Cooking With Fernet Branca

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  And yet … I’m now beginning to wonder whether, in the way its characters degenerate so spectacularly, Piero’s Arrazzato may not easily eclipse anything I could do by way of a spoof. That’s the trouble with Italian verismo: it always goes just that little bit further.

  17

  A slightly worrying phone call from Marja last night. Apparently Father has been saying it’s ‘time to check on Marta’ to ‘make sure she’s all right’. Cannily, she offered to come out and report back to him but dear Father was wise to that. He said he wasn’t prepared to lose both daughters and quoted some hoary old Bunki hunting song about how, if you’ve lost a favourite hound, you don’t send out your next favourite dog to look for it. Charming. Father’s ability to be insulting in about ten different ways while wearing the disguise of a concerned parent is unique – or would be if it weren’t shared by practically all Voyde males of his generation. I keep thinking what a mercy it is for me that Father has this crippling phobia about telephoning. I think it may have to do with horrors in the past involving death sentences or something ghastly like that, but I don’t ever remember him making a call. In very exceptional circumstances, though, he can be induced to receive one. So today I gritted my teeth and did what I ought to have done weeks ago, which was to call him myself and reassure him that I’m still his dutiful baby daughter.

  ‘And this Pacini fellow, is he courteous to you?’

  ‘What an odd question, Father. Yes, of course he is. After all, he wants good work out of me. Besides, he has perfect Italian manners.’

  ‘You mean he asks before pinching your bottom?’

  ‘For heaven’s sake! You’ve spent too much time cooped up there in the backwoods. Not every man behaves like that one-eyed henchman of yours, Kyril Whatsisname. Or Captain Panic.’

  ‘Hmpf.’

  ‘It’s true. All the men I’ve met here have been most polite and helpful.’

  ‘They’d better be. So what about this film of his? Pigeons in Venice, I think you said.’

  ‘Well, they still haven’t absolutely finalized the script yet. Still early days, you know. Things move quite slowly in the film world. It’s changed a little from the original, um, pigeons concept. It’s shaping up to being a pretty interesting sort of docudrama about a fishing commune and Green politics. What he’s tryi–’

  ‘Politics?’

  ‘No, no, not that sort of politics. More, you know, environmental concerns. They’re very big here in Western Europe.’

  ‘A fishing commune? That’s not political? What, pray, is a member of a commune if not a communist? Tell me that, Marta. Indulge your stupid old father living in the backwoods of Voynovia.’

  ‘Now you know I didn’t mean that, darling. You just goaded me with that joke about bottom-pinching.’

  ‘That was no joke, Marta.’

  ‘OK, but neither is this film. These are not communists. They’re just students – kids, really – who don’t like the way commercial interests always override the well-being of the environment and who want to reinstate traditional, less harmful methods of fishing.’

  ‘Oh, you mean sentimentalists.’

  ‘If you like. Just so long as you don’t imagine Lenin appears at the end of the film, walking on the water.’

  ‘Are you able to get paprika there? And pavlu?’

  These abrupt shifts of attention are entirely characteristic of Father and mean nothing other than that he’s bored with the previous topic. I was able to assure him that paprika is available, that Italians eat quite well really, despite a chronic absence of pavlu in every delicatessen I’ve tried so far, but that Marja is sending me regular Red Cross parcels of goodies to keep my Voyde body and soul together. Furthermore, I am working well and Pacini is pleased. There being no polite way of saying to one’s father ‘and would you for Christ’s sake calm down and leave me alone to make a life for myself’, I didn’t try, but anyway he had seized on Pacini’s name again.

  ‘Didn’t he do a film called Nero’s Birthday?’

  ‘Er, I’m not absolutely –’

  ‘Take my word for it, Marta, he did. And I take Professor Varelius’s word for it – he’s at Voynograd University, in case you’ve forgotten. You do realize that until recently if a Voyde had made so much as a single metre of a film like that he would have been arrested, taken down to the basement at Stepanky Square, and shot. Not sent to Siberia, Marta. Not even tried. Just shot with a single nine-millimetre round his next of kin would have to pay for.’

  ‘Well, thank goodness those bad old days are dead,’ I heard myself saying cheerily.

  ‘I sometimes wonder if they really were so bad after all,’ came that familiar gravelly tone. ‘And don’t give me one of your impertinent little lectures about freedom and licence, Marta.’

  ‘No, Father.’

  ‘I’ve got my eye on Mr Pacini.’

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  Eventually I managed to ring off; and it is a measure of how wrung-out I felt that I actually poured myself a small glass of Fernet Branca for medicinal purposes. I think by the end of our conversation I’d more or less managed to convince him that I was not in immediate moral or nutritional danger, but it wasn’t easy. Poor Father. The trouble about our mother having died when I was fourteen was that all the burden of bringing up two rather independent daughters fell on him. Of course various female retainers like old Mili did the day-to-day domestic stuff but he had immediately seen himself as responsible for our honour, which in turn is so inextricably mixed up with his own and that of the family. Ljuka has often told us how much worse it was for him as the only son, with all that pressure to become worthy of taking over the clan and its affairs one day, whereas all Marja and I need to do is make sure we’re both virgins when we become officially engaged.

  ‘You think that’s easy?’ I cried, pleased to make my brother blush and protest that I ought to watch it, that one shouldn’t make such jokes. ‘I don’t see why not,’ I countered. ‘It’s a funny business, sex. It was certainly very comic watching you trying to protect your virginity from that dudi schoolteacher until Captain Panic got on the case and he disappeared.’ Whereupon Ljuka chased me all over the house. Voyde society is no place for free thinkers, least of all for free-thinking girls.

  Ordinarily speaking, you might think such a phone conversation with Father is drama enough for one day, but the surprises are not yet over. A minor one occurs at lunch-time when distant voices indicate that Gerry is not alone. Nothing of his private life is remotely my business, of course, and being the very reverse of a nosy neighbour I am indifferent as to whether it is a guest in the singular or guests in the plural. Still, I have discovered that from the window of the end room upstairs one can just glimpse a tiny bit of Gerry’s terrace between the leaves of the trees, and through binoculars it looks as though ‘singular’ is exactly the right word: a scrawny creature with a polished head. Quite a knowing young man, I’d say, from that worldly little face. They seem to be laughing a lot but then I’m hardly surprised to see more than one bottle on the table. Some connection with work? Or a lover, perhaps? It does seem that Gerry’s been quieter recently, come to think of it. It’s some time since I consciously heard his singing but maybe I’m so used to it by now that I scarcely notice any longer. Well, well. No doubt all will be revealed in due course. Unless I’ve got him very wrong, Il Falsetto can keep a secret about as well as a wet paper bag can hold a carton of ice cream. I do hope it’s a lover: the poor dear badly needs someone to look after him and it’ll get him out of my hair.

  But the real surprise comes much later this evening after I’ve had supper and am playing to myself at the electronic keyboard with headphones on. I’m trying out various combinations of sound and am quite pleased with the effect the opening of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ sonata makes when played on trombones. It’s stately and mournful and I’m just trying out the left-hand octaves with tubas when an alien sonority begins to creep in. Puzzled, I punch some buttons but it goes o
n becoming more obtrusive. On impulse I raise one earphone and realize it’s an external sound: a deep clattering hum getting louder and louder and then swirling deafeningly over the house. Obviously a helicopter. I leave the headphones around my neck and jerk out the jack plug. I’m quite distracted. By the time I’ve found a torch and gone outside it has landed at the back and is standing in a winking pool of its own lights, rotors freewheeling with the winding-down sound a switched-off turbine makes.

  Even though I’m fairly sure who this is, I’m still gripped by alarm. The sudden noise and drama, as well as the torn-off leaves still floating to earth everywhere, seem aimed entirely at me. In our part of the world helicopters have always meant trouble. This one is particularly sinister, being of racy and futuristic design as well as finished in matt black without identification that I can see. The navigation and landing lights go off. The door flips upwards and the pilot steps out, also black-clad and removing a silver helmet with night-vision visor. He reaches back into the cockpit for a flashlight, ducks perfunctorily beneath the slowly revolving blades and comes towards me in the starlight. Behind him a few green and red panel lights continue to twinkle eerily on the rakish canopy. I flash my own torch uncertainly.

  ‘Marta!’ he calls.

  ‘Ljuka!’ I reply in relief. ‘My God, you gave me a shock! I mean, how could you find this place in the dark?’

  ‘GPS,’ he says. ‘I set the co-ordinates when we bought the house, remember? When I waded out into this paddock and asked you to mow it?’

  And my baby brother folds me in his flying suit, which smells sexily of kerosene, as the rotor blades of his magic chariot finally halt with a sigh. My forgotten headphones dig into my collarbone, the dangling jack plug knocks softly against my shins.

  18

  ‘God, this place is a tip,’ observes Ljuka, blinking in the electric light and taking stock of my charming kitchen. ‘Why do you always have to live like this, Matti? What point are you trying to make? It reminds me –’

  ‘I know,’ I say. ‘It reminds you of that house up at Bolk where we used to spend those holidays. Perhaps that’s why. Happy times. So why the Men-in-Black, stealth-chopper visit on this moonless midnight?’

  ‘Father, mainly, though I wanted to see for myself how you’re getting on. I don’t know what you said to him over the phone today but he told me that as I’m on business for him in Torino tomorrow I’d better drop in to find out what’s going on.’

  ‘Nothing, obviously,’ I say, my natural asperity a little submerged beneath the pleasure of seeing him. ‘Can you spot the evidence of debauchery? The floor littered with syringes and crystalline white powder? Can you feel the squelchy squeak of used condoms beneath your feet? Ought you to check the bedroom for unconscious lovers, exhausted in torn rubber-wear?’

  ‘Marta!’ He sounded genuinely shocked. ‘How can you be so flippant about such things? Of course I don’t expect my elder sister to have, well …’

  ‘A life of her own? Have you eaten, by the way?’

  ‘Sort of. That reminds me, I’ve brought you a box of goodies from home. Father was most insistent about your having enough kasha.’

  ‘He’s a complete peasant in some ways, isn’t he?’

  ‘You do say the most awful things, Matti. If he could hear you …’

  ‘Oh, I know. But you also know what I mean. A clan chieftain presiding over a multi-million-dollar business empire’ (and my voice puts expressive inverted commas around the phrase) ‘who could buy any pharmaceutical or dietary product by the ton. And what does he send his favourite erring daughter? A peasant staple that can be eaten or turned into a poultice. Or smoked and inhaled, too, probably, in times of severe hardship.’

  ‘I’ll get the box,’ says Ljuka, disappearing with the torch. Boys can’t handle theory, I’ve noticed. He is soon back with an immense carton that obviously weighs half a hundredweight.

  ‘Just like Christmas,’ I say, unpacking shonka and kasha and slivovitz made from our own plums. Also many murky jars.

  ‘Mili sent you kompot. She made it herself.’

  ‘Darling Mili. How is she?’

  ‘Worried about you. Her little girl exiled in a land of foreigners. The same as ever. Ageless. She doesn’t seem a day older than when we were in the nursery. I think she was always seventy-nine even when she was a little girl herself. That wooden tub there’s from her, too.’

  ‘It’s not –?’

  ‘Oh yes it is. She’s very concerned that you’re not brushing your hair with goose grease first thing in the morning and last thing at night. You remember, two hundred strokes –’

  ‘– and fifty extra when there’s a “z” in the month. In other words every month except February. Oh Uki, it’s as though we were still eight years old.’

  ‘Sure. But if she’s not getting any older, why should we?’

  I make coffee. Ljuka sits at the table and runs his fingers over the electronic keyboard. He can’t play a note of music on any instrument. Indeed, the more successful I become as a composer, the more disdain he affects for music in general.

  ‘Go on – what else?’ I prompt.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I know you too well, Uki. And I’ve only been away just over two months. You’re Father’s boy to the hilt.’

  ‘He’s really unhappy about this career of yours, Marta, but I guess you know that. He wants me to talk you into giving up and coming home. Money no object, of course. I know you won’t, but I did promise I’d try.’

  ‘And this is you trying?’

  ‘What do you expect me to say? What does he expect me to say? I think he’s most of all bothered about the company you’re keeping.’

  ‘Which company is that?’

  ‘Well, what about this neighbour of yours? Marja said he was being a nuisance. We don’t like the sound of that at all.’

  ‘Gerry? Oh, he’s just a harmless dudi. A bit pathetic. He has this habit of singing rather loudly and now and then he comes over with a bottle of something. I think he has a problem with bottles.’

  ‘Not just with bottles, if he carries on. I’ll be over there to break his legs.’

  ‘Ljuka! You’ll do no such thing. You can leave that sort of behaviour for your business activities’ (again the inverted commas). ‘I don’t know how you can talk so casually about going around the world breaking people’s legs as if it were a perfectly normal thing to do.’

  ‘You’re a girl, Marta. I guess you’re also an artist. You don’t understand the first thing about how the world runs.’

  The coffee is ready at exactly the right moment to accompany some home truths.

  ‘Listen, Uki,’ I say to him earnestly, ‘I love you. You’re my little brother and you always will be. But it’s time for you to grow up. You know I’ve never asked questions of you menfolk but that doesn’t mean my brain isn’t fully functioning. One of the reasons I’m here is because I had to get out, and you do know what I mean so you can wipe that pretend frown off your face. I’m as devoted to Father and the family as you are, but I also know he’s a lost cause. He can’t change. All that time Voynovia was under the Russians, all those years he was in the OKU, what do you expect? Of course he professes himself to be passionately anti-Russian, like any good Voyde, and obviously he is. But underneath you know as well as I do that he misses something: all that secure power structure, all that state bureaucracy tilted always in his favour. You don’t have KGB officers as your colleagues without coming to believe that you, too, are above the law.’

  ‘Dangerous thinking, Marta,’ says my brother, pouring slivovitz into his coffee. Who breathalyses pilots?

  ‘Listen to you! Even you sound as if nothing had changed since 1989 when you were barely ten years old, for God’s sake. As if we weren’t sitting here in a free, democratic Europe where the one real danger is not thoughts but lack of them. I’m not stupid, Uki. Without Father’s contacts do you think I should ever have gone to Moscow Conservatory? But I’ve made my own
way by my own contacts ever since. Pacini saw Vauli Mitronovsk and here I am in Italy at his request. Nothing to do with Father. Not a string pulled anywhere. Agreed, our money bought this house, and this dubious family business of ours now brings me my little brother bearing gifts. But I’m making my own way, Ljuka.’

  He looks up from his empty cup and smiles that smile which makes him look about ten again and melts my heart. ‘I had to try,’ he says. ‘At least I can tell Father I tried.’

  ‘Oh Uki, Uki, move on. Now you’ve got to get out, too. You know you have.’

  ‘Easier said than done.’ His voice is sad.

  ‘Sooner or later it’ll go wrong, Ljuka, you know it will. You’ll notice I’m not making a moralistic point about it being wrong, only that it will go wrong. As far as I’m concerned it already has, because my little brother now talks casually about breaking legs and he’s obviously up to things I don’t want to know about and which he also doesn’t want me to know about. I just ask myself what sort of a deal needs to be done, and at what level, in order to square the Italian authorities so you can buzz around their airspace at night in an unmarked and presumably unarmed Russian-built attack helicopter. It’s one of the new MILs, isn’t it? There, you see: you think I’m just some dumb bunny with her head in a pile of music. But we’ve all read these stories about ex-Eastern-bloc mafias forging links everywhere. Uki! Sooner or later it’s going to blow up in that handsome face of yours. It’s no way of life for an intelligent person. We don’t need the goddamn money.’

  ‘Oh, Matti, you really don’t understand. Of course you understand some of it: we’re none of us stupid, we grew up with the system, we sense how it works even if we don’t know the details. But when you talk of the father who wound up a full colonel in the OKU, you’re forgetting the father who’s also the head of an old Voyde landowning family. We four – we’re living proof of a miracle. There’s no other word for it: that bureaucratic oversight or freakish chance that meant our family was never purged or sent to Siberia or eliminated altogether. However it was, we survived and now incredibly our ancestral lands are ours again. That means everything to me, Matti. It’s my blood. I’m the son.’