Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar (3 page)

They live a mile from the beach but never go. They spend their days indoors, avoiding the sun, shuttling between doctors and hospitals. With visitors the talk runs to health problems, funerals, obituaries, taxes, and restaurants. My grandparents love to eat.

We set off for the early-bird special at a French place, and on our way they introduce me to neighbors who recognize me from my grandparents' bragging.

“The foreign correspondent! How are you, foreign correspondent?” The neighbors shout so loudly that I take a step back.

My grandmother grips my arm as she shuffles to the car. I insist on driving. Their own driving is insanely slow and they notice absolutely nothing on the road that's not directly in front of them, slow-moving, and very large. I make a point of sticking to the speed limit, which requires some effort. They both tell me to slow down anyway.

The restaurant is busy with early birds: retirees who favor pastel sport shirts, beltless pants they call slacks, and white patent leather shoes with rubber soles. Sun streams in the restaurant windows. It doesn't feel like dinnertime, but I have a huge appetite nonetheless. The early bird special—country pâté set on a nest of hydroponic lettuce, poached lobster dabbed with a jarring citrus glaze, gooey chocolate mousse crowned with a maraschino cherry—is Floridian French. It's a bizarre hybrid, and a weird send-off. The next morning I get a southbound flight, and in a few hours I am
away from south Florida's strip malls and sprinklers and shuffling retirees. Suddenly, I'm in another world altogether.

On my very first trip to Haiti, I take a walk along the seafront a few blocks from downtown Port-au-Prince. A traffic jam fouls the air with clouds of exhaust fumes so thick I have to breathe through my shirtsleeve. The streets teem with legless beggars and deformed, hollow-eyed children whose rust-tinged hair suggests malnutrition. The open sewers emit a dizzying stench. Rats big as housecats skitter through piles of trash, and sweating, sinewy men crouch in shade where they can find it, their eyes bloodshot and hooded.

As I walk, soaking up the sparkling expanse of sea and the closer chaos of street commerce, I finally come across the traffic jam's source. A remarkable roadblock traverses the boulevard, rudely fashioned of tree limbs, piles of garbage, a broken bicycle, and, as its centerpiece, a dead body. The corpse is that of a middle-aged man. He is shirtless and shoeless. He wears pants, but the zipper is down and his genitals are exposed, as if they've been yanked from his pants. This weird tableau is what has brought traffic to a halt.

Haiti is the most mind-boggling place I know—a country where, as an American ambassador once said, you can believe nothing of what you hear and only half of what you see. I crisscross the country on repeated trips, driving on dried-up riverbeds to follow rumors of massacres, covering coups d'état so frequent they might be thunderstorms, writing about the competing epidemics of AIDS, boat people, deforestation, corruption, hunger.

Amid all this misery, there is a tiny, French-speaking elite that enjoys a tight grip on the relatively few profit-making enterprises in the country. At the American embassy, these oligarchs are referred to as MREs—“morally repugnant elites.” They drive Land Rovers, reside in palatial villas, and have second homes in Miami and New York. In the cool, leafy precincts of Pétionville, which overlooks Port-au-Prince like a gargoyle, chic restaurants cater to them, and the food is terrific.

At one of the city's most fashionable places—dazzling white walls hung with tastefully framed paintings, tables draped with starched linen, a tempting menu of Creole specialities—the owner is notorious for her temper. She approaches me one evening, agitated that one of my colleagues, a correspondent from the
New York Times
, has portrayed the Haitian dictator of the moment as a bit of a thug. (I have too, but she has not seen my paper.) “The
salaud!
” she says, furious at the
Times
man. My French is good enough to know that Madame has just called my colleague a bastard.

“You know what I will do?” she says, shaking her big finger at me. I do not know, and say so. “The next time he comes in here, I will poison his pumpkin soup.”

I laugh, and am promptly scolded by Madame.

“You don't think so? Just watch!”

Madame is formidable. She's built like a linebacker, and wears a dazzling white sleeveless dress. Her hair is encased in a brightly colored cloth, wrapped almost like a turban. She is a very good cook. Her pumpkin soup is renowned, and so is her
griot
—a traditional Haitian dish of crusty deep-fried cubes of pork, served with a vinegary sauce.

Madame's threat seems worth heeding. A few years earlier, a notorious chieftain of the Tontons Macoutes, the squadron of thugs used by the Duvalier dictatorship to terrorize the country, had died after eating a bowl of pumpkin soup. I pay for my dinner, thank Madame, and, on returning to the hotel, find my colleague from the
Times
. I recount Madame's threat and suggest that henceforth he avoid her pumpkin soup. He says he may avoid Madame's restaurant altogether.

My Haitian guide and translator, Patrick, has the height and build of a basketball forward. He is manic, charismatic, and good-looking. When I meet him, Patrick has just returned to Haiti after four years in New York, where he put himself through Columbia University by scalping tickets at Radio City Music Hall.

When I'm not around he hangs with a crew of Colombian cocaine traffickers for whom he serves, as far as I can tell, as a sort of courier. He wears a bullet on a golden chain around his neck, a pistol in his belt, and a thick wad of hundreds in a silver money clip in his pocket. Strictly speaking, I should not be working with Patrick, but I figure everyone in Haiti is corrupt in some way, and few have his talents.

These include a knack for talking his way into and out of practically anything. Once, intent on interviewing boat people preparing for their departure, we are surrounded on the beach by a group of men brandishing machetes who believe I am an American spy who would betray their plans to sail to Florida and seek asylum. (Except for the spy part, this is not far from the truth; I am, after all, in the business of writing about what I can learn.) The men back us into the surf up to our shins before Patrick unleashes such a tirade of electrifying oratory, by turns hectoring and hilarious, that the men back down, dissolving in laughter and accepting a peace offering of cigarettes.

A few months later, in the aftermath of a coup, we are in a slum courtyard interviewing a
vodoun
priest and his three wives, who are describing a murderous rampage by army troops. The priest has just returned to the neighborhood, which is otherwise deserted. We've been talking for ten minutes when two army jeeps screech up. They disgorge a dozen soldiers and their commander, a wild-eyed captain. The captain is apoplectic; the tendons on his neck are bulging. He is screaming, calling us “provocateurs”—the only word I can make out from his tirade in Creole—pointing his pistol in Patrick's face and then in mine, his finger on the trigger. His men prod us in the ribs with the muzzles of their M16s, enjoying my terror.

Patrick attempts to soothe the captain with a bribe and, failing that, calmly informs him that I am President Bush's personal emissary, a close friend of First Lady Barbara Bush, and—he throws this in for good measure—a former aide-de-camp to General Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
He explains that any harm that befalls us will be taken as a grave insult by the White House and the Pentagon's top brass. For proof, Patrick tells me to produce my driver's license (“more official-looking than your press card,” he explains later) and carefully pronounces “Washington, D.C.” for the benefit of the captain, who is evidently illiterate. Drenched in sweat and still enraged, the captain nonetheless orders his men to withdraw, though not before shooting out the tires of Patrick's Land Rover and firing a few more shots from his pistol just over our heads.

When they are gone, Patrick shrugs. “In Haiti we are all little dictators,” he says. “That captain, those soldiers, the president—even me!”

I leave Haiti feeling drained and stunned, as if I have dived into a swamp full of alligators and swum a dozen laps. At the Port-au-Prince airport, I run a gauntlet of pickpockets, begging children, and foreign travelers panicked by the terminal's routine pandemonium, and pay a series of small bribes at customs, though I am carrying nothing of any value. Once I clear passport control, I collapse in the departure lounge, drink Barbancourt rum, and chain-smoke cigarettes. I don't fully relax until the plane is wheels-up, bound for Miami.

In the hum of the flight over the Caribbean, I stare down at the clouds, my thoughts toggling from the soldiers and their wild-eyed captain to my grandparents. They expect to see me tonight for the early bird special at a new Vietnamese place in Boca. They're going with friends—“the Shermans from Brooklyn!” my grandmother tells me when I call—and they want to show me off. I think of the soldiers and their M16s and the
vodoun
priest. And I think it has been a hell of a trip—one unbelievable hell of a trip—and what I'd really like is to put off my grandparents for a day or two so I can be by myself tonight, at a spectacular Cuban restaurant I know in Coral Gables, and order every damn thing on the menu.

BARBARA DEMICK

IN 2003, A JAPANESE SUSHI CHEF BE ARING THE PSEUDONYM KENJI
Fujimoto penned a memoir that gave rise to the expression “cook and tell.” The subject of Fujimoto's indiscretion was Kim Jong Il, for whom he had served as personal chef for more than a decade. The rotund North Korean leader had greater passion for good food than for beautiful women, allowing his chef as intimate an understanding of his psyche as any of his many purported mistresses, though none of them—as far as I know—ever wrote a memoir.

Fujimoto was recruited in 1982 by a Japanese-Korean trading company to work at an elite restaurant in Pyongyang for five thousand dollars per month. Six years later, he was asked to be the personal cook for Kim Jong Il, then the heir-apparent to his father, North Korea's founder, Kim Il Sung. As Fujimoto tells it, he soon became a companion to the younger Kim. Both men were in their forties at the time. They went horseback riding, hunting, and jet-skiing together. They ogled dancing girls at banquets. But most of all, they obsessed about food. Fujimoto ingratiated himself with Kim through his superior knowledge of food. They talked recipes. Fujimoto regaled his patron with anecdotes from Japan's great kitchens and markets, especially Tokyo's Tsukiji fish market, where Fujimoto had spent six months
learning how to fillet fish. He showed Kim videos of cooking shows that Fujimoto's sister had taped from Japanese television.

Although Kim was at the time renowned for his heft (only five feet two inches tall, he weighed more than two hundred pounds), the North Korean was a gourmet, not a glutton. He took food seriously and owned a collection of several thousand cookbooks. His palate was so sensitive that he could detect if the kitchen added a few grams too much sugar to the sushi rice. Before cooking the rice, the kitchen staff would inspect each grain individually and discard any blemished by irregularities of shape or color. He ate only the choicest foods and loved the fatty cut of tuna known as
toro
.

Sometimes Fujimoto would prepare sashimi using a trick he'd learned at Tsukiji, slicing so the vital organs were spared and the fish was served writhing on the platter. Kim loved shark's fin, a delicacy across Asia, and
poshintang
, a dog-meat soup that Koreans believe strengthens immunity and virility.

Money was no object when it came to food. Fujimoto made shopping trips around the world to pick up ingredients—to Iran and Uzbekistan for caviar, to Denmark for pork, to Thailand for mangoes, durians, and papayas. On a whim, Kim once sent Fujimoto to pick up a box of his favorite rice cakes, which were scented with mugwort and available only at a department store in Tokyo. Fujimoto later calculated the trip and put the cost of each bite-size morsel at $120.

Fujimoto worked for Kim until 2001, when he defected back to Japan, escaping on the pretext of making a shopping run to pick up
uni
, or sea urchin, to make a dish they'd seen on one of the videos. Since the publication of his first book, he has written two more about his time in North Korea. He makes frequent appearances on television, usually wearing aviator shades and a bandana to disguise his identity. I never got a chance to speak directly to Fujimoto (when I requested an interview shortly after the publication of his first book, I was told there would be a fee), but I have read excerpts of his writing translated into English and heard his views on issues
ranging from denuclearization to the process for choosing a successor in North Korea. It is as though he peered through the gullet straight into the heart and soul of one of the world's most enigmatic leaders.

I don't mean to dismiss what Fujimoto writes. He is taken seriously by the intelligence community and by journalists like myself following North Korea. The chef is one of the few outsiders who has personally met Kim Jong Un, Kim's youngest son and heir-apparent. Indeed, Fujimoto gained some credibility by correctly picking out Jong Un, whom he'd met as a child, as the likely successor. “A chip off the old block, a spitting image of his father in terms of face, body shape and personality,” he wrote in his first book. He also supplied the world with the first (and as of this writing in 2010, only) confirmed photograph of the successor.

Another account comes from Ermanno Furlanis, an Italian chef, who published a three-part series in the
Asia Times
titled “I Made Pizza for Kim Jong Il.” The tell-all Italian chef, who worked in the private kitchens for a stint in 1997, never met the North Korean leader (Kim took over after his father's death in 1994), but got an up-close view of what he and others in his retinue were eating. “Every now and then a kind of courier would show up from some corner of the world. I saw him twice unloading two enormous boxes containing an assortment of 20 very costly French cheeses, and one box of prized French wines. That evening, dinner—a feast worthy of Petronius'
Satyricon
—was served with an excellent Burgundy and delicacies from around the world. As an Italian I could not refrain from objecting, and three days later fresh from Italy a shipment of Barolo arrived.”