Bees Knees
There’s a dozen umbrella’s clustered together, creating a shaded part of the open courtyard. A glassed cube forms an adjacent indoor area and the smokers have been shooed off to the end of the L-shaped outdoor section, on a slightly raised wooden deck. It’s a perfect winter afternoon on the Highveld of the holy land. The sky the palest of blues, the sun casting its warmth gently over the bare heads of the few people lucky to be out of the shaded parts. The place is almost full, I look around for my lunch host but she’s nowhere to be seen. I choose a table in the smoking area, because my host has told me she’s been reading Pamuk’s Black Book and has taken up smoking again.
I soften myself towards the unfamiliar service when visiting an unfamiliar spot with as much kindness as possible. I settle in to watch the crowd while I wait. Every table in this roofed outdoor smoking area is literally smoking. There’s the usual array of brands, nothing notable and I relent and indulge my own occasional smoke. I dig about in the multiple pockets and nooks of the daily work-bag and eventually gather the paper, a filter and tobacco to make a roll-up. I lift my head to light it and catch a face at the corner table smiling at me. I stare back before I remember to smile and she calls out ‘that’s so cool.’
My lunch host bustles in before I can reply, the wake of her handmade natural perfume enveloping us. She catches the almost interaction between the corner table human and gives her a rapid but unequivocal sizing up. I get the warmest long hug and the traditional double cheek kiss before she settles herself down. She adjusts her chair and corner table human is obliterated from my view. Pity, corner table human had such a sweet smile and curls too. Lunch companion asks for a rollup and I immediately get taken back more than a decade to my first bumbling efforts to roll-up a smoke under her watchful eyes and withering commentary at my misshapen shaped smokes.
In another lifetime, I shared a few meals with this human-shaped being. She made a big deal out of each meal we shared. Which is no bad thing. The finest salmon, hunks of pasture raised, dry aged cow-shaped beings and the best of the seasonal produce available in the Highveld mine dump village were gathered together. She fussed as much over the endives and the texture of the cos lettuce as she did over the wine. And the morning coffee blend. The persimmons had to be just so and many a market-lady scene was enacted at the little green grocer’s counter. Mostly over the less than perfect shape of his chestnuts but the tomatoes and garlic were as often subjects of intense and sometimes heated derision and accusations of price gouging. The first time I witnessed this exchange between the epicurean of a certain age and her green grocer, I was to say the least, a little alarmed. Here I was, only concerned with the next meal of the day and dinner was being hotly debated over. I wondered if the grocer deliberately chose to have the heated exchange over the chestnuts to warm them over a bit, so they were easier to roast.
Lunch and dinner were both served with the obligatory wine. In fact, far from merely obligatory, as much time and dialogue were spent on the wine as the chestnuts and the exact region of the eponymous Karoo lamb being proffered. Each part of every meal was as critically observed as the whole; from concept to the last morsel.
Cheese hunting took up a chunk of conversation and added miles to the daily foraging for lunch and dinner. ‘This roquefort is not good enough, the texture’s all wrong. Good provolone must be bland, this has too much flavour and I don’t know why they just can’t age the camembert properly.’ Bakers would proudly show off their grissini when she bustled in and she would happily taste everyone of them. I remember once asking why she always tasted the variations of the grissini Pablo offered when she always just bought the same plain ones. ‘Ah, it means nothing — it is just a game’ she answered, with a straight face and in tones not very different from the Merovingian in the Matrix. It was a few more lifetimes later that I finally understood the depth of the truths we shared in those days of three extravagantly constructed meals a day in good company and beautiful spirit.
For the most part, lunch followed the daily foraging. On a rare occasion the foraging took place after lunch but this was frowned upon because my host, companion and lover held her post prandial siesta as sacred, along with her vinaigrette dressing recipe and anchovy supplier. To be fair, she certainly had her priorities all neatly lined up. And if life gifts you such a luxury as a post lunch siesta, then it would be an ungrateful being that did not avail themselves of this indulgence. Lunch excursions were planned but only in her head. It would start slowly over morning coffee, the merest hint of; ‘I’m thinking kleftiko’ she’d say. I hardly ever had much to share about her lunch leanings. She was the expert and if not expert then at least with considerably more exposure to the sensual delights available to the well-heeled and the well-endowed, or so I’ve been told. After various little detours in the conversation and as the coffee reached the dregs, she would stealthily slip back to lunch plans and announce the venue. She always let me choose the time. Although this mattered little if the mid-morning foraging ran over time; she would simply announce any number of variations of the plans and we’d head back to base to stow and prepare whatever was needed for the dinner plans.
The rich red wines were set out to reach the ambient temperature and the wooded chardonnay stuffed in the fridge to chill. If it was quail or some other main that required hanging and airing before being cooked, this too was prepped. The vegetables were sorted and prepared for storage, the cheese relieved of its shroud and just a little bit of each new acquisition tasted. This often led to the call for just-a-glass of wine, with a gentle toss of her hair and a can’t-say-no-to smile. A stowed bottle would be pulled, glasses rustled up. Sometimes this was the cue for an afternoon at the pool with a thrown together lunch from her well-stocked pantry. The abandoned lunch plan would sometimes be resurrected into dinner but more often, we’d end up at the little Italian place down the street, sampling Roberto’s fresh pasta. It was a warm season; this season of being schooled in the joys of rarely-gifted epicurean and naturally related delights.
All these memories flitted to and fro in my mind as we ordered lunch. Salads all round with a request for some specialty bread. We were at a bakery after all. We catch up on the intervening years since our shared summer (and schooling for me) and she glazes over her current paramour. She’s much more interested in my current status but there’s nothing to report there, so she lets up and we tend the post traumatic stress disorder that comes with being temporarily back in the now dishevelled Highveld mining dump village.
Lunch arrives and the salad is passable. The menu descriptions far exceed the actual product on the plate, even if the presentation remains excellent. She murmurs mild approval when I enquire after her smoked trout and eats with relish. I grab a sliver of the fish and it’s just okay. I wonder if her recent return to smoking has dulled her unimpeachable palate. I goad her with my assessment of the trout and she swallows and laughs heartily. ‘I have lowered my expectations of the food in accord with the unkempt state of the city,’ she answers.
I join in the laughter and we share a toast to adapting to the environment. The tension I’d been carrying about her enjoying lunch or even staging a little scene (as she’d done a few times in the past) leaves me and we settle into our old, friendly comfort. Meeting an old friend from a past life can be fraught with the loaded expectations of the past and I’m grateful that this has been dispelled.
We linger over espressos as the lunch crowd disperses and in an hour we’re the only people left on the raised deck. The post lunch service lull envelopes us as we round up and she settles the bill, despite my keen offer to stump up for once. It’s dismissed with a casual insider reference to my junior status in the pecking order of society and again, I’m taken back in time to the tender tutelage of my lunch companion through the years.
We part as the sun starts her death dance on the western side of the city. The chill has returned to the air and I spend the drive back to my lodgings with a sense of sadness that this might have been the last time we got to touch hands. Life being life. Still, I remind myself, it’s better to have ended this long, undulating chapter of my life on a warm, winter Highveld afternoon; the very same way it started.
Bees Knees is a tribute to the serendipity that thrives so very effortlessly in the Highveld mine dump village and the life-changing chance encounters it gifts us.
Jesh Baker for Oppi Stoep © 2023AD
