Yes, Chef (16 page)

I had laundry to do and I was overdue to write a letter home, but I was there because Brigitta had left a note under my door that morning, asking me to meet her. I hadn’t seen her since the night we hung out at Gatz. We’d had a lot of sex that night and the next day, and when we finally left her room, we had to walk through a laundry room full of white-scarved women who giggled at us. They knew what was up.

Maybe she wanted to hang out some more, I thought. Maybe I was that good.

I didn’t see her come in, so I was startled when she put her hand on my shoulder. She was as pretty and elegant as I remembered: light green eyes and long brown hair with bangs that came down almost to her eyelashes. She had deep dimples when she smiled, but she was not smiling now. She didn’t even sit down.

“Ich bin swanger,”
she said. “I am pregnant.”

If there was any conversation after that, I don’t remember it.

After Austria ended and before my second contract with Victoria began, I’d scheduled ten days at home in Sweden, and I now dreaded every one of them. I had gotten a girl pregnant, and as much as I wanted to pretend it hadn’t happened, it had. This was, of course, a predicament that many of my friends back home had faced, but in Lutheran Sweden, abortions were more the rule than the exception. It usually played out like this: Once a guy found out his girlfriend was pregnant, maybe he’d go with her to the appointment or maybe not, but he always arranged a place for her to hang out for a few days afterward, maybe a friend’s apartment, and he’d stay with her there until she was OK to go home. It sounds harsh, but that’s usually how it went. That was the routine.

The mess I was now in was anything but routine. I had gotten a Catholic girl from a Roman Catholic country pregnant. The outcome was far less clear.

When she broke the news to me in that café, I felt hammered. I was stunned into silence. My brain worked overtime, trying to wriggle out of the reality: Why did this happen to me?

For a second, I considered “doing the right thing”—marrying Brigitta, this woman I hardly knew, and spending the rest of my life in Austria, not a place where many black Swedes from Ethiopia have been known to put down roots. I’d get a job as a line cook somewhere, maybe at Elisabethpark, and that would be it. But before I could even finish articulating that scenario in my head, I was past it.

I couldn’t do it.

I also couldn’t work up the guts to ask Brigitta if she had thought about terminating the pregnancy. She wasn’t asking for my opinion. Or, for that matter, my money or my time; she had a big family and they would be supportive of her as she raised the child.

“I thought you should know” was pretty much all she said.

“OK,” I said. “Thank you.”

By the time I got back to Gburg, I was no clearer than I had been in the moment. And I was pissed off: I’d done everything in my life not to become a statistic. I’d done everything I could to avoid the negative stereotype of an irresponsible black man, but there was no disputing my part in the situation. Or my stupidity.

“You seem so tired, Macke,” my mother kept saying. “I think they work you too hard.”

“What’s on your mind, son?” asked the father who usually welcomed my rare silences.

I tried to calculate the damage my news was going to cause, but I couldn’t. Brigitta could not have been more than ten weeks pregnant when she told me. She didn’t look the slightest bit heavier. This is what I told myself, to feel better.

“Maybe something will happen,” I thought. “Maybe she’ll change her mind.”

S
UMMER WAS ONE LONG PANIC ATTACK
. S
OMETIMES
I
FELT LIKE
I
WAS
going to die … or at least that the career I’d worked so hard for was about to die and I was standing by its deathbed, watching helplessly. I said nothing about the pregnancy to anyone at Victoria, not even Mannfred. Not even Christina, who started her job at the same time I returned. She and I were given a small apartment in the dormitory—a step up over the monk’s cell I had during my first stint—but despite the daily contact and nightly intimacy, I kept mum.

The only way I managed to keep up the lie was that the restaurant kitchen was such a refuge. My job had changed, but everything else, including Giggs’s incessant sarcasm, was just as I had left it, and I happily dove back in.

As
demi chef de partie
for the
garde manger
, I now had more responsibility, more independence, and more of a public face. I not only butchered without Franz standing over me, I was now the one who stood over the new batch of
commis
and came down hard on them when they cut through muscle. I showed them how to fillet fish and how to prep oysters by slitting apart the shell without fully disengaging the flesh. When we had breakfast buffets, I worked the omelet station, taking orders directly from a long line of guests and cooking their eggs in front of them. This sounds simple, but we were cooking over portable gas burners that gave out uneven heat. Stocker wouldn’t hear of us using nonstick pans; he wanted us to use only the beautifully polished copper pans. He believed that an omelet should be cooked through but never, ever have “color,” which meant any omelet with a browned edge was to be immediately discarded. On this point, he was adamant. Finally, you had to have enough polish to be able to do all this while chatting up the guests, most of whom couldn’t have cared less if their eggs were a little brown.

After Stocker’s meeting broke up one morning, Giggs came back to our station and made a beeline right for me.

“He wants to see you,” Giggs said.

I hesitated, feeling a wave of panic rise up. What had I done?

“Now!” Giggs barked.

Stocker barely looked up from his desk when I walked in. I didn’t dare sit down in the chair across from his desk unless I was asked. I was not asked.

“You speak English well, Mr. Samuelsson,” Stocker said in German. I wasn’t sure if he meant it as a question or a statement, but I decided to answer in English.

“Next to Swedish, it’s my best—”

“I have a colleague in Gstaad,” he interrupted. “At the Grand Hotel, which is very busy in the summer. He needs cooks. Victoria is Switzerland’s leading hotel, as you know, and as such, we must also lead the way in staff. I am sending you for twenty-five days. You will go tomorrow and when you arrive, you will ask for Herrn Muller.”

I stood, frozen, while it sank in that I was not in trouble. In fact, to be sent away was a reward. “Thank you, Herrn Stocker,” I said. I prepared to launch into how much this meant to me, how honored I was, how grateful, and—

Stocker had no interest in compliments. “Do not embarrass me,” he said, and picked up his telephone, dismissing me from the room.

Gstaad was only forty-five miles away, still in the Bernese Alps and so similar to Victoria in its no-nonsense professional atmosphere that within two days, I felt like I’d been there forever. The Grand Hotel had half as many rooms as Victoria and its banquets didn’t serve more than a hundred people, so the pace was manageable, and I never felt overwhelmed. As an extra hand, I worked in the
garde manger
and also helped out in the meat station. Because the staff was more Swiss and less international in its makeup, people were even more formal in their interactions with me, but I also noticed that I was treated with more deference and respect, as if the Stocker stamp of approval bumped up my status automatically.

W
HEN
I
GOT BACK TO
V
ICTORIA
three weeks later, my status went right back down to its previous level; in fact, it almost seemed like the
sous-chefs
and line cooks above me were now determined to keep me from getting a swelled head. They loaded me down with grunt work and, whenever the opportunity arose, reminded me that I was not out “in the country” anymore, but back in the real world. I didn’t care. I knew I had held my own in Gstaad, I hadn’t embarrassed Stocker, and I’d successfully added one more notch to my chef’s belt.

But the better I got at my job, the less I liked it. Let me rephrase that: I loved working for Giggs and Stocker. Stocker’s innovation with technology and technique made all of our lives in the kitchen easier, and his expectation of peak performance was one I admired and aspired to. Giggs, despite his crankiness, was a great teacher, and he rewarded effort and talent with extra attention and time. Even
Victoria itself had a personality—of grandeur and tradition, all of which was anchored in a beautiful landscape that I was taking full advantage of, thanks to the hiking, biking, and skiing I did with Mannfred and his friends. But I longed to work in a kitchen where the chef’s passions ruled. Stocker and Giggs held to the highest standards in the industry, but they worked from a playbook set in stone. French stone.

Giggs, who had traveled so widely on his cruise ship days, offered clues about his own palate preferences when he added lemongrass to staff meals or threw together fried rice between service. He’d talk at great length about the difference between Thai and Indian curries, but I never saw him developing his food while on the clock. He followed the script. The potential of our kitchen seemed so vast, too. That’s what killed me. We had dozens of foodways within reach, from the Portuguese and Spanish dishwashers to the northern Italian and American waiters. And the more I mastered the basics, the more I longed to shake up the routine.

Sprinkled throughout the international kitchen staff were the rich kids who were never going to cook as professionals but wanted the Swiss hospitality pedigree. You could tell this group instantly: They strolled along when the rest of us dashed. Their hands were baby soft—no calluses, cuts, or burns. You’d never see them pull something out of a deep fryer with their fingers, as seasoned line cooks did. And they didn’t want to help, either—they were completely up front about having come to Victoria with no hands-on experience, and also clear about the fact that their futures as hoteliers or managers wouldn’t include any cooking. The rest of us watched in awe as they said hello to Stocker when he passed by. They actually looked him in the eye, which seemed to confuse him, and he usually just grunted in response and kept walking. Still, we also had interns from Tehran and Colombo and Seoul who loved to eat, and even more, loved to entertain. They rented small houses around town, and the big benefit for me was that those houses had kitchens. Those of us who lived in the dormitories would get invited over for meals, and we’d have Indian naan
bread, Chinese fried rice and glazed spareribs, Japanese
nabemono
. The foods we’d eat at those informal dinners were alive with heat and flavor; they had a vitality that spoke to me instantly and far more persuasively than the thrice-reduced cream sauces that took days of careful tending to render just so. Why was there no room at Victoria for those tastes?

I wrote in my food journal almost every night. I tracked what I was learning, but I also started to ask questions, to play with the what-ifs of dishes that were taking shape in my mind. What if you matched turbot with a miso-based stock? What if you put seared salmon into crisp spring roll wrappers? It was not my place to suggest these things openly, but the ideas kept coming, so I kept scribbling them down.

Meanwhile, Christina and I got along on the surface, but we were mismatched, too. She wanted to see us as having a future; my cooking dreams and my secret threw up a wall that couldn’t possibly be broken down.

By the fall, that secret was about to burst at its seams. Any glimmers of hope I’d held on to of this issue magically going away were finally extinguished when I got a letter from Brigitta. She was coming along, she wrote, and due in November. She enclosed a set of paternity papers for me to file with the Austrian consulate in Bern. She asked no involvement from me, but she would not pretend that she didn’t know the father of this baby.

I filed the papers during a day trip to Bern with Mannfred.

“Where are you going, man?” he asked when I said I’d meet him back at the station in a couple of hours. Splitting off on my own was completely uncharacteristic of our adventures together.

“I just need to go do something,” I said.

In late November, the news came. A baby girl, born on the sixteenth, five days after my twenty-first birthday. Both mother and daughter doing fine. I was not fine, though, and every time I looked at Christina, every time she told me she loved me, I felt like a bigger jerk had never existed.

The news of the baby arrived just before Christina and I were scheduled to go on holiday with her parents. They were driving down from Göteborg, and would pick us up for a trip to France, then take us back to Göteborg for winter break. I’d picked the destination, Monte Carlo, thinking that I might try for a spot at the famed Hotel de Paris while I was there, which would be a perfect conclusion to my apprenticeship stage.

The night before her parents arrived, I burst. Christina asked me something simple, like whether she should pack this sweater or that sweater, and I spilled my guts. The one-night stand, the lying, the pregnancy, the baby. She cried and screamed all night; I apologized, got defensive, and then apologized again.

“Hey,” I said, at one point. “This is completely fucking with my dreams, too.”

“Why did you wait until
now
to tell me?” she asked, over and over again.
“Why?”

I had no answer for that.

Her parents, Jens and Aiko, pulled up to Victoria at eight the next morning, as planned. We threw our bags into the trunk and for most of the drive south, Christina and I sat mute in the backseat, staring out opposite windows. When we did speak, it was not to each other. Our three days in France passed peacefully, if quietly, and I imagine Christina’s parents assumed we were burnt out from work and perhaps a little tired of our dip into domesticity. When we got to Monte Carlo, I felt too anxious and mixed-up to walk into the Hotel de Paris and ask for a tryout. I’ll write a letter, I told myself.