The Road Home

by Rose Tremain

  When Christy told Panno about Lev, his willingness to work hard, his spell at GK Ashe, Panno said, “Does he look Greek?”

  Lev took a waiter’s job at Panno’s. Six pounds an hour, plus tips, evenings only, six to midnight, six nights a week. The taverna was a twenty-minute walk from Belisha Road, so he’d save on fares, save on time. And he liked Panno. A stooped man in his fifties, with a melancholy face. Brows singed by his charcoal fire. A wrestler’s handshake. In his eyes, a fierce patriotic Greek pride.

  Compared to the menu at GK Ashe, Panno’s was simple: fish, chicken, lamb kebabs, steak, spiced Greek sausages seared on the grill; beef stifado, lamb kleftiko simmered in a low oven; sage-scented moussaka mulched with a thick head of béchamel; prawns and octopus fried with green chili salsas; zucchini rissoles; stuffed mushrooms and tomatoes and vine leaves; oily hummus and tarama; butter-bean stew; aubergine pâté; fried halloumi cheese; bowls of fleshy green olives; charred pitta bread and Greek salads . . .

  “Never changes,” explained Panno to Lev. “My regular customers know the menu by heart. It’s what brings them back: good food, but simple. Adriatic food. Sometimes, depending on what looks nice at the market, I put on different fish or I make a fish soup. But if I changed the menu, there would be a Highgate mutiny!”

  Lev was told to wear his own clothes. “Black or gray trousers. White shirt. Keep everything fresh and clean.” Tied round his waist was the taverna’s hallmark, a blue-and-white apron, striped like the Greek flag. Lev liked its heavy cotton texture, didn’t mind that it was a kind of uniform.

  The place was full most nights, crazy on Fridays and Saturdays, Lev and the other waiters, Yorgos and Ari, walked a full ten kilometers in their six-hour shift, back and forth to the kitchen. But Lev’s sinews were toughened by his time in the asparagus fields. He was nimble and fast. Soon got the art of balancing three plates up his arm, acquired that left-of-vision knack of seeing the raised hand, the wine bottle held aloft. And he didn’t mind being front-of-house. After working behind the scenes in the high-velocity kitchen at GK Ashe, it was interesting to be in this other arena, the dining space, taking the food to the tables.

  The customers got drunk on Greek beer, wine, retsina, raki, but Lev noticed that they usually seemed to have a good time. The food brought out in them a kind of abandonment, an emotional outpouring, as though they were on a Greek-island holiday for a few hours. There was a lot of laughter, a few arguments, some weeping. Mostly, the tips were generous.

  “The British need Greece,” Panno was fond of saying, shaking his grizzled head, as the last inebriated customer staggered out into the summer night. “Always did. Even before Lord Byron. It’s where their hearts feel most free.”

  Lev had little time in the kitchen to note how Panno’s dishes were prepared, but he kept a notebook anyway, understood how cheap lamb shanks could become succulent kleftiko—the dish named after the kleftes, the robber bands who fought against Turkish rule of their homeland in the 1800s—when braised slowly with garlic, wine, onions, and tomatoes, how vinegar tenderized the stifado beef, how the split prawns had to flare like firecrackers on the charcoal to get their “butterfly” shape, how olive oil flowed over everything like a benediction . . .

  “You got eyes, Lev,” Panno said to him one night, as they were finishing up the service. “I’ve seen it. But it surprises me. Not many people from your country are interested in good cuisine.”

  “No,” said Lev. “That’s because we’ve eaten Communist food for sixty years. But now it’s changing.”

  Lev walked home from Panno’s taverna through the dark, often choosing the route down Swains Lane, past Highgate cemetery, locked and barred against intruders and desecrators of Jewish graves. Christy had told him that Karl Marx had been buried there after his “long, sleepless night of exile.” Lev wondered if he’d go and stand at the headstone one day and tell the bones underneath that, in a grave above Auror, lay the body of a man who’d held on, held fast to the old Marxist ideas till his last breath. Then Lev would add, “But in another year, Karl, the graves will be under fathoms of water. And who knows where the occupants of them are going to be rehoused?”

  Sometimes, at one in the morning, Lev heard noises in the weed-choked hinterland of bushes and dusty trees that bordered the cemetery, noticed litter lying there, tires, a child’s broken bicycle. Once, a cat streaked out in front of him, shivering through the railings, like a phantom. Another night, he stopped, listened, heard a wailing that might have been feral or human, it was difficult to say.

  On the opposite side of the road, where the roots of the plane trees pushed upward and cracked open the pavements, were parked two ancient camper vans, curtains drawn across who knew what scenes of ecstasy or woe. The vans never moved. The curtains were never drawn back. Sometimes rubbish sacks were left out beside them in the gutters. Quite often, Lev saw vomit staining the wheels, runnels of piss flooding in and out of the sidewalk cracks. One night, a police car was parked there, its blue light slowly turning, but the car was empty and the vans were as closed and as silent as they ever were.

  Lev enjoyed the solitary walk home. The nights were warm now. They reminded him of the nights he’d known when he first arrived in England, almost a year ago. With his body tired from his shift at Panno’s, he let his mind rampage around his Great Idea, which was becoming more real to him now that he was back in London. He congratulated himself on how far he’d come, and wondered how far it might be possible to go . . .

  Back in Belisha Road, he’d make tea, sit dreaming at the window, postponing, till he felt his head fall, the moment when he’d lie down in his room and sleep. Or, if Christy was there, stay talking till they both started snoring in their chairs.

  One night Christy said to Lev, “There’s something on your mind, Lev. I can see it in your look. D’you want to tell me what it is?”

  “Yes,” said Lev. “Soon I will tell you, Christy. When everything is more clear to me.”

  “Fair enough,” said Christy. “But the Irish are good at keeping secrets, you know. Maybe because our heads are so chock-full of them. Me ma used to say, ‘If walls could see into our minds, the house’d fall to pieces.’ ”

  Mostly, these nights, Christy talked about Jasmina: the immaculate color of Jasmina’s skin; her glossy hair, scented with almond oil; the way the blood-red lacquer of her toenails startled you; the sexy Indian poshness of her voice. Lev hadn’t met her yet, but began to feel he knew her. “Like you,” said Christy, “she’s got a love-in going with food. I eat her cucumber and mint raita for breakfast, spoon it over me Weetabix. Sometimes we lie in bed and she brings tiny little samosas and baby meatballs, and we feed them to each other. I’m puttin’ on a ton of flesh, but who cares? Flesh is all we are—Mary, Mother of God, forgive me. Why not have a bit more of ourselves?”

  Jasmina had been married once—an arranged Hindu marriage—but divorced by her husband, Anand, because she couldn’t give him any children. Anand had married again and fathered five living daughters and one dead son. Jasmina was forty now. Alone for a long time. Never thought she’d fall for a Westerner. But then Christy Slane had fixed her boiler and that was it. “Gave her back a bit of heat, I guess,” he said, with a grin he couldn’t suppress. “Realized how cold she’d been.”

  Christy’s behavior toward Jasmina reminded Lev of how his had been with Sophie. When Jasmina couldn’t see Christy for a couple of days, he fretted. He’d phone or text her in the middle of the night, at dawn, at tenminute intervals . . . He brought her name into every conversation, caressed it with his voice: Jas-meena. Jasmeena. Said he’d even come round to liking Palmers Green. Pink magnolias grew in front gardens there. Indian music floated out of doorways and onto patios. Children wore clean white socks.

  “Of course,” he said, “there’s a lot of drug shite goin’ on, and Jasmina’s had two break-ins, but that’s standard issue anywhere in London. And wait till you see Jasmina’s front room. Now, there’s a thing. The colors of
that place get right into me dreams.”

  As instructed by Lydia, Lev had sent £50 to Rudi and told him to use it as a bribe at the Office of Rehousing in Baryn. But Lora, weeping, called to say that Rudi was in bed, that he’d been there for thirteen days, reading old car magazines and staring at the wall.

  “If he doesn’t get up, he’s going to die, Lev,” sobbed Lora. “What am I meant to do if he won’t leave his bed?”

  Lev was silent. Thought how much he’d relied on Rudi and how Rudi had never let him down. Knew that he’d somehow believed this pattern would continue forever . . .

  Lev took a breath and said, “I’m working on a plan, Lora. But I’ve a way to go yet. It involves money. Other things, too. You just have to trust me.”

  “What plan?”

  “It’s a plan for getting your lives going again—afterward, in Baryn. But someone has to secure two apartments: one for you and Rudi, and one for Ina and Maya. Can you go to the housing office?”

  “I’ll try. But I’m busy, Lev. A lot of people are coming now for horoscopes. They want to know if they’ve got any future. I’m doing palm readings, too.”

  “Good, Lora.”

  “Rudi says it’s dishonest, taking people’s money to tell them things that can’t be known.”

  “Not if it consoles them, helps them to carry on.”

  He heard a voice in the background. Rudi’s. Shouting at Lora not to use the phone anymore: it was a waste of money.

  “I’d better go,” she said.

  “No,” said Lev. “Put Rudi on.”

  An argument between them then. Rudi didn’t want to speak to anybody. Lora pleading with him: “Talk to Lev.” Eventually, a curse as the phone was dropped, then picked up, then Rudi’s weary voice: “Lev, I got nothing to say, buddy. I’m sorry.”

  “Did you get the money, Rudi?”

  “Yeah. I can’t go to Baryn. The Tchevi’s sicker than me.”

  “Okay. How did we get to Baryn before you had the Tchevi?”

  “What?”

  “How did we used to get to Baryn?”

  “You know how. Fucking bicycle. In the shit cold of winter. Froze our faces off. I’m not doing that anymore.”

  “It’s not winter, Rudi.”

  “Yes, it is. It’s winter HERE! In my fucking heart, it’s winter. Guess you haven’t understood, Lev, because you’re arsing about in London, with some ballbreaking bit of English totty who treats you like the cat’s dinner, but we’re finished here. All of us. No work. No house. No transport. No money. We’re dead. You got it? We’re stone fucking DEAD!”

  The phone was slammed down. Lev stood in his room and stared out at the patched and tilting roofs of Tufnell Park and the sky above, streaked with vapor trails. Even the idea that Rudi might die made him feel panicky.

  He let a few minutes go by, then called back. Lora told him she had a client arriving.

  “Won’t keep you long,” he said. “Just get to Baryn, Lora, and sort out the apartments.”

  “I’ll try, Lev. But the only income we’ve got now is from the horoscopes and the palm readings. I need to be here.”

  “It’ll only take a morning. Get the early bus. Please do this. Leave the rest to me.”

  Leave the rest to me.

  How pompous that sounded! A braggart’s boast, absurdly confident. It was also tainted with a lie: the lie of implied certainty. And there was no certainty, only this wild dream of his, this thing he called his Great Idea, built on hope and nothing else. Lev cursed himself for even mentioning it to Lora. Could already imagine Rudi saying, “So what does he think he’s going to do? Stick his fucking finger in the dike and hold back the water, or what?”

  On a Monday afternoon, Lev kept the appointment he’d had to beg for with G. K. Ashe.

  “I’m not taking you back, Lev,” G.K. had snarled on the phone. “I’ve replaced you. Got it?”

  “I’m not asking for my job, G.K. I swear. Got a job in a restaurant in Highgate now. Swear on my daughter’s life.”

  “All right. So, what d’you want?”

  “One hour of your time. I need advice, information about an idea I have. One hour of your time. Please, Chef.”

  There had been a long silence. Then G.K. said, “Okay. An hour and that’s it. Out of the kindness of my heart. Come at three.”

  They sat at the familiar table, near Damian’s bar, the smell of the place bringing back feelings of agony, feelings of joy. Waldo, bringing them coffee, gave Lev a weak, commiserating smile.

  Lev put his notebook in front of him and opened it. G.K.’s blue eyes watched him. Lev felt like a fish in a bowl. His shaking hands clutched the two open covers of the notebook. He took a breath. Now he had to begin to make real the Thing that, until this moment, had substance only in his mind. As he spoke, he worked hard to keep his voice steady.

  “This is it,” he said. “This is my Idea. I am going to open my own restaurant.”

  Lev stopped. He swallowed. Waited for G.K.’s look of disdain or disbelief, but it didn’t come. So he summoned up a stronger voice and went on: “My restaurant will be in the city of Baryn, where new hydroelectric power is coming. I believe that, following from this, many businesses will come to this city, so for my restaurant, I think the time will be right.”

  He waited again, looked up at G.K. Sure the put-down was going to arrive now. But all G.K. said was: “Your English has improved.”

  Lev thumbed his notebook, tried to imbibe, from all the optimistic words he’d written there, a heartful of courage. “My plan is, I start with a small premises. Maybe forty covers. Maybe fifty maximum. I will be chef-proprietor. I will give my people food like they’ve never had. I don’t mean like here at GK Ashe. I know I could never —”

  “Why not like here?”

  “You have years of training and work, Chef. A big talent. I could never —”

  “Why not aim high? You said ‘food like they’ve never had.’ If this is an expanding arena of new capitalism, it’ll be chocka with restaurants before you can say beurre noisette. So, how’re you going to make yours the best?”

  Lev gaped. But what he liked already—what was making his heart race with joy—was that G.K. was taking him seriously.

  “Chef,” he said, “of course I want this. I want mine to be the best. But in my country most people are still poor. They can’t afford high-end cuisine.”

  “Okay. So what are you going to cook?”

  “Chef . . .”

  “Simple question. What are you going to cook?”

  Lev turned to his clutch of recipes, most of which had been filched from G.K.’s menu. “I haven’t decided quite —”

  “Right. Okay. Give me some paper. Let’s get some sense into this.”

  Lev tore out a sheet from his notebook, and G.K. snatched it from his hand, unsnapped a pen from his pocket. The coffee stood forgotten at his elbow. He began to scribble fast in his large, unruly writing. After a while he turned the page round toward Lev. He jabbed a finger along the lines of writing as he spoke.

  “Number one,” he said. “Style of cuisine. Decide on it. Stick to it. Pin your name to it. Keep it authentic. Right?”

  “Yes.”

  “If you want my advice, don’t fart around with fucking fusion. I could name you ten restaurants in London that’ve gone under by flirting with cardamom pods. One foot in Paris, one in Bom-fucking-bay. And that’s a recipe for disaster, because the clients don’t know what the hell they’re meant to be savoring. Right? So, let me ask you again: what do you want to cook?”

  Lev rubbed his eyes. “I suppose . . . what I imagine is . . . like here,” he said. “This kind of food. Very fresh ingredients. Meat never overcooked. Nice sauces and jus. Nice vegetables . . .”

  “Okay, but you have to formulate it. A lot of my cooking was learned in France. But it’s modern. It’s even quite minimalist. This is right for London at this moment, but you have to decide what’s right for your town.”

  “My town,
Chef, has never known good food.”

  “No, I hear you. Okay. You’ve got everything to play for. But you’re also going to have to educate people. You’re going to have to persuade them it’s worth spending real money on something that’s going to end up in the toilet in twenty-four hours. Which brings me to Costings.”

  G.K. began to scribble again. Then he looked up and said, “Margins aren’t big in catering, except on booze. Price your food too low and you’ll be paddling backward into Debt Creek. Price it too high and you won’t get any customers. You have to judge what your catchment area can take. And you have to judge it right.”

  “I know . . . and this is difficult.”

  “My advice would be: keep the menu small. Don’t offer fifteen choices, offer four or five. Or three, plus one or two specials, based on what looks nice in the market that day.”

  “Yes. I was thinking that, Chef. At least, to start.”

  “Okay. Good. Small menu, but that brings us to Number three, the Big Number three: Supply. And remember, this will dictate your style of cooking. If you can’t get a game supplier, you can’t cook game. If nobody grows tomatoes, you can’t make pasta. From what I’ve heard about your country, all anybody’s eaten in the last century is goat meat and pickles, so you’ve got a free hand, but it won’t be free if you can’t get the ingredients. Have you thought about that?”

  “Yes,” said Lev. He skipped hurriedly to another page of his notebook. “Supply is what I’ve worked on, Chef. Before I start, I will buy a car, or a pickup, go round very many small farms. These were once part of our national farmsteads, but now they are individual and people work very hard on them. So I talk to these people, place my weekly requirements: chickens, geese, ducks, pigs, and so forth. Also to local allotment zones, give my requirements for vegetables. Buy direct. And I know the limits of my country’s allotments. No point thinking about kiwi fruit or avocados.”