Tim Parks - The Server

Despite all the murder stories? God.

On my left Kristin is silent as the grave. She is not happy or calm, but she is silent. How do I know that? How do I know that she has issues too? I know. She has issues but she is dealing with them, she is sitting her way through them. Her back is bowed. Her head falls a little to one side. Meredith is upright and composed. Meredith is a girl doing well at finishing school. Her back is so straight. She balances a book on her head. With no effort. She knows her p s and q s, pronounces her t s and d s correctly. Meredith is learning a lesson because her parents have paid for it, even if you pay nothing to come to the Dasgupta. The Dasgupta costs nothing but total surrender. Mrs Harper is in front of me, her big square back quietly breathing. Livia is to her right, then Stephanie, then Ines. They are all bathed in Mi Nu’s glow. Only Marcia and I are out of it. I hate Marcia. I’ve barely met her. Marcia’s a bag of shit.

Bless her. Blessings on odd days. Resist aversions on even.

The moon is impossibly distant. Was there a moon that night on the beach? Take all his diaries away and chuck them. Do him that favour. Take his life and trash it. Do it! Go to his room, gather his books, chuck ’em in the trash. Best forgotten. Concentrate on your breathing, Beth. The breath playing round the nostrils. You imagine your thoughts are so interesting, don’t you, Mr Diarist? That’s the truth. It doesn’t matter if they’re painful. Your thoughts make you interesting. Oh, I have such complex thoughts. Oh, I’m such an interesting person. He loves himself writing that letter, writing his diary. Oh, the poor tortured soul. I’m such a fascinating man. The way I suffer. I’m so tender to my daughter. Oh, bollocks! Spray the crap away. Excuse me, Professor Tony, could you scrape off these diaries? This wordshit. So I can stick them in the dishwasher. A professor of linguistics maybe? This storyshit. Or literature. Concentrate on your breathing, Beth. Your breathing is more interesting than this diary. The nature of your breath at the present moment is a matter of the utmost importance to you. The utmost importance.

I’d give my right arm to be in love the way—

No!

I uncrossed my legs and struggled to my feet. My ankles were numb. They weren’t there. I stumbled between the cushions and out into the porch.

Mrs Harper was on her feet, following.

I dragged on my shoes and out into the rain.

‘Elisabeth! You’re not supposed to leave the hall during Strong Determination. You know that. You’re a server.’

I made a face. ‘I’ve got wind, Mrs Harper. I didn’t want to disturb.’

THERE IS NO killing at the Dasgupta, but endless cutting up, endless topping and tailing, chopping and dicing and slicing and grating. We’re doing the veg again. This is a kind of punishment, as Paul sees it. Paul’s another blandly sexless Dhamma bloke, the kind who always obeys the rules. Without thinking. He doesn’t think. He has a barber’s haircut with a parting and wears pale blue shirts and grey pullovers. Harper wears a grey pullover too. They’ve surrendered totally. Kristin obeys the rules, but Kristin is thinking and suffering. Kristin is trying to grow. Oh, but it’s crazy liking and hating people you’re only going to see for ten days, especially when the whole point of the Dasgupta is how mad it is to get attached to anything since everything in all existence arises only to pass away.

At the three o’clock meeting, Kristin was the only one not to volunteer, for anything. We pull in chairs from the male and female servers’ rooms and sit in a semicircle round the Tasks Board by the small fridge. Tomorrow is black bean stew and fig roll. Day four. Vipassana day. Ines volunteered to be main chef. Again. Ines volunteers for everything. She has nominated herself for Miss Dhamma Server 2010. Bathing suit not required. Paul assigned Marcia to work alongside her. ‘The bean stew’s a bomb,’ I told Marcia. Meredith began to grin. Yesterday I found out that Meredith’s been coming to the Dasgupta since she was thirteen. Her mum brought her to the children’s courses. Now it’s a home from home. ‘I’ve always meditated,’ she says, and starts to giggle.

Kristin never speaks to Meredith.

I volunteered to do Special Requests. Paul read them out. A cheese salad sandwich. A bowl of stewed fruit and yoghurt. A plate of toast and margarine.

‘Chicken salad it is,’ I said.

Rob grinned. And Tony. But Paul didn’t get it. Then he saw Meredith heaving.

‘ Cheese salad, Elisabeth, I said cheese .’

‘We’re out of chicken, Beth,’ Rob said.

‘Slip of the tongue, Paul, sorry.’

‘Fowl slip.’ Tony laughed.

Paul hates this jokey stuff. He assigned me to veg and salad as a punishment. He doesn’t know I love chopping. I love getting inside things, right into a squeaky lettuce heart, or the bloody pulp of a big salad tomato. I love that odd rubberiness broccoli has when you pull the twigs apart. I adore putting the big saucepan on the floor between my ankles and using all my weight to ram down the masher into boiled spuds and milk. Mum would be amazed. ‘You never did a stroke at home, Elisabeth.’ But really she liked to do everything herself. Otherwise how could she have felt exploited? At the Dasgupta I’ve learned to love the way a carrot bends a bit then snaps clean. I love using the big chopper to slam right through a head of crisp cabbage. The green halves fall apart and you see the crinkly layers whitening to the core. It’s so simple and mysterious. I never have any problem blessing a cabbage.

Today we’ve got celeriac, swede, turnip, potatoes, carrots, cauliflower, onions. There are peeling knives and chopping knives and sinks and boards and basins. The swedes are really small with shiny dark- and yellow-green stripes. Maybe they’re squashes, or pumpkins. I’m not sure. They glow on the work surface under fluorescent light. But it’s frustrating peeling them. There’s more peel than pulp. When you gouge out the seeds and slime they cling on by sticky threads. You scrape and scrape and they’re still there.

‘Place the cubing disc in processor R302.’

Reading the recipe book I can hear Vikram’s voice. He’s explaining to an idiot in idiot-proof formulas.

‘But which is the cubing disc?’ Meredith asks, pulling them all off the wall and checking blades and perforations.

‘There are labels under the hooks, sweetheart.’

Now she doesn’t know which disc she took from where.

We go at it for an hour on the long surface with the three sinks. The stuff mounts up under the grinder. Celeriac is filthy when you plunge it in the water, the rind is gnarled and grizzled. I use the biggest knife to slice it off. Inside it’s like white marble with twisty brown imperfections, then creamy and sticky when it’s cubed. The orange of the carrots clashes with the orange of the swedes. The grinder clatters. Sometimes it jams.

‘Parsneep, turneep, pumkeen.’

Stephanie’s practising her vegetables.

There are always foreigners serving at the Dasgupta. They treat it as a kind of language school, which is funny for a place that sets such store on silence.

Meredith’s giggling again. She’s discovered her parents’ flat in Paris is only a block away from Stephanie’s home.

‘With a swede’ — I pull one from the sack — ‘you can breed.’

Stephanie did her puzzled look. Like Ralph’s, but with freckles. She’s studying acupuncture somewhere.

‘What sort of vegetable is Paul?’ I ask Meredith. Her hair is escaping her hat. She won’t use anything but a small peeler, for fear of cutting her fingers again.