ONE
As an embryo, I must have been a coffee bean.
My prenatal waters were laced with coffee and, once born, I was happy to suckle latte as my mother’s milk. She was a coffee devotee, a fanatic, my mother, Margherita. The way people have a glass of water by their bed, fearing dehydration during sleep, she had a mug of coffee to sip on in case of a nightmare. She was, I think, in a way superstitious and believed coffee, her grano de oro, could ward off evil spirits better than garlic or the holy cross.
“Sleep, sleep, my dear; cats are playing lovers here. Ching, ching… ” Burlesque piano chords and a hoarse male voice for my lullaby, improvised, broken, syncopated by Margherita’s brother, Dimm. In the background, my mother veiled in aromatic steam, a medicine woman conjuring magic out of the black potion, a spell for her lover to call.
In my cot, I was rubbing and grinding my gums on coffee beans to ease my teething pain, anticipating the first finger dip, the first quick slurp, a stolen lick from a guest’s coffee cup, earning me a burnt, itchy tongue, a rebuke and a smack, but also praise, propelled by Dimm’s cognac-fermented vocal cords, “Bravo, Puppe! That’s my girl!”
Rapt, I oozed devotion for him, a smile out of my eyes, my lips, all my pores, my tiny hands pulling on his moustache, a moth in flight.
Dimm, my guru, my initiator, introducing me to the suave and velvet richness of coffee culture.
Introducing me to murder.
Coffee beans were the choice for chips when the family gathered for a game of poker: Margherita and Dimm, their mother, Nadya. Occasionally, one of Margherita’s lovers, or Nadya’s friend, Madam Sonya, would join us and the cards were dealt. Kent flesh royal, Broadway and wheel straight, one pair of aces, two pairs: kings and queens were laid on the table, and the small and aromatic brown mounds changed hands, leaving tiny traces of hull specks, a congregation of insects, beetles — Devil’s Coach Horses perhaps — rustling against each other. Behind the players’ backs I counted: ten of spades, five of diamonds, seven of spades, three of clubs, my first lessons in mathematics. In the background soft jazz music: Duke Ellington singing ‘Take The A Train’ or Glenn Miller’s ‘In The Mood’ muffled by the heavy curtains of our draught-infested flat in the centre of Sofia. A small missing window panel was replaced with a calendar that was upside down so if I kneeled on the floor and tilted my head to one side really low I could see a hammer and sickle crossed at their handles like a pair of scissors around the year 1954, as if ready to crop it.
We kept our voices low, but the night would bring heavy noises, columns of tanks crossing the city, their links scraping the surface of the paved Tolbuhin Boulevard, named after one of Stalin’s marshals, the cupolas open, young men with leather helmets stemming out of the battle machines like Cold War centaurs, guns targeting the starry sky.
Dimm chuckled, behind the tulle of cigarette smoke, flashing his spaced front teeth, an early stage of pyorrhea stripping off the gums around them, his moustache hanging over like a neatly manicured grass roof. In his hand a glass of cognac adding to the bouquet of fragrances coming from the Jebel Basma tobacco, sweet and nutty, grown on the gently cascading slopes of the Rhodopi Mountains that straddled the border between South Bulgaria and Greece, and from Madam Sonya’s French perfume Soir de Paris. “The enemy doesn’t sleep,” he quoted mockingly. A popular slogan of the day.
“Not in front of the child!” Nadya warned him.
I winced. I was five at the time, and staying up late, doing small jobs for the players like bringing a fresh supply of cigarettes or emptying the ashtrays into the flower pots, finding a clean handkerchief if it was flu season, or opening boxes of shortbread biscuits and Turkish delight. This made me feel part of the fascinating world of the adults where everything was allowed. Like the playful slap that Madam Sonya gave Dimm with the back of her gloved hand.
It made me furious.
Madam Sonya was not supposed to see Nadya because their gathering was considered a concentration of bourgeois elements in one place, which was strictly prohibited. The widow of a once wealthy wine dealer, she was secretly teaching lessons in French. She was Nadya’s age, but looked younger and associated better with Margherita and Dimm. Now she joined his chuckle, adding falsetto notes. “Not in front of the child, you lucky one,” she droned teasingly, watching Dimm scoop coffee beans from under her nose after beating her two of aces with his three of aces — spaced teeth were believed to bring good fortune. I smeared marmalade on the inside of her jacket and observed the silk lining soak it up profusely.
Whoever won the poker game had to grind the ‘chips’ and prepare a cup for each of the players. Usually it was Dimm who would produce a series of full houses, and all of us gathered around the coffee pot on the kitchen table, hot and dangerous, the strong revitalising aroma escaping the lid, everybody repeating, “Italian, Italian…”, meaning different, good quality, not like the stale, dull, lifeless stuff the Armenian shopkeeper at the corner sold, the mechanical brass mill with a three-joint handle a toy in his hairy hands as he powdered the coffee we boiled at home.
Bulgaria had been an Ottoman Empire province for five hundred years and many traditions came from the time when its cosmopolitan city of Istanbul, became the bridge for the triumphant march of coffee into Europe. At home, it was a ritual to offer the guests a cup of Turkish coffee, a glass of water, and a tiny saucer with homemade preserves, white cherries were the best. Fat and meaty, with tiny white worms’ glaze inside.
Our flat overlooked the Triangle 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