Interlude: The Menu

On Sundays, Anselm took his grandmother Ilse to lunch at the Café Lindqvist, which had been in the same corner of the same square since before either of them was born.

The menu was a laminated booklet of twelve pages. There were soups and sandwiches, salads, grilled things, baked things, three kinds of dumplings, a section called “From Grandmother’s Kitchen” that Ilse regarded with open contempt, and a long last page of desserts. Ilse never opened it. She said hello to the waiter, ordered the barley soup, and folded her hands on the tablecloth.

Anselm, who was thirty-four, opened it every time. And every time, he read all twelve pages.

“It’s the same menu,” Ilse said, after twenty minutes. She had finished a glass of water and most of a roll.

“I know. I’m just trying to see if there’s something better than the chicken.”

“You’ve ordered the chicken for eleven years.”

“Yes, but what if I’ve missed something?”

The waiter returned, looked at Anselm with the patience of a man who had known him since adolescence, and went away again.

Ilse watched her grandson with her chin on her hand. She was eighty-three, small and exact, with an expression that gave nothing away unless she wanted it to. She had come to this country at nineteen with one suitcase and a sewing machine, and had made, in her life, a number of decisions that she did not discuss.

“What is it you are deciding today?” she asked.

“What do you mean? Lunch.”

“No,” she said. “Something else. You have been like this for three months. You read the menu like a man reading his own will.”

Anselm put the menu down. He was silent for a while. Outside, a tram went by in a long metallic sigh.

“There’s a job,” he said at last. “In Lisbon. They want an answer by the end of the month. I’ve made lists. I’ve talked to everyone. I can’t tell if it’s the right thing. If I go and I hate it, I’ve thrown away what I have here. If I stay, I might always wonder.”

Ilse nodded slowly. The soup arrived, steaming. She tasted it and made a small noise of approval.

“I will tell you something about soup,” she said. “I chose it because I was hungry. Now I am eating soup. If it were bad, I would order something else. Most things in life are like soup, Anselm. You choose, and then you make the choice a good one. You do not marry the soup.”

He laughed in spite of himself. “So the chicken is soup.”

“The chicken is soup. The dumplings are soup. Close the menu, order the chicken or order something else, I do not care. In either case you will not be hurt.”

“And Lisbon?”

She set down her spoon. “Lisbon,” she said, “is not soup.”

He waited.

“For Lisbon you should think carefully. Take your time. Talk to people who know. But for that kind of thing, you should also decide when you will decide. You have been in the menu for three months. At some point, the menu is no longer the work. It is the hiding.” She picked up the spoon again. “Give it a day. Not a month. A day. And then tell me.”

He ordered the grilled fish, which he had never tried, and which turned out to be fine. It was not the best thing he had ever eaten. It was warm, and slightly overcooked, and his grandmother stole a potato from his plate without apology.

He called Lisbon on Tuesday. He did not tell her what he said, and she did not ask. On the following Sunday, he arrived at the café a few minutes late, sat down, and said hello to the waiter. Ilse watched him fold the menu shut without opening it.

“Barley soup,” he said. “Today I will try the soup.”

Ilse looked out the window at the square, where the pigeons were arguing over something small, and hid a smile in her water glass.