Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar Read online

  In Salvador, I develop an unhealthy addiction to Pollo Campero, a chain of fried chicken joints whose secret recipe, near as I can tell, involves nothing but salt. On trips to the countryside to track down the guerrillas, I stuff my backpack with pupusas revueltas, pillowy corn tortillas filled with beans, cheese, and meat, the ubiquitous street food of San Salvador.

  As comfort food this is all fine, but it provides meager relief. There is bloodshed and trauma everywhere, and the days are blood-spattered and draining. I’ve always loved to eat, but after a while, my relationship with food is transformed. It’s not just that I enjoy food; I am needy. For me, food becomes like alcohol, and consuming it is a diversion that helps keep me sane. I eat partly in hope of forgetting what I’ve seen, and remembering what pleasure feels like.

  On the morning after the meal in my darkened apartment, I am out reporting in San Salvador with a colleague when his pager buzzes: six priests have been murdered overnight at the nation’s preeminent university. We race across town and arrive before the police. Four of the priests are lying facedown on their front lawn, their arms splayed at weird angles. Two of them are draped in their nightshirts; the others have on T-shirts or pajamas. They’re wearing slippers. One priest is tall; his white gown is crumpled, its hem bunched at his thighs. Just beyond him lies a second priest—dark T-shirt, lighter pants. A third is to the left, and a fourth is nearly skull-to-skull with the third. Two more are inside the house.

  On the lawn, the brains of two of the men have been blown cleanly from their heads by the impact of assault rifles fired at close range. Their skulls, emptied of their contents, are sallow, deflated, and misshapen. I stare, then turn away and squeeze my eyes shut tight. I am dizzy and breathless.

  Just a few months earlier I’d been in Washington, D.C., living with my girlfriend, wearing bow ties to work, trying out a beard, playing hoops on weekends, cooking elaborate meals—soufflés, Chinese pot stickers, chicken Kiev. I was a dandy, self-absorbed; I’d seen nothing very terrible. Now I am here on this lawn, with these dead priests, staring, looking away, my mouth so dry I can barely swallow. So this is what evil looks like, I think.

  The priests were Salvadoran leftists, liberation theologists, men of peace. They were the most famous intellectuals in the country—one the university’s rector, another the vice-rector, another a noted sociologist whom I’d interviewed weeks before, a kind man, self-effacing, intelligent. They had been taken from the beds where they slept, dragged into the yard of their residence, and executed by Salvadoran army troops. The army brass, fierce anti-communists, have long hated the Jesuits, whom they regard as the guerrillas’ intellectual godfathers.

  By mid-morning, the sun is blinding. The bystanders at the Jesuits’ house, standing like sentries and gawking at the bodies, cast stocky shadows. The sun has etched dark shadow-rims around the bodies, too, delineating them. It is hot, suffocating.

  We get another pager message, this time about a Mexican cameraman, a colleague, who is missing. We set out in a convoy of media vehicles—Jeeps and Land Cruisers with “TV” in big letters taped to the windows like a talisman to repel bullets. There is shooting everywhere—the guerrillas have stormed the capital, capturing chic neighborhoods and slums—and the city is a mess. Shattered glass carpets the sidewalks. The streets are an obstacle course of fallen utility poles and tangled bouquets of power lines. No one knows which wires might electrocute you.

  We pile out of our cars in the neighborhood where the cameraman was last seen—a rundown school with its trash-strewn playing field, some abandoned-looking small apartment buildings—and start looking around. It is spookily quiet. We see no one. Then gunfire erupts. Fuck! I throw myself to the pavement and roll to the curb, the only bit of cover available, and my colleagues do the same, all of us piled up, panting, cursing. We can’t tell where the shooting is coming from, whether we’re the target or simply caught in the crossfire, but the bullets are just over our heads, buzzing like angry hornets. My teeth, my fists, my jaw, my eyes, my ass, my whole body is clenched in terror, and I press my face into the dirt and dog shit at the curb. I have never been religious, but now I am praying: Pleasegodpleasepleasepleasepleasegod.

  My beat for the newspaper includes both Central America and the Caribbean, but no air connections link them directly. To fly from El Salvador or Nicaragua to, say, Cuba or Haiti, you have to go through Miami. My habit is to stay a few days in transit with my notes and laundry and receipts strewn over the floor of my hotel room.

  I do my expense accounts, work, order room service, see a few friends, try to decompress. But I am jumpy and short-tempered—I find myself flinching at loud noises. I take a stab at talking about the chaos I’ve witnessed, describing my fear, the paralyzing proximity of gunfire and bullets. It doesn’t help. Over drinks with a friend at the News Café in South Beach, bathed in late-afternoon sunshine and gazing at the young models sauntering down the sidewalk, I find it impossible to recount the scene of the dead priests, or convey the ordeal that followed. It’s not beyond my powers of description; it’s just too starkly out of context. Except for other correspondents, no one can relate. No one wants to hear it.

  I live nowhere that is really home, my friends are far away, and the places I work are joyless and terrorized. The idea that a good meal can wash away the taste of terror is ridiculous. But my thoughts keep wandering in that direction. I want a blowout meal, something spectacular. I want it as balm, as a diversion, as fortification, as an escape. I find the best Italian restaurant in town, a sedate place in Coral Gables, take a table on my own, and start ordering. I order the San Daniele prosciutto and buffalo mozzarella and tiny pungent olives. I order littleneck clams, risotto with saffron, and a Roman chicory salad. The waiter nods and starts back to the kitchen, but I smile ruefully and tell him, Sorry, I’m not quite done. I order more—veal with mushrooms and a good bottle of Barolo. I eat slowly, delighting in the meal. This is gluttony, pure and simple, but I’m not just hungry for the food; I’m hungry for pleasure in the vague hope that it may neutralize some of what I’ve seen.

  The trip to Florida will be short, I know. There is news in Haiti—a power grab by the army, a bloody interlude, nocturnal gangs roaming the capital. But I crave some touchstone of normalcy and home. So in the few days I have in Florida I find it with my grandparents, well into their seventies, who live in a retirement community in Boca Raton.

  The drive from Miami to Boca is under an hour, and I know exactly what to expect when I get to my grandparents’ condo. My grandmother will have the front door open, and she will be standing just behind the screen, surveying the parking lot, so by the time I park and step out of my car she will be out at the second-floor railing, beaming and bellowing my name.

  She is tiny and shrunken and fragile, bony in my arms. Her arthritic hands are knobby and liver-spotted.

  “Did you drive on I-95?”

  She is terribly anxious, and I can hear the fear in her voice.

  “Of course, Nana, there’s no other way to go.”

  “The TV said there are crazy people shooting at cars there! It happened just a few weeks ago. Honey, I wish you wouldn’t go on that road, such crazy people.”

  My grandparents—dotty, off-kilter, fussy, familiar—are well past their prime. Listening to their patter is like revisiting the sound track of my childhood.

  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 slo
w 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 frie
nds—“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.

  A DIET FOR DICTATORS

  ~ NORTH KOREA ~

  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.