The Birdwoman's Palate Read online

  Why is it suddenly about me? But it’s something he tells me all the time.

  He continues. “We’re back to the thick-skin thing again, baby. If the general public continues to hold two views that are just plain wrong, then why should we give in to either of them? What’s important is that we know why we’re doing what we’re doing.”

  There are a lot of things I love about Bono—this is one of them. And even though I’m sure he’ll reach a point one day when he’ll tread too hard on my toes, I still love him for it.

  A few minutes later, we’re sitting at the dining table, a plate of steaming hot fried rice in front of each of us. It’s already Thursday and, for all his self-centeredness, he knows I need something to help me relax. He opens a bottle of chilled Riesling from the Clare Valley in South Australia—a Grosset Polish Hill 2010, one of his favorites.

  He speaks a bit about his day, filling me in on the latest details of his ongoing rivalry with his sous chef—a former employee of a very famous and well-respected restaurant in Jakarta, but whom Bono considers rather superficial. And it isn’t just because he hasn’t done an apprenticeship abroad, he adds hastily.

  “I know, I know,” he continues, with a shrug. “All chefs—even the best of the best—can learn a lot from their team. Not just from their sous chefs, but from the other members, too. One can always benefit from the culinary knowledge of others.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “The problem,” he says sharply, as if annoyed that I of all people should be asking him this, “is that when he’s working for me, his main task is not to show off his creativity! And certainly not in front of Jonas, Tanya, and Michael, for fuck’s sake! The three most sophisticated gourmets in this fucking country—well, if you don’t count fucking Nadezhda—who just happen to be our big bosses! His main task should be to put my creativity into execution—my ideas about a dish and its creation, springing from my vast stores of knowledge about spices and the culinary arts. It’s his fucking job to carry out those ideas and perfect them!”

  For a moment, I say nothing. What should I say to this dazzling but exasperating person, with his double chin, his glossy bee-stung lips, his arcade of battle-mongering scowls and grimaces that seem to hold a private dialogue with him? I know my duty as a friend is to stand by him and love him, however large his ego has grown. But maybe what Bono really needs is a girlfriend. Still, the second I think about it, sadness overtakes me. Why should Bono need a girlfriend? I don’t have a boyfriend, do I? Moreover, what kind of girlfriend would be able to put up with his inhumane working hours, his food-obsessed brain, his impulsive and explosive personality, and, to top it all off, the acute awareness weighing on him morning, noon, and night that each dish he sends out from his kitchen, whether prepared by him personally or by someone under his supervision, is a singular and unparalleled work of art and as such can either make or break his career?

  “In New York,” he continues, “even a talented, well-traveled chef with experience working for the best chefs in the world may never be able to open his own restaurant. He accepts that this may indeed be the case. He may know all the right techniques: how to cook savory dishes and how to bake sweet treats, how to whip up a salad and do a good roast. He may have mastered the art of seasoning and sauce making, perfected his knowledge of texture, contrast, taste. He may follow the world’s contemporary chefs and the latest developments in their cooking styles. He may know how to market himself. But all of that means nothing if he doesn’t know how to lead and work alongside others in a cramped, hot space under the pressure of temperature and time. And he certainly needs to know how to inspire other members of the team—”

  “So you’re saying you know how to do all of those things?”

  “How to practice discipline when it comes to oneself and to others, where to find the best ingredients at the cheapest possible cost—”

  “Hey! Are you listening to yourself?”

  “How to create a bond between one’s kitchen and the dining area, how to convey one’s personality and passions to every patron, how to cater to the finicky, capricious, and sometimes nonsensical culinary whims of the public.”

  I pour more wine into his glass and take a deep breath. “You do know that you’re completely exhausted, don’t you? If you really believed everything you’ve said, you would just let Arya take over your duties so you could rest. I mean, that is his task, isn’t it? Execution? Execution doesn’t mean he has to introduce something new. Execution means putting into practice what already exists.”

  I sense something in him relax. Most likely, he’s just very tired and needs some time to vent. From what little I know about Arya, he’s adaptable, gifted, and possesses a high level of self-discipline. And although his powers of culinary perception are more limited than those of Bono’s, he’s actually better at working with the rest of Bono’s team, which is composed of people like Arya. They’re kids who have grown up in small towns like Malang; who graduated from small, private colleges in Jakarta with degrees in hospitality and tourism management; who shoulder the responsibility of helping support their families; and who work within religious restrictions that, like it or not, limit their ability to enjoy all kinds of cuisine to its fullest extent. I really can’t blame Arya if he does feel a little jealous toward Bono, whose family isn’t wealthy per se, but who has still been fortunate in terms of opportunity. But this isn’t the time to defend Arya.

  Mercifully, Bono has already calmed down and moved on now to other topics: the condition of my apartment that, though far from shabby, certainly isn’t luxurious. My sixteen-year-old cat and her various ailments. My career, which is “running in place.” How I don’t have to live “like this”—“this isn’t the life for you,” though God knows what he imagines is the life for me.

  He tries to sympathize with me about my job and ask incisive questions to show he’s interested—like why the farmers whose poultry has died haven’t been affected by the avian flu themselves (my answer: “See? Exactly!”) and whether autopsies are always carried out on those who have died of avian flu (my answer: “No, never”)—and I try to answer them as best I can.

  Then I ask whether he’s really from East Java, and he says yes, from Madura to be exact: his mother is Madurese; his father is ethnic Chinese, from Surabaya. And I ask again whether he wants to come with me, even as I try to refrain from asking in the same breath about whether there’s any religious tension in his family, though it’s kind of obvious: his Madurese mother is most likely Muslim and his Chinese father is most likely not. I’m sure he isn’t interested in coming along since the last thing he probably needs is to revisit his childhood and all the varieties of petis—a sweet black variety of shrimp paste—for which his hometown is famous. What he really needs is sleep: a long, deep slumber that will get his creative juices flowing again. But he doesn’t say no.

  “So you want to come?”

  “Yeah, sure.” He sounds a bit uncertain.

  “Really, seriously. You’re coming?”

  “Yes. Seriously.”

  “Fantastic!”

  “I’m just coming along out of curiosity. I was born in Madura and all, that’s true, but I don’t remember much of it. My family moved to Jakarta when I was quite young. Nowadays, though, my mother tells me that people have such bad impressions about the Madurese.”

  “What kind of impressions?”

  “She says people think the Madurese are coarse, quick-tempered, wild. And sure enough, every time I say, ‘Let’s go over to Madura,’ people say, ‘Huh? What for? Watch out, the people there are fierce. Say the wrong thing and they’ll cut you.’”

  I laugh.

  “Anyway, if my mother’s to be believed, the Madurese are tough. In a good way. And iron-willed. A proud people, smart and strong, with a great sense of humor. And the farther east you go, in cities like Pamekasan, the people are more refined. Their food, too.”

  “So you’re serious about coming?”

&
nbsp; “I just told you I am,” he says with a new edge in his voice. “But promise me one thing.”

  I ask him what more he could possibly want from me in this world.

  “I want to leave Vanilla here while we’re gone. Is that okay? And I want you to let Job stay here and cat-sit for us.”

  Job—I don’t know his full name—is Bono’s roommate. He always claims he’s a distant relative of Bono’s, even though Bono has never felt the need to explain Job’s presence at his place. What Job does to support himself remains a complete mystery, as does whether he recognizes the irony of this mystery, given his name. He spends almost every day dashing from mall to mall. Sometimes he stops in at Bono’s restaurant and hangs out at the bar long into the night, chatting with the mixologists, who, God knows why, often share their cocktail recipes with him.

  I don’t particularly relish the idea of Job living in my space for the next two weeks, breathing and polluting the air in my apartment. Though I do need someone to take care of Gulali. But in my relationship with Bono, which is quite possibly the strongest relationship I have, I’ve let myself fall into a role where I surrender to his demands, in the same way that everyone whose lives overlap with his surrenders themselves to him as well. How exactly? Picture, for example, three investors—three restaurant owners, three people accustomed to being in charge—and picture not one of them having the courage to say, “But we don’t want cauliflower and squid. Everyone knows that’s Jason Atherton’s signature dish. Everyone knows Siria should be more than the Jakarta branch of Pollen Street Social.” Or, “A quarter of the dishes on this menu have pork in them. Indonesia’s not an Islamic state, but this is going to severely limit our clientele. It’s time for a reassessment.”

  Instead, the concessions Jonas, Tanya, and Michael have made to Bono’s whims have their roots in business calculations that rely at times on instinct, not logic. The decision those three young entrepreneurs have made to put their money and faith in a chef as young as Bono, I’m sure, isn’t just borne out of naïveté, and their willingness to agree to whatever Bono desires isn’t as farfetched as my readiness to order my life in accordance with Bono’s worldview. Ironic, yes, but there it is. Bono feels empowered when those whom he loves live for him; I feel powerful when I don’t have anyone in my life at all.

  “Okay, but Vanilla has to bring her own food,” I insist. “Also, tell Job that everything in my fridge is strictly off limits. Oh, and most importantly, he is not allowed to sleep with Gulali.”

  4

  FARISH

  My father wasn’t always the man I knew (or at least I thought I knew) growing up. That’s what my mother would tell me after he passed away. “You were his only daughter,” she would say with a sigh. “To you, your father was and always will be the man of your memories.”

  Still, she acknowledged, in many respects my father had indeed remained constant. Though he wasn’t very good at earning money, he wasn’t a drunk and he wasn’t dishonest. He wasn’t coarse either, or violent. He was always pleasant toward his wife, even more than accommodating. He never lost his temper. And he wasn’t the acquisitive sort either, except when it came to gambling.

  Even before I was born, the nights he spent at the tables taught him how to remove himself from my life. Later, he would claim it was for my own good. A child who couldn’t manage the loss of a parent would never be able to stand on her own two feet, he’d say. Only by losing a parent could a child become a true adult. He wanted to teach me to love solitude, to learn how to make do with whatever options life presented. Perhaps he became such a quiet man because he was never there—after all, an absent man has no voice.

  One day I’d realize: the gambling dens provided him with many things—sweaty faces and painted lips, flashy clothes and false flattery, fortunes told by amateur astrologers, beer-scented kisses, and meals of chicken porridge taken in the early hours of the morning. But there was a void in his heart that remained unfilled. A void deep and dark, whose echoes kept him awake all night and finally forced my mother to retreat to another room. I never told my friends at school that my parents slept in separate beds.

  One day, when I was ten, the echoes turned into long coughing spells—spells that persisted till the day he died, on a mountain of debt, his lungs riddled with holes. I was twenty-four years old.

  What can I say about my father, really? He was never there, yet I always miss him. I miss him the way a child whose parents have divorced misses the parent who has gone away because he or she will never live in the same house as that parent again. I miss him in a way I never missed my mother because I knew that my mother would always be there for me. As for my father, I’m not sure whether he even understood what “being there” meant.

  To this day, the love of solitude he instilled in me means I’m happy living alone, to the point that I hardly ever call my mother, much less do all the things a good daughter should do: take her on visits, organize lunches and dinners, go shopping together, plan excursions. Sometimes I feel guilty. After all, I’m the only one she has left in this world, and she’s never demanded anything of me.

  But my mother changed after my father passed away. She worked hard to pay off his debts and succeeded, with a little help from my wealthy grandfather. She began keeping birds as pets. And every time I did visit, she would cook my father’s favorite dishes, as though in late affirmation of his actions, a sign that all was forgiven. It was as if she wanted to say, “See? You’re not the only one who needs space. The three of us were always individualists at heart. Who knows why God brought us together only to break us apart.” (My father and I were never devout Muslims, though my mother, despite the polytheism of her Balinese–Hindu upbringing, believed fervently in God.)

  I guess that was her way of saying sorry to my father, so quiet in life and so quiet in death.

  Oh, I should say this isn’t a dream. But bits of it do pervade my subconscious. This is why I never want a partner who will remove himself from me in the same way my father did. That is, if I ever try to find one at all.

  It’s Saturday, but I decide to go into work, though yesterday was so long and tiring I didn’t think I’d be able to return ever again. But since I’ll be away for a while, I have to tie up loose ends.

  Today I’m even quieter than usual, meaning I’m practically mute. Usually I only open my mouth if someone asks me something or if I have a question that needs answering. Because no one is in today, I don’t need to open my mouth at all.

  I check my e-mail. The OneWorld secretary, Talisa, has sent Farish and me our flight itinerary. It looks grueling. We have to return to Jakarta constantly between destinations, thanks to the lack of direct flights between cities. And this itinerary doesn’t even mention all the places we’ll have to drive to by car.

  Which means three things:

  1. Before I start out (that is, from this point on) I have to refrain from eating corn, water spinach, cabbage, and peas—the four vegetables that make me feel bloated and would therefore (a) make me sluggish, (b) make it hard to pick out which clothes to bring, (c) make me look like a water buffalo no matter what I wear, and (d) make me grouchy and unfocused because I look like a fucking water buffalo.

  2. I should bring several packs of Pankreoflat and at least two bottles of Norit—the first to relieve any bloating and the second to alleviate any diarrhea (especially since I plan to try the infamous sate lalat of Pamekasan).

  3. I should pack a head scarf so I won’t be arrested by the police in Sampang or Banda Aceh, where Sharia law is in effect. Being arrested would also mean never consulting for OneWorld ever again.

  A number of hospitals in Banda Aceh, on the outskirts of Medan, and in Surabaya have suggested specific dates and times for meetings. Talisa will arrange anything further.

  I log on to a forum I subscribe to.

  Online debate continues to rage over the formulation of the vaccine for the latest strain of avian flu. The people involved are mainly outbreak experts such as mys
elf, researchers, faithful followers of everything to do with Extraordinary Events (or EE, the official government term for what I prefer to call “outbreaks”), and some unusually technologically savvy government officials.

  A professor of epidemiology—a creature like me but a million times smarter—has written the following:

  Look, viruses mutate. That’s what they do. Therefore, anticipation is key. Okay, so let’s say the new vaccine is ready in two to three months. Then what? How will the vaccine be distributed? Is every bird in the entire archipelago to be vaccinated? If so, how? By people in spacesuits descending into every village in the country, from Sabang to Merauke? It’ll cause mass panic. Look at what just happened in North Sumatra.

  Furthermore, will said vaccine provide sufficient protection? What we need, as I keep saying, is to fix the animal health care system, which has been broken for so long.

  Afrizal Fuadi, an NGO researcher—I don’t know him, but he’s always providing commentary on these kinds of forums—writes:

  Geez, why are people still talking about this? It’s not like the screw-up in handling the EE avian flu crisis popped up yesterday. It’s just the same old song.

  And did you see the latest interview with the representative for the Avian Flu Action Coordination Committee? How can he speak in such stock phrases? “We remain vigilant about X.” “We appeal to Y.” “There should be better cooperation between the Ministry of Social Wellness and Fitness, the Ministry of Livestock, and regional authorities along all shared infrastructural channels involving matters that fall into the categories of human health and animal health.” “Surveillance of interregional poultry trade must be tightened.” Etc., etc.