timbers, their legs encased by cloth and clay. A stroke of luck. They had been saved from instant death by ceiling beams, stout wood from local trees. They had woken in a dark and sudden tent, closed off from the world.

  By dawn the heat was stifling. They tore their night-clothes off and ripped the sheets. They called for help but could tell from the way their voices were absorbed that they would not be heard. They knew that their uneaten supper was within reach. Except there was no reach for them. They could not turn or stretch. The earth was just a finger-length away. They breakfasted on perspiration from their lips and moisture from the clay.

  By evening the clay had fixed and baked, entirely dry. They sweated only smells. No moisture any more, and nothing on their lips to drink. They should have died within a day; the heat, the pain, the thirst would put an end to them. But they had worked their whole lives with clod and clay and stone and knew their properties. A thousand times, to stave off hunger in the middle of a task, the old man had popped a pebble into his mouth and sucked. He swore that he could always taste what crop was in the field. So now he searched the rubble with his one free hand until he found the flat, impassive flanks of stones, the ones he’d hauled so many times out of the way of his motor plough. He tugged two stones the size of supper plates free of the clay with his strong fingers and placed one on his wife’s naked stomach and the other on his own. The weight expelled the danger, saved their lives. Their fevers were absorbed by stones. And once the stones had levelled off at body temperature, they were discarded by my neighbours and colder thermostats were found.

  The old man and his wife stayed strong with stones. Their bodies grew as gelid as the earth and they could feel their stomachs filling, the slow transfusion into them of rain and sun and harvest crops.

  The diggers finally came with dogs to hunt for bodies. Who could survive that long and in that heat with nothing to sustain them? But when they pulled the rubble and the rocks away and peered between the ceiling beams they saw at once how hale the couple seemed, sustained in their hot tent. Each had a flat stone on the abdomen, as if their bodies would have drifted off, would have risen through the earth and rubble, as sinuous and weightless as a plume of smoke, without the anchoring of stones.

  ‘You can’t eat stones,’ the farmers always said when crops were poor or prices low. But, when my neighbours had been rescued from the slip, wise heads explained what everybody always knew, that there was sustenance in rock and earth, that those grey stones had fed the couple, by paying for their body heat with food.

  And so, those nine years down the line, when the old man had to put his wife into the ground for good, he did not send her off clutching family photographs or her best brooch or something gold to bribe the gods or (as is often done) put cobs of maize into her hands to feed her in the afterlife. Instead, he placed one of the flat grey stones that had once saved her life across her abdomen and wrapped her fingers round its rim. The stone, he thought, might return its heat to her and once again might sweat its nutrients and minerals, its energies, onto her skin, to be absorbed, to keep her warm and hale and fed until the rubble and the clay backed off, replaced the roof, restored the rear wall to their lives, returned uphill from whence it came.

  49

  ‘THE FINEST FOOD, like the best of marriages, is bound to break the rules,’ according to Eugene Naval. ‘It seeks to reconcile opposing tastes and textures, sweet with sour, hot with cold, sharp with bland, the fluid and the firm, the solemn and the comic, and it depends as much on luck as diligence.’

  So the tiny Syrian who, when we were kids, used to run the fried-food stall down by the harbour esplanade was working in the best traditions of his craft when – by way of cleaning up and as a joke aimed only at himself – he made a meal of his remaining scraps one afternoon, combining the last fish on his tray and a sorry piece of lamb’s liver with the one surviving wheel of pineapple. He frittered the lot in sesame oil, wrapped it in a leftover sour pancake, added a dash of unsold onion relish and a dramatic shake of Boulevard Cream Liqueur from his near-empty bottles, and garnished everything with hyssop leaves.

  He would have tested it himself, then tossed it to the gulls, had not the seminary tutor come cycling by and, tempted by the new and usual smells, stopped off for an unscheduled snack.

  ‘I’m closing up. There’s nothing left,’ the Syrian explained, but the tutor could see for himself that this was not entirely true. He bought the pancake full of scraps – a melange which as yet had not been named – described its smell as ‘heavenly’, donated a copy of the most recent Seminarian, of which he was the proud editor, and rode off on his bike.

  Depending on your viewpoint, the tutor tumbled off his bike that afternoon, fifty metres from the Syrian, either because the pioneering snack was so fabulously delicious, or because it was too shockingly extravagant for one who earned a living advocating moderation and austerity. It’s possible, of course, that he simply lost balance, fell and stunned himself. It couldn’t have been easy for a man of his age and weight, and with so many people strolling on the esplanade, to grip the handlebars and eat his pancake at the same time.

  What is certain is that the Syrian, delighted at the impact he had made on someone of another faith and size, incorporated this new pancake meal of liver, fish and pineapple into his regular menu. The passengers from visiting liners took word of it back to their chefs at home, and it appeared in restaurants and cookery books from that time on.

  So even though the Syrian never became rich or famous, he made a lasting contribution to international cuisine. But only he – and those of us out walking near the harbour on that afternoon in 1969 – can say with any certainty why this distinguished snack is known throughout the world as ‘tutor on two wheels’ and, incidentally, why the proud seminarian himself was from that day onwards feted as ‘the Pancake’.

  50

  WHAT COULD BE a better wedding gift for two dear friends? A newly germinated love-leaf tree for the glassed-in balcony of their first apartment. It was, in fact, a sort of palm, Roystonea labia. We did not know whether they were green-fingered but, never mind, they’d have to care for it. The label in the pot described our gift as ‘edible, low-maintenance and with a modest habit, 2 metres at ten years’. What caught our eye, though, were the claims made by the sales leaflet that came with every purchase. It said:

  The inner meat, shoots and tender terminal buds of the lip palm, or love-leaf tree, from Madagascar can be harvested as a vegetable and eaten as a dressed salad or with rice-and-pork dishes. Tradition forbids the picking of the foliage before or after the palm’s seventh birthday. Shoots of a seven-year-old plant, also known as heart of palm, palmetto d’or or millionaire’s salad, are, however, thought to bring good fortune and rejuvenation to their consumers and are regarded as potent aphrodisiacs.

  With this growing gift, then, we’d plant a time bomb in their ma
rriage. Here was a loving meal, seven years in preparation, to whet their appetites.

  The lip palm flourished on their balcony. We checked whenever we went round, that first year of their marriage. The leaves were glossy and unpicked, the soil was damp, the plant was growing up. We envied them the hungry years ahead. We were aroused ourselves, just at the prospect of the harvest on their seventh anniversary.

  IT IS A MIRACLE they’ve stayed together for so long. They’ve both got other friends and lovers. We never see them in each other’s company, not even in the shops or at the railings of the school. Their love was so shortlived. There was no heart to it. It has to be the little girl – she’s six this year – that stops them splitting up.

  We went round to their place about a week ago, to babysit. Their daughter was asleep by nine. We must both have had the same thing on our mind. We’d done our sums. The lip palm was seven. We went out onto their balcony like thieves, armed with a kitchen knife. I think it was a shock, a disappointment, too, to find the centre of their tree removed. They must have cut and eaten the meat, we guessed – too good to waste – and gone off in their separate cars to spend their resurrected passions with more recent friends.

  We managed to cut out what remained of the freshest shoots and foliage. We did not bother with the salad dressing or the pork and rice. We ate palmetto, on the balcony, like chocolate. How good it was! How young we felt as, with their daughter sleeping in a distant room, we did what two dear friends should do when they have passed their seventh, loving year.

  51

  IT’S SAID THAT cheese is milk that has grown up, fresh milk transformed by time. If so, then what is boysie tart? A senile dish, turned bitter by the years? It’s made from old blue cheese, matured – ignored – enough to be as hard and slippery as a horse’s hoof.

  The cheese is difficult, too gnarled to cut easily. You can only chisel and pare it into hard slivers, the devil’s nail clippings. It won’t be edible until you’ve baked it with sultanas, prunes and well-hung game – a scrub fowl’s best – in a sourdough case. Old cheese, old fruit, old yeast, old meat. All carcasses. For New Year’s Eve, the last meal of the dying year.

  If you’ve an orange that’s gone hard and turned to parchment, then squeeze what reasty juice remains onto the tart. Then dine the old year out, with timid forks, with ancient friends. This is the taste of those dishonoured resolutions that have left their pungent marks throughout the house, those perfidies that have the gift of ageing cheese, and souring yeast, and shrivelling the plums and grapes, and putrefying meat.

  Tomorrow is another year. Fresh milk.

  52

  OURS IS A little town of great, historic charity. In the last six months alone, public subscription has put a new roof on the medieval chapel, and planted a garden for the blind, and raised the money to buy a touring bus for the use of local schools. We have made holiday provisions for fifteen pensioners and sent coach parties to the zoo. The park is somewhat overburdened with cedar benches and flowering trees, donated to the town by dutiful relatives in memory of a parent or a child. The street fete in the summer raises money for the lame, the hungry and the orphaned, who limp and starve and grieve in places that we can’t pronounce. The cottage art museum, up in the pines, has just acquired a small Matisse, thanks to the efforts of our citizens.

  So it ought to come as no surprise that when three refugee families were dumped like sodden cargo on the docks one night they were quickly offered temporary housing in the block behind the port by the Association for the Poor. And somebody (she much prefers to stay unnamed) began to organize a ‘cart’. In other words, the open trailer, used by the private school for taking camping expeditions to the hills, was draped with lights and dragged around the better streets by some of the older pupils to gather food for our new visitors.

  To start it off, the one-who-wants-to-stay-unnamed went to her own larder and removed a large and almost full jar of mixed pickles. Her husband, a heartburn martyr and the owner of the school, could not – she was weary of reminding him – risk eating pickles any more. She cleaned the inside of the glass rim with a cloth, disguised the pierced jar top with a cap of green muslin held in place by a matching rubber band, and put her offering onto the cart. The boarding master, a divorcee of eighteen months, came out from his flat and rid himself at last of his wife’s exotic teas.

  The first house that they reached provided half a dozen tins of fruit in heavy syrup. ‘Glad to help,’ the woman said. She was a kilo overweight and had determined, only that morning, to cut down on sugary desserts. The next house offered a packet of unpopular breakfast cereal, hardly touched. And the next, a cellophane packet of spaghetti shapes, which had hardened and lost much of their colour in the months since they’d been bought. The next, a red string sack of onions, podgy-skinned and coiffed with dying yellow shoots. And then a bottle of the local wine (which no one from the region drinks) and, finally (from the last house in the street), the well-intentioned but not entirely edible fig cake that the daughter had prepared at school a day or two before. ‘We ate it all up for lunch,’ her mother would explain. ‘And it was wonderful.’

  The second street quickly yielded its offerings of rusty tins, odd-smelling packets thought too old to use, flat lemonade, three cartons of Fortified Meals for the elderly (no longer needed by a recently buried aunt), dried pulses smooth and solid as porcelain, yoghurt well beyond its date, the unused ingredients of too ambitious meals, unwanted gifts, imported goods with no translation on the label, hasty choices, past mistakes. And so on, downtown from the school, street after street, until the cart was overloaded with our charity and had become the oddest shopping trolley in the world.

  Here is the photograph. The pupils are lined up behind the cart. Three little waifs are posing on their month of meals. The owner of the school is shaking hands with a wildly grinning refugee. The caption says the town donated 200 kilos to its ‘unfortunate guests’.

  And that’s not counting all the problems solved, and all the larders tidied up at last, the daughters satisfied, the heartburns eased, the diets honoured, the separations finalized, and the blunders of the past concealed as gifts.

  53

  WHAT’S FOR DINNER? Pig’s cheese. Always the same reply. And what’s for pudding? Buttered stones and acorns. And what’s to drink? Chicken milk. What’s for breakfast, if we stay that long and don’t run home to mum in tears? Scrambled goat eggs on toast.

  We never needed calling twice for meals.

  But then my grandma always disappointed us with stews and roasts and apple tarts. Undramatic food that we could trust. Things we had at home. The sort of lunches that they dished up at school. Yet still we used to live in hope. We’d look out from her downstairs room, on those always rainy days when we stayed at the farm, and watch the two of them at work between the barns. Soon my grandma would return, wet through, her trugs and punnets full of food.

  From that farmhouse window with its peeling paint, its ornaments, its wind-thinned glass, we saw the chickens and the pigs contesting for the kitchen waste. We saw the great oak trees refusing to relinquish even one centimetre to the wind. We watched the line of tethered goats picking at their nests of leaves. How easily their devil’s hooves might crack and spill our eggs. Behind the house the tipping field was dappled with the yellow, plough-turned stones. And on the hill-beyond-the-hill, the furthest field, my grandpa’s ewes were always lifting in the wind.

  And what would make our feast on Christmas Day? Always the same reply. Sheep wings.

  54

  THE DEVIL WANDERS with his straw sack at night through the meadows and the woods behind the town. He’s there, we’re told, to plant the mushrooms that he’s raised in hell, where there’s no light to green them, so that the gatherers who come at dawn, against the wisdoms of the countryside, can satisfy their appetites for sickeners or conjurers or fungi smelling of dead flesh and tasting of nothing when they’re cooked. He feeds them disappointments, nightmares, fevers, ind
igestion, fear. He lets them breakfast on his spite.

  The mushroom devil has been seen from time to time. Courting couples seeking privacy in some deep undergrowth have heard his foot snap stems behind them or sensed him creeping by their cars, a mocking voyeur hoping to disrupt their love. Those midnight wanderers who search for mysteries and gods when all the bars have shut have told how he has come so close that he has stunned them with his breath. He shows himself to children, too. They run out of the woods and fields, their punnets empty, their bikes abandoned, with the devil at their tails.

  Those foolish ones who stand and stare report his backing gait, his clumsiness. He has the odours of a kennel, plus boiled eggs, scorched hair and sweat, they say. They cannot capture him. He will not talk or give his name. He slips away, enveloped by the unresisting darkness. But first he holds his open sack for them to see and smell the rootless puffballs and the chanterelles, the honey funguses, the magic heads, the ceps, the shagcaps, boletes, morels, the inky dicks, which he will push into the earth that night like unconvincing garden ornaments.

  Sometimes they only see his stooping back and watch his white hands coming from his sack.

  I, too, have met the devil in the woods. I, too, have seen the mushrooms in his bag, lolling like eviscerated parts, meringues of human tissue, sweetbreads, smelling of placenta and decay. To tell the truth, these mushrooms baffle me. I’ve eaten them in many of their forms, I’ve tried the best, but always I am bored by them. The moment that you take them from the earth, they’re dull. The moment that you place them in your mouth, they let you down. I’ve always thought they were expensive and absurd. If they’ve been planted by the devil, then he is making fun of us.