The Waiter

by Matias Faldbakken

  “Can I allow myself to call back?” I ask the chef.

  “Allow yourself.”

  Edgar answers; he takes it in a second, with a huff and a clearing of the throat, and explains that he has to travel to Copenhagen on “urgent business” and wonders whether Anna can come down to The Hills after school. The trip is work related, he says. She can just sit there. What? I say. She’s used to it, says Edgar. You don’t have to keep her entertained. No, no, I answer. Just give her a bit of food, says Edgar. I see myself as highly conflict averse, but if I don’t want my nerves to be the end of me, I need to toughen up and explain that it’s stressful for me to be responsible for Anna while I’m working. Edgar has no sympathy for that. Your job’s pure routine, he says. Isn’t that the whole point? Put food in front of the girl and chat for ten minutes, and the job’s done. Give her a Cola. She doesn’t need special treatment. She’ll do her homework and read. It’s easy, he says. We’re talking about a child. One child is nothing; two are like ten, so they say, says Edgar. She just needs the food on credit, that’s the only difference. Food on credit? He won’t be back late, he says. I’ll pick her up in good time, he says. In good time like yesterday? I ask with a bitter undertone. Hey, watch it. Edgar becomes sharp. How bad was it yesterday? Isn’t he allowed to let loose once in a while? Isn’t he a single parent, and doesn’t he stay at home, night after night, practically alone, in his flat, year in and year out? Hasn’t his mother died? Does he have anyone else to help? Is Anna’s mother a pill-popping wreck or not? Aren’t I a friend? Is it so much to ask? All this is asked. No, of course it’s not, I reply. It’s not too much to ask. When you put it like that. You can send Anna over after school. Why this kind of onslaught? He is attacking me with his child.

  ROMANESCO

  THE CHEF’S BACK IS HUNCHED and rounded.

  “I need tomatoes. You have to fetch tomatoes,” he says.

  “What?”

  “Four minutes.”

  “Where are they?”

  “The cellar.”

  I’m standing by the cellar hatch, feeling my nerve endings twitching and taking in the fact that Sigurd the Crusader tramped around these square meters 885 years ago. This is where he walked, mistress’s son Sigurd, barely forty years old. He had already been king for twenty-six years, taciturn, not kind, but good to his friends, and faithful. And here I am, in the same place, ready to open the cellar hatch and go down to fetch trusses of tomatoes, worrying in an abstract sense. Yes, the distance between what happened when Sigurd walked here and what is happening right now has to be seen as infinite. An infinite distance, seen from a human point of view, but a distance equal to zero from a geographic perspective. He stood here, Sigurd, in Oslo, about to die after an utterly epic life. A phenomenal life. After having sabered down Muslims on the edge of Europe. “Sabered” might be the wrong word in this context: he stabbed them with swords, at least, possibly a bearded axe. I’ve never stabbed a Muslim. I can’t find the right key for the padlock; it’s difficult to hold the heavy chain in my bandaged hand while I fiddle with the chef’s enormous bunch of keys. Why is it so huge? The padlock and chain are bitingly cold, and my hand goes numb. My breathing is shallowing. I produce brief bursts of frost smoke. The hatch is as heavy as lead; the stairs are steep and perilous, with steps worn down by use. But why is the light on? The bulb hanging in the first corridor is burning brightly. I’m stooping at the bottom of the stairs. The back of my head is touching the ceiling, it’s so low. And I thought The Hills had high ceilings. I glare diagonally downwards, towards where the fork in the passage is supposed to be. Is there someone down here?

  “Hello?”

  The countless drawers, cabinets, and shutters disappear in the obscurity of the central corridor before the much-discussed fork appears. The tomatoes are kept to the left, I know, along with the other fruit, in the drawer section beside what looks like a dashboard. Tomatoes are classed as vegetables in many Norwegian homes, but botanically speaking they’re fruits, with large, juicy, and not least nutritious seeds. Using my right hand, I fumble down to the fork in the corridor; I press the blistered hand against my thigh. Below, at knee height, beneath a “fore-drawer,” you’re supposed to be able to turn on the light in the next section, according to the chef. It’s not easy. What is a fore-drawer? My fingers run beneath a series of five drawers with sloping fronts. Could these be fore-drawers? All I can feel is soil or soot, something dry, powdery. Beyond these, I reach behind something resembling a bureau. I’m down on my knees and an elbow, thanks to my injured hand. I pull on a small knob and the light comes on. I look at the panel above me. Dashboard? Are these fuses? It can’t be climate control? The wall where the tomatoes and other fruit are kept is divided into a number of new drawer sections. A truss or two are sticking out.

  “Yes, hello,” I hear behind me; I’m still on all fours.

  Jittery and bent-backed, I manage to crawl into a half-standing position and stare straight at the Maître d’. What’s he doing down here?

  “What are you doing down here?”

  “What am I doing down here?”

  The Maître d’ has no expression; all he really does is hold his big face in front of mine.

  “How’s it going?”

  “How is it going? What do you mean?” he says.

  “No . . . of course.”

  “We need the small pewter plates for the sticks of butter.”

  “Aha,” I say, forming a small OK sign with my thumb and index finger.

  The pewter plates he’s talking about are the sweetest little things. They’re Danish, and they have a banner engraved around the edge, as well as the previous owner’s initials, dated 1789, actually. There’s an encircled anchor and a gull stamped on the back. They’ve been in the Hill family’s possession, incredibly, since three-quarters of a century before the restaurant opened. The Danish pewter plates have a diameter of eight centimeters. It would be an exaggeration to say that the bags beneath the Maître d’s eyes were as big as pewter plates, but they are big, those bags, so it doesn’t seem an unreasonable comparison.

  “Well . . . hunger knows no friend but its feeder,” he says with a clearing of the throat, which sends the unmistakable scent of Kremlyovskaya up my nose. Then he turns, after another brief stare, and crawls up the awfully steep stairs.

  “You’ll have to get up.”

  The idea that vodka doesn’t betray secret drinking is only half-true, I think to myself.

  The vegetables are on the opposite wall, some of them in open drawers, and between the cauliflower and broccoli, beneath an overgrown and fairly ugly turnip and some turnip rape—which is hardier than rape, so they say—are three impressive Romanescos. I like Romanesco. Romanesque cauliflower is something I’ve always liked. Not the taste, but the appearance. Not that it’s all that original, but I’ve always been fascinated by the Romanesco’s fractal shape. It’s almost too much. It’s not necessarily tasteful, visually, the Romanesco. But you can’t cast judgment on its tastiness if it’s naturally spectacular, can you? I feel a deep, childish joy whenever I see a Romanesco. Has Anna seen a Romanesco? Probably not. I decide to take one up so she can see it later. If she’s bored. After her homework is done and the fantasy has been read, when the conversation with me dries up. I will keep her busy. I will keep her entertained. I will dig a moat around her with my routines.

  THE FLORIST

  IT’S EIGHT IN THE MORNING, I’m exhausted already, and it’s Friday, which means the florist is blooming by the back door, to put it glibly. The florist does his floristry a couple of times a week, and always on Fridays, so that the flower arrangements are fresh and crisp for the weekend. I’ve got my arms full of tomatoes and the Romanesco, and I ask him to go in. The florist is the least florist-like man you can imagine: he’s no gossipmonger, and he’s not of unconventional preferences. He doesn’t have glasses, the hairdo, scarves, or challengingly cut clothes. He’s young and looks more like a craftsman from the Balkans than a flo
rist. But he takes his floristry all the more seriously for it, and offers both flower arrangement and design. He even grows some of the flowers himself, I know, and sells these flowers, which means that much of the floristry is covered by his business. He leaves the floristics itself, however, alone. I asked him about it once and was given a brief, dismissive answer. I know he has a fundamentally ikebana philosophy adapted to a traditional, European customer base. Sure enough, he stays away from contemporary European arrangements, with their focus on asymmetry, negative space, dramatic pauses, and silly counterpoints. I nod tensely at the door stopper to hint that he should use it while he’s bringing the bunches of flowers in and out of the algae-green Berlingo parked in The Hills’s own parking space. As though he doesn’t know that already, about the door stopper. As though he hasn’t been here before. As though he doesn’t bring flowers to The Hills twice a week. My lack of tact complicates situations.

  “Did I ask for Romanesco?” asks the chef.

  “Not at all,” I say.

  “Then what’s this?”

  “Romanesco.”

  The chef gives me a dead look.

  “I brought it up to show Anna. I thought it might be fun.”

  “Anna . . .”

  “Yeah, she’s coming here after school. She has to stay for a while.”

  “Ah.”

  “Edgar, her father, is in Copenhagen on business.”

  “. . .”

  “So she has to stay here a while.”

  “. . .”

  “I thought the Romanesco could be something.”

  If I have the ability to make conversations drag, the chef is the grand master of driving them into the ditch. We stand there for a second, staring at one another and breathing, him through his flat nose, me through my mustachioed mouth. He places the tomatoes on a chopping board and turns his back to me. I go back out into the restaurant. The twitching in my head is out of time with the steps my legs are taking, like a fowl again, something from the Galliformes order. And as I lock eyes with the Child Lady, I feel the damn Romanesco weighing heavily in my right hand. Why haven’t I put it down? Why have I brought a cauliflower out into the restaurant? The Child Lady looks at the vegetable and then up at me. She waves and I, still birdlike in my movements, can’t see any other possibility than to skip/waddle/strut over with the cauliflower in one hand and the blister/flap in the other. She places her phone on the counter, screen up. I wish I had another face to give you, another visage to present. I would have liked to give you the face I had, say, twelve to fourteen years ago. But that face is gone. It doesn’t exist anymore. Like so many other things. The only face I have is this one. A mug exposed to considerable wear and tear. I can feel it, the damage, the age, when she, decay-free, ageless, stares at it, my face.

  “That’s some vegetable,” she says.

  “Yes . . .”

  “Is it a . . . ?”

  “A kind of cauliflower.”

  “Yes.” She smiles.

  “Romanesco, it’s called. You can taste that it’s related to broccoli.”

  “Oh really?”

  “Yes.”

  “. . .”

  “And look at this,” I say, lifting the vegetable to her face.

  “My word.”

  “Yeah, maybe you can see that it’s intricate.”

  “Yes, wow.”

  “You could imagine Benoit Mandelbrot having drawn it,” I say, followed by a “Heh,” which is a bit too loud; it sounds like a cough, a clearing of the throat; the sound comes from the roof of my mouth.

  “. . .”

  “I like this kind of complex or impossible visuality,” I continue, now out of control.

  “Such bottomless visualities.”

  I’m holding the Romanesco with straight fingers, like a small skull, studying it with narrow eyes before I hear myself blurt out the following train of thought:

  “Think how nice it was in Old Europe, not even that far back in time, when, for example, you might step through a door and up a staircase and find M. C. Escher cutting his impossible geometric figures onto wood blocks with the greatest of accuracy. So pleasant. He carved absurd and impossible perspectives into his wooden blocks, with the focus of a scientist, and then he made those into beautiful woodcuts. That was that. Enjoyable for him to make. Beautiful for us to look at. Things aren’t like that anymore. It’s no longer possible for us to go to the market in Nuremberg and see Albrecht Dürer and his wife, Agnes, née Frey, in the stall she set up next to the fruit and vegetable sellers to sell her husband’s prints. The childless Dürer couple went to fair-like events in Leipzig and Frankfurt and offered divinely inspired prints to the everyman for good money. No epic genius sells prints on that square anymore. You can forget it. Now it’s all döner kebabs and broken-phone-screen repairmen everywhere. Poor Europe. You can get your phone fixed, that much is certain.”

  The Child Lady is listening. Is she taking it in? I’m floundering. It’s healthy, I say now. Antioxidants are important, I say. And isn’t that the hallmark of the moron? People who talk about things they have no idea about always talk about antioxidants. Antioxidants protect against the body’s production of free radicals, I say. They’re important for preventing cancer, among other things. Too many free radicals can damage our cells. You find antioxidants in rose hips and walnuts. In sour cherries and sunflower seeds. Blueberries. And tea. And chocolate! Did you know that? No, the Child Lady didn’t. Maybe you know what I’m getting at here? No, she’s not sure. Well, vegetables are also full of antioxidants. Red cabbage and kale. And maybe broccoli in particular. And who’s broccoli’s neighbor? The Child Lady points to the cabbage. Exactly! The Romanesco.

  This is a full-on crisis. I’m left standing with the vegetable in my hand, and my lips shaped like the mouth of a bottle for a few seconds before. In panic, I shout at the florist, who has just come out of the kitchen with a huge bouquet of lilies in his arms.

  “Hey!”

  The florist stops. I place the cabbage on the counter.

  “Can you cut off the stamen so the lilies don’t start smelling like manure in two days?”

  “Of course . . .”

  “Good. Don’t put it off, please.”

  “OK.”

  “And you have to pinch them off with your fingers, ideally with paper in between. They stain horribly.”

  “I know that,” the florist says with a puzzled face.

  I’ve set the level of my voice too high, but I can’t give in now, and drag it out a little more.

  “Good.”

  “Could I have the bill?” says the Child Lady. Her smoothness makes her difficult to read. If she’s disappointed, offended, if she’s trying to get away in panic, or if she just wants the bill, it’s impossible to say. Her face is like an unplugged flat screen, a so-called smart TV without power. She allows her peepholes to cling to me, with their almost bluish whites, until I force out a matter-of-fact, reserved, concise, professional, firm, desperate “Of course” and top that “Of course” off with a nod so severe that a lock of hair falls forward onto my forehead. I must look like a clown. With one hand outstretched, resembling a Heil Hitler more than anything else, I shout to the Bar Manager that there’s a request to pay at this end of the bar. “There’s a request to pay” are the actual words I use. The Bar Manager places the bill on a little plate, which I carry from the till over to the Child Lady. The plate is from Rörstrand, I know that.

  “The bill for a quadruple espresso presented on a small faience plate,” I say, letting the plate land gently, like a little bird, in front of her.

  “A what plate?” the Child Lady says.

  “Faience.”

  “Which is?”

  “Fayance.”

  “. . .”

  “It’s earthenware. Originally from Faenza. The factories in Delft tried to copy Chinese porcelain—white with blue detailing, you know. Faience became very popular.”

  “Ceramics?”

  “
Yes, you could say. They’ve been making faience at Rörstrand since the 1700s. Here in Norway, Egersund Fayancefabrik have been at it for over one hundred years. We’ve got a lot of Egersund in the cellar.”

  “I’m learning a lot today.”

  “But the majority of items from Egersund aren’t faience.”

  “No?”

  “They’re stoneware.”

  “OK.”

  “They’re in the cellar.”

  “In the cellar?”

  “We’ve got a complex and deep cellar, right beneath here.”

  The Child Lady pulls an impressive wad of cash from her clutch while she studies the bill, which is resting with a discreet crease on the faience plate. There’s nothing proportionate about the wad of cash and the price of the quadruple espresso. But the Child Lady still has to get them—the cash and the espresso—to communicate somehow.

  “You’re not interested in hearing what Edgar said yesterday, then,” she says without looking at me.

  What should I say to that? She uses her breath and the movement of her tongue to hoot out his name—“Edgar”—again.

  “Edgar has never actually been in the cellar beneath here, under The Hills,” I say. I pick up the Romanesco and weigh it in my hand; I let it bounce up and down.

  “Never,” I repeat.

  “No?”

  “No. Never.” I place the cauliflower on the counter and turn it over so that the very tip of it is pointing at the Child Lady.

  “But would he . . .”

  “You know that the Norwegian word for waiter comes from the German Kellner, which really means ‘cellar master’—derived from the Latin cellarius.”

  “No, that’s news to me.”

  “Well, then.”

  The Child Lady looks up and gives me another smile. If you really want to talk about dental arches, the prime specimen is right here, in the Child Lady’s mouth. Everything has to be straightened nowadays, I often think, but you can clearly see that correction and straightening have something going for them here, given that this dental arch has been straightened, something I’m assuming it has, unless it’s natural after all, which is no less spectacular.