The French for Christmas

by Fiona Valpy

‘Ah, yes,’ I say, nodding gravely, ‘I can see that naming one’s pig could be fraught with jeopardy.’

  After we’ve consumed the best part of a wheel of creamy camembert, Mathieu uncorks an unlabelled bottle of deep gold liquid. ‘Mademoiselle Evie, un petit Armagnac?’

  I allow him to pour a little into my glass and take a sip, trying not to gasp as the firewater burns my throat. It’s certainly fortifying, and fleetingly I give thanks that Mathieu’s work with those lethally sharp butcher’s knives is pretty much finished for the day. As he makes to refill my glass, I shake my head with a laugh and put a hand over the top of it. ‘Merci, but I’d better not... or I might be arrested for a new criminal offense: drunk in charge of a mincing machine!’

  Perhaps it’s the Armagnac that loosens my tongue, or perhaps it’s the memories of cooking alongside my grandmother that this day is conjuring up but, as Eliane and I work side by side that afternoon, I find myself telling her about the years in Paris and London. She asks about the bistro, enthusing about the dishes we used to serve. Pausing as she lifts jars of pâté out of the pressure cooker and sets them on a rack to cool, she glances at me appraisingly.

  ‘You know, Evie, your eyes really shine when you talk about your work. You must miss it?’

  And I nod slowly as I realise that, for the first time in a long while, I really do.

  Seeing myself through Eliane’s eyes—in my element as I chop and stir and adjust a seasoning here and there—suddenly I understand that losing Lucie was only a part of my bereavement. A major part, of course. But losing my work was another blow. I hadn’t realised until now, working in Eliane and Mathieu’s rudimentary kitchen, that my cooking is such a fundamental part of me. It’s how I best express myself: it’s my heart and soul. And today has given me back some of the sense of self that the events of the past year had taken from me.

  I leave at the end of the day, breathing in the crisp evening air as the huge crimson sun sinks below the horizon. On one arm I’m carrying a basket, into which Eliane has packed several chops, a couple of pounds of sausages, some links of boudin noir, and three jars of pâté. And under the other arm I’ve got the pressure cooker, which I’ve borrowed from Eliane in order to cook a Christmas Pudding in double-quick time.

  It’s been a satisfying day’s work...

  Although I do think I might just make myself some vegetarian pasta for supper tonight, as a welcome contrast to all those mountains of meat.

  * * *

  Didier is leaning against the kitchen counter, savouring a glass of well-chilled Bordeaux blanc as he watches me preparing our supper. I’ve spent the afternoon making the Not-Christmas Pudding, chopping and soaking dried fruit, stirring the ingredients together and letting the whole lot steep in a generous splash of amber cognac, which hasn’t had to travel very far from its home just to the north of us. I couldn’t find all the dried fruit that my recipe calls for, but I’ve experimented a little by using some plump Agen prunes in place of currants, which I hope will enrich the mix in lieu of a month or so of maturing. The pudding is now in the pressure cooker, which is just starting to get up a head of steam on the stove.

  Tonight’s supper, since you are so kind as to ask, is going to be simplicity itself: some of the home-made sausages from yesterday, served with fluffy mashed potatoes which have had a generous dollop of wholegrain mustard stirred through them to add a little piquancy. And, in a nod to my Irish roots as well, I’ve shredded some dark, leathery leaves of Savoy cabbage which I’ll steam, so they still have a little crunch when I dish them up, as green as Galway grass, alongside the sausage and mash.

  Couldn’t be simpler. But then, as Mamie Lucie used to say, the best meals are those seasoned with friendship and conversation. And, I might add, if the seasoning happens to bear a striking resemblance to Bradley Cooper then tant mieux. I realise, too, that a major part of regaining my love of cooking lies in preparing food for others. There seems so much more point to it than to half-heartedly cobbling together something for myself alone.

  We’re just finishing the main course, and I’m in full flow describing yesterday’s butchery master class, when suddenly there’s a violent rattling noise from the pressure cooker. I notice that the steady plume of steam that has been streaming from the safety valve on the lid has disappeared. The valve must have jammed shut and now the pot has built up so much pressure that it’s in danger of exploding if I don’t act fast. I leap up, turn off the heat under the pot, wrap a dish towel around my hand and grab a long-handled wooden spoon so that I can give the valve a brisk tap without risking scalding myself. There’s a loud, hissing sigh of relief as the valve releases and a cloud of the trapped steam escapes, condensing into water droplets on the cooker hood above. As the steam clears, I take the dish towel and mop the water away. Checking my watch, I figure the pudding’s probably cooked long enough for now anyway and can sit happily in the pot until it’s finally cooled.

  Didier is watching closely. ‘Wow, I didn’t realise Christmas Puddings could be so dangerous! What was that you just did?’

  I tell him how the pressure-release valve works, shaking out the damp dish cloth and draping it over the handle of the oven door to dry. As I explain, a strange look comes over his face. And then he suddenly leaps up from the table, grabs me, hugs me tightly and plants a smacking kiss on my forehead.

  Excitable people, these French. Who’d have thought a simple lesson in the correct use of cooking paraphernalia could cause such an ecstatic response? Note to self: must try and think of a few more items of kitchen equipment to demonstrate to him—the blender, perhaps, and the electric whisk: who knows where it could lead...

  ‘Of course!’ he cries. ‘Evie, merci, you are a genius.’

  I demur politely, somewhat mystified as to exactly what I’ve done to warrant this accolade, but I guess I’ll take any compliments that are going.

  ‘Come!’ He takes me by the hand and leads me out into the yard, where the horse peers out at us over her stable door, disturbed by the sudden commotion. ‘Wait there!’ Didier leaves me standing outside the garage, its frosted windows dark. He reappears at a run, with the key.

  Pushing open the door, I step into the gloom and blink as he switches on the harsh overhead lights. It’s a real man-cave, a workshop with tools strewn everywhere. Standing in the middle of the floor is a strange contraption, about the size and shape of a two-drawer file cabinet, but with a complicated tangle of wires and leads and tubes protruding from the back. On the top perches an electronic screen, and what looks like a small accordion is fixed to the side... Some kind of musical instrument maybe?

  ‘O-kay?’ I’m not sure what to say really. Let’s start with, ‘What is it?’

  ‘This, my dear Evie, is an anaesthesia machine. But, unlike most other anaesthesia machines, this one is very simple to operate; it will keep on running when the power cuts out; and it doesn’t require large, expensive bottles of pressurised gas. It’s an anaesthesia machine that will save lives in the places where it’s needed most, in war zones and refugee camps. And,’ he hugs me again, ‘thanks to you and your Christmas Pudding, we have now solved one of the final problems with the design.’

  ‘Well, you’re welcome. I’m very glad to be of help. Cooking, complicated medical science, it’s all in a day’s work really.’

  He lets go of me—(oh no! I was enjoying that hug)—and picks up a length of clear plastic tubing.

  ‘You see, my very clever machine concentrates oxygen from the air around us, which has the advantage of being both plentiful and free; hence, no need to rely on expensive cylinders of compressed gas, which run out or don’t even turn up in the first place. But now, say it’s the rainy season in Africa. The air is full of humidity. We want the air, but we don’t want the water vapour that it holds because it can affect the workings of the machine. My problem is: how do we remove the water vapour? And the answer, as you have so clearly demonstrated, lies in changing the pressure. I need to make the system simple, y
et at the same time as resilient as possible, so instead of a sophisticated valve such as you have on your pressure cooker, I think I can make a condensing area here’—he gestures to a length of plastic tubing that projects from the side of the machine—‘by adding on a section of this wider-gauge tubing.’

  I look at him blankly. ‘And that will solve the problem because...?’

  ‘Because the oxygen-enriched air that travels down this tube is under pressure. So when it encounters the wider tube, the pressure drops suddenly and—eh hop!—the water will condense out, just as that cloud of steam condensed when you hit the release valve on the cooking pot.’ He grabs a pencil and notepad and begins sketching out how it might work. ‘I’ll need the right connectors, a T-junction in the tubing to drain the water away into some kind of reservoir, tac, tac, tac...’ He puts down the pad and beams at me. ‘It should work. No, even better—it will work!’

  I look about me. So this is what he gets up to late at night. He’s hard at work, saving the world. As one does, hidden away in the depths of rural France. Hold the presses: the guy turns out to be even more amazing than we first thought!

  The cement floor is beginning to feel positively arctic beneath the thin soles of my indoor shoes and I pull the edges of my sweater about me with a shiver, having come outside so precipitously without the time to grab a coat. Didier is sorting through a jar of widgets, or gizmos, or possibly whatchamacallits, and looks as though he might be settling in for an all-night session unless I can come up with some sort of distraction. I touch his arm gently.

  ‘Perhaps this can wait until tomorrow? Because right now I propose we go back inside, where it’s warm, so that we can finish our meal and I can ask you, as we eat the pear and almond tart that I’ve made for dessert, how come a rural locum doctor is busy inventing a complex and fascinating anaesthesia machine for use in the third world in his garage.’

  ‘But of course! Evie, you are freezing.’ He switches off the lights and locks the door behind us.

  As we cross the courtyard, our breath condensing in the chilly night air, the thirteenth moon hangs heavy behind the oaks, approaching fullness. Perhaps it’s something to do with the cold air, but its colour has changed from the usual bright gold to a burnished copper, casting an ominous, rust-tainted light over the frosty ground. A ball of mistletoe is silhouetted against the pockmarked orange orb. I half expect a witch on a broomstick to fly across it—there’s a hint of sinister bewitchment in the air tonight. Eliane’s superstitions must be getting to me, I chide myself silently...

  Back in the comfort of the bright, warm kitchen, the pressure cooker is murmuring quietly to itself as the pudding cools on the stove. We settle ourselves back down at the table and I cut each of us a generous slice of pear tart, the buttery pastry crumbling as I slice into it. I push a bowl of crème fraîche towards Didier.

  ‘Now, spill the beans. So, apart from a need to escape Christmas, what brought you here and inspired you to invent that machine?’

  At first he seems reluctant to talk, sitting in silence and gazing, unseeing, at the dessert plate before him. But then, as if the warmth of the kitchen has finally begun to thaw the permafrost that’s gripped his heart since he lost Aurélie, he picks up his fork and takes a bite. And maybe it’s the comfort of good food, prepared with love, but the thaw allows his words to flow freely at long last, his story pouring forth like spring meltwater.

  ‘Well, to begin at the beginning, I suppose you have to go back three years. To the Christmas of Aurélie’s death. We’d planned to spend the day with our families, her parents and mine celebrating together, looking forward to our wedding in the spring. So you can imagine how terrible that was, being preoccupied with funeral arrangements instead, everything closed over Christmas so we had to prolong the agony of waiting, having to tell everyone, ruining so many Christmases with the sad news. And even after the funeral, I still had the date we’d planned for the wedding looming ahead of me like a brick wall, overshadowing every day of my life. I was working as an anaesthetist at a large teaching hospital in Paris—that’s my specialism, you see. But I just wanted to run away, as far and as fast as I could, somewhere where I didn’t have to see the sorrow on the faces of Aurélie’s parents, my own parents, all our friends... On a staff notice board at the hospital there was some information about Médecins Sans Frontières. Have you heard of them?

  I nod. ‘Doctors Without Borders? Of course, it’s a fantastic organisation. I know they do incredible work, sending medical staff to wherever there’s a crisis in the world.’

  ‘Well, I phoned up, applied straight away, took compassionate leave from work and, because I said I was prepared to go absolutely anywhere at very short notice, I found myself in a refugee camp in South Sudan. The world’s newest country. It had only just been created, after years of war in the region. It’s still turbulent there now: tribes at war with each other; the fighting raging on. More than half a million people have had to flee their homes. And conditions are harsh. Poverty, fear, disease. They have one of the highest infant mortality rates in the world. Not to mention the highest maternal mortality rate.’ He points his fork at me. ‘If you’re a pregnant South Sudanese woman, you have a one in seven chance of dying in childbirth.’

  ‘That’s horrific,’ I say, suddenly not hungry at all. I push my plate away.

  His expression, which had hardened at the memories of the challenges he’d had to face in Africa, softens as he notices my sudden loss of appetite.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Evie, that was tactless of me.’

  I shake my head. ‘No, Didier, I wasn’t thinking about my own pregnancy. I was thinking of Tess, my sister. But I know she’s in good hands. Both her experience and my own must be so different from anything those women have to go through.’

  And in any case, this conversation isn’t about me. It’s about him. I can see from the strain that shows in the lines of his face that it’s hard for him to talk about these things. But I now understand how important it is for him to do so. Swallowing my anxiety for my little sister, I pick up my fork again and smile at him, encouragingly. ‘Please, go on…’

  ‘So there I was, working in a makeshift hospital in one of the biggest refugee camps, just outside Juba. It was certainly a change of scene. And it succeeded in my aim of distracting myself from Aurélie’s death. Most days I worked non-stop and then collapsed onto a camp-cot in a dusty tent for a few hours’ sleep before getting up to do it all over again. We were fighting to save the lives of the injured and maimed who managed to make it to the hospital, as well as waging our own war against epidemics of cholera, TB, black fever, with very few resources.’

  ‘But what about international aid? Couldn’t they help? Give you more resources, more equipment?’

  He shakes his head, sorrowfully. ‘Let me give you an example to help you understand the problems we faced out there. In the hospital, I had a state-of-the-art anaesthesia machine, not unlike the ones I was used to using in the hospital in Paris. But I could only use it when the electricity was on, which was never a given. We’d be in the middle of an operation and there’d be a power cut. And if I did have power then, often, the bottles of compressed gas would run out, even though I was constantly ordering more supplies; they either never got delivered or turned out to be empty bottles which had de-pressurised because the valves were faulty. I could never count on having enough gas available.’

  ‘You must have seen some terrible things there,’ I murmur quietly, sobered by his story.

  He nods, his blue eyes clouded with the memories of things he’d witnessed. Little lines of pain etched across his forehead. For a moment I worry that he’s going to clam up again, slamming the door shut on those memories that are still too painful to handle. But at last he focuses his gaze on my face again and finds the strength to go on.

  ‘And then, disaster struck. An even worse disaster, that is, on top of the disaster zone it already was. It was another December—coming up to Christmas again
. Somehow these things are all the more grotesque in that context. There had been tribal clashes in Jonglei, the neighbouring state to the one I was in, and there was a raid on an MSF clinic in a town called Pibor. They killed hundreds, including members of staff. One was a good friend of mine. In Africa’s dark heart, it was one of the darkest moments of all. They pulled us out, all international MSF staff, fearful that there’d be more such raids. They’ve gone back in again now, but at the time we had to desert those poor people, leaving them to survive as best they could. I came home to France. I needed a rest after all those months of gruelling work, all the trauma. I was exhausted. I’d scarcely taken any leave in the two years I’d been there and I’d overdone it too, I suppose, trying to forget my own misery by saving others. Not having to think about losing Aurélie as long as I was distracting myself, day after day, with other people’s problems, other people’s misery. My parents were worried about me. And so that was when I decided to try another change of scene for a while, come down here just until I’m strong enough to go back to Africa again. Through a family friend, I heard that old Doctor Lebrun was retiring, but that the commune had been unable to find a replacement. It seemed a good opportunity to hide away from the world for a while and regroup.’ He shrugs.

  We sit in silence for a minute or two, each lost in our own thoughts.

  And then I say, ‘So your way of regrouping is to spend every night building a machine that will help those people you left behind in South Sudan—and everywhere else that there’s a need for anaesthesia under such terrible conditions.’

  I reach out and put my hand on his, so that he will know how profoundly his story has moved me.

  ‘The priest in the church said to me that we should try to do what we can to let a light shine out in the darkness. Your story is amazing, Didier. You’re trying to light up the whole world. Working so hard to save so many lives.’

  He raises his eyes to mine. And then his strong fingers close around mine, holding on tight.