The Geographer's Library

Jon Fasman
did: a castle, maybe, a mansion or a cloister. A farmhouse out in the country.
Seeing Professor Jadid in a parka and boots, walking past a lawn mower and
stopping to pick up a free community paper from his stoop, seemed incongruous:
he was meant to dissolve into a late-nineteenth-century Viennese
café at the end of every day.
professor jadid’s kitchen was long and low, warmly lit, with plenty
of dark wood surfaces: the sort of room to pass a childhood in. He deftly
chopped two tomatoes and two small red onions into tiny cubes, then mashed
them to a paste with the back of a wooden spoon, adding a few cloves of garlic,
the leaves from three sprigs of marjoram he pulled from a pot on the
windowsill, a glug of olive oil, and a splash of white wine. He cubed a hunk
of lamb and added the pieces to the vegetable slurry, and dumped the whole
mixture into a ceramic dish that he put in the oven. He poured us both
glasses of white wine and insisted that we toast the bulky rectangular briefcase
sitting in the corner.
“Why?” I asked.
“All shall be revealed,” he said, with a showman’s raise of his eyebrows.
I exhaled impatiently. We sat at a round wooden table in front of two sliding
glass doors that opened onto a back garden, but because of the night and
the light above and behind us, all we could see in the doors was ourselves. A
sudden knock at the glass doors, and the erasure of both of our reflections
made me jump and spill my wine.
Professor Jadid grimaced sympathetically at me (“Joseph always parks
around back”), then stood up to open the doors. His nephew, holding a sixpack
of Newport Storm in one hand and a file in the other, squeezed through
the doorway. He hugged his uncle, almost completely enveloping him, and
they kissed three times, alternating cheeks. Joe was followed by a tall, whipthin
young man in a knife-pressed maroon suit, pin-striped shirt, and maroon
tie with a garnet stickpin, carrying a leather jacket; he looked like a halfstarved,
worried musician from 1950s Greenwich Village.
“This is Lyosha Priyenko,” said Joe. Priyenko slipped through the door
gingerly, as though afraid of being noticed, and extended a bony hand to
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