Читать книгу The Coffee Lovers - Ilinda Markov - Страница 1

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 Square — a 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.