Читать книгу The Coffee Lovers - Ilinda Markov - Страница 3

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.