The Coffee Lovers: Memoirs of a Communist Princess

By ilinda markov

The Coffee Lovers, Memoirs of a Communist Princess possesses the seductive charm of Joanne Harris’s book Chocolat and is an answer to Ian McEwan’s Atonement. It’s a book about sultry love and broken hearts against the backdrop of famous coffee venues around the world, a book about the history of coffee culture and celebrities like Einstein, Napoleon and Casanova, all fervent coffee lovers.
Beautiful and ambitious, Arnya Stefan is a writer whose life could have been ideal if not for the panic attacks bringing back memories of her traumatic childhood. As a little girl in communist Bulgaria she betrays her family and their dangerous secrets.
Now Arnya travels the world in search of the perfect red berry drink. In Switzerland she meets another “coffee animal”, Bruno Stein. In his arms she will again learn to walk in the present, savouring life like a superb, delicious cup of coffee.

Can Bruno’s love make her forget or it’s just another illusion?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tablo Publishing
• Release date: Apr 3, 2019
• ISBN: 9781925939330

Book preview

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 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,