The Coffee Lovers. Ilinda Markov

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, as if it was one of Nadya’s garters. Sometimes, while playing with my dolls, I would tell them that I was a real princess from a communist tsar’s family. To prove this, I would put a coffee bean under my mattress and say, “You see, I can’t fall asleep because I feel this small coffee bean, even smaller than the pea from the tale about that other princess that Nadya reads to me.” I fancied that I was named Arnya after Papa-Great Andrei, and soon I’d grow out of my pet name Puppe. Most of the time I had to keep this princess thing to myself. I knew it would not go down well with Dimm.

      As it didn’t go down well with him when Papa-Great Andrei would invite me to visit him in his enormous Russian luxury ZIS car, inside which I left chocolate marks everywhere because, yes, there would be real chocolates for Puppe. “Lucky child,” Papa-Great Andrei called me. “You don’t know how lucky you are, you are going to live in the communism, which we are going to build after we finish building the socialism.” “Will Vladimir also live in commanism?” I asked about his eldest son, my favourite among Andrei’s three children. “Oh, he’ll be engineering it!” Andrei exclaimed pinching my nose. “I love you Papa-Great!” I droned. “The other children have a marmalade moustache, I have a chocolate moustache and Dimm has… ” But he was already getting off in front of the yellow building of the National Assembly ordering his driver Simo to take me home. Now I had the whole car for myself and Simo kept a blind eye on me when I rolled on the thick handwoven carpets in the big saloon in the back of the car and opened the cabinet with drinks to ‘expropriate’ a small flat bottle of whiskey for Dimm. But when I told Simo that Nadya was waiting to take me for a walk to the Sofia Central Prison for news of her younger brother who was sent some months ago to a forced-labour-camp, Simo sank into a deep silence and the scowl that dug two deep grooves between his brows never left his face.

      That was my childhood, a schizophrenic existence, a swaying pendulum reaching the uttermost extremities within a split second.

      The red ruby star erected on the roof of the Communist Party House next to the building of the National Assembly was part of the new monolithic architectural centre copying, like everything else, the Moscow architecture of the day. In the dark and from afar the star reminded me of a red berry, juicy and shiny. I felt guilty for loving the red star because Dimm hated it. It was love for a red berry in the night sky of Sofia pulsating in the dark that made me feel bad.

      As if reading my mind Dimm smiled sadly and broke the silence. A nerve was twitching on his cheek when he said, “This chess game drives you nuts. I've got this doctor friend. He has a theory. He says that if people dance for half an hour each day, the loony bins will be closed down. As for me, I don't believe all that jazz. Bullshit! He-he! Jumping around as if someone had stuck a chilli up your arse can prevent you from going mad? No way! Puppe, listen, my liver, my piles and my gall bladder are having their own contest. The winner will help me die happily in my old age.”

      After a small pause, a gentle musical rest, he sighed. “I don’t want to die young.”

      A tear like a stray half note crawled along his eye. I touched it and licked my finger.

      “Let’s play our game,” he said.

      The game was to quickly blabber words beginning with the same letter until one of us ran out of them.

      “Let’s have ‘D’ for Dimm,” I suggested, totally rapt by the intimacy that elevated me to the status of an adult.