Frightened by the clump of cold chicken blocking his air passage, he reeled around the kitchen in a panic, until finally felled by a massive heart attack. Mercifully, Papa was dead even before he hit the floor.
We all thought Papa would live forever, and his funeral in Lumière remains to this day bleak and out of focus. The entire family was mad with grief, but I personally was so brokenhearted, my eyes so blurry from the constant flow of tears, that I never noticed how feeble Madame Mallory was looking, as she leaned heavily on Monsieur Leblanc’s arm and stood unsteadily at the back of the cemetery. All I could see was that the cemetery was filled with local residents, thousands of them from as far away as Clairvaux-les-Lacs, their hats off and heads bent in respectful mourning.
He won them over in the end, my Papa.
Two months later, on her way down from the attic, Madame Mallory tripped and tumbled down the stairs, breaking several ribs and both legs on the descent. She died a few weeks later, from pneumonia, confined to a bed in the same hospital that had treated my burns two decades earlier.
It is my great shame and sadness that I never made it back to the Jura to properly say good-bye to my maîtresse, but I couldn’t, for simply too much was happening in Paris. Life always brings unpredictable surprises, and after all my good fortune, it was apparently time again for an Indian-style hullabaloo.
The world we had known for so long, it abruptly ended in some profound way, when the television screens suddenly filled with the shocking news that stock markets around the world were collapsing.
Economists have their own explanation as to what happened during this dark period, but I like to think the universe at large was itself reacting to the news that Abbas Haji and Gertrude Mallory were no more a part of this life, but had finally been summoned to the abattoir.
Depression, on a global scale, it was the only appropriate response.
Chapter Fourteen
It was Saturday, twenty years after I came to Paris, when I was at the Place Maubert farmers’ market acquiring a handsome pair of imported mangoes wrapped in purple tissue and carefully packed like rare orchids in a wooden box, that my sister rang my cell phone and informed me that Paul Verdun had died in a car crash.
Mehtab called just as I was handing over my money to the cashier under the stall’s awning, so I was unable to respond to her typically brutal delivery, but my sister chattered on in a voice pitched with excitement.
“They found him at the bottom of a cliff, just outside Courgains. Dead. Just like that. Car, flat as nan. Nah, Hassan? Are you there?”
The vendeuse behind the fruit stall handed me my change.
“I cannot talk now,” I said, and disconnected the phone.
For quite some time I stood stupid with shock, wondering what should become of us. The world seemed to be coming to an end, and a meaningless and monotonous phrase—an era is over—incessantly went around in my head.
But Paris cannot in fact be stopped and the Place Maubert market continued its brisk trade without pause. It was early May and couples lugging string bags stuffed with leeks and joints of spring lamb banged into me. A Vespa beeped with irritation at my statuary immobility before carefully negotiating around my back.
Odd details still stick in my mind: the policemen on in-line skates eating cheese pastries, flakes of dough falling on their blue shirts; the golden charcuterie chickens turning in the rotisserie with windows yellowed from grease. The very air of the market smelled, I remember, of ripe Comté cheese, and a wicker hamper filled with wine bottles from Argentina’s Mendoza vineyards stood on the sidewalk opposite me. Not even the North Africans hawking cocaine-like vials of Turkish and Iranian saffron, normally a great personal weakness, could budge me from my spot in the center of the street, where I was rooted like thistle to a rock.
But there it was, inescapable: an important branch of classic French cuisine had just died alongside Chef Verdun, one of its last true defenders.
It was at that moment a cantankerous old woman with a fig face knocked into me, deliberately I am sure, and, without warning I was furious. I pushed back, hard, and she scuttled away yelling, “Sale Arabe.”
The woman’s curse—“You dirty Arab”—brought me abruptly back to the Rue des Carmes, and for the first time I really looked around at the Parisian indifference surrounding me in the market, so typically offhand, as if nothing of true significance had actually occurred.
I was deeply offended. Paul was a national treasure and even I, a foreigner, knew the bells of Le Panthéon up the hill should have been ringing out the country’s great sorrow. And yet his departure from this world was greeted by nothing more than a Gallic shrug of the shoulders; but perhaps I should have seen it coming. Just weeks before, Gault Millau had demoted Paul from nineteen to fifteen points out of a possible twenty, a brutal reminder that today’s critics and customers were obsessed with the culinary cubism of Chef Charles Mafitte.
It was logical, with my heritage, that I would be drawn to Chef Mafitte’s “world cuisine,” which seemed to revel in combining the most bizarre ingredients from the most exotic corners of the earth, but if I leaned in any direction, it was toward Paul’s French classicism. Charles Mafitte’s “laboratory” creations were highly original, creative, and even at times breathtaking, but I could not help coming to the conclusion his culinary contrivances were, in the end, a triumph of style over substance. And yet it was undeniably his “chemical” cooking that had struck a chord with the critics and public alike these last several years, and, like it or not, Paul’s classically ornate fare was passé and seemed, in comparison, hopelessly outdated. But Paul was all honest blood and bones and meaty substance, and I, for one, was going to miss him deeply.
But it was all over. And thick-headed as I was, I realized, standing in that Saturday morning market, there was nothing left for me to do but to return home and call Paul’s widow to express my condolences. So, mangoes under arm and full of this admittedly abstract sense of loss, I headed back to Le Chien Méchant, up at the top of Rue Valette.
As I trudged up the hill, past the flat-faced apartment buildings on Rue des Carmes, marking the postwar rise of French socialism, I walked under a string of children’s underpants hung from a clothesline stretched across two balconies. Right then a woman in the ground-floor flat of the working-class building threw open a window in her kitchen, and I was instantly engulfed in a steamy cloud of tripes à la mode de Caen, billowing out from the cast-iron pot on her stove.
It was this earthy smell of tripe and onions that finally pulled up from my depths a stew of memories, and in that moment my friend Paul—not the three-star Chef Verdun—was restored to me.
For I remembered that time when, a few years ago, eager not to take the trip alone, Paul convinced me to join him for a produce tour of the Alsace, on the border with Germany. Paul drove his silver Mercedes at a reckless tempo through the countryside, and it was too much, the manic way he pushed us through our tasks. Until, that is, the afternoon arrived when—after countless trudgings up and down muddy lanes to remote farmhouses, where we sampled yet another Gewürztraminer or thyme-infused honey or smoked sausage—I had a fit.
“Enough,” I yelled. I would not continue to one more farm, I told Paul in an ice-cold voice, unless he first agreed to stop for a quiet and unhurried meal. Paul, shocked by my uncharacteristic show of steel, quickly agreed to my terms, and we pulled into a sleepy village I can no longer remember the name of.