The Demon of Dakar - Kjell Eriksson [23]
He nodded, studied the plate, and, realizing that there was nothing to alter, tried to memorize the arrangement.
Donald left the kitchen at ten o’clock. Pirjo also went home after Johnny promised to handle the cleaning up. He put things away, rinsed and scrubbed the floor while Feo made a rapid inventory check and called in orders to suppliers’ answering machines.
Afterward they each sat down with a beer. Feo smoked a cigarette, only one, in silence, with obvious pleasure.
“You go home,” Johnny said. “I’ll take out the garbage.”
Feo shook his head.
“This is the best time,” he said and smiled at Johnny. “Let’s drink some coffee and have a calva. We have to celebrate your start here.”
“How come you speak such good Swedish?”
“Practice,” Feo said. “I talk with my wife all the time and she corrects me. Our place is like a language course. It is the only way to become a person, to understand the words. Should I go around like a svartskalle and understand nothing?”
“One thing,” Johnny said. “Where does Donald come from? He said Kerala, but that’s in India.”
“His father was a missionary,” Feo answered. “Donald lived in India for fifteen years. You should taste his bean dishes and lamb cooked in yogurt. He could open an Indian restaurant.”
He stood up, left the kitchen, and returned with espresso and calvados on a platter.
“Slobodan’s treat,” he said.
They drank their coffee in silence. Johnny experienced the fatigue in his body as a pleasant mutedness. Voices and laughter could be heard from the dining room and the bar while the kitchen rested in stillness. The best time, Johnny thought, and stared into the shimmer of the calvados for a long time before he tasted it.
The spirits exploded in his mouth and he jerked forward as if he had received a violent blow to his back, but he managed to put the glass down before he ran over to the sink.
Feo watched him but said nothing. Johnny remained leaning over the sink. He spit, and did everything he could to quell his impulse to retch.
“Damn,” he said, when his body had calmed down, “it must have gone down the wrong way.”
“Have a little water,” Feo said.
After exchanging a few words with Måns in the bar, Feo and Johnny said their good-byes in the alley outside Dakar’s kitchen entrance. The Portuguese unlocked his bicycle and rolled away. Johnny stood and watched his new colleague as he left.
He should have known better than to have a strong drink like that. It had started about a year ago, the nausea and heaving and a diffuse ache in his abdomen. An ache that sometimes turned into a stabbing pain. Beer was all right and sometimes also white wine, even if the enjoyment of having a glass was now diminished since he feared the nausea and pain. At first, Sofia had urged him to go to a doctor, but then it was as if she had lost interest in his well-being and she stopped commenting on his contorted expressions.
What had Feo thought? Did he sense that Johnny’s claim that the drink had gone down the wrong way had been a lie? Feo had not said anything, but his eyes revealed that he had not completely bought the explanation.
Johnny walked home. He did not mind that it was a long way, perhaps two kilometers. He actually appreciated the mild and restful evening, the occasional person he encountered did not bother him, and he thought that his new city reminded him of a foreign country. It was a feeling he would carry with him for a long time, that he was a guest, a stranger who did not have any duties to the town and its inhabitants.
If anyone talked to him, posed a question, or sought his opinion, he could excuse himself with the fact that he was new, a temporary visitor, and in this way avoid all responsibility.
It was Sofia, connected to his dream of a life with meaning, who haunted him. He knew that his self-imposed outsider status was a defense . He lived as if in quarantine. Working as a cook at Dakar was the only thing that made him human, a social creature. He did not seek the company of others, their warmth or acceptance. He could just as well