not.
He took Ilona to a place called the Salzburger Café, one of the few restaurants in the city whose menu could be relied on to feature meat. The menu offered reassuring promises of entrecôte de boeuf and lammkotelett , but Jack had been in the area for four months without seeing a cow or a lamb, and it was his view that the remnants of the once-splendid German cavalry brigades, now roaming freely through fields and forests outside the city, nightly met their fate in the kitchen of the Salzburger. He debated keeping his theory to himself, but in the end he guessed that Ilona would see the bitter humor in it.
She laughed. “I hear rat is quite tender,” she said. “When the horses are gone.”
She pored over the menu as if it were the Sunday Times , reading the name of each item aloud, regardless of whether it was available. When the food came, she dispatched it with a terrible ardor. She licked sauce from the tines of her fork, from the flat of her knife.
“I have gained new respect for horses,” she said. “Also for Austrian chefs.”
Jack was less enamored of the dark fist of horseflesh sitting clenched and bloody on his plate. He found it gamy and tough, ribboned with strings of fat, so at a certain point he just laid his fork down and got his pleasure from watching her go at it. After she had cleaned her plate she belched and then covered her mouth with her hand. It was the first time he’d seen her blush. Then her eyes drifted toward his plate, and he saw hunger fight its way through the embarrassment. He passed it across the table toward her, and she cleaned that, too, sopping up the gravy with a piece of the white bread that had suddenly become available in the city, the bakers catering to the tastes of their American occupiers. When there was nothing edible left anywhere in the vicinity of their table, Ilona pushed back her chair, settled her hands on her belly, and smiled sleepily, looking, with her yellow-green eyes and red hair, like a contented ginger cat.
“You save any room for dessert?” he asked.
She blushed again. “Maybe a little. Do they have coffee?”
“They have something they call coffee. What it is, I don’t know.”
When the waiter had served their strudel and the watery brown liquid he insisted, despite all evidence to the contrary, on calling coffee, Ilona managed to slow down, lingering over the dessert.
“The Red Cross nurses who come to the DP camp keep saying be careful, be careful,” Ilona said. “They say our digestions are not used to protein, to fat. And it’s true; at first I got sick sometimes. But now?” she patted her belly. “My stomach is like the horse I just ate. Maybe I’ll go home and eat your foie gras, too.”
“My grandmother used to make strudel like this,” Jack said. “Actually, I think it was her cook. But she used to say it was her grandmother’s recipe.”
“This is your German grandmother?”
“Yes. I mean, generations back. But they’d been in America so long they weren’t really German. They were barely Jewish. They had a Christmas tree every year.”
“My family is like your father’s, I think. Only just a little bit Jewish. We celebrate every year Christmas. In America, there are many Jewish army officers?”
“Some,” he said. “I wouldn’t say many.”
Jack had been one of only three Jews in his officer training course. Early on, the NCOs had targeted the Jewish officer candidates for special mistreatment, and their fellow OCs, relieved to find scapegoats for their misery, had eagerly joined in. Kleinbaum had washed out after only a few days of the abuse. Finkelman, a wiry little graduate of NYU law school, had responded to the attacks by growing steadily more belligerent. By the time he and Jack received their bars, Finkelman had been involved in at least a dozen scraps. He was saved from being shit-canned from the course only because his victims were too embarrassed to complain that a skinny, four-eyed, Jewboy
He took Ilona to a place called the Salzburger Café, one of the few restaurants in the city whose menu could be relied on to feature meat. The menu offered reassuring promises of entrecôte de boeuf and lammkotelett , but Jack had been in the area for four months without seeing a cow or a lamb, and it was his view that the remnants of the once-splendid German cavalry brigades, now roaming freely through fields and forests outside the city, nightly met their fate in the kitchen of the Salzburger. He debated keeping his theory to himself, but in the end he guessed that Ilona would see the bitter humor in it.
She laughed. “I hear rat is quite tender,” she said. “When the horses are gone.”
She pored over the menu as if it were the Sunday Times , reading the name of each item aloud, regardless of whether it was available. When the food came, she dispatched it with a terrible ardor. She licked sauce from the tines of her fork, from the flat of her knife.
“I have gained new respect for horses,” she said. “Also for Austrian chefs.”
Jack was less enamored of the dark fist of horseflesh sitting clenched and bloody on his plate. He found it gamy and tough, ribboned with strings of fat, so at a certain point he just laid his fork down and got his pleasure from watching her go at it. After she had cleaned her plate she belched and then covered her mouth with her hand. It was the first time he’d seen her blush. Then her eyes drifted toward his plate, and he saw hunger fight its way through the embarrassment. He passed it across the table toward her, and she cleaned that, too, sopping up the gravy with a piece of the white bread that had suddenly become available in the city, the bakers catering to the tastes of their American occupiers. When there was nothing edible left anywhere in the vicinity of their table, Ilona pushed back her chair, settled her hands on her belly, and smiled sleepily, looking, with her yellow-green eyes and red hair, like a contented ginger cat.
“You save any room for dessert?” he asked.
She blushed again. “Maybe a little. Do they have coffee?”
“They have something they call coffee. What it is, I don’t know.”
When the waiter had served their strudel and the watery brown liquid he insisted, despite all evidence to the contrary, on calling coffee, Ilona managed to slow down, lingering over the dessert.
“The Red Cross nurses who come to the DP camp keep saying be careful, be careful,” Ilona said. “They say our digestions are not used to protein, to fat. And it’s true; at first I got sick sometimes. But now?” she patted her belly. “My stomach is like the horse I just ate. Maybe I’ll go home and eat your foie gras, too.”
“My grandmother used to make strudel like this,” Jack said. “Actually, I think it was her cook. But she used to say it was her grandmother’s recipe.”
“This is your German grandmother?”
“Yes. I mean, generations back. But they’d been in America so long they weren’t really German. They were barely Jewish. They had a Christmas tree every year.”
“My family is like your father’s, I think. Only just a little bit Jewish. We celebrate every year Christmas. In America, there are many Jewish army officers?”
“Some,” he said. “I wouldn’t say many.”
Jack had been one of only three Jews in his officer training course. Early on, the NCOs had targeted the Jewish officer candidates for special mistreatment, and their fellow OCs, relieved to find scapegoats for their misery, had eagerly joined in. Kleinbaum had washed out after only a few days of the abuse. Finkelman, a wiry little graduate of NYU law school, had responded to the attacks by growing steadily more belligerent. By the time he and Jack received their bars, Finkelman had been involved in at least a dozen scraps. He was saved from being shit-canned from the course only because his victims were too embarrassed to complain that a skinny, four-eyed, Jewboy
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