Eating - Jason Epstein [15]
It is the summer of 1939. Everyone knows that war is now inevitable. Chexbres had been gassed in the 1914 war and is dying. A leg has been amputated. Soon the other will have to go, Fisher coolly, lovingly reports. They have returned to Vevey for the last time and are now on their way to Milano. The waiters in the restaurant car, the old one with the patched jacket and the young one who had been trimming radishes, had grown fond of Fisher and her lover on previous trips. They try to hide their dismay at Chexbres’s condition, but their solicitude betrays them as they hustle him and Fisher into the restaurant car early to spare them the company of the “Strength-through-Joyers”—coarse German tourists—who have squeezed into their compartment. When lunch is over, and the train is stopped at the border much longer than usual, the waiters invent pretexts to keep them at the table lest they discover the reason for the delay. A prisoner who had been taken aboard in chains that morning and led past their table in the restaurant car by two fascist agents has committed suicide by smashing the vestibule glass at the far end of the restaurant car and slitting his throat on the broken pane. The lovers know nothing of this, but when the train moves on into Italy at last, and they return to their compartment, they notice the broken pane and a dampness on the vestibule floor that had not been there before and they remember the man in chains being taken back to Italy.
That winter, their lives “had ended … with Chexbres’ illness. And when we got word that we should go back to our old home in Switzerland and save what we could …we went, not so much for salvage, because possessions had no meaning any more to us, but because we were helpless to do anything else. We returned to the life that had been so real like fog, or smoke, caught in a current of air. We were very live ghosts, and drank and ate and saw and felt and made love better than ever before, with an intensity that seemed to detach us utterly from life.”
By “life” she meant the life around them, for people “that summer, were laughing and singing and drinking wine in a kind of catalepsy, or like cancerous patients made happy with a magic combination of opiate before going into the operating theatre. We had finished with all that business, and they had it still to go through.”
When I wrote about Fisher for the Times, its food page consisted of several introductory paragraphs and a few recipes, conventionally formatted. Had Fisher described some of the meals that she and Chexbres enjoyed, I would have tried to reconstruct them for the Times’s readers, but she didn’t. Instead, I described the first lunch I managed to put together after 9/11, when, after two weeks confined to the wounded city with the smell of fire and death still clinging to our neighborhood, a mile or so north of where the Twin Towers had stood, it was time to drive out to Sag Harbor. I did so in low spirits, for the United States had been hurt and the new administration was untried. Judy, a foreign correspondent with years of experience in the Middle East, knew at once that the attack was the work of Islamic terrorists linked to those who had tried unsuccessfully to destroy the Towers eight years previously. The media were comparing the new attack to Pearl Harbor. But this seemed wrong. Japan had been a powerful nation. For FDR in 1941, war was the only possible response. But Osama bin Laden, who had by now emerged as the likely mastermind, was a gangster, a fanatic with religious pretensions, as Judy, who had been the first journalist to write about him at length, had written in the Times. As I drove out to Long Island that day, I wondered whether the shoot-from-the-hip Texan in the White House who had failed to anticipate the World Trade Center disaster—which, in retrospect, should have been foreseen—would be competent to prevent further attacks.
The Twin Towers had formed the backdrop to the cityscape that I see from my terrace,