by Jay Rayner
Rashenko was a huge man of muscle gone to fat, his heavy Slavic head pedestaled upon a neck as thick as my thigh. Seeing me, he rose from his seat, his cavernous, double-breasted, midnight blue satin suit pulling against itself like a sail catching the wind, until he was looking down at me from somewhere near the ceiling. And then, without warning, he burst into tears. Hefty sobs made his shoulders heave and roll as he wrapped his arms about me and pulled me deep into the padded, sweaty cell of his man-cleavage. He muttered something damply into my ear about being really sorry for the Cold War and all the general unpleasantness it had caused and said he watched the video of my apology to Jennie every evening because it was “inspire-ration-al.” He let go of me and returned to his seat, his face suddenly impassive once more.
“And that’s it?” I said to Jennie when we had escaped back to the other side of the room.
She smiled. “That’s his schtick. Rashenko cries a lot when he apologizes. Look …” He was on his feet again, another startled man swept up in his arms, tears dribbling down his cheeks. “I’m told it goes down very well with other Slavs.”
“I’m glad it goes down well with somebody.”
“They all have a routine of some sort, actually. Watch the Italian girl …” On the other side of the room an elegant woman in a red Chanel suit was standing at a table deep in conversation with a balding mustachioed man. She was taking off her expensive jewelry, piece by piece.
“Once the Greek apologist has gone she’ll put it all back on again to be ready for the next one. Apparently she has some teasing speech about stripping herself bare before you. The French guy quotes Molière endlessly, you know.”
I scanned the room.
“It all seems a bit …”
“… unsubtle?”
“I was going to say ‘calculating,’ but ‘unsubtle’just about does it.”
“Exactly, Marc. That’s why you’re here. True empathic engagement is an art.” She jabbed me in the left side of my chest. “You feel it here.” She started looking about the room as if searching for someone. “Plus you’ll cook up a mean gumbo, I’m sure. Ah, there’s Max. Let’s go see him. I know there’s something he wants to show you.”
Jennie left us together while she went off to work the room. Max immediately walked me toward the door. “Come on, son. I want to get us out of here before Rashenko gets his hands on me.”
“You’ve met him, then?”
Max gave a weary nod. “Met him? I’m on temporary assignment at the Russian Federation so it’s unavoidable. I’ve had a lot of damp shoulders, I can tell you.”
“You’re no longer with the Foreign Office? I didn’t know.”
“Busy, busy, busy,” he said simply. “Always busy.”
A small golf buggy was waiting for us in the evening gloom. Max took the wheel and drove us out to one of the aircraft hangars, a cigarette tucked neatly between his lips so that the smoke streamed over his shoulder as we drove. At the hangar an engineer in greasy blue overalls unlocked the sliding doors and we slipped through the gap into the darkness, illuminated only by a blade of light from security lights outside. Max took a new cigarette from a pack in his pocket and cupped his hand around the guttering flame as he lit it, a discrete pool of orange warmth illuminating half his dry, angular face in the blackness. Somewhere off beside me I heard the solid clunk of a switch being thrown, then another, and a third. Away at the far end of the hangar, banks of arc lights expanded into life.
A floor-to-ceiling theatrical backdrop hung across the entire width of the hangar, shimmering silkily in the light. Before it was a podium set up with a lectern and microphones from where, tomorrow, my appointment would be officially announced. Printed on the vast expanse of curtain was a black-and-white photograph. A man is outdoors, kneeling on the ground at the top of a short flight of broad steps, his body stiff and upright. His hands are clasped in front of him, very pale against the blackness of his raincoat. His head, with its elegant swept-back receding hair and long forehead, is bowed so that his gaze appears to be fixed on a spot on the ground perhaps two feet in front of him. He appears oblivious to the large crowd that surrounds him at a respectful distance. Many in the crowd are holding cameras and, like the photographer who took this picture, recording the scene. This was clearly an important moment, although I didn’t recognize it.
Max Olson was looking up reverentially, as if stopped by a memory. He took a drag on his cigarette and exhaled, the long plume of smoke guttering in the beams of light around him.
“Warsaw,” he said gravely. “December 1970.” He didn’t look back at me. He waved the hand holding the cigarette at the image. “Do you recognize him?”
I said I was sorry but I didn’t.
He laughed. “No need to apologize to me, young man. Not for that. It’s Willy Brandt …” He sounded the W in Willy as a soft Germanic V.
“Chancellor of West Germany?”
“Very good. Chancellor of West Germany. Arguably the greatest postwar German chancellor. Do you know where he is?”
“Well, you said Warsaw …”
“He’s at the memorial to the half-million Jews of the city’s ghetto murdered by the Nazis.”
“And he’s …” I hesitated, wary of failing the test. “… Apologizing?”
“A seminal moment for West Germany,” Max said, approvingly. And then, with a weary shake of his head: “Jesus, but it was cold that day.”
“You were there?”
“Oh, sure. I’m back behind the fat army guy in the peaked cap. You see him? Well, I’m just to the right and back a little with the—”
“I’m sorry. I can’t quite—”
“I was there, is all. And afterward Willy says to me, he comes to me and he claps me on the shoulder and he says, ‘Max, maybe I should get some thicker pants …’”
“You knew Willy Brandt?”
“I was attached to the embassy in Bonn for a while in the sixties and seventies.” This, as if it were obvious. He fell silent again and took another long drag on his cigarette.
“This is our man, Marc, poster boy for the Penitential Engagement crew. There’s not been a gesture like it since.”
“Not even Clinton in Kigali in 1998?”
He turned and fixed me with an amused, fatherly grin. “You’ve been doing some reading.”
A little, I said. My office had prepared a few briefing papers for me and I had tried to read as much of them as I could. There had been one on Bill Clinton’s trip to Rwanda, while still president, to apologize for the world’s failure to intervene in the Rwandan genocide.
Max sniffed the air irritably. “Shall I tell you something about Clinton at Kigali, Marc? Shall I?” He wasn’t looking for an answer, but I nodded all the same. “You know he was only there for two hours?” I nodded again. “And that he never left the airfield?”
“There were security concerns and—”
“The engines on Air Force One were never turned off,” he said, enunciating every syllable so I didn’t miss the point. “All the time Billy Boy is on the tarmac wearing his bleeding heart on his sleeve and saying his wise words about the one million dead who aren’t there to hear him, there are four Rolls-Royce engines back there, all powered up and ready to go.” He took a final drag on his cigarette, then dropped it and ground it under the toe of his shoe. “If you go round in the car to say sorry to a neighbor, it’s always good to turn off the engine. Just for a minute at least. Don’t you think?”
I nodded wisely again.
“No, Marc,” he said, pointing up at the image in front of us, “this is your man.” He walked over to me, placed a hand on my shoulder, and together we studied the gargantuan picture. “I just wanted Willy Brandt and the heir to his legacy to spend a little time together.” Tomorrow, he said, would be a circus. For now it was just me and him. So we stood there in silence, looking up, and I tried to think grave thoughts about Lewis Jeffries and slavery and I wondered whether I ought to do the apology on my knees,
just like Willy, but abandoned the idea. Kneeling was one thing. Kneeling and talking at the same time was quite another.
Disbelieving, I said, “I am the new Willy Brandt?”
“Time magazine made him their Man of the Year for that,” Max said.
“Really!”
“I thought you’d be interested.” I blushed at the bubble of enthusiasm in my voice. “No need to be embarrassed, Marc. A little ego is a good thing. You think Willy didn’t check his hair right before kneeling down? That he didn’t straighten his collar? He knew the world would be watching. And they’ll be watching you too, kid. Don’t be frightened. Trust me. You’re going to be a big, big star.”
Jennie was leaning over a work surface, making final corrections to my recipe sheets.
“Would you have preferred to stay at the conference, then?” she said without looking up.
“Christ, no. I was grateful to be able to escape early to come here and cook. That’s the thing. The day after my Max Moment, when I’m standing up there next to the UN secretary-general and he’s making his big ‘dawn of the empathic era’ speech to introduce me, do you know what I was thinking? I’ll tell you. I was thinking how bloody cold Willy Brandt’s knees must have been. That was the only thought in my head.”
Jennie looked up at me. “That’s fine, Marc. That’s just fine. It proves you’re human, not some weirdo policy wonk.”
“Like you?”
“Exactly. You’re not a weirdo policy wonk like me.” Looking back now at the neatly annotated pile of paper in front of her, she said, “We’re ready,” and I knew she was right. There was no more time for agonizing or recipe checking. There was no more time for tasting. After all, it wasn’t as if we’d been cooking these past three days to sate our own hunger.
At a few minutes past nine the next morning I found myself halfway down a great alley of ancient trees, their heavy engorged roots reaching out across the ground toward me, their branches above me leaning in toward each other as if conferring over my suitability. As a mark of my humility I held in my arms two heavy brown paper sacks of Wal-Mart groceries and I was wearing chef’s whites, the loose-fitting jacket buttoned high at the neck, which encouraged me to stand with my chin just up, as if I had been called to attention. Behind me, strung out along the verges of the road that ran past the end of this driveway, were three dozen television trucks, many of them connected by a thick umbilicus of cable to their upload satellite dishes ranged along the top of the levee that bordered the road. And ahead of me was the imposing white clapboard and porticoed Welton-Oaks Plantation House, where Lewis Jeffries III was waiting.
It was time.
Twenty
The front door was unlocked, as I had been told it would be. Inside, the wooden-floored, wood-paneled hallway smelled heavily of furniture polish and freshly cut flowers. A grandfather clock ticked to itself at the bottom of the stairs. I went through the open doorway to my left, as Jennie had instructed, into a formal reception room dominated by an expanse of shiny oval dining table and a white fireplace. Above the fireplace was a portrait of a Mr. George Welton in breeches and red jacket, a hunting dog at his side, a pile of dead game birds at his feet. There was a look of quiet satisfaction on his face: the job is done; the birds are dead; the meal can be prepared.
“Would you like me to introduce you to the family?”
I almost dropped my groceries, startled that anybody had managed to enter the room without my hearing. I turned around. Jeffries was standing by the table in a loose-fitting dark suit and dark blue shirt open at the neck. The fingertips of one proprietorial hand rested lightly on the tabletop as if he were about to check it for dust.
“He raped at least six of his house slaves.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Your ancestor.” He pointed up at the portrait. “George Welton. He raped six of his house slaves, fathered seven children by them, and was probably responsible for a murder or two.” This, as if he were discussing the provenance of the table. “Lewis Jeffries. Good to meet you.”
Clumsily, I placed the sacks on the floor and we shook hands. I said, “Yes, well, we’ve moved on a bit from then as a family. Less of the rape and murder.”
Jeffries nodded slowly. “Probably for the best.”
“None of the rape and murder, actually.”
“Indeed.”
And then, faced down by his quiet and his poise, I began talking, letting free a flood of inconsequential words: how good to meet you; to have this opportunity; to make amends; to bring an end to this epoch; this scar on my history; on our history; on all of us, really, because slavery, ooh, a terrible thing, yes, a terrible thing really, and …
Just as quickly as they had begun my words dribbled away to nothing. Silence. Out in the hallway the grandfather clock marked time.
“Was that the apology?”
“Er, no.”
I took a deep breath. Now I began to explain myself, slowly: that the apology for the great injustices and hurt of slavery would be made over a lunch of traditional dishes from the American South which, in a formal act of penance, I would be cooking for him. Hence the chef’s whites. I went through the menu enthusiastically: the fried chicken and cornbread and gravy. The gumbo and the Frogmore stew and crawfish. The Key lime and pecan pies and the chocolate-covered macadamias.
Lewis Jeffries blinked. “Young man,” he said slowly and deliberately, “do you think my people won their freedom from slavery so we could eat that low-rent garbage?”
“Well, I—”
“No. We did not win our freedom from slavery so we could eat that low-rent garbage. I hate fried chicken. I hate milk gravy. And if the Federal Government of the United States of America is planning to cook me a meal, I expect something rather more sophisticated than Frogmore stew.” He looked me up and down. “You want to make me believe you mean it when you say sorry? Then you better cook me filet mignon and seared foie gras. That is the way to this black man’s heart.”
“Yes.”
“I also have some thoughts on the wines.”
“Of course.”
“You can keep the chocolate-covered macadamias, though.”
“Jennie?”
“How’s it going?”
“It’s going bad.”
“Bad how?”
“He doesn’t want the Frogmore stew.”
“So don’t make it. Dump the Frogmore stew. There are other things on the menu which will—”
“No, no. He doesn’t want any of it. He calls it low-rent garbage.”
“Aah.” A pause. A hiss of static on the cell phone. “What does he want?”
“It’s complicated.”
“How complicated?”
“Very complicated. Larousse complicated.”
“Oh!”
“Exactly. If I were in London or New York I could probably get most of this stuff together in an hour or two, but out here …”
“Do you think he might be able to help us with suppliers?”
“I can ask him. He should have a few ideas. But there’s also the wines to think about.”
“The wines?”
“Yeah, the professor’s got thoughts on wines. And believe me, they aren’t going to be stocking these at Wal-Mart.”
“I’m going to need help with this, aren’t I?”
“Yes, rather. Perhaps we can get someone to lend us the National Guard. That should just about do it.”
“Very funny.”
“Only trying to break the tension.”
Another silence. And then: “Actually, they might not be such a terrible idea.”
“Jennie?”
“Call me back in ten minutes with a list of ingredients and any thoughts on suppliers that you can get out of Jeffries. I’ve got some calls to make.”
“Jennie?”
“Marc. You’ve got the list?”
“Yes.”
“And you think you can pull it off. Can you actually cook this?”
; “Yes, but it will now have to be dinner, not lunch.”
“Sure, dinner. But you must still hit the six o’clock deadline so we can get the declaration on the networks. This is UNOAR’s big moment and we mustn’t screw up. They’ll be going to us live at 6:30 PM.”
“I understand, Jennie. An early dinner.” Another few seconds of static. “I so wish you could be in here with me, helping me cook.”
“I know, Marc. I do too. But I just don’t have the plausible apologibility.” Jennie Sampson: ever the sweet, weirdo policy wonk.
We let the disappointment hang heavy between us until she said, “The list, Marc.”
When I was done and we had checked the details, she said: “Okay, here’s what’s going to happen.”
I listened, and when it was my turn to speak I said, “You’re kidding me, right?”
She wasn’t kidding me. In the ten minutes between our conversations the White House had been advised of our problems. They had asked the Department of Defense to offer us all necessary assistance, and they in turn had scrambled four Apache attack helicopters out of the US Army’s Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, 125 miles northwest of us.
“Three of them have external tanks for extra range,” Jennie said, as if helicopter gunship specifications were a regular part of her daily duties, “so they can make round trips to Florida and Texas at a push. The fourth will only be able to do the run to New Orleans.”
Throughout that morning and early afternoon the Apaches beat up the warm Louisiana skies. One flew directly over us at low altitude, rattling the window frames and giving the TV crews outside something to shoot for the rolling news networks, who took the pictures live. It was heading for Seagrove Beach in northwest Florida, the location of Sandor’s, “the best restaurant in the Southeast,” according to Jeffries. There it hovered for ten minutes, whipping the sand into great stinging clouds and drawing its own crowd, who stood looking upward, hands shielding their eyes from the dust and the sun, as it winched up a quart each of the finest beef, fish, and veal stock. Then it turned back on itself and flew twenty-five miles west to the seafood market at Destin, just south of Niceville, for half a dozen plump live scallops on the shell.