Scene 2

How often, when the situation had seemed to be hopeless, Maille had allowed the next step to be dictated by his hunger pangs. Immediately on his arrival he had wanted to contact Ruslan Rachmaninow. Ruslan and he had first met eight years earlier in Paris, when he had rented a flat in the French capital. The two of them had been the only members in the audience during a nightshow of Stanley Kubrick’s «Dr Strangelove». Just before the end of the film, there had been a break in the screening due to a technical problem, and two of them had begun to chat – first about the film, then about Russian cuisine in the city, and then about the local markets, the head of the Charcuterie «Adam» and the Creole blood sausage «Chez Babette».

The technical glitch could not be rectified, so the screening was cancelled and the viewers were given their ticket fees back. Maille and his new acquaintance decided to invest their returns in a couple of glasses of wine at the bistro «La Marine» on Quai Valmy. No sooner had they begun to sip their wine than they had begun to quarrel – over the correct way in which to eat oysters, over the best blue cheese in the country, over the culinary worth of dried herbs… The evening ended in Maille's kitchen, where the two of them prepared a big Russian-Lemusan «placatory pasta» together.

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