Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar (6 page)

But this was not normal times. So Klea hoarded her dried eggs from her aid package for a few months and swapped them for a tin of humanitarian aid pork from her Muslim neighbor. “Disgusting,” she said. But she made the
borek
, and we all ate it that Christmas by candlelight with my contribution—Toblerone bars, of course.

Klea had other recipes that had come from desperation. She would make
lepinja
, the local equivalent of pita bread, which was traditionally made with flour, oil, yeast, salt or sugar, powered milk, and water. She showed me how she made cheese—a cup of powdered milk, a cup of oil, a cup of water, salt, and a few drops of vinegar—or a faux Nutella spread from flour, powdered milk, oil, cocoa, and sugar. (The amount of each ingredient would be the same, depending on how much you had to start with. Mix all together and cook for a few minutes.)

Greens would be supplemented by nettle. “It was a type of weed,” she remembers. “It stung your skin, like poison ivy when you touched it. We boiled it and cut it and served it with rice.” Salad was made from dandelions. “And if I had a potato, or some kind of meat,” Klea says, “we mixed it with whatever packaged food came from the humanitarian aid box.” The best, she says, was chicken à la king.

Bosnians love coffee. Every home I went to during the siege, no matter how desperate, would serve coffee, Turkish style, cooked over a flame with several teaspoons of sugar. It would be insulting to refuse it, and from that time on I have been unable to drink weak coffee. Wartime coffee was something else, though: it was made from rice that was roasted and then ground.

The funny thing is, considering how desperately hungry and frightened everyone was, a friend of mine called Lucky told me that surveys done during the war showed that people were incredibly healthy. “I was as healthy as an ox,” he told me. People had great sex. The birth rate was up. Perhaps because everyone lived on adrenaline, their immune systems managed to hold on.

It was only afterward that the survivors collapsed.

Klea and her family live in Canada now. They are Canadians, not Bosnians. I have not seen Klea in sixteen years, but because of what we went through
together during those war years, we are still very close. Sisters, almost. She knows things about me I do not tell close friends. The war bonded us inseparably, forever. And I feel, I suppose thanks to e-mail and now Face-book, that I have seen her every day of all those years, war and postwar. Deni was too young when they left to remember much, certainly not the wartime food. But his mother does. Those years of scarcity are embedded in her memory.

I go back to Sarajevo often now, and once I went to the Holiday Inn. I actually stayed in the horrible place, which was empty, and saw some of the waiters. “Remember the soccer games that you had in the dining room at night? Because you could not go outside to play because of the snipers?” I asked. Said was not there, but the others pretended to remember. “Yes, yes, the war. Terrible days, the war.”

I am looking back at that time from eighteen years' distance. I remember Paul, young and strange and handsome, not yet writing his novels, smoking a cigar. And I see his end by his own hand in a Parisian flat, after a tortured life. I see Kurt and me eating another dinner years later at a different table, one overlooking water in Freetown, Sierra Leone. We're eating prawns and salad and beer. The morning after, Kurt went down the road to a place called Rogberi Junction, where he got ambushed by some kids with RPGs and guns and never came back, not alive. And I think of Joel, who went to California, married, had children, continued to surf, and lives, I believe, a very happy life. He quit the war thing. I kept going for a while—too long, it seems.

It was a particularly nostalgic time of my life, that trip back. I stayed in my old room on the fourth floor. It's always a bad idea to go back in time and try to replicate a memory. Strangely, although the hotel was expensive, it had not changed much since the war—same awful purple and orange interiors and nasty fake wood furniture. I think they had changed the bedspreads—but we used sleeping bags anyway back in those days. And of
course, the big difference was that the toilets flushed and there was running water for bathing.

They had moved the dining room to the back of the hotel. That would have been impossible during the war because it was the side of the building that got hit all the time. I ate fried eggs and toast, and drank cappuccino. No one remembered the red juice we had drunk at the beginning of the war—was it blackcurrant or cranberry? I went back to my room and packed my bag. Passing Kurt's old room, and Ariane's and Paul's, I mourned our younger selves. Too many ghosts. I picked up my case and left, and never stayed there again.

ISABEL HILTON

IT WAS MARC, A FRENCHMAN, WHO INSISTED WE EAT DOG MEAT
. Marc was one of the more intrepid gastronomes in the small foreign student body in Beijing in 1974. Once he had found a place that served it, nobody could back out. Twelve of us went one evening. The dog was served in a rich brown stew, strong and slightly sweet. Childhood memories of dog breath discouraged me from repeating the experience.

The dog meal was one stop in a two-year journey through the byways of Chinese cuisine that began in Beijing in the autumn of 1973. It had started inauspiciously.

The first meal I ate in the People's Republic was served in the cavernous dining hall of the Beijing Languages Institute, at that time the only institute of tertiary education allowed to admit foreigners. China was closed, remote, and suspicious of Western visitors. It was a country full of secrets. A quarrel with Moscow had closed Soviet airspace to flights heading for Beijing, so travelers from Europe were obliged to take the long route across the Middle East to Pakistan before heading north across the Himalaya. It took nineteen hours to reach Beijing.

Ours was the only international flight to land that evening at Beijing's airport, and we were greeted by a British diplomat, several uniformed border
guards, and a Chinese doctor in an oversize white coat who personified the government's view that foreigners brought dangerous contagion into the motherland. He offered a physical examination and threatened several injections. Behind the doctor, other servants of the Chinese revolution waited, alert to the dangers of infection from the cultural and political pathogens carried by the arriving foreigners.

A long bus ride through deserted city streets brought us to the institute's campus in northwestern Beijing. A giant statue of Chairman Mao dominated the front gate, gazing out across the quiet suburban street to the gates of the college opposite. The campus, like the rest of Beijing, seemed eerily quiet.

The officials who received us had given some thought to what these exotic new additions to the student body would eat. The meal, which appeared through a narrow hatch and was eaten in one corner of the chilly canteen, consisted of a gray fried egg, three slices of strangely sweet white bread, and a tall glass of sugared, milky tea. It represented the school authorities' idea of the debased culinary taste of the West, and no matter how disgusting they found it, they were unshakable in their conviction that we would prefer it to any local offering. Since Chinese could not be expected to eat unfamiliar food, they reasoned, foreigners must feel the same profound, if misguided, attachment to their own cuisine. In eating habits, as with other arrangements in Mao's China, apartheid was the rule.

Those were austere times. Beijing was dimly lit and subdued, the capital of a nation turned in on itself, its people wary that the wrong word or gesture could trigger devastating political consequences. They rose early and vanished from the streets as dusk fell, as though the rhythms of peasant life had infected the capital. They mimed their participation in the daily rituals of political campaigns; they seemed passive and drained of energy. Their curiosity about us, these aliens who had appeared in their midst, was expressed in mute staring. They would tug at their children's hands as we passed. If we stopped, they would encircle us, bemused by our odd clothes,
the outlandish color of our hair, our large noses, our enviable leather shoes. If we tried to talk to them, they would stare us down or shuffle away.

The wide city streets were empty of cars except for the occasional official vehicle, its windows curtained to screen the occupants from the street. Freezing winds blew in from the Gobi Desert, carrying a stinging load of dust that sandblasted our faces and seeped through the badly fitted windows of the dormitory. We joined the monochrome drifts of cyclists pedaling slowly along the flat boulevards, skirting occasional camels and frequent mule carts, their drivers dozing on top of tottering loads. The streetlights were dim and the entire town was shuttered by 9:00
P.M
. There were no bars or cafés, no nightclubs or discotheques. Cultural life was limited to the handful of films and revolutionary operas deemed politically pure.

For the visitor, Beijing was a closed city in which every foreigner who was not Albanian was a potential spy. There was no telephone directory and no guide to the city's many cultural landmarks. A few tourist attractions were open, but most of Beijing's temples had been destroyed, boarded up, or converted to other uses at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, six years before. Precious statues had been smashed and rare books and paintings burned in an orgy of rage against the past. The great city walls had been pulled down to create a ring road on which few cars ever traveled. Exploration of the city was discouraged. Foreigners would be told what they needed to know; everything else—including news from outside China—was considered a secret not to be shared.

We were surrounded by people in the world's most populous country, but a wall of politics separated us from them. The Chinese students were polite, but conversation was limited to a nervous exchange of banalities. Only a few years earlier, any contact with foreigners had been enough to bring down the fury of the Red Guards and charges of treason. Nobody had forgotten the risks, and we were marooned in a virtual isolation ward of political disapproval. Those around us spent hours in political meetings from which we were excluded; when they were not studying the latest party
instructions, they bent over their books or disappeared for long stints working in factories and on communes. The prospect of a year without social contact stretched out before us.

Exploring the rich traditions of Chinese food, we realized, was one of the few recreational possibilities available to us. It also provided the collateral benefit that we could at least share some public space with the local people, whose passion for their own cuisine seemed to have survived even the onslaught of the Maoist revolution. For us, this was a welcome diversion from the bleakness of institutional life. It was only afterward that I fully understood the gulf that separated our recreational indulgence from the preoccupations of the Chinese diners who crowded into the capital's restaurants.

Between 1960 and 1962, just over a decade earlier, an unknown number of Chinese had starved to death in what the official record still insists was a three-year stretch of natural disaster. The estimates of the dead vary from 30 million to 80 million. Every adult I encountered back then was a survivor of the worst mass starvation in human history.

It was a disaster created by politics. In 1958 Mao Zedong, in one of his periodic bouts of reckless hubris, launched China on a course of hectic industrialization that he boasted would bring China's steel-making capacity up to that of Britain within fifteen years. It was to be done through the collective efforts of the laboring masses, armed with the magic power of his own thought.

Hundreds of millions of peasants were organized into communes, their possessions—animals, land, and household goods—redesignated collective property overnight. They were to labor at the party's direction and be paid in kind through the distribution of the annual surplus, if surplus there was, according to how many work points they had earned in the course of the year. On top of their labor in the fields, they “voluntarily” dug irrigation ditches and steep hillside terraces, built roads and dams—many of which were to collapse—and, in fulfillment of Mao's steel-making ambitions, attempted to forge steel in makeshift backyard furnaces. Millions of
people wasted months of effort and untold tons of fuel creating unusable pig iron.

The magic of Mao's thoughts extended to agriculture: the peasants must throw off their old conservative habits and harness themselves to the power of revolution. He ordered the grasslands ploughed up for wheat, grain to be planted more densely, rice to be grown where it had never been cultivated before. If his instructions were followed to the letter, he said, China's harvests would triple.

It went wrong from the beginning, but who would dare to tell him? To deny the magic was to betray the revolution, and what local official would volunteer for the disgrace of being designated a counterrevolutionary and the likelihood of a slow death in a labor camp? If the chairman ordained that they could triple the grain harvest, that is what would happen. From across China miraculous harvests were reported, yields abundant enough to fill the state granaries to capacity and still leave plenty for export.

But the magic of Mao's thought worked only in the minds of party faithful. In the peasants' fields, the harvests had collapsed; the thin topsoil of the ploughed-up grasslands had blown away, exposing barren rock; the closely planted grain had shriveled and died. The rice had withered in strange latitudes. Peasants had salvaged what they could, enough perhaps to see them through a lean winter and to give them some seed stock for the following year—provided no grain tax was collected.

When the magic of Mao's thought met the desperate reality of the countryside, the result was disaster. The grain tax was set high, in accordance with the miraculous harvests reported from across the country. When the peasants refused to pay it, they were accused of sabotaging the revolution and hoarding grain. State officials seized all they could find. Within a few months people began to go hungry, then to starve. By the time the policy was reversed—and Mao himself sidelined—the manmade famine had raged for three years.