Sourdough

by Robin Sloan

  We’ve arrived in Berlin. This apartment is bigger than the last one, but it’s really dark. Shehrieh says it’s fine. I still haven’t told her about my restaurant.

  Chaiman wants me to tell you he misses your city by the bay. As for me, I miss your voice on the phone.

  THE LOIS CLUB (CONTINUED)

  I’D SKIPPED A MEETING of the Lois Club, not because I consciously decided not to go, but because I’d been so busy it had escaped me completely. I sent an apology to Hilltop Lois a week late and promised I had not forsaken them. We missed your bread!!!! she replied. She seemed to use more exclamation marks every time.

  When I entered, bearing six loaves of bread—one to eat, the rest to distribute as gifts—the Loises all fell silent. I’d expected a hero’s welcome; instead, they looked at me strangely.

  “What?”

  “It’s just—you look so different,” Professor Lois said.

  “You look wonderful!” Compaq Lois said.

  “Do I really look that different? What do you mean?”

  “You just—” Professor Lois searched for words. “You’re in great shape. Have you been doing yoga?”

  “You’re making us feel bad!” Old Lois cackled. “Here we are, all the same as ever. Of course, for some of us, that’s an achievement…”

  To fill the silence, I started to unspool the story of the last month. They didn’t know about the Marrow Fair. I told them everything.

  “Can I shop there?” Compaq Lois asked. “It sounds fabulous.”

  I explained that it ran previews early on Wednesday mornings, but by invitation only, and that it would be opening to everyone soon.

  “And you’re going to Café Candide?” Professor Lois asked. “How wonderful. My husband and I went there years ago. Our twentieth wedding anniversary.”

  “Hope you saved your pennies,” Old Lois said. “I hear it’s pricey.”

  “I’m not going to eat,” I said. “Just to investigate.”

  “I saw her speak at the Commonwealth Club,” Professor Lois said. “Charlotte Clingstone. Very impressive woman.”

  “I saw her in a documentary on KQED,” Hilltop Lois interjected.

  “I met her at a fund-raiser,” Compaq Lois said. “For the turkey vultures.”

  They had started and it seemed they couldn’t stop. Their fascination surprised me; but as they spoke—

  “She spent three years in France, you know.”

  —I realized—

  “Yes, she met her husband there.”

  —Charlotte Clingstone presented a kind of ideal. She was bohemian but accomplished. Worldly but rooted.

  “Her first husband. Now she’s married to a poet.”

  Who wouldn’t want that life?

  “Oh, yes. I have his book. He dedicated it to her.”

  “That was his first one. The second, he dedicated to her plums.”

  “Her plums!”

  “No, he really meant it. In the back, in the garden behind the restaurant, I guess there’s this amazing plum tree…”

  “Her plums,” Old Lois crowed.

  “I’ll see if I can spot the tree tomorrow,” I said.

  “Yes,” Old Lois said between snorts. She couldn’t stop laughing. “Watch for those plums!”

  THE HUB, THE HEART

  SAN FRANCISCO IS SHORT ON GREENERY and the streets have a bare brightness. Berkeley runs wilder. Walking from the North Berkeley BART station to Café Candide, I had to circle around huge hedges that surged and blocked the sidewalk. There were no lawns. Instead, residents cultivated behemoth planter boxes; personal citrus groves; gardens of meaty succulents that seemed to glow with an inner light. The streets were quiet, but I sensed eyes through gauzy curtains. A fat squirrel shadowed me for a block.

  In one place, a massive willow tree’s roots had split the pavement. Its leaves brushed my head.

  I pulled out my phone to double-check the restaurant’s address, but I didn’t have to search for it: Café Candide was preemptively inscribed on the map, like a government office or a natural landmark.

  When I emerged into the quiet shopping district I saw the rim of the hills looming above, a dark cutout now turning pink in the evening light, the steep wooded slope crusted with houses whose windows flashed white in the sun.

  I found the restaurant smashed between a hardware store and a mobile phone outlet peddling a brand I didn’t recognize. Both store and outlet looked like they belonged on this block; Café Candide, not so much. That impression was wrong, of course. Café Candide had stood here for decades while businesses flashed through the storefronts on both sides.

  It was a house of darkest gingerbread, odd-angled and enormous, seeming to lean slightly on its neighbors. Yes, Berkeley Nuts-n-Bolts and Air Zero were definitely providing significant structural support to the old restaurant. Café Candide’s roof was densely shingled and sharply slanted. A short chimney tossed up a ragged streamer of smoke.

  It was very clearly a witch’s abode.

  The house/restaurant was set back from the sidewalk, guarded by a stubby fence of wrought iron, the gate currently open. My heels thwapped across a patio paved in slate. The door was a slab of dark wood with an iron handle that matched the fence. The wood was carved with a mazelike pattern; I wanted to plunk my finger down and find my way through it. The maze’s channels shone smooth and glossy, so maybe I wasn’t the first person to feel that impulse.

  There was no sign that said CAFÉ CANDIDE. There was also no doubt that this was the place.

  I knocked, or tried. My best effort produced barely any sound; it was like knocking on a mattress. So I took the door by its handle, hauled it open a crack, and before it could close again, I slithered through.

  Inside, a young woman in a linen smock was pushing a mop across gleaming floorboards. The soap smelled dense and spicy.

  “Excuse me,” I said. Her eyes snapped up. “I’m here to see Charlotte Clingstone. I called this morning.”

  The smocked mopper nodded and beckoned for me to follow.

  She glided through the cool, dark dining room. The tables and chairs matched the paneling on the walls and the boards beneath my feet; the room could have been carved from one great block of wood. Everything was soft and smooth, polished by use. I saw myself reflected in the floor. A warm shadow.

  The smocked mopper led me through a swinging door into the kitchen.

  According to Horace, this was it. The hub, the heart. Sanctum sanctorum. The quiet workers before me—currently chopping, cleaning, carving, prepping, planning, all in matching smocks—would in time open restaurants, host TV shows, write bestselling cookbooks. I had penetrated the innermost crèche of California cuisine.

  Where, as in Chef Kate’s kitchen, hip-hop was playing on a whoomphy Bluetooth speaker.

  The smocked mopper glided through the kitchen and I followed her path as precisely as I could, wary of getting in anyone’s way. I kept my head down.

  Then I saw the oven.

  It was epic, with a pale stone dome, walls of black-lacquered brick, and a yawning mouth with a flicking, forking tongue of fire. The heat was palpable from across the kitchen. As I passed, a red-faced baker twirled a long wooden paddle—her arms were enormous—and sent it slicing into the oven to slip beneath two loaves at once. With a snap of her shoulders they were out, rough and crackly, uppermost edges singed black. Her bread looked even more rustic than Everett Broom’s, like some primordial ancestor from a harder epoch—one that required more armor. As I watched, she dropped the loaves into a line that was forming on the countertop, then gave the paddle another twirl, tossing it into the air as she did, a confident flourish intended for no one but herself.

  “Awwwesommme.” I groaned it out loud without intending to. She heard me, and a wicked grin flashed across her face.

  I spotted the baker’s starter sitting on the countertop in a widemouthed plastic tub. Its name was written on a band of peeling tape: CLINT YEASTWOOD.

  The smocked mopper w
aited at the next door, impatient with my awe. I followed into a dark hallway lined with coats on pegs and shoes and boots on the floor, past a small washroom, around a corner.

  We came to a door, slightly ajar. The smocked mopper knocked gently, and when the reply came—a crisp command to enter—she left me to discover on my own what waited within.

  * * *

  THE ROOM WAS LONG AND SKINNY, set up against the back of the building, with tall windows that offered a panoramic view of the restaurant’s backyard garden filtered through a veil of beans that climbed lengths of string pulled taut across the windows, their leaves softening the light that fell into the study.

  Through the beans, I saw figures moving in the garden, filling baskets with greens. More acolytes, serene in their linen smocks.

  At a small desk, Charlotte Clingstone sat in dappled bean-shadow. Before her were a laptop, an enormous pile of documents, and not one but three phones. She was poking at one of them as I entered. She glanced up with a look of annoyance.

  It was definitely her: the central deity from the Ferry Building.

  “Someone named Lawrence,” I said. “I talked to him on the phone … He said you would have time to see me. Around now.”

  “Lawrence is very accommodating,” Clingstone said. She lowered her glasses and a look of recognition flitted across her face. “I know you. How do I know you?”

  I hadn’t expected her to recognize me, but maybe the fact that I had presented her pantheon with something other than pickles had earned me a single sparking neuron.

  I told her I was Lois Clary. I’d tried out for the Bay Area farmers markets … all of them … and been rejected.

  “Oh, I hope you’re not here about that.” Pity and impatience mixed in her voice. She fiddled with her phones, moving them into a neat line. I wondered if she had a panic button mounted on the underside of her desk to call for help in case of confrontation by spurned farmers and/or simpering gourmands.

  “I came to show you something.” I crossed the distance between us and extracted the copy of Horace’s menu from my bag. “This.”

  She hitched her glasses up and peered at the menu. “Goodness.”

  “Do you remember it?”

  “Well, give me a moment.” Her eyes flitted across the paper. “I’ve made quite a few of these, you know. Hmm … 1979. This is ancient.” Her eyes scanned farther down, and something crossed her face. A softening. “Oh, yes. I do remember.” She looked up at me. “Where did you find this?”

  “A friend of mine. Horace, he’s a—”

  “Portacio. Of course.” She clucked. “It’s quite a hoard he’s gathered. I didn’t know I was part of it.”

  “He has all your cookbooks, too.”

  “A lot of people have my cookbooks. No one has these menus anymore. I wish I did.”

  “I wanted to ask you about something specific. About this meal.”

  “Go on.”

  “The bread. Sourdough à la Masque. What was it? Where did it come from?”

  Outside, the acolytes moved in the garden.

  “It’s the most interesting thing on the menu, isn’t it?” Clingstone mused. “I don’t think that’s obvious. Am I remembering correctly—you’re a baker? Yes, I can see why you might be curious about this. Well. All right.”

  She stood, slipped a manila folder under her arm, dropped a phone into each of her jacket’s pockets, leaving the third on the table. “Come along, then. I’ll explain.”

  She led me out through the warren—past the washroom, the coats—and back into the kitchen, where it was a different thing entirely to enter in the presence of Charlotte Clingstone. Nothing outwardly changed—not one knife skipped a chop—but a crackling field of attention snapped into existence.

  “Where’s Lawrence?” Clingstone called out. “Someone find Lawrence, please. His memory is required.”

  Acolytes zipped out every door.

  Clingstone glided over to the burly baker. “Mona,” she said sweetly. The baker glowed. Clingstone turned to me. “This is Lois. She bakes.”

  Mona’s gaze cooled. I was an intruder in her domain.

  Clingstone lifted one of the loaves from the line, tapped it on its back. “Lovely,” she cooed. She returned it to the line and lowered her glasses. “I’ve always thought the starter’s influence was overstated. People tell these wild stories—‘Oh, I got it from such-and-such, it’s been going strong since, you know, Sister Brunhilde began it in Gothenburg a hundred years ago,’ that sort of thing—but it’s all basically the same.”

  “I agree,” Mona said. As if she had any choice.

  “But,” Clingstone said, “there was an exception. Years ago. Look at this.” She handed Mona the menu I’d brought. “From 1979, you see? We were just starting. This was still Harriet Grayling’s house, and we were her wild young friends”—Clingstone seemed to apply some retroactive skepticism to this—“throwing these enormous dinners in her parlor. This kitchen was different. It was tiny.” She snapped her head around. “Where is Lawrence? I need him to remember something.”

  Two more acolytes went scurrying.

  She turned back to Mona and me. “It was becoming a bit of a flophouse. Harriet didn’t mind. She was having the time of her life. It was that summer, I think, when Jim Bascule wandered through. A friend of someone’s … I can’t remember who. Lawrence!”

  Another acolyte gone.

  “He’d been in Europe. He’d met someone. They’d lived together in Brussels. She was a wonderful cook, apparently. She baked bread. He fell in love. Then she left, and he ran out of money. He showed up here with nothing but a beat-up old guitar and the sourdough starter she’d left behind.”

  Around the kitchen, those acolytes who had not gone in search of Clingstone’s quarry tilted themselves to hear the story. This was precious history. Indoctrination.

  “Jim Bascule played his guitar all day, singing sad songs. He might have been in a band. I can’t remember. I need Lawrence! But”—she clucked—“here was the surprise. Every morning, Jim baked. His lady had taught him well. The bread was wonderful, but also…” She paused. Looked from Mona to me with eyes that dared us to question what came next. “There’s no getting around it, is there? There were faces in the crust. These strange … sharp-edged…” She curled her fingers and made a face. An ecstatic mask. I recognized the spirit of it immediately. Her features returned to normal. “We ignored them. Those weren’t the strangest things we saw back then. Jim baked that bread every day for … six months? We paid him what we could. He saved it all up, until he had enough for a ticket back to Europe.”

  Mona was fully caught up in the story. “To go after his lady?”

  “That was the idea. We threw him a going-away party.” She held up the menu: A FEAST FOR THE UNREQUITED. “Back then, we could get away with names like this.” She smiled and was lost for a moment. “Someone—I can’t remember who; where’s Lawrence? He knows all these things—someone tried to keep the starter alive, but it just…” Clingstone made a limp gesture. “We all said it died of a broken heart.”

  An acolyte burst into the kitchen trailing a man, wiry and bald, Clingstone’s age, cradling a bottle of wine under each arm.

  “There you are!” Clingstone cried.

  His hair rose up in a frizzy halo around his skull. “What is it, my love?”

  “I needed you for a story. But now I’m done with it. Do you remember Jim Bascule?”

  “I certainly remember Jim Bascule’s bread, darling.”

  Clingstone offered the man the old menu for his inspection. He leaned close, and while his eyes scanned the page, she said to me, “This is my husband, Lawrence. Although he wasn’t my husband when this menu was written.”

  Lawrence looked up and said drily, “I was only her lover then.”

  “In any case,” Clingstone said, “I haven’t thought about that bread in years. It was wonderful.”

  It was clear that Mona, the baker, would have preferred for this st
ory to be recounted to her exclusively. She addressed me. “You’re a professional? Do you work for Broom, or…?”

  Here I was at the wellspring, the source, and this baker was checking my credentials—her curious gaze joined by Clingstone’s now, and Lawrence’s—and I wanted to impress them.

  “I’m the baker at the Marrow Fair,” I said. “The market on Alameda. Have you—?”

  Charlotte Clingstone’s expression closed like a gate crashing down. She started to speak, but only made a clucking sound. Currents of annoyance swirled across her face.

  “The Marrow Fair,” Lawrence repeated, trying the name on for size. “Do you know it, darling?”

  “I do,” Clingstone said. “I’ve heard about it. From Portacio, and others.”

  “Ah, Horace!”

  “He’s my friend,” I said. “He found this menu.” For Lawrence’s benefit, I explained: “It’s a new kind of market.”

  “Very … forward-thinking,” Clingstone said lightly. Other possible adjectives played across her lips. “Its founder thinks our restaurant here is quite retrograde. Even a bit silly.”

  I felt waves of opprobrium from the acolytes. If Clingstone ordered them to beat me to death with rolling pins and stale sourdough, there could be no doubt: they would do it.

  I sputtered, “I’m sure he doesn’t. I mean. I don’t really know anything about him. I only make bread. I have a robot.”

  Mona looked at me with pity.

  One of the phones in Clingstone’s pocket buzzed. She peeked at the screen and said, “I’m sorry. I’m late for a call.” Retreating back into the warren of the restaurant, she paused a moment, then turned. Her gaze was chilly and complex. “Now I wish I hadn’t told you that story.”

  Lawrence escorted me out of Café Candide, and, on the way through the dining room, he swiped a bottle from inside a white cardboard box. “Take this to Horace. He’ll like it. Sorry about Charlotte. Well, not really. This Marrow Fair place sounds wretched.” He said it with winning diffidence. “But it’s all changing, isn’t it? No matter. We’ll stay the same. You should come for dinner sometime. We have tables available next spring, I believe.”