12. Waiter
Gluttony is not just unhealthy, it's a sin.
Rabbi Moses ben Maimon. Mishneh Tora
The ten-store building of Queen Hotel was sticking out from the rocks just above the beach, seven kilometers south of downtown Eilat and only a minute's walk from a border checkpoint. Across the barbed wire was its twin, the old Queen Hotel. The border with Egypt used to be three kilometers further south, on the far side of a tiny town called Taba. Then the International Court decided that Taba with all Israeli-built infrastructure should be ceded by Israel to Egypt. Mr. Priks, Queen's owner, abandoned the old hotel and built a new one. The old hotel was now run by the Egyptians. It differed from the new Queen only in having much lower prices, but was getting few tourists because of poor advertising.
As for the new Queen, it was the most expensive hotel in Israel, although even in Eilat there were at least three places with better service and location. Hotel prices are seldom determined by quality.
The hiring manager greeted me with a happy smile.
"Nice to meet a compatriot! Have you just arrived?"
"It's been a year, Sir. Sorry to say, I don't have the honor of being your compatriot. I was born on the Continent, but used to live and work in the Kingdom."
"Oh, well. Where did you work?"
I mentioned an obscure hydrobiological facility. I used to deal with it a few years earlier, while working in a research institute.
"Great! Where did you live in London?"
"You won't catch me," I thought, and said:
"It wasn't in London proper."
"Well, where was it?"
The problem was, UK was one of the few European countries I'd never been to. At the time I was traveling around Europe, the pan-EU visas and the tunnel under the Channel didn't exist yet. I couldn't take a ferry, because I didn't have visa to any country except Germany. So the only places near London I'd heard of were Chelsea, Dover and Stonehenge. But I couldn't risk using a real name.
"In Cherusty," I said.
"Cherusty? Never heard of it. Where is it?"
No wonder he'd never heard of it. It's a small logging town a few hundred miles east from Moscow, known for extensive cranberry-rich sphagnum bogs in the vicinity.
"It's a small town twenty miles east, down the Thames, Sir."
"You have good manners," he finally changed the subject. "We could hire you for our restaurant."
"Thank you, Sir! I'll do my best to prove that your trust hasn't been misplaced, Sir!"
I filled a twenty-page application form, and became a waiter.
In addition to good pay, free food and housing, my new job had another great advantage. The hotel entrance was only twenty meters from a beach, and thirty meters from a coral reef. I could now spend my lunch breaks snorkeling there.
The restaurant was huge; it occupied two floors of the building. The only other "Russian" there was a kid from Smolensk, known as Dima the Gay. It was Dima who told Jimmy about that job. I suspect that the reason they didn't hire "Russians" anymore was their experience with Dima. His favorite pastime was complaining about everything, making scenes, and pitching employees against each other. No normal man, straight or homosexual, could stand his company for more than fifteen minutes. But girls just loved him, and could spend hours chatting with Dima. For them he probably was a perfect friend. As a male, he couldn't possibly be jealous or competitive. As a gay, he didn't have to be attracted, kept at bay, or manipulated.
I shared a two-bedroom apartment with Dima and a "Russian" couple working as boots at the eighth floor. Their names were Sasha and Lyuba. Every morning a van picked us at five, and delivered back just before midnight. No wonder we all looked like zombies. But we couldn't leave the restaurant earlier, because we were earning a lot for overtime hours and weekends. And we couldn't be late for the van. If we missed it, we had to spend a two-hour salary on a taxi ride.
I always found the Sabbath system in Israel a bit funny. Obviously, in a modern country someone has to work at any time. So the more religious people save their souls by hiring Arabs and immigrants to commit the sin for them.
People who work 18-19 hours a day usually aren't particularly friendly. Our crew resembled a rabies-infected fox farm: quarrels and fights sprang up every few minutes. Most of the conflicts were over tips. Some of the waiters came to Israel on nonimmigrant visas and were paid only half of what we citizens were getting. Tips were an important source of income for them. The most tip-crazy employees were Dima the Gay (he was a citizen, but a particularly greedy one), and a Chinese girl who called herself Li, although her real name was probably much more difficult for a Westerner to pronounce.
The only person who managed to maintain some level of sanity was Billy, a Zulu from South Africa. His job was to wash the dishes, so he didn't have to care about tips. I liked to chat with him if I had a spare minute, but he was an exception. As for our patrons, most of them were too rich to be nice. Other waiters went to great lengths to befriend them to get more tips, but I couldn't force myself to do it. I tried to create a self-image of a "Russian bear" - slow, calm, and slightly stupid, so that my supervisors would leave me alone.
Some of the waiters were Israelis, but they never could stand the pressure for more than a week. Anybody who survived on the job for twenty days was considered a veteran. Only Li had been there for three months. But she had her own reasons to stay. She was making more money in a week than a factory worker in her native Hunan Province could earn in a year. In six months since she'd sold her house and came to Israel, I was the first person she could speak Chinese with. And I only knew about a hundred words.
Naturally, we didn't eat the same food as our patrons. They got the meals made of partly spoiled vegetables, or fruit someone had dropped on the floor, or dishes that the cooks had screwed up somehow. All the best stuff was consumed by the cooks themselves, and we also got some of it. Trout a la Faeroe, camel steaks, lobsters of all kinds, truffles... it wasn't bad. But that job made me hate restaurants, especially large ones, forever since. Even before that experience, I always preferred cheap eateries for factory workers, roadside stands, and suspicious-looking basement taverns, popular only among locals.
In addition to constantly munching something at work, I had a two-hour lunch break. I tried scuba diving once, but the bottom below three meters was boring, except for a huge colony of garden eels. A mask and a snorkel were all I needed. The reef was very good, considering that it was the northernmost reef in Asia and only a few kilometers from two cities. It even had giant Tridacna clams. There were tons of butterfly fishes, angelfishes, triggerfishes, and moray eels. After two weeks I knew all larger fishes and even some sea urchins of the area personally. One particularly huge eel lived just across the road from the hotel. I hand-fed it with chunks of tuna, and soon it learned to come out of its hole and greet me the moment I entered the water.
Sometimes I managed to sneak out of the hotel at night, when the reef was even more interesting. I saw some rare stuff there, such as a flashlight fish - tiny, very rare creature with a light-producing organ under each eye.
Further north there was a gap in the reef. The coral there had been killed by fresh water a few years earlier, when a nearby wadi produced a flash flood. Now the gap was covered by algae. Green bands formed an underwater thicket inhabited by tiny octopuses called "paper nautilus". These creatures have a weird way of reproducing. One of a male's tentacles would detach itself, grab a ball of sperm, and take off in search of females. A female that happenes to be found by such a tentacle would use palm-like disks on two of her own tentacles to build a thin, semitransparent shell. Then it would fill it with eggs, and guard until the hatching of baby octopuses.
I found three females with egg-filled shells, and kept watching them for almost a month, until one day I found one of the shells abandoned, and the female surrounded by a cloud of poppyseed-size babies. I still have that shell.
Sometimes the water was too murky for snorkeling, so I would just swim out, as far as I could in two hours. I had no I idea how far it was, but on one of such days I was picked up by a border patrol boat.
"Your documents, please," said the guards.
"Sorry, I don't have them on me." I was wearing a very small swimsuit.
"We'll have to take you to the base."
"I have to be back at work in half an hour."
"It's not our problem."
Suddenly one of them said:
"Hey, guys, I know him. It was you who was on the Platform with that gorgeous chick, right?"
"Yes, it was me."
"He's one of ours, guys." And they let me go.
Meanwhile all of the country's universities were paralyzed by a strike. It lasted for many months. At some point it became clear that all students would have to take the same classes next year. Hundreds of them rushed to Eilat, looking for jobs. Soon all workers in the restaurant, except for Dima and me, were replaced by Israelis. Then Dima got fired and returned to prostitution, his main profession. Up to that moment English was the only language I'd ever needed in Eilat. Now I was suddenly surrounded by Hebrew speakers. By that time I could speak and understand it a little bit, but pretended not to know a single word. It was easier that way. Besides, there wasn't much to talk about. If you see a typical Jewish face in Russia, you can safely presume that person to be reasonably intelligent, or at least well educated. In Israel it usually means just the opposite.
The hotel was built near a steep rocky slope. More and more often I would stop and look at a tiny patch of feathergrass behind a glass wall. I was missing the outside world. I started having dreams about various wild places, especially my beloved Russian Far East: angry gray waves crashing into black basalt rocks, flotsam-covered pebble beaches, endless rows of mountains under a blue blanket of taiga forest, rolling fog in unnamed river valleys, cold moist wind from the ocean... Meditating or quietly whistling the overture to The Barber of Seville, I kept running from table to table, mixing up orders and removing full plates instead of empty ones.
I couldn't meet with Anka anymore: even if I had a day off, I spent it crossing the desert to and from Tel Aviv for yet another attempt to break through the bureaucracy and get my passport. But now I got Uti.
She was a Yemeni Jew, a descendant of a tribe that had spent more than a thousand years living in almost total isolation in remote mountains. Some of their girls were stunningly beautiful, and Uti was the best I've ever seen: knee-long curly hair, eyes like windows into a moonless tropical night, thin eyebrows... She wasn't tall, but she had perfect legs and waist, only her butt looked just a tiny bit too heavy. She could pass for a huri from Arabian Nights, but she could speak good English and had a great sense of humor.
A year earlier she'd won a Miss Eilat pageant, and was now considered the fiancee of the mayor's son. She worked every other day (her job was to sit at the restaurant entrance, greeting the guests with her enchanting smile), and he always came in his black Jaguar to pick her up after work. Yemeni Jews have a very traditional society. He couldn't even kiss her before wedding. But Uti was a healthy girl from a tropical country - no wonder my interest in her soon became mutual. Besides, I made it clear from the beginning that I'd be totally content with a relationship limited to our working hours.
And that was our problem. We had no place to be alone. Once I walked her to a wadi behind a nearby ostrich farm, but she didn't like it at all. Inside the hotel, there were hidden security cameras in every room, even (illegally) in restrooms.
I managed to steal one spare camera from a storage room, and took it apart to figure out how it worked. Then I found an unlocked suite, sneaked up to a camera there, and quickly switched it to manual imaging. Now it was transmitting the last image it had: the empty room. Since that day, Uti and I could enjoy our lunch breaks any way we wanted.
I'd never seen an easier girl to turn on. It was enough to kiss any part of her body between her chin and knees, to slide a hand along her back, or simply touch her earlobe with the tip of my tongue, to make her breathe faster and try to press her body to mine. After we ran into our cameraless suite and blocked the door with a chair leg, I sometimes tried to tease Uti - just hug her and move my belly against hers, instead of undressing her immediately. But as soon as the zippers of our jeans got in touch, she couldn't wait any longer, and started tearing off my clothes, moaning and trembling with desire. Than I would strip her naked, put on a bed and kiss in the mouth. It had to be a two-hour kiss, otherwise her voice would be heard in every corner of the hotel.
At first I couldn't get rid of a strange feeling that I was screwing some Biblical character, but then I got used to Uti's exotic beauty, and enjoyed our brief sessions a lot. Fortunately, her traditional upbringing didn't seem to have any impact on her psyche. She didn't look embarrassed at all when we had a 69, or sneaked together into a restroom, not being able to wait for a lunch break. In such cases I had to go in first, find the hidden camera, block it with a piece of chewing gum, pull Uti in, and do her swiftly and passionately.
Poor Anka didn't get much attention now, but it wasn't my fault. I could only see her once a week. Her young hot body was demanding love, and I couldn't give her enough in a few hours, no matter how hard I tried. I discovered that I could make her come intensely every minute or two by massaging a certain place in her vagina with a finger while licking her clitoris and circling her anus with another fingertip. If I kept doing it for an hour, I could get her so exhausted that she could hardly move. But it still wasn't enough for the rest of the week.
Soon I was informed that she'd been seen with Levi. I found it strange that she would date a guy who'd hired someone to cut her face with a razor. But she had her own plans.
One morning Ari, our overseer, called me from the reception desk.
"You have a phone call!" he was almost too excited to speak. "From Mister Priks! Himself! I've been here for two years, but never had the honor of speaking with Mister Priks himself."
"Vladimir?" the hotel owner had high-pitched voice, and sounded like a cunning old fox. "I've just got a call from Nature Conservation Department. They asked me to order my driver to take you to Hai Bar immediately."
I jumped in his limo - long, black and shining like a wet sewage pipe. The driver turned on the siren, and we zoomed north. I was met by Moni and most of the stuff.
"Nice of you to come, Vovi," he said. "The African wild ass is about to give birth, but it's not going well. Toni refused to perform surgery, and Beni says that he can do it, but only if you would assist him."
The mare was out in the savanna. She looked lost. A pair of tiny hooves could be seen under her tail. Blood and green amniotic fluid were dripping on the hot sand. We surrounded and lassoed her, tied up her front legs, and brought all the instruments.
"I'm afraid I'll have to do a Caesarian," said Beni. "Let's feel her belly."
We put our hands on her belly, she pushed, and suddenly the foal was almost halfway out. We pulled her to the ground, she laid down, the foal fell on the sand and sneezed. The mare got up (we barely had time to cut her front legs free), turned around and started to lick the newborn. Soon the foal was on his feet.
"Wow," said Moni, deeply impressed. "That's what I call professionalism. One touch, and it's over."
Mr. Priks' driver was a bit surprised when an hour later I got back to the limo completely drunk. My former colleagues gave me half a bottle of champagne to go, and I finished it on the way to Eilat. I didn't know how I managed to spend the rest of the day of my feet and not to spill hot soup on somebody.
Nobody asked me anything, and "Russian bears" are not supposed to be talkative. But after that incident my status changed. Not that people didn't respect me before that. Every time I get a new job, I try to work very hard for the first few days. Then I let it slide, but nobody notices, because I am already considered a good employee. Now my reputation got even better. My supervisors were so happy with my performance that they hired two more "Russians" among other students.
I was now a veteran, and seized the best position in the restaurant. I became the juice squeezer operator.
For some reason most of our guests liked fresh orange juice. To make one glass of it you had to squeeze five-six oranges. It took a long time, so there was always a queue of waiters in front of my desk. They were all ready to scratch each other's eyes out, because any delay could result in loss of tips.
The key to obtaining political power is to create a shortage and then control the distribution. I had a backup bucket of juice made in advance, and could use it to provide some waiters with the magic elixir without making them wait in line. So people I liked, and those who managed to please me somehow, were getting more tips. But if someone made me angry, I could always say that there wasn't enough time to make him a glass of pure juice, and add some water or juice concentrate. Even a few drops of an additive would spoil the taste a lot. To make sure there wasn't enough fresh juice for everybody, I drank a lot of it myself. I didn't have to try to get tips anymore: other waiters soon started paying me a percentage of theirs.
I was amazed to see how quickly and effectively could such a system be implemented with very little effort on my part. It was like watching a mafia movie; only I made a godfather in less than two days.
For a while I almost enjoyed my work at Queen Hotel. A festival of classic music began in Eilat, so now I could listen to Mozart and Beethoven while pouring juice into selected glasses. I even learned to take quick naps while processing oranges. But soon I got tired of possessing unlimited power.
Just before Passover the hotel hired more waiters, including one more "Russian". It happened to be a guy named Alesha with whom I'd once worked on a snake farm in Turkmenistan. It was in the early 1980-s, I was still too young to be hired officially, so I had to give my catch to other snake hunters, Alesha among them, for 90% of the price. I was very surprised to see him in Israel. He was a pureblooded Russian from a remote village in Ryazan Province, and even spoke a local dialect, pronouncing all unstressed vowels as "ya". Since the advent of TV most local Russian dialects became diluted by Muscovite pronunciation, and it is kind of unusual to meet someone still speaking a local variety of the language, unless you travel to very remote places around the White Sea or deep in the forests of the Kama River basin.
"Alesha, you bastard," I said, "what are you doing here?"
"Nice to see you!" he smiled, "So you are in Israyal, too! I got here on my wife. What about you?"
"Well, I immigrated... kind of."
"Wait a minute," he stared at me with his blue eyes, "you can't be Jewish!"
"Why not?"
"You used to drink as much as I did!"
I was glad to see an old friend, but his arrival caused problems. No, I didn't mind him nicknaming me "Vovi the Bartender" for my control of the juice squeezer. But now there were more than three "Russians" in the restaurant. A certain critical mass was reached, and now most of time we were talking on various subjects rather than working. It was clear that the administration would not tolerate the "Russian Mafia" much longer.
Meanwhile Uti quit the job - her wedding was only a few weeks away. I tried to work as many extra hours as I possibly could, not only for money, but also to avoid going back to the apartment, because my roommates Sasha and Lyuba were fighting all the time. Lyuba didn't sleep with Sasha anymore: she got fired from the hotel, and used Dima the Gay's recommendation to get admitted into a secluded circle of Eilat's hookers.
I hated my work, and it was getting worse every day. I'd already been a waiter for five weeks. Only Li had been there longer. I got all the necessary papers and was supposed to get my passport within a few days. The spring was in full swing, and I didn't want to miss the most interesting season of the year. But I decided to stay until the end of March, because we were all expecting to be paid higher rate during the Passover, and to get a lot of overtime.
Then I got myself into a conflict with the hotel rabbi. Any cafe or restaurant in Israel has to make sure all food is kosher; otherwise it risks losing most of its customers. In Queen Hotel, maintaining the kosherness was the responsibility of our own rabbi, a tall young Moroccan Jew. Once in a few days he would come to the restaurant, eat as much as he could, and crawl away.
During the event-rich history of my people it so happened that Jewish religion had evolved towards a total dementia. In the Middle Ages all folk traditions and taboos described in the Old Testament were taken to the absurd. The phrase "don't cook a calf in its mother's milk" was interpreted as a ban on cooking any milk with any meat, and then developed into a sick idea of having two separate sets of tableware: one for milk products and one for meat.
Such system is not easy to maintain even in a small household, but for a large restaurant it is a nightmare. I got used to having "meat meals" on some days and "milk meals" on others. But I had to open dozens of milk packs every morning, and it was impossible to do with round-tipped "milk" knives. Once the rabbi saw me opening a milk pack with a "meat knife", and tried to attempt, as Beni would say, a dominant mounting.
I hate clergy. I consider any religion an infectious disease of the mind, and the clergy its principal vector. I can't be polite with parasites.
"If you ever talk to me again without my permission," I said slowly (he didn't speak much English), "I'll tell Mr. Priks that you were drunk when you were preparing the Passover dinner."
During the Passover week Jews are forbidden from eating normal bread. The medieval clergy interpreted it as a requirement to rid every house of any traces of bread, no matter how microscopic. So our restaurant had to undergo a cleanup that would be sufficient for fixing the Chernobyl disaster. The rabbi was supposed to be the busiest person during the cleansing. Instead, he was drunk.
Well, I got him scared, and he never tried to talk to me again, but would often give me a hateful look.
As for the ceremony itself, it can be very beautiful, especially when performed by a family of Yemeni origin.
By the time I was ready for my own exodus, I earned a nice sum of money, not only by working overtime, but also by manipulating my magnetic timecard in such a way that I often got paid for 28-30 hours a day. I was now one of the wealthiest new immigrants in Eilat, and it would be stupid not to use that advantage. I went with Beni to his bank, showed them my paycheck, and cosigned on his loan. It allowed him to buy a Ford. The car was to be delivered from Tel Aviv in a few weeks. Then I went with David to his bank, and got him a loan to buy a Niva, a Russian-made SUV.
There was nothing for me to do in Queen Hotel now. Working after March 31 wouldn't make sense, because I wouldn't be paid for April until May 7. I picked up my stuff from the apartment and took the last bus to Hai Bar. I was planning to wait until April 7, get my March paycheck, and use my Israeli passport (that I hoped would have arrived by than) to take a ferry from Haifa to Odessa.
I told Anka that I was to leave in two days. I managed to convince her that she was dumping me. But we both didn't really mind. It's nice when everything ends by itself.
The bus stop was two kilometers from Beni's house. I walked through the warm night, crossing the crooked shadows of acacia branches, toward a tiny speck of light ahead - Beni's window. Nothing is better than freedom!
To Ann
Well, it's that time again - time of sailing away,
Masts should
get their wind, they should sing their song.
Other seas of
the world call to me, I can't stay.
I am back in
the game, even if I am wrong.
May be you won't
remember me, never at all,
May be you'll
think of me once or twice, all the same:
I'll not see
you again, I'll not write you or call.
What's the point?
Sea's between us, and no one to blame.
It could all
go a different way, but today
It's too late
to be sorry, to guess or to try.
There are enough
losses on our long way,
This one's not
a big deal - not a reason to cry.
Yes, it's probably
better for you, if you will
Just forget
me like that, just be happy like that.
Never think
of the nights when the time would stand still,
Never mind that
I'll miss you, I'll never forget.