The Two-Plate Solution

by Jeff Oliver

  On the table, big wooden bowls overflowed with fattoush salad, and small plates were set out with pickled cucumbers, black olives, hummus-ful, grilled zucchini with za’atar, and labenah cheese. The cast, ordinarily wild animals in the sight of such delicacies, waited patiently for Salid to finish plating and to join them.

  “You honor us with this table tonight,” said Chef Clora. She pulled out a seat for Salid at the head of the table. “To the chef,” she said, and raised her glass.

  “To the chef!” they all sang out. And then they dug in.

  For minutes, only moans, slurping, and the hurried clanks of forks and plates could be heard. The food was eaten slowly, the chefs savoring each sumptuous morsel. Knowing smiles were exchanged, eyes rolled in bliss, and heads shook in disbelief.

  Nisha broke the silence. Her head was bowed almost in prayer. “Sometimes I forget why we do what we do, you know? This food brings it all back. It’s about love.”

  “Love,” the others repeated.

  “And friendship,” said Tanya.

  The feasting continued until curiosity got the better of Etienne. “Salid, what is the flavor combination coating on the lamb?” he said. “I’ve never tasted anything like it before. And yet it’s familiar.”

  “A sumac mixture?” guessed Chrissy.

  “More lush. Tarragon?” asked Cowboy.

  “More aromatic.”

  “Salid. C’mon, dude,” said Chef Joaquim. “What’s the secret? I’ll pay you for it.”

  “I am afraid that is impossible,” Salid said.

  “C’mon! Everyone has their price,” said Joaquim. “I pull in bank at L’Apicio—I’ve got cheddar to spend, bro. And I won’t tell. Cooks’ honor.”

  “Better give him what he wants, Salid, or he’ll never shut up about it,” said Tanya.

  “C’mon, Salid, spill the beans,” said Etienne. “We won’t tell a soul…”

  “It’s called Ikhaz’a,” Salid finally said.

  “It’s like a spice?” asked LizZ. “A weed?”

  “A hybrid,” said Salid.

  “Called it,” said Chrissy.

  “Where do you get it?” asked Ghana. “I have a client who would go mad for this. Cash on the table.”

  “I’m afraid that no amount of money can purchase Ikhaz’a,” Salid said. “Because Ikhaz’a no longer exists.”

  “Now he’s messing with us,” said Etienne.

  “That, or he’s going to be super fucking rich,” said Clora.

  “If it were only so,” Salid said with a bittersweet smile. “You see, Ikhaz’a requires a certain kind of volatile environment to grow.”

  “Extreme arid climates?” said LizZ.

  “That seems to help,” said Salid. “What it needs most of all, actually, is oppression.”

  “You lost me, bro,” said Joaquim.

  “I am from a small town right on the border,” said Salid. “Nearby is a military zone that is restricted both to Palestinians and to Israelis—kind of a no-man’s land. After the second Intifada, Israel extended the border to put a buffer between the two lands. To do so, they had to bulldoze certain villages, cutting down trees to clear the way for their tanks. I guess they wanted to make sure no one was hiding. And so they cut down rows of olive and citrus trees along the wall.

  “When the tanks began rolling through, soldiers would chew sunflower seeds and toss the unopened ones on the ground. My theory is that the seeds took root amongst the burnt roots of the olive and citrus trees, and there was a mix. It took years, but the seeds came to life. And when they did, ugly, smelly plants sprouted. Try to eat them off the ground and you’ll be sick—smells like sewage. But when ground up and roasted, they become earthy and aromatic unlike anything I have tasted on earth.

  “I have tried to replicate this outside of that environment. I have planted sesame next to olive and citrus, and waited and waited—but it never is the same, never right. Israel has now tightened the security in the zone by the border, so there is no longer a way to sneak in. Months ago, I saw that, for the benefit of their tanks, they paved the area that had the Ikhaz’a plant. So, no more Ikhaz’a. What you are eating is actually the very last of it in existence. You are the last people on earth to taste it.”

  The chefs were in awe. They gazed down at their plates, at their forkfuls of food, and paused. This was an historic moment in culinary history.

  “Where I am from is not unlike what you experience in some ways,” said Salid. “People our age, we want things. We have dreams. We watch TV and we want it all. My brother Rafi—he dreams of being on American Idol. My uncle Yvar? He longs to play tennis against Rafael Nadal. But the situation makes that impossible. And it is not the war. War you can understand. It is the nature of our relationship with Israel. The humiliation of the check points, the blockade that makes it so we cannot depend on the basics we need to live.

  “Little boys who would grow up to be something—doctors, teachers, lawyers, writers—they are treated like criminals. They sense the fear and desperation of their parents—the anger, too. Education is a luxury when families are scrambling to survive. The Jewish people have been persecuted around the world for thousands of years, and then were offered a homeland.

  “I, too, would protect it to the death, but there is cruelty happening. We are given identification cards and, if you make a mistake, you earn a green dot on your card—that means no entry into Israel. Which means that soldiers can come to where you live and interrogate you. They can jail you for nothing. Who can live under such stress? Who can build a career and find love, or thrive as a singer, a tennis player… or a chef?”

  Salid paused to look around the table. “You may have noticed that I close my eyes when I cook. Sometimes it is to use my other senses, but more often it is to imagine that some day I will be free. To walk amongst people like you who are not suppressed or unemployed or frustrated. And yes, people who are not violent. Because when a wall blocks you from freedom, you bang against that wall —and even if it hits you back twice as hard, you keep hammering at it, because what choice do you have but to keep on trying?”

  That night as Tanya lay in bed, Ramin, using a quill and a bottle of ink, wrote a poem on her naked lower back.

  “Is this like the poet’s version of a tramp stamp?” said Tanya.

  “Concentrating,” said Ramin.

  “It tickles. What does it say?”

  “It is about love.”

  “Sure. Then someone’s going to translate and it’ll be like, ‘Tanya craves cock’ or something.”

  “Please,” said Ramin. “I am working. Think about something else.”

  “I am. I was. I can’t get what Salid said tonight out of my mind, actually. About being free to thrive. He’s such a talented guy. In the States, he’d get a gig anywhere he wanted, at the very least as chef de cuisine. Is what he described what your life is like too?”

  “It can be frustrating to be told you cannot do the things you want to do,” said Ramin. “But this is, to a degree, the same everywhere in the world.”

  “What do you want to do?” asked Tanya.

  “I am doing it,” said Ramin. “Now let me concentrate.”

  “Okay,” said Tanya. “So, this is going to sound pretty spoiled right now, and you’re not listening anyway so I’m just going to say it. On a weird level, I kind of relate to Salid. I mean, I sometimes feel like a prisoner. Instead of soldiers, there are these producers encouraging me to act like someone I’m not. My dad worked for twenty-three years at an insurance firm and, then one day, he was laid off, for no reason at all. I watched him come home with his pathetic little cardboard box of framed photos and paperweights. He was so stunned he just sat there for months until his unemployment insurance ran out. Still sitting there, actually.

  “My mom doesn’t know what to do with him and she’s not about to bust out into the workforce. Meanwhile, people are offering me ten grand just to hang out at some club for the night. They don’t even want me to cook
anymore. Just hang out and get blasted. Sometimes I wish there was a parent around, to just be like, ‘No, go to your room. You’re barely twenty-six years old and you know what? You’re grounded.’

  “But instead everyone is like ‘Go! Go!’ and I don’t want to disappoint them. I mean they hire me and there’s a ton of chefs who beg for my gigs. But sometimes I’m like, ‘When is it going to end exactly?’… Ouch! Too hard!”

  “Sorry.”

  “I know I sound like an asshole,” Tanya said, “but when we were all just sitting around and eating and talking, it was almost like I was a regular person and I was among family. Is it like that for you ever? Just sit with people and eat and talk and not feel the need to get all fucked up and crazy on drugs.”

  “All the time,” said Ramin.

  “I’d like that, you know. I think I want that life. Not saying white picket fence in the ’burbs, but like, friends and brunch and … I don’t know, it just felt so right,” Tanya said.

  Ramin smiled. It was exactly the wish he’d inscribed on Tanya’s lower back in poem form—for her to want a normal, slow life, full of love and family. A life with him.

  “Tell me about your life, Ramin,” said Tanya. “Tell me everything. Your parents, siblings, what street you live on. What kind of toothpaste you use. I don’t want you to leave out one detail.”

  “All done,” said Ramin. He put the cap back onto the ink bottle and laid down his quill. He grabbed Tanya’s hand mirror. “Go ahead,” he said. “Read it.”

  Under the veil of night, Etienne and LizZ snuck into the kitchen. They laid out the new ingredients Etienne had scribbled onto his napkin, including ground mastic, orange blossom water, ricotta cheese, ground nutmeg, and one more they’d simultaneously come up with at the beach: 1 tablespoon of mahlab. They worked slowly and deliberately, their hands moving as if attached to one body. It took nearly two hours to prep, and when it was ready to bake, the sun, blood orange and delicious, had begun to rise above the sea.

  “That’s everything,” said Etienne.

  “Our baby,” said LizZ.

  The two chefs peered into the oven like anxious but exhausted parents in a maternity ward.

  “What shall we call her?” said LizZ.

  “Junk,” said Etienne.

  “La Junk,” LizZ corrected. “Americans love that French shit.”

  “Oh, you are so very naughty …”

  “Oh, you are sooo naughty,” Nisha sighed. Sheets twisted across her naked, sweaty body.

  Ghana gazed up at the ceiling fan as if it confused her. “That was…”

  “Everything,” said Nisha.

  “That,” Ghana said, nuzzling up against Nisha’s neck, “was only the start.”

  Back at the resort, Sara, in bed with Ruti, ran fingers through Ruti’s thick curls and kissed her forehead.

  “Tell me a bedtime story,” Ruti said, yawning.

  “That’s yawn number two,” said Sara. “You’re not going to make it through so much as a haiku.”

  “You’ve slept in my bed three times and you already know my yawn count?”

  “It’s pronounced.”

  “You know who used to count my yawns? (yawn) My dad. You remind me of him in many ways.”

  “That’s not weird at all,” said Sara.

  “You both wear lavender deodorant,” Ruti said, sleepily, “and you both (yawn) count my yawns. And you are both stubborn like, like… sloths.”

  And then she was asleep, her mouth opened slightly, a gentle whistle coming from her nose. Sara again kissed Ruti’s forehead and lay back on her pillow. “Night, my dear.” She peeled open a trashy magazine and tried to settle into the celebrity photos, but couldn’t manage any joy. It was Ruti’s mention of her father that kept Sara so distracted. Al-Asari had been right about Sara’s involvement in his death. How he knew, Sara couldn’t possibly imagine. The IDF’s cover-up had been thorough and deep.

  Still, Sara couldn’t forget that awful night. It had rained so hard it hurt the skin, rained so hard the plump drops pinged off the tank’s hull like bullets. There were five of them, all packed into the Merkava Baz battle tank that evening. Sara sat in the gunner turret staring at a tiny screen. Whenever heat of any kind showed up—a dog, a vehicle, a terrorist with a Russian-made anti-tank missile—a black spot appeared on the screen.

  Dv’or, the stocky tank commander, sat wedged in the commander hatch. Idan, whose weed habit had earned him the nickname Mastool (stoned), was in the cannon loader’s hatch. And “Stinky” Yuri, who claimed he had food poisoning but everyone knew was just chicken-shit, continuously passed gas from the driver’s hatch. All four soldiers wore flak jackets, heat-seeking goggles, and intra-tank communication helmets.

  But there was also a fifth person in the tank, or as Yuri and Dv’or liked to call him, The M.R.S. (murderer/rapist/sonofabitch). MRS, a bearded Syrian with a thick unibrow in a brown prison jumpsuit, sat low in the turret, wrists and ankles cuffed and immobile. MRS was there because, on top of murder and rape (which eyewitnesses confirm he one-hundred-per-fuckingcent committed), he also copped to knowing the whereabouts of a certain cabal of scientists who were at that moment putting the finishing touches on chemical weapons intended for both Israeli and American targets.

  Sara had retrieved the information from the prisoner, who let her know that he would lead them to the precise location of the scientists, but only if Sara went along for the ride. Every active Merkava Baz battle tank in the Israeli army housed a stack of depleted uranium 120-millimeter missiles, a bushel of hand grenades, two MAG machine guns, a crate of 5-caliber shells, and five-hundred 35-millimeter bullets. But not this tank.

  And there was one uniquely fucked-up reason why. In order to fit the murderer/rapist/sonofabitch into the tank, they had to forego the MAG ammunition and the crate of shells. This was a simple point-and-shoot operation with the cannon. They weren’t supposed to need the rest. But what if they did? This MRS sat where the bullets were supposed to be, and that made Yuri, Dv’or, and Idan hate the bastard even more.

  The rain slowed as the tank rolled across the Gaza border and into enemy territory. That wasn’t necessarily good news. Though it allowed Sara better vision through her periscope, and thus a greater likelihood of accurately aiming the cannon, it also afforded any number of masked assholes with Russian Agger anti-tank missiles better vision as well, and at last count there were plenty of those about. Idan, Dv’or, and Sara tried not to think about that, and luckily there were other issues to be royally pissed about, chief among them Yuri’s flatulent stomach and the broken AC system.

  “Goddamnit, Yuri, are you shitting your pants? It smells like a dog’s balls died in here.”

  “Abal. I told you my stomach has knife pains.”

  “Then go on sick leave.”

  “If I go on sick leave, I miss Illil’s visit. She’s here Tuesday.”

  “So you’re waiting to shit in front of your girlfriend? Let me give you some advice, metumtam: Chicks don’t dig that. Ask Sinek.”

  “I can confirm,” Sara said. “Chicks don’t like shitty boyfriends. And they hate shitting boyfriends. Now can you please both shotk?”

  “You heard her, Yuri,” said Idan. “Plus, you’re breaking the Geneva Convention gassing our shithead prisoner.”

  “Who gives a shit about this MRS?” yelled Yuri. “He’s dead the minute we bomb these fuckim.”

  “Guys, give it a rest. I can’t think,” said Sara. She gazed at her yellow screen, willing herself to concentrate.

  How Sara had even gotten this deep into the IDF was a crazy, long story. Her U.S. battalion had been safely stationed in Turkey when Sara got the call to visit the Sergeant Major’s office. It was an odd call. Officers of Sara’s rank were rarely in the presence of a Sergeant Major, unless it was to be disciplined. Sara’s bunkmate dragged a thumb across her throat to indicate that Sara was S.O.L. When Sara entered the office and was met not only by the Sergeant Major but by a tall, meticulous-looking
woman in an Israeli military uniform, she knew it was true. Sara saluted.

  “At ease, Sinek,” said the Sergeant Major.

  “Sir,” said Sara.

  “Sinek, I’d like to introduce you to Lieutenant Safit. She’s been hard at work gathering intelligence on Gaza, and some significant crossover has come to her attention—activity that points to plans for an attack on American bases, and even localized spots in the United States. Now I don’t have to tell you how important our interests are in the region.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then you understand how valuable it would be to have someone embedded over there with our allies. To look after our interests. To do some digging on the threats to our nation.”

  “Yes, sir, but as you may know…”

  “Your knowledge of the language and local culture, in addition to your religious background, make you a perfect candidate. I would think you’d be especially keen to help out.”

  “Sir, my religion is not a factor in…”

  “I’m not saying that, goddamnit. Relax, Sergeant. Your religion is the U.S. Army. So whether you’re a Jew, a Christian, or a goddamn Scientologist, you’re here to protect U.S. interests.”

  “Yes sir, Sergeant Major.”

  “Now tell me: How’s your brother doing? Nathan his name is?”

  “Struggling, sir,” said Sara. “And that’s why it’s so important that I—”

  “I’m aware you’ve had some financial problems back home, that it’s important for you to feel that your brother is taken care of, and that you’re scheduled to head back there next month.”

  “In twelve days, sir…”

  “I admire your commitment to family,” said the Sergeant Major. “But you’re needed here, Sinek. Now, to help you out, we would consider this a special combat mission. You’ll receive imminent damage pay as well as hazard pay right off the bat, even if you find yourself pushing pencils for the next six months. Bet your brother could be helped by that kind of additional compensation.”