Heart of Iron - Ekaterina Sedia [89]
“Hussar Menshov!” Kuan Yu cried out in English. “We wondered if you would be along with your fellow hussars. Have you found Mr. Bartram?”
I shook my head. “I worry the English have him, but I found no trace of him.”
Liu Zhi gave me a penetrating look. “You got here fast enough; you didn’t look for long.”
“I fell ill,” I said, and felt my cheeks blaze with shame.
Kuan Yu whispered to his friend and smiled at me. “Do not worry,” he said, reassuring. “Do not pay attention to Zhi—he’s a busybody. Here, meet our friend Woo Pei, the cook here.”
I shook hands with a very tall and very thin Chinese gentleman, who wore his hair braided in a long queue. His lips pressed tightly together, lest a word or a smile escaped from them.
“I hear you make great pot stickers,” I said.
He nodded. “My fame precedes me. Or rather, it escapes my kitchen and wanders about looking for new customers. Sit with us then, as I was about to make food for my friends. You are welcome to join us, but you mustn’t get angry if we speak our own language.”
I shrugged. “Why would I be? Surely if it is something that concerns me you would tell me. Correct?”
Woo Pei said something in Cantonese, and the three of them laughed. I busied myself taking off my new furs and watching Woo Pei boil water in a copper kettle, and pour it over flour. He mixed the dough and kneaded it with his long, thin fingers, then cut it into small pieces and flattened them. With minute, precise motions that seemed more suited to a watchmaker than a cook, he chopped onions and mixed them with ground meat and sesame oil, dusted the mixture with potato flour, and stuffed all the tiny dough circles with meat.
Before I knew it, he was heating a large iron skillet. As it hissed and sputtered oil, he dropped perhaps three dozen of the tiny meat dumplings into the skillet. He then poured water over them, covered the skillet, and sat down with the rest of us.
“Five minutes,” he told me in Russian, and then went back to talking with Kuan Yu and Liu Zhi. By then, the aroma of onion and meat had grown strong enough to distract me from any other thoughts but how hungry I was. Jack was an afterthought now, as I concentrated on not looking too impatient.
The pot stickers were delicious—fried golden on one side and steamed perfectly otherwise, served with brown salty and spicy dipping sauce , they seemed to me a most delicious meal I had ever tasted. I always got such an impression when eating after a long hike or a protracted riding lesson, something about the combination of physical exertion and fresh air made even the simplest food taste divine, a joy meant to be savored only infrequently, distinct in my memory from all the other mundane, everyday meals.
After the four of us had finished eating, I sat back in my chair, enjoying the pleasant sensation of fullness and warmth, accompanied by the first twinges of fatigue. I listened to the three Chinese men, and imagined myself back in the comfortable confines of the Crane Club, its vast windows gilded by the setting sun, its mysterious tiny machines and airship models humming and whirring, the tiny jointed wings folding and unfolding like paper fans . . .
Two words pulled me abruptly back into the tavern kitchen in a brand-new Siberian town. The words Taiping Tianguo stood out clearly in the otherwise incomprehensible speech.
I sat bolt upright and leaned over the table, as if sheer effort of my will would be enough to decipher the indecipherable syllables, and I wished I had learned Cantonese back in St. Petersburg when there was still someone to teach me. As Eugenia had warned me when I was just a child, no one grew up with no regrets; the best one could do was to make sure one’s regrets were not stupid.
Woo Pei noticed me straining to understand, laughed