ties to Sweden beyond my family. I was moving on.
“I don’t know when I’ll be back,” I said.
“That’s OK,” she said. “I’ll wait.”
After a point, I stopped trying to talk to her. We were breaking up, as far as I was concerned. Cooking was the only thing I had room for. Cooking was the only thing I wanted to make room for.
There was nothing clean about my last loose end, which was the question of what I was going to do about the army. Sweden may not have taken part in a war for the last hundred years—not officially, at least—but it maintained an army, and service was mandatory. In my father’s generation, this duty was something you never questioned. In mine, and especially among my
blatte
friends who felt only marginally welcome in the country much of the time, the army seemed obsolete, a waste of time.
But once I had turned eighteen, my father started to bring up the topic every now and then. “Which station do you hope to go to?” he’d ask out of the blue. “You definitely don’t want to end up in Lapland.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I’d say. “I’m not going.”
This was a position my father simply couldn’t understand. To him, the only reason you should be excused from military service was if you were mentally ill, physically incapacitated, or, consistent with his generation’s ideas of maleness and gender, gay. I was none of those, so I should go. I suspect, too, that he felt I was a little too close to my mother, too protected by her. Maybe my cooking even baffled him. The army would make a man out of me.
“You can do something that has nothing to do with guns,” my mother suggested, trying to broker a compromise. But it wasn’t the guns; it was that nothing about the army fit into my dream of becoming a chef.
P OLITICAL BOUNDARIES between one country and another are artificial divisions, of course, and in Europe, they have shifted more times thananyone can count. But almost the moment the train crossed from the small town of Padborg, Denmark, into the slightly larger town of Harrislee, Germany, something broke open inside of me. I felt like I was at the beginning of a new path, one I’d forged by myself. This was a job
I’d
gotten, that
I’d
earned, and for the first time in my life, I recognized the weight of adult responsibility and welcomed it. By the time I changed trains in the Hamburg station, the comforts of Scandinavia seemed fully behind me.
When I finally felt hungry enough to get food, I walked to the café car and came back with a large, buttery soft pretzel and a fat pink wurst on a bun, swimming in sauerkraut and sweet brown mustard. I conducted the transaction in German, but it wasn’t pretty: Every time I opened my mouth I wished I’d practiced more, instead of goofing off with Mats during the three years of German I’d had in school. German was the language of business at Victoria Jungfrau, Tony had told me, and in order to keep up, I’d need to get fluent fast.
Our route took a fairly direct path south, and every couple of hours, we’d stop in a town big enough that I recognized the name: Hannover, then Göttingen, then Darmstadt. The closer we got to Munich, the more languages I heard, and I recognized many of the tongues of my
blatte
GAIS teammates. Poles and Slavs boarded, and when I switched trains again, this time in Munich, my seatmates were a Greek family who had brought a multicourse picnic with them. They spread paper napkins across their laps and ate olives and pita bread they dipped in garlicky eggplant spread or covered with slices of feta they cut from a block with a pocketknife. I tried not to stare, but the mother must have seen me sneaking glances. She put two dark dolma rolls on a napkin and handed them to me, smiling and nodding as she pressed them into my palm.
“Efkharistó,”
I said, using the one Greek word I’d learned from hanging out at my friend Tomas’s apartment. Thank you.
The mother laughed. I’d probably
“I don’t know when I’ll be back,” I said.
“That’s OK,” she said. “I’ll wait.”
After a point, I stopped trying to talk to her. We were breaking up, as far as I was concerned. Cooking was the only thing I had room for. Cooking was the only thing I wanted to make room for.
There was nothing clean about my last loose end, which was the question of what I was going to do about the army. Sweden may not have taken part in a war for the last hundred years—not officially, at least—but it maintained an army, and service was mandatory. In my father’s generation, this duty was something you never questioned. In mine, and especially among my
blatte
friends who felt only marginally welcome in the country much of the time, the army seemed obsolete, a waste of time.
But once I had turned eighteen, my father started to bring up the topic every now and then. “Which station do you hope to go to?” he’d ask out of the blue. “You definitely don’t want to end up in Lapland.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I’d say. “I’m not going.”
This was a position my father simply couldn’t understand. To him, the only reason you should be excused from military service was if you were mentally ill, physically incapacitated, or, consistent with his generation’s ideas of maleness and gender, gay. I was none of those, so I should go. I suspect, too, that he felt I was a little too close to my mother, too protected by her. Maybe my cooking even baffled him. The army would make a man out of me.
“You can do something that has nothing to do with guns,” my mother suggested, trying to broker a compromise. But it wasn’t the guns; it was that nothing about the army fit into my dream of becoming a chef.
P OLITICAL BOUNDARIES between one country and another are artificial divisions, of course, and in Europe, they have shifted more times thananyone can count. But almost the moment the train crossed from the small town of Padborg, Denmark, into the slightly larger town of Harrislee, Germany, something broke open inside of me. I felt like I was at the beginning of a new path, one I’d forged by myself. This was a job
I’d
gotten, that
I’d
earned, and for the first time in my life, I recognized the weight of adult responsibility and welcomed it. By the time I changed trains in the Hamburg station, the comforts of Scandinavia seemed fully behind me.
When I finally felt hungry enough to get food, I walked to the café car and came back with a large, buttery soft pretzel and a fat pink wurst on a bun, swimming in sauerkraut and sweet brown mustard. I conducted the transaction in German, but it wasn’t pretty: Every time I opened my mouth I wished I’d practiced more, instead of goofing off with Mats during the three years of German I’d had in school. German was the language of business at Victoria Jungfrau, Tony had told me, and in order to keep up, I’d need to get fluent fast.
Our route took a fairly direct path south, and every couple of hours, we’d stop in a town big enough that I recognized the name: Hannover, then Göttingen, then Darmstadt. The closer we got to Munich, the more languages I heard, and I recognized many of the tongues of my
blatte
GAIS teammates. Poles and Slavs boarded, and when I switched trains again, this time in Munich, my seatmates were a Greek family who had brought a multicourse picnic with them. They spread paper napkins across their laps and ate olives and pita bread they dipped in garlicky eggplant spread or covered with slices of feta they cut from a block with a pocketknife. I tried not to stare, but the mother must have seen me sneaking glances. She put two dark dolma rolls on a napkin and handed them to me, smiling and nodding as she pressed them into my palm.
“Efkharistó,”
I said, using the one Greek word I’d learned from hanging out at my friend Tomas’s apartment. Thank you.
The mother laughed. I’d probably
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