The Noodle Maker

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The study faces a kitchen window of the opposite building. At midday or dusk, ‘waves of delicious frying smells stroke or sometimes blast their way through my nose and stomach’. The professional writer always speaks with this level of precision during his conversations with the professional blood donor.

The writer can now distinguish smells from at least three of the kitchens below. Living at the top of an eight-floor building as he does, he has no choice but to get used to them. As long as the couple from Hubei (he’s convinced they are the culprits) are not fouling the air with their fried chillies, he can sit back and enjoy the smells that waft up from several floors below. Whenever he pushes his window open to let the smells in, his eyes drift from the blank manuscript paper on his desk, and he sinks into a trance.

The kitchen directly opposite him is very much to his taste, and if he’s not feeling too particular, he can spend an entire afternoon luxuriating in the fragrance of their fish-head soup. He’s seen those large fish heads in the market; you only need buy half a head to make a pot of soup. As the middle-aged woman in the kitchen opposite tosses the Superior Dried Mushrooms, fresh from the local supermarket, into the wok, the professional writer (forties, slightly overweight, single) is overcome once more by the sweet aromas. Now and then, in the dim light, he glimpses a short little man appearing and disappearing between the kitchen implements and washing-up cloths, sausages and prime joints of ham that hang from the ceiling. If their smoke extractor were not making such a racket, he’d be able to hear them talk, and then he could find out at last whether the short little man is her husband, her son, or a Jewish trader from Chaozhou.

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