The Pasha of Cuisine

by Saygin Ersin

  The days and nights at the el-Haki brothers’ house passed with reading, writing, and learning, and when the cook could answer questions such as, “If, in a person’s horoscope, Saturn is in Libra, Jupiter is in Cancer, Mercury is retrograde in Virgo, and the sun is in Leo, and at the time of question, the Moon is in Taurus, and Saturn is in retrograde in Scorpio, what will this person’s state of mind and mental outlook be like, and if said person has a congenial heart condition on his father’s side, in which circumstances regarding the movement of the stars should he watch out for the health of his heart and which sort of regimen should he follow?” Brother Sa’d and Brother Sadr decided that he would only be wasting his time by staying with them any longer and politely requested him to start getting ready for the next step in his journey of knowledge.

  They hadn’t told him until his last night where he would be going. When the time came to bid each other farewell, they asked him to cook dishes that would cheer them up.

  The cook rose to the occasion magnificently. Thanks to that dinner, the el-Haki brothers’ house enjoyed its most cheerful and enjoyable night, and the brothers did not bicker. Rather, each told anecdotes and jokes regarding their fields, and as the hours ticked away, the conversation turned to their past, as far back as their childhood.

  Hours after the evening prayer, with Brother Sadr yawning, the cook could no longer restrain his impatience and he asked where he would be going. Brother Sa’d cast a sidelong glance at his twin and, with a wry smile on his lips, he said, “Do you want to know where you’ll be going or what you’ll be learning?”

  The cook thought it best to keep silent. Brother Sa’d continued, “From here, you’ll go south toward the Persian Gulf. When you reach the city of Basra, you’ll see a small ship with black sails docked at the harbor. Its captain is named Behrengi. He will take you to Hormuz Island. When you reach the island, do not tarry in the city but walk straight along with the sea on your right. After passing along a long beach with reddish sand, you’ll see some boulders. Climb over them and after scaling two hills, you’ll see a beach with a large pier and a stone mansion hidden between some outcroppings. Knock on the door and say you wish to speak to the Lady of Essences. She will teach you about spices.”

  Along with the sweet fear of taking a step into the unknown, the cook was also seized by excitement. Spices had been a mysterious riddle for him ever since he first started practicing his art. For as long as he’d been aware, cooking, blending flavors together, and imagining how the result would taste before even putting the pot over the stove had been quite easy. But when it came to spices, everything was different. He was in awe of the fact that even the smallest pinch of spice could change a food’s taste, and his mind balked at how a spice that was used in the same quantity for the same dish could create a different taste every single time.

  In short, the cook’s clockwork logic faltered when it came to spices, and even his vast store of often arrogant skills had to retreat. “Is it not too soon?” he was about to ask, but he held his tongue and said, “Let’s hope for the best.”

  During the final hours of their last night together, Brother Sadr could no longer resist the pull of sleep and bade the cook farewell before retiring to bed, even giving him a hug in a rare display of affection. Brother Sa’d made his way toward his observatory, and the cook, now alone, went to pack his belongings.

  Brother Sa’d knocked on his door toward dawn. “Venus is almost rising,” he said. The cook left with his bundle on his back, and, after looking at that sacred star burning on the horizon toward the east with a yellowish gleam, he embraced Brother Sa’d.

  “What you have learned here will always be of use to you,” Brother Astrologer said. “My wish is for you to use everything we have taught you for the sake of good. If the day comes when you are in need of the science of the stars, no matter where you might be in the world, talk to the first astrologer you find and mention our names. Whatever information you desire will be handed to you.”

  The cook thanked him.

  He began to walk south toward the Gulf of Persia. When he turned around for the last time, he saw Brother Sa’d going back into the house.

  The journey from Baghdad toward the city of Basra was an unexpectedly nightmarish one. Alone and far away from the house and the brothers, so far from his books and the learning which had occupied his mind for months, all the memories he thought he had forgotten began to emerge one by one, and the gloomy thoughts he once believed he had cast off began to occupy his mind and his soul even more painfully than before.

  The cook could not remember ever having felt so helpless and alone. Kamer was always in his thoughts: during the day when he tried to take shelter from the scorching sun in the shadows of an outcropping at a dingy caravanserai or in the corner of a loud inn, or at night as he walked on a deserted path in the cool desert air or rested next to an oasis with a caravan group he was following. After all the time that had passed, it was now even more painful to think about her. Now he had questions, endless unanswerable questions that multiplied, as deep and endless as the remediless suffering that had seized his soul: where was she, what was she doing, was she hungry, was she cold, was she a wife, was she a mother, did she still dance, was she happy, did she regret anything, did she sometimes think of the past or did gloomy thoughts occupy her mind with even one thousandth of the strength that they occupied the mind of this Majnun traipsing across the desert, or … had she forgotten him long ago?

  He wondered if she had, and, if that was the case, as terrible as that possibility was, it at least offered a consolation: that thing called forgetting might be possible.

  The cook’s mind was hopelessly mired in questions when he arrived at Basra harbor. The trip across the water did him well; he helped the sailors, aided the helmsmen by using the stars as a compass, and found solace in the captain’s endless tales.

  After four nights and five days, the small ship cast anchor in the harbor of Hormuz. The cook left the city and began walking along the shore with the sea on his right. He longed to find his new master and lose himself in knowledge, learning, and memorizing again.

  He climbed the boulders and, just as Brother Sa’d had told him, he saw the small pier and the stone mansion in a small cove further down. It was quiet and calm. The rocky peaks blocked the wind and the crescent-shaped bay sheltered the beach from the waves of the open sea.

  Perhaps alerted to his presence by the noise of the stones clattering under his feet as he walked down toward the sea, someone had opened the door of the large, two-story mansion before he arrived. Standing in the doorway was a tall, strikingly handsome man with olive skin. The cook climbed the four steps to the door and announced that he wanted to see the Lady of Essences.

  “Did you come here from the el-Haki brothers’ house?” the man asked him.

  When the cook nodded, the man stepped aside and invited him in.

  As he took his first step into the mansion, the cook first thought his mind was playing tricks on him. The door opened into a large room packed with all manner of spices. Men and women were seated at tables placed in rows in the middle of the room, and they pressed, ground, sorted, and sifted dried spices, roots, seeds, flowers, pips, and mastic from the large and small sacks, jars, containers, and bottles by their feet. After weighing the items out on tiny scales, they placed them in velvet pouches with the Lady’s seal on them or put them in porcelain containers. They performed their tasks in absolute quiet and calm, as if they’d been intoxicated by the thousands of scents filling the room.

  When the cook began to walk toward the middle of the room, enchanted by the smells filling his nostrils, some of which were completely new to him, the man who greeted him at the door politely took him by the arm and said, “The Lady is upstairs, on the terrace.” Together they ascended the stairs next to the left wall of the room, and after walking down a long, dim, rather cool corridor with doors on each side, they arrived at the bottom of yet another staircase.

>   “Please, go on,” the man said, standing aside. The cook began to climb the stairs. The light sea breeze drifting in from upstairs began to clear his thoughts, and the clearer his mind became, the more he thought about certain strange details that he had seen downstairs. All the women and the men in the Lady’s mansion were surprisingly beautiful or handsome. They were all barefoot, and they all were wearing long white gowns, obviously of silk, which left their shoulders and arms bare. They were wearing silver belts which consisted of links in the shape of flowers.

  He thought it may have been a trick of the light or perhaps his confusion, but what was even more striking was that they all resembled one another. The cook knew he had seen men and women downstairs, but when he stopped and thought about it, he couldn’t recall who had been female or who had been male apart from the man who greeted him.

  The cook’s confusion fell from his thoughts when he stepped out onto the terrace. The Lady of Essences was standing toward the edge of the balcony with her back toward him, her hands resting on the stone railing as she looked out at the sea.

  She was wearing the same white dress and silver floral belt as the people downstairs and her black hair fell in waves over her shoulders. The red rays of the setting sun pierced through the dress, illuminating the Lady of Essences’s naked body underneath the thin fabric; her smooth back, her thin waist, her hips which seemed to have been carved from an ebony tree, the two dimples on her lower back, her shapely legs…. It was a silhouette of such perfection that the cook felt compelled to worship rather than lust.

  When the Lady of Essences turned around, her breasts and stomach visible beneath the fluttering cloth of her dress, the cook didn’t know what to say or where to look. He found the solution in bowing his head.

  “Raise your head,” the Lady of Essences said as she approached him. “Such shame only befits evil eyes.”

  After hearing those words, the cook had a singular desire: to withdraw into a shell like a tortoise. He finally looked up and gazed into her eyes, which were like those of the statues of female goddesses that ancient civilizations once raised, eyes that he would never forget for the rest of his days.

  “I am the Lady of Essences,” she said, standing a few steps away, her wavy black hair blowing in the breeze. “The best of all the rarest essences, leaves, roots, flowers, and resins are delivered to my home, and from here they are sent all around the world. This is my work, my science. Now, tell me. Who are you and why have you come?”

  “I am the Pasha of Cuisine,” the cook managed to murmur. “I am here to learn about spices.”

  The Lady of Essences took two graceful steps forward. Fixing her gaze on the cook’s eyes, she repeated, “Why are you here?”

  He realized that she had seen through his words. The way she looked at him compelled him to utter not just the truth, but the simplest piece of honesty that could be expressed in two words unsullied by languishing in the labyrinths of language.

  “To forget,” the cook said.

  The Lady of Essences pursed her lips and nodded. “Perhaps it’s not right for you to be here,” she said thoughtfully. “Perhaps I should send you directly to the Master of Oblivion.” When he heard those words, the cook’s eyes glittered with childish gullibility. “Would you like that?” the Lady of Essences asked.

  The cook faltered. Knowing that it would be uncouth to say “Yes,” he said, “I have never heard of him. But I wonder … where can he be found?”

  The Lady of Essences looked away and said, “Once upon a time, I sent a lad like you to him. He, too, had a burning desire to forget. Only the master could help him, because he is surely the only person on earth who knows all the secrets of the science of forgetting.”

  The cook’s curiosity was piqued. “And was he able to find the master?”

  The Lady looked toward the sea and said, “He did, but it was very difficult. He crossed snowy mountains, traversed dark forests and empty deserts, but finally he found him. The Master of Oblivion was sitting on the shore of a lake. The young man went up to him, introduced himself, and said that he wanted to forget, that he wanted to condemn everything that caused him pain and suffering to oblivion, that he never wanted to recall them again. ‘If you teach me the secrets of this science,’ the young man said, ‘I will do anything you like, even be your servant until the end of my life.’ The master was modest. He said he would teach the lad everything he knew, without asking for anything in return. ‘However,’ the master said, ‘there’s a small problem.’” The Lady of Essences paused and turned around to face the cook, who was listening raptly, and said, “‘I’ve forgotten the secrets of my science, too!’”

  Suddenly realizing she was teasing him, the cook blushed. The Lady laughed, but then with earnest seriousness, she added, “There’s no such thing as forgetting. No matter how hard you try, you only think you’ve forgotten, and over time the things you think you have forgotten emerge again under another guise and tear into your soul. Understand this: whoever says they have forgotten have merely condemned themselves to an endless repetition of the same event until the end of their lives.”

  The Lady of Essences was circling around him as she spoke, running her hand along a string of seashells hanging by the doorway as she moved, making them jingle. Each time she passed by, she made them jingle even louder. After a pause, she snapped, “Do you see what I’m getting at?”

  The truth of the matter was that the cook did not understand, or rather, could not. Finding the bare truth suddenly laid out before him, he was consumed by denial and rebellion. He searched for a reply but could find none. When he finally did hit upon something, he didn’t have the courage to speak the words out loud, not so much out of respect but because he was afraid of the harshness of what she might say—he knew he couldn’t bear another blow of truth.

  The cook was saved from his predicament when five residents who must have heard the sound of the seashells ran up to see what was happening. They lined up by the doorway, awaiting the Lady’s instructions.

  “We have a guest,” the Lady of Essences said. “He has come to our home to learn about spices. Prepare the hammam straightaway. We need to rescue his body from exhaustion and his mind from confusion. We’ll see to his soul later.”

  The cook looked at the people standing on each side of the door, inviting him downstairs with a bow. Only after a few moments did he realize that three of them were female. Habitually uneasy, his soul was suddenly filled with a sense of peace that surprised even himself.

  As they descended the stairs and walked toward the hammam at the end of the hallway, the Lady of Essences continued to give brisk orders: “First rub him down with saffron, camphor, and musk, and prepare the censers. Burn a lot of sage, some hemp, and a pinch of wormwood. Let’s see if his troubles are in his mind or hidden even deeper. Scatter rose leaves over the warm pool, along with lilac, jasmine, and Indian hyacinth. Pour only ambergris into the cold pool.”

  Later the cook would think about how those five pairs of hands undressed him so gently yet quickly. When they undid the sash on his waist a small wave of embarrassment washed over him, but the five pairs of eyes looked at him so guilelessly that the feeling fell away. The smoke rising from the censers cleared his mind until he thought only of the scents filling his nostrils, the sensations on his skin, and the quiet melodies drifting through the air.

  They had the cook lie face down on the warm marble slab in the middle of the hammam, and hands began to wander over his back, his neck, and his legs.

  He recognized the scent of saffron, one of the rarest ingredients in every kitchen. And there was the scent of musk from his childhood, from the Harem rooms filled with scents of perfume. Those two scents brought back the purest memories of his childhood. But the scent of camphor which followed, though not necessarily unpleasant, was so strong it seemed to cover every possible malodor. By virtue of its very nature, it made the cook think of death, rotting, and putrefaction, reminding him that the thorns of life were
still very real.

  Later, the cook dreamed he was lying in a garden full of flowers, a pleasant warmth enveloping his body as if the sun was shining down on him from all sides. He inhaled the scents one by one and in twos and threes, pursuing a dream inside his dream, walking toward infinity in a land of bright hues and a murmur of songs. He almost woke up when he felt a slight cold pricking his body all over like thousands of tiny needles, but then he drifted back to sleep, a deep, uninterrupted sleep that embraced pain as well as pleasure and calm.

  When he awoke, the cook found himself lying naked on a large downy bed. There was nothing in the room apart from a small bedside table with a small earthenware pitcher on top. The only smell was the scent of clean sea air gently blowing in through the open window. Next to his bed he saw one of the white silk gowns everyone at the mansion was wearing with a silver floral belt draped over it.

  He put them on and walked downstairs. He felt vulnerable and naked wearing the thin gown, but he also felt a peculiar lightness, as if his soul had donned the same outfit. He ascribed the feeling to the incense he had breathed in at the hammam and the skilled hands of the Lady’s attendants. In those days, he was so naïve that he didn’t realize that many of our woes are imaginary and the chains we forge for ourselves become heavier the longer we carry them.

  Everyone at the mansion was already awake, calmly going about their tasks. Their hands were deft but unhurried, and their faces showed none of the strain of stress. The cook approached one of them, who was putting black pepper grains through a grinder, and asked him where the Lady was. He received a simple answer: “I don’t know.”