Himmler's Cook

Franz-Olivier Giesbert

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781782394143
• eBook ISBN:
  9781782394136
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

A gloriously rich and blackly funny French bestseller about Rose, a 105-year-old chef who has experienced life at its fullest. . . and at its most deadly. Rose has endured more than her fair share of hardships: the Armenian genocide, the Nazi regime, and the delirium of Maoism. Yet somehow, despite all the suffering, Rose never loses her joie de vivre. As she looks back over her long life—one of survival and, sometimes, one of retribution—she recalls those unique experiences that added such spice to her life, whether it was being a confidante to Hitler, a friend to Simone de Beauvoir or cooking for Heinrich Himmler.

Chapter 1

Under the Sign of the Virgin

Marseilles, 2012. I kissed the letter and then I crossed my fingers, my forefinger and my middle finger, hoping it would be good news. I’m very superstitious, it’s my little weakness.

The letter had been posted in Cologne, in Germany, as the postmark on the stamp told me, and the sender had written her name on the back: Renate Fröll.

My heart began beating very fast. I was happy and anxious at the same time. At my age, when you’ve survived everyone else, getting a personal letter is bound to be a great event.

After deciding not to open the letter until later, so as to maintain the excitement of its arrival for as long as possible, I kissed the envelope again. On the back this time.

There are days when I feel like kissing everything, plants and furniture, anything, but I take care not to. I don’t want people thinking I’m a daft old biddy and likely to scare children. At the age of nearly 105 I have only a thin little thread of a voice left, three sound teeth, an expression like an owl, and I can’t smell violets.

When it comes to cooking, however, I still know my way around. I may even call myself one of the queens of Marseilles, only just behind the other Rose, a slip of a girl aged only eighty-eight who makes wonderful Sicilian dishes in the Rue Glandevès, not far from the Municipal Opera House.

But as soon as I leave my restaurant to walk in the city streets I feel that I’m frightening people. There’s only one place where, apparently, my presence does not seem out of place, and that’s at the top of the limestone hill from which the gilded statue of Our Lady of the Guard seems to preach love to the universe, the sea and the city of Marseilles.

Mamadou takes me there and brings me home on the back of his motorbike. He’s a tall, strapping lad, my right-hand man in the restaurant, where he keeps the place tidy, helps with the cash register, and takes me everywhere on that stinking motorbike of his. I like to feel the nape of his neck against my lips.

During the weekly closing of my restaurant, on Sunday afternoon and all day Monday, I can sit for hours on my bench in the sun as it beats down on my skin. Inside my head, I talk to all the dead whom I have lost and shall soon be seeing again in heaven. A friend I’ve lost sight of liked to say that they were much better company than the living. She was right: not only are they never in a bad temper, they have all the time in the world. They listen to me. They calm me down.

At my great age, I have discovered that people are much more alive in you once they’re dead. So dying does not mean the end; on the contrary, it means rebirth in other people’s minds.

At midday, when the sun gets out of control and cuts me under my black widow’s garments as if with a knife, or even worse a pickaxe, I get up and go into the shade of the basilica.

I kneel in front of the silver Virgin who dominates the altar and pretend to be praying, and then I sit down and have a little snooze. God knows why, but I sleep better there than anywhere. Perhaps because the loving look of the statue soothes me. The silly shouts and laughter of the tourists don’t bother me, and nor do the bells. It’s true that I am terribly tired, as if I were always coming back from a long journey. When I have told you my story you will know why, but then again my story is nothing, or nothing to speak of: a tiny splash in the mire of history where we all paddle, as it pulls us down into the depths from century to century.

History is a bitch. She has taken everything from me. My children. My parents. My great, true love. My cats. I don’t understand the stupid veneration that the human race feels for her.

I am very glad that History has gone away, after all the damage she’s done. But I know she will be back soon; I feel it in the electricity in the air and the dark looks of people’s eyes. It’s the destiny of the human species to let stupidity and hatred guide its way through the charnel houses that generations before us have never stopped filling.

Human beings are like beasts in the slaughterhouse. They go to meet their fate, eyes cast down, looking neither ahead of them nor behind them. They don’t know what awaits them, they don’t want to know, although nothing would be easier: the future is a return, a hiccup, it’s like heartburn, it’s sometimes the vomit of the past coming up again.

For a long time I tried to warn humanity against the three vices of our time: nihilism, cupidity and a good conscience. The three of them have turned our brains. I’ve tried it with my neighbours, particularly the butcher’s apprentice on the same floor as me, a pale and puny lad with the hands of a pianist, but I can see that I’m only annoying him with the drivel I talk, and when I meet him on the stairs I have more than once grabbed hold of his sleeve to keep him from getting away. He always claims to agree with me, but I know very well he agrees only so that I’ll leave him alone.

It’s the same with everyone. Over the last fifty years I’ve never found anyone who will listen to me. I realized I was fighting a losing battle, and ended up keeping my mouth shut until the day when I broke my mirror. All my life I’d managed never to break a mirror, but that morning, as I looked at the splintered glass on the bathroom tiles, I realized that I’d attracted bad luck. I even thought I wouldn’t last the summer, which would be only normal at my age.

When you tell yourself that you’re going to die, and there’s no one to keep you company, not even a dog or a cat, there’s only one thing to be done: you have to make yourself interesting. I decided to write my memoirs, and I went to buy four spiral-bound notebooks at Madame Mandonato’s bookshop and stationer’s. Madame Mandonato is a well-preserved sixty-year-old, I call her ‘the old lady’, and she is one of the most cultured women in Marseilles. When I was about to pay her for the notebooks, I could see that something was bothering her, so I pretended to be looking for change to give her time to decide how to put her question.

‘What are you going to do with those?’

‘Well, write a book, of course!’

‘Yes, but what kind of book?’

I hesitated, and then I said, ‘All kinds of books at once, my dear. A book in celebration of love, a book to warn mankind of the dangers we’re running. So that we will never live through what I have lived through again.’

‘There are a great many books on that subject already.’

‘Then we must assume that they haven’t been very convincing. Mine will be the story of my life. I already have a title: One Hundred Years Old and Going Strong.’

‘That’s a good title, Rose. People love anything to do with centenarians. It’s a market growing very fast just now – there will soon be millions of them. The thing about such books is that they’re written by people who laugh at themselves.’

‘Well, in my own memoirs I shall try to show that we’re not dead while we’re still alive, and we still have something to say.’

So I write in the morning, but also in the evening, in front of a small glass of red wine. I moisten my lips with the wine from time to time, just for the pleasure of it, and when I’m short of inspiration I drink a mouthful to get my ideas back.

That evening it was after midnight when I decided to interrupt my writing. I didn’t wait to be in bed, ready for my night’s rest, before opening the missive I had found in the letter box in the morning. I don’t know whether it was age or emotion, but my hands were shaking so much that I tore the envelope in several places while I was opening it. And when I’d read what the contents said I felt faint and my brain stopped short.

Chapter 2

Samir the Mouse

Marseilles, 2012. A few seconds after I came back to my senses, a song began running through my head: ‘Can You Feel It’ by the Jackson 5. Michael at his best, with a true pure child’s voice, not yet the tone of a self-satisfied castrato. My favourite song.

I was feeling fine, as I always do when I hum it. They say that after a certain age, if you wake up and you don’t hurt all over it means you’re dead. I have evidence to the contrary.

Coming back to myself after my fainting fit, I didn’t hurt anywhere and I wasn’t dead or even injured.

Like everyone of my age, I dread breaking something that might condemn me to a wheelchair. I particularly dread breaking my hip. But I hadn’t done it this time.

I had foreseen what might happen: before...

Table of contents

• About the Author
• Himmler’s Cook
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Prologue
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Chapter 13
• Chapter 14
• Chapter 15
• Chapter 16
• Chapter 17
• Chapter 18
• Chapter 19
• Chapter 20
• Chapter 21
• Chapter 22
• Chapter 23
• Chapter 24
• Chapter 25
• Chapter 26
• Chapter 27
• Chapter 28
• Chapter 29
• Chapter 30
• Chapter 31
• Chapter 32
• Chapter 33
• Chapter 34
• Chapter 35
• Chapter 36
• Chapter 37
• Chapter 38
• Chapter 39
• Chapter 40
• Chapter 41
• Chapter 42
• Chapter 43
• Chapter 44
• Chapter 45
• Chapter 46
• Chapter 47
• Chapter 48
• Chapter 49
• Chapter 50
• Epilogue
• Recipes from La Petite Provence
• A Little Library of the Century