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