Culinary adventures in Hamburg

Culinary adventures in Hamburg

My readers will know me as a man who is no stranger to adventure, to the exotic, the peculiar and arcane; a man who will sample almost anything once. They will know that there is little our green world has to offer to human taste buds that has not been savoured by my capacious palate – baring perhaps the meat of a mammoth or that of the ubiquitous Big Mac. Few, I think, would refute my claim that I have always been candid and unabashed in presenting the details of my colourful gustatory experiences: from the bland to the pornographic; from the Michelin opulence of the Paris Boulevards to the filthy side-street gutter-fried reptile skins of the Orient. But somewhere in the darkest reaches of my memory, there does dwell the recollection of a certain venue that I have never seen fit to share with my readers, maybe because it is an experience I never felt my readership quite ready to digest. Perhaps it is the advent of such fare as Masterchef, televisual drivel that purports to make gourmets of whichever fast food-gobbling swine will recline in languorous obesity before its cathode-blue radiance rapaciously grinding pork-scratchings to soggy cud… entertainment that aspires to make high art of a housewife and a hairdresser roasting chicken and potatoes in garlic butter… and with the next flick of the switch, the hairdresser switches seamlessly with some jaded celebrity, with tastebuds long since fried by cocaine; another brings us a wearisome witless fool in a white smock who mistakes profanity for passion… or to this modern era’s greatest abomination, the advent of molecular gastronomy… perhaps it is the culmination of these obscenities that has provided the spark to rekindle in my memory that most remarkable culinary experience.
So I now set this down with no reluctance, in the earnest hope that it will remind the faithful among my readers, and perhaps illuminate some newcomers, of what it means to be an adventurer at cuisine’s frontier, whether as chef or critic, and recall the dignity, respect and awe befitting that often overused title, gourmet.

This all took place many years ago, during the “sixties”, when I was still an aspiring journalist and critic – somewhat lesser in girth, and with tastes less accustomed to the finer things. I flatter myself, nonetheless, that I had built a considerable palate with cheaply funded sojourns throughout the continent, hitchhiking from city to city, spending every last penny on the finest food and wine I could acquire. I made piffling sums from occasional articles in London publications, even a piece or two in the United States, hinting at a colonial interest in cuisine I had not previously appreciated. The majority of my capital, however, came from Pa-Pa’s dwindling inheritance, as I deemed my culinary education well-worthy of the fast erosion of our old Surrey estate. I do not deny that my travels also provided me with such opportunity to indulge my other tastes, these as much restricted in London at that time as was (and still is) good food. I need not elaborate I suspect, as my faithful readership will no doubt be well cognisant of the unfortunate incident in Istanbul which, to this very day, has restricted my sampling of authentic Turkish Delight… but to those unacquainted with my history, I will say that I cut a rather dapper figure in those days – tall and slim with a well formed, protruding chin and full head of hair, immaculately brilliantined and black as my slender moustache. I had little need back then to seek attention, and had a voracious appetite for the exotic in all departments.
As such, Hamburg was a fabulous destination for me: Europe’s tenderloin. I recall many a rewarding evening spent in the colourful Reeperbahn district, notorious though it was at the time, and now celebrated as the once-merry stomping ground of a group of young English boys called the Beatles, who there cut their Scouse-stained teeth on a diet of music and sleeping pills. Not that I would know much about that, my tastes veering more in the direction of Brahms and Purcell than of adolescent Liverpudlian beat music. Still, it is likely that many was the night I would have been stationed at the opposite end of a smoky bar-room trying in vain to ignore the hideous racket of a group of sweaty, smelly, leather-clad boys on stage, who may well have been destined to sully the planet with Beatlemania in a bare few years. I wouldn’t have known, for my attention was rather more focussed on the sweaty, smelly, leather-clad patrons that reeled drunkenly to the rhythm of the foul noise; or else on those patrons reeking of fish, scorbutic and crusty with brine, and with those quant little gob hats set beguilingly askew on their sweet crew-cut heads … I digress.
When my attention was diverted elsewhere, it was, naturally, towards food. Paradoxical though it may seem (and as my regular readers will be well aware), it is in the lowest, most iniquitous surrounds that the finest, most authentic, and most adventurous dishes are to be found, be it the piss-stinking backstreets of Paris, the fetid gutters of old Peking, or the licentious alleyways of the Reeperbahn.
My guide in these adventures was Eric. A diminutive Estonian who fled his homeland when the Iron Curtain descended, Eric had plied the thriving trades of conman and gambler through Eastern Europe, then made a circle around the South of France up to Holland, and, when his notoriety in Amsterdam had become a threat to his very life, to Germany. Here, he ended in Hamburg, a place his ostensibly pernicious character was not only welcomed, but celebrated, and he’d finally found a home.
He was still young when I met him, but had the appearance of one much older, wiry in his body and with a tortuously wrinkled face. His smile, though, was full and winsome, being so filled by a set of good white dentures that he’d won in a game of cribbage. He was certainly louche, dissolute, and fiercely shameless about it. A zealous heterosexual and habitual, hopeless addict of prostitutes, he constantly berated and mocked me for my preference for boys, and, daily regaled me with stories of his sexual exploits, seeing it perhaps as his calling to bring me back to the fold. Though carrying a heavy accent from his homeland, Eric spoke English as well as I, but when he told his tales he would affect a Hamburg brogue, mixed with pidgin German, and spoke in a hushed conspiratorial tone that tickled the nape of the neck and made you feel sick and dirty for it… For his descriptions were clinical, coldly anatomical. And he was obsessed by abnormalities, aberrations; by thick hair in peculiar places, incongruous odours, physical deformities, disfiguring maladies, amputations. I doubt that there are many of any sexual proclivity that would have found his stories any more palatable than I, much less as the source of arousal he intended.
Nonetheless, I bore his odiousness gladly, and his abuses, for the one characteristic we shared was an insatiable desire for fine and exotic food. For this he was an invaluable asset. A fine couple we made, for he had an unmatched knowledge of Hamburg’s finest eateries, places utterly exclusive and arcane, the stuff of whispered rumour - and I… well I had money. A fine couple indeed – in preparation for this piece, I found, in a leather belted case in my attic, a worn sepia photograph. Staring out of it was myself, ensconced in a tight black suit and tie, those old silk gloves I so cherished, and a pair of spats, and Eric, slouched shiftily to my left, a cigarette of damp re-rolled butt-ends between his surrogate teeth. A suit hung off his bones, one that would have been loose on a much heavier gentleman, presumably acquired the same way as his gnashers, and worn to threads at collar and cuffs. Ever a strangely noble old rake.
I remember vividly, we’d find each other in the early evenings; Eric with a hang-dog expression would customarily turn out his pockets and let them sag sadly like cloth testicles. His hair was in wild disarray, clawed to patchy spikes by some unfortunate frauline, the cause of his impecuniosity. “Mein freund,” he’d smile, and I’d lead him by the elbow as he merrily diverted me with the unsavoury details of the encounter.
We’d visit some strip club where poor girls with lifeless, chalk-dusted faces made unpleasant entertainment with esoteric props, or - in places that charged more for the vodka (Eric’s most constant mistress) – with snakes. He would perch beside me at the edge of his seat, gesturing eagerly as a child at the circus, all to expedite my salvation-
“Where shall we go, my friend?” I would ask with a joviality affected to disguise my ennui.
“Ah,” (he would exude the words teasingly, our ritual powerplay), “mein kleine freund – tonight to a true beauty, a real premium feast, sweet boy.”
And we would step into the night, into fine, freezing drizzle – it rained always, those nights in Hamburg. Through the buzz and crackle of neon lights, the noise of drums and un-tuned guitars, broken glass and howls and growls and bitter, loveless merry making; stepping over figures rolling together on wet cobblestones in bloody embraces while white-bell-bottomed American boys and whale-net-stockinged local girls cheered them on… Then, suddenly, and with a furtive glance up and down the street, Eric would accost me to some unlit alley, and so would begin a rat-like crepuscular scampering through the dripping backstreets where the noise of the Reeperbahn was no more than a dim, distant mumble, and neither of us would speak a word as Eric’s eyes, wide in the gloaming, flicked feverishly back and forth.
We would scurry sometimes for great lengths of time, getting greatly sore in our legs, until eventually and without warning, he would pause and slip stealthily down a set of stone steps, or into a narrow cul-de-sac or up an iron stair case, all leading to a door lit at best by a scummy lamp, more often unlit, and always unmarked, whereon Eric would rap smartly with coded syncopation. The door would open a crack, exuding warm, viscous conversation and the clammy odours of a small kitchen. An eye appearing in the yellow slit would run us both up and down, then thin blue lips, always thin, wrinkled blue lips, would mutter in German or Hungarian, Polish, French, Moroccan, Indian, Cantonese, Mandarin, Mongolian, Brazilian, and Eric would mutter a reply in kind. Then we’d be ushered in, the rain steaming off us, into the velvety heat of a small Hamburg sitting room complete with cracked fittings, stained plasterwork and peeling yellowed paper, and crowded to its rotting rafters with happy diners half lost in blue smoke. They sat at round candle-lit tables, usually set with gingham cloth, crammed so tight there was hardly room to breathe. Forget the fine, opulent restaurants that littered even the purgatory slum that was old Hamburg. Here my friends was where the real gourmet was to be found.

Eine table fur zwei…?

In those days I truly believe I ate the finest food of my life. Even in the most mundane dishes, goulash, ratatouille, sauerkraut, was found the heavenly. There was a remarkable African eatery that always comes to mind. It was in an old bunker under a street in the city’s North. The street was still mostly rubble, bombed out in the war and since neglected. I can still taste their spicy brown lamb and couscous. In the corner of the windowless pit, a trio of lithe African men with carved ebony faces played metal drums and a steel guitar and warbled with ecstatic abandon; two barefooted oil-black ladies with beads and cold bangles, tight tressed hair, flowing rainbow dresses and high head pieces brought food to where we squatted at low tables. I recall being fixated by the graceful beauty of those ladies. Dipping stone-baked bread in thick gravy, I watched, enthralled, their bodies shimmying to the music, ferrying sand-coloured dishes back and forth, striding effortlessly over patrons, shiny pillows, and fat, yellow-bubbling hookahs, to the bright hole in the wall through which the chef’s glistening bald head occasionally protruded, yelling lightning fast, incomprehensible babble.
And so it was everywhere Eric escorted me, mysterious, exotic: restaurants where, instead of being danced with, reptiles were skinned and fried alive at the table, places where the scent of cardamom and aniseed was so strong it hung on your clothes for days. And all in the midst of the dreary chill, immorality and post-war detritus of ‘sixties Hamburg. We dined together for months it seemed. Rarely did we visit the same place twice, except our very favourites. Five or six nights a week, a couple of hours of glorious indulgence, then out again, fat and drunk and solitary, pursuing our own particular quarries.

Reflecting on this time, with eyes older and wiser, I struggle to understand how I could have tired of this invidious cycle of existence. But youth is insatiable and impetuous, and so it was that on November 22nd (it being memorable as my birthday and, for many years, a day for ritual transformation that others associate with New Year’s), I bemoaned my creeping boredom to my indulgent guide.
“Is there nowhere more intriguing, more esoteric, more thrilling,” I whined. To his credit, Eric initially dismissed this adolescent carping, treating it with appropriate disdain. He scoffed, and snarled that I was as a spoiled child, fattened on his discerning tastes and diligence, an ingrate, a typical arrogant Englischer, etcetera. But I persisted (my readers will know I am nothing if not tenacious, in matters of food), and his stubbornness served only to pique my curiosity, as there was something in his manner – the slightest spark of juvenile glee behind the hoary jaundiced countenance – that gave me to believe that he did indeed hoard some ultimate, wonderful secret treasure that, in truth, he was as eager to expose as I was to behold…
But still, after two weeks’ incessant and fruitless pursuit, I suspect I may heave seen our association draw to an inauspicious close, had I not raised the spectre of money, and intimated that such money as was required with regard to resolving this enigma would be of no consequence. Indeed, so impetuous was I, that I readied myself to sell the ancestral home if it came to that. And I was more fortunate than I could have hoped, for his wanton ways had led him further into debt than he would admit.
Eric’s weakness for debauchery was well known, being for him even a source of conceitedness, but he rarely spoke of his penchant for gambling. Perhaps he saw it as a true flaw, a feebleness rather that a haughty proclivity. I discovered later he was debtor to some of the foulest characters in the quarter, like the Russian, who ran all the local numbers games and was known to take a man’s feet in lieu of payment; and the Lithuanian, who ran barefist fights above the Pink Heart brothel, and whose rivals and impecunious defaulters alike were found tamed, humiliated and emasculated, face down in the dock’s scummy flotsam; sometimes two or three in a week.
“OK mein herr,” Eric had smiled, “but this will take time – tres exclusif.” And though his reluctant façade did not falter, I sensed an air of relief, and of eager expectation. Clearly the sharing of this culinary experience would be done with a profound sense of pride. Its predecessors, fantastic as they were, seemed now to be a mere aperitif, an overture in some kind of elaborate courting ritual.
Another fortnight passed, during which we ate together little. I lived on tasteless sauerkraut and hard bread, as my admission to the backstreet gourmet places had been entirely dependent on Eric. I was unceremoniously dismissed every place I tried, and for the first time in months I felt like a tourist. An alien.

Then, treading alone the uneven cobbles of Banhoffstrasse, I felt his wiry fingers on my arm and sour breath on my ear (my friend…) as he steered me to the Blue Star café.
“I have it,” he confided through the nauseating smoke of wet rerolled tobacco.
“Excellent!” I replied. Distributed between my socks was a fat wad of marks, money wired from England in anticipation of this outcome.
He leaned back complacently in his seat casting grey eyes over the passers by. “It was no easy task, this is surely the most exclusive restaurant in Hamburg, no Europe, if not the world.”
I despised these games of suspense and hyperbole, hamfisted theatricality (he knew he was getting the money after all), but I could not help being enticed into the play – I leaned in, drooling and feverish as a school boy clawing at a scrap of pornography – “Where is it? What is it called? What style of food…”
“Calm yourself Brian,” he dismissed me imperiously with a wave. Then with one eye, the other being squinted in a superior wink, he indicated the opened hand that waited beneath the table. Obediently, I transferred dirty notes from my feet to his fist.
“I do have to wonder though,” he mused while surreptitiously leafing through the bills that, mark-by-mark, enumerated his deliverance, “whether you are quite ready. A man of sophisticated tastes, I know” he added in response to my indignant scowl, “but still, so young, of so limited experience-“
I interrupted, with an ire fuelled partly from self-importance and partly impatience: I’d payed, there was no room for debate. I spoke the condescension one reserves for delinquents and urchins, “I have consumed delicacies from every corner of the world, and made it my business to acquaint my palate with every spice – there is no condiment that has not stimulated these buds,” I poked out the pink tip of my tongue, “no meat or vegetable I have not sampled. All that remains is to sample them in some new formula, some miniscule variation – a incremental diversion in the recipe, preparation or presentation.” My supercilious tone intensified, “you have proved useful in finding some moderately amusing local oddities, I admit, but I have serious misgivings on your capacity to delver on these boastful claims –.”
I curled his lips to a grimace and his face creased with such infuriating sagacity that I made to leave, slamming the table with my palms for leverage. But his hand, gnarly, mildewed and encrusted by cysts and moles, gripped my wrist and its skin felt like broken shale against my own.
“Don’t be stupid,” he muttered. A pause for tension’s sake, a sly glance beneath pubic brows. “It is a restaurant peripatetic,” (the difficulty with which he enunciated this would have been charming from a young frauline but was vile from his lips). “It has served food many places, using among its residence the finest restaurants about the city. Now it resides in the West. Its sessions are very private affairs and highly exclusive, only open to those known by the owners.”
“Who are?”
He shook his head as to an insolent child.
“What style is it?”
He smirked.
“…what is it called?”
He drew close, demurely shuffling the salt, pepper and vinegar to make room for his elbows. “It has no name as such, but most know it as Die Scheisshaus.”
I was fairly sure of my hearing, but incredulity forced me to ask him to repeat, producing exactly the same result.
“But…,” I dithered a while, “but… what do they serve?” I asked this hoping it was all just some daring gastronomic pun. Smiling triumphantly, he announced, “ex-he-cre-ment,” and his protruding eyes ambled playfully across my features, effortlessly penetrating the slender, impassive mask I’d affected.
There was no longer any purpose to attempting to hold a Laodicean appearance. I recoiled, horrified, my gustatory maidenhead grotesquely exposed-
“Oh no,” he reassured me gleefully, misinterpreting (or perhaps mocking) my misgivings, “oh no, they serve human too.”

Two nights later, we met at Connie’s, which was an English-style place run by a decent black-country man whose dissonant accent rang out sporadically across the bar room. I needn’t explain that it had been an extremely difficult decision to attend. My first instinct had been to leave Eric his money and call to a close our bare friendship as, clearly, he had either lost his mind, or else what lay in store was unthinkable. But, having recovered some degree of composure in the interim, I’d reconsidered. I barely remember now what finally brought me to that place. Perhaps it was pride, that I should not be so easily subdued by this filthy scoundrel. Or perhaps I suspected that that, finding himself unequal to the task I’d set him, Eric had conceived this foul fantasy as a ruse to deter me, and claim some moral victory, leaving me no choice but to call his bluff. One thing was for certain – my arrogance and my passion for rare foods played no small part; if what he said was true, how could I miss such an opportunity, even if it were only to observe at a distance such food served being by candle light?
After a quick drink, I was obediently at Eric’s fast-clacking heels, through the tortuous alleys of Hamburg’s nether regions, where the only sound other than our footsteps and steaming breath was the icy trickle of rain down the black, marmoreal walls. With irritating regularity Eric would glance over his shoulder, stilling me with a shhh!, only the whites of his eyes visible between hat brim and muffler. It was as if we were no longer in Hamburg, rather in East Berlin, spy and quarry en route to a defection.
Finally, having covered our steps several times to confound any pursuer, we emerged from the gloomy passages into a wealthy quarter quite unfamiliar to me. Muted, glimmering white lights like Christmas lights lit the windows of Paris-styled bistros and cafes. Automobiles, long and dark, reflected these lights the length of every street. The citizens that strolled there were wrapped in fine overcoats and black furs, and we moved among them like defiant mendicants. After a short distance we turned and paused and were presented with the delicate vista of a small courtyard set back from the street and bounded by three restaurants, all in similar rustic but very fine style. Eric led me toward the furthest, but as we drew near, bade me wait a moment in the penumbra of a street lamp. He walked on to the entrance, there greeting a fearsome, corpulent doorman. By the weak door light, I glimpsed a hint of recognition, but none of a smile in the man’s face.
There followed a long discussion between the two. Now and then a thumb or furtive glance would come my way and I, discomfited by the attention, feigned indifference and instead scrutinised the restaurant facades. Only on closer examination did I notice that, unlike the other venues, where tinted candlelight enlivened the frosted windows, those of our destination were dark, though a slit of light at the edge of one divulged that the interior was lit and the windows imperfectly blacked out. I also observed that the chains from which name signs swung out-front of the neighbouring buildings, hung empty above our doorman’s head.
So long was their talk that by the time Eric came to escort me in, I was stamping, clapping and heaving breath into my upturned collar to chase out the cold. On crossing the threshold I greeted the guard who did not reply but halted me with a finger to my shoulder. He cast dead eyes up and down and left and right over my face, repeating this process several times before nodding me on.
“There are no lists, no official membership, no one signs in,” Eric explained, “but it is member’s only, and only those invited become members. Victor is part owner, ex KGB. He memorises every face, so now you may come and go as you please.”
We gave coats, hats and scarves to a beautiful young Russian girl in the cloakroom. The entrance hall was dressed in rich crimson: the curtains, flock wall paper, and luscious carpet. Eric tipped heavily, demanding recompense for every mark as soon as we were out of ear-shot. A fetching youth held open the main door, ushering us deferentially into a pleasantly decorated but otherwise unremarkable dining room. The tables were on several levels with steps lit by diffuse light strips. The main lighting came from table candelabra and bracketed wall lamps behind deep red and gold filigreed shades. At the far wall was a small stage flanked by kitchen doors with the ubiquitous porthole windows emitting bright white light, fast dissipated by a still miasma of cigarette smoke.
Eric led me to the bar where several patrons were perched and, en route, I surveyed the clientele. I had expected, I suppose, a narrow stereotype; mainly rich, peculiar businessmen such as those one sees in Soho slurping sushi from the intimate crevices of naked oriental beauties. On the contrary, these people were of all sorts, business men certainly, here and there, but also aged locals in unostentatious garb, as if they’d slipped in on the way home from work, young couples, dashing clean shaven boys with fine, callow cheekbones, and their young fraulines, slim, with high heeled boots and short skirts barely imagined in England at that time, worn with uniquely Teutonic chic.
Every table was placed with entrees, and these also surprised me for they were simple, mundane dishes, the worst bistro fare, barely deserving of a restaurant. Eggs mayonnaise, prawn cocktails, cold meat platters – ham and spam – fleshy pork pate smeared on ashen toast triangles. Surely it was time for my friend to acquiesce and bring this feeble deception to a close. Indeed, the only unusual aspect of the scene was the synchronicity of the dining – every diner was midway through their entrees and empty aperitif glasses sat before them.

The bar served only jellied vodka, though wine could be ordered at the tables from a cadaverous sommelier. Eric gulped shots while I sipped modestly. I spotted four waiters, all male, though androgenous in appearance, and barely distinguishable from one another as each had black hair slicked back from a sharp widow’s peak, with colourless skin stretched over mercenary bones. All wore identical starched white smocks.
“How exotic,” I quipped as the efficient quartet ferried half eaten potato salads and so on back to the kitchen, returning with a clinking and rattling of clean glasses and cutlery. Eric’s face remained expressionless, if not a little superior – a poker face over a royal flush. The waiters moved quickly among the tables, at each setting they flourished lighters hidden in their fists as if they were conjuring fire. At first I imagined they were lighting the patrons’ cigarettes, but gradually there arose a mist, redolent with sandalwood and myrrh. “The scent from the neighbouring table can prove distracting,” Eric muttered, and I observed on the nearest table a small smouldering pyramid of Indian incense. Its effect was dizzyingly potent.

And then, finally, they came, balanced on the arms of the elegant waiters, who twirled back and forth through the kitchen doors, and wove fluently through the pungent smoke, graceful as ballerinas. The main courses.
In some ways they were as commonplace as their predecessors, arranged with insipid pragmatism on plain white porcelain. There were potatoes, buttered and sprinkled with chopped parsley; carrots, buttered and sprinkled with chopped parsley, a little tor of peas, buttered and sprinkled with… some came with chipped potatoes, or dried flaky mashed potatoes… some with a parsimonious green salad. Lettuce with tomato... Sliced… watercress… I digress.

These accompaniments inhabited roughly two thirds of the plate, as is the standard. Average and unassuming.

But in the remaining third, where the steak or chicken would normally nestle on a bed of something, drizzled or glazed with something else, there resided the key ingredient. It was a sight so surreal and horrifying that, for a moment my instinctive repugnance was allayed and I remained seated, transfixed, marvelling at the procession. Certainly there was a pleasantly surprising variety of textures and colours, from some quite arid, matt-surfaced servings, grey and faded, nearly albino, through those that nearly glowed - succulent, coruscated honey browns, and then those that glistened like shimmering coals, of dusky onyx and midnight-blue. The waiters transported the plates with that eternally distracting dexterity, three or four, precariously arranged along the length of each arm. As they passed I noticed that each wore on the tip his long, slender nose, an ornate but unostentatious ivory clip. Personally, I could detect no scent as the incense had anaesthetized my nostrils.
Rapidly and casually as croupiers, they dealt the plates to the sitters, and I gazed on spellbound. There they lay, perfectly formed, as if warmly deposited there in situ bare moments before they were swept up by these stolid porters. In the final moments of numb reverie, I remarked to myself on the immense skill of the chef. That he could, with a simple palette knife, form such sculptures from these unusual raw ingredients! – for surely it would take a tremendous talent to create formations of such authenticity – those gently sloping inclines, soft, rolling swirls, smooth, vermiform diminutions rising to the happily languid apex…
Then the spell was rudely broken. In the midst of a chorus of convivial conversation, the people grasped their cutlery and began to eat.

I left the building quickly, but with all due decorum, and vomited quietly in a gloomy snicket.

**************

My life was changed that night, I thought irrevocably. I fasted for a week, though not through choice. From that night on I found food, all food, foul and indigestible. I could not look at a bowl of vegetables without sensing palpably the filth from which they had grown, the earthiness; and the festering, necrotic stuff that nourished them; the slowly undulating worms that devoured, processed and exuded this matter. I’d see their sweet, delicate leaves reaching tenderly skyward, slithering through layer upon smeared layer of a cow’s faeces. I could not see an egg without feeling its uncomfortable white mass squeezing out of the dirty feathered undercarriage of some unclean fowl. Meat, I saw for what it was: bloody flesh sliced off some febrile, rooting swine or rheumy-eyed pendulous bovine.
Not only did I suffer the pangs of hunger, but also those of loneliness, worthlessness, soullessness. They were inseparable and insuffereble. I, who had existed only for gastronomy, for culinary adventure, for the unique thrills of the tongue and the olfactories, and of the satisfying passage of that consumed through the gently bubbling entrails, now found such pleasures the source of glassy torment. I’d never suffered existential uncertainty. I’d existed to consume, to document the consumption, and to share these marvellous experiences with my incipient readership. There could be no more noble existence.
Now I felt the universal void, and its sting was infinitely more profound than that of the mediocre twinge of an empty stomach or the perverted delirium that went cheek-by-jowl with autodigestion. Nevertheless, finding myself in the throes of starvation, I managed to consume some simple water biscuits, their extremely processed state and arid lifelessness making them barely palatable. It was this diet – crackers, tap water and occasional vodka – that kept me from death; but I became ill, emaciated and palsied, barely able to stand, and given to paranoia and frequently terrifying hallucinations. I dreamt of nothing but food, of sinking my rotting, rattling teeth into the succulent rump of a suckling pig on a spit, or gorging on a plate of lemony oysters, their glistening valves yawning invitingly; and I would waken, screaming as from an awful nightmare.
But still, strange though it may seem, I revisited that awful place. Indeed, I visited regularly, three or four times a week. I was not ready to accept defeat, a shark-bitten swimmer dipping his toe in the water. I became well known to the doorman, the waiters and the sly barman; so much so that their frozen Siberian faces would twitch, a suggestion of a glib smile at the sight of me sitting lonesome, pallid and nauseous at the bar. The barman greeted me by name and enquired about my day, polishing glasses with casual aplomb, as if I were socializing in some cosy cocktail lounge. And one of the waiters, Vladimir, unfailingly approached me, earnest and pofaced, to ask if I would be dining tonight. But I knew, while I cast my own gaze across the unsavoury spectacle of the room packed with expectant diners, that his lifeless, inscrutable eyes would flick a fraternal wink over my shoulder to the delight of the barman,. “Not tonight, I think,” I would reply with jocular politeness, though my voice came twisted and husky through barely unclenched teeth.
And no matter how numbed I was by jellied vodka, the emergence of the main course from the kitchen portal would invariably be the prelude to my departure, and the graceless ejection of a few half digested water biscuits into a cold Hamburg gutter.

All seemed lost. Even if I survived on this bare sustenance, I would never again sample the delights of anything more elaborate than ground cereals and grains. The diet of a horse. But them, at my lowest point, I encountered Eric again. I’d avoided him at all costs since the night he’d escorted me to Die Scheisshaus. During the following fortnight on spying him in the street, I’d divert down alleys and skulk in shadowy alcoves. But then, suddenly, he’d vanished, and I’d not seen or heard of him for more than two months. So estranged had we become that, on seeing each other again, we found one another’s appearances so altered that we nearly passed by unrecognised.
My own appearance was horrifying enough – skin and bone, with the skin waxy and hanging slackly, having been so quickly siphoned of its fatty stuffing. But he was far worse. His clothes, whilst never immaculate, had always been serviceable and fairly clean. Now he dressed in rags, the rich material torn and soiled, dwindling like the last autumn leaves. He had on only one shoe, the other foot dressed in a sock from which the toes and heel protruded, blackened with street dirt with a violet hue beneath, the product of some pestilence. This sight preoccupied me for some time as a perverse fascination got the better of me. Eventually I redirecting my attention to his face (for we still stood askew of one another for some time, casting tentative glances to ascertain if we were indeed acquainted) and noticed that lice writhed in his tussled hair, giving it a Medusan appearance, and teemed in the tangles of his eyebrows and newly cultivated beard. He’d been badly beaten some while before and unwashed blood still resided about his person. The fingers of his right hand were crooked and useless, broken and not splinted. His ears were purple and swollen, as was one eye that was also blood-shot and permanently dilated in the crisp winter sun. His once grandly worn dentures were cracked, and hung grotesquely between white lips. Still, there could be no mistaking it was him.
He reeked of many layers of dried urine and perspiration, so we were no longer welcome at any of the cafes that were once our regular haunts. We ended up cross-legged on the dewy grass of some small park, sharing bread and dry biscuits. Eric embraced like a teddy bear, a small whiskey bottle I’d bought for him. He was hard to understand, slurring barely coherent phrases through bloody, ulcerated gums, and half of that was rambling gibberish, Estonian nursery rhymes, and pathetic whimpering entreaties to his long-dead mother and father. During these asides, he would rock compulsively bock and forth with his eyes closed.
But I understood well enough from brief snippets of coherency that my money had not made its way to the Russian. Instead, Eric had layed the Marks at the Arminian’s cock-fighting pit near the docks, and watched it disappear in a whirl of blood and feathers. Then he’d made bets on the house’s credit and lost twice what he’d brought; and departed with the spectres of both the Russian and the Armenian hanging over him.
It is testament to his rodentine gift for self-preservation that he went a week untouched, skipping lithely between the dark back streets and ducking with stealthy acumen through noisy bars and brothels, and generally feeling quite pleased with himself, until the Russian dragged him from a hooker’s bed to an empty dock-side ware house, put his hand in a vice and smashed his face with a crowbar. Then, staggering half-dead from this hellish encounter, his luck entirely dissipated. A strong arm enfolded his scrawny neck and escorted him to the next empty warehouse where worse was yet to come from the sadistic hands of the Armenian.
And he was still held as a debtor; subhuman and demented, with less than a week remaining to find more money than we could make in a year. I gave him enough to get out of Germany though, a ferry fare and a little extra for food and board. He wept snot and blood, and I, much discomfited, attempted to soothe him, assuring him it was nothing, a simple gesture between old friends. But it turned out his tears were not of gratitude, but were for things past, for his eyes had misted over and his unhinged mind was elsewhere. He was sorry, he said in the voice of a castrati speaking the idioms of his native village, he’d danced poorly, he so wanted to dance the ballet.

I passed the day numbly, smoking in a poor-mans café, paying for endless coffees but drinking only water. I remember the sensation of hard biscuits gradually softening in my pocket; what had I to look forward to? What career for a food critic revolted by the simplest dish? What of my dreams of becoming the pre-eminent critic, feared and revered by the worlds foremost chefs…? And if I could restore my palate… how could I ever be the buccaneer, the pioneer, if there was one foodstuff that I could not… How could I hold my head up, having been presented such an opportunity, one that would prove I could consume anything, that I had a limitless palate, and not to seize it with both hands?
And who were those people anyway - those who night-after-night sat at the tables of Die Sheisshaus. Nothing remarkable there. Normal, ordinary, common volk, plucked from every walk of life, purely by chance. From every part of Europe. All that was remarkable about any of them was their main course, bracketed as it was between the most mundane entre and desert imaginable; and washed down with that ubiquitous tasteless vodka. If they could, then surely …
And so I found myself yet again on my customary barstool, a frosty glass anaesthetising my finger tips, its varnish-scented contents searing my barren, ascetic innards. The waiters and barman hovered, finding perverse, mirthless amusement in my suffering. Perhaps they ran a book on how long the skinny Englischer would last each night. As usual I observed unmoving as bland culinary accoutrements were shipped from the kitchen to tables abuzz with happy chatter. Taking a drink, I eyed Vladimir as he passed, wearing his imperceptible but unmistakeable smirk. I felt the judgement exuding from the corner of his eye.
My stomach hung slack and empty, wrinkled like a scrotum. A rancid taste rose in the back of my throat. A half-finished plate of cold meat held aloft by Vladimir appeared to be levitating beside me, the pink tooth-marked flesh lingering. A salad followed at a languid pace, washed but tainted by cold molecules of manure on the leaves’ frilly peripheries; the eggs’ yellow eyes stared accusingly at me from either side of a radish nose, its straggly yellow roots like blonde pubic hair.
“Excuse, mien Herr,” Vladimir aroused me from a half-dream. “Are we feeling well tonight?” His lips quivered as if ready to bark cruel mocking laughter, but none came.
“Very well,” I responded, despising the weakness my strangled voice exposed. I felt naked under his scrutiny, and sensed intensely the gratification that my humiliation was giving to him, and to the barman behind me. “Very well indeed!” I managed a feeble smile, but couldn’t bring myself to look at him directly.
“Well! Very good – sehr gut!” Then to the final joyful parry – the death blow – Vladimir recited urbanely the line that for so many weeks had aroused a fundamental terror in my lank viscera.
“Do you wish to see the menu now, mein Herr?”
A pregnant pause. The waiter inclined his mischievous face toward me. From behind me, I heard the bar creak under the bartender’s weight.

As though a dying moment, I suddenly saw my life flashing before my eyes, a creaky zoetrope; my birth, a slithering mucus coated, bloody thing squeezed unceremoniously from between tired thighs into the midwife’s lap; tiny infant graspings; a toothless chinless orifice in the middle of an amorphous face, compelled toward a vast violet nipple, ravenously sucking it dry, then to the other; then slurping mushed vegetables and fruit, and tiny cubes of beef and ham; then pain, such pain, soft flesh split open, by tiny vile enamel squares, a mouthful of teeth blossoming through blood and unthinkable, unremembered agony, suppressed in the recesses of my mind; then rotted black by sugary sweeties, a penny a piece under my pillow; a nocturnal imp; a penny for every kind; a penny a carnivore’s, a penny a herbivore’s, an omnivore’s tools, shredding, tearing, grinding, homogenizing in the spit; foie gras, caviar, tornados and truffles, all mashed to a pulpy bolus; ingested, digested, slowly squeezed, churned, pulverised, until finally, inevitably I took a long sweet swig of vodka and held Vladimir in an implacable and victorious gaze:

“Can I take a look at the specials?”

18 nov 09