The Pasha of Cuisine

by Saygin Ersin

  But his fears proved unfounded. The men were fluent in the language of the ocean, and when the waves rose up around them, they rowed slower, letting the heaving water carry them forward, and smoothly they made their way toward the shore.

  The cook realized that what he had thought to be one island was actually a collection of hundreds of stony outcrops which the oarsmen deftly navigated. When they reached the actual island by traversing a lagoon, the cook was stunned by the beauty of the place.

  The still water was clearer and brighter than any he had ever seen, neither blue nor green, but clear enough to see not only the fish swimming around but even the grains of sand at the bottom.

  The landscape had changed so suddenly that the terrifying din of the waves beating wildly against the rocks along the rocky reef seemed imaginary, nothing more than a frightening story told on a calm summer evening. The white sand of the seafloor gently rose up until it became a narrow beach which wound around the coast of the island like a pearly belt. Coconut trees grew along the shore, their fronds hanging low over the sand, contrasting with the blue of the sky and white of the beach with the softest shade of green.

  As if in a dream the cook stepped ashore. There was nothing in his mind but the sand shuffling under his feet, the wind caressing his face, the scent of the sea, and the coconut fronds in the sunlight. In the distance he could hear the sound of the waves. When the Lady called out to him he snapped out of his reverie. She was standing up the beach a little ways, about forty or fifty paces inland. The cook ran over to her. The canoes had been pulled up to the shore but at some point the oarsmen had disappeared into the underbrush. The Lady of Essences pointed to some simple twig baskets which had been placed at the edge of the water. The cook was baffled at first, so the Lady picked up one of the baskets and raised it to his nose. Inside was a peculiar shapeless object, covered in a layer of gray-white slime. It smelled foul, like a bucketful of fish left under the sun all day.

  “What is that?” the cook asked, scowling.

  The Lady smiled. “Don’t you recognize it?”

  The first words to come to his mind to describe the smell were filth and carrion. But he held his tongue and merely shook his head. Just then, the oarsmen who had rowed them to the island appeared again from among the trees. Two of them were carrying a large basket, each holding one handle.

  The Lady of Essences met them in the middle of the beach and began speaking in a language the cook had never heard before. As he approached them, he may not have been able to understand what they were saying to each other, but he could tell that they were passionately haggling. The cook’s eyes were fixed on the shapeless objects in the basket, the smallest being the size of his palm and the biggest as large as a coconut. He realized they were dried versions of the things he had seen in the basket on the beach, but he still had no idea what they were.

  The Lady pointed to the grayish-yellow ones in the basket and frowned, expressing her dissatisfaction with clipped words. Then she pointed to some other ones which were much darker in hue and counted on her fingers how much she would pay for the lot of them.

  The islanders seemed to disagree with the amount the Lady proposed. As they grumbled in unison, one of them picked up two of the darkest-colored objects and offered a small piece to the Lady and the cook.

  When the cook raised it to his nose, he smelled a mixture of rotten seaweed and manure. Anyone else may have been repulsed and tossed it aside, but the cook’s nose was trained in scents, and it discerned the base aroma which had emerged from the depths and became stronger as he inhaled the smell. He was so surprised he let out a short laugh: it was ambergris!

  He had experience of how seemingly foul-smelling things could bring zest to a dish. For example, the resin asafetida smelt not unlike rotten onions, which at first had made him approach it cautiously. Unsure of what the result would be, he’d only used a pea-sized amount to grease a pot once before cooking a dish. But the taste that had ensued cleared his mind of all prejudices. The asafetida added a quietly zingy flavor to the dish, like a few slices of salted onion or a baby leek.

  But ambergris was entirely different. It was used in very small amounts, and only for certain sherbets and puddings. The cook also knew that the strange odoriferous was crucial for perfume producers. He had heard that it came from sperm whales, but he’d laughed it off as a silly rumor. Now, however, the truth was before him. The foul-smelling things he’d seen on the beach, placed among the waves to be washed and matured, were dried in the sun for years on end, whereupon they became ambergris, which made up the base scent of many perfumes and acted as a stabilizer for others. And it was valuable enough to lighten the Lady’s treasure chest significantly.

  During that journey, with each passing day the cook encountered something new, and something that astonished him even more than ambergris was musk.

  After a long journey, they arrived in Calcutta, where they met with a Chinese merchant at one of the city’s innumerable spice bazaars. Until that day, they had been met punctually and had been respectfully received at every harbor and market. But that particular merchant kept them waiting for a long time, and when he finally did show up, he greeted the Lady in an overfamiliar manner and proceeded with the transaction immediately, as if there was a queue of customers waiting behind them.

  The merchant’s attitude angered the cook. Never before had he seen anyone talk down to the Lady of Essences in such a way, and he’d also never seen a merchant talk of money without even showing the goods he was selling first.

  What perplexed the cook even more was the Lady’s attitude. Just as she had done when she’d bought the Mecca balsam, she did not haggle and immediately agreed to the price he was asking.

  After the deal was made, the Chinese merchant took a small bundle out of his bag. He removed the cloth, revealing an elegant long-necked vial with a spout so small, it was little more than a slit.

  As if he was about to perform a magic trick, the merchant dramatically pulled a needle out of his pocket and stuck it into the wax stopper on the bottle until it touched the liquid. The merchant then removed the needle and waved it in the air a few times, making the wide dragon-embroidered cuffs of his silk shirt billow.

  Just as the cook was becoming thoroughly fed up with the merchant’s antics and airs, something suddenly took his breath away. And not metaphorically, but literally. The thick scent of the musk hanging in the air was making it difficult for him to breathe. Of course the cook recognized the smell; like everyone who had been born in the Harem, it was one of the first scents he’d ever breathed in. But that was the first time he smelled it in its purest form, and it was unlike anything he could have imagined. After a few gasps he was able to breathe again, and what he experienced next left him astonished; in the middle of that bazaar, the dozens and dozens of scents lingering in the air seemed to be frozen in time. The musk did not block out the other scents but rather made them all the more pronounced, and what was even more intriguing was that it did not allow even one smell to mask another. In short, it had done away with the temporal, spatial, and tonal differences between them. The scent of a pepper plant carried by a merchant who had walked past a minute earlier, the piper cubeba in the stall next to them, and the sandalwood at the other end of the market all had the same intensity.

  The cook put aside all other thoughts and let himself enjoy the peculiar bouquet. As he breathed, taking in all that he could, he saw from the corner of his eye that the Lady of Essences was paying the merchant twice the vial’s weight in gold. He wasn’t surprised in the least.

  As his journey went on, the cook felt that he was getting closer to attaining peace and happiness for the first time in his life.

  His old life seemed so distant. Now he was surrounded by people and the shouts of the sailors, there was always work to be done on the ship, the sea kept him on his toes, and the harbors were enthralling. He may not have had much time to think, but even on those brief occasions when he was alone, it seeme
d to him that his mind was calmer. The pain, melancholy, and longing were still there, but they were not transformed into the fits of suffering that tore at his heart.

  The only thing that bothered him was the Lady of Essences.

  For some reason he could not fathom, she would not let him forget. Not that the word actually existed in her vocabulary, but she was trying to prevent him from concealing things behind a veil of fog in the back of his mind, or at the very least she discouraged him from pretending he had forgotten.

  At every opportunity the Lady reminded the cook of his past and Kamer, even at the most inopportune times such as when the cook was lost in thought, gazing at the sea, the sky, or the moon, or when he was organizing the goods in the hold and sorting out the spices. She would start talking and then deftly weave Kamer, the House of Pleasure, and any other painful topic into the conversation. And she seemed to enjoy it. She would repeat the stories he had told her, laughing.

  The cook could do nothing but laugh along, but anger still welled up within him. The Lady of Essences’s idea of fun, however, was much more than an idle pastime. Every time the cook listened to his own stories told by the Lady, he would grasp a truth that he had been blind to before or misunderstood. He was well aware by this time that “destiny” had not taken Kamer from his life. Just as the Lady of Essences said, what was called “destiny” was the mathematics of the “divine disorder,” and humanity’s biggest mistake was to regard it simply as a creator of consequences. But destiny encompassed not only what a person does but also what they don’t do, what they choose and what they disregard, what they become and what they cannot become. It wasn’t a linear line stretching through time, beginning in the past and extending toward the future. Destiny was a cycle, filled with beginnings as well as endings. It contained unseen, secret causes in addition to consequences. The only thing that mattered was being able to interpret destiny. What the cook and many other people in the world did was merely look at one facet of destiny and then get trapped in a whirlpool. The important thing was to look at the whole cycle, to see the imprints left on times, places, people, and events. Being able to do so revealed the equations hidden within divine mathematics and made clear the opportunities available and those that had been missed.

  On a night when their journey was at a crossroads, they weren’t talking about such things. Rather, they were talking about travel, trade, and other cities.

  The Lady of Essences told him about golden cities hidden in the mountains of China, the glorious ancient capital city of Rome, Venice and Geneva, which became rising stars after the fall of the Romans, and the stunning harbors of Algeria, Tripoli, and Tunisia, which lined the coast of North Africa like a string of pearls.

  When the subject turned to Alexandria, she became quiet and turned to look at the cook. “Whenever Alexandria is mentioned, you think of a city of darkness, don’t you?” she asked.

  It was true; the cook had always imagined Alexandria to be a city of shadows, a nightmarish city that had a dark, painful beauty.

  “But that’s not the case at all,” the Lady of Essences said and then spoke at length about Alexandria. But as she spoke, her voice became more subdued. Her thoughts seemed to be elsewhere. Then she paused, muttered “Alexandria” one more time, and fell silent. She took a few steps away, the wooden deck squeaking beneath her feet, and then returned, gazing into the cook’s eyes as if seeking out the final solution to a puzzle.

  “Alexandria is your final stop,” she murmured. “But you have a long way to go yet. After you leave here, you will study with other masters and learn other secrets, until at last you travel to Alexandria, just like all the other Pashas of Cuisine have done before you. There you will complete your education and learn the greatest secret of your art, and only then will you be the master of every taste in the world.”

  The cook stared at her blankly. The look in the Lady of Essences’s eyes betrayed a slight sense of hopelessness and confusion. “But you,” she said, “I’m afraid you may never become the Pasha of Cuisine. Because … your soul is incomplete. You’re alone. You’re completely alone, and as long as you can’t mend the void within your soul, you’ll remain alone. Having people around you, whether they adore you or hate you, cannot change that fact. That is why you cannot become the Pasha of Cuisine. People with incomplete souls cannot attain completion in anything, in any art or science. What I mean to say is perhaps we’ve been looking at it wrong all along. We thought that becoming the Pasha of Cuisine would save your soul. But that’s not it! Becoming the Pasha of Cuisine will not make your soul whole again. On the contrary, you will only be deserving of that title once you heal your soul. To do that, you have to get rid of that loneliness, which curses you. So complete your adventure, find Kamer, and discover the truth. You have to hear your name fall from Kamer’s lips. Otherwise your adventure will never end and it will drag you into nothingness.”

  “Alexandria?” the cook murmured. Of everything she’d said, that was the only word that stuck in his mind. A misty vision of that city which he had never seen was taking him in its grip like a nightmare, and the fear in his eyes was visible even in the darkness of night.

  “I’m not sure,” the Lady of Essences replied. Her expression wavered between joy and sorrow, and her gaze seemed to be fixed on an invisible realm beyond this world.

  “I’m not sure,” she repeated. “It’s complicated. But from what I can see, it seems that your fate has become tangled just so it can be untangled in Alexandria. A future with Kamer did not exist in your past; you couldn’t have stayed with her as an ordinary cook. But you couldn’t have stayed with her as the Pasha of Cuisine either. You had to leave her so you could take on that title, which is what you did. And now, only by becoming the Pasha of Cuisine can you take her back. If you go to Alexandria, if you can learn the greatest secret of your art—you can begin to hold sway over flavors, and through them you can learn to control emotions and people. Then you will have truly mastered your powers, the greatest on earth. You could take Kamer back. Or perhaps not; perhaps you must not. Maybe then you would become something else altogether. I don’t know. I can’t see that far ahead.”

  The words Lady of Essences was murmuring became less and less distinct, finally giving way to a silence that enveloped the ship and the night, leaving only the soft splashes of small waves and the creaking of the parbuckle to be heard. The Lady suddenly took a few decisive strides toward the wheelhouse and shouted, “Captain Behrengi! Weigh anchor! Hoist the sail! Toward the Red Sea!”

  The captain leaped to action, the officers took their places, and the sailors, who were used to receiving orders at all hours of the night, emerged from their places of slumber and started hauling in the anchor and unfurling the sails.

  The Lady’s expression was half playful, half serious. “I may have given you a future tonight,” she said, looking at the cook. “But it’s also possible that I’ve taken your past from you. Maybe I’ve granted you Heaven on Earth, or drawn the apocalypse ever nearer. I don’t know. My job was to act as your guide and I have done what I could. If I have made the wrong decision, I am ready to suffer the consequences. The rest is up to you.”

  The wind filled the sails with a snap and the ship lurched forward. The cook, who had been listening to the Lady in stunned silence, raised his head to look at the sky and the stars. He turned to the Lady of Essences in a panic. “What am I supposed to do?”

  The Lady laughed and touched the cook’s face. “You’re going to go to Alexandria and find the Master Librarian. And you’re going to ask him to teach you the greatest secret of what it means to be the Pasha of Cuisine.”

  The cook was even more uneasy. He could barely hear the words coming out of his own mouth: “What on earth is the greatest secret?”

  The Lady of Essences held his face between her hands. “It’s a mystery that the master has shared only with Pashas of Cuisine since the beginning of time. Like any mystery, it is simple in essence, but incredibly powerful
. But remember, the work ahead of you will be difficult because you are going to your final destination, to the Master Librarian, much earlier than all the others before you. You should have spent many more years studying and learning. You have not even met half of the masters who would have guided you. But you must succeed. No matter what you do, you must learn the secret because you only get one chance at it. Every Pasha of Cuisine only gets to see the Master Librarian once in his lifetime. You can stay with him for as long as you like. You can try anything to convince him to tell you the secret. But if you give up and leave Alexandria, that will be the end of it. You will never be able to find him again, you will never be able to become a true Pasha of Cuisine, and you’ll be destined to remain incomplete for the rest of your life. Do you understand what I am saying?”

  The cook said nothing but merely looked at the Lady of Essences, his eyes full of questions.

  She pulled her hands away and said, “No, I know nothing about the great secret. I have never seen the Master. I don’t want to confuse you with rumors and hearsay. So, no. Don’t expect me to tell you anything. But don’t forget: if you don’t complete your training, that does not mean you’re still a novice. Experience is not acquired merely through charts and books. Maturity means knowing yourself. That is why you must look inward, learn more about your art, and see your art in yourself and yourself in your art. Think about what you’re doing, how you’re doing it, why you’re doing it. Great mysteries are ancient. They remain in place perpetually and wait for those who can see them. You should search for the secret within yourself, not in the Master Librarian’s words.”

  The cook was in no state to decide whether or not he actually understood what the Lady was telling him. He felt as though the ship had set sail for a land of fairy tales: The Master and the Great Secret. The more he thought about it, the more he wanted to laugh. He knew he was good at what he did. In fact, he was better at it than anyone he’d ever known. But it had always struck him as being quite ordinary. Cooking was to him was what flying was to a bird. What always surprised him was not his creations but the inability of others to create the same. That night, however, he discovered that the essence of his talent contained an otherworldly truth, which was why everything seemed so unreal and distant.