Chapter 16
CESARE
Bregman has seated us apart.
It is a long table and there are nineteen at it and he has put my wife at the far end between Petar Ilic and a shipping agent from Antwerp, and me at this end, and there are eleven people and about thirty feet of tablecloth between us, and he has done it with a seating card, in his own hand, at a dinner he is not hosting.
Sadko's is not his room. Sadko's is not anybody's room, which is the point of it, and it has been neutral ground for forty years and the family that owns it has never once taken a side, and Bregman has walked in here at seven o'clock and moved four cards.
"He has moved four cards," Teodoro says in my ear, taking my coat.
"I can see that."
"Do you want me to move them back?"
"No."
"I could move them back."
"Teodoro."
"It would take nine seconds and I would enjoy it enormously."
"Sit down," I say, "and watch Nunzia."
Here is what he is doing, and it is not stupid.
A marriage of eleven days, in this world, is a thing you test by separating. If we sit together we prove nothing; anybody can sit together for two hours. If we are put at opposite ends of a table with strangers, then for two hours the whole room gets to watch what each of us does with the distance.
A woman who has been given a costume looks for her husband.
A woman who lives in a house does not.
He is going to sit there for two hours and count how many times she looks up this table, and by the pudding he will know exactly what he has, and he is quite right to do it, and I would do the same.
I do not look at her once.
I want that on the record because it costs me more than anything I have done in this restaurant in nine years. I talk to a woman from the port authority about dredging for eleven minutes. I ask Petar's cousin about her son. I do the thing I do.
And at the far end of thirty feet of tablecloth my wife is having a conversation with a shipping agent from Antwerp about, as far as I can tell from here, gutters.
She does not look up the table.
Not once.
At half past eight I go out to the corridor because if I sit there for another minute I am going to do something visible.
The corridor at Sadko's runs from the dining room to the kitchen and it is narrow and badly lit and hung with photographs of people who ate here in 1968, and there is a payphone at the end of it that has not worked since I was a child.
I stand under a photograph of a man I do not recognise and put my hands in my pockets.
The door goes behind me.
I know it is her before she says anything, because of how quiet it is, and because the door does not bang, and because nobody else in this building moves like a person who has decided where the floor is.
"Petar has fallen asleep," she says.
"He does that."
"He did it in the middle of his own sentence."
"He has done that at this table for forty years. Somebody will wake him up when the fish comes."
She comes and stands next to me and looks at the photograph.
"Who is that?"
"I have no idea."
"You have not looked at me," she says.
"No."
"For an hour and forty minutes."
"An hour and forty five," I say. "But who is counting."
She does not laugh. She almost does something. It is a very small thing that happens on the left side of her mouth and does not get anywhere, and I have started collecting them.
"Bregman moved the cards," she says.
"He did."
"I know what it is for."
"I thought you probably did."
"He wants to see whether I look for you." She is still facing the photograph. "So I have been talking to a man from Antwerp about drainage for an hour and a half, and I have not looked up that table, and about forty minutes ago it stopped being on purpose."
I turn my head.
"Say that again."
"I could not look up the table," Rosalie says. "Not would not. Could not. I have had my hands flat on my knees since the soup."
I do not entirely remember the next part in the right order, which is unusual for me, so I will put it down as it comes.
There is a wall. It is on my left and it has a photograph on it of a christening in 1968, and it is close, because the corridor is narrow.
She turns round.
I get my hand on the wall beside her head, which is not something I have ever done to anybody in my life, and it is not to hold her there, it is because otherwise it is going to be on her and I have not asked.
"I am going to," I say.
"Yes."
"I have not."
"I know."
She has her hands flat on the wall behind her, open, fingers spread, which I now know is what her hands do when something is costing her, and she is doing it in a corridor with nobody touching her at all, and her chin is up, and she has not moved back one inch.
I am about four inches away.
I can feel the heat coming off her face. The corridor smells of the kitchen and of the wet coats by the door, and somewhere behind us in the dining room somebody laughs at something, and Rosalie says, very quietly, in exactly her ordinary flat voice:
"There are twenty six days."
"I know."
"I am telling you the number."
"You have told me the number."
"You did not want it in the room."
"No," I say. "I have changed my mind about that."
Her eyes go over my face in a way I have not seen before, fast, twice, like somebody checking a lock.
"Then say it out loud," she says.
"Say what?"
"What you are doing."
And I open my mouth to say it, and I do not know to this day which of the two available sentences was going to come out, and the door at the end of the corridor swings and Teodoro comes round the corner carrying a tray of glasses at shoulder height, at speed, talking.
"Right, so the fish is a disaster, apparently the fish did not come, so what we have is nineteen people and no fish and a man from Antwerp who has asked me twice about gutters, which I did not know was a subject, and Nonna has told the kitchen she will do it herself, which they will not allow, so someone has to go and physically remove her from the kitchen and I have decided it is going to be you, because she likes you best, and Rosa says the whole thing is because Bregman changed the seating and the fish is a metaphor. "
Nobody says anything.
Teodoro looks at the tray. Then at the wall. Then at my hand on the wall.
Then at his own feet.
"I am going to go back through that door," he says, "and come in again."
"Teodoro."
"No. This is fine. This is entirely fine. I will be counting to eleven on the other side of it."
He goes back through the door.
Rosalie takes her hands off the wall.
"That is a shame," she says, in the flattest voice she has, and walks past me down the corridor toward the kitchen to go and remove a seventy nine year old woman from behind a stove.
I stay where I am with my hand still on the wall.
She goes back to the far end of the table.
The fish arrives at twenty past nine, because Ottilie has got into the kitchen anyway, and the entire room knows it, and the man from Antwerp says it is the best he has had in this country and Rosa says loudly that it should be, and Sadko's head chef comes out and stands in the doorway with the expression of a man whose house has been robbed by somebody he is fond of.
I watch it come down the table on four plates at a time.
And I understand, somewhere around the third round, exactly what my grandmother has done, because Ottilie Orsini has not cooked in a restaurant kitchen in forty years, and there was no need for her to do it tonight, and there were three other solutions available.
She has given the room something else to talk about.
Nineteen people came here to look at a marriage and they are going to go home talking about a fish, and every one of them will tell it as a funny story, and inside the funny story is the fact that the new wife was the one sent to fetch her out and came back without her.
Which is a thing a family member does. Which everyone at this table now has a memory of.
It took her four minutes and a saucepan.
I look up the table at my grandmother, who is sitting between two cousins eating her own fish with enormous satisfaction, and she catches my eye, and she does something with her eyebrows that I have been on the wrong end of since I was six years old.
Bregman does not touch his.
That is worth noting because I do note it, at the time, and I do nothing with it for eleven weeks. He sits at the middle of the table with a plate in front of him and does not put a fork in it, and when the waiter takes it away he says something apologetic about his stomach.
Petar, awake now, watches the plate go.
"He never eats here," Petar says to nobody. "Forty years. Not once."
"Why not?"
"I have asked him twice." Petar puts his glasses away. "He says the fish is bad. The fish is not bad."
At eleven o'clock Yves Bregman comes past my chair on his way to the door and stops, and does the thing where he puts a hand on the back of a chair as though it were his.
"A pleasure," he says.
"Yves."
"Your wife is very good with the Antwerp people."
"She is very good with most people."
"Mm." He looks down the table. "Two hours, and neither of you looked once. That is either the best marriage in this room or it is not a marriage at all, and I have been sitting here all night trying to decide which."
"And?"
"And I do not know yet," Bregman says. "Which is more than I have had for eleven days, and I am content with it." He takes his hand off my chair. "Good night, Cesare. Give her my regards. I did not get to speak to her."
"You had her at the far end."
"Yes," he says. "I did."
Outside, Teodoro brings the car round and gets out and holds the door for her, which he has never done in his life, and she gets in without letting him complete it, and I get in the other side.
He shuts my door.
Then he leans down to the window before he goes round to the driver's side, and taps on the glass with one knuckle, and waits until I have wound it down.
"Nineteen," he says.
"What?"
He holds up his phone.
"In the corridor," Teodoro says. "She did not say anything. But I have been thinking about her face for two hours and I have decided it counts, and I want you both to know that I am putting it down as nineteen."
He straightens up.
"Also," he says, through the window, entirely conversationally, "I did count to eleven out there, and by the time I came back through she was in the kitchen. So whatever that was, it did not survive me, and I have to live with that."
And he goes and gets in the front and starts the engine, and my wife sits beside me in the dark with her hands flat on her knees, looking out of her own window, for the whole eleven minutes home.