“Eli,” Magaziner said, “bring me vat Mr. Peterson don’t finish, Gelfer Moonshine’s feelings shouldn’t be hurt.” Then he turned to us as he sopped up gravy with his bread. “Don’t feel bad, young man,” he told Peterson. “If you ken’t you ken’t. Oy, everybody’s a prima donna. I’m not referring to you, Mr. Peterson. I can tell, you are an angelface. It’s Gelfer Moonshine, my tchef. He’s a pick-of-the-litter, vorld-cless, A-number-vun tchef but he gets depressed if a person don’t eat up everyting on his plate. I tell him, ‘Gelfer, it’s not you. Sometimes ve got a guest his stomach ain’t accustomed to traditional cooking.’ I tell him, ‘Gelfer, cheer yourself, sometimes a fella’s hed a woyage didn’t agree mit him.’ ” Eli Nudel had been serving the coffee and was standing now beside Peterson, who seemed oblivious to the man.
Magaziner went on. “I tell him, ‘Gelfer, all right, maybe she’s too old to hev any more children, and all right, maybe she ain’t a beauty, but nobody could deny Yetta got a smile on her punim could light up the shabbes candles. And what about you, Gelfer Moonshine? You got it in your head you’re the Supreme Being’s gift to the ladies? You’re fifty-one years old, your bek aches, your feet get sore, you got a constipation could choke a horse. A nice person like Yetta could be a comfort to you. That time her son and son-in-law came to the embassy mit the grendbabies ven the mumsers ver making a pogrom, you saw for yourself. Like horses they ate, may the Lord, blessed be His name, make His countenance to shine upon them.’ Two tiny little girls, Mr. Mills, Mr. Peterson, couldn’t be seven years old, eight tops, and they ate for a regiment. Vat dey couldn’t finish Gelfer made up to shlep in a beg. You’ll take a cup coffee, Mr. Peterson?”
“What? Oh. Yes please. I don’t seem to see the — Would you have such a thing as cream?”
Moses Magaziner looked at him. “Dairy mit brisket, Peterson?” he asked sharply, then abruptly changed the subject. “Vell,” he said softly, “how’d it go at the pelace? Dey taking good care you boys?”
“We had a preliminary interview this morning with the Grand Vizier’s First Secretary. He told us to await further instructions.”
“Ah,” Moses Magaziner said, “further instructions. You speak the lingo, Mr. Peterson?”
“Sir?”
“Turkic. You hev Turkic?”
“Guidebook Turkic. Nothing more. Nothing as fine as I’m certain yours is, Mr. Ambassador.”
“Me? I talk Yiddish to them.”
Peterson raised his napkin to his lips. For some time now he had been looking quite ill. “I say, would you excuse me, sir? It seems …”
He never finished his sentence. Eli Nudel hurried him away and Magaziner and I were left alone.
“So,” Magaziner said. “So so so.”
Mills grinned at him shyly.
“Yes?” Magaziner said.
“It was delicious,” Mills said.
“My pleasure.”
“I particularly liked the pudding. What did you call it, ‘lucksh and cook’?”
“Kugel. Lockshen kugel.”
“That’s it,” Mills said. “Lockshen kugel. It was delicious. It was all delicious. It was my first state lunch. My friend’s been off his feed.”
“Your friend?”
“Peterson. Mr. Peterson.”
“Oh yes,” Moses Magaziner said, “Mr. Peterson.”
“The halvah was wonderful too. With the coffee. I loved the halvah. Is that right, halvah? I’m very ignorant. I don’t know the names of these aristocrat dishes.”
“Halvah, yes,” the ambassador said. “Tell me again, Mr. Mills. King George sent you as his personal emissary with Abdulmecid’s gift? The letter the courier showed me vas a little unclear.”
“Yes, sir. Queer, ain’t it? Me a boob and all.”
The ambassador waved off George’s self-deprecation and questioned him further. He seemed particularly interested in the circumstances surrounding their meeting, and when Mills began to repeat what the King had told him of his relationship with Maria he stopped him at once. “Skip all that,” he said. George assumed it was because it was gossip with which the man was already familiar and was at a loss as to what else to tell him. “Vat did you say? Vat did you told him?” Mills recounted his reasons for coming to London, mentioned the useless letter of recommendation his squire had sent with him but did not go into detail because he was still ashamed for the proud man he had so conscientiously pursued with respect, waiting each day for the cabriolet (which he still thought of as the squire’s carriage) to pass, planting himself beside the road those two furlongs before it not because he was afraid he’d miss it but because he enjoyed watching it, seeing it come. Not telling Magaziner any of this either, burdened by his queer guilt for the squire’s failed liaisons and associations.
So he told him what he had told the King, blocking out for him a general idea of Millsness, what he had been rehearsing not since he’d first heard it, since what he’d first heard he had no need to rehearse, had remembered, would always remember, but what had happened since, describing the circle, his ring of the wood, the tree, going over it — Magaziner was impatient, waving him quickly through certain passages, slowing him down at others, actually leading Mills’s story like a conductor, directing it like traffic — as even now, speaking to the ambassador, he was at once telling the tale and living some new part of it, the telling, living, remembering and rehearsing additional increments he knew it would have made him dizzy to contemplate if he had dared. (He didn’t need to dare. The strange pressures and weathers of his life had already acclimatized him to conditions and practices that were no longer even second nature but something actually biologically autonomous.) Magaziner stopped him. “Forty-third? He called you Forty-third?” Mills nodded. “Go on.” George backed and filled, telling the story randomly, stumbling a little, not permitted to do it as he’d rehearsed it in his head but forced by Magaziner to improvise, by Magaziner who interrupted him, conducted him, taking him forward to the voyage, the practice sessions in the cabin, Peterson’s silence at table, the courier calmly taking food into his stomach that moments later he would give up to the sea. Redirecting Mills another time to what George had said to the King, what the King to George, but always refusing the gossip, not as much shocked by it as bothered that it should have come up at all, asking George what he’d said, whether he’d encouraged it, Mills swearing he hadn’t, insisting his own embarrassment to Magaziner. “Yes?” Mills nodded. “Go on.” George related some more details. Magaziner raised a finger to his lip. Mills stopped. “ ‘There you are,’ he said? ‘It would seem you’re one of us? It would seem you’re one of us then, George?’
“Ah, Mr. Peterson,” the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire said, “fillink better?”
“Yes, thank you, sir.”
“Dot’s nice. Dot’s terrific.”
In the morning he accompanied George and the courier to the government carriage that had been sent for them. Peterson climbed in first and George handed the golden package in to him to hold for a moment before he got in beside him.
Just as he was about to do so, as he was raising one foot onto the carriage’s metal stirrup, the ambassador briefly embraced him and almost imperceptibly slipped something into his jacket pockets. It was halvah wrapped in two of the fine linen napkins from the embassy service.