Текст книги "Richard C. Morais - The Hundred-Foot Journey"

Автор книги: Richard C. Morais

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We all stood, awkwardly, at a loss on how to proceed, until Madame Mallory pointed at a basket in the back of the stall and said, “Look there, Hassan, as I told you. But they are the white navet de Suede, not the yellow or black I was hoping to find.” She leaned forward, ignoring Papa, and said, “Do you, Madame Picard, by any chance have some of the other, less common varieties hiding somewhere?”

There was a strange look on Papa’s face—not angry, more startled, like someone who’d just had his eyes opened as to how things would be from now on. And I will always remember how Papa, after blinking slowly a few times, taking it all in, put a hand on my shoulder, squeezed his good-bye, and then withdrew from the market without another word.

Six months after I started my apprenticeship, after a luncheon sitting, Marcel and I were in the kitchen mopping the floor spotless as Madame Mallory insisted, finishing our duties before we could crawl back to our respective rooms for our “room hour” rest.

There was a rap at the back door and I went to see who it was.

It was Monsieur Iten with a box.

“Bonjour, Hassan. Ça va?”

After the ritualistic exchanges about the state of health of various members of our respective families, Monsieur Iten informed me he had just received a special delivery of Bretagne oysters, and he brought them immediately by Le Saule Pleureur because he knew Madame Mallory would want to serve such fresh oysters during the evening’s sitting, if she knew they were available.

But she wasn’t at the restaurant. Neither was Jean-Pierre, Margaret, or even Monsieur Leblanc. No one of authority was around. It was just Marcel and me mopping up.

“What do you think, Marcel?”

Marcel shook his head vehemently, his chubby cheeks shuddering in horror at the notion we might make so crucial a decision. “Don’t do it, Hassan. She will kill us.”

I peered into the box. “How many, Monsieur Iten?”

“Eight dozen.”

I poked around in the box.

“Okay. I’ll sign for them. But subtract four.”

“Pourquoi?”

“Because these four are Crassostrea gigas. You know perfectly well, Monsieur Iten, Chef Mallory would never serve them to her guests. How did they get in here? She would be furious with you if she saw you trying to pass Pacific oysters off as huîtres Portuguaises Sauvages. And, besides, it’s all a jumble. The rest are all Breton oysters, true, but I see at least another six that are not the very fine La Cancale pousses en claires from around Mont Saint-Michel. Look, La Cancale have a pale beige mantle and toothed shells, like this. I would guess these ones over here are La Croisicaise, from the Grand and Petit Traict channels in the south. See, here, the signature pale yellow in the shell? And look at the varying sizes. These here are number fours, but these must be number twos. Non? There is no mention of this on your bill, Monsieur Iten. So I am sorry, but you will have to adjust the bill accordingly if you want me to accept delivery.”

Monsieur Iten removed the four offending oysters, made a note on the bill about the other details on size and quality I had noticed, before saying, “Forgive me, Hassan. An oversight. I will not let it happen again.”

It was only when Madame Mallory promoted me to commis the next day, to personally assist her in the kitchen, that I realized the box of oysters had been a test quietly prearranged with the fishmonger. Of course, neither of them ever owned up to the fact.

But that’s the way Chef Mallory was.

Challenging, always challenging.

Particularly of her staff.

It was a busy Saturday in deepest winter. The world outside was crystalline and white, with fat icicles hanging from Le Saule Pleureur’s copper gutters like hams curing in a shed. Inside, the steamy kitchen was in full roar, pot lids rattling, flames flaring, and in this culinary fervor I was tasked with making the day’s soufflés, a lunchtime favorite made from goat cheese and pistachios.

I pulled a set of ceramic molds from the chilly storage room in the back of the kitchen and, as was normal, lathered their white walls with soft butter, before sprinkling the dishes’ bottoms with cornmeal and finely chopped pistachios. The soufflé’s base was also executed by the book: unripened goat cheese, egg yolks, finely minced garlic, thyme, salt, and white pepper, all heated and folded, before adding, to lighten the base, a liberal dose of beaten egg whites and cream of tartar—that crusty acid scraped off the sides of wine barrels and pulverized, after purification, into the white powder that miraculously stabilizes egg whites. The final touch was, of course, the top layer of whipped egg whites, elegantly smoothed with a knife and given just a suggestion of an artistic swirl. Preparation finally complete, I put the molds in a water bath and placed the pan in the center of the oven to bake.

A half hour later, while I was making the veal stock, Jean-Pierre cried, “Hassan! Over here!” and I dashed to his side of the range to help lift the heavy pork roasts from the ovens for the ritualistic basting in lemon juice and cognac.

Madame Mallory, on the next counter, smothering daurade in herbs and lime, every now and then looked over at us impatiently, to see if I had gone back to my own station.

“Hassan, keep your eye on the soufflés!” she barked.

“Watch it! You almost dropped the pan, you idiot!”

Margaret, the quiet sous chef, looked up from her corner in the cold kitchen—where she was making a blancmange—and we locked eyes over the hissing flames.

Margaret’s sympathetic look, it made my heart flutter, but I could not linger, and I dashed back to my ovens to retrieve the soufflés. “Not to worry, Chef,” I called out. “Trust me. All under control.” I banged open the oven door, extracted the hot tray of soufflés, and lifted it onto the countertop above.

All shriveled, like a biology experiment gone bad.

“Ah, non, merde.”

“Hassan!”

“No. But look. I don’t understand. I have done this a dozen times before. The soufflés. They died.”

They all came over to look.

“Pff,” said Jean-Pierre. “Utter disaster. The boy, he’s incompetent.”

Madame Mallory shook her head in disgust. Like I was hopeless.

“Margaret, vite, take over for Hassan. Do the soufflés again. And you, Hassan, prepare the day’s pasta. You will do less harm there.”

I slinked off to the corner of the kitchen to lick my wounds.

Twenty minutes later Margaret came by my station, ostensibly to take down a dish, and as I reached up to the shelf to help her lift down the large platter, the backs of our hands touched and a jolt of electricity shot up my arm.

“Don’t let them bully you, Hassan,” she whispered. “I made the exact same mistake once. In deep winter, the outer wall in the storage room gets intensely cold, chilling the molds on the shelves of that wall. So, when you make soufflés in winter, you must first bring the dishes out into the main kitchen at least thirty minutes earlier, so the molds have time to reach room temperature before you pour in the egg whites.”

She smiled sweetly, turned away, and I was in love.

This thing between Margaret and me, it all came to a head a few weeks later, when we found ourselves in the same aisle of the kitchen. Madame Mallory and Jean-Pierre were on either side of us, banging pots and yelling at the front-room staff for a pickup. Margaret and I self-consciously ignored each other, until, that is, she bent down to retrieve some tarts from the oven, and I bent down to retrieve a pan immediately adjacent to her, and our legs inadvertently touched.

There was a shock of fire up my leg, right into my groin, and I gently leaned into it. Much to my delight, I felt her lean in from her side, and a few exquisite moments later, when I came up again with my pan, I was gasping for air and holding the pan strategically before my midriff.

“Come see me at my flat during the break,” she whispered.

Well, I tell you, no sooner had we finished the lunchtime service than I had my whites off and was pushing my way down Le Saule Pleureur’s raked garden and piles of snow. Finally through the stucco-and-stone wall, I broke into a run, slip-sliding down the icy back alleys to Margaret’s flat, just above the local pastry shop in the center of town.

Margaret met me in front of her building, and we exchanged knowing glances, but still did not say a word to each other. I looked nonchalantly up and down the cobblestone street, to see if we were being observed; her hand was shaking as she put the key into her building’s frosted front door. An elderly couple entered the Bata Shoe Store down the lane; a young mother and baby carriage exited the pâtisserie; a florist was shoveling snow outside his shop. No one looked our way.

The door swung open and we were inside, past the apartment mailboxes and radiator, taking the stone stairs two by two, laughing, charging up to her studio on the third floor. Through that door, at long last in the privacy of her flat, we were all frantic hands and open mouths and dropping garments wherever they fell.

That afternoon I took lessons on the French interpretation of la lingua franca, and after a hot shower involving lots of giggling and large quantities of soap, we reluctantly made our way back to Le Saule Pleureur, separately, far too relaxed and carefree for the rigors of the evening’s mealtime duty.

“Focus, Hassan. Where is your mind today?” snapped Madame Mallory.

That’s how it started. But our growing intimacy was not without its obstacles. Sleeping in a monk’s cell, next to the ever-watchful and austere Madame Mallory, was not exactly conducive to a romantic relationship. So these snatched afternoon encounters—as stimulating as they were—they were always hurried and gasping, with no chance for Margaret and me to ever spend languid time together.

One late afternoon, while I was dashing out the door and literally lashing tight my belt buckle as she stood in her kimono holding the door open, Margaret quietly said, “I am sorry you cannot spend more time, Hassan. Sometimes I get the impression you don’t want to know me better. C’est triste.”

Margaret then gently eased shut the door of her flat, leaving me to flounder on the apartment building staircase like a fish hooked and hoisted onto a boat’s deck. She was like Mother. Didn’t say a lot, but when she did, my heavens, it would hit you harder than any of Papa’s tirades.

That walk home I discovered, for the first time in my life, I didn’t want to run away when a woman I liked opened the door to something deeper. Quite the opposite; I wanted to plunge through Margaret’s open gate headfirst. So, walking back to Le Saule Pleureur that afternoon through the back alleys, I muttered loudly to myself, determined to make more time available for Margaret, particularly on our one day off from work.

This meant I had to inform the family I would no longer be regularly coming by the Dufour estate for our weekly feasts. This was, of course, as dangerous and diplomatically fraught as any Middle East negotiation, but the following Monday, knowing what was at stake, I manfully marched the short distance between the two restaurants, bristling with purpose.

My purpose evaporated the moment I crossed Maison Mumbai’s threshold. Auntie made me sit in the family’s most honored armchair, before fussing and plumping the pillow behind my back. Mehtab had, since my departure, taken over the kitchen at Maison Mumbai, and she emerged from the back of the house with a smile and a puffball pouch of crab-and-prawn paste, plus a few papri chaat, savory biscuits with curd.

“Just to tide you over, Hassan,” my sister said. “Lunch will be ready in an hour. I made your favorite lamb trotters soup. Just for you. Now put your feet up. You must rest, poor boy.”

I knew how much work had gone into making these delicacies, and my stomach churned with guilt. Mukhtar was on the couch opposite me, absentmindedly picking his nose while reading the newspaper comics jointly with Uncle Mayur.

“Thank you, Mehtab. Umm . . . sorry. But I can’t stay for lunch today.”

The room froze.

Mukhtar and Uncle Mayur looked up from their newspaper.

“What are you saying? Your sister and aunt have been slaving in the kitchen for you all morning.”

This remark was of course predictable, but not from laid-back Uncle Mayur, who always outsourced such acid remarks to his wife. It underlined how serious my trespass was, and his attack shook me.

“Umm . . . I am sorry. . . . Sorry. But I have other plans.”

“What do you mean, other plans?” snapped Auntie. “With whom? Madame Mallory?”

“No. With some of the restaurant’s other staff,” I said vaguely. “I should have told you earlier. Sorry. But it was decided just this morning.”

Mehtab did not say a word. She just lifted her head high, like a great begum who had been deeply offended in her own home, and solemnly retreated to the kitchen. Auntie was furious and shook her finger at me.

“Look how you have hurt your sister, you ungrateful beast!”

To make matters worse, Papa’s great bulk suddenly loomed in the doorway, and his deep voice rumbled over us like a tank battalion.

“What this I hear? Not eating with us today?”

“No, Papa. I have plans.”

He crooked his finger for me to follow him.

Mukhtar sniggered. “Now you’re in for it.”

I looked daggers at my brother before following Papa and the ominous sandpaper rasp of his slippers slapping across the floor. When we were out of earshot, deep in the darkened hallway, Papa turned to look at me imperiously from his great height, but I looked right back up at him, ready to hold my ground.

“It’s a girl, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Go. Don’t worry about them.”

I must have looked confused.

He wobbled his head, the Indian way, and before I knew what was happening, he was leading me farther down the hallway, the slap-slosh of Papa’s slippers turning right, down the half staircase, down to the Dufour mansion’s side door and the gravel drive. Papa took out his jangling keys, unlocked the door used for deliveries, and held it open.

He smiled kindly and gestured with his head.

“Go. You are working very hard, Hassan. You deserve some fun. I will take care of Mehtab and your aunt, don’t you worry. The ting about agitated hens, you throw some corn, you cluck over them a bit, and in no time they settle down. So go. I will take care of them. Not to worry.”

“Listen up, all of you.”

Madame Mallory and Monsieur Leblanc stood in the doorway of Le Saule Pleureur’s kitchen in heavy overcoats and hats.

“Henri and I will be gone for most of the day. We have some errands to run in Clairvaux-les-Lacs. So you will collectively assume the day’s responsibilities in my absence, and I will review your work when we return at eighteen hundred hours.”

It was a couple of years into my apprenticeship, and not, in itself, entirely unheard-of as Monsieur Leblanc and Madame Mallory occasionally took time off together, a morning here, an afternoon there, for errands or a little relaxation. We were never entirely sure about the true nature of their relationship, whether discreet Monsieur Leblanc and intensely private Mallory indulged in some form of amour when away from the restaurant and its staff; there was much speculation in the kitchen on this point. Margaret and I, perhaps influenced by our own secret, were convinced the elderly couple were lovers, but Jean-Pierre and Marcel took the opposite view.

On such days when the two went on an outing, Madame Mallory divvied up the day’s preparations for the evening meal among all of us. I, of course, was always given the least complicated of the assignments. On this blustery fall day, however, Madame Mallory had the devil in her, and she decided to mix things up, to keep us on our toes. Jean-Pierre, chef de cuisine, master of the meats, was tasked with making dainty desserts. Margaret, so skilled with sweets and pastry, was ordered to get her hands dirty with the fish. And I, the novice, was expected to prepare and precook the evening’s main meat dishes, which included, among other things, six wild hare, the same amount of pigeons, a gigot, and a pork joint. Most were perennials on the menu and were simple executions of well-known Mallory recipes. They did not worry me.

The hare, however, they were a surprise.

“Chef, is there any particular way you want me to cook the hare?”

“Yes. I want you to astonish me,” she said, and without further instruction, she and Monsieur Leblanc were out the door.

Well, you can imagine, no sooner had they left than the three of us went to work, lips pursed, brows beaded with sweat, keenly aware we had each been given an exam to determine how flexible we were in the kitchen. Jean-Pierre was soon dusted in flour, whipping up mille-feuille with preserved citrus cream made from Menton lemons, while Margaret, stern-faced with concentration, made a crayfish-and-sherry saffron sauce to accompany meaty chunks of pike grilled perfectly on metal skewers.

If I am honest, most of the day is lost to me in a blur of relentless hard work conducted at a furious pace. I do remember that after I butchered the hares, I marinated the pieces in white wine, bay leaf, crushed garlic, malted vinegar, sweet German mustard, and a few crushed and dried juniper berries, for that slightly pungent and piney aftertaste. Suitably softened, the hare then spent several hours cooking slowly in a cast-iron pot. It was nothing grand. It was simply my take on an old-fashioned country recipe, fleetingly glanced at during a study session up in Madame Mallory’s attic library, but it just seemed right for a chilly and windy autumn night.

The side dishes I prepared were a mint-infused couscous, rather than the traditional butter noodles, and a cucumber-and-sour-cream salad dashed with a handful of lingonberries. I thought together they would make soothing and light counterpoints to the heavy mustard tang of the stewed hare. Of course, now, looking back, I realize the cucumber and cream was, conscious or not, inspired by raita, the yogurt-and-cucumber condiment of my homeland.

Madame Mallory and Monsieur Leblanc returned in the early evening, as promised, and we watched anxiously as the chef silently took off her overcoat, donned her whites, and made the rounds, inspecting what each of us had prepared. I recall that she actually had fairly kind words to say about all of our efforts, for her, albeit she never missed an opportunity to point out how each of us could have improved our dishes, with this adjustment or another.

Jean-Pierre’s red fruit tarts, for example, had a very respectable crust, firm, and the lip-puckering crème de cassis filling also had just the right balance of fruity sweetness and tart acidity. But when everything came together it all lacked somewhat in originality, she sniffed. A little grated nutmeg on the crème fraîche would have elevated the dessert into something special, as would have a few wild strawberries from the woods, sprinkled around the rim of the plate.

Margaret, meanwhile, had, besides the grilled pike, made rouget stuffed with asparagus and simmered in a grapefruit bouillon, before wrapping the fish in a filo jacket that was lightly baked in the oven. “Very unusual, I grant you, Margaret. But the pastry ruins it, for me. It’s a nervous tick with you, always wrapping everything in pastry dough. You must be more confident and leave your comfort zone. Such strong flavors—rouget and asparagus and grapefruit—they do not need a pie crust slapped on top.”

By now she had wandered over to my station, where I stood nervously, a greasy tea towel hanging from my shoulder. Madame Mallory inspected the gigot—the spring lamb, its skin perforated with garlic slivers, dusted in cumin and herbes de Provence, all ready to enter the oven—but didn’t comment. The pork joint was already roasting in the oven, but was still too raw for a tasting, and the pigeon avec petits pois simply received a head nod.

Madame Mallory was, however, drawn to the cast-iron pot bubbling on the stove, pulsing and filling the air with a vinegary steam. She lifted the heavy lid and peered inside at the game stew. She sniffed, took a fork to a joint of hare, and the meat broke off easily. Chef Mallory then snapped her fingers, and Marcel rushed over with a little plate and a spoon. She tried the hare with some of the mustard gravy spooned over the minty couscous and the accompanying sour-cream-cucumber salad.

“A bit heavy-handed with the juniper berries, I would say. You only need three or four to feel their presence. Otherwise, the taste, it’s too German. But, really, other than that, very well done, particularly the untraditional side dishes. Simple but effective. I must say, Hassan, you have the right feel for game.”

The explosion was immediate.

“C’est merde. Complètement merde.”

Mallory’s public compliment, highly unusual, was just too much for Jean-Pierre. Unable to contain his fury any longer, Jean-Pierre snapped his foot hard, which in turn sent his clog shooting forward like a missile at the startled-looking Marcel on the far side of the kitchen. But the apprentice showed immense grace and speed for a boy his size, for he dropped to the floor like a felled stag at the crucial moment. The footwear continued on its trajectory and hit the kitchen’s far wall with a loud crack, taking down on its descent a jug sitting on a shelf, which crashed loudly to the floor in a shower of shattering pottery shards.

Stunned silence.

We braced ourselves for Madame Mallory’s inevitable explosion, but to our astonishment it never occurred. Instead, Jean-Pierre, still red-faced with anger, hobbled forward, one clog on and one clog off, and stood before Madame Mallory, shaking his fist at her.

“How can you do this to us?” he fumed. “C’est incroyable. We, who have been so loyal, have put up with your tyranny for so long, have devoted ourselves to your kitchen, cast aside for this little shit? Who is this boy, your plaything here? Where is your decency?”

Madame Mallory was the color of Asiago cheese.

Remarkable as it sounds, until that point she’d had absolutely no idea that by singling me out, by taking me under her wing, by making me so obviously her “chosen” one, she had deeply offended her devoted chef de cuisine. But when in that moment she realized what she had done, that as a result of her insensitivity poor Jean-Pierre was tortured with jealousy, her emotions were visibly stirred.

You could see it in her face. For if there was one human condition that Madame Mallory understood, it was jealousy, the intense pain of realizing there are those in the world who simply are greater than we are, surpassing us, in some profound way, in all our accomplishments. She did not show outward signs, of course, for that was not her way, but you could see the strong emotions trembling just behind her eyes. And the pain she felt, it was not for herself, of this I am sure, but for her chef de cuisine, long-suffering like her in the dark shadows of Le Saule Pleureur’s kitchen.

But Jean-Pierre was off on a tear, strutting back and forth in front of the range, peeling off his whites and theatrically throwing them on the kitchen floor. “I can’t work here any longer. I’ve had enough. You impossible woman!” he yelled.

At that remark, however, Monsieur Leblanc stepped forward, to protectively shield Madame Mallory from Jean-Pierre’s anger.

“Now stop that, you ungrateful bastard. You have crossed the line.”

But Mallory stepped forward, too, and, much to our amazement, took Jean-Pierre’s shaking fist in her hand and brought it up to her lips so she could kiss his raw and red knuckles.

“Cher Jean-Pierre. You are entirely right. Forgive me.”

Jean-Pierre came to a screeching halt. He was unnerved, maybe even frightened, by this strange Madame Mallory before him, and he looked to me like a child who had just seen a parent act entirely out of character because of something he had done. So now Jean-Pierre fell over himself trying to apologize, but Madame Mallory put a finger to his lips and sternly said, “Hush. Stop there. There is no need.”

She held his hands to her and said, with her usual authority, “Jean-Pierre, please, you must understand. Hassan, he is not like you and me. He is different. Lumière and Le Saule Pleureur, they can’t hold him. You’ll see. He has much farther to travel. He will not be with us long.”

Madame Mallory then made Jean-Pierre sit on a stool, which he did, hanging his head in shame. She asked Marcel to fetch him some water, which the boy brought, two hands holding the glass, because he was trembling so. After Jean-Pierre gulped the water down and he seemed calmer, Chef Mallory made him look up at her again.

“You and I, this place is in our blood, and we will both live and die here, in the kitchen of Le Saule Pleureur. Hassan, he has the makings of a great chef, it is true, and he has talent beyond anything you and I possess. But he is like a visitor from another planet, and in some ways he is to be pitied, for the distance he has yet to travel, the hardships he has yet to endure. Believe me. He is not my favorite. You are.”

The air, it was electric. But Chef Mallory simply looked over at Monsieur Leblanc and said matter-of-factly, “Henri. Take a note. We must call the solicitor tomorrow. It must be made clear, once and for all, that when I am gone, Jean-Pierre will inherit Le Saule Pleureur.”

And she was right. Three years after I began my apprenticeship at Le Saule Pleureur, I was ready to move on. An offer from a top restaurant in Paris, on the Right Bank, behind the Élysée Palace, stoked my ambition and lured me north. Madame Mallory said she thought the offer of sous chef, at a very busy restaurant in Paris, and with the possibility of promotion to premier sous chef, it was exactly what I needed. “I’ve taught you what I can,” she said. “Now you need to season. This job will do that.”

So it was, in essence, decided, and a kind of bittersweet mixture of sadness and excitement was heavy in the air. And the ambivalence of this period is crystallized for me in that day when Margaret and I drove to the gorge at the end of Lumière’s valley, on our day off, for a walk along the local Oudon River running around the base of the ragged-edged Le Massif.

Our outing started in town, when we first went by the local cash-and-carry to pick up lunch, some Cantal and Morbier cheese and a few apples. Margaret and I drifted through the shop’s narrow aisles, past the hazelnuts in red mesh sacks and the clouded Corsican olive oils. Margaret was just ahead of me, passing along the section of the aisles devoted to chocolates and biscuits, when a knot of men in their early twenties, Lumière’s handball team, came boisterously down the other side of the aisle, looking to purchase some snacks and beer for their sports club. I remember they had ruddy faces and were immensely fit and their hair was wet from having just come from the showers.

Margaret’s face lit up when she saw them, they had all been through the local school together, and she turned and said, “Go pay. I will catch up with you in a minute.” So I turned around and crossed over into the next aisle on my way to the cashier. But a pot of imported lemon curd caught my eye, which I wanted to have with the local cheeses, a kind of ersatz chutney, and I popped the jar into the wire basket on my arm before continuing down the aisle.

It was when I was directly on the other side of the stack containing the chocolates and biscuits that I heard a male voice asking what had happened to her “nègre blanc,” followed by all the other men laughing. I remember pausing—listening intently—but I never heard Margaret challenge the remark. She just ignored it, pretended it never happened, and then joined their laughter as they continued with their provincial palaver and teasing on some other subject. And there was a moment of disappointment, I must confess, when I held my breath and waited for her response, but I also knew Margaret was anything but a racist, so I pushed on and paid the bill and she joined me shortly thereafter.

We stashed our goodies in her Renault 5 and then drove to the end of the valley, parking in the state forest’s sanctioned parking lot, where fall’s yellow and orange leaves created a kind of natural papier-mâché carpet under our feet. There we laced on good walking boots and shrugged on our kit, and slammed the car trunk shut, finally setting off at a brisk pace, hands intertwined, across the seventeenth-century stone bridge that spanned the river.

It was a sparkling fall day but summer was dying and a slight melancholia fluttered down on us each time a yellowed leaf fell to the ground. The river below the bridge was as clear and sharp as Sapphire gin, the water gushing and gurgling around fat rocks. Small brook trout flitted about the pools, sucking in flies, or working their fins as they sulked in eddies. A picture-perfect stone cottage stood in the hollow on the far side of the river, and a state employee, a forestier, lived in the cottage with his new wife and baby, and at that moment when we crossed the bridge birch smoke was rising from its chimney.

Margaret and I followed the forest trail downstream, the river to our right, the sheer rock face of Le Massif, the snowcapped Jura mountain, rising majestically to our left. I recall that the forest air was cool and damp and mossy, filled with a water spray that fell finely from the mountain’s granite face soaring high above us.

Slowly, our hands swinging, we started talking about the offer from Paris, delicately, neither of us really discussing the great underlying question, as to what might happen to us. A stream fell suddenly down the mountain to our left, tumbling and cascading, its lace of white water leaving a trail of mossy carpet on shiny veins of feldspar. I remember, like it was yesterday, the way Margaret looked that morning, the faded blue jeans, the light blue fleece, the day’s wind naturally raising color on her cheeks.

“It’s a good offer, Hassan. Well deserved. You must take it.”