The Argument for Garlic Soup

1 Coming to town

The stranger stood in the middle of the square and slid his knapsack to his feet. Around him he saw the shops, offices and public buildings of what appeared to be a small provincial market town. In the corner of the square the farmer who had given him a lift into town had folded down the side of the cart and was attaching an awning above wooden boxes of vegetables and fruit. Other carts were beginning to arrive and forming lines along the cobbles.
     The stranger beckoned to a young girl of nine or ten who was sauntering past nibbling an iced bun.
     'What place is this?' he asked.
     'It's town,' she replied, as if any fool knew that.
     'I can tell that, but which town?'
     A wheezing old man put a hand around the girl's shoulders and scowled at the stranger.
     'I was asking which town this is.'
     'You've just arrived,' said the old man.
     'Obviously,' said the stranger, in a tone from which irritation was not entirely absent.
     'To appreciate our town, you must climb to the top of the tower.' The girl looked up at the campanile, from which the sudden but mellow sound of a large bell tolled. The three stood without speaking while the bell rang out eight times, each chime being counted in the head of the stranger. In the ensuing silence the old man said, 'If you go up there now you will not be deafened. And you will see which town this is.'

The stranger shouldered his knapsack and crossed to the great oak doors of the church. To one side of the porch he found a spiral staircase, the stone steps worn into curves by the footfalls of centuries. Above the level of the church roof a set of wooden platforms with connecting staircases lined the tower. A thick bell-rope hung impassively through the central space. From the topmost platform, alongside the bell, he could see the old man and the girl sitting on a bench under a tree. The market was now filling up with stalls. He noticed that the shade was deepening as the sun rose higher and added warmth to the freshness of the early morning.
     The old town was completely ringed by wooded hills but for the river that ran along one edge and the gap through which ran the road along which he assumed he had entered the town. Only between that road and the river did the buildings rise up the hillside. On the opposite side of the river, for as far as he could see in both directions, high cliffs towered over jagged rocks along the river's edge. A lorelei that sat on those rocks would have a most uncomfortable time, he thought.
     He surveyed the rooftops and the pattern of the winding streets of the old town but he could see no signs by which to identify the place. What could the old man have meant? If there were no obvious indications, was there a clue in the streets themselves? There were a couple of winding streets that looked like the letter S, others zigzagged. A junction of three streets formed a letter K, a road climbing the hill behind the town was like an M.
     He clumped down the wooden stairs from the bell tower and continued through the enclosed spiral of stone to the church porch. The girl was being ushered out of the knave by a young priest. She smiled at the stranger.
     'I couldn’t see the name of the town.'
     'Ask grandpa.'
     The old man stood as they approached. 'Did you see it?' he asked.
     'I could see nothing.'
     'I'm sure you saw a lot,' the old man corrected him. 'But you did not see where you are.'
     'If it was the town itself that was meant to tell me where I am, all I could make out were the shapes of the streets.'
     'And what did they tell you?'
     'It looked like Kszcmrcz.'
     The old man nodded slowly and gathered his granddaughter to his side. 'Then that must be the name of the town.'
     As they walked away, the girl looked back at the stranger. 'He doesn't believe you, grandpa.'
     'Oh, yes he does,' said the old man.

The stranger watched them walk away arm in arm in the direction of the market stalls before he himself turned to wander aimlessly back towards the church. He made the natural enough assumption that the square was the hub of the town, just as someone, arriving by train in an unfamiliar town, will begin to construct a mental map of the place beginning with the station. His bird's eye view from the top of the tower had shown him that the square was the most open space in the town, although smaller squares could be seen elsewhere.
     Nonetheless, there had been no regularity about the layout of the streets. No grid as there might be in American cities, nor main roads radiating from the central point as, for example, in Paris. Indeed, there was no uniformity about the height of buildings nor the width of streets. He saw that this was not a place that has been planned and organised but one that had grown organically around the people and their activities.
     A good and plausible analysis.
     'I thought so. And my job is going to be to meet people?
     It is.
     'And if anywhere in this town is likely to be a meeting place, it's clearly going to be this square,' he surmised.
     Your surmise is almost certainly correct.

Brothers and sisters
Had he but know it, there was ample evidence for the stranger's supposition about the square. For example, Nicolai had been sent to town from his father's farm to study at the university. As a child, he had been taken under the wing of his village priest, who detected in Nicolai a capacity for intellectual effort that was all too rare among his parishioners. A career in the church was anticipated, but it was not to be. The boy had arrived in the wrong town, where there was no university. He had, however, had the good fortune while standing forlornly in the square on his first day, of being accosted by none other than Karyl Kosmos, the well-known but erratic inventor.
     Kosmos asked the boy to hold aloft an umbrella to assist with an experiment in which an electrical discharge was meant to stimulate a localised shower of rain. The experiment failed and Nicolai's hands were scorched. Kosmos offered the lad a job and a room in the attic of his house, which were accepted with alacrity but not a little apprehension.
     That evening Kosmos forewent his usual dinner at the club in favour of a simple meal of bread, cooked meats and preserves which he shared with his new protégé at the workshop bench.
     'I am grateful to you, sir, for this opportunity,' said the boy. 'I was having serious doubts about the plans for my life. It's not just the expectations my parents had for their only child. If I had been ordained, my mother might call me father. She not only used to call my grandfather, her father, father, but she also called my father father.'
     'And he called your mother mother?' enquired Kosmos.
     'Yes. That is, until she decided to join a religious order that had a cloister just outside the village. She said she felt called by the Heavenly Father to join her sisters.'
     Kosmos's lightning intelligence kept pace with Nicolai's thinking. 'So your mother became a sister?'
     'Yes, but my father could hardly call my mother sister.'
     'No, I can see that. Out of interest, what did he call her?'
     'He didn't call her anything. In fact, he didn't call on her either and she rarely returned to the farm. Not for several years, until she had become head of the convent.'
     'She was mother superior?' Kosmos calculated.
     'Yes. But when she came to the farm and he once again called her mother, she took it as a sign of recognition of her position in the order rather than her role in the family, and he stopped calling her anything again. At least, anything she could hear.'
     'You must be glad they never had a daughter,' muttered the inventor as he turned out the lights.

Nicolai's story about his priest's intentions had ignited a spark in Kosmos's capacious and fertile mind. Why was there no university in the town? He reasoned that a centre of excellence in learning could be established with at least as much credibility as many of the places of education throughout the continent that were spoken of in such reverential terms.
     By the end of the following day, the eyes of those who passed by Kosmos's house and workshop were dazzled by a gleaming brass plate that caught the dying rays of the sun. Nicolai had stood next to Kosmos and had handled him the screws as the well-known but impulsive inventor affixed the plate to the wall.
     'Is that all it takes, master?' he asked.
     'I don't see why not,' answered the great man.
     And so it had become.

The dozen bakers
The stranger's eye had been attracted by the brass plate in a street just off the square, which he approached in hopes of discovering more about his location. But he was even more baffled to read the enigmatic inscription 'University of'.
     Retracing his steps, from the corner of his eye the stranger saw that in the angle at the corner of the square was a coffee house, separated from the church by another street. Realising that he had not yet had any breakfast, he quickened his pace. As he turned the corner by the coffee house he discovered that the street leading away from him was lined with shops, several of them bakers' shops. On one side of the street some of the shops were set back behind a short flight of stone steps down to narrow courtyards in front of each door and window. Shafts of early sunlight were streaking along the length of the street, glinting off the windows and the worn tramlines.
     He slowed his walking pace to allow time to inspect the window displays. Most of the shops seemed to offer similar ranges of breads, pastries and confectionery.
     When he reached the next junction he turned and retraced his steps, thinking to count up the remarkable number of bakery premises he had just passed. There were six on one side of the street and seven on the other. He smiled to himself about the coincidence as he selected the second from the square to his left. As with most of the other shops, its door stood ajar to allow the intoxicating yeasty aroma of warm bread to fill the morning air.
     Behind the counter a substantial woman wrapped in a white apron was waving her hand to dismiss a man wearing a white coat, his face and hair covered in a dusting of flour. 'And keep your daft ideas to yourself,' she was shouting. 'You'll get us into . . .' The harangue ceased abruptly as the stranger paused in the doorway.
     'What I can get for you, sir?' She attempted a smile but her face was not ideally adapted to such a venture. The stranger wondered if he had made the worst possible choice among the available shops. He looked back into the street, shook his head as if he had made a mistake and crossed to another baker's shop.
     On the counter stood several wooden trays, lined with greaseproof paper. One of them contained finger-sized doughnuts, golden brown and coated with sugar. 'I'd like some of these, please,' he told the woman behind the counter, whose manner was more agreeable.'
     'Certainly. They are among the favourites of this bakery, which, as you may already have guessed, is the finest in the town. How many would you like?'
     'A dozen, please.' He smirked. 'I presume that would be a baker's dozen?'
     'Certainly.' She pulled a face from which pity was not entirely absent and counted twelve fingers onto a sheet of paper and in a twinkling deftly folded a neat package with a flap at one end from which to remove individual doughnuts.
     'I thought you said ...' He thought better of it as he left the shop, surmising that the concept of a baker's dozen being other than a conventional dozen of twelve may be unfamiliar in this district.

The tinker at the tailor's
The stranger strolled back across the square, munching his doughnuts. He noticed that what he took to be a square had, in fact, five sides, the line of south side (he was using the sun for positional purposes) changing course during its length, leaving a foreshortened east side where the church stood. It surprised him that he had not noticed this before, especially from the tower. On the west side, opposite the street of bakers and the church, were several alleyways. He headed for one that wound its way from the middle of the square through several twists and turns. The buildings were tall and the street narrow, so he was immediately plunged into cool shade.A black cat trotted along beside the wall, paused by the first doorway and then sped off.
     He passed a man tinkering with a contraption that contained a grinding wheel. In his hand was a pair of scissors, no doubt the property of the tailor in front of whose shop he was parked. From the darker interior of the premises emerged a dandyish man in the richly coloured uniform of the hussars. 'I want to see it in the light,' he was saying. The tailor was fussing around the back of the coat, pulling and smoothing. 'Stop that now and bring the glass out here,' the soldier ordered, posing to catch a glimpse of himself in a window across the way. A black cat was trotting along beside the opposite wall. It stopped at a doorway and then sped off.
     The stranger passed on and followed the twisting lane until he saw the river before him. He stood on the quayside and watched the languid flow of slate-grey water.
     An old sailor was sitting on a bollard on the quayside. 'Can't trust no foreigners,' he was saying to a top-hatted man standing beside him. 'They ought to stay where they belong—in foreign parts.' The gentleman took a gold watch from his waistcoat pocket and tutted. Then his eyes fell on the stranger.
     'Are you the agent?' he demanded. 'You were expected yesterday. You'd better come with me to my club. We can talk there.'
     He led the way down another alley. A man in a shabby, heavily patched suit was shooing a beggar away from the front of a cheap boarding house. The beggar, in even more ragged clothes, held out his hand towards the stranger. 'Stay away from here,' the gentleman said. 'You can't trust anyone in this district.' A black cat came trotting along beside the wall, stopped by a doorway and then sped off.
     Just then a young woman came charging round the corner from the square. She had disappeared towards the quay before the two men heard the cries of 'Stop thief!'

The scribbler
The stranger continued to absorb his surroundings as the two men crossed the square making small talk. On the bench where the old man had sat there was now a different man, different in the sense that, for a reason the stranger could not identify, he looked as though he did not belong. As the stranger looked at the different man, it was as if the world around him was on pause for a moment. Even in a seated position is was obvious that the man's suit was ill-fitting, not just old but apparently of a different era. Yet although his hair was longer than normal, his shoes were polished.
     He was looking nervously around and scribbling furiously in a large notebook that lay open on his lap. He would not, of course, have been scribbling so furiously if the notebook had lain closed on his lap.
     His companion tugged the stranger's sleeve and the two walked on, the different man no longer visible behind the avenue of trees.

A closet baker
Back at the bakery, behind the first shop the stranger had entered, the argument was still in progress.
     'Luther, I understand, also spent much of his day in the lavatory,' Morrie, one of the bakers, responded to his wife's rebuke as she banged on the door.
     'So it's Luther you now compare yourself with?' she mocked.
     'Of course I don't. But he did not believe in wasting his time either. In there he worked on his seventy eight theses.'
     'His what?' she exclaimed.
     'Theses. T-H.'
     'You should speak more clearly.' For a moment Morrie thought she had left him in peace but her voice boomed out again. 'Ninety eight.'
     'Seventy eight, ninety eight. So who's counting? They were stuck on the lavatory door before they were stuck on the church door. And why should I not adopt a useful shickser idea? Please tell me what is wrong with reading The Baker and Patissier or doing the shop accounts?'
     'But it is the bagels you now are making!'
     'And it was ninety five theses, but you should worry about being accurate.'