It was a pressure cooker of a home. Slices of life wedged together
in that four-story Victorian, an imposing building that faced the fountained
entrance of Primrose Hill. Life at 62 Regents Park Road—where we had settled
after abandoning South Africa to the rigors of apartheid—emanated from the
kitchen on the first floor. At the four-hundred-year-old refectory table,
where monks once sat, now gathered haphazardly a family of committed atheists—on
one side, atheism reached back a full four generations. The monks, it seemed,
were vanquished. I contemplated this as a child while I sat and poked crumbs
into the central join of the table—two great slabs of polished oak that didn’t
quite meet, leaving a quarter-inch gap filled curiously with the historical
debris of the meals of many lifetimes.
In the basement of this tall house lived Jesse Hinchcliff, an elderly
violinist who played in the London Philharmonic. Here she occasionally received
a gentle, balding cellist from her orchestra. The whole family enjoyed his
early morning departures through the French doors of her living room, which
opened out onto the coal and rubbish cellars, and which were, as if in defiance
of such a view, prettily boughed about by flowering vines grown upon a trellis.
Also in the basement was my father’s study where he got little work done—these
were his dry years. On his wall hung a charcoal nude of my mother, her sumptuous
rear affectionately detailed by Evie, her childhood friend.
When my brother Jeremy was older, the storage
area across from the furnace room was converted into a bedroom for him. When
his girlfriend with the turned-up nose came over, my sister Hatty and I would
stand at the top of the basement stairs and listen for her inevitable moans.
While we did not know exactly how they were produced, we were happy with the
success of our spying and felt in some way we’d gotten our own back at Jeremy
who treated us poorly, as elder brothers do.
On the third floor, well distanced from the hormone-driven activities
in the basement, lived Grandma and Grandpa Stein. Grandma represented the
only religious faction in the house, apart from the monks’ practical legacy.
Here she lit the candles every Friday night, unpresumptuously, privately,
Grandpa accepting her ritual but remaining rather more interested in the algebraic
patterns he steadily created, ink from his fountain pen staining his right
hand blue while pipe tobacco yellowed the other.
Grandma cooked careful Jewish food. Chicken
schmaltz was saved for us to spread on toast and sprinkle with salt and pepper.
For me and Grandpa she made milk-soup knaidlachs: white matzo balls served
in scalding buttered milk and dusted with cinnamon and sugar. Or she’d prepare
a fat cow’s tongue, curled around itself and tucked neatly into a Pyrex dish
for long stewing on the stove until it was tender and the goose-bumped skin
of taste buds peeled off the soft meat beneath. The anatomy was fascinating.
I would feel my own tongue as I ate it, eerily one with it as carnivores are
with their prey.
On school mornings my mother woke me and then dragged herself down
the stairs in her long white nightdress. Half asleep, she stirred porridge
for me and served it up with a remarkable inconsistency: sometimes runny and
half-raw, other times thick and burnt, occasionally somewhere in the middle
and good to eat. My father, who could not and generally would not cook, made
porridge on those mornings my mother was too depressed to get up. Then, as
in Goldilocks, the porridge was just right, creamy and sweet. Porridge and
boiled eggs were my father’s only dishes, but the eggs always had soft yolks
and hard whites and the porridge was always smooth. To achieve this result,
as I came to understand, he measured the oats and water and timed the eggs,
having benefited from his early years in Grandma’s orderly kitchen.
My sister Hatty and I shared a room until I was
twelve and she was fourteen, by which point she was unambiguously mad, by
turns anorexic and gluttonous, sometimes both at the same time. She wouldn’t
eat with the rest of us, but still would be forced to sit at the table. She’d
narrow her sloped green eyes and hiss at us as we ate shepherds’ pie, greasy
with a film of orange fat turned the color of a sunset by the canned tomatoes
that my mother had cut into rough pieces and added to the pot of browning
minced meat and chunks of onion, the juice dripping like blood down her arm.
“You’re pigs,” Hatty would say, “Look at yourselves.
Look at yourselves.”
I’d see her, later, eyes hidden behind flat
dull-yellow hair, her stick body hiding at the bottom of the stairs. I’d watch
her reflection in the bay windows as she waited for the kitchen to be empty.
Then she’d come in, half-starved, and tearing at it with her thin, pianist’s
hands, shove down a whole, cold chicken that my mother, in one of her few
successful moments of nurturing, had realized she must leave for her—and
this in a house where the fridge was always empty and there was, strangely,
never extra food, apart from the social pot of bean soup on the stove.
Across the channel, the sixties were in full
swing. Paris erupted with barricades and youngsters hurling cobblestones at
caped policemen—this I learned from TV footage as I sat on my perch on the
kitchen table. The outside world became immediate and of utmost importance
to me. At home I watched and watched: the family, the friends, the visitors,
but secretly I empathized with all this rebellious humanity in the external
world. Then Hatty was gone and I remained unfixed, floating, not attached
to anyone, hidden in a cave of my own thoughts. The kitchen continued to provide
not only endless soup, but also a rotating cast of characters and a great
deal of laughter and color, layered in between Hatty’s mercurial sickness,
but nowhere really for a quiet person, like myself, to entertain a private
thought or feeling.
On summer nights I’d open the window and crawl
from my bedroom onto the ledge outside, the top of the kitchen’s bay window.
Crouched on the ledge, I watched the red London sky, lit up here and there
by orange sodium lamps. I talked to the twin oak trees at the back of our
yard and listened to the trains rumbling through, blowing their steam whistles,
hundreds of yards away behind the primary school I’d left a few years before.
Jeremy had left by now. My sister Lyndall was at college up north in Bradford.
Back in the house Hatty’s madness dominated everything, even during her hospitalized
absences. My father escaped with migraines, lovers, and Mozart playing loudly
in the morning when he delivered tea to us in our beds.
When I was fourteen my best friend Robyn, another troubled child of
South Africa, was expelled from our school, North London Collegiate, for smoking
and other transgressions. I read more and became more isolated, staying in
the empty classroom at break time and avoiding contact with the other girls.
For a while, Robyn and I met on the weekends at workmen’s cafés in Camden
Town. We drank tea and ate baked beans on toast, or eggs on toast, or mushrooms
fried soggy in dripping
and served on toast. But gradually Robyn receded further and further into
London’s drug underworld. I lost her first to Quaaludes, then to speed, then,
finally, to heroin, which she shared with her boyfriend, injecting it directly
into the veins of her arms, her fingers, and her toes.
Then it was summer. I turned fifteen and went
with my family on holiday to Italy.
Sperlonga Antica was built on a peninsula
that pointed sharply out into the sea. Where the long beach narrowed as it
met the rise of rocks, four hundred steps carved into the upthrusting of the
earth led steeply up to the white-washed fishing village, a casbah-like heap
of houses through which only donkeys and pedestrians could navigate. I first
saw the group from Paris, drinking espresso and grappa, in the café on the
piazza. Danny the Red, Bernard Carrasso and his lover Anne Wizemsky, and
Pierre Aroutcheff had found their way to Sperlonga. It was 1969, just a year
after the upheavals of ’68, and they had come for a rest—I remember them
telling us that—after the meetings and riots, the cobblestones ripped from
the streets and hurled at les flics in a failed replay of
earlier French Revolutions. Here they were, those same students I’d watched
on TV, tending their psyches, trying to understand what they had just come
through.
Pierre and I met on the beach when a crowd
of us went for a midnight swim. He took my hand. My body felt like electricity.
The rest of that holiday we spent hours together, much of it lying on the
sand, our faces just inches away from each other. I looked into his eyes.
He would rest his hand on his temple and reach his palm over to my temple
to provide shade from southern Italy’s intense sun as it blazed off the Mediterranean.
Inside this shade our eyes talked to each other. Sometimes I caught my breath
and let my eyelids shut. This connection with another person was something
I had first discovered in books, but only in Sperlonga
did I fully realize its possibilities.
It was like swimming in the warm phosphorescence of the night sea.
Now I had another soul in the dark, a fellow explorer, someone else
swimming through this murk with me. It was not that I thought Pierre necessarily
knew more than I did about the topography of this new country. Nor did he
pretend to. It was that he was there, simply existing in this realm.
In Sperlonga we ate cold squid soaked in olive oil and lemon juice,
or on the beach, sand underfoot and a thatched roof overhead, we sucked up
Spaghetti al Vongole, grit from the salty clam shells creeping into the red
sauce, and all of it washed down with wine that sweetened the back of my throat.
This lasted until one day the local fascists discovered that Jewish radical
Danny the Red was in town and chased him through the whitewashed alleys. The
whole scene was somehow made ridiculous by the panting, red-faced Danny, the
yelling and warnings, and the clumsy disruption of the village—it all seemed,
while frightening, somehow amateur, as if the fascists and my new friends
were just pretending.
Everyone went home. I went back to school. Pierre wrote letters to
me on squared paper torn from his journal, which he kept in a schoolchild’s
notebook. By Christmas my parents (oh, the perils of liberal parenting!) allowed
me to accept his invitation to an alpine holiday. A group of us left from
Paris, crammed into two tiny Deux Chevaux, my eyes stinging the whole way from the
blue smoke of Gauloises, Gitanes, and, eventually, in self-defense, my own
Marlboros.
On that trip to the mountains Jean Crubelier
brought a whole Parma ham. It became our staple, each of us grabbing the oily
shank and carving thick slices with Georges’ sharp hunting knife. Money was
in short supply, and eight of us lived this extravagant student frugality,
skiing in the French Alps with borrowed equipment, buying only bread and cigarettes
and occasionally broiling rectangles of Raclette, dripping the pungent cheese
on hot new potatoes.
Paris
Back in Paris I met Françoise, Pierre’s last
lover, who had not left him yet though he had left her. One night, in a restaurant
on Rue Jussieu, Pierre, Françoise and I ate steak
au poivre, the cream sauce hot and thick with black peppercorns
and cognac, the meat crusted with more peppercorns and inside: red, bloody, and tender.
Everyone called the owner of Chez Ray l’Anarchiste--and he
looked like one: his big black mustache drooping like a caricature over
the corners of his mouth, intelligence and perception shining from black
eyes. He toasted me and bustled around behind the gleaming wooden bar, and
then fussed and hovered, pouring wine, encouraging me to eat: “Mange! ma petite Anglaise.”
It was there that I complained of having to leave Paris – and who wouldn’t,
when faced with such a work of art as the Anarchist’s steak
au poivre? I dreaded returning to North London Collegiate
School, my sick sister, the empty fridge, our chaotic kitchen, my disconnected
existence, where Robyn, now lost to me, had been the only person who really
understood what it was like to float aimlessly in London with some great
gaping hole inside torn in the shape of South Africa. Françoise listened
with a generous spirit.
“I don’t want to go home,” I said.
“Well, then, ma petite, don’t,” she replied as Pierre
swabbed up the intoxicating sauce with a piece of bread, then washed it down
with a swig of wine.
“But what about my parents? It’s not as easy as you think.”
“That is their problem.”
“I can’t just leave. I have an obligation to them.”
“Eh! Pourquoi ça? Did you ask for your situation? You
aren’t doing something bad to them. You just want your own life.”
I couldn’t make sense of it. How could I, or anyone, think of leaving
like that? I wasn’t allowed to. I was too young. I had to finish school. I
crushed a cognac-soaked, cream-softened peppercorn between my teeth and the
pepperiness infused my senses, temporarily distracting me from the discussion
at hand. With some effort I recovered myself:
“But I have a responsibility to them, don’t I?”
Francoise leaned forward, her sweet eyes glittering under the low lights
above the restaurant table, “Alex, your parents are your chains.
You can be free. You are able.”
A month later Robyn’s boyfriend Philip dropped me off at the train
station, then returned to my house to deliver my goodbye note through the
front door of 62 while I headed for Dover and the hovercraft across the Channel.
In Paris, Pierre arrived to meet me, late, which I would soon become accustomed
to, but which wasn’t the kindest gesture right at that moment. Bernard Carrasso
took us to dinner—yes, Chez Ray—and gave me a black Victorian choker hung
with bright burgundy beads that bounced back the light bobbing in the eddies
of wine in our glasses.
That night Pierre lay beside me. I touched
the black hairs of his chest, ran my fingers through and through. My hand
smoothed down his side, over his ribcage and back up to his sternum and I
buried my face in his chest hair, rubbing and smelling, a happy animal.
In turn he touched me.
“Your breasts are like chocolate,” he said, mouthing the words into
these parts of me.
I thought of bread and chocolate, the breakfast of French school children:
the soft crusty bread and the bar of chocolate inside. It seemed a strange
idea of breakfast--nothing like the eggs and toast and strong cups of tea
I’d grown up with.
“Chocolate?” I asked.
“So smooth. And soft. They melt; c’est comme du chocolat.”
Pierre led me. I melted into him like
chocolate, became attached to him, felt connected in a way I never had.
One day Pierre brought me home a tube of Kwell.
Yes, in France it has the same name.
“You probably have little creatures,” he announced.
“What?”
“In your hairs, you probably have little creatures. I have them, and
also Michelle.” He assumed I understood about these things.
“You take this medicine and wash it in all your hair, your head and
down here,” he gestured below his belt. “I will take the bed things to wash.”
I examined myself. Yes, little creatures indeed, and some crawling,
very much alive, on me, on my body. I recoiled from myself and in the shower made rapid use
of the thick gray Kwell paste, waiting the required time while I could not
bear to be in my own skin. I had not invited these animals to take up residence
on me: they had arrived entirely without my agreement and now I could not
remove myself, could only wait for this medicated clay to suffocate them and
then, thank God, rinse them into the sewers.
Michelle, it turned out, had shared Pierre’s bed one day when I’d been
gone to England.
“It isn’t anything. Alain was gone, you were gone, we just ended up
there. But you know, the creatures did too!” He joked. It wasn’t a serious
thing. Certainly nothing I should feel upset about.
In France I learned to drink coffee: café au lait in
the morning, and café express after dinner. Sometimes I still
drank thé au lait, but without the dedication one learnt
in England. In France the coffee was good and strong, flavorful and sweet.
I watched Pierre as he took one of the rectangular sugar lumps from his saucer.
The first sweet cube he dipped half way into the cup of hot blackness, layered
with a thin golden froth. Then he lifted the melting cube and sucked on it,
the brown of his eyes deepening with pleasure. The second cube went into
the coffee and was stirred into richness. Through Pierre, I learned about ritualistic
French eating. The coffee and sugar were the penultimate step in the meal.
Last was the lighting of the black-tobaccoed Gauloise, sometimes followed
by a glass of Calvados, an intense, clear apple liquor.
My eyes followed these small acts. Meal after three-hour meal, I focused
on the comings and goings of food and drink; onto the table, into the mouth,
off the table; watched the swinging doors into the kitchen, the bump of the
waiter’s hip and his turning, plates held up above obstacles, and their safe
deliverance onto one table or another. For two years: French food, the flowing
abstraction of French language, Pierre’s love, Pierre’s infidelities. I became,
you could say, fluent. But then, over a dish of lapin chasseur,
juicy, tender rabbit falling perfectly off the bone, Pierre announced to me
that he had fallen in love with Harriette. This was followed, on my part,
by some weeks of a distinct loss of appetite.
Harriette, however, married someone else and Pierre stayed with me,
until my father, in one of his few acts of paternal care,
took me to New York.
New York
There I lived with my cousins Ezra and Ruthie
in a one bed-room apartment on the tenth floor of a red-brick apartment building
flanked by Harlem on one side and Columbia University on the other. There
was a small kitchen with a window looking out to an air shaft. We each kept
separate food, some of it labeled. Ezra was thin and worried about not having
enough, and so he kept a reassuring supply of steaks and frozen vegetables
and coffee from the A&P down the street. Ruthie and I shared more: having
a soul-sister bond, we did not feel threatened by each other’s eating. Besides,
she was a chronic anorexic, subsisting on condiments, and only ate by the
half-teaspoon portion. She would bring out a selection of ketchup, pickle,
mayonnaise, and mustard, and a quarter of a piece of white bread and rip it
into tiny pieces. Then she would anoint one tiny piece of bread with a mixture
of condiments, chew it delicately, lick her fingers and, after a rest, start
over. Ruthie’s nickname was Toothpick.
When Ezra was in a generous mood he would invite me to share a steak
dinner with him. He would put on Marvin Gaye or Stevie Wonder forty-fives
and wiggle himself around the kitchen with an appreciation of the rhythm that
failed, however, to demonstrate itself through his body. Then we would cook
together and eat companionably while he told me about his girlfriends or
we talked politics. He had old SDS friends, and friends from the black caucus
at Columbia, and he was driven, in a certain way, like me (this another symptom
of us ex-South Africans) to find a place to be politically active. He and
his latest girlfriend had joined the Union of Radical Political Economists
and together read long Marxist economic tracts which I could not yet tolerate.
Ezra often left to spend the night with Sally. Then Ruthie would take
his bed and I would sleep alone in the living room, pulling out my sleeping
bag from under the couch. Since this was New York the nighttime was inhabited
by cockroaches. Turning on the light sent them scurrying, heads down, for
the baseboards. I never got used to it, I felt them encroaching, as their
name suggested; they reminded me, I suppose, of the crabs I had hosted on
my body in Paris.
West Broadway was the main drag near the apartment and I loved it.
In winter, wrapped up in a five dollar fur coat bought at the thrift shop,
I walked through the chilled but clear blue air--a weather not possible in
Europe where winter brought clouds and fog and low skies. West Broadway was
populated by a jazzed human wildlife flowing up and down and probably under
the street, fed en route by pizza slices shaken with chili flakes and oregano.
Doing in Rome as Romans do, I happily took to this urban pizza picnic as
the foundation of my New York diet. On the corner of Amsterdam Avenue near
our building, sat a black and yellow Chock Full O’Nuts coffee shop, with its
horseshoe-shaped counters, into the hollow of which joggled worn waitresses
with bitter lips.
“Excuse me,” I asked one day as I stopped in, thirsty from pizza, “Could
I have a cup of coffee, please?”
I stepped slightly away from the counter,
tentative, watchful, turning my head back and forth to watch the powdered
face of the waitress as she coursed between one horseshoe and the next, filling
up the half-full cup of a middle-aged black man sitting, head sunk under his
felt hat, across from me. She ignored me.
“Excuse me!” I tried, louder.
She ignored me again. Even then I realized that her behavior wasn’t
malicious, it was just New York. She responded only to the aggressively delivered
imperatives that made it through her filters, which, had she not had in place,
would have meant a constant submission to the frenzy of the place—a frenzy
I found myself awed by, entertained and terrified by, and yet morbidly drawn
to. It was so interesting.
I observed the new customers who came in and achieved cups of coffee.
Finally I tried a frightening experiment. I sat full-square to the counter,
elbows out from my body, ready to intercept her during one of her runs, and
as she came towards me, shouted, “Gimme a cup o’ CAWFEE!”
She looked up for a split second, hoisted a cup from beneath the counter
and filled it contemptuously.
“That’s a qwaarter,” she said holding out her hand. This wasn’t Paris
where a cup of coffee entitled you to more or less permanent residency in
a cafe. Here you ordered, paid up, imbibed and left. Which I did, never to
return.
I learned to drink my coffee in the relative calm of Ezra and Ruthie’s
apartment. I smoked, still, which they tolerated, and fixed coffee with a
paper filter and ready-ground beans from the yellow and black Chock Full
O’Nuts can. Into this sour beverage I spooned a tablespoon of another new
discovery: CoffeeMate, non-dairy creamer. For a while I became addicted to
this claggy, oily stuff that covered up the sourness of bad coffee. It soothed
me and made the coffee taste like Horlicks, a childhood milk drink my mother
had given me when I couldn’t sleep. It eased the shock, somehow, of my transition
from the relative delicacy of Paris to the full-throttled, steel-edged existence
of New York, where ritual and etiquette cracked under the blast-heat.
Sometimes, Ruthie and I went to Columbia’s Philosophy building for
tea. Only a few hundred yards from the apartment, and just inside the campus,
tea was served every afternoon by the wives of the Philosophy faculty. Ruthie
and I, illicitly taking on the identity of young philosophy students (in fact,
we were pursuing this study probably with far more determination than the
actual students), lined up by the silver tea urns and nodded politely to
the middle-aged floral-dressed women as they offered us equally floral cups
of tea. These we balanced delicately on saucers as we moved on to the biscuit
tray where I, at least, (Ruthie not willing to take so large a share) stacked
up four or five thin, sugary biscuits. The ritual reminded me of milk-break
time at North London Collegiate School, where I should, by rights, still
have been.
Bearing our free aids to philosophical discussion, we moved to the
low couches, set ourselves down, and curled our feet up on the flowery fabric.
I broke a biscuit in half and passed it to Ruthie, and we sipped tea and spoke
of matters deep.
Soon we discovered that we could also meet men there. They, apparently,
had discovered the same thing. Before long we were rubbing shoulders (and
sometimes other things) with strapping New England architecture students,
Iranian chemistry majors, Indian soon-to-be MBAs and/or gurus, and other philosophically
unlikely types. While I had not officially left Pierre, the span of the Atlantic
ocean was making itself felt. In any case, for us fidelity was the foreign
concept, whereas “free” love was the norm.
London
Soon thereafter I decided that I really did have to become independent—I
was 17, after all. I had to earn a living, become a grownup, finally. So back
over the ocean I flew. In London I rented a room in a flat which I shared
with three of my brothers’ friends. Every morning I took the tube from Finchley
Central down to Soho to an entry-level receptionist’s job where I appeared
in cotton mini-skirts and Peter Pan blouses and, in my last known attempt
at applying makeup, clumps of mascara and sparkling sky-blue eyeshadow.
In the evenings, my flatmate Jan taught me to make chicken curry. He’d
extrapolated the recipe from the Karachi Café, a dimly-lit basement restaurant
up in Bradford, a five-hour drive north. Bradford, where my sister was drinking
and protesting her way through university, was a grimy mill town, not far
from the Wuthering Heights of the Brontë sisters and now home to thousands
of Indian and Pakistani immigrants. The immigrants worked in the mills and
lived in the draughty Victorian-era back-to-backs heated with kerosene stoves
that failed to keep the damp at bay. Thanks to their fortitude, Bradford was
undergoing a culinary rebirth—curry was mercifully replacing the traditional
“chip butty” (a white roll spread with margarine and stuffed with French fries—“chips”
to the English). The curry was so good at the Karachi Café that often, on
Friday nights, our Finchley Road household would drive the five hours up
to Bradford to catch a late night meal.
The menu was simple at the Karachi: for one
pound you’d get an institutionally-thick porcelain bowl filled with a rich
and complex curry on top of which had been ladled a layer of butterfat saturated
with roasted cumin, coriander, cardamom, fenugreek, fresh ginger, burnt-orange
turmeric, and volcanic-red crushed chili pepper. And then, a plate of whole-wheat
roti: flour and salt and water kneaded and flattened and thrown onto the hot
walls of the round tandoor oven, blisters of burnt crust yielding to a satisfying
chew of bread and served, in the American style—oh, joy—a bottomless plate, as many roti
as we could eat, an endless cozy pile, so soft and tender that I wanted to
rest upon their warmth and sleep forever, pillowed by the smell of hot baked
bread.
The love of food and the food of love tugged me down to earth. And
though I didn’t stay long in England, and never learned to make roti, my chicken
curry became quite good, and thus prepared, I headed down the road of life,
more or less on my own two feet.