I Didn't Do It for You (33 page)

 

The napalm bomb struck within a few metres of the open-air kitchen, splashing its lethal gel in a phosphorescent starburst. As culinary mistakes go, this was one no cookbook ever thought worth mentioning. While the ground blazed, hospital staff scrambled to shovel dirt on the flaming liquid before it reached the dormitories where wounded patients lay resting. John Berakis had committed a blunder that could have cost his colleagues dear. His preparations for the hospital's evening
meal had coincided with a random over-flight by an Ethiopian plane. Spotting the light from the stove fire flickering in the darkness, the pilot dropped his load with impressive precision. ‘It lit up just like a Christmas tree,' John remembers, with a guilty laugh. For the rest of the night, staff and patients crouched in the darkness, as one Ethiopian plane after another roared over the narrow gorge, taking turns to try and finish the job.

It is not easy, learning to be a chef when you have been posted to the frontline. The quest for gourmet excellence might, indeed, have seemed a tad counter-intuitive in the bleakness of the Rora mountains. But for John, a man whose brain churned with the relentless energy of a Magimix, pursuing his dream was a way of proving he was still human. ‘The Ethiopians' whole aim was to terrorize us so that we couldn't work. So you carried on with your work, regardless.'

Had John been born in the West, I have little doubt that by now he would be running a chain of five-star restaurants, a suave maître d'hôtel gliding to welcome his guests in a sombre silk suit. But John was born Eritrean, and that has made all the difference. Baptized Tilahun, an Ethiopian name, and brought up south of Addis, he spoke Amharic so fluently that all his friends and girlfriends assumed he was Ethiopian. He was careful never to speak Tigrinya in their company and when they talked about Eritrea, that bolshie province up north, he kept silent, pretending to share their views. But something, he knew, was not quite right. Like so many Eritreans of his generation, he felt a creeping unease. There was a sense that he was not like other folk, that he was playing a role that chafed. Once he moved to Addis, the moment of epiphany came.

He had returned home after dark to find a small crowd of worried Eritreans in the family compound. A mentally-retarded boy had disappeared, and concerned relatives had
congregated to discuss where the missing youngster might be. The sight of this crowd, gathering after curfew and speaking in a foreign language, was too much for the Ethiopian security services. ‘The Derg rounded everyone up, made us put our hands against the wall. Then they beat us with their truncheons and arrested us. All that, just for speaking Tigrinya.' That night, John realized his camouflage was not going to work very much longer. The contradictions had become unbearable. He set off for the north. Doing his best to avoid the main highways, he bluffed his way through a series of police checks until he finally reached the Sahel and joined the Front.

The EPLF system required everyone to be capable of combat, and John did his share. He learnt that it is possible, after your mind has been drenched in the limb-loosening adrenalin of terror, to find a still, calm place where rational judgements are coldly made, the hard core of the soul that constitutes courage. ‘In war, you only ever fear the first bullet. Once the shooting starts and you are in the thick of battle, you don't worry any more.' Stationed in one of the valleys east of Nakfa, he was part of an infantry unit which hunted down a force of Ethiopian soldiers helicoptered into EPLF-held territory in an attempt to break the military stalemate. ‘For eight hours, we killed them and we ran, we killed them and ran. We killed them until we were out of breath and could run no more.' He had seen friends die, killed by bombs so big they dropped to earth in their own parachutes and, on explosion, left no body parts behind. ‘There was nothing to collect, not even a fingertip. They just vaporized.'

John also worked in the laboratory at Tsabra hospital, an underground clinic hidden in a valley on the outskirts of Nakfa, testing blood groups. The Front did not own a refrigerated unit where blood could be safely stored. So the EPLF found its
own ingenious way around the problem. By testing Fighters beforehand and cataloguing their blood groups, it created a living, breathing blood bank requiring no storage facilities. When the battle turned fierce and the wounded streamed in, they knew exactly which Fighter to summon for a blood donation. It was while working in the laboratory that John received his own worst wounds. A colleague carelessly forgot to switch off the methane gas before retiring. When John entered to start his night shift the gas exploded, searing his head, upper torso and the arms he threw up to protect his face. His hands and forearms remain a mess of scarring, the skin buckled and twisted by the heat.

But John possessed other useful skills. He had been one of the first candidates to complete a new hotelier course in Addis. He had trained in the Hilton's kitchens–a job he enjoyed so much it barely counted as a chore–and worked as a waiter, donning black coat and white gloves to serve caviar canapés to Haile Selassie, cheekily attempting to catch the Emperor's eye to see if the story that no man could hold his gaze was true (it wasn't). When a consignment of books sent by EPLF sympathizers abroad arrived in Nakfa, the Fighters would sort through it looking for what was useful. Those on hotel management and catering–guides published by training schools in Kenya–ended up on the scrapheap, only to be fished out again by John. He devoured them, page by page, memorizing the jargon. ‘When someone was leaving for Sudan and asked me what I wanted I would always say “send me hotel books”.' Laying out petri dishes for the laboratory, watching the bacteria spores grow on his preparations, John mulled over the principles of nutrition and hygiene, cause and effect. He was ready to risk his life, endure the bleakness of the Sahel without complaint. But, in the meantime, he would also learn how to prevent a
béchamel
sauce from tasting floury, how to squeeze stock from a scrag of chicken, and what cookery writers meant when they talked about the
purée
and the
gratin
, the
julienne
cut and the
roux
.

When, in 1790, a French officer who had been arrested for duelling found himself confined to quarters for what seemed an endless 42 days, he warded off boredom by launching a mental voyage of discovery around his bedroom, exploring the ideas associated with every humdrum object. When Xavier de Maistre, author of
Voyage around my Room
, was told his confinement was over, he felt nothing but disappointment: the intellectual journey had proved so enriching, he did not want it to end. There was a similar cerebral quality to John's culinary obsession. This was ‘virtual' cuisine, a form of mental gymnastics staged almost exclusively in his own imagination, practised on gleaming steel kitchen surfaces he would never possess, using market-fresh foodstuffs he would never receive.

‘At the start, when we were moving from place to place, we were quite literally in the Stone Age. To bake bread, you would find a flat rock, prop it up on three stones, light a fire below and wait for the flat stone to heat to a point where you could cook on it. The stones were our pans, our plates and our tables. It was back to the primitive ways.' The position improved slightly when John was assigned to Tsabra. Here, at least, permanent stoves could be constructed, equipment gathered. But he never got a chance to put the lessons of Elizabeth David and Escoffier–John always favoured the classics–into practice. ‘Most of the time all we had were lentils, poor man's protein. You boil them, throw in some salt and eat that twice a day. There's not much room for invention.'

If he couldn't deliver on quality, John soon learnt how to provide quantity. From the air, Tsabra was effectively invisible. At first glance, a casual passer-by would have seen only a
V-shaped valley traversed by a clear stream squirming with tadpoles, the odd goat scampering through green sprigs of wild olive. If he lingered, he might have noticed a suspicious number of comings and goings, or registered that the surrounding slopes seemed strangely bare of trees. In fact, this was Nakfa's main referral hospital, a 200-bed facility where doctors received the injured from the trenches and decided which patients needed immediate treatment and which could risk the arduous trip north to Orota. The spot had been chosen because of the river–every hospital needs plenty of water–and because the gorge was narrow enough to present Ethiopian bombers with a challenge. A hidden generator supplied electricity to the maternity ward, operating theatre, lab, dormitories and offices, all built on the same principle. The Fighters had dug deep into the rock, hollowing large rectangles out of the red earth, building up the stone walls until they were thick enough to withstand bombing, then covering the lot with wooden screens heaped with soil and shrubs. It was a big facility and people needed to eat. Juggling his jobs as lab technician and head cook, John regularly turned out meals for up to 500 people.

But his gifts really blossomed when John was reassigned to the laboratory in Orota and was handed the responsibility for feeding the main hospital's 3,000 patients. When he arrived, each department ran its own kitchen, the women walking miles to find increasingly-scarce firewood. Looking at the denuded mountain slopes, John realized the hospital's fuel needs were causing an ecological holocaust. The energy-efficient answer was a central kitchen with a giant, multi-hobbed oven, built according to John's careful specifications. Friends in London were sent a list of the equipment he needed: a dough machine, a pastry mixer, a vegetable slicer, eight 200-litre cooking pans. He had moved on from lentils and salt, introducing poultry
to the Sahel, and the arrival of a flour mill meant the Movement could grind its own grain and bake bread. A few more ingredients were becoming available, as Fighters began planting vegetable gardens and raising livestock. Soon the kitchen, staffed by 50 women trained by John, was dispatching containers of hot food and bread to the hospital departments each morning, and fuel consumption had been cut by 80 per cent. In his own way, John had managed to recreate what he had seen and yearned for at the Hilton as a young man: ‘I had my modern kitchen.'

Soon, his reputation spread. Tilahun had long since been abandoned in favour of ‘The Man'. John was The Man who, if you were getting married, could be relied on to make the open-air banquet a success. He was The Man who could work wonders with a sack of lentils, jerry can of oil and some onions. He was The Man who could be trusted to make sure guests attending a conference on child poverty did not leave grumbling. Life in Nakfa and Orota was not without its frenetic social whirl. War or no war, the workshops and symposiums must go ahead, and it was obvious who could be trusted with the catering: The Man. ‘One time I slaughtered 76 goats and 9 cows. The biggest conference I ever catered for was the 25th anniversary of the Revolution, when we had 6,000 delegates,' remembers John. ‘People came from all over and slept under the stars.'

He had learnt a few little tricks to tempt appetites. On a really good day, he'd be given a couple of bulls to slaughter and guests would dine on steaks basted in garlic and butter, roasted under the trees on large metal trays. But you can't feed a multitude on steaks, so John became a master of the stew. Even that presented an occasional challenge. People, he had discovered, liked their stews dark in colour. But with wine an unattainable luxury and tomatoes in short supply, this sometimes presented
a problem. ‘If the sauce was white, people would refuse to eat it. So we would slaughter a goat, drain its blood, mix it with salt to stop it coagulating, and use that as colouring. We'd say it was tomato salsa and then everybody would eat it.'

The limitations of this dour lifestyle must have been exasperating, but John never appears to have experienced second thoughts, not even when concerned relatives arranged a Swedish visa or set up a lucrative job in Hawaii. He had made his decision at the age of 25, and that was that. Not for him the self-interrogation of Kagnew's Vietnam-dodgers, uneasily aware they had ducked their generation's greatest challenge. ‘A promise is a promise. You cannot go back on it.' He had quietly calculated the odds and worked out that he was unlikely to see independence. But he had no doubts liberation would come, for others if not for him. ‘Once you've done your training and you've been politicized, and you've studied Mao and the struggle of the masses, Lenin and the Russian Revolution, then you know that eventually, you must win. It may not happen in your own lifetime, but eventually, you will win.' Sometimes, he allowed himself the occasional daydream. If–it seemed a very big if–he ever made it through, then he would open his own restaurant and hotel school, training young Fighters to be chefs and waiters, hotel receptionists and chambermaids.

He had expected to die, but his luck held. With the liberation of Asmara–a city he had never set foot in before entering it as part of a conquering force–he was given the job of running the canteens at the old Kagnew base. Then he demobilized and took over responsibility for four UN kitchens and the UN's water bottling plant. A tiny business empire is being created, but John–who rises at 4.00 am each morning to ferry his workers from site to site–gloats not over his profits, but the contribution he is making to Eritrea's new state. ‘I have
150 people working for me and each supports a family, each pays his taxes. That thought gives me a lot of satisfaction.' The shelves of his office hold glossy cookery books written by Madhur Jaffrey and Robert Carrier. But pride of place still goes to a pair of well-thumbed hotel management guides, published by a 1970s Nairobi business school, rescued long ago from a garbage dump in the Sahel.

 

Peopled by such driven citizens, Nakfa represented Eritrea at its best. But as I spoke to ex-Fighters, I began to wonder if it had also contained the seeds of Eritrea at its worst.