Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar

by Matt McAllester

  I was the new kid there, freshly arrived from central Bosnia, so I wasn’t sure how much complaining I could do without appearing spoiled. It was my first real war. I had had stones thrown at me in the West Bank and had met with militants on the run in Gaza, but nothing was quite like Bosnia. When we came out the back door of the Holiday Inn, there were snipers watching us who could easily aim at our kneecaps.

  And you never knew when a shell was going to come crashing down, sending hot shrapnel flying and decimating everything in its path. You weren’t even safe inside. I knew someone whose mother stayed in for the entire siege but was killed by shrapnel that flew through her window as she was washing dishes the last year of the war. Sarajevo was like a doll’s house, someone once said, with a giant poised above it throwing rocks below at whatever took his fancy.

  It may have been hard to stomach, but what we were eating at the Holiday Inn, the wartime dormitory for journalists smack in the middle of Sniper’s Alley, was Julia Child’s canard à l’orange compared to what was available in the city outside our door. There, the civilian population of Sarajevo was subsisting on rice, macaroni, cooking oil, a small packet of sugar, and some tinned meat or fish. This came out of a humanitarian aid package that arrived, if they were lucky, every few weeks.

  “Imagine what it is like to be eternally dependent on someone else for what is put in your mouth,” Mario, a Bosnian poet friend, said to me. “Imagine that you have no rights anymore, even to eat.”

  I did not yet know how crazy people would get for a piece of meat, or the hot drag of a real cigarette—a Marlboro Red, for instance. In fact, a man had positioned himself near the Holiday Inn selling puffs of a cigarette for a few deutsche marks each.

  Meals at the Holiday Inn, though spare, were attempts to be classy. The food came on thick white ceramic plates, the tables were lit by candles—because there was no electricity, not to create a romantic ambience—and the waiters wore clean white shirts and black or green vests with little bow ties. The candlelight helped the food situation: once you put some salt—if there was some—on the rice, it was masked and you did not know what you were eating. It was simply something grainy and salty. The BBC brought bottles of Tabasco, so all you tasted was your tongue on fire.

  That night, Kurt asked for some cheese. At breakfast, along with the hard bread made from sawdust and water, there was sometimes a homemade cream paste, which we suspected was made from cooking oil and ground rice. (Breakfast was always depressing, as you climbed out of your sleeping bag cold and went to the dining room cold, yearning for coffee but getting boiled water. Once at breakfast, a few months later, I would see writer Susan Sontag squirreling away a sack of bread to give to her starving actors, whom she was directing in Waiting for Godot. Her actors, not surprisingly, adored her.)

  “There is nothing else tonight,” Said, one of my favorite waiters, told Kurt. “I am so sorry.” It wasn’t a surly response. It was the truth. There was never anything else, or anything worth eating. As for alcohol, you had to supply your own on trips back to Western Europe or to Zagreb or Split. The wine cellar of the restaurant, which apparently had not been bad for an Eastern European capital, had been drained dry by journalists the summer before. But we were not there for the cuisine, and we got used to it.

  The Holiday Inn was a testament to resilience. It should have been blown off the map, but it survived numerous attacks. The toilets did not flush and there was no running water—at one point during the summer of 1993, there was a cholera scare and we had to drop funny red pills into the carafes of water—but still, we were lucky. Everything we ate, every ounce of oil that sparked our generators came from the black market. We paid handsomely to live in that third-rate university dormitory and someone, somewhere was making a huge profit.

  “Baklava!” I will never forget the joy on the face of Chris, a Reuters photographer, when he saw the “dessert” one night. In fact, it tasted nothing like the sublime honey-coated flaky pastry I have eaten in Beirut or Athens; but it was an attempt at normalcy. Normalcy was important. Everyone tried to maintain their balance. The Sarajevo girls still put on lipstick and dyed their hair with lye during the siege, because they refused to be frumpy. “If that happens,” said one friend who applied her eyeliner as the bombs crashed down, “the Serbs have won the war. We must, we must be normal.”

  Food is always a precious commodity in a city under siege. In Sarajevo, everything could be bought and sold for a Mars Bar. And we were lucky. Because we were journalists, and therefore had cash and access to things the people of Sarajevo did not, we could manage far better than the local populace. Système D, the French journos called it—the World War II strategy of making do—how to make the best when you have nothing in your hands.

  That’s when I first noticed the national differences among the reporters. Next to our foursome that night was a French TV crew—Antenne 2, I think—who were feasting. They had brought bottles of Burgundy, saucisses, slabs of cheese. They were aided by the Libération reporter Didier François, who was slicing the saucisses with a Swiss army knife, and Ariane, a mouthy little freelancer who drove a German armored car so huge she could barely see over the steering wheel. On her head, during dinner, was a Russian fur hat, and she was happily chewing on a fatty piece of sausage. (Some months later, during a break from Sarajevo, we met for lunch at La Coupole in Paris, and I saw the same joy on her face as she ordered their famous AAA andouillette sausage. “Truck driver food!” she said happily.)

  They were always generous, the French, but at some point people looked after themselves. Even if someone offered you a piece of sausage, you probably would have to refuse it out of politeness. You could take it once, but the second time, no way. The Italian journalists were the most reliable. They usually arrived in Sarajevo with enormous wedges of Parmesan or pecorino cheese and asked the waiters to cook pasta, which they brought in by the sack.

  They would cook up a huge bowlful, and the waiters would bring it to their table with a flourish, and then one of the Italians would dish it out to everyone on little plates. The entire dining room got a taste. It reminded me, in the middle of the intense loneliness that was Sarajevo, of lunches at my Italian grandfather’s house when I was a child. There was something immensely comforting about seeing them gathered around that steaming bowl of spaghetti.

  The Brits brought chocolate—the Observer reporter once came to my room with a huge bag of Maltesers and mini Bounty bars, and we ate them all on Saturday waiting for our reports to be cleared by our desks back in London.

  The Americans, as a rule, did not share. The big guns from CNN sat grandly by themselves in a corner, ignoring peons like us. American newspaper reporters tended to operate like lone wolves: each man for himself. I remember one reporter coming down to breakfast with two eggs in his pocket. He removed them and asked the waiter to cook them. He did this in front of the rest of us, who probably had not tasted an egg for some time. But what the hell! It was war. Shamelessly he ate the fried eggs, dipping hard bread into the yolk.

  Reporters from other networks, like ABC and NBC, were much kinder, especially if you were poor and a freelancer; and later, when the summer came, a kind producer named Carlo based in Split would send in boxes of fresh tomatoes that he grew in his gardens, along with heads of garlic and onions. By then, with the siege still going strong, people were exhausted. I had forgotten what a salad, what a peach was. I had huge spontaneous bruises all over my body. When I went to London, my doctor did a blood test and my anemia was so severe that he made me carry bottles of a putrid German tonic called Floradix back to Sarajevo with me.

  Once, I am embarrassed and horrified to admit, when I had a terrible hangover I paid twenty-five marks for a can of Coca-Cola on the black market. Coca-Cola, a Croatian journalist called Sasa told me, could sustain you for more than a month in case you were pinned down, for example, in Vukovar or the eastern side of Mostar. “Sugar, water, caffeine,” he said, and I believed him. “You’ll stay alive
, at least.”

  After a while, this is all food was to us: a way of staying alive and putting energy into our bodies. At a certain point, I gave up and lived on Toblerone bars. To this day, I cannot look at Toblerone bars. And I smoked and smoked, which helped, and all of us drank an awful lot. Alcohol drowned out everything, most of all the terrible things that were happening outside, which will haunt me for the rest of my life.

  Outside the Holiday Inn that night ten days before Christmas was the war, but it was also snowing, big fat snowflakes coming down quietly between the heavy thumping of the shells.

  There were no Christmas trees in Sarajevo for the Catholics celebrating the holiday that year: they had all been chopped down for firewood. Instead, there was a yellow fog in Sarajevo, a cold winter fog. The cold went right through your bones, which was unfortunate because there was no heating anywhere, and the few places in the city that still operated—a bakery, for instance, where you could occasionally get bread—meant you had to wait in huge long lines. For hours people stood in the cold, until they no longer felt their legs.

  At the beer factory on the other side of the river, you could get water. People lined up with buckets, standing there as well for hours in their gloves and hats and warm coats, blowing on their fingers and stamping their feet to stay warm.

  On winter mornings before Christmas I walked through Veliki Park. There were old people dragging twigs on sleds, small children sliding on the ice. Then came the crackle of a sniper rifle somewhere not so far from us, maybe five hundred yards away. Everyone froze, and then scurried away.

  About this time I met a lovely but sad girl. Klea lived on top of a hill, Bjelave, in a tiny little house set back in a tiny garden with her husband, Zorky, and her tiny baby, Deni. The daughter of a professor of English—Mario, the poet—she had spent part of her life in America and England and was named after the character in Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. Her little sister, in fact, was called Alexandra.

  The war had started when Klea was pushing Deni in his baby carriage in April the spring before, and she was not happy being a first-time mother and a young wife in a city with shells crashing around her. Still, she was resilient and went about her days with a faint air of defiance and a large cloud of melancholy. She was delicate and birdlike, and pretty, with dark hair and enormous blue eyes inherited from her mother, Marija, who was equally melancholy. It was no fun to be young and pretty in Sarajevo during the war.

  Klea coped pretty well with the nightmare around her—the snipers positioned on the hills around the city when she went to stand in her lines; her father, Mario, quietly losing his mind and burning all his books to keep warm; being unable to feed the beloved dog; seeing the apocalyptic scenes on the street. It was hard to feed Deni properly, to get him milk. The child got only the powdered variety, but it appeared not to affect him—he was flourishing despite the siege. And Klea refused to let the Serbs get to her.

  Klea was a Catholic Croat, but like most people in Sarajevo before the war, she and Zorky were a mixed couple—Zorky was part Serb, part something else no one thought to inquire about before the war. Muslims celebrated Christmas. Catholics celebrated Bajram. Jewish friends celebrated everything. There seemed to be no ethnic divisions. And Klea wanted to celebrate Christmas.

  “So what are we going to make for Christmas dinner?” She stood in front of me, pretty and tired, her jeans sagging on her body, which was emaciated. A week before, she had been standing in a line waiting for bread and a sniper’s bullet went right through her jeans. It left an entry and exit mark but missed her flesh because she had lost so much weight.

  Klea wanted borek for Christmas, the traditional Bosnian pie made with a flaky pastry and chopped meat and onions. You can also make it with spinach and cheese—like a Greek spanakopita. This is the Bosnian national dish, along with cevapcici, a greasy but delicious sausage sandwich that you eat with a glass of yogurt on the side. But borek is to Bosnians what pasta is to Italians. Every Bosnian mother has her own secret ingredient. In normal times, this is how you would make it:

  Bosnian Borek

  PASTRY

  500 grams (about 1 pound) flour

  25 grams (about 1 ounce or 2 tablespoons) butter

  salt

  water

  FILLING

  500 grams (about 1 pound) minced veal

  250 grams (about 8 ounces) ground beef

  4 onions

  2 egg yolks

  25 grams (about 1 ounce or 2 tablespoons) butter

  Combine the pastry ingredients; roll out the dough and cut into four pieces. Mix together the veal, beef, onions, and egg yolks. Spread the filling over the pastry and roll up like a fat sausage. Brush with melted butter. Bake. Serve with double cream (whipping cream).

  But this was not normal times. So Klea hoarded her dried eggs from her aid package for a few months and swapped them for a tin of humanitarian aid pork from her Muslim neighbor. “Disgusting,” she said. But she made the borek, and we all ate it that Christmas by candlelight with my contribution—Toblerone bars, of course.

  Klea had other recipes that had come from desperation. She would make lepinja, the local equivalent of pita bread, which was traditionally made with flour, oil, yeast, salt or sugar, powered milk, and water. She showed me how she made cheese—a cup of powdered milk, a cup of oil, a cup of water, salt, and a few drops of vinegar—or a faux Nutella spread from flour, powdered milk, oil, cocoa, and sugar. (The amount of each ingredient would be the same, depending on how much you had to start with. Mix all together and cook for a few minutes.)

  Greens would be supplemented by nettle. “It was a type of weed,” she remembers. “It stung your skin, like poison ivy when you touched it. We boiled it and cut it and served it with rice.” Salad was made from dandelions. “And if I had a potato, or some kind of meat,” Klea says, “we mixed it with whatever packaged food came from the humanitarian aid box.” The best, she says, was chicken à la king.

  Bosnians love coffee. Every home I went to during the siege, no matter how desperate, would serve coffee, Turkish style, cooked over a flame with several teaspoons of sugar. It would be insulting to refuse it, and from that time on I have been unable to drink weak coffee. Wartime coffee was something else, though: it was made from rice that was roasted and then ground.

  The funny thing is, considering how desperately hungry and frightened everyone was, a friend of mine called Lucky told me that surveys done during the war showed that people were incredibly healthy. “I was as healthy as an ox,” he told me. People had great sex. The birth rate was up. Perhaps because everyone lived on adrenaline, their immune systems managed to hold on.

  It was only afterward that the survivors collapsed.

  Klea and her family live in Canada now. They are Canadians, not Bosnians. I have not seen Klea in sixteen years, but because of what we went through together during those war years, we are still very close. Sisters, almost. She knows things about me I do not tell close friends. The war bonded us inseparably, forever. And I feel, I suppose thanks to e-mail and now Face-book, that I have seen her every day of all those years, war and postwar. Deni was too young when they left to remember much, certainly not the wartime food. But his mother does. Those years of scarcity are embedded in her memory.

  I go back to Sarajevo often now, and once I went to the Holiday Inn. I actually stayed in the horrible place, which was empty, and saw some of the waiters. “Remember the soccer games that you had in the dining room at night? Because you could not go outside to play because of the snipers?” I asked. Said was not there, but the others pretended to remember. “Yes, yes, the war. Terrible days, the war.”

  I am looking back at that time from eighteen years’ distance. I remember Paul, young and strange and handsome, not yet writing his novels, smoking a cigar. And I see his end by his own hand in a Parisian flat, after a tortured life. I see Kurt and me eating another dinner years later at a different table, one overlooking water in Freetown, Sierra Leone. We�
�re eating prawns and salad and beer. The morning after, Kurt went down the road to a place called Rogberi Junction, where he got ambushed by some kids with RPGs and guns and never came back, not alive. And I think of Joel, who went to California, married, had children, continued to surf, and lives, I believe, a very happy life. He quit the war thing. I kept going for a while—too long, it seems.

  It was a particularly nostalgic time of my life, that trip back. I stayed in my old room on the fourth floor. It’s always a bad idea to go back in time and try to replicate a memory. Strangely, although the hotel was expensive, it had not changed much since the war—same awful purple and orange interiors and nasty fake wood furniture. I think they had changed the bedspreads—but we used sleeping bags anyway back in those days. And of course, the big difference was that the toilets flushed and there was running water for bathing.

  They had moved the dining room to the back of the hotel. That would have been impossible during the war because it was the side of the building that got hit all the time. I ate fried eggs and toast, and drank cappuccino. No one remembered the red juice we had drunk at the beginning of the war—was it blackcurrant or cranberry? I went back to my room and packed my bag. Passing Kurt’s old room, and Ariane’s and Paul’s, I mourned our younger selves. Too many ghosts. I picked up my case and left, and never stayed there again.

  MIRACULOUS HARVESTS

  ~ CHINA ~

  ISABEL HILTON

  IT WAS MARC, A FRENCHMAN, WHO INSISTED WE EAT DOG MEAT. Marc was one of the more intrepid gastronomes in the small foreign student body in Beijing in 1974. Once he had found a place that served it, nobody could back out. Twelve of us went one evening. The dog was served in a rich brown stew, strong and slightly sweet. Childhood memories of dog breath discouraged me from repeating the experience.