Lunch in Romania
Straight maths: how are they alive, how can this place remain open with a menu listing food you can buy as if a farmer dropped produce off at sunrise, the eeriness is true, they are dead they must be this is a trick – we have gone off track in Romania like ignorant lovers of life so now it’s a 70s domestic low-budget horror movie with white lace curtains that only hang halfway down the window and the deep dark bulging eyes of the hostess and that she doesn’t look at me and smiles constantly, cinema matches truth I tell you and the beer comes filled to the brim with no foam on top and it’s bubbling at least and tastes like tangy stale bread but there is salt and pepper on the table and a jar of some type of horseradish paste sitting right there in this room ready for a hundred woodsmen to come in and purchase boar meat by the kiloton and wipe the boar blood/horseradish paste from their whiskers, downing litres of the musty beer and whisking themselves off back to build or dredge or farm or heave and ho these men of posterised ideal, my frame shimmering via the weight of 500mls of beer, the soup coming fast and boiling live in the bowl, a watery broth with cubes of root vegetable floating in her, a few sips has us flaking in salt to illicit some sense of flavour, by the time half the beer and half the soup is gone you feel embedded, you get it, even the sturdy matron with a penchant for staring is endearing and part of the whole, you have learned, as they all have learned (the phantasms of your imagination, who are here nonetheless), I cough/choke on my cabbage soup “in spirit” that’s me with food on my lips grabbing for the beer and really now gulping it down the matron standing and doing some gesture which is foreign to me but I repeat it nodding and I hope it means that the next beer is coming and assuming so I down the rest of my half-litre, it’s in spirit, I believe, but it could be, as my partners face suggests, my own fantasy running amuck, the beer the food the matron the retired probably dead sturdy men who used to use their huge swollen thumb and forefinger to pinch and daintily lift the tiny glazed clay lid off the tiny glazed clay pot that houses the, one remembers, homemade horseradish paste and with a stomach-churning delicateness pick up and use the tiny spoon to liberally and repeatedly apply the house-potted perhaps too raw and fresh variety onto a steak or mutton or freshly ensnared killed and roasted deer is the stuff of dreams here in this small place that time has not touched (although today we will be eating frozen meat cooked in frozen sauce with frozen vegetables deep fried in a type of vegetable oil that we have seen here that is so nutrient-less that it is as transparent as water – how its spits and fights against the cook, “I don’t deserve this” (a creed for almost every human), he says, shielding himself from the spatter with clothes he must wash himself manually in a tub that gets heated by gas so he must decide whether to wash or bathe or cook in various configurations, his life largely determined by these negotiations, value propositions, such that he may go days without washing his body because he missed the cycle, wash clothes to dry to wear to work is a base necessity, cooking yes of course one must eat and live, then the body (he now groans realising the priorities he has chosen has led him to this result, that he feels dirty, that he is often perfumed with sour body odour, that he has prioritised outward appearance related to his job function above his own personal wellbeing) which he hides away in the kitchen registering his own odour which our guests were they to meet him would find charming or at the very least in keeping with the general atmosphere, expected – the derivative of this being that here in this country one is often pressed into making such sacrificial decisions about what one aspect of comfort one will indulge in at the expense of another, why travelling in public transport is oftentimes a olfactory travelogue, why the elderly look like that, smaller and greyer, why, the travellers may note once they have spent enough time here, just why things are the way they are, their charm being a lack of charm, for instance). Busy calculating the costs involved in keeping this place alive even assuming our hosts own the building another couple comes in, takes a seat at a table by the window largely ignoring the hospitalities of the attendant wraith and arrange their garments on the backs of their chair and fold their scarves neatly and shove them into the pockets of their autumnal coats in a ritual they have performed hundred of times, this is how they do that these two retirees who have worn themselves into synchronous behaviour, their souls and psyches melded, eroded into one another – her sharp parts filed down to nestle better into his smoothed edges, one soap-stone river rock union where the years make the objects fit and when we come along trekking through the forest and discover these romantic stones all those years later we see beauty, but it is because we can’t perceive time correctly, we perceive this process as gentle and natural, a softening, an understanding, but on a microscopic level, when we look into the neurons and synaptic connections and which channels have hardened to stone and which have died (the tendrils reach out for a connection, there is a chemical that, like pollen, sends out its message of new-life or tries to spawn somewhere new, the other hill, over the stream, out from this mired paddock where I was planted so that my seeds could be harvested for the farmer’s wife’s bland unsweetened poppy seed cakes and when finding no answer to their call, no pathway to connect with or grow towards it recoils, like a slapped hand or the face of a child who upon telling their parents they want to be a dancer are laughed at), and so this wearing down is the slow process of atrophy, of customisation, of making two objects that do not fit together erode the incongruent parts and violently form one whole, one spherical object (ratios to be determined, the degree in which one succumbs, or the amount one is willing to give, or the type of live one has for another, or, the degree to which one believes the other’s dream), say, or two hard-souled static archetypes who have always needed another to be whole required barely any smoothing at all and their two shapes formed a comfortable fit almost instantly is what seems to be the case with these two mirror images, barely gender discernible (as in they have obvious gender identities but they have grown so similar that any such distinction is irrelevant) so close have they aligned their tastes outlooks and opinions (identical footwear, identical outfit composition, namely, chinos, button shirt, padded vest, autumn light jacket, light scarves his light blue, hers light brown, in fact everything is in variational tones of light blue and light brown, in mirrored composition, similar haricots) so far that one could say they are growing into identical twins, humans who have a deeply shared DNA connection such that they have a single mind shared across two bodies, the matron comes and they place their order very quickly, again dismissing her pleasantries and when the transaction is complete they turn their gaze, him looking left and her looking right, out the window next to the table that they always sit in where they stop on their Wednesday afternoon walk to have lunch every week or fortnight as they have done ever since they retired and if they each ordered a main meal and a soup each which is the typical order in this region then the bill will come to the equivalent of around ten euro each but I hope they have ordered a beer and some dessert so in calculating the take so far this restaurant will earn around fifty to sixty euros from me and my increasingly lovelier partner and around thirty from this time-tested loyal dependable clientele which means they will earn almost a hundred euro this impromptu Wednesday lunch session, in casting my eyes around the room I count an at least forty two seat capacity which when taken at fifteen euro per seat means they could only every expect around five to six hundred euro per service and, given we are eating from a menu they have crafted to be deliverable even if no one open the front door for days (I am imagining, either unfairly or realistically) perhaps there is another calculation to be made – that, just like our worn together identicates, this couple, the sweating chef in the kitchen who jumps to cook at random points from mid morning to mid evening, together with his wife who is the spectre of the building, the white walls, the décor the cutlery and glasses in the cupboard untouched like the remnants of a home that has been deserted or that, after a long season of autumn, winter then spring is finally reopening, the family is returning for summer and they remember their glasses sitting upside down on the tea towels, throw open the door to their summer home, pop open a bottle of wine and simply blow the dust off the glass as they lift it and pour the wine in, drink it down and enjoy their holiday like they have done for decades, the family ages and changes babies are born, new couples form and some marriages end in divorce, in this way they are happy and they don’t calculate the euros and the revenue they are simply, like many things beautiful, simply a part of the human world, they exist and are able to exist, they have a menu that offers dishes they know how to preserve and then serve without the constraints of heavy foot traffic, they have a cellar of decent local wine and the ability to serve their type of local beer because the monastery fifteen minutes drive up the road makes it all year round no matter what mood tourists are in and sitting here now, the warm glow from the medieval monk-produced beer has me appreciating this triumphant couple, over and above these morose tired dull worn together stones, mirrored worn down humans beings who together are worth one soul, have no identity save what they have managed to mould together as some sculpture that is able to get through life and are still silently sitting there, heads turned, waiting for the same thing they order every time to come and be served for them to eat down and tick that box once more. Falling in love with earnest humans living through adverse conditions should be easy, the face of the matron is heartbreaking, her perseverance inspiring, of course, I have invented every aspect of this restaurant and these people to suit my own romantic version of reality, one in which humans beings are triumphant and stoic and honest and authentic when it could equally be true that the restaurant is filled to the brim Friday night through to Sunday, that travel through this small town is huge and that this couple is a greedy rat-like succubus serving mediocre pre-cooked defrosted run-of-the-mill Romanian traveller-quality fare to those unfortunate enough to make a scheduled rest stop in this village because the tour bus operator is getting a cut from these conniving hucksters who can serve out dish after insipid dish to an endless swathe of moron tour guide patrons who, enamoured as I am at the décor from another era, are happy to be charged a flat rate of forty five euro per person to try the local food and drink the local beer “it comes from the monastery down the road you know” and are packed back on the bus to fill the air with their horseradish burps and talk in unison about the food because they all had exactly the same goulash-like stew quickly and cheaply prepared (the gristle is the charm, “a bit chewy” they get to say, maintaining a sense of nationalistic pride because the quality of food in their homeland is far better, a validation that these “poor countries” do have it bad oh the poor things, etc.) and dish out into a bowl already half-filled with a huge watery bread dumpling which the tourists don’t realise is also frozen and reconstituted en masse and can be bought in the local super market for 50 crowns (roughly two euros) and is a staple of the downtrodden or indeed that the two visitors are of course two semi-retired research scientists who have chosen to live in this largely isolated and still natural part of the world after completing decades of world-saving stem-cell research catapulting humankind eons into the future with regard to cancer cures and advancements in nano-biology that will, because they set the groundwork for it, assist in curing almost every area of degenerative conditions to do with the liver, heart and lungs which are the major organs that cause premature death and can use the metaphor that they have punched death herself in the face, kicked a few teeth out of her bedraggled head and her shocked response let thousands of souls loose from her grip, the shades returning to the living bodies of the elderly who the next day sit gingerly up in their bed and feel for the first time in decades as though they are in their twenties again, they remember themselves so to speak, and refuse to look in the mirror for as long as possible such is the strength of the sense of self they have, they know, momentarily regained and so they sit here, a slight Asperger’s or awkwardness or irregularity to their behaviour as a couple, as humans, which a crude observer perhaps mean-spirited or misanthropic in nature may observe that they are atypical and appear non-loving or dull or unfortunate when it is in fact for them one of the rare places and times that they venture out and feel safe enough to visit and for a few moments behave and live as ‘normal’ people would, their minds deeply entrenched in a complex microcosm of elements and reactions and the secretion of enzymes interacting with the nucleus of radioactive atoms and in this world of swirling greens and purples and maddening calculations and great danger and the mind of god searched for in smaller and smaller iterations that they can sit and enjoy the trees swaying in the breeze (the incalculable mathematics of nature is what one is awestruck by instantly, they may argue) so in this sense, he knows, he has amused himself for a few moments in between sipping his beer and eating some of the cabbage rolls and mashed potato which, because he had to pull the toothpicks out himself, as warned by the matron by her doing a gesture of her mimicking holding a small rodent and then pricking spikes out of just after she placed the dish down in from of him, that these products are good and fresh and made with love, the texture of the cabbage is cooked-through but still firm, the meat and rice blend inside is moist and fresh, the sauce is not separated and the general sense of care is obvious, we are sitting here appreciating a single moment not on a road map or rule book, no tourist bus is scheduled to arrive and save this couple from oblivion, it is me and my partner and whoever from the local area is willing to come and be served with love and care, no matter the state of your relationship, your previous contributions to mankind or if you can’t bear to look at the person you have become reflected back at you in the gaze of your partner.
