Sheila Roberts holds an MA (University of South Africa, 1972) and a D Litt (University of Pretoria, 1977). She has published three novels, three collections of short stories, and three chapbooks of poetry. She frequently publishes articles on South African literature, a subject she also teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where she is a professor and the coordinator of creative writing.

Russian Bouillabaisse

“He’s here!” Nicolai called. Excited, he ran down the front living-room steps to help Sdanek haul up his Tupperware of ingredients and his ancient, battered cooking equipment. Gillian did not move from where she stood, her body slightly bent and both hands reflectively smoothing the scrubbed butcher’s block in the middle of the kitchen. All afternoon she’d been hoping either that Sdanek would cancel or heaven might send her a splitting headache to excuse herself. Neither having happened, her stomach now felt like a lump of unbaked dough someone was kneading. On the stove Nicolai had set Sdanek’s cauldron of chicken stock bubbling like obscene, soft snoring. Too much, she thought. Now once again she’d have to endure the cooking of Mongolian bouillabaisse in shamefully old pots, incongruous in her spotless, bridal kitchen. She felt for the cigarettes in her cardigan pocket, lit one, and forced the smoke to soothe as many mucus-membranes as possible, as quickly as possible.
     A shopping-bag over one arm and an old five-gallon aluminum milk-pail in the other, large shaggy-bearded Sdanek puffed into the kitchen, followed by dark wiry Nicolai carefully balancing a tarnished baby’s plastic bathtub in both arms. There Gillian glimpsed three pitifully floating half-dead but not quite-dead silver carp, their sucker lips kissing up for mercy.
     “Gill,” roared Sdanek, “tonight I make vor you and Nicki ... and da mamma ... vhere is da mamma?”
     You ignorant swine, thought Gillian. “My mother couldn’t make it,” she said coolly. Had Sdanek really believed that she would invite her cultivated, witty mother to this ... this Pantagruelian festivity?
     “But I vanted to make the best boulla you ever tasted, vor you Gill, and Nicki and da mamma.” Sdanek’s voice faltered and his eyes flashed sudden tears.
     “Gill said her mom didn’t feel up to coming out tonight, Sdannie,” said Nicolai softly. “It’s only us three. But ... it’ll be super.”
     “Vell, you give me a drink and den I start,” said Sdanek. A little frantically, he glanced around the kitchen and into the living room, as if hoping the mother would still appear. He wiped a hand across his eyes and shrugged, and then removed the lid from the caddy. Gillian exhaled away a twinge of pity for him. He wore lead-colored baggy cotton pants tied with twine and a sweater that was unraveling at his thick muscled waste. With his enormous shoulders hunched and his hair frizzing in his neck, he seemed to her a truly irredeemable japie. Poor goddamn ... Oh, fuck it, poor nothing, she decided.
     Nicolai now placed the bath gently on the floor and, black hair flapping, went galloping away to bring up Sdanek’s other stuff. As Gillian stooped to get the Vodka out of a cabinet, she stared at the contents of the caddy: circling, entwining, writhing eels, crappies and unnamables — these also very much alive. An immense hiccup began rising from her belly as she realized how many sea-creatures were waiting for horrible deaths in her kitchen. With effort she managed to swallow the sour taste.
     Could it be? She asked herself. No. No, not possible already. Impossible!
     She poured a tumbler almost full of warm Vodka and handed it to Sdanek who, not even thanking her, took a good gulp and gargled the liquid round his mouth. As he swallowed he rolled his daft blue eyes and grimaced in appreciation, showing long but perfect teeth. Gillian bit back another fuck it. She alone, once again, was not going to enjoy an evening. She and the fish. She should’ve listened to her mother years ago and married a nice BBC-English-speaking boy, preferably from the University of Natal in Durban, and one with acceptable friends. Yet, even the overhead kitchen light seemed treacherously to bless Sdanek’s knobby bald head, as was her humming husband who now panted in with a tray of knives and a grocery bag of things.
      “Gillian, sweetheart, this time it’s going to be fun.” Nicolai winked his black-lashed eyes at her hopefully and suggestively. “Darling,” he whispered, “but couldn’t you have begged your Mom?” Gillian refused to answer him. She merely blew curlicues of smoke from her nostrils, keeping her own eyes cut and unfocused.
     Sdanek drank deeply again. He bent to the bathtub and dragged out a carp. Gillian looked up and shuddered, for with two swift movements, he flung the fish on the block, grabbed a heavy knife, and chopped off its head angrily. As swift as the cook, Nicolai skated across the kitchen floor, whipped off the cauldron’s lid, and soon three startled heads were kissing up at the steaming stock and three headless bodies were bloodying the bathwater. Sdanek opened his other plastic containers from the grocery bag.
     Unable to pull herself away from the kitchen and yet wanting to escape from the ghastly sight and smell of so many slithery victims, Gillian went to stand against the backdoor. From the first occasion of being introduced to Sdanek, she’d been mystified by Nicolai’s affection for his friend: this man who was, in spite of his Old World lineage, an oaf, a poephol, a Mongolian, and, to carry her comparison further, someone who brought Gargantua’s ugly little brother to mind. He was the man who’d nearly ruined their wedding, but who was now, once again, cooking in her kitchen and, what was worse, appearing to be enamored of her own tender, powdery, beloved mother.
     Nicolai went to set the table while Sdanek, quaffing tepid Vodka and, timing himself, plopped first the crab-legs and then chunks of carp into the broth and stirred. Gillian dropped her cigarette-stub into the moist visceral scraps accumulating in the rubbish pale and turned to gaze at the way the back porch-light transformed their nurtured scrap of lawn to pale blue neon.

Gillian Graham had first met Nicolai Kalnajs and Sdanek Semrad at Professor Jacobs’s reception, following the performance of Eugene Onegin at the City Hall. The newcomers both looked remarkably handsome in black dinner jackets with hand-tied white silk cravats. Nicolai’s dark eyes and tussled hair shone lustrously, and his quick shy boyish movements as he went after a waiter with a tray of Champagne caught Gillian’s attention immediately. When he handed her the glass, she thought, If this man asked me to marry him right now, I would accept him. Next to him, Sdanek, large and for the moment over-serious and hands locked behind his back, looked like a Grand Vizier of sort. Some drinks later, however, Sdanek, fingers still linked behind his back, took on the appearance of an ice-skating spy, slowly twirling around the Professor’s elegant living-room on smooth feet, from woman to woman. He needed to sniff at their perfume, sneak up on their talk, almost touch their hair with his lips, as he eavesdropped on their intimate observations. He would stop often and swiftly snake out a hand to lift a glass from a passing tray, then continue his surveillance. At first, her eyes unblinkingly on Nicolai’s expressive Baltic mouth, her own mouth full of sweet saliva, Gillian was oblivious to everyone. Later she could not help being distracted by Sdanek’s movements, which were growing ever less like a ballet and more like a cakewalk.
     “Mr. Kalnajs,” she said, “sorry to interrupt you, but ... ” She turned to point to Sdanek reaching for a wall to steady himself. “But, I think your friend needs help.”
     “Please, Mister me no Misters, my name is Nicolai. What? Oh-oh, Sdanek. Where?”
     “There, at that Skotnes painting.”
     Nicolai turned and swiftly loped over to his friend, in time to stop him from slipping to the floor. Supporting him and smiling ingratiatingly at this one and that, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for him to holding up a man much bigger than himself, Nicolai, locked under Sdanek, rejoined Gillian. At that same moment, Gill’s mother, who’d been with friends of her own, sauntered up and kissed her daughter. The sight of Lisa Graham provided the backbone Sdanek needed. He straightened himself, pulled at his jacket and his tie, then bowed steadily over Lisa’s hand, barely brushing it with his lips. His eyes, no longer flatly blue, but as Gillian saw, mad as the mist and snow, gazed up at Lisa’s wide, softly full, aging mouth.
     At he end of the evening, Nicolai helped Sdanek and his new friends into his car and began driving them home. After a while, Nicolai’s low lulling voice narrating to Gillian his life story put both Lisa and Sdanek to sleep, her head resting on his shoulder and his snoring nose squashed to her temple. Nicolai told how he and Sdanek, teenagers and best friends, had left his Riga and Sdanek’s Brno as the Wall was coming down; had worked their way to Gdansk, where they’d met; got jobs on tankers; and eventually, having worked as shipwrights on a British Cruise Ship, they disembarked at Cape Town, having heard that the most beautiful women in the world lived there, but then went on to Durban. Then immigration and ... By then, Gillian, although in love, could not help herself from nodding off.

Sdanek had of course been Nicolai’s Best Man and, to begin with, he’d fulfilled his obligations with only minor clumsiness. Gillian, being a fatherless only child, had walked proudly up the aisle of the old Maritzburg Anglican Church on the arm of her tall, slim mother, a woman of enduring beauty, looking particularly Guineverish that day in a long gown of pale emerald-green satin. Once her mother had released Gillian to turn and face Nicolai, she’d stepped backward and to the side of the couple. Sdanek, who should’ve remained at Nicolai’s left, ready with the rings, simply waltzed around Nicolai and Gillian to stand, a simpering smile on his face, next to her mother. The priest had to recall him to his place. That was nothing, really; just a flub. Only the beginning.

The flubber, humming a soft dirge, was now dropping mussels and squid into the pot. He turned, smiling sadly, and then offered his already empty Vodka tumbler to Gillian. But Nicolai, skipping in from the dining room, took it from him immediately and replenished the drink. “Sweetie, try to look happy,” he said softly as he kissed Gillian’s neck. “He only wants to give us pleasure.” Gillian glanced at Sdanek. He glanced back, his blue eyes wild but with an unmistakable slash of determination to them. Oh God, thought Gillian.

At the reception in the one-time renovated Roberts Hotel, Sdanek and a whole parcel of expatriates from unpronounceable towns in Russia, Latvia, and the Czech Republic proceeded, as was expected, to make short shrift first of the Vodka before they turned to the brandy and the beer. Nicolai tried to keep up, as they repeatedly toasted him and Gillian in loud rumbling snatches of song, but Nicki was not a good drinker.
     When the dancing started, even before Gillian and Nicolai could solo circle the floor in that old ritual, Sdanek had pulled Gillian’s mother to her feet and begun trying to twirl her slender body, clenched into his bending, embracing one, through some variation of a Russian quick-step. Lisa laughed a little and tried to keep pace, but they stumbled. Her long emerald mother-of-the-bride gown became trapped between his hefty calves, and her long blond, silver-streaked chignon was coming loose at the back. They both swung sideways suddenly, as if bravely to commence the tango, but instead fell onto the floor in a parody of sexual congress. Gillian crying out and Nicolai doing his best not to neigh, moved to help them. However, the Ruskies beat them to it and scooped up Lisa. Many hands smoothed her gown and her breasts and patted her hair, and a glass of champagne was held at the ready for when her embarrassment had subsided and the whiteness had left her Charolotte Rampling face. Gillian, following in the wake of the helpers as Nicolai yanked his boyhood chum to his long-booted feet, could not believe it when she heard her mother say gently, “Thank you, my dears. Really, it’s quite all right. Really, it was fun and I’m fine.” Later, Nicolai, trying to soothe Gillian and plead for his friend, said, “Gillian, sweetheart, he really couldn’t help it. He’s in love with your mother, and he’s crying his eyes out in the men’s room. You must forgive him. He fell in love with her at the Opera ... don’t you remember, and then at the rehearsal dinner everyone could see how he was adoring her ... ?”
     “Oh, balls!” said Gillian, feeling her eyes expand with anger. Meanwhile, Lisa had resumed her seat, upright and renovated. Small patches of pink mottled her cheeks and her eyes were too bright, a detail very worrying to Gillian, whose hand she took. Lisa murmured with smooth irony, “Darling, what possessed you to marry among these wild ... wild Russians. You know, dear ... ” Her mother’s voice lowered into a husky naughtiness, “I think there’s just too much testosterone in the room: that’s the problem.” Knowing her mother had expected a returned witticism from her, Gillian feeling brainless declined, turning her head and holding back the tears.

Sdanek with one hand now added ginger, garlic, chilly and red bell peppers, chopped onions, and tomato sauce to his mixture, while he slurped from his glass with the other. Gillian lit another cigarette to help reduce her annoyance at the happy guttural hodgepodge of street-Czech, street-Russian, and Low-Latvian passing between the two men, dining-room to kitchen; kitchen to dining-room. She did consent to accept with a nod a glass of red wine offered her by bright-faced boy-eyed Nicolai, who then excused himself to make a quick phone-call, or so he said; but whom could he be calling at this hour? Another Eastern European to come and join them? Or, could he be calling her mother?
     Oh, how she despised that Gadarene Sdanek, that grave-robber, stirring his witch’s brew, his unpressed pants drooping over his soccer-ball backside. How could he imagine that her mother might be interested in him?
     Some weeks into their marriage, Sdanek had telephoned one night to ask Nicolai to help him move some stones.
     Stones, thought Gillian, which stones, where? “What stones, Nicolai?”
     “Well, stones ... stones, Sweetheart, from his backyard.”
     “Where are you going to move them to?”
     “Ah ... Sweetheart ... ” pleaded Nicolai.
     “Darling, you’re confusing me.” Gillian sat up in bed.
     “You see, Gill, it’s like this,” gabbled Nicolai, his abashed eyes shifting. “You see, years before I met you, when me and Sdannie were working on the ships and studying nights at the Tech, he was trying his hand at sculpture, I mean, he never took classes and such, but he stuck to it. Well, he needed some blocks of limestone for a project he had in mind that he thought would bring him fortune and reputation. But ... oh Kristus ... neither of us had the money to buy granite or limestone, or any kind of wood or stone, for that matter. So we started checking out old cemeteries, you know, those that nobody keeps up anymore, all overgrown with weeds and moss. We found one off the main road to Cato Manor, small, decrepit, some of the stones so eroded from the humidity you couldn’t read the inscriptions. Ach, maybe they were Muslim or something, which is why we couldn’t read the scrawls. Anyway, I lifted a small one that had fallen over, and Sdannie dug one out that was still embedded, also a small one. Both probably from ... oh Lord ... ” Nicolai coughed in his hand. “Er ... children’s graves.”
     “Oh, no,” groaned Gillian.
     “The story’s not so bad, Gill. We never did use the stones for his carvings, and they’ve been lying in Sdanek’s backyard all this time. But suddenly now, I think since he met your gorgeous mom, he’s getting superstitious, and he wants to put them back.”
     “What’s my mom got to do with it, dammit!”
     “It’s just that he wants good luck to shine on him.”
     “Good luck will never shine on a bum-face like Sdanek, Nicolai! But go on then, go put the babies’ headstones back in their rightful places.” Gillian turned over and let her tears soak into the pillow.
     Nicolai only returned home in the early hours from that expedition, dead-tired and half-drunk. No matter how hard he and Sdanek had searched, they couldn’t find the old cemetery.
     “So,” yawned Gillian, “what’ve you done with the headstones?”
     “Sdanek said a prayer over each of them and dropped them in the Tugela.”
     “At the same place where he sometimes fishes?”
     “He fishes mostly from the sea. But, well ... yes ... ”
     “Oh my God! “

“The table’s ready,” announced Nicolai cheerily from the dining room.
     “Aahh, you ready for the boulla?” Sdanek twisted his neck and leered at Gillian. “Vell, I jus’ put in dese ... ” He scooped up the slippery segments of squid and crappies and slipped them by threes and fours into the mixture, dropping some to lie squashed on the floor. “Vee vant dese werry tender,” he murmured. “Dat Lisa, she should be here, she vould enjoy dis boulla ... ”
     “For heaven’s sake, Sdanek, my mother’s too old for you,” cried Gillian.
     “No vooman is too old for me,” snarled Sdanek, not even looking up from what he was doing.
     Nicolai placed three bowls on the counter. Sdanek first scooped out the fish heads and sent them drizzling across the room expertly into the rubbish pail, even as Gillian jumped and bit her tongue. Blockhead. Nincompoop. Then Sdanek carefully ladled out three portions into the bowls. He reverently carried two to the table while Nicolai followed with the third. Gillian stubbed out her cigarette and dawdled after them. She took her seat and stared half-seeing at the large multi-colored salad, the wine poured into their best glasses, and at the artistic way Nicolai had arranged wedges of bread in the breadbasket.
     “Nicki, you know vot I like?” announced Sdanek suddenly, lifting his wine glass. “I like a vooman like dis Gill who keeps zo silent. She don’t look like her muzzer but she is like her muzzer.” Sdanek’s shot-silk blue eyes twinkled at Gillian’s face, shocked into surprise by his words. She was forced to lift her glass to her lips as the two men toasted her reticence.
     Then she again looked down and focused on the bowl of pink broth in front of her. Tangles of boiled sea-creatures and wedges of translucent onion embraced at the bottom while shrimp upended themselves, and the mussels like black lips smiled on the surface. Oh well, she thought, lifting her spoon. She skimmed out a fragment of carp and squid and, oh no, the eye of a fish.
     “There are fishes’ eyes in this filthy mess,” she hissed at Sdanek. “Look!”
     “Vhere?” he demanded, his mouth already packed with a lump of pink soggy bread. He leaned over Gillian’s bowl. “I see only vonn,” he objected, spewing pulpy breadcrumbs.
     “Oh, Jesus God, now I’ve got your bouillabaisse on my glasses!” cried Gillian. The room shimmering in front of her, she tried to rise. But Sdanek was breathing down her arm as he lifted her bowl and dabbled his fingers in the soup, hunting for further trespassing eyes. Grunting as if in some reverse-orgasm, Gillian managed to get her head under Sdanek’s arms. She tried to crawl away from the bowls and the mess and the table, but all she managed to do was knock her chair down and fall herself, her elbow hitting the floor and her knee smacked by the leg of the chair. “Oh no, oh no,” she yelped. Then Nicolai was lifting her, but she had to brush him roughly aside and limp as fast as she could to the bathroom, where she threw up copiously.

An hour later, the mess cleaned up, Nicolai stood boiling some instant rice and doing a little fish stir-fry in the kitchen, humming deep in his throat the tune from The Volga Boatmen or some such thing. In the living room, Sdanek sat slumped in an armchair, Vodka tumbler in one hand and a handkerchief in the other. Every once in a while he dabbled at his eyes. “Gill,” he said, gargling in misery, “Gill, you know nuttink. You don’t know how much Nicolai and me vee suffer. Vhen we vere working like slaves in Gdansk, vee vould burn our own skin wit cigarettes ... see here ... ” He pulled a sleeve up a thick muscled fore-arm, showing old brown tiny blotches. Gillian, however, kept smoking rapidly, even though she now sensed strongly that she should give up nicotine immediately. But she had to get the taste of vomit out of her mouth. She felt her own paleness, and suspected unhappily that in about six months time her coupledom with thin dark handsome Nicolai would be trespassed upon by a child. And what sort of child? What if it didn’t look like Nicki but rather like one or the other of the large blond Latvians or Russians, or even maniacal, like Sdanek?
     But dammit, she didn’t know how to respond to this tearful Sdanek. She thought she wanted to explain that she’d never liked men cooking in her kitchen, especially not an ignorant swine who could not pronounce her name, but that was not really what she wanted to say. She wanted to confess her complex jealousies; she wanted ... Then the doorbell rang three times rapidly. Gillian knew her mother’s ring and sat up. Sdanek had leapt to his feet.
     Lisa, humming huskily La vie en rose, mounted the stairs in her usual unhurried way.
     “Why, Mother ... you ... ” said Gillian, going to her, arms outstretched. Her mother hugged her.
     “Darling, I thought I’d come by to see how you were.” Lisa, to Gillian’s chagrin, looked marvelous in a little shantung suit, sleek nylons, heeled shoes with little laces, and her whitening blond hair piled on top of her head. She kissed Gillian first on the left then the right cheek, and whispered, “How’s my grandchild?”
     “Mother! Who told you? Was it Nicolai? Yes, of course, when he ... the sneak!”
     “Darling, don’t become upset. No harm has been done. I’m here to check up on my brave girl ... Oh, I was so chuffed to hear the great news!”
      Lisa was carrying a pastry-box, which she now placed on the coffee table. Sdanek had meanwhile gone gallumping to the bathroom. Gillian heard him call to Nicolai in the kitchen, “Please, Nicolai, qveekly, strong coffee vor me and clean shirt ... ”

Half an hour later, the table reset, the four people sat graciously forking fried-fish and rice into their mouths. On the table stood a neat little green salad Sdanek had hastily prepared from the contents in Gillian’s fridge, a gleaming dark Sacher Torte, the gift of Lisa, and a respectable bottle of Riesling from Nicolai’s collection. Sdanek had washed his face, rigorously brushed his beard until the red in it shone, and tightly donned one of Nicolai’s fashionably baggy white silk shirts. His slanted blue eyes gleaming like sapphires, and his nose seemingly having thinned in the seriousness of the moment, he look every inch a Czech aristocrat, or at least a Polish prince. He beamed with washed-sky clarity at Lisa’s contained face and, with cool sweetness, she beamed back. Gillian tried to feel defeated and unloved, but could not succeed, for Nicolai had one hand on her thigh, pressing encouragingly and moving suggestively upward. All the same, she keened to herself, Oh Mother of God. Unless she died in childbirth, she was going to end up being Sdanek’s stepdaughter and, worse still, he would become the subversive, forever fishing, cooking, and drinking Godfather and grandfather of her poor child.

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