Читать книгу Malafemmena - Louisa Ermelino - Страница 10

FISH HEADS

The hostel was dreary. Jakarta felt polluted, crowded and dirty after the island paradise of Bali, where we had rented a room in a family compound and discovered fruits worthy of fairy tales: mangoes, mangosteens, jackfruit, papaya, and pale yellow pineapples cut into wedges. An enterprising young woman named Jenik had gotten herself a blender and access to electricity and, at a stand on the dirt road to Kuta Beach in 1968, smoothies came to town. Jenik also figured out pancakes and French toast and would make omelettes with dirty blue-gray mushrooms. Her eggs, your mushrooms. Magic! But for how long can you watch the sunset and dance with the Barong? We had left home for adventure, to tip over the edge of comfort and familiarity, and Bali was only the first stop. We didn’t have much of a plan, but we knew we were moving and had all the time in the world.

In Sydney we’d bought a series of tickets that would take us through Java and Sumatra to Singapore. We had bus tickets, ferry tickets, and chits that would get us lifts on trucks in Sumatra. We had small bags and bellies full of nasi goreng and chicken satay. We’d had a Christmas feast at a Chinese restaurant in Denpasar with turtle soup and a collection of roasted and lacquered birds that, if they had still had their feathers, would have flown away. We’d roasted goats on spits over wood fires on the beach and piglets in pits of charcoal. We were loving Indonesia. The dreary hostel and grimy city would be left behind as soon as we’d washed our clothes and changed some money.

The night before we were to leave Jakarta, a man came to the hostel dormitory. I don’t remember if we thought it was odd that he was there, or how the conversation started, but he made us an offer that we thought we couldn’t, and shouldn’t, refuse. He convinced us that the overland trek to Singapore was a terrible undertaking. Unreliable transport, he said. Impenetrable jungle. Mosquitoes. Nowhere even remotely decent to eat or sleep. And it would take weeks. And it was the rainy season. What were we thinking? There were six of us. We looked at each other. Of course, our new friend had the solution. A ship to Singapore. Ocean breezes, deck chairs, all meals included for the seven-day journey. I personally loved ships, loved being at sea, had sweet memories of crossing the Atlantic on the Italian line, coming to Australia on a freighter. Someone poked me. What would it cost? Important point. It sounded like a big-ticket item. We were backpackers, remember? someone said. One new friend said not to worry. He would make it happen for us. He’d take our existing tickets plus a few extra rupiah. A bargain, he said.

We parted with our tickets and rupiah and the next morning we were at the dock, along with, it seemed, a thousand others—despite the appearance that the ship had no accommodations for passengers. It was outfitted for cargo, clearly. Pandemonium reigned. We made a quick decision to follow the crowd. We were the only foreigners but we were used to that, so we climbed the gangplank and got on board. Families were claiming spots, laying down mats. Space was tight because of the cargo, which appeared to be garbage, piled up high in the bow. There was also no way we were changing our minds and getting back off. The crowd was only moving one way. We spread out our sleeping bags and sat down on the deck. I had a flashback to summers in Coney Island, with beach blankets laid end to end held down by shoes and radios. The ship pulled out. Our fellow passengers started getting sick almost immediately. I closed my eyes and leaned against my backpack. Believe it or not, I was hungry.

I took good food for granted. I grew up a first-generation Italian American. We weren’t big on ambience (I don’t think I saw a milk pitcher until I was of legal age) but we knew about food. Lamb at Easter, the rib chops as tiny as a baby’s fist, the lamb’s head, capozelle, split and roasted with parsley, garlic and parmigiano; minestrone soup with five kinds of fresh beans and gobs of pesto stirred in; veal shoulder stuffed with egg and bread and oregano. When I started traveling, I didn’t know much about the world or what there was to see, but I was open to what there was to eat. Camembert in France, ham sandwiches with butter (butter? hmmm), pork-liver pâté. In Italy, puntarella and buffalo mozzarella, sautéed rabbit, fresh figs. Yogurt and honey in Greece and feta with tomatoes and cucumbers; profiteroles, zaatar bread, King of Persia pistachios, roasted corn, duck eggs swallowed raw in a tea glass on the road overland to India.

A gong sounded. People started to stir, then slowly stampede. A line formed that snaked the length of the ship. I didn’t see any food. I didn’t smell any food, but a gong and what could pass as a queue facing in one direction was enough for me. I imagined rice and vegetables with a fried egg on top, soup with scallions and cabbage and pillows of tofu, maybe a shred of pork or chicken. I hadn’t eaten since early morning. The line moved but I was too far away to see anything. I smiled at the babies; pushed with the best of them. I was very hungry and nearing my turn.

And soon, there in front of me were the servers, ladling food onto tin plates from two huge oil drums. I was pushed from behind, handed a tin plate, and pushed again.

I looked down. A ball of rice and two silvery fish heads. Maybe there were three. Fish heads? I liked the look of a whole fish on a plate as well as anyone: braised with ginger, or roasted with fennel. I even liked the way a whole fish looked after it was eaten. A charming head and tail and a beautiful skeleton of bones.

The rice was gummy, the fish heads were small, stuck in the rice, eyes staring. I didn’t know what to do with them except look for a cat! My companions, English and Australian, gave back their plates and left the line empty-handed. They hadn’t liked the Christmas turtle soup or the lacquered goose poised in flight. They pooled their money with a plan to bribe the crew. I decided not to give up. I was very hungry. I took my tin plate and went back to my place on the deck. I formed some rice into a ball with my fingers and shoveled it into my mouth with my thumb. The fish heads looked at me. I picked one up and studied it. I poked at it with my fingers and found a small round of sweet white flesh at the cheek. And more to eat in the furrow at the top of the head, and above the eyes, at the forehead (if fish have a forehead). I broke it apart and sucked the bones. I ignored the eyes and gelatinous bits (personally, aspic gives me shivers) and I started on the second head. I finished the rice. I rinsed my fingers and my plate. My travel friends, meanwhile, had managed to score a pineapple and a bag of mandarins for a small fortune. They set about rationing like shipwrecked sailors. I accepted a mandarin section. I have always liked fruit after a meal. I unzipped my sleeping bag and lay down on the deck. I dreamt of fish heads.

The next day lunch was fish heads and rice and dinner was fish heads and rice. Twice a day, every day, for seven days, I ate fish heads. I found more tasty bits. I found the joy in fish heads. I smiled at the babies. I breathed in the sea air.

The ship ultimately left us, not in Singapore, but on a tiny island off Malaysia that had never seen a tourist, where the police were kind enough to put us up in a jail cell for the night, and for another small fortune, we hired a boat to take us to Singapore. We went straight to Maxwell Road to eat amazing dishes at the open-air market: Hokkein mee (fried prawn noodles), Hainanese chicken rice, chili crab. I didn’t miss the fish heads. But I’ve never forgotten them.

There was an old Italian man in my neighborhood who had served time in Alcatraz. In “the hole,” he said, they fed him bread and water. “I’d put the bread aside,” he told me, “and after two days it tasted like cake . . .” In Indonesia, I learned what he meant.