It feels like I could

The night enters the day at gunpoint, shoots into the bloodstream like an intravenous injection, no objection, mainlines it with dim windows and street lights, and somewhere with smears of dark lipstick around the wrists.

The jet wash and the bass of engines dissolve on my face as I stand near a highway and watch planes descend into the liquid dark. I look up, veins strained, neck craned -- I could touch this plane if I reach out and stretch my arms, it feels like I could. Adrenaline gushes into the heart, turns it into a bass drum. The thrill becomes the drill. The plane levels with the runway, the air is pinned down to the fresh innocent grass, shredded by the engine turbines.

The ground is cold, the chill slowly snakes around my legs, seeps through under my jeans, into the skin. Another plane is zooming in, and after it, in a greater distance, one more.

My phone buzzes in my coat pockets, an incoming text. Let me treat you to a glass of ice champagne with strawberries and mint. The bitter, sharp smell of jet fuel weighs down the air, I gasp for breath. I pull a pack of chewing gum, peppermint, out of my jeans pocket. I take three pieces, the mouth is instantly awash with xylitol.

In the morning, from the bed unmade still, I'll watch other planes knife through the non-resistant light.

Here you are

I'm in front of an Henri Cartier-Bresson's black-and-white picture of a street in Italy. The title says it had been taken in Salerno. In it, a boy, maybe eight, maybe ten years of age, stands in the rectangular shadow from the wall to his right, behind him another wall and the carcass of a cart, both whitewashed in summer sunlight. One knows, sees, it's summer, the boy wears the dark shorts and white tank-top, and the light is bright, high, blinding. There is a distance between the boy and the camera, his face and the nature of the object in his left hand are kept unseen. His right hand cupped to the chin, he appears to be intrigued. Involuntarily I mimic the boy's gesture, I can't take my eyes off the picture. I probably take too long, soft words and rich perfumes steadily gather around me, mix in one, seep into my ears and nose. Someone steps on someone else's foot, "Pardon, pardon!" promptly ensues. I move on.

Outside are a fresh night and Paris. 

***
It was January when we started planning our trip. The four of us, girlfriends. We decided on the early April, a couple weekdays. Fewer people on the streets, more space for us. We rented out an apartment in Montmartre, on rue Lepic, curving and steep. To get inside is to walk through a courtyard, enclosed, unavailable for everyone else but the insiders and an occasional (and privileged) guest. A home for somebody's flower beds and herb pots, its other purpose, a more important one it seemed, was to collect, to contain, the evidence of everyday life. Piano sounds; a child's voice singing along with a song on TV; a plate breaking; even our loud and foreign exclamations about the light in the apartment as we stood by the elegant windows (two), and our "We have arrived!". Even those, perhaps. 

***
Ask my mother and she'll tell you I've been to Paris many a time.
In my early teens I dreamed of travelling like there was no tomorrow, and of all places I wished to see Paris was, somehow, the most important. I didn't have the means to go, so I was looking for a chance. 1998 FIFA World Cup was to be held in France, and Snickers® promised a free trip for the winner of their raffle. To participate I collected five (or was it ten) of the limited-edition Snickers® chocolate bar wrappers. I so hastened to send them in that I completely forgot I had to include an inspired letter about why I loved football, or was it why I loved Snickers®?  

I didn't get to be in Paris in 1998. 

Later one evening over tea I pleaded my allegiance with another city. It surprised my mother. 

"What happened with Paris?", she asked. 

"Nothing happened, but in my mind I've already been there more than a dozen of times." 

***
There are moments that attach themselves to one so strongly that no amount of time is enough to overwrite them. 

On our first night we strolled around the Sacre-Coeur, dignified, in no need of superlatives. We ascended the hill (by foot -- I refused to take the cable car) and our breath wasn't ours anymore. It was of Paris, among the breath of that homeless man who laid asleep by a metro entrance, and that of Hemingway who might have stood on the same spot and looked up the way we did. Silently and awed. Until someone threw an empty bottle at a taxi car and shattered the repose. We walked on, stumbled over the uneven cobbles. The night was fresh and clear, and in the distance were the Eiffel Tower's golden lights. 

I had to stop, stand still. I'd seen it countless times before, all through the eyes of others. From afar, through the bars of a fence, now I was looking at it. Here you are.

"I feel you've had quite an emotional moment there", said Morgane. She was referring to a heart-to-heart conversation we'd had earlier in the evening, over wine and dinner haute vitalité (Cafe Pinson), but I took it to mean this very instant.

   ***

A sight of worship for hundreds, thousands, millions. With each photograph I took I was stealing you from others. You are mine. You are everyone else's.

                     ***

We were at The Broken Arm, in pursuits of caffeine (without a doubt one of the finest filters I had) and sartorial splendor (the best top in color blocks I almost bought), when I saw a familiar face. "This man'' -- I nodded towards the entrance --  "was on the train to Paris with us. Doesn't he look like somebody we might know?" Correct. The father of a good acquaintance, in Paris briefly for a meeting, he will snap (iPhone) the only picture of the four of us together.

                                                ***
I have this image in my head from years ago, maybe even since I was fourteen. I forget what brought it about, a movie, perhaps, or a book. A moody day, soaked in autumn, the color of the sky matches the buildings'. I stand at the traffic lights, waiting for its permission to cross over. Barren trees flank the road, cars swoosh through the pools of rainwater gathering by the curbstones. Parisian houses, a story in each window, up and down the street for as long as the eye can see. Not so picturesque, this image. But it's not why it has stayed with me. It has because in it I had felt very accomplished, the way one does after nudging their dream into the outside world.

                                                  ***

I can't wait to go back to have more breakfast (pancakes strewn with crushed pistachio nuts and elegant pieces of fruit, in a pool of maple syrup, served with vanilla whipped cream; "Jesus!" escaped my lips when the plates touched down on the table), coffee, and lunch at Holybelly. A must! As is dinner at Septime, they say. And more of THE falafel sandwich (from L'As Du Fallafel).

La Fin

They have arrived

1979. My mother is a music student (piano). There is a tour to Bulgaria organized by her conservatory, and she applies to go. The application process involves an evaluation talk with a Komsomol commission, the members of which will have to decide if she is trustworthy enough to leave the country's borders. (To Bulgaria! So pro-communist then that it was known in the internal circles as an unofficial Soviet republic at the time!) In the end, it's a no. It's all unspoken, but she is dressed in clothes that look too Western (where does she get those from?); her last (maiden) name ends with -ovich and is therefore Jewish?

1989. My mother, now thirty one, is on a plane to Vilnius, Lithuania. Together with my late grandmother she is going to buy a luggage-ful of men's and women's clothes and maybe some footware to be sold among friends and acquaintances. Those goods are as close to Western as one can get. They are one of a kind in Shakhty and go fast. (From this trip I, then five, saw two summer dresses with short lantern sleeves -- one dress with butterflies and the other with chamomile flowers -- and a pack of Donuld Duck bubble gum.)  There followed two more Vilnius-bound trips, now alone. It would be alright but for one thing. My mother kept bringing the nicest looking attire as opposed to the better-priced one, and convinced that such approach disserved the "business", and besides, a mucisian would never know how to negotiate numbers, my late grandmother, a natural enterpreneur, "dismissed" my mother off her duties as a buyer. And so, Vilnius was as far abroad as my mother ever got to, and considering that back then Lithuania was still a part of the USSR, technically it wasn't even abroad.

The furthest my father went was Eastern Russia. No enteprenueral venture, this was his latest month-long work trip, in the grasp of winter, and the most memorable part of the month for him was seeing the endless Siberian taiga from the plane on his way back home.

This afternoon my parents flew in to Amsterdam for a ten-day visit. We were on the phone last night to iron out all the details -- what's English for this and that, what to say to a customs officers, and other such things -- and I could hear they were excited, a little proud even. I understand why. They are both in their fifties now. For two thirds of their lives a possibility to go abroad had been unimaginable because of the ideology and politics, then for another third because of the poor economy. For a change, I'm on the receiving end today and they have arrived. (Big thanks to the airport staffer who kindly walked them to the passport control after they had wandered off into transit zone and with an intention to collect the luggage stood in line for a flight to Mexico City.)
  
There will be important museums and the glimmer of canals and interesting faces and tall, tilted houses to look at and around. They will probably see Olivia the Cat Lady, and, with a little bit of luck, catch a glimpse of The Butt-Naked Man (I haven't seen him in a long while.) But so far, I cooked an Indian meal and baked banana bread for them tonight. They didn't have a banana bread like this before, I don't think. Heck, I didn't have a banana bread like this before either.

Here is what's unusual about it. First: instead of banana mush there is banana mash inside this one. Nigel Slater -- whose recipe it is and whose latest book, Kitchen Diaries II, in vein with his others, is magic! -- doesn't crush bananas into a smooth puree. He mashes them, ripe, almost sickly, with a fork to a lumpy state. This is smart, because later, when the bread is baked, these lumps will be those pleasant chunks of the moist and fragrant fruit that I always miss in a banana bread. (O how I'm upset with those banana breads whose only ties to a banana is in the title.) Then, there is chocolate, and its amount here is so right that it doesn't overpower banana flavor one bit. What it does is mingle with those banana lumps mid-mouthful and excite the palate. What's good for banana besides chocolate? Caramel. Its notes are here too, thanks to muscovado sugar.

Nigel Slater's Chocolate Muscovado Banana Cake (Bread) 

Adapted from Kitchen Diaries II, by Nigel Slater

Yield: 1 loaf

I will avoid the discussion of whether it's bread or cake, this. It's all in the baking vessel, isn't it? Commonly, cake comes from a baking tin and bread from a loaf pan. But seeing that Slater christens it as chocolate muscovado cake and bakes it as a loaf, I'll go ahead and say this: no matter. To me, banana bread rolls off the tongue, and banana cake does not. But never mind.

If you have the book, you will notice I upped vanilla extract to two teaspoons here. For me, a teaspoon is somewhat unnoticed amongst such heavy weights.

250 g plain flour

2 tsp baking powder
125 g butter, softened
235 g muscovado or dark brown sugar
3-4 very ripe bananas (400 g peeled weight)
2 tsp vanilla extract
2 large eggs
100 g dark chocolate

Line a standard-size loaf tin (24cm*12cm*7cm) with baking paper, leaving a little overhang throughout. Heat the oven to 180 C (350 F). Sift the flour and baking powder together.

In a bowl, mash the bananas with a fork. The mixture should be lumpy. Stir in the vanilla extract. Chop the chocolate into small pieces the size of fine gravel.

Using an electric mixer, cream the butter and sugar together till light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs until incorporated. Stir in the bananas and chocolate. Gently fold the flour and baking powder into the banana batter. Pour the mixture into the lined baking tin and bake, rotating the tin halfway through, for about fifty minutes. Check for doneness by inserting a metal skewer into the centre. If the skewer comes out moist but clean the bread (cake) is ready. If not, put the bread (cake) back in the oven for a few more minutes and cover the surface with foil.

  
Leave the bread (cake) in the tin to settle and cool for 15 minutes, then remove from the tin by lifting the baking paper up and out. Cool some more before carefully peeling off the paper. Serve cool, in thick (!) slices. Wrapped in foil, keeps for up to a week.