The Coffee Lovers

 

Tablo reader up chevron

ONE

As an embryo, I must have been a coffee bean.

My prenatal waters were laced with coffee and, once born, I was happy to suckle latte as my mother’s milk. She was a coffee devotee, a fanatic, my mother, Margherita. The way people have a glass of water by their bed, fearing dehydration during sleep, she had a mug of coffee to sip on in case of a nightmare. She was, I think, in a way superstitious and believed coffee, her grano de oro, could ward off evil spirits better than garlic or the holy cross.

“Sleep, sleep, my dear; cats are playing lovers here. Ching, ching… ” Burlesque piano chords and a hoarse male voice for my lullaby, improvised, broken, syncopated by Margherita’s brother, Dimm. In the background, my mother veiled in aromatic steam, a medicine woman conjuring magic out of the black potion, a spell for her lover to call.

In my cot, I was rubbing and grinding my gums on coffee beans to ease my teething pain, anticipating the first finger dip, the first quick slurp, a stolen lick from a guest’s coffee cup, earning me a burnt, itchy tongue, a rebuke and a smack, but also praise, propelled by Dimm’s cognac-fermented vocal cords, “Bravo, Puppe! That’s my girl!”

Rapt, I oozed devotion for him, a smile out of my eyes, my lips, all my pores, my tiny hands pulling on his moustache, a moth in flight.

Dimm, my guru, my initiator, introducing me to the suave and velvet richness of coffee culture.

Introducing me to murder.

Coffee beans were the choice for chips when the family gathered for a game of poker: Margherita and Dimm, their mother, Nadya. Occasionally, one of Margherita’s lovers, or Nadya’s friend, Madam Sonya, would join us and the cards were dealt. Kent flesh royal, Broadway and wheel straight, one pair of aces, two pairs: kings and queens were laid on the table, and the small and aromatic brown mounds changed hands, leaving tiny traces of hull specks, a congregation of insects, beetles — Devil’s Coach Horses perhaps — rustling against each other. Behind the players’ backs I counted: ten of spades, five of diamonds, seven of spades, three of clubs, my first lessons in mathematics. In the background soft jazz music: Duke Ellington singing ‘Take The A Train’ or Glenn Miller’s ‘In The Mood’ muffled by the heavy curtains of our draught-infested flat in the centre of Sofia. A small missing window panel was replaced with a calendar that was upside down so if I kneeled on the floor and tilted my head to one side really low I could see a hammer and sickle crossed at their handles like a pair of scissors around the year 1954, as if ready to crop it.

We kept our voices low, but the night would bring heavy noises, columns of tanks crossing the city, their links scraping the surface of the paved Tolbuhin Boulevard, named after one of Stalin’s marshals, the cupolas open, young men with leather helmets stemming out of the battle machines like Cold War centaurs, guns targeting the starry sky.

Dimm chuckled, behind the tulle of cigarette smoke, flashing his spaced front teeth, an early stage of pyorrhea stripping off the gums around them, his moustache hanging over like a neatly manicured grass roof. In his hand a glass of cognac adding to the bouquet of fragrances coming from the Jebel Basma tobacco, sweet and nutty, grown on the gently cascading slopes of the Rhodopi Mountains that straddled the border between South Bulgaria and Greece, and from Madam Sonya’s French perfume Soir de Paris. “The enemy doesn’t sleep,” he quoted mockingly. A popular slogan of the day.

“Not in front of the child!” Nadya warned him.

I winced. I was five at the time, and staying up late, doing small jobs for the players like bringing a fresh supply of cigarettes or emptying the ashtrays into the flower pots, finding a clean handkerchief if it was flu season, or opening boxes of shortbread biscuits and Turkish delight. This made me feel part of the fascinating world of the adults where everything was allowed. Like the playful slap that Madam Sonya gave Dimm with the back of her gloved hand.

It made me furious.

Madam Sonya was not supposed to see Nadya because their gathering was considered a concentration of bourgeois elements in one place, which was strictly prohibited. The widow of a once wealthy wine dealer, she was secretly teaching lessons in French. She was Nadya’s age, but looked younger and associated better with Margherita and Dimm. Now she joined his chuckle, adding falsetto notes. “Not in front of the child, you lucky one,” she droned teasingly, watching Dimm scoop coffee beans from under her nose after beating her two of aces with his three of aces — spaced teeth were believed to bring good fortune. I smeared marmalade on the inside of her jacket and observed the silk lining soak it up profusely.

Whoever won the poker game had to grind the ‘chips’ and prepare a cup for each of the players. Usually it was Dimm who would produce a series of full houses, and all of us gathered around the coffee pot on the kitchen table, hot and dangerous, the strong revitalising aroma escaping the lid, everybody repeating, “Italian, Italian…”, meaning different, good quality, not like the stale, dull, lifeless stuff the Armenian shopkeeper at the corner sold, the mechanical brass mill with a three-joint handle a toy in his hairy hands as he powdered the coffee we boiled at home.

Bulgaria had been an Ottoman Empire province for five hundred years and many traditions came from the time when its cosmopolitan city of Istanbul, became the bridge for the triumphant march of coffee into Europe. At home, it was a ritual to offer the guests a cup of Turkish coffee, a glass of water, and a tiny saucer with homemade preserves, white cherries were the best. Fat and meaty, with tiny white worms’ glaze inside.

Our flat overlooked the Triangle Squarea church, a mosque and a synagogue were erected in an isosceles configuration reflecting the local culture of religious tolerance dating well back in time. Now, with religion subjected to a ban in communist Bulgaria, the bell tower, the minaret and the tebah — the reader’s platform in the synagogue — were silent. Not so long ago, Nadya had owned a house not far away from here, but it was expropriated by the communist authorities who let her rent a room in her own house, while populating the rest of it with Red colonels’ wives, slaughtering chooks on Nadya’s Persian rugs, their husbands using her silverware as carpenter’s tools. Dimm told me that it was then that Nadya’s hair turned white overnight.

I knew that outside our home was the regime, but behind the walls the notorious bohemian, my uncle Dimm, ardently introduced me into the fascinating yet dangerous world of coffee and jazz.

Recently thrown out of the university for what they called ‘bourgeois behaviour’ — wearing a hat and a tie, playing jazz, speaking English, which he learnt in the American college in pre-war Sofia, dutifully closed by the comrades — Dimm was our family’s major concern. Nadya kept reminding me to forget what they talked about around the coffee pot at night and what music they listened to.

Coffee and jazz were secrets, not to be shared. But the regime had other ideas.

Once, well after midnight, Dimm and I were in the kitchen experimenting, mixing greasy Angolan beans that smelled like bedbugs with sturdy Ethiopian ones. Dimm was sober, the amount of alcohol in his blood having been replaced by a flood of fresh, hot, black coffee. Nadya was asleep, and Margherita was out for a night ride with one of her lovers who had just bought himself a motorbike.

As always, jazz music was playing softly in the background.

A bang at the door, unexpected, fierce, made me drop the jug of boiling water. I screamed.

Dimm wrapped me in his arms and hurried me away. Behind us, the banging grew louder, ricocheting inside the building. My heart was racing, and I gasped for air.

The banging stopped.

The front door opened. A screech growing into growls trailed from amidst a scuffle.

“Dimm!” I yelled at the top of my lungs, pushing at the door. Something was blocking it. Someone was leaning against it, receiving heavy blows. “Dimm!”

A loud crash — and the music stopped.

So did the wheezy breathing.

The door sprang open, and I fell to the floor. “Dimm!”

Two men were keeping him straight by boxing him at close range between them. They dragged him down the stairs, disappearing with him into the darkness, the clang of nailed shoes a loud echo.

Out in the street, a car door slammed, an engine revved, and then silence dotted by the soft drizzle of rain.

A motorbike pulled up and Margherita’s chirpy voice bade her lover goodbye.

The light went on, razor-sharp, dissecting my eyes.

Margherita appeared in the doorway. “What are you doing on the floor? Where’s Dimm?”

She knew.

Wailing, she rushed to Nadya, shaking her awake.

Nadya, swaying, full of sleeping pills, pulling her hair, crying, banging her head against the wall. In the other apartments, people stirring, talking in muted voices, lights off, doors locked, the sooty smell of burned coffee travelling through cracks and keyholes.

I watched, water pouring out of my eyes, my nose, my mouth, my armpits soaked, water leaking from between my legs, leaving puddles under me.

*

I left Bulgaria on a rainy day in the early nineties. Black armoured jeeps cruised the streets of Sofia carrying the bosses of the underground world and their henchmen to yet another killing spree. The illegal markets in drugs and traffic of girls forced to prostitute on the streets of Amsterdam, Hamburg, Milan and Brussels were then repartitioned. Corruption scandals were ripping apart the new elite of politicians. The coveted democracy gained after the fall of the Berlin Wall was victimised, the ugly face of an economic collapse — an inflation over five hundred percent — was chasing people out of the country. I was alone with a university diploma in music journalism. It was time to leave and pursue a dream: Dimm’s dream to travel the world — a once forbidden sin — on a quest for the perfect cup of coffee.

To drink it while roaming the ancient Mayan ruins of Tikal in Guatemala; or in snowy Salzburg, down the steep street from Mozart’s house where the market is bursting with live Christmas trees and decorations, lights and golden garlands in the sparkling darkness; or while flying downhill on a bike along the Bolivian Death Road, a one lane dirt road with two-way traffic descending some three thousand three hundred metres vertical altitude with waterfalls and rock slides fighting for every chunk of the road, with no guard rail but a drop of thousands of metres; or share my coffee with a fatal man with a rose clamped between his teeth, a man that felt equally at home in brothels and in the Amazonian jungle, among prostitutes or among curaderos chanting healing prayers; or share it with a ghost in an old haunted English castle.

The iron curtain had gone, the Berlin Wall had gone.

It was time for my coffee pilgrimage.

After three years of travelling in which “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons,” I reached Australia and settled in Brisbane, the capital of the sunshine state of Queensland — home of Australia deadliest creatures: the mighty saltwater crocodile, the long-tentacled box jellyfish, the bad-tempered Eastern brown snake, the merciless great white shark. I took on working in small cafes as I did so many times during my travelling. Full-time, part-time, filling-in. The notes I had started to write about the characters I met and chatted with while I prepared or shared a coffee shaped into a manuscript, which I entitled Coffee Lovers’ Portraits. I offered it to a publisher who turned out to be an ardent tea drinker. I remember the smile on her face when she saw me off with the words, “You’ll get a contract, Arnya if your manuscript converts me into a coffee lover”. She laughed profusely as if knowing already the outcome. Meanwhile, I published a text on coffee in music envisioning Bach’s Coffee Cantata, “Ah, how sweet coffee tastes — lovelier than a thousand kisses… ” And another article about the Iranian coffee house painting style. I was gaining confidence to the extent of thinking that I could open new horizons for people so they could perceive better their daily cup of the aromatic drink.

In Brisbane’s cosmopolitan West End district, I felt at home. The people from the Babylon coffee shop asked me to help them advertise. I advised a sign across the window reading: Casanova, Einstein and Napoleon were religious about coffee. The sales took off, the owner George was happy with my job. People kept coming and hanging out for hours. A place to be seen. Everybody felt like rubbing glory off those iconic men. I needed the money.

“Where’s George?” I asked one day surprised to see an unfamiliar man behind the counter at Babylon. I have taken up a part-time job in the nearby health shop and George continued to prepare my coffee exactly the way I liked it.

“I’m Manoli,” answered the man. “What are you having?”

“The usual,” I said sizing him up: tall, broad-shouldered, dark unruly hair curling down his temples, an overlapping tooth in the corner of his fat, sensual lips.

“That would be?”

“George knows.”

“He’s back tomorrow.” Manoli’s stare was disturbing, so was his voice.

“I can’t wait until tomorrow, can I?”

The man in front of me squinted, his eyes two Arabica beans, smooth, dark roast.

“Espresso,” I gave out a dramatic sigh. Then added, “Sorry.”

He served the cup. A lace-intricate teaspoon beside it, like a woman in a Kama Sutra mood.

Our eyes met.

“Why are you staring at me, Manoli?”

A Mediterranean seducer.

A mortal Greek god.

A bastard.

The word sticking to my teeth like fine coffee grounds.

I opened my purse to pay, but he said it’s on the house.

“What would George say about this?”

No answer, just waving his hand dismissingly

From the Vietnamese restaurant next door, the smell of crab noodle soup and deep fried Phoenix balls trailed in. Hunger rumbled in my stomach. Manoli had chicken sandwiches, baklava, and feta salad. I ordered a sandwich. He opened the cool cabinet behind him and used tongs to take out the lavish meal: two pieces of triangle-sliced bread around ivory-coloured chicken breast and neatly layered tomato and egg wedges.

Amused, he watched me voraciously devour the sandwich, a childhood rich in lack behind my greedy appetite. He brushed a crumb off my chin. I laughed.

An abrupt screech of brakes along Boundary Street drew him to the window.

The diamond needle screeching, skipping on a Duke Ellington song. Noises in my head loosen; nailed boots echoing through the stairwell, growls of pain.

I swayed, closing my eyes to shut out the vertigo. The walls advancing, turning the cafe into a landing, a man is falling into the jaws of darkness. Dimitri, don’t go!

“Arnya, are you all right?” Manoli was tapping me on the shoulder, then helped me to a table bringing a glass of water, another espresso.

“How do you know my name?”

No answer.

“Einstein, Beethoven and Casanova were religious about coffee, too.” I fired at him. Panic attacks made me chatty. “Naples is a great place to drink it. So is Brisbane. And the floating casino of Macau.”

He turned his back to me. There were customers coming in.

In the evening, Babylon was full. Often there would be a poetry reading. Someone came to take over behind the bar.

“Arnya, don’t go!” Manoli was standing behind me, his hand snugly on the nape of my neck. “Come home with me.”

Seducer.

Mortal.

Bastard.

We walked side-by-side back to the riverbank where a slice from the island of Rhodos with families fleeing hunger in post-war Greece had sailed across the oceans to anchor at Brisbane’s West End.

Manoli’s house was a temple of love.

I sat on the porch steps and through the open door watched Manoli giving a bath to his mitera.

Swollen joints, sunken eyes, thinning hair, the breasts that once fed him now fallen victims of gravity, the belly that sheltered him for nine months now a folded curtain above the gate through which he entered this world, victorious as Alexander the Great, mitera, mitera, mother, mother. He’d nurse her through his life, until the day of his death, he’d nurse his bed-ridden mitera with all his love, obeying, listening when she teaches him life, how to stay away from bad company in the cafenio; nai, nai, mitera, yes, yes, mother. A man of a lifelong childhood or a Colossus, Manoli put garlic in the moussaka. Panagia, prayed his ailing mother, calling him, don’t go out in the dark, don’t put salt in the moussaka, Manoli, paidi mou, my boy

He carried her in his arms to her bed, high like Olympus, and laid her among the handwoven linen and lace cushions. She dozed off, talking in her sleep, calling his name.

Manoli joined me on the steps. He took a sip of wine and looked up at the lonely moon, clinking glasses with me and the cooling breeze. His eyes telling me he was trying to remember the last time he had a lover. He returned to the house to rinse out the sponge and the cloth in the bathtub, the water still warm. Perhaps he was reminded of Archimedes and his law: the apparent loss in weight of a body immersed in a fluid is equal to the weight of the displaced fluid.

I sat in the moonlight, the aromas of his cooking descending upon me. Manoli prepared dinner — garlic-laced eggplant moussaka, red Macedonian wine from Epanomi, tzatziki with ccucumbers from mitera’s garden, marinated sardines. Ah, those sardines, first charcoal grilled, then soaked in olive oil, vinegar, parsley, pepper and salt. The olive oil, drops of melted sun, swirled like a line of sirtaki dancers.

Down the street, in Babylon, someone was reciting a poem about old Greek men drinking sweet Greek coffee brewed in hot sand, the thick crema overflowing the magic of the coffee pot of my childhood.

Oh, Manoli, my impossible love because of my fear that one day I might get involved and hurt and bleed again. I wanted to go away travelling again, forgetting.

I wanted to try my luck in Switzerland.

*

The decision to make myself heard in Basel, at the annual meeting of the Secret Society of the Coffee Sommeliers, the highest organ of the industry dictating trends and profits of the most sellable commodity after oil, was hard to take. The society was known for its absolute power and versatile tools to implement it.

Besides, it was strictly a man’s club.

Perhaps it had something to do with history: centuries of coffee indulgence in closed, male circles. Yet I made my move aiming to break into this society of heavy weights from the coffee world, alumni of Beethoven and Balzac, Freud and Wagner, Marquis de Sade and Pope Leo XII who left his coffee-inspired verses: “Last comes the beverage of the Orient shore,/Mocha, far off, the fragrant berries bore,” of Byron and Voltaire, all passionate coffee devotees — Voltaire only supposedly consumed up to sixty cups daily.

Sixty cups!

Surprisingly, an invitation followed and I arrived in Switzerland with high hopes.

That afternoon when I entered the Basel Kaffee Klub my heart was pounding at the sight of the five coffee coryphées sitting on an elevated platform shrouded in aromatic steam that made them look like deities inside a shrine. The steam was coming from four caldrons over an artificial fire brewing blends of superb coffee so tantalising that for a moment I felt dizzy. Soon I sensed the steam distilled on my face but it could have been my own perspiration.

The urge to kneel and pray was overwhelming. I wanted to make an excuse for bothering the deities with my human presence. But I spotted the impatience in their eyes and quickly started to present my pitch:

“Coffee blending is like playing jazz,” I stated with a racing heart, “improvising is the key word, coded in the mystery of a sex-hot drink; moonlight and cosmic-clutter noise are the real ingredients in a frothy cappuccino, the cry of a coyote is resonating in the small bubbles of an espresso black as a solar eclipse, addictive as money.”

Money! Their ears pricked up in unison. That’s what they were here for. Was it worth spending time, ergo money, on what a certain Arnya Stefan had to say?

Yet they listened. The board of five men, conceited coffee coryphées, different ages, appearances, nationalities stared at me, registering a figure like a stirring spoon: Hawaiian Kana coffee hair, long, thick eyelashes, good for a froth-whipping device, deep and steamy voice, scratchy at times, as if coming from an old percolator.

They looked amused and exchanged glances, the chains of the heavy silver spoons hanging around their necks and defining their supremacy tinkled brightly. The men thought it was my naive way to intrigue them, and they engaged shadows of smiles. They chuckled rustily when I compared Duke Ellington’s Cotton Club house band playing ‘Mood Indigo’ with Guatemalan and Kenya AA coffee beans, all nicely blended with a moonlight drip over a Balinese rice paddy.

Then, they became annoyed. Who was I? How and when did Arnya Stefan slip into their busy agenda, wasting their time with ideas so immature, dilettantish, dangerous? Wasn’t the old rule that the society is a man’s club still valid? Who dared break it? One of the five men made a sign to the club’s owner. He got up and interrupted me politely, yet ironically, “Thank you Mr Stefan”. They had misinterpreted my name as a man’s! The awkward silence soon grew into a humming-like booing from the small, no need to say, male audience that had flocked to hear practical things about a money-proven vintage, a mass coffee cheaper-and-better line. The booing escorted me out of the shrine I had profaned.

By having ideas different from theirs.

By being a woman.

Shocked by the clash between the deceiving, near-shamanic atmosphere and the blunt and pragmatic approach, I knew that was the end.

That was the end of my dream of seeing myself ordained Master Kaffeetier and dedicating this honour to Dimm, of my ambition to break into the Secret Society of the Coffee Sommeliers and find doors open for me to express my views, my beliefs for a ritualistic approach to what for some is just another short-lived energy booster.

Now, an hour later, shaking with humiliation and anger, I don’t feel like returning to my empty hotel room but offer my face to the October rain as I walk down the stone steps leading to the metal-grey and cold Rhine River that slits Basel by its throat, I am a victim of withdrawal symptoms, uneven heartbeat, cold sweats, dry, parched lips.

I lick the rain.

My tongue rolls back with the catch.

With closed eyes, I explore the fat, wobbly drop, its mossy taste of forest litter. Oak leaves and acorns, wild mushrooms, earthworms, noisy beetles, they have all tuned in for the perfect taste of my favourite rain coffee.

The rain reminds me of Chinese needles in the hands of an acupuncturist gone crazy. The prickling sensation makes my body quiver inside the black trench coat, suddenly heavy like a coffin. Coffeen. A bitter smile smears within my lipstick: a disaster-magnet forgetting her umbrella in the Basel Kaffee Klub, left at the mercy of the rain! The rain is pouring down to meet and merge with the wet vastness around me. It is cold like in an underwater graveyard. There is not a soul around the glistering river that drags along like a ballad, Tommy Dorsey’s trombone accompanying Sinatra’s ‘East Of The Sun’ in Milwaukee.

I lick the rain. I lap it up.

My tears mix with the rain that suddenly feels right for a short French with two shots of Courvoisier, freshly ground beans, half Ghana, half Ethiopian from a dry season harvest, so they can soak, releasing an almost-hard-to-touch aroma. A long-contained nostalgia, strong like vanilla essence, is added along with a moment of joy, a rewarding bliss, like when one finds the keys and arrives home. That’s what I wanted to explain, that coffee is but a dynamic, magic, untraceable, undefined, immeasurable, always different, elusive, evasive, always changing, absorbing, inhabited with flying, floating scents, moods, full of surprises, alchemy at its best. Coffee is not only coffee but a set of feelings, ingredients beyond the palpable.

The soggy mist and cold creep under my coffin-like raincoat, under my Max Mara blazer the colour of rye-infused cafe-latte, then nest in my Bangkok-market Louis Vuitton bag. If you can afford one original label, every fake bit on you is taken for the real thing.

The five coryphées didn’t take me for the real thing, but for an impostor trying to blow the established order of their society, the unwritten rule of the coffee initiated devotees that coffee was all about coffee. For a woman trying to compromise the male essence of their conspiratorial institution.

I consider looking for a taxi, then drop the idea. Bad ideas tend to breed like E.coli. It’s mid-afternoon. Across the river, I can see my hotel. A short cable-boat crossing and a ten-minute walk is all I need to get there leaving behind a dream to become a member of the most renowned society of sommeliers and dealers in command of the hottest worlds’ empire, worth billions of cups of coffee a day and growing.

How naive I was, how bizarre and embarrassing was my short visit!

I breathe in the fermented air, the smell of the river now filling me like a mould of the archetype of life, water.

The pier now is in full view. In front of me is the cable boat, the Vogel Gryff. Straining my eyes, I see the metal line across the river to which she is attached.

The boatman, a broad-shouldered colossus in a baggy pullover and rubber boots is waiting. I try to shake off the eerie feeling that I am his only passenger, but he is engrossed in his own importance: the ceremonial manoeuvring, the airs and graces he feels obliged to perform in slow motion, full of awareness and dignity while he positions the rudder on a specific angle so the current propels the boat. His almond-shaped green eyes on a high-cheeked Mongolian face make me wonder what mixture of blood and genes he carries. He is a handsome man, and I feel a cramp in my stomach, my hair coming to life, the roots twisting inside my scalp, my body pulsating. Ching, ching, ching, chick-a-ching…

I am transported back to the time when, before I learnt the letters, I knew the alphabet of flavours and aromas and could read the perfect coffee drink, while rolling on the worn but still thick and cuddly Persian rugs of our flat overlooking the Triangle Square.

In the mirror of time I see the reflections of my family sharing dangerous secrets around the coffee pot, I see people’s destinies, it hurts. These are people I loved and love.

My memories rush back to them.

*

Days later, Dimm returned, trying to mask a painful hobbling, a broken finger and swollen wrists. His face bruised, his smile crooked, he patted me on the head. “Puppe, why don’t you make a good coffee for your bad uncle?”

When Nadya saw him, she gave out a cry. Sobbing, she fretted over her hurting son. For a long time, he held her in his arms, telling her he was okay.

That day, she prepared a hot bath, and I watched him sink into the foam, the steam of chamomile, calendula and lavender blending with that of strong coffee, lingering over the tub along with bluish tobacco smoke, while Margherita supplied him with cigarettes, refusing a motorbike ride.

Nobody in the family was asking questions, and Dimm avoided answering the one he read in our eyes: We fear for your life, can’t you become a mimicker, become invisible and not always a thorn in the regime’s side?

“Come,” he said instead. “Come and help me, Puppe.”

He led me to the kitchen where ceremoniously, he unwrapped his coffee bags and packets. “This is Angolan, that over there Indian, we have a bit of Ethiopian, too. You have to marry them in such a way that the acidity is subtle, yet it’s there, bordering on bitterness that will sober me in the morning, yet the shock shouldn’t come like a punch in the teeth or, God forbid, like a cold shower.” He scooped fistfuls at random and let glossy and matt beans run through his fingers, creating the impression of miniature waterfalls, a coffee bead game, he called it.

Half an hour later, opening a new pack of cigarettes, flicking one out, lighting it and sucking down on the tarry smoke he continued hypnotically, “Mix, mix, experiment. Jazz is all about spontaneity. It’s inspiration that counts. The same goes for coffee.” Puffing on his cigarette, Dimm supplied me with more of the small beans with a groove in the middle. We felt like alchemists, inventing forbidden pleasures in colours that ranged from off-white through beige and brown, to cinnamon, graphite and black. Sometimes the coffee acquired the colour of an acorn or mahogany, tobacco, onyx, a liver spot, grief, an old parchment, or dried blood, but most of the time, it had the shade of tar. There was something diabolical about it.

“Coffee is the puke of gods,” Dimm would say, using the leftovers as if they were a quick-fix mouthwash to kill the smell of brandy and vodka. “Balzac lived on coffee.”

“Balzac?” I stretched the vowels.

“Yes, Balzac, the French writer” echoed Dimm. “In his honour, we will drink the coffee you prepare with cognac. They don’t import capitalist French cognac, the bastards, but we have Bulgarian Pliska cognac.” He unscrewed the tin cap of the potbelly bottle and poured lavishly into a big glass. Taking away the cigarette that had been dangling from his mouth, he took a good slurp of the ambry liquid. The alcohol molecules prickly and playful inside the chimneys of my nostrils, flew up to my innocent young brain with a message of unknown strange sensations. Then after hesitating briefly, Dimm laced his cognac with coffee, calling his drink Légion étrangère. That night, with my mother Margherita away consuming her latest unique romantic affair, I secretly dipped my finger in Légion étrangère and licked it. That made me feel even closer to Dimm.

Ching, ching, ching, chick-a-ching, he hummed, swaying in dancing steps around the apartment. “Rules, my foot!” He raised a half-empty open bottle he had stumbled upon. “I’m the one making the rules, or at least I did in the band. I brought inspiration to the soloist by supplying chords and rhythms on the piano — improvisations nobody had ever dreamed of before — like this one.” And he would play, or rather sprinkle, some chords on the piano whose lid was always open as if it too was a bottle ready for him to have a good sip from. “Count Basie. Duke Ellington… It was different before the communists came, Puppe. It wasn’t dangerous to play jazz. Jazz wasn’t anyone’s enemy. Duke Ellington was not a threat. Why is he now?”

Then he would stop the playing and find the deck of shabby cards some of which had to be repainted, the ink was so worn. His patience deck. “Why is the game of Napoleon’s patience so difficult to play?”

He expected no answer. I was his alter ego, catering for his need to talk to himself without raising the suspicion that he was losing his mind.

“Puppe, I can’t wait for you to grow up so we can have a glass of decent booze together. Instead, I have to read stupid tales to you. Once upon a time, blah, blah, blah. There’s no such thing as once upon a time. Everything is yesterday. It was yesterday when I went to school and jerked off with the other boys in the backyard. It was yesterday I was in the jazz band, the damn war was yesterday, then came the regime and the clock stopped. Why are you wearing a hat, why aren’t you wearing a hat, fucking nuts! A jazzman has to do some thinking, to express the theme in a melody, disintegrating, haunting, overtaking, indistinguishable, intrusive, idiotic, genuine. A jazzman has his own rhythm, his own world where freedom of musical expression reigns.”

He whistled to the rhythm of a favourite jazz number. He had been doing this often lately, for the gramophone player was beyond repair, and Nadya said he could have a new one only over her dead body.

“Puppe, you’re one little kid, cute like a little shit. But here’s the good news. When you grow up, you’ll turn into a big shit like me, or like your Papa-Great Andrei.”

I recoiled. Dimm hated Nadya’s cousin Andrei while Nadya thought of him as family and it would bring fierce disputes between her and Dimm. When we gathered around the coffee pot he would call Andrei’s branch of our family a ‘clan of Moscow bootlickers’ and other names that I was supposed to forget along with the jazz music we listened to, like Duke Ellington’s ‘Satin Doll’.

The morning before, Nadya and I had watched the tanks scraping the yellow Viennese cobblestones in the centre of the city as they paraded along the Mausoleum with the mummy of a communist leader and a head of postwar Bulgaria who was under orders from Stalin. He must have made a mistake because, as the annoying Nadya’s friend Madam Sonya loved to gossip, Stalin had one final order for him: to be poisoned while staying at a Soviet sanatorium curing himself with vodka. “But vodka is a slow poison,” she leered, “so his boss Stalin fed him a stronger one.”

My head was a jumble. I was quickly reaching my capacity to remember all the things that I had to forget.

From the tribune of the Mausoleum the parade was overseen by a delegation from brotherly Mongolia, all men with slanted eyes and fur hats, exchanging passionate kisses with my great-uncle, Papa-Great Andrei, and other high-ranked Party men standing in the tribune.

“Nadya,” I’d asked, “Why does Papa-Great kiss people on the mouth? He could get a disease.” This was what she taught me, and I seemed the only one concerned about Andrei, whom I lovingly called ‘Papa-Great’. Later in the day when I asked the same question Dimm answered me. “He’s already got it, Puppe. The red disease.”

Dimm was clever. He had been studying medicine for three semesters at the University. He might know all about diseases.

Now he continued talking to me, but rapt by his charismatic and casual arrogance, I must have missed some of his words.

“… that’s the first law of nature. Like mother, like daughter. I am not your mother, my little Puppe, and it would have been lucky for you if you hadn’t been stuck with my sister. Margherita’s motherly instincts are the size of that pinhead, the subject of profound discussions as to how many angels could gather on it. The second law of nature… ”

He never told me the second law, for he fell asleep still balancing on the chair, a burning cigarette between his fingers, the ash dropping on his shirt, making small black-rimmed holes.

I was sweeping the spilled grounds when suddenly he woke, confused and grumpy.

“All right, all right, I’m not telling you the whole story! Well, I don’t remember where I went, but I ended up with Mimi, the brothel girl, they call her the Brazilian because she plays so well the maracas… Ah well, what the fuck, she is giving a fantastic blow job. Ching-chack!”

“The cigarette is burning your finger!” I felt so motherly.

“Is it?” Dimm looked at his nicotine-stained fingers, then at the butt squashed between a cuticle and a joint, and somewhat hesitantly used it to light another cigarette. Finally resting his eyes on me, he continued, “Between you and me, people are no different from trees. Trees are people tired of chaotic movements.” He winked at me. “Where’s my coffee? I hope you haven’t drunk it all. This time I managed to create a coffee as elegant and dramatic as a ballerina with a bullet between her eyes.”

I brought his cup, half full, from somewhere among the empty bottles that littered every available surface, along with some chipped glasses. Disintegrating butts floated on top, bits of paper, tiny nicotine cuts like tribal boats, but they did not stop him from slurping the cold liquid forming a film like an oil spill.

He smacked his lips. “Mmm, not bad. One day I’ll lay hands on some real Arabica then you’ll see what your bourgeois uncle is capable of creating. Throughout the interrogations, some of which lasted for six or more hours, I lost all sense of time and humour, the bastards. Puppe, where’s my alcohol? Bring it, unless you’ve polished it off.”

Before I could move, he’d pulled out a full bottle hidden under an armchair and raised it to his lips without unscrewing the cap.

“That one’s empty,” he grumbled and chucked the bottle behind him.

There was the sound of glass smashing against tiles, followed by a sharp smell of Żubròwka, a blade of bison grass inside the vodka.

“Puppe, have you played chess with only white figures? Four white knights, four white castles, two white queens? In there, I was given only black figures to play with; four black knights, four black castles. Don’t tell Nadya. She has this cousin Matt who is a chess player. He might try it and go nuts. Our Nadya has funny cousins, don’t you think? Like my godfather and your Papa-Great, Andrei.” He looked at me searchingly.

I remained silent. I loved Dimm, but I also had a soft spot for my Papa-Great. I was proud that Papa-Great Andrei’s portrait was displayed in public places, among the portraits of other highly placed communist functionaries, a fact looked upon by the family as an embarrassment. I could see blown-up pictures of Andrei’s stern, serious face splashed across the facades of buildings, small kiosks, like that of the neighbourhood tobacconist, Kiro, who had smaller pictures, in which my Papa-Great looked friendlier, a half-smile showing awkwardly, as if it was one of Nadya’s garters. Sometimes, while playing with my dolls, I would tell them that I was a real princess from a communist tsar’s family. To prove this, I would put a coffee bean under my mattress and say, “You see, I can’t fall asleep because I feel this small coffee bean, even smaller than the pea from the tale about that other princess that Nadya reads to me.” I fancied that I was named Arnya after Papa-Great Andrei, and soon I’d grow out of my pet name Puppe. Most of the time I had to keep this princess thing to myself. I knew it would not go down well with Dimm.

As it didn’t go down well with him when Papa-Great Andrei would invite me to visit him in his enormous Russian luxury ZIS car, inside which I left chocolate marks everywhere because, yes, there would be real chocolates for Puppe. “Lucky child,” Papa-Great Andrei called me. “You don’t know how lucky you are, you are going to live in the communism, which we are going to build after we finish building the socialism.” “Will Vladimir also live in commanism?” I asked about his eldest son, my favourite among Andrei’s three children. “Oh, he’ll be engineering it!” Andrei exclaimed pinching my nose. “I love you Papa-Great!” I droned. “The other children have a marmalade moustache, I have a chocolate moustache and Dimm has… ” But he was already getting off in front of the yellow building of the National Assembly ordering his driver Simo to take me home. Now I had the whole car for myself and Simo kept a blind eye on me when I rolled on the thick handwoven carpets in the big saloon in the back of the car and opened the cabinet with drinks to ‘expropriate’ a small flat bottle of whiskey for Dimm. But when I told Simo that Nadya was waiting to take me for a walk to the Sofia Central Prison for news of her younger brother who was sent some months ago to a forced-labour-camp, Simo sank into a deep silence and the scowl that dug two deep grooves between his brows never left his face.

That was my childhood, a schizophrenic existence, a swaying pendulum reaching the uttermost extremities within a split second.

The red ruby star erected on the roof of the Communist Party House next to the building of the National Assembly was part of the new monolithic architectural centre copying, like everything else, the Moscow architecture of the day. In the dark and from afar the star reminded me of a red berry, juicy and shiny. I felt guilty for loving the red star because Dimm hated it. It was love for a red berry in the night sky of Sofia pulsating in the dark that made me feel bad.

As if reading my mind Dimm smiled sadly and broke the silence. A nerve was twitching on his cheek when he said, “This chess game drives you nuts. I've got this doctor friend. He has a theory. He says that if people dance for half an hour each day, the loony bins will be closed down. As for me, I don't believe all that jazz. Bullshit! He-he! Jumping around as if someone had stuck a chilli up your arse can prevent you from going mad? No way! Puppe, listen, my liver, my piles and my gall bladder are having their own contest. The winner will help me die happily in my old age.”

After a small pause, a gentle musical rest, he sighed. “I don’t want to die young.”

A tear like a stray half note crawled along his eye. I touched it and licked my finger.

“Let’s play our game,” he said.

The game was to quickly blabber words beginning with the same letter until one of us ran out of them.

“Let’s have ‘D’ for Dimm,” I suggested, totally rapt by the intimacy that elevated me to the status of an adult.

He started: “Drama, Darwin, drum, dare, detail, depth, death, daffodils, dinosaurs, delivery, dedications, dames, dining, Dracula, dungeon, dumb-heads, Dorsey… ching, chick-a-ching, chick-a-ching…

Soon, he fell asleep again in the armchair. This time, his snoring told me it would be for a while, a day even, perhaps two.

I put out the cigarette, which was hanging from the corner of his mouth, between saliva bubbles that were rhythmically swelling and deflating with his breathing. It was impossible to drag him to bed, and so, with lots of pushing, I reclined the chair towards the sofa and rolled him onto it. His head landed with a thud, but he didn’t wake, and gravity did the rest, leaving his torso slumped, arms spread-eagled, one leg on the sofa, the other hanging down onto the floor.

*

The rain feels colder and brings me back to the present.

The cable boat, Vogel Gryff, is about to reach the opposite bank. It sails slowly across the river. In my blurred mind it is no longer the Rhine, but the Styx River, the boundary between the Earth and the Underworld, the Hades, and the mythical ferryman Phlegyas is passing the souls of the dead from one side to the other.

The souls of my dead.

For a while, I roam the streets, trying to breathe deeply, trying to detach myself from my misfortunate encounter with the aloof coffee elite, the Secret Society of the Coffee Sommeliers.

My eyes brush against a sign: The Coffee Animals. My legs make an automating turn towards it.

I open the door, pushing my weight into it, grasping the metal knob, fearful it might slip out of my sweaty palms, my fingers a defiant octopus. The sound of cow bells welcomes me, along with a warm wave of condensed coffee vapours. A holistic amount of caffeine shoots through my nostrils and reaches my brain. A deep sigh parts my sticky lips.

I am home.

“Winy? Peachy? Ashy? Woody?” The enticing voice startles me.

“Woody. Allen. The trademark glasses. Thanks.”

The man whirls the cup he is holding under the running tap. A smile like a wreath blooms against the obelisks of his teeth. He shakes the cup to get rid of the excessive drops and places it on a shelf to dry. “Woody: the flavour of floating driftwood, or the acidity of shavings from a violin, a Stradivarius perhaps?”

There is no one else in the cafe.

Yet I feel agoraphobic like on the day when in desperation, Nadya decided to let me recite a poem glorifying the Communist Party, Our Suckling Mother. “It’s not bootlicking, Nadya,” Madam Sonya comforted her. “You have a family to think of. They are after Dimm.” Nadya and I sneaked into the Party club which was overcrowded. Nadya had put in a special effort to dress me so I could look like a proper socialist child. Under the white shirt, dark skirt and knee-length socks I had jersey tights, a sleeveless, thick, woollen pullover that prickled me and made me sweaty and exhausted with heat. It created a sauna effect. I felt I was hyperventilating and my brain went numb. Under the woollen monster, known as a hug-me, around my neck hung a handmade sachet containing a garlic clove and camphor grains designed to eliminate any source of bacteria that could attack me. I felt miserable and about to faint, but Nadya’s eyes showered me with so much love and guilt; I was the lamb she was sacrificing on the altar of the family’s survival. I took a deep breath and tried to show a bit of enthusiasm while reciting the hollow, pompous words anticipating that Nadya might mention this to Papa-Great Andrei and he would buy me a real chocolate and be so proud of me.

*

Now I also take a deep breath and my lungs fill with the hedonistic aroma of freshly ground coffee.

“How about a coffee that has the deep, hypnotic tone of the Ganges, amrita, nectar of immortality?” The man behind the bar steers away from me and dries his hands on a starched tea towel. Then he turns back: a surgeon ready for the operating theatre. “Or like the one my uncle Frank had on a Russian cargo ship? Two sailors stuffed the coffee grounds into his mouth and the captain opened a bottle of vodka.”

“Espresso, thanks.”

He squints, his eyes two Arabica beans — opaque, smooth, dark roast. Where have I seen these eyes?

“I don’t get it.”

“Don’t get… ” I echo watching him pull the shot, my pores burst open, my nose frantic, processing. Woody notes. Yet not those of driftwood! Unless it’s from the Fiji Yasawa islands — a copulating point of the sun and the ocean. A toy for the parrotfish and the giant clams, marinated in kava, passing down the generic code of the three-pronged fork. Ashy notes, as if from a volcano cloud or a powdered Egyptian mummy, added as medicine? Woody, ashy, low-acid, nutty, slightly nutty. A marriage of convenience — fifteen percent Sumatran and eighty percent Brazilian. Brazil churns coffee, any coffee, turning it from an elite indulgence into an everyday drink. The remaining five percent comes from a Costa Rican plantation in Tres Rios near San Jose. Yet it’s not all. A trace of rotting-flesh sweetness, distant, yet palpable, like a voodoo spell? A mistaken bean of authentic Blue Mountain, a Jamaican bean in a bag of Sumatran? A dirty batch? It’s not Blue Mountain, though, not even a fake. It’s a spare throw of medium roast, medium grind organic Goroka Paradise Gold from Papua New Guinea, from the same part of the world where some men grab each other’s balls to say hello when they bump into each other. Or it’s a fistful of monsooned beans forgotten from the time when ships were wooden, and it took ages for them to travel, circling the Cape of Good Hope to reach Europe. A length of time in which the green coffee beans would turn golden and all the acidity would be gone, replaced by a gentle sweetness.

These days they monsoon them artificially. I make eye contact. “Don’t get what?”

“A coffee book writer drinking espresso.”

“You don’t have Dracula’s ‘blooduccino’ or camel milk latte… ” I stop, my eyebrows arching. “How do you know that I’m a coffee book writer?”

“You stormed in and grabbed the cup.” He gestures to the cup left on the shelf to dry. “Slurped the leftovers, whispering, ‘My coffee book is the real thing! They can get… stuffed!’”

“I don’t use ‘stuffed’ but the f-word and I am not a coffee book writer in that sense.” I utter trapped in a sudden, raw and vivid flashback to my recent humiliation, to the mockery on the faces of the five coryphées shrouded in coffee steam, the booing from the audience. My out-of-control chatting with chattering teeth every time I get an anxiety bout is becoming a worry.

“What’s the sense then?” He waits for another reaction, but all he sees now is my poker face.

Why am I having this conversation?

“It’s not recipes or coffee venues that I’m writing about,” I say haughtily only to hear my voice breaking the moment I start to repeat my pitch from an hour ago. “I focus on coffee’s mystic and mischievous qualities as a cultural phenomenon, turning them into coffee lovers’ portraits.”

“You must have many of them.” Tantalisingly slowly, he serves the tiny cup in the shape of a beheaded cone. A miniscule lace-intricate teaspoon lies next to it on the blue porcelain saucer. In a Kama Sutra mood, of course!

I have difficulty taking my eyes away from the beheaded-cone cup, yet the sudden jolt of my heart makes me lean back in my stool.

In front of me is a mercenary on a mission, on a payroll of the mighty coffee empire. A mercenary trained to kill with sophisticated weaponry. The weaponry of palate-exploding sensations. A barista dressed in black, the coffee colour. I get a glimpse of his small ponytail of slick black locks, a black mole on his latte-coloured right cheek. A solid gold earring. An epitome of the five coryphées, a faithful employee and shameless seducer — selling the black beans by chanting woody-peachy mantras, camouflaged as a connoisseur but blind for the real spirit, the poetry of coffee.

The vision of my bare hands around his neck strangling him brings an unexpected confusion to me. The sexual tension hanging in the air between us, a spider thread swaying gently over the scorching aromas, animates the vision into another one: my bare hands sliding down his naked body in search of pleasure-trigger points. I can’t deny that his language has stirred my curiosity, but my hatred blinds me for his subtle ways about coffee. Driftwood? I never thought of driftwood in terms of coffee before. The mercenary speaks in such a romantic and knowledgeable way about coffee. Something is not right. Shavings from a Stradivarius? Crazy!

While I look intensely at the man across the bar, the cup disappears into my hand. Steam weaves its way upwards like a Pepper’s Ghost and morphs with the barista. A real barista not like Nadya’s friend of convenience behind the counter of the ‘delicatessen’ shop at the corner of Tolbuhin Boulevard and Graf Ignatiev Street.

*

Nadya’s friend from the ‘delicatessen’ shop was young, overweight and walked on her small feet like a mother duck leading a row of fluffy ducklings. Her whole-front apron, once white, was greasy and stained. She was busy holding a knife to cut low-quality butter and tahini halva, or a ladle to scoop curds and yoghurt from huge aluminium basins, or a short-handle shovel to dig into the twenty-kilo paper bag of flour paying no attention to the weevils but waving off the white cloud that would engulf her and Nadya, or a funnel to pour the vinegar and sunflower oil from the drums into the bottles we carried along. Finally, we picked some coarse soap, made of primitively processed fat, smelling worse than any dirt it was supposed to take off. Now it was time for coffee; Nadya’s friend would plug in her bare heating-resistor burner and prepare the mix in a Turkish metal pot: two teaspoons of sugar, two of finely ground coffee smelling of soap and marinated green chillies, a cup of water and while waiting for it to boil, she would complain about her life to Nadya.

“My husband still hasn’t got a job so I am forced to steal, let god forgive me,” she would say. “I don’t keep much, only five or ten grams of everything for me.” Nadya would nod her head understandingly while I would play with the scales with the dark metal weights looking like monstrous chess pawns: 200 grams, 50 grams, 500 grams.

Nadya drank her coffee blowing and slurping to show her appreciation for the woman’s coffee artistry because this was the custom in the Balkans but I knew that Nadya hated doing it, yet she had to please the young, overweight woman so that later she would give us under-the-counter precious supplies like feta cheese or cheap salami dubbed ‘dogs’ joy’ at a time when the shelves of the delicatessen were empty and long queues of people waited in vain for the supplier’s truck. I knew it was another of Nadya’s modes to look after her family. She let me drink some of the coffee: gritty, bland, and watched me with a suffering look on her face because by that time she was convinced that Margherita’s new husband Boris was molesting me.

Besides gritty and bland, that coffee was strong. As strong as what I am drinking now in The Coffee Animals more than forty years later, miles away.

“Bliss.” I lick my lips. “Flavour’s so intense, almost solid. I could do some writing on it.” My bad mood is leaving me as if being sucked down a man-hole. The bitter taste of failure is melting, disappearing along with the folly of an ambition to trade myself in as a coffee writer for a title like Master Kaffeetier and a giant silver cupping spoon to go with it.

“I am Bruno, this is Jose.” The man points to a high-stemmed glass at the far end of the bar, where a Siamese fighting fish flaps in and out of its cloak-like tail.

Frank Sinatra sings his ‘Coffee Song’ from an inconspicuous music device, They grow an awful lot of coffee in Brazil. Brazil, the 1800: fazendas, black ships with of slaves from Africa — with hand and foot shackles, coffee barons, a time when coffee was king; plantation owners forcing their slaves into sadistic orgies; beatings, murders, the slaves retaliated — a scorpion in the boot of the baron or ground glass in the corn meal of his family.

The mercenary looks at me expectantly. Ah, yes, the introduction.

“Arnya.” I twist a lock of my hair.

It’s dyed. In coffee. My abundant, wild, almost non-human hair. Norma Jean Baker, aka Marilyn Monroe, also used coffee to dye things. She soaked her veil in a strong potion to match her cream wedding gown before she could say yes to Arthur Miller in one of those fatal attractions between beauty and brains.

“Arnya, the love affair with coffee is the most lustful one.” He looks at me through his heavy eyelashes.

“I get high on coffee and coffee stories.” I look at my cup. The espresso has been created by forcing water at nine bars pressure and 88 ºC through a tightly compact wad of eight grams of freshly ground coffee. Twenty-two seconds for the brewing that tears the heart of the beans for me.

The black blood still dripping.

The espresso relaxes me and I notice the posters of Van Gogh’s paintings scattered around the place. Blown-up prints, not framed, spilling unbearable flamboyance into the neat and somewhat empty interior. The artist’s Cafe Terrace at Night is placed in the window. An image of a street cafe, a magnet for decadent intellectuals and artists, something The Coffee Animals can hardly be taken for. The paved street, the sky paved with stars, the half-empty venue with drum-like tables under that crazy canary yellow spilling into green and orange. Figures of people, long dead as the artist himself.

Under the shelf with neatly arranged cups and glasses, in the middle of a back door hangs The Night Cafe in Van Gogh’s characteristic, eye-poking lime-and-lemon colours. Small wonder the artist describes it as “… an atmosphere like a devil’s furnace… ” Of course, The Coffee Animals is nowhere near a devil’s furnace, and no one can imagine anybody committing a crime in such a lifeless place.

Another opus of Van Gogh, Orphan Man with a Hat Drinking Coffee, has been reduced and multiplied to form a frieze over part of the sidewalls on the left, above a bookcase with neatly arranged books and magazines, on the right above damask-padded sofas and deep-burgundy chairs arranged around several round tables with marble centres.

An obsession with the crazy artist?

Bruno is fixing himself what in Australia we call a Koala Fart: two espresso shots, eucalyptus drops for sweetener, scorching water under pressure for bubbles. Sometimes I order it in Brisbane’s Cafe On The Park, a small shaggy den between Moreton Bay and the lake with tortoises stretching their necks in the hope of a piece of shepherd’s pie. The cafe’s blue walls are decorated with photos from the fifties, a time when cane-cutting in the region was booming: young male workers in dark suit trousers, naked from the waist up, dancing barefooted on the beach in couples.

“Why don’t you add some cardamom powder?” I ask Bruno teasingly.

“What for?” He looks at me suspiciously chewing on his lower lip.

“Cardamom’s known to kill the side effects of caffeine.”

He looks offended and I want him to hurt, but my spite has ebbed away. All I manage is, “Is it always so overcrowded?”

Instead of a reply Bruno does what men sooner or later do — he gives me an overall scanning for a final assessment: fuckable, non-fuckable. Another valuable piece of knowledge passed down to me by Dimm. Surprisingly, more often than not I find myself in the former category.

Women, on the other hand, love to think of me as PMS with a calcium deficiency and a hyperthyroid problem, but it’s not the case. My periods are regular, although each one could be the last, and if I have a thyroid problem, it’s more on the hypo-side so coffee agrees with me. As for my bones, I have never looked bulky. The only thing women can’t deny me is my glossy and abundant hair. What they don’t know, however, is that the abundance is not only on my skull, but also everywhere else. Every few days, I have to pluck my limbs diligently otherwise I’ll soon be looking like one of Tarzan’s adoptive parents.

The only disturbing thing is that there’s no surprise whenever I look in the mirror. Sometimes I wish I could see somebody else there: a kid with the gap of a missing tooth, a teenager with pimples and spiky hair, or a man with a long Pinocchio nose looking back at me, telling lies and making bad friends.

I open my purse and pick a ten Swiss franc note. “Enough?”

He takes the note and our hands touch.

I say, “The coffee wasn’t peachy or woody. Nevertheless, it was good. I enjoyed it.”

His kiss lands between my knuckles. “Today it’s my lucky day. I turn forty,” he says to my knuckles.

Seducer.

Bastard.

The words stick to my teeth like fine coffee grounds.

At the far end of the bar Jose flaps in his water domain. Bruno turns his back to me and takes his time to rearrange some sample jars and featured collectables like original tins of Nash’s and Hills Bros Coffee, Solitaire Cowboy and a couple of Mac Laughlin’s Gem Coffee Bags. Then he washes his hands, repeatedly increasing and reducing the volume of lather.

I prepare to go.

Right then Bruno produces a packet of one hundred percent Guatemalan from a crop that comes once in decades, a crop after a long dry season when even the ocean breeze from Belize gets stuck somewhere along the Gulf Stream, and sailors can hear its distant singing luring them the way the sirens lured Odysseus when he had to wax-tap his crew’s ears. The aromas stay sealed inside the beans fusing to a perfect result.

Bruno opens the packet, lets me sniff it and takes it away. I feel like a child that has lost her ice cream to the family dog. A little Puppe, a red berry princess that has to learn to lose loved ones to death.

Bruno turns his back to me. There are customers flocking in.

Soon the place is full. A younger man comes to take over behind the bar.

Bruno brings his tall cup of coffee and leans against the bar not far away from me and the cup of espresso made with the freshly ground Guatemalan, which he also serves. The fragrance is as strong as Martian winds and makes me feel weak and dizzy. It’s like an invitation to hell.

“You always have it long?” I say matter-of-factly in the direction of his coffee but suddenly aware of my double-edged remark. I try to laugh it off.

He smiles and soon watches me sipping on my coffee that might also need some chewing. “How about you?”

The hot flush caused by my badly concealed excitement gives way to pleasant warmth with a hysterical ingredient which I can’t entirely blame on the bronco kick strength of the coffee. I feel the stranger’s magnetic aura three stools away. I hope he notices more things about me than the five coffee gurus. Like over-sized, hazelnut eyes, a dimple in the chin, more like a coffee bean groove actually; skin that has seen better days, yet maintains a moist, nourished look without me bathing in coffee grounds fermented with pineapple pulp, a Japanese wrinkle killer. I raise my hand to rearrange my hair.

After having a sip that looks more like a mouth rinse, Bruno returns his cup next to my espresso, David and Goliath, sort of, and shifts into the stool next to mine wrapping me in his body warmth. It’s scary and I feel the moist cold coming from the river crawl into my marrow, my teeth chatter, and I clinch them biting on my lower lip. As if it’s the most natural thing to do, he places his hand on my shoulder and caresses my hair with such tenderness and intensity that I experience a meltdown.

Or a déjà vu.

Casanova, Don Juan, Marquis de Sade flash before my eyes. I’m not a prey, I shout silently at this stranger. I want him to feel distraught and uneasy over his frivolous behaviour, over the fact that he is a cat’s paw of the money-making machine called the Secret Society of the Coffee Sommeliers. The society whose first cell was established more than a century ago in Brazil. A country that maintained slavery longer than any other country in the Western hemisphere because growers and politicians fought together against abolition. “Brazil is coffee,” one member of the Brazilian parliament announced arrogantly in 1880, “and coffee is the Negro.”

Yet I sit there, not moving, afraid that it might be over. A stray cat, scratched between the ears, baring her claws, arching her back, pushing for more.

“You must be new around… ” he begins, removing his hand. “Our friend there, Paul.” He makes a gesture towards the young man, the new shift behind the counter. “He is not only a barista. He is also an artist.”

“An artist?” I try to fake interest.

A group of rowdy girls invade a table not far away from us, nagging for fatty, fruity, creamy coffee derivates. Soon Paul is swamped by the girls, his round face gleaming. I see that he is not mean with the syrupy, creamy stuff he is using to decorate the four tall glasses showing a teaspoon of coffee visible in each.

Bruno follows my glance and smiles. One of the girls, a fresh, peach-skinned beauty, returns his smile.

The pang of jealousy sobers me. What am I doing here? Facing my second worst fear; that one day, I might get involved. My first, inherited from my mother Margherita, is that one night I might run out of coffee. I feel uneasy. Every year, millions of young girls, millions of fresh new faces, claim their places under the sun and scream for attention. I drag some money from my pocket and place it on the bar, then make a move to dismount from the stool. It’s time for me to go and anesthetise my wounded self somewhere where they mix cocktails with exotic names like Bula Mamma or Piranha.

Bruno is in the way, so I manoeuvre to the other side.

He makes no move to stop me and continues to lap his black soup, his eyes somewhere up on the shelves with the coffee sample jars.

“Paul’s idea to perform live coffee-themed paintings by famous artists might turn into a big attraction and this shop can one day become a coffee shrine.” His voice is like a head wind, causing me to shudder and abort my attempt to run away. “And what can possibly be a better choice than a cafe-and-coffee animal like Van Gogh? It’s sad that you are leaving. All good things are short, like your espresso, Ms…?”

“Stefan,” I utter feebly and his voice mellows into a whisper.

“Arnya, don’t go!” His hand moves snugly on the nape of my neck. “Come with me.” The words moisten my ear. “Come with me.”

A déjà vu. A mind-blowing déjà vu.

He helps me out of the stool and waves to Paul. His hand is now under my elbow; a rudder directing me to a specific angle to cross The Coffee Animals on the way out.

On the street, he holds my hand, sheltering it from the rain inside the sleeve of his black trench coat. From a street vendor around a primitive charcoal grill he buys scorching hot chestnuts, the fruit bursting with flavour under the burnt shell and lets me hold them for warmth, scooping my hands in his.

We cross the Rhine in the cable boat. The ferryman — this time a young girl, a tomboy — is rough and the boat jerks. Soon she touches the opposite pier and her scraggy hull scrapes heavily against it. The screechy sound ripples the water.

I cringe.

Bruno looks at me. There is concern on his face.

“I’m all right,” I hesitantly assure him.

For a while, we walk along the streets in the heart of the city. Now and then I stop to admire the architecture of a 13th century house and take mental notes of the museums and galleries to visit the following day. The stroll ceases to seem aimless when somewhere behind the Ruemelinsplatz and the windows of Bergli Books we stop in front of a small shop the size of a horse float. Slim, dark-skinned, the woman behind the counter in her bright coloured cotton wrap would have looked recklessly exposed to the humid chill if not for her activity around two small fires. On one she roasts green coffee beans in a hand-forged copper pan stirring them occasionally with a spoon. On the other, a copper jug with water is heating — boiling water turns the hard carrot soft, the fragile egg hard and brings out all the aroma and beauty of the placid coffee beans — as the old saying goes. As they roast, the beans hiss and pop. The woman empties the pan, and taking her time, pounds the beans in a mortar. Then she slips the content into a clay long-necked jar, adds the boiling water, taps the jar and leaves it to seep. Now she looks up at us. Her eyes give a sign of acknowledgement at the sight of Bruno, but her lips don’t move. Her hands are quick and agile, stirring a new lot of beans, now tossing them in the air and catching them in the pan in one efficient, show-off gesture. I watch the tapped clay jar, steam and aroma escape through a designed hole and reach me. I start to get high, finally completely forgetting the now distant withdrawal symptoms, the uneven heartbeat, cold sweats, dry, parched lips.

Soon we drink in silence, the coffee made the way they used to make it in Africa a thousand of years ago. The hypnotic liquid slips around my tongue, hangs on my palate, the aroma fumes out of my nostrils, bringing mist to my eyes.

I want to return to my empty hotel room.

I leave the chestnuts with the woman in the bright coloured cotton wrap and take Bruno with me. We walk in silence. His fingers are tracing mine as if reading the Braille alphabet.

I remember that I have to hate him.

“Bruno,” I begin, but it doesn’t work. My initial emotional charge has subsided, shrunk, vanished. My screams, whines and sobs are suppressed, squashed, desiccated. Hours ago, I was ready to grieve for my humiliation, for the burial of my cherished dream to break into the Secret Society of the Coffee Sommeliers; I wanted to throw myself onto the floor and go into a trance or a tantrum. Not now. The moment has passed, leaving me an unexploded shell in care of the sappers, leaving me with the bitterness and tingling anticipation of a night with a barista, an executor of the coffee industry’s blunt greed for money. Coffee money.

We walk side-by-side. The few streets are just a teaser.

Anonymous, oblivious, we step into each other’s lives sex-hungry and impatient. Soon, we are like two moles, blind to the sun, hidden in underground tunnels, listening to the howling wilderness. The termite monoliths are like tombstones in the Land of the Lots of Time where the Afghan cameleer postman travels for days to deliver a letter. For one name.

Bruno. The enemy.

He lies spent, his cock, moist, shiny and limp, still responding to my hand like a sleepy pet.

“Today I learnt an Ethiopian prayer,” he says and with his eyes closed he chants, “Coffee pot, give us peace,/ coffee pot, let children grow,/ let our wealth swell,/ please protect us from evils… ”

I sigh. Our family coffee pot in Sofia didn’t protect us from evil.

There’s something banal about making love to a stranger in a hotel room full of the ghosts of previous lovers. You can almost hear their moans of pleasure or subdued squabbles, the pop of champagne or beer bottles, the surfing of the adults-only channels, desire like a certificate for being alive, genuine or commercial.

I kiss Bruno’s closed eyes. My thoughts are like migrating birds that find sanctuary in a field of Arabica plants.

It’s way after midnight. The curfew hour for all ghosts but mine.

Bruno’s hands wrap me like the old, green corduroy robe of my mother, Margherita.

*

She was never at home, my beautiful mother, Margherita. Her absence turned me into a mother-scent fetishist. I went around our flat picking up her belongings and surrounding myself with them, hording them. Sometimes, Nadya would see me doing it and a bitter look would appear on her face. I loved Nadya, but I found her boring. She was my devoted servant.

Meanwhile, coffee sucking took over from my thumb-sucking habit. I had a pronounced cannibalistic taste, so as a little Puppe, at the age of five and six I chewed also on my toes. It was an exhilarating experience for which I was envied by the adults around me as I kept asking Dimm, Nadya, Margherita, her ever changing lovers and Madam Sonya whether they could do the same: lie on their back and bring their toes to their mouth. No one could, so I was wondering whether it was so great for me to grow up quickly and turn into an adult depriving myself of joyful hours of sticking my chubby toes between my teeth or even combing my hair with them. But there was another delight waiting for me when I swapped my thumbs and toes for my pyjama collar. The edges were perfect to nibble on, to suck on. Made of cotton, silk, or some other friendly material, they felt good between my front milk teeth, and then between the gap they left in my mouth when they finally were pulled out the usual way: a sound cotton thread tied around each of them, the other end of the thread tied around the door handle, the wind slamming the door unexpectedly, my poor tooth hung, then embedded like a precious stone in a thin golden ring.

The longer and sharper the collar was, the more I favoured the nightwear. The best one was a pair of satin pyjamas, striped in grey and purple. With its collar’s edge in my mouth, I would fall into a deep and happy sleep. The satin pyjamas only real rivals were my big toes. I was in love with them, and continued to keep them tucked into my mouth, where they felt warm and secure. Sometimes, I would snitch Margherita’s high-heeled shoes, which were made of snakeskin, a guilty reminder of pre-war times, when luxury was not a dirty bourgeois word in Bulgaria, when Dimm played jazz with the Ovcharov Band without needing to hide. On lucky days, I could also lay my hands on Margherita’s green corduroy robe, which had soft material in sand-ceramic tones running down the front on both sides of the long zipper. It was tight in the waist, for my mother’s was notoriously small, a la Scarlett O’Hara. It was a dream, this robe, the corduroy warm, downy and friable. My mother Margherita’s corduroy. She was not there for me, but her cuddly robe was. Even thrown across a random chair, this velvet extravaganza carried her scent like nothing else. I would stand near it, gaping at it, touching it, sniffing it, feeling it.

The extraordinary robe had a long life, and years later I started to wear it, even though it was already faded, worn out, threadbare in places, yet still full of life and warmth, multicoloured like a rare parrot, lawny green from here to infinity. I imagined I was Margherita, grown up, a true woman, men falling on their noses at the sight of me. It was their luck that most of the furniture in the house was soft and inviting. Around the dining table, the chairs were thickly padded, covered in plush teddy-bear-like material, light and dark, shiny brown. But I liked the glazed-tile stoves, the dressing tables, the low auxiliary chairs, and wardrobes in dark, solid wood, carved in round patterns. On top of the wardrobes were huge, round cardboard hatboxes.

The fancy hats were another source of awe. No woman in the household would dare to wear them on the streets. Hats were bourgeois — hence bad — forbidden, bringing shame and danger. Dimm was once spotted wearing a Fedora hat and it was confiscated. Dimm was in more trouble with the militia. When he arrived home and was telling us the story, he gave me a wink. I quickly ran out of the room and returned with his favourite mouse-grey felt hat, which he kept carefully sprinkled in naphthalene and wrapped in Margherita’s old floral dress so the moths couldn’t eat it, in the back of his wardrobe. The shiny naphthalene flakes made me sneeze and Dimm laughed as he took the hat and placed it ceremoniously on his beautiful head with his Roman profile, his flared nostrils showing a short-fuse temper, sexual omnivorousness, alcohol addiction, and a severe case of coffee passion or poison.

That night each one in the family decided to wear a hat for dinner.

Dimm kept his mouse-grey felt hat on, Margherita came up with a turban-like, olive-green extravaganza with a huge pearl pin, Nadya’s hat resembled the shape of a wide, flat shoe attached to her head with the help of a thin rubber string under her chin. For me, they had an embroidered piece of cloth that made me look like a real princess.

The dinner was cabbage leftovers in lard.

But Nadya produced her usual surprise scoop of Lavazza coffee in a two-handle cup and we were not in a hurry to brew it but passed it around and everyone smelled it, whispering, “Italian, Italian!”

Ma che profumo!” Margherita, once a student in the pre-war Italian school, Regina Scuola Italiana, forgot that Italian, another capitalist language, was better left alone. “Oh, what fragrance!” she kept repeating.

*

Like me, Bruno has drifted away, breathing evenly.

I stretch and press my head against his body. I find it smooth and appealing. Soon I start to taste it sucking teasingly his lips, his fingers, earlobes — the golden stud feels like a small ice cube, each of his nipples, too. My tongue slides over the inside of his arms, his armpits are like caves with underground rivers, a simmering scent coming from their depth.

He moans, still half-asleep, still far away.

“I love your name, Arnya,” he suddenly says, but all I am concerned with is to keep my guard up; I am, and always will be, a loner. But Bruno’s closeness lures me into talking, words pour out of me, soon he is buried in words.

He is, I notice, very alert to my words as if he is a mushroom picker and the thumb rule of a mushroom picker is if in doubt, don’t carry the mushroom home. So I see him filtering my enthusiastic account on locations I have made love at. The fishermen’s village in Bali at sunset where the smoke from the overpriced beach restaurants drags low, bringing tears to my eyes and spasms to the lungs and I cough until I turn myself inside out. In a winter night in a small Sofia park behind the preposterous monument representing a cross between a red star and a rising sun, a symbol of the promised communist future never to come, when it was so cold that words came out wrapped in breath fog like soap balloons, touching each other gently, bouncing away, chasing other words. “At that time,” I continue. “I trained myself in stoicism to stand the unbearable cold and be a hero, because everything was about being a hero of the socialist labour, but in secret I thought I was training myself for that special one polar night stand with my lover on a floating piece of ice that breaks away from an iceberg, sailing in its own quest for a new Titanic, leaving us behind on that ice raft with a hungry polar bear and her cub. Then my lover and I see the old Eskimo. He is not there to defend us. He is there to feed the bear and her cub because that’s how the Eskimo get buried by recycling their life with nature. He has left his igloo, composed, eternal, and walks through the ice desert to meet the bear and her cub, unaware of us and our fear of death.”

“I don’t fear death,” says Bruno, touching my shoulder, exploring it as if it’s an Egyptian papyrus containing secrets from the Valley of Death. “But it was in Bangkok where my best friend died from a heroin overdose when for the first time I’d wished I could do something to delay, if not prevent, death.”

“You want to talk?”

“I want to forget.” He scoops me in his arms, burying his face in my hair.

“Bruno,” I whisper. “There’s so much I want to forget.”

He listens to the stories of the red berry princess and he holds me tight with a tenderness that makes a solitary tear appear in the corner of my eye and slip down into my hair. Yet we can’t be more distant — two cargo ships passing each other in the ocean, no pirate activity, no forced boarding, no hostages, no looting of knowledge in terms of age, nationality, religion and sexual preferences, hobbies or culinary pursuits.

I get out of bed and bring my laptop.

“Here are two of my coffee portraits,” I say and place his hand back in the hook of my elbow.

Comment Log in or Join Tablo to comment on this chapter...

Espresso Coffee Lovers

A shot of golden crema and velvety texture in a small porcelain cup, hot water has been forced under pressure through ground coffee


SHE thinks of the coffee cup as a cave of bliss and is ready to be your kitchen goddess, fulfil her fantasies to make love on the kitchen table, hold her hand in public, she dies to show that she has swept you off your feet, wrap her shoulders with your jacket, she’d love to suck on your warmth’s leftovers, anemophobic, she has a fear of windy weather.

HE thinks coffee is the modern day ayahuasca, the shaman drink from the Amazon jungle, inducing visions for unanswered questions; handsome, wears an amulet of his animal spirit, loves street dogs and shelters them, a born flirt, he carries a bag of lies that he makes full use of, yet he tries to hide his venustraphobia, fear of beautiful women.

Cappuccino Coffee Lovers

An espresso shot, hot milk, milk froth, topped with chocolate powder


SHE thinks, it’s white blood and feels like a vampire, intelligent, prone to depression, easily finds short cuts between hell and paradise, persistent in her nagging-niggling way, until achieving her nightmare/dream to make you happy, her fantasies are to make love inside a hammock that sways like a pendulum, thus avoiding the gravity she fears, called barophobia.

HE is the indulging type, takes things slowly and in full, a bit egoistical, a bit lazy perhaps, won’t push limits, boundaries, self-confident, usually in a good mood, pleasure is essential for him, appreciates comfort, decoration means much to him; advises on your make-up: never use black mascara; he has melanophobia, fear of the colour black.


From Coffee Lovers’ Portraits by Arnya Stefan

Comment Log in or Join Tablo to comment on this chapter...

TWO

The smell of valerian blends with the powerful aroma of green unroasted coffee.

Tears flood Nadya’s face.

Men in uniform approach Dimm.

“Dimm, don’t go!” I cry out, grabbing the iron bars.

Slipping from my hand, a small coffee bean rolls between them, curious, zigzagging, then coming to a halt on the floor next to him as if tamed, recognising its master. A furious look on his face, the guard springs forward, crushing it under his heavy boot.

The screechy sound of the crying, pleading mercy, and executed coffee bean reverberates in my head when I open my eyes.

There’s no one else in the room. I know it before my eyes scan the room and my ears strain to catch a noise coming from the bathroom.

My body floats in a cold sweat, and I struggle to pull myself out of the dream.

I am spreadeagled on the queen-size bed in my four-star Basel hotel. Outside it is a grim October morning; the rain has stopped, drops still pattern the windows.

In a little while, I’ll slip on my clothes, avoiding thoughts about a barista called Bruno, leaving his rumbling, testosterone-fuelled voice behind, calling it a one-night stand, heading for a new day full of opportunities, full of coffee venues to investigate, coffee masterpieces to indulge and write about. Out of this random encounter, another man will remain among the characters in my coffee lovers’ portraits, like a pinned insect or an Alpine Edelweiss in an herbarium.

I have no intention to remain another day in Basel, a place I’ll always associate with rain — the coldest shower the one I received in the Basel Kaffee Klub. But before I leave for another place, another country, another continent in search of coffee aficionados to inspire me, I decide to give the old town along the Rhine River another chance to charm me.

Through the window, I see part of Basel’s main landmark: the Münster Cathedral in all its medieval glory. Originally a Catholic cathedral and later a reformed Protestant church, it stands imposing and bleak in the hostile weather. After breakfast, a hard-boiled egg on a piece of Emmental cheese, I ask the receptionist for an umbrella.

On the street it drizzles, then stops, and a rayless sun, a magnifying glass in the hands of God, emerges from the clouds. I give a sigh of relief. I am weather-spoiled, adopting recently the Australian sunshine and beach culture. But I remind myself that most people come to Switzerland for its snowy mountains, so I better focus on the architectural wonder, all bathed and suddenly shiny, in front of me.

Built of red sandstone, and consecrated in 1019, the Münster Cathedral fell victim to an earthquake in the middle of the 13th century and was rebuilt. Details from the original structure have been incorporated, like some white stonework in the Saint George Tower, stone carvings showing the founder of the cathedral, Emperor Heinrich II and his wife, Kunikunde. Restoration works on the other tower are under way, and it’s covered in scaffolds, yet I don’t see any workers there. Perhaps it’s been left to the angels to do the job, or to the ghosts of the Roman soldiers who used to camp on the grounds of this high hill, and built their fortress some time BC. Oh, I love those movies full of Roman soldiers — musk and heroic brutality dripping from the screen, raising my libido.

Soon, I am climbing up and down the stone steps around the Münster, imagining another era, when coffee was still the devil’s drink, a time before Pope Clement VIII endorsed it in 1600, after the Bishops of Rome petitioned him to forbid the drink. After a sip, the Pope pronounced the brew delicious. According to the legend, he then baptised it. Prior to this Arab nations, who had prepared their coffee drink since the 14th century by separating the bean from the berry, crushing it and brewing the grounds with water, had a monopoly on coffee by exercising a jealously protective control over the coffee trade. Execution was the punishment for anyone daring to smuggle coffee seedlings.

Like most psychoactive herbs such as kava, peyote, ololiuqui or ayahuasca, coffee, for me, is also a direct spiritual path to the divine through mind-expanding experiences. My addiction and crippling dependency on it, as happened yesterday, sees me having an occasional plunge into a downward spiral when I have to stave off withdrawal symptoms. Symptoms triggered by the total crash I went through under the scrutinising, patronising eyes of the five untouchable coryphées.

Now, I feel better, last but not least thanks to that stranger, the barista, and last night’s love-making graded as succulent coffee from the Chanchamayo region, carefully grown on the western slopes of the Andes in Central Peru near waterfalls and orchid fields, helping me to forget my professional frustration from the day before.

The warmth Bruno’s body gave me was like the one I get from a cup of coffee; living warmth that works not only on my temperature receptors but also on my soul. We all need to hold a piece of living warmth from time to time and consume it in a cannibalistic frenzy.

I know why people can’t get enough of coffee warmth.

*

I haven’t been able to have enough of it ever since the time when Dimm and I shared pots of coffee potion. Dimm might have been thrown out of the university, but he still had the protection of his godfather and Nadya’s cousin Andrei. It was Papa-Great Andrei’s long, invisible arm that arranged Dimm’s appointment as head of the department of soft drinks in a big Sofia factory. It sounded like a joke, but Dimm was delighted with his job. The secret: the department also dealt with coffee supplies for the city’s cafes so, in a way, it was like making the fox a security guard of a chicken coop.

Dimm started to come home with bigger and bigger bags of brown and pitch black beans whose aroma pushed through the stitching, creating havoc in the house. Glossy, like infant cockroaches, they had a life of their own, rustling, rolling over each other, curious to emerge and have a look at what was going on. What was happening was the brewing of their siblings in a big pot, usually used by Nadya for cooking macaroni. Dimm, another family shaman, conjuring a trance-inducing substance, throwing fistfuls of coffee beans into the impressive brass hand-mill. Soon, mountains of ground coffee lay on the table in front of him. He diligently scooped it all up, even shaking the newspaper that served as a tray into the pot. After adding water sparingly, Dimm watched greedily over the boiling, almost solid liquid, strong as a bronco’s kick, dangerous as a bull’s gore. After a few seconds of bubbling and plonking, the black potion was carefully taken off the hot plate to be served at the table in the traditional coffee pot. This ritual continued to be accompanied by the family’s poker indulgence on some weekends. It was a jolly time, laced with Dimm’s smart and snappy jokes, lashing the totalitarian system beyond the walls of our somehow small and vulnerable home. A lost-generation soul, he often played his ‘rotten capitalist music’ like ‘Chattanooga Choo-Choo’ on the old piano. Occasionally, there was a girl standing by him, squawking karaoke-style to his vigorous playing.

“Puppe, this is a fellow student,” he would introduce her, expecting and unfailingly being rewarded with a motherly outburst from the girl at the sight of his chubby little niece, Puppe, thus mellowing his catch of the day. “We are going to study together. Two hours.”

The wink that accompanied his words was more of an order that I shouldn’t hang around outside the locked door of his room. I was, of course, doing the opposite.

“Leave him alone,” Nadya would snap, emerging from the shadows, also snooping. “He has to catch up with missed lectures, prepare himself to go back to the university, pass exams, and estimate where he has better chances: accountancy, perhaps, or the political economy of communism, God help.” Here, she would make a quick sign of the cross, adding quickly, “Our Andrei can also help.”

Then she would go to look after her domestic chores, cooking a bourgeois meal, like coq au vin, an old half-bald bird, negotiated from the peasants’ market and soaked overnight in the leftovers from Dimm’s scattered alcohol supplies. The meal always made me tipsy.

My attention was suddenly divided, my nose pointing in the direction of the kitchen, my ears drawn closer to the locked bedroom door for a random selection of excited whispers, contagious giggles, small cries and shushed shrieks. Then silence and only the mattress creaking, groaning, bouncing, tuning itself into the rhythm of Ching, ching, ching, chick-a-ching… or perhaps of the political economy of communism.

“Watch out, Dimm,” Nadya warned him after he would accompany the girl home and return with a leering smile on his face. “Remember those militia-marriages!”

I jumped with fright, because I had eavesdropped one of Nadya and Madam Sonya’s confidential conversations, in muted voices, unfinished sentences, deep, meaningful sighs, Madam Sonya’s usual rhetoric question, “Ah well, what do you expect?”

“They need two witnesses… that Dimm has slept with one of these girls, and that’s what he is going to have… force them to a militia-marriage!” Nadya’s voice was moist with tears.

“That’s the regime’s latest idiotic idea to punish people for having sex, what do you expect? They say sex is a bourgeois evil like Coca Cola, classified as an alcoholic drink… communist comrades are peasants that smell of dung and still wear untanned pig leather shoes… Poor us, the old citizens of Sofia, we have to put up with them making all nice highlife people feel like garbage just because they haven’t robbed a dairy farm in the mountain! Partisans, fighters, my arse! But Nadya, the good thing is they can’t force Dimm to militia-marry all the girls he sleeps with.”

“Ah well… ” Nadya was not convinced.

“I don’t see you worry about Margherita getting forced into a militia-marriage.” It was Madam Sonya’s teasing remark.

“It would only do her good,” was Nadya’s retort.

There were two reasons for my fright. The first one, the mere mention of the militia, the image of the uniform or plain-clothed policemen patrolling Dimm’s life, the second that Dimm could marry someone and belong to her and not to me. After all, I was the one to marry him when I grew up! I was surprised, however, to learn that Dimm slept throughout his meetings with those girls instead of studying. But then, again, what were the strange noises coming from behind his locked door?

Dimm’s locked door left me with that sense of anticipation and curiosity that accompanied me over the years every time I was facing a door.

*

As I am facing one now under the sign The Coffee Animals.

Why did I leave the Münster so quickly and turn up here of all places? How about all the museums and galleries that I could have been visiting instead? A tingling sensation builds up around my toes, whirls in my stomach and reaches my skull.

The cow bells’ sound is familiar when I cross the threshold.

Behind the bar is Paul. He lifts his eyes to look at me and a smile leaves faint ripples across his lips.

Bruno is not inside the cafe.

The younger man prepares my coffee. He carefully serves the thumb-size, fine china cup, half-full of hot, black liquid, so thick it might as well have been tar. His intense blue eyes look at me knowingly.

“Where’s Bruno?” I ask casually.

Paul is arranging bowls with sugar sachets. “He comes and goes.”

“Is he coming to work today?”

“To work?” Paul gives me a sideway glance, his eyebrows arching.

“Yes, to work. The other barista. Yesterday he served my coffee.”

An enigmatic smile laced with amusement lights up Paul’s face, he looks even younger, and I wonder whether he shaves. “Bruno? He doesn’t work.”

There are customers coming in. Paul nods ceremoniously to me and walks away to attend to their orders.

Bruno doesn’t work. What was he doing here then?

When Paul comes back, I try another tactic. “I love Van Gogh because of his coffee obsession — in Arles he lived on coffee and bread. It’s there that he tried to kill his friend and fellow artist Gauguin.”

Paul takes his time cutting a thick, wobbly slice of creamy chocolate cake for the order, but I know I have his attention. Finally he answers, “Ma’am, Van Gogh was a poor man.”

I wait for him to deliver the cake. “Paul, by the way, my name’s Arnya, I’d like to hear more about your project — re-enacting that painting… What was it?”

I win his interest.

“Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters. It’s Bruno’s project, more Bruno’s than mine, to turn it into ‘The Coffee Drinkers’.” He prepares another coffee for me. This time he leaves me without a nod and attends to other patrons.

I spend some time digesting our fractured conversation and cast occasional glances to Jose, the Siamese fighting fish, as I sway dreamily in my stool to the rhythm of a song: Marlene Dietrich’s interpretation of ‘You’re The Cream In My Coffee’. I am familiar with the other recordings, too: Frank Sinatra, Debbie Reynolds, Nat King Cole, the latter is my favourite. As always, Dietrich is putting on an act, this time singing.

Soon I am on my way out. First I have to pay for the coffees and leave a tip for Paul.

I am mean on tips.

Outside it’s not raining much but because I carry the umbrella lent to me by the hotel receptionist, I decide to use it. It’s monocoloured; grey to match the sky, my sagging mood and the rising question, where is he now?

I still have a whole day to fill before packing and I make a quick plan: a leisurely stroll, a visit to a gallery, a small lunch and a look at the train timetable. Finding another cafe in Basel where to hang out for a couple of hours would do me good for sure. If I don’t like the music there, I can listen to my own.

The decision to choose music history for my university studies had to do also with the fact that most of the famous composers and musicians were, let’s use the local term: coffee animals. Mendelssohn, Liszt and Toscanini, for example, were regular customers of the Greco Cafe, the first coffee house in Rome that opened in 1763 just around Piazza di Spagna and is still thriving.

Perhaps I’ll head for Rome. First Milan, then Rome. It’s time to move.

To move on.

It’s getting cold. I exhale, the mist of my breath hangs inside the grey umbrella and triggers other episodes of my childhood to unfold backwards.

*

A favourite game was to draw on a breath-fogged glass. We would pick out a window and blow against the glass pane. The result was a breath-coated patch that demanded a quick artistic performance. I usually managed some scribbles and doodles, but Dimm’s approach was serious. “I want to draw words that are difficult to claim, words like ‘freedom’,” he would say, and press his hands down onto the shrinking ‘canvas’ as if determined to leave a message for generations to come. My breath was thin and shallow, and my puff of mist disappeared even before I had started to swipe my finger over it, but his breath was full of phlegm, and would leave a longer-lasting patch to draw on. Sometimes, he would use only his crooked little finger to mark some tiny lines, whispering, “This is a herd of elephants slaughtered for white piano keys.”

I started to cry over the slaughtered elephants when Madam Sonya appeared.

“Why is Puppe crying?” she asked. “I have all the reasons to cry, but I don’t cry. “Have you got a cigarette?” she said giving Dimm a glance like a search-over.

From an inside pocket of his jacket, Dimm produced a box of Rodopi cigarettes without a filter and offered it to Madam Sonya.

“I am taking two cigarettes,” she declared greedily eyeing the full box and snatching three with her long-nailed manicured fingers like owl talons.

“Don’t you want to light one?” Dimm asked her.

“If you insist,” she purred. This time she fiddled choosing a cigarette as if they were all different, then finally stuck one in her mouth and waited.

I was always in awe of the way people created a long ceremonial event out of a simple thing like lighting a cigarette. This time I wasn’t disappointed either.

Dimm slipped out his Zippo with a gesture borrowed from a gangster film and with a fist wrapped around the flame he offered it to Madam Sonya. The game began: the flickering flame and the tip of the cigarette dancing around each other, delaying the touch in a mockingly serious pantomime. Dimm’s thumb casually straying, sliding under her chin, her both hands suddenly cupping over his as if there was wind in the room ready to blow the flame out. Finally, she took a long puff and slowly and very reluctantly let go of him. I sighed in relief and waited for her to choke on the harsh tobacco. I had all the reasons to hate her. It didn’t help that at the time Madam Sonya declared herself to be my etiquette guru and watched me closely to see whether I used the fork and the knife properly. “Don’t lean down to your plate, bring the food up to your mouth elegantly in small morsels, chew it well, without smacking, keep your mouth closed while you chew, never talk with a full mouth. Then we have to do something about your posture.” She went to the bookshelves and returned with the fat volume of Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers and a couple of Emile Zola’s novels, full of sexual references, on which I had started to exercise my reading skills. Then she ordered me to walk around the house with the books on my head, keeping my balance so they wouldn’t fall.

“And never squash flies in the air by slapping your hands. It’s not bon ton.” Madam Sonya instructed me.

I bared my teeth at her. “Dimm taught me to develop good reflexes: flies are quick and if I get one in the air that means I am quick. Dimm also folds birds out of paper, flies them around the room and I feed them,” I boasted.

A moan of desperation came from the kitchen.

A bread knife in hand, Nadya appeared at the door, but she was quickly distracted by Madam Sonya, “Nadya, can you imagine what simpletons the proletariat artists are, one has painted a nature mort and the knife on the table was with its sharp side pointing to the right!” There was a pause. Then Madam Sonya went to Nadya, embraced her and started to cry. “In a week’s time I’ll be turning fifty-nine. The bastards took my life. They executed him as ‘an enemy of the people’. What enemy of the people was my poor husband, working all his life, importing textiles from England for the tailors’ shops on Serdica Street where all the brothels were and men’s attire was selling quickly? He would have been sixty-nine, Nadya. It was so French, so chic; the two of us in a sixty-nine clinch.”

“Not in front of the child,” mumbled Nadya, pulling herself away and running back to the kitchen summoned from the smell of burning oil.

I immediately wrote down the number sixty-nine, but it came out as a curly doodle, so I dropped Nadya’s shopping list on which I scribbled and pulled out the heavy typewriter, standing on its back in a black box in the small niche between the bookcase and the adjacent wall. The lid was always dusty, and in between a series of sneezes I undid the lock and dragged the typewriter out. It was a big no-no, because it had once belonged to my grandfather, whose nature and appearance I had to guess through what he had left behind, besides Dimm and Margherita, like this typewriter, a pair of round metal-rimmed glasses, a pince-nez, a silver letter opener with a gravure handle, a mahogany pipe, a black marble inkpot and blotting paper stand, the books in leather binding, an automatic ink pen with a golden nib, and an artificial eye. He lost his own when they sent a parcel with an explosive in it to him. Nadya and Dimm talked often about the attempt on his life after something that he wrote in a newspaper against Nazi Germany.

And the gun. Nobody knew that I knew about the gun. They all thought that hiding it out of my reach on top of the bookcase, almost touching the ceiling, inside a fake volume of Dostoyevsky was a good idea, but I was able to find easy access to each spot in the apartment, so it was only a matter of time before I found the gun, using a shaky ladder comprised of a kitchen chair plus the adjustable piano stool. And the bullets. My grandfather must have needed them, too.

I inserted a scrap of paper from Dimm’s university notes and typed 69. The digits looked like two tadpoles. It wasn’t worth the effort to struggle with the heavy typewriter that, in a way, was so similar to the piano; the metal and glass keys, the hammers producing letters and sounds, the two rolls of inked tape, the lever to pull after each line. The word Remington was written in Latin letters on the front. I was getting familiar with Latin letters, and could also read the name on the radio, Koerting. Dimm showed me how it was sealed inside by the authorities so we couldn’t listen to BBC but only to Radio Sofia and Radio Moscow.

*

Numberless masterpieces must have been written on Remington typewriters, I mull dreamily walking down a narrow Basel street, this time away from the hypnotic swell of the Rhine. It escapes me how exactly I have turned up at the small shop the size of a horse float, facing the dark-skinned woman in the same bright, colourful cotton wrap who looks immune to the local climate. She attends vigilantly to the two fires and must have noticed me before I approach, because when I stop in front of her she is ready with my coffee. I take it and smile. She smiles back with the corners of her eyes and the grit of fine wrinkles tells me she is not young.

Then I see him.

The same black trench coat (almost like mine), the collar up, a fragile fence against the cold breeze. I drink my coffee in silence under his watchful gaze and suddenly know that by coming here I have passed a test that is important to him.

An Italian couple stops by and I have to move aside and make room for them to order. By doing this, I brush involuntarily against Bruno because he doesn’t step back. The effect of the touch is like a high voltage electricity discharge. I can’t think properly. I don’t even remember whether Ethiopia was once an Italian colony. Maybe it was then when the Italians sucked in the raw power and understanding of coffee.

I finish the cup which remains pleasantly warm from the drink. We still haven’t exchanged a word but Bruno takes my hand and I follow him.

We walk side-by-side with my heart in the fast lane. Anticipation, greed, insecurities, love scenes from the previous night, aggressiveness, all melt in one. The consuming desire for him makes my sluggish blood boil; I take off the scarf I wear half-hidden under my jumper.

When we reach his place — a modern refurbished apartment on the last, third floor of a 19th century building — I finally talk. I ask for water.

He brings a glass and remains silent.

Soon the clothes peel off me like coffee husks.

He lets me lie down on my stomach and pours oil — the fragrance is a mixture of patchouli, ylang-ylang, wild rose, and mandarin — on my back. He encroaches me, his hands sliding up and down, creating a decadent orgy of senses. Rubbing up and down my spine, between my ribs, exerting pressure on spots so sore each could be the dwelling of my soul. His hands are gaining power over me like the hands of the young bath attendants who took care of my dirty heels and ears when the hot water was scarce and Nadya was sick of washing my bottom and scrubbing my face with the cold mountain water that ran from the taps on Tolbuhin Boulevard.

Unoticeably I slip away to another corner of the world, to another time, a place inhabited by people I loved and love.

*

For half the year, a big coal stove in the kitchen heated the boiler in the bathroom, starting from the first cool autumn days and finishing towards the end of April when spring permitted sleeveless attire. The rest of the year, we heated water in huge pots and filled the bathtub and containers for a rinse, or Nadya took me by the hand and, after a short ride on tram number two, we arrived at the mineral water bathhouse.

Nadya was adamant when it came to bath attendants, and they were all her friends. She tipped them generously because they put enormous effort into scrubbing her and, to my terror, also into scrubbing me.

While they were working on her, chafing her plum and white skin until it turned red under the coarse, fingerless gloves, and scouring her heels and elbows down to a bruise with pumice stone, I would disappear into the mineral water pool, causing turbulence and unnerving the women who were soaking peacefully, until a representative of the order, dressed in a white coat, would ask me to stop playing.

The bathhouse was a source of strange words, which served to enrich my vocabulary. There was tass, a metal bowl to scoop hot water from the kurna, which was a floor-level tiled sink with seats on both sides, and kir, the grime coming off my skin in rolls and flakes.

For a better result, first we had to soak in the pool, or stay in the steamy, sulphurous, tiled place full of naked women of different dimensions. Dimm used to say that being a bath attendant was the only other profession where one had to perform naked.

“What’s the first?” I was eager to learn about life.

“I am not supposed to tell you everything, am I?” he winked at me teasingly, but I knew it had something to do with Mimi, the Brazilian.

As for the bath attendants, I was curious about them, especially Rosa, the youngest, who was beautiful. She had velvet, milky skin, dark stormy eyes, chestnut hair pulled up into a rich, fluffy bun, and an hourglass figure that was suave and feminine, while her legs, which were on the shorter side, were well-shaped and smooth. When we happened to be with her, it wasn’t necessary for Nadya to drag me out of the pool and deliver me into Rosa’s hands. I didn’t stray then, but waited, because those hands not only took care of whatever dirt there was on my body but also released all the inner tension that I was starting to accumulate, despite my tender age. A particular feeling would overwhelm me whenever Rosa would sit on a small, low wooden chair in front of me and take my leg over her thigh, so she could rub the skin. Holding my ankle with one hand, the other hand, inside the coarse black cloth, would start to move from my toes up towards my thigh, her little apple-like breast resting snugly against my sole. Sometimes, my big toe would jerk and touch the dark, curly haired spot with an almost invisible slit, which she held exposed in a trusting, child-like way.

My perception was very different when, instead of Rosa, the skinny, wrinkled Nevena took a seat on the little chair and brandished her washrag. In her hands, I felt like an elephant being scrubbed with a coconut husk by an Indian carer, removing my dead skin in the Ganges River. Nevena used the crook of her elbow to hold me in place, and it hurt, but I had to put up with it. I got goosebumps and turned my head to watch the other women until, by the end, I started to think that it wasn’t natural that there should be so much ugliness under one roof. These women were nothing like Margherita or Dimm’s fellow students. Here, it was all sagging tits, draped buttocks, orange-skinned bellies, ganglia of varicose veins, bald tired-of-life pussies, hairy armpits, and faces that looked attractive only when compared with the large tap handles. The steam didn’t help to disguise the grotesque abundance of loose flesh and the smell of half-boiled decaying bodies, flopping around on wooden platform sandals called nalymi. Chlop, chlop, tack, tack. That was the ridiculous song of those wooden platforms, turned into shoes with the help of a rubber strap held in place by four nails, two on each side. Often, the nails worked loose and a woman would lose a nalym or two, or slip and strike a dangerous tile edge, metal railing, or shower skeleton. The showers were only for a rinse, or for those who were in a hurry or didn’t have money for a proper bath, where the attendants were paid generously.

Because they worked naked, Rosa and Nevena had found different ways to tuck away the tips given to them by grateful customers. Nevena had a plastic bag fastened around her neck, like a third sagging tit, but differing in size depending on whether it was the beginning or the end of her shift. Rosa also used a plastic bag, but would hang it behind her in a shower cabin from which the tap handles had been removed. The amount of the tip was important, not only for energetic scrubbing, but also because it gave us the opportunity to jump the queue and be taken straight away by Rosa or Nevena, whose knowing, invigorating hands exfoliated the dirt the way Bruno’s hands now exfoliates hurt out of my system.

*

I want more and more of it.

I want to make love to him, but he continues to exercise the power of his hands over me and remains blind to my hesitant attempts.

Perhaps I should rebel. The spirit of the coffee is rebellious. The French revolution was born in French cafes in 1789 when the Parisians took to the streets and two days later the Bastille fell, changing France forever.

But I don’t feel like rebelling.

It’s a moment that I find awkward and usually avoid: the second encounter. The curiosity is slipping away, the freshness is not there, and anonymity is compromised. One, however, is clear, when I talk to Bruno my words feel home. Whether we talk about coffee, Dimm or a little girl called ‘Puppe’.

So I tell Bruno about some of the stories I liked to read before I turned five. Stories like The Sleeping Beauty, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, The Adventures of Pinocchio, The Three Piglets, and, of course, my favourite, The Princess and the Pea. Then I tell Bruno about Dimm’s own bedtime stories which he used to tell me, like Snow White and Her Puss in Boots, or Little Red Riding Hood and her Seven Dwarfs, or The Town Musicians of Sofia and The Wonderful Wizard of the USSR.

Sometimes, he was really drunk.

Sometimes, he was not. Then he would tell me a story like this one.

“Puppe, you are a little girl, and I’ll tell you the story of another child, a boy named Kaldi. He lived in Africa long ago.” Dimm would pull out a map of the world and point at a spot in the north-eastern part of the continent where the land was shaped like a horn and ‘Ethiopia’ was written, and beneath it in brackets with smaller letters, ‘Abyssinia’. Then, Dimm would start the story, as if he was that little boy, Kaldi, snuggling in Dimm’s voice like in a shepherd’s hooded cloak, reaching out to me across time. And I’d start the journey with him.

“It’s the year 850. In Kaffa, at noon the sun kills the shadows, and the goats gather around the shrubs with bright red berries along the mountain path to nibble on them. The berries quench their thirst, the goats become frisky, running boisterously in the heat, their kids playfully butting each other.” Dimm’s voice changed to bring a new, strange world, Kaldi’s world, into the little room where I shared a bed with Nadya.

I tried to imagine that boy Kaldi. Was he my age, or a bit older, say, like my cousin Assen-Nessim? Was Kaldi happier than me, did he have more toys or someone to love him the way Dimm loved me, telling him bedtime stories like this one, Kaldi’s own story that goes like this:

“When the red wind starts to blow, it carries sand with it, and I rub my eyes. Baba removes the gauze cloth he wears around his neck and wraps it around my head.”

Here Dimm stopped to explain to me that at that place children called their father baba.

“So I can call you baba, can I?” I touched his moustache, trimmed and prickly.

Dimm remained sad and took my hand in his. His hand was smooth as the marble ink pot with a dry well in the corner of the library shelf, warm like the funny walnut wood scrolls decorating his favourite armchair, rustling like the rice paper some old, fat books were printed on.

Then we both burst out laughing. ‘Baba’ in Bulgarian meant grandmother. A name that I should have kept for Nadya if she weren’t as a mother to me.

After we had settled down, Dimm continued, imitating like a real actor the voice and intonation of a little boy and a goat herder.

I wished the story would never finish. But it did as my eyes were closing and I was succumbing to the no-man’s land of sleep.

“Now, Puppe, you sleep, and dream of the red berries. They’ll be your little toys, your friends for the night.”

I opened my eyes and looked at him. An ashtray full of butts, some still burning, next to him balancing on a taboret, between a coffee mug and a glass with amber liquid at the bottom — cognac; his friends, his little toys, together with the piano, a big toy to play jazz on. Wrapped in Dimm’s unconditional love, feeling like I was at the centre of the universe, I fell asleep, sucking my thumb, dreaming of red berries.

There was still no sign of the evil spirits my mother was so afraid of, the ones lurking in the shadows, eavesdropping, watching, waiting for the right moment to strike, spying to find out who listened to jazz music, to the BBC, who talked out against the regime.

*

I have to tell Bruno the bedtime story of the little boy Kaldi and his baba that Dimm used to tell me. It is the first thought that comes to me as I stretch out of the embryo-like position I have assumed during the night, curled nesting with my back to him in his arms.

Light seeps through the tiny cracks in the shutters.

Bruno gets out of bed. It’s on the floor, oriental-style. I look at his well-shaped body, similar to the ones seen in Renaissance paintings. Muscles, ligaments, bones, veins, pulsating under skin that has a mother-of-pearl glow, not unlike some mild-looking but invigorating Columbian beans.

“I’ll make the coffee,” he trumpets amiably.

I cringe. “Please, let me do it! Only in 18th century America did they use one tablespoon of coffee for each pint of water, besides they boiled it for anywhere from twenty minutes to an entire day.”

“My guess is you prefer a bonbon of coffee rolled in fat, like in the old Arab recipes, don’t you?”

I fight my morning drowsiness. “Let’s be serious! Dark roasted, full-bodied Sumatra Mandheling will do!”

He wolf-whistles.

“Ebony colour!” I continue.

He rolls his eyes. “More demands? No problem. I’ll be your coffee servant until you are my love slave!” He wraps a pullover around himself and ties the sleeves, which hang down over his groin, swaying. On his left thigh, I can see his lion tattoo.

All of a sudden, I’m afraid to visit the bathroom. What if Bruno is a serial killer? A knife-wielding ripper, tying me up, running hot water for me in the tub while looking lovingly at the blue veins on my wrists.

A bitter smile cracks my lips. Arnya Stefan, a notorious disaster-magnet, finds her death at the hands of a maniac while enjoying a jacuzzi-soak. I almost see a young female reporter biting into the story.

While Bruno is in the kitchen, opening and closing doors, drawers, jars, I look around. My suspicion that I have transported myself to a shrine somewhere in Thailand turns into certainty. The walls are covered with paintings, woodcarvings, textile pieces, miniatures on stands. Elephants, Buddhas, ornaments in gold, landscapes with rice paddies, temples, floating markets. I like Thai culture, but another stray thought starts to torment me: Is Bruno visiting that part of the world as one of those middle-aged creeps salivating over tiny, smooth-skinned girls and boys, gentle and submissive, cheap and grateful? Afraid that more sickly thoughts will enter my head, I jump up and stumble over a pile of cushions with embroidered lotuses and carp fish.

“My father was a doctor.” Bruno meets me on the way to the bathroom. “He worked for the Red Cross, spent years in Thailand.”

I run to sit on the toilet, suddenly feeling pressure on my bladder.

“He was a doctor who couldn’t stand sick people.”

I turn on the tap and let the water run into the sink. His voice continues to trail to me. “After my father died, I sold the family house, and now I rent. This two-room flat costs me a packet because it’s in the old town, but I’ve become fond of all the bric-a-brac my father collected, so I keep it.”

I've finished in the bathroom and am now hungry and thirsty. It must have been some twelve or more hours of bed-ridden activities interrupted by chocolate munching breaks.

In the kitchen Bruno is cooking scrambled eggs, still in the same outfit, a pullover wrapped in a biblical fashion.

“I had a dilemma: keep the house and work until I turned into a senile, tremor-stricken cuckoo, or sell the house, rent and live on the money.”

“You said ‘family house’.”

He gets the hidden question. “No, no family.”

“Not now, or… ” I can’t believe I am pushing for an answer.

“Arnya, I’ve been in one long-term relationship if that’s what you want to know, but she was already married. To her work. She was supposed to plan her holidays. She would refuse to go to a party or a concert if she had to get up early the following day. She never told me what she was doing in that office. It occurs to me now that probably I never asked.”

“How about you? Have you ever had a job?”

“My father trained me as a nurse, but I got the diving bug and volunteered for a green movement to save giant green turtles. You wouldn’t believe how many green turtles die swallowing hooks and fishermen lines or getting entangled in sharks’ nets!”

I can see him: a dark, suavely moving shadow in deep waters, his flippers making look like an amphibian. Water. The water world. The ocean. The second planet full of life different from ours. I hope he also saves the green turtles from the tags they staple on their flippers, or from the cameras they stuck around their necks; the mighty man, the Big Brother watching the intimate life of an innocent ocean creature, how she eats, how she mates, how she lays her eggs in a pit which she digs with her stump-like flippers somewhere in the Pacific, perhaps on a Yasawa Fiji island, she plops her eggs surrounded by seagulls waiting to feast on her unborn babies, she cries and covers her eggs as good as she can with her stump-like flippers, then she goes back to the ocean, back to life.

“How about you, Ms Stefan?” Bruno touches my arm.

I am unprepared. I have hardly stayed long enough to share my private life with a man I have bedded, so I haven’t got a story ready to tell.

“Odd jobs, and as I said, I write… ”

“It’s not the writing age, you know.” He makes it sound like the Stone Age. At least he produces perfect scrambled eggs with crumbled Raclette cheese. The moment he splashes some of the mixture onto a plate, I dig my fork in and start chewing.

Hunger has been taken care of.

Still thirsty, I am also cold. The central heating is doing a good job, but I don’t wear much. Another pullover, which I spot among the cushions, is soon wrapped under my armpits and tightened in front.

“How about your mother?” I ask.

Bruno darts a hostile glance at me. I feel embarrassed. I talk with a mouth full of toast and jam, which he also provides. The jam is made of grated orange peel.

“How do you like your men? Bearded or closely shaven?” He ignores my question about his mother.

“Closely bearded,” I answer, guiding a reluctant piece of syrupy orange back into my mouth.

He is preparing my coffee now decorating the crema with milk froth in the shape of a heart. The blob wobbles and slips out of the overfilled cup. Bruno tries new decorations like pictograms similar to the crop circles that appear in the wheat fields of England and are rumoured to be coded cosmic messages.

I can’t crack the code of Bruno’s message.

“How very barista!” I exclaim while I sip the pictogram coffee.

He doesn’t react.

I leave the coffee to cool down. I like that it’s thick and sticky. I need it thick and sticky.

Soon we go back to bed, back to sex and more observations like, “On Mars, they don’t look for coffee, they look for water!” We continue to cautiously explore each other; advancing slowly towards the mythical light at the end of the tunnels, rocks drilled in for explosives, then abruptly we stop at a sudden archaeological site, a fine brush in hand, dusting, lips blowing away a film of burial rites still lingering around, ashes, skeletons of dead loves and hopes, our fingers cringe at the touch of their own fingerprints, recognising the smell of dried blood under the nails.

I start to like it on the floor.

I start to like Bruno’s guttural whisper, “Once, I had a coffee with the Masai Mara warriors after doing their jumping dance. Arnya, I bought some lovely bead strings made by the women in the Masai manyatta village. I’ll give them to my wife one day, they are better than a diamond ring.”

I roll over and quieten my breathing. Then I reach for the cup with thick and sticky coffee. It’s cold by now and cold coffee may look like an oil spill, but I start to smear it on Bruno’s body: his neck and the small well at the base of it, his chest and in the furrow between his nipples, his belly and the small well of his navel, then I clean it with my lips sucking on his chin, his collar-bones, his nipples, my tongue drying the well of his navel. I have another sip of the remaining coffee and share it with his cock that looks just like another tongue playing with mine.

Bruno moans under me. I have him as a prisoner, a prisoner of the pleasure I give him. The power game. I am winning it.

A sudden fierce screech of brakes and a deafening thunder. Bruno jumps and swaying rushes to the window.

I remain on the floor with a face smeared with coffee and flaky traces of semen, invaded by a blurred feeling that my mother’s nurturing breast has been taken away from me.

Bruno comes back. “Nothing serious,” he comments kneeling beside me.

But the screeching noise continues and has the decibels of a Metallica concert. I plug my ears with my hands. Yet I know the sound is now raging from within me: metal scraping metal, glass incising glass. The diamond needle screeching, skipping on a Duke Ellington song. Noises in my head loosen; nailed boots echoing through the stairwell, growls of pain.

I want to get up but sway and sag back, closing my eyes to shut out the vertigo. The walls advance, turning the room into a landing, a man is falling into the jaws of darkness. Dimm, don’t go!

“Arnya, are you all right?” He scoops my trembling body. “I am not going to hurt you. Tell me what’s wrong.”

He holds me tight, it hurts.

When you love, you get hurt; when you get hurt, you lick your wounds; when you lick your wounds, you feel sorry for yourself; when you feel sorry for yourself, you fall in love again; when you fall in love, you get hurt; when you get hurt…

I grasp his hand. Panic attacks make me clingy. “Tell me about Africa.”

Africa, dark like a black buffalo, frightening masks to ward off evil spirits like the ones Margherita was afraid of, vuka-vuka the aphrodisiac made of red-and-yellow striped Myalabris beetles, copper bangles clinking in the rhythm of the Zulu warriors’ dance, Madam Sonya had golden ones. Africa, the birthplace of coffee and mankind.

Panic attacks make me chatty so I don’t wait for him but start talking first, my all-time mantra.

“Naples is a great place to drink coffee.” My teeth are chattering. “So is the floating casino of Macau. So is Brisbane’s West End where I live and where I met that Greek man. He was my lover if you can call him one. It was mid-afternoon when it all started and the sun, hot and dangerous — it’s always hot and dangerous in Queensland — hung over the hypnotic Brisbane River, her movement jazz-arranged, syncopated, no longer the Brisbane River but the Styx, boundary between Earth and the Underworld, Hades — where ancient Charon ferries the souls of the dead. The souls of my dead. I left the riverbank and walked along Boundary Street past sidewalk cafes, each with its own aromatic veil, and entered my favourite, Babylon. There I met the Greek barista.”

“The way you met me?” Bruno is supporting himself on his elbow, his body half-lifted as if suddenly finding himself too close to me.

“The way I met you. He was a barista like you.”

No reaction.

I continue, “He was a Mediterranean seducer. A mortal Greek god. He took me home with him. His house was a temple of love. I sat on the porch steps and through the open door watched Manoli giving a bath to his mitera.”

“We both need fresh air.” Bruno gets out of bed and starts to dress.

I decide not to argue mellowed by his tenderness and lovemaking, now graded Kenyan A/A mixed 50/50 with Ethiopian Yirgacheffe on my scale of pleasures.

I also start dressing. And it’s then I crack down.

I sob and yell, and then dig my nails into my palms while I pour out all my bitterness and resentment, all my spite and hatred, all my maddening two-day old experience in the Basel Kaffee Klub. I hiss and spit, and swear at the ‘holy’ coryphées from the Secret Society of Coffee Sommeliers who ridiculed me over my ideas to interpret coffee: as a friend, a protector, a keeper of ancient secrets; over the fact that I am a woman. A woman trying to break into a man’s domain.

“Women were long ago involved in coffee dealings,” I fume. “How about Dorothy Jones of Boston that became the first American coffee trader. She was granted a license to sell coffee in 1670! They can’t pretend coffee is a male affair.”

He strokes my hair, then combs it with his fingers. “Life’s not meant to be fair, Arnya.”

As if I don’t know.

“When I met you I acted like a psycho because I was angry. For me, you were one of them: barista, mercenary. Now I know that you are different, you have erratic ideas like this one about re-enacting a Van Gogh’s painting. Presenting his canvas The Potato Eaters as ‘The Coffee Drinkers’. If you come to think, it’s crazy! Absolutely crazy! Why on earth, it has to be this canvas and not one of his cafe paintings?” I stare at him accusingly.

It is hard to believe that The Potato Eaters, a dark, sombre work from the artist’s early period: a labouring family in their dodgy home, eating potatoes, created when the artist was still away from the sunny landscape of Arles and the French Province, has come from the same brush as his other works with their vibrant, prickly colours. This canvas was created in 1885 when Vincent van Gogh was in Nuenen, Holland and even his brother Theo didn’t like it.

Bruno ignores my hostility. “The first cup is for the guest, the second for the enjoyment, the third for the sword,” he quotes an old Arab saying. “Fight them, Arnya! Pull out your sword and fight the self-conceited bastards disguised as coryphées.”

He caresses my shoulders, arranging my hair over them.

“I am ready to do it,” I say leaning against him.

He wraps his arms around me whispering to my hair. “That was the longest and most beautiful birthday I ever had.”

“Perhaps I can help you fight them,” he says louder and looks into my eyes. “Perhaps.” The distilled desire in his eyes makes them sparkle — a champagne coffee. Why not try it?

We kiss.

My teeth click against his. “Let me read you more of my coffee portraits.”

“Read.” His deep voice is singsong, hypnotic. “But first I want more of this.”

He kisses me. Again.

Then I see them. The hats. Exquisite female hats standing on their bottoms up like Royal Doulton porcelain creations, a feast of colours, materials and models, all open like flowers, like black holes, like coffee cups.

I don’t know what to think.

I don’t think.

Comment Log in or Join Tablo to comment on this chapter...

Latte Coffee Lovers

Comment Log in or Join Tablo to comment on this chapter...

Viennese Coffee Lovers

Comment Log in or Join Tablo to comment on this chapter...

Arctic Coffee Lovers

Comment Log in or Join Tablo to comment on this chapter...

Romano Coffee Lovers

Comment Log in or Join Tablo to comment on this chapter...

French Coffee Lovers

Comment Log in or Join Tablo to comment on this chapter...

Jamaican Coffee Lovers

Comment Log in or Join Tablo to comment on this chapter...

Flat White Coffee Lovers

Comment Log in or Join Tablo to comment on this chapter...

Afagato Coffee Lovers

Comment Log in or Join Tablo to comment on this chapter...

Moon Rider Coffee Lovers

Comment Log in or Join Tablo to comment on this chapter...

Doppio Coffee Lovers

Comment Log in or Join Tablo to comment on this chapter...

Scandinavian Coffee Lovers

Comment Log in or Join Tablo to comment on this chapter...
~

You might like ilinda markov's other books...