by John Berger
Zdena started sleeping on the narrow bed in this room a few days ago in the hope of feeling closer to her daughter.
I don’t know how he knew the song about my name: Quel Joli Nom de Ninon. But he did. He said he was a cook. I thought he was an army cook. I thought he had recently stopped being a soldier. His hair was still cropped and his ears came out sideways. I asked him whether he came from the north and he smiled with his blue eyes and didn’t answer. He certainly looked as if he did. He had a pale skin and a lot of hollows and clefts on his body—such as under his cheekbones or between the two muscles of his upper arm, or behind his knees. As though your hand might suddenly slip between two close rocks into a deep pool farther in. He was all knuckles.
I first saw him walking down the middle of a street by a quayside in Toulon. He was doing this so as to be seen. Like an actor or like drunks do. He was grinning. On the back of his cropped head was clapped a soft hat. He was carrying two boards, joined together by webbing shoulder straps, and the boards reached to his knees. On them, back and front, was written the menu of a fish restaurant. A cheap restaurant for most of the dishes cost less than 50. The word Moules was written at the top, under his chin. Below were listed different ways of cooking the mussels. Américaine, Marseillaise, Bonne Femme, A l’Indienne, Reine Mathilde, Lucifer … the list was funny. Tahitienne, Rochelaise, Douceur des Isles, Pêcheur, Hongroise … so the Hungarians have a Hungarian way of cooking mussels! The Czechs, like my poor mother, must have one too! Our national dish, she joked one day, is knives and forks! I loved it when she laughed. It was like discovering a tree was still alive, although it had no leaves because it was winter. I never understood her knife and fork joke. Poulette, Réunionnaise, Italienne, Grecque … I loved it when she laughed. Now I was laughing, too.
He saw me. He saw me laughing at his menu, and he bowed. He couldn’t bow very low because the bottom of the sandwich board hit his shins.
I was sitting on a bollard above the yachts and motor launches in the port. It was the mussel man who spoke:
We shut at four. You’ll still be here?
No, I said.
On holiday?
I work.
He took his hat off and put it farther back.
What’s your line?
Car-hire service. Hertz.
I didn’t tell him it was my first job. He nodded and readjusted his shoulder straps.
They bite into you, he said. I do this till I find something as a cook.
No joke.
Like a trip in the yacht there? He pointed at one called Laisse Dire.
How do the Hungarians cook mussels? I asked him.
Like a trip in the yacht there?
He was as stupid as the menu on his back.
I’m going to be late, I said, and walked off.
Zdena, lying on the narrow bed in the corridor room in Bratislava, lets out a breath—as after a sigh or a sob.
I came out of the Hertz office at 10 p.m. and the Mussel Man was standing beside the newsagents in the railway station.
How long have you been here? I couldn’t stop myself asking.
I told you, we shut at four.
And he stood there. He didn’t say anything more. He stood there smiling. I stood there. He had no hat and he was no longer carrying the boards. He wore a T-shirt with palm trees on it, and a studded leather belt. Slowly he lifted up a plastic bag and took out a thermal packing.
I bought you some moules, he said, cooked à la Hongroise.
I’ll eat them later.
What’s your name?
I told him and that’s when he hummed my song. Quel Joli Nom de Ninon.
We walked down the main boulevard towards the sea. He carried the plastic bag. The sidewalk was crowded and the lights were still on in the shop windows. For five minutes he said nothing.
You walk all day with your menu? I asked him.
They turn the lights off in the shops here at 3:30 a.m., he said.
We walked on. I stopped to look at a coat in a window.
Bullet-proof glass that, he said.
I dream about coats, dresses, shoes, handbags, tights, headscarves. Shoes are my favourite. But I never stop before a jewellery shop. I hate jewellers. He stopped in front of one. I didn’t wait for him.
Hey, he said, there could be something you like here!
So?
You just need to tell me.
I hate jewellers, I said.
So do I, he said.
His face, between his cup-handle ears, broke into a smile, not quite sure of itself, and we walked down towards the sea. I ate the moules on a beach beside a stack of deck chairs. The moules were called Hungarian because of the paprika.
Whilst I ate, he undid the laces of his trainers. He did everything deliberately, as though he couldn’t think of more than one thing at a time. The left shoe. Then the right shoe.
I’m going to swim, he said, you don’t want to swim?
I’ve just come from work. I haven’t got anything with me.
No one’ll see us here, he said, and he pulled off his T-shirt with the palm trees. His skin was so pale I could see the shadow of every rib.
I got to my feet, took off my shoes and, leaving him, walked barefoot down to the water’s edge where the small waves were breaking on the sand and shingle. It was dark enough to see the stars, and light enough to see how he was now undressed. He somersaulted down the beach towards the sea. I was surprised and then I laughed, for I had guessed something: he was somersaulting out of modesty. It was a way of coming down the beach without showing his cock. I don’t know how I knew that, and I didn’t ask him. But the idea came to me.
Whilst I was laughing, he ran into the dark sea. I should have left then. He swam a long way out. I couldn’t spot him any more.
Have you ever tried leaving a man in the sea in the dark? It’s not so simple.
I went back to where we had been sitting. His clothes were in a pile on the sand, folded. Not like recruits in the army have to fold them. They were arranged like things you would be able to find in the dark if need be. They were arranged so that if you came back in a hurry you could gather them up quickly. One cotton T-shirt. One pair of jeans. A pair of trainers, with a hole in the sole of the left shoe, large feet, 44. A slip. And a belt with an engraved hand on the buckle. I sat and looked out to sea.
Twenty minutes must have passed. The sound of waves is like what you hear on the radio when the public claps. But it’s steadier and nobody shouts Johnny! He came up behind me, dripping wet. He stood there dripping and holding two deck chairs under one bony arm and a parasol in the other. I laughed.
So we went on, the cook and I. There was a solidity to his dumbness; it would never change.
After we’d fucked, I asked: Can you hear the waves?
He didn’t reply. He just went: Shooo shooo shooo.
Zdena sits up on the bed, lowers her feet to the floor and walks barefoot to the open window. Her nightdress has a lace neckline which covers her small collarbones. She looks down on to the tramlines. There is still the smell of new bread. A few men in the street are going to work.
I strolled down to the port where the pleasure boats were moored and I happened to think of the cook. I didn’t want anything, I just wondered what he would do if I appeared. Then I saw his menu-boards, so I pushed my way through the crowd but it wasn’t him. It was an old man in his fifties with grey hair. I asked the old man whether he knew the cook, but he shook his head and pointed to his mouth as if to say he couldn’t speak. This made me decide to find the restaurant.
The proprietor was a man with a light blueish suit and the face of a fat boy, a frozen face. I asked him about the cook.
Who are you? he said, without looking up from his calculating machine.
I’m a friend, I have something to give him.
Can you post it?
He’s gone?
He looked up for the first time. They took him away. You want his address?
&n
bsp; I nodded.
Correctional Penitentiary, Nantes … You take a coffee?
Everything he said was shouted. He had to shout to somehow get through the freeze of his face. He put the coffees on one of the empty tables and sat down opposite me.
They were looking for your cook for three years, he said. Seven of them broke jail. He was the only one who made it. The others were grabbed. But he got careless, he went downhill, your cook.
I saw there was something which amused him, not in his face but in the way he spoke.
They caught up with him by sheer chance. A prison officer from Nantes was on holiday here. Came into the restaurant with his wife to eat mussels. On his way out, he spotted his old acquaintance. Yesterday, a dozen of them were waiting round the back when he came off the quayside.
What’s so funny?
I was going to give him a job in the kitchen the next week! If he’d been in the kitchen, the flic wouldn’t have seen him, would he?
And that’s funny?
It’s good news! Your cook was biding his time. One Saturday night he’d have robbed the till. No question about it. Instead they clapped the handcuffs on him. You don’t ever smile at good news?
Frozen pig, I told him.
A thrush has begun to sing in the acacia tree. More than anything else, birdsongs remind me of what things once looked like. Thrushes look as if they’ve just taken a dust bath, don’t they? And blackbirds, with their glossy black feathers, look as if they’ve just stepped out of a pond, but when they open their beaks, it’s the opposite. The blackbird’s song is dry. And the thrush sings like a survivor—like a swimmer who swam for it through the water and made it to the safe side of the night and flew into the tree to shake the drops from his back and announce: I’m here!
Jean Ferrero still has his headlights on because he has come through cloud, white cloud washing the broken rock faces. The road zigzags its way down. He comes to the first pine trees. The debris of rocks changes into grass.
A good way below a man is walking, hands in his trouser pockets.
I imagine he is a shepherd, from the way he’s walking. Shepherds have their own way of moving from place to place. No keys in their pockets, no coins, no handkerchief, perhaps a knife but more likely the knife is in the fur-lined leather jacket he’s wearing. He walks nonchalantly to prove his independence, to prove his independence to the peaks, who have just emerged from the night to join a new day, of which he knows neither the date nor the day of the week. He walks this way because he’s proud the night has passed. He had something to do with its passing well.
As he approaches the shepherd, the signalman reduces speed. At the last minute he stops, raises his visor and puts his feet down. Why has he stopped? He himself doesn’t seem to know. Perhaps it was the hour and the lack of any visible habitation. Distantly one of the shepherd’s dogs is barking.
The shepherd takes a few steps past the foreign motorcyclist to say over his shoulder without looking round: Far? Going far?
Far! says the motorcyclist.
Probably the shepherd hasn’t spoken for a fortnight or more. Neither man knows immediately what to say; both of them are calculating and talking out loud at the same time. They are fumbling for a way of talking between Italian, French and a mountain patois which, in principle, they may share. They test each word, sometimes repeating it, like the shepherd’s dog repeating his bark.
I translate from their sounds, their barks and their bastard words.
Is it Sunday? asks the shepherd, turning round to face the motorcyclist.
Wednesday.
You started early?
Early.
The nights are still cold.
No fire? asks Jean Ferrero.
No wood.
No?
There are things I’d steal, says the shepherd.
Wood?
No, your bike.
Where would you go?
Down to Pinerolo.
How far is Pinerolo?
Pinerolo is twelve kilometres.
What’s in Pinerolo?
Women.
At six in the morning?
And a dentist!
Climb on. Been on a bike before? asks Jean.
Never.
Been to a dentist before?
Never.
Get on.
I’m not coming.
You got pain?
No.
Sure you’re not coming?
I’ll keep the pain here. You go far?
To Pinerolo.
Okay, says the shepherd.
And the two men drive down to Italy, the shepherd with his arms encircling the signalman.
It’s fatty on the roof of my mouth. On the outside where it’s burnt brown, it’s dry. Every morning I choose the brownest pain au chocolat I can see. So you’ve made Papa’s coffee, says the baker’s wife, and you’re on your way to school! She says this because Maman has left, and I live alone with Papa. I touch the black chocolate, first with my teeth, then slowly with my tongue. It’s liquid, not liquid enough to drink, you have to swallow it, but, compared to the pastry, it’s liquid. What’s cunning is to swallow your first find, and to leave enough to push with your tongue into every corner of the milky bread so it’s all perfumed with chocolate.
They stop at Pinerolo by the bridge. The shepherd climbs down and, with a wave of his hand but without a word, disappears into a café. The road follows the river, light catches the silver underside of the willow leaves, the water sparkles, there’s a fisherman casting for trout and Jean Ferrero drives on and on, hugging the tank with his knees.
The Casione joins the Po just upstream from Lombriasco. The inhabitants of the village are so used to hearing the rush of waters that if the two rivers were dammed in the middle of the night, they would suddenly wake up and believe themselves dead. Driver and motorbike pass through, attuned as if they were a single creature, like a kingfisher when it flies low over the water.
I’m drinking a cappuccino during my lunch-break. You can find me any day at 1:45 p.m. in the Via G. Carducci. It’s eighteen months now since I came to Modena. It’s as if, eighteen months ago, when I was asleep, somebody moved two letters around: MODANE, MODENA. I found a new town. I speak Italian with a French accent. “The words tap-dance instead of sing!” they tell me. They manufacture tractors and sports cars here in Modena and they make cherry jam in huge quantities. And I love it here. I’m not semplice. They’re not either. All of us know an apricot measures five centimeters and no more! Even in Modena, if a man gets too uptight when it comes to settling the price of cherries for the year, the Cobra Magnums can kill him. Yet I walk through the streets at night here, imagining every kind of happiness and looking behind the trees.
The sky is an early morning blue and there are white clouds near the tops of the trees. The road is straight. And the signalman is doing 200 kilometres an hour.
There’s this exhibition in Verona, and Marella and I, we decide to go in. The posters outside showed a woman’s head in profile. What a neck! The sexiest giraffe in the world, says Marella. On another poster I noticed the way the Egyptians had of tieing up their skirts. Anyway on Sundays it’s free, said Marella. They tie them across the left hip. So we go in. I look at everything. As if they lived next door. The numbers in the street are a bit crazy. They’re 3000 B.C., and we’re A.D. 2000, but there they are next door. I find a model of one of their houses: kitchen, bathroom, dining room, garage for the chariot.
The walls have niches for your body. Niches cut out to fit the shoulders, waist, hips, thighs … like cake tins which mould sponge cakes, but these are for bodies in all their beauty. Bodies to be protected like secrets. They loved protection, the Egyptians. Step into one of those, says Marella, and they’ll wall you up! Take your time, Ninon, I’m going to have an ice cream! If you’re not out in an hour, I’ll come and look for you in the mummy cases!
What a way to go! You lie in the mummy case like a bean in its pod and instead of the
bean pod being lined with silky down like a newborn baby’s hair, it’s snug with polished wood—they say it’s acacia wood—and on it is painted the lover god who is going to kiss you forever. They let nothing get lost. There’s even a mummy case for a cat. And the way the statues walk! They face you, no shilly-shallying, their arms raised, their wrists flexed, their palms facing outwards. Men and women. And when they are couples, the woman puts an arm round her man. They come forward, sometimes they take a very short step backwards, but they never never turn round and leave. No turning the back in Egypt, no leaving, no parting.
I try it myself, right foot a little ahead, back absolutely straight, chin high, left arm raised, palm facing forward, fingertips at the level of my shoulders …
Suddenly I know I am being looked at, so I freeze. The eyes looking at me, I can feel, are somewhere behind my left shoulder. Four or five metres away, not more. A man’s eyes for sure. I stay stiller than the Egyptians did.
Other visitors start to stare at the man behind me. They see me but I don’t trouble them because they think I’m joining the Egyptians and I don’t move a fraction, then they notice the man behind me, and they stare at him aggressively, for they blame him for my not moving!
Let up, you hog! I hear a woman’s voice hiss at him. It is the hardest moment for me because I want to laugh. I can smile but I can’t laugh, let alone giggle.
I don’t move till I feel the gaze has shifted. In the reflection of a glass case I see there’s no man behind me any more. He’s been forced into the next gallery. Only then do I stop being Egyptian.
I tell myself I’ll take a look at him. In the next room are five monkeys. Life-size baboons in marble, sitting there, taking the sun. I think the sun’s setting and every evening they come and sit on the same rock to watch the sun go down. The tizio is wearing sunglasses and he has a camera slung from his shoulder. I can’t see through his sunglasses. Anyway, why wear sunglasses in ancient Egypt?
