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