The Coffee Lovers. Ilinda Markov

completely forgetting the now distant withdrawal symptoms, the uneven heartbeat, cold sweats, dry, parched lips.

      Soon we drink in silence, the coffee made the way they used to make it in Africa a thousand of years ago. The hypnotic liquid slips around my tongue, hangs on my palate, the aroma fumes out of my nostrils, bringing mist to my eyes.

      I want to return to my empty hotel room.

      I leave the chestnuts with the woman in the bright coloured cotton wrap and take Bruno with me. We walk in silence. His fingers are tracing mine as if reading the Braille alphabet.

      I remember that I have to hate him.

      “Bruno,” I begin, but it doesn’t work. My initial emotional charge has subsided, shrunk, vanished. My screams, whines and sobs are suppressed, squashed, desiccated. Hours ago, I was ready to grieve for my humiliation, for the burial of my cherished dream to break into the Secret Society of the Coffee Sommeliers; I wanted to throw myself onto the floor and go into a trance or a tantrum. Not now. The moment has passed, leaving me an unexploded shell in care of the sappers, leaving me with the bitterness and tingling anticipation of a night with a barista, an executor of the coffee industry’s blunt greed for money. Coffee money.

      We walk side-by-side. The few streets are just a teaser.

      Anonymous, oblivious, we step into each other’s lives sex-hungry and impatient. Soon, we are like two moles, blind to the sun, hidden in underground tunnels, listening to the howling wilderness. The termite monoliths are like tombstones in the Land of the Lots of Time where the Afghan cameleer postman travels for days to deliver a letter. For one name.

      Bruno. The enemy.

      He lies spent, his cock, moist, shiny and limp, still responding to my hand like a sleepy pet.

      “Today I learnt an Ethiopian prayer,” he says and with his eyes closed he chants, “Coffee pot, give us peace,/ coffee pot, let children grow,/ let our wealth swell,/ please protect us from evils… ”

      I sigh. Our family coffee pot in Sofia didn’t protect us from evil.

      There’s something banal about making love to a stranger in a hotel room full of the ghosts of previous lovers. You can almost hear their moans of pleasure or subdued squabbles, the pop of champagne or beer bottles, the surfing of the adults-only channels, desire like a certificate for being alive, genuine or commercial.

      I kiss Bruno’s closed eyes. My thoughts are like migrating birds that find sanctuary in a field of Arabica plants.

      It’s way after midnight. The curfew hour for all ghosts but mine.

      Bruno’s hands wrap me like the old, green corduroy robe of my mother, Margherita.

      *

      She was never at home, my beautiful mother, Margherita. Her absence turned me into a mother-scent fetishist. I went around our flat picking up her belongings and surrounding myself with them, hording them. Sometimes, Nadya would see me doing it and a bitter look would appear on her face. I loved Nadya, but I found her boring. She was my devoted servant.

      Meanwhile, coffee sucking took over from my thumb-sucking habit. I had a pronounced cannibalistic taste, so as a little Puppe, at the age of five and six I chewed also on my toes. It was an exhilarating experience for which I was envied by the adults around me as I kept asking Dimm, Nadya, Margherita, her ever changing lovers and Madam Sonya whether they could do the same: lie on their back and bring their toes to their mouth. No one could, so I was wondering whether it was so great for me to grow up quickly and turn into an adult depriving myself of joyful hours of sticking my chubby toes between my teeth or even combing my hair with them. But there was another delight waiting for me when I swapped my thumbs and toes for my pyjama collar. The edges were perfect to nibble on, to suck on. Made of cotton, silk, or some other friendly material, they felt good between my front milk teeth, and then between the gap they left in my mouth when they finally were pulled out the usual way: a sound cotton thread tied around each of them, the other end of the thread tied around the door handle, the wind slamming the door unexpectedly, my poor tooth hung, then embedded like a precious stone in a thin golden ring.

      The longer and sharper the collar was, the more I favoured the nightwear. The best one was a pair of satin pyjamas, striped in grey and purple. With its collar’s edge in my mouth, I would fall into a deep and happy sleep. The satin pyjamas only real rivals were my big toes. I was in love with them, and continued to keep them tucked into my mouth, where they felt warm and secure. Sometimes, I would snitch Margherita’s high-heeled shoes, which were made of snakeskin, a guilty reminder of pre-war times, when luxury was not a dirty bourgeois word in Bulgaria, when Dimm played jazz with the Ovcharov Band without needing to hide. On lucky days, I could also lay my hands on Margherita’s green corduroy robe, which had soft material in sand-ceramic tones running down the front on both sides of the long zipper. It was tight in the waist, for my mother’s was notoriously small, a la Scarlett O’Hara. It was a dream, this robe, the corduroy warm, downy and friable. My mother Margherita’s corduroy. She was not there for me, but her cuddly robe was. Even thrown across a random chair, this velvet extravaganza carried her scent like nothing else. I would stand near it, gaping at it, touching it, sniffing it, feeling it.

      The extraordinary robe had a long life, and years later I started to wear it, even though it was already faded, worn out, threadbare in places, yet still full of life and warmth, multicoloured like a rare parrot, lawny green from here to infinity. I imagined I was Margherita, grown up, a true woman, men falling on their noses at the sight of me. It was their luck that most of the furniture in the house was soft and inviting. Around the dining table, the chairs were thickly padded, covered in plush teddy-bear-like material, light and dark, shiny brown. But I liked the glazed-tile stoves, the dressing tables, the low auxiliary chairs, and wardrobes in dark, solid wood, carved in round patterns. On top of the wardrobes were huge, round cardboard hatboxes.

      The fancy hats were another source of awe. No woman in the household would dare to wear them on the streets. Hats were bourgeois — hence bad — forbidden, bringing shame and danger. Dimm was once spotted wearing a Fedora hat and it was confiscated. Dimm was in more trouble with the militia. When he arrived home and was telling us the story, he gave me a wink. I quickly ran out of the room and returned with his favourite mouse-grey felt hat, which he kept carefully sprinkled in naphthalene and wrapped in Margherita’s old floral dress so the moths couldn’t eat it, in the back of his wardrobe. The shiny naphthalene flakes made me sneeze and Dimm laughed as he took the hat and placed it ceremoniously on his beautiful head with his Roman profile, his flared nostrils showing a short-fuse temper, sexual omnivorousness, alcohol addiction, and a severe case of coffee passion or poison.

      That night each one in the family decided to wear a hat for dinner.

      Dimm kept his mouse-grey felt hat on, Margherita came up with a turban-like, olive-green extravaganza with a huge pearl pin, Nadya’s hat resembled the shape of a wide, flat shoe attached to her head with the help of a thin rubber string under her chin. For me, they had an embroidered piece of cloth that made me look like a real princess.

      The dinner was cabbage leftovers in lard.

      But Nadya produced her usual surprise scoop of Lavazza coffee in a two-handle cup and we were not in a hurry to brew it but passed it around and everyone smelled it, whispering, “Italian, Italian!”

      “Ma che profumo!” Margherita, once a student in the pre-war Italian school, Regina Scuola Italiana, forgot that Italian, another capitalist language, was better left alone. “Oh, what fragrance!” she kept repeating.

      *

      Like me, Bruno has drifted away, breathing evenly.

      I stretch and press my head against his body. I find it smooth and appealing. Soon I start to taste it sucking teasingly his lips, his fingers, earlobes — the golden stud feels like a small ice cube, each of his nipples, too. My tongue slides over the inside of his arms, his armpits are like caves with underground rivers, a simmering scent coming from their depth.

      He moans, still half-asleep, still far away.

      “I