“Like someone said,” she says, “war is the most intelligent form of irrationality.”
“Did they?”
“Yeah, a hundred years ago . . .”
“That’s something to ponder,” I say.
“It comes to me when I look at the girl.”
“Ah.”
“There’s something agitating about her; not exactly violent, but instigating, inflammatory.”
“Yeah, it makes you think . . .”
“For sure.”
“Don’t you have anything more concrete?”
“I’ve found an odd detail,” says the Bar Manager.
“Go on.”
“It’s not often that pretty women have nicknames. Fine women have names like Jasmine, Caroline, Cameron, Mia, Billy, Cindy, Flannery, Mira. But this one has a nickname.”
“Oh?”
“They call her Zloty. She has another name, but people call her Zloty.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, that’s what I’ve heard.”
“But who is she?”
“One thing at a time. Behave yourself, now.”
•
The Bar Manager winks at me as she says, “Behave yourself, now.” It’s a bit much. She needs to calm down. She can’t throw that kind of suggestion around. I grab a rag I have no use for. I glance at the crumber. Should I go to the kitchen? Should I top up the Stravecchio? A slight dizziness strikes me. Or maybe it’s not dizziness: it feels more like a jolt, some kind of glitch in my attention span; a second or two fold in on themselves and disappear, and I experience a moment of confusion. My field of vision goes milky. Then I’m back, and my years-long routine of waiting kicks in. The Pig doesn’t need to give me a sign when he’s ready to order; he doesn’t have to signal. I know when the Pig is ready. I can feel it. I head over to his table. With his back to me, he starts to dictate into thin air: he knows I’m there.
“We’ll take two bottles of the usual, not one; more mineral water; and perhaps you would like to start?” The Pig turns to the Child Lady.
The Child Lady stares at the menu, shakes her head, and passes her turn, the wrong way, to the right, where Blaise is sitting.
“It’s a bit early for kid, isn’t it?” Blaise says, smiling broadly as he glances around. “I’ll take the snails. Give me a couple extra and that’ll do.”
“Of course,” I say.
“I’m always surprised by how filling snails are.”
Blaise might have had his hair done right before he came here. Goodness me. He hasn’t been threaded at the edge of his beard, has he? No, such a tasteful man would never do that. That’s the kind of thing they do in the Middle East. I’m assuming his beard line is naturally strong and well-defined. Now he changes his mind, as he often does.
“Are they really herbs from the Nordmarka forest on the plaice?” he asks, looking at me with eager longing for a concise answer.
“Absolutely,” I say, meeting his steady gaze with an absence of doubt concerning the herb question.
“Then I’ll try the plaice instead.”
“The plaice is an excellent choice.”
“I can never get the hang of snail tongs, anyway.”
The Pig nods appreciatively, I’m close to saying, but it isn’t appreciation for Blaise in his nod—more a kind of confirmation that the choreography of the ordering is going well, despite Blaise’s dithering. Now he directs our attention back to the Child Lady, who is still staring at the menu. I hold a small, spade-shaped hand in the air by her face. She could have turned around and gagged on it. With a gentle plop she closes the menu and stares straight ahead, the way she did before the quadruple espresso, with water hazing her eyes.
“Could you fry up a selection of mushrooms? But no oyster mushrooms,” she says, her voice sounding completely croaky.
There’s a slight rise in the floor, in the mosaic, by the entrance to the rotunda—which isn’t actually a rotunda, but which we call one anyway—and I’ve unintentionally placed my right foot on that rise, which means that I have a slight, awkward forward lean as I give her a nod which conveys certainty, despite the nodding ban.
“The kitchen will take care of it.”
I pull back my leg and move my still spade-shaped hand towards the Pig’s face.
“I’ll take the tartare, but with minimal grape-seed oil, as you know.”
“Wonderful,” I say, gathering in the menus in a clockwise direction.
•
The chef gets to work like an autist, immediately chopping and frying mushrooms and topping it with a quick flambé. Once he has arranged the mushrooms, the plaice, and the tartare on plates bearing the restaurant emblem, I take the mushrooms and the tartare on my right arm, balance the plaice on my left, and go out and place the mushrooms in front of the Child Lady, the tartare in front of the Pig, and the plaice in front of the inebriated actor at table nine. Blaise stares at me in bewilderment. The Pig makes a strange movement with his hand but doesn’t say anything. No one touches their food. The table is completely silent. I draw it out, let the silence become piercing, before I take the fish away from the drunk actor, who actually ordered the confit duck thigh, take the plaice back to table ten, and let it sink down in front of the eyes of the thoroughly maintained Blaise. I hold my slightly stooped position for a few seconds without looking at anyone before I snatch back my hand and stand up with a slight groan, as though to put an end to it. I’m a tall man, impressive to look at, so I’ve heard, slightly stiff, well built, and so self-confident that I can barely stand upright. I’ve got wiry facial hair, a mustache. Once, someone told me that I look a bit like Daniel Plainview. I took that to heart. But it’s a half-truth. The doggedness might be true. The inflexible stoop might be true. But Plainview is more durable than I am. He looks more outdoorsy. I’ve got more of a café vibe. Where he’s determined and vengeful, I’m more service-oriented and jumpy.
NIEPOORT
THE TALK IS FLOWING NICELY around the Pig’s table now. It seems as though they’ve forgotten my serving blunder. I’m supposed to have a comfortable degree of invisibility: it’s in the job description; it comes naturally to me. I’m not meant to push myself into the foreground. I glance at the Pig. He’s the gentle type. But he’s also a businessman; that can never be forgotten. In a way, he’s always negotiating. With charm and tact, he builds relationships so that he can capitalize on them. I’ve never understood negotiating. Isn’t it just about discussing your way to the best possible terms for yourself? Advanced haggling, in other words? That’s a primitive thing to be doing. It would never occur to me to ask for a lower price for something, even if the price was unreasonable. If a seller is brazen enough to be asking for that much, well, he should get it. I’d rather work a bit more to make up for my loss. I’m not going to be the one fishing for a reduction. No, haggling has no place in my culture; we pay full price here.
The Pig gets up. Is he going downstairs to the toilet? No, ugh, he’s coming towards me. I fold the napkins as quickly as I can without being sloppy. What does he want now? There are two older women sitting just behind me, whispering away so quietly and feebly that it sounds like whistling. They wheeze a steady stream of half-truths to one another, and one of them is making such sharp s sounds that it’s like a scalpel slicing my eardrums every time she says “mess” or “west side.”
“Excuse me, can I ask you something?” the Pig says gently.
“How can I help?”
“There’s something I’ve been thinking about,” says the Pig. “That Tom Sellers character, who often sits at the neighboring table: Do you know him? Isn’t he some kind of connoisseur?”
“Could you excuse me for two seconds?” I say, scowling wildly over the heads of the lunch guests. And there, as though on cue, with a comic’s timing, the widow of deceased accountant Knipschild gives me a slight wave, indicating that she wants to settle up.
“No, listen here, there’s something I want to say,” the Pig says.
“Graham, I’m so sorry, could it wait a moment?” I’m squirming like an adder. “I have to see to Widow Knipschild. She’s in a hurry. You know: age.”
Age? What am I saying? What is happening?
“Not to worry,” says the Pig, giving me an utterly bourgeois smile, with the proviso that anything can be called bourgeois in this country. Even the slightest hint of deviation from the intended tone is picked up by us highly sensitives. It may be unfair to call the Pig sly, but I can detect a hint of slyness in him now. What does he mean by “Not to worry”?
Sellers? What does he want from Sellers?
Widow Knipschild is sitting, as she often does, with a book to the side of her plate. She reads page after page. Suddenly, two well-tended hands appear, take hold of the plate, and move it. Her eyes remain fixed on the book; from her angle all she can see are the hands coming in from the side of her field of vision. The hands take things away. They reach for the glasses and napkin. Those hands are mine. It’s me. I make objects and food come and go without being noticed myself.
“I’ll be back with the bill in a moment, Mrs. Knipschild,” I say.
Widow Knipschild has had the foie gras. She has the foie gras quite often. She might even order two courses. First a terrine, then some fried foie gras. She has apple with it, and that apple should have star anise on it. It can even have a bit of caramel. And before you know it, the goose’s liver has been washed down with a fortified wine from the pressed grapes of the steep, narrow Douro Valley, and it should say “Port” on the label. If it doesn’t say “Port,” then these drops are not suitable for washing down the liver of the goose. Not for Widow Knipschild.
She’s like a razor, or should I say a Shun knife, when it comes to cutting through the culinary, but using bank cards and payment terminals are not her strong point. The chip is upside down, the strip is worn; the code is forgotten; her bluish, witchlike fingers have to rifle through her purse, where she keeps a handwritten note of her codes—and which are, she claims, also written in code. It gives me time to scan the restaurant, and because of my intimate knowledge of distances and placings here, I know that a glance roughly 110 degrees to the left will give me the opportunity to study the Child Lady in three-quarter profile from behind. As in, I want to be able to study her without her seeing me. From this angle, Blaise suddenly looks like the Child Lady. Maybe it’s because I’m straining my eyes. Now both of them resemble the Pig. It’s like a magic mirror. The Child Lady is abstract now. I blink. They’re joking at the table. The Pig’s laughter is loud and ringing, and it always drowns out the others; it sticks out and produces more laughter; it’s a kind of laughter which breeds laughter and keeps the collective laughter balls in the air a little longer. Blaise Engelbert has the rougher, more booming type of laugh that members of the social elite often do. His howls of laughter are like the columns beneath the Pig’s architrave, if I can put it like that.
The internet is slow today: Widow Knipschild waits on the line. She uses the time to claw about in her pillbox. Out pops a pill, then another one. She takes a tablet. What’s that tablet for? Or possibly against?
“Excuse me?”
Her head trembles faintly as she looks up at me. The payment goes through.
“Couldn’t I have another glass of Niepoort?”
Knipschild has the metallic clang which often takes over elderly ladies’ vocal cords.
“Of course,” I say. And this is a bit unfortunate, but her previous glass was actually the last of the Niepoort. In other words, I’ll have to go down to the cellar. Why? Because the short-haired, anemic Vanessa, who has less seniority than I do, and who usually goes to the cellar if it’s needed, is out for a while. Out for a while? An errand, the Maître d’ said. She’s having her hair cut. I asked again. Hair cut? When did the waiters start getting their hair cut during working hours? This is a European restaurant, not a beauty salon. You come presentable, you leave presentable. Never bother the colleagues with your upkeep. Of all things, the Maître d’ is generous about Vanessa cutting her hair. The whitest tablecloths get dirty first, he says. I’ll have to go down to the cellar.
THE CELLAR
THE GOODS CELLAR BENEATH THE Hills is where we store all our pillages; everything has to go down there. Access to the cellar is from the street, something which is fairly unusual in Oslo, but which you see quite often in New York, for example, where things are always being heaved down to the cellars beneath buildings through hatches in the street. These access points are ideally holes in the ground, right in front of the building—the restaurant, the nail bar, or whatever it is—with a trapdoor over the top, and it seems really tricky to take the goods down there, but it’s the only place where there’s room; they don’t have any choice.
Down in the goods cellar there is an intricate shelving system. I don’t have much business in the cellar. I’ve never been to the very end of it, the deepest part. I’m not usually the one to fetch things from down here, but I’ve been in the area closest to the stairs and peered in. I’ve seen how the shelving system vanishes into the darkness. The chef has explained in a mumble that the walkway splits in two farther ahead, in a fork. The walls are curved, and the shelving system, which consists of both open and closed shelves as well as small drawers in two layers, adapts to these curves. There are also a number of cupboards placed randomly on top of and next to one another, and cabinets with beveled fronts that are divided into smaller cupboards. These give more of an impression of being some kind of electric panels than cabinets as such. Parts of the shelves—or is it the wall?—are covered in metal plates which would likely have been made from titanium or magnesium on a space station, but which are possibly sheet metal or tin down here. Yes, the incalculable level of detail seems more like some kind of elongated cockpit than a storeroom, workshop, or garage. The way they’ve utilized the space is unbelievable. The abundance of surfaces, platforms, and spaces always means a new abundance of surfaces, platforms, and spaces. You can practically experience a “fractal” solution and richness of detail. It’s hard to describe, but the rounded walls, which would otherwise have been problematic for conventional, straight shelving systems, are handled by this ingenious storage architecture so that the shelves actually provide more storage space than if they had been straight. And they say—it’s said, they allege, it’s claimed—that this system, and this incredible use of space, continues all the way to the end of the cellar, but I haven’t personally been there, to the end, like I said. I haven’t even seen the infamous fork.
The shelving system is old. They say that parts of it have been here since the beginning. Yes, they say that Benjamin Hill, the founder himself, built the shelves just before his clothing business went bust. That seems likely. The drawers and small cabinets are ideal for haberdashery, buttons, spools, combs, and hardware, needles, screws, hangers, knobs, pins, and so on. They say that Hill hid down there in shame between drinking sprees and dizzying financial losses at the poker table; it was down there that he took himself when everything else seemed impossible. This isn’t just drawn out of thin air; it’s written that Hill was an apprentice with his uncle’s carpentry firm in Windsor around 1830, half a decade before the charmer and dandy in him emerged and drove him to the exclusive and frivolous environments of the capital. And from there, through various detours, to Oslo. Or Kristiania, as the city was known at the time. Regardless, this goddamn shelving system—which, in truth, is a composite structure from many different epochs, and has had to be repaired, improved, and patched up at regular intervals since Benjamin Hill’s original structure went up—is, as I’ve mentioned, both intricate and innovative; and it works well enough that it hasn’t needed to be changed while The Hills has been home to the sale of either attire or the edible. It’s as though, with all the small repairs, improvements, and complications, the “resolution” of the entire structure is higher, almost as though the years of use and expansion have made it organic. The shelving system has grown; it’s crack
led and folded into itself through the shifts between use, wear, and repair, use, improvement, and more wear. If you can imagine some kind of shelving version of the sticker-covered walls up in the restaurant, it’s like that. Layer on layer. Intention on intention. Use over use.
•
Luckily, the Niepoort is close to the stairs. I need to take only a few steps along the left-hand row of shelves to find a wide, aged, extendable drawer-like shelf of steel. It’s forged, heavy as lead, moves easily on well-functioning runners, and has some kind of velour padding inside. The drawer is full of Niepoort, Ruby, Tawny, Colheita, and so on. And some Tokaji, oddly enough. Oh, they’re roomy, these drawers. I take out two Niepoorts, but as I try to close the drawer by giving it a hard shove with my hip, I manage to trap my left hand something awful. What do you call the edge of your hand, or the back of the hand right down by the lower side of the little finger, where the back of the hand turns into the palm? What do you call it, by the wrist joint at the bottom? What the hell’s that called, the bit between the wrist and the little finger’s joint, the karate chop part, the hand knife? Is it the hypothenar muscle? Is that the word I’ve heard? The bit which gets paralyzed if you hit your elbow, if you give your nervus ulnaris a jolt, if you bang your so-called funny bone and experience what the Norwegians call widower’s grief, because it’s over so quickly, and your little and ring fingers are often paralyzed. That’s the part I manage to trap in the heavy, smooth drawer. What can I say? The pain is hellish. I moan loudly and hiss between my teeth, which means I also send a string of drool down onto my nice waiter’s jacket. I manage to drop the bottles to the floor without breaking them, press my hand between my thighs, and continue to hiss and splutter, because this is absolutely womb-crushingly painful. I don’t dare open my thighs to look. It’s impossible to tell whether my hand is crushed, cut, or broken, or what has happened. It hurts so much that it feels like someone is kidding with me. I can’t believe it. I try to walk off the pain. I walk and walk, I stagger knock-kneed back and forth between the rows of shelves with my hands clasped between my thighs. I don’t go too far down the walkway, because I don’t want to go in, I don’t under any circumstances want to go deeper into this moldy cellar. This gathering place for all sorts of things. I doubt I’ve cut myself, I rub my hands together, and it doesn’t feel wet, it doesn’t feel like there’s any blood. I don’t want to look. I stand beneath the streets of old Oslo and groan.
The Waiter Page 6