Chương 179: Five Memory Cards

The tension in the team room was thick enough to wring out. Chris laid the five sealed envelopes across the table in a row. He drew a breath and opened the first. He didn't read it to himself. He read it out, clearly, word by word, to his teammates.

"Card one."" A rainy afternoon, in my grandmother's kitchen in the Italian countryside. The air smelled of flour and eggs and her hands. She always hummed something that wasn't quite a tune, and with a rolling pin worn shiny with age she made me a plate of the simplest hand-cut pasta with tomato and basil. That is the safest and the warmest flavor in my memory." Neither Ethan nor Kira said anything. That wasn't a dish. That was a whole childhood.

"Chairman Benini." Chris had it almost at once. Italian, an advocate for roots and for feeling — the memory was cut to his shape. He opened the second.

"Card two."" A refugee camp after the war ended. I had not eaten in three days. A soldier from the United Nations gave me half a loaf of black bread. It was dry and hard and so sour it hurt my teeth, and I could barely bite through it. It was the most delicious thing I have ever eaten. It was the flavor of staying alive." The air in the room got heavier. Kira went a little pale.

"The German judge. Wolfgang Schmidt." Chris said it quietly. His file put Schmidt's birth in postwar Germany; the memory matched his age and his background exactly. He opened the third.

"Card three."" Behind the high-school football field, under that enormous apple tree. The girl I liked gave me half of an apple pie she'd baked herself. The crust was a little burnt and the filling was sweet enough to hurt, but the sun was good and so was her smile. That was the first time I tasted love — clumsy, and full of hope."

"Emily," Ethan said immediately.

"That's a scene out of an American high-school movie." Chris agreed. Emily Jones, American, lively in her style: the likeliest fit by a distance. He opened the fourth, and his hand caught slightly.

"Card four."" My father was a man who never smiled. His only hobby was fishing. The last time I saw him was in a hospital. He was very weak, and he insisted on making me a bowl of fish soup. A very simple soup — fish, butter, a little herb. He said nothing at all. The soup said all of it for him. That was the flavor of goodbye." Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon. Something turned over in Chris as he finished.

He thought about his own father, and about a lonely potato pudding.

"Who…" Kira sounded uncertain.

"Who would that be? Judge Schmidt? He's a father too."

"Possible," Chris said.

"It could also be Madame Dubois. She's been restrained the whole way through — the kind of person raised inside rules. That card is the hardest one to place." He picked up the last envelope and opened it.

"Card five."" My first year studying abroad, I ran out of money and then had a terrible fight with my family and refused to ask them for help. On New Year's Eve I was walking alone down an unfamiliar street, cold and hungry, and I felt I couldn't hold on any longer. I turned into an alley and went into a small place that sold nothing but plain rice congee. That bowl had no flavor in it. Only the smell of rice, and warmth. It is why I did not buy a ticket home the next day.

That was the flavor of comfort — of a hand reaching down into despair." Chris looked up at Kira without meaning to. Her eyes had gone very wide. Her lips were trembling slightly, as though she were looking at her own reflection.

"Judge Akiko Tanaka." Kira said it almost under her breath.

"That's her story. I know it is." The loneliness and helplessness of being in a foreign country, and being saved by the simplest food there is — Kira had lived inside it. Five cards. Five lives. Joy, grief, hope, despair, love and goodbye. Everything human beings hold in common, concentrated into five dishes.

"Right." Chris rapped the table and pulled them all back.

"This isn't the moment to analyze. It's the moment to choose. Each of us takes the memory we feel most, the one we can answer." He looked at Kira.

"Card five. The congee. That's yours, isn't it?" Kira nodded hard. She looked at the card, and there was something like duty in her eyes.

"I can make the bowl that pulls someone back from the edge." Chris turned to Ethan.

"And you?" Ethan's eyes had been on the father's fish soup the whole time. He was thinking about the roast chicken that had moved a judge. He was thinking about his own father. He lifted his head, and it was completely settled.

"Card four. The soup. Give it to me."

"Done." Chris didn't hesitate. Three cards left on the table. The grandmother's pasta, the wartime black bread, the first-love apple pie.

"I'll take the apple pie." Chris picked up the third card.

"I know American dessert formulas, and I… understand what that feels like." He pushed the first and second cards into the middle of the table.

"So we're left with the warmest of them and the heaviest of them."

"The grandmother's hand-cut pasta needs absolute patience and love. The wartime black bread needs the deepest possible understanding of suffering, and respect for it. Neither is technically complicated. Emotionally they're at opposite poles." Chris looked at his teammates and made the last call.

"We make the pasta together, all three of us. Kira does the dough — feel that grandmother's gentleness. Ethan does the sauce; use your precision to reproduce that purity of simple. I'll integrate at the end."

"As for the black bread." His face went serious.

"We can't reproduce that dish. We cannot imagine hunger and despair at that level. Any attempt to imitate it disrespects the memory."

"So we don't make black bread."

"What we make is a dish that pays tribute to that belief in staying alive."

"I'll lead it, and I need you both to lend me everything you understand about life and about food." The division was done inside a few minutes. Every one of them had found their point of contact with a stranger's memory. This wasn't a cooking competition. It was a symphony assembled out of five human lives. And Team USA was about to conduct it.