The Pasha of Cuisine

by Saygin Ersin

  Yet the more he thought about Kamer, the deeper his mind seemed to sink into a quagmire and questions raced through his mind. According to what the Lady had been telling him, if he’d understood correctly, he was going to go to Alexandria, find Kamer, and hear the truth from her. But what was he supposed to say? What was he going to ask her? Would Kamer be able to understand what he was telling her? Did someone named Kamer really exist? Had she been alive; was she alive now? He understood better than ever why Majnun had asked Layla, “Who are you?” after meeting her in the desert. He had seen Kamer so often in his dreams that he had forgotten she actually existed in the world.

  He decided that the Lady was right. The truth was not what Kamer would say. The truth was Kamer herself. And as long as he was encountering visions of her in his dreams rather than seeing the woman herself, the world would not turn for the cook. That was why he had to leave.

  The Lady of Essences did not leave her cabin for the next four days. The cook knew that she was hiding from him and his questions. She had nothing more to say and no answers to give. That was only the inevitable consequence of an inevitable situation: for the first time in his life, and in every sense of the word, the cook was truly alone.

  The cook had been ready long before the ship approached the harbor of Suez and the sailors lowered the gangplank onto the pier. But he did not disembark at first. He knew that the Lady, who had been avoiding him for days, would come to bid him farewell. After a while she emerged from her cabin, smiling—but her smile betrayed confusion. She approached the cook, stroked his cheek with her palm, and said, “Good luck.”

  “Thank you,” the cook replied. Hundreds of questions were filling his mind, but he brushed them aside. “Thank you,” he repeated, “for everything you’ve done for me.”

  He turned to leave, thinking that the Lady had nothing more to say. But he was wrong.

  “Don’t forget,” the Lady said, her voice as warm as her palm on his cheek, “loneliness is what you feel when you miss someone calling out your name.”

  The cook strode down the gangplank onto the pier. When he turned around after a dozen or so steps, he heard the Lady’s voice again: “Weigh anchor!”

  The cook listened to the clamor of the sailors as he walked away, and then the noise of the harbor, the shouting of porters, the calls of merchants, and the cries of touters from a nearby market drowned out their voices. When he stepped through the large gate of the wall separating the harbor and the city, Captain Behrengi’s black-sailed ship disappeared into the realm of silence.

  During his journey to Cairo along the banks of the River Nile, the cook recalled how he had walked under the scorching heat of the sun and over barren earth to reach its shores. As he got closer to the river, the baked earth gave way to greenery, but the heat remained the same. The waters of the Nile gave life to the desert, but rather than cooling the air, the river filled it with humidity so intense that the cook found it suffocating. But he walked on, without waiting to run into a caravan, guide, or fellow traveler, without stopping unless he had to, asking for directions along the way.

  After five days of walking through fields, gardens, and vineyards, the cook saw the sea, and to the left he saw the city of Alexandria abutting seemingly infinite green fields. The city was surrounded by walls, behind which white buildings and minarets rose up into the air. Perhaps it was indeed as beautiful as the Lady had said it was, but the darkness in the cook’s soul was able to devour the whiteness of the city even from a distance.

  He might have been in denial about it in the moment, but in truth the cook was thinking about giving up. Cairo was behind him now, and the harbor of Suez was even further back. He knew that the Lady of Essences was probably on the open seas by then—either travelling back home or continuing on her journey—and that going back to her home would be the worst thing he could possibly do, as he knew he wouldn’t be able to look her in the eye.

  Up ahead on his right, where the green came to an end, a desert began, one that stretched all the way to the land of Nubia. The Mediterranean stretched out in the distance. The cook considered going back home. But what would happen if he did? Would he spend the rest of his life cooking for the House of Pleasure, just like Master Adem, and cursing his past just like him, too?

  The cook was terrified, and his sole desire was to run away. But it seemed to him that the world was only as big as the landscape that spread out before him. Apart from the sea, the desert, and distant unknown lands, only Alexandria seemed to exist in the world, and that was the only place he could go.

  He kept walking.

  When he entered the city, he began to follow the Lady’s somewhat odd instructions. “Walk toward the sea, toward the Eastern Harbor,” she had told him. “Walk on the streets that look out onto the western tip of the island of Faros. You’ll find the Master’s shop eventually.”

  That was it. There was no mention of the name of a square or a street, or anything else.

  Soon enough he found the streets she had mentioned and began to walk along them. They were modest streets, lined with buildings that had shops on the ground floor and apartments on the upper floors. As the cook wandered around, he stumbled upon what he was looking for on his right, between a grindery and a tinsmith: the Master Librarian’s bookshop. He peered through the window. It was fairly large inside, but it was hard to tell just how large because the rear of the shop was shrouded in darkness.

  As he hesitantly pushed the door open, light streamed into the shop, revealing more of its depths. In the farthest corner past some bookshelves, there was a large desk, and a thin figure was sitting in a large chair behind it.

  The cook stepped through the doorway and, as he walked toward the figure, he was surprised to see that with each step he was leaving deep footprints on the floor. The dust was so thick that it seemed that no one had been there in centuries.

  When he was finally standing in front of the figure, the cook realized that the man was also looking back at him. A shiver ran down his spine. The man had the oldest face he had ever seen in his life. The deep wrinkles on his face made him look so ancient that even death himself would have seemed young compared to him. The hood of the man’s worn cloak was pulled over his head, but the cook could see his honey-colored eyes, which gleamed with the vigor of a young man.

  “I’m looking for the Master Librarian,” the cook said.

  “I am he,” the man replied in a clear voice that was remarkably youthful.

  It occurred to the cook that the man seated before him was very much like the books in the shop: ancient, yellowed, but very much there and alive.

  “I bring you greetings from the Lady of Essences,” the cook said.

  The Master Librarian searched his face, a hint of bemused surprise in his expression, and replied, “I have not heard from her for a long time. But I do know that the Lady wouldn’t send just anyone to bring her greetings.”

  The cook averted his eyes and nodded. As he went over one question, turning it over and over in his mind, the master said, “You’re still quite young. Would you be so kind as to tell me which masters you studied with before coming here?”

  The cook understood that the question was the first link in a chain of questions, and saw where it was going. “Before staying at the Lady’s house, I was the guest of the el-Haki brothers,” he said, somewhat abashed. “I know, it’s not nearly enough, but—”

  The master interrupted him. “You can’t know that,” he said. “Yes, you’re only at the beginning of a long road. You’ve not yet learnt the secrets of dough and baking bread from Master Kirkovyan, or the power of fire and the intricacies of cooking from Master Elşad. You’ve not yet visited Turkistan. You don’t know anything about the language of animals or the science of meat, let alone the miracles of milk. You’re only a beginner when it comes to the art of wielding a knife. You know little of wine or olives and their oil, what grows in fields and what grows on trees in the wild, or what can be found in the seas and wa
ters of the world, not to mention your ignorance of water itself and much else. But, you’re here! That is what concerns us. Tell me, why did the Lady of Essences send you here?”

  It seemed that the Master Librarian wanted to hear the cook say what was truly on his mind. The cook could resist no longer and replied, “I am here to learn the great secret of my art from you, so that I can become the Pasha of Cuisine.”

  The Master Librarian’s eyes filled with mischief. “Yes,” he said, nodding slowly. “You have to learn the secret to become a Pasha of Cuisine. Seeing as the Lady thinks the time is right, go on then, ask me your question.”

  The cook was confused. He didn’t know what it was he should be asking, and the enthusiasm in the master’s eyes seemed to be fading. “Do you not have a question?” he asked.

  The cook blurted, “What is the great secret of my art? Please teach me.” But before he could even complete his questions, the master’s eyes dimmed even further.

  “Is that your question?” he asked.

  The cook lapsed into silence and as he did so, the master slowly turned his gaze from the cook’s face.

  “So that’s your question,” he said after a long pause. “If that’s the case, this is very sad indeed. It’s sad to realize that the Lady was wrong.”

  The cook felt as if he’d turned a corner only to find himself on a dead-end street. His voice full of contempt, the Master Librarian said, “You’re still immature. More so than a complete novice. You haven’t asked anything at all. You haven’t even managed to ask the wrong question properly. You have no idea about which facet of your art carries the great secret. If an apprentice who had thought at least a little about his profession had been standing in your place, he would have at least said, ‘Teach me the secrets of the knife,’ ‘Teach me the secrets of fire,’ or ‘Teach me the secrets of cooking.’ Because even in his novice’s mind he would have been able to realize that the great secret of his art lies hidden in one of those things. He would have been wrong, obviously. But at least he would have had something of an idea regarding his art and over time, that idea would grow, helping him understand the mistakes he was making and leading the apprentice to the right question one day. Such an apprentice would never have come up to me and asked, ‘Teach me the great secret of my art’ as if he were a neophyte who knew nothing about his art.”

  The cook managed only a pathetic whimper in response. If he had been able to unknot his tongue, he would have begged the master to help him and show him the way, but before he could get a word out, the Master Librarian silenced him by raising two fingers in the air.

  “I’m here to help whoever is worthy of it,” the master said. “As long as you remain in Alexandria, my door is open to you. You have all the time you want and as many chances as you want to ask the right question. But, as you’ve been told, if you give up and leave Alexandria, you will never find me again.”

  The Master Librarian closed his eyes. The bookshop was suddenly enveloped in an ancient, parched silence, and the cook had no choice but to leave.

  In the following days he spent in Alexandria, the cook thought about what the Lady and the master had told him. The question nagged at him: truly, what was the secret to his profession? When he was being taught by Brother Sa’d at the el-Haki brothers’ house, he was almost convinced that the greatest secret to cooking was the stars. But what Brother Sadr had taught him was also important. The secrets of medicine that were revealed to him made the stars seem a little duller as a result. And then at the Lady’s mansion everything changed again. That time, spices took the foreground and pushed what he had learned until then into the shadows. The cook was only just starting to realize what his journey was about. It wasn’t merely a matter of learning. At the place he would have gone after the Lady’s mansion, he would have learned about fire, meat, or some other aspect of cooking, and he would have been astounded yet again by what he learned, but each time, what he learned would make what had learned before seem like ordinary knowledge rather than a mystery, and the cook would finally see that the secret truth which set him apart from other cooks was not hidden in what he learned or what he knew, and that he would have to search elsewhere for it, in places that were deeper and more internal.

  The cook finally understood why his journey was so important, but that understanding trapped him in such a hopeless state of mind even his journey started to lose meaning. As soon as he left Alexandria, the master would disappear, and it wouldn’t make any difference afterwards if he had struck upon the right question. For the time being, Alexandria was his entire world. It was both his prison and his only salvation. There was only one thing he could do, even if it took him until the end of time: he had to stay where he was and search for the right question.

  After spending three nights walking the empty streets of Alexandria by the city walls and the ruins on the harbor, one early morning the cook found himself on a hilltop observing a large mansion just outside the city.

  He wasn’t sure why or how he ended up there. It was almost as if he had woken up on the small hill on which he was standing. He hadn’t asked anybody anything, nor had anyone told him to go there, but somehow the cook knew where she was. The red rays of the rising sun were gleaming on the walls of the Darıcızade mansion.

  The cook was feeling the frightening pleasure of being so close to Kamer after so long. With each passing day, his desire to see her grew. The Kamer of his dreams was slowly returning to reality.

  The cook looked at the tall thick walls surrounding the mansion. They seemed insurmountable, but the cook knew what he had to do: he had to enter the mansion as a flavor, as a scent which could seep in through the gaps under doors and the cracks in the walls. He had to interpret feelings, find weaknesses, and replace feelings with other emotions and servile desires. He knew that was the only way he would ever get into the mansion. The cook knew very well what he had to do, but he couldn’t do it. He hadn’t yet become the Pasha of Cuisine.

  The cook did the only thing he could do, which was wait. He knew Kamer would go out sooner or later and he was waiting for that time. Once it came, he would find a way to stand before her even if it cost him his life. Perhaps they wouldn’t even have a minute to talk, perhaps the guards would grab their daggers as soon as they saw him. But it didn’t matter. The cook did not need much time. A moment, just a moment so he could look into Kamer’s eyes—because the truth was brief, and it lay in Kamer’s eyes.

  But Kamer was nowhere to be seen.

  Heart pounding, he watched each group of people leave the mansion. He would wait on top of the hill until they approached the city’s southern wall and then he’d quickly run down, entering the city through the southwestern gate which used to be called the Sun Gate, and follow them. The women of the Darıcızade mansion traveled to the city on sedan chairs. Aside from the slaves who carried the chairs on their shoulders, there were also around a dozen guards accompanying each group. Half of those surrounded the sedan chair at the front, while the other half guarded the concubines, maids, and eunuchs who followed behind, which made it impossible for the cook to get any closer than ten paces. But still, he watched. Buoyed by the hope of actually seeing Kamer, he searched for even a mere trace of her, a crack in the wall.

  Months went by this way. The possibility of seeing Kamer again made everything else pale in comparison. With each passing day, he thought less and less about the Master Librarian. He told himself that if he could only be reunited with Kamer, there wouldn’t be a problem on earth he couldn’t solve. But he couldn’t find her. The walls of the Darıcızade mansion were not only high but silent. Not a whisper escaped them. Even the residents of the city knew nothing of the Darıcızade family and the cook almost started to think that their existence was a figment of his imagination.

  But then a coincidence saved him.

  Once again he had followed a group of people who had left the mansion and were headed for the market. The group of women, who were out to do some shopping, was
larger than usual. Even though they were surrounded by twice the usual number of eunuchs and guards, the women were unstoppable as they scattered around the market, looking at fabrics. The cook watched them carefully. It was the first time he’d been able to get so close to the women from the mansion, and his heart was pounding. He listened to the conversations of every woman he could get close to, hoping to hear Kamer’s name or a whisper about her, while at the same time keeping an eye on the guards.

  Just then a breeze brought him a miracle that made his heart beat so fast it hurt.

  The breeze had blown back the thin green silver-embroidered veil of a woman standing in front of the stall next to him. The cook only saw her face for the briefest of moments, but it was enough for him to be certain. He recognized the face he saw. The woman’s name was Şehandan. She had once played the lute and sang at the House of Pleasure, and she was one of the twelve girls gifted to the Darıcızade heir by Sirrah. The cook knew she had traveled there with Kamer, so she would undoubtedly know where she was or what she was doing. He decided that he had to ask her.

  The cook didn’t have enough time to be subtle, and so he did the first thing that came to mind. The market was crowded and noisy, so the cook suddenly sprang forward, took her by the arm, and pulled her into a narrow gap between two stalls that was concealed behind some fabric. Şehandan was terrified. At first she opened her mouth to scream, but when she realized she was face to face with the cook, she gasped.