Cooking With Fernet Branca (12 page)

‘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.’

This discussion goes on in much the same declamatory and pointless fashion for another hour, with each of us telling the other things we both already know, which seems to describe ninety-five per cent of all human discourse and especially that between family members or lovers. Finally Ljuka looks at his watch and yawns and says he must go. He’s locked into it all in a way I can do nothing about. My little brother, so handsome (and my God he
is
a handsome kid, everything his elder sister isn’t) is unreachable and alone as he walks out into the night in his black jumpsuit. When I embrace him I leave my stupid tears on the flap of his breast pocket as I grip his shoulder blades, pulling us together and determined not to allow my hands to stray in order to satisfy a bleak curiosity that wants to know if he is armed. Those Makarov pistols, whatever became of them? If you fly mysterious unmarked aircraft in a NATO country things will go hard with you if you’re also found to be carrying concealed weapons, unless … unless … Oh, I don’t want to know.

‘I’ll be back in a bit,’ he says. ‘You only need call and I’ll come, Matti.’

These childhood names. We’re still the kids we’ve always been. What on earth would Mili think if she were standing here in the dead of night watching the children she had nursed waving to each other through perspex as the turbine groans, whines, and the sagging blades overhead whirl and stiffen? But she’s a survivor, too, and has seen far worse. In a calamitous typhoon of downdraught and hot kerosene gas the winking machine lifts, tilts out over the gulf and sinks, its
whup-whup-whup
banging back from the cliff face opposite as it flogs the night air below where I stand. Long afterwards I glimpse his lights as he curls away towards the northeast, gaining height to clear the Apuan Alps. Far below, the quilt of lights that is Viareggio and the coastal strip ends abruptly at the black invisible Mediterranean Sea. If I follow that coastline down far enough I might just see the lights of Pisa. I wonder if even at this moment some
American at Camp Darby is watching the blip of my brother’s helicopter on a radar screen with a puzzled frown, reaching for a telephone. A sister’s paranoia? (But pride, too, that our family should have such power.) I shiver and stare long at the now silent sky and its pricklings of ancient starlight over Mt Matanna.

Off to a famous start down at Pisa airport, having with some difficulty spotted my man coming out of the Arrivals hall with the bemused look common to air travellers. This, together with his gamin figure, gave him an air of youthful vulnerability I wasn’t quite prepared for. I was expecting something rather more raddled.

‘Mr Riah? I’m Gerald Samper. Welcome to sunny Tuscany. May I call you Nanty?’

‘Nanty’s fine.’

‘Right.’ I lowered my voice as his fellow passengers elbowed their way past in order to beat each other to the car rental windows. ‘I recognized you at once, thanks to having been warned. I must say that’s far and away the best bald wig I’ve ever seen. Congratulations.’

He removed his dark glasses and revealed cold blue eyes. ‘It’s not a wig.’

Oh well done, Samper. ‘Ah. Sorry. I was told you’d be wearing a disguise. Wig and shades, they said.’

‘This
is
a disguise.’ The blue eyes blinked once as though taking a snapshot. ‘You didn’t recognize me, did you? You just guessed.’ His voice is triumphant, bright boy catching out teacher.

We Sampers are not often at a loss for words but I led the way to the car in what I hoped was a conciliatory silence. Only when we were on the Genova motorway did he say: ‘You really don’t recognize me, do you? Not even enough to know that when I’m Brill I wear a blond wig, which is too much of the time. That’s fine.’ He smiled at a passing truckload of soiled pigs speeding towards their Golgotha. ‘That’s just what I wanted. Someone who can see me for what I really am.’

Bald, he means? My fingers tightened grimly on the steering wheel, like Per Snoilsson’s in chapter three. How many days of this would I have to endure? My mind started flitting, for some reason touching on roasts and fricassées. What would make the best stuffing for Marta if I survived an Andean plane crash and she didn’t? We could hardly be a planeload of rugby players, though. Hang on – a planeload of
chefs
, of course, flying to Valparaiso to take part in a televised cookery contest. Each is bringing his own supplies and equipment with him so the aircraft’s hold is stuffed with exotic spices and personal kitchenware. That’s why the glacier outside the shattered cabin windows is strewn with brightly polished copper chafing pans flashing in the high-altitude sunlight … ‘I’m sorry?’

‘I said, I’ve never been to Italy before.’

Izzat so, buster? ‘That’s quite an achievement, Nanty. Not easy, these days. I thought all the British nobs came here now. You know, Tony Blair and the rest. Tuscminster.’

‘I must have been avoiding it.’

I catch the blue glance sideways. Maybe he does have a sense of humour? Like a lot of showbiz stars young Brill is surprisingly small. The baldness is distracting but underneath is a professional youthfulness that makes his actual age hard to guess. This little number, I think, may even do a Cliff Richard if he can keep it up and shun evil. I go on mentally fitting him with a succession of wigs to see if I recognize him. Nope. I’m afraid that like many people with rather a good head of hair I’m quick to notice the follicularly challenged. I wonder what happened to his? A fashion statement, perhaps. One of those clones with high-gloss scalps. Or maybe he was staying in the Chernobyl Holiday Inn when …
Not AIDS??
The thought is disquieting. Naturally I know all that stuff about loving the patient and not the disease, easier said than done, and no doubt it’s difficult to catch in the normal course of non-erotic domesticity. We all saw those pictures of Lady Di fearlessly pressing terminal flesh in hospices around the globe. But we were never shown the next shot, when she was
whisked away to gargle with bleach and plunge into a bath of boiling Dettol. After Nanty’s gone am I going to have to smash all the crockery like a Romany who’s discovered that his daughter was menstruating when she did the washing-up? Make a funeral pyre of my choice oak lavatory seats? Am I being a little hysterical?

‘Alopecia,’ he says.

‘Sorry?’

‘You’re wondering why I went bald. Everyone who sees me like this does. How can the leader of a boy band be bald? It’s simple. I got alopecia and they don’t think it’s reversible. It mostly all fell out except my eyebrows and, if you’re interested, what the specialists call “scanty body hair”.’

The funny thing about hearing a phrase like ‘scanty body hair’ (or even ‘Nanty body hair’) is that you can’t stop yourself trying to visualize it. Young Mr Riah has been there, too.

‘Not enough to fill a contact lens,’ he said briefly.

We had long since left the motorway and were just winding uphill to Casoli. ‘You must be wondering where on earth I’m taking you.’

‘Not really. Your bloke said it’s secluded. That’s good enough for me, unless you’re a mad axe-murderer.’

Not yet, I thought to myself. Just don’t push it. Ten minutes later my megastar guest was clearly taken by the house. He admired it, he admired its position, he admired my downstairs lavatory.

‘He’s kick, your teddy-bear,’ he said when he returned to the kitchen.

‘He’s called “Gazzbear”.’

‘That right? I saw he’s wearing a waistcoat saying “Squeeze me – I’m a gas.” So I did. Seriously unbad.’

‘He’s advertised as “The World’s First Farting Teddy Bear.” He comes from Pennsylvania. I discovered you can modify the fart with KY Jelly, depending on how wet you want it to sound. You feel a bit of an idiot with your little finger inserted in the pink rubber anus of a stuffed toy, but you get over it.’

‘I’ve seen worse at parties.’

‘Oh, good. We’re going to need a lot of baroque detail for this book of yours. That’s what the punters come for.’

‘You reckon?’

‘Trust me. It’s always been like that. Whoever wanted to read a biography of Nero without the orgies and tortures?’

‘Did you catch that movie,
Nero’s
Birthday
? Hey – unbelievable stuff. I’ve got the director’s cut on DVD.’

‘Exactly. We’re voyeurs at heart. After half a century of TV we all want to
see
without actually having to risk anything. Heroin overdoses are really only fun to read about. True of many things. Even sex, quite often.’

Nanty glanced at me sharply. ‘The voice of experience?’

‘Maybe it’s not as uncommon as people like to pretend,’ I said evasively. ‘You may remember a predecessor of yours, John Lydon, a.k.a. Johnny Rotten? He memorably said “Love is just two minutes fifty-three seconds of squishing noises.” I think he went on to remark that only someone who needed his head examining would bother with it, but I can’t remember the exact quotation. And that was love, mind.’

‘John’s not wrong,’ said the lead singer of Freewayz with conviction.

We ate lunch on the terrace. I had deliberately prepared nothing exotic for my guest, after all. My Rabbit in Cep Custard could wait as I already had a good cold bird in the fridge. I thought I’d try him with a perfectly standard scratch luncheon: home-made bread, salami, prosciutto crudo, a salad of tomatoes, mozzarella and basil, with three different cheeses and fruit to follow. He blenched at nothing, didn’t call for Branston pickle, and addressed himself like a trooper to the wine – a quite passable chilled Greco di Tufo. Indeed, he became merry as the afternoon slipped by and positively flattering about
Downhill
all
the
Way!

‘Great book,’ he summed up, pouring himself another glass from the third bottle I had opened. ‘Great title, too.’

‘I don’t know how on earth I got it past them. I really don’t think they noticed. They just registered the word “downhill” and because Luc was the world’s most famous downhill skier they didn’t see beyond it. Even stranger because he was clearly past his peak at the time I wrote it, although he didn’t do his spectacular collapse until after the book was out.’

‘Burnout?’

‘Oh, everything. Knees had gone, hips were going, bladder problems. Plus he’d snorted more snow in ten years than he’d skied over. Couldn’t get it up, but not for want of trying. And all this at twenty-eight. I’d call that downhill, wouldn’t you?’

‘But, like, you were sympathetic, you know? You made him a real person. I mean, not just an icon in snow goggles.’

‘Luc
was
a real person. Still is, I suppose, in that Swiss clinic of his. These days he’s a prematurely aged businessman who totters from chair to chair discussing sportswear franchises and authorizing his signature to be put on a line of skis he’ll never wear. He’s surrounded by nurses who look like Playboy bunnies and who, when he’s in wistful mood, give him vigorous enemas. But it does no good.’

Shortly after this we both had to go and lie down, Nanty describing his condition as ‘totally stocious’. I wouldn’t have said he was a fellow I yearned to work with, exactly, but compared to Per Snoilsson he was practically a kindred spirit despite his occasional Buffyisms and mockney vowels (he’s actually from Harpenden). As far as I was concerned he’d passed the first test by not being faddist about food. The second test, too, by not being especially boring and for having some sense of irony. The third test …

The third test he flunked – and retroactively the second one after all – when we were sitting on the terrace later that evening having eaten a resplendent bird stuffed with some of the precious smoked cat I get from a little alpine village in the Alto Adige and which I must learn to make for myself. You hang the cat in a chimney for some weeks. If you mince the meat fine, mix it with porridge oats soaked in Fernet, pack it
into the hollowed skin of a pomegranate pierced with holes and stuff a bird with it, a delicious smoky-sweet scent pervades the flesh of the stuffee – in this instance a guinea-fowl. I didn’t tell Nanty exactly what the stuffing was made from, saying only that it was a chef’s secret. I don’t yet know him well enough. Still, he ate a good two-thirds of the bird.

But it was after this, when we were toasting each other in
vin’ santo
and gazing out past the dark crags of our eyrie at the twinkling panorama below, that he asked the dreaded question that failed him the third test: ‘Gerry, do you believe in UFOs?’

There was a pause.

‘No, Nanty.’

‘I guess that means you’ve never seen one? You will when you do.’

‘No doubt. The same goes for ghosts and visions of the Virgin Mary. Until then I remain a profound unbeliever.’

‘I’ve
never seen one,’ he admitted to my surprise. ‘But I’ve read enough to know they exist. You ought to read Timothy Good – he’d convince you. It’s completely impossible that all those people are either liars or nutcases. I do wish I could see one,’ he said. ‘This is just the sort of place. Nice and dark up here. Panoramic field of view.’ He stared wistfully upwards. ‘I
know
they’re up there somewhere. The question is, would I definitely recognize one if I saw it?’

‘I should imagine so. Aren’t they usually like whatever it was they think landed at that US air base in Suffolk in the early eighties? Revolving lights, tripod feet, the little turret on top, the classic saucepan-lid profile?’

‘That’s the whole point,’ he cried, spilling his drink for emphasis. ‘You can never tell. A UFO doesn’t necessarily have to
look
like a UFO. You can’t ever tell about aliens, either. They don’t always look like Greys in
Close
Encounters
any more than they’ve always got green antennae. They can look however they choose. They might look like you or me.’ There was a pause. ‘They might
be
you or me.’

Just for a scooting instant as I looked into those mildly insane blue eyes beneath the hairless dome I felt a chill pass over my bare arms and saw the hair on them rise. Long ago as early teenagers a friend and I had played that game of scaring each other shitless while walking home in the dark. It was an unlit country lane on a moonless night. We both knew the lane blindfold and in any case there was enough starlight in the sky for the hedgerows to be clearly visible. But we both saw the menacing figure at the same instant, its claw upraised. It was unquestionably keeping pace with us. We stopped in terror.

‘It’s just that dead tree the cows scratch on.’

‘No it’s not. That’s further on.’

Bit by bit we talked ourselves into sidling close enough to see that it was the tree. ‘But supposing it
hadn’t
been?’

‘Yes. And supposing … just suppose
you’re
not the person I think you are? Suppose I turn my head suddenly and it’s not you at all? It sounds like you, but that’s because it’s taken over your body.’

The tremble in his reasonable voice scared me too. ‘I could say the same about you,’ I said. ‘You might have been taken over ten minutes ago, and whatever you are now is just saying these things in your voice to lull my suspicions. If I dared look at you I might see you had a scaly tail dragging silently behind.’

‘Well, I haven’t. I promise you I haven’t.’

‘But you may be only
saying
that …’

Together we worked ourselves into a state of barely suppressed panic, rigidly walking the last half mile not daring to look at each other, staring straight ahead and promising on everything we held sacred (suddenly quite a lot) that we really were the old friends we said we were and not monsters who might suddenly give a triumphant scream and turn with glowing eyes and rending claws. We tested each other on intimacies surely no monster could know about, listening intently for any uncharacteristic tone or word that would
reveal the lurking impostor, even as we silently knew that the fiend could inhabit every last cell in our brains.

And here on my terrace in Italy, maybe a little ‘stocious’ with wine, I felt the same momentary chill at the resurfacing of this half-forgotten childhood game, now played not in terms of monsters, which were kids’ stuff, but in terms of aliens, in which millions of adults worldwide fervently believed.

‘You think about these things a lot, do you?’ My tone was one of sympathetic detachment, the cool old analyst noting down a young patient’s wacky fantasies.

But Nanty wasn’t listening. He was staring out across the dark bowl of panorama whose craggy edges were formed by mountain outlines and whose bottom was stuck with myriad crumbs of light. ‘What’s that?’ he asked, pointing.